"The Year", The Pittsburgh Pirates, And The Truth.

The phrase has passed the lips of every fan of every team of every sport at one point or another: "This could be the year."  It's more talisman than utterance, more affirmation than statement.  It's saying the magic words, an incantation to the team and invocation of the Gods.  It's not an every-season thing, obviously, because sometimes the writing is just plain on the wall, and your team is not coming within a stone's throw of success, even if they're using a catapult.  But sometimes, we say it and we mean it.  With enough luck, if most of the team stays mostly healthy, if things break right at the perfect time or at least avoid breaking poorly and the worst possible moment, it becomes a truth and a hope and a dream.  "This could be the year."

And as fans, the meaning of that phrase is a given.  No one has to ask what "The Year" is, because it's the same thing for everyone: a championship.  Champagne and jubilation and your team riding on parade floats down your city's main avenue.  That's what you envision when you invoke the magic words.  "The Year" is this rosy, diaphanous thing in the lexicon of every fanbase.  Every fanbase, that is, save one. 

If you happen to root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, "The Year" is almost assuredly not concerned with the World Series.  You've probably heard, but the Bucs have a sustained track record of ineptitude to rival that of any organization in sports.  (Yes, I am aware that the Charlotte Bobcats exist.)  To wit: The Pirates have finished with a sub-.500 record every season for two decades.  That a team could miss the playoffs for twenty straight years seems statistically improbable; that a team could fail to win even half their games for twenty consecutive seasons defies belief, yet that's exactly what the Pirates have done.  Last time the Bucs won more games than they lost in a year, the first President Bush was in the Oval Office, Boyz II Men's "End Of The Road" was #1 on Billboard's Hot 100, and the term "email" had yet to be coined.  I imagine that, if any Pirates fan has used the phrase "this could be the year" in the two abysmal decades since, they weren't thinking about October glory so much as just a nice, pleasant season in which the team managed to win more than 81 games. 

To that end, it appears that this may in fact be "The Year" for the Pirates.  Here is a thing which is true: Pittsburgh has the best record in baseball right now.  Not the NL Central, or even the NL, period.  In all of baseball.  Again: Pittsburgh.  Best.  Record.  In baseball.  This is not a typographical error. 

Despite such an encouraging start, there is, of course, plenty of fretting among the Bucs faithful.  Cautious optimism is the only kind that fanbase has known for a long time, and even a first half as auspicious as this year's is no guarantee of anything.  (See: 2012.)  There are real baseball concerns like whether or not the pitching staff can continue their superlative performance through the stretch drive.  There is also, because it's the Pirates we're talking about after all, irrational, fatalistic dread. It's the sort of apprehension that comes from having watched a team repeatedly, completely, utterly wilt after (if not long before) the All-Star break.  They're waiting for the other shoe (injury? surging Reds team?  Inexplicable decline?) to drop.  Twenty years of abject misery will to that to a body.  Twenty years and one of the slowest, most perfectly mustachioed baserunners in the history of the game. 

Sid Bream's slide in 1992 effectively murdered baseball in Pittsburgh.  As a Braves fan, it was one of the great moments of my young sports-watching life, but I can see how, given everything that's happened to the Bucs since, that slide has come to embody the whole sorry mess of bad trades and worse luck and collapse after collapse after collapse.  (I was at Turner Field last year for the 20th Anniversary commemoration/bobblehead giveaway of the Sid Slid game, and there was a guy a few rows down from us wearing a Pirates cap and a homemade t-shirt that read: "Twenty years of lies.  Sid Bream was out.")  And I get it.  It's the same pathos that causes me to refer, to this day, to a long-retired Minnesota Twin as "Kent F****** Hrbek" or Red Sox fans to still call a 61-year-old man "Bucky F****** Dent" or Clevelanders to call pretty much everything "Awful, Demoralizing, Heartbreaking F****** Sports."  Some moments you just never let go of. 

Admittedly, I used to revel in the Pirates' failures.  They were the Braves' fiercest NL competition for two or three seasons, and a heated rivalry flared up during the incredible '91 and '92 NCLS.  Thing is, that rivalry was ultimately too short-lived, with too little history attached, to really hold water two decades removed from its inception.  I'll never stop hating, say, the Phillies, but I long ago discarded any real animosity for the Bucs.  Which brings me to a sentence and a sentiment that little-kid me who watched Sid Bream's slide could never have imagined writing.  I am rooting, actively and more than a little fervently, for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  And so should you, if you have a heart.  Root for them because not even Bills fans are this miserable and the Bucs faithful need something, anything, good to happen.  Root for them because it's a fun team miraculously playing over their heads and Clint Hurdle seems like a good guy.  Root for them because watching a team, finally, mercifully get off this kind of historical schneid is gratifying and even a little life-affirming.  Mostly, root for them because every fan should be able to say the magic words from time to time, with hope resting in the truth of possibility.  Root for them because, after all, this could be the year. 

Night In A Car Alone: A Brief Rumination On Irrational Fandom.

Being fans is a fascinatingly irrational part of our daily lives.  Whether it's a psychopathic overreaction to Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson (and seriously, have we come to this, people?) or going near-catatonic over a humiliating playoff loss (like I did after the Falcons' atrocious showing against the Giants last year), the idea that we would emotionally invest in people and their exploits with virtually zero reciprocity is counterintuitive to the point of foolishness.  We cede certain territories of our souls to the objects of our fandom, and ask that they keep those fiefdoms in good repair.  Sometimes they're kind enough to oblige.  More often, those little geographical soul-areas are left with the weeds choking out all other flora and covering over the dilapidated buildings.  And yet, we keep going back to the well. 

We do this because, especially in this age of internet unilateral consciousness cum digitized isolation, we badly need real-world affirmation.  The nod to the person on the street wearing the same ball cap we're wearing.  The high fives with the random people in the stadium or the sports bar after a big play.  Fandom, even the long-suffering variety, is a balm for the countless bruises we sustain on our hearts and minds because we can share it.  Perhaps especially when it's also the cause of said bruises.  This paragraph is overwrought and a dead-horse-beaten reprisal of a thousand just like it, but it's that way because it is rooted in truth.  Fandom matters because it imparts a fundamental sense of belonging to the fan.    

Of course, there are also the contradictory tendencies that come with devotion.  Most common and identifiable is the "player you hate now but would adore if they were traded to your team."  (Copyright: Bill Simmons.)  I mean, I'm fairly certain Cole Hamels is an irredeemable d-bag, but if I woke up tomorrow and he was miraculously on the Braves' playoff roster, I would go buy his jersey immediately.  (Obviously, there are exceptions for people like John Rocker.)  It really is incredible how the name on the front of the uniform can eradicate any negatives associated with the name on the back.

But this kind of thing is mostly harmless, and also falls into the shared experience category.  It's when you isolate us, when the act of rooting becomes a solitary thing, that the emotions that find release and reflection among our fellow fans turn inwards and can lead to the more illogical extremes of rooting.  When you can't vent with or express you opinions to other people about what's going on in the game, things can take a bizarre turn.  

Last night, I had possibly the most viscerally irrational moment of my sports fan life, and that, folks, is saying something.  

Here I was, alone, in a dark car at night.  After a ten-hour work day, all I wanted was to get home, crack a beer, catch the end of the Braves game, watch the second half of Bears/Cowboys, and go to bed.  Unfortunately, I was stuck in a torrential downpour of the sort that grinds traffic to a crawl because no one can see out of their windshield for the rain, creeping down 400 South at eight miles an hour.  So I was already tense and cranky.  On the radio, Don Sutton and Jim Powell were narrating as the Braves struggled to stage a late-inning rally on the Pirates.  Since the Nationals were losing to Philly, we still had a shot at the division.  We win out, they lose out, presto: NL East title. 

Now, here's where things got strange in my interior fan dialogue.  (Or, you know, sad.)  Instead of getting upset at our anemic bats for failing to get anyone across the plate, I became absolutely furious at the Pirates.  Their season, after all, is over.  These last few games are a formality as they stagger to another sub-.500 finish, when even a month ago their playoff hopes were so vividly alive.  They don't have any dignity to play for.  Sid Bream took it with him when he left the visitors' clubhouse in Three Rivers Stadium in '92, and it hasn't been back since.  There was nothing in this game for Pittsburgh ... so why didn't the bastards have the decency to roll over and lose?  Why did they insist on fucking up our season?  Why?!?!?!  I started muttering snide and petulant asides every time a Pirates batter stepped into the box.  "I bet your OPS is terrible, Josh Harrison.  I've never even heard of you.  And you're probably lousy at Scrabble, too."  I was trying to be funny for the audience in my empty passenger seat, but I swear to Craig Kimbrel, there was real vitriol behind every thought and word.  For whatever reason, I simply could not fathom why the Bucs wouldn't lay down and die, and it incensed me with rage.

