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A Few Tweaks that Could Save The MLB All-Star Game

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Okay, I just can’t help myself. A sports “opinionator” is powerless when it comes to an issue like MLB’s All-Star voting.

First, a few disclaimers. I’m a baseball purist, and I’m older than 25 (okay, significantly older). Those two things may, unfortunately, have become redundant, but as the kids say today, “it is what it is.”

Since the job of All-Star voting was returned to the fans in 1970, the annual listing of the players who were “snubbed” has become as big a part of the game as the list of the guys who get in. Teams have always campaigned for their players, and players who got lots of national TV exposure always had a big advantage.

Because of that history, it’s tempting to look at the results of this year’s selection process and simply say, “well, you can’t make everyone happy,” and leave it at that. Unfortunately, if you’re an “opinionator,:” you need to try to figure out a way to fix it. So here goes.

There are several challenges to fixing this system, not the least of which is that baseball itself has absolutely no interest in doing so. They’ve made several changes to the player selection process over the last few years, including adding much-needed roster spots, but none of these has gotten to the unfortunate root of the thing, which is that most fans are woefully unqualified to pick an All-Star team.

Oh, I can hear it now, all the wailing, “It’s the fans’ game!”

Hey, you know what? Not anymore. You see, one of those changes a few years ago was to take the home field advantage in the World Series and give it to the league that won the All-Star Game. To me, that means it’s no longer “the fans’ game.” It’s serious business, as any team which has led the World Series 3-2 and lost it in seven games will tell you. In fact, you may be surprised to know that 20 of the last 25 World Series were won by the team that played the first two games at home.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the very thing that the Commissioner of Baseball came up with to make the game more “meaningful” (meaning: interesting for top players to play hard in) also had the effect of taking the role of the fan out of the selection process. Well, except, it didn’t. In an incredible convolution of logic, the All-Star Game became hugely important in the pursuit of the Championship of the Sport, and yet the most important factor in the game, the selection of the players, was left in the hands of mechanics, schoolteachers, astronauts, six-year-olds and other, less-qualified people.

And here’s the best part! Baseball is thrilled! This year’s voting broke all records! People voted from their computers, from their phones, from kiosks at the ballpark! Early and often (25 votes at a time). This is not going away, folks. So, let’s get back to trying to fix it.

The concern amongst reasonable people is not that Pablo Sandoval won the starting NL 3rd base spot over David Wright. Sandoval doesn’t suck, and Wright is still on the team. No, the problem isn’t what happened out here in San Francisco, it’s what ALMOST happened.

Okay, I just can’t help myself. A sports “opinionator” is powerless when it comes to an issue like MLB’s All-Star voting.

First, a few disclaimers. I’m a baseball purist, and I’m older than 25 (okay, significantly older). Those two things may, unfortunately, have become redundant, but as the kids say today, “it is what it is.”

Since the job of All-Star voting was returned to the fans in 1970, the annual listing of the players who were “snubbed” has become as big a part of the game as the list of the guys who get in. Teams have always campaigned for their players, and players who got lots of national TV exposure always had a big advantage.

Because of that history, it’s tempting to look at the results of this year’s selection process and simply say, “well, you can’t make everyone happy,” and leave it at that. Unfortunately, if you’re an “opinionator,:” you need to try to figure out a way to fix it. So here goes.

There are several challenges to fixing this system, not the least of which is that baseball itself has absolutely no interest in doing so. They’ve made several changes to the player selection process over the last few years, including adding much-needed roster spots, but none of these has gotten to the unfortunate root of the thing, which is that most fans are woefully unqualified to pick an All-Star team.

Oh, I can hear it now, all the wailing, “It’s the fans’ game!”

Hey, you know what? Not anymore. You see, one of those changes a few years ago was to take the home field advantage in the World Series and give it to the league that won the All-Star Game. To me, that means it’s no longer “the fans’ game.” It’s serious business, as any team which has led the World Series 3-2 and lost it in seven games will tell you. In fact, you may be surprised to know that 20 of the last 25 World Series were won by the team that played the first two games at home.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the very thing that the Commissioner of Baseball came up with to make the game more “meaningful” (meaning: interesting for top players to play hard in) also had the effect of taking the role of the fan out of the selection process. Well, except, it didn’t. In an incredible convolution of logic, the All-Star Game became hugely important in the pursuit of the Championship of the Sport, and yet the most important factor in the game, the selection of the players, was left in the hands of mechanics, schoolteachers, astronauts, six-year-olds and other, less-qualified people.

And here’s the best part! Baseball is thrilled! This year’s voting broke all records! People voted from their computers, from their phones, from kiosks at the ballpark! Early and often (25 votes at a time). This is not going away, folks. So, let’s get back to trying to fix it.

