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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEVALUATION

 

               In my columnizing days I covered the U.S. Open tennis tournament annually, and got a kick out of the way the New York crowds cheered for the underdogs in early-round play and, after some won, complained that famous players were gone. Much the same thing now is happening in all our major sports as playoffs expand and more teams are added.

               Exhibit A was the just-concluded baseball World Series. With the post-season tourney field newly expanded to 12 teams from 10 the finalists were a No. 6 seed, the National League Arizona Diamondbacks, and a No. 5, the American League Texas Rangers. The D’Backs came into the Series with an 84-78 regular-season won-lost mark, the third-worst record ever for a World Series contestant (the two worse were the 1973 New York Mets, at 82-79, and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, 83-78, who won). The Rangers brought a 90-72 record to the fray, setting the two-team win total at 174. That was the lowest such figure ever for the event.

People in Arizona and the Dallas area couldn’t have been happier, of course, but the rest of the nation was underjoyed. Television ratings for the five-game Series (won by the Rangers four games to one) were the lowest on record, with viewership averaging less than 10 million a game. By contrast, about that many people tuned in to the NCAA women’s basketball championship final last March between LSU and Iowa.

The TV numbers were the latest—and most vivid—recent example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. In answering public demand to expand their playoffs our sports major leagues have devalued both them and their regular seasons, our major entertainments and their main sources of revenue. The more games our teams play the less valuable each becomes. This invokes another popular saw, the Law of Diminishing Returns.   

Exhibit B (or, rather, 1A) is the National Basketball Association. It spread its playoff tent last season with a complicated arrangement of “play-in” games, and wound up with a final involving the Miami Heat, which had only the seventh-best won-lost record (44-38) in the Eastern Conference.

Schedule length in any sport is determined by commerce, not competition. They’re all too long, topped by MLB’s 162 games, but the NBA’s 82-gamer is the most problematic because its first half (the months of November, December and January) is played in the shadow of the National Football League, the undisputed champion of the airwaves. Until Christmas only aficionados pay much attention to the hoopsters, and then not really until the playoffs approach around March.

The NBA is trying to remedy that this season with an in-season tournament plucked whole from England’s soccer Premier League, the theft extending to its terminology (“group play” and “knockout rounds”, with a “cup” that goes to the winner). Running from November 3 through December 9, it’s being contested initially by six units of five teams each followed by a single-elimination go-around culminating in a final. All games save the final will count in the regular-season standings, with winning-team players pocketing $500,000 each.  That’s a nice prize even in a loop in which eight-figure annual salaries are common. So far the tourney has been met mostly with guffaws, but at worst it couldn’t hurt.

The NFL also has extended its playoffs in recent seasons and beginning last year did the same with its regular season, going from 16 games to 17. That addition (about 6%) is equivalent to 10 more MLB games. Schedules change only in one direction (longer), and sports leagues loathe odd numbers (home-road equity, don’tcha know?), so another boost to 18 games surely will follow.   

In the NFL the main consequence of more games is more injuries, the unavoidable result of football’s bruising nature. After about week three of the schedule every player is nursing some sort of hurt, and more-serious, game-missing injuries are common. Football is unique in that its most-valuable players—quarterbacks—also are its most vulnerable, and this year fully one-third of its putative starting QBs have missed at least a game while healing. The big question each year at playoff time isn’t so much which team is best as which is healthiest.

As NBA basketball becomes faster and on-court collisions harder and more frequent, injuries become more common, and the too-long schedule more of a grind. The league has recognized this by going corporate, legitimizing star absences with what it calls “load management.“  That means it’s okay for players to sit out games from time to time for no other reason than rest.

As I reported in my blog of last May 15, the league’s dozen-best players (Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luca Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Kawhi Leonard, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Ja Morant, Damian Lillard and Jimmy Butler) missed an average of 23 games each last season, or about 28% of their teams’ schedules. Theatrical plays notify patrons through program notes when leads are being replaced by stand-ins. NBA teams should do the same.

Indeed, they should go further by putting a warning on tickets saying the purchase price doesn’t guarantee the presence of either team’s stars. Fans bear the costs of schedule devaluation, as they do most things. But hey! It’s only your money if you give it to them.

 

 

FALL BALL '23

 

October and November are my favorite months in Arizona. One reason is that by this time the temperatures have abated somewhat from their sizzling summer highs. Another is the Arizona Fall League, the annual gathering of selected young baseball prospects seeking Major League futures. The young men play a six-week, 36-game schedule at six of the Phoenix area’s fine spring-training ball parks. It’s baseball at its purist and most accessible.

