22 Apr 2011, by Ted
There was a shining half-season last year when Cliff Lee pitched for the Seattle Mariners, and every fourth day (the fifth belonging to King Felix) he’d pitch and push back against the growing realization that the team couldn’t hit its way out of a pile of day-old rally fries. The accuracy of his fastball, so familiar with the low corners, and his metered pace defied the hitters who would disappoint once he quickly allowed them the stage again. Lee was, at that time, a brilliant journeyman, a gentleman of the road. His pitching was mercenary, and context-free.
Now he’s a settled man, towing with him to the pitcher’s mound a satchel of stability, money, respect, and esteem. By actively choosing Philly over New York and eschewing the biggest or at least the most prestigious paycheck on the table, he deliberately chose to pitch in a smaller (though equally rabid, I’d argue) baseball market, alongside three other studs who undoubtedly dissipate the hot glare of the spotlight. Lee, once the Tarantino-esque mysterious free agent, has moved in with a nice suburban family. Where will he hide his gun?
Lee pitched a midweek day game against the Brewers that I had the chance to watch pretty closely. Recalling the joy of the Lee pitching performances of yore, I zeroed in on his work. I saw the same guy, the same meat of Lee’s game: the big curve working off of the hard, straight fastball, the clock-like wind-up and delivery, the intimidating demeanor of an ace. But the intangibles were fuzzy at the edges: the location, the genius of his pitch sequences, the actuality of his impermeability (“I’m beating you because I’m beating you, and I will continue to do so.”)
His fastball still hummed, touching 94 at times, but the precision was lacking. He left them up, and the Brewers were touching them with long fly outs and drives to the gaps. Lee’s cutter, which usually hints at the corner of the strike zone before ducking out of it at the last moment, hung like a mediocre slider. Brewers were hitting the ball squarely, which if you’d told me that would happen during any of his starts in Seattle last year I’d tell you to go jump in a lake.
On this particular sunny spring day, the sparkle of his first half in Seattle in 2010 was absent. This is notable because somewhere along the line Cliff Lee became, for me, the pitcher that doesn’t falter, who wills himself past fallibility. The average performance means that I have to accept that Cliff Lee is capable of average performances. It’s like watching your dad trip.
This Brewers game is the exception, and a light one at that, as Lee is actually pitching very well this year (24 strikeouts to 2 walks), and even today he was able to stop the bleeding at two earned runs through six. Gosh, was it only two? There was another one unearned, but I could've sworn it was more. And anyway the Phillies caught up soon after he left the game. But in the symbolism that each baseball game represents for the single viewer, this faltering performance represented a shift in the Lee archetype. For Lee, a bad start is nowadays a ripple in a broad pond, a Philadelphia stinker that’ll soon be lost in the greater body of great starts, that will span years in the city and in the uniform.
Lee's stopovers in Philly the first time around, Seattle, and Texas were ethereal, and fleeting. Once he was gone, you felt like one of the townsfolk watching the aloof hero disappear into a dust cloud on the way to the next town in need. But Cliff Lee has settled down. His career has taken on linear airs, which comes with the small forgivenesses afforded by family, knowing, as families do, that time is a healer and all we've got is time.
21 Apr 2011, by Eric
I turned on NPR yesterday to hear a couple of people who were not Frank Deford talking about the Dodgers being taken over by Major League Baseball. If you weren't aware, the Dodgers have been taken over by Major League Baseball. Although it may not feel that way to fans who have followed the McCourt ordeal closely and to bloggers trapped in the never-ending cyclone of baseball information, this is big and news. National news. It was the front page story on the New York Times website.
I marked the occasion by starting a Twitter campaign to get MLB to appoint former assistant GM Kim Ng to run the team (I'll take credit for this idea, because why not?). I also marked the occasion by grinning joyously. It may not seem that way, but this is good news. This is progress. For a fan like me, who is willing to sacrifice short term goodies for long term stability – or at least solvency – the MLB takeover of the Dodgers is a good thing.
