OK, maybe the title's mostly from NPH killing Aerosmith's classic (and probably my favorite song ever). Still, I think it sums up the Sox pretty damn well. And, since this is a dual-purpose baseball/politics blog, the Dems. But I'll focus on the Sox for at least the first paragraph or four.
A great deal's been written about the "Pink Hat" phenomenon; that is, the prevalence at the ballpark of "Red Sox fans" who couldn't pick Carl Yastzremski out of a lineup or who think (I swear this actually came up on blogs) that Alex Gonzalez was the "greatest shortstop in Sox history." I have two big problems with this outcry. The first is just that bandwagons are a price of success, and one I'm willing to pay. The second, and more important, is that "Pink Hat" mostly applies to female fans, and that's not cool. There's absolutely no shortage of male bandwagon-jumpers, and just playing the percentages of "guys are required societally to like sports and girlfriends are considered awesome if they play along," it truly sucks to use women as the object of annoyance there.
Regardless. I won't claim true hardship as a Sox fan. I was born in 1983. So I missed Slaughter beating Pesky's throw, Gibson destroying the Impossible Dream, Lee tossing an eephus to Tony Perez, and Bucky Fucking Dent (it's a blog, I don't need asterisks, ha ha). And I was a toddler barely adjusting to "wait, what do you mean I've got a sister" when Mookie hit that grounder to Billy Buck. So there's a lot of shit I missed.
On the other hand, my first baseball memory is watching Dave Stewart eviscerate the Sox in 1990. I saw Mo Vaughn on that goddamn horse in '95, watched the Sox kill the Indians in Game 1 in 1998, then drop the three non-Pedro starts. 1999... more Pedro heroics, then a complete collapse in the face of the Yanks. The sad self-destruction of the late Harrington-Duquette Sox, with Carl Everett going nuts and Jimy Williams getting canned (on my 18th birthday! Hooray adulthood!) And all of that, leading to the 2003 ALCS, the end of which frankly would serve as an entirely acquittable defense for the murder of Grady Little by any resident of New England.
So yeah, it's a bit annoying when I'm at Fenway surrounded by 19-year-olds in Ellsbury jerseys who don't quite understand the whole "three strikes and you're out" concept. I've never hated being at Fenway before, but I did on Patriot's Day this year, when the Sox were getting annihilated by the Rays (and I remember when they were the Devil Rays, and SUCKED, which none of the Ellsburys can say) and the seven rows around us only cared that the kiosks would stop selling $7 Budweiser in the 7th.
But I reassure myself with the knowledge that they can't appreciate a Sox win the way I do. There's just no way. To watch everything that unfolded between Millar's walk and Stewart's steal and that bouncing grounder from Renteria to Keith Foulke... Ask any true Red Sox fan how they spent that week, and you will hear some tales. Lack of sleep, sitting in the same position for hours so as not to curse our boys, going to work and/or school in a complete daze having watched the game till 2 am... It was a frigging gauntlet. And we came out the other side with the pennant that eluded every Sox team for nine decades prior. That 9th-inning toss from Foulke to Minky, the same toss that happens in a hundred games a year; it killed a century of demons. And if you were in New England and truly watching, you could feel them die. There was actually a whisper in the air.
So when Tony Massarotti and Dan Shaughnessy start screaming that the 2010 Sox, with their newfangled stats and oddly ineffective Josh Beckett, are doomed to failure, I can take the long view. The baseball team I live and die with is not exactly playing its finest baseball right now. But the players involved are better than this, and there's four more months in the season. And if they don't happen to win the Series this year, then you know what? That'll suck. But they'll still have a Beckett-Lester-Buchholz-Lackey rotation going into next year (and the three after that), and an almost unfair farm system feeding new guys in. The Sox have a lot of season left, and a lot of seasons ahead. I'm only 26, I've got plenty of time to watch them.
21-20? All that means is they need to go 74-47 to win 95 and make the playoffs. Easy. Go Sox.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
...the weapon of choice
The two main threads of this blog don't intersect all that often, but it's fun when they do. Watching a recent Daily Show clip, I was treated to a host of Fox News personalities telling me about how liberals want to give Washington more power, to nationalize the banks, to take away your freedoms, and so forth. And it got me thinking about Scott Podsednik. I will explain this.
Scott Podsednik is a lousy MLB player. His career OPS+ is 88 (it's like IQ, "average" is 100), his defense is iffy, and he's been pretty injury-prone for the last few years. Needless to say, he's currently employed by the Kansas City Royals. His strengths are as follows: he plays hard, he steals bases (though not at an impressively high rate, and not as many as he could if he would, like, draw a walk once in a while), and he puts the ball in play, whether by swinging at the first pitch or sac bunting his teammates over to second. None of this is useful enough to outweigh his comically low OBP, nor his complete inability to hit for power. But it is, I will freely admit, fun to watch.
