Major League Baseball 2011

[collegestudent22]

and the Rockies are good.

Really? Interesting. I didn't think they were that good, but then I don't really understand what makes a team good at baseball all that much. This opinion is mostly based on my father complaining about how horrible the Rockies pitchers are whenever he watches the games.

[The Cid]

I didn't think they were that good, but then I don't really understand what makes a team good at baseball all that much.

I'll try to make it short and less boring.
The Basics:
-The Rockies are currently 26-29. Admittedly, this is not a good record. They are 4.5 games back of Arizona and 4 games behind San Francisco.
-However, Arizona is a young team that has a patchwork pitching staff. San Francisco is the defending champion, but they lost one of their best hitters to a broken leg for the season. Their pitching rotation has two great pitchers at the top (Lincecum is one of the most entertaining players in the game today) and question marks beyond that.
-The Rockies are one of the model franchises for how to win on a budget, as they've qualified for the playoffs twice in the past four years. (Only eight out of thirty teams make the MLB playoffs. Simply showing up is a feat.) They also made a World Series appearance in 2007. They are looked at as a model because of their organization's knack for finding talented young players. Particularly power hitters.
Hitting:
The Rockies' best player (Troy Tulowitzki) is not having the stellar season most fans would have liked, but he has eleven home runs so far. So that gives you an idea of how good he might be when he's doing well.
-Todd Helton is still chugging along, hitting .306 with 7 home runs. By the way, Helton's going to the Hall of Fame. Rockies fans--even casual ones--know that, right? History is going to be very kind to the untarnished players of the "steroid era," and to the best of my knowledge Helton is among those.
-They have two guys in Seth Smith and Dexter Fowler that can run really fast and end up on base a lot. These are fun players to watch, which is the overall message here: the Rockies play a particularly entertaining brand of baseball.
Pitching:
-Their best pitcher is named--I swear--Ubaldo Jimenez. Just say that name out loud. Fun, right? He also throws in the high 90s (that is, he throws the ball very hard) and tends to celebrate strikeouts. (He's also very streaky. Right now, that streak is not good. His ERA for the season is over 7.)
-Jorge De La Rosa was long considered one of those players in every sport that doesn't quite live up to a lot of hype he had as a rookie. He's living up to that hype now. 5-2, 3.69 ERA, 52 strikeouts in 59 innings.
-Their closer is named Huston Street. The best possible quality in a closer is consistency. Needless to say, like most other closers in the league today, Huston Street is wildly inconsistent.

[ampersand]

Ubaldo and Hudson Street would make great band names. Unlike, well, say Elway.

[The Cid]

Since every time any catcher suffers an injury in a collision, we talk about Ray Fosse I feel obligated to point something out.

The story is that Fosse was run over by Pete Rose in the 1970 All Star Game, broke a bone and was never heard from again in MLB. What nobody tells you is that...
-It was Fosse's first all-star game, meaning that there's no way to say with any certainty that he was a talent "here to stay."
-He played in the same game the very next year. So "never heard from again?" Not so much really.
-Fosse went on to hit over .300 just once after 1971. He did it in 1976, six years after people like to pretend his career was ended by Charlie Hustle.
-Usually, MLB catchers that start 80+ games per year for more than five seasons are applauded for their talent and longevity. Ray Fosse is always talked about in terms of "what could have been."

My point is that the impact of that collision in 1970 is overstated. We do this because it adds to the legend behind Pete Rose, a man who left the entire sport in disgrace more than twenty years ago.

[The Cid]

So, after a decade and a half of people complaining about big market payrolls, baseball has finally started to consider that there are other ways to make the playing field a bit more even. The word realignment is now a hot topic in baseball circles.

