There is the regular season, and there is the post-season. Baseball also has an off-season, in which teams make trades and sign free agents. There is, in addition, another season, and we are apparently in it now. Introducing the Silly Season.
Unlike the regular season and the post-season, there are no rules governing the Silly Season. Anyone can play, and many do. Eligibility requires only that you have a silly idea and a place to display it so people can see how silly it is. Ideas can take different forms.
For this Silly Season’s debut, I offer Exhibits A, B and C. I came across A and B on the Internet. Exhibit C came to me in the form of an e-mail from a reader.
Exhibit A
Sports web sites are always looking to post articles in which they proclaim the “10 best” this or the “10 biggest” that. MLB.com and ESPN.com are especially good with those meaningless measurements. Here is a recent assortment of what I am talking about:
Top 25 baseball stories of 2016
The 40 biggest contracts in MLB history, from worst to best
Top 5 Major League games of 2016
Each club’s top moment of 2016 season
10 active players on HOF fence
None of those or any others, though, matched an MLB.com post last week:
Big Unit, Maddux head All-Free Agent Team
With what purpose I don’t know, but Manny Randhawa, a name with which I am not familiar, picked an all-star team from among the players who were free agents the past 40 years. Could he have found a more meaningless exercise?
Those so-called all-stars, though, were not the writer’s personal picks. That would have been silly enough. No, the writer wrote, “These players were selected based on Wins Above Replacement per 162 games (or per 32 starts in the case of starting pitchers) while playing for the team they signed with as free agents.”
W.A.R.! He has created an all-star team of free agents based on a metric that didn’t exist when many of them signed and played.
The idea struck me as being so ridiculous I couldn’t read the article, but deciding to test the legitimacy of the selections, I looked to see who the right fielder was. It was Larry Walker, and that told me all I needed to know about the writer’s selections and his method of selection.
Where was Reggie Jackson? A member of the first class of 24 free agents after the 1976 season, Jackson was notable for several reasons. His Yankees’ contract for nearly $3 million set the tone for free agents to come. He was instrumental in the Yankees’ World Series championships in 1977 and ’78, supporting his boast that he was “the straw that stirred the drink.” He became known as “Mr. October.”
The trouble with W.A.R. mongers is they don’t look at anything else. They don’t know what the word intangibles means. If it doesn’t have a number attached to it, it’s meaningless. What is meaningless is this silly all-star team.
Free agency is unpredictable. Some players who are eligible to be free agents sign contracts with their team instead of opting for free agency. So what sense does it make to select an all-star team from among the players who chose free agency?
And to base the selections solely on W.A.R.? I am certain the writer of this ridiculous piece didn’t see all of the free agents from 1976 on. There aren’t too many of us left who covered free agency from Day One. I was in Philadelphia in July 1976 when the owners and the players agree to the system of free agency, I don’t think Manny was there.
I also don’t think he has seen all of the free agents play. But I forgot. Neither he nor any other W.A.R. monger has to see players play to make them all-stars or most valuable players or even Hall of Famers. They have W.A.R. to decide these things for them. No thinking is necessary.
I have no idea what Jackson’s W.A.R. rank is, nor do I care. Where is Larry Walker today? Jackson is in the Hall of Fame – deservedly, W.A.R. or no W.A.R.
Exhibit B
The news release announcing a new baseball book was headlined “New Study Says 13 Players On 2017 Ballot Meet Hall of Fame Standards.” I didn’t have to read further to know this book qualified for the Silly Season.
The book is based on what it calls Hall of Fame standards, but the Hall of Fame has no standards. I don’t mean that in a negative or critical way. I am simply saying the Hall has established no standards that players have to meet to be eligible for HOF election.
The author of the book, neither of which I will identify because I am not endorsing the book and wouldn’t want people mistakenly buying it, makes the fatal mistake many people make. He uses statistics of players who are in the Hall of Fame as a way of judging players who become eligible for election.
If the writers in a previous election had a bad year and were misguided and mistakenly elected an unworthy player, why should the writers in a subsequent election compound that mistake by electing a player just because his statistics match those of the player who shouldn’t have been elected? Players should be judged on their individual merits.
This book, the news release says, identifies 10 batters and 3 pitchers who “meet the Hall’s stringent standards.” If the author wanted to be accurate, he would’ve written that there are 13 players on this year’s ballot whose career statistics match those of players already in the Hall. And then he could have added, “but that doesn’t mean they should automatically be elected.”
If players are to be elected to the Hall of Fame based on statistical standards, or if winners of post-season awards are to be chosen based on W.A.R., no voters are necessary, neither writers nor anyone else, not even the know-everything critics of writers for their “stupid” selections.
This book, however, does not rely on W.A.R. Why do that when the author can create his own metric? He calls his “base value,” or “BV.” Just what we need, another player measurement.
The author, the news release informs us, “has calculated the base values (BV) for all 10,070 batters and 5,355 pitchers who played big-league ball between 1961 and 2016. BV is the difference between the number of bases a batter reached (or a pitcher yielded) and the number of bases an average player would have reached (or yielded) under the same conditions. A large positive BV is the best score for a batter, while a large negative BV is ideal for a pitcher.”
Now I’m torn and confused. Do I follow W.A.R. or BV? Give a boy a computer, and he’ll spit out a baseball metric.
Exhibit C
Of all the silly stuff, this one may be the silliest, and I apologize because this one involves me.
This e-mail from a reader alerted me to the nonsense I knew nothing about.
“As you may be aware,” he wrote last week, “someone has been collecting the HOF ballots (some voters even email them anonymously). Anyway, you are the subject of a poll, which you may find amusing: (website link)
The odds are running 50/50 as to whether you will submit a blank ballot or not.”
I fail to understand why anyone should care what kind of ballot I submit. Talk about silliness. I have a writer friend whose blank ballot enraged a Philadelphia columnist who supported Jim Bunning for the Hall of Fame. The columnist couldn’t understand why my friend just didn’t vote if he didn’t want to vote for anyone.
“That is my vote,” my friend tried in vain to explain.
If a voter thinks no one should be elected and casts a blank ballot, his ballot counts in the tabulation of votes and raises the percentage of other votes cast that a player needs for election.
One person actually is conducting a poll on how many players I will vote for. “Murray Chass voted for one player (Griffey) last year. How many boxes will he check this year?”
At the time I became aware of this silly poll, it had received 792 responses, with 49 percent saying I would vote for no one. Incredulous that so many people wouId participate in such a silly exercise, I asked the person who alerted me to the poll, “Don’t people have a better way of wasting their time?”
His reply: “Harmless fun I figure… only takes a few seconds to start a poll and even less to respond to them.”
The Internet is responsible for this sort of inane behavior. It is free to all and allows all to behave like mentally deficient jerks. I had initially planned on disclosing and discussing my Hall of Fame ballot in this column, but those MDJ’s will have to wait, if I ever reveal it at all.
Happy New Year to the rest of the readers.