Two things about this: First, it is likely better for the Braves that we lost last night.  We can rest Chipper, Mac, Prado, and anyone else who needs a breather.  We can set the postseason rotation.  We can focus on scouting the Cardinals as fully as possible.  We can take a beat, let the kids on the bench get some time without it being critical, and see where they're at.  Tactically, this is a superior position to mad-sprinting and nail-biting our way towards an almost certainly unattainable division title.  And I knew that last night.  I knew losing that game would probably be better for the Braves in terms of the postseason, yet I still desperately wanted us to win that game.     

And second, why on earth should I want or expect the Pirates to just give up?  Truthfully, I'm afflicted by far more saccharine sentimentality than a proper 21st-Century sports writer ought to have.  I confess that to a great extent, I love all the "spirit of competition" and "majesty of sport" and "triumph of human will" jazz that gets spouted in the form of tacky aphorisms by certain ESPN personalities or in the pages of SI.  The thought of striving in the face of long odds or playing out the string for the love of the game fills me with warm fuzzies.  (Yes, I am a sap.)  In any other circumstance, I'm sure I would have thought the Pirates quite noble for playing hard even in the ashes and wreckage of another lousy September, made all the worse because things looked so promising for so long this year.  

But I didn't.  I was just pissed that these clowns were actually trying.  Again: I ascribed zero blame to the Braves' hitters who kept leaving runners stranded on base; it was all on the opposition for actually, well, opposing us.  And it occurred to me that I would never have felt this way if we were playing, say, the Brewers.  Because Milwaukee has been a pretty good ball club these past few seasons.  It was the notion of a lesser team, a weaker team, having the gall to step into our path.  In a brief moment of utter madness, I had become a bourgeois fan.  I felt entitled to my team stomping all over someone else purely because they were supposed to.  God help me, I'd turned into a Yankees fan.

I have no idea what possessed me.  Normally, I'm passionate but not irrational in my fandom, and not prone to these sorts of bile-fueled funks.  For whatever reason, last night set me off.  My neural pathways were shorted out, and temporarily replaced with idiocy.  Being a fan is strange that way, sometimes. 

Asleep At The Switch

On June 9th, I got to Turner Field very, very early.  This wasn't just some random day game, after all.  You can meander down to The Ted any home-game afternoon and have a fine time marinating in Budweiser and peanut shells and scorching Georgia sunshine.  This day was different, special.  This was Sid Bream Bobblehead Giveaway Day, and I'd be damned if I wasn't one of the first 20,000 through the gates fortunate enough to claim one.  Just look at that majestic representation of one of the most iconic moments in Atlanta sports history.  It's a thing of beauty.

"The Slide" took place 20 years ago this October, when the National League's power structure looked an awful lot like it does now.  By record, the five best NL Teams in 1992 were the Braves, Pirates, Reds, Cardinals, and Expos.  If you take the Nationals to be a metaphysical continuation of the 'Spos,which to a degree they are, then things haven't changed much.  (Or rather, they've changed a great deal and then changed back.)  Granted, it's not a perfect analogy.  The following things are different than they were in 1992: the Dodgers and Giants are also formidable contenders this season, which was not at all the case back then.  The advent of the Central Division and subsequent team realignment has resolved the cartographic farce of the Braves somehow belonging to the NL West.  Oh, and none of the '92 players are still active.  (I checked, Jamie Moyer didn't pitch a single game in the majors during the '92 season.) 


Not only did I get that sweet bobblehead on that Saturday back in June, I got the rosy feeling that comes from watching your team play excellent baseball.  That was back when Atlanta was only a game back of the Nats in the NL East; when Michael Bourn was raking; when Brandon Beachy and Jair Jurrjens were in the rotation; when the Braves looked great.  Things look a little less rosy today.  After muddling through a mini-swoon through the second half of August, the Braves came out smoking like a Craig Kimbrel fastball in September ... or so the record said.  The team took 9 of its first 11 games this month including five straight, and everyone in the ATL breathed a collective sigh of relief.  Maybe we wouldn't catch Washington in the divisional race, but we were going to the postseason without a hitch.  There would be no repeat of the long, precipitous decline that capped last year's campaign in agonizing fashion.  Not this year, not this team.  This team had an identity.  This team had a deep and healthy bullpen.  This team had a shot at a lengthy October run.  The problem is that the swoon never really ended.

Atlanta's offense can also be added to the list of things that are different than they were in 1992.

 From the 1st to the 13th of September that season, the Braves scored 76 runs and allowed 48.  In that same date span this year, they've scored 37 runs and allowed 41.  This month, Atlanta has been collectively outscored by a pair of teams struggling to remain relevant in the wild card race (Phils, Brewers) and a pair of teams who barely qualify as big-league clubs at all (Rockies, Mets).  Aside from an 11-run outburst against New York on the 8th, the Braves have failed to put up more than three runs in a game for ten days, and that against some of the lowliest pitching in baseball, no less.  On the year, the team OPS has been a very respectable .718.  This month it's .643.  And I don't even want to contemplate our Stranded RISP rate, which has been truly atrocious since the proverbial calender page turned. Calling the recent offensive production anemic is doing a disservice to anemia.  The Braves don't lack red blood cells, they lack blood period.  They lack life.  This team is sleepwalking through the deep stretch drive, and the situation will become untenable if they don't wake up soon.

It's not that we're headed for another closing-day loss meltdown.  I hope.  It would be almost impossible to drop out of both wild card spots with so few games left.  I hope.  (Although we said much the same last year at the beginning of the month.)  It goes back to the well-worn concept of being hot at the right time.  Two weeks ago, the Braves were scorching and looked ready to roll into the playoffs firing on all cylinders.  Now, the bats are doing a convincing rendition of John Cage's "4:33" and the pitching is coughing up five-run innings every other game.  Staggering into the postseason in a collective torpor is rarely the recipe for success.

For that reason, tonight feels big.  Back in the Ted after a discouraging road trip.  Against the upstart Nationals, a team we'll likely have to battle again in the postseason.  Against Ross Detwiler, who has semi-owned some of Atlanta's premier players this season, to the extent that Fredi Gonzalez is sitting Michael Bourn and Brian McCann tonight because they just can't seem to hit the guy.  And against the tide of inertia and entropy that has enveloped the team of late.  If we can't swim (or at least doggy paddle with gusto) in this game and the ensuing series, it's going to be sink, undertow, and out to harsher waters right quick.

This is it, boys.  Time to flip the switch.  Play ball.  

  

To Pitch Or Not To Pitch?

Sometime in mid- or late September, the Washington Nationals are going to shut Stephen Strasburg down for the remainder of the season.  At that point, the team that currently holds baseball's best record will voluntarily shelve its best starting pitcher while standing on the brink of the playoffs (barring a 2011-Red-Sox-ian collapse, of course).  Since no team has ever done anything like this before in sports history, and since D.C. baseball fans have been among the most consistently abused people in sports history*, the question of whether the "right decision" is being made has become much more incendiary and vitriolic than a normal hot-button sports argument.  The Nats' fans (and some players) are furious, the Nats' brass are standing pat, and the rest of us are either vehemently arguing one side or the other or simply scratching our heads at the whole thing. 

It's been said that the line between genius and insanity is often gossamer thin.  There have certainly been notable past instances of courageous innovation and full-blown lunacy being two sides of a singular coin, as Picasso or Mozart would attest if they weren't, you know, centuries dead.  In fact, unorthodox thought is often perceived as madness until hindsight shows us otherwise.  So, what will history show us about Washington deactivating one of the game's elite pitchers on the doorstep of the city's first postseason appearance since 1933?

As Jayson Stark's cover-all-the-angles article noted last week, medically, we simply can't know.  There is no predicting the effects of a season-ending shutdown versus skipping a start here and there verses 15 or 30 days of rest now and reactivation when things get serious next month versus letting Strasburg continue to pitch as he has all year.  Each body reacts differently to Tommy John surgery and recovery therefrom, and past outcomes have been varied enough that a definitively correct medical course of action cannot be identified.  The Nats are apparently erring, in the most dramatic way possible, on the side of caution.  That a team would be so bold and far-sighted as to place the long-term health of a player above more pressing and immediate concerns, even in the face of so much averse reaction from fans, is its own form of courage.  And in a weird way, it is commendable.

This is no little thing the Nationals are doing, or at least have assured us that they will do.  It flies in the face of conventional wisdom, of putting your best possible team on the field, and some might even say the spirit of baseball or sports in general.  In the name of protecting the future, the team is voluntarily rendering itself less competitive, less likely to win in the present, in a season where they have a legitimate shot at a World Series title.  That's some Big Picture Thinking accompanied by a pair of Big Brass Ones.  It's certainly breaking new ground.

But here's the thing, and somebody probably ought to have told Mike Rizzo this at some point:

Winning a World Series is extraordinarily, phenomenally hard.

