Category Archives: Baseball

On Freese and perspective

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David Freese

David Freese comes down the third base line after sending the 2011 World Series to a seventh game with a leadoff blast in the Game Six bottom of the eleventh.

If there’s one sub-pastime that animates baseball faithful almost as much as the game itself, it’s arguing. Especially about who belongs in the national Hall of Fame, and who doesn’t. Now you’re about to ponder a twist you probably never thought you’d have to consider.

You may never hear of any Hall of Famer declining the honour because he felt honestly that his career really didn’t justify it. But now there’s David Freese, the biggest of the big from the 2011 World Series, who’s turning down his election to the Cardinals’ team Hall of Fame because he feels his career doesn’t justify it.

The Cardinals aren’t the only team whose greatest moments were often written by others than their national Hall of Fame legends. But I’d be willing to bet they’re the only one who’ve just had one of those authors turn their own team Hall of Fame down. If I’m wrong, I’d be glad to know whom else.

This is a team who’s had enough big moments to stock a warehouse. Including, but not limited to, Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander (who was or wasn’t hung over) fanning Hall of Famer Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded in the 1926 World Series, an inning before the Redbirds threw Babe Ruth out stealing to end it—with Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig on deck while Bob Meusel was at the plate.

There was Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter’s mad dash home in the 1946 World Series. There was Hall of Famer Bob Gibson’s perseverance in Game Seven of the 1964 World Series, then busting Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s single Series game strikeout record in 1968. There was Jack (The Ripper) Clark’s monstrous three-run homer to snatch a pennant from the Dodgers who were an out away from forcing a seventh 1985 National League Championship Series game.

There was Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols’s glandular home run off Brad Lidge that only staved off the Cardinals’ elimination in the 2005 NLCS; and, his three bombs in 2011 World Series Game Three—starting in the sixth inning, finishing in a kind of reverse cycle. (A three-run shot, a two-run shot, and a solo shot.)

And, almost superceding the entire foregoing, Freese in Game Six of that Series. You had to have some kind of mojo working to supercede all that. Freese had it that night. When he hit a game-tying, opposite-field triple with the Cardinals down to their final strike in the ninth; then—in the bottom of the eleventh—sent the Series to a seventh game (which his team also won) by hitting a full-count, leadoff homer straight over the center field fence.

It added the World Series MVP to a trophy case that already included Freese’s being named the 2011 NLCS MVP as well. He’d done bloody well splendid for a kid who’d grown up a Cardinals fan, gave up on the game before college, but took it up again to become the Padre for whom the Cardinals traded aged Jim Edmonds only because they needed a third baseman with a little pop in their minor league system.

Then he earned the starting 2011 third base job, missed time early when hit on the hand by a pitch, and returned to play out the season with a Cardinals team that more or less backed into the postseason when the Braves collapsed as the Cardinals managed to reheat just enough.

“[S]ure, he might trade his career for a Hall of Fame career, but then again he might not,” wrote The Athletic‘s Joe Posnanski in 2020, recounting his own sixty top baseball moments. “There are 270 players in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is only one player who grew up in St. Louis and got to live the dream again and again for the team he grew up loving. I suspect David Freese is pretty happy with how it turned out.”

Freese’s happiness has been won hard enough. He’s spent a lifetime battling clinical depression, including a lapse into alcoholism as a way to battle it. He kept quiet about that battle until well after he’d left the Cardinals: he didn’t take it to the public until eight months after he married Mairin O’Leary and—after two seasons as an Angel—had become a Pirate.

David and Mairin Freese

Freese with his wife, Mairin. They met and married after he left St. Louis and began putting his inner burdens—including the outsized weight of the hometown sports hero—in their proper places.

“It’s been fifteen-plus years of, ‘I can’t believe I’m still here’,” Freese told USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale then. “You win the World Series in your hometown, and you become this guy in a city that loves Cardinal baseball, and sometimes it’s the last guy you want to be. So you start building this façade, trying to be something I was not. And the whole time, I was scared to death what was going to happen to me after baseball.

” . . . Who knows where I was headed, but as long as I was here, I had so many friends here, I wasn’t good at just saying no. I wanted to please people, make everyone happy, and that became impossible.”

He came to his hard-earned inner peace only after the Cardinals traded him away. (Then-manager Mike Matheny told him candidly it might be the only way he could begin remaking himself.) He had one or two more moments in the postseason sun, as a Dodger in 2018. He hit a pair of leadoff bombs—in Game Six of that NLCS and in Game Five of a World Series the Dodgers lost in five to a Boston Rogue Sox team of replay room reconnassance rapscallions.

