The Dart Through the Dime

First off, to those of you who check JnM regularly enough to know our output has been lacking, thanks for doing so. Within the week expect a treatise on the toast of the AL East, the Toronto Blue Jays. And soon we'll be back to our normally updating schedule - Mondays and Thursdays.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to bring attention to some gorgeous new NBA commercials from Adidas. These were done in collaboration with Free Darko; both the look and the stylistic commentary are copped from their book. The commercials - the second of which is my favorite - are embedded here, but feel free to jump over to FD to read their post and maybe cop some merchandise (this shirt and this print are both worthy of praise) to support the good work they do.

See the Ball, Hit the Ball

Before I get into this, I should say that JnM is by no means a reactionary, angry site. We're for baseball, for the people who play it, for the foibles and the eccentricities and the human bits that make it all worth watching. For new visitors, it might be worth checking out our Ethos, and maybe skimming one or two of our other posts to get a sense of what we're about. Note in first link how Ramirez is listed as a player who exemplifies what we love about the sport. We've said from the beginning that steroids aren't as big a deal as they're presented to be by the media at large, and that the numerology in baseball can be as much of a burden as it can an asset. So when a player who embodies so much of the good in baseball gets hoisted out on a skewer by yet another irresponsible columnist holding aloft his personal code of ethics as the Truth, I think we should say something.

Jayson Stark's new article about Manny Ramirez's suspension is up and can be found here. You should probably read it before continuing.

Every single part of that article is horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit. Starting with the first sentence, where Stark decides to start his article burying Manny with a grand statement about being proud to be an American and proud to be amongst such a forgiving populace, continuing to the last, where he says it'll take more than his (Manny's) hair and his bat to earn forgiveness. It's horseshit because it's built on a faulty premise and is thus fallacious; that Manny doesn't deserve to be forgiven because he didn't take on the full brunt of the blame in his apology. The people who have done this and have been forgiven (deservedly) apparently begins and ends with Pettitte. There's not another name listed, though Stark infers there are others. These people who have been forgiven were so absolved because they took their punishment like a man. It's a ridiculous idea that misses the point completely.

I don't want to step on the toes of upcoming posts we'll do about steroids, but I've never felt that juicing is enough to warrant a tarring-and-feathering. It's just not that simple. Even for a player like Rodriguez, whose use was/is more a statement of insecurity than anything else, and whom I don't even care for, the Steroids is an insignificant event; more interesting for the psychological implication it makes about him than the padded stats. So while I may think it's not a big deal regardless of the player, Stark clearly does. On his own terms, then: Manny was caught with a female fertility drug that raised the amount of testosterone in his body. Pettitte used Human Growth Hormone to heal his pitching arm. In simple black and white terms, Pettitte's was the greater baseball sin. It's not even close. Also worth noting is that Manny has passed at least a dozen tests for illegal substances in the last few years, and given the nature of steroids, its benefits and consequences on the body, combined with Manny's strengths as a player, it's pretty reasonable to say that there's no real reason to suspect he's had a history of juicing. Bill Simmons, of course, takes a maudlin approach when he contemplates the cataclysmic repercussions of Manny taking some pills, and though he's more realistic about what steroids mean in a general way, somehow Ramirez's failed test causes him to lose his shit. He's wrong, too, but his is a more personal disappointment and while he misses the point - Manny and Ortiz still were the Ruth and Gehrig of our time - his last sentence sort of gets it right. Everyone's cheating.

Baseball is a game of cheating, though. Stealing signs and steroids, whether to win a game or prolong a career, are all part of it. So when Simmons says "Everyone was cheating back then," he's half wrong. Everyone has always been cheating.

