Chicago Cubs Lock Up Anthony Rizzo

The big news yesterday was the Cubs’ announcement that the team had extended 23 year old 1Bman Anthony Rizzo for seven years at $41 million.  This signing continues and extends the trend of major league teams locking up their young stars with long term contracts early in their careers.

At this point in his career, Rizzo has exactly 685 major league plate appearances, about one full season, with a career .253 batting average and .762 OPS.  At this point Rizzo is still more promise than production, even taking into account his awful debut with the Padres in 2011, when at age 21 he batted only .141 with a .523 OPS in 49 games.

By way of comparison, Starlin Castro and Paul Goldschmidt looked like seasoned veterans at the point that their respective teams extended them (Castro by the Cubs last August and Goldschmidt by the Diamondbacks this Spring) insofar as Castro and Goldschmidt had at least completed full seasons in which they had established themselves as star players before being extended.

The Cubs’ thinking is obvious — they’re sold on Rizzo and they’ve locked in for the best years of his career a still very young power hitter who is more likely than not to get much better over the next three to five seasons at a very reasonable rate.  In fact, the contract contains two club options for years eight and nine which, if exercised, would raise the contract to $70 million and would keep Rizzo a Cub through age 31.

Rizzo, on the other hand, has potentially left a lot of money on the table for the guarantee of what should be lifetime financial security at age 23.  He also gets to play his prime years in Wrigley Field, which gives him the one of the best chances to develop into a superstar slugger.

Clearly, there’s a risk here for the Cubs — as noted above, Rizzo really hasn’t done much so far in his major league career, and he strikes out a lot.  Major league pitchers will find holes in Rizzo’s swing, and we don’t yet know how good Rizzo will be at making the necessary adjustments to close or at least shrink those holes.  Even so, the upside of this signing is certainly high enough to justify the $41 million risked.

At this point, I think the only thing standing in the way of other teams signing their young stars as relatively inexperienced as Rizzo to long term deals is that some of these young stars will choose to defer the long-term deal for at least a couple of seasons in order to establish themselves as major stars and command the much larger deals that, for example, Matt Cain (five years and $112.5 million new money) and Buster Posey (nine years, $167 million) recently signed with the Giants, Felix Hernandez (five years, $135.5 million new money) signed with the Mariners and Clayton Kershaw will likely soon sign with the Dodgers.  Further, teams will likely wait longer to extend their young pitchers in order to see whether they can handle 200+ inning work loads for multiple seasons.

 

Dodgers Hurting

It was announced today that Los Angeles Dodger starter Chad Billingsley will have Tommy John surgery on his pitching elbow causing him to miss the rest of the 2013 season.  It sure didn’t take long (less than a month) for the Dodgers’ immense surplus of starting pitchers at the end of Spring Training to turn into a deficit.

As you well know, Zack Greinke is out for at least six more weeks after breaking his collarbone fighting with Carlos Quentin, and Dodgers dumped Aaron Harang and $4.25 million towards his remaining contract to the Rockies for catcher Ramon Hernandez, who turns 37 next month and appears to have very little left in the tank.

Meanwhile, Chris Capuano is also on the DL with a strained calf, although that at least sounds like an injury Capuano will come back from quickly.

As a result of all this rash of injuries, the Dodger rotation suddenly looks suspect, with Ted Lilly set to rejoin the rotation after pitching in only three minor league starts (and poor ones at that) since late May of 2012.  Rounding out the rotation is Stephen Fife, a 26 year old rookie who doesn’t look like he’ll have a significant major league career unless he gets really lucky.

It just goes to show you how quickly things can change in baseball.  A couple of key injuries and a major strength suddenly becomes, if not a major weakness (the Dodgers still have Clayton Kershaw, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Josh Beckett), at least a major cause for concern.

I bet the Dodgers now wish they’d held on to Aaron Harang just a little bit longer, when all they got in return was an over-the-hill back-up catcher and a little bit of salary relief.

Karma Catching Up to Frank McCourt and Other Notes

The never ending saga of the Frank/Jamie McCourt divorce has entered a new phase.  Jamie is seeking to re-open the former couple’s marital property settlement agreement and obtain an additional $770 million on top of the $131 million she received previously.  All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving ex-husband.

