My season-long boycott of baseball has continued. It’s really not been hard since the Royals have been so shitty this year. I’m not feeling any inclination to crack in a week when the playoffs begin. I’m sure I’ll watch some of the games, but I don’t expect to be as into them as I have been in recent years. I have plenty of other things that can entertain me during evenings in October.
Still, I thought I should drop a few baseball related thoughts.
Dayton Moore Fired
This is over a week old, but the Royals have finally moved on from their long-time general manager/president of baseball operations, the architect behind the 2014 pennant and 2015 World Series winning teams.
This was a good move.
Everyone says Dayton is a decent man who loves the franchise and the Kansas City area, and I don’t doubt that. But his methods had become outdated and it seemed like as long as he was in charge, the organization would remain stagnant.
When you look back at his career, it’s really remarkable that the R’s ever got to the postseason. It’s not that they weren’t deserving; those teams were filled with high draft picks and smart acquisitions. Rather what made those two Octobers seem so unlikely are the seasons around them.
I think Dayton was probably one more under-performing season away from losing his job in 2014. And the post-World Series era has turned into an absolute disaster.
A Twitter commentator said that championships are never truly flukes – it takes too much to win one in any sport to write them off as breakdowns in the matrix – but when you look at how the Royals performed in Moore’s first seven or eight years, and then in the seven years since, that title seems like a huge outlier.
I’m hopeful that J.J. Picollo, despite being a Moore protégé, is the right choice to move the franchise forward. He seems more open to using advanced stats and more modern training methods than Moore ever did. Perhaps that will unlock the potential of all the pitchers the R’s have collected in the past five years. His changes to the organization’s hitting philosophy are promising, so that bodes well.
The Dayton Moore era was filled with contradictions. The Royals were one of the few franchises that looked to take care of all of its employees during the pandemic. His efforts to build a new baseball academy are exactly what the sport needs to stay relevant and capitalize on talent that doesn’t come from the baseball factories of the American south or Latin America. Then there was his weird interest in educating players about the dangers of watching porn. Of all the ills in the world, that’s the one he chose to take a stand on? Bizarre.
There was a lot of shitty baseball between 2006 and 2013, and again since 2017. But what happened in the middle can never be discounted, no matter how much of an outlier it was.
Aaron Judge
I’m sure my long-time readers will be shocked that I’m super-annoyed by the coverage of Aaron Judge’s pursuit of the American League home run record, a mark he tied last night.
There’s the way ESPN has covered it. I don’t watch a lot of Sportscenter these days, but when I switch by it drove me nuts how the crawl would say something like “Judge Still Stuck at 60.” Still stuck. Two games after he hit #60. God I hate American journalism sometimes.
There was the same whining that happens anytime a record is being pursued and a hitter gets walked a lot. It’s not the job of the opponent to serve up meatballs, especially when they are fighting for a playoff spot. Ironic that some of the people complaining about Judge’s walks are the same people who fit into the next group and are allegedly concerned with the sanctity of the game.
But what has annoyed me most is the commentary around his chase, and the idea that should he break Roger Maris’ 1961 mark, he will become the “real” home run king.
That is garbage.
The MLB home run record is 73. It doesn’t matter if you hate Barry Bonds, if you think he didn’t play a clean game in his life, and if you think everything about that era was suspect. Those games, and those home runs, happened. You can’t strike them from the record without removing everything that happened in that era. So, Yankees fan, do you want to eliminate the team’s consecutive titles between 1998 and 2000? Roger Clemens was on those teams. Andy Pettite was on those teams. Jason Giambi. Kevin Brown. And those are just the big names we know about.
And you know how I feel about steroids. Do we know for certain that Judge is clean, or that he’s not using something now that is illegal but won’t be allowed in five years? The PED line is always moving, there are always advances in medicine, and I refuse to get upset about who is/is not using when the criteria for what is/is not allowed is not fixed.
Aaron Judge is a marvel, and what he’s doing is one of the most impressive performances in baseball history, especially when you compare his numbers to the other power numbers. He’s in position to break the AL home run record while also winning the Triple Crown, which is nuts. Let’s just celebrate that without trying to re-litigate 20-year-old grievances.
Albert Pujols
Hey, Pujols has had a remarkable summer, too. I figured when he signed with the Cardinals it would be for a victory lap, maybe a couple home series in the summer in front of packed crowds, then he’d slip away with an injury that would keep him on the IL until the final weekend of the season when he would come out for a few final ABs and hat tips to the crowd.
Boy was I wrong! Despite being 52 years old,[1] he’s somehow rediscovered the magic he lost over a decade ago and has bashed his way to 700 career homers and is OPS+-ing a cool 142.
It’s pretty amazing how a player can decline for a decade and suddenly find it agin. It’s weird how there’s been all the kvetching about Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa but no discussion of Albert’s miraculous comeback. Not saying it’s not legit, just saying be consistent if you’re going to complain.
Brett Favre
Not baseball, but he’s a piece of shit. Not that this was a surprise.
- Or 42. Allegedly. ↩