Some Final Questions

 

It is my sad duty to report that Frederick C. Klein, author of the Fred Klein on Sports blog, former Wall Street Journal sports columnist, husband, father and general savant, passed away on the evening of December 26. 

It was his tradition to share an annual set of his burning questions on his birthday, February 2.  He was planning to do so again this year, and had written this in advance. This is his final column.

Thanking each of you on his behalf for your friendship and the attention you have given him and his words over the years. 

-        Mike Klein, Fred’s son, who introduced him to blogging in 2003.

 

Some Final Questions, from Frederick C. Klein

               --When was the last time I got up from a chair without saying “oof”?

               --When did I get to be a weather wimp? In Chicago I took single-digit temperatures in stride, but in Arizona I shiver every time they’re below 60.

               --When will we admit that our “wars” against gun violence, drugs and climate change are lost, and turn to dealing with the consequences? Whatever the polls show, entrenched interests prevail every time in situations like those.

               --Why has Wrigley Field survived for 110 years while the life expectancy of our newer stadiums for any big-league sport, usually paid for by the taxpayers, is about 30 years?

               --When did the accent in standard discourse start to fall on the first syllable of “in” words like insurance and install? That used to be country-folk talk.

               --Is there a contest among American sheriffs to see who can put the most stars on their collars?

               --Why do governments like Syria, Iran and Venezuela, which make war on their own people, expect international generosity when natural disaster strikes them?

               --Why are contributions to university athletics departments tax deductible? They’re in the entertainment business, pure and simple.

`              --Isn’t it remarkable that when I travel I spend more time packing my pills than my clothes?

               --Is it possible to open one of those little foil butter packets you get in restaurants without getting butter on your hands?

               --Did people in frontier Dodge City think that more guns would make them safer?

               --Can you name a perfect thing? I can—M&Ms.

               --Is there a bigger ripoff than those “tuneup” visits AC-repair outfits promote? You pay them to come and tinker with your unit and discover “problems” you can pay them more to fix. They violate a very-good rule: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.  

               --Was Sinatra better than Nat Cole? I can make an argument either way.

               --Is there a better name for a baseball pitcher than Janson Junk, of the Milwaukee Brewers?

               --Why would anyone pay for a large soft drink in a restaurant that allows unlimited refills?

               --Is there a better TV serial than “Rocco Schiavone” (“Ice Cold Murders,” actually), on Amazon Prime?  It’s about a grouchy Italian detective demoted from Rome to a small town in the snowy Alps. He solves murders but it’s mostly about him. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, darkly insightful in others.

               --Why does anyone still not know that all the world can see anything posted on “social media”?

               --Were you thrilled that the 2023 Stanley Cup final was contested by teams based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Miami, Florida?

               --Do people still read Mordecai Richler’s books? I hope so. His “St. Urbain’s Horseman” is a classic.

               --Are some web sites engineered so that when you click on one thing you get another? I think yes.

               --Isn’t it weird to get a Facebook “friend” request from yourself? And see that you and he have only seven mutual friends?

               --Aren’t drug ads informative? Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known I have a perineum.

               --Why are Russian athletes allowed to compete in international competitions while Putin makes war in Ukraine? Would Germans have been able to do this after Hitler invaded Poland and France?

               --Is any presidential poll taken before September ’24—after the national conventions-- worth looking at?

               --Which is the more-irritating ESPN personality, Stephen A. Smith or Pat McAfee?  “Both” is an acceptable answer.

               --Don’t you get the feeling that the presidential election will hinge on the price of gas on election day?

               --Is there a more useless computer feature than “autocorrect”? About the only word it reliably respells is teh.

               --Does any message from Norton not include a request for extra payments?

HANDICAPPING THE HALL, '24

 

               The Baseball Hall of Fame, American sports’ most-exalted shrine, has few formal requirements for admission. One is that the player, coach, etc., put in at least 10 seasons in the Major Leagues. Another is that he be retired for five years.  A third is that he pass the initial ballot muster of a sports writers’ committee whose standards are generous.

                There’s another requirement, though, and it’s just as important for being unwritten or even publicly acknowledged. The Hall’s annual major event is its new-member induction ceremony every July. With no inductees there’s no party so it’s imperative that somebody be elected each year.

