Baseball | Bryan Joiner

March 27, 2013

Do not bring up Jackie Bradley Jr.

This is all in addition to what’s here. The point is: It is a money-losing proposition to start the season with Jackie Bradley Jr. on the Red Sox roster. As WEEI’s Kirk Minihane writes:

Are you willing to give up a full season in 2019 for nine games in 2013?

That’s it, nothing more and nothing less. The idea that the Boston Red Sox should punt a full year of club control over what sure looks to be a potential star in what will be the absolute prime of his career in exchange for nine games is, of course, as foolish and short-sighted as it sounds.

Bradley Opening Day cheerleading, like this from the Boston Herald, is crazy. Starting him on Opening Day isn’t throwing caution to the wind; it’s throwing cash to the wind. The Red Sox have injury problems. They don’t have contract problems. Jackie Bradley will be much better in six years than he will be in April. Using him to solve an injury problem now will just create a contract problem later. It’s been more than a year since a game that matters, so it’s unsurprising that Sox fans would be clamoring for a spicy new name. Let it simmer, boys and girls, just a little bit longer, and you can eat like kings for years.

2 Comments

March 13, 2013

The Toronto Blue Jays will or will not win the AL East

I listen to podcasts. It’s a thing I do. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about the AL East because, you know, Red Sox. I’m excited for this season. The low expectations are like Ben-Gay on my aching legs after running the marathon of giving a shit that was the Red Sox against the Yankees for nearly a decade, while living in New York. This year, it doesn’t… fucking… matter. This year, the only thing that matters is improving, and the Red Sox will improve. It is a near-certainty. It could never be as bad as last year. The only place to go is up.

One thing I’ve learned from listening to these podcasts, specifically SBNationa’s Over the Monster, I believe, is how unlikely the Orioles are to repeat what they did last year. The Red Sox and Blue Jays were abhorrent last year. Someone had to win those games. I had never put that together with the Orioles’ magical run, but it seems obviously in retrospect. I like a good Orioles team, but I’m not hopeful.

After them, you’ve got the Rays and Yankees, who both could win the division with a subpar record by their standards. The Rays could age up into it, or the Yankees could age down into it, but “it’ could easily be 93 wins. The Red Sox will be better. They’ll probably break .500. They’re actually pretty good.

And then there are the Blue Jays.

The Blue Jays are, somewhat remarkably, the favorites to win the AL East in Las Vegas (or Barbuda). They’re a really popular team in supra-baseball circles, which is really fucking strange. They’re the Blue Jays. They were really bad last year. Then they made two trades, and they went from nobodies to a team the general public liked. How the shit can the general public get behind a team anymore that hasn’t been good for two decades? What makes the Blue Jays different?

I’ve thought about it, and I think there’s nothing to make the Blue Jays any different. And that’s what convinces me they’re not different.

I mean, they could win 90 games, and win the division. That’s one possibility. If everything broke their way — Josh Johnson staying health, Jose Reyes at 80 percent of his breakout season, Jose Bautista at 80 percent of his — they could pull it off. If the players on their team were necessarily capable of it for more than one or two years over the course of their life, they wouldn’t have landed on the Blue Jays. At a time where it is as easy as it ever has been to predict how likely a player is to repeat a career performance, and the exponentially more unlikely idea that every successive player will contribute 100 percent is well known, people will want to believe the opposite. It’s something of a hysterical pregnancy. It’s been so long since Toronto has been around that it seems like a novel idea, fraught with whatever projections we didn’t heap on the previous four teams.

