The Ol' Ballfield

Matleuse Outage

Sorry I haven't posted in a week... DIII football season has been taking a lot of my time. Don't believe me? Fine, but it's true. Here are a few quick thoughts, and tonight I will LiveBlog game four of the Series:

-Kenny Rogers is cheating, but I always thought it was kind of cool how pitchers doctored the ball. If he got caught, he should have been ejected. He wasn't caught (technically), and everyone knows about it now, so he'll be more careful next time. Everybody does it, and it's not a huge problem.

-Gaylord Perry is a gigantic douche. He takes his status as a greaser and uses it to elevate him, sort of staking a claim to the art of doctoring. Who do you have more respect for, Whitey Ford, who had a great career with some doctoring and kept quiet about it, or Perry, who had a great career with some doctoring, and keeps shooting his mouth off in a bragging manner about how he "beat the system", even though countless pitchers have done it since the beginning of time, and who has chosen for this to be his legacy to baseball. How many baseball fans know Perry won two Cy Youngs? Not as many compared to the factions that know him for his doctoring.

-An interesting payroll/performance graphic. The most effeciently-run teams? Minnesota and Oakland. No surprise there. Kudos also to Florida, who come in at third with a $15 million payroll. WOW. And reverse kudos to the Cubs. Dusty Baker needed to go, but I think Jim Hendry needs to go even worse. (Warning to Firefox users: sometimes this link makes my browser close, don't know why. Fair warning.)

-Billy Beane and Tony LaRussa are suffering from the same disease: "A-little-bit-overrated-because-a-book-came-out-about-how-great-you-are-but-as-a-result-
the-backlash-has-been-overcompensating-and-now-you-are-somewhat-underrated-itis." Beane, in addition to suffering the wrath of crotchety sportswriters everywhere, has incurred more criticism for firing Ken Macha. Beane has been labeled as too controlling over the team, not giving his manager enough sway or power, as well as overruling his decisions and diminishing the manager's standing with the players. A number of A's player have gone on record saying Macha was not a good handler of the team's needs, but people have speculated that Beane forced them to say it. My thoughts:
Look, Michael Lewis may have polished Billy Beane's knob a little much in Moneyball, but that doesn't change the fact that Beane has done a remarkable and revolutionary job at the helm of Oakland. The A's, under Beane, have more collective victories than any team in baseball apart from the Yankees, and have made the playoffs more than any AL team apart from the Yankees. With a payroll that has never been in the top ten in baseball, this is a remarkable feat. And it wasn't because of Art Howe or Ken Macha; it was because of the players put on the field by Billy Beane. Managers going into Oakland should know that this is Beane's team, and he calls the shots. That's not the way it has been done in baseball, and it's not the popular method even now. But Beane's rejection of these standards is what has made him successful.
As far as LaRussa is concerned, George Will's Men at Work is also a bit of a knob-polisher. It led people to view LaRussa as some sort of law-school-trained deity of baseball thinking, and when he didn't win a World Series since 1989, that led to his labelling of "overrated". The people that do this labelling are the same people that fell for Will's romanticization; i.e. THE ONLY ONES THEY'RE REACTING TO ARE THEMSELVES. Tony LaRussa may not be a God of managing, but he gets respect from his players and the media, handles his pitching staff well and plays the percentages as best he can. That's really all that can be asked of a good manager.

But I guess we'll find out tonight!

posted by Carnival @ 10/25/2006