So Grantland came into being this week, with a staff roster and layout to stick it to either of the baseball Rogers (Angell or Kahn).
And after three months of anticipation, the launch felt underwhelming, to say the least.
Aside from the whole not-being-an-urban-hipster factor, I'm pretty much the perfect target audience for Grantland. I'm the kind of internet-addicted sports fan who also reads actual ink-and-paper books - novels even! (If, admittedly, not nearly so much as I should.) I'm a young, glib, cynical, fresh-faced university graduate, and I like to support my opinions with acerbic writing and rhetoric rather than facts and shit. I don't care much for pop culture - maybe not even "culture" itself, so much, as an entity - but I do allow many of the unique strands of art that I have been exposed to to infest my own life. I'm a sponge, equal parts Freaks-and-Geeks era Martin Starr and Fast Eddie Felson, equal parts juggalo wannabe and lover of Irish folkpunk, reader of Sartre and lover of History channel's epic Pawn Stars. I'm not sure whether it comes out of insecurity or an actual interest in well-roundedness as an individual - probably some measure of both - but my point is that if anyone is, I should be buying what Grantland is selling.
Some people don't like Bill Simmons, but I don't care about that. To me, going in, he's nobody, some ex-columnist. I never read his articles on ESPN and as long he writes almost exclusively about basketball and hockey, I probably won't read too many of these ones either. The ones I do will be judged on their own merits (although he didn't buy himself a whole lot of goodwill by getting a name wrong in his very first one). Molly Lambert, on the other hand, once wrote a mind-blowing post analogizing writing with money and the whole thing with telephone wires, the kind of spacey random-tangent type of thing that should never work but that once, for me, absolutely did. That post clicked with me and made me think - the difference between writing that equates to someone stuffing their opinion down your throat, like I am doing now, and actually writing for the reader. You know, give a man, teach a man, etc.
As for the others? I haven't especially been impressed with Klosterman based on his puttering fawning in this Stephen King interview or the odd single-paragraph excerpt I've glanced through in a bookstore, but that's roughly the writing sample size of a single at-bat in baseball terms, so I could easily be convinced I've underestimated him. And my knowledge of Dave Eggers amounts to a couple of people saying that his autobiography is a touch megalomaniacal, so I've got nothing on that. These people are celebrated by some people, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I defer to that opinion.
But, after a preliminary read of the odd Grantland article, I'm left wondering. What is it? Is it highbrow? Is it aiming right in the middle? On the one hand, I dislike canonical thinking - the notion that a Mamet is better than a crime thriller because it's a Mamet, or that a Pitchfork review is better than an allmusic review because of its url - but at the same time I'm not sure that such a massive multifaceted entity can afford to go through the same kind of identity crisis I go through when debating whether to watch Spun for the fifteenth time or go to a baseball game.
The internet is full of noise, and it's the niches that stand out. IMDB became IMDB because it was the best movie site. Google became Google because it was the best search engine. Youtube - hell, ESPN, you name it. Yes, funds and readership appeal help sustain a site at start-up, but internet is anarchy.
And I wonder if by trying so hard to stand out, Grantland will fade into the woodwork.
Please forgive me my five-day absence; I've been pondering great questions of existence and major league's baseball's amateur draft, which is after all when non-existent players come into being (well, at least that's the way it works in my sim league).
In truth, though, I'm not one of those people (scouts) who actually has a clue when it comes to the ammy. The Jays took a HS pitcher? Cool. To me hearing that informs me exactly that they didn't take a college player and they didn't take a bat. No more, no less. In my mind, the difference between a Beede and a Bundy has far more to do with serial killers and Ed O'Neill than baseball.
From the so-called "experts," however (and I use the term loosely), I can pick up a couple of things from the draft. First of all, it sounds like they took someone with a strong commitment to college, which means one of two things: either they really are serious about going for the best talent, and are convinced that they can blow this Beede kid out of the water with ridiculous money...or AA is still trying to game the system.
