Eric: Less than one month until Pitchers & Catchers report. Let's start it this way. What non-roster invitee/subradar acquisition do you think will have the biggest impact in the majors this year?
Ted: That's a great question, Eric. Unfortunately, I am in the process of memorizing each non-roster invitee for every team in the AL. I'm playing catch-up for when I move into full-on Mariners bandwagon mode. I don't want to interrupt this intensive exercise by pointing out any particular player. Besides, all I've got is radar, so if they're subradar then I don't know about them anyway. Let's just say that my full support is behind any non-roster invitee who is still older than I am. The list shrivels each year.
Maybe I'm getting old and cynical, but I have a hard time feeling optimistic about the old guys in camp. The systems are too good these days to let a player slip through the cracks. I mean, I'm sitting here amazed that nobody has signed Johnny Damon yet, but he'll probably suck next year. The computers already know it, even if the American people don't. I think it's also still a result of the long steroids hangover. Ah, the Steroids Era! When careers never had to end! The cold hard truth of entropy was suspended and we all frolicked in a NeverNeverLand of home runs and swollen heads.
Anyway, I'm getting carried away. Even if a biblical snowstorm is ravaging the mid-Atlantic, spring is approaching, and that's no time for cynicism and nostalgia. It's time to think about new, young things. I bet Kevin Millar bought himself a new pair of ostrich skin boots when the Cubs signed him!
So I've gone on about the hard truths. Give us some bunny rabbits and Skittles, Eric. Who do you think will shine this year?
Eric: You mean besides Kevin Millar's gleaming, winning smile? The obvious answer is that the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers will shine this year. Right? Right? Yeah.
In all seriousness, I have high expectations for the math-powered Mariners.I share your creeping feeling that the fans are just a little too optimistic, but you know what? It's been a helluva sunny winter here in Seattle. So why not? And keeping things semi-Pacific, I have very optimistic notions about the AL West this year. The Mariners are obviously and (especially if they bring Bedard) significantly improved. The A's are doing something interesting by signing all these old guys, the Angels lost stuff but probably not enough to make them a below-average team, and the Rangers enter year two of the great Nolan Ryan badassery experiment.
Speaking of which, there won't be any skittles in the Rangers clubhouse for them this year. As a Texas-native, how do you feel about the rise of Nolan Ryan The Executive? He's proving to be a pretty fascinating dude, ditching conventional wisdom (pitch counts) in favor old conventional wisdom (suck it up). I almost see it as a Finley or Veeckesque maneuver. Thoughts?
[caption id="attachment_1275" align="aligncenter" width="302" caption="Nolan Ryan only pretended he knew what pain was for this ad."][/caption]
Ted: Nolan Ryan judging pitchers' durability is like Brian Cashman complaining that other teams aren't spending enough money. The Ryan Express had the most rubbery wing in history, making him the worst possible judge of human arms other than his own. That said, I think he may be tapping into what has long been stewing: a desire for pitchers and pitching coaches to stop being such babies. I have a bit of this in me myself, though I temper this attitude with the mental image of some poor second-year guy sweating bullets and lobbing hand grenades towards the plate while Nolan Ryan grins down from the luxury box in his cowboy hat with his arms crossed.
Suddenly, the "old guy market gap" is gathering steam, which is great because it took the baseball public like ten years to catch up with Billy Beane and his OBP gap. Nowadays, a market gap lasts about fifteen minutes, and that's before it proves to have any value. I think we can say that Nolan Ryan will probably own the "blow out guys' arms" market gap for some time. This article here has a good little recap. (editor's note: No pitcher on the Rangers threw 200 innings in 2009. I don't know what that means.)
In this era, everybody notices what nobody is noticing really quickly, in what feels like the length of The Sandblast. The amazing thing as that some people still regularly blunder through the process, and seem to ignore all available insight. I'm a fan of one of those teams, the Astros, and the most popular blogger in the hemisphere, JoePos, chronicles the pratfalls of another. In this age of excellence, where there's so much information and so much insight, there are a few shining lights that tip the balance back to the mediocre. And that is why they play the games.
Here's a challenge, Eric: I've ended with a cliche. I challenge you to start your reply with a cliche, and build off of that like Dayton Moore has built a dynamo off of Billy Butler.
Eric: How about two? They play the games to win and there's more than one way to skin a cat. What I mean to say is that there's no right or wrong way to build a roster; there is only winning and losing. These market gaps, whether age, defense, or OBP-based, are only a small part of what goes into assembling each lineup and pitching staff and bench. Take the Twins, whose success seems to be the result of existing in a vacuum, apart from all the hype and all the trends.
