Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

Straw-Man Hunting Season with Bruce Jenkins

You may have thought that poorly-thought-out, knee-jerk, Neanderthal baseball opinion pieces were out of season until next March. If so, you thought wrong. The tweeting of OldHossRadbourn (who everyone should be following NOW) alerted me to an article on SI.com by Bruce Jenkins entitled “Joe Girardi deserves praise for refusing to pamper starters”. I think you can see where this is heading.

The article opens with a definition of the word “mollycoddle”, for those readers under the age of 90, taken from the well respected lexicographic authority WordNet.

I once knew a Molly Coddle. Close friend of Jimmy Jack. Neither is related to Joe Girardi, as it turns out, and for that we should all be grateful.

And I once knew a guy named Loopy Louie and another guy named Sad-Eyed Sid. What the hell are you talking about?!

The World Series gave us a novel’s share of heroes…but for me, the lasting impression will be Girardi’s three-man rotation. He used it throughout the postseason, 15 games’ worth, with spectacular success. He turned back the clock, drove a lot of people nuts, and emerged with a great big trophy in his hands.

Checking the national-media reports as the World Series reached its most crucial stage, you got the impression Girardi was an odd sort of dead man walking. “You’d better be right, you idiot,” was the general tone. “Because you’ll lose your job if you blow this.”

I don’t remember anyone being too stunned or upset at Girardi’s move. The only time it came into question, really, was when he started A.J. Burnett on three days’ rest in game 5–which didn’t work out too well for the Yankees, you may recall. In fact, I think most reporters were on the same page as Jenkins, praising Girardi for his Macho Manliness in employing old school baseball tactics

Jenkins doesn’t name any specific “national-media reports”, so I can’t really attack his hypothesis. I think he thinks Nervous Nellies attacked Girardi’s strategy, and now he’s giving these Imaginary Wusses a piece of his Manly Mind!

In truth, Girardi’s job never was in jeopardy, but such was the tone of panic and paranoia as the Yankee manager wielded that deadliest of weapons: common sense. He employed a strategy that worked in baseball for, oh, about 70 years, not including the 19th century.

I think Jenkins is confusing “worked” with “was the status quo”. Lots of things existed for long periods of time, but whether they were effective, wise, or just is a whole other story. Western civilization “worked” for a few millennia without the input of non-whites, the landless, and women. Does that mean we should return to those wonderful days?

While four-man rotations were employed by most teams until the 1970s, how well they worked depends on your definition of “worked”. If by “worked” you mean “allowed baseball to exist”, then yes, they worked. If by “worked” you mean “kept pitchers healthy and ensured long careers”, that’s a different question. It’s also a question that’s very difficult to answer, but Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in asking it in the first place.

Somewhere along the line — and I’m sure it’s connected in some sinister way with the Nixon administration — baseball lost its way. Forever the province of workhorse starters, pitching entire seasons on three days’ rest and approaching 150 pitches in a given start, the game surrendered to the Mollycoddle Generation. Five-man rotations became the rage, and “100 pitches” equated to a traumatic overload, certain to destroy a man’s arm and perhaps cause flooding in the neighboring streets.

So many things about baseball are different now. Until 1961, there were only 16 teams and 154 games in a season. There are far fewer off days now–a team will routinely play eight, nine, or ten games in as many days, often while traveling across large distances. In the olden days, series were often four games (or longer) instead of just three, meaning travel between points was less frequent. Until 1958, there were no teams west of St. Louis, and most travel was done by bus or train. I don’t care what anyone says, but constant plane travel is NOT good for you, mentally or physically, especially the coast-to-coast variety.

So is it unreasonable to ask the game to adjust to these new realities? Yes, apparently!

The old-school guys didn’t know whether to holler or weep. A number of them, including Bob Gibson and Robin Roberts, were hanging around this year’s World Series, wondering aloud what happened to the game’s integrity. “I don’t get it,” Gibson said after Game 4. “A guy can’t pitch with three days’ rest? I don’t think it’s going to kill somebody.”

Bob Gibson wonders why guys can’t pitch on three-days’ rest because he’s Bob effin’ Gibson, one of the best pitchers ever. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be mortal. I’m sure Einstein wondered why people couldn’t do quadratic equations in their head.

Using a legend like Gibson to prove your point about short rest being okay is like pointing to to an eagle and saying, “Why can’t everybody fly like him?!” We can’t because we’re not all gifted with wings. For every Gibson, there are 10 guys who had a few good, promising seasons, were overworked when teams didn’t know any better, blew out their arms, and were never the same.

