As you know by now, Melky Cabrera failed a drug test and was suspended for 50 games yesterday for using synthetic testosterone during the best season of his career. Cabrera will miss the rest of the Giants’ regular season, but he’s already been worth 4.5 WAR to the Giants, and some people within the game are grumbling that a mere 50 game suspension isn’t enough of a deterrent to prevent ballplayers from taking performance-enhancing drugs. If it isn’t an effective deterrent, is it an adequate punishment?

Kirk Gibson, the manager of the Diamondbacks, was outspoken yesterday. “Obviously, there’s not a big enough deterrent if it continues,” he told the Arizona Republic. “I think it should be a minimum of a year (for a first positive) and after that it should just be banned.” So what kind of suspension would adequately deter players from using banned drugs?
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Chien-Ming Wang suffered another injury setback yesterday, as continuing hip soreness forced the Nationals to pull him from his rehab assignment. He’s only 32, but he’s pitched a grand total of 223 innings in the last five years, and even if he returns to pitch meaningful innings for the Nationals this year or for another team next year, it’s looking increasingly likely that the bulk of his career is already behind him. So it might be appropriate to look at the career he’s already had, as the best Taiwanese player in major league history, and possibly the best Asian pitcher born outside Japan to come to the Major Leagues.
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Queen Elizabeth — or her Amidala-like surrogate — parachuted into London to witness the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. She did a fine job of looking bravely impassive as the ceremonial figurehead of her country, much as she did at the Diamond Jubilee honoring the 60th anniversary of her reign.

It was well and good for her, I’m sure. But I’m afraid that I have no use for these Olympics. If the Olympics don’t care about baseball, then I won’t care about them. This is the first Olympic Games to lack baseball and softball in 28 years; baseball began to rear its head at the Olympics as an exhibition sport as early as 1904, finally becoming a medal sport in 1992, while softball became a medal sport in 1996. In terms of its overall presence at the Games, it’s hardly an upstart. Why isn’t it here? Well, politics, obviously.
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The legendary baseball writer Robert Creamer died yesterday at the age of 90. He’s best remembered for his biography “Babe,” which many consider to be the last word on the subject. But I’ll always remember him for his lyrical, brilliant book “Baseball in ’41.”

Here’s how it begins:

My god, what a year 1941 was. I was eighteen when it began, and I turned nineteen that summer on the day Joe DiMaggio hit safely in his fifth-fourth straight game. He had kept the streak going to my birthday; it ended three days later.
   1941 was the year ted Williams batted .400—.406, to be precise. And the year the Dodgers, the rowdy Brooklyn Dodgers of Leo Durocher and Larry MacPhail, survived a tumultuous, season-long, nose-to-nose pennant race to win for the first time in twenty-one years—and then lost the World Series when what would have been a game-ending third strike got past their catcher, Mickey Owen.
   Is this the heritage of the hapless baseball fan, that he remembers 1941 for Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and Mickey Owen instead of Pearl Harbor?

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It’s been three days since the last regular season game, and I feel like Homer Simpson with no TV and no beer. (“All I need is a title. I was thinking along the lines of… No meaningful baseball on TV makes Alex something, something.”) Back before national television contracts and interleague play, the All-Star Game was one of the only times that fans could see the greatest players from the other league.

But then, back in the old days, some of that was ameliorated by in-season exhibition games and post-season barnstorming. And the best players — Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Willie Mays — played the whole game, because you don’t take Stan Musial out of a game. Especially not for a lame excuse like saying that the game is “for the fans.”

When ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick asked Justin Verlander about his abysmal performance in the Midsummer Classic, Verlander explained that he wasn’t trying to get by with guile. “I know this game means something,” he said, “But we’re here for the fans, and I know the fans don’t want to see me throw 90 [miles per hour] and hit the corners.”

Actually, I’m a fan, and I’d love to see the best pitcher in the league try his damnedest to beat the best players in the other league, rather than just raring back and throwing souped-up straight fastballs because he thinks that’s what people want. We need to revisit what the All-Star Game means, why it matters, and whether we should still have one.
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Today is the 65th anniversary of the debut of Larry Doby, the first African-American player in the American League and the second in Major League Baseball. He came up three months after Jackie Robinson, so he was largely overshadowed by Jackie. But he was a spectacular player in his own right, a deserving Hall of Famer who made seven straight All-Star teams from 1949-1955 while playing in a league that was much more white, and much slower to integrate, than the National League.

