Archive for the 'Baseball the Teacher' Category

The Strange Grace of Players Trading Places

Ted, August 1, 2010, 2 Comments

image via Flickr user abbygdawson (click-through)

You would be hard-pressed to find another franchise that’s had a two-day period the likes of the Astros recent whirlwind. Not only in terms of volume of activity, but when you consider that the Astros traded away the two players who have defined the team for the last decade. Two pillars, gone, in two days.

As I mention occasionally, deep down I’m an Astros fan (despite a recent diversion to the Mariners). I grew up on them, cut my teeth in the Astrodome, etc. Lance Berkman has been one of my favorites since he played at Rice University in Houston. He’s charming and self-deprecating (“I think any great performer or athlete has to have a little bit of a gut to be great.” – from an interview with Dan Patrick). He has a sweet swing. In short, he’s a great franchise player, who is both likable and awesome.

Oswalt isn’t as likable, but his manner of pitching makes up for that. He’s always had a somewhat distinct style, with his hard, straight fastball, excellent command and a loopy curveball. His stern-faced business-like manner was the counterweight to Berkman’s more jovial nature.

Other Astros came and went–great players and nobodies–but there was always the feeling that Berkman and Roy-O would be around. They were the main planetary bodies and the rest of the team orbited around them. They were drafted by the Astros and came up with the Astros, signing large contracts when they didn’t need to. If timelessness and aesthetic consistency is your baseball jam, then these two were Hall of Famers.

They’re gone now. Both of them. In days. Even from my displaced POV, this is a shock. Like if your parents sold off your childhood home and moved to a condo without telling you. Reasonable, yes, and probably necessary. But strange and disconcerting nonetheless.

The sense that there’s nowhere left to go home to. But that’s growing up for you, and growing older, and the most any of us can do is make a home with what we have, right where we’re at.

Today, I’ve got my Berkman t-shirt on. It’s clean, and fits me well. And I look forward to see him wear Yankee pinstripes, odd as that may be to say. Great players should play on big stages, and though he’s past his greatest days, his swing is still pretty and he does well what the Yankees like in their players: getting on base and playing well calmly. Same, too, for Roy Oswalt, though he’ll be in the same league. He’ll show some new fans what he does well, and that’s something.

There is pleasure to be had in seeing something well-known and beloved in a different setting. You can’t stand still, after all. You’ve got to move forward.

Jump to: it’s a couple of days since I wrote the above. I’ve watched Berkman play in two games. In the first, he went oh-fer. Today, he had a ringing single. In a reverse of roles, I was as glad as a parent to see him get his first Yankee hit. Watching Lance make his way in the big wide world, out of the comfort zone of Houston. When others bestowed praise on him, I accepted it personally.

The brain adjusts quickly to change, even if previously the prospect seemed unbearable. My brain’s new challenge is to accept the Lance Berkman of the Yankees, and the Roy Oswalt of the Phillies, and to get on with it, taking pleasure where I may as the Astros (slowly) nurture new heroes. After all, Chris Johnson‘s having a pretty good month….

Baseball the Teacher and Thinking, 2 Comments

Sailing to Byzantium

Paul, July 19, 2010, 0 Comments

The author of this post is Paul Franz. Ted and I invited Paul to contribute to Pitchers and Poets with the idea that he would bring a new perspective. Already, he has wowed us by writing an insightful essay built around a poem by W.B. Yeats. Please welcome Mr. Franz to PnP with open arms. For more of his work check out Nicht Diese Töne. –Eric

There comes a moment in the career of a topflight ballplayer when he is no longer a star. The moment is often followed, in short measure, by an even more painful moment when the player is no longer even league average. Then he falls to replacement level or below. Finally, the player retires, often because no one will sign him, or because his team forces him to.

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Sometimes the process is protracted, like it was for Ken Griffey, Jr., whose injuries kept him off the field for the better part of the decade. The Kid pushed back into the All-Star Game and even found his way to the MVP discussion with big years towards the end of his stay in Cincinnati, but upon his return to Seattle he found himself unable to field, unable to run, and, increasingly, unable to hit.