Ask any fan, sports journalist, broadcaster, player, or coach.  The sheer amount of factors that have to align for a specific team to plaster a locker room in champagne in October is staggering.  Team health, luck, fate, coaching decisions, umpiring calls, and usually at least one purely miraculous act have to not only be involved, but be involved in the correct sequence.  Trust a Braves fan here: my team had the best rotation in baseball for a solid decade and 14 straight division titles, and they captured exactly one World Series title.  They could have, and probably should have, had more.  But there are just too many things at play over 162 games and the playoffs.  Too much can go wrong; fate is too capricious. A Kent Hrbek/Ron Gant call here, a faulty Bobby Cox pitching change there, or a plain old "it just wasn't our year" moment, like running into that buzz saw of a Yankees team in '99.  There are literally infinite variables, some so minute that you only notice them in retrospect, that can derail a team's road to a championship.  In other words, people are asking the wrong question.

The question is not: is this a wise decision for the future of Stephen Strasburg's career, and by extension, the Nationals organization?  The question is: when staring at lightning in a bottle, when everything is clicking for your team, when you have momentum and chemistry and all those other intangibles on your side, and they are in evidence on a daily basis in the Win column, how can you resign yourself to anything less than a full-on assault at the trophy?  The Nats are in the middle of a charmed season, and they are prepared to throw it away because they believe there are many more in store.  [Ed. note: as a Braves fan, I am absolutely not complaining about this.]  Problem is, baseball almost never works like that. 

Stephen Strasburg may never miss another start for the rest of his career.  Fine, but what happens if Bryce Harper goes down with a broken tibia next July and the heart of your order can't get along against elite pitching without him?  Or if Gio Gonzalez never comes close to replicating his stellar 2012 season again.  Or if the bullpen falls apart?  If, if, if.  That two-letter word isn't worth much in Scrabble, but it's everything in baseball, and Washington is banking on several ifs, for years to come, coming out in their favor.

The odds of that happening are stacked heavily against them.  That's why you don't look gift horses in the mouth.  That's why you don't ignore lightning in a bottle.  That's why you let transcendent talent keep taking the mound.  You just never know. 

*It's true.  We think that, say, Sonics fans have it bad, but Washington has had its baseball team taken away TWICE.  The original Senators franchise had a proud history including Hall Of Famers like Walter Johnson and Goose Goslin, and were the 1924 World Series champs.  They mostly faired poorly in the '30s and '40s, but following the 1954 signing of Harmon Killebrew, their fortunes looked to be improving.  Killebrew led the league with 42 homers and made his first of 11 consecutive All-Star teams in 1959 ... and then the team was shipped to Minnesota to become the Twins in 1961.  The expansion/replacement "new" Senators were objectively terrible, averaging 90 losses a season from 1961 to 1971 ... and then they moved to Texas to become the Rangers.  Lacking a baseball team from 1971-2005, D.C. fans were forced by default to root for the Baltimore Orioles.  Aside from the '83 World Series and the privilege of watching Cal Ripken Jr.'s incredible career unfold, this was a pretty miserable proposition for most of those years.  And of course, when the city did get the Nats in '05, they were awful and have been right up until pretty much this year.  That's a lot of losing, both in the W/L column and in the ignominy of having your team taken away two times in a decade. 

The Atlanta Braves Really, Really Hate Mondays.

The Atlanta Braves are in the middle of one of the most bizarre streaks in the long, streak-addled history of major league baseball.  Apparently, despite getting paid incredible amounts of money to play a game for a living, the Braves despise the start of the work week just as much as the rest of us.  Possibly more, in fact.  The following is an actual, real statistic:  Atlanta is 0-12 on Mondays this season, and actually have an 0-16 streak going back to the horrendous end to last year.  In tribute to that inexplicable and patently absurd streak, I present a recommended pregame clubhouse playlist for Atlanta as they send Tommy Hanson to the mound tonight against the Marlins' Mark Buehrle tonight. 

1. Monday Morning - Fleetwood Mac
2. Monday Morning - Death Cab For Cutie
3. Monday Morning - Melanie Fiona
4. Monday Morning - Pulp

(There are a lot of effing songs titled "Monday Morning."  Seriously, I left like nine more off this list because at some point you can't really go back to that particular mixtape well anymore and I felt like four consecutive opening tracks was, in fact, "some point.")

5. Rainy Days And Mondays - The Carpenters
6. Monday Monday - The Mamas and the Papas
7. I Don't Like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats
8. Stormy Monday - T-Bone Walker
9. Manic Monday - The Bangles
10. Monday - Wilco
11. Come Monday - Jimmy Buffett
12. Monday Afternoon - Lori McKenna
13. Blue Monday - New Order
14. Blue Monday - Fats Domino
15. Monday Night - Ryan Adams

Play good tonight, boys. 

Wrong Man, Wrong Place, Wrong Time.

Trading emblematic athletes is always a minor tragedy of sorts for the particular franchise and fan base losing them, but it's also a whiplash-inducing event for fans at large.  The sight of a great player who has long been synonymous with a team suddenly wearing different colors never sits right in the mind's eye.  Some visuals just rattle your insides with cognitive dissonance.  Joe Montana as a Kansas City Chief.  Steve Nash as a Los Angeles Laker.  And now, Ichiro Suzuki as a Yankee.

(Don't you feel just a little bit sick after reading that last sentence?) 


The departure is not surprising in and of itself.  Aside from Ichiro's rookie season when Seattle won a monumental 116 games, the Mariners have been perpetual occupants of the American League's sub-basement for pretty much his entire career.  Like Nash, who also left his longtime franchise at age 38 for greener pastures, it's entirely understandable that he opted to be dealt to a contender before twilight too fully dulls his transcendent (and already in considerable decline) skills.  For the M's, their superstar's diminishing value made it logical to trade now, giving their younger outfielders increased playing time and getting what they can in return.  Tactically, the trade made sense for both teams.  (Though there is more than a little incredulity regarding the fact that the Yanks somehow got back cash concerns as part of the deal.  What, they needed the money?  Really?  Someone should have told Brain Cashman to cram that particular stipulation up his ass.) 

I won't rehash all the angles of what acquiring Ichiro means for New York; read this piece on Grantland by Jonah Keri if you're interested in the details.  What I want to talk about is how monstrously unfair this all feels.  To Seattle, to the rest of the AL East, and to Yankee haters (read: right-thinking individuals) everywhere. Of course, this is a far cry from actual unfairness, which only exists in sports when a) someone cheats, b) there's a blown officiating call so egregious that it will be recalled with perfect clarity and anger decades hence or c) you live in Cleveland.  But this has the unmistakable feel of unfairness; the sickening and wretched sensation of karmic impropriety.  To paraphrase Chris Rock: "that s*** just ain't right!"

First, Seattle fans have really seen and suffered enough.  There was the unconscionable hijacking of their beloved Sonics, the metaphysical descendents of whom just played their first of what will likely be many thrilling NBA Finals.  They have the most likeable and exciting young core in the game, a once-in-a-generation talent in Kevin Durant, and a well-run organization who are apparently also luckier than is really OK.  (See: Perry Jones III, drafting of.)  Then there are the Seahawks.  Despite a respectable seven playoff appearances since 1999, and a great run of NFC West titles from '04-'07 Seattle has never been thought of as a great or even a semi-formidable team.  And of course their lone Super Bowl appearance, against the Steelers in 2005, saw them get phenomenally hosed by some of the worst officiating in NFL history.  Aside from Marshawn "Beast Mode" Lynch, who incidentally was recently arrested on a DUI charge and may be suspended for the beginning of the 2012 season, they haven't had a legitimately electrifying player since, well, ever.  (No disrespect meant to Matt Hasselbeck, who was a very good quarterback, but he didn't exactly make you gasp in awe with his play.)  Oh yes, and the Mariners are the only MLB franchise other than the Nationals to have never played in, much less won, a World Series.  For Seattle fans, watching their last great player leave town to don the pinstripes must be a nasty a kick in the teeth.  Surely no one begrudges him trying to find a contender after giving his soul and his considerable gifts to Seattle for so long, but running straight into the arms of the Evil Empire ... it's just so grimy.  Oh well, at least they have the Sounders.

And if you're another team in the AL East, you have to feel like North Texas playing Alabama last year.  You've already been blown out and utterly thrashed, and now they're just shamelessly running up the score.  Granted, Ichiro is not the devastating force he was four years ago, but he still improves a team that already has baseball's best record and a seven game division lead.  It's just piling on at this point.  You almost have to throw something.  Like the Gatorade jug in the dugout.  Or the towel.

For the Yankee haters out there, that feeling of abject disgust rising in your gut is comprised of the two components: firstly and obviously there's anger because of everything I just mentioned above and the fact that there has been no exemplar of "the rich get richer" in sports (and maybe life) quite so blatant and glaring as the Yankees.  And secondly, because most baseball fans genuinely like and admire Ichiro.  Yankees should not be genuinely liked and admired, they should be reviled.  Hell, I have the utmost respect for Derek Jeter's remarkable career and abilities, but his thinly veiled egomania and never-ending slew of bullsh*t cliches and platitudes make me positively ill every time they flash his smug, robotic "I'm just happy to be playing ball and gosh I hope I'm making my parents proud" smile across the TV screen.  Having a likeable guy, full of legitimate quirks and personality, makes it much more difficult to just kick back and hate the Yankees in peace.  Ichiro's mere presence on the roster has upset my and every other non-Yanks fan's baseball ethos.  New York's unassailable and inherent evil is ever so slightly diluted.  How dare they deny us the right to hate to the utmost by trading for a gem of a guy like Ichiro?!?!?  It's annoying, damnit!