Frank McCourt is a sack.  According to wikipedia, McCourt financed his 2004 purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers mostly with debt which he repaid in part by raising ticket and concession prices every year he owned the team.  He paid himself and his now ex-wife enormous salaries out of the Dodgers’ enormous revenue streams, but largely avoided paying taxes by structuring these payments as “loans.”

During his tenure, McCourt effectively ran the team into the ground, so much so that the team filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011, despite being one of the top three or four teams in MLB in terms of revenue streams.  MLB was able to force McCourt to sell the team, but McCourt then sold the team for $2 billion, more than 4.5 times what he had paid for the team only eight years before.

Frank McCourt is an insatiably greedy scumbag who married a woman after his own heart.  When the marriage failed (surprise, surprise!), she went after his ill-gotten gains with the determination of a hungry lion after an old and sickly wildebeest.  In my book, that’s karma.

As a San Francisco Giants fan, I normally wouldn’t shed a lot of tears over terrible things happening to the Dodgers.  As a baseball fan, however, it bothered me to see a storied franchise being raped by an “entrepeneur” who wasn’t content to take the typically obscene profits major league owners make in the course of buying and selling top franchises, but had to milk the situation for still more.

I’d rather see the Dodgers fail the old fashioned way: poor baseball decisions like bad trades and overpaying already expensive free agents who don’t end up performing as the team hoped.

Meanwhile, in today’s baseball action, I see that Andy Pettitte won again and is now 3-0.  If he is really and truly off Vitamin S for good, it’s great to see a soon-to-be 41 year old continuing to flummox major league hitters.

It will be interesting to see how Hall of Fame voters treat Pettitte however many years from now.  On the one hand, his numbers are clearly Hall of Fame worthy: he’s almost certain to finish with more than 250 career wins, a terrific winning percentage and an excellent post-season record for numerous World Champions.  On the other hand, he’s an admitted steroids/PEDs abuser.

However, he copped to his PED use a lot faster than most of his fellow cheats, told a pretty good story about why he did it (trying to recover quickly from an injury to help his team, blah, blah, blah), and even fingered another reputed and more significant steroids cheat, all-time great Roger Clemens.  That might buy Pettitte some sympathy from Hall of Fame voters — Americans, as a group, love to see the mighty cut down to size, but we’re awfully forgiving when said mighties abjectly admit their mistakes and ask for forgiveness — it has a lot to do with our Puritan (read broadly) heritage.

Meanwhile, Roy Halladay and the Phillies beat the Cardinals today 8-2 in a game called on account of rain after six and half innings.  I wonder if umpires are more likely to shorten games on account of rain when the game is a blow out?

My guess is yes, umpires do.  They are human, and I can’t imagine that they don’t take into account the score and the inning when deciding if it’s rained long enough to call the game.  If the game was 3-2 after six and a half, I suspect the umpires would have waited longer to try to get more of the game into the record books.

Has anyone done any research on this question?  If not, it would make an interesting research topic for the SABRly minded.

Meanwhile, I have no idea whether the Pirates will contend this year, but at least they’re trying.  Right now, the Bucs’ decisions to take on A. J. Burnett’s (albeit at a steep discount) and Wandy Rodriguez’s salaries last year looks brilliant.  Today Rodriguez completely shut down the Braves, the hottest team in baseball; and Burnett has a 2.63 ERA and leads the NL in strikeouts.

Baseball Brawls

Because of the big brawl yesterday between the Padres and the Dodgers in which Zack Greinke broke his collar bone, apparently when he and Carlos Quentin traded shoulder blocks, Sports Illustrated is running an on-line article it advertizes as “the most notorious brawls in baseball history”.  It then lists 13 relatively recent brawls, only three of which occurred before 1993 and none before 1965.

At least the article included Juan Marichal hitting catcher John Roseboro over the head with his bat after Marichal claimed that Roseboro buzzed his head with a throw back to pitcher Sandy Koufax, because Koufax wouldn’t throw at Marichal after Marichal had plunked at least one Dodger (Koufax reputedly refused to throw at hitters because he was afraid his 98 mph fast ball, the fastest of his day, might kill someone).

You see, before 1965 baseball was a game of peace and love where no one ever mixed it up.

What a load of BS.  Baseball was a rough, rough game in its early professional days and has gotten more and more tame as players have become better paid and MLB has worked to make the games family entertainment.

