15 Jul 2011, by Patrick
I began the evening writing about Derek Jeter: it’s the sort of thing one does out of obligation, a futile action that marks one as a Baseball Writer. It’s seven o’clock and a faceless tweet reminds me that the Mariners have begun the second half of their season, so I throw the game on in the background and continue perusing Henry David Thoreau, collecting my thoughts on America's Captain.
The game proceeds as one would expect. Josh Hamilton sends one over the wall in the first, Nelson Cruz does the same in the third. Jason Vargas appears confused, suddenly unsure of what it means to be Jason Vargas. The voice of Mariners’ broadcaster Dave Sims rises and falls like a metronome in the background as the Rangers tack one run after another, until in the middle of the sixth the score is 5-0 and Thoreau is irritating me even more than usual. “If I have unjustly wrestled a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself,” he smirks. The banality of the broadcast booth might be even worse, but I’ve learned to tune it out. Still, these are no conditions for art. A headache burrows behind the edge of my temples, as if I’d gulped down a half-bottle of Boone's.
The Mariners, over the course of six games, have dropped from a playoff probability (according to coolstandings) of seventeen percent to two. The baseball season grinds on in its plodding, determined fashion, but the average fan isn’t expected to accompany every step of the voyage. There are days like these, when the weather is nice and the lawn needs watering and the inevitable result of a terrible baseball team hardly requires us to devote three hours in observation. This is why writing is hard, and why there is such appeal in being a dilettante. Days like this make me want to write about politics, or food, or insects.
Is this a personal voyage, or a universal one? Is it a test of strength? Like anything else I can only know baseball through my own perspective, and there’s little use in hiding the fact that, for all my years of casual fandom, as a writer I’m a neophyte. I can’t help but wonder if I’m experiencing, for the first time, the truly unrequited love of the baseball fan, subjected to countless weak ground balls to second, home runs by opponents that barely clear the walls. Baseball’s routine is more punishing, more rhythmic and unerring and indomitable than any other sport. Losing is lonely, and it takes forever.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, acclaimed British travel author, wrote a book about his experience living in a French monastery entitled “A Time To Keep Silence.” Short on money, and in need of a secluded place to work on a manuscript, Fermor found what he felt to be a perfect fit in the Abbey of St. Wandrille. His initial reaction:
Back in my cell, I sat down before the new blotter and pens and sheets of new foolscap. I had asked for quiet and solitude and peace, and here it was; all I had to do now was to write. But an hour passed, and nothing happened. It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.
The fate of my hometown baseball team did not perhaps deal quite so severe a psychological blow as the bare, foreign walls of this elementary prison. But as the bottom of the sixth arrives, the broadcasters begin to discuss Derek Holland’s prospective perfect game, and watching the spectacle, I begin to wonder how this doesn’t happen against the Mariners every other week, or how anyone ever successfully write an article about Derek Jeter. I feel like I understand the tiniest fraction of Fermor’s despair.
But Fermor continues:
My first feelings in the monastery changed: I lost the sensation of circumambient and impending death, of being by mistake locked up in a catacomb. The mood of dereliction persisted some time, a feeling of loneliness and flatness that always accompanies the transition urban excess to a life of rustic solitude. … One is prone to accept the idea of monastic life as a phenomenon that has always existed, and to dismiss it from the mind without further analysis or comment; only by living for a while in a monastery can one quite grasp its staggering difference from the ordinary life we lead.
Fermor went from sleeping eighteen hours a day, living in a haze, to sleeping five, his body sharp and his mind focused on his work. So perhaps there’s hope after all for the monastic life of baseball. Every writer stares at the blank page sometimes and wonders if they’ll ever write again, just as every baseball player goes through a slump and wonders if another hit will drop in. Every fan, at some point, wonders if they'll ever again have a team worth rooting for. And yet we all muddle on.
Derek Holland opened the bottom of the sixth with a bases loaded walk to Franklin Gutierrez. Then, of all people, it was Chone Figgins who fought off an inside fastball, dropping it over Ian Kinsler’s glove for a single. I smiled, turned off the television, and took my wife to go walk in a nearby park.
06 Jul 2011, by Patrick
The first time I really thought about the pickoff move was in 1995. My beloved and beleaguered Seattle Mariners had finally reached the postseason, and in the second game they faced a young, unspellable left-hander by the name of Andy Pettitte. I was used to seeing lefties lob the ball to first, almost as a warning shot; Pettitte snapped the ball to first like a rubber band in a motion that looked like a cross between a balk and a dance move. It struck me, an unbiased observer, as unfair and possibly inhuman. Pettitte picked off two runners that game, and I found myself in unconscious awe. What was he doing that made him so incredible? Why wasn’t anyone else doing it?
