WORLD BALL

 

               We don’t think about it much but sports haven’t always been part of Planet Earth. They are the product of leisure, which in turn is the product of prosperity. A society that’s worried about where its next meal is coming from doesn’t have the wherewithal for fun and games.

               That little intro sets the stage for the present—in much of the world, at least. Whatever else globalization has brought it also has resulted in a geographic spread of athletic accomplishment that has no historic precedent.  If you believe as I do that genius of every sort—scientific, intellectual, artistic and athletic-- is sprinkled randomly around the globe, needing only opportunity, instruction and encouragement to bloom, you find affirmation every day in the sports pages. While the world might be smaller in many ways, it’s larger in others.

               The Modern Age began with a global setback—World War II. It left much of Europe and Asia in ruins, while Africa and Latin America struggled with technological deficits and the colonialism that sent their resources elsewhere. Triumphant and intact, the USA pretty much stood alone atop the various medal platforms for a quarter of a century, leading many to believe the status was permanent.

               Not so, it’s turned out; the revolution has been quiet but relentless. In the 1948 Summer Olympics, the first after the war, athletes from 23 different countries won gold medals. The last time around, at Tokyo in 2020, that number was 65, almost three times as many, albeit in an expanded schedule.

               Today, the world’s best soccer player is Lionel Messi, from Argentina, or Cristiano Ronaldo, from Portugal, depending on whom you ask. The world’s top track-and-field athlete in this century has been Usain Bolt, the sprinter from Jamaica, and women from that small island finished 1-2-3 in the 100-meter dash at Tokyo.

 In the so-called “country club” sports Iga Swiatek, a Pole, is the top-ranked woman tennis player, and Novak Djokovic, a Serb, tops the men’s chart. There are more Asians (5) than Americans (2) among the current top-10 of women’s golf, and five nations are represented among the top 10 male linksters.

In basketball, a sport we Yanks invented, African-Americans still dominate, but any listing of the world’s dozen best players must include Giannis Antetokounmpo, from Greece, Nikola Jokic, from Serbia, Luca Doncic, from Slovenia, and Joel Embiid, from Cameroon. Touted as the best current young player is 18-year-old Victor Wembanyama, raised in France by a French mother and Congolese dad. He stands anywhere from 7-foot-2 to 7-foot-5, depending on what you read.  

But a couple of other examples of internationalization are more striking, straining credulity. The world’s best baseball player, with skills not seen since Babe Ruth, is Shohei Ohtani, from Japan. And reversing the usual order of ascension the best ice-hockey player is Auston Matthews, raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert burg with a climate closer to that of Timbuktu than Medicine Hat.

Ohtani, born to athletically unremarkable parents in the small northern-Japan city of Oshu, is a kind of unicorn, a combination hitter-pitcher who is not just rare but unique over the last 100 years. Comparing athletes of different generations is a fool’s task because conditions are so different; while great athletes would be great in any era, today’s jocks are so much stronger and better coached than those of the past that they should dominate any imaginary competition. Further, Ruth’s Major League career spanned 22 seasons (1914-1935), while Ohtani’s so far numbers five (2018-22), and in two of those (2019 and ’20) he started just two games on the mound because he underwent reconstructive elbow surgery.  The kid (OK, he’s 28 years old) is just getting started.

But Ohtani bids fair to become the first player to both hit and pitch at a high level in the Bigs over an extended period. Ruth’s career had two, distinct segments: in five of his first six seasons, with the Boston Red Sox, he was a pitcher, and one of the best of the time, but once sold to the New York Yankees in 1920 he became a fulltime position player, making just a handful of foolin’ around mound appearances in his 16 seasons in New York. He seriously combined the two skills in just one year—1919—when he hit a then-record 29 home runs while pitching 133 innings.

After surgical recovery Ohtani has posted two excellent hit-pitch years—2021, when he won the American League Most Valuable Player award after pitching 130 innings with a 3.18 earned run average while hitting 46 home runs and batting in 100, and this season, when he upped his innings pitched to 166 while lowering his ERA to 2.33 and had power numbers of 34 and 95. He probably won’t repeat as MVP this season—Aaron Judge looks likely to get it—but he also might receive Cy Young Award votes. If he stays healthy that’s likely to be an annual occurrence for quite a while.

Auston Matthews was born in California, also to athletically unremarkable parents, and was moved to Scottsdale at age two months. He stayed there until, in hockey’s Dickensian youth-development system, he was packed off at 15 to join a U.S. national age-group team in Plymouth, Michigan. Children who grow up in frosty northern climes can have their own ice rinks in winter if they have a back yard and a garden hose. Most of the ice in Arizona is in drinks, with the flat variety confined to a few indoor venues that charge fees to use.

Young Auston played baseball as well as hockey but found the diamond sport too slow. His innate hockey aptitudes brought him to the attention of coaches. He went from kid phenom to National Hockey League pro, with the Toronto Maple Leafs, at age 19. He was a star from the outset and last season, at 25, scored 60 goals and won the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s version of the MVP prize. Hockey’s equivalent of pitching is catching—that is, playing goalie. He probably could do that, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

IT'S IN THE CARDS

 

              

This is an era of overstatement; if the word “incredible” were removed from the vocabulary TV news and sports casters could barely speak. Even the least-exceptional occurrence is thusly described; as my late friend Seymour Shlaes used to say, “It’s so incredible it’s unbelievable.”

