The Other Competitive Balance
Everybody, it seems at times, loves to rant the night away about "competitive balance". You know: the kind involving disparities, real and alleged, between the Have and the Have Not teams, real and alleged. It seems a foreign enough concept to this moboisie that a club could have even Yankee-approximate fat dollars, relative to their actual and prospective markets, and still deploy such dollars with Devil Ray-approximate thin brains.
But I really came here to talk about baseball's other competitive balance. The one that matters just as greatly toward baseball's health, about which the moboisie says little enough now that it appears to be reviving. It should be a bristling point of contention with anyone who wants to segregate the fact from the flatulence, especially because baseball's baronage and its designated publicists seem to think if they ignore it, it will go away.
A newspaper ad for Fox Sports's All-Star Game telecast was a huge improvement over the insult that was the Home Run Derby's animated television spots. (Those showed Derby participant as animated beings just hit by gamma rays and turning into the Incredible Hulks. That's the way to promote a game soiled by steroid charges, folks.) That about exhausted the All-Star ad's brilliance, beyond its handsomely arrayed, handsomely pencil brush-toned imagery of six marquee men.
The centerpiece is Barry Bonds, following through in his familiar power swing, splendidly turned out in a Giants uniform, right down to his too-familiar pajama bottom pant cuff, over those white-topped shoes that make him appear to be hitting in spats. (Call me a churl if you must. But if I were a manager, one rule I would enforce across the board would be: show the stirrups, whether you cut them low as Casey Stengel or high as Frank Robinson - this, gentlemen, is baseball, not Lord of the Dance.)
Back to business. To the upper left of the ad, behind Bonds's backswinging bat, there encircle five more marquee mugs (counterclockwise from top center): Alex Rodriguez, squint-staring, as if toward a pitcher winding up or a batter about to chunk a grounder toward his territory; Sammy Sosa, face pushing down from the familiar warmth into the taut gaze he shows bearing down on a pitch; Mike Piazza, like a Talmudic student struggling to assimilate a fresh rabbi he might face later in the game; Jason Giambi, eyes wide frozen, crazed, murder in his heart for a fast ball; Ichiro Suzuki, beatifically gazing over the full field spread, as though the wisdom of his ancestors shaped his soft facial shell.
You're right. Only one of the five does not represent intercontinental ballistics. (Ichiro at the All-Star break had - count 'em - two home runs.) And none of them resembles a pitcher, who with precision marksmen get barely legible block-letter background mention. You see no such countenance as genial Curt Schilling or cerebral Tom Glavine; neither bullish Eric Gagne nor sweet-smiling Byung-Hyun Kim; not passively intense Mariano Rivera or boyishly determined Odalis Perez.
Baseball's lordship and Fox Sports aren't just off the page. They are out of the library. The big bombers are not baseball's only story having nothing to do with labour issues. (And, while I'm at it, a little reality check about the All-Star Game itself: Bud Selig is not without his faults, but if Joe Torre and Bob Brenly - managers who usually know better - had managed their pitching with a little more foresight, the All-Star Game might not have been halted at an extra-inning tie.)
Gaze like Ichiro upon the full field spread. Seven out of the nine starting pitchers on the All-Star teams are on paper pace to win 20 games this season, assuming an unabbreviated finish. So are three All-Star wingmen (Glavine, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson) who elected to sit the game out. Two pitchers not named All-Stars (Kazuhisa Ishii, Mike Mussina) also arrived at the break with a paper chance to win 20. It's been how long since twelve 20-game winners turned up in one season?
It gets better. Curt Schilling on paper still has an outside shot at winning 30. The last three National League pitchers to win 27 or better? Steve Carlton (27), 1972; Sandy Koufax (27), 1966, Robin Roberts (28), 1952.
The earned run average story is just as much fun. The top five in the National League at the All-Star break showed ERAs under three, from 2.90 (Al Leiter) to 2.27 (Glavine, who continues making his a case as the actual greatest pitcher in Braves history who isn't named Warren Spahn), with the top 20 in the league all under 3.55 . The top five in the American League show four under three, including Bartolo Colon before the trade heard 'round the world, with the top 20 in the league all under 4.00.
Among the starting pitchers on the All-Star teams, four of the American League five are over three but no higher than 3.57 (Mark Buerhle), with the league ERA through the break at 4.16; only one National League All-Star starter (Vicente Padilla) is over three - with a piddling 3.05,compared to the league ERA of 3.87. (Dump the DH, anyone?)
The All-Star relievers? They are all under three, unless the name is John Smoltz. (4.44 - he may still be unhorsing himself from that ninth-inning, nine-run can of whoop you-know-what the Mets opened on him in April.) Six of the All-Star relievers are under 2.50; only one of those (Trevor Hoffman) registers 2.40 or higher.
Well. Since baseball's legislators have given them maybe two generations worth of a kind of taxation without tax loopholes (skewing toward offence, and the longer-range the better), and since umpire strike zone fluctuations enhance their image as judicial activists, the pitchers have been engaging a healthy sort of civil disobedience: taking back the whole of the strike zone (as best they can, given the umpire fluctuations), reclaiming nuance, craftsmanship, and the inside half of the plate.
