The Historical Context of Baseball Greatness

One of the most appealing things about baseball is its context in history. If you transported a fan from Fenway Park's first Opening Day in 1912, and plopped them down in the same spot a few months from now, it would likely be the only thing about modern life they understood.

Sure, there are differences: the jumbotrons, the sound systems, and the racial diversity of players and spectators would surely confuse our mythical 1912 fan. But the ballpark has changed remarkably little when compared to other everyday institutions of American life.

Baseball's long history has certainly had its share of upheavals, what with multiple expansions to the playoff structure and number of teams, the addition of the designated hitter, and the explosion of player salaries under free agency - but the game still has a level of statistical continuity that allows for perennial arguments about the "best ever."

This year's debate will center around Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. If the Captain had played for a shorter lived expansion team (like the Rays), I might be able to entertain the idea of him being the best they'd ever had. But the Yankees? A team that employed Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, and Yogi Berra?

There's a tendency among fans to view players that were on the field as they came of age as larger than life - better than any who came before or who will play in the future. But the beauty of baseball is that you can look at (most) statistics and compare them across the decades, even if they must be taken with a grain of salt.

Typically when discussions of "modern advantages" come up in baseball, they allude to the use of performance enhancing drugs, but today's players have plenty of totally legal advantages over their predecessors. Things like Tommy John surgery and laser eye surgery didn't always exist, and players didn't always have access to personal trainers and dietitians to perfect their bodies. Even something as simple as a salary that doesn't require an offseason job as a ditch digger to make ends meet can extend a career long enough to make a Hall of Fame worthy difference.

So is it really possible to compare players across generations? Maybe - but while having heated discussions about "the best ever," we must remember that there's no definitive way to know how today's players would perform under 1912 circumstances - or how someone like Babe Ruth would do with the modern conveniences (and prying press corps) of today.

Padded caps for pitchers?

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According to a story on ESPN, Major League Baseball has approved the use of padded caps for pitchers starting this season. Considering the sheer magnitude of innings pitched in a single season, line drives that hit the pitcher in the head are very rare - but incredibly scary whenever they happen.

The protection would come in the form of foam and plastic padding inside pitchers' caps, adding about half an inch to each side of the cap, and an inch on the front. ESPN has a video up on their site showing a few major league pitchers trying on the caps, and from a distance it would be difficult for fans to tell the difference.

The caps would be optional at first, but widespread adoption would likely lead to a new rule in years to come. Major League Baseball certainly isn't dealing with the same concussion PR-nightmare the NFL is, but they're still taking steps to allow their players to protect themselves.

Among the players interviewed, Yankees lefty CC Sabathia said he would wear the new cap, even though he's never been hit in the head in his illustrious twelve year career."You can never be too safe," he said. "Especially with the way guys are hitting the ball these days."

No word yet on whether any Red Sox pitchers will decide to take advantage of the new protective headgear - but I would guess the front office would support such a protection for their investment.

Alex Rodriguez suspended for 2014 season

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It's official. The arbitrator has decided, and Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will miss the entire 2014 baseball season with a suspension of 162 games, plus any playoff games the Yankees might qualify for.

Technically this is a reduction in the original punishment, as Major League Baseball had initially suspended Rodriguez for 211 games. Either way this could mean the end of his career, as he'll be forty years old before he's allowed to take the field again, and who's to say the Yankees will want their lineup anchored by a middle-aged scandal-ridden pariah.

For anyone who isn't a Yankees fan, this is a boon, as the Yankees still have to find a third baseman for the upcoming season, and the market is thin this late in the offseason.

Of course, Rodriguez and his legal team aren't ready to accept this decision - they have released a statement saying they will be taking the case to a federal court.

FAQ: Free Agency

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The World Series has been over for almost two weeks. The boys of summer have all gone home, and with their departure comes the worst season of them all: winter.

There is some excitement to be had during the offseason, and it's mostly free agent-related speculation. With a lot of free-agency related questions floating around out there, and the GM Meetings kicking off today, I thought I would gather all the answers in one place.

What is free agency?

Free agency is the state of being free from contractual obligations, and able to sign with any team.

Who can be a free agent?

There are different kinds of free agents. Typically those we hear about the most are players who have at least six years of major league service. Players who have been in the league much longer but have reached the end of their contract, and players who have been released by their most recent team are also free agents.

What's the difference between that and international free agents?

Because the MLB draft only includes players from US high schools and colleges, any player who falls outside those institutions in any other part of the world is an international free agent, and can sign with any Major League franchise. International free agent signings usually take place in the summer, but can happen at any time.

What's the difference between arbitration eligible and free agency?

