On the weekend last, I bucked my 20-year trend of relative isolation and met fellow Razzball scribes at an event more than worthy of our time. Your author came as close as he will ever stray to meeting his anti-hero, Bud Black. It was a reverse World Series, a battle between two of the four most futile teams in all of baseball. In another world I live in California or Miami and manage to catch the Athletics play the Marlins. In this world, however, we watched the Colorado Rockies do battle with the Chicago White Sox. What a glory it was to behold.
100 degrees on the field of play, my first remembrance is that of scorching the reproductivity out of my loins by simply attempting to sit in my seat. The next is meeting up with our fellow scribes, and bathing in a ball game that stood as a metaphor for each team’s futility. There was a listlessness pervading most of the proceedings that could be chalked up to the sky-high temperatures, but it truly felt like I was watching an entire team of Chris Getzes and Bud Blacks play each other with full knowledge that there was no entertainment in failure. I’ve watched abysmally bad baseball in my life, but there is so much public awareness surrounding rebuilding teams and trade bait that seeps into the way the game is played. It’s crushing to view.
It reminded me of being a teenager on a rainy summer afternoon stumbling on some old LEGO sets, and thinking I might rekindle some childlike wonder. After tinkering with building ideas, I put down the pieces and felt a wave of grief surge through my body. My days of sitting alone in the basement, creating worlds, with no responsibilities save for eating my vegetables and brushing my teeth, were gone. I was hurtling faster and faster into a world that valued deadlines, executive functioning, calculus, and greed far more than I could ever value my creativity.
I put the pieces away, and my mom asked me if she heard me playing with my old toys at dinner. I looked around the table sheepishly and lied about shaking LEGO bins to create percussion samples on a song I was recording. They seemed to know I was lying, but I didn’t want to tell them that my childhood was gone and that it felt like something died in me that day.
Watching the White Sox and Rockies, I felt like I was my Mom and those players were me. For the players, the innocence and dreams of playing baseball were entirely gone, as I watched them attempt to deny that loss for nine innings.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the company and especially appreciated Keelin walking me around the park until we found some delicious Cuban sandwiches to destroy as the game came to a close. May you all be so lucky to find yourself in the company of such wonderful people.
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!
Mathletics Participation Ribbon
Jarred Kelenic went 3-for-4 with a run scored against the Cardinals on Wednesday.
After slugging a homer in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader against the Cardinals, Kelenic collected three more hits in the second game. His base hit in the eighth inning drove in the only run of the game for Atlanta. The 24-year-old outfielder has performed well since taking over the leadoff spot. He’s slashing .279/.318/.457 with eight homers and three steals across 223 plate appearances.
Source: Rotoworld
Arguing about context in fantasy sports is a bit like having a hearty and healthy bowel movement; most of us do it all the time without raising a single suspicious eyebrow. And if were to raise both eyebrows? Well, we would then be dealing with surprise rather than suspicion. And if there were no eyebrows whatsoever? The answer to this riddle is Billy Zane.
Kelenic has been on fire and is not strictly platooning. You look up his last 7/14/30 games on your favorite fantasy site’s statistical filter and watch a guy go from relative zero to swellative hero. His season-long cumulative slash line is Buzz’s girlfriend: Woof. However, Acuna is done for the year, Michael Harris is out, and Adam Duvall has almost completed his transformation into late-period Adam Dunn. We will now refer to him as Adam Dunnvall. I can think of worse portmanteaus, but I could think of many better things in the world: The smell of a lake in the morning, Arthur Russell, the knowledge that every five years kids come up with newer and weirder slang, the moment you read the last word of a book and slowly close the cover, when you get a parking spot at midnight in your neighborhood that has too many cars and yours is one of them, the way certain smells act as portals to a vision of your past so vivid it escapes nostalgia and simply exists as magic, when you panic that you didn’t pay for your parking but you didn’t get a ticket… Yes. All of these things are better than that portmanteau. Very good.
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award
Nolan Gorman went 0-for-3 with a walk and two strikeouts against the Braves in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader.
