Monday, August 27, 2012

Hubris & the Slugger

Hubris: a blind arrogance that unleashes violence, which in turn reflects back on the hero who suffers from hubris, causing his downfall. We know this as the keystone of Classical tragedy: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Creon, all heroic, all destroyed by hubris.

But it’s an alien concept to U.S. culture: we glorify in super-sizing, whether in the cinematic blockbuster or in the deification of celebrity—& celebrity at this point includes all of the famous, from movie stars to politicians, from sports heroes to the latest reality TV show phenoms.  If we have
also sometimes gloried in their downfall, it’s not in a recognition of the tragic, but in a tabloid manner: who has been "voted off the island"—at best slightly more akin to the medieval “O Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi” than to Aristotle’s catharsis, with its notion of terror cleansing the mind & spirit.Our stories aren’t tragic—but do they have that potential?

Let’s consider the story of the greatest baseball player I ever saw perform, Barry Bonds.  Whether you follow baseball or not, you’ve almost certainly heard his name, not only because of his unprecedented assault on some of baseball’s most hallowed statistics (he holds the record for the most home runs in a career as well as the most in a season), but also because of his legal troubles that all center on his alleged use of any number of performance-enhancing drugs; according to the book Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams, Bonds was using as many as 10 illegal substances during the final nine years of his career—nine years that saw his performance escalate from that of “merely” great to superhuman.

I speak from a personal perspective, because I saw Bonds play at Candlestick Park in San Francisco during the “merely great” years—by the time his alleged doping had begun, I’d already moved away from Baghdad by the Bay. 


 



A first memory: 1992, & there were already rumors circulating that this would be the Giants final year in San Francisco, & indeed Giants owner Bob Lurie sold the club to a group in the Tampa/St Petersburg area. But the sale was voted down by the National League & a group spearheaded by Safeway tycoon Peter McGowan bought the Giants & kept them in San Francisco. Joy thru the land! But the joy turned to sheer wonder when the Giants signed Barry Bonds, who was a free agent, to a 6-year contract prior to the 1993 season. Suddenly, the Giants were not only staying in San Francisco, but had the best player in the National League, if not all of major league baseball, in their line-up. Bonds had won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1990, finished second in ’91, won again in 1992. Bonds would finish the ’92 season with a .3411/.456/.624 line; his on base percentage & slugging percentage led the league, & he also hit 34 home runs, stole 39 bases, & scored a league-leading 109 runs to go with 103 RBIs (yes, the despised stat!) His “wins against replacement” figure for 1992 was a stratospheric 8.9. 

Candlestick Park in 1965 (with Willie McCovey playing 1b) - a bit before my time in the Bay Area

Then it was April 15, a night game at Candlestick Park against the formidable Atlanta Braves, National League champions the two preceding seasons, & I was in attendance. Greg Maddux was the Braves pitcher that evening, & he ranked as one of the best in the League, while the Giants opposed him with Jeff Brantley, who was at best a serviceable fourth or fifth starter. I can still picture Bonds’ first at bat against Maddux—there was a sign in right field in Candlestick Park advertising Charles Schwab (a locally-based firm); Bonds hit that sign like a bull’s-eye for a home run (later, the sign was changed to read “Bonds”—obviously referring to both Barry & Schwab.) For the game Bonds went 3 for 4 (home run, single, double) with 2 runs scored & 5 batted in; the Giants won 6-1, scoring 5 in a mere 4 innings on the great Maddux, while Brantley pitched superbly, only giving up 1 run in 7-2/3 innings. There was electricity in the air.



& it continued thru the season. The Giants, even with the addition of Bonds, had been generally predicted to finish no higher than middle of the pack in the National League West—the Braves, who were in the west in terms of the National League, if not in terms of geography—were favorites, & the Cincinnati Reds also had a strong club. But with a combination of strong pitching & defense, timely hitting throughout the line-up & a truly magical year from Bonds, the Giants actually led the Division thru much of the summer.  Sadly, it wasn’t to be: the Braves made one of the great surges ever—it was truly a historic race. The Giants won 102 games, the second best record in all baseball, but the Braves won 103 & won the title. 