Back to Stark. There's a weird sort of fascist bent to whole article's chiding. Stark darkly intones that Manny's reputation before this suspension is enough cause to throw him overboard; whereas Pettitte's stellar history renders him easier to forgive. This is where I take the most umbrage. You see, whereas Stark seems to think Manny has no fans, that his behavior is sinister and his past unforgivable, I see it the other way. This play, for better or worse, sums up what I love about Manny. He's a ridiculous, child-like person; he leaves the field to pee in the middle of a game, wears sunglasses with earbuds in them during warm ups, he doesn't seem to be taking any of it seriously, ever. There are a thousand other examples of this, and anytime an expression is coined to explain a person (Manny being Manny), you can rest assured there's a pattern of behavior. But Manny's acts aren't childish; they, as I said just now, are child-like. And the joy Manny has for baseball is obvious. Witness his slump busting homerun against the A's a few years ago in the playoffs, where he stood back and admired his hit for far too long, and you won't see a player rubbing his excellence in his opponent's faces. You'll see a player watching the ball go over the wall, finding his swing again.

Manny is one of the top 2 or 3 right handed hitters in the history of baseball. He's a World Series MVP, he's clutch, and a dozen other positive adjectives that I can't list here. Moreso than that, though, he's wholly himself and authentic. He has style and verve and swagger and is one of the handful of players that I would steal money to use to watch him play. That is why he'll be forgiven. Not because we're his parents and we decide punishment, or our ideals of purity and sanctity have been compromised. That's stupid, and where Stark is fundamentally most wrong.

I'll wait for Manny to come back because Manny is a baseball player: One who plays a game. That he does so in accordance with his own head rather than some fictionalized utopia a sportswriter dreams of is all the better. I'd wish to everyone that they find the happiness and excellence in their own jobs or hobbies that Manny Ramirez has in baseball.

So, Jayson Stark, we here at Joy in Mudville posit that you (along with Plaschke and his typically completely ludicrous response, and a number of other ESPN talking heads), are completely and totally wrong about this. And if you think for a moment that baseball is more about Pettitte than it is about Manny - that we're watching the game for Andy's dour expressions or impassive mein - then you can take your ball and go home.

The rest of us will be happy to fill the stands.

Burn, Basepaths, Burn!

Another assortment of quasi-organized thoughts from our foreign correspondent and has-been jersey taxidermist, Blylevin's Beard.

Did you see Jacoby Ellsbury steal home against the Yankees?! I mean, wow! Sorry, I’m excited, and I’ve gotten way ahead of myself. I’m gonna back it up, like a lot, and seemingly switch topics entirely, but I beg of you, please bear with me. Because that steal of home was awesome.

Once Barry Bonds had eclipsed perhaps the most treasured record in all of sports, a feat responded to by Hank Aaron with predictable grace, and by Bud Selig with predictable weaseliness, and by the American public with all the enthusiasm of a car owner paying for new brake pads, Major League Baseball blackballed him. They shut him out, hoped he’d shut up, and directed our attention to Alex Rodriguez, the clean-shaven-former-teen-phenom, the pinstripe-clad golden boy at the height of his considerable powers, destined to restore the shine on the newly-tarnished Home Run Throne. And then it turned out that he’d tested positive for ‘roids while a Ranger. And some new book clams that he may have been juicing as far back as his high school days, and has played with needles while in a Yankee uniform, too. Oh yeah, and while in Texas he allegedly tipped pitches to opposing batters in hopes of getting the favor returned – selling out his teammates for an infinitesimal boost to his own stat line. To put it bluntly, this is a bonafide shitstorm. And this time, the MLB can’t slug their way out of it.

The tradition of enticing disillusioned fans back to the ballpark with the promise of dingers aplenty stretches back to baseball’s seminal shitstorm, the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The following year, umpires began cracking down on spitters (and emeryballs, and goopballs, and snotballs...) and introducing fresh balls once those in use got scuffed up, dramatically tipping the scales in favor of hitters: ergo, the dawn of the "Live Ball Era." The Babe became The Guy, and was soon joined by the likes of Lou Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Jimmie Foxx and Mel Ott in reeling fans back in by knocking more and more pitches out of the park.