Sac bunts are exciting. Hit-and-runs are exciting. Shit, I'm a Sox fan, I watched Jacoby Ellsbury steal home once. And it was awesome. But it was also really fucking stupid. The point of baseball, after all, is pretty simple. Score more runs than the other guy, and you go home happy. Anything that helps you score more runs is good. Turns out, when you run the numbers, that the best way to do that is to have a bunch of players who walk a lot and hit for power. It's not as exciting, I'll admit, as the old "swing at everything and steal any base not nailed down" method, but it works pretty well.
So when sabermetricians go after Ozzie Guillen for bunting all the time, or the Royals for signing players who can steal every base but first, it's not because they hate the little stuff, or don't have any interest in exciting baseball. It's because they want their teams to win, and they understand that drawing walks is more conducive to winning than not drawing walks.
And here's where the politics angle comes in. Fox News was declaring that liberals want to expand government power, as though it were just for kicks, an end unto itself. And it's not true. While I will admit that my heart goes all aflutter anytime I hear that OSHA has written a new regulation, or that corporate tax rates went up by .1%, the main reason that I support government intervention or expanded powers is that it works. I live in a commonwealth, and I expect the government of that commonwealth to do whatever it can to improve the lives of its citizens. If the facts showed that minimal government involvement was the best way to do that, then that's fantastic. But they don't.
Liberals want to expand the role of government in American life when said expansion makes Americans' lives better. Thus, more oversight of coal mine safety: good. Subsidies to help poor people buy health insurance: good. Executive authority to assassinate American citizens by fiat: bad. See how simple this is?
I seem to recall reading in stories that the ability to figure out what works and then do that was one to be admired. It even seemed to correlate with the term "can-do American spirit" a lot. Someone will have to explain to me someday why this skill applies to neither America's government nor its national pastime.
Scott Podsednik is a lousy MLB player. His career OPS+ is 88 (it's like IQ, "average" is 100), his defense is iffy, and he's been pretty injury-prone for the last few years. Needless to say, he's currently employed by the Kansas City Royals. His strengths are as follows: he plays hard, he steals bases (though not at an impressively high rate, and not as many as he could if he would, like, draw a walk once in a while), and he puts the ball in play, whether by swinging at the first pitch or sac bunting his teammates over to second. None of this is useful enough to outweigh his comically low OBP, nor his complete inability to hit for power. But it is, I will freely admit, fun to watch.
Sac bunts are exciting. Hit-and-runs are exciting. Shit, I'm a Sox fan, I watched Jacoby Ellsbury steal home once. And it was awesome. But it was also really fucking stupid. The point of baseball, after all, is pretty simple. Score more runs than the other guy, and you go home happy. Anything that helps you score more runs is good. Turns out, when you run the numbers, that the best way to do that is to have a bunch of players who walk a lot and hit for power. It's not as exciting, I'll admit, as the old "swing at everything and steal any base not nailed down" method, but it works pretty well.
So when sabermetricians go after Ozzie Guillen for bunting all the time, or the Royals for signing players who can steal every base but first, it's not because they hate the little stuff, or don't have any interest in exciting baseball. It's because they want their teams to win, and they understand that drawing walks is more conducive to winning than not drawing walks.
And here's where the politics angle comes in. Fox News was declaring that liberals want to expand government power, as though it were just for kicks, an end unto itself. And it's not true. While I will admit that my heart goes all aflutter anytime I hear that OSHA has written a new regulation, or that corporate tax rates went up by .1%, the main reason that I support government intervention or expanded powers is that it works. I live in a commonwealth, and I expect the government of that commonwealth to do whatever it can to improve the lives of its citizens. If the facts showed that minimal government involvement was the best way to do that, then that's fantastic. But they don't.
Liberals want to expand the role of government in American life when said expansion makes Americans' lives better. Thus, more oversight of coal mine safety: good. Subsidies to help poor people buy health insurance: good. Executive authority to assassinate American citizens by fiat: bad. See how simple this is?
I seem to recall reading in stories that the ability to figure out what works and then do that was one to be admired. It even seemed to correlate with the term "can-do American spirit" a lot. Someone will have to explain to me someday why this skill applies to neither America's government nor its national pastime.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
No Lyric Tonight, Too Pissed
So it's not too often that I get pissed off at Digby, but goddamn was this awful. I will certainly allow that given how dreadful the subject matter is, hyperbole and angry initial reaction is understandable. But for fuck's sake.
