 |
| Just do it Bartolo! |
BARTOLO Colón is very much the people’s champion in the game of Major League Baseball, owing to his age (42), longevity (20 big league seasons), and suboptimal athletic physique (he’s listed at 5’11” and 265). Colón has amassed 221 wins with eight different teams in his career, and he’s still an effective starter with the Mets, as he sports a 2.82 ERA and has only issued four walks in 38+ innings pitched. Young pitchers pitch with their arms, but veteran pitchers pitch with their heads: Colón has been a strike throwing machine for years, a guy who uses guile and savvy and experience on the hill to make up his stuff diminishing over time. He’s actually a better athlete than he looks, clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously (watching him race Reds speed demon Billy Hamilton to the bag on a routine grounder to first was gif-worthy all unto itself), and he’s always got his wits about him:
Bartolo Colón has never been much of a hitter, however. Pitchers generally aren’t, of course, but Colón has been particularly bad. He sports an .092 lifetime batting average and a lifetime OBP of .099. He’s been hit by pitches twice but has never drawn a walk in 249 career plate appearances, which is closing in on an all-time record. He had never even had an extra base hit until 2014, when he legged out the first of his two doubles for the Mets. His swing is, well, not exactly elegant:
But on Saturday night at Dog Food Park in San Diego, Bartolo Colón broke baseball, broke the internet and earned himself lifetime baseball folk hero status against one-time Padres ace James Shields, who probably should just quit baseball right now:
Colón became the oldest player in Major League Baseball history to hit first home run. The Mets announcer declared it to be “one of the greatest moments in the history of baseball,” and he may not be far off. Baseball social media exploded when this happened. On a day where you have NBA playoffs, NHL playoffs, the Kentucky Derby, a championship prize fight, and on-going series between Nats-Cubs (two best teams in baseball) and Yankees-Red Sox (two most self-important teams in baseball), the #1 sports story on twitter was a 42-year-old fat guy hitting a dinger.
Awesome. I love it. We need guys like Bartolo Colón to keep the game fun. We need those guys who somehow stick in the bigs even though nothing about how they look indicates that they should be. (Buzzards coach Scotty Brooks once quipped that Houston Rockets fans loved it whenever he was on the floor, since they got to see nine of the best athletes in the world.) We need our proverbial 12th men in the NBA. (Scott Hastings was one of the best of those, he being the inventor of “the trillion.”) We saw this sort of love for the everyman in the NHL All-Star Game earlier this year, when the fans voted veteran enforcer John Scott to the game and he wound up being the MVP, reminding everyone that even the worst player in the NHL (which Scott probably was) can still play the game at an incredibly high level. These guys provide a connection with the fans to a game or a sport that none of us could ever, ever do.
Colón’s next scheduled start is in Los Angeles this coming Thursday, when he will square off against Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw is the best pitcher in the game, of course, and will probably do what he always does and mow down the first eight Mets he faces. But Kershaw is also known to have a good sense of humor, and the Dodgers have clearly been making an effort to fun up the clubhouse this season after last season’s dismal malaise, and I think it would be one of the funniest things ever – and also something of a tribute to a guy who has gone a long way to making the game fun over the past 20 years – if, having mowed down the first eight Mets like he will almost certainly do, Kershaw then faced up with vaunted power hitter Bartolo Colón in the batter’s box … and intentionally walked him.
• Speaking of intentional walks, Bryce Harper had better get used to them. Harper was walked 13 times in 19 ABs by the Cubs during a four-game series in Chicago. In Sunday’s 13-inning game, Harper managed to reach base seven times without an official plate appearance – six walks and hit by a pitch. He had no plate appearances in either of the last two games of the series. Cubs manager Joe Madden was adamant in not letting Harper beat him – and he was proven right by doing this, as the guy who hits behind Harper, Ryan Zimmermann, had a historically awful day on Sunday in stranding 14 runners on base. The Nats got swept by the Cubs, who exposed Washington’s obvious flaws. The Nats are winning with pitching, but apart from Harper, who is the best player in the NL if not the game, their lineup completely stinks.
That it was good strategy by Madden doesn’t make it attractive viewing. The on-field look is bad. Harper has said repeatedly that his goal is to make the game fun again, but it ain’t any fun at all for the fans to watch one of the game’s greatest talents being force fed a steady diet of four wide ones. I liken this to insufferable Hack-a-Shaq strategies employed in the NBA on bad foul shooters like Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan and Andre Drummond. I don’t want to watch Andre Drummond shoot 20 free throws, nor do I want to watch a circus act whereby DeAndre Jordan is sprinting down the court and running as far away from the ball as possible while being chased by some guy trying to foul him. That’s not basketball, in my opinion.
