WE WUZ ROBBED

 

               Conspiracy theories are the rage in the U.S.A., so I’m glad to report the demise of one. Debunking is tough because it’s hard to prove a negative, but I think it’s safe to say that the National Basketball Association no longer labors under the cloud that its playoffs and other functions are fixed for the New York Knicks to win. Forty nine years of no championships for the Garden dwellers, and just one playoffs appearance in the last nine seasons, seem finally to have put it to rest. Now, I guess, the L.A. Lakers have become the focus of the whispers, but they also didn’t make the current POs, so even those have been muted.

               The genre, however, is far from dead. Indeed, it seems to have expanded to make victims of just about every team in the league, and those in our other major sports, too. To hear the players, most broadcasters and many fans tell it, the referees and umpires have it in for everybody, and lay in wait to loose their venom at the most hurtful times. The cry “We wuz robbed!” reverberates through the land.

                Don’t believe me? Then check out the next NBA playoff game you see. Every time a foul is called the perpetrator lifts his eyes to heaven and raises his arms in disbelief, astonished to be so unfairly accused. If it’s a home-team player the audience responds similarly. It happens so often you’d think they’d get worn out, but one outrage just seems to fuel the next.

               I hate to get political here, even in a general sense, but I think what’s happening is that the ultrapartisanship that affects our politics has gravitated to sports. Paranoia is up, as are many forms of nastiness. Twice during the just-concluded NBA playoff between the Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks players reported that their wives, girlfriends or moms had been insulted or worse by opposing fans in the stands during games, and players and fans in that and in other series have traded barbs directly. We Americans used to feel superior to the European and South American soccer fans who experience their loyalties viscerally, but we’re heading in that direction.

               You might think that sports-media pros would bring cooler heads to the frays, but many don’t. I see baseball games from around the country by way of the game’s Extra Innings cable-TV package and must report that homerism is rampant, affecting every facet of the broadcasts.

 Rooting from the baseball TV and radio booths is old stuff, dating back to my distant youth (Bert Wilson used to say he didn’t care who won as long as it was the Cubs), but in memory it used to have a joking aspect. Today it’s expressed by continual complaints about the umpiring, specifically about how all the close calls are going against whatever team the broadcaster works for. Even the electronic strike-zone box most games feature on television, and the microscopic analysis of plays subject to video review, don’t quiet the bitching; when a call goes against the homies it’s often explained away as too close to really determine.

It's no wonder that the NBA playoffs have amplified the bad-call mania. The NBA regular season is too long, meaning that many contests are desultory, but there’s little of that in the POs.  Players and fans are keyed up, and the familiarity bred by the best-of-seven format heightens individual animosities.

 Making it worse is that in the playoffs the league and its officials seem to do what the broadcasters call “let the boys play.”  Fans seem to like that in principle but in practice the phrase translates to “let the boys foul.”  NBA basketball is played by large, fast and muscular men who make the courts look small, and there’s so much banging around in the normal course of things that fouls could be called on just about every play. Not calling some of the usual fouls leads to greater feelings of unfairness about the ones that are called. The question then becomes how much is too much, and the answer varies widely. Where to draw the line on how often or hard Joel Embiid or Luca Doncic can bang his shoulder into an opponent’s chest to improve his position? Depends on who you’re rooting for.  Booooo!

Do the refs, umps, etc., make mistakes? Of course they do, as do players, coaches, sportswriters, accountants and surgeons. But are they intentional and directed toward helping or hurting certain teams? Zero evidence for that. Only once in the annals of modern big-time American sports has a game official being found to have used his position to alter games’ outcomes. That would be the case of NBA ref Tim Donaghy, who spent 15 months in prison for fixing games in 2006 and 2007. As far as is known his actions were aimed at benefiting only himself, by way of his bets.

 I’ve known refs and umps professionally and socially. My nephew, David Trachtenberg, referees high school basketball and volleyball games in and around Denver, where he lives. By my own and others’ accounts they’re a fine bunch, dedicated to their sports to the exclusion of other loyalties. Game officials in the NBA and Major League Baseball do well financially these days, earning between $150,000 and $500,000 a year depending on seniority, but they got their starts working high-school or kids’-league games for, maybe, 50 bucks per, if they were lucky. Without them those games wouldn’t be possible. Their fraternity should be cheered on that ground alone.

 

              

              

                

 

NEVER AGAIN?

 

               It was a nothing-special hit—a groundball single to right field—early in a nothing-special late-April game, but it stopped the baseball world. Fireworks exploded, people rose to cheer, the hitter’s wife, kids and mom raced to the field to embrace him. The ball was sent off to Cooperstown, presumably to rest in display with others like it.