Most recently, of course, the “Problems? What problems? Check out this 500-foot blast!” method was employed following the disgusting/depressing 1994 strike. At the pinnacle of this swing stands the McGwire-Sosa derby of 1998, but those two certainly weren’t alone in the effort: Bonds, Griffey, Sheffield, Matt Williams, hell, even Jason Priestley, er, I mean Brady Anderson, got on the Round-Tripper Trolley! Only this time around, it wasn’t decreased levels of vaseline on the ball making everybody homer-happy; it was increased levels of testosterone in the players. Baseball’s best and brightest in the post-strike era weren’t “farm-boy strong” a la Enos Slaughter and Mickey Mantle, they were rapidly morphing into Lou Ferrigno lookalikes, and it wasn’t because of the new Nautilus machine in the clubhouse, either, and everybody knew it, but they thought the party would last forever, and then it blew up in MLB’s face, and that pretty much brings us to the shitstorm at hand.

So like I said, with Barry long-beyond-tainted and A-Rod newly-tainted, it’s become clear that the longball won’t cure what’s currently ailing baseball. To my great delight, however, it appears that what will is a return to old-school, Senior Circuit speed-and-defense baseball. Once again, did see Jacoby Ellsbury steal home against the Yankees?! How about Carl Crawford’s sextet of steals against the Red Sox. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when Ryan Howard gets ahold of one, too, but he does so once every 15 at-bats or so. Jimmy Rollins’ wheels, on the other hand, are on display in every inning of every game he plays. So I say give me more Emilio Bonifacio inside-the-parkers, more Ichiro Suzuki stop-on-a-dime bunts, more Reed Johnson diving catches, more of Hanley Ramirez on the rise and Juan Pierre on the rebound [Ed: This last one's not going to happen. Live in the now, Beard]. Give me the second coming of Vince “Firecrackers Ahoy!” Coleman and the Redbirds of the mid-‘80s, with a lineup full of switch-hitting, count-working, drag-bunting, hit-and-run-executing speed demons who somehow found a way to make baseball played on turf a glorious thing.

Let’s put this steroid mess (and all the other baggage A-Rod’s bringing to the table these days) behind us. One stolen base at a time. Speaking of which, did you see Jacoby Ellsbury steal home against the Yankees?!

A Pacific Typhoon

Because I can't say anything more about the fight than these pictures do.

If you're looking for analysis of the beautifully phrased, putting-this-into-context sort, the type of post I wish I could write about boxing, head over to Boxiana (on the "sites we're following" box to the right) and check out this latest post, Tell it to the Judge. It's excellent work.

Baseball commentary to resume tomorrow, this fight ended up eclipsing the entire weekend of sport for me and pushing other things out of my brain.

Don't Look at My Finger, Look at the Moon

When I was younger I was not a fan of Michael Jordan. Back then I didn't really appreciate basketball the way I do now, the otherworldly athleticism and talent and dedication and beauty that comprises the pro game. There was more to it than that, though, because when I did focus on the NBA, I disliked Jordan, actively and routinely. Bear in mind too that this was when the Jordan/Bulls crested as a player and a team, during the mid-late nineties, so in all truth there were only infinitesimally small flaws to find. Even granted all that, though, I hated Jordan and never liked watching him play; hated his little dainty hand poses and first-step travels and anything else I could critique. I wasn't alone, either, and I can remember Rick Reilly penning an especially hateful column lambasting Jordan and the Bulls and Chicago fans (though for the life of me I can't find it online), and finding still more people who agreed with me, especially if their replica jerseys weren't red and black.

That's a pretty common thing, the pinnacle of one sport being hated by their rivals. But there's something corollary to that I've noticed and wanted to talk about: the indifference by modern media to that peak. And I mean this point very esoterically, because all my evidence is anecdotal and I'm sure a google search will clarify that the numbers skew even. So here goes:

It seems to me that most of our attention is devoted to players who have potential to be great, or who are on the descending side of their mountain. Meaning the periods of time where that player is among the all-time elite, where that player is doing things no one ever has, no one's interested in talking about them. It's (the ascent and decline) easy to talk about, I know. It's also more interesting to speculate than it is to give slightly differing opinions on what's already happened. Those two guys over in that bar probably have seen the exact same footage as each other, but one will tell you Ali was the greatest to ever dance in the squared circle, and the other will yell about how Frazier essentially went 3-0 against old Clay. It's the sort of opinion that gets compared to assholes. What-Ifs, though, are different. You get to imagine what would have happened if Wade and Caron shared the same backcourt, if Simms were drafted to the Niners instead of Montana, if Gibson played integrated ball, if Babe stayed a Sox. That's fun. Those two guys will bleed your ear with the numbers Williams would have put up if he never went to war.