But it is good strategy, and what’s often the case in sports is that good strategy ends up looking awful, but is far too effective to ignore. The sport of hockey has never been the same since the neutral-zone trap was devised, a defensive tactic intended to make the center of the ice a claustrophobic mess and suffocate the opposition’s skill players. The chief architects of this strategy, the New Jersey Devils, have multiple Stanley Cup banners waving in the rafters of their Newark arena to show for it. In the Champions League final in a couple of weeks, the world will be subjected to the ways of Atletico Madrid, a club which plays some of the ugliest soccer on the planet: defensively stout, overly physical and, at times, overly cynical as well. It can be just horrible to watch, and yet it’s damningly effective – Atletico is in their second UCL final in three years, and won the title in La Liga in 2014. Atleti can’t hope to match either the flair and dynamism of Spanish rivals Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona, nor do they have the resources to creatively compete, so they don’t even bother to try. Atleti’s approach is one of heightened pragmatism, and it continues to yield results – which is all that matter, in the end. Intellectually, you can appreciate this, but it’s not particularly easy on the eye.
And on the field, when faced with this, you just have to figure out how to beat it. It’s all that you can do. Whining about it isn’t going to do any good. Harper’s going to keep being walked from hereon out until the Nats get even more guys on base before him and get some protection in the lineup behind him. The NBA big men I mentioned before turn into huge late-game liabilities, with Drummond being the biggest, as his .355 free throw percentage this past season was the worst in NBA history. He’s so bad at the line that the Detroit Pistons just can’t have him on the floor at the end of the game, which made trying to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs all the more difficult to do. Eventually, if these sorts of somewhat cynical strategies become pervasive, leagues will try to legislate them out of existence – I think you can do it in the NBA by further clarifying the intentional foul rules, for example; in the NHL, meanwhile, they’ve been trying to unclutter the center of the ice for more than a decade now and I’m not sure it’s really worked. But in the meantime, make the damn free throws! And if you’re the Nats, hit! Hit, god damn it! Hit!
• With the sweep of the Nats, the Cubs have moved their record to 24-6. They’re already 7½ games ahead in the NL Central. Their run differential of +102 through 30 games is absolutely ridiculous, and at this pace, they’ll shatter all-time records in that department. Projection systems are already forecasting this team to win 105-110 games, with the all-time record of 116 wins not being out of the question.
And none of it matters.
Because this is the Cubs, mind you. This is a franchise which hasn’t won a World Series since 1908. And for the next couple of months, it will be a giant lovefest at Wrigley Field, as the Cubs win a ton of games and score runs for fun and run away from the field and leave the Pirates and the Cardinals and the rest of the National League in their rearview mirror, but at some point, that’s going to change and the pressure is going to start to build. It’s going to build into a 16-tonne gorilla riding on their backs come playoff time, because anything other than winning a World Series will be a failure.
And all it takes in baseball to be a failure is a bad week. The 116-win Mariners of 2001 had a bad week in the playoffs and they were gone. Say the Cubs roll into the playoffs and face the Mets and Noah Syndergaard thunderbolts his way to a 2-hit shutout of the Cubs in Game 1. Here comes the doubt creeping in. Or suppose the Cubs face the Giants, with a team deep in postseason experience, and Bumgarner does his superhero routine in Game 1, and Joe Madden gets outfoxed by Bruce Bochy in Game 2, which wouldn’t be the first time Bochy has stolen a game in the playoffs. What happens then? Cubs fans will be losing their minds, the media will be just killing them and the pressure will be palpable, tangible.
Playoff baseball is hard. It’s really, really hard. One of the better and more memorable baseball teams of my lifetime, the 1986 Mets, endured two of the most tense, intense, brutally difficult playoff series I’ve ever seen in order to win the championship – at no point against either the Astros or the Red Sox did you think, “oh yeah, Mets got this one, no problem.” There isn’t a Giants fan I know whose heart didn’t very nearly stop during loser-out Game 5 of the 2012 playoffs against the Reds. If it’s easy to win the championship, it’s the exception rather than the rule.
So the Cubs can run up the win totals this summer, but I suspect it’s going to get a whole lot more difficult for them, as the National League is loaded with big-time front-end starters and every team who fancies themselves a contender is going to want to beef up. Good. Let it be difficult. In the meantime, let the Cubs have their fun.
• I mentioned the Giants in that previous conversation, since they have plentiful offense and three studs in their rotation and I suspect they will win the NL West (plus, you know, even year bullshit and such), but they do need to get their shit together on the back end of the rotation. Last week, the Giants became the first team in major league history to yield two innings of 12 runs or more in less than a week. The second of said innings occurred last Thursday against the Rockies.
The 5th inning started with Colorado leading 4-3 and the Rockies were hitting Matt Cain pretty good. Cain is beloved here in San Francisco, a guy who toiled for years with so little run support that his name has become a verb around here, as in, “the Giants got mattcained today at Busch Stadium, losing 1:0 to the Cardinals.” Cain blossomed into first a playoff ace – a 0.00 ERA in the 2010 playoffs – and then tossed a perfect game and was their #1 starter in 2012. But he’s lost two whole seasons now due to arm trouble, and the rehab isn’t going so well. The Rockies started beating on him pretty good in the top of the 5th. From the game log:
Top 5th: Colorado
• Trevor Story homered (393 ft.) to deep left center. Colorado 5, San Francisco 3.