Then, he retired after the 2019 season. Long after he’d begun enjoying life outside baseball, including learning the piano and becoming an avid traveler with his wife and two young sons. “Freese no longer saw his stupefying 2011 postseason as a cross to bear from behind the wall of depression,” I wrote in 2020.

He looked forward to taking his . . . son to a live Cardinals game in due course. Not to mention showing the little boy what Daddy delivered in Game Six. And all that postseason, including a still-record fifty total bases and 21 runs batted in.

. . . The guy who made St. Louis baseball the happiest place on earth in 2011 fought hard enough to get to happiness with how his baseball legacy turned out in the first place.

That’s the guy who took an honest look at his career and, still at peace and happiness with how it turned out, decided he was honoured that Cardinal fans voted him into the team’s Hall of Fame but that they gave the honour to the wrong player.

Lots of not-so-greats have come up bigger than their own selves in baseball’s biggest hours. Such men as Al Gionfriddo, Dusty Rhodes, Don Larsen, Moe Drabowsky, Al Weis, Donn Clendenon, Gene Tenace, Brian Doyle, Bucky [Bleeping] Dent, Dave Henderson, Mickey Hatcher, Sid Bream, Mark Lemke, Tony Womack, Edgar Renteria, Scott Spiezio, David Eckstein, Steve Pearce.

They don’t all get the chance to prove publicly that they were better men than their isolated moments at the top of baseball’s heap. This weekend, Freese struck a big blow for putting a brief spell of baseball greatness into the kind of perspective that comes only from a man who made himself greater than his signature professional achievement.

The Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland

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Oakland Athletics

Will the owners do the right thing and block John Fisher’s final betrayal of the fan base he abused?

Now we know Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo lacks either a brain or a veto pen when he needs both. We’re about to discover—or rediscover, as the case probably is—whether major league baseball owners have brains and vetoes enough to do what Nevada’s legislature and governor couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

Lombardo signed off on the state pledge of $380 million tax dollars toward building the Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland a new playpen on the fabled Las Vegas Strip. That, as more than a few social media crawlers have snarked, makes Lombardo the rookie of the year. Not.

The only thing left to plunge the knife all the way into Oakland’s back are the owners. Are they willing to rubber-stamp A’s owner John Fisher and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s insistence on finishing Fisher’s betrayal of Oakland and, by the way, waiving the $1 billion dollar relocation fee the A’s would normally have to pay MLB to make the move?

You’d better not ask Manfred about that. All indications are that the commissioner has long surrendered Oakland as a lost cause without bothering himself to ponder that the cause wasn’t lost, it was discarded witlessly. And A’s fans smothered in frustration, rage, and sorrow alike have learned the hard way what Manfred thinks of them after all.

Almost 28,000 fans poured into RingCentral Coliseum Tuesday in a “reverse boycott” aimed at letting the world know the A’s atrocity wasn’t their doing. That they weren’t the ones who let the team and the ballpark—whose usefulness disappeared years if not decades before the A’s might—turn into the city dump.

Manfred himself didn’t see the game. He was occupied with dining with some of the owners after their week of meetings ended in New York. But he did see the game’s coverage. And it impressed him this much: “It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.”

Was Commissioner Nero even mildly aware that Fisher reduced the A’s to rubble while trying and failing to strong-arm Oakland and its home Alameda County into handing the A’s a new home practically on the house? That Oakland called his bluff and compelled Fisher to think about sticking it to Las Vegas and its home Nevada?

“I think if you look at the A’s record over time and the economic circumstances, including the state of the stadium that they’ve operated in for a very long time, they had a very good record up through the pandemic,” he said.

Translation: Oakland wasn’t willing to just build Fisher a delicious real-estate development in Howard Terminal with a new ballpark thrown in for good measure. Except that that wasn’t the only option Fisher blew sky high. “Wasn’t Fisher committed to Fremont not that long ago?” asked The Athletic‘s Tim Kawakami—in April. “Then to San Jose? Then to rebuilding at the Coliseum? Then to the Laney College site? Then to Howard Terminal . . . ? This is the Death Lineup of squandered and blundering stadium efforts.”

Kawakami then was perversely optimistic that Fisher would fall on his face in Las Vegas and thus be compelled to sell the A’s if only because he wouldn’t be able to meet Manfred’s deadline of getting new digs by 2024 or else. Except that Fisher and Manfred and Fisher’s parrot David Kaval picked their Nevada marks well. Nevada’s cactus juice-for-brains lawmakers and governor fell for it hook, line, and stinker.