Tom Glavine, one of the ace pitchers for the '93 Brav
Bonds was the clear MVP in 1993; his wins against replacement was a majestic 9.7, the best figure for the first part of his career, & he contributed a .336/.458/.677 line, again leading the league in on-base & slugging; he led the league, too, in home runs & rbis with 46 & 123, while also stealing 29 bases & scoring 129 runs. Oh yes, he won a Gold Glove for his defense in left field, but Bonds always won Gold Gloves—he was a marvelous defensive outfielder, tho it’s true that his one weakness was a middling throwing arm.
Bonds transformed: 2006
During the first 13 years of his career, Bonds hit 411 home runs, driven in 1,216, scored 1,364, stole 445 bases, & produced a .290/.411/.556 slash line; he also walked 1,357 times, due both to his remarkable eye & also to the fact that teams routinely pitched around him. & lest we forget: he’d won 8 Gold Gloves as a top defensive outfielder. Realistically, he had another six to eight years in his career, with probably about half of them still producing results at a very high level, & then a few years of decline performance—tho Bonds’ decline, one suspected, would probably be good years for many players. There was little doubt of Bonds’ Hall of Fame stature—indeed, there was little doubt that he was one of the best baseball players ever.
Then in 1999, he showed up at spring training a changed man. As Fainaru-Wada & Williams note in Game of Shadows, the player who’d had the physique of a “muscular marathon runner” now looked like “an NFL linebacker”; his teammates began calling him “the Incredible Hulk,” & joked about “the ‘gamma radiation’ that had transformed him into a muscle-bound superhero.”



From 1999 until the end of his career in 2007, Bonds hit an additional 351 home runs while compiling a .316/.505/.712 slash line, & amassing 1,201 walks: these are video game numbers. In 2001 & 2002, his WAR was 11.6, one of the highest numbers of all time; in 2004 it was a mere 10.4. He broke the single season home run record with 73 in 2001; he led the league in batting average in both 2002 & 2004 with averages of .370 & .362, while hitting 46 & 45 home runs those years. These are superhuman statistics—video game numbers.



Indeed, Bonds had become a video game character: super-sized. Even his head appeared larger, which is symptomatic of using human growth hormone, one of the substances he’s alleged to have used during this time period. As Giants fans, we tried to look away; he led the team to the 2002 World Series against the Los Angeles Angels, & if the team suffered a historic meltdown, losing what would have been a decisive Game 6 after carrying a 5 run lead into the 7th inning, it was not Bonds’ fault. We saw the physical changes, but we tried to believe that they were the product of Herculean workouts as the TV announcers told us. Later, the evidence continued to mount—after the BALCO facility was raided by the feds in 2003, it came out that Bonds’ personal trainer Greg Anderson was charged with supplying anabolic steroids & other illegal performance enhancing substances to athletes, & then in 2007, Bonds was indicted for perjury for his grand jury testimony regarding his involvement with Anderson & BALCO—so then Giants fans took the tack that, sure, maybe he was using, but so was everyone else in the major leagues, so it was a level playing field, even if the entire field was chemically-enhanced. This is still the opinion of many Giants fans when it comes to Bonds.

There is of course, truth to this. It’s widely accepted that the use of these substances was rampant in major league baseball thru the 90s & well into the 00s—I’ll write more about this later—& it’s true that Bonds was far from the only player to undergo a Marvel comics transmogrification.


It’s important to note that the media has always portrayed Bonds as a surly, arrogant man with a chip on his shoulder—in that sense, when combined with his nonpareil baseball efforts, certainly a candidate for the hubristic Greek tragic figure if ever there was one in baseball. I should note that Bonds’ father was Bobby Bonds, an outfielder with the San Francisco Giants (& other teams) in the late 1960s & early 1970s, playing alongside the great Willie Mays during the latter part of his Giants career. Bobby Bonds combined power & speed as did Mays & his son, but he never did reach anything like the level of superstardom those two enjoyed. He was one of the notable “34 true outcome” players, setting a record for strikeouts in 1969 (long since eclipsed), while also leading the National League in runs scored. Because Bobby Bonds developed a friendship with Mays during their time as teammates, Mays was Barry Bonds godfather.

So Barry was baseball royalty: a star player as a father, & one of the top five ballplayers of all time (easily, I would say) as his godfather. It was expected that he would do great things, & he did them—but in the end, attempting to reach unheard of heights, he became a caricature, so much larger than life that he could no longer be believed.



I do think it’s fair to say that Bonds has been singled out as the greatest villain of the steroid era; the reasons for this are complex—baseball as an institution, including fans & writers, are very protective of the single season & career home run records, & there is a sense that these have been sullied. There’s quite a bit of speculation that Bonds was blackballed by baseball when his final contract with the Giants ended at the close of the 2007 season—although Bonds was a free agent, available to any team who wished to bid for his services, none pursued him; & this despite putting up a .276/.480/.565 line in 2007 with 28 home runs (the on-base percentage led the league.) Had Bonds played another couple of years, he would have amassed even further records: he was within reach of 3,000 hits, 2,000 RBIs, & had a good chance to finish with 800 home runs (unprecedented) as well as the most runs scored ever & the most extra base hits. After receiving no offers for two years, Bonds finally officially retired after the 2009 season.

