Poetics

You know, baseball gets a bad rap these days. Whether it's steroids, or the length of the games, the increased specialization of players, the supposed reliance on homeruns, or the lack of complete games. In particular, over the past week the game has endured several black eyes. A-Rod's testing positive and admitting steroid use. Tejada pleading guilty to lying to Congressional staffers. Robbie Alomar's health has been called into question. Former catcher Jim Leyritz, who is charged with vehicular manslaughter, has had his bail revoked. The Marlins ballpark proposal seems like it's falling apart. It's easy to forget, frankly, how awesome the game is.

So, since it's Valentine's Day for a few more minutes, (and a very happy Valentine's Day to all of you), The Common Man thought he'd wax poetic about the five things he loves most about baseball. Be warned, The Common Man claims no impressive talent, just enthusiasm. And so, without further ado:

5) The Wild Card

The purists say the Wild Card,
is an abomination,
that rewards the mediocre teams
who should be on vacation.

But the Wild Card, every year, adds some extra spice,
to seasons that once would have been dead.
And millions of fans who would be depressed and alone,
can watch Buck and McCarver instead.

(hmmm...maybe there is a downside to this Wild Card.)

4) The Trade Deadline

Every year in July,
The rumors, they fly,
And there's an excitement that hangs in the air.

Who will get CC?
And who will get Manny?
And who gets the hero who will take the team there.

To the land of October,
Of game winning homers,
Of pennants, and races, and cheer.

And who gets shut out?
Who goes on without?
Who sadly says “wait ‘til next year?”

3) Johan Santana

Once there was a man from Tovar,
Whose left arm would take him so far,
Twice the Cy Young,
The heat dost he brung,
But it’s the change-up that’s made him a star.

2) Joe Mauer

Matinee idol,
God of summer, dome, and mask,
Will the power come?


1) Triples

With a slash,
A sphere rises into the gap,
Splitting the golems that guard the passage.
The blur races onward, tarrying not,
chalk and dirt churning beneath.
The golems give chase and inch closer to the white, spinning orb,
But cannot catch it before the blur turns yet again, head down.
Reaching their goal, the guardians return the sphere.
It comes closer,
Closer,
Closer to the blur.
It bounces once from the ground and into the waiting mitt.
But…too late, for the blur is at rest.
Safely at third.
Home runs? Bah!

Here are some other things The Common Man loves about the game but was too lazy to put into iambic pentameter: The Minnesota Twins, the arc of a majestic homerun, the sweet swing of a left-handed batter, the umpire when he calls a third strike, a rich and glorious history that is still being unpacked and digested. And, finally, one bonus (and lazy) poem to maybe the greatest reason to love baseball.

*) All the Information That's Available to Read and Digest

B is for Bill James, who sired them all.
A is for Aaron Gleeman, an inspiration to amateur bloggers everywhere.
S is for Shysterball, whose insight and snark are keen.
E is for Everyone The Common Man is missing (The Hardball Times, Baseball Musings, Baseball Analysts, Carbord Gods, wezen-ball, Joe Posnansky, IIATMS, and countless others.
B is for Baseball Prospectus, now being shipped.
A is for All-Time leader in outs, which you can look up on baseballreference.com, the best free resource on the net, though retrosheet gives it a run for its money.
L is for Leader, as in Worldwide, and their four stalwart writers, Gammons, Neyer, Olney, and Stark.
L is for Law, Keith Law.

Good News, and Bad

Thank God. You want even better news? Games start in just twelve days.


Sadly, it's not good news all around today. As Jason at It Is About the Money, Stupid, pointed out on Monday, the Japanese World Baseball team was working out Ichiro as a pitcher to use in emergency situations. Jason had high hopes for Pitchiro, saying "I have no doubt that this guy could do anything he wants on a ballfield, including hitting for power, if he put his mind to it. If he wants to become a pitcher once he hits 40, he could last another 10 years and it wouldn't surprise me the least. Of course, if he blows out his elbow Canseco-style, then prepare for the last WBC game you will ever watch!" Frankly, The Common Man can't imagine a more awesome development to come out of the World Baseball Classic. But it was not to be. According to this MLB.com report, joyless bastards running the Mariners have put the kabosh on the greatest baseball phenomenon since Fernandomania. According to the same article, those killjoys, GM Jack Zdurniencik and manager Don Wakamatsu respectively, explicitly told the Seattle Times, "He's not going to pitch," and that the idea was more "propaganda than real."

