Who Will Play Center Field in Colorado?

Trading Dexter Fowler for jack shit still boils my blood despite the trade having occurred several months ago. Rox brass claimed they had to get rid of Fowler to free up some cash. Bullshit. Fowler would only make $7mill this coming season and slightly more in 2015, which is very reasonable for an above-average lead-off hitter and above-average center fielder. Furthermore, the Rox immediately turned around and signed Justin Morneau to the same money over two years!

Fangraphs listed the Fowler trade as one of the top 10 worst transactions this off-season, observing how Fowler is 

"...still a quality player, in the prime of his career, and the Rockies basically gave him to the Astros in order to free up enough room in the budget to sign Justin Morneau, who is older, worse, and not really much cheaper. Moving Michael Cuddyer to first base would have freed up playing time for Dickerson or Blackmon in the same way that trading Fowler did, and the team would have been better off for it. Lyles and Barnes are unlikely to ever make any real contribution in Colorado, and it’s hard to see this series of moves actually paying off for the Rockies."

On the flipside, the Fowler trade made their list of the ten BEST off-season moves from the Astros' perspective, as

"...Fowler has been an above average outfielder for the last three years running, and is just 28 years old, so a short term spike can’t be ruled out. In exchange for two reasonably priced arbitration years of a quality player with remaining upside, the Astros gave up two fringe talents that they won’t miss in any real way. This move flew under the radar because it was completed during the busiest day of the off-season, but the Astros picked up a ton of value in this deal."

And when Rockies brass came out in favor of moving perennial Gold Glover, Carlos Gonzalez, to center field the acquisition of Brandon Barnes -- a center fielder -- looked even more idiotic than before. While Cargo is probably an upgrade over Fowler in center, for sure, who would the Rox play in left field? 

Once the club decided to pay over $4 to get Drew Stubbs for one year, also a center fielder, the Rox brass sheepishly shied away from allowing their most prized "investment" (read: the human being named Carlos Gonzalez) the opporunity to flash his leather in center field, where it's needed most, and instead assured us and him that he'd remain in left, lollygagging after base hits and rarely getting the chance to show off that canon of an arm. Is it for fear of an injury? It's not like Cargo plays as hard as Pete Reiser, for christsake.

Anyway, I'd written some other stuff here about all our outfield options (Blackmon, Dickerson, Stubbs, Barnes) but forgot to save it and now it's gone. Screw it. Nothing about how the Rockies organization is run inspires any hope or excitement anymore. Especially after giving up on our center fielder for no fucking reason.

A starter and a reliever

Day after day, the ball player will go through his nine innings, three outs to an inning, three swings to a turn, until the season ends, and then wait anxiously through winter for the routine to begin again. What, we might exclaim, could be more meaningless! After all, what Purpose is served, what is accomplished by these repetitive, endlessly repeated performances? Listening for an answer, we discover only the philosopher dares speak. And when we hear him say "Pleasure," in disappointment at his answer we become ourselves philosophical. 

--Edward F. Mooney, "Nietzsche and the Dance"  (1970) 

Adios, Jim

After hearing that Jim Leyland finally stepped down as manager of the Tigers, I had to go find this paragraph I once wrote about the old dude some years ago...

"Jim Leyland, hiding in the darkest end of the dugout, seems confused and angy, looking like that blind rat in The Secret of Nimh – his thin fragile face holding on to whispy gray hairs collecting in a bushier version of the dictator's moustache; strawlike outgrowths of dead white whiskers packed tightly, as tidily trimmed and pruned as that frail body of his comically suited up in tight baseball pants and pitcher’s windbreaker. A hollow shell of a baseball coach no longer permitted to smoke in the dugout, a nervous wreck. No longer capable of helping his players in any way whatsoever, he finds himself unable to even follow the game he thought he still understood. Sad, in the way an Alzheimers victim slowly loses touch with what the rest of us call ‘reality’. Frightful, in his resemblance to a bitter old SS rat. Weak from his conservative, stubborn and closed-minded ways. The Tigers lose again."

 
Photo borrowed from The Onion: "Angry Jim Leyland's Mustache Keeps Falling Off While Yelling at Team" (July 17, 2008).

But after seeing that clip of Leyland dancing in the locker room after clinching the AL Central for the third consecutive year, he looked almost...human. And I almost feel sorry for the guy.

What still bothers me is that Illich, Dombrowski and whoever else is part of the Tigers' brass didn't have the cojones to hire a Latino manager -- former Detroit infielder/outfielder Carlos Guillen comes to mind -- to lead Los Tigres to the World Series. Brad Ausmus? Seriously? 

Lame.

Field of Dreams

If money still happens to be
the sad currency by which we
value things like time,
performance, art, and
play

then my dream becomes a wish
within the confines of this world.

