Of Willie And Wang
(Had to.Sorry.)
To the headlines: Randolph got pink-slipped, finally, and Chien-Ming Wang broke the crap out of his foot.
I feel kind of bad for Randolph, because, although we can’t know what went on behind closed doors, it did seem like the Wilpons jerked his chain the last few weeks instead of just telling him something — anything.Even “we don’t know quite what to do instead, so you’ve got two weeks to turn it around” would have worked.I don’t have a problem with the firing qua firing — Minaya should go out to the curb in the same cart, though, because I don’t know what miracles anyone expects Randolph to summon with an aged roster he didn’t build himself.But Randolph also didn’t get the results he could have from a team that is pretty old, but also pretty talented, and you can’t fire the players, so here he is.Still, it was handled poorly.Why didn’t they just pull the trigger over the winter?Whatever you think about his in-game decision-making or leadership style or whatever name you want to give it, “intangibles,” “clubhouse chemistry,” Randolph clearly did not have, or do, what would work with this group of players.We all knew that by October 1 of last year, though.
Everyone involved is relieved to have it over with, no doubt, but I don’t know how realistic team ownership’s view is of what’s going to happen next.
As for Wang, well, it’s just bad luck.Hank Steinbrenner, among others, is clutching his pearls in the direction of the NL for not adopting the DH and thereby somehow perpetrating Wang’s injury, and I don’t like interleague play either, in the abstract — the teams need to play more games within their division, not fewer, plus the schedule can favor certain teams in the matchups (see: the Yanks not having to face either the Cubs or the Cards) while others get boned — but shut up, Hank.Let’s remember that the DH is a relatively recent development; pitchers had to bat and run the bases for themselves, in both leagues and throughout organized baseball, until 1973.The vast majority did not injure themselves while doing so.Pitchers also have to field their positions, racing to first to make close plays that may get them spiked accidentally, and sometimes a batter hits one straight back and clips the pitcher; Bobby Abreu did it to that guy a week or so ago, and Abreu felt terrible about it, but it’s not like you don’t know that’s going to happen sometimes.That’s the job.
There is the attitude now — which didn’t exist 20 years ago, at least among fans — that a pitcher is extraordinarily fragile, and you can’t expose him to even the slightest deviation from his work routine or the tinest extra exertion, or he’ll have to have something amputated.And it does seem like pitchers get hurt more nowadays, but does anyone else think it’s a result of the coddling?We don’t have to go back to the days when Walter Johnson threw both thirteen-inning games of a hard-fought doubleheader and then went out and hammered railroad spikes with his bare hands to wind down or whatever the hell, but if you can’t round third without fubaring your foot for the next three months, in the course of a game which you, an athlete, play for a living, perhaps the problem is not overwork, but rather the opposite.
I’ve thought the same thing regarding Joba for a year now; no, you don’t want to burn the kid out, but if he’s going to burn out, he’s going to burn out eventually regardless of what you do.You can stretch him out as much as you want beforehand, as gently or slowly as you like, but if he can’t sustain a 200-innings-a-year pace, he can’t.Again, I don’t advocate the Rube Waddell “pitch a complete game every three days while drunk” program, because it’s not about whether Waddell could do that so much as it is that his managers knew he could, if that makes sense.And lots of people can’t.It’s why only a tiny fraction of the population pitches for a living — it’s hard to do well, it hurts your arm even when you suck, the stress is killer.
But why dick around finding out whether a given pitcher can become what you need?It’s not like Joba came out of an office cubicle; he’s a pitcher.He does this.He’s been doing this.If you really think his arm might snap in two, wouldn’t you want to know that sooner rather than later?Throw him out there to do the job, not to pitch to a count; if he needs to stay in and finish an inning, let him do that.It’s his job, and if he really can’t last longer than 10 or 15 pitches, you need to formulate a new plan pronto.And so does he, like learning to type.
Bill James relates a story from Phil Rizzuto’s time in the minors that illustrates the point:
A leg injury got infected, and gangrene set in.[Rizzuto] was in danger of losing the leg.A local doctor had to cut away a few inches of one muscle, and tied the other end to a big tendon; the surgery left 37 stitches in his leg.After a few weeks’ rest the doctor told him to run as hard as he could, saying that “if it doesn’t hold now, it never will.”He didn’t run well, but he didn’t crumple in pain.The stitches held. — Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame?, 217-8.