In the 1880′s and 1890′s the game was hard fought in a literal sense.  Umpires were routinely threatened by players and fans, and it was not uncommon for both to back up their tough talk with physical violence.  The best teams of the era, the St. Louis Browns of the 1880′s American Association and the Baltimore Orioles of the 1890′s National League regularly abused umpires and opposing players forcing/inspiring other teams to follow suit.

During this era, there was generally only one umpire monitoring the action, and when his eyes were following the ball, fielders tried to impede base runners by getting in the way, tripping them, throwing knees or elbows and even body blocks, or grabbing their belts.  Baserunners responded in kind, and one base runner famously defeated the belt-grabbing strategy by unhooking his belt so that when an opposing fielder grabbed it, the fielder was left holding the belt as the runner continued round the bases.

Fans threw glass bottles and rotten eggs at opposing players and umpires, and on-field fist fights were common.  Most professional baseball players came from poor or working class backgrounds, life was hard for working class men in the late 19th century when the national economy was notoriously boom or bust, and a major league ball player’s salary was something worth fighting for.

The game got so rough that baseball and ballplayers got unsavory reputations, which kept many potential fans away from the ballparks.  This only changed when the American League announced itself as a major league before the 1901 season and quickly began moving teams into the biggest cities.

The AL’s driving force and strong man Ban Johnson felt the “rowdyism” of the 1890′s was bad for the game, and he wouldn’t allow it in his league.  The NL eventually followed suit.

Further, as major league revenues and salaries, more former college players entered the game and brought with them the ethics of elite and more upper class amateurism.  Most notable of these players was New York Giants ace Christy Mathewson, probably the player most mythologized during his own day of any player in baseball history.  [Matthewson had attended Bucknell University, was exceptionally handsome and was far and away the best player on the dominant club of his day -- there is a certain irony in the fact this All-American icon died prematurely as a long-term result of being gassed by his own government in a training exercise during World War I.]

However, the cleaning up of major league baseball wasn’t something that happened over night.  It was a long and slow process, and with the exception of the famous Marichal/Roseboro bat incident, the game has gotten more and more tame as high salaries and professionalism have reduced the incentives for violence.

Here is a post from espn.com which at least goes back beyond 1965 in referencing famous baseball brawls/fights.  I particularly like the quote from Yankees’ catcher and Hall of Famer Bill Dickey after he famously broke Washington Senators’ outfielder Carl Reynolds’ jaw with a single punch following a home plate collision on July 4. 1932: “It was hot, and the games had been close, and I had been banged around for days,” Dickey said. “When Reynolds came at me high, I just had to hit somebody.”  [Dickey received a month-long suspension and was fined $1,000, probably a sixth of his 1932 salary.]

Even if Sports Illustrated’s memory doesn’t extend back any further than incidents for which it can provide pretty pictures, don’t for a minute think that human nature has changed much since the American pastime turned pro in the late 1860′s.

Bad Craziness

The big news today is Dodger pitcher Zack Greinke breaking his collar bone in a scrum with the Padres Carlos Quentin after Greinke hit Quentin with an inside fastball.  I think it would be a whole lot easier to change the rules to reduce home plate collisions than it would be to end hit-by-pitch fights.

Home plate collisions could be reduced almost to non-existence simply by clarifying and enforcing the rule that catchers may not move into the base line until they have the ball in their mitts and by passing a rule that runners may not come in high (or must slide) on a play at the plate.  I strongly suspect that the reason MLB hasn’t passed these simple rule changes/clarifications is that there is a perception that fans like to see home plate collisions because they are exciting, much in the same way that the NHL allows fights that aren’t tolerated in international competition in spite of the obvious health problems that NHL “enforcers” suffer as a result.

On the other hand, hitters charging the mound after getting plunked has always been outlawed in baseball, but still happens for obvious reasons.

Dodger manager Don Mattingly called Quentin an idiot for thinking that Greinke was throwing at him on a 3-2 pitch in a 2-1 ballgame.  Mattingly is hardly an unbiased observer, and it’s frankly a stupid comment.

Here are the facts that mattered to Quentin. This was the third time Greinke had plunked Quentin in about 30 career plate appearances, in which Quentin had also taken Greinke deep three times.  Greinke generally has excellent command.  Quentin is a power hitter who gets hit by a lot of pitches at least in part because pitchers are trying to push him off the plate to neutralize his power.

