It seems appropriate to re-publish this post from May of 2015 in light of the latest Hall of Fame voting. Next time up, I’ll address Vlad Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, and some other fun stuff. T…

Source: Steroids, Hypocrisy, and Cooperstown

Okay, when do pitchers and catchers report? Is it next week? Come on already. I suppose I could become a European soccer fanatic but I don’t have access to the kinds of drugs that would enable me to start watching live games at 3 o’clock in the morning and , besides, I’m not a total hermit. Yet. I know, many sports minded people are pacified by the NFL, the NBA and college basketball, the NHL or (gulp) golf. Not me, buddy. I parted ways with football for good after the Montana-Young 49ers dynasty stumbled back to Youngstown and they started putting actual bounties on quarterbacks. I think the whole twin towers and W thing put this great nation of ours into a bloodthirsty frenzy to show everybody who the meanest son of a bitch in the world was and football and all those weird new fighting games feed into that in a very end of empire sort of way so I stopped participating in even the typical passive American way of watching, downing beers and yelling. As for hockey, I’m with Rodney Dangerfield. Besides, my eyes are too weak to follow the puck.

As for basketball, well, I still enjoy the high school game. The Warriors I follow rather indirectly. I don’t watch games much, never the whole thing. I don’t mind reading about them the next day, but the games are too much for my nervous system and no, I don’t mean because they are exciting. A few simple rules changes would make hoops fun again, but they will never be made because Rupert and the others who now rule sports with their television money prefer Charles Barkley type collision ball with lots of time outs so players don’t get winded and bad food and lousy beer and irrelevant cars can get sold. Here’s what I would do. An offensive foul means the team loses possession. Period. On a defensive foul, the offensive team gets a free pass, meaning the defensive team can’t defend until the pass is received by an offensive player. Screw the boring free throws. Yellow cards would be issued for an unsafe obstruction with a warning that a second yellow card means that the offender is removed from the game. The first yellow, as in soccer, would require that offender to leave the game until the next time out. Red cards would be issued for flagrantly unsafe obstructions clearly meant to prevent a goal and the offender goes to the showers. No team would be forced to play with fewer than three players, however. In other words, let’s replace thuggery with real defense. Sorry, Chuck. Free throws would only be taken after shooting fouls, and then the team shooting the free throw would retain possession. A “technical foul” would earn a yellow card. Play ball, fools. Of course all of this means that the spectator would need to be paying attention. One other thing—a new circle, making all shots made within six feet of the basket score one point. For bonus points, let’s play fewer games so that the playoffs could begin in March and be finished by tax day. Attention, Donald Trump, that’s April 15. These changes would reward athleticism rather than brutality and result in fewer injuries. While we’re at it, let’s restore the guarantee of the first amendment to the NBA and forget fining players and coaches who dare to speak their minds. Okay, one last thing. Barkley would hereafter be confined to reporting on golf.

It’s not baseball to blather on endlessly about contracts and how much Mike Trout is getting paid and whether or not Eduardo Nunez is worth four million a year or why Danny Duffy got a five year contract. That’s business page stuff. No, I want some ball, damn it. Are there still winter leagues? Why aren’t they televised?

Despite his ties to Tommy Lasorda, I wholeheartedly agree that Mike Piazza is most deserving of his selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  He was no Johnny Bench behind the plate, but his career …

Source: Why Make Tim Raines Wait?

Beg, borrow, or steal the price of heroin, nicotine, and gasoline is always met. What they call market forces do come into play on other popular items eventually and, when the new administration in Washington, D.C. gets going next month, we are likely to see that what has mistakenly been called “trickle down economics” will instead become a Niagara Falls of impoverishment.

There has been so much money being made in professional sports lately that we are seeing some things that heretofore would have been considered unimaginable, such as the building of stadiums without any team or ownership entity committed to occupying them. Will the coming recession or downward cycle or whatever bullshit term economists choose to use have an effect on this relatively recent boom? Chances are that it will, but there has already been a big change in the way sports teams are marketed and financed. I think it is safe to say that the disastrous cancelling of the 1994 baseball season was the result of a conflict between money and big money.Hall of Fame Chevy salesman Bud Selig was just “acting” commissioner then, and his prescribed job for the owners was to sell the public on the “fact” that 19 of the 28 teams were losing money in their charitable passion to deliver major league baseball to all of us ungrateful slobs out here who had no appreciation for what they had to endure. The two main issues were revenue sharing by the owners and acceptance of a salary cap by the players. No profit cap for the owners was on the table. So the awful strike happened and of course, in the spirit of divide and conquer that has always ruled our fair and decent land, the fans blamed the players. At any rate, when peace was eventually restored in 1995, many things changed. Revenue sharing began, so that television money enjoyed in large markets such as New York, where the Andrew Carnegie of American sports George Steinbrenner still reigned behind the scenes, had to share with relative paupers in smaller markets like Pittsburgh, Seattle and lo! Milwaukee. The idea of the salary cap went the way of orange baseballs. Baseball and its new commissioner could go back to making money, except that a large public relations problem had developed after the World Series, never cancelled even during World War Two, had indeed been cancelled in ’94 and many followers had lost their enthusiasm for what now seemed to be a big greed game.

