baseball

March 06, 2008

Gooden and Strawberry Update

According to Bob Klapisch, Daryl Strawberry has found peace and contentment as a Mets hitting instructor and advocate for autistic children. Doc Gooden, on the other hand, is apparently still struggling with his demons.

I can still remember watching Strawberry during batting practice at Shea shortly after his rookie callup, in 1983. Only 21 years old, he had a dazed look in his eyes, as if he wasn't exactly sure how he'd ended up in New York City. That expression went from vulnerable to hangdog over the years, as the fans turned on him, mockingly chanting "Darrr-ylll" in a Nelson Muntz singsong. Like Michael Jackson, Linsey Lohan, or Britney Spears, he grew up in public. When it falls apart for somebody like that, I find it hard not to, well, blame the public, myself included - hey, I may not read Perez Hilton, but I do watch Best Week Ever, which launders celebrity rumors just as newscasts launder Matt Drudge's political snark.

In the classic Simpsons baseball episode, the opposing fans go into the "Darrr-ylll" chant when Strawberry steps to the plate. A teammate comments that Strawberry's a professional, so it'll roll right off him - then we cut to Strawberry, a single tear trickling down his face. I always thought that joke held more truth than we fans would like to admit. (Actually, that whole episode is worth rewatching - remember Ken Griffey's "grotesquely swollen head"? In the show, it's caused by drinking too much of a Springfield patent medicine, but after all we've learned about the changes in Barry Bonds's hat size, it comes off a lot differently today.)

Some people just aren't built for the media glare. From George Foster to Ed Whitson to Chuck Knoblauch to Roberto Alamar to Jeff Weaver, many established vetrans come to New York and wilt. I guess that means they "don't have what it takes," compared to the heroes with icewater in their veins, like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. But every player - every person - is a bundle of strengths and limitations. Jeter doesn't have great range at short. Mo can't get through a season any more without a few trips to the DL. And some players just don't click with the hyperactive media culture of New York City. (I guess I can relate - I lived in NYC for one year after college, then hightailed it to grad school in North Carolina.) Those players probably just shouldn't play in markets where dozens of reporters hound you after every game when you're just trying to clean up and go home - just as righthanded pull hitters like Don Baylor probably shouldn't play in a ballpark that's 430' to left center. Paul O'Neil, a lefty who thrives under pressure, was a much better fit.

Savvy management maximizes its players' strengths and minimizes their weaknesses, while keeping its eye on the long term. But Strawberry and Gooden were just squeezed for everything they had, future be damned - Doc's arm was never the same after he'd pitched a boggling 35 complete games by the age of 21.

Stawberry told Klapisch that he helps autistic children because they "have that pain in their eyes that I can relate to." I think that's the look I saw in Strawberry's eyes back in 1983. I'm so glad to hear that after years of injury, addiction, and a battle with cancer, he's finally in such a good place. And when I hear about Gooden, I feel sorry - and guilty.

Posted by tedf at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2008

Peter Gammons Leans to Obama

From Gammons's ESPN Insider blog:

"The Angels know who they got in Torii Hunter -- a man who drips energy and preaches hope and potential. There are numbers that will quantify what Hunter is or isn't worth, just as there are politicians who try to tell us that "experience" is far more important than the foundation of hope and potential. Those numbers don't matter as much as Hunter's ability to energize and inspire his teammates, with character that cannot be quantified."

As an Obama fan, I'm tickled, but I'm perturbed to see him equated with an aging, overpriced outfielder, however much of a mensch Hunter is. Who does that make Hillary - maybe an uninspiring sabermetric fave like Jack Cust?

Posted by tedf at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2006

Baseball Ennui

For some reason, I just can't get myself to care about baseball at all this season. Part of the problem is time - I've been swamped with administrative work all semester, and haven't even had time yet to launch the fantasy league I organized over the winter. But I think the deeper issue must be the steroid scandals.

