Jake Peavy, the Trade Deadline, and my Second Favorite Day of the Season

I love the MLB Trade Deadline.

It's pretty consistently my second favorite day of every season.¹ The rumors are swirling, every player is going to be on a different team by 4:00 pm and it's going to be a whole new season! The 140 Club's Twitter updates should always be open, I constantly monitor my Twitter feed and I keep refreshing MLBTradeRumors.com just to make sure I don't miss anything.

If you root for a team that's, well, good, you probably don't find the trade deadline nearly as fun as I do. Your main baseball focus might be winning actual games instead of trying to exchange people who will help your team not be the worst in the league for other people who might have a chance to help your team win hypothetical games three years from now, but that would mean that you don't like having fun.

The Red Sox and Tigers detest your non-fun-loving tendencies. They just completed a seven-player, three-team deal with the White Sox that clearly changes everything for the rest of the season. Boston gets an injury prone, 32 year old pitcher with an ERA over four to go along with the rest of their injury prone starting rotation and a reliever with an ERA over 20 in seven appearances this year. Detroit gets a young prospect who wasn't starting every day in the first place and is hitting .205 in June. The White Sox got an outfielder with a ton of upside and a few other prospects that should help them out down the road.

What I described doesn't sound like a huge blockbuster but we don't know how much of an impact it's going to have. Peavy and Iglesias could be for their new teams what Manny Ramirez was for the Dodgers in 2008² or, to a lesser extent, what Hunter Pence was for the Giants last year. Either way, contenders try to obtain players that they hope will make them better, and considering adding major-league-capable talent for prospects is automatically a short-term upgrade, the intentions clearly make sense. 

The flip side is when  you root for a team like the Cubs. They were really bad last year. They're still not good this year (a little bit better, but still). They just lost three straight to the Brewers, blowing late leads in both games of yesterday's double header. Luckily for them, the trade deadline is here which means that they will only be getting worse this season. Right field, center field, closer, lefty-specialist and other backup positions could all be up for grabs by this afternoon for whatever scrubs decide that now is their time to take the reins.

July 31 can often signal new life for selling teams. As Grantland's Michael Baumann pointed out yesterday, Texas was 12 games under .500 at this time in 2007 and decided to sell Mark Teixeira to the Braves. The Rangers weren't going anywhere with the roster as it was constructed, so they decided to exile their best player for a bunch of mid-level prospects. Those guys ended up developing into Elvis Andrus, Matt Harrison, Neftali Feliz and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, three all-stars and guys who helped the Rangers win two AL pennants in the next five years. 

That's the key. Texas did in 2007 what every bad team is trying to do today. No one as productive as Teixeira is available, but not as many teams are selling. Texas may have put the Cubs in a similar situation when they acquired Matt Garza earlier. The haul the White Sox got for Jake Peavy could push them over the top and we could see an all-Chicago dynasty ravaging both leagues starting in 2015.³

 

Cubs color commentator Jim Deshaies highlighted what I love most. He said that he wanted to just start a ridiculous, completely unfounded rumor and see if anyone rolls with it. I thoroughly enjoy all the rumors, starts, stops, negotiations, bluffs and, ultimately, the deals. The general baseball landscape probably won't be all that different this year, but you never know which all star might have popped up in that seemingly innocuous trade from a few years back.

^{1. Second obviously to opening day. My least favorite is usually that one day in mid-April when the Cubs are eliminated from playoff contention.↩}

^{2. Still bitter about that. Ramirez wasn't the only reason the Cubs got swept by those Dodgers in that NLDS but he's certainly a big one.↩}

^{3. We almost definitely will not see such a dynasty, but a boy can dream, no? ↩}

The NFL, Injuries and Overexposure

When you ask most fans if they have a favorite sport, the answer is usually a resounding "yes." In that regard I, at the moment, am not most fans.

As recently as two years ago my answer would have been football¹, but that's no longer the case. The sport is still basically the same (albeit a few relatively minor changes) so maybe I'm the one that changed. It's hard to pinpoint one thing that's given me such pause, but there are definitely some aspects of the game that warrant introspection from its fans.

A quick disclaimer before we get started: I admit to the occasional hipster-ish tendency. Sometimes I like things (bands, TV shows, etc.) a lot until I find out that basically everyone else likes them too and that makes me like those things less. I accept that this is a part of my personality, and while it might contribute to my current feud with the most popular sport in America, I do not believe it holds significant value.