The Jays also took the first Canadian of the draft - way down at 139, or about a hundred picks before that Gretzky kid. In an interview on Jays Connected last week, Robson, who's a skinny little pike, compared himself to Roy Halladay, and it for all the world sounded like a ten year old kid saying he wanted to be a fireman. Still, if he could conceivably model himself with any success after Halladay's style (as opposed to simply his regimen), it wouldn't be a terrible place to start.
Of course, the fact that they even took Robson at all should probably underscore that Anthopolous is playing, at least a little, to Joe Nationalist. Now that's not to say that Lawrie is a bad player or even that this kid is necessarily a reach that far down - but it's no coincidence that we're seeing guys like Loewen sign here, or that a 32-year-old Scott Richmond is still on the 40-man roster despite stinking up the joint in Vegas while a 29-year-old Josh Roenicke has packed his bags.
Of course, the most memorable instance of a team favouring the local boy in the past decade worked out pretty damn fine back in 2001 (wonky knees notwithstanding)...so I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom. I'm sure Anthopoulos will grin and cheerfully suggest in that devious CEO way of his that he absolutely thought that Robson was the best eligible player at that point in the draft. But don't be fooled. Joe Canadian sells, and AA is no less a used-car salesman than JP Ricciardi. He's just one with far more (Canadian) tact.
Anyway...back to my existential woes. This song, by itself, makes life worth living:
Aren't rebuilding seasons supposed to be boring and disappointing? Throughout my baseball-watching career, I've watched the Royals and Pirates from a safe distance, aware of the occasional highlight (Zack Greinke! 2003! Come to think of it, I can't think of anything Pirates-related) only because they stand in such stark contrast to the usual misery that surrounds such teams. It's for fear of the negative karma that such "rebuilding" teams project that many teams - such as the Blue Jays - use weasel words like "building" and "long-term plans" in an effort to avoid any associations with a 20-year death spiral.
But this season - which, in spite of the best efforts of the team on the field and the voices in the front office, should absolutely be considered the ebb of a (hopefully quick) rebuilding process - has been anything but slow. In fact, compared to the doldrums of some leaner Ricciardi years, when Lyle Overbay's bland personality and Vernon Wells' carefree attitude lended a mediocre team the air of stagnation, this season has been all about Kid Dynamite. Highs and lows: no-hitters, three homer games. Walkoff wins and blowouts - both in the offensive sense and the bullpen sense. There's been Octavio Dotel striking out Jeff Mathis with the winning run one ball away, there's been Yunel turning a loss into a win, and there's been a little too much of Frank Francisco.
The first two months of the season have been about the youth movement. They've been about upside, potential, and hope. Rookies. Major league debuts. And they've been about failure. After putting up cartoon stats in Vegas, first David Cooper then Eric Thames have gotten a lesson in major league pitching. Cooper couldn't handle it, though Thames has survived fairly well (despite being eaten alive in selective at-bats). And any day now, Brett Lawrie will make his debut after posting the best AAA OPS of the lot. This season has been a coming-out party for Kyle Drabek and JP Arencibia. We've seen terrible players play well (Corey Patterson), and supposedly good players play terribly (Brett Cecil, Travis Snider, Aaron Hill).
But none of that is too far out of the ordinary. They're great subplots, but I could have written many of the same types of things in 2002 about Eric Hinske, Vernon Wells, Josh Phelps and Roy Halladay. What makes this season fascinating, as Blue Jays seasons go, is Jose Bautista.
I guess it could be argued that in the wake of the past decade I had forgotten what the title Home Run King used to mean in the baseball vernacular. Before everyone got sick to death of ubermenchen McGwire and Bonds, the guy who led the league in homers every year was a bona fide superstar. When Cecil Fielder hit 51 home runs in 1990 it was a big deal. When Kid Griffey was hitting 40 a year in the mid-90s, he was considered the best player in baseball. SI covers, commercials, what-have-you - he was the face of baseball. Everyone knew who Griffey was, and it didn't matter that he played for an up-and-coming team in the Pacific Northwest (or pretty much as far as you can get from the nearest major league baseball city...aside from San Juan, I suppose).