"I don't think it's a good idea," Wakamatsu said. "I just don't think it is a very good idea after the career he has built. It wouldn't be worth hurting his elbow."

But The Common Man's joy, and that of millions of American and Japanese fans might be worth that much, boys, and might actually breath some excitement into what may be an otherwise dreadful summer for Mariners fans. This is how Bill Veeck used to pack them in, Seattle. Stop being such sticks in the proverbial mud and have some fun for God's sake. And see, you made this boy cry:


and this one:


and you made this one comically mad:


Way to go. Keep it up, Seattle. The Common Man can post adorable pictures of sad or crying children all day. There is a veritable world of children you can disappoint out here on teh interwebs, and The Common Man doesn't think you want that on your consciences.

Anyway, until the Seattle braintrust gets their collective heads out of their posteriors, this is all the Pitchiro the world is likely to get:

Agents of Change

The Major League Baseball Rule 4 draft (its annual draft of amateur ballplayers from the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico) is, frankly, troublesome. In the real world, when a job prospect negotiates with a potential employer, that employer has to compete with all the other companies offering that candidate a job. In baseball, when a player is chosen to enter the league, he is allowed to negotiate only with the team that picked him. You have 30 individual businesses restricting the rights of young men to choose their employer, under the guise that the league is somehow a single entity, rather than a confederation of competing states. And while this makes little sense from a logical standpoint, it's basically what has kept the league functioning smoothly since the early 1960s, as perenial losers like the Phillies, Browns, Senators, and Boston Braves (to name just a few franchises that had incredibly long fallow periods) now have the first crack at exciting young talent, which allows them to (in theory) return to competitiveness sooner (note, may not apply to the Pittsburgh Pirates or Kansas City Royals).

Anyway, because of this system, young men just out of high school and college have been at an extreme disadvantage as they've tried to negotiate contracts. And the NCAA hasn't made this any easier. Until yesterday, if a high school or college player retained legal counsel, to help them sort through their drafting team's offer, to double-check the contract to make sure it really was in the player's best interest (basically hiring an agent, but not paying them), they lost their college eligibility. In other words, 18-22 year old kids were expected to negotiate with grown men with 20+ years of experience in baseball. While "advisors" were allowed to have contact with the kids, they were not allowed to communicate in any way with the ballclub. That system, with its arbitrary distinctions and half-baked rules, makes absolutely no sense to The Common Man.

And so, when Andrew Oliver, a 21 year old kid, wanted to be pitching for Oklahoma State this year, he could not because his advisors went to a meeting with the Minnesota Twins, the boy and his father. According to ESPN,

"His former advisers, Tim and Robert Baratta, were at a meeting between Oliver and Twins officials when they discussed a potential contract.

That meeting led to Oliver's suspension from Oklahoma State last spring and his lawsuit.

Oliver and his father testified that the advisers were at the meeting because neither of them knew enough to negotiate a professional contract.

Instead of playing ball, Oliver was forced to the bench, even though the Twins never paid him a dime.

Yesterday, however, ESPN reports the wise Judge Tygh Tone (awesome name, by the way) ruled, "An NCAA rule that allows players to hire a lawyer but prohibits them from negotiating a contract is impossible to enforce and allows for the player to be exploited." Tone struck down the NCAA's rule and ordered that Oliver be allowed back on the team. And there was much rejoicing.

This is an important development for a couple of reasons. First, and most importantly, remember that the overwhelming majority of players who get drafted never even sniff the major leagues. Unlike football and basketball, there is an extensive minor league system that weeds out players who simply never develop the skills needed to make it. For most of them, their signing bonus is the biggest paycheck they'll ever collect from their ballclub. Also unlike basketball and football, many of the draftees are taken right out of high school, meaning that they're barely legal to begin with, and not at all up to understanding the complexities of their market value.

Second, it's potentially another step down the road toward Major League Baseball losing its anti-trust exemption, or at least all the perks that go along with it. While this ruling does not address baseball's draft specifically, it does attempt to deregulate the rules limiting ameteur players. An enterprising attorney and player, The Common Man imagines, would have little difficulty demonstrating that the current draft structure is also exploitative, and should be deregulated, or even that the draft rules do not apply to players who have yet to join the Players' Association (who negotiates the league's collective bargaining agreement). Given that the Supreme Court has said (in 1972) that only Congress can revoke the anti-trust exemption, perhaps a court ruling that addresses the league's rules and structure is unlikely. However, it is unclear to The Common Man why the Court believed Congress had jurisdiction in this matter, when the court has been the only entity to officially address the league's status since 1922, and when the Supreme Court itself bestowed the anti-trust exemption. The Common Man wonders whether, after 36 years, legal opinions may and interpretations may have changed radically, and wonders what has stopped agents and players from attacking the league and the draft through the courts. Maybe one of you dear readers can set him straight.