Sometimes the collapse is more rapid, like it has been this year for Todd Helton. The Toddfather hasn’t been a star for quite some time, but he was well above average last season, plugging along with his 10-20 homer bat and his consistently high, .400 plus OBP. While his body was clearly falling apart, only this year has Helton lost the rest: he’s not walking as much, he’s striking out more, and the power is all but gone.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

It’s at this unfortunate stage where a player’s “character” and “leadership” start to stand out. Media, fans, and other players will talk about the wisdom of players like Griffey and Helton, their joy while playing the game, and their tremendous skill. They’ll talk as if that skill is immortal, as if this season’s numbers are only a blip, a slump that will undoubtedly end any game now. No doubt those magnificent numbers Griffey and Helton put up in the late 90s – when today’s stars were watching after their Little League and Legion games – speak to the vain, unarticulated hopes of Franklin Gutierrez and Troy Tulowitzki: some players, great players, are different. Those players are forever.

It”s hard to blame someone who has spent his entire life being paid millions of dollars to do something because he was so much better at it than almost everyone else for refusing to believe that he can’t do it anymore. You might as well ask a writer not to write, a musician not to play, or a chef not to cook. Baseball is, in fact, much crueler than that, because it is the realm of the young, caught up in body and motion and justly irreverent towards the stuffy work of the mind. What right has some number-cruncher to tell Griffey he’s not good enough? What does Helton care for his line-drive percentage? It is difficult enough to ask for self-knowledge from any man or woman, let alone from a ballplayer.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

No wonder so many baseball players stay in the game as announcers, coaches, and scouts. That innate knowledge is something they must share, because it is in leaving the game that they truly understand it. Meanwhile their statistics are engraved into the History of the Game, a testament to their superior ability. At last they are satisfied to take a less agile form, to leave the field quietly. A lucky few, like Griffey, will have busts made in Cooperstown, commemorating their prowess, and acknowledging that, really, they are the stuff of myth. For the rest, well, not everyone makes it to Byzantium

Baseball the Teacher and Thinking, 0 Comments

Lines in the Sand

Ted, June 3, 2010, 0 Comments

Bryce Harper got ejected from a JUCO World Series game recently, and for me what was more interesting than the delicate personality traits of a 17-year-old kid is the taboo that he put in the spotlight: drawing a line in the sand. Jonathan has the story on his B3 blog.

Harper was ticked about a bad call on a pitch off the plate that got called for a third strike. In the course of his griping about the call to the umpire, he swiped at a spot in the dirt with his bat, presumably where he thought the pitch crossed–or in this case failed to cross–the plate. The swipe (which for my money kicked a bit of dirt at the ump as well, which is unacceptable at the college level) ticked off the ump, who tossed Harper post haste.

An astute commenter, astrostl, on Mayo’s blog pointed out that, in fact, making a mark in the dirt to show where you thought the pitch was is an instantly toss-worthy offense, even at the highest levels. To very resoundingly argue his point, the commenter pointed to a video of Ichiro Suzuki’s first ever ejection from an MLB game. Hard to argue the speed with which he was heaved.

I hadn’t ever heard this unwritten-type rule before, and it was enlightening to have an online reading experience start with the slightly bratty ejection of a kid who in a few days will be The Business, and end with a new piece of knowledge that I will look for in MLB11: The Show.

Baseball the Teacher, 0 Comments

Portrait of a Man Out of His Depth

Ted, May 28, 2010, 0 Comments

If you’re into awkward conversations, people discussing issues they have no professional knowledge of, and winter hats in the summer, watch Manny Delcarmen play Dan Savage (many NSFW words) for ten minutes over at boston.com.

Link

Baseball the Teacher, 0 Comments

Pew Pew Pew! Baseball Demonstrations from the Booth

Ted, May 6, 2010, 2 Comments

I enjoy it when retired pitchers turned broadcasters in expensive ties grab a baseball that some intern had to scare up for them and demonstrate how to throw a cutter or a circle change. The starched cuff of a fine dress shirt, a little bling on the fingers and slow demonstrative arm gestures remind me of Little League, when the dad who was also a lawyer would pull up in his beamer and teach the kids a thing or two before heading off to the steakhouse to make deals.