I thought I'd seen superstars in Toronto. Clemens had two of the best years of his career here, albeit as a mercenary. Roy Halladay developed into the best pitcher in baseball. Carlos Delgado hit .344 with 41 home runs in 2000. But none of them really got noticed. Pedro's '99-'00 put Clemens in the dust, and he was always destined to be remembered as a Red Sox/Yankee rather than Blue Jay anyway. Halladay was a beast, but a beast who had to be seen to be appreciated. "Santana's better," people would say; then, after Santana went to the other league, it was "hotshot so-and-so has a better ERA. Halladay's a good pitcher, but..." And by 2000, great hitter seasons had become the norm; Delgado didn't even start the All Star Game, much less win the MVP.
Jose Bautista is different. Jose Bautista is mid-career Griffey. He's getting articles in Time. He's leading the world in All-Star votes, which is something I thought I'd never see before I saw the Jays in the playoffs again. He's the best player in baseball, italics necessary. The heir apparent. He's Pujolsing Pujols, who took that mantle from Bonds. He's getting namedropped on virtually every baseball podcast or website south of the border. Halladay's great seasons got footnotes, but Bautista is the headline right now. He had a couple of words with an 0-8 pitcher and it became a story. If he can maintain anything close to the numbers he's produced in the first half of 2011, then we won't have to worry about media coverage in Toronto for a whole lot longer. Before the season, Bautista's fame score might have been in the lower quadrant, but right now he's about a Yankee jersey behind ARod in the baseball world's awareness.
It seems that every day over the past couple of weeks, there's been a different story coming into focus in Blue Jay-land. Jojo Reyes winning; a superprosepct being demoted or promoted; a near-fight on the field; yet another Player-of-the-Month award. It's almost like we're a real team with all that stuff real teams (you know, like the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox and White Sox) have - melodrama, tension, post-game press conferences. Everything.
Over at GROF, there's a post about how it's cool to be a Blue Jays fan right now. I'm too far away from Toronto these days to know if it's true or merely a projection, but if so, maybe it's a little sad that it takes one measly player leading the world in a overrated stat like homers to make it so. But at the same time, I can't argue with more fans supporting my team on a larger scale. The times, they be a-changing.
A few weeks into the most recent incarnation of my current form of employment (which pretty much sets the gold standard in menial wage-slavery - but hey, some recently-graduated "writers" wouldn't have it any other way!), I had one of those painful get-to-know-you conversations with one of the far-too-attractive teenaged tarts who tend to surface in such places. Once she found out I was involved with that magical institution known as university, she became instantly fascinated and wanted to know all about it. She asked my major - which, five years into a four-year degree, is pretty much the most dreadful question in the world. And then it only got better.
"I'm a writer, too," she said (which is right up there with "What are you going to do with that?" as the most awful, predictable response imaginable). "Who's your favourite author?"
I thought about it for a minute, wondering if I should dazzle her with some archaic literary giant who'd written a short story I'd been forced to absorb at some point, or just come up with a disappointing, honest response (Nick Hornby?). I settled for a compromise, a familiar name that was definitely top 5.
"I like Salinger quite a bit." I said.
"Who?"
I sighed, slightly disappointed, my last hopes fading that this girl was some kind of sentient being behind the cheerleader facade. "Catcher in the Rye?"
"Oh yeah." Her nose wrinkled as she focused really hard, trying to place the title. "I read that in like grade 10. I think...I'm pretty sure I had problems with his views on women."
I laughed out loud. It was too perfect: the way her criticism of it embodied everything about the book, parroting some high school English teacher who might well have been a frustrated writer herself (perhaps of the feminist bent). At the way her conversation skills betrayed her teenaged lack of self-awareness, when the book is all about adolescence. At the way that the rift in our conversation could have been the rift between Holden and his girlfriend as he rants about taking her to the country. And while I'm a little blase about invoking the much-exaggerated catchword of the novel, there was a definite phoniness in there too - in her superficial smile, in the way she tried so very hard to carry on the conversation at my level. It was just the perfect Salinger moment, far more telling than if she'd jumped up and said "yes! That's my favourite book too!"
Anyway, this girl has nothing to do with baseball. But our conversation reminded me of a time - almost a decade ago now - when I was the foolish high school student and it was my coworkers who were the snobbish university types who wouldn't give me the time of day. In other words, when I was a teenager and when I was a phony.