Oakland itself (the city, that is) isn’t entirely innocent. They were quite prepared to make $375 million worth of commitments to a new A’s stadium if only Fisher and Kaval left it at that. But no. Fisher and Kaval insisted on pushing the $12 billion Howard Terminal development project. That, said mayor Sheng Thao, turned the simple into the too-complex.

“There was a very concrete proposal under discussion,” Thao’s spokeswoman Julie Edwards said in a formal statement, “and Oakland had gone above and beyond to clear hurdles, including securing funding for infrastructure, providing an environmental review and working with other agencies to finalize proposals.

“The reality is the A’s ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a nine-acre leased ballpark on leased land. If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction.”

If you need me to explain why Fisher and Kaval are settling for just the ballpark in Las Vegas, remember my beach club in Antarctica? You can have it for a song now. Maybe just a short medley.

Thao’s statement said, essentially, spare us the crocodile tears, Mr. Commissioner. “I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland,” Manfred says.

I do not like this outcome. I understand why they feel the way they do. I think the real question is what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to the point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. It’s not just John Fisher . . . The community has to provide support, and at some point you come to the realization that it’s just not going to happen.

“This,” tweeted retired (and one-time A’s) pitcher Brandon McCarthy, “is [fornicating] pathetic. How is this not disqualifying? This toad is the steward of a glorious sport, dripping with history and he feels entitled to mock fans who are making their voices heard as he sits by and caters to hiding billionaires?”

Why does Manfred think Oakland “has to support” a team reduced to pathos by its owner, in a ballpark allowed to become a dump for too many years, with its host city responsible for building a new ballpark and just handing it to the team on whatever terms the team demands—even and including a $12 billion development where the ballpark would have been oh-by-the-way?

All that was Fisher’s doing. He did his level best to make things unpalatable for A’s fans. Including but not limited to the abject gall of inflating prices after last year’s A’s finished 60-102; two years and more worth of shipping or letting walk any viable A’s players who now perform well for other teams; and, ten years worth of fielding baseball’s 26th highest payroll with only one postseason game win to show for it.

(For the curious, the win was Game Three of the 2000 American League division series against the Astros—when courageous Liam Hendricks was still an Athletic, and kept a late two-run lead intact pitching the final two innings to nail the game.)

“[T]he A’s could have made money in Oakland,” writes Mark Normandin in Baseball Prospectus, using Tuesday night’s “reverse boycott” game as a classic example, “but chose not to.”

They stopped trying a long time ago, and began to try even less after that. No matter how many executive fingers are pointed at the fans in Oakland for not attending games, it doesn’t change that there is money to be made if you simply give the fans a reason to give it to you. Nearly 28,000 people paid an average of $29 just to show up on TV and tell John Fisher he sucks and should sell the team; do you know how much more positive energy and money could be out there for the A’s if they had a team worth paying to see? This is a city that, after all the team has done to them, was still willing to give them hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds to stick around even longer!

All that stands in the way of the A’s hosing Las Vegas and the entire state of Nevada now are the owners. (You think $380 million tax dollars is a fortune? Just wait until the almost-inevitable cost overruns begin to make themselves manifest. Three guesses whom the A’s and MLB will try to stick with those bills.)

I say again: I’d love nothing more than major league baseball in Las Vegas. But not like that. Not by way of a taxpayer hosing. Not a team whose often colourful history was betrayed by an owner who treated the team and its fans who’ve loved them like nuisances. I don’t want major league baseball in Vegas that badly. I’m perfectly happy having the Triple-A Aviators.

An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there’s something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams’ own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling “Stop!”

Keep your veto pen wet, Gov. Lombardo

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Once the Athletics’ uniform insignia, this now represents what John Fisher has made of the A’s. And, what Nevada’s cactus-juice-for-brains lawmakers approved for taxpayer financing to move to Las Vegas. It’s your move, Gov. Lombardo.

Let’s put it this way, as Deadspin‘s invaluable Sam Fels has, in more words than I’m about to sketch: Nevada, you’re being had. You have better odds playing for the Megamillions slot jackpot ($14 million) won two months ago by a man in a Reno casino than you have that the Oakland Athletics will make it worth soaking your taxpayers for $350 million plus to build it when they may not come the way the A’s think.

Fels wrote before the state Assembly gave its blessing toward enabling A’s owner John Fisher and his enabler, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, to count on that minimum $350 million tax soak to build a ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that isn’t liable to draw anywhere near what Fisher and Manfred think it will. The Assembly approved it a day after the state Senate signed off on it eyes wide shut.