Anyway, best to Mr. Suzuki with his new team, condolences to Seattle for yet another sucker-punch sporting occurrence, and here's hoping things don't get any worse for the rest of us.  I trust no one is stupid enough to believe it, but we can hope.

Oh, and as always, damn the Yankees.

The Ghost Of Pitching Changes Past

Not to speak ill of the semi-retired, but a certain facet of Bobby Cox's managerial style used to drive Braves fans up a wall.  Let's be honest here: though he was and is and is a lifelong top-echelon baseball thinker, the man had a penchant for inexplicable bullpen moves.  Cardinals fans are nodding in sympathy right now, but this tendency wasn't anything akin to Tony La Russa's mad scientist schtick.  Most of the time it wasn't some elaborate, matchup-oriented chess maneuver or high-concept stunt.  Neither Bobby nor pitching coach Leo Mazzone ever went in much for that brand of gamesmanship.  No, it was simply that he'd leave a starter in a few batters too long, or pull them when they were cruising, or send precisely the wrong guy to the mound in key situations.  Worst of all: you knew it as it was happening.  You could just feel it. 

Any Atlanta fan over the age of 25 knows exactly what I mean.  Maybe John Smoltz would be in a jam, clearly having an off night.  His stuff wouldn't have the electric zip it usually had, guys would be tagging singles left and right, and Bobby would leave him on the mound.  We'd collectively sit there thinking "get him out of there!!!", as if we could telepathically force our manager to make that decision through sheer force of will.  By the time he listened to our ESP prompting, it was almost always too late.  Conversely, maybe Tom Glavine would be ripping through opposing batters, and then with one out in the sixth, for reasons known only to himself, Bobby would yank him and send Armando Reynoso or Mike Remlinger or some other poor soul out to the mound.  Your gut would tighten, you'd wince, and you'd think "Oh f*** here it comes."  And it would come.  The leadoff walk.  The double into the gap.  The crack of a towering homer leaving the bat to slice through the humid Georgia night and land deep in the seats.  As if by alchemy, a two-run lead would become a three-run deficit. For all our gawdy starting rotations (and often underrated bullpens) of that halcyon 14-year run, Bobby's pitching changes sure could spin straw into crap.  

When it was announced that Fredi Gonzalez would be taking Cox's seat in the dugout, the general thinking was that a guy who spent a number of years with the organization was the perfect replacement.  Gonzalez, after all, understood the Braves Way, or How Bobby Did It, or whatever.  Unfortunately, that apparently includes a pronounced atavism regarding Cox-ian bullpen management.

I was driving home from work on Friday when, in the opener of a semi-critical series with the Nats, Andrelton Simmons sent a two-run dinger juuuuuuust over the wall in left-center; his apparent favorite spot in Turner Field.  That homer completed a four-run rally to tie the game; it was pretty much the definition of a momentum shift.  How did Fredi Gonzalez capitalize on this windfall?  He sent freaking Chad Durbin to the mound to pitch the next inning.  As soon as that particular bit of information came over the radio, I tensed up.  Such a move had all the makings of a disastrous Braves bullpen moment, and I knew what was going to happen before it came to pass.  As I held the steering wheel in a death grip, Michale Morse launched Durbin's first pitch into the right field stands.  The Braves lost 5-4.     

On June 12th, Gonzalez pulled Mike Minor, who was (and still is) in dire need of a confidence boost with one out and a man on first in the 8th.  Minor had been mowing down the Yankees for seven innings, and commanded a four-run lead.  Instead of letting him roll, or sending in Craig Kimbrel to get the last five outs (heaven forbid we use our best reliever for more than one inning at a time!!!), Fredi sent a woefully struggling Jonny Venters to the hill.  The next few minutes unfolded like so: single, walk, A-Rod grand slam to tie the game, single, Fredi pulls Venters and STILL doesn't go to Kimbrel, sends Cory Gearrin out there instead, Nick Swisher hits a two-run homer.  Yankees win 6-4.   

And tonight, just now as I was writing this, yet another example manifested.  Our promising young starter Tommy Hanson was in the middle of a superb performance against the lowly Cubs, allowing just one run through six innings of lights-out work.  Now, here's the thing about Tommy: he has endurance problems and generally does not fare well late in games.  Over the last week, Atlanta has been subjected to the sort of  triple-digit heat and drenching humidity that usually waits until August to fully afflict us.  This is the stuff that drove humans to invent central air conditioning because at some point on the thermometer oscillating fans become utterly worthless.  Vicious, implacable summer weather.  The kind that drains the body's energy and addles the mind.  The kind that turns even the most finely-tuned athletes into staggering, dead-eyed versions of themselves.  In other words, precisely the sort of conditions under which one does not send a starting pitcher of questionable stamina back out for the seventh inning.

Actually, I'm going to cut Fredi a little slack on sending Hanson out for the top of the frame.  Before tonight, the man hadn't lost a game since May 28th, and he was clearly in a groove on this sweltering evening.  The problem was leaving him out there after two consecutive singles to start the inning.  I mean, how glaring and obvious a red flag do you need?  Right then, the prudent action was to get Hanson the hell off the mound and send in Eric O'Flaherty or some other competent arm.  Nope, Fredi left him there even as he was clearly faltering.  So of course, Hanson walked Darwin Barney to load the bases and then gave up a three-run double to Luis Valbuena.  4-1 Cubbies, which was still the score when Freddie Freeman flied out to end the game.  Bobby Cox's one fatal managerial flaw is alive and well in the ATL. 

Look, like every Atlanta native, I revere the man.  He wrote out our lineup cards for the entirety of my cognizant life up until a few seasons ago.  But he had a genetic deficiency when it came to when and how to make pitching changes, and I deeply wish Fredi Gonzalez's memory retention of managerial techniques had excluded that particular tic.  I know baseball is difficult and fate is capricious, but in 14 years we only won a single World Series with one of the greatest pitching rotations ever assembled and a lot of heavy bats.  With (mostly) lesser lights on the roster and brutal competition these days, what can we realistically hope for in 2012?  If the answer is going to be anything beyond "a decent regular-season record" then Fredi has to shake those bullpen idiosyncracies.

Fans, on balance, are not anywhere near as knowledgeable as those who have had years of intimate involvement with a sport.  We do, however, have the ability to recognize patterns when they're staring us in the face.  This is one such pattern.

Dear Fredi: if you won't listen to your gut, listen to ours.  Or, failing, that, listen to logic.  Please stop mismanaging your pitchers.  I gotta tell you man, we've danced this two step before and we're beyond tired of it.

Sincerely,

Braves fans everywhere.

Andrelton Simmons In June: A Timeline

Well, this ain't good.

The Atlanta Braves are in something of a freefall.  They have lost six of their last seven games, stranded an unholy quantity of base runners, and failed to score any runs in twenty consecutive innings.  They're sitting 4 games back of the Nationals in the NL East, barely clinging to a wild card slot.  The starting lineup is banged up, and Brandon Beachy's just-announced move to the DL is the latest in a series of unfortunate developments for the pitching staff.  At times like this, reflecting on the big picture is a sure path to the blues.  Scratch that; the Blues.  With a capital B.  I'm talking whiskey-drenched, cigarette-smoked, slide-guitar-moanin' in the juke joint, life sure is awful here.

So instead of walkin' on down that lonesome road, let's focus on one of the precious few bright spots on this Braves roster: the glorious wonder that is Andrelton Simmons.

June 1: Listening to AM 680 in the car, traffic at a glacial crawl along 400 North.  Buck Belue, of Run Lindsay Run!!! fame, informs me and the rest of Atlanta's sports talk-listening public that the Braves have sent Tyler Pastornicky back down to the minors and called up Andrelton Simmons to be the new everyday shortstop.  The book on our boy is that he's a bona fide  defensive whiz kid but not too dab a hand with the lumber.  Buck is of the opinion that just about anything will be an improvement over Pastornicky, who has been woefully mediocre thus far.  I couldn't agree more.   

A little backstory here: Simmons nearly won the starting job in spring training, but Atlanta had already earmarked essentially preordained Pastornicky as the club's Opening Day starter, and the battle was, by all accounts, a stilted one for Simmons, who nonetheless almost pulled it off.  Instead, he took the additional time in the minors gaining confidence, refining his swing, and biding his time.

June 2: Simmons makes his first Major League start on the road against the Nats.  He goes oh-fer at the plate, but looks every inch the sublime defensive player we've been hearing about.  He's doing the little things right, moving around the infield dirt with the self-assured fluidity great fielders always seem to have.  He looks like he was born to gobble up funny hops and rifle them to first.  Every instinct is perfectly attenuated, every movement purposeful and smooth.  He reminds me a little, blasphemous at this is to write, of a young Ozzie Smith.  Without the back flips, obviously, but with a similar grace and intelligence.

