The draft happened during this present All-Star break, meaning most blurbs looked something like this:
Any Player was drafted in Whatever Round.
We can tell with absolute certainty that Player will be nothing more than a bench bat for the Whoever Whocares.
Source: Rotoarmageddon
I am not a draft hound of any sport, nor do I hold any ill will towards anyone enraptured by similar events where people’s names are announced to a spectrum of applause. I’d like to think that these Draft Heads attend graduations like they’re Phish concerts and have a library of the “In Memoriam” section of the Academy Awards on 4K blue ray. There is a beautiful moment at the beginning of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode covering the outrageously perfect “Boggy Creek 2: The Adventure Continues, where a crowd of cheering college football is accompanied by Crow T. Robot’s proclamation: “We have attached our egos to you!”
While there is judgment in that riff, it really nails the passion surrounding the NFL draft, and probably basketball and some baseball drafts eventually. When we all became aware of the “Three Seasons” narrative of professional North American sports leagues (season, playoffs, draft), I think most of us recognized the vibe capturing going on. Every league in the majors wants you to be Sports Dad, and have players be their more talented offspring not be honored, but to be staked to unreasonable expectations.
Any professional athlete is a point of projection for someone’s life. When one is experiencing a major victory in life, watching Shohei Ohtani destroy modern baseball with every swing adds to the delight. When experiencing a loss, no matter how insignificant, watching Corbin Carroll struggle this year is all that more painful to endure. Even without the grotesque framing of gambling onto every portal of visage at our Sports Eyeballs fingertips, we are all Sports Dad vicariously experiencing our Object of Rooting’s triumphs and downfalls.
Again without judgment, I can unequivocally say that this is an unhealthy relationship. It’s why players get DM’s from fans and fantasy players with the simple KYS abbreviation, which I naively mistook for the pluralizing of a lubricant so many moons ago. I believe I’ve said it before, but no one deserves to be harassed for playing a dumb sport poorly, regardless of the level of professional play. Save your trolling and whining for corporations and politicians. If you’re in the business of salary-shaming people, then post your salary in whatever social media bio you engage with and ask again why you’re wasting time projecting your insecurities and hopelessness onto strangers who were offered money and accepted the offer.
A baseball contract for even mediocre players is like winning the lottery, only it’s a lottery you spent years working on, shaving numbers off of outcomes to change your luck. I haven’t worked hard enough to win the lottery, although now that I’m stay-at-home-dadding and filling out applications for my second round of grad school while freelance writing (please hire me to write and/or edit pieces for you, I promise I’m more than capable of concision and comprehension when I’m not purposefully authoring bloated and labyrinthine blogs (I can also recognize when we need to page Dr. Thesaurus, as I’ve probably used the word “labyrinthine” in my years of writing Blurbstomp more than I’ve used the word “probably,” probably)) I can say that I may never work harder in my life.
Finally, I certainly feel for people who stake their careers on the final frontier of baseball scouting. I’m sure someone’s made a bit about scouting Kindergartners, but we’re so close to teams hiring scouts for backyard wiffle ball. This is a bleak statement, but I may finally have my avenue into professional sports. My whiffle slurve breaks knees and humiliates children.
And with that, onto the blurbs!
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
Boy Scout’s Flowery Diction Badge– examining how words create meaning, and sometimes destroy meaning altogether
Mathletics Participation Ribbon – Quantitative and Qualitative Oddities in a given blurb
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – blurbs don’t always need to make sense, friendo
Max Scherzer Crown of Leaking Insane Rage – blurbs so angry at a player it’s uncomfortable
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts and there isn’t a single question about catchers in the comments section. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Rockies released RHP Tyler Danish.
Danish was cut loose earlier this week after posting a stratospheric 7.71 ERA, 2.32 WHIP and 26/31 K/BB ratio across 39 2/3 innings (11 appearances, 10 starts) for Triple-A Albuquerque in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League. The 29-year-old former second-round pick from the 2013 MLB Draft made a career-high 32 relief appearances for the Red Sox during the 2022 season.
