Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Jeff Francoeur is an idiot


Non-Braves fans often ask me why Jeff Francoeur drives me so crazy. He's young and powerful and exciting, they say!

Well, it's because of this kind of stuff:

For Atlanta outfielder Jeff Francoeur, the search for a more disciplined approach is elusive and the source of occasional torment. Francoeur began this season with loose goals of 80 strikeouts and 50 to 60 walks. But he's always been an aggressive player, and he's wary of becoming too passive in the quest for a higher OBP.

"If on-base percentage is so important, then why don't they put it up on the scoreboard?" Francoeur says.

Except OBP is on the Turner Field scoreboard, with Turner Field being the place Francoeur plays half his damn games.

I'm reminded today that there was a rumor floating around last winter about the Braves and Royals doing a straightup swap of Greinke for Francoeur. Everyone denied it at the time, but please, if there was even a scintilla of truth to it, DO NOT TELL ME. I don't think I could bear it.

(thanks to J.C. Bradbury's Facebook status update -- a first for me, tip-wise -- for the link)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:33pm

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

It happened, but I missed it


Longtime readers know that, from time to time, I have to give ATH a miss during the season. Usually it happens when various strains of B.S. infect my life the night before, which was the case last night. Apologies, but such is life when you're essentially moonlighting.

Regular blogging will resume later this morning.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:45am

Perspective maker


The next time I say something snarky about the Braves' Greg Norton, please, someone, remind me to shut the hell up.

Jesus.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 6:00am

Doug Glanville questions the pitch tipping allegations


My daily spewing about the Roberts-A-Rod book is up over at NBC.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:41am

My Morning in Exile


Apologies once again for the lack of ATH this morning. I hate not getting to it. Barring power outages, catastrophes, and/or restraining orders from Selena Roberts' publishers, it'll be back in the morning. As for now:

  • The Dodgers may be running away with this bad boy.


  • The Yankees don't need to "get tough." They need to win games.


  • Dice-K is on his way.


  • Given their pitching apocalypse, how on Earth are the Angels leading the league in starter ERA? After all, they don't play the A's every day.


  • The previously mentioned comments about Doug Glanville's pitch tipping piece.


  • Finally, I linked Geoff Young's THT piece, so let's just eliminate the middle man.
    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 11:18am

    The Brewers’ Logo


    One of the cool things about baseball is that despite how small our world has become, how nationalized, standardized, commoditized and sanitized everything insists on being, there are still healthy pockets of localization. Things teams do and things that fans think that don't instantly make the mainstream. It's far less prevalent than it used to be, of course, but there still remains a fair amount of the healthy, color-enhancing provincialism about the game that I hope doesn't go away any time soon.

    Example: Despite all of the retro trends and the opinions of nationalized opinion spewers like me, there are folks in Milwaukee who really want the old baseball glove logo to disappear:

    Look around Milwaukee. Look around Miller Park. What do you see? Most likely you see the greatest baseball logo in Major League Baseball, the Brewers old ball and glove logo the team wore regularly from 1978-1993. Nowadays, the Brewers break out throw back uniforms from that era for every Friday home game. As cool as that logo is, it's time to retire it. Here's why. It's time to move forward, respect the past and build the future.

    The estimable Brew Crew Ball feels the same way.

    I love the old blue and gold jerseys and wish the Brewers went with the old mitt logo full time, because that's still what I think of when I think "Brewers." But ultimately neither the marketers, the networks, the trendsetters or even people like me get to define what the Brewers are all about. Brewers fans get to do that, and for some of them at least, the old ways aren't anything to which they want to return.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 11:40am

    Zack Greinke: Tabula Rasa


    My NBC colleague Mike Celizic on Zack Greinke, in a column entitled "Finally, baseball gives us as hero to admire":

    Finally, baseball has a fresh young superstar nobody can throw so much as a pebble at, a kid who is the perfect antidote for Manny B. Manny and A-Fraud and everything else that drives you nuts about sports . . .

    . . . A lot of fans wish they had A-Rod’s life. Not many would want Greinke’s. They would want his talent, to be sure, but not his demons. That’s why we’ll probably never find ourselves ripping Greinke. Once we appreciate what he had to go through to get where he is now, we can wish him nothing but the best. Even if he were pitching against our team for the last spot in the playoffs, it would be impossible to wish him ill.

    I don't begrudge Celizic's enthusiasm for Greinke for a moment (or Posnanski's or the many others who have weighed in in recent days). The challenges he has overcome were formidable and the talents he has displayed are supreme. If Greinke quit playing baseball today he'd be someone we'd talk about for years, and as we sit here today we wouldn't have a bad thing to say about the guy.

    But if we've learned anything over the past decade -- and should have learned over the past century -- it's that ballplayers are mere men. Some drink too much. Some are racists. Some do drugs. Some don't treat women very well. Some battle all manner of personal demons, the likes of which, if we knew them, would make us think of them as anything but the fine young men the sporting press would have us believe. They do one or two extraordinarily difficult things outrageously well, and they provide us with tons of entertainment, but they are just men, for all of the good and bad that entails.