For reasons best known to itself, Major League Baseball moved the league’s start up by a week this time, incurring a Big Heat overlap. It also moved from a mostly day games to a mostly nights schedule, and changed the day-game starting times to 2:30 p.m. from 12:30. Neither of those changes were popular with the old timers who make up most of the league’s public, and attendance has fallen. Us codgers are used to being dissed, though.

MLB uses the Fall League to try out possible rule changes. There were a bunch of those last year, in the name of faster play, but few this time around. One changed the permitted time between pitches with runners on base to 18 seconds from 20, and it went off without much notice. The other was more interesting, permitting ball-strike challenges to pitchers, catchers and batters provided they be done immediately, without bench input.

 Each teams gets three per game, with successful appeals not counting. This took place only at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, the only park wired for it.  When a challenge was called the strike-zone rectangle was shown on the park’s TV screen and the ball zoomed in, for good or ill. I generally oppose electronic interference in our games, but this one was handled with dispatch and was kind of fun. Look for it at your local big-league park.

 Putting on my scout’s hat (actually, the one I usually wear), I attended a goodly number of AFL games during the season’s first five weeks. I judged the general level of play to be a tad below that of some past years, with no flaming talents like those of Vlad Guerrero Jr., Nolan Arenado or Kris Bryant revealing themselves. Some of the kids could play, though, and will be appearing in the triple-decked stadia in due time. About 60% of all fall leaguers make it to the Bigs, and this crew should be no exception.

The best pitcher I saw was Ricky Tiedemann, 21, a left hander owned by the Toronto Blue Jays. Standing 6-foot-4, he has a mid-90s fastball and a nice array of breaking pitches, which he isn’t afraid to use late in counts. A third-round draft choice in 2021, he’s already made it to AA, and should be ready for serious promotion in a year.

The best hitter I saw was Dominic Keegan, of the Tampa Bay Rays. He’s a solidly built customer who has hit well at the college (Vanderbilt U.) and minor-league levels, and continued that pattern here with numerous multi-hit games. In one game I saw he got the only two hits the above-named Tiedemann allowed in a five-inning stint, and a double and home run at that.  He’s listed as a catcher, but his bio also mentions other posts, meaning it isn’t written in stone. But wherever he plays his bat should make him welcome.

My team, the Chicago Cubs, has two prime prospects here, Kevin Alcantara and James Triantos. The 21-year-old Alcantara is the better-known of the two, having come to the Cubs in the traumatic 2021 trade that sent All-Star first baseman Anthony Rizzo to the New York Yankees.  Alcantara is tough to miss in the field, standing a very skinny 6-foot-6. His height makes for a long swing and he can look bad whiffing, as he often does, but when he connects he shows real power, and he’s graceful afield. Also, he has a lot of shtick, including the nickname “The Jaguar” and a well-rehearsed home-run bat flip, so he’ll be fun when (if) he makes it to Wrigley Field.

               Triantos isn’t impressive physically but plays with intent and has been among the AFL batting leaders all season with plus-400 marks. In one game I saw he had four solid hits, including a single that sent the contest into extra innings. He’s a second baseman, which could be a problem because the Cubs have a long-term incumbent there in Nico Hoerner.  Any hitter like Triantos should find a place somewhere, though.

               The Chicago White Sox’s top AFL prospect is shortstop Colson Montgomery, their top draft choice in 2022. At a filled-out 6-foot-3, and left-handed batting stance, he’s a Corey Seager look alike, but he hasn’t been Seager-like here. Still, Montgomery showed  some moxie in a game Monday in which he came up in a tied ninth inning with the bases loaded and one out. With a 3-2 count against a lefty reliefer he fouled off four pitches, then drove a deep fly ball past a drawn-in outfield to drive in the winning run. The Sox need a shortstop, and his draft status alone ensures him a look.

               I like short players with pop, and Corey Rosier meets that description. He’s with the Boston Red Sox chain. He’s fast afoot and makes good contact with his short swing. Another good little guy is shortstop Nasim Nunez, a 23-year-old Miami Marlins prospect. He’s sharp in the field and his 52 stolen bases in 125 minor-league games last season adds to his attraction.

                At 6-3 and 230 pounds ,Aaron Sabato looks like the home-run hitter he is, currently leading the league with seven. One on Monday cleared the 410-foot mark in Glendale Stadium with room to spare. He’s with the Minnesota Twins.

               An interesting experiment here involves Reggie Crawford, a San Francisco Giants prospect. Drafted in round one as a pitcher, his 6-4, 235 frame also looks hitterish, and he was sent here to get some swings. Alas, a new Ohtani doesn’t seem likely, because Crawford has been sub-.200 at the plate all season, and never showed much in the games I watched.

