This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Posted in: Baseball
This victory was a significant achievement for the Dominican Republic, a country where baseball is hugely important. The Dominican team had not played well in either of the two previous WBCs. In 2009, they were eliminated after losing twice in one week to the Netherlands in what only could have been seen as a national embarrassment in the Dominican Republic. This year, the Dominicans have nothing to be embarrassed about.
The most intriguing question facing the Yankees is not which of their veterans can come back or who they can acquire to help their chances this year, but what the next decade will look like for the Yankees. Only Cano, Gardner and perhaps Sabathia, are both young and good enough to be around and contributing in five years. The prospects who are expected to arrive in the next few years are solid but unspectacular. Accordingly, the Yankees need to build a team based on some good prospects, a contingent of aging and, due to contracts, largely unmovable veterans, and, of course, the ability to outspend everybody. This last point alone will not be enough to build a winner.
The WBC is far from perfect, with occasionally uneven play and many of the game's best players deciding to concentrate on spring training rather than the tournament, but it is also a lot of fun for many people and an opportunity to highlight one of baseball's biggest accomplishments in recent years. Selig has gotten a lot of things wrong, but should be recognized for getting this one right.
The basic problem with this cliche, like many cliches, is that it has no meaning. On one level, it states the obvious, that the Yankees would like to win the World Series every year. This, however, is true of most teams. Moreover, while the Yankees remain the most successful team in baseball history, winning the World Series every year, or even most years is simply not a realistic goal. The team has won one World Series in the last decade and even going back to its most successful recent period, has won only five of the last 17 championships. This is, of course, an extraordinary run of success, unless the platitude of winning every year is taken seriously. This cliche also suggests that other teams either only occasionally set out to win, or that when they do win, it is do to some kind of coincidence. However, in recent years teams like the St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and even the Boston Red Sox have managed more championships than the Yankees. Fans and management of those teams would probably not agree that those were the result of luck or anything of that nature.
Are we in the post PED era yet? The steroid era is frequently referred to in the past tense, but that may be a triumph of hope over reality. The Biogenesis PED story has linked big stars like Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun to PED use. Nothing has yet been proven, but this is not the first time Rodriguez or Braun have been linked to PED use. Rodriguez is an aging star who, despite an enormous contract, is unlikely to be an important on-the-field presence again. In this respect, Rodriguez's association with Biogenesis is the least damaging for the MLB. More troubling are reports that Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez, a 27-year-old rising star, and Mariners catcher-DH, Jesus Montero, a player who many see as having a bright future in the game, also had ties to Biogenesis. This suggests that a new generation of players are dabbling in PEDs and that the problem is not going away soon.
Some of the most exciting young players in the game are also playing in California now. Mike Trout's rookie year was extraordinary, the most impressive debut by a young player in a very long time. Buster Posey, the catcher for the Giants won an MVP award in a season where most Giants fans would have settled for simply a solid return to catching. Posey and Trout could well be the two faces of baseball for the next decade. The only young players on the east coast who are similarly exciting, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg, are playing not in Boston or New York but in Washington.
The current system allows voters to list up to ten players on their ballot. Players listed on 75 percent or more of the ballots win election to the Hall of Fame. Those who do not make 75 percent, but who get more than 5 percent, are kept on the ballot for another year, and can remain on the ballot for up to 15 years. Players who receive less than 5 percent of the vote are dropped from the ballot for good, although they can become eligible for the veteran's committee special ballot after several more years. One major problem with this system is that once it gets backlogged, as it is now, it is very hard to change that. In the next few years, due to this back log, there will be more than ten very strong candidates on the ballot, forcing voters to make tough choices. More significantly, this may also lead to mid-range candidates being dropped from the ballot after only one appearance. This is what happened to Kenny Lofton this year.
The real reason these men, including my father, became Cardinals fans is simply because of Stan Musial. Musial, who died over the weekend at the age of 92, had not uncoiled his famous swing in a meaningful baseball game in just short of half a century. During that time a legend grew around Stan Musial. Of all the great World War II era stars, Musial was the decent one who rarely sought attention but lived his life honorably, was polite, pleasant and respectful and never had any contact with even the whiff of scandal. Musial's personal story reinforced this. He was a Polish-American who grew up in a coal mining town, was a natural athlete who worked hard to make it in baseball, spent his entire career with one team and was married to the same woman for more than 70 years. Gradually, other stories leaked out. Turns out that in 1947 Musial had without fanfare made it clear that he, as the leader of the reigning World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, had no problem with African American players and expected his teammates to act the same way. Baseball history might have been very different if Musial had given in to the racist pressure coming from some corners of that team. The legend of Stan Musial helps explain why of the thousands of men who have played professional baseball, only one was known as "The Man."
The combinations of expansion, prioritizing power and patience and, yes steroids, creates problems for how sluggers are compared across eras and, of course, for the Hall of Fame as well, but this problems is exacerbated by a voting system that is unwieldy and flawed. This year no players were elected to the Hall of Fame. The merits of that decision can be debated, but the impact it will have on future elections will be clear. In short, by 2014, there will be so many deserving players on the ballot that it is likely that a player with numbers that were good enough for the Hall of Fame a generation ago, and perhaps no demonstrated link to steroids, will be dropped from the ballot after one or two appearances after next year. Next year there will be five 8000/140 players on the ballot as well as a number of other standouts like Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Tim Raines.