               It was, of course, a very-special statistical hit, the 3,000th in the illustrious career of Detroit Tiger player Miguel Cabrera, putting him among the 33 men who have reached that level among the almost 20,000 who have played in the U.S. Major Leagues. At age 39 he’s not quitting yet and will go on to add to that total.

               Cabrera’s achievement well might stand out in a more singular way. He certainly will be the last to notch hit number 3,000 for a good many years and maybe he’ll be the last to do it—ever. Yes, ever is a long time and many unlikely things will happen in such a span; the rule “never say never” rightly applies to feats like his. But trends in the game are moving the wrong way for such a thing to occur.

That also is true about other hallowed numbers in the diamond sport, one that leans more than any other on round-numbered statistical feats to measure greatness. It used to be that 3,000 career base hits, 500 home runs, 300 pitching wins and 3,000 pitching strikeouts guaranteed Hall of Fame immortality. That no longer applies to players who stopped in juice bars along the way (Barry Bonds, ARod, Roger Clemens), or went out of their way to be offensive (Curt Schilling), but the standards held nonetheless. Now, not only the hits mark looks old fashioned, but the career-pitching-wins measure does as well.

Indeed, changes to the game seem to have permanently removed 300-win pitching careers from the above list containing 24 names, ending with Randy Johnson in 2009. One major obstacle besides the sheer difficulty of averaging 15 wins a season for 20 seasons has been the move to five-man starting rotations from four starting in the 1970s. Another has been the increasing role of teams’ bullpens beginning at about the same time. In 1974 there were 1,089 complete games pitched in the Major Leagues, or 28% of the total. Last year there were 14, six of which were no-hitters, and even taking a perfect game through seven innings doesn’t protect a starter from the hook. That’s what happened to Clayton Kershaw a couple of weeks ago, and he left the mound smiling.

Among active pitchers Justin Verlander leads in career victories with 227 as of last Thursday, followed by Zack Greinke with 219, Max Scherzer with 193, Kershaw with 188 and Adam Wainwright with 186. Kershaw is the youngest of the group at 34 but his annual starts have dipped into the 20s from the 30s the last half-dozen years. Verlander still is going strong at age 39 but another 70-plus wins seem undoable. Greinke is on his last legs at 38, Scherzer is 37 and Wainwright is 40.  Seems that 250 is the new 300.

Two members of the 3,000-hit club currently are active—Albert Pujols in addition to Cabrera—but from here it’s hard to see where another will come from. Under different circumstances Robinson Cano would be preparing to join them but he flunked a drugs test and lost 80 games of the 2018 season and then tied ARod for the all-time-dunce award by flunking another and losing the entire 2021 campaign. He had 2,631 hits through Thursday but at age 39 is hitting just .184 this year (7-for-38), and this season appears to be his last.

After Cano the decline in the active-hits department is steep. Yadier Molina, 39, is next at 2,116 but he’s already announced his retirement after this season and given his bruising position (catcher) and early-career struggles at the plate it’s remarkable he’s hit as well as he has. Joey Votto is next at 2,035 but he’s 38 and doesn’t have another 1,000 in him.  Jose Altuve has 1,783 in 12 seasons and Freddie Freeman has 1,726 in 13, but both are 32 years old and 3,000 seems a bridge too far.

A good measure of how great an achievement 3,000 hits is can be seen by the examples of Mike Trout, Nolan Arenado and Mookie Betts, the first three players I’d pick if I were choosing sides in the playground. In 12 seasons neither Trout, Arenado (10 seasons) nor Betts (9) is halfway to 3,000.   

Any foreseeable-future Mr. 3,000 would have to surmount just about every playing-field trend in the game. Just as fewer individual pitching starts and more bullpen emphasis is thwarting possible 300-game winners, it’s also making it tougher on hitters, fresh pitchers being more-formidable foes than tired ones.  Further, the guys trotting to the mound today are bigger, stronger and better coached than those of any previous era.  Computer tracking helps managers put their fielders where hitters are likely to hit.

Hitters are contributing to their own problems by trying to please chicks who dig the long ball, strikeouts be damned. The All-MLB batting average has dipped below .260 annually since 2009 and bottomed at .244 last season. Through 500 games this year it’s dropped to .231, which if it holds would be a record since they started keeping track in 1871. That would be worse than the .237 of 1968, “The Year of the Pitcher,” and the “Dead-Ball Era” low of .239 in 1908.

The cry of “Help!” you hear comes from the fans as well as the hitters. We want to see more guys getting hits, running around the bases, scoring runs. In 1969 MLB answered a similar plea by dropping the pitchers’ mound to 10 inches from 15. Another drop is in order, and an anti-shift rule as well.

And how about requiring batters to choke up at least an inch?

OK, maybe that’s too much.