Baseball Isn't About Feeling Good

At the beginning on the 2007 baseball season, after the Mets had won the NL East Division easily the prior year, Jimmy Rollins said this:

"The Mets had a chance to win the World Series last year. Last year is over. I think we are the team to beat in the NL East, finally. But, that's only on paper."

The Phillies then won the division by one game and Rollins was named the 2007 NL Most Valuable Player.

In 2008, Johan Santana signed with the Mets and their center-fielder Carlos Beltran, flush with the excitement landing a marquee Ace brings, said:

"So this year, to Jimmy Rollins, we are the team to beat."

Now, this is pretty tame stuff, I'll grant you. Baseball doesn't lend itself to the sort of grandiose predictions and boasts that football or basketball often do. It's the nature of the game; hitting the ball a third of time you bat is an excellent accomplishment and the season essentially lasts a half year, so getting all Namathy and guaranteeing a victory is both useless and antithetical in many ways. But what Rollins said in response while in spring training is the stuff of legend:

"There isn’t a team in the National League that’s better than us. The pressure’s back on them if you ask me. They were on paper the best team in the division last year and they were supposed to win, and they didn’t. One, there are four other teams in our division who are going to make sure that doesn't happen, and two, has anyone ever heard of plagiarism? That was pretty good, especially coming from him. He's a quiet guy, so it was probably shocking when he said it. Not shocking in a bad way, like 'Wow, I can't believe he said that.' More like, 'Wow, he finally said something because he's a leader on that team and you definitely need to be a vocal leader."

In one fell swoop he decimated Beltran - who is an excellent player - the Mets and the entire National league. That year, of course, the Phillies went ahead and won the World Series.

So the question I want to ask here is this: Why isn't Jimmy Rollins a bigger deal? Because he damn well should be.

Hell, earlier this year Davey Johnson, in a fit of what we'll call Larry Brown-type myopia, started what appears to be the corpse of Derek Jeter over Rollins at short.

Baseball, perhaps more than any other professional team sport, suffers from a surplus in terms of recognition. It's not just the huge rosters and the ever-changing lineups; football is essentially nine faceless men and a couple recognizable position players. It's also the fact of the teams themselves, at no point does there seem to be any focus on more than a couple for any reasonable period of time from the national sports media. For most of the decade, in fact, those teams have both been in the AL East. This sounds more unkind that I mean it, because I can't really blame the press for doing so- following baseball takes work. The kind of time that young kids and older men have in abundance, who memorize lineups and stats and take score at the game and things of that sort. Ask any baseball fan in his/her mid or late twenties or early thirties who the Cardinals have at left and they'll probably look back at you blankly. Some won't be able to name their team's starting nine. But you can bet your ass when they were 13 they knew that back and forth. Football is easier to watch, easier to follow, easier to field a fantasy team. All that means, at least as far as this essay goes, that no one is really getting stories on a team unless that team is the Yankees or the Red Sox.

And somehow the Phillies are essentially a small market squad. Last year's WS matchup with the Rays was basically murder to the MLB brass looking for ratings; no one on a national level cares about them. Cole Hammel, the handsome white pitcher, got a cover story on SI after they won, and Rollins did too in 2007 when he won that MVP we've discussed so much. You know who the last Philly on the cover of SI was? Not Howard. Think later. Think Steve Carlton, in 1983. Philly as a city is so obsessed with the Eagles that they themselves don't apparently care about their baseball team. Anecdotally, a friend of mine who was born and raised in Philadelphia evidenced this to me without even knowing. As the Phillies made their WS run, he was happy and casually supportive. When the Eagles lost to the Cardinals, he was almost put on suicide watch. (This could snowball to a rather unkind diatribe of the fans in Philly, and I won't do that. At least not now.)

Rollins, though, should be above this. As a baseball player, he's among the game's elite and for my money the best shortstop in the NL. He has all five tools (the most notable of which is his speed - he's transcendentally fast), plays the game beautifully and is maturing; winning Gold Glove awards while hitting more home runs, lowering strikeouts, moving the runner over more, taking walks, etc.. All that, though, takes a backseat to his personality, and I mean that in the best possible sense. Jimmy Rollins is funny. He's smart, he's quick in interviews, he's the sort of guy who can transmit in 5 second the type of creativity and humor that shows like The Best Damn... can't manage in a full hour; the type of person who has the laconic ebullience Kobe and Bron and countless other NBA players wish they had. He's the one player who you half-want to retire so you can watch him instead of Kruk on Baseball Tonight. That clip a few posts down from the Dick's Sporting Goods commercial is notable because his version of getting hit with a baseball from a pitching machine is substantially funnier than professional comedian Adam Sandler's.

