Eric writes about Frank McCourt, Fred Wilpon, and the obligations owners and fans have to one another at Baseball Prospectus.
David Cone is on his way to becoming the best player-turned-analyst ever. "I love Fangraphs," and other choice quotes at New York Magazine.
A pitching duel or a slugest? Cee Angi over at Essence of Baseball chooses pitching every time, and discusses how she picks the games she wants to attend.
Josh Wilker's new book, an appreciation of 'The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training' is out June 7. Until then he's writing about players on the team, starting with ye olde Jimmy Feldman at Cardboard Gods.
If you like P&P but don't always like reading, check out our tumblr Pitchrs & Poets. Also, if you haven't already, feel free to follow us on twitter and on facebook.
The P&P Lightning Round is an exercise in crowdsourcing and fast writing. Twitter suggests a topic. We spend 45 minutes writing about it. Then we post the results.
New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon is barely hanging on. In pictures he looks a broken man, shoulders sagging, face weathered in new and unkind ways. In interviews he gives the desperate impression of somebody defeated, a man trying desperately to maintain some semblance of control. But Wilpon will not maintain control. A look at the recent history of the Mets indicates that he likely never truly had control. Fred Wilpon is already ruined.
George Steinbrenner, even in death, is not ruined. His post-mortem legacy maintains a tighter grip on the Yankees than a living breathing Wilpon ever could on the Mets. The years of cycling through managers and front office officials still remain fresh in the baseball consciousness. The boastful and ill-conceived statements to the media have only been further-perfected by his son Hank. The silly rules that Steinbrenner used to establish himself as unquestioned boss of the New York Yankees remain in place today.
The silliest of those rules, of course, are those applying to facial hair. And not just because facial hair is a silly thing to regulate, but because there were never actually any rules. Steinbrenner’s facial hair policy was subjective. If he felt a mustache was too long, a mustache was indeed too long. The Simpsons of course parodied this with Mr. Burns questioning the length of Don Mattingly’s sideburns to the point of absurdity.
Funny. Even funnier when Mattingly was actually suspended the next season for refusing to cut his hair. (I love the image of Mattingly as rebel. Someday I will write something about Mattingly and John Cougar Mellencamp as dual Indiana idols who seem different but are actually surprisingly similar.)
The thing about Mattingly though, is that he was Mattingly. He could afford to protest. He was a beloved figure. Steinbrenner had him suspended, but then the issue was resolved quickly. Everything went back to normal. Could you imagine a lesser player attempting something similar? Luis Sojo?
I once worked at a restaurant that required clean-shaven faces from its male staff. There was an open kitchen, so even the back-house guys had to shave. Once, I showed up with about a day’s worth of shadow – maybe even slightly less – and was scolded by a manager for it. I’m not what you would call a regular shaver, and I thought it was a stupid rule, but the job paid really, really well. I picked my battles.
In retrospect, I’m sure my manager didn’t care about my beard. It was a power-play. Steinbrenner was likely the same way. It’s hard to imagine him with strong feelings about the aesthetic value facial hair. It’s easy to imagine him maneuvering in a Machiavellian way to cement his status atop the franchise. Reds owner Marge Schott, a similar if more evil strong-armer, also had a no-beard rule.
For Steinbrenner and his imitators (Willie Randolph and Joe Girardi instituted no-beard policies with the Mets and Yankees respectively – though tellingly, Mattingly hasn’t with the Dodgers), rules can exist solely as a manifestation of power – and a reminder of who’s boss. When Danny Tartabull and Paul O’Neil shaved in the morning, they thought of George Steinbrenner. They remembered their place in the world. They remembered who was boss. It’s hard to imagine a New York Met player having a similar thought.
Ted and Eric discuss the mysteries of the MLB Fan Cave, the weirdness of Fred Wilpon, the 1990s First Basemen Week hangover, the golem that is Michael Pineda, Grizzly Giambi, and more.
These have been an epic two weeks. 1990s First Basemen Week started as a loose concept album, a free associative invitation to ramble. It is a testament to the magnetism of Mssrs McGwire, Vaughn, Bagwell, Olerud, Thomas, and the rest that, despite our very broad concept, so many contributors and readers immediately found themselves on the very same page. We all knew what it meant to talk about first basemen from the 1990s. We all felt it.