Around the Horn

--Shysterball has a theory, and The Common Man thinks it's a good one. In light of all the anti-ballplayer news released or leaked by the government in the past week, he writes,

"Ya think it's a coincidence that both this and the A-Rod leak are happening all a couple of weeks before the Bonds trial? I sure don't. In fact, I can almost see this as an orchestrated operation in order to bolster the opening and closing statements of the Bonds prosecutors. Rather than refer to lies about a raid five years ago, the prosecutor can stand up and say 'this was no innocent lie! The headlines in just the past month show that the scourge of steroids is as rampant as ever! Like A-Rod and Tejada, Bonds is a ballplayer who thinks he's above the law and worked to thwart an important government investigation!'"

Indeed, the timing is suspicious. Virtually at any point before this, this information could have come out about Rodriguez. And the charges could have, presumably, been filed against Tejada at any point in the past three years, given the amount of information the government has had. It's not that these players don't deserve to be highlighted and punished. They deserve a good spanking from Uncle Sam, and perhaps a small one from the general public for their transgressions. But if you see Roger Clemens in the news this week, you'll understand what's up. And for more information on how the Federal prosecutors are manipulating the justice system, feel free to read this and this. And Craig's got, like, a dozen more where that came from. When you fight the law, this is why the law wins.


--And for the record, The Common Man is officially taking back what he wrote about Alex Rodriguez the other day, when he said A-Rod was finally acting like a man. The apology was still a good idea, and The Common Man thinks it could have been worse. But sloughing off responsibility for your actions on a permissive culture and naivete is not manly (more adolescenty). But here are some important things to keep in mind. First, most ballplayers are, actually, grown adolescents. Living in a bubble where they are surrounded by fawning friends and fans, reinforced by the locker-room mentality that is more animal house than house of mirth. Also, as The Common Man pointed out in the comments section below, there was a lot of fishiness going on in that Rangers clubhouse. From the Mitchell Report, Pudge Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, Rafael Palmeiro, David Segui, Ken Caminiti, and Ismael Valdes all played for the team in the steroid era, as did A-Rod. And those are only the guys that have gotten caught (though technically, none of them have been officially punished, so caught is a relative term). While you should be disappointed in A-Rod, don't judge him more harshly than you would an average ballplayer or teenager who did something wrong.
Because there was a culture of drug use at work in Texas, and he was part of it. You should reserve the majority of your scorn for the front office types, field management, strength and conditioning coaches, and, yes, reporters who allowed their clubhouse to become a drug den. Chuck Norris is weeping over his Texas Rangers.

--A big congratulations to Lar at wezen-ball (The Common Man still wants to understand the name of the blog, though) for getting Rob Neyer's seal of approval this morning. Lar is a recent reader of The Common Man and has just begun commenting, and getting praise from Neyer is basically like having God send down the dove and say "this is my son, with whom I am well pleased." Lar does a lot of fun stuff with old resources, taking a look at how contemporaries viewed some of the game's greats. Today, for instance, he recalls Hank Aaron's chase for the home run record through Peanuts (who knew Snoopy had such power?). He's off to a tremendous start in his blog, and The Common Man wishes him only the best. Meanwhile, Rob, The Common Man likes God too.

--Speaking of awesome blogs, DrugMonkey deserves significant praise for being on The Common Man's bandwagon for a while, having linked to him for the first time months ago. He writes primarily about sciencey issues, many of which are over The Common Man's liberal arts-loving head. But he's snarky and smart as hell. And if you love-ah da science, and want to know who the rising stars are in substance abuse research or how to get funding for your crazy-awesome science, he's as good as you'll find.

Justice Tempered With Star Trek

The Uncommon Wife is an uncommonly big fan of almost everything Star Trek, which is how The Common Man got roped into watching four episodes of The Next Generation last night. Much of the time, The Common Man tunes out, but last night The Common Man got some wisdom from one Jean-Luc Picard (who The Uncommon Wife often refers to as "a total panty-dropper;" seriously, sometimes all The Common Man has to say is "engage" and he's, well, engaged).

