Jayson Stark, on baseball's latest tarnished star:
I'm willing to bet right now that Alex Rodriguez will join that
Cooperstown missing-persons list -- no matter how many home runs he
hits, no matter how he chooses to spin Selena Roberts and David
Epstein's impeccably reported story on SI.com.
So if that's true, think of where this sport almost certainly will find itself 15 years from now:
The all-time hits leader (Mr. Peter E. Rose) won't be in the Hall of Fame.
The all-time home run leader (assuming that's where A-Rod's highway leads him) won't be in the Hall of Fame.
The man who broke Hank Aaron's career record (Barry Bonds) won't be in the Hall.
The man who broke Roger Maris' single-season record (Mark McGwire) won't be in the Hall.
The man who was once the winningest right-handed pitcher of the live-ball era (Roger Clemens) won't be in the Hall.
The man with the most 60-homer seasons in baseball history (Sammy Sosa) doesn't look like he's headed for the Hall, either.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Stark's right about what the baseball writers will do when the rest of the steroid era's stars hit the Cooperstown ballot. But I think that I would vote for A-Rod to go the Hall of Fame - and for Bonds, and for Clemens, and maybe even for Sammy Sosa. I don't know exactly where steroid use should sit on the hierarchy of sins against the game: I think it's worse than throwing spitballs and not as bad as throwing games, but how much worse and how much less noxious I'm not entirely sure. But I do know that to date, the only otherwise-deserving players who've been denied entry to the Hall - Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson - have been those who were guilty of infractions that got them banned them from the game for life. Now perhaps steroid users should be banned for life, but the fact remains that A-Rod and others stand accused of violating a rule that carried no penalty save treatment at the time that they (and dozens if not hundreds of other players whose names haven't been leaked) broke it, and that today only gets you banned outright if you're a three-time offender. And I think it's a good rule of thumb that if you're allowed to continue playing major league baseball after committing a given infraction, you shouldn't be disqualified - informally or formally - from its Hall of Fame.
This isn't to say that the steroid effect shouldn't be considered in evaluating a player's fitness for the Hall. I wouldn't give A-Rod or Bonds the honor of a first-ballot induction, and I think that evidence of steroid use is a good reason for keeping borderline HoF candidates out. If you think a player wouldn't have reached Hall-worthy numbers without cheating - as I suspect McGwire wouldn't, for all his gifts - then don't vote him in. But there's no question that Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens would have made the Hall without the edge that steroids provided. And if you grant that premise, I think that they belong there, unless the sport is willing to take the plunge of banning them from the diamond permanently.
When this World Series finally ends, there will be a great deal of
discussion about how to avoid this sort of misery. The first will be to
figure a way to shorten the schedule. Say the schedule was reduced from
162 to 148 games (records or no records; the Steroids Era made too many
baseball records meaningless), then the division series and League
Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with
the World Series theoretically completed by mid-October. Granted, the
loss of the seven home dates would hit teams' revenue streams, but
they'll just have to adjust player salaries; CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez might have to make ends meet on measly $20M salaries.
In the mid-'90s, several owners went to a Miami Super Bowl and
discussed the notion of having a 10-day World Series at a neutral site.
They'd have to get local fans to buy into destination and vacation
packages. There wouldn't be the feel in Anaheim, San Diego or Los
Angeles that there is in New York, Chicago, St. Louis or Boston. But
then the Cardinals are the only team since the 2002 Angels to win in
front of their home fans. It would be a hard sell, but the notion of a
World Series week has some advantages.
I say no to the second option - October baseball in a neutral, warm-weather site? heresy! - but yes to the first. Though I don't see why you'd need to drop all the way to 148: Why not go back to the original 154, thus re-establishing continuity with the pre-Sixties game? They'd save about nine days, which would give MLB the flexibility to start the postseason a week earlier and, perhaps, to make the first round best of seven instead of best of five. And while they're at it, they could start a few more playoff games before 8 PM, and even schedule a few for the weekend afternoons. I know, I know, the TV networks would never allow it - but some day soon, we're going to reach a point where the World Series ratings have nowhere to go but up.
October 29, 2008
Congratulations, Philadelphia
That was a pretty exciting three and a half inning victory. (Seriously! And it ended before midnight! Maybe the postseason needs more rain-suspended games.) I was especially happy for Brad Lidge, after the great post-Pujols flameout in Houston ... and yes, I was still rooting for Tampa Bay fans to learn the meaning of postseason suffering. So sue me.
Incidentally, if you're Joe Maddon, with a runner at third and one out for the Phillies in the bottom of the seventh and the game tied, I really think you have to bring in David Price and go for the strikeout, instead of leaving Chad Bradford in to give up what turned out to be the Series-winning hit and saving Price for three inconsequential outs the following inning. Just something to mull over during the months till pitchers and catchers report ...