There might one day be a kind of
dry spiderweb material
spun on a grander human scale --
quite capable of withstanding
immense pressure and push and pull --
while remaining invisible
to the distracted human eye.

The web would work like backstop nets
to protect the fans now sitting
extremely close to the playing.

Foul territory diminished,
fan interference abolished,
no room for fat cops to stand 'round
cuz all the kids be getting closer:
the best seats in the house are saved
for the unaccompanied youth.

Now we can leave those deep outfield
walls and monsters right where they are.
My stadium is intimate
yet spacious and wild with nature.

There are no ads, no anthems, nor
flags or military symbols.
No corporate insignias
and no lucrative boob-tube deals.

Scoreboard? Sure
Jumbotron? Nah

Welcome to the ballpark

Hardball Hukommelse

It's opening week in the 2013 season and if I allow myself to think sentimentally about this great game, a steady succession of childhood memories associated with baseball begins to flow through me...

-1987...opening a pack of Topps cards in my grandparents' living room, discarding the hard stick of pink gum from the stack, and seeing Bo Jackson's "Future Star" card sitting on top. Seems like it was the only time I ever scored a truly priceless card. Today, it's worth about $2 sitting somewhere in my parents' crawlspace.

-Sitting on the steps of the house we moved into in 1994, flipping through several laminated baseball card albums with the neighbor kid, Justin, who was a few years younger than me. It was hot and sunny. He's dead now; crashed his car into a gully while driving drunk.

-In the backyard of our old house, my eight-year-old self would set up three flimsy bases in a rough diamond where second base got plopped no more than ten feet from the home run fence -- a very short, old, splintery 3ft. wooden fence with the upper third carved into some kind of lattice pattern -- and one of those tightly-strung pitchback net backstops placed behind the homeplate area, which had a red-bordered strike zone stitched onto the center of that wonderfully cooperative construction. I'd write out the 1988 Blue Jays or 1990 Padres starting lineup in pencil in a little notebook, leaving enough space to tally their R/H/HR/RBI/AVG stats. It was then time to play whiffle ball. As pitcher Jimmy Key or Andy Benes I'd throw to each imaginary batter of that day's opponent (or most of 'em at least), only surrendering hits or walks or HBP to opposing players whom I liked. When it came time for the home team to bat, I'd do my best to impersonate each of the Jays, studying their cards for clues as to how they'd hit -- not just righty or lefty, but gap power or slap singles and so forth. Every so often, I'd even make a defensive play -- always a web gem.

-Attending a Denver Zephyrs AAA minor league game in the early 90's at Mile High Stadium for the 4th of July fireworks show. There were 80,000 people there to see minor league ball!

-With the Alameda Pirates little league team, I remember making a diving stop at 2nd base against the Lakewood Tigers and throwing the coach's son out at first, after which he yelled from the first base line: "What a play!" Might've seemed like a small tip of the cap on his part, but it stuck with me in several ways. I appreciated the compliment and it made me feel good, but it also told me that it's cool to praise the opposition when they do something great.

-Grandpa Kroh in his gold hatchback Honda parked directly behind homeplate, keeping score for both teams during dozens of my little league games. Running up to him after I hit my first and only home run (a grand salami) to ask if he'd seen it, he replied, "oh I saw that grand slam alright, but who was that slugger that hit it?"

-After spending a season chasing down fly balls in the outfield since nobody else seemed capable, my mom told me to write on the head coach's thank-you card: "Thanks for a great season. Wish I could've played more second base." I didn't want to write it, but I did. I still feel bad that coach Juan Pena had to read that rubbish.

-As a younger lad, around six or seven, standing in the dugout entrance at one of my dad's softball games as the bat-boy and not paying attention, feeling a cannonball explode into my chest and knock me back to the bench and down, getting the wind knocked out of me and seeing my dad and a few other players standing over me asking if I was alright. I eventually got up, I guess, but clearly remember the old man who ran the little concession stand come over and tell me I could have any drink I wanted, on the house. I didn't know what "on the house" meant, but I asked for a Yoohoo chocolate milk, which I'd always wanted to try, and drank it on the bench with my dad's buddies acting proud of my toughness.

Zito's Paradox

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in motion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the pitched ball is therefore motionless"

Christian Player-Products, on sale now...and then

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game...The big league games are too fast for the beginner and the newspapers don't help. To read them with profit you have to know a language that comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice.

Jacques Barzun, 1954

I've gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don't follow it anymore. I just see the headlines and turn my head away in shame from what we have done with our most interesting game and best, healthiest pastime.... The commercialization is beyond anything that was ever thought of.... Other things are similarly commercialized and out of proportion. But for baseball, which is so intimately connected with the nation's spirit and tradition, it's a disaster.

Jacques Barzun, 2008

Although reading our blog might not require the same kind of philosophical training that Barzun deems necessary for comprehending the sports page, we're not exactly floating softballs here. In fact, this post will probably razzle and confuse all you Bible-thumpers out there. But frankly, in America, you're in the majority and atheists like me are in a minority, so buck up.