The concern amongst reasonable people is not that Pablo Sandoval won the starting NL 3rd base spot over David Wright. Sandoval doesn’t suck, and Wright is still on the team. No, the problem isn’t what happened out here in San Francisco, it’s what ALMOST happened.

Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford, second-year Giants starters who each looked like they could get sent down to the minors at various points this season, both finished second at their positions in the All-Star voting. Crawford, whose glove is magnificent but is hitting under .240, missed getting the start by only 350,000 votes.

Aubrey Huff, who has 9 hits in 58 at-bats, finished 17th in the voting in the outfield. Freddy Sanchez, who has not spent one minute on the active roster this season, finished fourth in the balloting at second base. Both of them had over 1.9 million votes. Really!

This should scare MLB. Because of the World Series appearances in 2002 and 2010, the Giants have a very strong fan base in the 18-34 age group, and they are wired to the teeth. The fact that they’re not competent to vote for All-Star teams is not their fault. If you take someone who’s never driven a car and give them the keys, you bear some responsibility for what happens.

Okay, that’s the problem, what do you do to fix it? First of all, there has to be a way to remove people from the ballot if they haven’t played enough games. That would have taken care of not only Sanchez and Huff, but Sandoval. Pablo missed 35 of the team’s 80 games this season, and that alone should remove him from consideration for a starting spot.

Secondly, there could be a minimum performance standard for position players. Maybe a player needs to be in the top 10 in the league in any of the key offensive categories to be eligible to be voted on. This can’t be that difficult. I understand that there are still paper ballots that are printed way ahead of time, but any votes for ineligible players would simply not be counted. That would take care of the Belt and Crawford situations, which came very close to being very embarrassing for MLB.

Lastly, it’s time to recognize that things in the world have changed since 1970, and we need to let go of the rule requiring each team to have a representative in the game. It was a nice rule when it was first implemented, but again, now that the game counts, a manager has to make sure he’s got all the positions and pitcher spots covered. Ron Washington chose a rookie closer from the A’s, Ryan Cook, because he needed a relief pitcher. Cook’s been a nice surprise, but he has 7 career saves in 10 career opportunities. And he’s an All-Star? Over Josh Reddick? Really?

So there you have it. We keep fan voting, as ridiculous as the concept is, and just try to limit the damage. If they don’t do something, the Giants could have the whole starting eight next year. There’s no market that has the combination of sellout crowds, high TV ratings and internet penetration that the Giants enjoy, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Giants Show Repeating is Harder Than it Looks

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Published September 7, 2011 at CSNBayArea.com

I think I’m going to surprise you with my next statement. Outside of the New York Yankees, only one Major League Baseball Team has repeated as World Series Champions since the Reds did it in 1975-76. I’ll give you the rest of the column to come up with the team that did it, and I’ll bet some of you can’t.

This topic is of particular interest these days in the Bay Area, as it becomes increasingly clear that barring two very unlikely events (A D-Backs’ collapse and a Giants’ hot streak), the local lads will be added to the long and distinguished list of World Series Champions who came up short in their bid to repeat.

So what’s so hard about repeating? You’ve got great players, obviously, with the playoff experience you need and the confidence to know they can do it. That’s what the announcers always talk about when they break down a series. The team that’s “been there before” is always given an edge over a team without that experience.

Well, maybe that experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and in fact, maybe it should be looked at as a detriment! Is it possible that players who haven’t won a World Series have a fire in their bellies that goes out once they win one? That no matter how much they all talk about how much they want to defend that title, it’s just not quite as important as winning it the first time?

I think the Giants, while not a classic example of this theory, have shown some signs of it. Last year, they had less playoff experience than the Phillies, and it didn’t matter at all. Cliff Lee’s experience was supposed to give him the edge over Lincecum in the World Series, and it didn’t matter at all.

This year, the experience hasn’t helped them. When Aaron Rowand and Miguel Tejada were jettisoned from the club last week, several anonymous players told the media that their demands for playing time in the face of overwhelming evidence that they weren’t getting the job done was wearing on their teammates and the coaches.

I’m sure there are others in that locker room whose playing time was impacted by the arrival of Carlos Beltran and the other trade deadline acquisitions who have not been able to keep their frustrations to themselves, but let’s zero in on Rowand right now. Here’s a guy making a very high salary, with two World Series rings, and a long succession of terrible at-bats this season. You’d think a guy like that would be able to say to himself, “Aaron, let’s be a team guy, work real hard to get on track, and make the most of whatever opportunities come our way, and help this ballclub try to get back to the World Series.”