I was (and am) a phony on many levels; too nerdy to be a jock, but too jocky to be a nerd. Too busy smoking weed to read, but too busy reading to learn to roll a proper joint. I loved to talk Neitzsche but nearly failed Existentialism 201. And when I played baseball, I fielded like a good hitter and hit like a good fielder.
Because - see - at the very low level at which I played baseball, I was a third baseman. And third base is a position full of phonies.
It's the tweener position: the position where bad corner outfielders and 1B/DHs start their careers and the position where catchers and great middle infielders go to die. It's the position of failed prospects. From Sean Burroughs to Hank Blalock to Eric Hinske to Alex Gordon (or maybe not Alex Gordon?) to Wilson Betemit to Edwin Encarnacion, third base prospects love to burn out. And of the ones who do make it, many don't last long at third. Ryan Braun, Gary Sheffield, and Edgar Martinez will surely go down as historical third basemen, right? On other side, you've got a Yankee-era ARod here, you've got a 36-year-old Tony Fernandez there, and you've got the orange-capped corpse of Miguel Tejada somewhere else - basically, all aging All-Star shortstops who can't/couldn't move like they used to.
The "ideal" third basemen is a great power hitter with soft hands, cat-like reflexes and a strong arm - basically a guy who fields like a shortstop but is built like Paul Konerko. And occasionally you'll find someone who profiles like that. But Evan Longorias and Brooks Robinsons are rare. More often, you get someone like my major league equivalent: someone who fields like a first baseman and hits like a middle infielder.
Since taking over the reins of the Blue Jays, AA has wrestled with this conundrum of the disappearing 3Bs. He started with Edwin Encarnacion, then traded for Brett Wallace, then dumped Wallace and subsequently traded for Brett Lawrie.
To recap:
1) Edwin Encarnacion plays third base like a DH, and has been since relegated to that position.
2) Brett Wallace played third base like a first baseman, and has since been traded and relegated to that position.
3) By all accounts, Brett Lawrie plays third base like a corner outfielder.
Given what's at stake - i.e. almost nothing, short-term - I have no problem with bringing up Brett Lawrie as a third baseman. God knows the Jays could use someone with a little more offense than the John McDonald/Jayson Nix two-headed monster. But given the comparisons to Ryan Braun, given the constant position changes, given John Sickels' wavering qualifiers as he assured the Getting Blanked crew that Lawrie could - in some conceivable time-space continuum - stick at third, I'm not banking on anything long-term. More likely, Lawrie is another Eric Hinske - not quite an Encarnacion-level shitshow, but somehow who could, best-case scenario, not embarass himself too much. Somehow who a fan can easily tell doesn't belong at third, but can cover it well enough that the manager can justify putting his best offensive lineup on the field.
Much has been made of how space will be made for Lawrie this weekend (or, now, whenever he is deemed healthy enough to play). With guys like Mike McCoy, Luis Perez and Eric Thames kicking around, 25-man roster space shouldn't be a major concern, but 40-man roster space is another story, and from one phony third baseman we come to another: is it time for the Jays to part ways with E5?
Yesterday afternoon, I (along with a few other people) did some jawing with @TaoofStieb on this very subject. The question was whether E5's value as an asset outweighed the value of an available roster spot. I'd argue that simply because a player of rostered doesn't mean he's a positive asset; negative value exists, too. Fangraphs had a good article on the same subject, pointing out that, at his best, Edwin Encarnacion is a league-average hitter and having a league-average hitter as a DH is a generally poor allotment of resources. In most cases, a given American League team would be better off simply finding a replacement level player with good defense and putting their poorest defensive regular in the DH slot, so even at the relatively reasonable price tag of 2.5 million, Encarnacion has little to no value as an asset. In some universe, he could conceivably find work as a National League player in the mold of a Marlon Anderson, but at this point I'd argue there's very little reason for the Blue Jays to hang onto him - unless they truly do foresee a Bautista-like emergence in the near future. And after two years, I'm very skeptical.
So, Jays fans, let's get ready for our sixth third-baseman-of-the-future of the past decade, as we say goodbye, perhaps, to the fifth.