    The thing about it, though, is we rarely know this stuff when players are breaking out like Greinke is now. It almost always comes later. As Bill James said in his comments about Doc Gooden in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:

    When a young player comes to the major leagues and has success right away, writers will almost always write about what a fine young man he is as well as a supreme talent. Never pay any attention to those articles or those descriptions. Albert Pujols is going through this now . . . people who didn't know Albert Pujols from Jack the Ripper six months ago and have never talked to him more than six feet from his locker are writing very sincerely about what an exceptional young man he is . . . Sportswriters, despite their cynicism or because of it, desperately want to believe in athletes as heroes, and will project their hopes onto anyone who offers a blank slate. The problem with this is that, when the player turns out to be human and fallible, people feel betrayed. It is a disservice to athletes to try to make them more than they really are.

    We may have to wait forever for Albert Pujols to exhibit some fallibility, but I have this feeling that he's merely the exception that proves the rule.

    Before Greinke's canonization, Alex Rodriguez was pegged to be the man to restore honor to the game by sanitizing the home run crown. Before A-Rod, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were the game's heroic saviors. I recall an article from the late 80s talking about how Barry Bonds was the perfect antidote to the nastiness that the Strawberry-Gooden Mets unleashed into the public consciousness, and as James noted, Gooden was once thought of a fine young man poised to breathe fresh air into the game himself. I'm sure we could trace that trail back to the deadball era if we wanted to.

    But let's not blaze a trail into the future with this, OK? Let's let amazing ballplayers be just that: amazing ballplayers. Let us take note of the hurdles that guys like Zack Greinke has overcome, but let us not ascribe larger heroic qualities to such men simply because they play ball. "Hero" is too strong and baggage-laden a word anyway. As James notes, it places a heavy burden on young men, and these guys are under such scrutiny day-in and day-out that they really don't need it. What's more, the term hero it necessarily assumes its opposite -- villain -- and demands that we search them out too. You know, to restore balance to the universe and everything. Often -- as in the case of A-Rod and Gooden and Bonds and all of the others -- they're the same people, just older. I have no reason to think that will be Zack Greinke's fate one day, but I have no reason not to think it either, so why do we even want to tempt it? Lord knows that if Zack Greinke does fall one day it will be bad enough without having all of us hero worshipers around to comment on it.

    Hero creation, worship, and subsequently, destruction has long been a part of baseball. But it's not an essential part, and in my mind not a desirable part. Why don't we try to dispense with that whole game and see what happens? I have this feeling we may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:01pm

    Quote of the Day


    Via Whitlock, who continues to lay waste to Selena Roberts, comes a quote from Roberts herself from last night's Jim Rome show which pretty much explains why I've been writing what I've been writing since last Thursday:

    "You give people a litmus test, Jim . . . You say to them, you go back to them over and over again and you say, 'Is it consistent what they're saying to me? Have they changed at all? Do they have a credibility issue? Is there anything in their past that might make me wary of this person?' "

    If that's the test, how can anyone presume that she's shooting straight?

    As I mentioned over at NBC this morning, I now have the book, and have started reading it. It's not exactly a dense read, so it shouldn't take too long. I should have my reactions to it up by Friday at the latest.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:45pm

    The Fisking of Roberts has begun


    A little over 48 hours since the book's release, and people are starting to pick the nits. I'm not sure I care about the "was he in Milwaukee or was he in Detroit" kind of nits that hell of a lot, but if there are tons and tons of them, it suggests that the commercial motive that led to the rush to get this book out far outweighed any pretense of good, accurate reporting and the development of the themes Roberts has pretended to care about so much.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:28pm

    Wall Street vs. the Minors


    Pete Toms sends along a story about a Princeton pitcher poised to go in the second or third round of the draft. He's a business student, and there's a discussion about his choices:

    Hale, a 21-year-old junior from Marietta, Georgia, majoring in operations research and financial engineering, said he’s already decided that he’d rather play minor-league baseball than return to Princeton and a possible career on Wall Street.

    “I don’t know if I’m in for those hours, so we’ll see where baseball takes me,” the 6-foot-2, 195-pound right-hander said in an interview at Princeton’s Clarke Field. “It’s probably a better option right now with the whole economy, and it’s my dream, so I obviously want to do this.”

    As a baseball player drafted in the late second or third round, his skills would earn him a one-time signing bonus of $400,000-$600,000, said Baseball America Co-Editor in Chief John Manuel. The major-league minimum salary in 2008 was $390,000.

    Entry-level Wall Street jobs for Ivy Leaguers are paying in the $100,000 to $200,000 range, according to eFinancialCareers.com. Postings by employers on the Web site were down 47 percent in April compared with the same month last year.

    Amazingly, nowhere is it mentioned that being a baseball player is amazingly cool, while working on Wall Street sucks by every human-based measure.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:56pm

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