First, the pants. Second, the leathery leathery skin. Third, the inebriated crotchetude. Eventually, this is what happens to all of us, even boyhood heroes.
First, the pants. Second, the leathery leathery skin. Third, the inebriated crotchetude. Eventually, this is what happens to all of us, even boyhood heroes.
Posted by S.M. at 11:41 PM in Royals | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Well, that didn't take long. Despite Tyler Kepner's admirably outside-the-box pick of the Royals to win the AL Central, most of us who actually follow and think about the team for more than the eight minutes it takes to make preseason predictions were less optimistic. We have the usual concerns about the offense. We were not uber-thrilled by Dayton Moore's big offseason acquisition: ex-Marlin Mike Jacobs, a first baseman with some power but a lifetime OBP of .318. Even at the relatively low cost of a decent young bullpen arm in Leo Nunez, this was an underwhelming roster move. Moore had given lip service to understanding that on-base percentage is the foundation of everything offensively in baseball, but actions speak louder, etc. Jacobs might increase the tepid slugging power of last year's flaccid lineup, but if the Royals are going anywhere we're going to need Alex Gordon and Billy Butler to become legit three-outcome mashers. Gordon at least got off to a good start today, with two hits, including a tater off the orthographically-daunting Mark Buehrle.
Still, for me personally, and for other professional Internet Royals fans, the Jacobs trade paled in pure stupidity, if not necessarily in significance, to Moore's decision to shovel $4.625 million at KYLE FARNSWORTH to join our bullpen. That was, no foolin', the single worst signing of the offseason, by any team. Then, just yesterday, KC's braintrust compounded the fracture when our highly limited manager Trey Hillman announced Farnsworth would be the primary setup guy in front of lights-out closer Joakim Soria, instead of Juan Cruz or Ron Mahay. Or, you know, Amanda Whurlitzer or Kenny Powers, whom I believe were available.
How do I put this graciously? Kyle Farnsworth is an aging reliever who throws a very straight fastball, is extremely susceptible to the home run, and has no sense of craft whatsoever. Managers like him because he "competes" and "shows toughness" and is "a proven veteran" who "establishes the fastball." But as an actual pitcher he's been terrible for much of his career, and in the eighth inning this afternoon, after Gil Meche had spun seven strong frames and left with a 2-1 lead, Jim Thome established a Farnsworth fastball about 420 feet into the center-field seats for a three-run homer. Farnsworth set up Soria mostly for a nice hot shower and a restful evening. I realize it's only one game out of a long season, we've got Greinke going tomorrow, we never beat the Sox in Chicago anyway, yadda yadda. Farnsworth will probably pitch better than that at some point during the year. But why is it, when it comes to the Royals, that the only people in the world who don't see the train coming down the track are the ones getting paid to watch for it?
Posted by S.M. at 02:25 PM in Royals | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Let's say you run a baseball team. Not a good baseball team. Don't get carried away. First you gotta calibrate your expectations. It's a franchise with a wonderfully proud history, sure, but you're in a small market and your on-field product's been garbage for a long long time, and most people essentially have forgotten you are a major-league enterprise. That proud history is now the only solace your fans cling to, the consecutive division titles, the playoff heartbreak, the upper-deck home run that at last sent you to the World Series, eventually even a championship. There are flags and retired numbers on the scoreboard between the fountains past the outfield walls. But the glory days are so long gone their memory seems an illusion. In the here and now, your margins are tight. The city did not vote to build you that new stadium. You took the job knowing that, to contend for a playoff berth at any point, you have to maximize your advantages, draft exceptionally well, get significantly luckier than you deserve to. You have relatively little money and no cachet whatsoever, so you know you are unlikely ever to attract marquee, or even second-tier, free agents.