October 19, 2008
Congratulations, Tampa Bay Rays
You earned it the hard way, you bastards. Good work, and welcome to the Show.
October 17, 2008
The Glory of Their Times
Roger Angell, the greatest (and perhaps the oldest) baseball writer of them all, turns to blogging:
Boston's comeback is the second-best October turnabout in
major-league history, topped only by an eight-run seventh inning by the
Philadelphia Athletics in 1929, which won the fourth game and put the
White Elephants (as the A's were called then) on their way to a
five-game championship win over the Chicago Cubs. That game and inning
are well remembered by this writer (who, at nine, could scarcely handle
the yard-and-a half-wide sports pages of the time)--especially an
inside-the-park homer by Mule Haas. A teammate of his in the dugout was
so transported by the blow that he clapped his skinny, elderly Hall of
Fame manager, Connie Mack, on the back, sending him to his knees amid
the bats. Mack forgave him.
Those were the days. So are these.
I used to have an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of baseball history (before my head was stuffed with other, less interesting stuff), and when the Red Sox started coming back last night I actually summoned that seventy-nine year-old Athletics' rally from deep in the memory vaults before anyone on television cited it as a precedent. But Angell actually remembers listening to the game itself! The mind boggles.
Maybe there's hope for McCain yet ... Update: Just so as not to tempt the baseball gods, let me add that the Rays, on the evidence of this series, are a more talented team than the Red Sox, that momentum is the next game's starting pitcher, and at this point there's every reason to have as much confidence in James Shields as you do in Josh Beckett. This could easily, easily, go the way of the Astros-Cards series in '05, where a stunning Game 5 comeback didn't carry over for the Cardinals.
But you never know, do you?
October 14, 2008
Enough
Okay, so this has been a nice little run by the Tampa Bay Rays. I don't mind saying that I've been pulling for them all season; I don't even mind saying that I wasn't all that fazed when they beat out the Red Sox for the division title. It's good for baseball to have small-market teams make the postseason, and as with the Rockies last year I think that the Rays have paid their expansion-team dues at this point, and it's completely legitimate to be happy for their (relatively) long-suffering fans. Really, though - it's enough already. Rays fans are acquainted with regular-season losing, sure, but now it's time for them to be acquainted with another form of baseball suffering: The postseason near-miss. In the long run, it's for their own good: They'll better appreciate final victory when it eventually arrives, and they'll avoid the dreaded "Florida Marlins syndrome," in which a premature World Series win (or two!) ruins a city for the normal ups and downs of baseball fandom. All of which is to say that the Red Sox won't just be taking another step toward repeating as World Champions if they stop drowning in two feet of water and come back from 2-1 down to knock Tampa out of the postseason; they'll be doing the Rays, and especially Rays fans, a big favor as well.
I think this emailer's case for the seven-game series is stronger than my vague theories about what feels fair or just to the losing team's fans:
I'm a Cubs fan and I'm not going to whine that the
five-game opening round screwed the Cubs. In a seven-game format they'd
still, after last night, be down 0-3 with two more games to go at Dodger
Stadium. Unless you get extraordinarily lucky you aren't going to come
back from 0-3 to win a seven-game series. When you dump three in a row
there's usually a reason for it.
But the best argument against a five-game opening round has nothing to
do with what the losing team "deserves," or how much randomness it
introduces into the outcome of the series. The argument is simply that a
five-game series, because it's shorter, produces less excitement and
fewer interesting storylines. Yeah, a sweep is a sweep whether it's
three games or four games. But say the Cubs had won a hypothetical Game
Four. Then Game Five is at least marginally interesting, because if the
Cubs win then things return to Wrigley where--until the playoffs, at least--the
Cubs have been a very tough team. More games automatically means more
opportunity for drama and more fun rooting for the comeback, however
unlikely. I'm sure you're happy that the ALCS moved to a
seven-game format in 1985. Think of all the fun you would have missed out
on in 2004 if the ALCS had ended that year with the Yankees clubbing the Red
Sox 19-8 to sweep the best-of-five.
Selig also downplayed any talk of expanding the first round of the
playoffs from to best-of-seven series. He told team owners that
expressed support of more playoff games they would have to cut
regular-season games from the schedule -- something owners clearly
weren't willing to do and the players' union likely would oppose.
"End of discussion," Selig said.
And meanwhile, last night's results suggest that the baseball gods have decided to take all my whining about the boringness of the three-game sweep and throw it right back in my face.
