Flaws In The System

One of my favorite sports writers, the Honorable William Leitch has put up a column saying exactly what I had started to write about Rhoden and the All Star Game before I caught his tweet and had to abandon it. It's worth your time.

To that end, I've decided that JnM supports unequivocally the candidacy of Manny Ramirez for the 2009 All Star Game.

The thinking here (background is detailed better in this post) is that the wholesale support of Mr. Ramirez by the fans will end (at least in a small way) the constant focus and attention on PEDs like steroids, and help us move along to greener pastures. I'm not saying it won't end the controversy of Manny; moreso that if we get a few million people electing a player caught using a testosterone supplement to the All Star Game as a starter, it might help the media focus itself on issues we actually care about. To vote, head over to MLB's homepage and click on the upper-right All Star Game 2009 graphic - you can vote up to 25 times!

Hail The King

Falling Into Place

Apologies, my dear readers, are in order. These NBA playoffs have been all-consuming in my household, and the lack of updates from me has been inexcusable. Now that the finals are sorted, I'm back on the horse. Expect more. Stay thirsty. Etc.

Watching the NBA Playoffs has driven home how happy I am with Baseball. The NBA seems to exist as a counter to its own sport; I'm suspicious whether or not Stern even fundamentally likes the game. The talk around every water cooler has been how poor the referees have been in calling the playoffs, but the more interesting aspect to me has been how badly the NBA misunderstands its own fans - watching the games you're absolutely bludgeoned with propaganda, over and over and over, reminding you that the NBA Cares and these courts are where Amazing Happens and it's patently ridiculous. I'll speak for most fans when I say I don't give a shit how much time Lamar Odom spends at a free basketball camp for kids or how often Rip Hamilton spoons food to the destitute in Detroit (a redundancy, I know). What I would like is for a game that is timed at exactly 48 minutes to end in less time than a Lord of the Rings movie. Is it really fundamentally important that the players put on nice clothes? Stern seems intent on polishing the brass; his concern is really deeply racial. He has to "sell" big athletic (mostly) black men to the whole of White America, and he's missing the point. Those swayed by the propaganda are too stupid and too small a minority to matter, and those who need proof of Wallace's mandated kindheartedness won't go to games regardless. America deserves its share of time in the corner, but by and large, we can deal with the complexities of individuals who play basketball. (And if you can't, then go pick up a People Magazine or watch something on E!) What Stern has done is like a vegan who makes a decent tasting vegan version of a dish - maybe a chocolate cake - and brags over and over, "It tastes just like a regular cake! And there's no animal products in it!"

Yeah, but: Who the hell wants vegan cake?

Referees are calling games like prison wardens afraid that is they take a finger off the trigger the inmates will burn the building to the ground. Look at this play - Howard is whistled for a technical foul for exulting after a pretty amazing finish. This is illegal, according to Stern. Notice too on the same play Varejao, for whom I have complete and utter contempt, tackles Howard from behind. The NBA is arguably at its apex in terms of talented players, and the Stern-mandated focus has resulted in a game that acts as weights on the ankles of these players. Shit, if I were Howard, I would have stood over Varejao and yelled for a few minutes. It's a damn game, and it's getting harder to wade through the pile of bureaucratic nonsense to enjoy it.

With that as preamble, how can we not appreciate baseball all the more? Rick Riley, apparently missing the irony in a golfer bored by the slow speed of baseball, has excreted a column I refuse to link to about how he'd change baseball if he were commissioner. One such idea is to install a clock to make sure pitchers take less time between pitches, to which I humbly say: stick it up your ass, Riley. He also thinks similarly to Stern in that he believes throwing at a player is a capital offense; fans of the game know better. Baseball doesn't need rule changes (Other than the start time for playoff games being moved up - is it wrong for an important game to be played in daylight? And that's not even a rule thing. See?). Attendance is down incrementally from last year, but it's mostly due to the economy, and on the whole most teams are doing well. Playing 162 games means that the total figures for people watching games in person absolutely annihilates the other three major team sports, and if you're making a joke about Hockey not being a major sport, then let's go ahead and be friends.

There's an obvious timelessness about baseball that has an appeal for a huge swatch of people. This gives the powers that be - whatever my/your objections with Selig are - reign to actually promote the sport, and they're doing a pretty damn good job at it. I'm specifically referring a few of Major League Baseball's official venues to fandom - MLB.TV, the DirecTV Extra Innings, and, most relevant of all, the MLB iPhone App. For those of you with an iPhone and even a passing interest in baseball, go buy it. Right now. Find the ten dollars, or skip any takeout meal you'll buy today, and you'll thank me for it, I promise. Because this thing is amazing. Up to the second scores, complete game coverage, video highlights, end-of-game summary videos, stats, pitch-by-pitch diagrams... it's all a little much, in a completely positive way. My favorite feature is definitely the radio. Each in-progress game has a link to audio, which will play a radio announcer's call of the game. Which announcer? Well, you get to choose that, because the App lets you pick which team's radio man to listen to. It's incredible. Given that you can buy an iPhone for like 100 bucks, it's probably worth a new phone by itself

If this seems like the entire post has existed for the sole reason of praising MLB's employees, then I'm sorry; it's only a third that.

Baseball has its problems, of course. PEDs are becoming a monomaniacal obsession of those that cover the game, for one, and this in turns upsets all the old hats. We have the Joe Morgan versus Common Sense fight-to-the-death. There's no shortage of issues to talk about; salary caps, owners, seat licenses, beer costs or whatever else it may be. But as the NFL scratches for the bottom floor, the NBA fights its own players and the NHL slowly becomes a niche sport, I'm appreciating more and more the simple archaic perfection of baseball as it finds its way through our modern filtration systems.

Meanwhile, this season has started to get interesting. My unseen post on the Blue Jays and their hideous efficiency has become a moot point, and the players the Yankees bought to perform in the summer months are doing just that. It helps they play in a wind tunnel blowing out of right field, but still. We have a few interesting divisional struggles, a sudden deluge in players with mental handicaps, the return of Justin Verlander, the utter disaster in Washington, Grienke's ascension, the pitching staff of the Giants against their batters, the implosion in Tampa, the rise of the Marlins, the coronation of Pujols, the 300th win of the second most unlikeable man in baseball, and hundreds of others.

Amazing is happening right here, damn it.

A Polite Discussion of Terms

Hot damn do I love Carlos Zambrano

edit: Now with bigger, juicier pictures and video! (as long as MLB doesn't notice):

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?!