Not Dark Yet

2006 in Lyrical Retrospect

In keeping with a short-lived tradition, I would like to proceed with my seasonal awards by paying homage to Bob Dylan- Minnesota’s great cultural export besides the Twins, Prince and Mitch Hedberg. Rather than boring you with the laundry list of accomplishment stemming from my birthplace I will jump into the start of my second annual non-traditional award dispersal. Instead of re-hashing MVP ballots and Cy Young races over which you and I have no power, I will convey some aspect of my Minnesota roots to you, the reader, by expressing some of my favorite storylines through the mercurial lyricism of the Iron Ridge’s own Robert Zimmerman.

“I go to catch your monkey and I get a face full of claws/ I ask ‘who’s that in the fireplace, you tell me Santa Claus/ The milkman comes in wearing a derby hat/ You ask why I don’t live here/ Honey, why do you have to ask me that?”

-On the Road Again

For Bud Selig, who will not seem to let up on his extortionist bent against every major league city. Certainly a former owner will show his colors from time to time, but Selig’s blatant one-sidedness never leaves any open questions regarding which side of his bread is the more dairy-prone. Selig continually insists that teams need new ballparks to remain competitive no matter how many teams prove him wrong in different and constantly changing ways. Consider the teams in this year’s playoffs: Selig successfully lobbied the cities of Detroit, St. Louis, and San Diego for new stadiums, and Minnesota, the Yankees and the Mets have their own mallparks in the pipeline. Still, the New Yorks, Minnesota, Oakland, and the Dodgers have found ways to be very successful in sub-optimal parks despite widely varied surroundings.

Apparently, the recent 6-year run of contention from the Twins has been an aberration that does more to hurt the competitive equity of the game by setting a bad precedent of competent management and player development. Forget about demonstrable or tangible effects of new stadiums, which may or may not have any meaningful impact on competitiveness, and think of how much money has been wasted by all of these cities due to Selig’s threats of abandonment. Selig is like an abusive spouse who mooches off of his excessively needy spouse, and when her friends finally get her to make a stand, Selig threatens to leave for some unrealistic alternative (a young blonde, the Starbucks barista, or, in this case, Portland), causing a sentimental cave-in and monumental relapse.

Think of what he has done in Oakland, a team already extremely competitive and consistent on a reasonable payroll in a park built by a tyrannical football owner. Despite continual proof to the contrary, Selig insisted that, "Clearly for this club to be competitive in the future it needs a new venue.” And like any good demagogue/salesman, Selig extended his pitch to imbue anxiety and fear in what should be a position of confidence: Once people around you start getting new ballparks and generating more revenue, it becomes hard for that particular franchise to compete.” Not only do the A’s need a new stadium, but so does everyone else! What happens when every team has a new retro-park? The regime will probably start over with the top of the alphabet, condemning Arizona’s Chase Field as an imminent fire hazard, or some such thing.

The truth is that deft management at every level- from scouting, to player development, to player acquisition, to on-field tactics and strategies- has more of an impact on a team’s success than the revenue itself. In fact, revenue is one factor out of many that implicates each of the listed variables. Obviously, the Yankees derive an advantage in player development by taking in such a girthy stream of revenue, but the rules of baseball are written such that this action has an opposite (though not necessarily equal) reaction. Specifically, their free agent signings force them to surrender draft picks, which can make for a good source of cheap talent for other teams, giving teams pre-arbitration depth and potentially home-grown stars in their youthful prime. It is no surprise that players often disappoint once the get to New York: they play through their physical peak, leave for New York as free agents, and play at a slightly diminished level in their 30s, such as most of 2006’s pitching staff. Smart teams manipulate these rules, like the A’s by stockpiling their draft picks.

But I digress. Ultimately, we have to remember that Selig is a bold deceiver, but that his ruse is never so thick that the intelligent baseball fans will miss the obvious evidence against his suggestions.

“Your temperature is too hot for taming/ your flaming feet are burning up the street.”

-Spanish Harlem Incident

To Ryan Howard, who was absolutely too hot to handle for about three months. As far as I see it, there are three threads running through the Howard storyline in descending order of importance: his approximation of the 2002-2004 Barry Bonds level of performance for half of a season, his role in the rejuvenation of the Phillies after the Bobby Abreu trade, and lastly, the fact that every sportswriter immediately anointed him the King of Clean Urine.