Now, on your baseball team you have a pitcher, P-I-T-C-H-E-R. He is your best pitcher. He throws a cut fastball, 91-93 mph or so with good movement, but he also has exceptional command of that pitch, able to spot the ball on any corner of the strike zone four times out of five. He also throws two varieties of curveballs, a hard overhand job that comes in at about 80, and a bananas lollipop 12-to-6 deal he can bring in between 65 and 75. He keeps the ball down, gets his share of ground balls and soft pop flies, hardly walks anyone ever. For two seasons, he has dominated the American League, as stingy as anybody in the circuit. Yet for that entire time you have used him only for one inning at a time most games, and certainly no more than two. He never starts; in fact, he throws fewer innings than any other pitcher on the staff except the mop-up guys. Two or three times a week—and it would be more often if you were any good—he sits on the bench, not even warming up, not even soft-tossing, when the game is in the balance in the middle innings. While other guys, not nearly his equal, cough up leads, or let close games get out of hand, in the middle innings. So why do you do that? Why is that your strategy? MY QUESTION IS AS FOLLOWS: why do you proactively craft a game plan where the desired outcome is to use your best pitcher the least of all the pitchers on the team? I mean, it's not like your starting rotation is out there col' runnin' shit. You have two good starting pitchers and then a whole lotta nothin'. And the offense you've built, full of mediocre young players who might get better someday, is impatient and consequently terrible, so the only way you possibly can win even half your games is to pitch out of your mind. This is your reality. In this reality, why would you not want to get this exceptional pitcher, your best pitcher, into as many games as early as possible, to make sure he faces as many batters as possible, throws the greatest possible percentage of your team's total innings? Why would you not want to see if he can be equally great throwing 200 innings a year, and making a real difference, instead of 70 innings, where he is totally peripheral?
You've never tried him as a starter before—nobody has, not at the major-league level—so you can't say with any confidence he wouldn't be just as dominant in the rotation. There is no downside if he fails; you just put him back in the bullpen. So why on earth would you not make the move?
I'm just saying it seems to me you should.
Posted by S.M. at 11:43 PM in Royals | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
The 2008 Kansas City Royals are currently in the midst of a two-game winning streak, with their best starting pitcher, Zack Greinke, set to toe the rubber tonight in Chi-City against Crazy Ozzie Guillen and the White Sox. That's the good news. No, really—that's the sum total of good news related to the franchise. As usual with KC's finest, the bad news is somewhat more extensive. You may recollect that the Royals recently suffered through a 12-game losing streak, during which, with one notable exception, they lost in the same desultory way every night: by failing to score anywhere near enough runs. In the first game of the streak, Boston's Jon Lester no-hit them. They went on to get swept in consecutive four-game series by the Red Sox and Blue Jays. The game after Lester skunked them, Boston brought up a kid from Double-A, and he too promptly ate the Royals' lunch, allowing three hits and a single run over six-and-a-third. The next night they expired feebly against the sweating, bloated carcass that once was Bartolo Colon. Moving on to Toronto, they helped the Blue Jays' already excellent young pitchers gain some unneeded confidence, pushing across four runs in four games. Back home against the Twins, who killed the Royals this year even before the streak, they a) lost the opener in 12 innings, even after tying the score inexplicably in the bottom of the ninth when Delmon Young played what was at most a run-scoring double into a three-run inside-the-park home run; b) squandered another nice Greinke start in the second game, coughing up a five-run ninth-inning lead; then c) fell victim on getaway day, 5-1, to a six-hit complete game spun by the immortal Kevin Slowey.
Why this happened, and easily could happen a couple-three more times before the season ends, is no mystery—the team is offensively terrible. They have one decent major-league hitter who ain't getting any younger (Jose Guillen), one improving young hitter who hasn't quite figured it out yet (Alex Gordon), one guy who's playing out of his mind but will stop soon (Miguel Olivo), and—well, what else? As Rany Jazayerli has pointed out, saying a major-league player is "solid" is basically the same as saying he sucks, and right now the Royals are a cavalcade of solidity: guys who can hit .260 all day long, with no power and no batting eye.
