Baseball is an acquired taste. Best to have an older relative who knows the game and introduces you to it when you're young. Otherwise you don't learn to appreciate the subtle joy. The hidden moments that make it a game of the mind as well as the body.
Like a 1-0 game.
You don't see these anymore. Nine inch pitching mounds, the DH, and obsessive compulsive managers have just about driven them out. But now and again, if you're really lucky....
Sunday in Cleveland. The Yankees come to town and the tumblers fall into place. Two number one starters, Chien-Ming Wang and C.C. Sabathia, both on their game.
Yankees up first get two on. Damon on a single and Rodriquez with a walk. Here's the problem for the Yankees. Sabathia has no need to pitch to Rodriquez with Shelly Duncan hitting behind him. Plus, Sabathia's stuff is impressive. Five foul balls, an early sign the hitters can't get around.
Delluci gets a hit to start the Indians half, Hafner walks, Garko can't come close to Wang's slider. The tipoff. Five batters and five looking strikes on the first pitch. It's a Money Ball game, but seriously, sometimes the first pitch is the best to hit.
The second passes, 3 up and down both sides. Garko, having one of those days, puts Damon on with an error in the third. No problem, Sabathia puts down Jeter and Abreu. Michaels doubles and goes to third on a passed ball by Molina. Molina is wearing sunglasses under his mask and looks like the warning label on some industrial chemical. Hafner, a lifetime .300 hitter batting .226, leaves Michaels at third when he can't get the ball out of the infield.
The Indians get a runner on in their half of the fourth, then Wang strikes out the side on 14 pitches. Wang has heavy stuff, mainly a slider with bite, that he spots low. As he throws more pitches he actually gets better because the ball stays down.
You go into the 5th thinking the Indians will break through and score. Sabathia has given up only one hit, and that to open the game. Robinson Cannot (Cano) is up, hitting a robust .157. He gets kind of sort of infield hit, immediately realizes what he has done and gets picked off. And then comes Melky Cabrera.
Cabrera is fate's way of having a laugh at the Yankees expense. New York could have acquired Johan Santana but no, Cashman would part with Cabrera or Hughes but not both. So fate is sitting in the stands in Cleveland out in left field, working on its tan and enjoying a glorious sunny day and starts feeling bad about Cano, bad about the Mets having Santana, bad about an AL East with the Orioles in first. What the heck, give them a home run.
Cano broke the rhythm. That's all I can figure. Sabathia is confused by Cano getting on base. Cano is confused by Cano getting on base. Then the pickoff. Time stops to ponder absurdity. So Sabathia grooves a fastball that Cabrera deposits in the left field bleachers. Being neither drunks nor buffoons, the well mannered Indian fans keep the ball. 1-0 Yankees.
So that's the play of the game? No. This is. Last of the 5th, Gutierrez singles to left. Tight game, Wang is pitching well, the Indians decide to have Michaels bunt the man over. Runner on second, one out, a fair exchange. Then Girardi, or Molina, wins the game. The first pitch is high and tight and backs Michaels out. And just that easy, the Indians get the idea they won't get a pitch to bunt and put the hit sign back on.
But there is still the matter of second base. Wedge sends Gutierrez, who is thrown out. Michaels strikes out, Delluci walks. Now take that inside pitch away. You'd now have two on, one out. Instead, two out one one. Cabrera (2nd base, Indians) goes down swinging.
Sabathia awakes. After Jeter opens the Yankee 6th with a double and Abreu (a lefty) hits the ball to the right side to move him over, Rodriquez and Duncan give a neighborly wave before quietly exiting. Garko gets hit in the Indians half of the inning but no damage. Still 1-0.
The seventh passes with 1-2-3 innings on both sides. Wang is at 113 pitches, but has an inning left if required. After the Yankees politely bow to Sabathia in the 8th, Girardi has a decision. But not much of one. Joba Chamberlain is in for Wang.
Overmatched is overused. A major league hitter should seldom be overmatched. The Indians were. Delucci fouled out. Why Cabrera even brought a bat with him to the plate is a subject for conjecture (three pitch strikeout). Hafner does his best imitation of a road sign watching a Mercedes roar past and is down looking.
Ninth inning. The Indians bring in Kobayashi (not the competitive eater, the pitcher). Abreu, Rodriquez, Duncan all place the ball in the air in some tepid form. Death to flying things and on to the last of the 9th.
Rivera is in and the announcers drone on about all the leads he has protected. Shakespeare said there is nothing good or bad that thinking does not make it so. The expectation of failure hung in the air. Maybe Rivera is that good, maybe teams expect to lose when he comes in.