My dad never worked nine-to-five, so I suppose there was something mysterious about these well-dressed, clean-shaven dads. I didn’t envy them. In fact from the beginning I thought it was tacky to put a glove on and toss it around in business clothes. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t appreciate, at the time, the tightening noose of time that each day presents.

But I digress. The reason I brought it up is because FackYouk has an awesome dramatization of an Al Leiter broadcast booth demonstration. What he is demonstrating, I have no idea. I do know that is is Magic®.

via a Reader share from WalkOffWalk

Baseball the Teacher and Media, 2 Comments

The Noble Hearts Ache

Eric, December 14, 2009, 6 Comments

Today is the first day since the World Series ended that I have felt a compulsion to write about baseball. It’s a good feeling, this impulse, and I was beginning to worry it would never return. But really I should have known that it was only on hiatus and that a super-awesome-mega-trade would bring it back. After all, nothing brings out the amateur baseball philosopher in me like a big-ass trade.

Readers of this blog probably know that I came of age cheering for the Los Angeles Dodgers of the 1990s. This means that the two most significant transactions of my youthful baseball fandom were Pedro Martinez for Delino Deshields, and Mike Piazza for the Florida Marlins. These were massive and tragic mistakes. Therefore I do not believe I would be remiss to assign a certain post-traumatic significance to my current fascination with trades.

In my last post on trades, I discussed the inherent weirdness of bartering with humans. That weird dynamism is part of what makes trades so interesting and activities like fantasy sports so addictive. But aside from the risks and rewards of dealing in commodities as fragile as humans – even great athletes – tend to be, there is a broader meaning to be read in trades: the impact they have on franchises and the communities surrounding them.

There is a psycho-transactional chasm between the trades and free agency. When a star player leaves on his own free will, he is letting down a team. When a team decides to dump its star player, it is letting down its fans. It all comes down to what different parties are owed in the ecosystem of fandom.

In this ecosystem, which works like an unwritten social contract, we all have roles. Here’s a simplified version: Fans like you and I are called upon to spend our money, to clap at certain times, and to hold players and owners accountable. It calls for players to play the best they can, sign the occasional autograph, and generally not make us hate them. And mostly, it calls for front offices to assemble teams with a chance at winning, therefore making fans us want to come spend too much money on beer and merchandise at the ballpark.

Sometimes, in order to fulfill this contract, in order for the ecosystem to thrive, difficult decisions must be made. For Cincinnati Bengals fans, that might mean conducting elaborate protests and practical jokes to gain the attention of a negligent owner in the manner of Who Dey Revolution[1]. For the Toronto Blue Jays, that meant trading Roy Halladay today.

The trading of a superstar is not to be taken lightly. Superstars act as ballasts for franchises. Uniform designs, stadium naming rights, and supporting casts can rotate, but superstars are supposed to be permanent. The term franchise player is no accident. It refers to the centerpiece, the foundation, the keystone that keeps a structure from collapsing in on itself. The meaning of these players to their respective cities, to their fans, and to their teammates, is hard to overstate.

When the Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles in 1988, members of the Canadian Parliament tried to block the deal. An effigy of Oilers owner Peter Pocklington was burned by fans. And within months of the deal, a Gretzky statue was erected in front of Edmonton’s arena. There was a documentary on ESPN earlier this year about the trade called “King’s Ransom.” Had Gretzky left via free agency instead of trade, there would have been no parliamentary shenanigans, no burning effigy of Pocklington, no bronze statue, and no documentary. But he was traded and a nation mourned.

I don’t think Canada will shed as many tears for Roy Halladay, who was born in Colorado, and whose departure has been long-awaited, as it did for The Great One. Partly, this is because unlike the Gretzky trade (or more recently, the Piazza trade), the intentions behind the Halladay deal appear at first glance to be noble. But noble acts can still be painful, and it is worth considering the torturous implications that this trade will have.

