2019 MLB Regular Season running thread

Because baseball appeal is so local, I don't think national sports talk shows have any real reason to dig into it beyond the most superficial level. Of course, they don't get past superficial for any of the other sports, either.

 

This is all just my opinion -- I guess that's obvious. But I've been exposed to professional baseball since 1965 and have witnessed all of the changes up to today's Three True Outcomes.

Nobody roots for actuarial table updates. Nobody pays money to watch someone write code. Who cares about your million simulated seasons? Yes, the mathematics have sucked much of the mystique from the sport, but that's only a contributing factor to the general lack of interest.

PROSPECTS: I've been attending minor league games since 1969, and 99 percent of the people who go are there just to be entertained, whether it's the sumo wrestling, hot dog races, the kiss cam or finding the ball under the helmet. Nobody knows who those kids are on the field, and for the most part, 99 percent of them will be out of baseball in 24 months. That's evolved, thanks in part to Baseball America and other outlets, thanks to the increasing focus on minor league systems, the draft and international signings.

That's led to an arms (and bats) race to compile the strongest list of prospects, sometimes at the expense of optimizing your major league roster. Nobody cares who wins the Sally League championship except for the guys who get a ring and a bonus. And way too many prospects never pan out, leaving some organizations continuously in a rebuild cycle.

PLAYOFFS: Before 1969, you won the pennant and had a 50-50 chance of winning the World Series. Even up to the invention of the Wild Card, you needed seven wins to be world champions. Now it's almost a 10-team roulette wheel spin. The team built for a short series that gets red-hot suddenly has an advantage over the one that prevailed over 162 games. Unfair, but them's the rules. Only one team out of 30 gets to celebrate at the end.

In addition, there's a shrinking middle ground between contention and elimination. There's little incentive in spending millions of dollars making an 80-win team better if you know six teams in your league have the capability of winning 90. The chances of "catching lightning in a bottle" get smaller as the chasm between the good and bad teams expands.

There's always been a window of contention/rebuild cycle in baseball. Unless you have unlimited resources (or the Kansas City A's as trade partners), you can't sustain success forever. It's just that the Astros and Cubs went to the extremes to accomplish it, and that strategy is being copied. What you've got now are teams in various stages on boom-or-bust cycles, trading every valuable piece for some unknown future value. Why should any fan invest emotional energy in the Tigers this season, knowing full well they'll trade Castellanos, Matt Boyd and Shane Greene for 19-year-old kids who may or may never play in Comerica until 2025.

Teams are asking fans to be patient without the guarantee of trying to win games. That's a dangerous assumption to make in terms of your long-term fan base.

ROSTERS: In addition to the migration of the best players from pretenders to contenders, there's so much turnover that casual fans can't keep up. Growing up, every team in the league had a cornerstone player. Baltimore had the Robinsons and Boog Powell. The Red Sox had Yastrzemski. Minnesota had Killebrew and Oliva, and so on.

Free agency was great for the players (it could be debated whether it continues to be so). But how does the casual fan react when he buys a jersey with his favorite player's name, only to have that guy playing for the rival team the following season (or month)?

My father can still list the starting position players for all eight American League teams from the 1940s. Then again, 80 percent of those players were the same from year to year, season to season. Could the casual fan name another Tiger other than Miguel Cabrera? I'm even hard-pressed to tell you their starting rotation (Al Avila might have the same problem).

And it's not just from team to team. It's the constant shuttling of pitchers and position players from AA and AAA and back. I heard where the Orioles had already used 25 pitchers (including a couple of position players) and it's only May 3. The guy in the second deck drinking beer doesn't care who the LOOGY is, but he sure isn't happy when the relief corps blows a three-run lead in the ninth. Or some kid he's never heard of strikes out with the bases loaded.

FANTASY: I don't give a ---- about your fantasy league team. But in general, those people don't really care about "baseball." They only care about the data, the box score and how their specific players performed. No one goes to Vegas specifically because they use a particular brand of cards or have 20 Wheel of Fortune slot machines. They go to gamble on something, and everything else that got them into the casino is secondary to that end. While it's a large industry, I have to believe some of the decline in fandom comes from focusing on your winning rather than your favorite team's record.

MONEY: This isn't just about the expense of taking your family to the game. It's the constant screed over who's getting paid what and whether that's a good deal/bad deal for the corporation/individual/union. There's an over-reliance, particularly in the offseason, on dollars and years and potential WAR. Did Mike Trout leave too much money on the table? Did the Phillies overpay for Bryce Harper?

Does the casual fan really care about $ per WAR? Who cares what Liberty Media saved by signing Acuna? It's not going to make the price of beer cheaper at the park. I think the media in general is fascinated by the business of baseball rather than the sport of baseball. And that's not a healthy sign.

Sorry to go all Big Ragu on you.