Getting hit by a 90+ mph fastball hurts.  It’s also a potential threat to Quentin’s health and livelihood.

I’m not justifying Quentin’s actions in charging the mind and I’m not suggesting that Quentin shouldn’t be punished, but I can certainly understand what was likely going through his mind the moment after a pitch up around his head hit him.  I don’t see any way you can legislate away a situation that is already against the rules.  Pitchers will occasionally hit batters with pitched balls, accidentally or on purpose, and either way the batters aren’t going to like it.

The only thing MLB can do is impose stiffer suspensions when these brawls happen, but they have to get the agreement of the players’ association first.  Because the collective bargaining agreement requires just cause for discipline and batters have never received more than eight or ten game suspensions in these circumstances, there’s no way MLB can suspend Quentin for more than ten games and have the sentence stick in impartial arbitration provided for in the collective bargaining agreement.

I don’t see the players’ association agreeing to a suspension for Quentin any longer than the traditional five to ten games.  At least half the membership of the players’ association are hitters who aren’t going to support allowing pitchers to hit hitters with pitches without any consequences.

In my mind, the fact that Greinke got hurt and will miss one to three months while his collarbone mends is simply irrelevant.  Greinke didn’t turn around and run when Quentin charged him — instead, Greinke threw down his mitt and met Quentin’s charge.

In other news, MLB is reportedly paying former Biogenesis employees for documents in part because sources say some ballplayers have similarly purchased Biogenesis documents in order to destroy them.  MLB has already brought a lawsuit against Biogenesis and some of its former employees on a very aggressive legal theory that their actions have damaged the business of baseball, although the main reason for the lawsuit appears to be to enable MLB to conduct discovery of the documents in Biogenesis’ possession in order to discipline wayward players.

If players are buying documents in order to destroy them, I have a feeling this will come out, and MLB will have sufficient evidence to make long suspensions stick.  However, with respect to the documents MLB is paying for, there will be questions about the authenticity of the documents obtained and the motivations of the former Biogenesis employees in providing them, which will weaken the evidentiary value of whatever information the documents contain.

It’s pretty clear that MLB is determined to pursue any players who were involved with Biogenesis and that this issue isn’t going to go away.  We’ll have to wait to see how it all plays out.

Finally, in a college game on Tuesday, Central Arkansas beat Grambling 30-0.  Central Arkansas’ catcher Michael Marrieta went 7-for-7 with three HRs and three doubles, good for 19 total bases.  He also drove in 11 runs and scored six.  Grambling is now 13-18 this season, so they’re not nearly as bad as this one game suggests.

Asia Ball

Those of you who read this blog with any regularity know that I like to report on the goings-on in Asian baseball.  Here are a few recent items of interest to me.

A 17 year old high school senior named Lee Su-min (family name first) struck out 26 batters on April 7th setting a new Korean high school record.  He did it in 10 innings pitched and allowed a run on three hits and three walks allowed, but won the game when his team scored its second run in the 10th.

Lee threw 162 pitches to set his record.  He’s 4-0 this season and threw 128 and 126 in two of this other starts this year.  Last year, Lee went 8-2 and had two starts in which he made 154 and 130 pitches respectively.  He struck out 17 in the 154 pitch effort and 13, 11, and 10 in the other three efforts in which he threw more than 125 pitches.

Needless to say, young Su-min looks very promising, at least until his arm gives out from the heavy workloads.

We are already about 16 to 18 games into the Nippon Professional Baseball (“NPB”) season.  Dae-Ho “Big Boy” Lee, Tony Blanco and John Bowker are off to hot starts; Brooks Conrad, Nyjer Morgan and Kosuke Fukudome are struggling mightily.

Please note, however, that NPB’s English-language website is about eight or nine games behind on the stats for the players listed above.  Come on, guys — give us those Japanese stats in a timely fashion!

As I’m sure you know, Hyun-Jin Ryu won his first game for the Dodgers yesterday.  His only major mistake in 6.1 innings of work was giving up a two-run bomb to Andrew McCutchen.  Well, that could happen to anyone.

I read an interesting article today about the fact the Ryu does not throw in the off-season or throw bullpen sessions between starts.  This runs counter to what is the norm in MLB, where starters usually throw a bullpen session about half-way between each start in order to keep their pitching sharp and to work with the pitching coach.