As bummed Jays fan Drew Fairservice eloquently pointed out today, the Blue Jays have entered an era in which their ace is Ricky Romero. This could be the first step toward a bright future, a time as bright as the early 1990s for Toronto. After all, it remains to be seen whether the northbound prospects will amount to fair value for Halladay. But regardless of what happens, there will not be another Roy Halladay. There is no fair value for a franchise player. There is no replacement, only a franchise redefined.

[1] Awesome blog/collective “dedicated to demanding that the Cincinnati Bengals front office act aggressively and rationally in their pursuit of a Super Bowl.” R

Baseball the Teacher and Thinking, 6 Comments

Who’s Our Daddy? A Roger Angell Appreciation

Eric, November 30, 2009, 4 Comments

Roger Angell is 89 years old. He was born in 1920. To put that in perspective, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were born in 1931. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were born in 1924. What I’m saying is that Roger Angell is an old man. That fact, of which there is no hiding, is what makes his latest in the New Yorker, Daddies Win, so magnificent.

He takes a few cheap shots at the blogs. He bemoans statistics. But the man still writes like he is living in 1957, in a world where baseball players are made not by television, but by the words floating through the air via radio, and the ones printed on newspaper and magazine pages. He writes like baseball still has the power to capture the imagination of an entire nation. His essay on the Yankees’ latest World Series victory is plucky and poetic. Without being sappy, the piece emits a sort of sepia-tinged nostalgia. What struck me most as I read this was Angell’s knack for magnificent little descriptions. He writes about baseball like the game is still new.

Here are some of my favorite descriptions:

On Alex Rodriguez:

“This year – well, this year he he’s been somebody else.”

“I’ve had the impression that I’m within touching distance of a new species.”

Cliff Lee:

“He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producint it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings across his waist. This columnar closing posture . . . is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood.”

Chase Utley:

“Utley, who has slicked-backed, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick back and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an ATM reaching for his cash.”

AJ Burnett:

“a Tom Joad with beads.”

CC Sabathia

“Sunny looks and pavilion-sized pants and weird, white-toed spikes.”

“his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment . . arrives like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.”

cc: turtlemom4bacon

On the New Yankee Stadium:

“I enjoy the wild, Ginza-esque light shows – the “lightage” I mean – but I’d trade them for the steeply vertical stands of the vacant, now shrouded original and the walls of noise they produced on big nights.”

On Nick Swisher:

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

On Hideki Matsui:

“His silence kept him old-fashioned: a ballplayer from the black-and-white newspaper-photograph days, before our heroes talked.”

I’d venture to say the same thing about Angell.

Baseball the Teacher and Media, 4 Comments

When Life Throws You Curveballs, You Take Them The Other Way

Eric, August 31, 2009, 3 Comments

In a literary sense, I sort of like clichés. Before they become hackneyed and mundane, they are tight exceptional metaphors and similes. The first time somebody compared his lover’s eyes to a glowing moon, or her beauty to a red rose it was brilliant. The meaning of those words has worn over time, but not the initial spark of genius from which they were born. Like any writer, I avoid clichés as much as I can, but their initial spark remains bright in my mind.

The same can be true for most conventional wisdom: at one point, it was not conventional. It was just an idea that explained something fairly well, or a strategy that was effective most of the time. The sacrifice bunt, for example, is a conventional strategy in baseball. It’s often employed without second thought, lauded if effective, criticized if ineffective (or used too frequently). But the first time some manager trotted a weak-hitter out to move a runner over with a bunt, it probably blew minds.

In the tendency to assign grand meaning to Sports, I see both the cliché and the conventional wisdom. I see the initial reasoning for doing so and dig the value of this pretense, but I also see the worn out catchphrases and the strained logic and wonder why it happens. There are so many sayings about Sports – and I mean to refer to Sports as a proper noun here – that it gets hard to remember which ones came from Vince Lombardi and which ones originated with some orthopedic surgeon coaching his son’s Little League Team.