More likely than not, the only realignment we'll see is Houston moving to the American League (West), giving both leagues fifteen teams and likely elevating the amount of interest in both the Astros and Rangers by giving them each other as natural rivals. So why Houston? Mostly it has to do with interleague play. Certain teams, as we know, are saddled with an interleague "rival" that they have to play every year, six times, without fail. The Mets and Yankees, for example. Only one of these "rivalries" involves a team from the AL West playing a team from the NL Central--Rangers and Astros. That creates a scheduling problem in and of itself, and is the primary reason that the interleague schedule looks weirder and weirder every year.

More drastic realignment ideas are more aimed at "fairness." Some plans lump all the big market teams together in their own divisions (like an AL East of the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets, Phillies and Nationals), others eliminate divisions entirely (but often come with a six-team-per-league playoff system that would never work in baseball), or revert to the two-division-per-league structure like we had before the strike.

Anyone have any thoughts? Want your team in a different division? Who do you want to play? (For my part, I must say I'm intrigued at the idea of trading out Toronto, Baltimore and Tampa Bay for the Phillies, Mets and Nats. Something about that sounds like a lot of fun from the fan's perspective.)

[ampersand]

Let them get rid of The DH first before we talk about realignment.

[collegestudent22]

Yeah, the DH rule makes no sense. For all intents and purposes, baseball is the only major sport where teams competing for the same trophy play by different rules based upon which is the home team. Would football not be a ridiculous sport if teams played with 11 men on the field in the NFC and only 10 in the AFC? Would hockey fans not riot if nets were two feet wider in Boston than they were in Vancouver? (Along with all the other things they riot about, including losing - and sometimes winning.)

[The Cid]

Let them get rid of The DH first

Never going to happen. Player's union won't let it.

...baseball is the only major sport where teams competing for the same trophy play by different rules based upon which is the home team.

Which makes the only option the option that nobody really wants: both leagues adopting the DH. Players don't want it because, as far as I can tell, most players don't want to DH. Fans don't want it because...well, honestly I don't know. Because pitchers have always hit in the NL? Because it's fun to watch a lanky pitcher attempt to size up a fastball for some reason? Managers have always hated the DH because it gives them less opportunity to micro-manage a game. And baseball generally loathes change in all its forms anyway.

I'm conflicted. I both like and dislike the DH position. I don't like watching pitchers try to hit in important World Series moments. It never ends well and it's not very entertaining. My problem with the designated hitter is that it removes any way for pitchers to keep one another in check when it comes to pitching inside. In part because of the DH, Major League Baseball has had to enforce beanballs with fines and suspensions. (Then again, these days a player can wear enough padding to protect them from anything, so why anybody thinks beaning people is still effective is beyond me.) But the rule is here to stay, for good or ill. Chances are, the NL will have to adopt it sooner or later.

[ampersand]

Well...here's the real problem with baseball, and I think it also applies to Cricket as well. They're typewriters in a computer age world where sports who can adapt to the 15 nanosecond attention span of the average viewer will survive and sports who can not will not.

Or perhaps will have to repackage themselves as restaurants are repackaging themselves as part of the "slow food" fad, where some will like that it's trying to buck the trend. But I don't see these rebellion-like trends lasting.

But even sports who adapt well to technology are showing signs of strain as the technology of the high definition cameras will rival that of actually attending a game. Why go to a game where everything is overpriced and over-regulated when you can drink and eat as much as you want while watching a game from the best seats in the house with definition that's probably better than what you could see on the field? Every sport has to come to grips with that. And baseball is probably the least able to adapt to these changes and cricket, while they've tried to make some changes like the twenty20 version (twenty overs, so a game lasts a few hours instead of the days that a Test match may run), it still sounds like they're kind of running behind.

I think if baseball wants to change, they should do more than just move one team from one league to another. I understand they are wanting to get rid of the notion of divisions altogether, but I think grouping teams in geographic pairs will serve them well. They also should get rid of the notion of maintain a semblance of tradition. Tradition has its place, but from what I see, it's much more minute than it has ever been.

[The Cid]

They're typewriters in a computer age world where sports who can adapt to the 15 nanosecond attention span of the average viewer will survive and sports who can not will not.