The next day’s newspaper article made no mention of the two pickoff throws. It’s hardly surprising, because there was plenty to talk about, especially Jim Leyritz’s game-winning, fifteenth-inning home run. But it’s also not surprising because the pickoff only sort of exists.
Nobody likes the pickoff throw. The fans detest it; I don’t know what the level of tolerance used to be, but at the game I attended last weekend, the crowd booed with every single toss to first. The statisticians hardly bother to track it. The analysts don’t care for it either, because of the way it hampers the rhythm of the ballgame and inserts dead air into the proceedings. Opposing coaches gnash their teeth as weary hurlers cast the ball back and forth to the first baseman, buying time for a reliever to limber up. The runners themselves can’t be too thrilled about having to dive back all the time, either.
From an aesthetic standpoint, however, I enjoy the pickoff. I find the deception in the windup and the suddenness of the motion thrilling. Added to this is the appeal of a battle of wills between baserunner and pitcher, who is already locked in combat with the batter at the plate. It’s a combination of threats, the physical appearance of a pitcher slowly surrounded like a go piece thrust in atari, flailing back at his tormentors.
But beneath these surface considerations, something bothered me. There is something fundamentally wrong with the pickoff throw, beyond its effect on the pace of the game.
One of the most beautiful aspects of baseball is its reliance on mixed strategy. Mariano Rivera throws a decent cut fastball, but if he throws it for every single pitch, the batter will expect it and hit it more often. If he throws too few, he’ll be sacrificing some opportunities to use his best pitch to get the batter out. What results is a careful equilibrium that seeks to optimize the output of a player’s performance by adding enough variety to prevent the hitter from getting comfortable. When the pitcher can’t do this, because his breaking ball isn’t working or he falls behind in the count, the hitter gains the advantage and his chance of success increases proportionately.
Not only must the pitcher (and the batter, guessing which pitches he is likely to see) optimize his arsenal, but he must randomize it. Mariners fans of 2011 are well aware of Felix Hernandez’s past penchant for relying too heavily on the fastball early, leading to many first-inning struggles. Randomization is not an easy thing; the human brain tends to work in patterns. Unpredictability is necessary for gaining the upper hand.
The running game itself provides excitement in execution and its own mixed strategies, not just in the evaluation of a single game element, but in the overall strategy by which a general manager builds his team and searches for skills in his players. For teams that lack firepower, the stolen base becomes a viable alternative for scoring runs. Based on run-scoring environment of each era, the running game waxes and wanes in popularity. Players with certain skill sets become under or overvalued, creating market inefficiencies and fostering creative ways to develop championship teams. As a self-regulating system, it’s pretty amazing.
And that’s where the tragedy of the pickoff lies: it’s a dominant strategy. From the perspective of winning ballgames, there is simply no reason why the pitcher shouldn’t continue to throw to first base ad infinitum whenever a runner steps off the bag.
Dan Malkiel at Baseball Reference undertook some painstaking and invaluable research regarding pickoffs, and the evidence is somewhat surprising. To summarize his findings: The pickoff throw does not distract the pitcher and make it harder to throw strikes. In fact, there is slightly more evidence that it is the hitter, not the pitcher, who loses concentration during multiple pickoff throws. Nor does the pickoff actually deter the runner from running: because of the heavy correlation between multiple pickoff attempts and faster baserunners, we see higher steal rates after a runner is sent back to the bag a couple of times.
What we’re left with, then, are the two outcomes that change the state of the game: a successful pickoff, and an error. Because an out is almost always worth more than a single base, it would take several times as many errors to create a risk worthy of deterring hopes of a pickoff, but the numbers lean the opposite way: a pickoff throw is three times as likely to result in an out as an error. The pickoff is simply too dangerous a weapon. You rarely see it succeed, but you see it succeed too often.
There is nothing in the rulebook that constrains a hypothetical continuous pickoff strategy, save for 9.01(d), which allows umpires to eject players for unsportsmanlike conduct. Instead, the play is handled by baseball’s unwritten rules, which serve repercussions for such behavior in the secret underground bunker each Sunday evening. Different proposals have been made: Bill James recommended reducing the number of “free” pickoff throws to two an inning, and charging a ball to the pitcher for each unsuccessful attempt thereafter. The trouble with this lies in three-ball counts, where the mixed strategy will crumple to pieces.
There are two primary ways to alter the pickoff situation: to restrict them, or to make them less appealing as a strategy. Most of the discussion centers on the first, but I find myself drawn to the latter: by balancing the strategy into a mixed one, with potential benefits and costs, the game not only speeds up, it becomes more interesting at the same time. The way to do this is to alter the ratio of successful pickoffs to errors, either by lowering the first statistic or raising the latter. On top of this, it would be helpful to do it in such a way that the runner’s leadoff isn’t allowed to expand, which might play with stolen base numbers.
