31 March 2016

Wouldn't It Be Great...

Dreaming of the upcoming season. Wouldn't it be great if...


Someone did a home run dance in the sixth inning of a 7-2 game . . . and no once paid any attention? You want to stop gratuitous celebrations? The sound of one hand clapping would do it.


A batter laid down a bunt to break up a no-hitter in the ninth inning of a 3-0 game, invoking the ire of the opposing team and leading to a plunking, a two-base error and a double that tied the game and unwrote the unwritten rule?

Ken "Hawk" Harrelson retired and someone who knew something about baseball in the 21st century replaced him? Then fans on Chicago's South Side would have at least one thing to celebrate this year.

Umpires ordered batters to stop fooling around and get in the box and demanded that pitchers serve up the ball within 20 seconds as required by the rules? And games started moving along?

Jake Arrieta really is as good as the second half of last season? Because that would mean that in 2016 he'd allow a .409 OPS and an ERA of 0.75. He'd allow four home runs all season.

A fan bopped by a batted ball admitted it was their own damn fault for not paying attention?

The players on a last place squad began extolling the team's chemistry? Funny, you never hear that.

Someone connected to a club 10 games under .500 announced that his team had just acquired "momentum" and then they went out and won 13 of the next 15 games? Then we
would finally have one verifiable example of the spirit magic that gives rise to that term.

Baseball writers and announcers all had to take a course and pass an exam on new analysis and be able to explain triple-slash stats, Fielding Independent Pitching, True Average, BABIP and Wins Against Replacement? That way fans would learn about them and we would all better understand the game.

Baseball announcers, particularly play-by-play guys (as opposed to analysts) had to pass an oral communication exam? Then we would stop hearing idiotic phrases like "controlling their own destiny," grounds rule double, and "second-chance opportunities."  (Destiny cannot be controlled and chances are opportunities.) Announcers would understand basic sentence structure, common idioms, proper usage and diction, and generally sound like experts in communication rather than like Norm Crosby.

Mike Trout did it again, and then again and again through age 30?  He'd have 96 WAR with half his career ahead of him.

30 March 2016

Why Some Folks Love the Indians

Stop me if you've heard this before: the Cleveland Native Americans' bandwagon is loading up fast. The teepee is full and Chief Wahoo's entourage is growing. With the Tigers down, the Twins falling back to earth, the White Sox in need of darning even before the season starts and apprehension about the Royals' staying power, many a quipster, seamhead and hot-taker is hot-taking the Indians to win the Central.

The Land of Cleve finished 81-80 with a late surge last season, a punchless stars-and-scrubs lineup bolstered by good pitching and defense. Their top slugger (Carlos Santana) bopped 19 homers and the best player (rookie Francisco Lindor, pictured here)) got into just 99 games.
That would seem like a good baseline for improvement the following year, especially as several of the better everyday players still live on the south side of 30.

What They Got and What They Ain't Got
What's so alluring about the Indians is that last year's carryover -- power arms in the rotation, a solid bullpen, young studs dotted throughout the lineup and rotation, and good defense around the horn -- are scarce commodities. What they lacked last year -- any hint of a third baseman, two-thirds of an outfield, an occasional long ball -- are relatively easy to replace.

So after losing super-utility knife Ryan Rayburn to the Rockies, Cleveland brought in Mike Napoli to split 1B/DH duties with Santana; twinkle-toes Juan Uribe to bring some semblance of Major League stability to the hot corner; and outfielders Rajai Davis and Marlon Byrd to solidify the green space. Together that group should supply some added power as well.

The Indians will count on former Cy Young winner Corey Kluber to once again anchor the starting five, with flamethrowers Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar, Trevor Bauer and Josh Tomlin filling out the staff. Tribe hurlers produced the highest average velocity in the sport last year, which comes in handy especially during those cold autumn evenings of October.

Seen It Before
Okay, fine. But Murphy and his law lie in wait for this outfit. Perennial All-Star Michael Brantley, (right) the only outfielder worth keeping last year, is out for months following shoulder surgery. The pitching crew isn't exactly Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz-Avery, particularly at the back end. And the bench goes just a couple deep before injury ravages this team's chances.

The Indians are intriguing for sure. Baseball Prospectus rates them the best team in the American League, based on middling hitting, excellent pitching and the second best defense (behind Tampa Bay) in the league. And if they start the season with that kind of fire, there might be a big bat in the trading deadline mix. But lots of teams are intriguing and could win the pennant with a few positive "what ifs."