Another thing I've been yelling about on Twitter is the Jewish holiday of Passover. Passover celebrates the ancient Hebrews and their escape – at the hands of god, acting through Moses – from the grip of the Egyptian Pharaoh and his slave-driving, child-killing ways. The comparison I've been working with most is recent callup Jerry Sands as Moses. Kershaw as the Angel of Death. And on and on. Now a more apt metaphor has presented itself:
The Hebrews left Egypt only to encounter 40 years of wandering the desert. It took them 40 years to find the Holy Land. This takeover by Bud Selig, this liberation from the hands of the Pharaoh McCourt, is the first step on the Dodgers' journey to their own land of milk and honey. There may be rough and confusing times ahead. After all, nobody took Bud Selig for a savior. There may be false idols and bland, unleavened bread in our future. But there is also a better day coming. This is a freedom story.
Some other thoughts:
1. The Dodgers are not the Montreal Expos. They are not the Hornets, either. The Dodgers have a history of fantastic attendance. They have a wonderful stadium. There is no reason at all to be concerned about the team leaving LA.
2. This seems obvious but it also seems worth reiterating: so much depends on who the new ownership is. Less depends on how long it takes for MLB to line that owner up. After all, having a limited budget for off-season maneuvering might have prevented the Dodgers from signing Juan Uribe this year. Not such a bad thing to put Colletti on a shoestring.
3. For the first time in my life, I am singing praises for baseball's anti-trust exemption.
4. On that note, I would love it if somebody could explain the bylaws that make it possible for Bud Selig to actually remove Frank McCourt from control of the team. Couldn't this lead to a new round of ugly litigation? (This, of course, being the worst case scenario.
5. Somehow none of this seems any worse than Fox and trading Mike Piazza. Maybe it's because this time I'm 24, not twelve.
20 Apr 2011, by Eric
Eric:
The Cleveland Indians are in first place at 12-4. This wouldn't matter to me normally. But the Indians are 12-4 on the back of a vigorously healthy Travis Hafner. Grady Sizemore just returned to the lineup after seven years on the disabled list. Matt LaPorta might not suck after all. And Carlos Santana far from sucks. There's something compelling, and dare I say, inspiring about this mix of resurrected corpses and fresh-faced infants tearing up the American League, right? How long before Omar Vizquel hangs up his White Sox hat and heads out East to rejoin the party in Cleveland?
Ted:
I had no idea that Seven Years in Tibet was based on Grady Sizemore’s career. He should’ve let some people know he was lighting out for the territories. And it’s nice of Hafner to show up the year after everybody stopped drafting him in fantasy baseball leagues.
The Indians right now seem to embody one of the mysteries of baseball: injuries. There are the obvious injuries that can gum up a career, but more common probably are the kind of injury that are barely detectable. Some fiber of shoulder muscle might be weak enough to keep Grok from Grokking, but not enough to keep him from starting. There are a couple of things that I’ve learned about baseball with age. One, deception is the most important part of pitching. Two, injuries (and the greatest injury of all: aging) are just about the most important factor in the makeup of a good baseball team.
Both of these tenets are difficult to detect, and they are boring. But they explain why Greg Maddux was great.
Eric:
I am not quite comfortable with calling aging the “greatest injury of all.” I have a feeling many of our readers who exist outside the scope of professional baseball will not appreciate that sentiment. Anyway, I’m intrigued by injuries as a factor in team success and a measure of player value.
Some word problems that you don’t need to answer:
1. The Green Bay Packers lost their starting running back Ryan Grant early in the 2010-11 season, and yet they went on to win the Super Bowl. Could that happen in baseball with a similarly valuable player?
2. Intelligent people who make careers out of evaluating the relative merits of baseball players are quick to point out that like a sharp batting eye and a strong throwing arm, the ability to not get hurt (durability) is a skill. This is why a guy like Sizemore, for example, is not as good as he seems. Do you buy this premise?
It’s hard to deny that certain players are more affected by lingering and recurring injury problems than others (i.e. Rafael Furcal). But isn’t there also a spiritual or karmic or at the very least luck-oriented side of all this? Isn’t this why we call them “freak injuries?”