I want to pay more attention to those few moments that really matter than I do hoping more monents will come. Because it's really easy to come back and punch up the numbers and go "yep, turns out there was never a better 4 than Tim Duncan," or, "finally, Federer lost the top ranking." That shit's easy. What's harder to do is appreciate greatness in its own time.

This, of course, is in no way specific to sports. Rolling Stone hated Led Zeppelin, and so forth. Perhaps there's a general laziness w/r/t intertia in the casual fan or sportswriter; show me the all-time numbers and we'll talk, or no one will listen to this crap, in another way of speaking. Or we just get to fetishize stuff we loved as younger version of ourselves, attaching with solemnity our allegiances to players and focusing our fandom with them at its center, thus hazing the next generation with impossible-to-top standards. I'll be the first to realize I grew up watching Griffey and defend him to this day as a top 10 all-time player so vociferously that it's clear my childhood passions are inflamed, rather than a rational sports conversation. But that hasn't stopped me from finding new players and recognizing genius when it steps on the field. Nor, I posit, should it hold back any of you.

What prompted this essay was a recent tweet by the FreeDarko guys about how they love watching Rondo play. And it occurred to me that recently I have read many pieces about Rondo, and his uniqueness and effectiveness over the last year and these playoffs. I am not doubting for a moment that Rondo is a baller, because he is. He's a player. But he's no Dwyane Wade. Not even for a second. And this season, while leading the league in points and averaging more assists than LeBron and having more blocks than anyone his height EVER HAS, Wade's been playing at what we have to assume are the physical limits of a basketball player/human being. Yet, outside of a mid-season SI piece, I haven't seen anything lauding Wade with the type of ridiculousness he's deserved; that praise has been handed to those douchey USC linebackers. Maybe that's a football-saturation problem, though the draft is a big deal in basketball, too.

We're all anxious to see what will happen.

So here's the real problem - we don't see what we've been waiting for when it happens because we're so consumed with what's about to happen. Put another way: Rondo maybe in 5 years develops the type of complete game that Wade has right at this very moment. Sanchez will probably never make that Pro-Bowl Peyton puts on his calendar every year. Or if we do come around to recognizing players, it's SI's mostly fawning piece on the Kid or the soon-to-be-written Tim Duncan appreciation posts that remind us how excellent he was. That's not good enough.

This hasn't been too focused on baseball, I know. It's almost harder than the other big two, because baseball's draft is small and the path tends longer to the MLB than the other two (or at least the process is quieter), and also in no small part because of the numerology that the words "All Time" creates. You can't just say in any serious baseball circle that you think Griffey is one of the all time greats, because his career average is hovering around .280 and his power numbers dropped and etc. But there was a year in 1996 when Junior played baseball as well as anyone in the history of the sport ever has. And I'm glad I was paying attention.

What shifted the waters for me most memorably was this benchmark NY Times article David Foster Wallace wrote about Roger Federer. It's a magnificent dissection of a world class talent at the absolute height of his game, and for me it was important enough so that I not only have been a fan of Roger's since, I have also now been casually following tennis - a sport I never watched even once - for the same period of time. It's a tribute to the late DFW's genius, to be sure, but it's also a compliment to Federer. When a player at that level bores the media with his dominance, then maybe, just maybe, we ought to demand more from our media. Or from ourselves as fans.

It's one thing to accept, however grudgingly, that player X on the other team is good. What this is about, and what I've been trying to say is that it's a far, far better thing to really appreciate that game for what it is. To not give a damn that you're born and raised in Chicago when you watch Pujols in those rectangular boxes, because sweet god he's one of the best to ever swing a bat.