And again — the Blue Jays could win the division. In fact, if they did, it would be fucking awesome. I am so comfortable with an 85-win, non-playoffs Red Sox season that I realize it is the upper bound of expectations. The fact is, anyone could win the AL East this year, and that’s cooler than the idea of the Blue Jays running away with it. It turns it into the NFC East, where every game is a bloodbath. I can’t imagine anything cooler than that. It’s baseball where every pitch matters, the whole season. and one where power changes hands every day. The Blue Jays have had it for one long day. When the season starts, it’ll up to anyone to grab it. It could be them, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

3 Comments

March 2, 2013

How I talked myself into B.J. Upton’s breakout season

I play in a keeper fantasy baseball league that uses an auction system, and is a points system based on linear weights, so your runs and RBI can suck it. This morning, I made the decision to bring B.J. Upton back for one year at $10. Upton represents everything that this league doesn’t reward — fielding, speed, raw home run numbers — so I have spent the last three hours trying to talk myself into this being a bad idea, but I think it’s actually a good one. The statistics are one thing, and they are the main thing; they predict a year much like his last three, which would make him slightly less valuable than $10, in our system. My pause is this: Every anecdotal factor — every single one — is in his favor, as far as I see it. It’s a predictor’s no man’s land. It’s the rare time that the sides are equally weighted, as far as I can see.

Upton was once the top prospect in the game, and he has turned in a slightly above-average career through six full seasons and two partial ones. He had one great year, in 2007, at the age of 22. Since then, he has consistently hit around .270/.320/.430, albeit with a heap of plate appearances. He’s been success as a quantity, though not necessarily at the quality the Rays expected. The Braves signed him for 5 years, $75 million a deal that reflects his durability and the twinkle in the eye most free agents are for most teams. They see good things, and a lot of them. They see a very good baseball player, and teams need very good baseball players.

So why pull this for a guy who’s been good-at-best in the aggregate for the last six seasons? I think it works because Upton is a low-risk, high-reward proposition for the Braves. As a fantasy owner, he’s somewhat riskier, because I’m betting he’ll be good this year, instead of at some point in the next three years. But I think if he’s ever going to put it together beyond the perfectly respectable level he’s achieved, it would happen now, for several reasons.

The first reason he might be better this season is the new contract, which pays him almost twice annually the $7 million he earned last season in Tampa, itself almost twice as much as his previous high of $4.8+ million. Like the Patriots, the Rays are always playing the angles, locking up talent below market rates. Like the Patriots, I can’t expect this to endear itself to players in the long run. I think that a large contract has as much potential to calm an athlete as it does to throw him into complacency, a trope that rarely plays itself out — players who don’t fulfill the terms of huge contracts, like modern-day Alex Rodriguez — shouldn’t have been offered the contracts in the first place. For a player of Upton’s self-assuredness, I’m guessing that he’s more likely to fold comfortably into self-assurance, instead of being the player who “vexed his adherents, because he’s clearly a gifted five-tool player who can carry a team when it matters.” Unrelated to the contract, I think Alex Gordon is a good precedent for Upton’s career arc, albeit one without the wonderful age-22 season. Scouts can be right or wrong, but in the aggregate, they are quite good at identifying baseball talent, and Gordon was every bit the prospect as Upton, though more or less a complete disaster until two seasons ago. Upton’s talent has never been an issue, nor was Gordon’s aptitude for the game, but both have had trouble harnessing it. Gordon has become an above-average player, quite possibly a good one. It took him five years, and he broke out at age 27. Upton is 27 right now, and will be until August. If the dam is going to break, this would be a natural time for it to happen. To be clear, I’m not talking about a Jacoby Ellsbury-like breakout, but one like Adam Jones’s last season, which, at .287/.334/.505 would be a great landing spot for Upton.

The second reason I think it could happen is that he’s playing with his brother. Jeff Sullivan crunched the numbers at FanGraphs to see if siblings improved if they were on the same team, and the answer was: Not really! “It turns out baseball is a complicated game the outcomes of which can’t be determined by one’s emotional state,” he writes. “Play with a brother in April and, chances are, come July or August, it just feels like regular baseball.” Being wicked smaht, however, he throws in this caveat:

Of course, what applies generally doesn’t have to apply specifically, and the Upton brothers are unique, like all sets of brothers. Both are known for their incredible raw skillsets, and both are known for not consistently reaching their ceilings. Maybe each will be motivated in Atlanta by the presence of the other. Or maybe B.J. will just be happy to be away from Tampa, and Justin will just be happy to be away from Arizona. Maybe they don’t improve. Maybe they stay the same, or even get worse. At the end of the day, they’re just two teammates in major-league baseball who know each other pretty well.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I think the combination of B.J. being away from Tampa, and taking on an elder-ish statesman role on a high profile team alongside his struggling younger brother, will be good for him. I’m not sure this works out for Justin, anecdotally, but he’s already owned for $31. Obviously, BJ at $10 is a better bet than Justin, but the question is whether it’s a good one. I think BJ is good for Justin. It’s possible that being an oldest brother with the initials “B.J.” is clouding my judgment. It’s likely, even, but it doesn’t make me wrong. At the very least, I don’t see how it would hurt B.J. This is obviously a major judgment call, but it’s on these margins that desktop scouting happens. There’s an argument that it’s a hobby from which to stay away, like picking stocks unless you’re really good at it, but forget it, Marge: It’s fantasy baseball.

Finally, I think the Braves provide a better environment for Upton than Tampa’s wonderful free-for-all. Part of growing is accepting that you need to change, and if Atlanta’s slightly more strict ways can have a positive effect on Upton, and get him to wait on juuuuust a few more pitches, the benefits will expand disproportionately to the costs of instilling them. This is always true, but this is why change can be important — even if Upton is nothing I say he might be, and does in fact use his contract as an excuse to dog it, the barriers to getting messages across in a new environment are necessarily easier to cross than they are in a static situation. If the Braves can get him to stop swinging even a little bit, they’ll make out well. I think they’ll do it, and I’m betting my fake money that it’ll be this year. I feel just good enough about it, but these are the margins at which I have to work.

1 Comment

January 11, 2013

Kill all the sportswriters

They were writing about performance enhancing drugs 50 years ago. They’re writing about them more, now, because they believe that for sports to survive, there must by a mystery. For almost all members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, there’s simply not that much to do any more. The numbers have closed around them. More people can better evaluate players than ever before. The game of hero-making for a living is transparent; Jon Heyman doesn’t even bother hiding the game anymore, like playing the cup-and-ball version of three-card monte with an invisible glass, where you can see the ball go down his sleeve just before he looks you dead in the eye and tell you that were wrong, wrong, wrong.

If we needed sportswriters at any point, we certainly need them a lot less now. Games are covered from every angle, as they happen, on Twitter. The sportswriter must figure out how to make lemonade out of a fully squeezed husk; the difference between the sportswriter and the journalist is that the journalist does not pee in a pitcher and tell you his lemonade is the absolute best, because it has real lemon husks floating inside. The press box is a coddling mechanism, an incubator to keep the writers happy with the team’s CEO. In the specific case of the Hall of Fame dialogue, punishing the players for alleged PED use exonerates the owners. The “Hall of Fame” is a misnomer as it is; it’s one room at an otherwise amazing museum of baseball. Clear out the plaques, and you could put some cubicles in there, make some cold calls. It’s the least special part of a very special place. It’s the coat room at the Chartres Cathedral.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are arguably the two best baseball players ever. They do not seem to be nice people. They did really well at the end of their careers. They are famous beyond belief. They don’t need the Hall of Fame. Frankly, the Hall of Fame doesn’t need the Hall of Fame. It’s stupid and demeaning and insulting to the intelligence of anyone who bothers to pay attention. The “character clause” is institutionalized bigotry, not necessarily along racial lines, but along the lines of us vs. them. Ken Rosenthal compared attack-dog statheads to Tea Party activists, but he’s got it backward. His vote is his weapon, and he uses it irresponsibly simply because he can, for now, even as he feels he’s being marginalized to a zero point. It’s insanity, and the angry voices in the computer likely have nothing on those in his own head, telling him that what he’s doing is right. Barry Bonds played. Roger Clemens played. Baseball happened, and it’s properly represented everywhere on Earth except the one room built to do so.