Ted:
My response, in math quiz form:
1. Winning is relative, obviously, in that if you lost a player on a great team, it might become a very good team, which would still be better than a simply good team. I think the team question is a lot more complicated than the individual question. Individual performance is graded in such analytical terms these days that the tendency is to say, well, he’s good or he’s bad for this reason and that reason. But a guy like Hafner reminds me, at least, that there’s not a sort of numbers-based reason that he’s been crummy. It’s a human thing: a confluence of muscle fibers and tendons and psychology worthy of the chaos theory. I don’t know what I’m getting at. We all know that life is complicated.
2. I do buy the premise that some guys get hurt more than others, yeah. Those are the heartbreakers, because the fans among us think that faith can out-duel probability. Like right now Indians fans are feeling pretty convinced that Sizemore will be the story of the year. He’ll come back and lead the World Series parade down whatever the main street in Cleveland is. But the odds are that he won’t. He’ll probably get hurt again. The odds always win given enough time. My dad taught me that (not in a gambling way, in a middle school math way) and he’s much smarter than me.
Question is, does it matter? Does the mystery of injury have anything to do with being a baseball fan, besides the mere presence or absence of a player in the lineup? In other words, what does a simple fan do with the mystical veil of injury?
Eric:
Let’s be honest here, we have no idea what the simple fan does with the veil of injury. I’m not even sure what the veil of injury is. But all fans are affected by the mysterious ways of injuries. When a player is limping along, ineffective, grimacing, tragic, it’s the fans who are forced to sit and watch and pity him. When a star like Grady Sizemore goes down with a seven-year ligament tear, it’s an act of urban blight: another factory shuttering its windows and lettings its remaining employees go, another light on the Cleveland skyline turned out, another devastating blow to that city’s poor sports fans.
What I’m saying is, the mystery of injury has everything to do with being a baseball fan. Especially a baseball fan like you or me. We live for the narrative. And think about all the great baseball storylines defined by injury. Think about Mickey Mantle’s knees or Sandy Koufax’s arm or poor Herb Score’s face. Injuries are as much a part of the games as home runs and strike outs.
And this, my friends, is why the Cleveland Indians will finish in fourth place in the AL Central this season.
18 Apr 2011, by Ted
This Situational Essay comes from friend of the blog and regular contributor Paul Franz, whose work you can find at his blog, Nicht Diese Tone.
When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories. Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb." People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad." Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring." Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative." And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors. I think this stuff is all hogwash. Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things. While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.
* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.
Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue. The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous. The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.
In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man’s Heaven and another’s Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests. Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.
In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field. Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven." It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation. Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield. In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game. Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box. It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.
The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks. Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300. The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.
* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun.
Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway. It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park." And it is. The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball. It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind. Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*
* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125. Big? Yes. Infinite? Not quite.
This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency. The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%. Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season). That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.
Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy. With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out. Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large. To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss." The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).
The Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best.
The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors. That Park Factor of 125 is big. Really big. Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best. But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind. While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.* Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors. Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.
* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9. That's epically, historically great. It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season. I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?
Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias. When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback. When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks. A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs. A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark. The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.
Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time. Coors Field does matter. It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%. The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams. But only very, very slightly more often. The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors. The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.
But wait, I'm not done yet. We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp). While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids. And we can't know. What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree. What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use. Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good." We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids. No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair. They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.
Is that right, though? My answer is no. Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd. Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many. And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated. Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks. Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.
To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree. It helps us survive. It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual. In nature, nuance leads to destruction. That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however. If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite. That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink. If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor. In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.
The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful. Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write. Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy? Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?* The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad. The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.
* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.
Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many.
Ah, there I go breaking my own rules. You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree. The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad. To say so would undermine the argument. The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute. We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category. Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence. Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.
So what is there to do? Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both. To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball. We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate. Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out. Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate. Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth? Maybe, but probably not. Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.