How about Sandy Koufax? He was a workhorse, too, and he had six of the best seasons any pitcher has ever strung together. And he had to quit after those six seasons, because the Dodgers rode his arm so hard, he had to get special jackets made with one sleeve shorter than the other.

It was so refreshing to watch Girardi go through a month of excruciatingly tense baseball with CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Andy Pettitte as his starters….There wasn’t any big puzzle to the strategy [in the old days]. Teams went with their very best, not some questionable fourth or fifth starter, with the idea of rising above the rest. Other sports, notably football and basketball, have found ways to maximize the “bigger, faster, stronger” element and develop athletes more fit and productive than ever before. Baseball has managed to go backward, and it’s not as if the pitch-count madness has improved the product. There has never been an era with more elbows, forearms, rotator cuffs and labrums on the shelf.

Thanks to advances in medical science, we’re able to diagnose and treat things like torn labrums and rotator cuffs. In ye olden days, when a pitcher’s arm hurt, they patched him up with voodoo and greenies and sent him back out there until his elbow exploded. Then they threw him on the scrap heap, because there was no free agency and all players were expendable, interchangeable parts. Ah, the good ol’ days!

I don’t think there’s more injuries nowadays; teams are just able to detect them better and be cautious about them.Thirty years ago, most front office types probably thought the labrum was one of those little bones in the ear. Blaming the modern pitcher’s regimen for injuries is like blaming an x-ray for a broken bone.

I’m not saying that a four-man rotation is an idea completely without merit. Even amongst the sabremetric set, the debate rages: at least one Baseball Prospectus writer thinks a four-man rotation would improve the game without damaging arms, while Rob Neyer believes that such a rotation simply wouldn’t work with the modern baseball schedule, for many of the travel/day off reasons I mentioned above. I can’t say I know enough to make a conclusion in either direction.

This is what I do know: Throwing a baseball the way pitchers throw baseball exerts a huge amount of trauma on the arm. Especially when it’s done over and over again, which is unavoidable when you’re a pitcher. It seems to me that a pitcher’s effectiveness would be in indirect proportion to the amount of work that arm is asked to do. Not in every case, of course. But in most cases.

Asking an athlete to do that to their body throughout a season, then asking them to be in top shape down the stretch when it matters the most–which is the whole point of a baseball season, isn’t it?–is begging for trouble.

Long story short: Unless I’m show definitive evidence to the contrary, I don’t think a four-man regular season rotation would be to the overall benefit of all pitchers or clubs.

But I guess we should just do it cuz that’s what manly men like Allie Reynolds and Bob Feller and Warren Spahn did. Can’t argue with that logic!

One thing Jenkins neglects to mention: While the Yankees employed a three-man rotation throughout the playoffs, they didn’t really pitch anyone on short rest until the World Series. Thanks to a short NLDS against the Twins and rainouts during the ALCS, they didn’t need to. Sabathia pitched game 4 of the ALCS on three-days’ rest, but that was the only short-rest start for the Yanks until he pitched game 4 of the World Series.

So this “daring act” Jenkins credits to Girardi was really just the byproduct of some fortunate scheduling. Had the dates and the climate conspired otherwise, who knows what he would have done?

If other managers haven’t tried similar gambits in recent World Series, it may be due to the fact that this year’s Fall Classic was the first one to last more than six games since 2003. There’s little point in starting a pitcher on short rest when you have a commanding 3-0 or 3-1 lead in a series. In fact, when Girardi did that with Burnett in game 5, it very nearly blew up in his face, and basically forced him to start Pettite on short rest in game 6.

But again, I don’t recall too many sportswriters in traditional media blasting him for doing this. So I really don’t know who Jenkins is railing against here. I imagine that he sees the Bill Jamesians the way that Dave Berg used to draw all “young people”, like dirty long-haired types, a bong in one hand and a pitch counter in the other.

1999 Project

1999 Project: NLCS Game 6

Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.

99_nlcsgm5_ventura.pngVegas had the Mets at 5-1 odds to win games 6 and 7 in Atlanta. No other team who opened a playoff series with three straight losses had ever forced a seventh game. Only one other team that fell behind 0-3 had gotten as far as game 6 (ironically, it was the Braves, who lost the first three games of the 1998 NLCS, then won games 4 and 5).