To be arbitration eligible, players must have between three and five years of service time. At the end of the season, their team must either offer them a contract for the following season, or allow them to become free agents. Once a deal has been offered, the player can accept, or make a counter offer. If the team and player cannot come to an agreement, a salary arbiter will decide which contract the player deserves. The arbiter can either select the team's offer, or the player's counter offer, but cannot compromise between the two.

What's the deal with "compensation"?
Until last offseason, free agents were classified as Type A, Type B, or unclassified, based on rankings from the Elias Sports Bureau. If a team offered a contract to a Type A free agent, and that player signed with another team, the original team was due the top draft pick from the signing team, as well as a supplementary draft pick between the first and second rounds. The arrangement for Type B free agents was similar, though teams got supplementary picks.

The 2011 collective bargaining agreement amended that process. Now, teams can get compensation for their departing free agents only if they offer those free agents a contract worth at least the average of the 125 richest contracts in baseball.

What's the time frame for signing free agents?
Today was the last day for free agents to accept offers from their 2013 teams - if they do not accept qualifying offers, they can still negotiate and/or sign with that team, but other teams are not allowed to make offers. Free agents can now sign with any team at any time. Arbitration hearings aren't until January, though many teams come to terms with their arbitration eligible players before then.

Where can I find out more?
The internet is full of information! Here are a few good sites. Just make sure you get information from sites updated after the 2011 collective bargaining agreement. If you want a more in depth look at the history of free agency, I highly recommend The Way It Is, by Curt Flood, who took the fight for free agency (unsuccessfully) to the Supreme Court, and Catfish: My Life in Baseball, by Catfish Hunter, the first player to be granted free agency.

The Complicity of Bud Selig

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However you feel about the Alex Rodriguez debacle, you have to agree that it makes for excellent baseball television. Personally, I'm quite enjoying the circus - schadenfreude has always been one of my strong suits.

When A*Rod takes the field in Chicago, he'll doubtless face a loud chorus of boos and jeers. After talking to a few Yankees fans, I don't think his reception would be much better at home in the Bronx; Rodriguez has a seriously dwindling list of supporters.

But to focus on Alex Rodriguez at the expense of all the other storylines surrounding the suspensions would be a mistake. Sure, A*Rod's return is somehow both arrogant and brave, and certainly makes for great drama - but there's so much more to talk about.

In light of Bud Selig's singleminded prosecution of Rodriguez and his fellow PED users (which, of course, is warranted given their alleged indiscretions), we should not lose sight of the fact that it was Selig and his power structure who let the steroid era go unchecked for so long.

Selig took the reins at MLB in 1998, when the game was still trying to recover from the strike and cancelled World Series in 1994. So when the home runs started flying out of (publicly funded) stadiums and fans started flocking back in, he looked the other way.

In his defense, Selig was dealing with an at-times uncooperative Player's Union, but he didn't manage to get steroid testing into the game for six years. Selig ignored the problem for more than half a decade. Six years of rampant PED use across the game created a culture of steroids in cities everywhere - and people like Alex Rodriguez realized that the benefits outweighed the risk.

The wide use of performance enhancing drugs is a black eye to the game of baseball, but the sport will recover - just like it has recovered from scandals in gambling, amphetamines, and greed. The reputations of Alex Rodriguez and Bud Selig, however, may be beyond recovery.

Counting down to pitchers and catchers

While stumbling around the internet this morning, I found a wonderful website to give me hope even on days (like today) when the snow is falling outside.

Introducing Spring Training Countdown, a site with the sole purpose of letting anxious baseball fans know how long they'll be waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training:

As you can see, there's less than a month until spring training! And even this clock can't estimate when the early birds will start to arrive; there are always players who show up before they have to, and with the abysmal showing the Red Sox had in 2012, I'm hoping we have a lot of them.

By the time you read this post, the screenshot  just took for the photo will be minutes or hours old - so go ahead, click through, and indulge your daydreams of springtime and baseball for a few moments.

Wild Card Day!

Photo from the mlb.com homepage

Today will be an exciting day for baseball.  Even if both Wild Card games are blowouts, it's a history-making endeavor: the first day of the newly extended playoffs.  The Braves take on the defending World Champion Cardinals at 5:00, and then the upstart Orioles look to knock out the defending AL Champion Texas Rangers at 8:30.

I know most people hate the new format, what with adding two more teams to the pennant race and making the Wild Card teams play a winner take all one game playoff - which understandably seems like a ridiculous gamble after slogging through 162 games to reach this point.

But I actually really like the new format.  First of all, Major League Baseball still has fewer teams make the playoffs than any other major sports league, so if you complain about the new Wild Card setup and have no qualms with the systems of the NBA, NFL, or NHL, you need to take a good long look at yourself.