June 5: The Braves play their first game in the 21st-century-marketing-funhouse-cum-architectural-atrocity that is the Miami Marlins' new stadium.  Simmons has a three-hit, three-RBI game, scores a run, and demonstrates audacious foot speed when he legs out a triple.  Kid can fly.  Braves win 11-0.

June 9: A breezy day at Turner Field.  Clouds and Atlanta smog make for soft-focus lighting conditions in the late afternoon as the Braves square off with the Blue Jays.  In the bottom of the 7th inning, Simmons sends his first career dinger over the wall in left-center.  The ball just barely gets out of the yard, carrying 391 feet, but no one ever accused the guy of being a power hitter, right?  He even home run trots classily.  If any occasion would give a little leeway for celebratory histrionics, you'd think a first homer in The Show would be it, but Simmons rounds the bases at a good clip; he acts like he's been there before.  When the game ends, he's batting .280, third-best on the roster.  The kid who wasn't supposed to be much of a hitter is anchoring the bottom of the order.  Well, then.

June 11-13: After having lost the final game in the Toronto series, the Braves are swept at home by the Yankees, catalyzing their current tailspin.  Nonetheless, Simmons bats .364 against some formidable New York pitching, including a 2-4 day against ace CC Sabathia.

June 15: Simmons goes 3-4, and hits his second career home run in almost the exact same spot as his first, 390 feet to left-center.  The blast puts the Braves on top 3-2; they will go on to win the game.

Today: In a few hours, Simmons will take the field at Yankee Stadium for the first time.  His resume as of now: a stellar  .333/.396/.542 slash line, an ever-growing collection of Web Gem-worthy highlights in the field, and an all-around savvy that is just plain scarce among rookies with a mere 14 games of experience at the game's highest level.

If the Braves don't start putting together some wins, this season could take a sour turn much sooner than last year's September collapse, but at least we have the privilege of watching a great young career unfold in our back yard.  Andrelton Simmons may not be the answer, but he's a nice diversion from the unpleasant questions Braves fans have been contemplating of late.  Sometimes, that's all you can ask.  

The Ashes of Romance: One Weekend Kills America's Sports Nostalgia, Only Not Really Because It Was Already Dead.

Apologies for another protracted absence.  Life has kept me from writing nearly as much as I'd like recently, but it flat-out could not be helped.  Oh well, take the opportunity when you can get it, I guess.  A few words on last weekend, the shimmering of dead eras, and the sweetness of bygone days.

(Disclaimer: at thirty years of age, it's entirely possible that I don't know what I'm talking about.)

It seems like every year when the Kentucky Derby rolls around, the winner acquires a certain cachet founded upon a brief flash of fame and a slightly-longer flare of potential.  "If only this horse can win the Triple Crown", the (insane) thinking of the industry goes, "the tremendous nature of that feat will resurrect America's love of horse racing."  This hopelessly self-deluding notion is amplified if that horse also manages to prevail in The Preakness.  In such an instance, as happened this year with I'll Have Another, anticipation builds feverishly towards the Belmont because Watching History In The Making is always worthwhile.  The hard truth, though, is that there is no bringing the sport of kings back to its formerly prestigious and central role in the cultural landscape.  I'll Have Another's scratch from the Triple Crown's final leg was lamented as the death knell of racing's last, best hope, but that moment, if it ever happened, passed us by a good while ago.  Horse racing is, in its own parlance, fading down the back stretch.

I watched a few episodes of "Luck" before it was cancelled, and I think the show sums up neatly the reasons for racing's slow descent into irrelevancy.  Here we see a world of mobsters and gamblers, horse people and those whose lives depend on them and the animals they train and race.  The romantic seediness of horse racing, the booze and bets and attendant trappings, are on full display.  The show paints a picture of the glorious, grimy intimacy within which the sport exists.  But even in a modern context, the lexicon of the railbirds, trainers, and crooks feels antiquated, like it belongs to halcyon days that are long gone.  The problem is that America doesn't really operate that way anymore.  We don't care to deal in up-close like we used to, and up-close is what horse racing is really selling.  Consider: the Kentucky Derby is a days-long event and spectacle, but on television it takes all of ten or fifteen minutes to get from "My Old Kentucky Home" to the after-race roses and interviews.  TV simply fails to convey the heart of the thing.  The experience.  The slow, all-day julep-fueled build of anticipation; the clank of betting windows closing and, moments later, the whoosh of the gates opening; the churning of hooves in the dirt and the throaty press of the crowd; the feel of a ticket, maybe a winner, clenched in a sweating, white-knuckled hand; the unadulterated beauty and power of one horse shooting the inside rail on the final turn, thundering out ahead under the brassy-blue incandescent Southern sky ... none of that comes close to making it through the TV screen.   What we see are a bunch of pretty horsies with funny names hauling ass around the track, and the results, and some ceremony, and that's it. 

In other words, horse racing's grandeur and essence is diminished by modern media's distancing effect in a way that no other sport is.  Where watching football on a 56-inch hi-def TV may not be the same as being in the stadium, it carries some consequential benefits, like enjoying the event without the hassle of parking and not paying $9.00 for a beer.  Conversely, watching a race in the same way misses the point almost completely.  Stripped of atmosphere and context, it's something of a dull (not to mention fleetingly brief) business to take in, which is why so few still do with any regularity.  Sure, the gamblers will tune in to see whether or not they hit the exacta, but there's nothing substantial or engaging for the average person who can flip the channel at any time to another game or reality show or whatever.  TV, for all its beautiful usefulness within the sporting world, is violently reductive to horse racing, and is slowly but inexorably performing a coup de grace on the industry.

Once upon a time, racing was one third of the primary triptych of American sports.  Along with boxing (receding into meaninglessness) baseball (holding on for grim life), it dominated not just gamblers' myopic attentions, but the fascination of the country.  People huddled around transistor radios on front stoops and in barber shops, breathlessly hanging on the ballgame, the race, or the boxing match.  It is a sort of morbid thought exercise deciphering whether that America turning into this one killed (or is in the process of killing) those sports, or if their deaths were/are among the agents that accelerated the transformation.  Or perhaps those esteemed modern philosophers The Buggles had it right all along, and video did indeed kill the radio star.  

Earlier in the week, one of our teachers came into work and asked me what I thought about the Pacquiao/Bradley fight and the ensuing outcry over the decision.  I was forced to confess that I haven't watched a boxing match since Tyson and Holyfield were the sport's biggest luminaries, and that I follow the sweet science in only the most cursory manner these days.  I hadn't seen a single punch, and was therefore unable to provide an informed opinion, but I gather it was an outright travesty of the highest order.  Like I'll Have Another's failure to run in the Belmont Stakes, the judges' decision on Pacquiao/Bradley has been proclaimed by more than a few people to be the final nail in the sport's coffin.  Those people apparently missed boxing's mainstream obituary.  It was published when Mike Tyson retired, and it read: it's not enough anymore.     

This weekend may have been a confluence of horrible occurrences for horse racing and boxing, but it was akin to the coma patient developing pneumonia; an unfortunate addendum to an already un-salvageable situation.  The fact is that we prefer our entertainment more visceral, more exciting, more more-ish now.  We demand the type of gleaming edifice and perpetual motion those two sports are ill-equipped to provide.  Even at their most dazzling, the pugilist's artistry and the majestic thoroughbred simply don't carry the brutal immediacy and saturation to sustain themselves, and baseball will find itself in a similar boat if it continues to stubbornly resist a very necessary evolution. 

Last Saturday night, we didn't witness the demise of anything at all.  What we saw were the ashes of romance, spilled out of the urn of America's sporting past, blowing aimlessly in an uncaring wind.

Infinitesimal: Baseball's Self-Protection Cliche Mechanism and the Probability of Every Pitch.

Everything about baseball is big.  Not in the sense of football's visceral immediacy or the larger-than-life swagger of basketball, and certainly not as regards television ratings, but still.  Football and hoops, though entirely different in their respective aesthetics, are predicated on a blaring-trumpets-and-furious-impact brand of excitement.  Baseball lacks such decadent fervor, but in terms of scope, no other American sport comes close.  Stacked up next to its brethren, it is a thing of hulking immenisty.  There's a half-century more of history and tradition, and nearly twice as many games per season, as in any other sport.  Where football airs like a series of 16 mini-dramas, and basketball and hockey seemingly (but not really at all) mark empty time until their lengthy second seasons begin, baseball is a sprawling construct of infinite variability.  This seems counterintuitive in the sense that baseball allows for the least improvisational freedom within its structure of any sport.  However, consider that every pitch represents a series of discreet possibilities which will affect the selection of all future pitches, possibly into the next game or month or season if you factor in injuries and pitch counts.  On the micro level, baseball is staggering in its complexity.  On the macro level, that complexity runs over the course of a 162-game chain reaction.  Baseball is the ultimate "butterfly flaps its wings and causes a rain storm" exemplar.