When it comes to what goes into each transaction, we are still very much in the dark. Baseball moves slower than politics and the stakes are different. The narrative cycle -- is the bottoming out of the veteran market really "news"? -- exists more for the sake of the fans than for the sake of the executives. For all we know, for all the tweeting and info-sharing, they are probably still a good seven steps ahead of us. After all, they make the market. We only react to it.
"If I can still walk, if I can still move, if I can still see, I will play baseball." - Old Cuban man, translated from the Spanish, fr. Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey
Bill Spaceman Lee doesn't concern himself with dignity. Anyone who talks as fast as he does can't worry about the occasional joke that falls flat.
Lee is concerned with baseball, and making sure that he plays as much baseball as possible, in whatever game he can find. It's downright undignified for a pro ballplayer to grow old, and for that pro ballplayer to continue to take the mound after his professional value has expired, but that doesn't bother Lee. He'll pitch anywhere, because pitching anywhere is better than not pitching anywhere.
I bring it up because the other day the MLB Network ran a documentary on Bill Lee: Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey. The film is a kind-hearted venture; half bio and half travel journal. We learn about the Spaceman's career, watch some (wonderfully 70s) archival video, learn the highlights and the lowlights before trekking with Bill and his baseball club of dumpy dudes as they travel to Cuba to play baseball in pick-up games against Cubans who are of a similar age but look about a hundred times better.
From said archival footage there was an exchange to emphasize Lee's viewpoint about his baseball shelf-life. The conversation covered Les Expos' expulsion of Lee from the team after he left the clubhouse for the barroom one game:
News Lady: "You could get blackballed, you know." Bill: "Well then I'll go out to California and grow walnuts or go to British Columbia and grow peaches like I always said I would after I was done playing baseball." News Lady: "You don't care if you'll be out of baseball for good?" Bill: "Oh, I'll never be out of baseball for good. It's my life."
The film's finest feature is Lee's endless monologue, a spoken-word soundtrack that runs wild through the countryside of the mind, veering from one subject to another, and which usually has something to do with baseball. Lee punctuates his stories with an open-mouthed grin. He illustrates his pitching explanations through gesture (he has massive hands and a farmer's physicality).
The traveling team is an amateur collection of over-aged and under-talented men who've gone to Cuba to play dodgy ball games on sagging Cuban fields, just because they want to. Lee, the only player on the team to have been paid to play baseball at any point in his life, is a lob-baller with bad knees and a big belly, and he's not particularly good, even against the level competition (though I'd take a team of 50-year-old Cubans over any other national team every time). But Lee is there, and his endless banter boils the otherwise sluggish stew of crappy baseball. He talks ball like he's twenty. He breaks down his last turn at bat (for yes, he is a hitter, too, and a better one now than he is a pitcher, even if he's requiring of a pinch-runner) as though he is at Fenway facing Juan Marichal.
("I'm like Juan Marichal," he said after cursing his bad knees. "Marichal always played hurt.")
The thesis: good baseball, bad baseball, it's all baseball and it's there to be enjoyed. Treat yourself like A-Rod, because nobody else is going to and there's no point in standing around waiting for them to.
Lee can't get over how much Cubans all over enjoy baseball so deeply. "I love Cuba," he went. "God damn they play baseball for all the right reasons. Cause they like it. They don't play it to make more money or sell some more satellite dishes."
The documentary reminded me of the day that I spent with the Spaceman, when I helped out at a baseball clinic that he led one Vermont fall day. It was a modest affair: a rag tag collection of seven or eight people who were clearly more interested in hanging with the Spaceman than in improving their baseball skills. An average age of around forty-five, I'd guess, and as a whole the group showed the coordination and agility of a roomful of broken vacuum cleaners. But no matter, as Bill Lee would entertain them in the manner that they hoped for.
The Spaceman didn't stop talking. He answered questions all day, most of which revolved around the favorites or least favorites, the toughest, etc. The only answer I remember is that his least favorite hitter to face was Thurman Munson. Ever expounding, Lee went on to describe Munson's style at the plate, how to pitch to him, his locker room habits, his favorite restaurants, etc., spinning a single word answer into a sonnet.
Lee brought a giant wooden bat with him to the clinic. Custom-made, he explained. The knob at the handle-end was the size of a kid's rubber football, to provide a counterweight and propel the barrel through the hitting zone, went the idea. Lee, who loved hitting near as much as he loved pitching and talking, took BP with us. He swung the mammoth bat like a heavy gate swinging open, and he lofted pitches around the outfield.