October 5, 2008
The Cubs, The Cubs
When I remarked that I would vastly prefer to have the division series round of MLB's postseason go seven games, because the current best-of-five feels "engineered to
produce sweeps and injects an enormous crapshoot effect into an already
overly-random system," a reader wrote in to point that statistically speaking, the crapshoot effect in a seven game series is only marginally lower than in a five game playoff:
Baseball is inherently a random game, so there's no real way to structure the playoffs to avoid the possibility of an inferior team winning. A battle between an 81-win team and a 100-win team would be a fairly lopsided playoff matchup. Using the log5 method (which is the generally accepted sabermetric method) and running 50,000 simulations, the 100-win team won a 5 game series 71.5% of the time and a 7 game series 74.6% of the time. So, the 7 game series is less random, but it's not a huge difference.
Interestingly, the just-concluded Cubs-Dodgers series was almost as lopsided as the simulation above - the 97-win Cubs against the 84-win Dodgers - and after watching Chicago go down to defeat , I'm of two minds about my "seven games are better" thesis. On the one hand, I think that even though the effect of the extra game(s) on the randomness of the outcome is marginal in the extreme, there's still a sense in which a seven-game series feels like a more just reward for a great regular season than a five-game series, and losing 4-1 or even 4-0 leaves the losing team's fan base with a better taste in their mouth than the "blink and you missed it" feeling that a three-game sweep inspires. (When the Red Sox lost 4-0 to the vastly-superior A's in the 1988 and 1990 ALCS, I felt like justice had been done; when they lost 3-0 to a similarly-loaded Indians team in 1995, I felt like I'd been cheated out of a real postseason appearance.) On the other hand, it felt like they could have played best-of-seventeen and the Dodgers still would have swept the Cubs: Alfonso Soriano would have ended up 3-for-42; Ryan Dempster would have walked 21 batters in three starts; Manny Ramirez would have hit ten home runs for the Dodgers, and the outcome would have been exactly the same. If you can't do more than the Cubs did in three high-stakes games against a markedly inferior team, maybe you don't deserve a fourth chance at it.
October 4, 2008
2-0, 2-0, 2-0, 2-0
What was that I said about the lousiness of wild-card era postseasons again? C'mon, Cubs and Brewers and White Sox and Angels ...
Well, okay, maybe not the Angels.
September 29, 2008
It Is Designed To Break Your Heart
Last year, the New York Mets lost to the Florida Marlins at Shea Stadium on the final day of the season and missed the playoffs by one game. 365 days, 162 games, a new ace and a new manager later, the Mets lost to the Florida Marlins at Shea on the final day of the season and missed the playoffs by one game. Baseball is a hard game.
As for the bigger picture ... once again, the wild card (and revenue-sharing) era produced a pretty damn good regular season: Four teams playing for their life on the final day (which turned out to not quite be the last day, after all), a famous dynasty falling on (semi-) hard times, and the Brewers and the Rays taking over the feel-good, drought-ending role the Rockies played last year. Now the question is whether, once again, the wild card-era postseason will turn out to be a bust. Here's my litany of complaints, from last year:
... the expanded playoff system, while it's had its moments, comes with an
awful lot of built-in problems: The 3-of-5 first round is engineered to
produce sweeps and injects an enormous crapshoot effect into an already
overly-random system; the sheer number of teams that make the playoffs
prevents postseason rivalries from taking shape (not just the
ancient Dodgers-Yankees rivalries, I mean, but also the great '70s
battles between the Orioles and the A's, or the Yankees and the Royals
or the Phillies and the Dodgers); you end up with too many series where
a mediocre team, having lucked into a victory in the preceding round,
is wildly overmatched against its next opponent; the built-in off days,
which increased this fall for no good reason, create enormous amounts
of momentum-sapping dead time (hello, Rockies!); the plethora of games
makes each individual contest and series less memorable, even if it's
really good; and finally, the whole thing just seems too damn long ...
Regarding the issue of days off and dead time, the fact that the Red Sox and Angels will be only three games deep into their best-of-five series a Sunday doesn't exactly suggest that the higher-ups have any plans to fix the problem - or that they consider it a problem at all. The rest, though, is up to the players. Here's hoping for something special, before summer finally goes out.
September 24, 2008
Damn Yankees
A reader points out that while the Yankees outperformed their regular-season Pythagorean record during their golden age of 1996 to 2001, they outperformed it even more during the six-year age of silver that followed - which suggests, in turn, that the effect is a combination of statistical noise and the impact of Mariano Rivera (a constant across both eras) on close games than the any roster-wide "we know how to win" killer instinct. Henceforward, then, I pledge to confine my mythologization of those late-nineties teams to their astonishing postseason record, and I'll leave their ability to beat the "runs scored versus runs allowed" odds out of it.