The bill in question deals with the (seriously) horrible practice of teachers and school administrators dealing with unruly students by physically restraining them. Like, tying them to chairs. At best. And many of the students in question have developmental or mental disabilities, leading to the further awesomeness of a student who doesn't understand that he's done something wrong strangling to death because a poorly trained or reactionary administrator hogtied and gagged him. So this is horrible, and a federal law banning this is just flat-out unambiguously good. 153 representatives voted against the bill (145 Republican, 8 Democrat), which is certainly morally reprehensible. So far, I'm in my normal "yep, right on, tell it, sister!" mode when reading Digby.
Then she referred to the voters in question as "non-humans". At which point my fists balled up and only heavy restraint saved my Ikea laptop stand from flying across the room, lappy and all.
See, here's the thing. I just finished reading Richard Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany. The phrase "non-human," or some variant (pest, bacillus, animal, etc.) comes up a lot. Dehumanizing one's enemies is a fundamental aspect of fascist or genocidal regimes and parties, and is a major way they legitimize their killing. It's a lot easier to kill another person, or several thousand other persons, when you've been told for years that their sort aren't actually human, but are instead some form of lower animal. It even comes up in societies that aren't openly fascist, when justifying torture, or endless imprisonment, or the need to eliminate a political viewpoint. Glenn Beck does it when he says liberalism is a "cancer." Hell, one of the main critiques of World War II flicks from Saving Private Ryan to Inglourious Basterds is that they use Nazis in the same "hey, they're evil and inhuman, we can kill lots of them" way as Resident Evil uses zombies. It's an unfortunately not uncommon aspect of modern American culture.
And you know who's made a great deal of mention and garnered a great deal of traffic by pointing that out? Yeah, Digby. Linking to Neiwert's work on eliminationism, writing about the corrupting effect of the torture regime... Shit, she even does it in the exact article that's got me fuming: "This vote is yet another sign that this rightwing assault on basic decency toward your fellow man is inexorably defining deviancy down. If you can defend a vote to allow the continued torture of special needs children you can defend anything." So the response is... to dehumanize the people who are dehumanizing special needs kids? What kind of perverse fucking logic is that?
Are the 153 members of the House who voted against this bill wrong? Yep. Are they at best questionable in their moral priorities? Oh hell yeah. Should this level of casual indifference toward the suffering of their fellow humans be seen as a sign of their unfitness for national office? Again, I'd say yes. But they're human. They're all too human. Driven by fear, hatred, superstition, greed, or whatever nasty little failure of morality led them to this vote.
The saint martyred for his belief, the mother defending her children, the lawyer defending the wealthy murderer, the congressman voting for a war, the guard leading prisoners to a gas chamber... Human. Every single one of them. The minute we forget that, the minute that we start seeing our political opponents as non-humans... It doesn't end pretty. To finish, I'll quote a man whose book I bought because it was recommended by a blogger I greatly respected:
"Escaping the downward spiral of eliminationism means seeing those who indulge it as human beings, as our fellow Americans- affording them the very recognition they would deny us."
The bill in question deals with the (seriously) horrible practice of teachers and school administrators dealing with unruly students by physically restraining them. Like, tying them to chairs. At best. And many of the students in question have developmental or mental disabilities, leading to the further awesomeness of a student who doesn't understand that he's done something wrong strangling to death because a poorly trained or reactionary administrator hogtied and gagged him. So this is horrible, and a federal law banning this is just flat-out unambiguously good. 153 representatives voted against the bill (145 Republican, 8 Democrat), which is certainly morally reprehensible. So far, I'm in my normal "yep, right on, tell it, sister!" mode when reading Digby.
Then she referred to the voters in question as "non-humans". At which point my fists balled up and only heavy restraint saved my Ikea laptop stand from flying across the room, lappy and all.
See, here's the thing. I just finished reading Richard Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany. The phrase "non-human," or some variant (pest, bacillus, animal, etc.) comes up a lot. Dehumanizing one's enemies is a fundamental aspect of fascist or genocidal regimes and parties, and is a major way they legitimize their killing. It's a lot easier to kill another person, or several thousand other persons, when you've been told for years that their sort aren't actually human, but are instead some form of lower animal. It even comes up in societies that aren't openly fascist, when justifying torture, or endless imprisonment, or the need to eliminate a political viewpoint. Glenn Beck does it when he says liberalism is a "cancer." Hell, one of the main critiques of World War II flicks from Saving Private Ryan to Inglourious Basterds is that they use Nazis in the same "hey, they're evil and inhuman, we can kill lots of them" way as Resident Evil uses zombies. It's an unfortunately not uncommon aspect of modern American culture.