I'd like to point something out to the entirety of the crowd that believes this:

Golf is going to be on television all damned day today. Starting tomorrow, tennis is going to be the most interesting daytime television for two weeks. Shortly after that, golf will be on network TV all weekend again. Both sports are doing just fine--though golf is currently running around like a chicken whose head got caught in a sex scandal. So the "attention span" thing might be overstated. Just check out how many people watch the US Open this afternoon--even though the leader is beating down the field to a historic degree, making the outcome all but certain.

Man, people watch televised trials. If our attention span was as collectively short as people like to say, who would watch courtroom proceedings moving at a snail's pace?

But even sports who adapt well to technology are showing signs of strain as the technology of the high definition cameras will rival that of actually attending a game.

I don't know if I agree that this and your other point are the same subject, but I can't really disagree with this statement very much. Having gone to Fenway twice this year already, I can say with certainty that there's still an experience to be had at the ballpark. However, not every baseball stadium is Fenway Park. It's easy for us--Boston's a baseball city, the team's a regular competitor, and the home stadium is really nice. Only a few MLB cities can check off all three of those boxes. A couple franchises--the Oakland A's are a good example--can't check off ANY.

Attendance at sporting events will probably go down slowly with time, but what it will reveal is a scary reality that should bother anyone who has bought a ticket to a sporting event in the past decade. See, as it turns out, you as a ticketholder are not all that important in any sport. Oh, sure, my twenty five bucks per game is presumably going toward the salaries the Red Sox are paying their players, but it's dwarfed in comparison to the money that NESN takes in for the franchise. The fact is, teams would rather get good television ratings than rank in the top five when it comes to attendance. (Oh, and they also turn a healthy profit on all the merchandise you buy. If you went to your franchise's owner and asked "what can I do to make you happiest," he'd direct you to the team store and say "two words: replica jersey.") Get good ratings, and the value of your regional TV contract goes up. Get consistently good ratings, and it becomes a viable business plan to create your own version of NESN or YES.

They also should get rid of the notion of maintain a semblance of tradition. Tradition has its place, but from what I see, it's much more minute than it has ever been.

Dumping traditions would be a gamble for baseball. It isn't the NFL, where history just doesn't matter (to a degree where Hall of Famers from the seventies often turn into sad stories that nobody cares about). The gamble for baseball is, would dumping those traditions bring in more fans than it would lose? Remember, baseball fans often resist change--which is why there's still widespread complaining about a four-decade-old position like the DH. That rule's older than you, and yet you want it abolished. That sounds pretty traditional to me.

It's hard for me to see this issue clearly. I'm a fan, and I think the sport is great the way it is. I like that the closer as a position is older than the three point shot as an NBA rule, yet baseball people tend to talk like it's a passing fad. (And it is. In ten years I suspect we'll see very few full-time closers and more bullpens like the Tampa Bay Rays have had in recent years. Good closers are extremely rare and their success tends to be fleeting.) I like that people complain about the four-decade-old DH in the American League while college football teams change the color of the actual playing field. I especially like how baseball people look at a minor change in the shape of the pitching mound for one season as a mistake that created extreme statistical anomalies. (Check it out: the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season did it in the year that a different pitcher set the modern record for ERA in a season. All because the pitching mound changed in shape slightly.) And maybe these personal preferences cloud me from the inevitability that baseball is headed the way of the dinosaur. But I don't see it.

[collegestudent22]

It isn't the NFL, where history just doesn't matter (to a degree where Hall of Famers from the seventies often turn into sad stories that nobody cares about).

I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter at all. It's just that it doesn't have as much pull - likely because the sport's popularity isn't as old as baseball's. However, I am a big fan of, say, "The Drive" in the 1986-87 AFC Championship game, despite the game taking place two and a half years before I was born in August 1989.

[The Cid]

I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter at all.