Also, another reader notes that the '01 World Series ended in November because of 9/11-related delays. So Olney's "last night" was a November night, not an October one as I suggested below.
Finally, here's John Schwenkler's midseason meditation on the end of the Yankee era.
The Last Night of the Yankees Dynasty
According to Buster Olney, the dynasty's real "last night" came seven years ago, in October of 2001 - the night that Luis Gonzalez fisted a Series-winning single over Derek Jeter's head, ending the Yankee streak of consecutive World Championships at three and ringing down the curtain on a particularly indomitable era in Bronxian history. And Olney's right, in a sense: The Yankee teams of 2002-2007 felt at times like a waning shadow of the terrifying squad that came before them - the team of Scott Brosius and Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez, of El Duque's leg kicks and David Cone's pinpoint control, of Bernie Williams' effortless center fielding and the nasty middle-relief work of Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, and Ramiro Mendoza. The pre-2001 Yankees weren't as talented, strictly speaking, as some of the squads New York has fielded in the last five years - O'Neill didn't hit like Gary Sheffield, Brosius was no Alex Rodriguez, El Duque's regular-season record never matched Mike Mussina's - but they were vastly harder to beat than the jury-rigged teams of recent vintage, with their uneasy mix of over-the-hill superstars (Kevin Brown and Randy Johnson, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon) and unready twentysomethings (Melky Cabrera, Philip Hughes, etc.). The Nineties Yanks were the great exception to the Moneyball rules - the team whose numbers didn't tell the whole story, the team that consistently outperformed its Pythagorean record, the team that you knew was going to find a way to beat you when the chips were down. You knew Derek Jeter would drive in the tying run in the seventh and Williams would homer to win it; you knew Paul O'Neill would get the clutch bloop single and that Mendoza would wriggle out of the bases-loaded jam the following inning to save the game; you knew that they'd capitalize on your team's errors and stifle your last-ditch, eighth-inning comeback attempt. You just knew it. And God, how I hated them.
Those days are long gone. But the streak of post-season appearances went on: Even when the Yankees would struggle early in the season, and people would murmur that this, this at last was finally the year when they wouldn't be playing in October, they always found a way to right the ship, to leave the Jays and Rays and Orioles in the dust and lap the Red Sox - and even last year, when they finally didn't catch us, they still cruised into the playoffs, claiming it as their birthright yet again. And crucial pieces from those old, terrifying teams remained in place - Jeter prancing around shortstop, Posada's hangdog face behind the plate, Andy Pettitte (back after an exile in Houston) sweeping curveballs across the plate, and Mariano Rivera, deadly and elegant, there at the end of every Yankees win. Joe Torre endured as well, until this year, and even then his replacement, Joe Girardi, was a fixture from those great mid-nineties team, Posada's platoon-mate turned Posada's manager, the wheel of Yankee history coming full circle yet again.
And so attention must be paid: Last night, on fields in Boston and Toronto, the amazing run that began when Don Mattingly was still the Yankee first baseman finally ended, and baseball's twentieth century - which was, more than anything else, a pinstriped century - finally, irrevocably, gave way to its twenty-first, in which the role the Yankees filled for generations is very much up for grabs. They will be back, of course, but in a different stadium, under different leadership, and in a different era. And now is the time for their fans and their enemies alike to salute the way they were - a team, and a dynasty, the likes of which we may not see again.
July 17, 2008
The Lies of Jonathan Chait
Somehow I missed this outrageous smear (probably because I was still icing my sprained ankle when it went up):
On Saturday, TNR beat a combined Atlantic Monthly/National Journal squad in softball 10-9 in a 10-inning thriller. The highlight of the game was Ross Douthat injuring himself while--this is true--attempting to wave home a runner while coaching third base. (Those worried about the future of theoconservatism and right-of-center populist reform will be happy to learn that Douthat limped off the field but later returned.)
Attempting to wave home a runner? Let's just be clear about this: I twisted my angle while leaping up and down to celebrate having successfully waved a runner - the tying runner, I might add, with two outs in the bottom of the last inning - home all the way from first (a gutsy call, in other words, worthy of the greatest third base coaches of all time) on an error by TNR's third baseman. I trust Frank Foer has already ordered an internal investigation at his publication to determine how this outrageous slander slipped by the fact-checkers.
May 28, 2008
Rays Fever!
Nearly a third of the way through the season, the best record in baseball belongs to ... the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But the AP couldn't resist taking a dig at Rays fans yesterday:
While Tampa Bay is 11 games over .500 for the first time, the Rays drew an announced crowd of just 12,174 for the holiday game.