Apparently, Ryu did not throw between starts in South Korea’s KBO because KBO starters generally throw more pitches per start than MLB starters.

The Dodgers position for the time being is to let Ryu do what he is comfortable with, at least until they perceive a need for him to throw between starts.  In my mind, that means that Ryu will get to do it his way until he has three poor starts in a row.

As always, a shout-out to MyKBO.net where I get my Korean baseball news.

April Is Good (and Big Catchers)

April is a good time.  After the month-long tease of Spring Training, we finally have major league baseball games again that count toward the championship season.

Only three or four games into the 2013 season, we’ve seen Bryce Harper become the youngest player to hit two home runs on Opening Day and the fourth youngest player to hit a home run on Opening Day, Clayton Kershaw become only the second pitcher since at least 1916 to pitch a shut out and hit a home run on opening day (Hall of Famer Bob Lemon did it in 1953), and Yu Darvish come within one out of a perfect game.  That’s what we’ve been waiting for since the 2012 World Series ended five months ago!

One start into his major league career, Hyun-Jin Ryu, the 2012 off-season’s most exciting foreign signing, looks like the real deal.  While he took a hard-luck loss against the Giants, he allowed only one earned run in 6.1 innings pitched and struck out five while walking none.  However, he also allowed 10 hits and two unearned, suggesting he’s still got some things to learn about pitching to major league hitters compared to those in the Korean Baseball Organization.

I read somewhere during Spring Training that Ryu was probably only a fourth or fifth starter in MLB.  However, his spring training numbers didn’t show it.  In six starts and seven appearances this spring, he had a 3.29 ERA with a pitching line of 27.1 IP, 17 hits, one HR, eight BBs and 27 Ks.  You couldn’t ask for much more than that from a pitcher pitching against major league (and high minors) hitters for the first time.

I’m sure Ryu still has some things to learn, he could blow out his pitching arm before the 2013 season’s over, and I still think he needs to lose a few pounds, but so far he hasn’t done anything to suggest he isn’t worth the big contract the Dodgers gave him.

I read yesterday on mlbtraderumors.com that the Orioles tried, but were unable, to sign catcher Matt Wieters to a long-term contract extension this Spring.  This may be the best contract the Orioles never signed.

Catchers Matt Wieters’ size (he’s listed by baseball reference as 6’5″ and 240 lbs) very rarely have long major league careers.  Of the top 20 catchers all-time in terms of games played at the position, the largest to date was Lance Parrish, who baseball reference lists as 6’2″ and 210 lbs (fangraphs says he weighed 220 lbs).

Players at all positions are steadily getting bigger, and A. J. Pierzynski (who is listed as 6’3″ and 235 lbs, is currently 27th all-time in games played at catcher, and has averaged 124 games caught per season for the last three years) is only 75 more games played away from jumping up to 19th all-time in games caught.  However, the only other catcher of that size in the top 30 is Ernie Lombardi (6’3″ and 230 lbs) who is currently 28th all-time.

Matt Wieters has played 126, 132 and 134 games at catcher the last three seasons, and, so long as he doesn’t get hurt, is likely to play roughly that many each of the next three seasons before he becomes eligible for free agency.

I’ve written many times over the last few years about how the Twins should stop running Joe Mauer (6’5″, 230 lbs) out at catcher 120+ games a year at catcher, and Brian McCann (6’3″, 230 lbs), who had his best two offensive seasons at ages 22 and 24 and has seen his OPS drop each of the last four seasons, is pretty much the poster-boy for the problems with playing a man that size at catcher 120+ games a season year after year.

Wieters is represented by Scott Boras, which usually means that it will take the absolute maximum to get Wieters signed long term.  If the O’s plan to play Wieters 130+ games a year at catcher for the next three seasons, they’d almost certainly be better off letting some other team give him the ginormous contract he’ll get as a free agent.

What Are the Chances Johan Santana Makes the Hall of Fame?

At this moment, probably not good.  Johan Santana had shoulder surgery today and, according to espn.com, will miss the entire season for the second time in three years.  He is vowing to pitch again in the major leagues, but whether he actually does remains to be seen.