Long odds, but not nearly as hopeless as things looked at the end of game 3, and playing from behind seemed to suit this team well. Fans sounded hopeful that they could actually pull off such a comeback, while noting it was not the Mets’ lot to make things easy on themselves. “[T]he Mets always give you ulcers, they never go about things the easy way,” said Mike Kramer of Brooklyn. “They don’t breeze through like the Yankees.”

By the day of game 6, the team from the Bronx had already dispatched of the Red Sox in a five-game ALCS. They eagerly awaited the winner of this series, and vice versa.

Ed Westfall, captain of the 1975 Islanders team that rallied from a 0-3 deficit to win a playoff series (one of only two pro sports teams who’d ever pulled off such a feat), threw in his own two cents. He praised Bobby Valentine for not cracking under pressure, and celebrated in his Long Island home when the Mets won game 5, despite recovering from bypass surgery. When he saw the team ecstatic over Robin Ventura’s grand slam single, he said, “I’ve seen that before. I’ve felt that before.”

The team definitely believed in itself. Bobby Valentine went so far as to say, “I think there’s good forces working on our behalf.” The Braves often referred to themselves as America’s team, but Orel Hershiser felt the country was rooting for the Mets. “I think America has a love affair with underdogs,” he said. “I’m an NFL fan and I root for the team that’s down at halftime. I think people in America want to see the Mets win because nobody’s ever come back from 3-0. They can even overcome disliking New York.”

“Just because no team has lost a 3-0 lead doesn’t mean a team can’t be beaten four in a row,” Marc Kriegel wrote in the Daily News. “That has been done. Despite Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz, the Braves dropped four straight to the Yankees in the ’96 Series. Maybe you forgot that. But you can bet the Braves did not.”

There were signs that the Braves had begun to feel some pressure. After game 5, Atlanta pondered what could have been. In game 4, they were four outs away from finishing the Mets, and were beaten by a double steal and a slow chopper. The next night, they were three outs away from a trip to World Series, and once again the Mets rallied to defeat them. More galling than a blown one-run lead in the fifteenth inning were the 19 men the Braves left on base. “It doesn’t matter unless you end up with a hit,” Greg Maddux sighed. “We’re not up there to get ‘Atta boys’ and ‘Way to gos'”

Back in Atlanta, game 6 starter Kevin Millwood fielded questions from reporters. One began by noting that the righty hadn’t lost a game since August, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the query. “Shh, don’t say it,” Millwood warned, half-jokingly.

Millwood did proclaim himself confident, however, because he had beaten the Mets in game 2 even though “I didn’t have my best stuff…They probably saw a lot of pitches last time they won’t see this time.”

Al Leiter would take the mound on three days’ rest for the first time since 1994 for “one more last start”, as the Daily News put it. He’d given nothing but stellar performances in must-win games for the Mets all year, and particularly in the last month, even if it didn’t always show up in the win column for himself or his team. He stopped a seven-game slide with a win over Atlanta at Shea in the last week of the regular season, threw a complete game shutout against the Reds in the play-in game, and pitched 7 2/3 great innings against the Diamondbacks in game 4 of the NLDS before Armando Benitez and Todd Pratt rendered his performance an afterthought.

He also gave up only one unearned run to the Braves in game 3 of the NLCS, and somehow wound up with a loss. But he’d pitched to a 1.47 ERA in his last four starts, and Bobby Valentine felt confident about turning to him because he’d only thrown 103 pitches in that game, a relatively low count for the lefty. Leiter hoped he could ride the near-death-experience vibe the rest of his team did. “Let’s face it, we’ve been playing like it’s been our last game for a while now,” he said. “Not that we thrive on it, but we are doing OK with it.”

If Leiter faltered, Rick Reed proclaimed himself available to pick up the slack. Despite pitching 7 innings in game 4, he’d only thrown 73 pitches in the effort. He also warmed up during the marathon game 5, and would have pitched the 16th inning if the score had remained tied. Reed said he’d take that warmup as his between-starts workout, and be ready in case the Mets needed help in game 6. Once again, it was all hands on deck.

99_nlcsgm6_piazzaint.pngThat included Mike Piazza, who would play game 6 despite suffering a lifetime of bangs and bruises in the past month. He still looked dazed and distant while fielding Craig Sager’s pregame questions. Even ignoring the mild concussion he suffered in game 3 (which most newspapers and broadcasters seemed to do), both of his arms and hands were beaten up, which had led to a pronounced lack of power in the series. “When I took the last swing on Rocker [in game 5], I felt a tingling in my fingers and a
real hot sensation in my forearm…” he told The New York Times. “The
bat feels a lot heavier than it did a month ago….My left arm — I’m
looking for a donor”

“If the Mets make the World Series,” Bob Costas opined, “Mike Piazza should get a ring and a Purple Heart.”

