The Padres baseball cap is the one my father wore when my mother and he attended the only game that the Padres won in the 1984 World Series.
NOTE: WordPress insists on changing “MONEYBALL” to “Moneybag.” Autocorrect is such a drag.
“The game takes no prisoners,” Andrew McCutchen said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you did to get you there. You’ve got to show up the next day and be ready to win. Can’t feel bad for yourself. Game doesn’t feel bad for anybody. Game doesn’t care who you are. Game doesn’t care what you did last year. Game doesn’t care if you were an MVP or an All-Star. You’ve got to be ready to go the next day. That’s what I’ve learned. I don’t care that I hit two homers today. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow, trying to win the ballgame. That’s what we have to do. Gotta put our big boy pants on and go…. We don’t feel bad for each other in here. We’re just going to shake it off and get ready to go the next day.”
— Andrew McCutchen, Sunday, August 11, 2024
Professional athletes are not known for being LBGTQ advocates. If anything, the homosocial legacy of professional sports competition has directly served to reinforce the normatively of heterosexual role-playing. The death of Billy Bean, a journeyman baseball player who come out of the closet after his playing days were over, this past summer was the occasion for a lengthier obituary than his performance on the baseball diamond might usually have generated, in large part because of his courage to publicly acknowledge being gay. Billy Bean’s name, however, was close enough to a more famous name associated with baseball, Billy Beane, that some obituaries conflated their careers. Beane (with an “e” at the end) with the protagonist and main proponent of “Moneyball,” the idea that careful evaluation of a player’s true worth on the field might enable a small-market team on a tight budget to have a competitive roster. It’s not unusual in professional baseball, for instance, for a large-market team (the Yankees; the Dodgers; the Red Sox, etc.) to have a payroll two or three times larger than a small-market team (the Pittsburgh Pirates).
The problem with the “Moneybag” approach is that it requires a genius — and a fair amount of luck — to pull it off. One can’t be merely a competent general manager and be successful with tis approach. A case in point this year is (once again) the Pittsburgh Pirates, who two-thirds of the way through the 2024 season were actually two games above .500 (56-54). Then the bottom, as it has frequently done over the past thirty years, fell out once again. In early August, the Pirates lost 10 games in a row; and there went the season. By the start of the final weekend in August, the Pirates had a record of 7 wings and 18 losses. It’s possible that they will win both of the remaining games of this month’s schedule, but I don’t know many people who are betting on the Pirates finishing 9-18 for the month of August.
So why have the Pirates floundered so badly this year? Andrew McCutchen’s observations at the start of today’s post pretty well sum it up: it’s a game in which what you did last year is irrelevant. David Bender was an all-start reliever two years in a row, and now his ERA is above 6.00 and he is directly responsible for the Pirates losing seven games in the ninth inning this season. However, is he alone in Major League Baseball in letting down his teammates? Not at all. Camilo Doval, a reliever on the San Francisco Giants, was an all-star game player last year. This year, his ERA shot up to 6.43 and he was sent down to the minor leagues.
Bednar’s performance in August has been far worse than Duval’s: How much worse? Bednar has a 10.97 ERA (13er/10.2ip) in August and has blown three save chances. Even so, one can’t place yet another disappointing season entirely on Bednar’s shoulders. All-star third baseman Hayes has had a subpar year at te plate, and the outfield defense ranks last in the MLB. The Pirates’ shortstop leads the MLB in errors at that position. Well, what can one expect from a team with the second lowest payroll in MLB? “MONEYBALL,” as I said, requires a genius. It didn’t take a genius to choose Paul Skenes as the team’s first round draft pick last year. Apparently, though, it takes a genius to realize the Mr. Cruz, at the very outset of his career, was far better suited to center field than shortstop.
The Pirates have a stunning stadium to play their games in. It’s a shame their fans don’t have players to watch to match that stadium’s quality. The San Diego Padres, on the other hand, can come very close to having an attractive stadium in an urban setting. While Padre fans have been waiting a long time for a World Series championship, and the odds don’t favor them this year, at least team management is fielding a competitive ensemble. As “Iron Mike Marshall once said, “Victory is the quality of competition” and at least the Padres will make the playoffs for the third time in the past five years. I wish that team much luck! “Ninety percent of the game is half-mental,” said Yogi Berra, and that applies to management, too.
About Bill Mohr