The only ways to reduce pickoff success, without altering the length of a runner’s lead-off, would be to somehow make the pitcher’s throwing action more difficult, potentially by requiring an extra step. This is troublesome, however. The other option is to increase error rate. This can be done by leaving the pitcher alone and instead making the play more difficult for the first baseman, by preventing him from camping at the bag. Force him to run in from his regular position to perform a pickoff, and not only does the play become more exciting and demanding, but more errors are likely to occur.
Would it be enough? We couldn’t know until we try. But as a proposal it has a few virtues, not least of which being its subtlety. A rule that proposes the first baseman move fifteen feet is more likely to find traction with the conservative baseball folk than one that creates new statistics, or creates a new type of walk. I’d like to see it in action. Not only would we get to keep the pickoff, but it might be a little more exciting.
29 Jun 2011, by Ted
Fashion blogs are all over the Internet these days, from the Sartorialist's style-making streetside photos to 1990s First Basemen Week contributor Jesse Thorn and his men's fashion blog Put This On. Troops of professionals and weekend stylists scour the streets of Brooklyn and the world snapping portraits of youths in leather shoes and old men in double-breasted suits. I enjoy these image-heavy style blogs. Their subjects are often idiosyncratic and interesting and more bold than your average Joe. Mister Mort, one of my favorites, finds some real characters whose style often includes just one fantastic adornment amidst an ensemble of crazy.
With Mort's work being a more extreme example, style blogs chronicle this continual tension between the traditional, the contemporary, and the futuristic. Baseball fields are another such battleground, where a few intrepid sports put heat to the glass of tradition and warp it into some novel shape. Others, in my humble opinion, succumb to the overwhelming weight of skewed tradition and/or mediocrity. In any event, I've got my opinions, and that's what I'll do here.
And so, taking my own turn at the wheel, I present the Pitchers & Poets Style Academy, Volume 1, in which I decide for myself which players' style on-the-field sets them apart, and which players' stand out for their sourness.
Note: In this volume, I am taking into account only on-field presentation. I am not bold enough to venture into what some of these dudes wear in their privatest times (Exhibit A).
Fashion Five: The Height of Style
Ichiro Suzuki
Ichiro, whose style has personified the Japanese look in America for a solid decade now, creates harmony among the disparate elements that comprise his rig. A glint of silver in his high tops echoes the shimmer of his batting gloves, which in turn calls out to the silver in the Mariners cap. The neat crest of his pant leg where it meets the high sock, and the close fit of his jersey on his narrow frame accentuate the speed that comes with the silver lining.
Jose Reyes
Dreadlocks are more commonplace now than ever, and now that Manny Ramirez has retired, they can return to respectability as a charming style component, best displayed by Reyes, the kinetic, quick-footed shortstop. What better to trail a speedster as he takes the extra base, like built-in motion lines? Reyes' modern baggy pants also reflect his kinetic style.
Jayson Werth
Proprietor of the beard with its own Twitter feed, Jayson Werth pulls off dramatic facial hair while maintaining a sense of decorum that a showman like Brian Wilson jettisoned long ago. While Wilson clings to the meme that began last year, letting his boot polish bristle expand, Werth doesn't fear change, and he's known to trim down to a soul patch (causing his Twitter doppelganger to enter SOUL PATCH MODE). Beard aside, Werth's pants and jersey are of a full cut that looks back to an age-old style while remaining contemporary.
Vladimir Guerrero
[caption id="attachment_3708" align="aligncenter" width="444" caption="photo by Keith Allison"]
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For decades, now, this man mountain's visual style has worked in perfect tandem with the way he plays baseball. Who else could successfully tuck his pant cuffs into his high tops but a player of Vlad's trademark aggressive effectiveness. Guerrero's giant legs help the idiosyncratic gambit succeed. Subtract batting gloves, add pine tar, finger tape, and one of the very few successful chin-only goatees, and the swing-away vision of Vlad is complete.
Mike Napoli
I don't necessarily agree with Mike Napoli's style. I'm not a gold chain guy. But I respect the completeness of the effort. Chain, tightly bounded beard, ornamental arm tats, hair flowing from his helmet, wide red armtape. If Russell Crowe played a major leaguer, I would expect to see the same full-bodied commitment to the aesthetic. Not since Piazza's handlebar mustache has a catcher so boldly defied the aesthetic limitations of life behind the mask.
Honorable Mention
Derrek Lee, John Axford, Prince Fielder, B.J. Upton, Hunter Pence (with points off for magic necklace), Derek Jeter, Rickie Weeks. Please feel free to write your own suggestions in the comments.