Why was the American League so much slower to integrate? Racist owners and executives are a big part of it. Boston’s Tom Yawkey and New York’s Del Webb and Dan Topping were notable for their lack of enthusiasm at integration. According to Roger Kahn, as quoted in Rick Swaine’s “The Integration of Major League Baseball,” Webb used to brag that his construction company had built Japanese internment camps during World War II. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, John Sickels wrote an interesting blog post, more of a musing than an analysis:

A) At the amateur level (high school, college, etc.), baseball is primarily a game for the children of wealth and the upper middle class. Do you think that is true or false?

B) If you accept that A is true, is that good for the sport and what, if anything, should be done about it?

I accept his proposition. I played Little League baseball for five years or so, and I was a growing boy — I remember how many pairs of cleats and clean white jerseys and pants and metal bats and gloves I went through, to say nothing of the summer camps, the days at the batting cages, and the dues for the league themselves, much of which probably went to the trophy I invariably got for showing up every year. This despite the fact that I was, as many of my readers no doubt will have guessed, no good at all.

Because I wasn’t any good at all, my parents saved on things like travel (because I certainly wasn’t traveling), personal instruction, or the “metal contraption” that Trevor Bauer’s dad built for him.

But I had no idea how much they were spending. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Cameron made a radical proposal today aimed at teams thinking of moving away from the standard five-man rotation. He suggested that they essentially blur the lines of starters and relievers and simply assign an even number of innings (or batters faced) to each pitcher in the pen. “Each pitcher will be asked to face 10 batters per game, which translates to about 38 pitches apiece.”

Cameron advocates that teams target two-way players like Micah Owings, who are decent at handling a bat and also can throw average innings, and swingmen like Alfredo Aceves — mopup guys capable of taking a fair number of innings fairly frequently. That’s actually much more akin to the way that bullpens used to function in the days before hyperspecialization, except that in those days the majority of the important innings went to a “closer” like Roy Face or Bruce Sutter or Rollie Fingers, who pitched a lot more innings but had a lot fewer appearances than modern closers and setup men.

Cameron’s strategy makes pitchers more fungible. But teams would still want reliability. The best pitchers in such a system would be the ones who throw a lot of innings every year without fail. There aren’t many of those around: there are only two active pitchers in the top 40 on the all-time appearances list. One of them, Mariano Rivera, is out for the year and maybe for good. But LaTroy Hawkins is still going strong.
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Browsing through the Japanese leaderboards at baseball-reference is a strange occupation. The first thing you notice is all of the old friends who are doing well over there: boldfaced names who played in the majors once upon a time and took the transpacific voyage to keep playing baseball.

Of all of the hitters with at least 55 at-bats, 16 of 130 have played in the majors. Of the 200 pitchers listed, 25 have played in the majors. Some of them are foreign-born players who wound up in Japan after they couldn’t hack it in the majors any more. For example: Wily Mo Pena is the fourth-leading home run hitter in Japan.
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On Monday, the Atlanta Braves took Justin Black in the fourth round, the 149th overall pick. It may have been seen as an overdraft by some — Black was seen as a top-500 talent by many draft evaluators but not necessarily a top-150 talent — and it may have been an oblique result of the new draft rules that may incentivize overdrafting to save money. He’s raw and toolsy, and he’s already signed with the Braves. But one of the most interesting reasons for his rawness is: his high school didn’t even have a baseball team, because he grew up in Montana.

I spoke to a Montanan friend of mine, and he explained that this is relatively common in his home state, and leads to interesting solutions. The best high school players can play American Legion ball, as Black did. They can try out for the Billings Mustangs, a single-A team that boasts George Brett and Trevor Hoffman among its alumni. Black even went to Arizona in March to play with a traveling Canadian club team. Black is clearly dedicated and has a lot of confidence — in a predraft interview he said he expected to be drafted in the 3rd or 4th round — but there isn’t a whole lot of precedent for it. In fact, there has never been a great position player from Montana. Ever.
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