I've been surprised by how much this steroid stuff has bummed me out. No baseball fan awake during the home run boom of the last decade can be too surprised that it was largely powered by illicit substances. And thinking historically, this is hardly the first time the game has been widely influenced by cheaters - think of all the spitballers like Gaylord Perry who, at least in retrospect, seem more rakish than vile.

I guess it's the combination of corporate hypocrisy (it seems pretty clear now that the Yankees knew just what they were getting when they signed Giambi), institutional intertia (both MLB and the players' union sat on their hands as long as they possibly could on all this, until Giambi's cancer and the Bonds bust forced them to at least look like they were doing something), and the trashing of cherished records (Bonds chasing Ruth and Aaron).

The latter, in particular, is such a bummer that I feel like not watching any baseball highlights until Bonds retires. I'd been excited over the last few years to have the chance to see the career home run record broken in my lifetime, and now the prospect just fills me with dread.

Again, it's not really that I'm disappointed with Bonds personally - from all I'd read about his failings as a human being, juicing up never seemed out of character. And maybe in 50 years we'll remember him as another cantankerous competitor like Ty Cobb - part of the vast range of characters who makes the game's lore so rich.

But I sure wish somebody had called a halt to all this nonsense before something as central to the game as the career home run record was threatened. Maybe the worst part is how this all seems to cheapen, retrospectively, the accomplishments of Ruth and especially Hank Aaron, who handled racist harassment and even death threats with incredible poise on his way to breaking Ruth's record. Now the record may well end up just another number attached to a juiced-up cheater. Or think of the McGwire/Sosa home run race, so thrilling at the time, which now looks more like corrupt stunt than a historic rivalry.

What burns me the most, I think, is that if baseball really wanted a power explosion in the '90s, they didn't even have to go this route, one with unknowable long-term health consequences for all those scrawny middle infielders who poured god knows what into their bodies and suddenly starting pounding out 30-plus homers a year. The owners could have simply brought in the fences in more parks. Or openly juiced the ball, the way they did in the 1920s when the dead ball era gave way to the modern power game. Or allowed aluminum bats. Or whatever. Instead, major league baseball looked the other way, and in many ways encouraged, a chemical arms race that led to so many players to conclude that they needed to juice up just to stay competitive.

Hell, if MLB and the MLPA had any integrity, they could have begun research years ago on the health implications of long-term steroid use, and developed safe and legal alternatives. If so, fine - that would be just another development in the history of sports training, like the rise of nutritionists, weight trainers, and sports psychologists. But by sliding the whole mess under the table, the owners and the players union conspired to create an unfair system which penalized the players who played by the rules, while endangering the lives of players who made the perfectly rational decision to risk their health in return for the chance of a $100 million payday.

I'll probably get over all this eventually. I'd hate to give up on a pastime which has given me so much pleasure over the last 28 years. (I started following the Yankees at age 9, in 1978 - what a season!) But in the meantime, I'm stoking my thirst for competitive entertainment with reality TV, and gearing up for the basketball playoffs.

Posted by tedf at 03:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2005

Chewbacca Throws Out the First Pitch

Yahoo! Sports - MLB - Photo - An actor playing Chewbacca throws out the ceremonial first pitch pr...

Posted by tedf at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2005

Mouse Baseball

I don't understand this, and I can't begin to explain it. My favorite detail is the third base coach.

The mouse baseball game diorama, St Johnsbury, VT

Posted by tedf at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2005

Where Have You Gone, Sidd Finch?

Al Schwarz, an old friend from high school, has a great piece in today's New York Times about the 20th anniversary of Sports Illustrated's publication of "The Mysterious Case of Sidd Finch," one of the great hoaxes in the history of sports. For April Fool's Day, Plimpton invented a pitcher who learned to throw the ball 168 miles an hour while living in a Tibetan monestary. The best part is, 20 years later, the guy who played Sidd Finch in the photos accompanying the article still gets stopped and asked for his autograph.