In addition, it must be noted that Bonds, who is African-American, has probably been given less the benefit of the doubt than other players for whom strong circumstantial evidence of drug use exists. Even pitcher Roger Clemens, whose name is often linked with Bonds’ as the other mega-star implicated in the scandal who has also denied the charges, has enjoyed some amount of rehabilitation of late & is even said to be considering a comeback at the age of 50—but then, Clemens like Bonds was never short on arrogance & even hubris.



Is Bonds’ story cathartic? Does it set an example for us about the costs of arrogance? Does it cleanse us in any way? What did he lose? The chance at some further records, certainly, tho it could be argued that those records were never really his to attain; a large shadow cast over what would have been a truly great career without the apparent doping; the real possibility that he’ll be denied entry into the Hall of Fame, despite the fact that even in the years before his alleged doping, his statistics merited his inclusion. Yet Bonds still enjoys massive wealth & popularity at least in the Bay Area; there is even some talk that he may return to the Giants in a consulting position of sorts, possibly even as a hitting instructor. Of course, these latter considerations are facts, & not necessarily truth.

We are a nation that lives by the slogan “We’re #1,” & in general, our culture teaches us to “look out for #1.” The U.S. is big, geographically, & enormous in the psyches of its inhabitants—the children of a Superpower disregard the tragic, equating it with the “sad,” with which it shares little common ground. The tragedy of an Agamemnon or an Oedipus is rife with terror—not the terror of our horror movies, which is a mere frisson in comparison to true existential terror. Can we learn the terror of hubris, the blind arrogance of gigantism from a sports star? We could, perhaps—but we will not. & this is our cultural failure, not that of our tragic heroes.




All images link to their source; all are from Wikipedia/Wiki Commons
  1. Barry Bonds in 1993: author is Jim Accordino at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyack205/ who publishes it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
  2. The "Mask of Agamemnon": photo by Wiki user  Rosemania at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosemania/5705122218/, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
  3. Candlestick Park 1965: by Wiki user Dave Glass; published on Wiki commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
  4. Tom Glavine in 1993: by jimmyack205, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
  5. Barry Bonds in the on deck circle: by Flickr user randomduck, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
  6. A bronze tragic mask, on display in the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus (Athens). It dates from the mid-4th century and is given to sculptor Silanion. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, November 14 2009. The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.
  7. Roger Clemens by User Keith Allison on Flickr; published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
  8. Theatre mask, dating from the 4th/3rd century BC. On display in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, housed in the Stoa of Attalus. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, November 9 2009. The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.
  9. Louis Bouwmeester as Oedipus in a Dutch production of Oedipus the King c. 1896. In the public domain.
  10. Barry Bonds in action (2006) by Kevin Rushforth, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. 

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Thomas the Rhymer Ponders RBIs


Do you know the 17th Century Scottish ballad “Thomas the Rhymer”? It’s one of my favorites & has been for many, many years. There are a number of striking moments in the ballad, but one section I’ve long pondered is the following:
 

'O see ye not yon narrow road,   
  So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?   
That is the Path of Righteousness,   
  Though after it but few inquires.   

'And see ye not yon braid, braid road,     
  That lies across the lily leven?   
That is the Path of Wickedness,   
  Though some call it the Road to Heaven.   

'And see ye not yon bonny road   
  That winds about the fernie brae?     
That is the Road to fair Elfland,   
  Where thou and I this night maun gae.   

Rather than reading this as a sentimental fairy story, “Thomas the Rhymer” has always seemed to me to describe poetic consciousness & the “third way”—a way that navigates between the extremes of straitened & undisciplined thinking; a different focus—indeed, perhaps a radical one. 


1970 Roberto Clemente baseball card: a treasured possession!

But how does this Child Ballad relate to baseball? Let's take the long way home on this question; I think True Thomas would have approved.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, the grand world of baseball statistics has undergone a revolution in the past 25 to 30 years. Baseball has always been a game of statistics par excellence, in some ways an inheritance from its cousin, cricket. Traditionally, statistics were pretty straightforward: the major statistics for hitters were batting average (number of hits divided by official at bats); home runs, runs batted in & runs. There were other counting categories, but these were the big four you’d always find on the baseball card. For pitchers, you had the won-lost record, earned run average ((Earned Runs/Innings Pitched) x 9) & strikeouts. By the late 1970s, you’d start to see to see the saves category for relievers. Again, these were the baseball card stats.


As the sign says...

Since I’ve rehearsed the story of Bill James & the sabermetric revolution in the past, I won’t go into it again here. Suffice it to say that, spearheaded by Bill James’ efforts, a whole set of new & more complex statistics have come into existence, & while some of the most hidebound traditionalists would disagree with this statement, I believe there’s a growing consensus among baseball followers—fans, writers, bloggers, & professional team management—that these new statistics deepen our understanding of player performance, & enable generally more accurate evaluation & comparison.