As far as we are concerned here at P&P HQ, the concept album went platinum. You laughed, you cried, you offered to write about the mediocre slugger that everyone else had long forgotten about. The week expanded from one to two, the album grew to a double disc.
It's been a privilege to curate the joy and the sorrow, the amazement and the dread that these fellows channelled. But even more, it's been a joy to curate such a remarkable group of writers. The first basemen of the 1990s may not be dead, but you still somehow managed to bring them back to life.
For that, we offer a huge THANK YOU to every one of our contributors. This was your week(s). You contributed to the monumental chronicling of an era, not through stats or lists, but through stories. Also, particular thanks go to the talented Kolin Pope--@kolinpope who is also the force behind our new design--for the epically appealing and amazingly appropriate header image, which has really tied the room together.
Sincerely,
Ted and Eric Pitchers & Poets
A few P.S.es:
Check out our new Tumblr blog, where we post the weird, wacky, wonderful imagery of the baseball multiverse.
When this first base business is over, Eric Nusbaum will still be here.
I admit there was a slightly cynical subtext to our early discussions about a 1990s first basemen week. On the one hand, the 90s first basemen topic gave us a range of personalities to explore and celebrate, it gave us avenues to discuss everything from urban blight to steroids to the strike to usual standby memory. On the other, the 90s are good business for people like this blog's editors, born in the 1980s. The 90s are a gold mine of nostalgia.
The 90s were when we learned baseball. Its stars were the first stars we formed opinions about in the present-tense: by watching, by collecting cards, by reading sports pages. I know about Mickey Mantle but I know Ken Griffey Jr. This feeling, this owning of recent history, is the very premise of VH1. It's the reason that The Tenth Inning felt so disconnected from the rest of Ken Burns' Baseball. There's been an unopened Cal Ripken Jr. Wheaties box in my parents' pantry for over a decade.
So yes, we knew, or at least hoped, that the topic we chose, the 1990s first baseman, might capture the zeitgeist a bit more than our usual stuff. We wanted that, and thanks mostly to an unbelievable array of guest posters, some famous, some heretofore unknown (even to us), but all generous and talented, we got it. And further, thanks to the flurry of memories and old baseball cards and long winding essays of these past two weeks, I’ve been able to put off writing about Eric Karros
The powers that draw children to their favorite players have been written extensively. We know of the mystical nature of baseball fandom. Thanks to Josh Wilker we also know a little bit about the strange personal bridges we build to our own imagined versions of sports stars. There was never such a mystical connection between myself and Eric Karros. Instead, there were other things. There was timing and there were coincidences.
Karros was never my favorite player. My favorite player growing up, and still to this day if I had to pick one, was Raul Mondesi. Raul Mondesi was the player who made professional baseball – even when it was played live right in front of me – seem like the kind of thing that somebody had to have made up solely for my benefit. Everything about Mondesi was kinetic, dynamic. His arm. His grin. The way he hacked at bad pitches and slid only head first and when he did slide head first, always seemed to lose his helmet.
Karros was similarly inept at taking walks, but otherwise, he was nothing like Raul Mondesi. He plodded. He drifted. Where, say, Jeff Bagwell went to war each time he crouched into his high-tension batting stance, Eric Karros went to sleep. Eric Karros was and is an un-charismatic man. His game reflected this.
But I liked him. I liked him enough that in the years when Mondesi was my established favorite player, Karros slid comfortably into the two spot. There was so much about Karros for me to latch onto: his name was Eric. His number was 23 (my brother's birthday, my grandmother's lucky number in roulette). He was a tyall, slow-moving first baseman, which a small part of me must have known was the kind of player I'd become by high school.
And he was there. We traded Pedro. We traded Piazza. We traded Mondesi. We even traded Paul Konerko because first base was already locked down. But it took a decade for the Dodgers to trade Eric Karros. So I grew up with him. As much as Vin Scully or the ubiquitous Tommy Lasorda or Dodger Dogs or whatever else, Eric Karros was a staple of my baseball development. A stolid, not-quite-beloved but certainly well-liked constant from the time I was six, to the time I was sixteen.
* * *
The story should end here: a workmanlike remembrance of a first baseman past. But it doesn't. Because things happened toward the end of Karros' career, and I began to understand better. And Karros became a broadcaster. Now this is an essay about coming to terms.
