There was a time, not too long ago, when writers like me would write long, angry screeds whenever a person in the game or a member of the media said something that didn’t comport with rationality or smart baseball orthodoxy or whatever. It was at times a fun thing to do -- some folks built careers lampooning old school baseball thinking -- but it’s pretty passé now. At least if you’re doing it earnestly and being a jackwagon about it. With the possible exception of Hall of Fame voting season, when we consider the past, those old debates are mostly over. The smart guys won and there’s not much worse than being a sore winner.
But we can still smile at silly things, right? The cliches and nonsense which baseball folks tend to utter as place-fillers when talking about the game. Things like this, from Dayton Moore, talking about free agent Eric Hosmer:
Dayton Moore is a smart dude with a World Series ring, so he knows damn well that if Eric Hosmer could really hit 40 homers by choice, he’d be hitting 40 homers. Heck, maybe he’d hit 500 of them. One for most plate appearances and a few intentional triples so as not to kill the rallies and unduly embarrass opposing pitchers and such. Don’t wanna get greedy. He also probably knows that Hosmer has two sacrifice bunts in his entire career, and has likely not been asked to attempt many more than that for a good reason. If he’s only hitting 25 homers. it’s probably because he’s a 25 homer hitter. No shame in that.
Yet he says stuff like this. Why? I suppose it’s human nature. The question put to him in the context of the article is why Hosmer might be a better choice than J.D. Martinez, who hits more homers. It’s not natural for a person in the game to point out flaws in a teammate, or to even accurately describe someone in a manner that might even seem like a flaw. It’s a fact that Martinez hits more homers than Hosmer. Moore, who has great affinity for Hosmer due to their time together, isn’t wired to say, publicly, “yes, Hosmer has less power, but . . .” so this little bit of silliness comes out. It’s pretty understandable. It’s actually downright sweet. Moore might very well no longer have Hosmer on his team next year, and he’s gonna miss him. I like that. It humanizes booth Hosmer and Moore, really.
But it also suggests to us that a lot of what is said, qualitatively instead of quantitatively, is probably baloney. Even if it’s benign baloney. How good a teammate a guy is, what kind of character he has, his drive and the cut of his gib is all relevant to teams when they evaluate players and all of those skills contribute, however intangibly, to teams winning and losing. But it’s also the case that those traits lend themselves to distortion and overstatement. Sometimes it’s funny, harmless distortion like this. Other times it might serve to obscure something or distract us from something. So much of it is unverifiable and based on word of mouth from often unreliable narrators.
It doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things -- if Dave Dombrowski signs Eric Hosmer it won’t be because he thinks he can hit 40 homers on demand -- but it’s worth remembering that, when we assess players, there are limits to how much one can take the word of the insiders who know these guys personally. And it’s worth remembering later when fans slag on a guy for not fulfilling expectations, how those expectations were set.