Picard and his Enterprise buddies find themselves orbiting a Eden-esque planet where all the people wear flimsy, satiny outfits that cover only their naughty bits (there's an uncomfortable amount of guy-nipple in this episode) and make love "at the drop of a hat...any hat." They play all day and freaking do it all night, basically. Nice life. Anyway, there is a downside to this existence (didn't you just know there would be?), and that's that the penalty for any infraction is death. Texans would love this place. Anyway, Wesley (perhaps the most annoying character in Star Trek history, with his whining and penchant for trouble) violates the law and is all set to be executed when Picard saves him with a soliloquy:

Picard: "The question of justice has concerned me greatly of late, and I say to any creature who may be listening, there can no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions."

Riker: "When has justice ever been as simple as a rulebook?"

First of all, shut up Riker. Trying to upstage your captain. Not cool, dude. Grow a beard or something. Second, Picard's speech came to mind again today, when The Common Man heard about young Marie Morrow, a member of the Douglas County Young Marines, who has been suspended from school and faces possible expulsion because some idiot in her school's parking lot can't tell the difference between this:


a drill team rifle that is "made of wood, with duct tape, to resemble a real rifle," and this:

you know, a real rifle.

It's not really the school's fault. State law mandates that "a firearm, whether loaded or unloaded, or a firearm facsimile that could reasonably be mistaken for an actual firearm" mandates the suspension and possible expulsion. It's a tough policy, but one that makes sense in the wake of the Columbine tragedy. What's missing from the law, as Morrow points out, is the opportunity to allow trained educators who work with kids every day to use their own discretion in determining which threats constitute real threats to the school (for instance, if Morrow wasn't on her local drill team and had fake rifles in the back seat of her car) and what does not.

What makes this worse, in The Common Man's opinion, is how measured and responsible Morrow's being about the whole thing. She tells reporters, "I take responsibility, it was my mistake," and "I understand exactly why the policy is there," and only wants to "go back to school and graduate with my class and take my AP tests and all that." She's clearly not the student this policy was intended to catch and handle. And she's in it now.

There may not be anything that can be done for Marie, under current laws and regulations. And this should not become an excuse for gun nuts to lobby for loosening the restrictions on guns and schools around the country. But it should be an opportunity to add some common sense to the lawbook, to remember that there can be no justice in absolutes, and to help the next Marie Morrow who comes along.

Damn It A-Rod:

Every time The Common Man tries to get out, they keep pulling him back in. A quick comment here: A-Rod is finally showing some good judgment in confessing to ESPN's Peter Gammons. At this point, there's nothing that he can do (you know, short of murdering Derek Jeter) to hurt his reputation further with baseball fans in general, and Yankee fans in particular. Getting all the details out and owning up to his decisions is the only reasonable way out of the hole he's in. At this point, he has to atone for his sins and work his way back into the public's good graces, and he's choosing to do that immediately and directly, rather than (as The Common Man's friend Bill points out) waffling about trying it once and not liking it (Hi, Andy Pettite!) or simply not commenting further. He opens himself up now to the possibility of becoming a spokesperson against PEDs, by confessing to his mistake, talking about the drugs' effects on his body and mind, and discussing his shame. And $25 million a year does a lot to assuage feelings of guilt and shame (The Common Man assumes; he's never had the good fortune to know first-hand). Today, for whatever reason, A-Rod's acting like a man. Good for him.

Now The Common Man is going to disconnect his internet connection with a sledgehammer, so that he won't have to listen to this any more.

Stupid Explosion Tricks, or The Common Man Takes the Day Off

After two mega-long weekend posts about A-Rod and the scum of humanity (which are not necessarily the same thing, he feels compelled to remind you), The Common Man is taking it easy today. Maybe by tomorrow the whole A-Rod thing will have blown over and The Common Man can talk about puppies or something. What do you think the odds are? In the meantime, The Common Man doesn't want you to leave empty handed. So, for your amusement, here, is a Stupid Man Trick, courtesy of The Founding Father over at The Mantuary:



Notice how the beer can ricochets solidly off the runner's noggin. That's a powerful arm right there. Like the Roger Clemens of the Preakness Infield. Oh, see. Now The Common Man's talking about steroids again. Will this topic not go away for five minutes?!? To make himself, and you, feel better, here's an explosion. Feel free to picture Clemens, A-Rod, Bonds, Palmeiro, McGwire, and the whole of the mainstream media strapped to a rocket and ready to be shot into space:



Cathartic, no?