Fashion Five Hole: The Dregs
Luke Scott
I'm not immune to the impact of Luke Scott's politics when evaluating his look, but it seems fair to say that his style choices hint at his strange brew of ideas and behaviors. For years, his sideburns have been cut higher than a Monty Burns employee, and the snug fit of his jersey top and his devotion to gaudy Oakley sunglasses suggests an unhealthy attachment to the Reagan Era. And, of late, some kind of
mullet thing has been seen creeping out of the back of his helmet. Also, this.
Josh Beckett
Beckett is, in my eyes, the lead culprit in the disparaging trend of nausea-inducing magic necklaces and repulsive chin beards that are so common in today's game (there are whole Houston Astros teams from 2007 to 2009 that lionize and emulate Beckett's style the way hipster ladies look to Zooey Deschanel). Back during his rise to prominence with the Marlins in 2003, Beckett was a fresh faced young power pitcher sporting a chin disaster. Follies of youth can be excused, if only Beckett had abandoned the gaff in the interim. Instead, he's elevated the chin beard to an art form, like a Thomas Kinkaid painting or a faded tag on a stop sign in Topeka.
C.C. Sabathia
Big men don't have it easy when it comes to looking good in a baseball uniform. The solution, however, is not to add twenty-four square feet of additional fabric to the ensemble. Plus, he wears his cap less crooked/awesome than he used to.
Hideki Matsui
Sometimes, a single fatal flaw can sink an entire presentation. In Hideki Matsui's case, it's the grandpa-grade altitude of his waistline.
Shawn Marcum
With his "roadie for the WARPED tour" multi-leveled beard, his "roadie for Led Zeppelin" bell-bottom pants, and his "roadie for the Chili Peppers" necklace menagerie, Shawn Marcum could front a crappy rock band in any of three decades.
Honorable Mention
C.J. Wilson, Kevin Youkilis, Johnny Cueto, Corey Hart
28 Jun 2011, by Patrick
It was the sort of field you would expect to see behind an elementary school: the ferrous chain-link backstop, splotches of crabgrass masking divots in the clay. The playground, ordinarily teeming with playful shrieks and children’s arguments, today fell silent; the wind brushed the leaves of the trees lazily in the summer sun. In front of the backstop, the earth had worn down by a hundred children digging their toes into the earth, emulating their favorite heroes. The rubber bases were placed in rough approximation, second base located perhaps a shade too close to third, the diamond more of a rhombus. I leaned forward into the stretch, rolling the white plastic wiffleball between my fingers, shaking off a nonexistent catcher. The six year-old boy fidgeted the oversized orange bat, tense with waiting.
Between classes and readings for graduate school, I spend my time with a before and after school program at a nearby grade school. Ordinarily, there are twenty or thirty children, but today is the last day of school, a half-day, and most of the parents have come early to pick up their children and begin their summer vacations. For the handful that remains, only I and six hours stand between them and their freedom.
We play with rules that have been engraved in the rules of the sandlot since ages past: the pitcher’s hand, the ghost runner. Children lead off despite my warnings, and I whip my arm in a fake throwing motion, sending them sprawling back to the bag. There are no walks, and five strikes to a batter, and too many times I have to remind the younger boys and girls not to stand on the plate. We track the runs, not because anyone is keeping score, but because the teams switch sides after five runs are scored; without gloves and with the tentative fingers of first basemen, outs are rare.
The innings and the hours pass. Occasionally, my phone will ring and a child will be sent to their waiting parents; otherwise I continue with my rubber arm. Years of pitching wiffleballs have honed my skills, and nearly every pitch I throw is a graceful, twelve-six curve at the knees, the kind that would make Tewksbury proud. I mix in an occasional Quisenberry or a Sewell, but the batters refuse to swing. They tell me to pitch normal. I throw a fastball by them, and grin, and they snarl with sharp little teeth.
Eventually there are only two boys left, Neil and Elliot, a pair of seven year-old identical twins. The game has gone on for hours and the heat swims around us, but they insist on continuing. “One more inning,” I croak, as the Neil steps to the plate. The wind has stopped, and the world, like the game itself, seems to wait for the next pitch.
“What’s the score?” he asks.
I haven’t been keeping score. “You guys are winning by one,” I lie. “Twelve to eleven. Ninth inning. Let’s go.”
Alone in the field, I still manage to put the boys away quickly in the top of the ninth: a couple of infield flies, a tapper back to the mound, and Elliot is on to close. I wave at a couple of pitches, put a runner on, mask the fact that I’m throwing the game. Then, with two down, I hit a grounder toward shortstop and pretend to stumble out of the box. Elliot retrieves and hurls the ball fifteen feet wide of first. Neil gives chase while I run the bases as slowly as possible, but in their panic the boys have lost all sense of accuracy. At the plate I hurl myself in the path of a wild throw, miss, and accidentally land on the plate, winning the game.