The first two accomplishments would be interchangeable if the Phillies had made the playoffs, but without a flag, Howard’s historically high level of performance is more of an individual achievement than a group effort. Even though he set the record for most games stuck on 58 homeruns (a small and select group, I assure you), Howard milked the take-and-rake train for all it is worth. Without exceptional spray-hitting ability or any speed whatsoever, Howard’s offensive value comes from his ability to hit the ball a very long distance, and the ensuing on-base skills derived from pitchers’ collective fear of those long balls. With only two discernable skills, the room for error in such a skill set is more like a walk-in closet- see Mark McGwire’s rapid and complete degradation once his bat slowed just a little. Nonetheless, there is no substitute for a masher mashing, and Howard was truly mashtastic.

Howard’s year was a long time coming after he proved himself a viable batsman in 2003 by coming up 7 RBI short of the AA Triple Crown. He sat on the shelf in 2004, spending time at AAA while Jim Thome put up crooked numbers in the inaugural season of Citizens Bank Park. In 2005, Thome went down with all sorts of injuries, and Howard never looked back. He has been on a tear ever since, improving constantly. In the first half of 2006, he hit .278/.341/.582 with 28 homeruns, a solid line that will yield no complaints, except maybe some concern about the OBP on the corner (though it was pedestrian enough to make his overall line worse than that of Albert Pujols, a better MVP candidate with comparable offense and more defense for a playoff team). He overcompensated for that concern in the second half, squashing the Homerun Derby jinx to the tune of .355/.509/.751 with 30 more bombs. Sure, it is a half season, but a 1.260 OPS is a 1.260 OPS, and pitchers feared no one more than Howard over that stretch.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Howard’s run was the way it jumpstarted a Phillies team that was dead in the water. At the trade deadline, GM Pat Gillick decided to start refashioning the roster along his lines by dumping Bobby Abreu, and his considerable contract/talent on the Yankees for filler. The logic behind the lopsided move followed from the assumption that the team was out of contention for 2006 and could use the extra flexibility going into 2007, maybe to supplement that thin pitching staff. About that time, Howard started channeling Babe Ruth, and the rest of the NL was mediocre enough that his performance alone brought the team close enough to the playoffs that they made waiver deals to enhance the rotation and had a hope going into the last weekend of the regular season. Make no mistake, the turnaround came from Howard. Chase Utley continued his strong play from before, David Dellucci had a few great weeks in Abreu’s stead, and Jon Lieber and Cole Hamels started to pitch more consistently. On the other hand, counterbalancing factors weighted these improvements down, like the attrition of the bullpen, Brett Myers’s struggles, and the loss of Abreu’s production, even in a down year. The real difference between the Phillies as a pretender and a contender, while not all that large in the wins column, came down to Ryan Howard becoming a true superstar.

With his superstardom came additional media scrutiny for Howard, resulting in his exaltation as the messianic figure in baseball’s transition out of the Steroid Era. This designation is so silly and misguided that I have difficulty deciding where to start criticizing it. For one, Howard is every bit as quantitatively guilty/innocent as Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, or Mark McGwire. Like the others, he has never failed a test for performance enhancing drugs. Some like to point out that Howard has always been big and has big family members. Well, have you looked at Barry’s gut recently? If body fat absolves him from the scarlet “S,” then there are a lot of football linemen who would probably like to appeal their suspensions and judgments in the court of public opinion. And the argument about his large brothers is complete hogwash- I have a brother who is considerably smaller than me. Does that make me a PED suspect? How about Ozzie and Jose Canseco, who both got huge on the juice? Finally, it seems odd that everyone is so comfortable that we are now heading out of the Steroid Era. There is now better testing and a fairly credible deterrent, but the biggest change seems to be the boom in mudslinging based on purely subjective opinion. I do not mean to say that any individual is or is not on PEDs, nor do I mean to comment on the effects of PEDs on baseball, since I think a lot of work is left to be done on the balance between pitching and hitting. I mean only to say that I have grown weary of idle speculation and condemnation for no purpose other than generating headlines. I do not know and I do not care. I hope I am allowed to enjoy the Ryan Howard Era in spite of this caveat.