You want specifics? The 2008 Royals are last in the AL in runs scored (having scored about 10% fewer runs than Seattle or the O's), last in the league in slugging, 13th in on-base percentage (only the cosmically shitty Mariners are more allergic to reaching safely). Their team OPS is .678. No AL team since the 119-loss Tigers of 2003 has failed to clear .700. Even those Tigers hit the wire at .675, just a smidge worse than the current Royals. In 57 games, a third of a season, the Royals have hit 29 home runs. The average AL team has 51; the league-leading Rangers, powered by ex-crackhead Josh Hamilton, have clouted 68. Over in the NL, two second basemen, Chase Utley and Dan Uggla, have combined for more dingers than KC. Thank Baal for the flaccid A's, who have hit only 34, or the league would have lapped our boys in blue by now. The Royals also have walked a mere 145 times in those 57 games, an average of just over 2.5 per contest. Not good. How not good? Well, the average AL team has amassed 193, a full walk a game more. You could say "That's just one base," but runners on base tend to score sometimes; like drawing hands in poker, they give you better implied odds. What all this basically combines to mean is that, to score a run, the Royals need to string together three singles in a given inning, which, as a long-term strategy, will get you exactly fucking nowhere. Their offensive pitifulociousness also forces them into the coping strategy of taking dumb risks. Surprisingly, for how many baserunners they lose, the Royals do not lead the league in caught stealing; the first-place Rays outpace them in that category, 23 to 19. You might say, "Hey, that could be worse," particularly since stolen bases are but a wee small component of the offense anyway, but, again, you'd be wrong. The Royals have successfully stolen only 29 bases, giving them a theft percentage of 60%. The general consensus is that, if you get caught stealing more than 30% of the time, you're running yourself out of innings and hurting your team. The Royals not only fall well below that benchmark, they're the worst team in the league by a solid seven percentage points; every other team in the league is at 67% or better. The Rays, if you care, have swiped 62 bags against their 23 miscues, a 73% success rate. The Royals steal neither for a high percentage nor in volume. Basically, they do nothing well from an offensive standpoint. They suck at the big stuff; they suck at the small stuff. KC's favorite sports columnist, the excellent Joe Posnanski, writes a lot about the Royals. He's an empathetic soul, and he cares about the team because he cares about the city where he lives and works, but, as a Cleveland native, he's able to view the chronic derailment of each successive Royals season with a bemused detachment that I lack. Recently, Joe analyzed the team in detail in order to figure out whether any Royal position player did anything particularly well—not even excellent, since that's unthinkable, just pretty well. The ugly results are catalogued here. If you want to save some time, I'll summarize: they have one guy who can field and one guy who can run. Neither of those guys can hit. One of them, Tony Pena Jr., is the single worst hitter in the history of the universe.
Of course, over the first three weeks of the season, it looked like the offense's comprehensive non-awesomeness wouldn't kill the team completely, because the pitching staff was performing out of its collective mind. Well, that too proved temporary. Greinke has been excellent, pitching well enough to win all but one of his starts, and closer Joakim Soria has literally been unhittable until recently, when overaggressive manager and confirmed Christianist Trey Hillman's desperation to end the losing streak led him to stretch Soria beyond his limits. But the rest of the crew has been awfully hit-or-miss. Brian Bannister, every seamhead's favorite pitcher because he understands and appreciates sabermetrics, tossing off references to BABIP in post-game interviews, walks a tightrope every time out, spotting that 85-mile-an-hour cutter and changing speeds, and when he's on it's magic (and must be frustrating as hell for his opponents), but when he's pressing, or he gets tired (here's Posnanski again on Banny's tendency to fall to pieces around the 100-pitch mark), he will get lit up like the Fourth of July. I still like the Royals' staff better than any they've had in a decade or so—Gil Meche is settling down, Luke Hochevar (every fratboy's favorite Royal, since he pronounces his name ho-shaver, haw haw haw) has potential, they've got three decent relievers in Ron Mahay, Ramon Ramirez, and Leo Nunez, even if Nunez is now on the DL—but dominating they ain't. And to win any reasonable number of games with an offense this lousy, they have no choice but to dominate.
So fuck it, basically. At the beginning of the season, I toyed with the idea of ponying up for the MLB Extra Innings package. As excited as I was when the Royals broke from the gate at 9-6, holding first place (!), I held off, because they'd scored only 47 runs in those 15 games. They'd already been shut out twice (now the number of blankings stands at 6) and limited to one run in another loss. It seemed pointless to get more involved in the affairs of a team that was not just obviously flawed, but flawed in a way guaranteed to make the experience of following them maddeningly futile. When the Royals had the Worst Bullpen In Human History in the early 00s, that was crazy-making, but at least they sometimes actually had leads in games before the bullpen dumped kerosene all over the place. Like they say, 'tis better to have loved and lost.
Before the season started, I thought about writing a post previewing the 2008 Royals, not least so I could gloat about my remarkably accurate predictions from last year. For instance, I managed to guess the Royals' final record (69-93) exactly. But that was luck. Nobody knows anything before the season starts, and a 2008 preview would have been another exercise in trying to tamp down my unrealistic hopes that this franchise might stop sucking wind so immensely hard. Much better to wait until there were some data to review. (Plus I'm lazy.) Unhappily, these new data tell the same old story. Maybe the route from Point A to Point B is slightly different than previous years, but Point B is still the cellar of the AL Central.