I bring up the bat because numero uno it's a marvel to behold, and there was a Paul Bunyan effect, especially being up in the Vermont mountains as we were, but numero dos because in the documentary there was a scene in which an older Cuban man, a spectator at one of the games, asked the Spaceman for a bat. Lee looked around himself like the man had asked him for a light, then he said, "Yeah, I gotta bat for you." And he brought over a wooden model with that enormous knob and handed it over the chain-link fence to the Cuban.
During the baseball clinic's pitching session, I caught for Lee. It was a pleasure because the lefty threw the ball about 65 miles per hour and he hit his spots. He threw to the attendees too, in a semi-scrimmage. After the paying guests finished their turns flailing at the bat and romping around the bases, I hopped in there and wallopped a Spaceman slow curve to an empty place in right center. Some oohs came from the gang, but I was young and a baseball player to boot. It was a lollipop pitch to hit, and still there was Lee saying "I hung that one." The truth was, he hung them all.
He hung them all but he never hung them up. And that's saying something. Fourteen years of organized baseball and I wouldn't know where to find a full-on game to save my life, and here he's in Cuba playing the Steel Workers Union and whatever else he can find. And that was him, for the day I hung with him and in the movie and in every interview I've heard or read: he finding baseball in everything, when most of us keep trying to find everything in baseball.
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Because he talks so much, and because he makes a great soundbite, I pulled a few more quotations from the movie, from Lee and others. They might be verbatim.
Bill Lee quotations from the film:
"I got a secret power: I'm left-handed. It helps."
In his VW bus in the parking lot of Olympic Stadium, to the parking attendant: "I pitch for the Expos, name's Lee. I'm pitchin the second game, you wanna let me in?"
"I never quit playing. The Expos released me and two days later two Frenchmen came to my door in Montreal. I woke up in a drunken stupor and they said, 'Bill, would you want to play in Longay for the Senators, and I go, 'Well, that's a sobering experience.'"
"And once the Russians pick up the game of baseball, world peace will be established."
"Why am I in demand? Because I provide an alternative."
"It's funny, it's a great game. It goes on forever."
"These people ask me if I'll go out and throw the ceremonial first pitch. I say, 'not unless I get to throw all the rest.'"
"What's wrong with baseball? Nothin...Only at the highest level of the economic structure of baseball are we in trouble. Cause eventually it'll die at that level. But the kids'll keep on playin."
Quotations from others:
"I never passed up a left-handed pitcher in my life." - USC coach Rod Dedeaux
"What you call a good pitcher, he know what to do." - Luis Tiant
One more quotation, because I can't resist. On Manny Ramirez leaving Boston:
"He's the greatest hitter I ever saw. I loved the guy. He's a prima donna, and he pushed down the traveling secretary. Well, you pick the traveling secretary up, and you dust him off, and you apologize and you go back to work. He's the greatest I ever saw. I like Jason Bay. I'm not saying anything disparaging against Canadians, because I've married two of them."
5. No love for the Western States either. Pitchers & Poets is a Seattle-based blog, written by an Astros fan and a Dodgers fan. As you can imagine, we find the East-Coastiness of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball lineup objectionable, deplorable, and quite disappointing. (Fanhouse).
About two decades before the birth of Jesus Christ, construction began on what some historians have called the first Hall of Fame. It was conceived of by the Roman Emperor Augustus as a way to honor his gods, his ancestors, and himself. Hardly discerning when it came to his statuary, Augustus loaded his personal Hall of Fame with 108 busts, some hauled back to Rome from far-off lands, others commissioned by Augustus himself, others yet commemorating military triumphs.
Earlier this month, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown elected its 293rd member in Andre Dawson. He will have to make due with a bronze plaque instead of a full-on marble statue. At initial glance, 293 seems like a lot of members. After all, the history of baseball in America pales in comparison with that of conquests in Rome, and Cooperstown is in many ways more notable for the players it leaves out than the ones it admits.
This year, Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar found themselves on the cusp of entry, scraping in vain at the impregnable golden fences of Cooperstown. Next year, they should be admitted. But what makes the Hall of Fame dynamic – as an institution more than as an actual building – is the list of men left on the outside. The Hall of Fame is defined by that invisible line that separates the worthy from the unworthy. It is the line over which celebrated men like Marvin Miller and Buck O’Neill, Gil Hodges and Ron Santo can never cross.