More importantly, the disagreement over the "unfairness" of the one game playoff is absurd; if anything, this sets to right the issue with adding the Wild Card back in the nineties.  Since the inception of the Wild Card, the only penalty given for not winning your division was a lack of home field advantage.  Essentially the Wild Card winner was treated exactly the same as some of the division winners, and that is downright ridiculous.

Now, winning the division means something. It means not having to get through a one game playoff, which, as most baseball fans know, is essentially a tossup.  It means more meaningful baseball in the last games of the season. I don't know why you wouldn't be on board with that.

Happy Jackie Robinson Day!

I'm headed to Fenway this morning to see the Red Sox battle the Rays - and keep hopes for a sweep alive.  It will be my first time at the park since Game 81 of last year (which ended in a Red Sox loss), and I could not be more excited about the fact that today is Jackie Robinson Day across MLB.

I'm taking a couple of sports related classes this semester (Baseball as American Culture and History of US Sports), and so we've obviously talked quite a bit about Robinson, both as an incredibly talented baseball player and as an amazingly strong and resilient human being.

Robinson took more abuse from fans, opposing teams, and even coaches, than any of us will ever understand - he not only paved the way to end segregation in baseball, but he was a beacon of hope to African-Americans all over the United States.  The best book I've read on Robinson is called Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy, by Jules Tygiel.  If you're interested in reading about Robinson's journey, or about Dodgers' mastermind Branch Rickey, this is the book for you.

The Red Sox in particular have cause to reflect on Jackie Robinson today, because they were the last MLB team to integrate, when Pumpsie Green debuted in July of 1959, TWELVE YEARS after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.  The Sox remained a notoriously racist organization far beyond Green's tenure on the team, and this fact was a big part of some terrible Red Sox teams - even when the Red Sox were ready to bring in African-American and Latin players, said players wanted nothing to do with an organization with that kind of reputation. (For more reading about this topic, check out It was Never About the Babe: The Red Sox, Racism, Mismanagement, and the Curse of the Bambino, by Jerry M. Gutlon.)

Of course, the Red Sox aren't discriminating against non-white ballplayers these days, but it's important to understand the scarred history of the franchise, because it all led up to today.

Today, every player in Major League baseball will wear 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson, and all that he stood for.  It's a meaningful and important sight, and I feel privileged to have tickets on this day specifically.

Expansion was inevitable - and it's not the end of the world

 I'm taking a class this semester called "History of U.S. Sports," and we actually had a discussion of playoff expansion a few weeks ago.  The professor broke it down for us: who benefits from playoff expansion, and who loses? First the beneficiaries: owners - with more games, they make more money, and cusp teams will be playing meaningful games deeper into the season; players - more players will get the chance to show their stuff in the postseason, and since many of them have playoff series MVP reward triggers in their contracts, they like this; agents - they benefit when their players do; Major League Baseball - more games is more hype, more advertising, and more money; small-market cusp teams - if you're a perennial second- or third-place finisher, this is going to energize your team and your fanbase; networks - more high-stakes games means more viewers, more advertisers, and more money.

So who loses? Big market playoff shoe-ins - teams like the Yankees or Phillies, who nearly always make the playoffs, don't want to see more competition in their way; fans - the more diehard, nostalgic fans see this as an affront (just as they did with the advent of divisional play in 1969 and the Wild Card in 1995 - fans always pine for the good old days, which tend to be whatever was happening when they became a fan).

You can see why the expansion will always win out: most of the beneficiaries are backed by the potential for big bucks, while the losers don't have much sway - diehard fans aren't going to boycott the expanded playoffs in large enough numbers to make up for all the casual fans who will find a one-game playoff infinitely more exciting and digestible than actually paying attention for 162 games (we should face it, as a culture, we love the potential for heroics and heartache in a high-stakes situation).

I actually like this new format (I know, I'm upsetting you, but hear me out): yes, one-game playoffs are inherently unfair, as any fan knows than an inferior team can beat a superior team in one game. But the format SHOULD BE UNFAIR to a Wild Card team who, by definition, is not as good as the Division winner. [I'd actually much rather see a balanced schedule, but that's a rant for another day.] 

The fact is that this will make winning the Division actually mean something - and it hasn't for quite some time.  Teams with the Wild Card locked up have coasted through September for years now, resting up their regulars and rendering the last month of the season essentially meaningless (thus cheating fans who buy tickets).  Under the new system, teams will want to avoid a one-game playoff at all costs, and will play meaningful baseball for longer.

At the end of the day, Major League Baseball is a business, and they will do anything that makes them more money. Playoff expansion has been profitable (in every American sport) every time it has happened. So love it or hate it, it's here to stay.

[And yes, I actually get college credit for discussing these things every week. Last class we discussed playoff expansion, Linsanity, Tim Tebow, and Teddy Roosevelt. I love you, Trinity College.]