Archive for the ‘TPA Dispatches’ Category

Hey, remember Yoenis Cespedes?

Yeah, you remember, from Cuba. He was kind of a big thing for a while there. He had that amazing, overproduced video, where over the course of twenty minutes he murdered baseballs, ran track, worked out and was seen roasting a pig. Essentially every team in the league was rumored to be bidding for his services at one point or another, led by the Yankees and those free-spending Marlins (hey, remember them, too?). Then the Oakland Athletics signed him, which was a pretty huge surprise, but — to we non-A’s fans populating the vast, vast majority of the baseball-loving world — kind of a boring one. It did allow us to pay attention (on tape delay) to his Major League debut, as the A’s went out to Japan to play two real baseball games against the Mariners while everyone else was still in spring training. So we saw him double off of Felix Hernandez in his third big-league PA, and hit a long, key seventh-inning home run in his second game.

He was pretty uninspiring for the month or so after that, though, hitting .240/.313/.400 from April 6 to May 6. He’s been very good since then…but that’s it, no one cares, the lustre is gone. Why is that? Read the rest of this entry »

Do you not feel shame, Major League Baseball?  Do you not feel the hot tears of embarrassment and grief streaming down your rosy cheeks in the way you have so callously murdered baseball’s 2012 season by adding a second Wild Card team to each league?  Jeff Passan thinks you should,

It is the middle of September, and baseball is celebrating a pair of teams [Philadelphia and Milwaukee] that have clawed their way back to around .500. Their refusal to fold is laudable, certainly, and their re-admittance to the wild-card shuffle should invigorate fan bases that were ruing September. And that’s about the only positive thing baseball gets from this watered-down race that rewards the pedestrian and manufactures and force-feeds drama where it need not be…. The number of deeply flawed and disappointing teams nonetheless in the playoff hunt is disheartening. Contention and bad baseball are not supposed to mix in September.

Passan goes on to talk about 9 franchises that he identifies as still being “legitimate” contenders for the postseason (including the 71-76 San Diego Padres, who sit six games out with six teams in front of them with 15 games to play, truly stretching the definition of “contender” past any and all reasonable measure).

Good god, spare us your moralizing, Jeff.  “Shameful?” Baseball is not a great moral undertaking.  It’s a game and a business that provides entertainment to millions and millions of North Americans.  Shameful?  I suppose if your goal is to shut down interest in baseball’s postseason chase for a better part of a month in those nine cities, and cede the fall to football for a month, that would be a disappointment.  But I cannot see how it’s at all shameful that fans have a reason to keep talking about their teams and buying tickets for games deep into September.

Read the rest of this entry »