With Chipper Jones on the DL for the first two weeks of the season, the Braves traded one of their top pitching prospects, J.J. Hoover, to acquire Reds third base prospect Juan Francisco. Hoover, whom Marc Hulet recently ranked as the 13th-best prospect in the Braves system, goes to Cincinnati in a trade for the powerful but strikeout-prone third baseman.
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I don’t mean to #humblebrag, but I was there in person for Yoenis Cespedes’s first home run in a major league uniform. It was just the luck of circumstance: I was there with a lot of my Fangraphs colleagues for spring training, and the first spring training game of my life just happened to feature the moment where Jeff Francis tried to sneak an 82-mile an hour fastball past Cuba’s best outfielder. Mike Newman was there as well, and he captured the moment. But now that Yoenis has homered in his second continent and third major land mass, I thought I’d take a look at the recent history of Cuba’s best players to come to America, to whose number Cespedes now belongs.
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Yesterday, ESPN’s Mark Saxon asked Torii Hunter how he felt about facing Yu Darvish this year, and Hunter gave him an interesting reaction:
Torii Hunter said the early edge will be Darvish’s, but time is on the hitters’ side. He said he gradually became more and more comfortable facing Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, another mega-star to emerge from Japan.
“All of the Japanese pitchers have pretty much the same style,” Hunter said. “They throw almost the same breaking pitches, almost the same off-speed stuff, pitch in the same way. In fastball counts, they throw a lot of off-speed stuff and they have an explosive fastball. It might be 92 (mph), but it has a little extra get-up.”
There are a couple of ways to hear that quote. It might just be gamesmanship: maybe Hunter is just razzing Darvish. It might be ignorance, with a faint whiff of prejudice, which is how a few of my friends initially reacted. Or maybe… just maybe, he might be onto something.
In case you weren’t aware, Jose Canseco has been attempting a baseball comeback with the Mexican League. Last night, the president of the Mexican League confirmed to ESPN that Canseco had been banned for taking testosterone, a prohibited substance. Canseco then tweeted:
How can I test positive when I never took any test don’t believe everything the media tells you.the truth always comes out I am not using any illegal substanced
It’s easy to make fun of Canseco, the man who singlehandedly touched off the steroid scandal in baseball and wrote two books, Juiced and Vindicated, about his own personal steroid use and the steroid use of other players in baseball. He is simultaneously the most famous steroid user and the most famous steroid truth-teller in baseball. So, logically, does it make sense to believe him when he says he did nothing wrong?
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A week after the arbitration ruling in favor of Ryan Braun, the controversy over the arbitrator’s ruling shows no sign of abating. Eno Sarris did a good job of explaining why the decision did nothing to calm the furor: “Science — or the collectively bargained scientific process, at the very least — determined that his test did not stand up to scrutiny.” The problem is that science is a very different thing than the collectively bargained scientific process. The scientific process requires a hypothesis to be tested, but in this case, the hypothesis was not, “Did Ryan Braun use a banned substance?” Instead, it was, “Did Major League Baseball follow the collectively bargained procedures to prove that Ryan Braun used a banned substance?”
MLB clearly screwed up, not just by being blindsided by a loophole in the legal language of the steroid bargaining agreement, but also by leaking Braun’s name so that a normally secret process was carried out in the open. (UPDATE: My assumption on the leak was incorrect. A report has emerged that the leak came from someone Braun’s defense team spoke to.) There have been previous cases in which a player has beaten a steroid rap — but none of those players’ names have been released publicly, which is why MLB was able to claim that no player had ever done it before. Likewise, as Eno said, MLB VP Rob Manfred sounded ineffectual and petty when he condemned the ruling that had gone against him.
But Buster Olney writes today that a curious thing has happened since the ruling. Off the record, a number of players and others in the game have been siding against Braun. They feel that Braun managed to cheat the system, and by extension, to cheat them. “I don’t think anybody wants to be faced with the choice of either taking drugs or possibly losing their job,” a player told Olney. “If somebody cheats, that’s a problem for all of us.”