Baseball fandom depends on two things: The experience of the current season, and the memory of seasons past. The Rays finally have a current season worth getting excited about (at least so far), but they've been playing for a decade without producing a single non-embarrassing memorable moment - and they play in a city where half the population are transplanted Yankees, Mets and Red Sox fans, all of whose teams have been consistently interestingly for the past ten years. Speaking as a transplanted Sox fan myself, it would take more than two good months of baseball to make me start caring deeply about the fate of the Washington Nationals, and if the Nats subject us to another seven years of Rays-style baseball and then turn in two good months of play in the spring of 2015, I'll be even less likely to leap headlong on to the bandwagon. This isn't a brief for fair-weather fandom: I stuck with the Red Sox and Patriots through the mid-'90s lean years, and I'll happily stick with them long after the current run of championship play has come to an end. But there's a difference between sticking with your favorite team through thick and thin and signing up to root for a lousy team that's never had any thick at all. I have nothing but respect for those Tampans who do root for the Rays as passionately as any fan of a more distinguished franchise - their reward will be great in baseball heaven - and I'm pulling for their team to have a great year, for the same reason that I was pulling for the Rockies last season: I want to see a long-dreadful franchise make the Leap, I want to see Tampa fall in love with Scott Kazmir and James Shields and Evan (not Eva) Longoria, I want the '08 Rays to give future generations of Floridians a reason to identify with their hometown team. But I don't blame the people of Tampa for not showing up in droves just yet.
Over on the Current, I use this rain-soaked Opening Day as an occasion to contemplate why the steroid scandal hasn't prompted large-scale disillusionment among baseball fans.
March 26, 2008
Great and Glorious Games
Being a typically provincial American, I lack the breadth of experience to adequately address Alex Massie's claim that the glories of baseball are eclipsed by the perfection that is cricket. In defense of my limited horizons, I would only say that Americans’ provincial attitude toward sports has less to do with our philistinism than with our glut of home-grown, big-time sports. The United States has not one but three national games, two of them wildly popular in their collegiate as well as professional varieties, plus a kitchen sink’s worth of popular alternatives to the football-baseball-basketball trifecta, from hockey and horse racing to boxing and tennis; meanwhile, we’re constantly being hectored by internationalist goo-goo types to support our local soccer league as well. And then of course there are the Olympics, when we’re supposed to feign interest in a slew of contests that nobody find remotely interesting if their nation’s honor weren’t at stake.
All of which is to say that while I’d love to immerse myself in cricket – if nothing else, it would enable me to appreciate the greatest sports book ever written – as it stands I can barely keep up with the sports that I followed obsessively as a kid. In high school, I was fanatical about college basketball, baseball, and football; in college, the first of these dropped off my radar screen somewhat (too many teams, not enough time); and now that I’m a half-decade deep in adulthood my football IQ has dropped to a point where I had to turn down a chance to write a piece about about the Patriots this winter – something I would have killed to do years back – because I simply wasn’t following their season closely enough. Maybe once I’m retired I’ll finally have time to learn enough about bowlers and wickets to judge whether Massie’s making sense or full of it, but until then I have to plead ignorance and duck the argument.
Photo by Flickr user Pandiyan used under a Creative Commons license.
March 11, 2008
The Best Of All Possible Games
Via Crooked Timber, I see that John Rawls got at least one thing right. Here he is channeling the legal scholar Harry Kalven on the perfections on baseball:
… the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.
… the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc.
… all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.
… baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on.
Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback …
One could go on to note the perfect balance that baseball strikes between team effort and individual performance, a balance at once deeply Christian and deeply small-d democratic. Or its paradoxical nature, which inspires quantification and romanticization in equal measure, and offers food for statheads as well as novelists, conservatives as well as liberals, historians as well as business writers. Or …
No, enough. No argument, however self-evidently powerful, will persuade those deluded souls – and they do exist! – who would argue that the qualities that Rawls and Kalven considered strengths are actually weaknesses. Those who would claim that baseball’s physical ecumenism – the sport’s ability to find a place for Chone Figgins as well as Vladimir Guerrero, for John Kruk as well as Bo Jackson - makes it ultimately inferior to basketball or football or soccer as a test of athletic ability. Those who would assert that the skills that baseball requires are too idiosyncratic to be interesting – that whereas everyone can appreciate the physical strength required to be an offensive lineman, or the speed and agility required of a small forward, only a crank or an obsessive can get worked up about how well a paunchy middle-aged man flicks a curve or spins a knuckleball. Those who would aver that baseball’s clocklessness, its out-of-time quality and its inclination toward eternity, just means that the games take too damn long.
Such people are beyond the reach of reason. Also, they’re communists.
February 14, 2008
Roger's Version
Josh Green reports on what happens when professional sports and professional politics collide.