The location of this line, this threshold, is hard to place. Once upon a time, it sat squarely between numbers. It sat between 499 and 500, between 299 and 300, between 2,999 and 3,000. Only certain circumstances – misdeeds, injuries, intangibles – could compromise the landmarks of greatness. But these are different times. Belief systems, like home run records, have been crushed beneath a type of deceit. Traditional statistics, once considered infallible measurements of performance, have been proven inadequate.
There are 539 Hall of Fame voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Aside from the broad and broadly-covered schism between old-school skeptics and sabermetric believers, that means 539 unique definitions of what merits Hall of Fame induction. Induction requires 75% approval, or 405 votes. Once eligible, players can remain on the ballot for up to fifteen years. This means time for voters to consider the legacy of a candidate as his career fades further into the rear-view mirror. For guys like Blyleven, who seems to be gaining momentum at the pace of a baseball rolling across a flat surface, it means annual near-misses, an extended human drama that feels destined to play out like the final scenes of an ancient tragedy.
This is why there needs to be some level of Hall of Fame voting reform. Not just for poor Blyleven, for whom induction would mean so much at this point, but for all of us. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be a celebration. It’s supposed to be nostalgic and it’s supposed to make us happy. We want to see our heroes in tears on that podium for their final moments of glory. We want to remember what it felt like to watch them play and win and lose.
I don’t know what I’d prescribe to fix the Hall of Fame voting process, but I know this. I would let more people in. I would ease the restrictions. I would welcome more players and more managers and more executives and more ambassadors. Not a lot more, but a few more; some of those legacies stranded right outside the gates would be granted admission.
As it stands now, the voting process is entirely subjective. There are no statistical requirements for entry, no thresholds that need to be reached. There are just those 539 writers and the meager check and balance of the Veterans Committee (an essay for another time). If it were otherwise, if this were a Hall of Greatness or Hall of Merit, then Bert Blyleven would have already been admitted, and the whole conversation would be moot.
But it’s a Hall of Fame. And that’s a different thing. With a Hall of Fame, the stakes are basically non-existent. Is Mickey Mantle’s presence in Cooperstown really soiled by Bill Mazeroski’s? There need be no statistical formula for inclusion. We have our hearts and our imaginations and the whole point of the institution is to please us, the baseball fans who trek to upstate New York, and pass hours arguing about it. So why not ease the standards, ease the frigid self-righteous shrieking over whether an excellent player (anybody whose even part of the conversation is an excellent player) is or isn’t quite deserving enough?
How could this be accomplished without creating a Hall of Mediocrity, or a Hall of Cora Brothers? There are a few possibilities that immediately come to mind. One option is to simply lower the 75% threshold used by the BBWAA, perhaps even to a more sane 70%. Another would be to introduce an element of controlled fan voting. I realize that some fans hate All Star voting because they believe average folks aren’t smart enough to know who the best second baseman in the NL in a given year is, but the fans are what powers baseball. As a single component of a larger formula, fan voting could bring a new dynamism to the process. A third option would be to introduce appeals processes, so certain candidacies could be resurrected.
I don’t know how much thought Augustus put into the statues in his forum. It is very possible that he argued for hours with advisors over whether to include a 109th statue, or whether a certain ancestor or general was being unjustly excluded. But honor and glory are not finite substances of which we could run out. Even with a slightly-expanded Hall of Fame, there will be emotional induction ceremonies and heated arguments over who deserves admission. It’s just that if we open the gates to Cooperstown just an inch or two wider, there will be more joy, and isn’t that the whole point?
Today's the day of the big Rogue's Baseball Index relaunch. Below is the text of our intro post over there:
Welcome to the new and improved Rogue's Baseball Index blog. When we unveiled the RBI in September, it was as a Wiki, a browse-able dictionary with no practical uses and without even its own domain name. Today the RBI is reborn as a blog. It's still baseball like you've already thought it, only this time it's delivered to your doorstep (or RSS Feeder) every day. Check in for new terms every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and archived gems on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The wiki will also still available for your perusing pleasure.
If you're still not quite sure what this is all about, you can visit our About Page. But here's the main idea: The Rogue’s Baseball Index (or RBI for short) is what we have deemed an alternative baseball lexicon: it’s a baseball dictionary, if Merriam was Mike “King” Kelly and Webster was Bill “Spaceman” Lee. It's brought to you by Ted Walker and Eric Nusbaum, the guys behind Pitchers & Poets. We'll also have regular contributions from Carson Cistulli. Artwork and Design are by Mark Penxa and Kolin Pope.
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