Earth-Shattering Labor Day Insights

Braves shortstop Paul Janish flashes big league leather. We know this because he takes the field daily alongside Major League players even though he is not a Major League hitter. Janish is batting .197/.276/.248 with seven extra-base hits (no homers) in 174 plate appearances for Atlanta. That's a rough approximation of the rest of his five-year career.

By way of comparison, Tim Hudson is batting .222/.260/.276. Hudson is a pitcher. With Janish in the lineup -- which is every day -- 22% of Braves at bats are nearly automatic outs. That's crushing to an offense.

The Braves don't care. Janish anchors an infield that plays a 40-year-old at third base. Janish's glovework is so impressive that he's been worth two wins over a replacement player in his career despite an OPS barely half of the league average. But Janish shouldn't get too comfortable. Rookie Andrelton Simmons flashed leather and batted .296/.336/.452 in 33 games in June before fracturing his hand and he is scheduled for a September return.

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Yankee manager Joe Girardi has invoked the Patron Saint of September, Alex Rodriguez, to secure the East for the Bombers. ARod returns to the lineup today after missing all of August due to a broken left hand, during which time the Yankees scuffled and the Orioles and Rays made up ground.

Girardi is in for a disappointment. ARod batted .276/.357/.449 before the injury. His replacement, Eric Chavez, has hit .365/.403/.587 in his absence, and the gap widens when considering defense.

Girardi should ratchet down the pressure and ask ARod not to screw things up too badly during the stretch run.

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Imagine Penn State firing football coach Bill O'Brien for failing to win the Big Ten this year. Such scapegoating would be pretty transparent.

(Aside: is there a stupider name in sports than the Big Ten? Since they're not 10 and they'll never be 10 again, why don't they change the name to something less inappropriate and confusing? Ditto for the Big 12.)

Analogously, the Houston Astros dumped manager Brad Mills August 18. The team had lost two-thirds of its games and had just completed a 4-34 collapse. 

If the Astros wanted justice, they should have rehired former owner Drayton McLane and former GM Ed Wade just so they could kick their sorry butts out the door again. That pair is responsible for the baseball debacle that you see in Houston today. Their multi-year effort to sacrifice the long-term for short-term mediocrity has forced current management to jettison all their assets and completely rebuild.


The result is a Minor League team getting bullied by the big boys, exactly on cue. Expecting Brad Mills win with this club was like expecting Eddie Gaedel to double off the right field wall.

Current Astro management has otherwise been adept and patient as they reconstitute their franchise. It's hard to believe they fired Mills just because the team was losing, but the signs point that way. Owner Jim Crane said of the firing, "we knew we might slide back a little bit, but we didn't think it would be this bad." If Crane believes that, he is orbiting a planet hitherto unknown.

Mills was a remnant of the previous administration and may not have been bought into the plan. By all accounts he was knowledgeable and supportive of the players despite the demoralizing regularity of failure. Mills appeared to nurture the young guys (actually, they're all young guys on that team) and was focused on teaching them how to play like professionals.

There are myriad reasons unrelated to wins and losses to cut loose the manager. We'll probably never know exactly why Brad Mills wasn't the right man for the job, according to GM Jeff Luhnow. We have to give them the benefit of the doubt . . . but the doubt remains.

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The David Ortiz sweepstakes have officially begun. The Cookie Monster is munching on AL pitching again this year (.318/.415/.611), but he's a geriatric DH with a twangy hamstring who runs like a backhoe and weighs nearly as much. He makes $14.5 million and will be a free agent at season's end, which has already come in Boston. With the Red Sox's big contract purge, it's hard to see Ortiz returning.

So who needs a gloveless big bopper?  Get on line! Most American League teams with playoff designs in 2013 are in the mix. Only Detroit -- a team of DHs, the White Sox -- who can't move Adam Dunn anywhere, and the Angels -- owners of three slugging first basemen, can pass on Big Papi. The Yankees, Rays, Orioles, Rangers, A's, Blue Jays and any of the other franchises, if they're delusional, are imagining Ortiz in the middle of their lineups. Papi's agent will work to maximize contract length, but any team offering more than two years will pay dearly on the back end.

May the worst team win!

Him Hit Cookie...Yum Yum Yum

Reports of Big Papi's baseball death -- notably mine -- were greatly exaggerated.

Following a poor 2009 season and a miserable start to 2010, David Ortiz suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous predictions. Combining his declining skills with a big body and an inability to play the field (not to mention steroid whispers), many pundits wrote Oscar the Grouch stories about Boston's Cookie Monster.

I plead guilty to some of this. Here's what I said last April: "Undoubtedly, the wrist injury of '08 was part of the equation, but turning 230 pounds into baseball's golden years -- he's 35 this year -- is likely responsible for some of it too. Look for Ortiz to continue to be an asset, but a depreciating one, particularly since he can't play the field."

Here's your depreciating asset, punditheads. After batting .143 with one home run last April, Papi finished the season at .270/.370/.529 and 36 blasts, and has started this year at .326/.394/.612 and a 40-homer pace. He's already twice as valuable as he was in the injury-plagued '08 campaign.

The pivot point seems to be that Ortiz can get around on lefties again. He's hitting .333 versus southpaws after struggling to .221, .212 and .222 the last three years. He's never really powered up against same-side hurlers, but as long as he gets on base with regularity against them, his ability to crush righthanded pitching means he's still an awfully dangerous at-bat.

So in retrospect, it appears Ortiz's wrist woes sapped his strength in '09 and maybe during the cold New England April of last year. But he's been hotter than Courtney Kardashian since, which is to say he's the same David Ortiz he was from '03-'07. The conclusion being drawn, that Ortiz was in decline because his performance had tailed off, he was aging and other players built like him hadn't aged well, was reasonable, but ultimately wrong. Those factors suggest decline, but they don't guarantee it.

The Red Sox may luxuriate in a full season of the Big Papi who led Boston to a pair of World Championships. Still, they would be wise not to bet the farm on his svelt self after his contract expires this year.

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