But he couldn’t do it … even though he did it LAST YEAR, and it worked out perfectly, except for one thing. His ego, without which he never would have made the major leagues, could not take another year of being a reserve on a good team. I think if the Giants had traded him to Houston for Jeff Keppinger he would have been very happy if it meant he would get to play every day.

I’m not saying it makes him a bad guy, either. I’m saying it shows how hard it is to get 25 guys “pulling on the same rope.” I think it also illustrates how masterful Bruce Bochy was last year at getting so many players to accept lesser roles than they were accustomed to. I think what we learned is that players will do that once, but they won’t do it year after year, even in a case like Rowand’s where he’s made much more money than his production would have indicated.

You can almost understand a player’s desire to be selfish if he’s early in his career and he hasn’t had that big payday yet, but Rowand and Tejada are not that guy. They are, however, players getting toward the end of the line, and in Rowand’s case, another ring was not going to change his life. He’s trying to squeeze as many at-bats out of his remaining days in the majors as he can, and I don’t blame him, but nobody forced him to sign that contract. That’s the one thing that kept him on the bench for the Giants this year rather than playing for another team, nothing else.

The Yankees have had two things going for them that helped them solve this problem: 1) Their owner never accepted not winning the World Series as a successful outcome of a season and 2) That owner would back up that stance with the money to bring in a couple (or a few) hungry veterans who wanted to get their championship ring before the clock ran out on their careers, and they would accept any role on the team to get it. It’s unbelievable that they won three titles in a row, and came within a whisker of adding a fourth in 2001.

So what team is the only one besides the Yankees to repeat since 1974? How about the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993?  There weren’t very many players who were integral to both teams, just Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Devon White, Tony Fernandez and John Olerud. On the other hand, here’s a list of players who were on one or the other team, but not both: Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, Candy Maldonado, Dave Stewart, Tom Henke, Jimmy Key, and David Cone. Jack Morris was on both teams, and had a great 1992 season, but was 7-12 in 1993 and didn’t pitch in postseason.

So my theory is that the simple fact that the Giants won a championship last year made it harder for essentially the same club to come back and win it this year. Add in injuries to Posey, both Sanchezes, Sandoval, Wilson and about ten other guys, sign one aging veteran who turns out to be terrible, make a deadline deal that kills whatever chemistry you still had, and it’s amazing that they’re as close to the D-Backs as they are. If only those players weren’t so darn human!

Giants fans quick to boo, quick to forget 2010?

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Published August 29 2011 at CSNBayArea.com

Since the beginning of August, the experience of being a Giants fan has changed pretty dramatically. It’s understandable that there’s some angst out there, and frustration, and even desperation regarding the chances to make the postseason.

What’s surprising to me is the anger! Listen to the talk shows, read the #sfgiants posts on Twitter, check the comments here on the CSN Bay Area site and those of the local papers, and you’re bombarded with angry fans who sound like 5-year-olds who’ve had their favorite toy taken away. Oh, wait, do 5-year-olds swear? OK, 15-year-olds, then.

You’d think that the Giants were the Yankees, a perennial contender and occasional champion, who had disappointed their spoiled fans by daring to miss the postseason. Is it possible that Giants fans have gotten this spoiled this quickly? With one measly championship?

Let’s review. In 2010, the Giants were the feel-good story of the young century, finally delivering a World Series championship to their faithful fans who had patiently waited over 50 years for it. They did so with some spectacular pitchers and despite a lineup of statistically ordinary players, including a guy, Cody Ross, whom they claimed on waivers just to keep him from San Diego.

During the offseason, management was in a tough spot. The players who had brought this championship needed to be rewarded, of course, but the fact remained that they were still relatively ordinary players. Now we’ve found out that without the fairy dust that was apparently being sprinkled around last year they’ve become even more ordinary.

August is drawing to a close, and the fans have every right to be disappointed. But let’s take a step back. No Buster Posey. No Freddy Sanchez. No Jonathan Sanchez, for all practical purposes. No Barry Zito for the most part, although for three weeks he looked like he was going to help. Practically no production from Andres Torres. Miguel Tejada has done the impossible; disappoint despite extremely low expectations. Ross was hurt in spring training and has never recovered. Aubrey Huff must be the least productive starting first baseman in either league.

I could address the offense, and it’s tempting, but I’m kind of in a hurry to get to this next part. For the last two weeks, in the most desperate time for this desperate team, they’ve been without Brian Wilson and Sergio Romo, their best two relievers. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fine bullpen, but you take the top two guys out of any team’s ‘pen and make them play for a few weeks like that, it’s not going to be pretty.

Sunday’s loss to the Astros was the third time in the past two weeks that Romo and Wilson were unavailable and the bullpen gave up the go-ahead run, and it actually happened twice in that game. What would the situation look like if the Giants had won one or two of those games, let alone all three?

