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Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Down Time

There are several reasons for the paucity of entries lately. First, I have nothing to say. Secondly, the Sox aren't doing anything interesting enough to make me even turn on a computer -- though I still do, for the safe and natural male enhancement opportunities. I comb the media for mention of the Patriots, but other than the usual early predictions by geniuses boldly stating that what happened last year will happen again this year, there ain't much going on. Ken Walter is still in prison, and the remaining players are all resting for the start of camp.

I am mostly filling time with my cycling blog, as well as cataloguing the exploits of my brilliant little boy, and even hoping to start a website profiling the naked rampage as the quintessentially American reaction to distress. Look for nakedrampage.com soon, although we're moving in two weeks (from the rental to the "permanent" place), so don't expect me to contribute anything to society before September.

That's not to say I don't hope for the best from the Sox. God bless 'em, if that's how it works. It's just that they are collectively mailing it in these days, and I have better things to do than to find original ways to say this. So do you. Now, go forth and prosper, and come back after the Tour de France, when all we'll have left is baseball.

Unless they trade Youkilis for Catalanotto. Then look for a 6,000 word essay on how completely screwed up the team is.

Monday, June 14, 2004

Anticlimax

Has this season seemed a little lackluster? this is not something I can prove with statistical analysis, and since I live in Seattle, it's hard to say much about the Man on the Street with any authority. But has the regular season failed to live up to the offseason hype?

There are several factors at work here. Yes, the offseason was a succession of 60-point double-stack headlines concerning one player transaction or another. And when the season started, suddenly we were pounding away on the Yankees, unleashing several months' worth of frustration in a mere seven games (OK, that's fitting).

And then Pedro declared his intention not to sign anything; the losing streaks started; the pitching became pedestrian -- and that's one of Derek Lowe's good days. Two and a half months after it all began, the Sox have the second best record in the AL, behind only the streaking Yankees. Isn't all right in the world?

Yes and No. Schilling has been great but seems destined for some time off. Pedro and Lowe went through a miserable stretch that they both now claim to have emerged from, with new tips on where to plant your landing foot. Just in time, too, because Wakefield has left the reservation, Bronson Arroyo is still Spanglish for "long reliever," and Nomar and Nixon are only now emerging from those spring training "day-to-day conditions." Ha. Mueller and Millar have been mediocre, Varitek is slightly off... Where would this team be without Manny and Ortiz and Pokey Reese?

I dunno what my point is. I guess, we just had a little too much fun in April. Nobody wins anything in April. Maybe Sox fans will remember that someday.

Monday, June 07, 2004

Oh, and one more thing

In my last post I mentioned that there is no foolproof way to recognize future maturity in a kid. Meanwhile, the media is full of reports that the top skill player, J.D. Drew's brother Stephen, has a fancy agent and a reputation for not always feeling like playing baseball. So while there may not be a foolproof way to recognize future maturity, it's still possible to detect a sure clown from great distances.

Actually, his sin (and apparently his big bro's) is that they don't really love playing baseball. OK, fine, people are entitled to their preferences. I don't particularly love playing football. But then, you don't see me hiring Scott Boras to shake down some NFL team for millions so I can go half speed through tackling drills. The D-Backs drafted Drew because he had #1 talent but the first 14 teams said no thanks, and someone has to waste a pick on this guy. Stuff like this makes one think maybe Duquette was onto something when he officially declared minor league player development a waste of money. It generally isn't, but in this case it appears to be.

Damn. People named Drew just don't get it.

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Do you feel a draft?

[Sorry, we just bought a 91-year-old house...]

This week marks the annual baseball draft. The fact that I would start a post with such a banal lede is testament not to our cumulative state of sleep deprivation, nor my own deterioration since we got a satellite dish. No, it's because I want to say something about the draft, and baseball in general, and I am not sure whoever still reads this site is even aware the former is taking place.

The baseball draft gets more ink these days than it used to, when it was an agate piece with a couple lines in the Notebook section of the Globe. There are 24-hour sports channels, major websites (including but not limited to FBBTTPL, EPSN, etc.), sports radio... people with a lot of white space to fill, desperate for something to say, and the baseball draft is technically something. If America were a just society, they'd all just run or link to Peter Gammons' columns and leave it at that, for unlike the OCD-inspired vaporings of Mel Kiper Jr., this is actually all you need to know.

So yeah, the baseball draft gets noticed a bit more, and in this information age you can get a few names of people who teams really actually want. But it is now and always will be completely unrelated to the basketball and football drafts. For precisely the reason I love baseball.

[Disclaimer: I spend all winter salivating over football, but only because the Patriots are the greatest sports franchise since the Knights of the Round Table.]

