Give That Man a Show About Baseball!!

Yesterday, on the radio, Tony Maserotti (sp? who cares?) was singing the praises of Red Sox closer, Koji Uehara. 'Maz' listed the reliever's many truly impressive stats: his minuscule WHIP, his microscopic ERA, his 40+% strikeout rate...

But Maz said one stat towered above them all and was Uehara's "most impressive statistic." That stat was ZERO LOSSES.

Humbly Rounding the Bases > Being Talented at Baseball

There's really a lot wrong with this article by one John Delcos.

Mechanically, it's a fucking nightmare. It uses 3 paragraphs to make the very basic point of "No one should care about the Mets' Jordany Valdespin." Two of its first 5 paragraphs are, in their entirety, as follows: "Answer: There is no reason." and "Bottom line: They can lose with or without Valdespin."

Which brings me to another very weird and incredibly dumb piece of this article. Delcos keeps making this argument that the Mets are really bad, so Valdespin doesn't matter because they are bad with him or without him. But this argument obviously would apply the same to David Wright or Matt Harvey? "They can lose with or without [Harvey/Wright]."

Anyway, so Delcos really doesn't like Valdespin, who appears to be a pretty talented, toolsy youngster on the Mets. So what makes him not worth caring about? Well, his attitude. His attitude is "me-first." And, we all know that players with that type of attitude have never had successful major league careers, or contributed to good teams. (Except for Barry Bonds, and Reggie Jackson, and Wade Boggs, and Pete Rose.)

How do we know his attitude is so me-first-y? Well he preened and watched a home run in a game his team was losing badly. Once again, we need look no further than baseball history to learn that hot-doggish, me-first-y guys have never been great players - except for the fact that the biggest hot dog of all time, Ricky Henderson, was an absolutely dominant force on a baseball field and won like 3 World Series.

I've seen the play. It was hardly egregious but it was moderately dick-ish. I mean, Valdespin's a young player who hit an upper deck blast and wanted to have some fun admiring it. Not good etiquette. But hardly the end of the world. In fact, I seem to recall Ken Griffey Jr. (a forgettable nobody who never contributed anything) leisurely walking out of the box every single time he jacked one out.

Back to Valdespin, veterans and coaches should pull him aside and tell him to knock it off. Again, no biggie. I'd venture a conservative guess that 50% of players, early in their careers, crossed the invisible lines of baseball etiquette and had to be set straight.

Valdespin was indeed set straight, by his opponents. As the author of this hit-piece rushes to inform us, Valdespin was plunked by the Pirates as retaliation. But oh his reaction to getting hit!? It was horrible. He got mad and spiked his helmet. He could have injured a teammate! It could have "ricocheted and hit somebody in the eye!" This is unacceptable of course. You know this is so because Paul O'Neil who threw tantrums to rival a 3 year old girl , was widely decried and criticized and called awful names such as a ... "gamer" and "great competitor" and "true class act."

Now, if you are still not convinced that we should all maintain a posture of something hovering between indifference and dislike towards a talented young prospect, then John Delcos still has one more- oh wait, no. Nope, that's the whole thing. That's his entire case.

To recap: this young, talented player should be forgotten, written off and made to sit on the bench while some washed-up has been (like, who's the worst player you can think of, let's say Rick Ankiel! Remember him!? Just awful! Oh wait) gets his ABs, because he.. wait for it... watched a homer and got mad when he got plunked. Boom! Case closed!

This article is garbage on so many levels but it's also a kind of dog-whistle-y with the "NBA diva" comment and its overall tone.

This Man Hates Baseball (and Kirby Pucket and Freedom)!

Here's a throw-away article about each MLB team appearing in various movies (cuz the Oscars or something). But, when it gets to the Twins, it goes from forgettable to a full-on atrocity with this line:

We'll be honest: We've seen "Rookie of the Year" 20 or so times. Little Big League? Zero. Transformers and Go-Bots as far as we're concerned.

The sentiment of this paragraph is so objectively wrong and self-defeating I am genuinely wondering whether the author believes GoBots was a better cartoon/toy franchise than Transformers. That might just make more sense. In fact, contrasting LBL to RoY should be the go to analogy anytime anyone wishes to compare two categorically similar yet completely qualitatively different things. ("Looks like you brought Rookie of the Year to a Little Big League fight.")

Rookie of the Year is also just such a terrible movie on its own. (GoBots was at least half-decent robots-that-become-vehicles children's programming.) Who wants to watch it even a second time? It makes a mockery of the game with the worst baseball scenes ever put on film. The "bad guy" is the big cross-eyed dude from Revenge of the Nerds. In Little Big League, it's (sort of) Ken Griffey Jr. In LBL, the kid is a FAR better actor (no squeaky voice), and there's no Gary fucking Busey.

This writer is apparently auditioning for a spot in the BBWAA. 

This Should Be Fun...

The steroid ballot has arrived. This is an especially fun topic to debate as to how steroid use should affect a player's eligibility, but it's also sure to trigger nonsensical arguments and inconsistencies amongst the actual people who get to decide, the BBWAA, arguably the least intellectually curious cohort whose membership doesn't require a belief in alien spirits lurking the earth.

We're already off, with this gem:

"My view is these guys played and posted Hall-of-Fame-type numbers against the competition of their time. That will be my sole yardstick. If Major League Baseball took no action against a player during his career for alleged or suspected steroid/PED use, I'm not going to do so in assessing their career for the Hall of Fame,"

That's Bob Dutton from KC. Don't think to hard, Bob when you can just outsource your judgment and standards to some other entity that had a financial stake in being asleep at the switch.

Of course McGwire has been on the ballot for a while now and hasn't sniffed induction, so maybe the standard has already been established - in fact, McGwire's totals have gone down somewhat over the years. But you can't expect the BBWAA to maintain consistency over the 15 years these guys are eligible.

Curt Schilling belongs in the Hall, his career numbers are sick.