“Come you masters of war/ You that build all the guns/ You that build the death planes/ You that build the big bombs/ You that hide behind walls/ You that hide behind desks/ I just want you to know/ I can see through your masks”

-Masters of War

The award for the most tumultuous and explosive team of the year goes to the Toronto Blue Jays, who easily made more noise off of the field than on it over the last twelve months. Tracing our memories all the way back to last winter, the Jays made plenty of headlines for their free agent/trade bonanza, including acquisitions of A.J. Burnett, B.J. Ryan, Funky Ben Molina, Lyle Overbay, and Troy Glaus. Early in the season, the Jays hovered around .500, generating little interest outside of constant injury reports regarding the shark in A.J. Burnett’s elbow. As the season wore on, the Jays endured remaining decidedly average, highlighted only by Roy Halladay’s fourth consecutive season of Cy Young-caliber rate stats- if not playing time. Finally, the also-ran status became too much to tolerate, and both Shea Hillenbrand and Ted Lilly had violent runs-in with manager John Gibbons.

Indeed, Canadians love hockey, and hockey’s primary attraction may be violence, so it comes as little surprise that Canada’s largest baseball story of the year revolves around incivility and fisticuffs. Sure, these encounters were not of the caliber of a Miami Hurricane brouhaha, but baseball is different than football. In baseball, hypermasculinity, overtly excessive testosterone, and utter insanity are at least nominally discouraged. Going back to stars of the ‘70s, we can see that players like Vida Blue did not benefit from playing on a perpetual cocaine high. Baseball lunatics are eccentrics or hams, not Lawrence Taylor or Bill Romanowski. Lattimer from The Program would not make it as a closer, regardless of the intimidation. When Kenny Rogers goes Ron Artest on a camera, it is more appalling than when Ron Artest pulled the same stunt, because we expect different things out of baseball players- if not better ones.

Maybe one fracas would be excusable, but for the same manager to have two violent incidents with his own players during the same year shows a tremendous lack of order. It is no wonder that Vernon Wells relishes the thought of free agency; even if the Blue Jays do not lose 90 games every year, the stress of playing in such a whirlwind would diminish the genuine enjoyment that some players seem to get out of the game. The second-place finish is little consolation, and I do not intend to convey the sort of patronizing moralism that such protestations usually suggest. Instead, I feel sorry for fans of the Blue Jays, whose fortunes have dramatically reversed from the early ‘90’s dynasty. I am reminded of my Minnesota Vikings fandom: most of the time, the troubles and disappointments are small and predictable, but the nagging unhappiness of following a team with little hope for improvement, and almost none for a championship wearies a fan tremendously.

“Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats/ Too noble to neglect/ Deceived me into thinking/I had something to protect”

-My Back Pages

Living with a real Red Sox fan- one who is actually from Boston and who frowns upon the pink-capped bandwagon ladies and their Papi-loving frat-boy counterparts- brings about a harrowing exposure to the withdrawal and depression so deeply engrained in the franchise that a season’s success cannot uproot it. The folly of many Boston fans after the 2004 World Series was the logical train that led them to believe that a ring could undo 86 years of heartbreak and despair. More directly, the Sox had a great postseason run, but did not magically surpass the Yankees as the preeminent franchise in the sport. Eighty-six win seasons happen to good teams, especially when struck with a spat of unfortunate injuries at the same time, forcing into service fatefully inadequate reserves who are far down the chain.

To be fair, the Red Sox front office has made its share of mistakes. Matt Clement has been an unmitigated failure, even if not on the same level as Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright a little further down the seaboard. Orlando Cabrera has walked away and been a more productive shortstop than anyone imagined, while the Sox were left with Alex Gonzalez and his wet noodle at the dish. And the fans experienced far too many first-hand reminders of the institutional stinginess in the case of Johnny Damon. Still, consider the fates of the important players from the 2004 team who have walked away or been sent away in the title’s wake:

-Kevin Millar- Part of Baltimore’s 1B/LF/DH logjam, not a productive member of the baseball society.

-Mark Bellhorn- Utility vagabond of marginal usefulness at the bottom of a roster.

-Bill Mueller- Injuries once again keeping him off of the field, little value going forward.

-Orlando Cabrera- A true missed opportunity. Three good months could have been turned into a few good years.

-Johnny Damon- Again, still useful, but the sting lingers due to his replacement’s failings

-Pedro Martinez- Refusing to guarantee that fourth year seems more reasonable now that he is a Sunday starter at best.

-Derek Lowe- Serviceable, but consider the context: great pitcher’s park, National League, strong infield defense.

-Bronson Arroyo- A great season, but it is hard to believe he would have done the same for Boston.