Newly-minted Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo is expected to sign it all. Before he does, you wish he’d read Fels’s warning. Not only are the A’s moving from a large market they threw under the proverbial bus, when they couldn’t shove their once-planned Howard Terminal project of mass real estate investment with a ballpark thrown in for good measure down Oakland’s throat, but they’re planning to build the smallest ballpark in the Show.

Fels warns properly that the A’s may be counting on most of Las Vegas, if not most of Nevada, having just as much cactus juice for brains as their state legislature and, apparently, their governor. The forthcoming ballpark, as planned now, and as Fisher and Manfred want you to believe, means 27,000 tickets sold per game, which is ninety percent capacity for 81 home games. Not so fast, Fels hollers: Nobody sells that much per game all home season long.

You know who doesn’t sell 90 percent of their seats on average? The Dodgers (86 percent). You know who else didn’t? The Best Fans In Baseball, Cardinals (87 percent). Neither did the Yankees (also 87 percent). Are we really supposed to believe that the A’s, run by the duopoly of knuckleheadedness that is John Fisher and David Kaval, are going to produce a team that’s going to draw 90 percent capacity through July in the desert?

Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred say of course you’re supposed to believe it. They’re a trio of Mad Hatters. Except that the Mad Hatter was unapologetically honest about inviting you to come have some tea because he had no tea. The disingenuity from which Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred spring is enough to make smarmy politicians the essence of candor.

Maybe the lawmakers should have asked a major league ballplayer who just so happens to be native to Las Vegas. He grew up the son of a Yankee fan and with friends who became Braves fans (thanks to superstation TBS); Dodger or Padre fans (since each team is a mere four and a half hour reach from Vegas by car); or, Cub or White Sox fans, thanks to lots of Chicago people moving to Vegas over three decades prior to his 1992 birth.

“Are they really going to sell out for a Yankees game on a Friday night?” asks Bryce Harper, now a Phillie for life and hoping to keep things that way. “Is it going to happen? I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t think anybody knows . . . Do you think people are going to drop the Cubs or the White Sox to be A’s fans? There’s no way. No chance. But that five- or six-year-old, in the next ten years, they could grow up A’s fans. In ten years, you could have a lot of fans.”

Depending, of course, on one small detail nobody’s convinced the A’s can tend so long as Fisher ownes the club and Kaval is his trained parrot. “You can’t have (out-of-state) fans having to push this team,” Harper goes on. “You can’t have that. You need a fan base. They’re going to have to build a fan base, big time . . .”

They’re going to have to build behind a player. Who is that player going to be? Because it has to start next year . . . If they go to Vegas next year, you have to be able to go, ‘We’re going to get this player. We’re going to spend $300 million on him. And this is what it’s going to be.’ And he’s your guy. You have to build around that player. But it has to be a dude. It can’t be a middle-of-the-road guy. It has to be a dude. And it should be two.

Some people seem to think that if the NHL’s Golden Knights could thrive in Las Vegas—not to mention win a Stanley Cup Tuesday night, the second-fastest Cup win for an expansion team in NHL history—there’s hope for the A’s. Uhhhhh, not so fast, folks.

The Knights were born as an NHL franchise in 2017. In what’s surely one of the most grotesque cases of timing in this century’s sports history, great misfortune led to unforeseen reward. The Mandalay Bay atrocity of that year brought the best out in the newborn Knights, whose organisation from the front office to the men on the ice dove headfirst into helping a shattered city rehorse, financially and spiritually.

That cemented the Knights in turn as a “Vegas Born” city favourite. So did smart administration and solid play enable reaching the Stanley Cup final in their newborn season. The A’s won’t be Vegas born, they’ll be Vegas imported. (A joke since I moved to Las Vegas in 2007: if you’ve lived here seven years, you’re considered a native.) And it’ll be like importing pestilence, not princeliness.

When the Dodgers and the Giants went west for 1958, Los Angeles and San Francisco at least had the pleasure of welcoming teams whose owners believed in true competition and were recent World Series winners. (The Giants in 1954; the Dodgers, 1955.) When the A’s move a little ways east, unless Lombardo gets whacked with a wake-up stick, Las Vegas may have the dubious pleasure of welcoming what was once just the team’s uniform breast insignia: a white elephant.

(Harper: “I don’t think they should use the A’s name. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to anybody in Oakland for that to happen. I really don’t. I think they should rebrand it. That’s my own personal opinion. Maybe people in Vegas might think differently. They might love the Las Vegas A’s name. You already have the [WNBA’s] Aces and they’re really good. You’re not going to take a New York Yankees fan and change them into an A’s fan overnight.”)

RingCentral Coliseum reverse boycott night.