Are the hitters hurting? Not by, er, a long shot. Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Lance Berkman, Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi, and Shawn Green are still sending baseballs into the next county. Ichiro is still threatening to hit .350 or better for the second of his first two major league seasons; only Mike Sweeney (at .361) is ahead of him. Lots of hitters are hitting. The National League average: .277. The American League: .274. The top fifteen National Leaguers bat from .307 (Chipper Jones, Alex Sanchez, Sammy Sosa) to .350 (Larry Walker); the top fifteen American Leaguers, from .305 (Magglio Ordonez, A-Rod) to .361 (Sweeney).
This should all taste like overdue refreshment. But baseball's shadow government behaves, so it seems, as though it is castor oil. And they continue cultivating the fly-by-night, oooh-and-aaah fans they have hunted since the 1980s, those who care for spectacle and not sport, explosive thrill and not enveloping balance.
Out of the library? Baseball's shadow government isn't even near the closest comic book stand, the Home Run Derby promos notwithstanding. That was a giant yawn you heard, on that night in June when there were more home runs hit in baseball games over one night than one Roger Maris hit in 1961. The Yankees and the Rockies played an interleague game (ok - it was in Coors Field) to a final score of 20-10, and the best it got was a clever joke that George Steinbrenner fired the kicker the morning after for blowing the third extra point.
Meanwhile, back in the jungle, there came last December a banana peel the moboisie has yet to notice but which should have tripped baseball officialdom: Major League Baseball's own "Updated Supplement to the Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner's Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics." Yes, it has come to that: baseball documentations with that make Congressional legislation read like "Casey At The Bat." But then you read the thing. There is no joy in Budville - the mighty owners have crapped out.
From 1995 through 2001 (remember - this is baseball's baronage talking, the ones who have been crying pending poverty for over a decade), baseball's revenues rose 156 percent, from $1.39 billion (1995) to $3.55 billion. Now, listen further up. In the same seven seasons, player salaries rose 113 percent - but "other expenses," non-player related expenses, went up 134 percent.
Baseball got $2.1 billion extra per season over those seven years to play with, and the players got less than half of it. Neither, says Society for American Baseball Research economist Doug Pappas, did the teams spend it on more farm teams, higher scouting, ticketing, and clerical salaries, stadium rent hikes, or the like.
"With inflation running only 17 percent since 1995 to 2001," Pappas asks, "clubs aren't paying twice as much for supplies and equipment. If, as the owners claim, MLB is hemorrhaging money, why haven't they tried to stop the bleeding? Why are non-player expenses continuing to increase far faster than inflation? Why won't (commissioner Bud Selig) let anyone who knows the facts talk about these costs? Unless and until the owners provide credible answers to these questions, their claimed losses are about as believable as Enron's September 2001 financial statements."
But so far as the moboisie is concerned, baseball's problems, real and alleged, come down to two sides of a funny money coin. It's either those greedhead players refusing to stop the owners before they overspend, misspend, or malspend again; or, it's all the Yankees' fault. (God forbid an intelligently operated and marketed baseball team - which is what the Yankees have actually become - should serve as a model rather than a whipping boy.) And shut the hell up about nuance and balance and all that rot.
That is the audience baseball's baronage has courted. And that spinning you hear emmanates from the grave of A. Bartlett Giamatti.
Just One More Note Before I Go
"I Played For Casey Before And After He Was A Genius" - If you watched the pre-game hoopla at the All-Star Game, did you notice the little old man wearing an ancient Braves jersey with number 21 over his loose gray slacks, among the four men throwing out ceremonial first balls?
Baseball preluded the All-Star Game with "30 Most Memorable Moments," rich in history and wanting in production coordination. (Poor Ray Liotta - he who played Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams - he couldn't quite coordinate his fine narration to the arrangement.) The little old man in the ancient Braves jersey had actually produced one that wasn't but should have been among the moments - unless you know anyone else who posted his thirteenth 20-win season at age 42.
Warren Spahn epresented power as but one element in a spread of craftsmanship. ("Spahn and Sain and pray for rain," went the saying around Boston while the Braves were en route the 1948 pennant.) Pretty good for a guy Casey Stengel dumped as a quickly abused rookie.
Stengel managed the rookie Spahn in 1943 on yet another hapless Boston Braves outfit. "Young man," Stengel ordered, after a rather rough outing, "go pick up your railroad ticket to go back to the minors - you've got no guts!" One world war, one stellar tenure with the Braves, three World Series, and thirteen 20-win seasons later, Spahnie began winding down the hard way, as a pitcher-coach for the 1965 New York Mets.
His manager there: Casey Stengel.
"I played for Casey," Spahnie still likes to say, "before and after he was a genius."
"Oh, Thank You, Spahnie!" - The one pitch Warren Spahn probably remembers above all the others he threw was thrown long after he retired - in Washington, at RFK Stadium.