And you know who's made a great deal of mention and garnered a great deal of traffic by pointing that out? Yeah, Digby. Linking to Neiwert's work on eliminationism, writing about the corrupting effect of the torture regime... Shit, she even does it in the exact article that's got me fuming: "This vote is yet another sign that this rightwing assault on basic decency toward your fellow man is inexorably defining deviancy down. If you can defend a vote to allow the continued torture of special needs children you can defend anything." So the response is... to dehumanize the people who are dehumanizing special needs kids? What kind of perverse fucking logic is that?
Are the 153 members of the House who voted against this bill wrong? Yep. Are they at best questionable in their moral priorities? Oh hell yeah. Should this level of casual indifference toward the suffering of their fellow humans be seen as a sign of their unfitness for national office? Again, I'd say yes. But they're human. They're all too human. Driven by fear, hatred, superstition, greed, or whatever nasty little failure of morality led them to this vote.
The saint martyred for his belief, the mother defending her children, the lawyer defending the wealthy murderer, the congressman voting for a war, the guard leading prisoners to a gas chamber... Human. Every single one of them. The minute we forget that, the minute that we start seeing our political opponents as non-humans... It doesn't end pretty. To finish, I'll quote a man whose book I bought because it was recommended by a blogger I greatly respected:
"Escaping the downward spiral of eliminationism means seeing those who indulge it as human beings, as our fellow Americans- affording them the very recognition they would deny us."
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Ooh, that smell...
Someone's tossing the horsehide around...
Oh, baseball. You are so close and yet so far away. But close enough that your curly-headed detractors have begun their song of discontent. See, Dan Shaughnessy's knickers are all twisted up again. Seems the Red Sox don't have anyone on the club who hit 30 HR last year. And thus we are doomed to once again watch the Yankees dance about and engage in totally non-phallic champagne popping come late October.
Baseball's a simple sport, really. And not even in the "you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball" way. You play a nine-inning game, and whoever has the most runs at the end, wins. Every team does this 162 times, and the eight teams who were the best at it get to go to the playoffs. So it would seem that the key to this particular sport would be scoring more runs than the other teams. Danny's worried that the Sox won't score enough runs without a giant Manny/J-Bay/Big Papi-type masher in the midst of their lineup. And that might be true. (It's actually not, but we'll get to that in a paragraph or three.)
There are, as it turns out, two ways to improve your team's run differential. One, the traditional method of Sox teams from time immemorial, is to hire as many mashers as possible, thus increasing your runs scored and clubbing the opposition into a pasty substance. The other is to reduce the number of runs you allow. Admittedly, this is the recourse of (ugh) National League teams, and is equivalent in the eyes of the Boston sports media to moving to P-Town and opening a bed and breakfast. But it's also effective. For proof, ask the 2008 Rays. Or even last year's Mariners and Giants, who both damn near made the playoffs despite lineups that would have had trouble outhitting most American Legion squads.
And man, oh man, will the 2010 Red Sox prevent runs. Their pitching staff's got three of the top ten starters in the AL, and their 4 and 5 guys would each have a legit shot at the #1 spot on about ten major-league clubs. The bullpen should be solid, and is anchored by a dude who, though gleefully, batshit insane, is probably the best closer alive. And every single fielder on the team, as opposed to last year's "please God, don't hit it to the left side" club, can be described as somewhere between "above-average"(Scutaro, Ellsbury) and "best to ever play the position"(Beltre, maybe Cameron) defensively. Leather will be flashed at Fenway this year, which is a new and intriguing concept. I still remember being in the grandstand in 2003 and participating in a half-sarcastic standing ovation when Manny Ramirez made a running catch on a routine liner.
So the Sox look to hold their opponents to very few runs this coming year. But what about the offense? How will the Sox, those under-30 HR-hitting weaklings, ever plate enough runners to take advantage of their potentially scary-brilliant pitching and defense?
Partly, of course, with their BP-projected .360 OBP. And, perhaps, the fact that 6 of the Sox' projected starters have a pretty good shot at hitting 20+ HR. And the three who haven't done that at some point in their career are an absolute base-stealing monster, an MVP 2B who's also the player that everyone seems to think David Eckstein was (i.e. short, scrappy, and awesome at baseball), and Marco Scutaro. Who knows how to draw a walk and will be batting 9th anyway. These guys are going to wear out a lot of starters, and pound on a lot of bullpens. And this is without factoring in the benefits of seeing the Monster in left 81 times a year.
