18 Feb 2011, by Ted
From Bryan Burwell's column, "DeWitt rolls the dice," in the St. Louis Dispatch:
The strategy that is unfolding is clearer than ever now. The Cardinals chairman is risking it all in the hope that Pujols and agent Dan Lozano are miscalculating Albert's value in the open market. When informed that this was some bold chess move he was making, DeWitt shrugged his shoulders and allowed a thin smile to crease his lips.
"I don't play chess," he said, 'so I wouldn't know."
This feels like a high school economics problem: baseball's best player, Albert Pujols, wants an extension, and an historic paycheck to match his historic play. The team's owner, Bill DeWitt, Jr., through a glib smile, calls what he thinks is Pujols' bluff, lowballing the Machine and waiting, more or less, for the free agent market to prove him right. The conflict pits the racing pulse of Pujols-level talent against the measured meter of money. The World Series of another game, poker, proves over and again that the mathematician wins the game of chance, not the gunslinger. But audiences still clamor for the gunslinger, and the public calls DeWitt a madman for resisting the temptation of a massive emotional payoff that comes with the big signing.
DeWitt plays Russian roulette with one of the game's icons while baseball fans flinch because it could happen to their team, and Cardinals fans gasp at the thought of losing baseball’s sure thing. In a column on the subject, Fanhouse writer Ed Price distills the matter to its most basic formula, claiming that “Cardinal Nation is left to choose sides, feeling either Pujols is greedy or the Cards aren't taking care of their icon.” I, for one, would hope for a more mature view of the art of the deal than this dichotomous summation provides.
I’ve been known to watch the Bravo show “Million Dollar Listing.” It’s a “reality” show about real estate agents in glitzy Los Angeles, and it has a simple lesson that shines brightly through the high gloss and sports car sheen: you can’t beat the market. In the show’s common formula, an owner wants to sell their house for well over the market price. The real estate agent, who are the de facto stars of the show, tell the camera that there’s no way that the owner will get that much. The owner hems, haws, or harangues, but when it comes down to it the agent is always right, because they are the experts on the market, the number. The owner lowers their price, and the house gets sold.
[caption id="attachment_2272" align="aligncenter" width="435" caption="Bill DeWitt"]
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Bill DeWitt must watch the show, too, because he’s following the formula to the letter in his dealings with Albert Pujols. Fanhouse quotes him as saying that, “it's hard to speculate what the open market really is,” but I don’t believe him. He knows exactly what he thinks the market is. Whether DeWitt is the delusional homeowner who wants a better deal than he deserves, or whether he is the realistic agent who knows what the home will bring, that will bear out when the negotiations pick up again and the real market comes into play.
Pujols, for his part, didn’t get to be a generational great by acquiescing to the demands of others, and his negotiating style plays out thusly so far. He told MLB.com:
"[I'm] not disappointed. Like I say, this negotiation, it happens. Two sides didn't get together and get to an agreement. And that's the way it goes. It's negotiation. You can't get disappointed. You know why? Because I still have another chance after the season, and maybe we'll get something done then."
Those are the words of a realist, and in this case realism means understanding what a rare commodity he is as a player, and trusting the market, just as DeWitt does. Million Dollar Listing taught me that there is usually a number, and it might be somewhere in the middle and it might not, but the various factions come to learn what that number is one way or another.
The Cardinals brass claim that they want to both pay Pujols and have enough money left over to put together a good team. This sounds to me like bargaining bull, as there isn’t a player worth more than Pujols, and a team that loses him quickly has a lot of ground to make up in the lineup. He alone is worth ten or so $3 million players (though you’ll have to check with Fangraphs to learn if that’s really true, it certainly to my eye seems the case).
Of the whole thing, Pujols himself put it well: “It’s a zoo,” he said. It’s an appropriate metaphor for the argument that I’m advancing, because a zoo is a sort of ordered chaos. It can be a little stinky and a feast for the senses, but there’s an underlying balance that dictates what happens from one day to the next. The lions and the tigers have got their number--whether it’s pounds of meat per meal or square footage of a pen--just like the Cardinals and Pujols have theirs.
Passions would dictate that the Cardinals should pay Pujols whatever he asks. It would be a blameless victory for Pujols and everybody else. But baseball’s recent history suggests that the painful decisions of today can pay off down the road. A-Rod left Texas and the Rangers had their best season ever a few years later; the Giants defied logic with a series of mediocre, aging free agents and they won a World Series.
A few months ago I argued that Derek Jeter should stop worrying about money and worry more about his legacy with the Yankees. A few parallels were drawn between the two situations, based on their import to the identity of each franchise. This is a stretch. Pujols is prime time, and Jeter is the late late show. Where the Jeter situation was highly emotional, the participants in the Pujols negotiations seem intent on rational, reasoned discussion in front of the public.