This is the seventh series this postseason and it likely will be the fifth to end in a sweep (of the 22 previous teams to take a 3-0 World Series lead, 19 swept it). Of the other two series, one ended in four games. Even the one series that went the limit scarcely had a good game -- the average margin of victory in the American League Championship Series was five runs, with Boston outscoring Cleveland 30-5 the final three games. And let's not get into all the days off without any game at all.
You know a postseason is bad when the most interesting moment is an invasion of insects.
Obviously, I'm not complaining about the outcome, but Caple's right. Buster Olney has similar thoughts, behind the ESPN firewall, and he makes the larger point that really, there hasn't been a good World Series since the Tribe-Marlins tilt of 1997.* (And that one involved the Marlins depriving the Indians of a championship, so I've basically stricken it from my memory.) I would add that the postseason as a whole hasn't produced any really memorable series in the three years since the Yanks-Red Sox war in '04 (and the neglected, but likewise excellent, Cards-Astros battle the same year). Yes, the Sox-Indians went seven games this year, as did the Mets-Cards semi-final in '06, but I wouldn't call either one a series for the ages, and beyond that it's been a sweep here, and a sweep there, with precious few of the extra-inning marathons and shocking turnarounds that you look for in postseason baseball.
The Red Sox were only seven games better than the Rockies over the course of the regular season, a nearly-meaningless edge when you're talking about a seven-game playoff series. In the second half of the season, they were considerably worse. In the postseason, they've gone 7-3; the Rockies have gone 7-0. Admittedly, the National League offers markedly inferior competition, and I do think the Red Sox are a better team than the Colorado. But 2-1 favorites? Not hardly.
(All betting lines provided for informational purposes only.)
October 22, 2007
The Most Obnoxious People in Sports
Via JVL, your (semi-accurate, alas) guide to being an insufferable New England sports fan. (I get the feeling the author doesn't much care for Bill Simmons ...) Meanwhile, Ben McGrath profiles Scott Boras.
The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate ... The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?
Vince Lombardi’s exhortation that winning is the only thing, in retrospect, has caused unimaginable heartache and blues. It sounds good but is probably antithetical to inner peace.
Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, tear moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.
I would ask Boston fans whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?
Here's the problem: I understand where Rhoden's coming from, and there's no question that I look at the Yankees and their fans and feel more than a little pity for them, trapped as they are in a cycle where the ordinary joys of having a winning baseball team are overshadowed by a grim win-at-all-costs mentality. But I'm not sure what the Red Sox organization is supposed to do to avoid this fate: Yes, they should avoid signing unlikeable mercenaries who can't perform in the clutch (ahem, Kevin Brown), but overall I think they have an obligation, having grown financially fat off the dollars generated by a passionate fan base, to plow that money back into the team on the field. (This was always something you had to respect about Steinbrenner: He was crazy and horrible and tyrannical and all the rest, but you always knew that he was in it to win baseball games, not to get rich.) And if you do plow the money from a passionate fan base back into the team, and do so intelligently, you're going to have the chance to grab the brass ring season after season - which in turn creates the sort of unreasonable expectations that the Yankees currently labor under.
Rhoden raises the spectre of the Sox signing Alex Rodriguez this winter as an example of what turning into the Yankees might mean, and I take his point - but look, if the Red Sox ownership has the chance to sign Rodriguez for an amount that makes sense given the team's resources, what should they do? Not sign him, out of some sense that it's bad form to want to win as much as the Steinbrenners of the world? Surely not. Yes, they should consider the character of the team as well as its rotisserie value; yes, they should spend more money on the farm system than on free agents (more Pedroias, please, and fewer Julio Lugos); yes, they shouldn't adopt Steinbrenner's star-chasing obsessions when the stars in question are passing their primes. But if you're the custodian of a franchise like the Red Sox, the trap of high expectations is one that you have to be willing to step into, even knowing what it's made of baseball in the Bronx.
October 16, 2007
Respecting the Rockies
I worry that my earlier reference to the flukishness of the Rockies' current run suggests a general lack of respect for that team and its accomplishments. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I've been following the Rockies on-and-off all season, usually via this guy's blog; along with the Brewers, Royals, and Pirates - and until last year, the Tigers - they're one of the down-and-out franchises I pull for every season (except when they play the Red Sox, of course). I won't say I saw this run coming, but at the very least I could talk intelligently about Troy Tulowitzki, Manny Corpas and Ubaldo Jimenez back in August.
The crucial question, of course, is whether a team that's less than fifteen years old deserves the same kind of goodwill that older teams - and long-suffering fan bases - like Detroit and Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Kansas City merit from out-of-town baseball fans like myself. The other day, Bill Simmons wrote of the NLCS:
No matter how much you love baseball, it's nearly impossible to care about the Colorado-Arizona series. You might watch it, you might enjoy it, you might even gamble on it ... but unless you're an absolute baseball nut or a Rockies/D-backs fan, how could you honestly care who wins when neither franchise is older than Jamie-Lynn Spears? It's like going to a wedding in which you don't know anything about the bride or the groom ...