Despite these inclinations, I think the way the NFL is represented in the media is entirely unique. This goes beyond "that kid I don't like so much likes 'How I Met Your Mother' and because of that I don't like it as much." The banality and repetitiveness of its coverage is approaches on brainlessness. How many times in the past eight years has the question, "is Eli Manning an elite quarterback?" been asked?

ESPN is partially to blame for this overexposure, but is by no means the only culprit. The NFL as a media organization has done an incredible job saturating the market with its product making it impossible to escape its considerable reach. At least from this fan's standpoint, it's that reach that has taken away from the game. Seeing too much of one thing in too small an amount of time can ruin anything, whether it's a song that you've heard too many times on the radio, that one kid who just always seems to be there all the time or an actor who seems to be in literally² every single show. Coverage is in so many places at so many different times that its quality has been so watered down presumably due to a lack of new information or a lack of effort for something deeper.
Jeremy Maclin (torn ACL/MCL), Dan Koppen (torn ACL), and Dennis Pitta (fractured hip) are already out for the season due to major injuries sustained in the first couple days of training camp. A few other less eye-catching names have also hit this list, not to mention the other bumps and bruises that might force other players to miss regular season time. Most camps only opened late last week.

Injuries happen in every sport, but the severity and long-term negative impacts of the NFL seem to outweigh all of them. While the entertainment value of one sport versus another is an argument for another day³, the eye test tells me that a lot fewer baseball and basketball players are dying in their mid-fifties than football players. I have yet to hear about the Cooperstown Legend shooting himself in the chest so that brain doctors can use his brain for their concussion research.⁴ That the NFL was warned as early as thirteen years ago that their helmets might not even have been the best ones for the job seems to be cause for concern. And yet, football is growing more and more popular. The Super Bowl breaks its own TV ratings record every year.

The injuries, concussions, lockouts and lawsuits in the past few years have only proven the old "no publicity is bad publicity" adage. Football continues to grow and be the most popular sport in America and is even making headway into the UK. Maybe my threshold is lower than most people's, but I can't imagine this golden age lasting forever.

<sup>1. American football, not soccer. Never soccer. Ever.↩

2. Figuratively↩

3. That's never a good argument. No one wins. Let me like my sports and I'll let you like your sports. If you don't find my sports entertaining nothing I say is going to change your mind.↩

4. The verdict is still out on the long-term effects for the heavy steroid users from the MLB. Stay tuned.↩</sup>

Matt Garza, Reinforcements and, as always, Hope

I like Matt Garza just as much as the next guy. He always seemed nice enough in interviews, but mostly he's a good pitcher who didn't make any negative headlines on my favorite team. Granted, neither I nor the next guy have ever met Matt Garza.¹ No matter how much I liked him as a Cub, I'm really happy he's now a Ranger.

Garza was traded on Monday in a deal that helped infuse more depth into the Cubs' minor league system. Third baseman Mike Olt is just a year removed from raking at the AAA level and is a former top prospect. Righty CJ Edwards hasn't allowed a home run in his 18 professional starts. Justin Grimm has some pretty ugly numbers in 17 starts this season but he's still just 24 and could be a solid back-end rotation piece. The player to be named later could be Neil Ramirez, another young pitcher with success so far in the minors.

The cache of exciting talent only seems to keep growing. They're still a few years off from even considering being competitive, but with Starlin Castro and Anthony Rizzo already making the big time and plenty of others waiting in the wings, there's reason to believe that quality baseball might not be too far on the horizon.

Garza's departure signals the beginning of a fire sale of veterans that is sure to hit the North Side. Kevin Gregg, Alfonso Soriano, David DeJesus, Cody Ransom and Nate Schierholtz could all be dealt before next Wednesday's deadline, but none will bring back as good a package as they just received. Either way, the farm keeps improving and this front office keeps giving itself more options for the future.

The Cubs attained the best record in baseball in 2008, winning 97 games before being swept by Manny and the Dodgers in the NLDS. They won 83 games in 2009, and haven't had a winning record since. That one blip of success had a lot to do with getting lucky with some trades from past seasons. The problem was, no one was there to take the reins once the wheels fell off. In 2009, Baseball America ranked the farm system 27th.The roster's "new blood" featured duds such as Jake Fox, Micah Hoffpauir and Sam Fuld. They were ranked 14th in 2010, but with no one close to the majors, most of those notable players have since either been traded away² or seen their production drop considerably.³ All of these factored into the crummy situation in which they've found themselves since.