Posted by S.M. at 04:43 PM in Royals | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Thanks so much, ESPN, for all the things you do! Modern life wouldn't be the same without you! Thanks for being the Worldwide Leader in smug fratboys peddling catchphrases! Thank you for all the shouting! Thank you for Woody Paige and Skip Bayless and Cold Pizza! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to watch Adam Sandler and Stephen A. Smith debating whether Maria Sharapova or Jeff Gordon is more "now"! I don't know what that means, but I love it! I know for sure it has nothing to do with anything important! That's the best thing about it! Also: thank you for reminding me that the only important thing in sports is what happened last night! Context is for assholes! Finally, thank you for all the work you put into your "branding"! I really enjoy ESPNU, ESPN360, ESPNMobile, and the ESPNZone! Did I mention all the shouting?
Most of all, I really want to hug and kiss ESPN for its relentlessly promoted mini-series The Bronx Is Burning. It's so good on so many levels! Last night's episode was thoughtful enough to remind me of Games Four and Five of the 1977 ALCS. I especially like how the audience is expected to identify with the plucky struggles of the Yankees against their various terrible oppressions, like their association with the blighted, pre-gentrification Bronx, the random gunplay of the pre-incarceration David Berkowitz, and the oafish self-regard of the pre-senility George Steinbrenner. As if the Yankees were underdogs rather than being then, as now, the richest and more profligate team in the majors. As if they weren't the team that invented free agency by throwing cash at Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. I guess this sort of thing is what happens when history gets written by the winners.
Part of the problem with the series is the characterizations of Jackson and Billy Martin, which are not only emo in the extreme but ring awfully false to me, as a person who actually remembers something about how these guys behaved in real time. Both are portrayed as whiny, tormented, and joyless. The other characters make constant reference to Jackson's sensitivity and intelligence, while Reggie himself mainly sulks and broods over real and perceived slights before always grudgingly agreeing to take the high road. No doubt Jackson is a sensitive, intelligent person, but there's a mountain of evidence suggesting he's also a cruel and petty egomaniac. He also sometimes seemed to have fun on the baseball field; that's never shown. Martin, meanwhile, always looks like he's about to slip into a diabetic coma, thinking slowly, moving slowly, almost never speaking above a mumble. You and I might remember Martin as an irascible prick, but here, he never loses control; he gets mad only to serve a defined, team-related purpose. And why on God's green earth does John Turturro speak his lines in a Southern drawl? Martin was from Berkeley.
Even if you're not a stickler for historical accuracy, I don't understand the tormented emo approach from a dramatic perspective. Wouldn't it have been a lot more fun to watch the topdog/underdog struggle of Jackson and Martin as they really were, two spirited and vaguely crazy hotheads, instead of doofi afloat on seas of their own angst? Why do we need to fabricate a tortured inner life for our protagonists these days, even if it slows the pacing to a crawl? Personally, I don't mind watching a drama about monomanically driven people engaging in morally tenuous behavior. I think there's a parallel here between the revisionist Jackson and Martin in The Bronx Is Burning and the phony, moralistic agonizing of Eric Bana and crew in Munich, but that's beyond the scope of my current assignment.
(Lemme go off-topic for a second: here's a random Yankee-related fact I just learned. You remember Chuck Knoblauch, the former All-Star second baseman for the Twins who moved to the Yankees in the late 90s and immediately contracted Steve Sax Disease? "Knoblauch" means "garlic" in German. There you go.)
Anyhoo, by far the best parts of last night's episode were the clips from the actual ALCS games. Those few images brought back so many memories so quickly:
Since you asked, I have been paying attention to the current baseball season. At least a little. I wrote a little about this when the season started, and so far the Royals have performed about as I expected. I'm not entirely displeased, even though they've been in last place since April. The most important thing is they're significantly better than they were last year. They have two good starting pitchers: Gil Meche has been worth the money, despite all the mockery he endured after signing and the fact that the Royals never score any runs for him, and Brian Bannister looks like the second coming of Bob Tewksbury. The fact that the Mets gave him up in exchange for Amborix Burgos is another reason to wonder if Omar Minaya really knows what he's doing. The Royals also have, at long last, a competent bullpen—this after years of setting and resetting the standard for Total Relief Incompetence (or TRI, a new sabermetric formula I hope to define and popularize any day now, when I have the time to take several semesters of statistics classes, which will happen some time after I remember how to do basic arithmetic). Joakim Soria, whom the Royals basically scavenged from Fresh Kills in the offseason, looks like a legit closer. Between Soria, David Riske, Jimmy Gobble, and Joel Peralta, they have four relievers with ERAs of 3.57 or lower. If you count just his relief innings, Zack Greinke would be right there with them. That may not sound like much to you, O Cardinal or Dodger fan, but it is Cause For Rejoicing in KC. Dayton Moore, the Royals' virile and youthful GM, gets at least a B, if not a B+, for reconstructing the pitching staff alone. And the lineup is full of promising young players—Teahen and DeJesus and Gordon and Billy Butler—although I have my doubts that any of them is going to make the leap from useful to legitimately outstanding. Butler especially worries me—the guy is 21 and already unable to field any position. That kind of player never ages well. But since this team is not winning anything, I'd certainly rather see young players out there than the used-up retreads Herk Robinson and Allard Baird used to import to teach the young guys How To Win (i.e., unproductively take all their playing time). Mike Sweeney and Reggie Sanders have had the decency to spend most of the season on the DL. If the Royals could just overtake the White Sox for fourth, the rest would be gravy. I keep telling you, it doesn't take much to make me happy.