               That’s why it’s good to focus on something exceptional that’s so often been repeated it has become ordinary. I mean the presence of the St. Louis Cardinals in another baseball playoffs season. While most of the attention in the now-concluding pennant races has been elsewhere they are there again, for the 16^th time in this 23-seasons-old century. And while they won’t be favored to reach the World Series the fact they’re in the mix gives them a shot. They’ve made it four times since 2000 and won it twice, in 2006 and 2011.

               Plus, they haven’t been bad in their non-pennant years. Since Y2K they’ve had just one sub-.500 season, a record exceeded only by the almighty New York Yankees.  And while it can be said that the Yankees (and their National League-counterpart L.A. Dodgers) buy their victories with a limitless budget, the small-market Cardinals, with a mid-level payroll, gather them the hard way, through skill, guile and perseverance. There’s a lesson there, for any organization that aspires to do the same.   

               You’re probably waiting for my “to be sure” paragraph, and I won’t disappoint. Point one in this regard is that the Redbirds’ success dates back farther than the year 2000. In the horse-and-rabbit stew that is Major League Baseball (the horse being the Yankees), the Cardinals have been the biggest rabbit, with 11 World Series titles (to the Yanks’ 27) beginning in 1926. Point two is that other small-market clubs, namely the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays, also have outperformed expectations over the last two decades, but their charts are roller coasterish while that of the St. Louisans looks like a placid lake.

               The Cards’ record stands in sharpest contrast with that of the Chicago Cubs, my team and their biggest rival. The Cubs broke their epic, 100-year-plus championship drought only after Theo Epstein showed up in 2011, cleaned the stable of every serviceable veteran, and intentionally sustained three bad seasons while building toward contender status. The drought was broken by a good run and the 2016 crown, but the Cubs never repeated that triumph and Epstein eventually left the team where he found it—near the bottom looking up. Its latest rebuild now numbers two dreary seasons with no certain end in sight.

               Fans love to debate whether good fans make good teams or vice versa (I favor the latter position) but it’s not debatable that St. Louis is as good a baseball town as there is. Except for hockey—a niche sport in the American Midwest—the Cards have the city to themselves, the NFL having fled in 2015 and professional basketball absent since the ABA folded in 1976. With a metro-area population of about 2.8 million people, 21^st on the U.S. table, the team annually ranks at or near the top of the MLB attendance list, regularly averaging more than 40,000 filled seats a game in its 44,000-seat Busch Stadium home. That’s despite local summer weather famous for its sticky heat.

               A larger asset has been the kind of organizational stability that’s rare in the impatient world of big-time sports. The current span started with Bill DeWitt Jr., who bought the team from the Anheuser Busch brewing people in 1996. He’s a baseball guy to the core, his father having owned and run the St. Louis Browns and Cincinnati Reds. His own history in the sport started as a nine-year-old batboy for the Brownies.

Walt Jocketty was the Cards’ general manager when DeWitt bought the team. He was kept on, serving until 2007. He then was replaced by his assistant, John Mozeliak, who in 2017 was replaced by his assistant, Mike Girsch. Similarly, the team’s recent managerial chain includes just Tony LaRussa (1996-2011), Mike Matheny (2012-18), Mike Shildt (2018-21) and, now, Oliver Marmol. Matheny, Shildt and Marmol all had Cardinals’ tenure before becoming managers. Marmol has been with the team since he was a 19-year-old player draftee in 2007.

That’s the “Cardinals’ Way,” the title the team affixes to the 86-page handbook it gives to every new employee. For players it lays out the fitness expectations, practice designs and on-field approaches it applies at every level of its system. For the Cards, the saw “being on the same page” is meant literally.

But if the Cards march mostly in step they can break cadence to plug holes. Their lineups typically are anchored by home-grown players, such as the catcher Yadier Molina and the pitcher Adam Wainwright, but when the need arises they can reach out for help, even if it means breaking the game’s maxims. For example, they ignored the lately popular “never pay anyone over 30” rule to trade for their two current best players—first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and third-baseman Nolan Arenado—after those guys’ original teams decided against paying them at market prices.

 Goldschmidt was picked up in 2019 at age 31 and given a five-year, $130 million contract. He’s repaying the Cards with an MVP-quality season at 34. Arenado, the game’s best third-baseman since Mike Schmidt, was acquired in 2021 at age 30 with six years remaining on an eight-year, $260 million deal. He’s annually been hitting 30-plus home runs and batting in 100-runs-plus as usual in St. Louis.

The Cardinals have been lucky—witness Molina and Wainwright going relatively injury free for extraordinary periods (Molina is in his 19^th season, Wainwright his 17^th). And Albert Pujols, the Hall of Fame-to-be slugger the team jettisoned in 2011 at age 31, is back at 42 and having a swan-song season worth a Hollywood script. In his case them that has deserves to get.