TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Friday, September 17, 2004

Unfrozen Caveman MVP

Tonight's extremely entertaining Red Sox-Yankees game resulted in a 3-2 Sox victory, and I'd like to use it to again start the agitation for Johnny Damon as MVP.. He hit a homer to leadoff the third to put the Sox on top, stole a base when the game was tied, and ended up hitting the go-ahead RBI with a bloop hit in the ninth inning off Mariano Rivera. Damon's having a season, and the Manny-Ortiz MVP talk is misplaced. Damon's pacing this team, rest assured.

Speaking of that bloop hit -- when was the last time you saw Kenny Lofton dive for a ball? It's hard to believe he's not stretching out for that kind of ball in a tie game with the Yankees' lead slipping away. I didn't buy the rep Kenny had with Cleveland for dogging it, but I'm beginning to wonder.

The game was delayed by rain twice, while the Yanks were down 1-0, and the glacial pace at which Orlando Hernandez and then Tanyon Sturtze worked was something to behold. The Yanks took a 2-1 lead in the fifth, and it's amazing how the pace of the game perked up once it was legal. The remnants of hurricane Ivan held off the rest of the game, but we can imagine that the first horrible stirrings of Hurricane George, due to hit New York hard about October 5th, are working themselves up in Tampa Bay.

Tomorrow's game looks like it will be rained out due to Ivan's last gasps. I will sound like a broken record here, but I'll say again it's time for baseball to stop washing out partial games that get rain and don't get to four and a half or five innings. Just count them and make up the rest of the game instead of rescheduling the whole thing, and these end of the season jams baseball is having now won't be nearly so bad.

Pat Robertson, Calling for Barry Bonds

I've heard of the 40-40 club, and in recent years the 500 club, but who ever heard of the 700 club until now? I don't remember anybody referring to the 600 club when Bonds was coming close. (I just did a google search on "600 club" and couldn't find a single baseball reference in the first 13 pages among 5,870 hits on the term. Lots of references to car clubs, though.) I think somehow the pop culture reference to the religious program wormed its way into the sportscast vocabulary, and we now have a club we didn't know about. So...for those of who remember "Alice's Restaurant"...how many people does it take to make a club? Why are some achievements referred to as being a 'club' and others not? These aren't rhetorical questions, I just can't make heads nore tails of it.

Congratulations to Barry, though. There aren't enough exclamation points on the internet to truly describe having this kind of a season at his age and stage of his career, much less be reaching milestones like this while being among the league leaders in the stat. That would make an interesting study sometime: players who reach significant career milestones while being among the league leaders in the same category. Strikeouts seems the category most amenable to this phenomenon: Ryan, Johnson, and Clemens all reached top-10 career numbers the same year they were first or second in Ks.

One of these Things is Not Like The Other

...one of these things just doesn't belong. You know how to play! Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, George Steinbrenner. Steinbrennner's eligible for induction into the hall of fame, despite his felony conviction on election law violations and his suspensions from baseball for tampering with Dave Winfield, not even to say his important role in destroying the economics of the game to turn it from a middle-class sport to one for the champagne set. Perhaps that last is a bit too harsh, but I'll let history judge. Which is not what the New York Times' Buster Olney is doing today in a piece for ESPN that argues Steinbrenner should be in the Hall of Fame! Bill Veeck had to be dead for five years before they elected him. Among categories of Hall of Fame inductees -- players, managers/coaches, broadcasters, writers, owners, the "owners wing" is the least selective as it is.

I won't impugn Buster Olney's motives, although he current has a book on the best-seller list on the Yankees that was based on years of exclusive "insider" access -- I'm not sure Steinbrenner would stoop to that kind of quid pro quo, although who knows. But I might question Olney's judgment or perhaps his sanity at arguing that Steinbrenner has been important or even good for the game of baseball. (One is tempted to blame Stockholm syndrome.) The most ludicrous assertion is that all Steinbrenner really cares about is winning, not the billion-dollar enterprise. I'll give Steinbrenner plenty of credit for being a smart businessman, but it's a distinction shared by many scalawags and few honest criers. He's just the latest strong-arm in the history of sports business, and I'm not even sure Ban Johnson deserves to be in a Hall of Fame that doesn't include Marvin Miller or Curt Flood.

posted by The Crank 9:53 PM