Posted by S.M. at 03:49 PM in Royals, Spleen | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
For a couple of reasons. First and most obviously, the dearth of, as the rock n' rollers say, new material over the past couple weeks. I'm sure I've irreparably compromised the growth of this site, which had grown from its simple beginnings to a readership well into the low two figures.
But more importantly, I've recently found myself having feelings that are so totally alien to my value system that they make me want to crawl out of my skin. The sort of feelings that, if my younger self had known ten years ago I'd someday have, might have inspired me to take my life. I've tried to ignore them, but I can't, so I might as well just cop to them and move on. If that's even possible, which I'm not sure. I'm talking, of course, about the shameful pleasure I'm getting from Alex Rodriguez's hot start this season. You know who I'm talking about—the guy sports journalists refer to as "A-Rod." Who can be blamed for the whole dumbass naming convention that gave us "J. Lo" and "T-Mac" and "J-Plum" and "S. Ting." Not only that, but bear in mind that this is a guy who plays for the New York Yankees we're talking about. It will not surprise you to learn that I really hate the Yankees. It's a cliche these days—everybody hates the Yankees. I know Yankees fans who hate the Yankees, or at least what the Yankees have become since O'Neill and Brosius and Conie blew town and the payroll exploded beyond reason.
But I really hate the Yankees. I'm a pretty big sports fan, and it's not an exaggeration to say that all the formative events of my sports fandom pretty much all involve hating the Yankees. I grew up in central Missouri. My father's family was from Kansas City. For twenty years—the heart of my grandfather's life, my father's childhood—Kansas City not only had no major-league baseball team (not that it currently does), but its minor-league team, the Kansas City Blues, was the top farm club for the Yankees. Which meant that the Yankees would come through town once a year, at the end of spring training, give the rubes a quick look at that miserable prick Joe DiMaggio and the Scooter and Tommy Henrich and all the rest, then return to New York, from where they would periodically pluck the Blues' best players, as needed. I know, and you don't have to tell me: that's what major-league clubs do. But understandably, the dynamic tended to make Kansas Citians, who tend to have chips on their shoulders already, feel a little irritable, undervalued, pissed-upon, a means to the end of keeping the Yankees on top of the American League.
Some of you who are students of history might guess that things changed in 1955, when the Philadephia A's, sucking wind, moved west to K.C. You would be wrong. The new Kansas City A's were owned by a guy named Arnold Johnson, who was maybe the shittiest owner in major-league history. How shitty was he? Shittier than the bowl of a Port-o-Let on the third day a three-day jam-band festival. Shittier than Donald Sterling, even. Johnson had previously owned the Blues, and when the A's came to town he didn't seem to realize that he was now competing against the Yankees in the American League, rather than shining their shoes from the bowels of the American Association. As Bill James recounted in detail in his 1986 Baseball Abstract, under Johnson, every time the A's would develop a half-decent player, the guy would end up in Yankee Stadium the next year. Roger Maris? The guy who owns the record for most home runs in a season by a non-roided-up goon? After a good season and a half for the A's in the late 50s, the next year he was roaming in front of the short right-field porch, winning the first of consecutive AL MVP awards. The best season ever turned in by a Kansas City A was Bob Cerv's 1958 campaign. He fell off a little the next year, then was traded to the Yanks early in 1960, where he helped the Yankees to the World Series. And pretty much every A's pitcher who ever demonstrated the smallest shred of promise was instantly shipped to Gotham: Ralph Terry (who actually began his career as a Yankee and was sent to KC only briefly, for a little seasoning), Art Ditmar, Bud Daley (who actually, no idea how, won 16 games twice for the A's), Bobby Shantz. The list goes on. None of these guys were especially great, and certainly it's unlikely any of them would have thrived as much on the A's, who sucked massively, as they did on the Yanks, who had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. But the stench of cowardice was so putrid that it's stunning the A's had any fans left.