Football is War. Baseball is a microcosm for life. Casey Stengel and John Wooden and so on and so forth and I think I’ll grab myself a drink. The task of a coach is to mold young men, men who prove their mettle, prove their value as humans on the field of play. By this world view, people don’t dive in front of slap shots, or lean into inside fastballs, or take a hard charges in the lane merely because they want to win the game, but because winning the game has everything to do with winning at life. And damn it to hell if life is not about winning.

The point to all this crotchety, self-righteous, rambling is pretty much to bemoan the overwrought (ironic that I’m calling somebody that) way we think about sports. I’m thinking we should back up a smidge. Instead of seeking wisdom in the broad existence of Competition and Running and Playing and Winning and Losing maybe we can find wisdom elsewhere. Maybe the real wisdom can be found in the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game, the times that a particular sporting event lines up with a particular moment in our lives. Baseball is the National Pastime, not the National University or the National Church. Things are better this way.

The game serves a wonderful purpose: not as a metaphor, but as an entity that merits discussion on its own terms. There is insight to be had and wisdom to be found in baseball. The sport has its own language and its own issues and its own ongoing dialogue. Sometimes baseball mirrors greater society and sometimes it exists on a completely separate plane. Baseball and Sports in general, contribute to language and culture and dialogue the way anything else do. There are things a man’s curveball can tell us, but there also things his marriage or his job performance or his fashion sense can tell us.

I love the way Free Darko can extrapolate on-court behavior and performance into stunningly accurate and refreshing takes on an athlete’s broader position in our society, his own personal struggles, and the general mythology of sport. But I also appreciate that while Greg Maddux’s repertoire and approach and legend seem an accurate reflection of his entire existence, he probably wouldn’t put it that way. Sports is just another activity in our lives which means sometimes it’s an effective way to make the nuanced, the deeply personal, the incomprehensible events and emotions that we deal with every day a little easier to understand. But sometimes those events and emotions are better explained in the context of a road trip, or a meal, or a six pack of beer.

The Free Darko guys understand this. They like basketball and have a keen sense for what basketball can tell us about both itself and the broader world, but they realize that the game is not a perfect representation of society. Unlike the speeches of Vince Lombardi, or the pained reminiscing of nostalgia-crazed “those were the days” baseball fans, there is no dogma to be found here. There is only the transitory wisdom and pleasure of a pastime.

We must realize that while Sports can tell us unique and vibrant and refreshing things, it cannot tell us everything. A life is a life, a war is a war, and baseball, to end with a surprisingly fitting cliché, is only a game.

Baseball the Teacher, Conventional Wisdom, Meta and Thinking, 3 Comments

Nate McLouth And The Modern Indentured Servitude

Eric, July 9, 2009, 2 Comments

When I was young and green and full of vigor, I read the sports page every day before school. And by read I mean read through; I looked at the standings, the box scores, a few columns or articles, and finally the Transactions. The Transactions were always tucked somewhere amongst the horse racing odds and high school football scores – hidden in the crowded back pages. Some days it took longer to find the Transactions section than to read it.

There was something so nonchalant about the Transactions. The print was tiny; the language was terse and mechanical. No byline here: this was pure information, like you’d find in a box score, or the stocks page. All suspensions, signings, trades, and waiver wire claims are treated with the same banal objectivity.

After all, what’s a transaction but an exchange? St. James Place for B&O Railroad or $2.95 for a bottle of detergent – it’s all the same. In this context, Roy Halladay for prospects looks just like Joe Triple A for a Player to be Named Later.

There’s something both egalitarian and inhumane about the Transactions. In one sense, it’s only fair that all these moves get equal mention. To the teams involved, to the players whose lives are affected by a cross country trade or disheartening demotion, the newsworthiness of the transaction is completely irrelevant. But on the other hand, the offhandedness of it all, the blasé list of players swapped for one another as mere commodities reveals something kind of startling:

Trades, and the whole idea of trades, are really kind of insane.

Where else on earth can supposedly competitive entities, allegedly separate businesses, legally traffic in humans like they can in sports? What other environment would encourage something like that? Critics bang fantasy baseball for overlooking the human aspect of the sport, for reducing players to their statistics, but they forget something. Fantasy GMs are trading imaginary rights. Real GMs trade human beings.