May 4, 2012

Farewell to the Master

If this is the end for Mariano Rivera, it finished not with a whimper but the thud of a baseball against a wall. That was always one potential finish, but this was like the residents of Pisa waking up to find the damn thing toppled over and finally having to answer the question of “What now?” Rivera stood for so long and broke so many rules that the talk today will likely be of what a tragedy it is for the whole exercise to end this way. I don’t celebrate it, but in the end River’s body did what no single hitter could ever do convincingly, and that’s show that the guy is human. This could have happened at any point since the strike. It happened in 2012.

Rivera’s career isn’t just staggering. He’s sui generis, a now-fallen baseball god with no father to his breathtaking style. Cal Ripken was eventually the Guy in Gehrig’s Shadow, and the bulky guy who didn’t meet a batting stance he didn’t like. Rivera was the converse. Almost ashen in his wiryness, his control panel had one button and he pressed it with joy. Yankees fans loved him for it, and why not? They won and won and won and won, and they won with happy endings the likes of which all sports fans may not crave, but love, because it puts them at the center of the narrative. Rivera was Disney-like, and if there’s anything good about the way it likely ended it’s that we can appreciate the man instead of the myth.

But oh, what a myth! Even in his most visible moment of “failure,” against the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, it was in play. He only gave up broken-bat singles, and when called upon to throw to second base, he pressed the only button he had, and chucked it into center field. In a moment so potentially fraught with symbolism just after September 11, mighty Mariano fell short, and the winners weren’t New York’s brokenhearted but a bunch of Curt-come-latelies from Arizona. The gift here was the same as the injury, in a way: It showed that life doesn’t give a shit about your narratives, and the lesson is to enjoy the good times when they happen.

I’m trying to make chicken salad here, which might sound rich coming from a Red Sox fan, but I loved Rivera. He belonged to the Yankees, but he belonged to the baseball-playing human race, and that’s all I really care about. Shit, it’s better than he played for the Yankees. If anyone was deserving of the spotlight, it was him. Derek Jeter is a great, great player, but he’s symbolic of the Yankees teams in a way Mariano isn’t. Those Yankees teams were Derek Jeter and had Mariano, and that’s an important semantic difference. Mariano belonged to all of us, because things that damn awesome just do.

All that said, there’s no official word that this is the end for Mariano, but it is the end for the Yankees, who finally have to face life without him on a sustained basis. This is the moment everything changes. As fans of literally every other team can tell you, “relief pitching” is an oxymoron, in that it’s almost always a relief for the other team to see it activated. Through all the scuffling, the Yankees knew Rivera was on the end of that chain, and for as long as they needed him. Even as his appearances longer than one inning dwindled, you knew he had it in him, just like he had three innings in him in 2003 against the Red Sox in the famous Aaron Boone game. It’s barely remembered that David Ortiz came about two feet from hitting a home run off the great one in extra innings, and for good reason: Rivera kept him in the yard, and when Boone did Ortiz about 60 feet better, he ran to the mound and pounded it with his bare fists, crying like a man who had given everything he had to a game he loved. If your lasting image of Mariano is of the legend writhing in the dirt, tears streaking his face, make it that one, and not the one from yesterday. That’s the legend in carbonite, the tower that can never be rebuilt.

1 Comment

April 26, 2012

The forthcoming, nauseating Bobby V redemption

Bobby V, only baseball’s most recent enduring snake oil salesman, walked straight into the wave of jeers, because they were coming from behind the bench, because where else was he going to go? The Yankees were pulling their remarkable comeback against the Red Sox on Saturday, and the fans booed the cocky symbol of change, the cosmopolitan brash jerkoff in the townie capitol of America, running their team. If this wasn’t the bottom, what was? How long before everyone just dealt with it?

Change happens slowly, but tiny moments often bear the weight of long periods of change. Nomar was traded, and the 2004 Red Sox went on a tear and won the World Series. This was a big deal because reporters liked to ask if it was a big deal, making it a big deal. How big of a deal was it? I don’t know, but the Nomar trade was a jumping off point for baseball writers eager to try their hands at fiction, the same way the Sox’ September meltdown last year was great fodder for the giant Internet writing workshop that is the Internet. Premise: Stupid, puritanical shit that has nothing to do with baseball affects baseball. Word limit: None. Go to town.