Moments matter, for individual franchises, but there's very little beyond that. The in-depth fan will find out about the old Super Bowls, but pre-1966 it's not easy to find a lot of NFL stuff. (Hint: there was an NFL long before there was a Super Bowl. Jim friggin' Thorpe played in the NFL.) In general though, history is background noise if it's even that in the NFL.

In a way, it works to the NFL's benefit that they don't seem to care about their history. Theirs is a league that changes all the time. In my time as a sports fan, I've seen half a dozen offensive trends and an equal amount of fad defenses come through the NFL. Meanwhile, the only "new" baseball strategy in the past thirty years is "Moneyball," and that's more or less a word that means nothing. In the same span, Phil Jackson has won eleven titles among two franchises while utilizing one style of offense. In hockey, changes only ever seem to come when the league makes rule changes like they did after the lockout. So those sports can embrace their history a bit more. The game Yogi Berra played doesn't look TOO much different from the game Alex Rodriguez plays, right?

Well, players take better care of themselves than they did in the fifties and sixties. Don't see a lot of Mickey Mantle-style hard living guys anymore. Players don't smoke in the dugout anymore. Weightlifting is part of the training regimen now. In fact, there IS a training regimen now that Major Leaguers are generally expected to follow in the offseason. Also, players didn't always get paid enough to play baseball full-time. Until the 70s or so, only the best players had that luxury. Parks are generally larger in dimensions today, the strike zone is officially taller, there are more teams, division play and a Wild Card. Technology has helped build a better baseball bat, and a more consistent baseball. There are two positions--the DH and the closer--that did not exist in the early 1960s. Shortstops were light-hitters at the time. Catchers were generally power hitters. I could go on, because there's more.

Oh...right. It's completely different now.

Oh, and let's not forget that Babe Ruth, everyone to ever hit .400 for a season, Joe DiMaggio, Cy Young, Ty Cobb and all the other old greats played before Jackie Robinson came into the league. So they played in an all-white league. And it wasn't really until the 1960s that the league was truly integrated, thanks to some particularly racist owners. So that pretty much makes the only "clean" era 1960-1985. Except for 1968, when they messed with the pitcher's mound.

There's a good side and a bad side to embracing history. Basketball probably has it right--they embrace their history in that great players and teams of old morph into these legends and tall tales of superhuman feats. (Example: Wilt Chamberlain. Scored 100 points in a game with limited witnesses, might be better known for his scoring off the court and there's no way that number is possible. This is how basketball fans treat their legends.) Hockey has traditions around the Stanley Cup, mostly, and all of them are cool. It's pretty much accepted as "fact" that the Stanley Cup is infinitely cooler than the Lombardi Trophy, the O'Brien Trophy or the Commissioner's Trophy (bet you didn't know the NBA and MLB trophies had names!) because of the traditions associated with it. The Original Six being revered over all the other teams is another way hockey embraces its history. But baseball does it more than the others. Every comparison is historical, records are a bigger deal in baseball than any other sport, and the Hall of Fame is poured over every year like players are being appointed to the Supreme Court. They don't do that in any of the other sports. Nobody really gets mad about people who are selected to the NFL Hall of Fame the way baseball fans get mad when "unworthy" guys are put in Cooperstown. Even that word is treated like a synonym for baseball Valhalla. In the other sports, the Hall of Fame's usually only a big deal when one of your favorite players is going in.

The great football teams are entirely limited to the Super Bowl era, and most people accept that the real great teams didn't come around until at least the Steel Curtain. Great baseball teams are routinely compared to the 1927 Yankees, 1975 Reds and sometimes the 1967 St. Louis Cardinals. You say The Drive is a big deal for you? Yankee fans are still celebrating championships from the 1920s. (No, really. Ask one. They always talk about their titles as a total. That means they're celebrating all of those titles.) What's the first thing that comes to mind about the Chicago Cubs for you? Is it over 100 years old?

[collegestudent22]

I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter at all.