Growing up in Oakland while the Athletics were at their most recent championship form, Rollins idolized Henderson. Now, Ricky has himself over the years become an industry of self-parody; he started referring to himself in the third person before anyone. He also played the game in a hubristic, flashy way that was worth watching even if you didn't like baseball: snapping the glove quickly from his side to catch pop-ups (and every now and again missing the ball while trying to be so cool), wearing retina-searingly bright batting gloves to run the bases, stealing with an intent and purpose that bordered on sinister, sliding headfirst every single time; Ricky was one of a kind. Rollins, to his eternal credit, shares with Ricky none of the self-aggrandizing nonsense or third person speech patterns, but has quietly taken a bit of style and flash for his own. He runs with a low center of gravity that suggest a running back and slides with the abandon of youth, he hits and fields with a dialed-down intensity and grace that calls to mind a very powerful engine running in a low gear. He plays the game Ricky would have played if Ricky didn't believe Ricky was the best baseball player in the world.

Rollins, I hope, will get his due. The type of player he is with the type of personality he has doesn't come around often. I won't exhort you to watch him any chance you get - remember, following baseball is hard - but what I will say is: while Jimmy Rollins is around, we should be paying attention.

PLAY BALL!

Unshakable Faith

Pujols has been a low profile lightning rod internally here at JnM since long before we started the site.

A certain member of our staff who tends to be more numbers-aware than I has posited, rightly so, that Big Al's numbers are in many ways face-meltingly incredible. I'll let him make his own argument, which will come here at some point this season, but I've been less than impressed with Pujols as a player than he. It's not for lack of remarkable moments; as the city of Houston can probably attest to. It's been hard for me to pin down what exactly it is I don't like about Albert, and my argument was mostly a hodgepodge of suspicion at his hitting prowess and physique, the lack of physical grace in the Maysian sense, and Pujol's own churlish comments at Howard's MVP award a few seasons back.

[Quick aside there: For background's sake, if you're unfamiliar, Pujols carried a pretty average Cardinals team to the WS in 2006, while at the same time finished second in MVP voting to the Phillies' Ryan Howard. The numbers sort of wash out, Pujols with a better average and Howard with better power - RBI and HRs - but Howard put up some gaudy digits towards the end of the season and was seemingly the only player in Philadelphia trying to win a baseball game, so in the end he won the award. The awards are largely subjective, and I don't want to step on the toes of an upcoming post about what the MVP award should mean, but it didn't then and doesn't now seem like that big of a deal. Especially considering that Pujols won the thing in 2005. And the fact that he got a ring should probably abate his pain, but he went ahead and decided to give his ridiculous opinion about the voting, which went:

"I see it this way. Someone who doesn't take their team to the playoffs, doesn't deserve to win the MVP."

(apologies for the easy picture)

Which came across as severely selfish and self-aggrandizing. It has actually gotten worse with age; seeing as how now Howard won his ring last season and Pujols was awarded MVP for a non-playoff eligible Cardinals squad; one would assume Pujols would turn down the trophy for philosophical reasons - unless he was simply being in a bitch. In any case, it didn't serve his reputation well.]

Which bring me to this recent Sports Illustrated cover piece on El Hombre, which I strongly encourage you to read. While not revelatory or even particularly interesting, it has swung me in a small measure to the side of fandom, for probably the opposite reasons that Mr. Posnanski wishs.

It's pat with the standard writery set pieces that in large part we hate about MSM sports coverage: kids with disabilities, straw arguments, very little actual baseball discussion, and so on. But what it reveals about Mr. Pujols is a consistent excellence that has had little conversation to this point (his thick/strong but not lean body style and almost flawless eye, combined with a swing that seems too perfect all land on the Bonds side of supplement-suspicion, as was his lack of fanfare coming up through the system [in the way Ellsbury or Sizemore were lauded], this piece explained how he's been a baseball prodigy since he started playing) and a religious devotion to baseball that has sapped him of all personality.

But maybe that's where his appeal lies. Duncan is, after all, one of my favorite basketball players, whose style exists as a negative (detailed here much more eloquently). While not a perfect parallel, I think Pujols might be the baseball version of Timmy D. It's exemplified best in his position; usually first base is where the lumbering power hitters sit and hope to not be made fools of; Fielder and Vaughn spring to mind, but Pujols has made the non-remarkable and workman position a bastion of his proficiency and is quietly the best fielder on his team. His swing, too, is the most praised part of his game and almost without peer, but it's less memorable and flashy than we expect, somehow. See: Manny.