One of the byproducts of that hugeness is that baseball has evolved an almost limitless stream of folklore and conventional wisdom that, aside from supposedly illuminating the game, mostly help us cope with that complicated and lengthy slog without our brains turning to mush.  You could publish a War And Peace-sized tome containing nothing but baseball cliches, and you still might need a few appendices to cram in every tired phrase and tidbit.  Of that volume, there would probably be a couple of chapters devoted to not sweating a losing streak in May, that the standings don't really start to matter until after the All Star Break, and similar sentiments, of which there are legion.  These ideas exist because if we fully engaged and invested in every single pitch, at-bat, game, series, etc., we would go bonkers.  Not just fans, either.  The players and managers and broadcasters and everyone else have to tell themselves, just as we do, that those early-season losses don't matter.  A pitcher gets shelled?  Shake it off.  No big deal.  A hitter goes 0-for-26?  Take some extra BP, you'll get your swing back.  Don't worry.  Truthfully, thinking this way, in dismissive cliches, is how we prevent the dizzying spiral that would probably result if we allowed ourselves to recognize and comprehend the enormity of every pitch.  But here's the thing: every pitch counts. 

There's been a recent movement in basketball analytics decrying the notion of "clutch."  To thumbnail sketch it: two points is two points, and the bricked jumper in the second quarter is no less significant than the one at the end of the game in terms of contributing to the loss.  We could have a merry little argument about basketball "closers" and who does or does not have the intestinal fortitude to take and make those last-second shots, but from a purely numbers perspective, the no-clutch argument holds up.  Two points is two points.  You could say the exact same thing is true for baseball.  A win is a win.  And since those wins hinge entirely on what transpires from pitch to pitch, all pitches matter.

If you don't believe me, ask any Braves or Red Sox fan what sort of crime they'd be willing to commit to retroactively tack on just one more victory before game 162 last season.  If Tim Hudson walks one less batter that scores on a sac fly in a 5-4 Atlanta loss, the Braves are in the playoffs.  If David Ortiz launches one more dinger over the Green Monster in a close game, we never have to hear about Beer-and-Chicken Gate.  Or not.  Maybe it's a different guy at the plate or on the mound.  Maybe it's a game in mid-August, maybe it's Opening Day.  Baseball is governed by minutiae; it breathes and quakes in the passed balls and bloop singles, the reliever who hung a slider and the pinch hitter who connected with it.    

Better yet, ask a Cardinals fan how grateful they are for every single "W" they eked out along the ride to the World Series last year.  Taking an example at random: on April 5th, 2011, in the bottom of the 7th inning, Albert Pujols singled to left field, scoring Ryan Theriot and Colby Rasmus and giving the Cards a 3-2 lead which they held for the remainder of the game.  Any one of the pitches in any of their respective at-bats were responsible for the events leading to the win.  Also, though, it was Kyle McClellan who held the Pirates to 2 runs over 6 innings.  McClellan, incidentally, was making his first Big League career start in place of an out-for-the-season Adam Wainwright.  While there's no mistake about who the superior pitcher of the two is, it's possible that Wainwright might have gone out and had a bad outing, the Cards might have lost the game, and maybe that loss means they don't make the playoffs and stage their improbable run to the championship.  The preseason pitch that took Wainwright out of the 2011 equation may have been more significant on April 5th than any that actually got thrown in the game, and on and on down the regression analysis rabbit hole we go.  If so inclined, you could engage in this sort of retroactive what-iffing for every team, every game, and every pitch of every season.  That would make you an obsessive-psychotic-masochistic loony, but you could do it.  Baseball is the only game where you can collapse infinity down to gold dust fragments and still not distinguish anything solid.

Here in Atlanta, one of our sports talk radio hosts is a fellow named John Kincade, who is likeable and very good at his job even if he occasionally comes across as a sanctimonious, obnoxious bag of air.  (Related: Kincade is from Philadelphia.)  When the Braves went on their recent skid, callers were flooding the lines in consternation, and Kincade predictably started rattling off those don't-sweat-the-small-stuff cliches from that aforementioned fictitious baseball handbook.   

You people are panicking for no reason.  I'm not going to worry about the standings in early June.  If we can get healthy, we'll be fine.  It's a long season.  One game at a time.  Losing streaks happen.  It's no big deal.

Oh, but it is, John.  See, these losses don't seem like much cause for concern now, but if we're 3 games out of the wild card with five to play in September, they're going to be a big honking deal.  Your cavalier recitations of "accpeted" baseball philosophy are just platitudes that deny the facts.  It may indeed be a long season, but it is comprised, like every other measurable thing, of discreet units.  Road trips/home stands, series, games, innings, at -bats.  Oh yeah, and pitches.  Say what you will, but on the smallest scale, like inches in a mile, you're ultimately adding up a whole bunch of individual pitches to get to game 162.  And every pitch counts.

All Growed Up Over Night: Brandon Beachy is the Braves' Salvation.

I'm loathe to start off this post with a cliche this trite, but here goes: appearances can be deceiving.  Given that the Braves are currently tied for the 3rd-best record in baseball, maybe I'm just picking nits here, but there's a pretty glaring flaw in the shiny gem that has been Atlanta's 2012 campaign thus far.  For a team that has maintained a reputation for strong pitching over the past two decades, the dirty secret about the Braves this season is that their starting rotation is phenomenally average.  On paper this probably shouldn't be the case, but reality has an annoying way of superseding "on paper" with vicious finality.  (Ask any 2011 Philadelphia Eagles fan about this.)

Just look at Atlanta's starters, and the actuality of their performance compared to what they're theoretically capable of.  Veteran Tim Hudson's ERA is pushing 4 as he tries to recover from surgery and rediscover his rhythm on the mound.  Touted young arms Tommy Hanson and Randall Delgado aren't exactly pitching poorly, they're simply not fulfilling their considerable potential.  Former ace Jair Jurrjens is back in the minors with his delivery a shambles, and if JJ has fallen completely apart, Mike Minor's construct is one Jenga block away from a similar disaster.  Sure, the bats have been mighty and the bullpen is certifiably filthy, but the guys on the mound for the 1st inning have been a shaky proposition all season.  So, you know, thank heaven for Brandon Beachy.

(Cue beam of radiant light and choir of angels.)

The undrafted 25-year-old sophomore logged his first complete game last night: a five-hit shutout masterpiece that seemed a culmination of sorts.  Beachy had two semi-related knocks on him coming into this year: a chronic inability to pitch deep into games and a propensity for nibbling too often on the edges of the strike zone.  All it took was a concerted effort in the off season to rectify those issues.  At 6'3" and 215 lbs, Beachy's got the build to be a true hoss, he just had to figure out how to utilize it.  As for the nibbling, he's managed to mostly fall out-of-love with the temptress of the strikeout, who had him in thrall for much of his rookie season.  He's figured out that pitching to contact is a fine way to get outs as long as you set up the hitters correctly.  This is also keeping his pitch counts down, contributing to increased endurance on the mound. 

No one would accuse Beachy of having electric stuff, but he doesn't really need it.  He's got a good arsenal and, more importantly, hits his spots with precision on nearly every pitch.  His low-90s fastball tends to have a decent cut to it, he's got a pinpoint curve, and an effective slider.  His changeup is a thing of terrifying beauty.  When he's mixing the right gumbo with those pitches (read: pretty much all the time this season), he's a monster for opposing bats.  Watching him on the mound last night, looking for all the world like he was born to be there despite having played 3rd base for much of his baseball life, he had the air of a man in complete control.  The batters came and went with nary a hitch.  Even in his one semi-jam during the top of the 5th, Beachy just took a breath and calmly extricated himself from the trouble via that devilish changeup.

Now, playing paint-by-numbers for a moment, exactly how good is this kid who's keeping the Braves' rotation afloat?  Well, statistically speaking: out-freaking-standing.

He's sporting a 5-1 record and a league-leading 1.33 ERA.  His WHIP is a stellar 0.89.  He's allowed precisely one home run in 54 innings of work this year, and he's generating a 1.10 GB/FB rate.  We can expect some regression towards the mean here, of course.  Unless the baseball gods are feeling particularly generous, I doubt that .214 BABIP is going to hang around, and his 3.81 xFIP and 3.86 SIERA forecast a little less rosily than his current pace.  Nonetheless, Beachy right now looks like one of the best in the game, and if he keeps plastering the zone with artistry like he has so far this year, that's going to become a truism instead of mere hopeful projection. 

Yes, Huddy is still getting back into the groove.  Yes, JJ is a train wreck.  Yes, Minor needs to settle that fidgety and unnatural delivery down.  Yes, we need better performances from Hanson and Delgado.  But while we wait for the rest of the rotation to recalibrate themselves, let us give thanks for Brandon Beachy.  He may not quite be the second coming of Greg Maddux, but so far this season, and pardon me here for the awful pun, he's definitely in the ballpark.  For now, that's plenty good enough.  

In The Offing? Run Differential, The Rangers, and The Cardinals.