I don’t have a degree in medicine; I don’t have first-hand info on the percentage of guys playing hurt 50 or 60 years ago; that particular doctor is probably one of the ones who prescribed Camel straights to cure chest colds.We live in a different time now, and Mantle taping up 85 percent of his body to play every day would not happen anymore; you can argue the positives and the negatives of that, I think.I certainly don’t believe Wang should run on a broken foot unless or until he’s sobbing in pain, but I agree with the idea behind that doctor’s suggestion — that you might as well know one way or the other. The complete game has become nearly as rare and remarkable as the no-hitter, which is too bad, but I would have no issue with treating pitchers like overbred racehorses with bones like dry noodles if it worked.My objection isn’t that they get babied; if it works, hell, put diapers on ’em.It doesn’t appear to work.
It’s sort of a freak injury, and Wang didn’t seem out of condition, but then the fat guys always have back problems anyway, so who knows.Who knows why it happened; it doesn’t really matter.Blaming the NL for not having the DH isn’t going to address the larger question, I know that.
What does it mean for the Yankees?Short-term, I fear it means that Kei Igawa is up for another cup of six-runs-in-three joe, which I could do without, but Wang had only recently started to look effective again — so perhaps that foot had started to weaken or bother him somehow prior to his actually breaking it — and Moose and Pettitte had stepped back up in recent weeks, plus we have A-Rod’s and Posada’s bats back in the order.Wang’s the ace, nominally, but he had a meh May, and the squad’s inconsistency at the plate meant that they weren’t coming back from four runs down; now, they’ve started to stay in that type of game better.Giambi’s hitting, Matsui’s hitting — this is dismaying, but it’s not the end of their season.If Cashman can swing a deal for Sabathia, we might have half a shot at this thing, but I get the sense that that isn’t real likely.
Any road: Mets press conference is at 5 PM, I believe.Area fans may vent at will in the comments; everyone else, feel free to chime in.
Definitely been waiting to hear your pov on this – I’m not a Mets fan…more a Willie Randolph fan, I guess, since that’s how my father raised me, but yeah, this was done quite badly. Bad choice, Mets.
I absolutely agree with you re: the coddling of pitchers. It does seem as if they are far more fragile now that they’re babied, and perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate that attitude.
To blame this on the lack of a DH in the NL is just kind of dumb.
Hal is an idiot. He wasn’t even griping about interleague play; it was about pitchers hitting. Way to join a debate that’s 30+ years old. There are positives and negatives to both interleague play and the DH rule but they didn’t really change because of that play. And if he believes his pitchers need to be coddled that much, then take the out when they come up as protest. If you can’t do that, then shut up.
But then I saw Bartolo Colon flail around helplessly against the Phillies. No one should ever be subjected to that again, so now I’m with Hal.
You don’t have to apologize for that headline–you DID have to do it. All day yesterday I was seeing these Google headlines on Gmail with things like “Yankees Lose Wang” and “Wang Hurt as Yankees Weigh Future” and I was giggling like a 12-year-old.
I completely agree about the handling of the Randolph firing–especially coming after a win!–and almost wondered if they’d waited until the Mets were on a West Coast road trip so that it would break (as it did) at 3 in the morning back east. I thought it was odd and disrespectful, and the timing was just…hinky.
About Wang, pitchers, the DH, and player fragility–well, it’s all about money, isn’t it? The teams have invested so much that they’re terrified of career-ending injuries. And the players are making so much, and are so eminently unfit for anything else, that they’re terrified of losing their meal tickets. It DOES seem as if players get injured more nowadays, despite being muscle-bound monsters. (My old friend Kenny–RIP, baby!–who was a gym rat back in the ’80s before AIDS took him away, used to avoid being asked to do any real heavy-lifting around the office: “Cosmetic muscles, baby!” he’d say, “they’re not good for anything practical!”) Back when players were all from farms, and went back home to work in the off-season, they didn’t have a lot to lose if their careers ended, and they had a place to go. Now, not so much.
I feel like I’ve seen Hardball Times and Baseball Musings both come back to the pitch count thing, which goes to coddling as well, where ZOMG not over 100 pitches thrown ZOMG and how it, at times, is super arbitrary but no one wants to be that guy who had the bright young phenom throw 103 pitches and then his arm literally fell off. Which also speaks to the coddling of any player – everyone’s got all that yapping in their ear from fans and etc about ZOMG what did you DO TO THE WEE BABY WE PAID FOR??