The sort of non-sport specific things we normally glean from our premiere athletes - the various stylistic changes Jordan inspired, or the backwards hat and easy grace of Griffey; hell, even the simple adornments of Ripken - are lacking from Pujols. Here too, he is in Duncan's good company: wearing an absurdly ugly goatee and that huge necklace, Pujols further manages to mess up his baseball uniform in a way Duncan could never attempt, tucking his pants into his cleats. Pujols, to his credit, makes this endearing; and really it all means is that outside of his stance we can't see any kids trying to emulate his game.

But this isn't a bad thing. Pujols, playing in and to St. Louis, will probably never be the hottest baseball player on the planet.

All evidence points to him being the best.

Scuffed Your Spikes

I'm not entirely sure where I'll go with this, but the commercial below merits a discussion. Should be up in few weeks.

Re-boarding the D-Train

The following is from our soon-to-be regular contributor. We're still working on his profile, so I'm posting this on his behalf. Ladies and gentlemen, Blylevin's Beard:

Not a spring training goes by that I don’t internally develop some far-fetched wish into a bold claim, and then agonize over that outcome - something that I knew from the beginning, deep in my colon, was an incredible longshot. This year, I’m looking for Dontrelle Willis to be named AL Comeback Player of the Year. The Tigers are approaching this situation with far more caution than I am. They have, after all, been through this before. In 1976, Mark Fidrych was arguably the most electrifying player in baseball. At only 20 years old, he drew nearly a million fans to his 29 starts, 24 of which he went the distance in, 19 of which he won. Fidrych wasn’t just an astoundingly accurate and effective pitcher, though – he was The Bird. With a penchant for stomping around the mound, talking to the ball, and sporting a glossy porn-‘fro, he was downright unprecedented. Then came a knee injury sustained while horsing around with a teammate, which led to a torn rotator cuff, from which Fidrych returned prematurely – twice – and 162 innings scattered over four years later, The Bird was done in the bigs. Willis’s arrival on the major league scene was damn near as dramatic as Fidrych’s. 19 years old, with that high leg-kick that wasn’t quite Spahn and wasn’t quite Marichal but evoked comparisons to both, that jaunty-angled cap, that fastball that far exceeds it radar gun reading as it explodes from his hand and darts and runs like fastballs rarely do, that high-wattage grin… as with Fidrych, the delight that Willis inspired in fans outshone his statistics. Unlike Fidrych, Willis’s best was yet to come: in ’05, he won 22 games, and struck out more than thrice as many batters as he walked. Then he began to stumble, for reasons that remain largely mysterious, with a solid-but-unspectacular 2006 season followed by a year in which he served up nearly three times as many homers as he had in ’05. When the Tigers acquired him (as a somewhat-suspicious “icing on the cake” in the Miggy Cabrera deal) and signed him to a fat three-year deal, it was a gamble. If you’re going to gamble, though, you may as well bet on a 26-year old lefty starter with All-Star credentials, right? Then 2008 happened.

A horrific start to the season was mercifully interrupted by a knee injury, and by June, Willis was pitching in the minors and it was generally agreed that the best move for everyone involved was for him to stay there for a while. Amid a Tigers season rife with disappointments, this one was tough to top. The most frustrating aspect of it all was the “Why?” factor: Why can't he throw strikes anymore? Why do the strikes he does throw (almost all four-seamers) wind up 400 feet or more from the catcher's glove at which they were aimed? The progression from “Wow!” to “Why!?” was so steady that it's hard to blame any physical malady. And that's a troubling thought. If the barriers that Willis is up against here are psychological in nature, then the Tigers have perhaps less reason for optimism than they did as they crossed their fingers while watching Fidrych long-tossing in the spring of ’78 (and ’79, and ’80, and…). In recent years, physical woes have proven more commonly surmountable than mental ones. Just this past year, Liriano returned from a horrific elbow injury to renew his credentials as one of the game’s best starters. Meanwhile, Rick Ankiel, who followed a long, hard road to resurrection as an outfielder after seemingly catching wildness the way one might catch the flu, fell off a statistical cliff after steroid allegations began to hound him. Other notable victims of “problems upstairs” include Pete Harnisch, whose attempts to quit chewing tobacco effectively derailed his career, and John Rocker, whose jackassery boomeranged and transformed him from thunderbolt-slinging showstopper to wandering gopher carnival practically overnight. Though none of these situations mirror Willis’s, they don’t bode well for him, either. Jim Leland, Dave Dombrowski, and the rest of the Tigers’ brass have two further reasons to grimace even moreso than their forebears did 30 years ago: 1) Willis is making A LOT more money than Fidrych ever did, and 2) at least Fidrych’s glory days were spent with a gothic-scripted “D” on his cap; it’s possible that the Marlins have succeeded in getting Willis’ best, then passing him off at just the right time. These are a less than appetizing pair of considerations, to be sure.