I have to confess that I haven't fully immersed myself in the 2012 MLB season quite yet.  This is per the usual, as too much of my life goes into the NBA playoffs to give baseball the care and attention it deserves until someone has been handed the Larry O'brien Trophy.  This isn't to say that I have no idea what's transpired since Opening Day, just that I'm not as acutely aware of the minutiae as I will be once basketball is over.  It's a tall order getting fully acquainted with all the wonderful tics and blips that comprise 162 games, and I'm just not up to it until then.  So, outside of keeping close tabs on the Braves, I don't know much beyond the cliff's notes:

• Boston is imploding somewhat sooner than last year.
• Yu Darvish is no joke.  Neither is Bryce Harper.
• Josh Hamilton and Matt Kemp are hitting the almighty crap out of the ball.
• Albert Pujols is not.  
• Related note: the Angels aren't nearly the team we I thought they'd be.
• Until further notice, Baltimore is apparently pretty good at baseball again. 

That's about all I've got so far, which is a pretty fair but extremely crude thumbnail sketch.  Safe to say, I've been largely ignorant of non-Braves-related data and goings-on.  Until last night, when the Braves pregame radio guys dropped a statistic before our game against the Cardinals that caused the closest thing I've ever felt to a literal boggling of the mind: did you know that St. Louis is +73 in run differential?  Plus.  Seventy.  Three.  That's not a statistical outlier, that's a freaking data point on a different graph altogether.  Granted, the Cards' schedule thus far has not been what anyone would call arduous, (the Marlins, Pirates, Brewers, Cubs, Reds, Astros, and Diamondbacks have comprised every game except for last night's loss to Atlanta), but still.  The next closest under St. Louis are the Dodgers with a + 27.  That's 37% of what the Cards have accomplished, which is just ridiculous.

Of course, there's one team that has actually exceeded that insane mark so far this season: the Texas Rangers at + 75.  Unsurprisingly, both clubs are leading their divisions, and are first (Texas, .667) and fourth (St. Louis, .625) in winning percentage.  (Since 2nd and 3rd are the Dodgers and Orioles, I say we wait until at least the All-Star Break before saying the Cards aren't a de facto second.)  Run differential is far from a perfect statistic, obviously.  Its failure to account for the fact that a blowout can have huge ramifications on this particular stat while only affecting a single game in the W/L column is an issue.  But since last year's World Series participants are so egregiously far off the curve from everyone else, I decided to poke around a little and see if we might be heading for a rematch.

What I found is that in more-or-less every offensive category, the Rangers and Cardinals are #'s 1 and 2 in some order.  This runs the gamut from basic stuff like runs (192 and 181, respectively) and batting average (.294, .287) to more advanced stats like wOBA (.360, .363) and team WAR (10.1, 12.5)  We can probably expect an incremental bit of backslide in some or all of these categories, since both teams also have the highest BABIP's in the league (.324, .330), but basically their offensive production owns MLB.

Next I took a look at pitching, to see if that offensive output would be sufficiently buttressed.  The Rangers are 3rd in WHIP and 4th in ERA.  The Cards are 2nd in both categories.  Texas has an xFIP of 3.60 and St. Louis' is 3.40.  So, you know, they're looking pretty solid on the mound too.

It's rare for a team to make it back to the World Series, much less both of the preceding year's teams.  (For Texas, this year would be a third consecutive appearance.)  The probability is that, over the course of the season, injuries and flukes and the capriciousness of the game will spin a different outcome than a rematch.  But the numbers say it's more likely this year than most.  Whoever scores the most runs wins the game, and when you're outscoring your opponents at the patently absurd clip the Rangers and Cardinals are, it's easy to think history might repeat itself.

Talkin' Cole Hamels Bean-Ball Blues.

When you get down to brass tacks (or brass-bound misguided idealism, depending on your view of the matter) what Cole Hamels' plunking of Bryce Harper illustrated is this: Cole Hamels is insane.  Or, at the very least, he's extremely confused about the definitions of terms like "old-school" and "tradition."  In a mostly nonsensical monologue during a post-game interview, here's what Hamels had to say:

"I was trying to hit him.  I'm not going to deny it.  It's something I grew up watching. That's what happened.  So I'm just trying to continue the old baseball because I think some people get away from it.  I remember when I was a rookie, the strike zone was really, really small and you didn't say anything because that's the way baseball is.  But I think unfortunately the league is protecting certain players and making it not that old-school, prestigious way of baseball.  It's just, 'Welcome to the big leagues.'"

Certainly, beaning guys is a part of the game.  You can argue about its merits or "classiness" or whatever, but it's been woven into baseball's fabric since time immemorial and it ain't going anywhere anytime soon.  So it's not the act I find indecipherable, but the context.  What was the motivation behind Hamels drilling a rookie he's never faced before, and had no prior grudge with?  Let's slog through that paragraph of marvelous incoherence above and try and suss it out, shall we?

"I was trying to hit him.  I'm not going to deny it."    

There is a vast amount of poor judgement that goes into stating this explicitly to a cluster of people armed with cameras, microphones, and notepads but, uh ... bonus points for honesty, I guess?  I presume that at some point you've met Bud Selig, right Cole?  You know how obsessively invested he is in preserving the Saintly, Blessed, Old-Fashioned, Poetic, not-at-all-like-those-violence-mongers-in-the-NFL-or-hip-hoppers-in-the-NBA, All-American image of Major League Baseball?  Well, this here is the sort of thing that's essentially guaranteed to draw his ire.  Everybody knows people get plunked from time to time in retaliation for whatever minor offense or slight.  No one ever comes out and states it baldly like that, though.  So while that 5-game suspension will have no tangible ramifications for you or the Phillies, you're not the sharpest of the five tools.

"It's something I grew up watching.  That's what happened.  So I'm just trying to continue the old baseball because I think some people get away from it."

What I'm truly and honestly confused about is what iteration of baseball Cole Hamels apparently thinks he "grew up watching" that gave him that impression.  You plunk people if the opposing pitcher plunked one of your guys, or if a batter showed you up by being a tad too demonstrative the last time he homered off you.  Neither of which applies in this instance, so far as I'm aware.  Then again, Cole Hamels is a veteran major league ballplayer and a World Series MVP, so the odds are substantial that he's somewhat better versed in the unwritten rules of the game than I am.  Cole, why don't you tell us exactly which of baseball's "old-school" tenets Bryce Harper violated. 

"I remember when I was a rookie, the strike zone was really, really small and you didn't say anything.  That's the way baseball is."

That's an almost total non sequitur unless Hamels was giving a poorly-elucidated example, completely unrelated to Bryce Harper, of "the old baseball" that has been "gotten away from."  If that's the case, his complaint was apparently regarding one of two things:

A. That the strike zone, in general, has expanded since he entered the league.  I don't see why he'd be lamenting that fact.  Expanded strike zones are beneficial to pitchers, after all.

B. That back then, pitchers weren't allowed to carp at umps about the strike zone as much as they do today.  Again, I'm not sure how this is detrimental to Hamels or the game.

"But I think unfortunately the league is protecting certain players and making it not that old-school, prestigious way of baseball.  It's just, 'Welcome to the big leagues.'"

Ahhhh, now we're getting somewhere.  I think.  Hamels appears to have a very tenuous grasp upon either reality or verbal self-expression, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say it's the latter.  The implication seems to be that Bryce Harper is being "protected" by the league.   Harper is a young phenom who through his brief career in The Show has essentially lived up to his hype, and is therefore being accorded the ink and Sports Center highlights that are generally granted such athletes.  He is also more than a little effusive and cocky in his demeanor; a little "uppity" for a rookie, if you will.

Is that the transgression?  Does Cole think Bryce Harper's media love-in is unjustified given his blink-of-an-eye temporal footprint in the game?  In that case, I think he meant the league is "promoting," not "protecting" certain players.  But the vocabulary miscue isn't really the issue.

If he's saying that Harper is getting preferential treatment because the league needs young stars to market and the Nats need a savior, well, maybe he's correct in that assessment.  However, I don't recall Ken Griffey, Jr. or A-Rod getting drilled in the back just for being ballyhooed, hyper-talented rookies.  If he's ticked off because he finds Harper's particular brand of swagger offensive, he needs to look in the mirror and remind himself that Bro-on-Bro violence is never cool. 

And that "Welcome to the big leagues" tag at the end, isn't that much more an NFL/NHL mentality?  Rookies go through hazing in all sports; all professions, really.  But the inflicting of unnecessarily harsh pain and crowing about it afterwards is what defensive backs do to rookie NFL receivers and NHL enforcers do to flashy wing players.  I've seen plenty of hurlers brush a rookie back with a little chin music just to make a point, but I seriously can't recall straight beaning as an accepted facet of baseball unless the pitcher has been specifically provoked, cocky rookie at the plate or no.  

Whatever Hamels' "reasoning," he's certainly stirred the pot now.  These division mates will see each other plenty over the course of the season, and we're likely in for a low-grade arms race of avenging perceived damages now.  Cole Hamels needs to chill.  Whatever his conception of baseball's "tradition" might entail, beaning rookies simply because they're getting more headlines than you probably shouldn't be a part of it.

Especially when those rookies will retaliate by swiping home from under his nose.  