My father renounced the A's when they traded Maris, as he'd predicted they would. But others still made the trudge down to the old Municipal Stadium to witness the dismal parade of losing. And boy, could the A's ever lose. They could lose with the best of them. They lost at home. They lost on the road. They lost big, they lost small. They lost with hitting, and they lost with pitching. They lost for average and for power, and they lost in the clutch. They lost to all fields. They lost in the showers of April, then lost again in the heat of July. They lost to good teams and bad ones. Lost day games and night. They lost sober and they lost drunk. The old players taught the young players how to lose with class. They lost on grass and would've lost on turf had there been any turf. During the Johnson years, in an eight-team league, they finished sixth, eighth, seventh, seventh, and seventh. In 1960, Johnson sold the team to Charlie Finley, then promptly died. Finley was a P.T. Barnum-type huckster who eventually won big with the mutton-chopped, handlebar-mustache wearing Oakland A's of the early 70s, before Bowie Kuhn stopped him from selling his players for beer money. (I don't know why Kuhn cared; this was a time-honored franchise tradition. Two times, in 1915 and again in 1932, Connie Mack dismantled A's World Series teams for cash rather than pay his players what they deserved.) But in K.C., Finley was just as inept as Johnson, if a little more defiant. They finished last his first year. In 1961, when the league expanded to ten teams, the A's contrived to finish ninth, behind the expansion L.A. Angels. After that: ninth, eighth, tenth, tenth, seventh, tenth. Over thirteen straight losing seasons, the Kansas City Athletics' aggregate winning percentage was .404.
Finley stopped selling all his best players to the Yankees, but his passion for gimmickry led him to pick fights with the Bombers whenever possible. Presumably this was intended to arouse the home fans, but the fans were smart enough to understand that, even when the Yankees stopped annually winning the pennant in the mid-60s, they were still a lot better than the A's. Finley tried to bring in the right-field wall to match the short porch at Yankee Stadium, but the league stopped him. Undeterred, he painted a white line on the field where his proposed short porch would have been, and instructed the PA announcer to solemnly intone, "That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium" every time a batter flied out to right beyond the line. As you can imagine, this did not have a positive effect on the town's civic pride, although it did have the effect of associating the A's resolute capacity to utterly fail with the Yankees. One night, the Twins hit four straight home runs, which no major league team had ever done before had been done only twice before in major league history. Naturally, the next batter pasted one to the warning track in right, whereupon the announcer duly noted it would've been a home run in Yankee Stadium. That was the end of the gimmick; it had become too embarrassing even for Finley.
The A's left K.C. after the 1967 season for Oakland, where they immediately became contenders for the pennant, eventually winning five straight division titles from 1971-75 and three straight World Series from 1972-74. But Kansas City, against all odds, got an expansion team in 1969, and, equally against all odds, the Royals, with a competent owner, developed into an excellent franchise. Turning the tables on the pitiful 1961 A's, they never finished last, not even in their first season. In 1975, they pushed Oakland to the wire, finishing second in AL West. The next year, they won the division.
Which is where I come in. In 1976, I was six years old, and I don't remember a lot from that year, but I certainly do remember Chris Fucking Chambliss hitting a home run to lead off the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Five of the ALCS and send the Royals home. And of course I remember the joy my father felt when the Yankees got swept by the Reds in the World Series.
But 1976 didn't hurt nearly as much as 1977. In 1976, no one expected much from the Royals. They were young. It was their first time in the playoffs. The Yankees were older, more grizzled, more storied. We'd played them to a standstill, essentially; we could take pride in that. But in 1977, we were expected to win, and we did, with fucking gusto. We won 102 games, best record in baseball. We absolutely thumped the Yankees in Game One of the playoffs in the Bronx. The Yanks took Game Two, but then we came back to K.C. and throttled them in Game Three, with our ace, Dennis Leonard, going the route and putting us one win from the Series. Unfortunately, that night, our first baseman John Mayberry, with his brothers in from out of town, celebrated by embarking on a cocaine binge of historic proportions, and showed up at the ballpark the next night drooling and uncommunicative. Most people remember Game Four, if at all, for Billy Martin's ballsy decision to bring his Cy Young-winning closer, Sparky Lyle, into the game in the fourth (!) inning, after the Royals had cut the Yanks' lead to 5-4, but I remember Mayberry, stumbling around first base like the human embodiment of a Quaalude with its ankles tied together, fanning twice and committing two errors before being pulled in the fifth for Duke Wathan, who wasn't even a first baseman. The Royals lost, but, even so, the next night (with Mayberry riding the pine) they took a 3-2 lead into the ninth inning of Game Five, before Whitey Herzog decided to push his luck and bring back Leonard, on one day's rest, to close the game. The Yankees scored three to win 5-3, the second straight year they'd won the decisive game of the ALCS in their last at-bat.