Anyway, a friend of mine who works in the sports world got me thinking about this on Monday when he e-mailed just to say, "Colorado versus Arizona might be the least watched LCS in baseball history. Who the hell cares about either team? I'm convinced that sports is all about history. If there's history, it's interesting. If not, who cares? People need the emotional attachment that comes from a lifetime of cheering for the same team -- and especially when their parents rooted for the same franchise."
He's since backtracked a bit, but it's a reasonable point: Aren't the Rockies too new, too un-historied, their fans too unacquainted with suffering, to deserve our love?
I say no, and here's why. Unlike other recent expansion teams - the Marlins, the Diamondbacks - who have tasted way more success than their fan bases deserve at this stage in their history, the Rockies have entered baseball the old-fashioned expansion-team way: With a decade or so of relative futility. Sure, they had some decent teams in the mid-'90s, and snuck into a Wild Card berth once, but basically they've been terrible, with six straight losing seasons to their name before this year. Which is how it's supposed to be for expansion teams: You break in your fan base with consistent mediocrity punctuated by outright awfulness, whittle your attendance down from the sellouts of the opening season or two, and then, once you've acquainted the good people of your city with years of losing baseball, you make the Leap. This Rockies' team is thus the equivalent of the '69 Miracle Mets, or the '95 "Refuse to Lose" Mariners: It's a squad that fans will remember for years and decades as the team that put baseball on the map in Denver with an absolutely incredible, improbable, only-in-baseball late-season run. And like those teams, it deserves the affection of baseball fans everywhere. The kind of history that Simmons and his friend are talking about has to start somewhere; for the Rockies, it starts here.
October 15, 2007
When They Were Kings
Let's start back in with baseball, since it's where I'm having the easiest time catching up. Here's Joe Sheehan, explaining why Yankee fans shouldn't be disheartened to see their team turning into this decade's answer to the late-'90s Atlanta Braves, a good team bounced again and again in the first round of the playoffs:
A more concrete problem is that postseason series, best-of-five or best-of-seven sprints, are poor tools for separating the evenly matched teams that play them. The gaps between even the best and the worst playoff teams are small when reduced to a week’s worth of games.
Last year, the Mets (97-65) met the Cardinals (83-78) in the National League Championship Series. That 14-victory gap made it seem as if the Mets should be a big favorite. In fact, that difference amounted to one victory every two weeks or so during the season. That is inconsequential over the course of a postseason series. The Cardinals went on to win the pennant and the World Series.
If a 14-victory advantage can be negated in a playoff series, how does one make meaningful distinctions when four contenders finish with 94 to 96 victories, as in the American League this year?
This is a crucial question for the Yankees. They were 12-1 in postseason series from 1996 to 2000 on their way to four World Series championships; they have since gone 5-7, with two World Series appearances and no titles. The Yankees have been eliminated in the first round the last three seasons.
When looking at the big picture, though, the Yankees’ recent futility does not stand out. What is notable and unusual is their four championships in five years. The correlation between regular-season quality and postseason success is weak, and the Yankees’ achievements from 1996 to 2000 are a statistical anomaly.
Like most wonky baseball fans of my generation, I'm much more likely to call some highly unlikely development - like, for instance, the play of the Colorado Rockies over the last four weeks - a statistical anomaly and leave it at that than to wax eloquent about how the anomalous team or player has more "heart," or somehow just "knows how to win." In the case of those all-conquering late-'90s Yankees teams, though, I turn into a grizzled old scout, shaking my head and muttering about intangibles. With the exception of the 114-win '98 team, none of those Yankee squads were obviously head and shoulders above the competition as far as regular-season stats were concerned; Sheehan notes that they "featured power pitching, good defense and a great closer," all of which "correlate well with postseason success," but you could say the same of other ninety-win teams, in that era and others, that didn't come close to pulling off what the Yankees pulled off. Which would ordinarily lead me to call their run a fluke - except that I was there, I saw them play, and against all my pro-stathead instincts, I'd bet a not-insubstantial sum of money that if you replayed the postseasons of 1998, 1999 and 2000 a hundred or a thousand times over, those Yankee teams would win through many more times than the statistics suggest they would. It makes me cringe to say it, but I really do think that particular combination of players just, well, knew how to win, like no team I've seen before or since.
And God, I hated them for it.
Photo by Flickr user Dennis used under a Creative Commons license.
