"How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball?"

The New York Yankees and the New York Mets have their own television networks. These networks broadcast nearly every game live and replay every game at least once. They may have the best color and play-by-play announcers this side of Vin Scully.
Both networks have some pretty savvy former ballplayers as color guys. The Yankees have Ken Singleton, Al Leiter, John Flaherty and Paul O'Neill. The Mets have Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez. Hernandez might have been the best fielding and best hitting first baseman of his era (he played 1974 to 1990).
The quote "How can you not be romantic about baseball?" is from the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill about the 2002 Oakland A's. The movie looks at the clash between baseball traditionalists and statistically driven innovators.
But the roots to this clash do not lie with Bill James, as the movie suggests, the Turning Point in moving away from a traditionalism to a statistically driven approach was Strat-O-Matic baseball.
If you know what that is (SOM or Strato for short) then you immediately get the point. Most kids from my generation either grew up playing SOM or its competitor, APBA. Basically, you pick a team, you pick your lineup, you roll dice, you play a baseball game. Every player has a card based on last year's statistics.
In S-O-M, you have pitcher cards and batter cards. If you roll a '1', '2' or '3' on one die you look at the batter's card. If you roll a '4', '5' or '6' you look at the pitcher's card. Then you roll two dice to get the result. Sometimes on the pitcher's card you will have to check a fielder's rating to get the result.
During a Mets game, commenting on a terrible play by an outfielder, Hernandez exclaimed "oh my, that guy is a '4'. Gary Cohen, the play-by-play guy, has no idea what Hernandez is talking about.
Hernandez went on to explain that in Strato, fielders are ranked from '1' to '4' with '1' being the best fielders and '4's the worst. This guy who made a lousy defensive play was a '4.' This made me laugh, because I knew from experience that Hernandez in his prime was a gold-glove caliber first basemen who was usually a '1'. It was so cool that a ballplayer knew about Strato. Especially an All-Star like Keith Hernandez.
Last week in a broadcast, Hernandez said he was going to play a Strato game between the 1969 Mets and 1986 Mets to see which World Champion team would win.
As kids, we were playing Moneyball well before 2002. We were playing it in the 1970s. When we picked a lineup we looked at more than just a players average or homeruns. We looked at his fielding, his speed, his hit and run abilities, his walks and ability to get on base (which included hit by pitches, anyone remember Ron Hunt?)

Most of us who managed Strato teams growing up could do a better job of managing and picking a team of players than most of the executives today. Because Strato always used the previous year's statistics, you would NEVER pick a player on what he did five years ago. NEVER.
Routinely, executives today pay enormous salaries to former All Stars well past their prime. Strato players know NOT to do this. They know the guy can't run, can't field, can't hit lefties anymore.
Moneyball just further exposed ludicrous traditional thinking and grounded it more solidly in mathematics. Heck, we didn't need math, we had Strato.
By the way, with the advent of the designated hitter, there are some players who never play the field and shouldn't. To reflect this, Strato came up with a '5' ranking for these players. You don't want to put them in the field in an inter league game, they will cost you. For those interested, David Ortiz of the Red Sox is a '5'.
One of the reasons the Yankees are so good, besides their homeruns, is that Texiara, Cano, Granderson and Gardner are all '1's. They can field, too.
How can you not love baseball? Enjoy the playoff races my friends!!

Derek Jeter and Rod Carew and 3,000 Hits

In 1977, while living in Minnesota and attending the College of St. Thomas, I attended 32 baseball games at the Twins Stadium in Bloomington. The Twins weren't the best team in baseball (the Yankees won the World Series), they weren't even the best team in their division (the Royals won the West Division) but they had Rod Carew.
The 1977 Twins were fun to watch, even if they finished 17.5 games behind the Royals. They could hit (team BA 1st) and they couldn't pitch (team ERA 12th) so most of the games were high scoring affairs.
The big draw was Rod Carew spending most of the year batting over .400. He finished the season at .388. In this pre-steroid era, they had six players hit more than 10 home runs, led by Larry Hisle's 28. Even Carew hit 14, in addition to 38 doubles and 16 triples. Carew played in 155 games, scored 128 runs, had 239 hits and amazingly 100 rbis.
Every day at the ball park, Carew was guaranteed to do something amazing. One game against the Brewers, I got seats in the third deck behind homeplate right in front of the radio announcers. Back then, a younger Bob Uecker was doing radio for the Brewers.
Carew went four for five. After Carew's fourth hit, I looked back at Uecker, he had a big grin on his face, looked straight at me and lifted his hands in surrender as if to say 'we can't get him out, not today, not no way.' As a baseball player, Uecker was clearly enjoying, as we all were, one of the greatest players ever to play, in his prime.
Carew moved on to the Angels, where he never matched his success of that magnificent year. His skills declined as he entered his mid 30's. He retired at 39 after batting .280, with a career average of .328.
Many thought Carew kept playing past his prime so he could reach 3,000 hits. He ended his career with 3,053. They were probably right. Although, it needs to be said, not many players hit .280 even in their prime.
In 2011, I'm living in the NYC area, can't afford to go to Yankees or Mets games, but I watch them on HDTV every night (I make my own popcorn).
The big story in NYC this year is Derek Jeter closing in on 3,000 hits. The wags are on his case because he's 37 and not playing like he was, uh, two years ago. At 35, Jeter hit a phenomenal .334 with 18 home runs among his 212 hits. Not many players can do that at 35. This year, the wags are saying Jeter is washed up because he is batting .257.
I've been comparing Derek Jeter and Rod Carew careers. They are remarkably similar. Here's the numbers:
      Carew    Jeter
AB   9315    9602
R      1424    1725
H      3053    2998
2b      445      480
3b      112        62
HR      92       236
RBI  1015     1157
BA    .328      .312
SB     353       330
OPS  .822     .832

They were both Rookies of the Year, Carew in 1967, Jeter in 1996. Jeter is the better fielder, winning four gold gloves. As Carew got older, he switched from second base to first base. Jeter continues to play shortstop. Jeter has also shown more power, hitting more home runs, while Carew had more speed, hitting more triples.
The local sports talk radio shows have people calling in giving their thoughts on whether Jeter has had a Hall of Fame career. I think he does. Carew was a class act, so is Jeter. Something Jeter said in the paper recently about the enormity of the task to hit get 3,000 hits made sense.
He said that you had to average 200 hits for 15 years to reach 3,000. That means you have to be very good for a long, long time. For my penny, that means Hall of Fame.
Some day, Jeter will be in the Hall of Fame with the great Rod Carew. And he will deserve it.