The boys, usually reserved, turn on each other, crying unashamedly. “Why did you throw that?” one demands, but as they tangle I can no longer tell who it is. “Well, why didn’t you throw it to me? Why did you try to hit him?” I stand by, helpless. I am a terrible father figure. I have ruined summer and baseball and America.
“Guys,” I blurt out, desperately. “The game’s not over.”
“That was the ninth inning,” one cries.
“But… this is your school. You go here, right?”
“Yeah…”
“So you must be the home team, right? And the home team always bats last.”
The boys pause, sniffling. They think about this. They smile. “Yeah. Yeah! Of course it does!”
The game resumes, and with a little help, Neil crosses the plate to score the winning run. Elliot rushes in to hug his brother, and they laugh and cheer while I round up the bases. We go back inside to celebrate with ice water.
Later, their mother arrives to take them home for the summer. “Mom! Mom!” they cry, hugging her legs. “We won! We beat Patrick.” Baseball and the summer were saved.
27 Jun 2011, by Ted
Joba Chamberlain elicits a negative response from the average baseball fan that far outweighs his time spent as a big league pitcher. For a few years, Chamberlain was the lightning rod for Yankee-hating, embodying what outsiders disliked about the team.
The Yankees fan base, meanwhile, accustomed to a team that develops its own foundational members, asked too much of the kid. The Yankees called him up to the big leagues after just a year in the minors. In the hustle to nudge him, with Robinson Cano and Phil Hughes, up onto the Yankees pedestal once occupied by the four horsemen, Yankee fans made him Joba before he was Chamberlain. In the rest of the country, his unique first name became a slight, and a shorthand term for a long-held distaste for the Yankees. Soon, the name Joba came to symbolize a fatigue not only for the team’s ruthless big money practices, but also for the media’s clear favoritism towards East Coast franchises.
That Joba Chamberlain was the symbol of this sentiment is misguided and unfortunate, and more a result of bad timing than anything that Joba did. Because, generally speaking, Joba Chamberlain is the opposite of what people don’t like about the Yankees.
First, he’s a high round pick that rose from within the organization, not one of the Yankees’ empire-boosting free agent acquisitions. The Yankees picked Chamberlain, who is really a good pitcher, with the 41st pick in the 2006 amateur draft, after every other team had a shot at him. According to John Sickels, he was a well-regarded prospect who had some injury problems that caused him to drop from the top fifteen picks. They took a chance on him and he produced. That’s not the profile of a bothersome business-type who carries himself like the CEO of ARodCorp.
Second, Chamberlain is from Nebraska. It’s my suspicion that fans who dislike Derek Jeter hate him the most when they imagine him dining in an expensive Manhattan steakhouse, seated beside his lovely, urbane fiancee as he sniffs the cork of a fine wine. Nothing about Joba Chamberlain suggests to me that he’s an urban snob. His mom has had her run-ins with the law. His dad drives a motorized scooter named Humphrey. According to Tyler Kepner, he has a tattoo on his left arm that says, “Always Give Thanks and Praise.”
Third, he’s not paid very well for a baseball player. He makes $1.4 million this year, the first year that he’s exceeded seven figures. He’s a bargain. Who doesn’t like a bargain?
The source of the ire is elusive. Joba has not enjoyed the infuriating adulation of a Derek Jeter, and he doesn’t do odd things in public like Alex Rodriguez. Why, then, was there a queasy sense of a doomed fate come to pass with the news that Joba Chamberlain--a kid who had a tough upbringing and has done nothing but earn his place by pitching well and working hard--blew out his arm?
The most obvious starting point is the Joba Rules. As Joel Sherman of the New York Post recounted in 2007, Joba rose from the Winter Leagues in Honolulu to the bright lights of the Bronx within the course of a year. He brought with him an injury history, and his meteoric rise was accompanied by an increased concern that he would fizzle as quickly, especially when the major league staff transitioned him from a starting pitcher to a reliever. By then viewed as a major asset to the present and the future Yankees, measures were undertaken to dodge any injury to Joba.
Coaches, media members, and fans called these pitching restrictions the Joba Rules, and talked about their evasive ins and outs the way George Costanza referred to the impenetrable Penske File. George King of the New York Post described the Joba Rules in late August of 2007 (just before they were about to change): “One inning pitched requires one day off. Two innings requires two days of rest. Three innings of work means three days on the pine. And he needs two days off before being asked to throw two innings.” I found four different names referenced as authors of the rules, from Joe Torre up to Brian Cashman. “A few months ago,” wrote Sherman at the end of the 2007 regular season, “we didn't even know who the heck [Joba Chamberlain] was. Now Yankees fans debate the rules surrounding his usage with - we can only hope - the fervor that the Supreme Court applies to cases involving freedom of speech.”