Eric Karros has not broken my heart. He has not made me a cynic and he has not changed the way I think about my childhood, or the Dodgers, or whatever else. But watching Eric Karros on television now is painful for me. And not just in the way that it's painful for anybody subjected to watching Eric Karros on television. I genuinely want to like him. I genuinely want that player who was so perfectly suited to my youthful circumstances to also suit my adult circumstances.
Instead, Eric Karros is the worst kind of ballplayer-turned-announcer: the kind who can't help but turn every on-field incident into a personal anecdote. The kind who is vain, unthinking, and genuinely boring to listen to. Watch Eric Karros in the studio, or listen to him in the booth, and you will experience a man who seems to have no sense of how he is being perceived.
Karros the broadcaster is probably most famous for making an inappropriate on-air comment about his colleague Erin Andrews during the 2006 Little League World Series. Via Deadspin:
Erin Andrews was doing a bit piece about an injured player who was hurt playing ping pong. She throws it back to Brent Musberger and Eric Karros, and Musberger talks about Kirk Gibson and how memorable that was. Karros replies, "Yeah, I think all of these boys will have something to remember with Erin Andrews." Musburger responds, "yeah," and is followed by 15-20 seconds of silence.
That's a tasteless comment. But let's face it, it's the kind of thing that any baseball player – or any man, really – might say off the air to no consequence. And it doesn't make Eric Karros a bad person, it just makes him a regular former ballplayer, a typical color commentator. Hell, even this, the most scandalous side of Eric Karros, is pretty bland. The consequences of his professional worst are a mere awkward silence, a few chuckles.
(Allow me this caveat: I don't think Eric Karros is a bad guy. When Jose Offerman shoved him in the dugout during a game, it was almost certainly because Jose Offerman was a crazy bastard. When he fought Ismael Valdes in the shower, it was probably just one of those things. And when he was finally traded and said it was his own fault for not producing enough, Eric Karros showed about as much dignity as a man could in that situation.)
In the end, Eric Karros is typical. He's a nice enough guy. He's a little vain. He's the all-time leader in home runs by an L.A. Dodger, and yet he never won a playoff series with the team. He never made an All Star game. His numbers look a whole lot worse than they did in the 90s.
Even with these last two weeks of first base adrenaline pumping through me, I'm unable to muster the enthusiasm I want to about Karros. Maybe because unlike teammates Mondesi and Piazza and Nomo, and unlike so many other 90s first basemen, he was never an outsized figure. Maybe because his career went fine for a decade then faded into effectual play and a quiet exit bow, like careers are supposed to do.d
Eric Karros became a dull broadcaster. Nothing in his career indicated that any other path was possible. Nothing in his career indicated that Eric Karros would differentiate himself as an intellect, as a wiseacre, as a stylish or otherwise memorable commentator.
The more I think about it, the less disappointed I am. Because Eric Karros and I still share a name. I still have a blue Dodgers batting practice jersey with the meaningful number 23 on it high up in my closet. These things are enough. I expect nothing more from Eric Karros. I deserve nothing more from him. Nobody does.
I once worked at a restaurant that required clean-shaven faces from its male staff. There was an open kitchen, so even the back-house guys had to shave. Once, I showed up with about a day’s worth of shadow – maybe even slightly less – and was scolded by a manager for it. I’m not what you would call a regular shaver, and I thought it was a stupid rule, but the job paid really, really well. I picked my battles.
Ted and Eric discuss the mysteries of the MLB Fan Cave, the weirdness of Fred Wilpon, the 1990s First Basemen Week hangover, the golem that is Michael Pineda, Grizzly Giambi, and more.
As far as we are concerned here at P&P HQ, the concept album went platinum. You laughed, you cried, you offered to write about the mediocre slugger that everyone else had long forgotten about. The week expanded from one to two, the album grew to a double disc.
Karros was never my favorite player. My favorite player growing up, and still to this day if I had to pick one, was Raul Mondesi. Raul Mondesi was the player who made professional baseball – even when it was played live right in front of me – seem like the kind of thing that somebody had to have made up solely for my benefit. Everything about Mondesi was kinetic, dynamic. His arm. His grin. The way he hacked at bad pitches and slid only head first and when he did slide head first, always seemed to lose his helmet.