There are an awful lot of bad sportswriters out there (hello, Murray Chass), but there are even more dumb fans. And when a smart reporter goes up against a busload of outrageously dumb questioners in an online forum - well, that's what I call entertainment.
September 17, 2007
Number Two With a Bullet
So I'm watching a Red Sox-Yankees game this weekend, and midway through the telecast what looked like some frat-boy doofus decked out in Sox gear showed up in the Fox broadcast booth. It wasn't Ben Affleck, the most likely candidate, and since I had the sound off it took a good five minutes to realize that it was none other than Dane Cook, the lamest comedian in America - and (naturally) the new face of post-season baseball.
Football passed baseball as America's real national pastime sometime in the late '60s or early '70s, and for a while MLB arguably slipped to third in the pecking order, behind the NBA and with hockey nipping at its heels. Since a certain early-90s low point, baseball has arguably clawed its way back to number two, but as long as the NFL's in business it's always going to be a distant number two. Still, do they need to make it quite so obvious? Compare this:
To this:
Now, which sport do you want to be a fan of?
Or as Cliff Corcoran put it, watching the same travesty: "Dane Cook and MLB on FOX were made for each other, both are loud and completely unqualified to do what they're doing."
I was talking to some guys in Seattle at my book signing last week and I said, 'You know, Patriots-Colts is a lot like Yankees-Red Sox.' For a while, the Red Sox were everyone's favorite and people wanted them to beat the Yankees, but after a while, people were so sick of the whole thing that anyone who isn't a Red Sox or Yankees fan despises both the Red Sox and Yankees. I think we're about four months and five billion Peyton Manning ads away from hitting that same point with the Colts and Pats. Right now, everyone is out to get the Pats, but in a few months, they'll hate the Colts just as much and be desperate for someone like San Diego or Pittsburgh to win something.'
This seems exactly right. It's clear, I think, that dynasties are good for the health of sports overall. Yes, parity is important, but so is familiarity and the joy of having someone to root against come playoff season. Thus baseball in the late '70s, with the Big Red Machine giving way to the dysfunctional Yankee dynasty, and a bunch of consistently good teams (Phils, Royals, Red Sox, etc.) nipping at their heels, was better than baseball in the '80s, when the only thing you knew going into spring training was that last year's division winners wouldn't be repeating.
But two-team rivalries, on the other hand, tend to only be interesting to the fans of the two teams involved, particularly once the weaker half of the rivalry finally pushes itself over the top. The Yanks-Dodgers combat of the '40s and '50s stopped being interesting to anyone who wasn't personally invested in the two teams the moment Sandy Amoros ran down Yogi Berra's liner in '55; for anyone outside the northeast corridor, the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry died in October 2004; and the same will go for Pats-Colts from now on, I'm sure.
This means that having either the Red Sox or the Yankees in the playoffs is good for baseball: They're the big kids on the block, and someone for the rest of baseball to measure themselves against. But having both of them - not so much. So last year, as painful as it was to watch, was good for the health of the sport. And now, of course, it's the Yankees turn to take an October off - except that being the Yankees, they don't seem to have realized it yet.
Photo by Flickr user Brent Danley used under a Creative Commons license.
A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the notion of demanding greater expertise from reporters - even if it would mean putting the folks at Get Religion out of work - but alas, applying the baseball test might not carry us quite so far as one might think. The sports blogosphere may be slightly ahead of the political blogosphere in providing alternatives to lousy, lazy MSM reporting and commentary, but overall the pattern in both realms is similar - scads of bad professional journalists, and hordes of bloggers who love to ask, DeLong-style, "why oh why can't we have better baseball writers?"
George Steinbrenner, on his way out. I've spent twenty years hating the guy, but (naturally) I feel like there's a void in my life now that he's no longer attacking players, firing managers, and lobbing potshots at Boston fans. And I'm sure that if I owned the Red Sox, I'd probably be just as over-involved and over-the-top as Steinbrenner has always been with the Yankees. (Well, okay, hopefully not this over-the-top.) He's sabotaged as many dynasties as he's built, but unlike manyowners you never doubted that he wanted to build them. In the end, there are worse qualities in an owner than being too big a fan of one's own team.
June 22, 2007
Lazy Friday Blogging (II)
I've been meaning to work in some baseball blogging here and there on this site, in imitation of Matt's basketblogging, and a slow Friday seems like as good a time as any to link to this site, which isn't always executed quite as well as I'd like - though the Dewey entry hit me right in the "deep well of male emotion" spot - but which has the potential to become the online version of one of the great baseball books of all time.
May 4, 2007
Derby Days
If, like me, you can't make the Kentucky Derby this weekend, the next best thing is following along with my colleague Tim Lavin as he bets, drinks bourbon and blogs, hopefully in that order, from Churchill Downs.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