Martinez goes all in and flys to right on the first pitch. Garko strikes out looking, although for what it is unclear. Peralta fouls three off and as much in resignation as contemplation leaves his bat on his shoulder for a third strike.
There was just one run and that was enough.
New York 0-0-0-0-1-0-0-0-0 1 4 0 Cleveland 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 0 4 1
The best pitcher in baseball is going to be traded, and it won't be to Pittsburgh. If you guessed New York, the Bronx area in particular, you're probably getting warm to the point of combustion. Just in case you are faint of heart, laying a little side money on the RedSox isn't a bad idea.
Money talks and right about now it is screaming the name Johan Santana. The Twins and their owner, Carl Polhad, don't want to lay out $13 million next season. They are afraid Santana will walk away as a free agent in 2009. Also that they might miss out on the opportunity to not pay that $13 million. You see the Twins are operating on the highly successful Pittsburgh Pirates model. Get the saps to buy you a new ball park, rid the roster of veterans, and raise the cost of parking and hot dogs.
The Yankees have come calling for Santana, bearing a lovely fruit basket with a selection that includes Phil Hughes and Melky Cabrera. The Twins, like a lovestruck teenage girl who runs to the curb when the horn blows, can be had for dinner. At McDonald's. From the drive thru.
Think hard before answering. You can have another season of a pitcher who has gone 93-44 with the Twins, struck out 235 in 219 innings, and has a four to one strikeout to walk ratio. On the other hand you have a rookie with a 4.46 ERA and a center fielder with less power than could be generated on a hamster wheel. What would you do?
What the Twins will do is take the Yankees offer, or a similar one from the RedSox. Not because Santana is going to leave in 09', not to have a foundation to build on, not because it's the best thing for the team. Simply because Carl Polhad, one of the 100 wealthiest men in America, could care less. This is the same Carl Polhad who enthusiastically embraced the idea a few years back of letting the team go out of business. The only reason there is still baseball in the Twin Cities is that Donald Fehr and the Player's Union stood firm against contraction.
On some level it is futile to even think about. Fans will come to the new stadium and watch AAAA baseball. Bud Selig won't stop a one-sided deal. And here on December 2, 2007 I can already tell you the RedSox and Yankees will be in the playoffs next season and the Orioles, Rays, and Blue Jays have already been financially and mathematically eliminated.
It's perplexing. Owners can't stop free agents from taking the Yankees money, but can't they summon enough gumption to stop giving players away to New York? Steinbrenner & Son have already priced most of them out of ever competing for the pennant. Doesn't that make them a little angry? Doesn't that make them want never to do business with New York again?
Make deals with terrorists. Negotiate with the Mafia. Take money from a political action committee. Subscribe to the Dish Network to get the NFL Network. You can be forgiven for those.
But deal with the Yankees? Just so no. Somebody has to.
You don't have to agree with everything Gary Sheffield recently said regarding differences between African-American and Latino players. His theory that teams avoid signing African-American players in preference to Latinos because the former demand respect, and the latter can be intimidated, is a simplistic view of a complex issue. But say this about Sheffield. He may have gotten the answer wrong, but the question right.
Why is major league baseball drawing so much talent from Latin America and so little from America's inner cities?
When I studied economics in college (only to later find to my horror the rumors that women went for econ majors were a cruel hoax) our professors taught us to believe that whatever the issue, whatever the question, all decisions were driven by financial considerations. So let's start there.
Gary Sheffield believes major league executives can't deal with assertive African-Americans. My alternate theory is that baseball executives are much more bothered by the agents who represent African-American players than the players themselves. Which brings us to baseball rules on player acquisition that are long overdue for change.
High school and college baseball players from the United States go into an amateur draft. The higher the pick, the higher the pay. The higher the pay, the higher the development cost risk if the player doesn't make the big leagues. Conversely, players from outside the United States are not part of the draft and can be signed for whatever the player and his representative believes is appropriate.
Playing Sheffield's game, where he contrasts an executive looking at an African-American player and a Latino player with the same stats and skill set, I'll stipulate that teams will prefer to sign the Latino. What's the difference? A couple hundred thousand dollars, or the gap between what the drafted American player will make based on established asking prices based on draft position and what the free agent Latin American makes without the benefit of that position. It's as simple as the chance to sign first round talent at fifth round prices.
Given a choice between dealing with agents like Scott Boras, who will take American players through protracted holdouts and possibly send them back into the draft the following season, and the opportunity to sign a Latin American player with comparable skills but lesser representation, teams will (as Sheffield alleges) pick the foreign player every time.