It was the Crackerjack Old-Timer's Game, debuting in 1982 in the former home of the former Washington Senators. To give the old guys a break, they cut the fences in very far. Spahn started the game for the retired National Leaguers. His first batter: longtime Chicago White Sox shortstop Luke (Old Aches and Pains) Appling.
Spahn tossed up what could have passed for an eephus pitch wanting to be the once-famed Spahnie scroogie when it grew up. Appling - all seventy-five years old worth of him - swung, and he ripped a rising liner that flew past not only the cut-in fence but into the left field seats for a major league-length home run.
The videotape of Appling's blast and his exuberant jog around the bases, with Spahn chasing him all the way, whacking Appling on the can with his glove, was probably the most popular exhibition game highlight in baseball that year. And several years afterward.
"I was trying," Spahn said later, explaining his chase, "to get him to mug a little with me, but he just kept saying 'Oh, thank you, Spahnie. Thank you, Spahnie'."
posted by Jeff Kallman 10:40 PM
Give Us A Break
Where we sit at the Some-Star Break goes a little something like this:
Whoa! What is with that Some-Star jazz? Well, it looked for awhile like another hour, another marquee All-Star pulling out of the annual tacky joke. Not just pulling out of the game but choosing not to even show up in Milwaukee.
None dare call it a boycott, real or alleged. Actually, Red Sox pitcher John Burkett did use that very word. He said about a month ago that if nominated, he would not run. Such was his distaste, he said, for everything the man who owns the team whose home park hosts this year's game - you know, the owner who doubles as commissioner.
Burkett wasn't nominated but his rotation mate Pedro Martinez was. And Pedro backed out for reasons having nothing to do with Bud Selig and everything to do (he said) with saving it for the season's second half.
Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry wasn't buying it during a Monday morning radio interview. Martinez does have that shoulder to beware, still, of course, but is going an inning going to screw the hinge or drain the wing that badly? Not likely, said the K-Y Kid. Not even if you have a regular start coming two days after the All-Star swing.
That's what Randy Johnson has, come Thursday against the Los Angeles Dodgers. He also has a small bother with back spasms, meaning he probably would not have gotten into the All-Star Game anyway. National League manager Bob Brenly would have seen to that. Brenly needs Johnson against the Dodgers, when their Diamondbacks begin a four-set in the white-hot National League West race.
But the Big Unit decided he would rather spend the All-Star break with the family. Nothing wrong with that, by any means, but does it not look peculiar to have Johnson's mug gracing the Game's media guide cover when he isn't going to be there?
Tom Glavine did not say, during another radio interview. With his dinged pitching hand, the Atlanta Braves ace pulled out of the Game, too. Decided to spend the break with his kids, too - in Milwaukee, joining in the All-Star fun (such as it might be, with the toxins in the air this go-round), especially since (in Glavine's theory, anyway) it just might be Daddy's last All-Star trip.
What is that you said about a tacky joke, then? Please. You think interleague play hasn't turned the All-Star Game into a snooze festival? Now it needs special circumstances to make it special again. Thanks a ton, Bud. Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn can only play one final All-Star Game before retiring, after all. So baseball hypes the dubious sweep with the Home Run Derby.
Bad enough: This meaningless oooh-and-aaah fest (ok, until it ends it is fun to watch awhile) represents baseball's damn fool, long-enough skewing of the game in favour of offence in general and the nuclear bomb in particular. Worse: Those disgraceful Derby promos - animated caricatures of some of the featured bombers that make each resemble a version of the Incredible Hulk - kept running all Fourth of July weekend, right through the night before the big show.
Anyone seeing those spots who says baseball's baronage gives a tinker's (or Evers or Chance's) damn about the game's integrity, without asking concurrently why they saw fit to use steroid-suggestive caricatures to promote a home run contest (here! we'll wave the bloody monkey in your face! and who cares if it also implies guilt by moboisie accusation and not hard evidence?), is a moral idiot.
Which reminds me that on the morning of the Derby came USA Today's poll of 500-plus players: Eighty percent of them, practically, favour steroid testing, with forty-four percent saying they have felt pressure to put the tiger in their tank. Player's Association executive director Donald Fehr continues holding that the proper realm of the roids is collective bargaining and nowhere else. Fehr wasn't born this clueless. The owners have handed him a bargaining chip bigger than the biceps and triceps which may or may not be roid where prohibited. For reasons yet obscure, Fehr will not deploy it, not even with the apparent whopping majority of his clients favouring the testing.
But he could make himself a hero overnight and give his clients a) the upper negotiating hand (and moral high ground); and, b) the sense that he gives a damn about more than just the numbers, the minute he says, no further questions asked, Yo, dudes! You want roid testing? You got it, any way you want it - the minute you open the damn books all the way, to an independent auditor, and let's see who's for real and who's for funny money around here..
Or does he prefer, as the owners almost don't really seem to care, that even one fan watches the Home Run Derby hollering "Steroid Shot" with each blast?
©2002 Jeff Kallman
posted by Jeff Kallman 7:21 PM