Of course, a revolution always brings casualties. The old baseball card stats have been devalued to greater or lesser degrees, with the two that have suffered the most precipitous falls being pitcher wins & hitter RBIs.


Prise de la Bastille!


Now it seems to me that reasonably astute fans have realized for some time that pitcher wins depended on a number of things beyond the pitcher’s personal control; in short, a pitcher on a team with a strong offense & defense is going to win more games than one whose team struggles either offensively or defensively, or both. This is self-evident, tho I probably will write more on the topic in a future post, because I also believe there are some historical considerations at play here.

RBIs are downplayed as well for somewhat related reasons: if a hitter is on a good hitting team & hits at a spot in the batting order that is likely to come around with runners on base, he is more likely to drive in these runners—all other things being equal—than a hitter on a team with a weaker overall offense. Again, this seems reasonably self-evident.  One problem that sabermetrically-minded baseball followers have with the statistic is that they believe—rightly I think—that the more traditionally minded baseball followers place an inordinately high value on RBIs, in fact looking at the stat as one of the most important. This is particularly relevant in that many of the traditionalists still hold sway in the Baseball Writers Association, which votes on post-season awards like Most Valuable Player, as well as on Hall of Fame selections.


The Plaques of the five original Hall of Fame inductees

Miguel Cabrera, with bat
However, I’ve recently encountered the opinion both in the form of podcasts & posts, some by nationally-known baseball writers, that RBIs “mean nothing.” This has particularly been prevalent in discussion of Detroit Tigers third baseman Miguel Cabrera, & specifically in regard to whether or not Cabrera is a viable candidate for the American League Most Valuable Player award this year. Cabrera’s “slash line” this year is .329/.391/.592. As of today, Cabrera ranks second in batting average, sixth in on-base percentage, & fourth in slugging in the American League. His 31 home runs rank third (there’s a tie for first, so following that, he is by default in third place); he’s third in runs scored & (of course) leads in runs batted in with 104—in fact, his RBI figure leads not just the American League but the Majors overall.

I’m not here to argue Cabrera’s case either pro or con as MVP—Angels outfielder Mike Trout at a mere 20 years of age is having a season for the ages, & assuming there’s no marked drop off in his performance over the last six weeks of the season, he really would appear to be the logical candidate. But as much as I agree that RBIs are a flawed statistic & that holding them up as some sort of sign of hitterly righteousness is misguided, so too, I’d argue, is a statement that they “mean nothing”—or that (as I heard a well-known baseball personality intone on a national podcast) that if you put anyone at a certain spot in the order they’ll come close to matching that performance.
Julia Kristeva à Paris

This, to my mind, is the one problem with the sabermetric community: while they’re to be applauded for promulgating statistics that enhance our understanding of the game, its members are not in many cases self-critical. Sabermetrics is in essence a critical method—critical in the sense of a system of thinking designed to understand an art form—whether that’s New Criticism or Structuralism or Deconstruction, etc. At their acme, criticism itself becomes an art form: think Bachelard or Derrida, or Empson or Kristeva. While sabermetrics doesn’t aspire to quite those same “heights,” it can be argued that Bill James’ own criticism thru statistics achieves a sophisticated methodology that brings rewards in & of itself. As a side note on this, it should be noted that James himself wrote, “I advocate, instead, what I call the democratic use of baseball statistics: Let them all speak.” This, to my mind, is Thomas the Rhymer’s “third road;” the quote, by the way, comes from his Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame: Baseball, Cooperstown, & The Politics of Glory.

But let’s look at concrete examples to consider the assertion that “RBIs are meaningless” & the strongly implied idea that any other player could approximate an RBI total by being placed at the same spot in a line-up. Cabrera bats third for the Tigers—the third spot in the batting order is traditionally given to the team’s best all-around hitter. He’s batting behind two players who should be able to get on base a good percentage of the time, & since he should be able to bat for both average & power, he should be able to move those players a good percentage of the time, in addition to being on base himself for the fourth & fifth place hitters, who traditionally hit with power.

So let’s re-arrange the Detroit Tigers batting order, & let’s take Miguel Cabrera out of the third slot—he could bat fourth, certainly. & let’s place in the third slot Brennan Boesch, the Tigers right fielder; after all, right field is traditionally a power position. & let’s compare Cabrera & Boesch using wOBA or “Weighted Batting Average,” a sophisticated sabermetric statistic for understanding offensive performance since it accounts for the players ability to get hits, to reach base in other ways & also to hit for power; it also won’t be skewed in Cabrera’s favor by including RBIs in any way & this creating a circular argument. Boesch’s wOBA for 2012 is .290; Cabrera’s is .412. FanGraphs considers a .290 wOBA to be “awful,” while a wOBA over .400 is “excellent.” While the evaluative terms may leave a bit to be desired, we get the picture; & given that, it seems unlikely that, even with the Austin Jackson getting on base ahead of him at a 40% clip, Boesch’s current total of 48 RBIs would even approach the neighborhood of Cabrera’s 104. Would they increase somewhat—probably. Would they increase at a rate to render Cabrera’s achievement “meaningless?” Doubtful.