               The golden door to the Hall is through the annual sports writers’ ballot for the recently retired. This requires a 75% favorable vote of an electorate that last year totaled 386, and getting that many sports writers to agree on anything is no mean feat. The wise men who run the Hall know that, so they created side or back doors to their shrine. Those have been the veterans’ committees operating with shifting labels over the years. The 75% rule also holds among those groups, but with memberships of 16 former players or other baseball lifers that amounts to 12 votes. When the scribes elected no one in 1971 and 1996, and the vets stepped up to fill the void—with eight electees in 1971. Most of the players people don’t think belong in the Hall were put there by the vets, and will continue to be.

               This year’s ceremony already has a speaker thanks to the vets. He’s Jim Leyland, a longtime coach and manager who piloted four teams—the Pittsburgh Pirates, Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies and Detroit Tigers—to various levels of glory over 27 years (1986-2013). He’s well liked and admired in the game. His is a baseball family—Katie, his wife of 35 years, previously worked for the Pirates and their two sons had baseball careers.

               Chances are good he’ll have company on the podium because the writers could elect as many as four ex-players this time. They’re an especially interesting group because none of them won a World Series ring over a total of 69 years in the Bigs. Just two of them even got to play in one.

               The player most likely to succeed is Adrian Beltre, ex of the L.A. Dodgers, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers. The native of the Dominican Republic best exemplified Woody Allen’s dictum that 80% of life is showing up. He showed up for 2,933 games over a 21-year career, the 14^th most among the 20,532 men who’ve played in the Majors since they were started in 1876.

               Third-baseman Beltre never reached baseball’s heights but piled up some sterling stats, headed by his 3,166 career hits. The 3,000-hit mark, sans steroids, is a Hall admission card, and he had an annex-full of other trophies. He won’t be a unanimous first-balloter, but he’ll be close.

               Todd Helton got 72.2% of the vote on last year’s ballot, his 6^th (of a permissible 10), and nobody’s gotten that close without winning the next year. The first baseman is unusual in two respects in the modern game—he played his entire, 17-season career with the same team (the Rockies) and ended up with a plus-.300 (.316) lifetime batting average. Rockies’ hitting stats have been looked down on by baseball mavins because of the light air at their mile-high Coors Field home, and the ballpark’s wide expanses, but his way was greased by Larry Walker’s election in 2020.

               Another first-ballot possibility is Joe Mauer, the Minnesota Twins’ catcher. No other catcher has won an American League’s batting title, but Mauer did it three times—in 2006, ’08 and ’09—and he ended his career with a .306 lifetime batting average. He was the AL MVP in ’09. Like Helton, Mauer played his whole career of 15 seasons with the same team.  Homegrown, the native of St. Paul was, probably, the most-popular Twin ever.

A model of consistency, he had only one plus-three full season earned-run average in his 16 seasons (1995-2010). Interestingly, he was a natural right-hander who taught himself to throw lefty after he broke his right arm twice by age seven.

Among the other ballot holdovers, outfielder Andruw Jones, a 58% poller in 2023, has the next- best chance, but it’s a big jump to 75. Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez, big-time sluggers, have big-time drug-related problems, and Carlos Beltran was a key figure in the 2017 Houston Astros’ cheating scandal.

The rest of the first-year slate is thin, led by Chase Utley, David Wright, Bartolo Colon and Matt Holliday.  They’ll get the 5% vote needed to stay on the ballot, with maybe one or two others. Stick around and you’ll get to see Ichiro Suzuki, maybe the best hitter-of-the-baseball ever, on the 2025 ballot. He’s a possible unanimous choice, and he, too, never played in a World Series.

 

                

              

              

MR. RELEVANT

 

               The National Football League’s most-remarkable story during my sports-writing tenure (1983-01) was that of quarterback Kurt Warner.  The native of Dubuque, Iowa, didn’t start for Northern Iowa U. until his senior year, and went undrafted professionally out of college. Except for a brief tryout with the Green Bay Packers he had no brush with the league for the three years he spent with the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League, a minor circuit. Between seasons he worked as a grocery-store clerk, among other such jobs.