The thing that really grates on me, though? Not the implication that defense doesn't count, nor the complete panning of the Sox offense because none of their above-average to awesome hitters hit over 30 home runs last year (Ortiz hit 28, Youk hit 27. Beltre and Cameron have both hit over 30 in their career, and we all remember Papi's glory days. Those limp-batted wusses.).
No, it's that writers of Shaughnessy's type (I bet even Dan himself, but I'm too tired to hunt all over teh Google for the right link tonight) were the ones who used to praise the late 90's Yankees for being a TEAM, not centered around a single superstar. And their proof of this was always that no member of those NY squads hit over 35 HR. But hey, maybe there's some quirk of baseball that makes deep lineups where everyone puts up a .290/.360/.460 only work in the Bronx. It is a funny game.
Oh, baseball. You are so close and yet so far away. But close enough that your curly-headed detractors have begun their song of discontent. See, Dan Shaughnessy's knickers are all twisted up again. Seems the Red Sox don't have anyone on the club who hit 30 HR last year. And thus we are doomed to once again watch the Yankees dance about and engage in totally non-phallic champagne popping come late October.
Baseball's a simple sport, really. And not even in the "you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball" way. You play a nine-inning game, and whoever has the most runs at the end, wins. Every team does this 162 times, and the eight teams who were the best at it get to go to the playoffs. So it would seem that the key to this particular sport would be scoring more runs than the other teams. Danny's worried that the Sox won't score enough runs without a giant Manny/J-Bay/Big Papi-type masher in the midst of their lineup. And that might be true. (It's actually not, but we'll get to that in a paragraph or three.)
There are, as it turns out, two ways to improve your team's run differential. One, the traditional method of Sox teams from time immemorial, is to hire as many mashers as possible, thus increasing your runs scored and clubbing the opposition into a pasty substance. The other is to reduce the number of runs you allow. Admittedly, this is the recourse of (ugh) National League teams, and is equivalent in the eyes of the Boston sports media to moving to P-Town and opening a bed and breakfast. But it's also effective. For proof, ask the 2008 Rays. Or even last year's Mariners and Giants, who both damn near made the playoffs despite lineups that would have had trouble outhitting most American Legion squads.
And man, oh man, will the 2010 Red Sox prevent runs. Their pitching staff's got three of the top ten starters in the AL, and their 4 and 5 guys would each have a legit shot at the #1 spot on about ten major-league clubs. The bullpen should be solid, and is anchored by a dude who, though gleefully, batshit insane, is probably the best closer alive. And every single fielder on the team, as opposed to last year's "please God, don't hit it to the left side" club, can be described as somewhere between "above-average"(Scutaro, Ellsbury) and "best to ever play the position"(Beltre, maybe Cameron) defensively. Leather will be flashed at Fenway this year, which is a new and intriguing concept. I still remember being in the grandstand in 2003 and participating in a half-sarcastic standing ovation when Manny Ramirez made a running catch on a routine liner.
So the Sox look to hold their opponents to very few runs this coming year. But what about the offense? How will the Sox, those under-30 HR-hitting weaklings, ever plate enough runners to take advantage of their potentially scary-brilliant pitching and defense?
Partly, of course, with their BP-projected .360 OBP. And, perhaps, the fact that 6 of the Sox' projected starters have a pretty good shot at hitting 20+ HR. And the three who haven't done that at some point in their career are an absolute base-stealing monster, an MVP 2B who's also the player that everyone seems to think David Eckstein was (i.e. short, scrappy, and awesome at baseball), and Marco Scutaro. Who knows how to draw a walk and will be batting 9th anyway. These guys are going to wear out a lot of starters, and pound on a lot of bullpens. And this is without factoring in the benefits of seeing the Monster in left 81 times a year.
The thing that really grates on me, though? Not the implication that defense doesn't count, nor the complete panning of the Sox offense because none of their above-average to awesome hitters hit over 30 home runs last year (Ortiz hit 28, Youk hit 27. Beltre and Cameron have both hit over 30 in their career, and we all remember Papi's glory days. Those limp-batted wusses.).
No, it's that writers of Shaughnessy's type (I bet even Dan himself, but I'm too tired to hunt all over teh Google for the right link tonight) were the ones who used to praise the late 90's Yankees for being a TEAM, not centered around a single superstar. And their proof of this was always that no member of those NY squads hit over 35 HR. But hey, maybe there's some quirk of baseball that makes deep lineups where everyone puts up a .290/.360/.460 only work in the Bronx. It is a funny game.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)