You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (15 page)

What happened? Nobody really knows. He just stopped being a good major-league baseball player, and it cost the Mariners $35 million, including the $8 million they gave him before the 2013 season to simply go away.

In baseball, they shrug and move on.

Oh well. Happens all the time.

It is truly incredible how wildly the performances of baseball players fluctuate when compared with other sports. In basketball, unless there’s a serious injury, the decline is gradual. Guys slow down little by little and their playing time decreases along with it. When they announce their retirement, nobody’s surprised. Jason Kidd can play for two decades and still be productive providing he’s used correctly and he stays healthy.

You can’t say the same about a guy like Adrian Beltre. Not to pick on the Mariners again, but when they signed Adrian Beltre from the Dodgers in 2005 they thought they were buying instant contention. In his walk year with the Dodgers, Beltre was a beast: 48 homers, 121 RBIs, a .334 average, OPS of 1.017.

In five years in Seattle, he never even drove in 100 runs. That 1.017 OPS became .716 his first year as a Mariner. He went
from Barry Bonds to David Freaking Eckstein over the course of one off-season. And he was
twenty-six
years old! How does that happen? Even factoring in the pitcher-friendly nature of Safeco Field, Beltre’s decline was outrageous. The Mariners should have been buying the best years of Beltre’s career; instead, about the only things he did consistently in Seattle were play defense and strike out.

Oh, and the Mariners ended up paying Beltre more than $60 million for his efforts. And the next three years of Beltre’s career? He drove in at least 100 runs in each of those years and finished third in the American League MVP balloting after a huge year with the Rangers in 2012.

How crazy is that?

You know who took the heat for Beltre’s collapse? Well, Beltre took a little of it, but he got to move on and make tons more money and continue an impressive career. The guy who got the bulk of the blame was the general manager, Bill Bavasi, who rode the signings of Figgins and Beltre off into the sunset after the 2008 season. Sure, he looked bad, but how could he have known? It’s not like he was the only guy willing to give those two players big, multiyear contracts. He’s just the one who got stuck.

It’s not just the guys shopping off the rack who get burned. The big-market boys do, too. In his first four years with the Yankees, Mark Teixeira went from being a possible Hall of Fame candidate—his 2009 year was phenomenal—to being an average hitter while playing in a tremendous hitters’ park. The deterioration was sudden and inexplicable, but it was real. By the time he was 32, he was just another guy.

The Mets have become a futile franchise. They have attendance problems and identity problems and they’ve lost the goodwill
of most of the fan base. But in 2012, they had one transcendent player: R.A. Dickey.

He wrote a captivating and compelling best seller.

He had a phenomenal season on the mound and won the National League Cy Young Award.

He was a novelty, relying on the knuckleball, a nearly extinct but highly entertaining pitch.

He represented the team well by routinely giving interesting quotes from a generally sour locker room.

He had one bad outing, was a wonderful story, and became one of the few reasons to embrace the franchise.

What happened in the off-season? The Mets traded him to Toronto. They didn’t trust his success enough to count on it happening again, and so they took one of their two marketable players (David Wright being the other) and packaged him in a deal that brought a bunch of young prospects.

The trade didn’t bring a huge outcry from whatever is left of the Mets’ fan base. You know why? They could see the reasoning. Nobody can safely say that R.A. Dickey’s 2012 season
wasn’t
a fluke. Not even the Blue Jays. Again, there’s the difference between the baseball GM and the guys in the other sports: it’s rare
—exceedingly
rare—for a football or basketball player in his prime to have one transcendent season and then utterly fail the next season without injury being a factor. In baseball, it happens.

In fact, you can make the case that 40 percent of the time major-league starting pitchers don’t have it on the day they start. And that’s exactly how they describe it:
I didn’t have it today
. And that’s acceptable in baseball, because it’s just the way things are. A guy making $15 million to make 35 starts sits at his locker and says,
“Well, fellas—just didn’t have it today,” and everybody nods their heads and moves along. It’s nobody’s fault.

Imagine being the guy who has to make the case for spending all that money. Your livelihood is linked to so many random, non-scientific factors, and you have no control over any of them.

To cite another example: name the last time an NBA general manager was shocked to learn that his starting center was actually five years older than anybody thought. It happens in baseball often enough for general managers to include it in their research when they’re looking to sign a Dominican player.

Let’s compare drafts. The NBA draft is two rounds. Every game of every college team is on television or live-streamed over the Internet. The amount of research that is handed to an NBA general manager is astounding.

The baseball draft is a circus. Seriously, I don’t know how they can even keep it all straight. They’re tossing out names faster than a horse-racing announcer—do we really even know if all these guys really exist? They draft up to forty rounds—plus compensatory picks—and that’s an improvement. It used to be that teams could draft until they wanted to stop drafting. If you wanted to stay all night and into the next day picking every one of the owner’s nephews and a junior-college pitcher whose dad owns the local Mercedes dealership, knock yourself out. A team could sit all by itself, tossing out names until the GM fell asleep or the phone went dead. Now they say the draft is “up to” forty rounds. You want to pack up after thirty-five rounds because the owner doesn’t have any nephews this year, go right ahead. Still, the number of baseball players that must be scouted to fill all the minor-league teams in an organization is astounding.

Say you were an NBA GM at any point between 1993 and 2012 and you had a high draft pick and needed a point guard. I’m
not going to say it’s been pretty easy to figure it out, but let’s just say it hasn’t been that hard.

