How do you know when the baseball team for which you cheer is not good? Well, sometimes, teams just tell you. I was listening to Blair and Barker a few weeks ago and they interviewed one of the White Sox announcers. Perhaps to be nice, perhaps to generate some excitement, Blair (I think ... might be misremembering) complemented the Sox and asked what was ahead for that team, were they expecting a good second half as the team improved? Whomever he was interviewing immediately said "no" and went on to state the self evident fact that the Sox were not a good team. There was no chance that they would be even close to the mix this year.
I liked it. With exceptions, the Jays media is only now coming around to this view about the Jays. They are not stating it outright (on Sportsnet this AM, there was talk about June being pivotal month!), but in retrospect there were signs and a lot of them. What were those signs?
Sign Number One: "if" syndrome. As the season started there were a lot of people talking in "if" language: if Manoah is back to form, if Vladdy plays better, if Jano is not injured, if Schneider can play even close to the way he finished the season, if Romano is healthy .... There is always an if or two for every team but if a team's season is depending on just about everything going right, that is too many ifs. The plexiglass principle (an old Bill James idea) suggests that luck evens out over the longer run. Thus, if some things go right, one needs to figure that other things are going to go wrong.
Sign Number Two: hoping players are better than they are. There are a lot of seasonal ups and downs in baseball. That is part of the game, but to begin the season counting on players who have not demonstrated an ability to play at a certain level is hope; not strategy. I cheer for Ernie Clement and Bowden Francis, too. I do. If one of them makes it, that is a good news story by itself. But, what are the realistic chances that they will be a core part of the team (say, an every day starter or playing third base)? Francis entered this year as a 28 year old rookie who had pitched a grand total of less than forty innings in the majors. Clement, likewise, is 28 with less than 500 career MLB plate appearances and an OPS (a measure of offensive ability) of 66. That is not good. What this means is that the Jays were counting on players who they had no reason to believe they could count on. I'd love them to succeed. I would. This is not about them. It is about something else: how we know our team is not good. And, counting on performance from players who have not demonstrated that they can play at an MLB level -- let alone a good MLB level -- is another of those ways.
Sign Number Three: jargon. Baseball has its jargon and that jargon can be hard for new fans. "Protect the plate," "cutter," "turn two" ... there is a baseball language one learns as one watches the game. However, when commentators start using words as if they were magical weapons, that is a sign that "the owls are not what they seem." The year's jargon word was "flexibility." With the ability of Biggio, Schneider, Clement, IKF, perhaps even Turner ... to play multiple positions, the team had a lot of "flexibility."
You see the problem? Flexibility does not win games if your players aren't good. Flexible players -- players who play more than one position -- can be good. All teams are looking for them. But, there is a difference between Mookie Betts' flexibility and Craig Biggio's. The ability to move weak offensive players around does not score runs.
What is more: this is a misunderstanding of flexibility. The Jays are actually not all that flexible. As I pointed out in another post, the way the Jays have designed their team is actually pretty standard and brings with it built-in constraints. The number of pitchers the Jays carry, for example, forces them to look for flexible fielders and to play players out of position (which carries a defensive downside). The Jays under Bobby Cox, back in the day, were flexible. Using an extensive platoon system, they were almost impervious to injury, for instance, while the smaller pitching staff allowed them to keep extra players to expand overall team flexibility.
Finally, flexibility is not just something to have, it needs to be a strategy. I will confess that I don't see that strategy, other than to try to ride the hot hand and ... well ... you can see how well that is working.
Sign Number Four: hope and patience. As the Jays limped through the first quarter of the season, commentary from coaches, team official, commentators, went something like this: we know our team is good. We just have to wait until we get hot. The key to a really good team, of course, is to win when they are not hot. But, hoping to get hot is the baseball equivalent of praying for rain.
There may be other signs, too. But, when we hears these things being said and see these decisions being made, they suggest that the team we're cheering for may not be as good as predicted. We heard these things and saw these decisions.
PS: Confidence
One thing I find personally annoying is the talk about confidence as the key to success. I don't doubt that confidence is better than insecurity. And, a sense that you are going to fail is a recipe for stagnation (why try if you are not going to succeed?). But listening to the game last night, it struck me that this is another point of confusion. Dan and Buck, in commenting on Baltimore, mentioned over and over again that they were "confident" and "free and easy" (or, words to that effect). The intimation was that this was the root of their success (this was linked to a discussion about Turner and supposed lack of confidence right now). It seems to me that this is actually the reverse of what is going on. Baltimore is confident because they are winning; not winning because they are confident.
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