Santana’s claim to be a Hall of Famer rests on the fact that he was indisputably the best pitcher in major league baseball for the five year period from 2004 through 2008.  During that span he led his league in wins, ERA, innings pitched or strike outs eight times, won two Cy Young Awards and could have, with a little more luck, won four Cy Young Awards.  Santana was clearly a better pitcher than Bartolo Colon in 2005, and there was very little daylight between his and Tim Lincecum‘s numbers in 2008.

However, Santana’s career wins total is presently 139, and that’s awfully few for a Hall of Fame candidate.

The (relatively) recent pitcher whom Santana most closely resembles among the All-Time Greats is Sandy Koufax.  Koufax finished his career with a record of 165-87 (.655 winning percentage), not a whole lot different from Santana’s 139-78 (.641 winning percentage).  Both were left-handed strike out pitchers with excellent command.

Koufax was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972, his first year of eligibility.  The problem for Santana, of course, is that Koufax’s last five seasons were clearly better than Santana’s best five.  Koufax led the league in wins, winning percentage, ERA, IP and Ks 13 times his last five seasons.  Using the newer metric, wins above replacement, which should take into account the facts Koufax’s days were a much better time to be a pitcher than Santana’s and the Dodgers of Koufax’s era were better than Santana’s Twins/Mets, Koufax’s last five lead Santana’s best five 40.8 t0 35.4 according to baseball reference’s formula and an even larger 43.3 to 31.6 using fangraphs’ formula.

The Dodgers won three pennants and two World Series in Koufax’s last five seasons, and Koufax also threw four no-hitters (compared to one for Santana) and a perfect game in his career and set what was at the time the single season strike out record and is still only one behind the all-time record.

Something else that will hurt Santana’s future Hall of Fame chances is that unlike Koufax, who walked away from the game at his peak, we’ve had to watch Santana battle arm problems for the last four years, which has made it easier for people to forget just how good Santana was when he was at the top of his game.

In my mind, the biggest knock on Santana as an all-time great is that he was never a pitcher who finished what he started.  In his career, he has thrown only 15 complete games.  In comparison, Koufax completed 27 games in each of his last two seasons.

The game has changed a lot, of course, since Koufax’s day, and it’s highly unlikely that any major league pitcher will ever again complete as many as 27 games over the course of two consecutive major league seasons, let alone one.  Even so, Santana hasn’t completed a lot of games even by the standards of the current era.  Santana is tied with the much younger Matt Cain for 14th place among active pitchers and is miles behind Roy Halladay (66) and CC Sabathia (35) the active leaders.

Although complete games are much rarer than they once were, they are still awfully important since bullpen fatigue is a much bigger problem now than it was in the days when starters regularly finished games and the last couple of guys in the bullpen didn’t pitch a whole lot.  Aside from the fact that Roy Halladay’s wins total is much higher than Santana’s, his record of throwing complete games is going to make him a much more attractive candidate to Hall of Fame voters even if Halladay doesn’t do anything more in his career.

A number of Hall of Fame starting pitchers failed to win 200 games in their major league careers: Dizzy Dean (150-83; famously hurt his arm while pitching with a broken toe he suffered in the 1937 All Star Game), Addie Joss (160-97; he died two days after his 31st birthday of tubercular meningitis), Lefty Gomez (189-102; pitched on six Yankees’ teams that won the World Series), Dazzy Vance (197-140; established himself as a major league pitcher at age 31), Rube Waddell (193-143; led the AL in Ks six years in a row between 1902 and 1907), Big Ed Walsh (195-126; the last pitcher to win 40 games or throw 450+ innings in a season) and Happy Jack Chesbro (198-132; his 41 wins in 1904 is the most by any pitcher since the mound was moved back to 60 feet six inches in 1893).

What I take from this list is that Johan Santana will need to come back and match Dizzy Dean’s 150 career wins to have  a serious shot at making the Hall of Fame.

The Greatest Baseball Mascot Ever

The Chicago Cubs are thinking about adding a mascot in order to make the team more “kid-friendly” in connection with the team’s five-year $300 million plan to renovate Wrigley Field.  The Cubbies are currently one of only four major league teams (the others are the Angels, Dodgers and Yankees, according to wikipedia — at least three teams have multiple mascots, not counting costumed idiots who run 7th inning stretch races — the Reds apparently lead the majors with four different mascots) without a mascot.