Plenty of teams limit their young pitchers, but few made it such a tediously public affair as the Yankees did. Sportswriters described the rules the way a business writer would track a business merger. In late September of 2007, Sherman wrote that, sure, the rules may have seemed excessive, but that “the Yanks were armed with reams of data that showed a too-frequent injury correlation when young starters were asked to quickly transition to stressful bullpen roles.” Few major league bullpens warrant a mention in the major media news cycle beyond a dominant closer or a disgraceful one, but even the biggest outlets updated America on the Joba Rules.
The Joba Rules seemed to pick at an American wariness of the balance between meritocracy and privilege. In the baseball world, the great players are most often those who excel in obscurity for a few years in the minor leagues, and rise to the majors and contribute once they have proved resistant to injury and capable of withstanding the trauma that your average pro gram inflicts on the brain and ego. The Joba Rules seemed to upend this formula, and to assume greatness as a given as long as injury is avoided, like naming the valedictorian at the start of freshman year and hoping she didn’t take a liking to pot and punk rock.
Also, baseball is supposed to be a pastoral game,for children and gentlemen of leisure. It began as a game to relieve the pressures of the urban reality. Baseball fields are the national park in the city limits, where adults act like children and the eye has a chance to relax against a peaceful backdrop. The Joba Rules, on some subconscious level, too closely mimicked the needling demands of business, of parenthood, of stress by limiting the public’s opportunity to watch and enjoy a great young pitcher in order to protect the bottom line, the investment.
I propose that Joba Chamberlain was the harbinger of a new era for baseball fans, and that the early stages of his career was the bridge from the Veteran Era to the Age of Potential, when the benefits of the long term investment grew to challenge the joys of the present moment. During the Veteran Era, your typical baseball fan could live with a team that traded away some young prospects for a chance at a great second half from a proven veteran. Such transactions were accepted as the cost of doing business, and experience itself was treated as a commodity.
But the Age of Potential, which began its full bloom at about the time Joba Chamberlain came up, brings with it panoply of new anxieties. Chamberlain drew our ire because he is the symbol of the baseball fan’s new modern condition, in which a fear for the future of the franchise holds as much sway over our daily lives as baseball fans as the standings and the playoff picture.
In managing the Joba File, the Yankees publicly pored over the type of minuscule player development decisions that used to take place privately. Rather than letting the innings pitched speak for themselves, Cashman, Torre, and company revealed the innards of the process, and the media made it fodder for fan consumption and consideration. The private anxieties of a baseball franchise, once the domain of a privileged few, were writ large, and it says a lot about how baseball fans relate to the game of baseball right now.
There is an increasing demand for decisions that are based on reason and analysis. The fine baseball blog U.S.S. Mariner is a case in point. Prominent baseball writer Dave Cameron takes the tone of a college professor critiquing local government when he takes the Seattle Mariners brass to task. Here’s a sample quotation, taken almost at random from a recent post about Ichiro Suzuki and Eric Wedge, which exemplifies the tone: “Giving a slumping player a day off is the baseball equivalent of spitting at the wind; when you’re done, it’s still going to be windy, and there’s a good chance you’ll have saliva on your face. I’m not saying that Wedge shouldn’t give Ichiro the night off. I understand why he’s doing it. He has to feel like he’s doing something, so he’s doing the only thing he can do. It’s just not going to matter.”
There are about twenty different layers of content embedded in these few sentences. There is the idea that Cameron is a fan of the team, but that he is also a professional baseball writer, and finally that he is an expert at constructing a lineup and a baseball team. Psychologically, he refers to Ichiro’s mental state, as well as that of Eric Wedge, and his own. He both reinforces and completely discounts conventional wisdom, and wields down-homey metaphor and meteorology. Generally, though, Cameron and many other writers like him take the fan’s side. But this version of the fan is a super-charged intellectual on whom nothing is lost. The super-fans set the bar very, very high.
Fans were once able to ignore, for example, more mundane aspects of player development, meaning the monitoring of very young prospects, ballpark financing, and contracts. At the very least one could bemoan a big contract but carry on with life as usual. But nowadays there’s the Joba File expectation that we incorporate into our ever-expanding portfolio of fears, concerns, and considerations the long term prospects of the organization, and the most prized assets within that organization, even if they are years away from making any real impact. Just as in a past era falling out of the sky used to be the worst possible outcome of a flight from Phoenix to Chicago, losing a major league baseball game used to be the least desirable outcome of the contest. Now, though, the worst that can happen during a baseball game is that a whirlpool opens around the pitching mound and sucks away the future of the franchise, leaving fans mastless in the void. The Yankees, when they publicly displaying their own anxiety as they developed young players, made it our problem as well as theirs, just without the control.
