The View from Right Field

Baseball’s “Magic Numbers” In a Year of Pandemic

This is, as many have said, a baseball season like no other.¹  Sixty games (hopefully) in a little over two months, and half the teams (actually, more than half; 53⅓% to be exact), make the playoffs.  While people often say the playoffs are a new season, this will be even truer this year.  Especially since no one knows how helpful home field advantage (which you get from having a better record) will be with no fans in the stands and with some people saying the postseason, or at least part of it, ought to be played in a bubble.  That would mean that having the best record just gets you last bats more often. 

But more than last bats, what baseball in 2020 is all about is October.²  Having the best record in the regular season is nice, and winning is always fun, but it means even less than normal this year.  In other words, fans (and players), don’t stress out over the regular season.  Your “magic number” this year isn’t about winning the division or having the best record.  It’s just being one of the sixteen teams getting to the postseason.  Thirty wins (assuming you play all 60 games) is probably all you will need to do that.

Baseball Is Different This Year – In a Way That Surprised Me

I realize it is a bit silly – and obvious – at this point to say that baseball is different this year.  But I have found it different in a way I did not expect.  We have been lucky enough to Cubs season tickets since 2012 (though “lucky” is perhaps not the word I would have used the first three of those seasons, especially our first year as season ticket holders when the Cubs lost 101 games). 

I have been able to get to 35 to 40 games a year since we got the season tickets.  Much of my schedule from April through September (and into October a couple of times) has been based on going to baseball games and, therefore, whether the Cubs were at home or on the road.  But this year is different.  The Cubs are on TV and the radio and I can watch them there, which is nice.  But it doesn’t matter whether Cubs are at home or on the road because I can’t go to the games.  If all you are doing is watching on TV or the radio, it doesn’t matter whether the game is at home or the road.  Especially when the Cubs are playing so many of their home games, even on Fridays and Saturdays, at night.

The Cubs are starting a long homestand tomorrow night, which would have been really great in past seasons.  I would have looked forward to it because I would have been going to games.  But homestands this year?  It doesn't really matter.

Covid-19. Baseball. I Don’t Know. None of Us Knows for Sure.

With respect to the mess in Miami (the Marlins, that is, not the city as a whole; also, the Marlins and Covid-19, not the Marlins as a lousy baseball team), people have all kinds of answers:  Baseball shouldn’t have started; Baseball’s doing it the wrong way; Baseball can’t continue; etc.; etc.¹ 

The one thing I know is that I don’t know.  Actually, there is one other thing I know: Covid-19 is hard.  We don’t have all the answers.  We are learning new things about this virus every day.  Remember how the warm summer weather was going to slow the virus down.  Oops, that didn’t happen.

Silly Question of the Day: “Is testing for MLB diverting resources?”

The headline of the lead article in today’s Chicago Tribune asks (in the print edition): “Is testing for MLB diverting resources?”  Really?  That’s the most important question today?  If so, we must be in pretty good shape.  Because the amount of resources used by MLB for its testing program is pretty small compared to our whole country.  Especially since MLB hired a company that wasn’t already doing testing to set up a new testing program for MLB.  But even with that, one of the people quoted in the article worried that the MLB program was diverting swabs and other testing supplies that could be used elsewhere.  As I said, if the biggest question in the United States today is whether MLB is diverting swabs, etc., so it can test a few thousand people more frequently than otherwise, we are in pretty good shape.

Except, of course, we aren’t in good shape.  We need to test lots more.  We need to be able to test lots more people lots more frequently.  Testing, testing, testing is how we can stall this virus until we can get a vaccine.  But we’re not there.  The federal government¹ needs to ramp it up.  Big time.  We probably should have had this kind of testing capability in reserve.  But nobody in Washington, of either party or any administration, apparently cared enough, or had enough foresight, to do that. 

As the Cubs Start, More on Why 108 Years Was 108 Years – Even If You Weren't 108

[I was going to post this in the middle of March, but then, when Covid-19 caused MLB to delay the season, I decided to wait until baseball was ready to start again. I didn’t realize it would be this long.  In any case, here it is.]

Before I left for our trip to Egypt in February, which seems forever ago, I wrote a post I titled “Congratulations, Chiefs Fans. But 50 Still Isn’t 108.”  In it, I tried to explain why, even for Cubs fans who weren’t around for 108 years (or who weren’t even around for 30 years), the Cubs’ 108 years was different than the Chiefs’ 50 years.  In doing so, I mentioned that the media was always talking about how it had been 108 years and that’s what everybody read about.