Of course, I’m oversimplifying since you hardly want, as you say, pitch every three days drunk off your ass model. But it feels like it’s reallllll hard for a coach to come out on the side of being tougher when dealing with the kind of investment made in pitchers. Maybe let’s just be tough on Kei Igawa?
So… do they let Willie come on back to NY on the team plane or do they give him a Greyhound ticket and say “bus leaves at 7! Thanks for everything!”
[eyeroll] Omar needs to be next out the door, no doubt about that. There just wasn’t much Willie could do with David/Jose and a bunch of Grandpas. We’ll see how the rest of this season plays out, but it doesn’t look good from where I’m sitting.
@Karen: Back then, they really had to work off-season jobs, which most of them did until the ’60s — the pay was not good enough for anyone except the big stars to take time off from work. Now the league minimum is something like 390K a year, plus the big bonuses they often get…I don’t know. You don’t want to sign a kid for five years and then his arm is gone and so’s your money, but if he’s only pitching three innings a week anyway to keep his arm on? Just move him to the outfield and try to recoup the investment.
And if you’re that unprepared for life after baseball, or for the possibility that, when you use your body to make a living, the tools might break down on you…this is an assumed risk of the job, for everyone involved. Go out, throw your best, ice up afterwards, and invest your salary carefully. The fact that they’re not trained for anything else, when they’re probably going to be out of the game by age 30, is up to them to handle, I think.
Maybe the AL should go back to the way we played as kids with “invisible men”. “Invisible man on first!”
As a NL fan, it seems that quite a few times in extra inning games that pitchers will get used as a pinch runner. Allows for a double switch and the theory seems to be that pitchers do a lot of running anyway for strength building.
As far as Willie being gone the Phillies fan in me says good job Mets.
My husband and I have had the coddled pitcher conversation a number of times. Personally, I think pitchers should have to bat, period. Hitting is part of the game, in my opinion, and I don’t want to say that pitchers are less of a player because they don’t do it . . . but maybe I will, anyway.
I’m also not so much a fan of pulling starters out who are still pitching just fine. Maybe the Tiger fan in me thinks this because I’m tired of watching our bullpen blow it, but sometimes, it seems like Leyland pulls our guys at the worst possible time. He let Verlander pitch a full game that wasn’t a no hitter and I was shocked. Granted, his pitch count was really low, but I’d love to see that happen more often. If the game is close, your guy is throwing great stuff, and your bullpen is shakey, let the man pitch!
Here’s Buster Olney on the feeble handling of Randolph’s ouster: http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index? entryID=3448037&name=olney_buster
Faith and Fear in Flushing’s take: http://faithandfear.blogharbor.com/ blog/_archives/2008/6/17/3749814.html
Brought here, not by FAFIF (where I’m a regular), but by a decidedly non-sports person who reminded me of your much-beloved site on this less-than-beloved subject:
My two cents on the Mets-spects of what you said.
Oh, man, Jeff . . . “invisible man on first!” REALLY takes me back and makes my face smile into a million pieces. Yeah, takes me back almost 50 years, but takes me back nonetheless.
“The word I most associate with ‘dismissed’ is ‘class.’ Until now, anyway.”
@Ray: Well put. If I’m Willie, I’m raiding the mini-bar with a fuckin’ vengeance.
Absolutely, Sars, the working off-season did have to do with the low salaries, and I had planned to make that clearer. I left out Ring Lardner’s brilliant 1920s Bush League stories, about a not very bright ballplayer who makes it to the majors in Chicago, and is constantly trying to negotiate something higher than his $50/week, or something like that. That’s what I meant when I blamed it on the money–the salaries today tend to disconnect the players from real life or non-baseball jobs, or at any rate the possibility of any job that’s not paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they cling to baseball.
The New Yorker had a fascinating piece a few months back on Lenny Dykstra (!) who, in his post-baseball life, has become something of a financial whiz, and is starting a magazine for ballplayers about how to manage their money while they’re playing so they don’t end up destitute and haunting the Bowery (so to speak) after their careers are over. It was a funny piece, because he’s such a piece of work (at the Four Seasons, he just wanted a burger and fries), but it was also profoundly moving. These guys make so much money–even the guys at the minimum, by any sane, non-sports standard–and they tend to treat it like it’s gonna be pouring out the money faucet forever:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_mcgrath
He was also featured on Real Sports that same week, I think; you can hear the audio version on iTunes.