The plan makes perfect sense in theory. Eventually, just like in '08, they will be able to field a watchable team. When that happens, rather than repeating the disaster that followed '08, the accumulated resources should provide enough organizational depth to ensure sustained success. Having more pieces can only decrease the odds of a similar fiasco.

Nobody, no matter how promising he may seem, is a sure-thing. Development and future production are projections that can only be made based on past results, and injuries can hit even the most finely tuned athletic machines. Geovany Soto was the 2008 NL Rookie of the Year, but hasn't since come close to replicating that performance. They key to consistent winning is the luxury of not relying on one guy to get you over the top. One prospect can be a bust, but it seems a little too pessimistic to believe that all of them will be.

<sup>1. I've never met this "next guy" so I could be wrong about that. They could be buddies, I'm just assuming they don't know each other.↩

2. Ironically, guys such as Chris Archer, Hak-Ju Lee and Sam Fuld were shipped out for Garza in the first place. Oops?↩

3. Brett Jackson immediately comes to mind in that category. He's batting just .223 so far this season with 77 K's in 242 PA ↩</sup>

The Cubs, The Second Half, and Broken Air Conditioning

I experienced some temporary hell earlier this week. The air conditioning in my apartment building broke Sunday morning due to a blown transformer at the start of a week where every day has been be over 90 degrees and at one point Thursday was forecast to hit an even 100. Luckily, the people whose job it is to fix these things did their jobs and by Tuesday we were back to setting the thermostat to a cool 65.¹

The Cubs have been without air conditioning since 2010. They've had losing seasons each of the last four seasons, and this year doesn't look like it will be any different. Heading into the second half, they are exactly where many people expected they would be. They showed a little more fight than in the first half of last year, but they still sit nine games under .500 and project to be worst following the fire-sale of productive and inexpensive veterans during the upcoming trade deadline fervor. It's going to be a long and dreadful rest of the summer for the Wrigley Faithful. For some reason though, this year feels different.

Maybe it's that some of the moves that still-new-in-front-office-regime-years Theo Epstein and friends have made have already borne fruit. Anthony Rizzo has had a tough sophomore campaign but is still an excellent prospect who should be a cornerstone for the next decade. Scrap heap pickups such as Scott Feldman and Paul Maholm were exchanged for promising young arms Jake Arrieta and Arodys Vizcaino. Sean Marshall and Ryan Dempster, holdovers veteran from the last regime, brought back Travis Wood (the team's only all-star this year) from the Reds and Christian Villanueva (currently the farm system's top third base prospect according to Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com) from the Rangers.

Other than Wood and Rizzo (to an extent), none of the players this brain trust brought in are proven in any way. Baez, Almora, Vizcaino and Cuban defector Jorge Soler have all missed significant time due to injury this season. 2007 third overall pick Josh Vitters has been toiling away in AAA and has not developed the way the team expected. Brett Jackson has struck out more than 100 times in each of his three full seasons in the minors (including a whopping 158 in 2012) and has already racked up 77 in just 61 games this year. Both made underwhelming MLB debuts last September.

Even with all that could go wrong, this still feels different. The "Lovable Losers" moniker that has been attached to this team for so many years doesn't feel as appropriate anymore. Even in 2008, when the team won 97 games en route to a division championship, something was going to go wrong.² The Cubs are going to tank the end of this year and have another top-10 pick. Next year will be better, but probably not by enough to really get excited.

2015 is a long ways away. Obviously, not every prospect is going to live up to the hype. Even so though, with Wrigley Field getting set to enter the 21st century with its renovations, this front office is trying to do the same with its roster. A few pocket seasons of success just aren't going to cut it anymore. Many fans have been sitting with broken air conditioning for far too long, and while Theo and company might not be the ones to bring people into the cold, they're at least hiring the right people to do so.