It is no surprise that a team that has won two of the last three World Series has a good farm system, but the discrepancy between how the system, and indeed the franchise, is perceived, and what it actually is remains significant. Posey and Sandoval are hardly unknown. The former was handily elected NL MVP and has ended both of his full seasons in the big leagues by catching the last strike of the World Series. He is one of the faces of the Giants and is poised to become one of the game's most visible and marketable stars Sandoval, for his part, has a colorful nickname, and was the MVP of the World Series last year. Belt, however, despite an equally colorful nickname remains virtually unknown outside of San Francisco. While Posey is generally known as a star player, Sandoval is still at least as well-known for his weight as for his hitting while Belt is probably still seen as a disappointment to many fans because like many players who derive much of their value from drawing walks, he is under-appreciated.
Therefore, a good test for whether a player should be elected to the Hall of Fame is whether or not he was clearly better than Jack Clark. The data suggests that people who were better hitters than Clark probably should be in the Hall of Fame. There have been 47 players who, like Clark, posted an OPS+ of 135 or better over 8,000 or more plate appearances. Of those 26, are in the Hall of Fame. Of the remaining 21 all but four other players, Will Clark, Bob Johnson, Sherry Magee and Reggie Smith are either on the ballot, still active or not yet eligible.
For baseball fans, December is the time of year when the hot stove heats up as rumors and confirmations of trades and free agent signing take our attention away from less important things like work or the holiday season. This is a fun and welcome distraction, but the newer December ritual of reporters and baseball people of a certain age, most recently Tommy Lasorda, making pronouncements about how steroid users, according to their subjective definition, do not belong in the Hall of Fame, has become tiresome.
This is a decision about personnel, but it is also a decision about philosophy. If the Yankees believe that they must win the World Series every year, then the logical thing to do is to bring on Napoli or Pierzynski. However, these players are 31 and 35 years old now; and Napoli has never been a full time catcher. Signing an older player, particularly if that player will quickly migrate to first base or DH, as Napoli would, would raise many problems for the Yankees, especially as both these players will likely end up with contracts of three years or more, but turning the job over to some combination of Whiteside, Cervelli and Romine will damage the Yankees' chances in 2013.
Unfortunately for the Yankees, Rodriguez is not the only aging slugger on the roster who no longer hits like he once did, but to whom they owe a lot of money. Mark Teixeira is owed $90 million over the next four seasons. Teixeira's contract is not quite as big as Rodriguez's, but it is almost as substantial. During this same three year period, Teixeira came to bat 1,641 times with an OPS+ of 121, ten points below his career OPS+. Over these three years, Teixeira had 10.5 WAR, almost two more than Rodriguez. While these numbers suggest that Teixeira has been better than Rodriguez over the last three years, they also indicate that the first baseman is in decline and that he is no longer a star player either. In fairness, Teixeira is four years younger than Rodriguez, but was never as good as Rodriguez.
This second World Series win in three years is a fantastic accomplishment for the San Francisco Giants; and it is also an opportunity to reflect on some of the players who were key parts of this win and, in some cases, both World Series wins by taking a brief, if early, look at there Hall of Fame chances. There are four players on the team Buster Posey, Pablo Sandoval, Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, who have played well enough to establish a chance at being elected to the Hall of Fame.Interestingly, these four players were among the few holdovers from 2010 to be part of the 2012 team. The remaining Giants are either two young or are clearly not on a Hall of Fame path.
For longtime Giants fans, this means rethinking our identity as fans. We are no longer rooting for a forgotten team searching for a championship, a team that for a period of close to half a century were either mediocre or found a way to lose championships in dramatic, and occasionally strange, ways. Fans of other teams have experienced similar things. Any thoughtful Red Sox fan would have to rethink the narrative of being cursed and long suffering that was part of what being a fan of that team meant for more than eight decades, but after 2004 and 2007 can no longer be taken seriously. Similarly, a fan of the Orioles from 1966-1983 would have thought of that team as always contending, having stellar pitching and usually being in or around the playoffs while occasionally winning a championship, but over the last 30 years, the Orioles have evolved into being a very different, and less successful, franchise.
Fifty years after that tough defeat, and more importantly two years after finally getting their World Series victory, Giants fans can look at that 1962 team more charitably. They can recognize the impressive talent and interesting baseball stories that were brought together on that team. It is still possible, but not likely, that that great World Series will be commemorated by a 50th anniversary rematch. Even if this does not occur, it is worth taking a few minutes this October to remember this extraordinary team that came up just a foot or so short of a championship.
For Goldstein and Parks, the podcast was always a labor of love and we were fortunate to be able to share it with them. Parks will still be writing on baseball and, who knows, may start another podcast in the future. For now, however, followers of Up and In should take a moment to raise a glass, actually two glasses, one of a blueberry wheat beer and one of the beeriest beer we can find, to thank Jason and Kevin and wish them both well in both their future endeavors.
Melky Cabrera’s suspension for the use of testosterone is a blow to the pennant hopes of the San Francisco Giants as Cabrera was having a great year and had been a key ingredient to the Giants being in first place at the time of the suspension. The impact of this event, however, goes far beyond one team. Cabrera’s steroid use demonstrates that while steroid abuse is probably not as rampant at it was 10-15 years ago, the steroid era is not as firmly in the past as many in baseball would like to believe.
Posey, only about fifteen months removed from a horrific injury which caused him to miss most of 2011, is hitting .329/.394/.541 for an OPS+ of 167. It is unlikely he can continue that pace, but he will not need to do that to accumulate 1.6 more WAR and break Breshnahan’s record. Posey is likely to record the greatest season ever by a Giants catcher, to some degree because catcher has been a weak position for the Giants throughout most of their history. Posey is, despite that context, still having a great season for a catcher. If he continues at this pace, he will have 6.6 WAR by the end of the season, good enough for a tie for 17th best season for a catcher and eighth best ever for a catcher under 26 years old.