I suppose that the measured emotional responses from each side--excluding Cardinals fans and bloggers, one of whom called the ordeal albertageddon-- are appropriate, too, give that the players include a God-fearing man-mountain who puts up huge numbers with little chit-chat, and a Midwest franchise that wins World Series and contends every year without marking up the cultural map too much. It’s a tame zoo, this St. Louis menagerie, more aviary thus far than lion’s den on the national scene. Come November, the predators may yet come out to prey.
Links:
Dave Cameron addresses the issue of one player's dollar value compared with multiple players making the same cumulative amount of money.
17 Feb 2011, by Eric
Alex Belth of Bronx Banter, an actual authority on the subject, takes (friendly) issue with this statement from yesterday's Milton Bradley post:
Some media folks love to posit Jeter and A-Rod as opposite poles, but really they are the same shiny clean-faced product designed for mass consumption. Jeter is just better at being Mickey Mantle.)
Alex says that is should read Jeter is better at being Joe DiMaggio. I considered that when I wrote the post, but decided to go with the Mick. Here's Alex's reasoning. I'm starting to think he's right:
Because Jeter IS Dimaggio, cool, calculated, meticulously guarding his image. Mantle was the natural, all raw talent, and is known now as much for being a drunk womanizer--a mess like A Rod--as he was for being an icon like Marilyn Monroe and Jack Kennedy.
So is that the right analogy? Jeter is to DiMaggio as A-Rod is to Mantle? Could we do better? Is this a futile waste of time, in the same way that comparing players on the field to their predecessors is a waste of time? Or is it actually more apt than the statistical business?
16 Feb 2011, by Eric
When Milton Bradley was arrested recently at his home for making violent threats to a woman, I was surprised to learn that he lived in Encino, CA. Encino is a plain and pleasant section of Los Angeles right at the mouth of the San Fernando Valley. It's nice --mostly white upper middle class families-- but it's not Major League nice. It swelters but not like the deep Valley cities swelter.
I have a theory about why Milton Bradley lives in Encino, where I attended a baseball camp and swam in our friends' pool. I think he craves the quiet. I think to Bradley, Encino represents something of the idyllic pastoral existence that city people grow up idealizing. The air in Encino tastes nothing like the salty air of his native Long Beach. When he walks down the street, the people may recognize him but they probably don't bother him.
If I ran into Milton Bradley on the street, I’d probably bother him. This isn’t true for most celebrities. But Bradley is different. If individual players can embody Pitchers & Poets and how Ted and I have come to consume and understand baseball, he is one of those players. By his attitude, his place in the ecosystem, his style of play, his perception in the media, he heightens our understanding of baseball. There are others like him -- Ichiro, Zito, Berkman, and beyond.
Bradley switch-hits. That’s almost enough in itself. But it’s not just that – it's how he hits and how he fields and the inexplicable dissonance between the cool and smooth and patient and effortless Bradley on the field and the turbulent and vulnerable Bradley off of it. When Bradley is playing his best baseball, it's as if he's revealing the man he wants to be – and by many accounts, usually is – off the field.
Therein lies the tension that defines him. Milton Bradley is not a volatile baseball player; even his signature season with Texas in 2008 was unassuming. He hit 22 home runs. He got on base. He stayed relatively healthy. And in the course of that season we saw something different personally. We saw a contentedness in Bradley’s relationship with Ron Washington. “The embrace with Wash was a special one,” Bradley wrote in a guest post for the New York Times baseball blog on making his first all-star team. “It felt like a father-son moment to me. In 30 years, I’ve never really had one of those so I can only imagine that’s what it must feel like.”
Vintage Bradley is patient, collected, and dangerous. His swing is compact in the legs and the hips, and from both sides of the plate an aesthetic pleasure. His arms lash across the zone with smooth and level grace. He gets on base like a professional, never seeming dissatisfied with a walk. Once upon a time, he was a decent enough outfielder too. But not even the glimpses of effectiveness reveal Bradley to be a superstar. Instead they reveal him to be simply above average – a good ballplayer, a pleasure to watch, but hardly a superstar, hardly exciting, hardly excitable.
But of course he is excitable. He is practically a caricature at times. He loses his temper during games. He tore his ACL while arguing with an umpire. He broke a bat over his knee (why is this a magnificent achievement of brutal strength for Bo Jackson but a pathetic sign of anger and weakness for Milton Bradley?). I once saw him empty the entire contents of a bag of baseballs onto the field at Dodger Stadium, then fling ball after ball into center field in what appeared to be complete obliviousness to his surroundings. From where I was sitting, I could see whites in his eyes. They boiled.