^{1.We don't pay for utilities so we can crank up the air as much as we want. It's amazing↩}

^{2.That something was that the lineup forgot how to hit and both Dempster and Zambrano got shelled in games one and two. Then everyone on the team got really old, really quickly, and there was no one in the farm system to fill in the blanks.↩}

"Real" vs. "Fake" Sports Fans

I'm a Chicago sports fan, because just like my brothers, I was born in Chicago. The difference there is that they had formative experiences in that town. Our parents failed at brainwashing us into being Philly sports fans, and since all my brothers' friends were Cubs and Bears fans it only made sense that they were too.

We moved to Long Island when I was just about to turn three years old in 1994. My friends were all Rangers and Giants fans. I still remember being jealous of Benny Shapiro's awesome Wayne Gretzky  Rangers jersey.¹ I admit that I bounced around with my sports fandom. Depending on the week, I could've been a Titans fan, a Jaguars fan, a Panthers fan, a Broncos fan, you name it. I had a stint as a Marlins fan just because someone gave me a blank hand-me-down  jersey that I really liked. 

Eventually around middle school, I settled on Chicago sports. As such, when I wake up tomorrow morning, I'm still going to be elated that the Blackhawks are Stanley Cup Champs, I'm still going to be depressed that the Cubs suck² and I'm still going to go with Michael Jordan in the debate-that-isn't-really-a-debate against LeBron for the best basketball players ever. I'm going to hate the Packers and I'm going to be uber jealous of the St. Louis Cardinals.³

When the Nets moved to Brooklyn, they had a lot of bandwagon fans follow them not only from across the country, but from their own backyard when Knick fans decided to jump ship. There were more Heat fans when LeBron James and Chris Bosh united with Dwyane Wade in Miami than probably ever before. These newly minted fans are often derided as being "fake" by so-called "real-fans," which brings me to the question: what are the rules to being a sports fan?

A real fan watches his or her chosen team's every game win or lose, has an encyclopedic knowledge of its history and owns lots of memorabilia and clothing. They dress up for games, come early and stay well past the end, and make sure everyone around them knows they're cheering loudest. Fake fans have no idea when their teams are playing, leave games early and don't know any of the history.


I posit that there's no such thing as a "real" fan. I would like to think that I know a lot about my team, that I follow them closely and that I'm at least generally connected with the history. That said, I live in New Jersey and have lived on the East Coast since I was just about to turn three. I've never been to Wrigley Field, and I have a hard time watching as many games as I'd like. I've never even been to a Chicago home game.

I worked with a kid at the radio station for a couple years who had a unique way of looking at sports. He was born in Chicago, but chose his favorite teams based on a specific player and has since stuck with them. He loves Jon Beason, so he's a Panthers fan. He's a Celtics fan because of Paul Pierce, even though he grew up in the Windy City with the greatest player ever at the height of his powers.⁴

Another buddy of mine is a St. Louis Rams fan because when he was first getting into football the Jets were really bad and he didn't like the Giants. He liked offensive games, and the Rams at the time had the best offense in the league. He got hooked and has stuck with them despite a lack of familial or geographical connections to the team.

Are we any less "real" than the people who grew up their entire lives following these teams? The distinction between "real" and "fake" fans is becoming increasingly blurry. More people have more access to more teams across the globe and the additional exposure can either strengthen or blur lines of loyalty.

I admit that I've found people so annoying that I can't be in the same room as they are just because I find the way they go about being fans annoying. But at the end of the day, they still like to watch sports in effectively the same way I do though they might express it in a different way. As long as they let it happen, any sports fan, whether they are new to a team or have supported one their entire life has the capacity for the wide range of emotions fandom offers.

It kind of makes calling anyone a "fake" fan feel petty, no?

^{1. Benny was really, really short (even for an elementary schooler). That jersey was very, very large. He was swimming in it}

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^{2. Though they are improving. Just eight games under .500! In Theo we trust!}

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<sup>3. I can admit that it's really hard for me to hate the Cardinals. I obviously root against them, but a team that does everything right, doesn't make any headlines, and seems to just do things "the right way" all the time really don't get my blood boiling
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4. I don't get it either.</sup>

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Chris Davis, Roger Maris, and Steroids

Chris Davis is having a really good season so far. His 33 home runs in 90 games lead the Majors. He had 33 home runs in 139 games played last season. He had 12 in 87 games in 2011. Before you try to speculate about his absurd  power numbers though, he's not on steroids.