It will inevitably be this way for the Bobby V Sox and the Yankees’ nearly bloodless coup of the Sox for four innings in April, 2012. The Red Sox are too good not to be good, and when they’re good, the premise of the writing assignment will shift toward making a sly, patient gamesman out of Bobby V instead of an ineffectual braggart. Soon, we’ll be told he’s playing the long game, and the Sox will suddenly be “surprisingly” competing with the Rays and Angels or Rangers for one of the two wild card spots. Soon, because of a blip of a rule change Bud “Milquetoast” Selig made during the offseason, we will see Bobby V’s widened room for error, and forget about it because it ruins the narrative. If the current wild card system was in effect last year, Francona would have made the playoffs again, and he might still be around. That would have been good, though painfully mature. In turning over the management of the team, the Sox showed that the inmates are running the asylum. The Cubs needed to clean house because no one was running the show. The Sox live and die by the players. Bobby V is the mermaid on the prow, and as much as some players obviously can’t stand him, a rising tide lifts all boats. This is the real Moneyball: Money wins out. The Sox spend too much to suck. When they don’t, remember that Bobby V probably has shit-all to do with it.

April 20, 2012

Pudge’s Quiet Exit and Career

Ivan Rodriguez is two things to me. He’s the guy the MVP award when it was rightful legal property of Pedro J. Martinez in 1999, and he was the guy on the Florida Marlins who hit singles the other way in 2003 like he was starting a trend. I always thought he was sort of a prick, and I stick by that now. A lot of that is playing for Texas for so long. Before their culture change, they were some unloveable losers.

Pudge was the catcher of his generation, more than Piazza, though maybe not in press clippings. He was a guy who knew what to do at bat and less controlled the game from behind the plate than kept it in line, unapologetically. If you wandered too far off of first, he would call you on it, and the universe would return to equilibrium. Someone would win and someone would lose, but the game would be kept on a level. The guy most like this now is Yadier Molina, and Yadier Molina is only hitting now what Pudge was hitting for years. He’ll be the first-ballot Hall of Famer that fans don’t give a shit about but that people within the game take for granted. The catcher’s job is really absurd when you think about it. is there a single other profession that requires so much crouching? And then to come up and swing away, one matrix into the other.

Enjoy the Hall of Fame induction. I won’t be watching.

1 Comment

October 29, 2011

The Ring and the Echo

In the end, Arthur Rhodes did not back into a championship ring. He was on the winning side, the one in St. Louis, not the losing side, of his former team in Texas. The same can’t be said for Colby Rasmus, the one-time phenom who was shipping out of St. Louis in the summer. Exiled to Toronto, he earned a championship ring tonight through the television. Adam Wainwright, dressed from head to toe in Cardinals white, won one too, one season after he finished second in the Cy Young award voting, throwing 230.1 innings—230.1 more than he’d throw in this, the championship year.

David Freese earned his ring and his MVP trophy, and Chris Carpenter, José Alberto Pujols Alcántara, Lance Berkman and Yadier Molina, among many others, can feel like they’ve done a lifetime’s worth of a job well done tonight. These things stick. They are intractable in a way a ring isn’t. You can’t sell having won a World Series on eBay. If you could have, Jose Canseco would have tried it long ago.

On the losing side, the Rangers gained something they’ve lacked for the first 50 years of their existence: an identity. They are, now, the great losers. Their talent and zest is undeniable, but the fissures upon which the organization stands have opened at precisely the wrong instances too many times in a row to be ignored. Ron Washington said he told his team that they were champions, but they were not. They were the other guys. The line in this series was as thin as it’s ever been between the two—I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow or on Monday if, in the World Series alone, the Cardinals’s comeback was the most implausible in history. Mets and Angels fans might be ready to object, but the numbers will tell their warm story soon enough.

Even now, at this hour, my inbox is pulsing with emails from fans angry about Ron Washington’s intentional walks. It’s enough, they say, to have turned their allegiance to the Cardinals. I wished I shared their joy right now, because the National League leaves me cold in almost every instance. I find it near-impossible to share in their joy. You know the exceptions.