It goes without saying that baseball is a business. But the existence of a financial bottom line does not preclude human emotion from its rightful place at the center of well, humanity. When the Pirates traded their best player, Nate McLouth, to Atlanta last month, we were all surprised. Teammate Adam LaRoche was a little more than that:

“It’s kind of like being with your platoon in a battle, and guys keep dropping around you. You keep hanging on, hanging on, and you’ve got to figure: How much longer till you sink? … I’ve still got to be in here telling guys it’s going to be fine with Nate gone. Well, you can only do that for so long until guys just kind of … well, they know.”

The war metaphor may be overwrought, and the rumors that Pittsburgh players held a candlelight vigil for their departed center fielder turned out to be false, but it seems obvious that beyond just baseball and business for the teams involved, the trade mattered on a human level to these guys. Not to mention the three prospects who packed it up from one minor league city to another, and their teammates, and their families, and so on.

We try to hold onto the things we can hold onto – the routines and the consistencies that define our lives. We need those to stay sane, to maintain the notion that we control at least some part of our destinies. The circumstances are obviously different for professional athletes – they are living a worldwide dream, making inconceivable amounts of money (at least at the highest levels), and achieving a kind of rare glory. In that context, the travel and the grueling seasons and the complete lack of control – one man’s fate (where he lives, who he works for) resting on the whim of another man – doesn’t seem so strange, or so undesirable.

I’m not here to lament the state of professional athletes because they get traded. It’s part of the game. We fans grew up with trades, with waiver wires, and disabled lists, and so did they. But it’s not for nothing that athletes covet No Trade Clauses. With the No Trade Clause, they are liberated from the fear and uncertainty of that Transactions section. They can start families, and at least for the length of their contracts, know that only by their own consent will that family be uprooted for job considerations.

This is not an argument for the elimination of trades – they are a vital part of what makes baseball and sport in general so compelling. I just find it strange, borderline illegal even, that such a system exists. And it could only exist, I suppose, in a realm of simulated competition like Major League Baseball, where the real (economic) battle isn’t between franchises on the field, but between baseball and other forms of entertainment.

Athletes are in a strange position. They are the most fundamental ingredient for major sports as we know them to exist. But in a business sense, they are expendable, they are products, albeit valuable products, on display. That it took so long for Free Agency to take hold is a testament to how skewed the system, with its antitrust exemption really is. If Curt Flood was a Well Paid Slave, does that make our current crop of athletes Well Paid Indentured Servants?

Baseball the Teacher, Conventional Wisdom and Thinking, 2 Comments

The Mulder Collective

Eric, June 18, 2009, 4 Comments

Something really weird happened to me this afternoon. I got all nostalgic about Mark Mulder. I was thinking about pitching, preparing to write a post about the rise of a new wave of aces, when all of a sudden there he was. Mark Mulder, free agent. He was sitting in an empty dugout, gazing out on some nameless field, arms crossed, gangly legs kicked out.

Mark Mulder is only 32 years old. He’s got a career record of 103-60. He has started an All-Star game. He has won big in the playoffs. He has led the American League in wins. And now he is all but forgotten. He is not on a big league roster. He is not on a minor league roster. And he is definitely, definitely not among the National League’s ERA leaders.

That list belongs to a different generation. If in some alternate universe Mark Mulder was among the top ten pitchers in the NL in ERA, he would be the second-oldest pitcher there. Once again, Mark Mulder turns 33 in August.

As of today, June 17, 2009, 33-year old Ted Lilly is the elder statesman amongst NL ERA leaders. Next is Dan Haren, 28. After that it’s a bunch of guys aged 23-26. Their names are Johnny Ceuto, Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Chad Billingsley, Josh Johnsen, Jair Jurrjens, Yovani Gallardo, and Zach Duke.