Prince Fielder on base

Let’s try it with a couple of other Detroit players, first their designated hitter & sometime left fielder Delmon Young; Young’s wOBA this year is .300—“poor” by FanGraphs' guidelines. Do his 49 RBI suddenly become 80-90 if he bats third. I wouldn’t bet on it. But to be fair, let’s look at Prince Fielder, the Tigers excellent hitting first baseman; he bats fourth behind Cabrera. Because Cabrera has a high RBI total, you’d expect that to impact Fielder. Prince Fielder’s current slash line is .311/.404/.521, & he has 22 home runs & 88 RBIs. His wOBA is .388—in FanGraphs' terms somewhere between “Great” & “Excellent”—one wonders about the distinction between those words, but we'll let that pass. Could the argument be made that if Fielder & Cabrera were flip-flopped in the line-up their RBI totals also might flip flop as well? Absolutely. Does this have an impact on considering Cabrera as an MVP? Yes, I’d say it gives a good context. Does it mean that RBIs are "meaningless"? I leave you to be the judge.

I love the sabermetric stats & underlying methodology for the deepening understanding of a beautiful & complex sport—an art form. But I’d love to see the sabermetric community follow that third road of Thomas the Rhymer much more often; the discourse about sports could stand considerable toning down on the levels of vitriol, condescension & what we now call “snark.” Let’s consider approaching this poetic game with poetic consciousness!



Thomas the Rhymer - 19th century illustration by Kate Greenway

All pix link to their source except for the photo of the Clemente baseball card, which is my own.
Opening measures of Thomas the Rhymer from traditionalmusic.co.uk
Topps 1970 Clemente baseball card
Bill James 2010 by Wiki/Flickr users Colette Morton and Dan Holden, who publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
"Prise de la Bastille" ("Storming of the Bastille"), anonymous, unknown date (presumably late 18th/early 19th century), from Wiki Commons; public domain; original located at the Museum of the History of France
Image of plaques of the first five baseball hall of fame inductees (Cobb, Johnson, Matthewson, Ruth, Wagner) by Wiki user Beyond My Ken.  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Miguel Cabrera 2011; photo by Wiki user Cbl62 [note: no user page has been created]; this file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Julia Kristeva à Paris en 2008: from WikiCommons. The author, who is anonymous, has released the image into the public domain worldwide.
Prince Fielder, July 13th 2012 by Wiki/Flickr user Keith Allison.   This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Kate Greenway illustration of Thomas the Rhymer. Greenway was a noted 19th century illustrator of children's books. I was a bit surprised to find how sentimental all the available online images of Thomas the Rhymer seem to be; perhaps my reading of the ballad is in the minority!
 

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Bernard Malamud

Shoeless Joe Jackson (r), Ty Cobb (l) c. 1913
“I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball. Well, maybe that's the way some people look at it, but I don't quite see it that way myself.”
“Shoeless” Joe Jackson: from WikiQuote, & ultimately from Sport Magazine, 1949
"Jackson's fall from grace is one of the real tragedies of baseball. I always thought he was more sinned against than sinning."
        Connie Mack, also from WikiQuote

Major league baseball—Arthurian Legend—the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown—T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland—organized crime—& of course, Bernard Malamud: these are some of the elements of a rare & strange tale!

If you know baseball history, you know that the 1919 Chicago White Sox—later nicknamed “the Black Sox”—threw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Chicago went into the Series as heavy favorites—the White Sox had won in 1917, & although they’d posted a losing record in 1918, that was directly attributable to their losing some star players to the service in World War I. In ’19, those players—including the great Joe Jackson—were back with the club, & the White Sox fielded a strong line-up that also included future Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins & such hitting stars as right fielder Nemo Leibold & first baseman Chick Gandil. In addition, the White Sox had two of the best pitchers in Eddie Cicotte & Lefty Williams. Cicotte threw his “shine ball,” essentially what we call a knuckleball today, tho I understand that Cicotte actually used his knuckles to grip the ball rather than the fingertips, as in the current usage. In fact, the White Sox had star players at pretty much every position, as well as a couple of fearsome hitters on the bench.
 

