‘National’ Disgrace Falls on Front Offices

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The big fake story in baseball right now is the relative strength of the leagues.I will spare you the charts on interleague results, relative earned run averages, and the like. Just look at the St. Louis Cardinals’ record and ponder that they would be the fourth-best team in the AL East and that the AL Central boasts the two best teams in baseball right now, and the obvious superiority of the junior circuit will be clear.

This pains me. Any league that fields 10 men instead of nine is playing something that is like, but not quite, baseball; I don’t like decaffeinated coffee, and I don’t like the American League, but the truth is the truth and it cannot be avoided.

Everyone seems to have a clever theory as to why the American League is so much better, but the reasons aren’t mysterious. Big, rich teams like the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies are or have been run foolishly, and the Atlanta Braves’ huge budget cuts seem finally to have caught up with them. That right there is a decent chunk of the league; in the natural state of things, all should be strong franchises, and none are. Meanwhile, the big-city clubs in the American League are all run quite well.

Just look at the NL West.Last year,the San Diego Padres nearly won the division with a losing record. This year, there’s been much talk of a resurgence in the West, but the division is still embarrassingly bad.Three teams being tied for the division lead with records three games over .500, and a fourth being half a game out is a tight race of the sort racers driving a Yugo and a Pinto might have, not something anyone should care about.

And in all cases, the teams are weak due to nothing more than plain bad management:

The Dodgers, who should be one of the flagship franchises in American sports, aren’t even on top in their own city. From the staggeringly impotent profligacy of the Fox years to clueless would-be wunderkind Paul DePodesta living down to every stereotype about the new breed of baseball executives,the Dodgers have resembled a sitcom more than a baseball team in recent years. New GM Ned Colletti has done an inoffensive job, but seems to have the imagination of a turnip, judging by his moves so far. At least the team is keeping up the fine Dodger tradition of maintaining a reputation for having the best farm system in baseball despite having produced no major league regulars in years.

The Padres, coming off their “triumphant” 2005, are the same club they always are: an odd assortment of overhyped prospects, washed-up veterans, and uninspiring no-names.This front office has always been highly praised despite its lack of results, mainly because it does a good job of acting like it has a plan. New hire DePodesta, one of sever al dozen former GMs the team has lying around, will, one imagines, fit in well.As the shop is now being run by Sandy Alderson, architect both of the Tony LaRussa and Billy Beane A’s and former heir apparent to commissioner Bud Selig, one also imagines the results will come in line with the hype some time before the decade is out.

The Rockies do not impress, despite finally having developed enough pitching to achieve mediocrity. They receive infinite demerits for having lost at least 85 games in seven of the last eight years, and still more for their recent boasting about how they are a Christian organization. In a national publication, GM Dan O’Dowd claimed God was directly intervening in Rockies games because of the franchise’s evangelical code of conduct, and former Rockie Mark Sweeney complained about teammates going through lockers looking for smut.They should have been in the batting cages and shagging fly balls, and management really ought to spend less time publicly congratulating itself for playing .500 ball.

The Giants are simply pitiful. One of the oldest teams in major league history, they’ve basically been the 2002 Mets plus Barry Bonds for years now, and they’re showing no signs that they’ll be able to manage the transition to simply being the 2002 Mets, full-stop. Fans in New York might curse the Scott Kazmir trade; how do you think Giants fans who got one year of vaguely acceptable catcher and legendary jerk A.J. Pierzynski in exchange for Francisco Liriano, Joe Nathan, and Boof Bonser feel?

Finally, you have the Diamondbacks. They do have what looks like the deepest pool of positional prospects in many years. Of course, they also have a partowner running around all but accusing star outfielder Luis Gonzalez of steroid use and boasting about how the team is going to implement a “code of conduct” without collectively bargaining for the right to do so. One might draw a line between this sort of thing and the presence of overpaid veterans at all the spots where the team’s top prospects play.

A similar tour through any of the other divisions would reveal just such a litany of incompetence and mediocrity; a tour through the American League would not. Is there any systemic reason for it? No. Give the Cubs a real manager, the Braves another $20 million in payroll, and so forth, and the league would look a lot stronger.There’s nothing broad and overarching going on, just normal silliness that’s concentrated more in one league than in the other, something that will change as incompetents and charlatans are shown the door and bright, creative people are given their jobs.

tmarchman@nysun.com


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