But while I was gone,¹ I realized that wasn’t it.  Yes, the media constantly harped about the 108 years,² but that was only part, and not the main part, of why fans, even those in their 30s, felt they had been there for 108 years.  It was, instead, that special tie between sports fans of different generations, a tie that I think is especially deep for Cubs fans.  Maybe this is because things have not always gone well for the Cubs.  When Ryan Dempster gave up that two-out, two-strike grand slam to James Loney in game 1 of the 2008 NLDS, people remembered the Marlins’ eight runs in the eighth inning of the game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, the 9th inning home run by Javy Lopez off Kevin Tapani in game 2 of the 1998 NLDS, the grand slam home run off Greg Maddux in the 1989 NLCS (when Giants batter supposedly read Greg’s lips), the ball that went under Leon Durham’s Gatorade-soaked glove in the 1984 NLCS, and so much about 1969.^3,4  All of them were part of being a Cubs fan.

I Guess I Have Been Missing Baseball More Than I Thought

People have asked how I am doing with no baseball.  I thought I was doing pretty well – until recently.  Recently, I have noticed feeling a little down, now and then.  I thought it was because politics is horrible.  We have a terrible president, but the people running to replace him aren’t much better, if any.  I don’t want the current person to be reelected, but the alternative could easily be just as bad. 

And then there are the riots accompanying the peaceful protests that we have had.  I’m not really sure how tearing down a statue of George Washington does any good.  Sure, he had slaves, but he was also, in the title of James Thomas Flexner’s book, The Indispensable Man.  Without George Washington, there is no United States.  Maybe the people pulling down his statue think that would be good.

Five Years Ago Today: My First World Series Win

As people who know me know, it was a BIG deal when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. (There is a reason I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “11-2-2016 11:47”.)  It was, obviously, the first World Series the Cubs won in my lifetime – and in the lifetimes of almost everybody alive in 2016 (except maybe people in Georgia).

But 2016 it wasn’t my first World Series win.  My first World Series win was in Omaha in June of 2015, when Jennie and I saw the University of Virginia win the College World Series.  It was great.  I blogged about it here.  At the time I thought it might be my only World Series victory.  (I was, after all, a Chicago Cubs fan.)  It wound up not be my only World Series win, but it will always be my first.  #GoHoos!

Here we are in Omaha, with the championship dogpile in the background:

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UPDATE (6/24/20 7:30 am): Added picture. 

“Manfred-Ball” Is (Or May Be) Coming to a Park (or TV Screen) Near You Soon

As part of their continuing effort to screw up baseball, which Commissioner Rob Manfred and player union head Tony Clark are doing a good job at, the owners and players have given up trying to reach an agreement.  After all, they only had three months to talk about one since their “mini agreement” in March, so how could you expect them to agree to anything.  Of course, the fact that Messrs. Manfred and Clark apparently only met in person once during that time may have had something to do with it, though if you really don’t want to agree, because it’s more fun to argue, then not meeting in person is a good idea.  Who knows, if you’re talking in the same room, you might actually reach an agreement by accident.  And it looks like nobody wanted that.  So, Rob Manfred got to decide.

Well, what's "Manfred-Ball" going to look like?  First, there will be 60 games, the fewest since 1878, when they also played 60.  They will not have the “all-in” playoffs the owners wanted.  I think the owners wanted sixteen teams in the playoffs, instead of ten, but the main thing was, I would imagine, that ESPN, et al, wanted to set the bar low enough so they could be sure both the Red Sox and Yankees made it.  (It’s the “Sunday Night Baseball Rule.”)

The @Royals Are Attracting Undrafted Players by Being Nice to Their Minor Leaguers. Not Something the @Cubs Are Doing.

The Kansas City Royals have come up with a unique way to attract quality, undrafted players this year.  A “market inefficiency,” as people like to call it. 

In order to save money, MLB shortened the draft this year from 40 rounds to five and put a limit on how big of a bonus could be paid to undrafted players.¹  Which means there are a lot of good quality undrafted players out there.  Jared Diamond wrote in The Wall Street Journal on how the Royals made themselves attractive to those undrafted players: They didn’t treat their current minor league players like crap, releasing dozens of them to save the $400 a week they would have otherwise had to pay them.²

“To Be or Not To Be”: The Baseball Version

The question is not when baseball is going to start, but if – and whether I’m going to care whether it does or doesn’t.  I understand the players and the owners both think they are standing on principle.  The players think they agreed to a pro rata payment based on the number of games played, and the owners think they can’t pay the players full pro rata salary if there aren’t fans in the stands.  

Jeff Passan at ESPN.com goes into great detail on the two sides’ positions and the reasons and principles behind them.  And each side has lots of reasons for their positions, reasons that they think are legitimate.  But ultimately, you know what.  I don’t care.