               There’s still a week and a half to go in the season, so come on out if you can. A game is well worth the price of admission, which is 10 bucks. It’s a rare bargain these days.    

              

JOCK TALK

 

               Anyone in his or her ninth decade on this planet has regrets, and I am no exception. My main one journalistically is the time I spent in sports press conferences or locker rooms, taking down the words of coaches and players and, later, passing some along to my readers. Occasionally a quote would illuminate a subject, but the big majority of them were blather, verbal pablum designed to placate or mislead the multitudes. Artificial intelligence could have provided better content and, without doubt, soon will.

               The subject of sports blab is timely because the TV and radio folks have decided we want more of it. Interviews fill the airwaves and no place is microphone-proof, even the playing fields. Baseball in particular is enamored with that, allowing players to be mic’d and questioned while games are in progress and they are at work. I could live happily without that.

               Just as TV action replays have been teaching tools for athletes, so has the constant playing of interviews; jocks just out of school know just what to say, and when. The best examples of this can been seen in the telecasts of the NFL and NBA college-player drafts. After every early-round pick a microphone toter will thrust his tool in the face of the chosen player and ask for his reaction. Invariably, the kid will express delight with the team that chooses him, no matter how woebegone, and promise to “work hard” to make it better.

 Indeed, the subject of hard work is probably the most overworked in sports. Yes, big-time jocks put it a few daily hours in the weight room or on the running track, but most of their practice consists of things others do for fun, like shoot baskets or play catch. Moreover, no exercises would mean much unless the athlete is in the top .01% of the population in natural abilities. As a 5-foot-8, 135-pound high schooler of ordinary physique I could have bounced a basketball every spare moment between ages 5 and 18 and never sniffed a college hoops scholarship, much less an NBA spot.

In listening to jock talk it’s good to note the way athletes speak of their situations. Rather than employing the conventional “I” or the royal “we”, they prefer to use the word “you.” They rarely lack for ego, but “you” introduces the common touch, implying that anyone would do the same. Ian Happ, a Chicago Cubs outfielder, illustrated this a few weeks ago in describing his team’s late-season, win-or-die throes (they died). “You have no choice [but to win],” said he typically. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”

Flat-out statements of fact are avoided, however obvious they may seem, mitigating any blame that may attach to them. David Ross, the Cubs’ manager, described a starting pitcher’s very bad outing thusly: “He kind of lost command a little bit out there.” And hey, if it was just a small problem, it might be easily corrected.

Similarly, athletes often couch their own subpar efforts (over par in golf) in terms of “struggle”; for instance, a basketballer who has just missed his last dozen shots will confess to “struggling” from the floor. The reasoning here is clear: struggle is noble and can lead to better things, while failure not only is pathetic, it also may be terminal.

A common excuse for an athlete who is struggling is that outside factors may have “distracted” him from his tasks. This can be counted upon to elicit a sympathetic response, even when the distraction may be the TV commercials he’s shooting on game days or the battery charge he faces.

The sports world is so committed to euphemisms it uses them to describe praiseworthy performances. When a jock plays well his fellows and the sportscasters who ape them will say he “stepped up” or “came up big.” More-questionable praise for one who gave his all in a game is that he “sold out” for his team. Benedict Arnold’s descendants might take heart from that one.

   Setting goals is another subject that’s usually addressed circuitously. Asked how he’d like to perform an athlete will shy from the grandiose—“I want to play great and win!”—and focus on something more easily obtainable, like “I want to be consistent” or “I just want to stay within myself.” The retort to the latter—“Where else are you going to go?” always remains unsaid.

Ego concealment is rampant, never more so than when money is involved. A jock who jumps one team for a better deal with another will pooh-pooh the money angle, saying “All I want is a ring”—the bauble members of championship teams receive. Once the guy gets his ring he might complain it had too few diamonds, but that’s another matter. One good thing about the nine-figure contracts top players are getting these days is that we no longer have to hear their nonsense about “feeding their families.”

Journalists contribute to the blather glut by passing it along mindlessly. Print beat writers—who qualify as reporters—might plead that they are fulfilling their duty to objectivity by relaying what the combatants have to say, but TV commentators and print columnists, who are licensed to speak in their own voices, have no such excuse. Ditto bloggers, who answer to no one. As a TV watcher I turn on a mental mute when most jocks speak, and as a reader I skim past just about anything in quotes. We’d all be better off if journalists use their eyes (and brains) more and their ears less.