Part of the scene from Tuesday night’s “reverse boycott” at RingCentral Coliseum. “Vegas Beware,” indeed!

On the same night the Knights secured the Stanley Cup by flattening the battered Florida Panthers, 9-3, in the finals’ Game Five, frustrated A’s fans in Oakland turned out large enough for a “reverse boycott.” Perfect timing: The A’s won (beware the shock factor) their seventh straight game. (“Break up the A’s!” became an immediate punch line.) The day after, of course, they reverted to their 19-51 form losing to the Rays.

“It was never going to stop the [relocation] process,” writes The Athletic‘s Tim Kawakami of the “reverse boycott,” never mind fans hoisting their now-customary banners demanding Fisher either sell the team or pay for his own relocation fully. “But the sights, sounds and emotional flavor of that 27,000-plus crowd were all indelible and important.”

MLB owners will not be persuaded by it, of course. They see the free win in Las Vegas, and they’re going to take it. But sometimes civic defiance just needs to happen. Sometimes the moral moment lingers even in the wake of a larger loss. Maybe especially then.

. . .This is a bad deal for Las Vegas, not only because of potential shortfalls that Fisher isn’t required to cover but also because I’ve not seen any deal language about who’s paying for overruns—which isn’t the only thing about this deal that seems to be unsettled. Do you trust Fisher in a $1.5 billion deal with tons of gray area? I wouldn’t.

. . . Oh, man, the final few months of this season are going to be brutal at the Coliseum, and possibly through next season, which is when the lease expires. I expect Fisher and Kaval to come up with a plan to play their home games somewhere in Nevada next season. But the most likely options are the minor-league stadiums in Las Vegas and Reno, and I can see the players union not being in love with those scenarios.

So there will be a lot of bumpiness in the coming weeks, months and years, to be sure. But soon, it’s likely to be all Nevada’s headache, not Oakland’s anymore. And Fisher will still be Manfred’s headache, too. That’s not going away. Manfred got one problem solved Wednesday, but he gave up a lot for it—that is, if you consider legacy, honor and moral standing important.

Legacy? Manfred’s legacy is liable to be trying to fix what wasn’t broken; ignoring what was and might remain broken; surrendering to the attention-deficit fan rather than enhancing the fan who knows baseball is a thinking person’s game requiring patience and the long view; and, now, enabling a billionaire who trainwrecked a colourfully-historic team and a fan base that loves them to move it out of town and jam too much of the cost down another town’s throat.

“This thing has the potential to be an absolute disaster,” Fels writes, “that will rob a passionate baseball city that’s been [screwed] over repeatedly of its team to give a team to a market that likely won’t want it after too long. But hey, Rob Manfred’s happy as long as Fisher didn’t have to pay for a stadium himself.”

Look. We in Las Vegas would love major league baseball. We’ve made the minor-league Aviators either the Pacific Coast League’s top draw or near enough to it since their lovely little ballpark was built and opened. And we know the only way the Show would work would be in a ballpark with any kind of retractable roof. The summer game would be played dry roasted otherwise. (The average Vegas temperature between the final third of June and the end of August: about 101 degrees. The known highs: As high as 120.)

But I think we in Las Vegas, and in Carson City, should have told Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval, “Halt right there,” when they decided they were going to abandon their Oakland loyalists—after abusing them no end—to come our way and stick us with a bigger bill for a bigger deception than they think they can deliver.

Manfred has spoken lovingly about expanding the Show to two more teams. That’s what Las Vegas should have had if he was that bent on planting a major league team here. Gov. Lombardo should awaken himself, be certain his veto pen has a full tank of ink, and tell Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval: If you want us to come, you build it and you pay for it.

Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss

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Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen, outside Citi Field. The fan-friendly Mets owner preaches patience. Attention-deficit Met fans say, “and we want it right now!”

Listen up, frustrated (and spoiled) Yankee fans who think any early season series lost demands an accounting of “what would George do.” Look across town to the owner of the Mets, whose frustrated fan base seems to wish he was prepared to go full-on Boss because the 2023 Mets, thus far, are (shall we say) underwhelming.

Enough Yankee fans think a season is illegitimate unless the Yankees reach, never mind win the World Series. Enough Met fans think, “this year is next year,” upon one terrible inning—in April. The Yankee fan wishes their owner had even an eighth of his father’s notorious impatience. The Met fan wishes their owner might consider selling to The Boss’s ghost.

Not so fast, urges that owner, Steve Cohen, who is disinclined to push the proverbial plunger simply because the team he thought was well constructed has shown cracks aplenty.