It’s a crying shame.  Mascots are a blight on the game, at least in the mind of this hard-core baseball fan.  When I shell out the bucks to see a major league baseball game, I come to see the action on the field, not to watch some costumed jack-ass parade around in the stands.  Mascots have always struck me as bush league entertainment which no major league team should dignify.

At least the Giants’ current mascot Lou Seal (some one dressed up in a fluffy seal costume at AT&T Park) largely stays out of the stands and instead rides around in a golf cart on the outfield and foul territory grass firing souvenir T-shirts and the like into the stands using an air cannon during the half innings.  At least a few lucky fans get something out of this silliness.

It could be a lot worse.  I went to a Phillies’ game at the Vet in 1991, and I can’t tell you how irritating I found the Phanatic.  Granted, we had paid for upper deck seats and then in the second or third inning talked our way into the lower deck box seats with a facile lie about how we joining our family but had lost our ticket stubs (we were college age at the time and I still locked like a high school student).  Now that ticket prices are really high, you can’t get away with that stuff anymore.

Even so, once in the lower deck, the Phanatic briefly blocked my view of the game in progress more than once with his “antics.”  Each time, I naturally enough shouted out, “Get the f@#$ out of the way — I’m trying to watch major league baseball!”  Even then I had a rapier-like wit…

It pains me to acknowledge that in three years of this blog, I have never once mentioned the greatest of all major league mascots by a wide margin — the San Francisco Giants’ Crazy Crab.

The Crazy Crab lasted only one season — 1984 — but he was worth his weight in, well, dungeness crab meat.  He would come out during the 7th inning stretch to his theme song, “Love That Crazy Crab” and the fans would go wild.  Everyone in the stadium would boo for the duration of the time that the Crazy Crab was on the field and probably half (including me once I saw others doing it) would try to throw garbage at the Crab or at least onto the field.

You have to understand that in 1984 the Giants were terrible (they finished 66-96, the worst record in MLB), and they played in a horrible stadium (Candlestick Park was one of the first 1960′s era multi-use poured concrete stadia — they hadn’t ironed out the kinks of what was a bad idea to begin with: the fans were miles away from the foul lines in order to make space for football games, and the winds at Candlestick Point which picked up around 3:00 p.m. and continued throughout the night were brutally cold).  After Opening Day that year, only serious baseball fans came out to watch the Giants and their opponents play, and we had little use for the Crazy Crab.

Even so, as someone who turned 16 that summer, I loved the Crazy Crab if only because it was so much fun to hate something that intently.  It was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the “Two-Minute Hate” described in George Orwell’s 1984, except that the animosity towards the Crazy Crab was probably more sincere.  I have little doubt that if the 11,000 or so of those of us in attendance had had the opportunity to physically confront the Crazy Crab en masse, we’d have torn the poor SOB inside the crab suit to shreds.

The Giants’ website at the link above says that the Crazy Crab was always intended to be an “anti-mascot.”  I don’t remember it that way.  At first, the Giants’ organization seemed serious about the Crazy Crab as a mascot and only started playing up the Crazy Crab as a joke once the fans responded with utter ridicule.

I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports pages religiously in those days, and I don’t recall any claim that the Crab was presented as anything but legitimate at the outset.  Again, you have to remember that 1984 was the acme of the initial mascot craze.  The San Diego Chicken was introduced in 1977, was a huge hit, the Phillie Phanatic was introduced in 1978, was a huge hit, and then every team had to have a mascot.  The Giants were one of the last hold-outs, but they had to try something since the product they were putting on the field most seasons in the early 1980′s was poor.

At any rate, the Crazy Crab made the fans completely unruly, and the players on the field started getting into the act.  According to the Giants’ website, the poor SOB inside the crab suit was eventually tackled by a San Diego Padres player and later sued the Giants for an allegedly resulting back injury.  I guess that’s why the team generally keeps Lou Seal inside the golf cart today.

Bobby Abreu’s Available Cheap

Here is an mlbtraderumors.com article which lists every option/player available to the Yankees now that Curtis Granderson will miss at least the first 30 games of the 2013 season.  It seems to me that if the Yankees need another outfielder until Granderson recovers from his broken arm, Bobby Abreu is the obvious choice.

In spite of his poor 2012 season (.242 batting average and .693 OPS), Bobby still got on base as he always has (.350 OBP last year, .396 career).  As such, Abreu still has some value and would be a terrific low-cost way to get some offensive value out of left field while Granderson is out.