                

THE WICKED FLOURISH (continued)

 

               It’s baseball playoffs time again and the Houston Astros are in them. No surprise there—they’ve qualified for seven consecutive postseasons now. That’s the second-best such record extant, behind only that of the 11-straight Los Angeles Dodgers, a bigger-payroll team. And if they were asked, the Dodgers might opt to swap records with the ‘Stros, because the Houstons have won two World Series (in 2017 and ’22) during their streak, to the Dodgers’ one (in 2020).

               You might think that such excellence would be celebrated widely, but cheers are pretty much limited to in or around the East Texas metropolis. The Astros go about their business wearing a scarlet letter, albeit a “C” instead of Hester Prynne’s “A.” The “C” stands for cheater, which is what the team was for all of its championship 2017 season and a good-sized chunk of the next, before its misdeeds came to light.

               Short memory is a lamentable modern condition, but I’d wager that most folks—or, at least, most baseball fans-- recall what the Astros did.  That was to carry out the most egregious scam in the history of American team sports. Some Astros’ brains devised a computer program that doped out the signs of rival catchers and named it “Codebreaker.” It then set up video systems in their home and some other ballparks that would beam the stolen signs to their team’s dugout. From there the scheme went low-tech: the pitches were relayed to batters by bangs or lack therof on a dugout trash can, silence meaning a fastball and one or two bangs, variously, meaning a curve or changeup.

               Almost equally mind-blowing was Major League Baseball’s response to the wrongdoing. The Astros were allowed to keep their ill-gotten 2017 trophy and fined a few draft choices and a piddling $5 million, which is the cash maximum the game’s owners allow themselves to be penalized no matter what they do. Worse, a review ordered by Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote a report calling the program “player driven and executed” even though it named for blame only one player, Carlos Beltran, who at age 40 was in his last season anyway.   A coach, Alex Cora, was suspended, along with manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow.  For one (1) year each.

               Such leniency should have been expected; it’s well known in other contexts that firing or otherwise penalizing managers or execs is cheaper and easier than doing the same to players. Further, our team sports have a complicated relationship with rule-breaking; as the jocks put it “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.”  Baseball outfielders can be counted upon to signal catches after they trap line drives, and all good football offensive linemen have a few artful holds in their bags of tricks. Sign stealing is a feature of both baseball and football, and it’s okay if done with the naked eye instead of electronically.  On another level, the taking of performance-enhancing drugs is treated as an individual offense, with no responsibility attached to the takers’ teams.

               The Astros’ sins were of a different order—obviously planned and carried out by a team’s leadership with the intent of securing a competitive advantage over a long period of time—and if that’s not condemned nothing is. But after their brief penance manager Hinch reemerged as manager of the Detroit Tigers, coach Cora popped up to manage the Boston Red Sox and player Beltran, hired and later quickly fired to manage the New York Mets, now is in that team’s front office.

               The only cheater still out of baseball is GM Luhnow, and one can deduce that’s mostly a function of his personal unpopularity. An engineer and management consultant by trade, he came into baseball in 2003 as a data analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals, having no baseball background and evincing open disdain for those who do. That image was magnified when he became the Astros’ GM in 2011, already carrying the nicknames “The Accountant” and “Harry Potter.” His claim to ignorance of the sign-stealing plot is ludicrous given the fact he was the only top Astros’ exec with the technical chops to put it together. Over the last few years he’s busied himself with soccer teams in Mexico and Spain, but he’s said he’s had feelers from several MLB clubs.  No one would be surprised to see him back in the Bigs soon.

               Baseball man or not, Luhnow’s path to building the ‘Stros was tried and true. The team tanked seasons 2011 through 2014, averaging just 58 wins (and 104 losses) a year but accumulating prospects and prime draft choices. Except for a stutter during the plague year of 2020 it hasn’t had a losing season since, meaning it knew what to do with the players it acquired.

               The team knows when to hold, as it has with the infielders Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, lineup anchors who have been in Houston for 13 and eight years, respectively. Under Luhnow’s successors it has shown it can identify hitters, such as young-vet stars Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez. It’s had good success developing pitchers, and when in need it can pop for veteran help, as it did in August when it assumed more than $50 million in salary obligations to reacquire the Hall of Fame-bound pitching ace Justin Verlander, whom it had let go to free agency the year before.

               This year’s Astros lack the oomph of previous editions, having snuck into the playoffs via two last-games wins, but once in them there’s no telling how far they might go.  Virtue may not be rewarded in sports but talent always is, and there’s still no lack of that in Houston.