Met fans can’t question Cohen’s own passion. Like me, he is a Met fan since the day they were born. Like me, he knows that frustration comes with the territory at least as much as surreal miracles or surreal self-resurrections. He, like me, knows that blowing a faltering team up at the first drop of a bad inning leaves little enough beyond difficult to contain rubble and fallout.

“When things get really bad,” Cohen told the New York Post‘s Joel Sherman over the weekend, “I’m not going to blow up. I don’t think that’s the proper response. I don’t think it solves anything, other than it gives people a one-day story. But it doesn’t really solve anything.” Where was he when George Steinbrenner turned the 1980s Yankees into Jacobin France as it might have been administered by the Rufus T. Firefly Administration?

“There’s plenty of blame to go around from a performance point of view,” Cohen continued. “So blowing up, I’m not sure it solves anything. It would demonstrate, ‘Oh, he really cares. He’s one of us.’ But the reality is it’s not going to solve our problems. And I think in some ways it can be demotivating.”

Hark back to how many times a Steinbrenner tantrum demotivated and demoralised Yankee teams from their top of the line stars to their glittering turned jittery prospects. (Roger Erickson, 1983 pitcher: “They told me I’m their future. I told them, ‘I don’t want to be in your future. It’s frustrating enough being in your present’.”)

“I’ve got enough experience, whether in my business or even in baseball now,” Cohen said, “to know that when things are going great, you are never as great as you think you are, and when things are going really bad, you are not as bad as you think you are. Things can turn around fairly quickly.”

They can. Until they can’t. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, things turn around quickly from tragedy to triumph. (Think of the 2019 Nationals and, what do you know, the 1973 Mets.) Sometimes, they turn around quickly from triumph to tragedy. (Think of the 1964 Phillies, the 1969 Cubs, enough Red Sox teams for the final 82 years of the 20th Century, and the 2007 Mets, to name a few.)

Cohen has the patience of Job. Enough of his fan base seems to wish Job had hit the ceiling running. But neither he nor they expected Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, a pair of future Hall of Famers in the sunsets of splendid careers, to show their ages quite this drastically. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected rotation inconsistency from that pair down to turn into bullpen exhaustion. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected Pete Alonso to hit the injured list with a wrist injury off being hit by a pitch. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected inconsistent hitting with men in scoring position.

Certainly manager Buck Showalter and general manager Billy Eppler have made an error or three. The Met fans who lack Cohen’s lifelong immersion in the team think the solutions range from throwing out the first manager to throwing out the first general manager—and then getting really mad. But Yankee fans with memories long enough and hubris short enough can tell you how well that worked for The Boss in the 1980s.

It’s not as though the National League is composed entirely of threshing machines. The league is somewhere between modest and mediocre overall this season. The Mets may not look quite as terrible as their surface record and their daily over-under-sideways-downs. And things could have been much worse.

Remember the gnashing when Steven Matz was thought to have gone back on his word and then signed with the Cardinals? How did that work out for the Cardinal Wayward? Matz had an injury-addled 2022 with a 5.25 ERA, and his non injury-addled 2023 has him at 5.72 and demoted to the bullpen.

Remember the prayers that some way, some how, Jacob deGrom might be made a Met for life? The injury-compromised great now requires his second Tommy John surgery. Of all the might-have-beens in baseball history, deGrom is liable to go down as the saddest of them all, a Hall of Fame talent who owned the mound when he was healthy but whose body told him, almost continuously, “Don’t even think about it, Buster.”

Remember how close the Mets got to making Carlos Correa one of their own? Until Correa flunked a physical exam for the Mets, just as he had for the Giants, then re-upped with the Twins. This season, thus far, Correa has a 97 OPS+, a .304 on-base percentage, a pace to hit far enough less than his career-long 162-game average 28 home runs, and he’s one defensive run below the American League average for shortstops. That should be a sigh of relief that he didn’t become a Met and become the planned third base experiment.

Cohen is not going to erect a guillotine in Citi Field or anywhere else just yet. The Boss kept his Yankee guillotine on red alert every month, so it seemed, at the worst of his depths. Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss.

“[T]he only other thing I see that, frankly, I’m a little bit troubled by is I’m seeing mental errors that we didn’t see last year and that we can fix,” Cohen continued. “That’s fixable.”

And I just don’t know why that’s happening. We all see it on the field on a daily basis. And that’s, that’s on the players, you know, and they’re working hard. I guess teams get into a funk, that happens. And then come out of it. These are veterans that have performed before, and they’re working hard. They care. They’re good guys. I believe in them.