So, I get the disappointment. It’s obviously much more fun when your team wins all the games, or even just all the close games. But I don’t think Giants fans have any right to be angry. It may feel good to dump on Ross, but believe me, if the Giants felt like they had a better option, he’d be in there! This was a team that started off weak on offense, and then was decimated by injuries. Have people forgotten that they put six players on the DL during one 10-game road trip, and had five more miss games for minor injuries?

You hear a lot of resentment about Giants fans. They’re called front-runners, bandwagoners and worse. One of the reasons is the perception that they all just showed up last year in September, and rode the wave through the playoffs. Now, I know that’s not true. The Giants’ attendance has been excellent ever since they moved to AT&T Park, despite some pretty bleak seasons over the past few years. But when you hear fans booing a team that won the World Series last year and is only a handful of games out of first place, it’s hard to argue with their critics.

So man up, Giants fans (including the many women who follow this team). Nobody promised you a World Series championship every year. I expect to have to explain that to my 7-year-old daughters, to whom history extends back one year, but I would think that grown-ups would have a better attitude about this. Root for your team, be bummed out if they don’t make the playoffs, and thrilled if they do. After all, as we all learned last year, victory is much sweeter when it’s unexpected.

Cannon: Faith, Beltran and Giants’ struggles

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Published August 23, 2011 on CSNBayArea.com

It’s been almost a month since Giants GM Brian Sabean started making changes to the roster, and the results, obviously, have been disappointing. The Giants, who won series after series over the first four months of the season, have won exactly one in the past four weeks.

It’s tempting to pin all of this misery on the incredible sequence of bad luck the team has run into lately, but I think that’s letting Sabean off the hook. He took a team that had only one thing going for it, and in shaking up his lineup, he destroyed that one thing: faith.

Faith was the team’s ace in the hole. It was winning games simply on the belief that it would; that someone would step up and get the two-out hit they needed to break a tie in the late innings. It wasn’t always a hit, either. Can you think of another team that won games on a pop fly lost in the sun and a bases-loaded balk in the same month? It was crazy!
It’s easy to understand Sabean’s desire to make changes. This team was, on paper, one of the worst offensive (most offensive?) teams in the major leagues. In fact, had the games been played on paper, you could be assured that the Giants would have been well below .500 at the end of July. Since the games are played on grass, not paper, and by human beings, not statistics, faith was a factor, and it carried the Giants to a four-game lead in the NL West.

That’s when Sabean started to talk about his desire to get some better sticks, and most of the baseball “experts” agreed that he had to. Here’s the problem, though. This isn’t Strat-o-Matic. You can’t just drop a new guy into the lineup of a Major League team and have him perform exactly the same way he would have with his previous team. And what about his new teammates? Starters become bench players, bench players get sent to the minors, and the team’s whole dynamic changes.

You may offer up Hunter Pence and Michael Bourn as examples of just the opposite; players who were acquired by their new teams at the same time the Giants picked up Carlos Beltran, and they clicked immediately and started making contributions. I would counter that argument by pointing out that the Phillies and Braves were teams which were offensively competent without those new players, and the pressure on them wasn’t nearly as great as it was (and remains) on Beltran. If you’re a team that is more reliant on talent than chemistry, you can add and subtract players without derailing your mojo. When you’re the Giants, mojo is not to be tampered with.

When Sabean went shopping, it was a reality sandwich for the whole team. It was like Wile E. Coyote suddenly looked down and realized that he had run off the cliff. Yes, Sabean got his man, but it seems like everyone else on the team (except Pablo Sandoval) has taken a step backward since Beltran showed up.

The interesting thing is that it’s not just the hitters who have been affected by this new, uncool vibe. Doubt has crept into the pitchers, too, who have had collectively their worst month of the season. Even manager Bruce Bochy, the man who has pushed all the right buttons since Aug. 1 of last year, doesn’t seem to have the same magic touch. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with him giving his No. 15 to Beltran, but why would a manager who won the World Series last year and sits in first place with two months to go tempt fate by changing his number?

So what’s my point? Good question. I suppose I just wanted to get on the record what a special experience it was watching the Giants play the first four months of this season. The past four weeks have been excruciating, but it doesn’t erase the memories of Crawford’s grand slam, Nate Schierholtz’s catch in L.A., Chris Stewart dropping a squeeze bunt in the top of the 11th and starting a 2-5-4 DP in the bottom to save the day. I mean, really? Chris Stewart?

Vogey making the All-Star team, countless innings of scoreless long relief, and Brian Wilson shutting door after door all made the Giants must-see TV. I understand why Sabean didn’t feel like he could leave that team alone and still have a chance to compete in October, but I wish he had.

I guess fans need to have a little faith.