 


I won’t re-tell the Black Sox story here, tho it is a fascinating tale. If you don’t know about it, Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out is a well-known tho controversial examination of the story, but actually the Wikipedia page about the 1919 scandal is a good overview. Briefly, Asinof’s book got its title from the fact that eight members of the Chicago team were implicated: Jackson, Gandil, Cicotte, Williams (not Collins or Leibold), as well as center fielder Happy Felsch, third baseman Buck Weaver, shortstop Swede Risberg, as well as utility man Fred McMullin, who apparently only got in by accident, finding out about the plot & demanding to be included or else blow the whistle on the whole scheme. Although this was never proven, it was alleged that the plot originated with mob kingpin Arnold Rothstein—in The Godfather saga, character Hyman Roth claims to have been inspired by Rothstein, “who fixed the 1919 World Series."

Arnold Rothstein

Two of the eight claimed they actually weren’t part of the fix: Joe Jackson & Weaver. While Jackson admitted at least initially that he took money, he claimed that he did nothing to contribute to losses, & in fact there are a statistics that give this argument weight: he batted .375 & compiled 12 hits during the Series’ eight games, & he also was credited with no fielding errors & threw a man out at home from his right field position. The 1919 Series was a best 5 of 9 format, unlike the best 4 of 7 that’s in use now (& for quite some time.) Weaver, meanwhile claimed never to have taken any money at all, but he did admit to knowing that the plot was in place.
Babe Ruth, 1921
But these days, we’re most concerned with “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, because he is a mythic figure in the game’s history, one whose mythic potency is almost comparable to the likes of Ruth or Mays or Mantle or Jackie Robinson or Koufax. Jackson may indeed have been the premier hitter of the deadball era. Between 1908 & 1920, Jackson compiled a lifetime .356/.423/.517 slash line, with 307 doubles, 168 triples & 54 home runs (players’ home run totals only rarely reached the teens in the deadball era.) Jackson’s career Wins Above Replacement, as calculated on Baseball Reference, was 59.6, with his best year by that formula being 1912: a WAR of 9.3, when he batted .395/.458/.579 with 44 doubles, a league leading 26 triples (!) & 90 runs batted in. He also recorded a 9.0 WAR in 1911, hitting .408/.468/.590.

Obviously—at least to baseball fans among you—these are Hall of Fame caliber statistics, & Jackson was consistently among the best hitters of his generation. Testimony from three contemporary Hall of Fame players:

Joe Jackson hit the ball harder than any man ever to play baseball.
Ty Cobb


He was the greatest natural hitter who ever lived.
Tris Speaker


I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.
Babe Ruth


But there’s no plaque in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame for Jackson because following the scandal, Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis declared all eight players to be on the ineligible list, & he remains there to this day.



Judge Landis (c) signs agreement to become Commissioner, 1920

If you’ve heard the saying, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” that refers to Joe Jackson. According to Charley Owens of the Chicago Daily News, a young boy approached him as he left the courtroom & said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Actually, the original was: "One urchin stepped up to the outfielder, and, grabbing his coat sleeve, said: 'It ain't true, is it, Joe?' 'Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is,' Jackson replied.”

Of course you remember the great ending of Bernard Malamud’s Great American Novel, The Natural:

Roy handed the paper back to the kid.
“Say it ain’t true, Roy.”
When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.

Roy Hobbs—not Robert Redford triumphing over the forces of evil in the mangled & mendacious film version
more like Robert Ryan, the tormented & magnetic film noir anti-hero. Roy, like Joe, is a “Natural”—not just a natural baseball player, but a “natural man” in the old sense of the word—a simpleton of sorts, in the great tradition of Sir Percival, the questing knight who, in Arthurian Legend, fails to heal the Fisher King during his Grail quest because he fails to ask a question. Critics have drawn close parallels between the Perceval/Fisher King story & Malamud’s novel—of course, that story was very much “in the air” in the first half of the 20th century due to Eliot’s use of it in The Wasteland. After all, one of the main relationships in The Natural is between Hobbs & Pop Fisher. & there are many who claim that Jackson’s country ways & apparent illiteracy were factors in his involvement in the scandal—that he too, in a sense was a “natural man” beyond being a “natural hitter.”


T.S. Eliot, 1923 - A Red Sox fan

The failed questing knight: “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands.” Joe Jackson: broken perhaps. But how would he have “cured” the Fisher King or rendered a Wasteland verdant? Indeed, it was in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal that baseball could have become a Waste Land—until the triumphant home runs of Babe Ruth led us away from the post war bleakness into the impossible 1920s—impossible culture hero, impossible home runs, impossible economy. Baseball always looks to the home run to save it from scandal—look at the late 1990s & early 2000s when baseball tried to obliterate the bitter scandal of the 1994 World Series shutdown; & in doing so, it would seem, struck a new Faustian bargain, as it turned a blind eye to rampant use of “performance-enhancing drugs” until it saw its most hallowed records fall; & then turned against at least the most famous of the perpetrators, both those who were “alleged” & those who admitted to the use of various anabolic steroids & hormonal treatments. More on this at another time.