Two other Mets would also be back in action. Roger Cedeno returned to the outfield after missing most of game 5 with back spasms. Third base coach Cookie Rojas had served his five-game suspension for bumping an umpire in the last game of the NLDS and would once again work the lines.
Continue reading 1999 Project: NLCS Game 6 →

Baseball

To Induce Vomiting, Read These Yankee Quotes

arod_ws.jpgAs I’ve said on many occasions, I don’t hate the Yankees. Really, I don’t. (No really! SHUT UP!). But they perpetuate a certain kind of Mystical Bullshit about themselves that the sports press force feeds to its readers, which makes me want to hate them.

When the Yankees reach the pinnacle of the baseball world, as they did last night, the sportswriter hackery goes into overdrive. Grown men turn a baseball game into Harry Potter fanfic. One of the great thing about baseball is that it turns adults into little kids again. That’s fun when you’re talking about fans. But as we’ve seen before, that feeling shouldn’t be invoked in self-proclaimed journalists.

So let’s take a tour of the NY papers today, shall we? How about the staid New York Times. Surely they will have some sense of restraint, like in this fan piece by Ken Belson:

Elijah McNally started rooting for the Yankees in 2004, when he was 6 years old. Back then, the Yankees were only a year removed from a World Series appearance, and another championship seemed just around the corner.

Since then, Elijah had known nothing but seasons that ended with the Yankees falling short of winning a 27th World Series championship. On Wednesday night, he and his father, Chris, secured two seats in the right-field bleachers to see the Yankees end that dry spell.

“I’ve lived too long hearing that the Yankees got eliminated,” said Elijah, who stood in the bleachers in an Alex Rodriguez jersey trying to get players to toss him a ball during batting practice.

Thanks to this piece, I think I am now legally cleared to smack an 11 year old.

To be fair, the Times also has one of the few pieces that dares to call out fans on their A-Rod flip-floppery, by William C. Rhoden: “With a World Series title, A-Rod will receive richly deserved adulation and praise. The fans who jeered, who called him A-Fraud, who
wanted him run out of town, now toss laurel wreaths his way. Makes you wonder who the real phonies are.”

But if the Times acts like this, you can just imagine how the tabloids are treating the news. Amazingly, the Post is not as ridiculous as you’d think, considering its earlier Photoshop work. There are, of course, talk about an “elusive” 27th title by Joel Sherman, and a piece on A-Rod by Mark Hale that glosses over the whole steroid thing.

No, for true batshittery, you have to go to the Daily News. For it is there that Simon Weichselbaum collects quotes from “psychiatrists” whose advice consists entirely of insults to Philly fans. Matt Gagne relates A.J. Burnett’s postgame “cream pie” adventures. (Glad to see Burnett made himself useful for something in this series.) There’s Filip Bondy’s report from The Bleacher Creatures (biggest bunch of mutants on the planet) and their declarations of “fifteen more years of domination!” (Try one for starters, see how that works out.)

And Joanna Molloy says that NYC “needed” the Yanks to win it all:

Ordinary New Yorkers needed to see the Yankees keep their act together, and hang tough day after day, because that is what people have been doing all over the city, all across this tough, tough year….

New Yorkers have just kept going. Feeding the kids, squeezing onto rush-hour subways, putting in long hours. Just kept putting one foot in front of the other. Ordinary heroes, their character only getting stronger.

And we saw the Yankees do the same. And we identified with these men in pinstripes.

Yes, this ragtag group of misfits are just like us regular New Yorkers! So plucky! Fighting and srapping with nothing but grit and determination! Plus a $200+ million payroll and a brand new state-of-the-art billion dollar stadium! What a testament to our city’s spirit!

And what of Derek Jeter? Oh won’t somebody please think of Derek Jeter! Sean Brennan, tell us how much this means to him!

It had been nine long seasons. Nine campaigns without experiencing baseball’s ultimate victory, without a parade through the Canyon of Heroes, without being the last team
standing at the end of the season.

After four championship rings in his first five seasons, Derek Jeter had to wonder if the success he enjoyed early in his career would ever come around again.

“With only four World Series rings, piles of money, and tons of beautiful women around him, how could Jeter live with himself unless he won his fifth title?!”

Just 160 days until spring training…