Before reluctantly endorsing some good-old mass-consumption of this year's MLB playoff product, there's another commodity which the Big Show churns out, year after year after year, whose linguistic practices urge this particular baseball-language philosopher to analyze, before turning to some truly Pagan themes in the next post.

Biblical allusions (illusions?), archetypes, and allegories still circulate within the sewers of speech that snake through American Sports rhetoric. And this bothers me to no end. Even in an age of supposed secularism, lessons of a most punitive Moral Order persist. Language of the straight and narrow steeped for over a century in holy water sterilizes the playful spirit. Humorless, conformist narratives manufacturing humorless, conformist disciples.

On the field, in the sports pages, and across the baseball blogosphere the unending barrage of Christian discourse continues to assault our humanist dispositions.

Major League Baseball has become a worldwide leader in the manufacture and distribution of several lines of commercialized Christian products. The most ubiquitous of all is the Christian Athlete, often seen grazing on the grounds of $400 million ballpark castles and cathedrals across the country.

North American professional baseball has manufactured this type of player-product since its inception over 150 years ago (Christy Matthewson, pitcher, was known as The Christian Gentleman exactly 100 years ago).

Sometimes the product features a sensationalized, lost-then-found backstory about redemption and success through Faith (everyone's favorite example: Josh Hamilton). Sometimes the player opportunistically dons the mask of the Christian Athlete, only to cast it aside backstage (e.g. Reggie Jackson). But most of the time, the Christian Athlete is presented as completely and utterly normal.

Very few, if any Americans felt their stomachs turn as I did after the stoic journeyman pitcher, Ryan Vogelsong, came out of the metaphysical closet in his post-game interview by immediately attributing his 7-inning gem to the benevolent willing of "God".

The predictability of this player-product is its primary draw -- a familiarity device engineered to please the majority of those who consume such a product. For this particular player-product, television is still the ideal medium in which to be marketed. The Christian Athlete is groomed for television by sports psychologists, personality coaches, and media trainers: shown how to act, told how to talk, and handled with care. This is the flagship model, the traditional standard by which other, improperly functional models are contrasted against.


Indeed, the relative few number of player-products which do not comform to standardization are usually just ignored and permitted to operate as an anomaly -- something that doesn't fit in, even in the eyes of the casual observer. For, these players display none of the rituals or gestures that accompany the Christian Athlete. Their ironic a-conformity is made featureless by the rhythms and grammar of superficial television broadcasts; potential ambiguity is made mundane, insubordination is labeled as juvenile or childish behavior, and all expressions of independent thought or attitude are suppressed by their superiors.

The Christian Athlete, on the other hand, is instructed to keep silent on all matters pertaining to politics, society, culture, and anything else outside of baseball. Like a politician on the campaign trail, they have sacrificed personality for the appearance of professionalism. They are driven by the fear of possibly offending some potential consumer, somewhere. Everyone is a potential consumer of this player-product and should any unconventional characteristics be revealed about the prototype, yeegads! - some people might not like it.

The rote mechanical way in which the player-product has been programmed to respond to questioning will, however, often include one or more references to their Faith. Utilizing Christian language in the context of sport is an easy way to link the twin passions of blind faith and fanaticism together, rendering the consumer more easily manipulatable. It also makes the story behind each player-product a fundamemtally simple, yet mythically powerful one. Watch as the player-product transforms into a silent warrior, driven onward and upward by his Faith and the promise of unfathomable financial gains.

And MLB continues to engineer and streamline what it sees as its most marketble asset, falling strictly in line with Christian consumer preferences.

But the player-product also happens to be an employee, a worker with constitutional rights. And their employers are bound by labor laws which explicitly prohibit preferential treatment or hiring practices toward one religious group over any other religious or non-religious group.

This is called discrimination. We've seen it before in baseball in more malicious, cruel, and segregating forms. Now, it's more subtle and benign.

But make no mistake about it: from the Christian rituals staged at the ballpark (so-called Faith Days at our publicly-financed stadiums), the redundant gesturing performed by player-products right on cue (pointing to the sky, crossing onesself after each televised hit ot homer), and the vocabularies employed in the way Baseball Men talk about their trade ("I'd just like to thank God for the opportunity..." "We feel blessed..." etc.) we can clearly see the homogenizing effects of the discourse of Christianity, thriving in the sewerage running through the discursive regime of American Baseball.

When Baseball finally reaps what hath been sowed by Christian normalization, led as it is by political and financial forces of Capital, it will once again find itself behind the times, clumsily out-of-step with progressive forces of society, lurching along stubbornly and always feeling itslef the victim of unfair persecution. 

("Fair!? What the fuck, 'Fair'? Who's the fuckin Nihilist around here!?")