Moments matter, for individual franchises, but there's very little beyond that. The in-depth fan will find out about the old Super Bowls, but pre-1966 it's not easy to find a lot of NFL stuff.

And I think that is mostly due to the fact that baseball was "America's sport" for so much longer. Football has only achieved national popularity relatively recently compared to baseball, so it makes sense that their big stars are from the 80s and 90s. That said, you are right - history is far more important to baseball fans.

Also, players didn't always get paid enough to play baseball full-time. Until the 70s or so, only the best players had that luxury.

Heh. Even Elway suffered from that, and chose football over baseball, despite being on the Yankees minor league team at one point.

[The Cid]

Heh. Even Elway suffered from that, and chose football over baseball, despite being on the Yankees minor league team at one point.

I love those stories. I wonder if there could be a "what if" team for each major sport: guys who played two sports through high school or college like Elway.

Football has only achieved national popularity relatively recently compared to baseball, so it makes sense that their big stars are from the 80s and 90s.

It's not quite that, because the NFL has always had big stars. Jim Thorpe was a household name, not because of his football ability, but people followed his career because he was Jim Thorpe. Johnny Unitas was a huge star. Bart Starr was the big name that brought any fans to the TV to watch the first Super Bowl, not Lombardi. Joe Namath was an enormous star from his time in college--and remember, college football has been huge since the thirties. Terry Bradshaw, Rocky Bleier, Franco Harris, and Joe Greene were all huge stars when the Steel Curtain was up. But the feeling is that NFL fans have just moved on after those guys.

NFL fans don't seem to mind branding each new generation greater than the last, which is part of it. Records aren't as sacred because they don't usually hold up as long in football as they do in baseball. (Passing touchdowns in a season--which you'd think would be the NFL version of the home run record--has belonged to Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, and could easily change hands again any season. Meanwhile, it took 37 years and a Rocky film worth of steroids to break Roger Maris' 1961 single season home run record.) Football fans are also more aware of the changes in their sport. Those giant spoiler tags in my last post are facts that many baseball fans ignore--especially the pre-integration note. (Pre-integration and the Negro Leagues are another reason baseball fans like to embrace history. Since there were zero stats and zero film clips from the Negro Leagues--seriously, every inning they ever played is lost to history already and I'm not kidding about that--we feel completely justified making claims like "Josh Gibson was the greatest home run hitter that ever lived." For all we know. Gibson lives on entirely in tall tales. Nobody knows how many home runs he hit--estimates often top 1,000, but nobody knows. Sachiel Paige's early career--and he came to the Indians as an old man--is entirely washed away, but I'm still convinced entirely through the power of stories and that he was the greatest pitcher ever. I'm convinced of this despite an absolute lack of a single shred of evidence to support my argument. The stories are that good. In 1999 and 2000, I saw Pedro Martinez do outright amazing things with a baseball. And yet this dude that has zero statistics for the first forty plus years of his life, who I've seen all of zero pitches from, has him beat in my book. (And Pedro kind of pitched for my favorite team. And was kind of part of their first championship since before my grandfather was born.) You'll never get any football fan to believe anything like that. Try to sell someone on any pre-television linebacker being one tenth as good as they think Ray Lewis is today. You think someone would be convinced by stories alone that some quarterback from the forties was better than Tom Brady is right now? Hell no. (Then again, part of the reason people advocate Gibson over guys like Ruth is that it makes us sound cool and progressive. Like the indie rock crowd. "Look what I found in the bargain bin! It's this dude that got screwed over by racist policies that hit a thousand home runs for all I know! How cool is that going to look on my wall?")

Also, while football FANS have a good grasp of history, I could suggest that the NFL itself is rather indifferent to its history.

[Calus]

There are a few things. I for one wouldn't say Brady, Manning, or even Unitas would be the greatest QB ever(I would go with Mr Graham myself). I agree with you on most accounts. Still pissed that the screwed up the naming of PNC Park.