Tonight doesn’t seem like the night for lessons, but what could we learn, anyway? The Cardinals were the best in 2011, and that’s all that matters. Next season isn’t so far away, if you look real hard. It’s across the winter, and before you know it, it’ll be time for pitchers and catchers, and the pretentiousness that accompanies their arrival to retirement communities.

I don’t see the beauty of spring training. I love October baseball. It’s over, and it’s time to say goodnight everywhere but in St. Louis, where they’ll shield their eyes from next season, and even the next sunrise, for as long as possible. The National League’s steadiest institution has done it proud. As an AL fan, I’m begrudgingly respectful. The Cardinals came through when it mattered. I don’t know why that’s something I have to live with, but it is.

2 Comments

October 28, 2011

Octoberfest

At some point during last night’s Sam Adams Octoberfest haze—it was the last keg of the stuff for the season, they said—I became aware that I would be a lot more emotionally invested in the sixth game of the World Series if I hadn’t been hangin’ with some buds, as the Budweiser ads implore us to do. Baseball’s fictional element breaks down when the mind is distracted, and it’s hard not be distracted when the game is broadcast scattershot alongside a ridiculous 9-8 Winnipeg Jets win and Thursday Night college football. It’s the slowness of baseball that makes it the darling of writers everywhere, including most recently Chad Harbach and Jane Leavy, who have eloquently and correctly expounded on how its pauses and emphasis on lingering facial expressions leave ample room for one’s imagination to operate.

In a sports bar, these pauses and emphases are wiped out. Alcohol does its part too. Alcohol pushes you to root for one team or another for an elemental reason you can’t quite put your finger on. It erodes the brilliance of sports-hate narratives to a simple “Fuck them.” It becomes personal instead of playful. Or should I say it does for me, anyway.

To me, there’s no better way to watch a baseball game than alone, in front of my television. Sports are a fiction, and fiction is best and almost exclusively consumed by oneself, allowing you to fill the pauses in the action, an elaborate Mad Libs playing on your senses of loyalty, heroism, good and evil. There’s no right or wrong way to love sports, but there’s always a better way. That’s why we talk about them so much: we’re refining.

This year’s World Series ratings aren’t great, but this year’s World Series is great, one of the greatest in memory. It has been at times grand and at times patently absurd. Despite what we are told, it is hard not to believe we’re seeing the best two teams in baseball. In an alternate universe, the Yankees and Phillies might be onto their seventh extra-inning game, the sixth having been won when Chase Utley bunted for a walk-off grand slam. That scenario would barely top last night’s Rangers/Cardinals game, with its endless assortment of gags and false endings, like a well-constructed but poorly written mystery novel. The hometown boy wins it. We’ll see you tomorrow night.

Tomorrow becomes today, and the words cascade. I wait for Will Leitch the Cardinals fan, Jonah Keri the steady, caustic and sarcastic observer and Joe Posnanski the master to weigh in. I search my own clouded headspace for a narrative, and realize that I drowned it. I’m not the only one. I wasn’t even the only one at my table.

At some point today the last Sam Adams Octoberfest will be poured from Ditmars Station Ale House. At some point today a mob of men will meet around a home plate or pitcher’s mound in St. Louis, throwing their caps gloves in the air in celebration, and maybe ripping someone’s jersey off. At some point today a series of disparate men and women will attack their keyboards all across the world, explaining what they saw. And at some point the fog will lift and I will know what I think happened in the 2011 World Series, and I’ll take my conclusion out to the masses, looking to defend, alter or disown it. And then I’ll do it all over again.

Fiction exists for a reason. It helps us learn about life through a shared experience. Its power comes from its texture, which is different from one book to the next. Sports are the same. Baseball is the best. The World Series is the best baseball has to offer. This is one of the best ever. Enjoy it.

4 Comments

October 25, 2011

Theo: The adult no longer in the room

And… that happened.

Category: Baseball