It used to be that the team on the major league field was a fan’s primary concern. Twenty-five players and a few coaches made for plenty to talk about and pore over, not to mention every other team’s twenty-five. The arduous, tedious process of raising another one hundred ducklings in the farm leagues, the five-year planning, developing, and drafting were not considered a part of the entertainment. It was the baseball equivalent of a middle management meeting to determine the craft services vendor for the next taping of The Sopranos.[1. There is likely a connection between the Age of Potential and the rise of Special Features on DVD menus, in which the viewer enters a magical world of The Lord of the Rings, for example, only to completely undercut the illusion by watching two hours of “Making Of” video.]
Back in those days, baseball fans were all happy and calm and spent more time with their families. Before we learned about prospects.
Dictionary.com starts to define the term prospect with words like “future” and “advancement.” But by the third definition, things take a strange turn: “3. something in view as a source of profit.” The word profit, sharing the optimistic prefix pro, is one of the most loaded terms in Western Civilization. It conjures up all of the costly causes and effects that drive the better and worse angels of our nature, the ruthlessness and superficiality, the grim mechanisms of interconnected life that baseball is structured to provide an escape from. Playing baseball for profit, after all, is the original sin for the baseball players. Profit is the side effect of success, not the core motivation in the moral universe of the baseball field. A prospect in the shadow of profit morphs into more of a speculative stock option than a pleasing narrative. With the prospect as commodity, Gordon Gekko in his two-tone braces puts a call in on a hot one, milks him for all the profit he can, and abandons it as soon as its monetary value fades.
This may be closer to reality than we’d like to admit, but the genius of baseball has been the industry’s general ability to cloak the inner workings, and the fan base aids in the illusion by endorsing it with its stamp of approval. How else can you explain the historically robust attendance at Wrigley Field?
But we’re stripping away the artifice, and, like a Swatch watch without a face, the inner workings are becoming an appealing aspect of the aesthetics of baseball for a lot of people.
An easy place to start is the MLB Network’s broadcast of the early rounds of the MLB Amateur Draft. To keep pace with the cachet of the NFL and the NBA, MLB stole their aesthetic of podiums and old commissioner groaning out the names of high school kids and college juniors and seniors that were until that moment anonymous. MLB has imposed a model of media consumption that should tie-in with an already massive media market like college football and basketball. Those drafts assign teams to already prominent public figures, so viewers and followers have a sense of context and transition between the two leagues. In baseball, the connection between amateur players and the major leagues are tenuous and uncertain. A staggering proportion of the names called on draft day will disappear back into obscurity after years of anonymous toil.
Baseball fans, in this model, are asked to invest their sporting capital, meaning their care, into players that will likely never return the favor. Baseball people understand this, and they continually hedge any excitement by noting how many pitching prospects fail, and how quickly a promising player can burn out. But draft coverage in the model of the other college sports trumpets the slow, uncertain process as though it was something different, something faster. Such coverage, like the Joba Rules, exposes yet another mechanism driving the heretofore thankfully hidden side of baseball management, but now comprising the growing anxiety machine. Fans are worrying about the business, without the salary.
There is no doubt that young players are an important part of winning, so it makes sense that fans like to watch the players coming up to determine what the chances are that a team will either continue or start winning. Young players have always mattered. The difference is in the attention that we pay them.
In the course of my lifetime, the trend towards increased prospect adulation and early career tracking seems to have started in the late 1980s and early 1990s, through the prism of baseball cards. Around that time, the once simple pack of cards started to crystallize and fragment, and as the variety of inserts and artificially rarefied sets expanded, it drove the need for more targets of interest around which to create such sets. Rookie cards met this need for a while, but once that idea was tapped out, the prospect cards took the concept further. The subprime mortgages of the baseball card collecting game, prospect cards were worth big money before the prospect made his major league team a cent, like rookie cards on the juice, inflating their performance by artificial means. Brien Taylor’s card was worth a few thousand pennies before the pitcher was worth a dime for the Yankees,[2. Jeff Passan at Yahoo! makes the case that Taylor changed the nature of the MLB Draft with his demand for a $1.55 million bonus, otherwise known as “Van Poppel money.” “Single-handedly,” Passan wrote, “(Brien’s mother Bettie) was changing how baseball did business, empowering the players who, for so long, had been stunted by a rigid bonus structure.”] and I can still picture Todd Van Poppel bathed in orange like a dynamo bursting from obscurity into stardom.
Despite the specialization of the baseball card industry, prospect-watching was still at the edges of general baseball patronage. The hype that surrounded players like Taylor and Van Poppel was the exception rather than the rule. Between then and now, however, the tracking of an organization’s prospects has evolved from an outlier’s art to a daily ritual.
I bailed on the baseball card industry back then, unable to keep track of the splintering brands and the nuances that distinguished a Gold card from a Platinum one. The chatter about prospects faded, for me, and I sank into a blissful period of watching baseball that prioritized present-day major leaguers above all else. When a young guy showed up, he had to play well. His reputation went only as far as the front door of the major league clubhouse.