What’s the right way to understand a player who swirls in so many self-imposed narratives, a player who requires so much? The trait that defines Milton Bradley, the one trait that sets him apart, even from the other smart and vulnerable and self-aware players, is that he demands to be taken seriously as a human being first and a ballplayer second. The earnest statements, the tearful pledges, the tremor in his voice during post-game interviews, the on-field incidents, the off-field arrests: they all reinforce the same subconscious drive to be appreciated or understood or at the very least accepted. Milton Bradley is a human being. And he might be a ballplayer and he might be emotional but those are less important things.
In this way, Bradley is the anti-ARod. (Some media folks love to posit Jeter and A-Rod as opposite poles, but really they are the same shiny clean-faced product designed for mass consumption. Jeter is just better at being Mickey Mantle.) Bradley is incapable of canned lines. He has no interest in public relations, in polishing his image. When Charles Barkley said he didn’t want to be a role model, he was rebelling against the expectations we have for superstar athletes. Bradley is probably aware of those expectations -- but instead of dismissing them, he is realigning them: acknowledge me, respect me, then leave me alone.
The story of Bradley's shortened 2010 season was the simple desire to be accepted as a regular person with regular feelings and regular problems. This desire was manifest in his preseason giddiness about sharing a locker room with Ken Griffey Jr. In the way he tipped his cap to Rajai Davis after Davis stole away an Opening Day home run. In the way he asked for mental help, and then came back, and then fucked it all up again. It was manifest in the way he emotionally confessed to an unsuspecting radio reporter after homering in an already meaningless May ballgame, “I was full of joy, everything felt right,” as if baseball had not felt joyful or right in a very long time.
Obviously, things didn’t stay right for Bradley in 2010. They haven’t begun right in 2011. The Mariners hired a former nemesis, Eric Wedge, to be their manager. Fans and local media wondered openly about his future in Seattle. And then there's Encino. The arrest.
Maybe Milton Bradley wasn’t ready for the desperate quiet anxiety that suburban life can elicit, and his arrest and the incidents leading up to it were the product of that ever-simmering angst and the pressurized valley air and an offseason spent reading about all the different ways he was no longer a part of his team’s plans. This after the worst year of his professional career. Or maybe nothing happened at all in Encino. The charges were dropped. The Mariners had no comment. We’ll never know.
All we can know is that it’s a struggle to reconcile Milton Bradley. He is baseball’s Jacob, always wrestling with himself, his managers, his teammates. His demand -- humanity -- is basic. But his behavior is so erratic, his game is so unassuming, his very presence is so emotionally wrought, that unless we step way back, it’s easy to not notice that humanity in the eyes of the public is already Bradley’s greatest achievement. Before he is a baseball player, even before he is a fuck up or a criminal or a walking injury or a whiner, Milton Bradley is a man.
15 Feb 2011, by Ted
I don't know a lot about soccer. I'm your typical late-comer who enjoys the aesthetic side of the game without having the greatest sense of its history. I learn what I can, and I enjoy the rest.
The great player Ronaldo, who just retired, is typical of the cultural marker that I know of without really understanding. He peaked when I was still in my "I hate soccer it's so boring" phase, which is I think a trial that every matured sports fan must complete and then leave behind, making room for the more justified distastes for NASCAR and golf. By the time I started paying attention, Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo were the stars of the day, attracting all the love and ire of 5 billion soccer fans across the world.
That said, I found Brian Phillips' summation of Ronaldo's career and public persona in Slate an article worth reading with the balanced levels of insight, thought, and perspective that I try to bring to P&P content.
I don't understand Ronaldo by reading the article, but I understand how a fan watched Ronaldo play, and what sort of a once-removed relationship there was between fan and player and media. Of note:
As a media figure, Ronaldo was never cool in the ruthless-visionary way of Zidane or in the lost-album-cover manner of Beckham. He seemed affable, funny, a little ingenuous, a little strange. Those qualities made him human, but they also made him a terrible fit for modern sports journalism, which knows how to handle only one kind of superstar—the kind who is entirely focused on being one.
And:
Over the years, Ronaldo somehow contrived to become the leading scorer in World Cup history, to become, with Zidane, the defining player of his generation, and yet, simultaneously, to become a joke.
I would also urge you to watch the highlight films, which show a player full of talent, in which "talent" is the barely visible ability to create space and opportunity where none appeared to have been.
04 Feb 2011, by Eric
Friend of P&P -- and situational essayist -- Larry Herold's play THE SPORTS PAGE will be read (EDIT: NEXT) Sunday at 3:00 PM at Stage West Theater. I've read THE SPORTS PAGE and it's damn good. It also won the 2010 Texas Playwriting Competition. That's Feb. 20. Not the same day as the Super Bowl, which would be silly.
There will be food and drink. Tickets are $5.
Click here for more info.