Somehow 1978 was even worse. For one thing, I was older and more aware of what was going on. For another, this was three years in a row, and if one is an isolated incident, and twice a pattern, three times is destiny, and it's no fun whatsoever for your destiny to be reaching the summit of the mountain only to cartwheel backwards down the slope while being thumped by boulders. This time the Royals expired in four games; it was like they knew they couldn't win. The next year they didn't even make the playoffs, finishing second to the Angels.
I don't remember as much as I'd like about my grandfather, but I certainly remember him sitting in front of his massive color television, watching the Royals and declaiming with unfathomable pessimism just why the team was fucked and would never get anywhere. He'd suffered through the minor-league era. He became an A's fan when they moved to town and got nothing but humiliation in return for 13 years of devotion. He watched the Royals grow from pupae to division champions, then saw them left at the altar three years in a row. Then, in February 1980, he died. Not to get all maudlin, but it still bums me out that he didn't make it one more year, if only to see what happened that summer and fall. The Royals lost the World Series to the Phillies and Bake McBride's geodesic afro, but, as heartbreaking as that was, in the final analysis, it was okay—George Brett hit .390, and more importantly absolutely parked a pitifully deficient Goose Gossage fastball into the third deck of Yankee Stadium for a three-run homer that clinched a three-game ALCS sweep. Even better, the sweep so unhinged George Steinbrenner that he fired his totally blameless and levelheaded manager Dick Howser, who subsequently managed the Royals to the 1985 World Series title. And I tell you what, Howser's steady presence at the helm of that unflappable 1985 team felt felt like kicking the Yankees square in the balls, repeatedly.
As you can imagine, I loved the Yankees of the late 80s and early 90s, with Andy Stankiewicz and Pat Kelly and Bobby Meacham in the middle infield racking up 90-95 losses a season. Conversely, I have grown increasingly bitter over the past decade of perennial Yankee hagiography each October on Fox, with the insipid Jeanne Zelasko and the incomprehensible Kevin Kennedy and the even less comprehensible Tim McCarver and don't get me started on Joe Buck, who should be replaced by his namesake male whore from Midnight Cowboy, who at least would not have chewed off his own tongue in rage when Randy Moss pretended to moon the crowd at Lambeau Field. Needless to say, the fact that the recent Yankee dominance has coincided with the complete disintegration of the Royals under the pitiful stewardship of David Glass, who runs the Royals like he used to run Wal-Mart (on the cheap, unimaginative, with contempt for his customers because he knows they have nowhere else to go), makes things even worse.
So you'd be right to point out that it's totally inconsistent with my established character that I should be happy that Alex Rodriguez is setting the American League on fire. Not only is he a Yankee, he's the Yankee who most egregiously symbolizes the tilted playing field that makes modern baseball so boring to the 60% of fans whose teams have no chance to win anything. Plus, he's a pretty boy, right? His hair is frosted. His arrival in New York coincided with the most pitiful choke job in the history of sports, an unprecedented gagfest in which he played a starring role. When he desperately slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's glove and then played innocent like Alberto Gilardino diving in the box, he not only disrespected the game, he incarnated the gated-community entitlement that defines the Brian Cashman era. Maybe it wasn't fair that the rich-kid team in The Bad News Bears was called the Yankees; after all, the Yankees of that mid-70s era—Munson and Lyle and Nettles and Guidry and Piniella and Mick the Quick—were dirtbags, not country-club swells. But the 2004 squad? Different story.
Anyway, I still very much hope the Yankees go 0-162 every year. They could go 0-162 for twenty straight years and it still wouldn't be enough for me. But I'm happy to see Rodriguez succeeding because, for all his flaws, he is an objectively great player who has been unfairly dissed by an obnoxiously spoiled fan base. Let's break this down. In 2001, he left the Mariners because the Rangers offered him a quarter-billion dollars. The media and fans instantly turned on him for being all about the money, even though none of them would have turned down the deal, either. Then he left the Rangers for the Yankees because the Rangers were terrible and showed no interest in getting better. He was branded as a mercenary, even though we're supposed to admire athletes who want to win above all else. When he got to New York, he willingly took a backseat to Derek Jeter, agreeing to play third even though Jeter is a much lousier shortstop, and abandoning any claim to team leadership. Nevertheless, over his first three seasons he averaged roughly .300/.395/.540, winning the 2005 MVP. What did he get in return? Everlasting scorn for being too deferential, not aggressive enough, not a leader—never mind that, if he had tried to pry the reins of the team from Jeter's cold, dead hands, the dickheads in the right-field bleachers (not to mention the press) would've been on him like white on rice.