 

Much of that is fair, though I'm not sure about the fantasy baseball section. I think part of the rise in fantasy baseball comes from the other factors you wrote about. Fantasy baseball has kept my interest in the game stronger despite the fact that I haven't had a favorite team since the early '90s. That was when I realized that the system was heavily stacked against the team that had been my favorite, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The system has gotten better, though the playing field still leans significantly in favor of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, but at the same time you have more teams that talk a good game about wanting to win, but ownership simply won't put in the proper resources to make it happen. That's where the Pirates are now. Even when they had a brief run of being decent because they actually have a hell of a front office right now, I just couldn't invest emotionally because I knew ownership wasn't going to let them spend enough to put the team over the top. Everything with that franchise is about cost cutting or cost certainty. That's how they ended up trading away their ace for scrubs before last season, then having to give up two outstanding young players to the Rays for Chris Archer to sort-of replace him. I say they only sort of replaced Cole because he's a hell of a lot better than Archer.

 

The strike of '94 made me realize life would go on without baseball so about as far as I go is a weekly check of the standings and maybe the playoffs and Series. I used to enjoy listening to broadcasts that wove in stories from the past - now it seems 90 percent of the analysis is pitcher on hitter battles. I get it, broadcasters don't have the access to players they used to, they aren't as enmeshed in the game as your Mel Allens, Vin Scullys, Ernie Harwells. But the broadcasts just aren't as interesting.

 

I don't know about this part. My rah-rah Dodgers is a shell of what it was growing up ... still want them to win it all every year but don't care if they flounder or even lose the World Series in consecutive years ... but being knee-deep into fantasy has strengthened my love of the game, which was sky-high to begin with. Watched a majority of the Cubs-Cards today and LOVED that Hendricks threw an 81-pitch shutout even though he's not on my fantasy teams and I don't give 2 shits about the Cubs or the Cards.

 

Count me among the fantasy baseball players who enjoys the game even more now. I watch so much more baseball than I used to, and like you, not just teams that have my guys on them.

 

Bill James did a study in the mid-to-late 90s which concluded roster turnover was not dramatically different then than it had been since the 1920s.

The only difference is that now some of that movement is precipitated by the players.

It would be interesting if somebody did that study on today's rosters. I'm sure somebody already has.

 

The 2018 Yankees had more home-grown starters than the 1927 Yankees.

2018 homegrown: Sanchez, Bird, Torres, Gregorius, Andjujar, Judge, Gardner. Stanton and Hicks were not.

1927 homegrown: Gehrig, Lazzeri, Koenig, Meusel, Combs. Collins, Dugan, Ruth were not.

2018 top pitchers homegrown (16 or more appearances): Severino, German, Robertson, Betances, Holder, Green, Warren, Cessa, Tanaka (ok, that's a push). Not: Sabathia, Gray, Chapman, Shreve, Cole, Kahnle, Britton.

1927 homegrown: Shocker, Pipgras, Moore, Thomas. Not: Hoyt, Pennock, Reuther, Shawkey, Giard.

Teams obviously use a lot more pitchers today. But the 2018 Yankees were more home-grown than the 1927 Yankees.

 

The Yankees were the great outlier over the entire history of the AL, especially during the era when cash sales of players were common. For a span of about 40 years, basically, whenever they needed a player, they could just go out and buy one.

The 20s and 30s, the period in which the Yankees became the dynasty they were, were also aberrational because three of the franchises which probably could or should have challenged them, the Red Sox, White Sox and Athletics, were taking turns as the dregs of the league-- Boston in the aftermath of the Ruth sale, Chicago in the wake of the Black Sox scandal and the A's as the result of Connie Mack's "once a generation" approach to building contending teams.

 

Tyler Glasnow is now 6-0 with a 1.74 ERA after abusing the Orioles for seven innings today. Austin Meadows was batting .351 with six home runs, 19 RBI and three steals through the first 20 games before suffering a sprained thumb that currently has him on the injured list. Does anybody still want to defend the Pirates trading those two so they could have the cost certainty that came with Chris Archer last season?

The Pirates could easily have Gerrit Cole, Glasnow and Taillon anchoring their rotation with Meadows in the outfield without losing much of value beyond Archer, who they only needed because they traded Cole for a couple of guys the Astros didn't really want. Combinations of moves like that are the hidden damage created by the financial disparity and owners who refuse to spend even when their teams are decent.

 

That might go down as an all-time bad trade for the Pirates.

Between the horrible regression after the hot start and the fact that Polanco and Cervelli have been useless at the plate, maybe they should have a firesale. They have enough young and/or cheap pieces, especially in the bullpen, to reload the farm system in a hurry.

 

Every season is a fire sale for the Pirates. Bad trades happen. Bad trades driven by ownership insisting on taking the cheapest approach possible at all times are a slap in the face to the team's fans. I honestly don't know how anybody can root for that team any longer at this point.