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Last summer, a home plate collision between Scott Cousins and Buster Posey ended Posey’s season and touched off a discussion about catching technique and team culture. Shortly after Posey’s injury, Oakland general manager Billy Beane ordered his catcher, Kurt Suzuki, not to block the plate:
I don’t want you planting yourself in front of the plate waiting to get creamed. You’re an Athletic catcher — be athletic. … I don’t want to lose you for six months.
Earlier this week, Bruce Bochy told reporters that he had given the same order to Posey. I think it’s absolutely the right decision, and one that more teams should publicly make.
The trouble is that years of baseball culture are in the way. The tools of ignorance make catcher the only position where a full-body collision is permitted by the rules; and a backstop who is perceived as unwilling to stand his ground is one who will lose respect. That’s why the order has to come from above. Bruce Bochy acknowledged as much: “I certainly don’t want people to think he’s backing off on his own.” As I wrote at the time: “The only way that baseball culture will be able to tolerate a change like this is if it is predicated as a strategic move to win ballgames… Blocking the plate is a lot less important than a catcher’s health. It’s time more teams started to treat it that way.”
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A year and a half ago, ESPN announced the launch of espnW, a digital brand aimed at women. The initial announcement in October 2010 was greeted by a great deal of skepticism in the blogosphere, from Tom Tango to Julie DiCaro. They feared that the site would patronize ESPN’s female viewers, especially after the ESPN VP in charge of espnW, Laura Gentle, suggested that the site might be about “women finding self-esteem in sports and about getting a pedicure.”
As DiCaro wrote, “Women already HAVE an ESPN. It’s called ESPN.” But espnW may not be as bad as its critics feared. I give you exhibit A: today’s sabermetrics primer, written by Amanda Rykoff (and already given the Tango seal of approval).
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Professional baseball is one of the purest meritocracies in the American job market: if someone possesses baseball talent, odds are that they will be tendered a job offer. But baseball reflects American society, and like all other sectors of American society, baseball has a history of discrimination which it still has to deal with. In previous columns for Fangraphs, I’ve discussed homophobia in the context of the anti-discrimination language in the new CBA; sexism in the context of Kim Ng’s move to the commissioner’s office, as well as the increasing presence of women in all levels of the game; and racism in the context of Milton Bradley’s retirement. I recently came across a scholarly article that used data from the 1880 census to examine anti-Irish discrimination in baseball in the late 19th century. It offers interesting parallels with the recent history we’re more familiar with. As the author, E. Woodrow “Woody” Eckard, an economics professor at the UC Denver Business School, concludes:
First, Irish players had to display superior performance to earn regular positions. Second, they generally were relegated to less important field positions. Regular Irish players were also more likely to be assigned to fill in at field positions other than their regular ones. Last, the Irish were underrepresented as managers. The evidence also suggests fan discrimination, with the presence of Irish players positively correlated with their cities’ Irish populations. These patterns, again with the exception of pitcher, mirror those observed for African Americans in the first decade or two after Jackie Robinson broke the MLB “color line” in 1947.
Yesterday, Jayson Stark wrote a column that was music to my ears. His column was the first serious report I’d read to indicate that Bud Selig’s dream of adding a second wild card in each league had hit a logistical snag. Stark is careful to note that it is still possible — “All of this is solvable,” says one of Stark’s sources — but the drumbeat of inevitability has been momentarily hushed.
And that’s fantastic, as far as I’m concerned. When the plan to expand the wild card was first announced in late 2010, I wrote two columns against the idea:
I want to keep the schedule from expanding further and prevent the slippery slope of an expanded playoff schedule eroding the significance of the regular season. The main objection beyond that is the speciousness of the stated reasoning. Bud Selig has couched the idea of expanding the playoffs in language about “fairness”… Obviously, this plan is predicated on money.
…
There isn’t much terribly wrong with this plan, in the abstract: it will make a lot of people richer while helping to increase the hopes of Blue Jays and Orioles fans without much hurting the fans of other teams. Compared to them, my objections are relatively minor. But I wish baseball’s leadership weren’t so disingenuous about it all.