So, as always, we'll see. In baseball, at least, the long regular season matters.

29 March 2016

Marshall McLuhan Is Killing Us

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." --Oscar Wilde
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html


If you were to watch sports television or listen to sports talk radio, you could be forgiven for thinking that LeBron James is driving the Cleveland Cavaliers bus off a cliff, that Mike Krzyzewski's legacy is now tainted by one bald-faced white lie, or that other  inconsequential moments in sports have taken on the gravitas of nuclear annihilation.

That's because these media have stopped the presses to devote interminable hours of blather dissecting both LeBron James's recent words and actions and Coach K's refusal to acknowledge a well-documented conversation.

"Nontroversies"
King James has, during the course of this ceaseless and meaningless regular season, demonstrated boredom, frustration and perhaps even regret about his team's dynamics. It appears he may have chosen teammates who don't share his singular focus, his devotion to his craft and his obsessive desire to win a championship for Cleveland.

Coach K lied to reporters about his words of admonition to an opposing player during the post-game handshake following Thursday's loss to Oregon in the NCAA playoffs. Cameras clearly caught him telling Dillon Brooks "you're too good of a player to do that," after Brooks fired up a three-pointer and celebrated its success with six seconds left and an 11-point lead. 

The Medium Is the Message
But this is not about James or Krzyzewski. It's about why these mini "nontroversies" flower into hours of discussion. it's about the medium, not the message.

You see, the existence of 24-hour sports talk and 24-hour sports news are far more responsible than LeBron James and Mike Krzyzewski are for the ubiquity of scandal in sports today. The plethora of national sports conversation outlets amounts to a gaping yaw that must be filled, minute after minute after minute -- at least those minutes not sequestered away for commercials, sponsorships, promos and the like. So let's say 50% of those minutes.

Paradox: More Conversation = Fewer Topics
With (the remaining half of) 24 hours to fill, you might think that many topics would get covered in the course of each day. Au contraire, Pierre. Because of the fierce competition, no network wants to be caught discussing any topic not of immediate and urgent concern to a majority of listeners at any given moment. That listener is liable to hit the radio or remote button and find another national sports network discussing the sport of their choice. So ironically, the existence of multiple options has reduced the sports talk universe to football and some seasonal filler. More choices has meant less hockey, tennis, car racing, track and field, soccer, boxing, baseball off-season or anything else.

This time of year, the NBA and the NCAA basketball playoffs join the NFL as topics that sports talk will cover. Consequently, that's all the sports talk consumer is interested in. And the cycle repeats itself.

More to the point, the hosts have to find fodder for their shows. And that means elevating the mundane to critical and expanding every anthill into a mountain.  It means parsing every word spoken by people who are not professional communicators and analyzing them into oblivion. And it means spouting opinions irrespective of the availability of the facts.

What They Won't Discuss
Because they are starved for content, the sports yakkers can never acknowledge the underlying business dynamic or that their subjects are drivel. For example, though they know that the NBA regular season is utterly, completely, without exception or doubt, irrelevant, they must still act as if every contest is a matter of life or death. In fact, the Cavs have clinched the playoffs and probably couldn't fall below the second seed even if they stopped trying. But acknowledging that would undermine the foundation of all the inconsequential prattle about LeBron James and the fate of the Cavs.

The result is disputations over LeBron's enigmatic tweets and Coach K's private conversations. They saddle us with the Johnny Manziel industrial complex and two years of deflated footballs, a discussion that is full of hot air about a subject that is not.  They bequeath us shibboleths like student athletes, division champions, unwritten rules and non-apologies.

I guess it diverts the listener from the alarming worldwide tangle with terrorism, the dispiriting presidential contests and the near-certainty of massive and disruptive global climate change. But anyone listening to it should recognize that sports talk is a highly distorted view of reality -- even of sports reality.


26 March 2016

The Adam LaRoche-White Sox Contretemps Is Really About Something Else

"If the phone doesn't ring, it's me." --Jimmy Buffett


By now you are awash in the details about 1B/DH Adam LaRoche leaving a guaranteed $13 million and a spot on the White Sox roster because they told him his teenage son wasn't welcome in the clubhouse everyday. If you haven't heard about it, read this Chicago Tribune article from March 18 and this report by the local Chicago NBC TV station three days later.