Joe Jackson, in the longer version of the quote that begins the post, said he’d accomplished all he wanted to in baseball, & so the ban didn’t matter to him. He was 32 years old in 1920, his last season prior to being declared ineligible, so it is likely that Jackson was past his peak—tho he did put up a .382/.444/.589 slash line, & also record a league leading 20 triples & a career high 12 home runs that year. But that’s Jackson the man not Shoeless Joe the legend. Not the legend who morphs into Roy Hobbs, embodiment of American grandiosity & eventual fall not only from innocence, but clear into damnation—the most American of damnations: the star baseball player whose records are expunged; the celebrity who becomes unknown & indeed unknowable.

The stuff of deep legends—on the superficial level of the film Field of Dreams, or on a deeper level where the exaltation & subsequent debsement of those we hold up to the iconic light of celebrity becomes a national fixation; or on an even deeper level yet where the exploits & foibles of these celebrities & sports stars somehow intertwine with deep myths. Shoeless Joe Jackson was among the first of these in our ongoing myth cycle; he is not the last, not even from the myth cycle of baseball.


Everything he hit was really blessed. He could break bones with his shots. Blindfold me and I could still tell you when Joe hit the ball. It had a special crack.
 Wiki Quote: Ernie Shore, as quoted in Baseball America (2001) by Donald Honig, p. 107

All images link to their source on Wiki Commons/Wikipedia. All images are in the public domain except the cover image of The Natural, for which Wikipedia claims fair use.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Dog Star Baseball, or When Things Get Sirius

The Dog Star rises with the sun: the Nile floods—the ancient world understands that the height of summer is here, inexorable as wrathful Achilles, whose approach to Troy is described as follows in a Homeric simile in The Iliad:
Priam was first to note him as he scoured the plain, all radiant as the star which men call Orion's Hound, and whose beams blaze forth in time of harvest more brilliantly than those of any other that shines by night; brightest of them all though he be, he yet bodes ill for mortals, for he brings fire and fever in his train- even so did Achilles' armour gleam on his breast as he sped onwards. 
Samuel Butler’s translation, from classics.mit.edu
It’s a baseball truism that the Dog Days of summer are the time the long seasonal narrative begins to take a coherent shape, beyond all the digressions into myths & extended similes. It’s the time when strange & vaguely mythic formulas like Pythagorean Expectations begin to overtake teams. It’s the time when individual statistics like the comically-named but crucially evaluative BABIP begin to charge to the fore like wrathful Achilles to bring reckoning on all those batters & pitchers who to date have cheated fate.



Each year brings us a surprise team, & with apologies to the Baltimore Orioles & the Oakland A’s, the surprise team (in terms of exceeding expectations) has been the Pittsburgh Pirates. One of baseball’s oldest franchises, the Pirates’ history goes back to the 19th century. Along the way, so of baseball’s most renowned & even legendary players were Pirates for all or at least significant parts of their career: Honus Wagner; Pie Traynor; Ralph Kiner; Roberto Clemente; Willie Stargell; Barry Bonds. But this season we have the pleasure of savoring the Pirates’ ascension into the pennant race—as of this writing they are holding second place in the National League Central Division, only four and a half games behind the Cincinnati Reds (who they are playing this very weekend), but also with a tenuous three & a half game lead on the mighty St Louis Cardinals, reigning World Series champions & by the Pythagorean Expectation formula the best team in the National League, if not in all baseball—but the real won-lost record doesn’t yet reflect that. & certainly Pittsburgh’s fans have endured a famine: their last playoff appearance & last season with a winning record was 1992, the final year Barry Bonds played there before moving on to San Francisco. 

But not only can we savor this rare & strange story of the team’s apparent reversal of fortunes—we can also savor the story of the young star who has done so much to bring the reversal about: centerfielder Andrew McCutchen, who is in the midst of a statistically phenomenal season: thru the game on Friday August 3, he’s put up a .373/.433/.630 to go with 22 home runs & 14 stolen bases (the latter figure is a secondary story in itself, because the last time he stole a base was in June, which is a bit puzzling, but more on that in a bit.) McCutchen was named the National League’s “Player of the month for both June & July.

How much can a single player carry a team? How many wins can he himself by sheer force of his talent & skills, add to their total? The Sabermetric folks have come up with a rather complex calculation to determine this, which they call WAR—“wins above replacement player.” I’m not thrilled with the acronym, but the formula does yield thought-provoking results & whether or not it’s the evaluative baseball metric par excellence that some claim (I neither claim that it is or isn’t—that’s beyond my scope), it is at the very least a useful measure & one that should be brought to bear in evaluating players.