From the ’93 draft, when Tim Hardaway was the first point guard taken, to the 2012 draft, when Damian Lillard was the first point guard taken, there have been just two busts among the first point guards taken. Felipe Lopez was a bust, and Mateen Cleaves was a bust. Every other point guard—we’re talking only about the first one taken, remember, guys like Allen Iverson and Jason Kidd and even Randy Foye—has been either a solid contributor or a star.

If you fail on back-to-back NBA drafts, you should probably be handcuffed and led out of the team’s facility.

Scott Pioli was fired after just four drafts as general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs. Nobody complained about this; most people associated with the team probably thought it was time for Pioli to go. But a quick look at his drafts shows a guy who really didn’t do all that poorly when it came to building a team. He drafted Jamaal Charles, Eric Berry, Javier Arenas, Dexter McCluster. He got a Pro Bowl linebacker, Justin Houston, in the third round.

For his first three picks of the 2010 draft, he got Berry, McCluster, and Arenas. Two years later, he was fired.

There was no outrage over his firing. In football, fans have seen Bill Parcells turn a team from 5-11 to 11-5 in one season, largely on the strength of a draft or two. The way it works in the NFL, Pioli had his chance and now it’s someone else’s turn.

Could you imagine the Cubs firing Theo Epstein—technically not the GM, but he’s the guy making the calls—after four years because he didn’t turn the Cubs into champions? That’s essentially what happened to Pioli, but there would be outrage—crazed outrage—if the Cubs jettisoned Epstein that quickly. Every single baseball writer would attack the Cubs for being callous.

Sorry, but it’s just way easier to draft in the other sports, and
far harder to screw up. In the NFL, the teams get immediate control of a player after at least three years in college. They have a combine where they can ask anything they damned well please—legitimate or not—and have an English-speaking, college-educated person answer.

Everyone knows the MLB draft is a long-term, hit-or-miss proposition. Draft-eligible baseball players come from high school, junior college, and four-year college. Unless a guy is a college senior, he’s got the option to turn down the signing bonus and go back to school, which means general managers have to assess a factor called “signability”—something that doesn’t exist in the NBA or NFL. If a GM guesses wrong on signability, as the Pittsburgh Pirates did when they drafted hot-shot Stanford pitcher Mark Appel with the eighth pick of the 2012 draft and he chose to return to school … well, the GM looks awfully silly.

And once the players are signed, the fun begins. This is when general managers are handed a whole new set of issues. Even the most elite player is subjected to the minors, which means every player essentially leaves the control of the major-league team and becomes community property within the organization. There are so many steps, so many hands that get ahold of these guys—every change in managers or pitching coaches or hitting coaches could spell disaster. Teams try to monitor these kinds of things, but a bad pitching coach can screw up a prospect for years. A hitting coach who decides to put his stamp on a kid can change the course of a career.

The players drafted in the first round of the MLB draft in 2007 had combined to play one inning in the major leagues by the end of the 2008 season.
One inning!
Sometimes it can take seven years for a top pick to make it to the big leagues. From 18 to 25—you can be a totally different person in seven years.

There are just so many variables for a baseball GM to consider. In the NBA, every hoop is 10 feet off the floor and every court is 94 feet long. In the NFL, every field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide.

The baseball GM doesn’t have the luxury of consistent dimensions. He might have a short right-field fence, which means his scouts have to pay close attention to big left-handed hitters. He might have a pitchers’ park or a big outfield or the thin air in Denver, where sinker-ball pitchers are like gold. It’s amazing how specific this stuff gets.

Jason Bay can’t hit at Citi Field. Well, hell—there goes $66 million.

Mike Hampton can’t pitch in Denver. There goes
$121 million!

In many cases, there’s a direct connection between salary and performance. Golf and baseball are the two sports with the most downtime, the most time to think about what you’re trying to do and the stakes involved in doing it.

It’s exceedingly rare to hear an announcer say, “Oh, Dwyane Wade is really pressing out there.” Sometimes you’ll see an NBA player or an NFL quarterback try to do too much, but in baseball it’s an entirely different animal.

Big contracts screw up some players. Barry Zito was affected by the money when he got his huge deal in San Francisco. Albert Pujols couldn’t hit for the first month of his first season with the Angels.

It’s like Greg Norman: fantastic on Saturday, ghastly on Sunday. Why? The money’s out there, and psychology gets involved.

Has there ever been a player comparable to Alex Rodriguez in another sport who so obviously and repeatedly gagged when the lights got brightest? Remember the divisional series against the Tigers in 2006, when Joe Torre had to drop him to the eighth spot
in the lineup? One of the best hitters in baseball was reduced to being a Double-A hitter. He was completely overmatched, and it was all in his head.

The adverse psychological effects of outside influences—money, attention—are profoundly exaggerated in baseball. How does a GM account for that?

How does he account for chemistry? The season is so long and the travel is so ridiculous that you have to take into account how personalities will work together. You get Milton Bradley in the clubhouse and he can blow it up. You might as well just pack it in.

There’s just so much, and that’s without even mentioning the lack of a salary cap—“Mo’ money, mo’ problems,” says Biggie Smalls—or the battle for regional television deals or the fifteen- to twenty-year PED train that drove right through the center of the sport.

A great job? Oh, yeah, sure it is. It’s so great, everyone who gets one of them should demand two perks: a lifetime supply of Advil and Pepcid AC.

American sports culture is dominated by team sports, and the broadcasting world follows that lead. Most of our reporting is on teams, and most of the fan interest revolves around teams and not individuals. Guys wear jerseys of players on their favorite teams; rarely, if ever, do you see a guy dressing up like Rafael Nadal to head out to a tennis match. That guy’s not a fan; he’s a stalker.