Adam LaRocheThe outline of the situation is this: LaRoche believed he had an oral agreement with the Sox to bring his son into the clubhouse every day. 14-year-old Drake LaRoche had a uniform and a locker and was a beloved team member, according to most players. White Sox president Kenny Williams says that some team members have privately expressed their displeasure at having a child in the clubhouse and he asked LaRoche to scale it back with Drake.

And so, we can all agree that the White Sox have the right to determine workplace rules and have a responsibility to the entire team, not just Adam LaRoche. And we can admire that LaRoche would sacrifice so much to be with his son.

But this is not about familial relations or clubhouse dynamics or Drake himself. It's not about LaRoche's performance, which was dismal last year in his age-35 season and, if repeated, would clog a roster spot and consume $13 million.

This is about organizational dynamics and in particular about communication. Dissertations and books have been written describing the importance of open and honest organizational communication; about ensuring that loops of communication get closed, that lines of communication run up and down hierarchies, that communication be consistent in content throughout an organization, and that communication cross platforms so that people can learn information with whichever sense works best for them. 

The problem in Chicago appears to be this: the team had a poorly articulated policy that applied to everyone but Adam LaRoche. Whether one or more people expressed dismay over the exception or management simply got tired of it, Williams apparently communicated that in a confused and inconsistent way. LaRoche, who believed the team had broached a clearly understood agreement with him, evidently felt betrayed.

The fallout was public chest pounding by key ballclub figures like Chris Sale and, I'm willing to bet, private muttering by others in defense of the team, all of which amounts to a further breakdown in open, honest communication.

Will this harm the White Sox's performance on the field in 2016? It certainly can't help, but baseball is less a team game than a game of combined individual actions. It's likely to fade away over the long slog of the season, unless the issue of clubhouse visitors pops out of its molehill again. LaRoche performed below replacement level last season, so if his replacement flashes even modest competence his on-field contributions will be easily forgotten.

19 March 2016

Bryce Harper In College

No insight here, not that that's anything new. Just happened to look up Bryce Harper's one college season and discovered the following in his 66 games for the College of Southern Nevada, a junior college based in Las Vegas playing in the Scenic West Athletic Conference:

He led the league in batting with a .443 average, 46 points better than the next best hitter.
He led the league in on base percentage at .526, 62 points better than anyone else.
He led the league in slugging at .987, 258 points ahead of anyone else.
He led the league in OPS by 421 points at 1.513
He led the league in homers with 31, more than double the next slugger.
He led the league in doubles -- by double.
He led the league in steals with 20 and was caught just four times.
He led the league in total bases by 50%.
He scored and knocked in 81 more runs combined than the next most prolific run producer.
He had the second most walks and third most triples. Slacker.

He also pitched for the Coyotes!
His 11-1 record accounted for the second most wins and the best W-L percentage in the league.
His 2.62 ERA was second best ERA in the league
He allowed the lowest batting average against.
He fanned 96 in 65 innings.

He had the league's fifth best fielding percentage.

This kid might be a good Major Leaguer. Keep an eye on him.


13 March 2016

The Week of the Rant in the Year of the Crazy Uncle

The past seven days appeared to be the Week of the Rant. We had Oscar Robertson's diatribe against modern basketball, Charles Barkley's harangue against numerical analysis and Goose Gossage's frothing over a multitude of imagined sins, best I could tell.

These three gentlemen have three important things in common:
1. They were all spectacular ballplayers.
2. They stopped learning anything about their sport after 1999.
3. They revel in their ignorance.

This appears to be the year of the ascendant crazy uncle -- witness the presidential nominations -- so Big O, Sir Charles and Goose can all be forgiven for assuming their personas, if not their comments specifically, would be warmly embraced. But whereas the electorate, particularly in the primaries, skews towards the visceral and the loony, the sporting public pays attention. After all, sports matter.

Most sports fans recognize these outbursts as cries for attention and dismiss them accordingly. There are enough of us who appreciate that games evolve, tools improve, practitioners get better at their sport over time in an almost linear vector and that those who don't understand it are doomed to fulminate, like the homeless guy on the street pushing the shopping cart and arguing with Jesus.

It's sad for them that they can't see how pathetic their ignorance sounds. It's sad for them that we hear their opinions and know that they are simply condemning what they don't understand. Or perhaps it's merciful. If they realized that their bitter jeremiads were tantamount to proclamations of ignorance, they might be mortified.

Or, they might not.

