A Little Kick In The Kotchman

Just when I start to get used to rays of sunshine illuminating the world of baseball reporting, the rain clouds of ignorance move in to remind me that while we've made some progress, we still live in a cumulus of journalistic daftness when it comes to sports reporting.

It's a small and silly thing really, a report this week from the Associated Press, that staunch defender of the 1901 reporting methods. It mentioned that the Tampa Bay Rays had signed first baseman Casey Kotchman to a contract, noting that in seven years he has hit .259 with 49 homers and 284 RBIs.

If you didn't know Mr. Kotchman or his St. Petersburg clan you'd have gained rather little insight into his career from those stats. He doesn't seem to be Stan Musial. Beyond that, though, you don't have much information.

After all, Casey might have kicked around for a few years, making cameo MLB appearances, busted out with a couple of 24 homer, 100 RBI years before a string of injuries put him on the shelf. In that case, bad luck might be winning the tug of war with good skills and the Rays are hoping for a good roll of the dice in 2011.

Or he might have plodded along through seven lackluster seasons, dinking seven homers and 40 RBIs a year. That's not even take-a-flyer material, especially at the least important defensive postion.

Maybe, in fact, Kotchman is a walk machine with after-burners who'll reliably bat leadoff for Tampa, get on base 250 times, swipe 40 of 45 bases and score 120 times while displaying a sizzling glove. In that case, the batting line presented not only matters less than his cup size, it summarily fails to measure anything relevant.

In fact, Kotchman is none of the above. A part-time player his whole career, he's accumulated even 300 plate appearances just four times. His .259/.326/.392 lifetime stat line show he's a hair above replacement level at the plate, unless he repeats last year's putridity. The less reliable defensive stats suggest he's a decent defensive backup.

The point isn't what Casey Kotchman is or isn't -- in fact, this is a throwaway item of little note that simply fills space in the newspaper. But as long as AP was going to fill that space, why couldn't they have filled it with information that told us something, anything? What they gave the baseball public instead was simply an empty bucket that was 30 years ago thought to have held something useful.

There is work yet to be done...

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