The baseball draft isn't interesting at the time it takes place because for the most part it does not portend anything in particular for the teams at the major league level. Unlike the NFL or NBA where almost all draftees get a chance to play, only around 60 percent of all first round draftees even so much as get a cup of coffee on the major league level, to say nothing of the guys picked in rounds 2-38. Since the average major league team consists of one-third guys whom you'd pay to watch and another two-thirds whom you wouldn't -- or even might pay for the assurance that they'll be locked in the clubhouse -- we can extrapolate out rather generously to conclude that maybe as much as 20 percent of first rounders are eventually worth watching, a number even the Celtics can surpass (don't quote me). And this number is actually woefully inflated, since a huge number of major league players, even the good ones, are drafted later, or not at all, or signed overseas.

No, the only interesting aspect of the baseball draft is to look back about five years later and see which teams knew what they were doing, or at least got lucky.

There are two primary reasons for this. First, the distance from pre-professional baseball to the majors is infinitely, infinitely greater than the distance from college hoops and football to the respective pro leagues. Baseball draftees are selected from colleges or -- jeezus -- high school, where they are guaranteed to experience nothing like major league baseball. The lamest future pro pitchers threw 17 no-hitters in high school because they were playing against guys like me (circa 1983), rather than matching up regularly with other potential MLB talents. Position players carried .765 batting averages when they were lining up at PS 194. It takes three years out of high school for their egos to deflate before they can even begin learning something useful.

College baseball would be better if the draft didn't remove 75% of the best 18-year-olds from the talent pool. But even if everyone had to go to college before the pros, it still wouldn't do much to bring these kids close to the majors at age 22. The season is necessarily short since most universities are closing their doors on another year just as the leather is starting to fly, even in the south. My alma mater can barely thaw out the soccer pitch in time for graduation ceremonies. It just doesn't match up, and that's even before we start discussing the nonsense of aluminum bats. They might as well take my brother's advice and put a surlyn (golf ball) cover on the ball, for all it has to do with baseball.

[aside: Incidentally, I am not endorsing the idea of making amateur players go to college. It's very quaint that a university can double as a sports entertainment forum, and playing sports is probably not a bad way for some elements of the average campus to work out their issues. But what do major sports and higher education really have to do with each other? Seriously, I get the value of teamwork and competition by playing at my own suck-ass level, so I don't buy that major college sports contribute more to that lesson than the intramural clubs. And it's fun to kick Middlebury's ass every year in hockey, but it would be just as fun without Martin St. Louis and Eric Perrin of the Stanley Cup finalist Tampa Bay Lightning. And more to the point, everybody knows the true talented athletes won't need to have passed organic chem to make their way through life. Not that they shouldn't, if that's how they get off, but there is no conscionable reason to say they have to./aside]

But scratching my head at college sports isn't what inspired this column. No, my second point and the true reason the baseball draft can't possibly predict what will transpire at the majors is that baseball asks more from a person than most 20-year-olds can offer. The raw physical skills, instincts and even some intelligence or training that can carry a late-teenager to competing in the NBA are no more than 40 percent of the game of baseball. The wild card is maturity. It takes a hell of a lot of maturity to not only handle failing on 70 percent of your at bats every day for six months but to see that doing so will put you on the all star team. Ditto for the pitcher who has to throw 100 pitches in a game, and see that no more than one or two is a hanging breaking pitch. Baseball, as much as golf, requires unfathomable concentration, and if you were born with the ability to hit a baseball 500 feet but without ridiculous patience, you're finished.

Some incredibly minuscule percentage of our ball-playing society develop this mental skill and mix it with enough physical ability to make it as a baseball player, usually around age 26 or 27. Far, far fewer people can do this at age 18 or 21 -- being 21 by definition means being impatient -- and nobody has invented a foolproof way to recognize future maturity in these young kids. So, round up the talented guys, interview them to glean what you can, and if all else is equal, draft the son of a coach or ex-major leaguer.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

There is something wrong with Pedro

What is it with the Big Four? These guys have no freakin clue how to turn in a contract year. Nomar is idle, Lowe has lost the will to live, Varitek -- well, he's Varitek. But Pedro looks nothing like he should.

Is he hurt? I don't think so, he's too careful to pitch in any real pain. But we see him very reluctant to throw the fastball, even though as he showed last night he can dial it WAY up and blow hitters away. Why won't he? Is he worried about getting hurt? Does he not have the stamina to throw it often, it wears him out? I don't think he's finished, but I do wonder what the hell is going on.

And, uh, the Angels are trouble. If their rotation ever gets going...
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