That's the kind of environment in which baseball finds itself. Davis hasn't put on any extra weight, nor has his head grown. He's always been viewed as a power hitter with immense potential, but until last year he never realized it. His swing looks exactly the same, he has protection in the lineup with an impressive O's offense, and, perhaps most importantly, he's entering his physical prime in his age 27 season.

A-Rod and Ryan Braun are a different story. With the Tony Bosch/Biogenesis suspensions expected to be levied in late July/August, multiple legacies are on the line. A-Rod's image, considering his playoff woes (not including 2009, which is a discussion for a different day), his up-and-down personal life and his injuries probably can't get worse. Another PED fiasco on his record would just be the dagger in the heart of one of the most statistically mind-boggling careers in MLB history. 

Braun, on the other hand, has a lot more to lose. The former National League MVP could have been in the clear a  year after being exonerated from similar charges on a technicality. Instead, the second connection brings up the same labels attached to Rodriguez. He has a ton of talent, but in the end he's a liar, a hypocrite and a cheater.

The mindset of a steroid user in any sport shouldn't be difficult to analyze. Major League baseball had a then-record high in average attendance in 1994 (a strike-shortened season) with close to 31,000 people going to games. Then in '95 and '96, that number dropped to about 25,000 and 26,000, respectively. The numbers were still climbing, but baseball was not experiencing the same success it had before the strike.

With popularity falling and people turning more and more to the NFL and to a universally popular Micheal Jordan-led Bulls team, it makes sense that the drug-testing policies loosened up a little bit. All of a sudden, Mark McGwire, Raphael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and everyone else were mashing home runs. Total ERA in the MLB went up a full run from 1989 to 1999.  Both McGwire and Sosa broke the single season home run record in 1998 in a race that was magnetic, electrifying and legitimately brought new fans to the sport. I was seven years old during that race and I vividly remember watching Slammin' Sammy mash homer after homer only to fall short of McGwire's infallibility.

If you're Ryan Braun, or A-Rod, wouldn't you want to be remembered in that way? Rodriguez was a must-watch ticket every single time he stepped in during his prime. As a Cubs fan, Braun was one of the scariest players on any opposing team.¹  Along with Prince Fielder, Braun was half of arguably the best 1-2 punch in any lineup in the Majors. If I'm a baseball player, I want other fans to be terrified of me, and I want my own fans to adore me. I'll take any edge I can get, and if that means steroid use, then so be it. Whether or not unnatural substances gave him an advantage, A-Rod almost single-handedly won the Yankees the 2009 World Series. Steroids may have helped them reach that pillar of excellence and prestige and earned them a ton of money. If steroids are going to turn me from very good to Hall of Fame-caliber, I might be taking that risk too.

Who is the true home run king? Is it Barry Bonds with his single-season 73 and his 762 career dingers? Is it Hank Aaron with his 755? What about Roger Maris, who peaked from 1960-1962 with 39, 61 and 33, but didn't hit more than 28 in any other season?²

It's a question that goes beyond power numbers and cuts to the core of a player's "integrity." Baseball more than any other sport is tied to tradition and "playing the game the right way." These terms are all bogus. Using steroids is no different to me than smoking pot or taking Adderall. If it's against the substance abuse policy and they get caught, then they should get punished. McGwire and Sosa are being retroactively vilified for something the league let happen. Bonds was never formally convicted or charged with anything more than obstruction of justice. Sosa was the only one of the three who was ever suspended for performance enhancing measures, and that was only because of a corked bat later in his career that the commissioner could not ignore.

If a baseball player uses steroids, he should be punished, but not because it says anything about his character or his respect for the game. He broke the rules and he probably didn't do it out of spite. In all likelihood, he did it because he was rehabbing a nagging injury, he was getting old, or he wanted to be remembered as one of the all-time greats. I don't have a problem with steroid users until they get caught, and I don't have a problem with them once they serve their suspensions for breaking the rules.

There's clearly an extra stigma attached to steroid-users, and that might be the root of the problem. Steroid users become great, those who don't are simply good enough. Players are not going to suddenly stop looking for competitive advantages. Don't punish players from history for the league's lack of enforcement. If they created such a black mark on the sport, then prevent it from ever happening again.

^{1.Even though he was still second in his own division to Albert Pujols}

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^{2. See what I did there? Right back to the Davis discussion - a player with one exceptional year is now extremely suspect, but since it was in 1961 Maris must have been clean}

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