Is this evidence of racism? Sheffield is correct in saying that teams are influenced by cultural biases and sterotypes but wrong in generalizing about black players. You can't say, as Sheffield does, that all young inner city athletes question authority any more than you can say that all white players are passive or drug free.
But if you go back through history, you'll see that baseball (and all sports) have always drawn alot of talent from the poorest neighborhoods. The dream of fame and fortune in athletics is as strong a motivator for inner city youth today as it was to tough kids from immigrant neighborhoods at the turn of the last century.
Born into grinding poverty many Latin American players will, in fact, go the extra mile. They will often sign for less money, work very hard to play baseball in America, and being in a new country and often unfamiliar with the language are not (as Sheffield points out) in a position or inclined to question authority.
Another cultural disadvantage for African-American players is the abundance of low cost scouts in Latin America and their relative scarcity in the United States. Play good ball in Latin America and there are dozens of scouts and an informal network of bird dogs to take a look at you. But if you're 17 and playing in a bad neighborhood in East St. Louis your chances of getting a white scout with a three state territory to come into your neighborhood and write a report on you isn't that good.
If Sheffield chose his words poorly, he is dead on when he says "this is a baseball issue". Baseball has an economic incentive to find African-American players for fans to embrace. They have a business incentive to expand the pool of baseball talent. And teams have, if their annual pronouncements on Jackie Robinson Day mean anything at all, a moral imperitive to act.
Funding inner city youth teams helps. Hiring more minority scouts is important. And leveling the playing field by making Latin American players draft eligible would certainly take away the incentive for the type choices Sheffield believes, rightly or wrongly, teams are making.
A major league official said, when asked about Sheffield's comments, "consider the source". I hope baseball does, simply because it can't afford not to listen to one of the last African-American baseball stars. At least, while there still are any.
It's sunrise in Minnesota. The air hangs still and frozen, an occasional white-winged cross bill slowly makes its way across the patches of frozen green and icy white looking for life in the hard, cold earth. Time to add a log to the iron stove that has been here for the 103 winters this house has stood. It's a solitary, but peaceful life.
You turn on the old Crosby radio over the mantle and give it a few seconds for the tubes to warm and the faint glow to stir inside the red plastic shell. Don't care much for the news of the world or the tricks of modern time, but maybe there will be word of the Vikings annual rebuilding effort. Better still, baseball's hot stove is heating up. Cheerful news of new aquisitions and high hopes for the Twins in 07' will surely dance across the airwaves and spill out visions of summer triumphant.
Then you hear the words. It doesn't make sense at first. Maybe you stood up too quick, or misunderstood the announcer. Maybe it's a cruel trick played by last night's tumbler of Glen Levitt that chased away the ten degrees outside and the loneliness within. You hear a roaring sound, like your ear held against a sea shell. The room spins, the words hang in the air and reform randomly. Pitcher, last season Orioles, Chen, free agent, possible aquisition, G.M. Terry Ryan is quoted.
This can't be happening.
It's no illusion. The Twins, your beloved Twins, are considering signing Bruce Chen. The Twins of Jim Kaat and Mudcat Grant. Jack Morris and Bert Blylevan. Camilio Pascual and Johan Santana.
You slump back in the recliner and look up at your autographed picture of Harmon Killebrew next to the deer head on the wall, ignoring the bald pated resemblence. Staggering to the computer you pull up Baseball Reference.com and look for some glimmer of hope. Maybe you're remembering it wrong. The evenings at the MetroDome watching the Twins hammer Chen's pitches into the blue plastic covering time and again. Good times. Good times.
You hear the old house groan, or maybe it's you. Numbers fly past your head. 797 IP 151 HR. You grab the rifle down and run outside. The dog looks at you with alarm. 6.99, 5.66, 4.78. Dogs know things, or sense them. Like not to sign pitchers with ERA's above 5, or that a HR allowed every 4 innings is a bad thing.
Nine wild pitches in 197 IP, 2005. But who will clean up the mess? That wouldn't be neighborly. Tractors out of gas and the car won't stay running long enough for the carbon monoxide to build up. Darn Buick. Darn Terry Ryan. Darn Bruce Chen.
Somewhere in the distance you hear the voice of Halsey Hall telling you that all is not lost. Francisco Liriano will eventually return, the core of young players is solid, Chen was once an effective lefty. Kind of. Sort of. On the occasional night.
You come to your moment of decision, lifting the rifle by it's barrel over your head. And smashing your head with the butt of the gun until unconciousness brings sweet relief. Maybe they'll find you before you freeze. Maybe you'll thaw out by spring. And maybe this will be the year Bruce Chen keeps the ball in the park.