In total, Cabrera and Damon are the only players the have really missed. I find it curious that the front office chose to hold the older players- Schilling, Wakefield, Foulke, Varitek, Ramirez- while letting many of the younger ones walk. Moreover, Theo Epstein needs to abandon this notion that he can turn every available piece of coal and squeeze it into an Ortiz-carat diamond. Clement, Pena, Crisp, Tavarez. Not every unexpected failure is available due to a lack of market efficiency, and the Sox have enough resources to occasionally buy high and get the value.

And that is exactly the point. The Red Sox are very marketable and have the potential to be very good. Their resources do not extend into the $200 million range, so they cannot buy sure things at every position every year. Thus, the difference between the Red Sox and the Yankees is that the Red Sox will have the occasional failure, and nobody needs to get up in arms over it. This season’s failings were a result of some gambles that did not pay off, and a handful of badly timed injuries. Again, 86 win seasons are within the scope of variance. Calm down, everyone.

“Although the masters make the rules/ For the wise men and the fools/ I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.”

-It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding

Explicit or implicit, there is a set of rules that most baseball teams seem to follow when building their rosters and planning for the future. Some of the rules make sense- such as the value embedded in starting pitching and up-the-middle players and the preference for cheap, homegrown talent. Others are a bit less sensible, like the notion that any team needs veteran leadership to win, or that big-name players necessarily fill a void better than journeymen who can produce similarly and more cheaply. Everyone lives up to these rules to a certain extend: evidence can be found in the Pirates’ signing Jeromy Burnitz, or the continual employment of lefty-specialists whose cost per out is through the roof.

Certain teams are bad enough that they can test these rules to see what happens when they are broken. Therefore, this “award” goes to the potential for experimentation for Gerry Hunsicker and Andrew Friedman in Tampa, and for Dayton Moore in Kansas City, two places where failure is so pervasive that the traditional rules do not apply.

In KC, Moore has committed himself to a meme of player development, and has a decent start with baseball’s best prospect, Alex Gordon, coming rapidly down the pipeline. Moore will likely take the knowledge gained from his extensive time in Atlanta and try to replicate the Braves’ success to some degree, creating an odd bit of reflective symmetry, from Schuerholz-and-Cox in KC to Schuerholz-and-Cox in Atlanta, to their professional offspring returning to the Show Me state. The Royals do not currently field depth at those traditionally important up-the-middle and pitching spots, so they will have to butter their bread with some other instrument. It will be interesting to see if Moore commits to the suboptimal and conventional option of Joey Gathright, Angel Berroa, etc, or experiments with some different options. Remember, tall shortstops were thought to have too little range until the Orioles experimented with Cal Ripken Jr., and were handsomely rewarded. Today, the strong arms of guys like Jeter and A-Rod are allowed to outweigh range questions, catapulting the shortstop position into a new class of offensive integrity.

Tampa has even more openings, since they have even less to lose in terms of organizational history and prestige. With 53 exciting prospects jammed into the four corners, the front office has all sorts of transactional and positional difficulties with which to experiment. Rather than try to prescribe what needs to be done without knowing many details about the skills of players like Elijah Dukes, I will patiently wait to see if the critical thinking skills of a highly-regarded front office team can prevail. As with the Red Sox and Blue Jays, overtaking the Yankees may not be a tenable goal. On the other hand, small victories will be tolerated, especially for a team that has had such little success in its short history.

“To know that some other man is holdin' you tight,/ It hurts me all over, it doesn't seem right.
All of those awful things that I have heard,/ I don't want to believe them, all I want is your word./ So darlin', you better come through,/ Tell me that it isn't true.”

One subplot started the season as a pressing and relevant issue, but slowly faded out of the news cycle and public consciousness, even though the impact seemed to remain throughout the year. While I do not know why or how, pitchers who participated in the World Baseball Classic suffered a disproportionate number of injuries through the 2006 season as well as underperformance. One could go so far as to make a case that a few teams’ seasons hinged on players who lost time or effectiveness to a few exhibition games in the early spring. Although I loved the WBC, watched most of the games, followed the strategies, and enjoyed the fan participation, I have to acknowledge that quite a few very good players did not offer their full contribution, and the correlation with participation in the event is alarmingly high.