Time passed, and the dormant creature awoke when, in the midst of the online baseball boom, I discovered prospect blogs and started to learn more about the minor leagues, especially from John Sickels, the proprietor of the earnest and addictive blog Minor League Ball. And while Sickels was a major bell cow, daily baseball blogs began to feature the work of minor league enthusiasts. The instance that I remember is the story of Arizona Phil as related to me by my friend Paul, a big Cubs fan. Arizona Phil was a mere reader of The Cub Reporter, whose copious blog post comments on Chicago Cubs prospects were so impressive that he became a cult figure among readers. His knowledge of Cubs prospects at every level of the organization became, even in comment form, a staple of the reader experience on the blog. Finally, Arizona Phil was welcomed into the fold as a regular contributor, and today he maintains AZ Phil’s Corner, a special section of the blog with detailed information about the Cubs 40-man roster that looks more like a spreadsheet for a middle manager at Microsoft than a baseball fan’s cheat sheet.
The televised MLB draft a few years later was a kind of mainstream coronation of the underground movement that fans like Arizona Phil gave such power.
The trend towards a public obsession with prospects has by now been canonized by the Tampa Bay Rays, who built a powerful franchise by focusing on landing one powerhouse prospect after another in the amateur draft and eschewing costly free agent signings, expending great energy to standardize their minor league system and build a cohesive organization from the bottom to the top. Jonah Keri chronicles this process in his book, The Extra 2%, where the strange tales of impulsive owner Vincent Naimoli, with his signings of Jose Canseco, Wade Boggs, and Greg Vaughn, give way to names like Upton, Longoria, and Price, and the Rays approach unfolds as proof that the prospect game could pay off big, affirming the shift in big league approach to match the baseball fan’s increasing concern for A-ball intricacies. The Rays played the game so effectively that they jumped from worst to World Series in a year, reinforcing with steel beams the baseball public’s mania for prospects.
To gauge the current attitude towards very young players who were very recently highly coveted prospects, all you have to do is perform a quick Twitter search for catcher Buster Posey, the 24-year-old phenom who rose to prominence as the unnaturally self-possessed rookie catcher for the World Series champion San Francisco. Posey, who fans quickly ordained as a full-blown star before he played an entire regular season, blew out his ankle in a collision at home plate. Posey had to publicly announce his lack of support for threats against Scott Cousins, the player who slammed Posey at the plate. When I heard the news about the young catcher, I gasped, taken over by a fear for the future of baseball. A friend of mine voiced much the same sentiment: “Such a young star.” Calls were put out to end home plate collisions entirely. The game would have to change in order to keep our young catchers from getting hurt. Catchers, who were once regarded as the toughest players on the field and who get to wear full body armor, should be protected like NFL quarterbacks.
When a community faces a growing anxiety, it searches for places to vent the mounting pressure. As the Age of Potential heightens, baseball fans face the growing expectation that they embrace their favorite team’s entire major and minor league system, that they learn about each of their team’s prospects and draft picks, whether these unripened ballplayers will ever see the major league field or not. In other words, there is a new fear in town, and it’s the fear of missing out, of mismanaging personnel, of poorly developing minor league players, of drafting badly. The keeper league fantasy baseball player has a particular knowledge of this challenge, to put names to the uncharted sections of the map, as dictated by the changing coordinates of potential; learning every face on earth, because one of them could be president one day.
Faced with expectations they struggled to meet, in a system with nerve-racking implications for the future of fandom, we lashed out at Joba, and now, in spite of all of the care, in spite of the reams of data the Yankees claimed to possess, the worst has happened. The golden arm blew out. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the subprime mortgage boom, driven by analysts with a certain access to mathematical systems that the average consumer has almost no knowledge of, has ratcheted up the public’s demand for transparency and control. The powers that be are no longer trusted to wield the tools of progress. The public has called for control of executive salaries, and more government involvement. In baseball, the fans have taken up the tools themselves, and transformed consumer responsibility into a consumable art form.
Joba Chamberlain is a good pitcher who came up just as the baseball community began to deal, on a deep level, with the rising tide of the prospect obsession. He enjoyed a half season of brilliance on the biggest stage in baseball, but has otherwise done little to warrant the attention paid him. Instead, it was the timing of his arrival that coincided with the pressures guiding baseball media and fans to press him to the top of the media cycle, and he rose like an air bubble from a deep sea vent to burst at the surface. For every armchair baseball Buddhist who accepts that pitching is a fickle endeavor fraught with peril, there will be a hundred of our nouveau fans, writers, and pundits who will work like demons to extract every teachable cell of invaluable vent vapor, searching for the secrets of the deep.
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