Look, Derek Jeter is a very good baseball player. It was very impressive how he made that one great play to get Jason Giambi's slower, more stoned brother at the plate in the 2001 ALCS playoffs. But anyone who thinks he's as good as Alex Rodriguez is on crack. It's not even up for legitimate debate. In the end, that's why I'm happy Rodriguez is doing well. He's a Yankee that Yankee fans hate for no good reason, other than his mere presence didn't automatically deliver them the World Series titles they feel are their birthright. They pretended to dislike him on principle—he's not a winner, he doesn't come through in the clutch—but really they were just pissed that the team was losing. It would be totally fitting, and make me incredibly happy, if he hit about .373 with 65 home runs and the Yankees finished third.
Posted by S.M. at 11:28 PM in Royals, Spleen | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
"Ciabatta Bread," Basswood Lane (2007)
Austin-based crew brings the baked goods, plus a big-ass smile to my face. If you were so disposed, you could kvetch about how hip-hop these days is about pursuit of the Ultimate Catch Phrase. That, of course, would be reductionist, just like saying that indie rock is all about finding the perfect crappy T-shirt to match your beard. But hip-hop artists certainly recognize the power inherent in an infectuous hall-rocking chorus. And because hip-hop is our country's dominant popular music right now, if you salt your chorus with enough hilarious, semi-incomprehensible randomosity, you could even find yourself with a novelty hit on your hands. I can only hope Basswood Lane has the good fortune to see this song blow up outside central Texas. We got a lotta haters, the chorus tells us, but we ain't never scared. We gon' eat these li'l fools like ciabatta bread.
I don't know about you, but, to me, that is just awesome. Nobody does random, playful, and infectuous like contemporary Southern hip-hop, and this chorus stands out in all those categories. It makes me want to get extremely dumb.
Now, you could quibble with my assessment. You could argue, for instance, that it doesn't really mean anything. What's the difference between eating somebody up like ciabatta bread and eating them up like a Ding-Dong or a Yodel? I think that's beside the point. The point is that Basswood Lane is coming to your town; they'll help you party down; but if you get out of line, they will demolish you as one would a delicious sandwich packed to the rafters with fat-marbled pork products, sharp cheese, and yellow peppers. And they will smile broadly as they do, because that shit will be delicious. Apparently there's even a foot-stomping, jaw-chomping dance that goes with the song. You can check out the MP3 (along with Serg's bananas-with-enthusaism endorsement) here.
In other news, it's apparently Opening Day today for something known as "base ball." Every team is 0-0 and thus legitimately can claim at least some small measure of hope for the coming season. (Except the winless Cardinals, who are already in the shitter, and the Mets, whose magic number has been pared to 162.) It's maybe the most obvious measure of the depths to which the Kansas City Royals, the team I've rooted for since I was 5 years old, have fallen that sportswriters are considered "edgy" when they pick the Royals to finish fourth rather than last. I have no illusions about this season, but I can tell you that the Royals should be improved at every position, except maybe shortstop, where we swapped the worst player in major-league history for a guy who, if he maxes out his potential, could threaten the slugging exploits of Ray Oyler. Zack Greinke has apparently conquered his social-anxiety problems through extremely heavy sedation. As for Gil Meche, all y'all haters can step off. Who were we supposed to sign? Was Sandy Koufax available? What about Clemens—was he clamoring to haul his ageless right arm and armoire of "flaxseed oil" to western Missouri? If Meche stays healthy and gives us the sort of year Jeff Suppan used to—220 innings, 11-12, ERA in the mid-fours, relatively few public outbursts of total existential despair—I'll be happy enough. Bear in mind that my goals are modest. I would high-five all the other Royals fans I know, of whom there are none within high-fiving distance, if the team a) fails to lose 100 games; and b) finishes above the cellar. I'm like a beaten dog, really—I don't expect a Milk-Bone, let alone a turkey carcass, but I'd really appreciate if they'd loosen the choke chain a little. Anyway, my predictions:
Posted by S.M. at 02:07 PM in Music, Royals | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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