Mo.

In the interest of full disclosure: I hate the Yankees.  In fact, that hatred is so smoldering and omnipresent that I mean it in two different senses of the word "hate."  There's the general, "everyone who doesn't have Gotham roots and thinks the team, their outsized payroll, and their fans are an obnoxious (and just plain noxious for that matter) blight upon the rest of the sporting world" hate.  There's also the hyper-specific, "you beat humiliated the Braves in the 1996 and 1999 World Series and I will despise you for it for the rest of eternity" hate.  The point is, I truly, deeply loathe those pinstripe-clad abominations.  So just know that when I say this, I mean it with all sincerity:

It's a damn shame about Mo.

He said he'll be back next season.  I don't know if it's possible.  I don't know if a 42-year-old, even one as phenomenally durable as this man has been, can make the full recovery necessary to return to form after an ACL injury.  Those insidious buggers have been making the rounds recently.  First Derrick Rose, then Iman Shumpert, and now The Great Mariano.  Ligaments, as it turns out, have an agenda to ruin everyone's fun this week.

If # 42 once again dons those iconic pinstripes somewhere down the line, if he can still push off the rubber in his accustomed manner, then we can probably look forward to a few more quality seasons.  Even if his age matches his jersey number, Rivera is among the best-conditioned athletes in baseball, and I certainly wouldn't lay any timber against his return.  While the hue and cry has gone up from the uninformed about what a star closer was doing shagging fly balls during BP, it's long been a claim of Those Who Done Seen It that Mo could have been one of the best defensive center fielders of his generation if he weren't such a brilliant pitcher.  The chance to snatch baseballs out of the sky during those pregame times was, I am sure, cathartic and exhilarating for a player who might not see the field at all that night depending on the situation.  Unfortunately for Rivera, it proved a costly avocation the other night in Kansas City. 

That one man with one pitch excelled so completely for so long is a marvel.  That cutter, that inscrutable, nigh-un-hittable cutter, has been the single most dominant pitch in baseball since 1996.  We can argue all livelong day about the statistical viability of the "closer" role and how and if specific pitchers ought to be utilized in that capacity, but Mo Rivera and that pitch made about as convincing a case in the affirmative as is possible.  He was so good that when he gave up a run or even a hit, it seemed anomalous.  When your only job is to shut down your opponent's last remaining threats on a nightly basis, and you select "Enter Sandman" as your heraldry music and it works for you like a tailored suit, well, you're a freaking boss.  You simply had to love watching the dude work.  Unless it was against your team; then you were just scared s***less.

So, assorted jerks of Yankeedom, you have my condolences.  You lost a class guy this week.  I hope you get him back.  I hope he's not done.  I'd like to see that cutter in action a few more times.  Not against the Braves, mind you, but still.    

Twenty, Twenty , Twenty-Four Hours To Go ... I Wanna Be Designated

It used to be merely a question of aesthetics, a fun barroom argument and one that could be had repeatedly without wearing the topic out. You pick your side, usually contingent upon which league your team is in, and you go after the opposition tooth and nail, convinced of your inherent correctness and their indisputable folly. That great, unresolved debate for the ages: Should baseball have a Designated Hitter?

Personally, I come down on the same side of the coin as Crash Davis on this one. (The relevant bit is at 0:39 if you're in a hurry, but really, who ever gets tired of listening to this whole monologue?) I believe that baseball players should be able to, well, play baseball. This most definitely includes standing in the batter's box and taking their cuts, outcome be damned. The American League, and the AL East in particular, fancy themselves superior to the NL, in no small part because their DH-fortified offenses tend to put up better overall numbers. Well and good, but to my way of thinking, the AL is a bunch of sissies whose pitchers wouldn't know which end of a Louisville Slugger to hold. The DH is the NFL Kicker of baseball. Sure, he's important and will probably win you some games, but it's awfully difficult to take him seriously.

The counter argument (and it's not without merit) goes: what fun is it to watch inferior talent at the plate? Wouldn't you rather have a born raker swinging the bat every game than the pitcher always up ninth and lucky to hit .230 for the year? I counter that the strategy of opposing pitching and defensive alignments based on where the pitcher-as-batter falls in a given inning adds nuance to the game. I further argue that when a pitcher does something big with the lumber, like Chris Carpenter's grand-slam-led 6-RBI game a few seasons ago, it's far more impressive and memorable than a dinger into the upper deck from a guy whose only job is to hit dingers into the upper deck. If you're going to call yourself a professional baseball player, then that should apply to all facets of the game. It's not like there's no precedent for hurlers who can perform at the plate (ahem, cough, Babe Ruth, cough-cough). Hell, my beloved Braves used to (very) occasionally have John Smoltz pinch-hit from time to time when he wasn't starting. (Smoltzy's 1999 numbers were perfectly acceptable for a 6th or 7th guy in a lineup. He hit .274 with a .725 OPS; not too shabby for the 29th-greatest pitcher of all time, according to Baseball Reference.)

Anyway, I say we abolish the DH and make everybody actually play baseball. Maybe you say we make the DH universal so we're spared the horror of, say, Josh Beckett trying to bat during interleague play. Here's the thing: this isn't a fun little argument or a question of preferences anymore.

When Chipper Jones announced that this would be his final season with the Braves, we were, of course, saddened in the way that fans always are when an icon decides to hang 'em up. The thought of #10 no longer occupying a spot on the roster of the only team he's ever had was almost beyond comprehension, the final nail in the coffin of the only enjoyable era Atlanta sports fans have ever known. And yet, amidst the heartache-ridden scramble to imbibe, viscerally and with great passion, every last towering homerun and barehanded field-ball-snap-gundown-the-runner of our third baseman's swansong, the pragmatic among us breathed just the tiniest sigh of relief. Because we'd payed him $28 million over the last two seasons and we're giving him $13 million more this year. Had Chipper played an additional season, we would have owed him $ 7 million in 2013 at minimum, and possibly more depending on how many games he manages to play this year. That's a hypothetical average of $12+ mil. per year for what amounts to roughly .270/.355/.810. While it's an accepted baseball caveat that nostalgia carries an outsized price tag for players who have meant as much as Chipper has to their longtime franchises, those numbers, even viewed through the rose-tinted lens of sentimentality, ain't worth twelve million dollars a year. To compound the problem, that "thanks for the memories" payout prohibits investment in better, more long-term assets. You pay a guy commensurate with his peak, and when that peak is gone, you have a distinct problem if the contract is still in effect.

None of this would be an issue if the National League had the DH.

If we could just gently transition Chipper out of everyday defensive duties and let him crush baseballs with minimal risk of injury, shelling out that kind of dough would be completely acceptable. Encouraged, even. But we can't. Because of the rules governing the National League, we cannot maximize the value of dollars on a long-term contract for an aging player.

And here's where the real crux of the matter comes into play: American League front offices know this about the NL. AL organizations are well aware that, because they can transition good hitters to an additional lineup slot at DH after their presence in the field becomes an injury risk/defensive liability, it's far less risky for them to offer excessive long-term contracts to players in free agency. This past offseason, the Angels lured Albert Pujols away from the Cardinals for precisely this reason. The Cards were understandably reluctant to shell out max money over a long time frame to their 32-year-old first baseman (though they probably should have), and Anaheim used that hesitation in conjunction with their ability to use The Machine at DH well past his days at first to offer him exorbitant amounts of cash. This was not the first occurrence of such strategy, but it was probably the most notable thusfar, and it damn sure won't be the last.

To get back to the Braves for a moment: what happens if they allow Brian McCann to become a free agent in 2013? He'll be 29 by then, and while he's proven more durable than most, catchers have a significantly shorter shelf life than other players. As much of an offensive force as he is, Atlanta's brass isn't going to feel grand about a contract that extends out to McCann's 34th or 35th birthday. Meanwhile some AL team will, I'm sure, be more than happy to offer McCann a more lucrative deal, knowing full well that when his knees go he can still step into the batter's box and wreak havoc on opposing pitching.

Lather, rinse, repeat. So long as only one league has the DH, NL talent is going to migrate as soon as the returns become sufficiently diminishing for NL franchises and their pocketbooks, because said talent can still get paid in the AL.

If Major League Baseball allows it to perpetuate and metastasize, the current situation will become untenable. In a nutshell: we've either got to scrap or universalize the DH posthaste. It's going to become a serious problem vis a vis competitive balance otherwise, the scales tilting precipitously in favor of the AL, or at least those AL teams with deep pockets. In my ideal world, the DH would cease to exist, but that strikes me as unlikely enough that even hoping is foolish. So we're left with only one realistic conclusion. Unsavory though it may be to myself and like-minded people, it's all we can do to fix the situation.

The NL needs to adopt the designated hitter. The sooner the better, too. Otherwise we're going to wake up in a few years and every power hitter over age 30 is going to be in the American League. And that's not a future I particularly care to experience. Because I like Brian McCann with a Braves "A" on his hat and tomahawk on his chest. Even if it's only in the batter's box, I hope we can make that a permanent arrangement.