In light of Steinbrenner, Jr.’s comments about the NL not having the DH as being the source of Wang’s injury, I just thought I’d throw this tidbit out there. It’s a little-known fact (I didn’t know this until I read the article in this month’s Baseball Digest), but the NL came as close as you can to implementing the DH the same year that the AL did.
At the time, the league needed a vote of 7 out of the 12 teams it had for the rule to pass, but the vote was 6-4 in favor, with the Phillies and Pirates abstaining. Pittsburgh’s representatives had been instructed by the team’s owner to vote whichever way the Phillies did, but the Phillies’ owner was on a fishing trip and didn’t vote, so neither did the Pirates. I can just see Steinbrenner building a time machine to go back and give those two owners a pair of cell phones…
@ FloridaErin: In the same article, Leyland was quoted as saying that the presence of the DH makes managing harder in the AL than it was for him in the NL: “[In the NL], if I’m behind in the game, I’ve got to pinch hit. I’ve got to take my pitcher out. In the AL, you have to zero in. You have to know exactly when to take pitchers out of there. In the NL, that is done for you.”
@Drew- Thanks for the quote! I hadn’t seen that. Leyland’s timing with pulling pitchers has been my number one complaint, and that definitely sheds some light on the situation.
I am probably as pro-pitchers-batting as I’ve ever been this season, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the fact that the Cubs’ pitchers are, relatively speaking, tearing up the league. Carlos Zambrano (average: .365) has agitated to pinch-hit on days when he’s not pitching–and they let him! But that’s just “Z being Z.” Heh.
But it’s more than that. I’m the mother of a pony-league pitcher who would no more let someone else bat for him than wear women’s underwear. Pitchers at that level are often the best players on their teams, and that’s because they can also HIT. Sad to think if they get to the bigs, that could all be over.
One more thing: here in flyover country, we just think Hal Steinbrenner is a big ole blowhard…
“…but if you can’t round third without fubaring your foot for the next three months, in the course of a game which you, an athlete, play for a living, perhaps the problem is not overwork, but rather the opposite.”
Heh.
@Melissa: Nobody thinks Hal’s anything else here in Gotham City. It’s just not usually this easy to pinpoint WHY he’s being an asshat.
Hank continues to prove that he is very much his father’s son.
I am not surprised that the Mets fired Willie, but I think it would have taken more balls (heh) if they traded away Reyes and gotten back a player or two that is actually trying to play and win.
Hank’s complaining that baseball is old-fashioned? Errr…where has he been his entire life? The Knickerbocker Rules were recorded in 1845. The sport is freaking ancient within the context of American history. Post-1900, the sport hasn’t made any truly earth-shattering alterations to the in-game play aside from the DH rule. And even that isn’t so earth-shattering if you include the courtesy runner, which dates back at least to 1860. And that’s an “old-fashioned” rule I’m sure Hank would love, since he seems to think his pitchers are too delicate to run the bases.
Also, is it me, or is introducing a 35-year-old rule into the NL the opposite of bringing the league into the 21st century? It’s a 20th-century rule. I wouldn’t call it “revolutionary” at this point, by any stretch of the imagination.
The coddling of pitchers pisses me off. When they’re young and the organization is high on them, I get that, but the obsession with relief pitching and pitch counts and all that just annoys the hell out of me. (I was born about forty years after I should have been.) Pitch counts have only been tracked for the last twenty-ish years, but the Dodgers had Allan Roth doing it back in the day, and I think that, based on those numbers, they’ve found that Dodgers starters threw fewer pitches per start than today’s starters do, rather than more. I think most would assume that, say, Don Newcombe averaged more pitches per start than Josh Beckett does, based on the modern obsession with pitch counts and the assumption of longer outings, but that isn’t the case at all. Obviously, those Dodgers numbers come pre-DH (and in a league that would be DH-less anyway), but that’s still sort of interesting.
Nolan Ryan once threw a twelve-inning complete-game shutout that was won on a walk-off sac fly. This was in 1972, when he was with the Angels and AL pitchers still had to hit for themselves. I’d love to see someone do that today. I think the baseball media would have a collective heart attack. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, at least if we’re talking about Dan Shaughnessy and Bill Plaschke.