The St. Louis Rams signed him as a backup in 1998 but used him in just one game that year. Between seasons he was left unprotected in the draft that attended the Cleveland Browns’ return to the league, but wasn’t picked. He got into the Ram’s 1999 starting lineup at age 28 only after a late-preseason injury to the incumbent QB, Trent Green. Warner then led the Rams to the NFL championship, winning league and Super Bowl MVPs along the way. His 12-year NFL career would include another MVP award and a Super Bowl appearance with the Arizona Cardinals. He’s a member of the league’s Hall of Fame.

What was mind-boggling about the Warner odyssey wasn’t that he starred but that it took so long to happen. Even 25 years ago athletic talent almost never went unnoticed in this sports-crazy land, with scouts of various rank plotting the progress of likely youngsters from Little League-age on. To use a much-overused word, how the guy got to 28 without his potential being recognized was incredible.   

Now it’s 2023 and we have another Warner-like football player. He’s Brock Purdy, the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback.  The parallels aren’t perfect-- Purdy was drafted after college in 2022 but as a seventh-round pick, 262^nd and last. That made him “Mr. Irrelevant”, the silly title given to the draft’s annual last pick because of a silly promotion by the coastal city of Newport Beach, California. It’s an “honor” that depends on the good nature of the recipient, if only because its several days of celebration culminate in the presentation of the Lowsman Trophy, a bronze depiction of a football player fumbling.  

 Purdy pre-NFL wasn’t so much a nonentity as a national-picture also-ran, albeit an honorable-mention one. He was a four-year starter at Iowa State U., winning most of his starts (29-17) but never doing enough to turn the right heads. Probably worse, he was (is) out of style at his position for his time, a dropback QB when superhero run-pass types such as Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts are in vogue.

  If you lined up those guys in the playground with Purdy, and asked the typical fan to choose one for his team, chances are he’d pick one of them. If they lined up for a decathlon, the 10-event Olympic competition whose winner is widely recognized as the world’s best athlete, Purdy might well finish last. At a listed 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds he is unprepossessing physically, and his boyish mien makes him look younger than his 23 ages.

Differences in measuring quarterback excellence also produce quite-different results concerning Purdy. The two main devices are the official NFL one—called the Passer Rating—and another called the Quarterback Rating, or QBR.  The Passer Rating is the simplest, involving mostly the stats that appear in a typical game’s box score. The QBR is the product and possession of ESPN and purports to be far more inclusive, the result, the network says, of about 10,000 lines of computer code, whatever that means.

 I say “purports” because no one outside ESPN knows its formula for sure, the network guarding it like a national secret. Computer generated and video monitored, it’s said to weigh various stats by “holistic,” real-game importance; for example, a 40-yards-in-the-air pass completion is worth more for the QB than a screen pass and 40-yard run by the receiver. Similarly, a pass completion with a game on the line counts for more than one at “garbage time,” when one team leads by two touchdowns or more in a game’s final minutes.

The gaps between the measures are more than matched by their outcomes. The current NFL ranking puts Sam Howell of the lowly Washington Commanders on top (?!), while Purdy is eighth. Purdy is first in ESPN’s QBR, Howell is 21^st. Goofy, huh?  For the simple-minded like me, Purdy’s leading the league in both completion percentage at 70.2 and average yards per passing attempt at 9.4 yards is more impressive than either of the yardsticks. That last thing means the Niners average a first down every time Purdy throws the ball, much less connects. In other words, he’s a hell of a QB.

Obvious in both the Warner and Purdy cases is that the football scouts’ handbook had and still has large holes when it comes to talent evaluation. Purdy has assets that were hard to quantify—things like field awareness and the head to cooly process complex info under duress. Both of them fall under the heading of gridiron intellect.

  At an Arizona Fall League baseball game last month I talked with a man who said he’d coached Purdy in a kids’ football league when the lad was a 12-year-old seventh grader in the Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek. He averred he never saw a boy more into, and knowledgeable about, the sport. “His dad told me Brock would watch a TV game with a legal pad in his lap, taking notes about the plays. He’d have been an ace at 12 if his hands had been big enough to get around the ball,” the guy said.

That’s someone a good scout might have checked out.