Spring training routines do not conform to a scientific or medical ideal, but they have developed over time to get players ready for the season. Even if the players do not take on a particularly strenuous alternative, the change in environment and the alteration of the body’s expectation could be enough to tweak a fragile pitcher’s musculature. If you disagree with my thinking, and still believe that the WBC injury plague is a media myth, consider the list of above average pitchers who were either particularly ineffective or injured after participating in the Classic:

Missed Time/Ineffective:

Daniel Cabrera

Bruce Chen

Rodrigo Lopez

Julian Tavarez

Mike Timlin

Freddy Garcia

Javier Vazquez

Todd Jones

Brad Lidge

Dontrelle Willis

Bartolo Colon

Kelvim Escobar

J.C. Romero

Scot Shields

Odalis Perez

Francisco Liriano

Carlos Silva

Duaner Sanchez

Victor Zambrano

Esteban Loaiza

Houston Street

Jake Peavy

Gustavo Chacin

Tony Armas

Gary Majewski

And here is a list of pitchers who performed up to or above a reasonably high level of expectation after participating:

Carlos Zambrano

Jeff Francis

Byung-Hyun Kim

Fernando Rodney

Francisco Rodriguez

Jae Seo

Joe Nathan

Chad Cordero

My methodology is admittedly sloppy, choosing players by my own expectation and impressions. Nonetheless, one list is quite a bit longer than the other. Think about your morning routine: when you have to get up early in the morning, you do not want to face surprises. If you are used to showering, sipping coffee, then driving to work, your body responds to those stimuli. If one morning features a water main break, a spilled cup of coffee, and a car accident, then you probably will not function well. Even if the routine is altered slightly, it has an effect on your behavior, just as it did on these pitchers’ bodies.

The strangest aspect to me is the fact that the discussion about the WBC disappeared almost entirely after about May. Gary Majewski complained about it briefly after the trade to the Reds, but few other pitchers even mentioned the word “Classic” after it was an early-season whipping boy for every injured player. Could it be that MLB got tired of hearing such discouraging words about its little promotional venture and kindly asked the journalists to call off the dogs? I have no special knowledge, except that my powers of observation make the disappearance seem odd.

“An' here I sit so patiently/ Waiting to find out what price/ You have to pay to get out of/ Going through all these things twice.”

-Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

“May you always be courageous,/ Stand upright and be strong,/ May you stay forever young.”

-Forever Young

I have given two lyrics for the polarity of this year’s Florida Marlins, my favorite baseball story of 2006 outside of Minnesota. The first lyric gets at the despair present throughout the diminished fan base before the season and through the first rough stretch of games. The second reminds us of how dramatically and surprisingly the team was able to turn around its fortunes. Sure, the Marlins finished under .500, easily outscored by the opposition, fourth in the division, and 10 games out of the Wild Card. None of their final stats seem so incredible for the average baseball team. The average baseball team does not play dozens of rookies, though, and the average baseball team does not have a marginal payroll within shouting distance of the minimum allowed by the league.

The truly inspiring and incredible aspect of the Marlins season is how many wins they piled up with such low expectations. No stat typifies their value as much as the marginal dollars they spent per marginal win: less than $200,000. By comparison, the A’s, Twins, and Rockies were the next best teams, all spending approximately $1 million more per marginal win. On the other end, the Yankees spent over $3 million per win, and the Cubs over $4 million. Naturally, the huge separation comes from Florida’s nearly inconceivably low payroll, which is only $5.8 million more than what a team would pay for a collection of all rookies. As a result, their 29 wins above the theoretical replacement level came as gravy, as the team was built with the cheapest talent available.

Maybe there will be some regression from this squad next year. They have experienced turbulence at the top, with manager Joe Girardi facing an early dismissal over disagreements with ownership. They also outperformed expectations so far this year that there is bound to be some return. Still, the Marlins have built a solid core of players for next year, and they will stay cheap for a few years after that. Hanley Ramirez, Dan Uggla, Josh Johnson, Scott Olsen, and Anibal Sanchez are all young, improving, cheap, and extremely valuable. Miguel Olivo, Joe Borowski, and Wes Helms are probably worse than they were this year. Still, finding an above-average center fielder to go with their collection of talented arms in the rotation and the bullpen, their strong up-the-middle talent on its way up, and their already present star power in the form of Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis, and the Marlins could remain legitimate contenders for several years without pricing themselves out of the NL East.

To me, the Marlins are exactly the type of team for which a fan would want to root. The players and manager seemed to be on a mission all season to prove that they deserved to considered a real professional team, much less a contender. Their struggles were akin to the Indians’ in Major League, with a villainous owner seemingly trying to doom the team to disappoint a fan base that would not buy him a new toy to make themselves more money. Instead of folding up and resigning themselves to the second division, the Marlins learned on the fly, becoming not only a Major League team, but one successful enough to be considered a contender. That, I believe, is truly award-worthy.