The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
For some, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. And sure, Christmas is a pretty wonderful time, I admit that. But for me, this time is the most wonderful time of the year. Not only for the coming great weather, the outdoor sports, the barbecues, the beach, etc. etc, but also because it's time for baseball! :-)
This is the time where I finish off my days watching Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight, watching all the highlights from the day's games. Unlike other sports, there is baseball almost every single night, and not just a few teams, but every team. It's a great thing to look forward to.
And for the past few years I've also played fantasy baseball, so not only do I watch the highlights for my favorite team, the
California Angels, but I also watch the highlights for many of the other games to see how my fantasy team players are doing, and to do research on which other free agents are doing well.
It's a very relaxing way to end the day, and it will happen for the next six months. :-)
ESPN Going Downhill ...
Is it just me, or have things been going steadily downhill ever since Disney bought ESPN? The biggest thing that bothers me have been the attempted cross-promotions between ABC and ESPN sporting events. Last season every time ABC talked about a Monday night game, they would always throw in a mention about the ESPN Sunday night game, and vice versa. Now, when it's during football broadcasts or during commercials, I think that's annoying, but OK. Disney owns both stations, they want to promote the other channel's show, fine.
But they also started doing it on SportsCenter. I have a real problem with that, because SportsCenter is supposed to be a news show. It should strive to be impartial and not favor any particular sports or teams or events, but instead now it's slowly skewing toward its own programming. It's gotten even worse this year, with weekly segments that plug "Monday Night Football" in the form of highlight clips and "rememberances". When the new NFL schedule got released, they did an entire segment on favorite MNF moments during SportsCenter, and also highlighted interesting MNF matchups.
Like with all news reporting, there's a big problem when the content of news programs starts to be driven by marketing concerns rather than legitimate news concerns. SportsCenter is a news program first and foremost, in my opinion. The mood might be lighter, they might crack jokes and do funny segments, but the bottom line is for most of the past decade they've done a damn good job of reporting sporting news. What was the score? Who got traded where? Who made an amazing play?
But now that they've started schilling for their own programs, the idea that they're "reporting" news has become tainted. Instead, they are clearly trying to
create news, trying to generate buzz for their own events. instead of just reporting the news. It started with the X-Games, when they devoted lots of time to covering the athletes in those events even before people really cared that much about it. Then came their own "original programming", such as PlayMaker, which they plugged towards the end of SportCenter. And now it continues with the whole Monday Night Football thing. SportsCenter is slowly turning into a platform for ESPN to advertise its own shows.
That really bothers me, because I love SportsCenter. It was the one place where I could get a great overview of everything that's going on in the world of sports in just one hour, and for the most part it was impartial. It didn't favor any particular sport over any another, and it didn't favor any particular team over any another. It just presented the news in an entertaining way. Now that's slowly going away, as they become partial to their own programming. That makes me sad.
Barry Bonds and the Hall of Fame
Like most people, I simply don't like Barry Bonds. First, he's never come across as a likeable guy in the media. Second, I'm from L.A. and so I naturally hate anything to do with the San Francisco sports teams (knee-jerk reaction, sorry!). So with all the steroids allegations coming out, it's pretty easy for me to hate the guy and to want him stripped of all his records and achievements and generally banned from the game. Honestly, the idea of him inevitably surpassing Babe Ruth this year, and Hank Aaron next year, if not this year, just sickens me. Barry will never be beloved, and half of people's reactions to his steroid scandal will always be because of this.
But today I read
Jim Caple's latest entry into the media frenzy that is the Barry Bonds steroid scandal, and he really made me think about this whole thing. He brings up some points that others have made about how many of baseball's records have been tainted, because of the ban on colored players, because of cheaters like Gaylord Perry, and because of changes to the ball/pitching mound/rules/etc. Since I'd heard all these arguments before, I don't know why I started thinking about this only just now. Maybe it was because Caple isn't really arguing one way or the other about Bonds, or maybe it's because he put together enough things about how many records are tained. But I found myself arguing the following: Sure, maybe Babe Ruth's 715 HR's shouldn't be considered so great because he didn't play against black or hispanic pitchers. But the reason we celebrate Ruth is because, over the course of his career, he so obviously towered over everyone else who was playing at the time, all of his peers. Hey, there were hundreds of other ballplayers who played alongside Ruth and faced the exact same pitchers that he did in the exact same ballparks using the exact same bats and balls, and none of them went yard 715 times, none of them had the outrageous slugging percentage that he did, none of them were nearly as good as he was. That's why we celebrate him, and that's why he's in the Hall of Fame.
And then I realized that that same argument applies to Barry Bonds. Yes, it's obvious now that he used steroids. And yes, without steroids, there is probably no way that he could be breathing down Ruth's neck and within striking distance of Aaron's record. But let's be clear here. There were probably lots of ballplayers out there who were using steroids at the same time that Bonds was, but NONE of them did what Bonds did. Bonds joined the 400/400 club before taking steroids, and nobody has joined him (in fact he's now the sole member of the 500/500 club). Bonds's OPS is so ridiculous that he's in his own league. McGwire at the height of his career featured a 1.229 OPS, certainly an astounding number. But Bonds crushed that with a 1.379 in 2001. And a 1.381 in 2002. And finally a 1.422 in 2004. Babe Ruth never had an OPS as high as Bonds had in 2004, nevermind anyone who played at the same time as Bonds. In fact, Bonds has had an OPS over 1.0 for the past 14 full seasons that he's played (15 if you count the few at-bats he had in 2005). Nobody has ever done that. Sosa had four seasons with an OPS over 1.0, McGwire had seven, nowhere near fourteen straight. Ruth had only 11 total seasons like that, and they weren't consecutive. Bonds is one of the few players who has a career OPS over 1.0 (among all players with at least 5000 at bats). You can count the others on your hands, and they are all in the Hall of Fame, except for one who is still currently playing.
Quite frankly, if you look at Bonds's stats, they absolutely tower over anyone he is playing with. Just like Ruth's did. Does that mean he deserves to pass Ruth and Aaron and have the career home run record? No, he cheated to get there. Does that mean he deserves to have the third highest career OBP, behind Williams and Ruth, and the fourth highest career slugging percentage, behind Ruth, Williams, and Gehrig? No. He cheated to get there. Does that mean he deserves to have the most walks, and the second-most doubles, of anyone who ever played the game? No. He cheated to get there.
However, does that matter when considering him for the Hall of Fame? Given that baseball turned a blind eye to steroids use for over a decade and allowed all these cheaters to prosper, it's simply impossible to throw out everyone's stats on suspicion that they were cheating. We are forced to accept that these statistics will stand, no matter how they were obtained. And judging by those statistics, Bonds stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries. And that is the most important criteria for determing Hall of Fame eligibility. Unfortunately, Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame.