ERA is a clumsy metric and stats in mid-June don’t mean a whole lot. But that’s not the point. The list above provides a rough snapshot of the next few years of NL pitching excellence. Surely some of these young guys won’t maintain their current paces, and some guys who aren’t in the top ten will surpass them. If you look beyond the photo’s borders (pardon the extended metaphor), you’ll find unsurprising things: Johan Santana is 11th in the NL in ERA, Roy Halladay is dominating the American League, and CC Sabathia is doing his usual.

But stay within the borders for a moment. Examine this snapshot in detail, ye nostalgic baseball fans, and despair. For soon, none of the old arms outside it will remain. In other words, classes of stud pitchers rise and fall. They rise in exciting waves, cresting like Ceuto and Cain and company right now. Then they fall as pieces, each pitcher alone in success or failure. Some linger, immune to gravity and time like Greg Maddux. Others go the way of the Mulder.

Consider, for a moment, the wave of the early 2000’s. We can call it the Mulder Collective and take 2003 as the year it crested. The American League saw big –or at least very promising – efforts from Roy Halladay, Barry Zito, Johan Santana, CC Sabathia, Mark Buehrle, Joel Pineiro, and Mulder himself. The NL saw big things from Brandon Webb, Javier Vazquez, Roy Oswalt, Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano. (At this point, Cubs fans are excused). It’s worth noting also, that a year later Jake Peavy and Ben Sheets emerged as aces.

The members of the Mulder Collective didn’t necessarily rise as a monolithic entity. They all entered the league at different times and ages, surrounded by varying degrees of hype and expectations. In the six years since, each member has found his own unique level of success, and they’ve combined for 25 top-5 Cy Young finishes. But at one point, before their destinies unfolded, an air of mystery surrounded the group. Who would climb Mount Olympus? Who would tempt greatness, but ultimately fly too close to the sun?

It’s all fairly arbitrary isn’t it? The Mulder Collective is my invention. It’s how I make myth out of men, because in the end they are just men. That these men happen to be the first pitchers I watched consciously as they entered the league and matured in it is coincidence. That their arrival coincided with the peak of my late-adolescent fantasy baseball obsession is also coincidence. For somebody a few years older, that first class of pitchers might be called the Millwood Collective.

I have no proof statistically that great pitchers arrive in clusters. They probably don’t. If the Mulder Collective is just projected out of my imagination, then the current state of the pitching leader board is an anomaly caused by small sample size, or just a sign of years passing. I’m looking for something meaningful in a relatively meaningless data set.

If the national pastime is baseball, then the national pastime of baseball fans is building up myths and debunking them. Baseball, more than any other sport, is defined by the tension between the truths we believe emotionally and the truths we understand intellectually. It’s about myths and symbols vs. facts and figures; guts and instincts vs. cold competence. In its current form (tools vs. stats, Joe Morgan vs. rational thought), the quarrel has escalated almost to the point where it undermines the fact that its own nature as a pastime. The joy of myth and the joy of fact need one another. Together, they buoy the Game.

In 2003, when the Mulder Collective began to assert itself, I did not have the burden of perspective. There were many great young pitchers and I watched them and I followed their performances and that was it. I would never have bunched them together as a unit like I do in retrospect. I would certainly never have named them. But at the same time, I was excited about them and amazed by them. There was so much joy in Barry Zito’s soul-crushing curveball, in Mark Buehrle’s robotic consistency that I feel ridiculous just typing about it. But it was there. I expected all of them, even Joel Pineiro, to be great.

Now the wave of pitchers dominating baseball is my age or just a few years older. Maybe that’s why I noticed them in the first place. But regardless of how good they are – and they are damn good – the myth seems a little less elevated. I know more about these pitchers as they rise than I did about the members of the Mulder Collective, and I certainly know more about baseball. I know with dead certainty that some of these guys will flame out, or go the way of the Mulder. But a couple will pitch like heroes long enough that they become them.

There is no back-story compelling enough to preordain success. Nor does any past achievement guarantee a future one. The Mulder Collective is breaking, piece by piece into the individual stories of its members. And it will be replaced by these new kids, with new stories. The real magic is in that cycle, those stories, and the mysteries of their unfolding.

Baseball the Teacher and Features, 4 Comments