After the rosy glow of Christmas morning fades we usually begin to think about the gifts we bought. Did we really need to spend $400 on the new computer gaming system that's only marginally better than the $200 system we bought 2 years ago? Then there are the gifts that you look back on and just can't figure out why they were needed or wanted. Which brings us to baseball's free agent market. A few observations:
Pennants aren't won with free agents: One player doesn't turn a team around and when it happens it's usually a younger position player who changes the dynamic in a lineup. Think Miguel Cabrera with the Marlins, Andruw Jones in Atlanta, or Albert Pujols with the Cardinals Free agency is about aging pitchers who are treated by general managers like the first women at the docks after the fleet comes in from a six month cruise. The only difference making hitter in this year's market was Paul Konerko who resigned with the WhiteSox. At $12 million a year for 5 years he is probably a little overpriced but not by much.
Don't Drink and Sign: Obviously general managers are tanked up when they sign multi-year deals with pitchers over 30 years old. There can be no other logical explanation Think of it this way, would you rather have a nine year old BMW or something newer and more serviceable?. GM's take the used BMW every time, then spend most of the year following the deal explaining why they did and trying desparately to trade away their mistake. As Kenny Rodgers once said, "you've got to know when to walk away and when to run." The Tigers didn't know that and signed a 41 year old Kenny Rogers to a $16 million 2 year deal. Last year he struck out 87 batters and walked 53. Don't rush to buy tickertape in Detroit.
Oh, What A Relief It Isn't: Consistent middle of the lineup run producers are as scare as compassionate conservatives or liberals with children in the military. Relief pitchers arrive in cartons that aren't counted in the warehouse. You lose one, break one, don't sweat it. We'll mail you another one tomorrow, no charge. Yet the Phillies, after getting out from under Billy Wagner's contract, are paying Tom Gordon $18 million over 3 years to be their closer. Yes, that Tom Gordon, the 37 year old setup man whose strikeouts fell below IP for the first time last season.
Then again, the Cubs are paying $3.7 million a year to Scott Eyre and $4.0 million to Bobby Howry on the theory that their bullpen problems last year weren't somehow related to Dusty Baker's handling of his relievers. That's $7.7 million that isn't available to sign a center fielder and leadoff man ("where have you gone Johnny Damon, the Cubs nation turns it lonely eyes to you..."). How about Jose Mesa as a $2.5 million closer in Colorado. That should be more fun that an arsonist in a fireworks factory.
You Shouldn't Be Ashamed To Save Money On A Generic: Brad Ausmus calls a good game and can throw a little. He cost the Astros $7.5 million over two years. They could of had gotten the same type catcher in Gary Bennett for $800,000 or Einar Diaz for $625,000. The Cubs could have passed on Eyre and gotten Mike Myers to fill the same role for $1.25 million (which the Yankees did).
A Smart Shopper Can Still Find Quality Merchandise For Less: The Saint Louis Cardinals are going to get close to 100 RBI next season from Juan Encarnacion for $5 million. They have Bennett coming in as a veteran catcher for $800,000. And they got Braden Looper back for $4,500,000 giving them a top setup reliever and insurance for Jason Isringhausen. The Yankees of all people made three smart signings without much expense. If Octovia Dotel ($2 million) comes back strong he can pair with Myers to make it tough on opponents in the 7th and 8th innings. The Bernie Williams signing ($1.5 million) is a relatively cheap price to pay for a quality hitter and veteran backup. Put it in context. That's just $250,000 more than the Giants are paying Jose Vizcaino to come off their bench.
It's Not The Top Salaries That Are Excessive, It's Those Just Below. The Yankees get Damon for $13 million. A 34 year old Brian Giles cost San Diego $10 million. A.J. Burnett cost the Jays $11 million annually. Kenny Rogers comes with an $8 million price tag to Detroit. Rafael Furcal changes the Dodgers offense for $13 million. Ramon Hernandez doesn't change the heartbreak that is an Orioles season for $6.87 million a year.
Small Town Homies Don't Play That: A serious flaw in the system is that teams like the Pirates and Royals overpay for players like Joe Randa and Mark Grudzielanek just to fill positions. The Reds, Brewers, and Twins are not now nor ever will be places agents will try to move players to. Most major league teams sell game worn jerseys for charity at inflated prices. The Marlins leave the player in the jersey and donate them to more fortunate teams in larger markets.
And so it goes. The rich get richer, the GM's get dumber, the Orioles get no respect, the Astros are used to up the bid before the player signs elsewhere, and everything Scott Boras touches turns to gold. Here's hoping some year GM's learn to keep their pockets in their wallets and spend some money on scouting and development or at least ready cash for mid-season trades.