• Carlos González doubled to left.
• Nolan Arenado reached on Brandon Crawford’s throwing error, Carlos González to third, Nolan Arenado to first.
• Gerardo Parra singled to center, Carlos González scored, Nolan Arenado to second. Colorado 6, San Francisco 3.
OK, so this isn’t working. Clearly, the situation calls for ADDING MORE GASOLINE TO THE FIRE!
In comes journeyman long reliever and recent call-up from the AAA Sacramento
• Vin Mazzaro pitching
• Mark Reynolds reached on Kelby Tomlinson ‘s fielding error, Nolan Arenado to third, Gerardo Parra to second, Mark Reynolds to first
• Tony Wolters doubled to right, Nolan Arenado and Gerardo Parra scored, Mark Reynolds to third. Colorado 8, San Francisco 3.
This closes the book on Matt Cain, who is credited with giving up 8 runs. The next chapter is all Mazzaro.
• Chris Rusin grounded out, second to first.
• DJ LeMahieu singled to right, Mark Reynolds scored, Tony Wolters to third. Colorado 9, San Francisco 3.
• Charlie Blackmon doubled to left center, Tony Wolters scored, DJ LeMahieu to third. Colorado 10, San Francisco 3.
• Trevor Story singled to left, DJ LeMahieu scored, Charlie Blackmon to third. Colorado 11, San Francisco 3.
• Carlos González walked, Trevor Story to second.
• Nolan Arenado hit by pitch, Charlie Blackmon scored, Trevor Story to third, Carlos González to second. Colorado 12, San Francisco 3.
• Gerardo Parra singled to center, Trevor Story and Carlos González scored, Nolan Arenado to second. Colorado 14, San Francisco 3.
• Mark Reynolds doubled to deep left center, Nolan Arenado scored, Gerardo Parra to third. Colorado 15, San Francisco 3.
Make it stop!
• Derek Law pitching.
• Tony Wolters struck out swinging.
• Chris Rusin singled to right center, Gerardo Parra and Mark Reynolds scored. Colorado 17, San Francisco 3.
• DJ LeMahieu grounded out, second to first.
13 runs, 10 hits, 2 errors. Colorado 17, San Francisco 3.
Mazzaro gets credited with the last two runs allowed, so that’s 9 runs he allowed in total, 7 of them earned, in ⅓ of an inning. Suffice to say, it wasn’t Vin Mazzaro’s best outing. Amazingly, it wasn’t his worst. In fact, there have been five relievers who gave up nine runs in an outing over the last five years, and two are Vin Mazzaro. To the surprise of pretty much nobody, Mazzaro was promptly DFA’d the day after the game as the Giants went about hastily rearranging the deck chairs on what has been a Titanic-sized calamity of a bullpen. And you feel bad for the guy, since he’s obviously managed to cobble together something of a career as a AAAA reliever, getting gigs and bouncing up and down between the bigs and AAA but never really sticking. But when you’re this bad, at this point in a career, it’s hard to ever imagine you being given the ball again.
I was drunk by the time the Giants finished scoring four in the bottom of the 5th, at which point the entire inning had taken nearly an hour and I was halfway down the bottle of usquebae. Judging from the headline on the game recap, I take it the Giants lost:
• The pathetic Cincinnati Reds bullpen finally kept a clean sheet, to borrow a soccer term, allowing no runs in last Friday’s 5:1 Cincy win over Milwaukee. The Reds’ pen had given up a run in 23 consecutive games, which is a MLB record, and the Kerosene Kids in the pen wasted no time before starting a new streak, as the Reds gagged away a 6-2 lead the following day and then gave up seven runs in the top of the 10th in what turned into a 13:7 laugher in favor of the Brew Crew. It doesn’t take genius analysis to figure out why Cincy has now sunk into the NL Central basement.
• It isn’t going well in Minnesota, where the Twins are 8-23 and already 13½ games off the pace in the AL Central. The Twins smoke-and-mirrored their way to an 83-win season in 2015, a record propped up by a 20-7 month of May which masked the fact that they weren’t very good last year, either. Take out that month and you’re talking about a 71-95 record since the start of last season. Yeech.
• The 7-23 Atlanta Braves have hit 7 home runs in 1130 plate appearances, and are on pace to hit 38 homers as a team this year. They also have hit zero triples this season, are slugging .288 as a team, and have an OPS of .582 as a team. The Mariners’ post-DH record for offensive futility – 513 runs scored in 2010 – is most definitely in play. But according to the conglomerate who owns the Braves, everything is copacetic in Atlanta, as the owners are “pleased with what’s going on – other than on the field – at the Braves.” Uh-huh.
• And speaking of the Mariners, they’re still in first place in the AL West. Watch for locusts.