Link

Posted by tedf at 02:17 AM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2005

Bill James Rethinks Clutch Hitting

This is big news: apparently, the great baseball analyst Bill James has an article in the latest issue of Baseball Research Journal in which he suggests many of his most controversial and influential claims - that there's no such thing as clutch hitting, for example - may have been unfounded.

According to the Society for Baseball Research website,

>>>"In his article, “Underestimating the Fog,” Bill James suggests in BRJ #33 that a wide range of conclusions in sabermetrics may be unfounded, due to the reliance, as he puts it, “on a commonly accepted method which seems, intuitively, that it ought to work, but which in practice may not actually work at all.” Does clutch hitting exist? Do catchers have an impact on a pitcher’s ERA? Bill James tackles these difficult questions and more in classic sabermetric fashion."<<<

Salon's King Kaufman elaborates:

>>>"The titular "Fog" comes from the metaphor James uses: "In a sense it is like this: A sentry is looking through a fog, trying to see if there is an invading army out there, somewhere through the fog. He looks for a long time, and he can't see any invaders, so he goes and gets a really, really bright light to shine into the fog. Still doesn't see anything."

The sentry, James writes, reports back that the coast is clear, "but the problem is, he has underestimated the density of the fog." That's where baseball is with the clutch hitting question, and several others he discusses, such as whether there is such a thing as a pitcher's ability to win games, distinct from his ability to prevent runs.

"We're trying to see if there's an army out there, and we have confident reports that the coast is clear -- but we may have underestimated the density of the fog," he writes. "The randomness of the data is the fog."<<<<

This is part of an lengthy evolution for James, as he's moved from the pure number-crunching of his early analysis to a more interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical research and other kinds of evidence. I think part of his self-imposed backlash stems from seeing what his work has led to: yes, the statistical savvy of "Moneyball" teams like Oakland and Boston, but also the stathead armchair arrogance of websites like Baseball Prospectus, whose relentless attack on conventional baseball wisdom has become its own kind of orthodoxy. The 2005 volume of BP's yearbook, the closest thing we have today to the Baseball Abstracts of old, has plenty of intelligent stuff, but it's marred by the smug prose of writers desperate to prove they're smarter than all those old jocks who run most teams. They're probably mostly right, but they still overstate their case, dismissing anything that doesn't show up in the stats. It's not just that, as is said about economists, they know the price of everything but the value of nothing. It's also that they don't know quite as much about prices as they think they do.

My own thinking about clutch hitting is that clutch hitting per se doesn't exist, but choking does. Put it this way: I can't see why a player with a given skill set could suddenly perform beyond that skill set under certain conditions. If he could, why wouldn't he always play that well? Wouldn't that imply that great clutch hitters are just slacking the rest of the time, playing at less than 100%?

Rather, I think most players play to the best of their ability most of the time. However, there are certain high-pressure situations that stress out even seasoned pros. Professional sports players are used to encountering incredibly high-adrenaline, pressure-packed situations. Every night, they're performing live in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. But even they occasionally hit a new level of intensity that can shake them up. You can see it at the beginning of a Super Bowl, for example - teams almost always come out tight, making extra mistakes before settling down. And occasionally you'll see entire teams come unravelled - like the Yankees against the Red Sox in the playoffs last year.

So, a clutch player isn't somebody who plays beyond his/her skills in certain situations. Rather, it's somebody who retains all those skills in the face of intense pressure. If many of the other players around that player are "choking" to various degrees, however, the clutch player will stand out. If Reggie Jackson's playing at 100% in October, but the Dodger pitchers are only at 80%, Reggie's doing to look like Mr. October. The fluctuations of small sample sizes will take care of the rest. (Reggie's so-called clutch skills didn't help the Yankees much when they lost in 1981.)

I just ordered the Baseball Research Journal issue with the Bill James article from the University of Nebraska Press website. I'll report back when I have a chance to read the whole article.

Posted by tedf at 12:56 AM | Comments (1)