Gorman homered four times in a three-game span from June 2-4. Since then, he’s 6-for-71 with two extra-base hits (both homers) and a 30/4 K/BB ratio. He’s batting just .188 overall, and the Cardinals might need to start thinking about whether José Fermín deserves a shot at second in his place.
Source: Rotoworld
I think this blurb is fine, but it made me remember that the Cardinals gave Jordan Walker less than a month at the beginning of last season, and he managed a double-digit hitting streak to begin his career. He was then sent down to “work on things,” which seemed to corrupt his swing and gotten into his head. Poor defense was cited in his case, and for some reason poor defense is not being mentioned for Mr. Nolan Gorman. And yeah, look at that 6-71 with two homers since the beginning of the month, and yet the Cardinals are sticking with him. Perhaps the replacements (Walker included) don’t look particularly inspired, but there is a distinct lack of organizational rage re: Nolan Gorman as compared to Jordan Walker.
Oli Marmol trying to go for Bud Black’s crown. I don’t think he has the backbone to make it happen.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Brent Rooker went 2-for-4 with a double on Wednesday against the Angels.
The Athletics keep losing, but Rooker keeps hitting. The double was his 32nd extra-base hit of the season and his OPS has climbed up to .845, 20th in the league among qualified players. Rooker could be in for a monster second-half if the A’s decide to trade him before the deadline.
Source: Rotoworld
Trade deadline conjecture is fun as heck, but it can toy with one’s heart. To be clear, I’m not really lamenting the blurb’s contents. I’d rather note that if Brett Rooker were to be traded to almost any other team, there is a good chance he would be platooned. I don’t say this out of any kind of informed opinion. Nary a fangraphs or baseballsavant splits page has been referenced. I simply look at the way players young and old are being deployed (especially in the outfield) and can’t discount the possibility that a stathead on a team will notice even a .100 difference in handed-OPS, and boom Rooker is out of an everyday job.
You see what I did there? It’s incredibly easy to create a hypothesis, hedge with an inordinate amount of caveats, and still sound like your hunch might be worth following. The trade deadline is a veritable Farmer’s Almanack of proclamations ranging from the outrageous to the bored. Every single IRL and fantasy baseball site will plainly state that a team’s closer will 100% be traded at the deadline, causing you to burn a roster spot on a handcuff (or two). The deadline comes and goes, and that closer stays on the team. The blurbs that follow rarely reference the hyperbole, choosing instead to provide a passing, “It seemed like a sure thing…” or something of that nature.
In the end, we are at the mercy of the Old Gods, wily tricksters one and all, hell-bent on creating water cooler conversations in an age where the water cooler has been replaced by Twitter, and the gossiping adults surrounding said water cooler replaced by 10-year-old social media mavens and enemy state intelligence farms. Does anyone win?
Boy Scouts Flowery Diction Badge
Colton Cowser came off the bench to hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth as the Orioles bested the Braves 4-2 on Wednesday.
Cowser was on the bench in favor of Austin Hays against a right-hander tonight, but that’s just not something the Orioles need to do with any real frequency. Even though Cowser’s numbers have come down after a hot start, his batted ball stats remain strong. He’s definitely one of the Orioles’ top three outfield options versus righties.
Source: Rotoworld
This here post is from June 12th, pardner. We all know what happens next, don’t we? Every single person with two giant cartoonish eyeballs see that there is maybe one full-time player on that roster, and he is an MVP candidate. Can you think of the last time a major league team had multiple players at almost every single offensive position?
Finally, we have an instance where someone’s batted ball profile is hyped up, but he still produced at a tremendously low level despite the insistence of blurbs that he was fine. While advanced stats will indeed help us find regression candidates, they are not fool-proof, especially for young players. The league gets the book on hitters very quickly these days, such as Julio Rodriguez, who has the lineup protection of a single bush in an otherwise barren field being invaded by a historic swarm of cicadas. It seems that every team realized they can throw him mostly balls and he’ll swing at most of them. Or Nolan Jones, who I can’t even research because the agony is too great.
Happy Fourth, everyone. May the blurbs be with you!