The beauty of spring, though, is that amid the grapefruits and the cacti, the coaches hitting fungoes and the pitchers jogging the warning track, hope springs eternal. Willis has been streaky thus far, struggling to hit his spots in one inning, cruising through the next, but in his highlights he's really shone: sitting down Bobby Abreu, Miggy Cabrera and Magglio Ordonez in order with a total of seven pitches, for instance. And that feels like the first step towards a Comeback Player of the Year award to me.

...upon the rock

We owe a substantial debt to FreeDarko, the (to our mind) definitive sports analysis site on the computernets. We want to put that upfront, because the impetus behind this endeavor is largely inspired from their work, and while we'll take our own journey and compose our own manifesto and do our own thing, FD is the Letterman to our Conan. Or we're Letterman to FD's Carson. In either case, theirs is a lofty standard, and if we can achieve a tenth of what they've done, in relevance or productivity, we'll consider this a wild success.

So what to say here at the start?

Joy In Mudville is borne from a desire to talk about baseball in a way we haven't seen done before. We're dissatisfied with the way sports reporting has evolved, how numerology and Moneyball have become the full extent of baseball analysis. We hate how websites we once relied on for trenchant information have become sports gossip sites; Gawker for athletes; the British soccer-player-tabloidification of American players. We abhor the K zone, the centerfield camera angle, the pore revealingly close shots, the inane announcers, relentless crowd cutaways and the general state of baseball on television. We submit that there is nothing so beautiful as a baseball game on a sunny day, nothing so tense as a two out, two-strike pitch in the bottom of the 9th knotted at 3, nothing in sport so unencumbered by modernity and so perfect in its imperfections as baseball is.

And so, this is our attempt to do better for baseball.



Joy in Mudville will be a website devoted in part to the indefinable essence of our beloved sport. We believe players are more than .313/36/132/.465 or fielding percentages, that baseball is poorly served by a simple box score or scorecard; we find our baseball in the poetry of a double play, in pre-swing rituals and the post-swing follow through. In the interminably long summer days, the season that lasts half a year, the brush-back, the leg kick, the first-to-third movement on an outfield single, those are the bits that get lost and ignored and we come here to reclaim them, to put them back in the discussion, and maybe - just maybe - to reframe the way baseball is talked about.

Baseball is an easily defined game that isn't meant to be, a team sport rendered wholly individual that remains cohesive by necessity.

We aim to celebrate the athletes who make the game worth watching, we include among them, but don't limit it to - Manny, Dontrelle, Lincecum, Pujols, Vlad, Ichiro, Wright, Upton, and Pedroia. We wish to find angles of debate undiscussed previously, to talk about CC's straight brim and Vlad's tarred helmet at indications of personal style that gets left out of more general discussions about their age or salary. We posit that Willie Mays is the best player to ever put on a uniform. Josh Gibson is our home run king. Barry Bonds was already a top 15 all-time player before he got jealous of McGwire and Sosa, and that steroids really aren't that big of a deal.

In many ways we're unsure as to what this site might be. We ask you, the reader, to give us a shot, to cut us a little slack at the onset, and to pass us along as you see fit. We do this in and with all sincerity: JnM is a serious celebration of a sport we love, and though like many of our age we've been sheltered under the tent poles of sarcasm and satire and pithy comments, this we do without irony. We're not blogging in the standard sense, and further essays and posts will be sporadic and without a set schedule; at the least we plan on weekly updates. At cause, of course, this number will increase significantly. There are still a number of days before the 2009 season begins, and to fill that space we'll soon roll out a few essays that we hope will sum our ethos and our style up in a pleasing way. They'll include a treatise on Alex Rodriguez, a celebration of Mays, a defense of Jeff Kent, and very possibly a discussion involving Mark Fidrych.


Come help us reclaim baseball.