Many teams have built new stadiums only to see their teams fail and their attendance drop. But look at the Seattle Mariners: Could it be that they’ve struck upon the nightmare of the true fan? Are they turning into a team with a large fan base that thinks of games as good, clean entertainment, who will show up at a state-of-the-art stadium when the team is good or when they’re bad, just as long as it features nice, wholesome young men with winning smiles?
Atlanta’s deal for J.D. Drew looks good, and but John Thomson hasn’t lived up to hopes. Speaking of Drews, will the Devil Rays have a shot to draft J.D.’s little brother? And Toronto’s large crop of top prospects are off to a mixed start in 2004. All this and much more news from Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Toronto in your Thursday Prospectus Triple Play.
Two months ago, the Oakland Athletics signed Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million contract extension that will keep him with the club through 2010. Despite some head-scratching from the public, there are good reasons behind why Billy Beane campaigned to do for Chavez what he hadn’t done for former MVP shortstop Miguel Tejada. Unlike Tejada, Chavez is a player whose skills, like his fine defense and his ever-improving plate discipline, are likely to be undervalued by the market. On top of which, Chavez has continued to demonstrate growth season after season, and PECOTA thinks that he’s a very safe bet going forward.
It is no secret, however, that Chavez has a tragic flaw: he can’t hit left-handed pitching. From 2001-2003, Chavez managed a stellar line of .306/.375/.579 against right-handers, but a Mathenian .229/.278/.395 against southpaws. The A’s, recognizing his defensive value and perhaps hoping that repetition would breed improvement, continued to start him anyway, in spite of a rotating array of viable platoon alternatives.
This year, indeed, has brought about a turnaround–Chavez is crushing lefties so far on the season (.288/.373/.561), while performing well below his career averages against righties (.214/.358/.398). Whether there’s any rationale for the change other than sample size, I’m not certain (I don’t get to see the West Coast teams play as often as I’d like to). What is clear, however, is that if such a change becomes permanent–if Chavez learns how to hit left-handed pitching at the age of 26–it would be a relatively unprecedented development. In most cases, a platoon split for a left-handed hitter is something like a finger print or a dental record: it remains a readily identifiable and more or less unchanging part of his profile throughout the different stages of his playing life. A left-handed hitter with a big platoon split early in his career is, in all likelihood, going to have a big platoon split later in his career.
Thursday in Indianapolis is so big, the state should just go ahead and call it a holiday. At the Indy 500, the Thursday before the race is called “Carburetion Day,” or to locals, “Carb Day.” In the heyday of the race, all 33 cars would be out on the track making final adjustments to their setups. From then on, the cars are locked down until Sunday morning. Of course, it’s been years since there were actually carburetors on these million-dollar engines, but the name still holds. It’s a tradition that, with the changes at the Speedway, have become a shell of the past–but it’s still pretty great. It’s impressive that 50,000 people watching cars practice can be considered failure, that pit-stops can be turned into a spectator sport, and that more beer will be consumed in five hours than at all seven games of the last five World Series. What makes me sad is that the good old days seem to keep some from appreciating what we have now.
Baseball is like that some days. People pine for the days that probably weren’t as good as they remember. Worse, they actively try to pull baseball back into the mythic grasp of the few. It’s just another battle in the war that has been raging for the last 30 or 40 years. Some want you to believe that baseball is myth, and that only they can give you a peek inside the mystical workings of the game. Others show that anyone with an original thought and sufficient effort can open the game up and make it better, whether they’re a national columnist, a writer in Kansas, or a guy who talks about groin pulls with an uncomfortable regularity.
Baseball belongs to all of us, and shame on anyone that tries to take it away. On to the injuries…