Source: Rotoworld
Everyone feels helpless and hopeless sometimes. I don’t think there is a word to describe the feeling I get when reading blurbs about the Colorado Rockies cutting pitchers from their roster. A fog of war settles on the page, and I squint to eventually get the information I already knew to be true: The Rockies will field a league-average pitching staff twice in a given century, at least until Dick Monfort finally sells the team (at an enormous profit after crying poor for so many years).
There will be the occasional rogue wave of statistical aberration in the form of a Daniel Bard or German Marquez, but for the most part, it’s piddling empty Taki’s bag-filled surf lazily washing ashore.
The Rockies gutted their scouting and metrics departments 1-2 seasons ago, all the while drafting players and promising they will be developed by a coaching staff that has helped produce such stalwart talent as Kyle Freeland and Gil Truthworld, and even Gordy Bravehome.
To be cut by the Rockies would be like garbagemen returning to your home and dumping the contents onto your front lawn while claiming your waste has no place in the hallowed grounds of the city dump.
It doesn’t feel good.
Boy Scouts Flowery Diction Badge
Athletics released OF Lazaro Armenteros.
Armenteros received a $3 million signing bonus as an international free agent back in 2016 and never wound up making it to Oakland. The 25-year-old outfielder was removed from the Athletics’ 40-man roster back in early May and has now been completely cut loose after posting a .681 OPS with three homers and 14 steals in 58 games this season between Triple-A Las Vegas and Double-A Midland. There’s a chance he gets an opportunity somewhere else in the coming weeks.
Source: Rotoworld
I don’t understand even the slightest amount of implied Salary Shaming. He received a signing bonus because those were the rules, and Oakland thought he might develop into an interesting player. Throwing a player’s biography into a blurb that may be that player’s final blurb makes sense, but even mentioning his signing bonus in passing seems to imply he stole money from the organization by not living up to projected expectations when he was signed at the age of…let’s see…as a 16-year-old? When I was 16 people could have paid me 3 million dollars to develop talent in a chosen field, and I would have declined. After all, I’m the most righteously moral person you – I’m kidding, I’d take the 3 million and throw it into a savings account and throw a bowling and pizza party, because my dream-self still has that Central New York party location option fever!
To beat a dead horse, you give someone a contract hoping they do the job they’re being paid to do. The contract isn’t a guarantee of perfection, it’s an outline of expectations. Hope and entitlement are two separate concepts, but in sports fandom they blend into a weaponized hybrid of anonymous hatred. Some people really like screaming at athletes and then pretending it was the person sitting next to them. I like doing weird things too! We’re all morons when you think about it.
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award
Ketel Marte will lead off for Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo in the NL All-Star lineup.
It’s a defensible choice, though Shohei Ohtani is right there, and Trea Turner and Christian Walker also might have been better options. Marte will be followed by Ohtani, Turner, Bryce Harper, William Contreras, Yelich, Alex Bohm, Teoscar Hernández and Jurickson Profar.
Source: Rotoworld
There are no defensible choices when constructing a lineup for the All-Star game, because:
- It’s the All-Star game, adjusting lineups made up of players from teams you don’t manage, in a game where you’re only guaranteed to play half a game, is rolling the dice.
- Even in the regular season, managers are making insane and indefensible line-up decisions. We’re maybe only a season away from micro-platoons. Platoons for: Day or night games, inning, national broadcast, and throwback jersey nights. We’re so close to teams having 100 player rosters, and all offensive players are treated like LOOGYS.
This is Rocco’s Modern Life, after all. Like that show, baseball makes as much sense as it needs to while finding novel ways to remain grotesque around the edges. My only hope is that it slowly transforms into Calvinball, loses its money-making capability, and returns to its roots of kids playing in a sandlot while their drunk Sports Dads fistfight in the parking lot because of a hit batter.