And they’re smart enough, they care enough, that they’ll fix it on their own. They’ll fix, at least the mental side. We’re going through a bad period, but they know it, and they are willing to own it. Those are what I would call unforced errors that we can fix and we will because these are good guys who are working hard. As much as the fans care, as much as I care, they care even more.

It could be worse. Much worse. To which one fears today’s attention-deficit Met fan would reply, “Off with your head!” Even Cohen knows the present state can’t continue. That he refuses to just blow up the joint is more than admirable. But he may also know that a move or two may have to be made, soon enough.

Commissioner, anyone?

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Adapted from JK’s speech to the Las Vegas chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research delivered 10 June 2023.

Calling baseball commissioner Rob Manfred an inveterate tinkerer is calling Donald Trump and Joe Biden mountebanks. Calling Manfred a visionary denigrates the very definition of vision. But those who pine for the so-called good old days, while letting themselves think Manfred’s lust for rule remaking/remodeling points toward them, must first be made to answer, “Which good old days?”

Certainly not the days when the bases were large stones. Certainly not when pitchers were required to throw no way but underhanded and from a standing position strictly. Certainly not when the one-hop hit to the outfield was ruled an out if the fielder snagged the ball on that hop. Certainly not when none but white men were permitted to play the major league game. 

There are some things from the so-called Good Old Days that ought to be preserved or exhumed, of course. That’s without regard to the particular period of Good Old Days the get-off-my-lawn crowd prefers to revive. There are also things heretofore inconceivable to which today’s governors of our game, Manfred on down, should lend far more thought than they do. But it cannot be Manfred to shepherd it any longer.

Would you like to become baseball’s next commissioner? If your answer is yes, at minimum you’ll need a reasonable station from which to disembark your train. What follows is a fourteen-step platform:

1. The august office itself. Upon assuming office, the new commissioner shall convene a rules committee to explore broadening the means by which commissioners are chosen in the future. There’s no sound reason why the owners alone should choose the game’s public steward and top administrator, since it’s long been proven that under the owners alone the commissioner thinks the good of the game is little more than making money for it, and them.

The commissioner of the future should be elected by the following group of 79 people: Single representatives of the owners and the players, each; and, designated representatives from each of major league baseball’s nineteen umpiring crews.

2.Tick-tock clock. On paper, and in the imagination, the pitch clock seemed sound as a nut. In actuality, it wreaks more havoc than should be allowed. Havoc, and no few injuries ranging from the simple to the serious and back. Not to mention the imposition upon pitchers with unique or at least colourful pitching styles. Those concerned about the coming of the Clockwork Baseball Player should concern themselves about and stand athwart anything that would make that coming reality.

3. Game time. Are we supposed to applaud that, thus far, the pitch clock and its concurrent impositions upon the batter have shaved a whole . . . half an hour on average off the time of play? Are we supposed to applaud that the truest culprit of the elongated major league game—namely, the broadcast commercial blocks after each half inning and during each pitching change—remains unmolested?

The pitch clock’s elimination should be matched by all effort to make a new broadcasting agreement that includes no commercial blocks longer than one minute after half-innings and thirty seconds during pitching changes. (Yes, Virginia, it really does take less time now for a relief pitcher to get from the bullpen to the game mound than for the commercials to play.)

4. Manfred Man. The free cookie on second base to open each extra half inning shall be eliminated. Permanently. The only Manfred man that should ever be in the public mind shall be, once again, the hitmaking band of the 1964-66 British Invasion.

5. We’re on the air, anywhere. Eliminate all blackout rules for television. Allow any major league game to be broadcast in any region regardless of whether the ballpark is in the same broadcast region. Let a million television sets bloom because decades of evidence have proven that, of all the reasons for people to stay away from the ballpark, television like radio before it is the least of those reasons.

(As a relevant aside, I still remember seeing Dodger Stadium fans clutching tiny portable TV sets in the park. With the pictures turned down but the sound turned up. Why? Because they wouldn’t believe what they’d just seen from beginning to end unless they heard it from the late Vin Scully.)

6. Umpires can be impeached, too. The umpires have been laws unto themselves for long enough. It’s past time for them to be held as accountable for their malfeasance as players, managers, and team administrators. There’s no reason on earth for accuracy below 96 percent to be permissible. If you doubt that, ponder that a surgeon with a 96 percent accuracy rating wouldn’t face job security, he’d face malpractise suits.

Umpires with accuracy below 96 percent shall be placed on probation for the rest of the incumbent season or the first half of the following season. Failure to improve will result in suspensions. And, yes, the rule book strike zone shall be enforced strictly. The days of umpires deploying their own strike zones must end. That by itself should help assure accuracy of 96 percent or higher behind the plate.