That's part of the core of what JnM is about: We're for the breaking of false allegiances for the forging of worthy ones - stop rooting for the Rockies because you were born in Grand Junction, you should root for the Giants because... well, bad example. Root for a team because you like watching them play, you have a few favorite players with a shared jersey. Don't ignore Adrian Peterson because you wear cheese to football games. Don't dismiss King Felix because you're not from the pacific northwest.

These flashes of physical genius don't sustain themselves for very long, so let's make sure we're looking at the right thing.

The Right One In

In 90 feet, Jacoby Ellsbury made the entire week of baseball a footnote. A week that found Pujols hitting so well that superlatives have become as effective as a broken condom when trying to describe him. LaRussa looks worn out just trying to compare him to great hitters, it's like being in the company of such Greatness is exhausting. We're still early enough in the season where things like the Blue Jays and the Mariners at the top of their divisions aren't worth noting or focusing on, where the Natinals' abysmalness isn't yet historical. Besides, all evidence tells us that the Marlins will win it all this year, anyway.

Back to Ellsbury: It's not the first time someone has stolen home, hell, Pettitte had the same thing happen to him two years ago in Toronto. But this felt bigger. This feels important, in the way that the indefinable and subtle shifts of momentum and capital-D Dynasties are known to have occured. Because we know the Yankees will probably lose the division and maybe miss the playoffs again and they don't have a cohesive team and Teixeira looks vaguely inbred and so on and so forth. This three game set in Boston showed us how truly bad they are compared to a high standard. The Indians humiliated them in their new house, but the Sox took the floor right out from under them; those brooms waving in Fenway portend something awful if you're a Yanks fan. And when the player taking that floor away is Jacoby Ellsbury... let me just say that this is the type of play that in 15 years could lead off the Ellsbury appreciation clip packages on ESPN after a long and storied career.

What I have been thinking about watching the Yanks-Sox series is the nature of fandom. In the WBC, Pedroia and Jeter spent time together and exchanged through the media the sort of "He's a good guy!" inanities you'd expect. Now this isn't noteworthy in any major sports; basketball's All Star weekend ends up a circle jerk of love amongst the games' elite. In any walk of life, the two dozen or so greatest talents in any field are probably so alike in so many ways that when the veneer of competition is off they got along swimmingly. Of course, various grumblings were heard in Yankee and Red Sox fanbases, the usual "They should HATE EACH OTHER!" complaints. So what I wonder is: from the players' perspective, what does that Rivalry mean? As fans, we get to pick our side and affix the versions of Love and Hate we use for sports to our respective team and really invest ourselves in the outcome. It's very easy. But if you're a millionaire athlete; if you're Damon, if you're Lowell, what makes these games special? This isn't basketball, where a Wade can trascend teams and impose his dominance, there is a reliance in baseball on ones' teammates that only soccer comes closest to paralleling. (Football and Hockey both technically qualify, but the former has half the team sitting for half the game and the latter is more a niche sport than anything) And the only thing I can come up with is the pressure. The type of "playoff atmosphere" stuff you always hear about when the crowds are really into it, pushing their team to win.

Basically, it seems to me that the reason that rivalries like this are so intense, so hard fought and so enduring is that the fans will that into existence. Players can find enemies on the field, and undoubtedly some squads will come to dislike others over the course of seasons, but that's the flip side to a passing fancy, lost quickly and certainly not sustained over generations. It doesn't matter, really, what the players think of one another. It matters that the fans demand the other team's blood.

Supplemental Fiber

A few quick site notes here: I am resolved to update more often. This regularity will hopefully help with reading as well as with commentary on current baseball events our longer player-specific essays lack.

So after this week, look forward to: regular posts on Monday and Thursday mornings. Our longer efforts, essays, esoteric ruminations and articles from sources not myself will come less often and will be put up on Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe a bi/tri-monthly schedule for those.

Comments, suggestions and the like are always appreciated, either through the email link on my name or through the comment button button below each post. Thanks for your support!