By the WAR metric, Andrew McCutchen has been worth 6 wins above the mythical “replacement level player”—the Wikipedia entry defines this as “a minor league/bench player at that position.”  By that figure, with this fictional player as opposed to McCutcheon in place, the Pirates record would fall from 60-45 to 54-51; this would drop them into third place in their division, three games behind the Cardinals & 10 & a half behind Cincinnati. Whereas their current record would qualify them for the playoffs as a wild card team (the two teams in each league with the best record other than the division winners), they would fall behind four teams in that race as well.


  

So Andrew McCutchen is indeed heroic in baseball terms, & if his Pittsburgh team is too much the underdog to qualify as the Greeks in this particular Iliadic pennant race, he can certainly take the part of Achilles in leading them on & inspiring them; & fortunately as it would appear, not the brooding & resentful Achilles of the epic’s first part. McCutchen plays the game with elan & a focused intensity, a skilled & extremely athletic player in a game that's dependent on very particular skills like hand/eye coordination, sometimes to the exclusion of more strict athleticism. But McCutchen has those skills too, & appears in addition to be a good student of the game; a heady & heads-up player indeed.But there’s another Sabermetric principle: regression to the mean. I alluded to this earlier when I brought up “batting average on balls in play.” Tho McCutchen’s age means he’s at a stage of athletic development that could include a quantum leap in skill level—the mid to late 20s being considered the great years for skill in baseball—it’s also true that while a was very good player prior to this year, he hasn’t in three prior big league seasons wrecked this much statistical carnage. In 108 games he 2009, he batted .286/.365/.471 with 12 home runs & 22 steals; in full seasons in 2010 & 2011 his stats read as follows: .286/.365/.449, 16 HR, 33 steals; .259/.364/.456, 23 HR, 23 steals. These are the statistics of a very, very good ballplayer, make no mistake; they are not the statistics of an unquestioned superstar, which McCutchen appears to have become. Interestingly, his WAR figure for 2011 was not that much lower than this year’s (5.3 to 5.9), but that statistic digests many figures, not simply the basic ones I’m quoting; & it puts a high value on defense (as it should), & McCutchen is a very good fielder at a crucial position.

Regression to the mean, in a baseball context, suggests that a player will at some point “normalize” in terms of performance & statistics to a group of players of similar talent & ability. Although “regression” has a negative connotation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a player will “get worse”—he may improve his statistics & performance to be more in line with expectations & similar players.
A .373 batting average is very high; in fact all three numbers in McCutchen’s “slash line” are high—not out of reach, not figures that a very select group of players can’t achieve in a given year, but high indeed. Given that expectations have been high for McCutchen & given that his age would indicate a high probability of a “breakout year,” we may simply decide that this year's player is the true McCutchen—unlike others who compiled gaudy statistics in the season’s first half, he won’t wilt in the Dog Days. In fact, speaking personally, this would be my preference. Because of my great attachment to Roberto Clemente when I was young, the Pirates have always been a favorite team of mine; & while they aren’t my main rooting interest (the Giants are), I like to see them do well. & McCutchen seems like the kind of player who could truly be generational, & that always exciting. In addition, on a rather silly & trivial note, I have him on my fantasy baseball team.  This fact has also brought me some hours of happiness.

But no stolen bases in over a month; only one home run in his last 15 games; only one RBI in his last 13. & this weekend, facing off against the formidable Cincinnati Reds in their home ballpark in a series that could begin to tell whether the Pirates themselves, even if not McCutchen personally, will survive the Dog Days as an contending team. Meanwhile, the “sleeping giant” St Louis Cardinals have won seven of their last 10 games…

These are the stories today, as I type with the fan humming in the background & the heat coming from each wall & window—even in moderate Portland. The Dog Days, when baseball gets Sirius.



 
All images link to their source
Sirius A & B photographed by the Hubbel Telescope; from Wiki Commons; in the public domain
1903 Pittsburgh Pirates-Honus Wagner is second to the right, second row; from Wiki Commons; public domain
Andrew McCutchen by Keith Allison on Flickr; from Wiki Commons & licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Black figure amphora depicting Achilles & Memnon, c. 520 BC; photo by Wiki Commons User Bibi Saint-Pol, who has released the image into the public domain
Andre McCutchen by Wiki Commons user Shaun Ganley on Picasa Web Album; This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
First page from Immanuel Bekker's 1837 edition of Aristotle's Physics. Relevance? Aristotle is just one of many Classical authors who referred to the Dog Days.
An X-ray image of the Sirius star system located 8.6 light years from Earth, from Wiki Commons. NASA file, in the public domain