7. No tank you veddy much. Team ownerships who fail repeatedly to invest properly in their major league product and their minor league support systems shall be put on notice. You have one year to decide: Will you invest properly in your teams, every year, regardless of the free spoils of revenue sharings you receive before each season begin; or, will you sell your team to a local/regional ownership willing to do what needs to be done to put an honestly competitive team on the field.

Tanking is fan abuse, plain and simple. If you can afford to buy a major league baseball team, you can afford to put forth a product that gives honest effort to compete. Rebuilding on the fly has been done for eons, before and after the free agency era.

Concurrently, past commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s ridiculous prohibition on player sales shall be rescinded. Teams shall be allowed to sell their players on an open market for whatever price other teams are willing to pay—and the players to be sold shall receive at least 25-30 percent of the sale price. This will allow the supposedly not-so-rich teams to stay minimally competitive, too.

Call it the Averill-Landis Rule, after the ancient commissioner who thought Hall of Famer Earl Averill wasn’t nuts to demand to know how much of the sale price he might receive when the Cleveland Indians bought him from the Pacific Coast League.

While we’re at it, a tanking team must never be given permission to relocate, which leads to . . .

8. If you want to build it, we will come. Under no circumstances shall any team seeking to build a new ballpark go to the local and/or state government for help. For now we mean you, Oakland Athletics. It takes colossal gall to try strongarming your incumbent locale into building you a new ballpark and, when they call your bluff, try to strongarm Las Vegas into building one for you; or, at least, paying for half if not more of it.

The willful self-destruction of a team fan base should never be sanctioned. Neither should regional taxpayers be made to foot all or most of the bill for a new playpen. The Voice in Field of Dreams assuredly did not say, If you build it, they will pay for it.

9. Interleague, schminterleague. Eliminate it from the regular season. Entirely. Save it for when it truly matters—during the All-Star Game, and during the World Series.

10. Are the All-Stars out tonight? Absent one fan, one vote, one time requirements, eliminate the fan vote. Why? Because the All-Star Game must include rosters containing none but the absolute best players on the season thus far. If this means one or more teams lack All-Star representation, tough. This isn’t T-Ball.

While we’re at it, the next commissioner must rule that the All-Star Game also needs to cease being used as a gold watch, even for future Hall of Famers. They’ll get their tributes appropriately around the circuit without a final All-Star honorarium, not to mention those so qualified getting the big one in Cooperstown in due course.

11. Competition, not compensation. This nonsense must cease. The regular season’s meaning has been compromised long enough. And the saturation of postseason games has compromised more than enhanced the game. There’s no reason on earth why any team not parked in first place at season’s end should be playing for baseball’s championship.

Expansion should be pursued to create divisions with even numbers of teams. Then, two conferences of two divisions each shall be fashioned in each league. The wild cards shall be eliminated entirely.

Then, each league’s division champions will meet in a best-of-three division series. The winners in each league will then meet in a best-of-five League Championship Series. (You want the Good Old Days restored, there’s a splendid restoration.) The World Series shall remain its best-of-seven self with its primacy thus restored. (Postseason saturation will be scaled back considerably under such a system, too.)

Thus will baseball fans no longer be subject to the thrills, spills, and chills of watching teams fighting to the last breath to finish in . . . second or even third place.

12. We want a real ball! Something’s very wrong when the Japanese leagues can develop baseballs pitchers can grip easily and are eminently fair to both sides of the ball but the American major leagues—which own a major baseball manufacturer—can’t. All effort to develop a baseball that doesn’t require that new-fashioned medicated goo for pitchers but is consistent and fair to hitters as well shall be undertaken.

A new, consistent baseball shall be developed and brought into play within one year of the new commissioner taking office. It’s long past time for the thinking person’s sport and those who support and supply it to start thinking. Hard.

13. Pensions. The new commissioner shall convene an immediate panel from among all team ownerships and the Major League Baseball Players Association. This panel, at once, shall agree that it was wrong to eliminate pre-1980 short-career major league players from the realignment of 1980. That realignment granted pensions to all players who accrued 43 days of major league service time, and health benefits to all players accruing one day of major league time.

The calculations shall be done to ensure full and proper pensions, based on their actual major league time, to all 500+ surviving short-career players who played before the 1980 realignment. The 2011 Weiner-Selig stipend—one small payment per 43 days service time, which today equals $718 per 43 days—was laudable, but insufficient.

Those players backed their players union’s actions that led to or upheld free agency, too. They do not deserve to remain frozen out.

14. As your absolute first order of business in office. Before assuming office, the new commissioner’s first official pronouncement shall be to demand . . . a recount.