We all have a choice. I choose to learn new things all the time, some of which contradict what I thought previously. If you're reading this, you have likely made a similar choice. People like Gossage stagnate, wither and die bitter old men tilting against an ever-growing array of windmills. People like us stay relevant, evolve and grow.

That's my rant.


07 March 2016

How the Current Compensation System Is Making Older Players Obsolete

Suppose you had a roster spot to fill on your team and you needed a fifth outfielder, utility infielder or platoon DH. You could grab some veteran off the waiver wire for the bargain-basement price of $2 million or promote a kid from Double-A. For the 85 at bats they'll get, the slightly higher quality of the veteran doesn't carry much significance, but at one-quarter the salary, the rookie's lower cost does.

So, absent any other offers, another 35-year-old retires from the game.

Most Valuable Players Are The Lowest Paid
Sports Illustrated's Jonah Keri released a list this month of the most valuable players in baseball,  taking into account their cost. As you might imagine, the list is light on players on the wrong side of 30, not because they're not great, but because they're expensive.

Clayton Kershaw, a generational pitching star, slots only 23rd on the list because he's already commanding $215 million over the next seven years.  Among those ahead of him are Sonny Gray, Gerrit Cole, Chris Archer and Noah Syndergard, all lesser hurlers making near the league minimum.

Thirty-two-year-old Miguel Cabrera, still the best hitter in the game, didn't make the top 50 or honorable mention. He can thank the quarter-of-a billion dollars due him as his baseball AARP discounts kick in for that.

Vastly Underpaying Great Young Talent
Baseball salaries are structured, at least until the next collective bargaining agreement is negotiated after this season (we hope), to compensate the owners for their investment in players in the early years and then compensate players at full market value thereafter. For their first three seasons of roster time, players earn a stipulated amount -- less than $600,000 -- whether they are the 25th man or Mike Trout.

In years four-through-six, arbitration allows players to capture a fractional share of their free-market value, until after their sixth season, when they are eligible for a free agency bonanza. At the current rate of roughly $8 million-per-win, an average starter entering free agency can expect to ink a multi-year deal worth around $16 million-a-year.

Expensive Experience Vs. Cheap Enthusiasm
Given that, who would you rather have manning a corner outfield slot, pre-arb Christian Yelich, a three-win performer under team control for four more years or four-win Jose Bautista, who earns $16 million this year and enters free agency next? Youth is served with extra garnish under the current compensation system.

This has been true for years, but never before have young players arrived so ready for the Big Leagues in such large numbers. Consider: Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, Francisco Lindor, Miguel Sano, Jose Fernandez, Sonny Gray, Xander Boegarts, Mookie Betts, Andrelton Simmons, Gerrit Cole, Anthony Rendon, Anthony Rizzo, Nolan Arrenado, Jake Odorizzi, Noah Syndergard, Zack Wheeler, Joc Pederson, Corey Seager, and of course, Bryce Harper and Mike Trout. All of them under 25 and cost-controlled. And I'm sure that list is incomplete.

Goodbye Graybeards
So, higher quality juveniles are crowding out the oldsters, not just theoretically but in practice. There were more than 30 position players age 36 or older with 100 or more plate appearances in 2012 and 2013, 22 in 2014 and only 18 in 2015, according to Dave Cameron at Hardball Times. This strongly suggests that teams are opting to fill their rosters with higher upside players at low cost than overpay for veterans in their declining years.

Now add a recent development -- the Qualifying Offer. The recent unpleasantness inflicted upon Ian Desmond following his foray into the free agent market is evidence of how artificially low costs for young players are squeezing the market for veterans. Desmond, coming off a bad year and turning 31 this season, eschewed a $15.8 million, one-year "qualifying offer" from the Nationals for a shot at a multi-year deal that would set him for life. Any team signing Desmond would have to relinquish its prized first-round draft pick to Washington. That left Desmond without suitors and lowered his value to the one year,  $8 million offer he signed with Texas.

The Consequences Going Forward
The Nationals would have liked to keep their second baseman, but they might like the draft pick even more. If that pick turns out well, they will have a young star for six years at below-market rates, allowing them the financial freedom to sign expensive free agents elsewhere on the diamond.

The players' union is not unaware of this development. Representing as it does existing members, not future ones, the union has already begun making noises about obliterating this system and about raising the minimum salary. We could be in for the first contentious labor negotiations since the abomination of 1994.