I’ve written a number of columns about the playoffs, and my basic position is simple: more playoffs means that the regular season means less. It cheapens the product. (I’m very sympathetic to the Blue Jays’ situation, of course. But I’d prefer to address that by rethinking baseball divisions and getting rid of unbalanced schedules, rather than by continuing to expand the playoff pool every year.)
Look, I hate the baseball offseason more than anyone, but I’m relatively unique among American sports fans, who have already turned their attention to football by the time the baseball season reaches its apogee. Baseball World Series ratings have plummeted compared to football over the past two decades, and part of the reason is the interminable season. Stretching the season into November doesn’t help matters.
It was a minor victory when, in 2011, the World Series actually finished before November, for the first time since 2008. But the playoffs are still incredibly languidly paced. The biggest reason that the playoffs stretch on, of course, is television revenue: Fox and the other networks who bid on playoff baseball want a typical series to have games on nights when they’ll get their biggest viewership: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So the off days are scheduled to satisfy almighty Mammon.
Since becoming commissioner, Selig has already expanded the playoffs once by adding a single wild card, and he’s looking to do it again. It’s only a single game this time, but it’s hard to feel certain that they’ll stop at two wild cards. After all, as I mentioned above, the fundamental argument has always been “fairness.” But if 10 playoff teams is “fairer” than eight playoff teams, then 12 playoff teams must be fairer than ten. Using that logic with that limited definition of what’s fair means that there’s essentially no way to stop adding playoff teams.
Moreover, a short-term view of the money — more games equals more dollars, ad infinitum — leads one to the same conclusion. But one look at the decline in Nielsen ratings for playoff baseball over the past two decades suggests that may be an overly simplistic analysis.
The reason for the recent snag is just about scheduling: certain dates in the 2012 playoff schedule are already set in stone, and it is difficult to figure out quite how the extra wild card games will fit in. But all sides appear to agree in principle on the concept. Stark writes that Bud Selig is “adamant” to get this done in 2012, but whether or not he is successful, appears like there will be no problem implementing the new playoff schedule in 2013.
Selig has presented the new wild card as a corrective to the original wild card, rather than an expansion. If an agreement is reached, then under the new rules, the two wild cards will play one another in a one-game playoff for the right to play in the division series against one of the division winners. The wild card team, it is argued, would therefore be disadvantaged against the slightly better-rested division winner.
That’s certainly what Richard Justice thinks. Justice writes for MLB.com now, but he’s a veteran sportswriter with prior service at the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, and ESPN. Because he works for the organization that’s trying to implement this policy, I doubt that he would have spoken out nearly as strongly if he didn’t support the new wild card — but I doubt he would have written something he didn’t believe. “To add two additional playoff teams while actually increasing the importance of the regular season is sheer brilliance,” Justice writes. “If you worried that baseball was diluting the regular season, your concerns have been addressed.”
So I may be an outlier even among the purist, old-fogey crowd. But I’m not alone. Tim Lincecum, Buster Posey, and Mark Teixeira have all spoken out in favor of the current system.
Still, Selig justifies his current action by recalling how many people who were previously against the Wild Card, all the way back in 1995, are now strongly in favor. In fact, he’s brought back one of his favorite icky metaphors. In 2010, he said:
If I had defiled motherhood I don’t think I could have gotten ripped any more than I did. But now it’s fascinating to me. Now they not only like it so much, they want more of it.
Then, just a few days ago, he said:
You would have thought I had defiled motherhood, the way they talked about how I ruined the game… But look what it’s done.
Ew, Bud. Just stop it. Please.
When Prince Fielder accepted a $214 million contract to play for the Detroit Tigers for the next nine years, it was hard to escape the obvious: Detroit is where he first came to prominence in baseball, famously hitting a home run over the fence as a teenager while his father was on the big league team. Detroit is where Cecil experienced his greatest success, of course, as his 51-homer season in 1990 was the only 50-homer season between George Foster in 1977 and Albert Belle in 1995.*
* Of course, while there were only three 50-homer campaigns in the 29 seasons from 1977 to 1995, there were 22 such campaigns in the 12 seasons from 1996 to 2007.
He appeared to have a good childhood with his father.