What to do? The leagues had been divided into three divisions for ’94 and now the wild card team idea arrived to help create fan interest. Big money meant ownership “groups” and the individual ownership era began to dissolve as people like Tom Yawkey, Phil Wrigley, Clark Griffith, Charles Finley and others were being replaced by conglomerates of anonymous investor groups. Perhaps coincidentally, baseballs began flying out of ballparks at unprecedented levels as the Mo Vaughn, Jose Canseco, Albert Belle and Mark McGwire types began to dominate the scene. Tightwad executives now changed policies as foul balls were no longer pursued and hoarded but rather distributed cheerfully to fans who learned to chirp like baby blackbirds in their nests for a souvenir. Despite all of the TV loot, ticket prices went up and up and up. Home runs and eight playoff positions got the masses involved again—at least, the masses that could afford it.

Much of the new largesse in baseball has been a good thing. It’s good to be beyond the days like when I was in fifth grade and Chuck Tanner, now famous for his managing career but at that time a backup outfielder for the reigning World Champion Milwaukee Braves, came to my school to take our school pictures. That was his off season gig, which was a thing that many, many pro baseball players needed to do in those days to supplement income. It is also a good thing that the players’ bodies are much more trained and protected against permanent injury since both their employers and their agents have an interest in keeping them safe. In the old days, one could always find a body to replace a sore armed pitcher, and on the cheap at that.

Of course, the wide availability of games to view on television is convenient and fun. Attendance is generally very good at games, but it is a distinctly different population of attendees than I remember from my youth. You have to be of a certain (high) income bracket in order to afford tickets. Then there is parking, which, the last time I went, cost me three hours of wages. So I often wonder how much the people I see stuffing their faces with ballpark food and drink are really into the game they’re watching. I don’t know, maybe they are real fans, just like the cheap beer slurpers I used to observe at games who could get in for 75 cents or a buck and a half and knew all the players without a scorecard, let alone the monstrous electronic scoreboards and their own electronic devices that seem to be of as much interest as whatever pitch Madison Bumgarner is going to throw next. I know, I’m an old fogey, I should just go with it and enjoy the pleasures of wealth management. I wonder about the future near and far though, and the lack of participation and interest on the part of the young people who the rich geezers seem to be leaving behind. What do you think?

Can anyone out there please explain to me why Bud Selig was selected for the baseball Hall of Fame? What was his skill set? Upon further review, it is fitting that the Chevy salesman will enter the hall shortly after the Donald enters the White House, but aren’t people supposed to have accomplished something? It was a bit of an accomplishment for the man who made Milwaukee famous again to somehow avoid a debilitating neck injury while frantically looking the other way during the Steroid Era as home run totals and earned run averages resembled the Deutschmark after World War One. How about, as Joe Buck would say, the deft manner in which he freaked out after a tie in an All Star game and decided that it was necessary to Make It Count by having it determine home field advantage for the World Series? That was brilliant, like selling some fool the safety package on a new Corvair.

One of the similarities between Trump and Selig is the way they each made themselves a ton of money while essentially bullshitting the rest of the world. Selig reigned as the game, hereafter referred to reverently by its acronym MLB, increased revenues as never before in recorded history. It happened first by the winning of sensational new television contracts that guaranteed that even success challenged organizations like Oakland and Milwaukee could garner millions just by showing up for work. Now, an even more lucrative field of cash has blossomed as the marketing of everything from “game worn” jerseys to every different cap that every different team has ever worn separates people from their presumably hard earned cash. Selig, I guess, gets credit for these revenue streams and that, no doubt, accounts for his selection to be honored in the same building as his “good friend” Henry Aaron and the likes of Willie Mays and maybe some day Pete Rose. I don’t know about you, but when I think about some skinny eleven year old kid in Cincinnati wearing a replica Reds jersey that says Kluszewski on the back I kind of feel sorry for not only the kid but also Ted Kluszewski. Because I remember being that age and finding, in a closet where I probably shouldn’t have been looking, my older brother’s letterman jacket he earned by playing high school football. It was a little big on me but I wanted to wear it to bask in some glory. So I did, but not for long. My mother sternly pointed out that my brother, who was now old enough to have moved out of the house, would probably not be pleased to learn that I was wearing his jacket. I soon realized that while it felt cool to act like a star I had not yet earned that right. So it went back into the closet and I felt a bit ashamed. These days I cannot imagine going out in public wearing an “authentic” jersey with the name Posey or even Puig on the back, and not just because it would cost me a couple hundred bucks to get one.

So all hail the commissioner. He was the commissioner for the owners, the money people and not the fans who just love baseball and that’s the way it has always been In the same manner, the president, who now gets his own acronym too, “POTUS” because no one likes to speak in complete sentences,is the president of all the money people who paid to put him there. We can still love the game, and we can still love our country. We don’t have to genuflect before phonies, though.

Before the whole world and everything done on it got completely organized, homogenized, and made into video games, we were often called upon to improvise our own fun. Back when he was still considered funny, Bill Cosby recorded a hilarious bit about playing football on an urban street with parked cars and lamp posts and other obstacles not generally associated with a playing field. You could seldom count on having enough players to field a regular side whether it was football, basketball, or baseball. My brother Jimmy and I even had an improvised game of “golf” which featured a ball (not necessarily a golf ball),a baseball bat (usually cracked) and a small hole dug into the ground in our backyard with the heel of one of our feet. No driving, just putting.

Most often, though, we played “stocking ball”. The equipment was pretty easy to obtain. We needed an old sock or two, the kind that came up over the calf. An old rag or the other sock was stuffed inside and a round shape was created. No stitching was involved; the ball was held together with a strong rubber band. The rubber bands that came with the boxes of wieners to our meat market were the treasured ones for this purpose. Before the first inning was over, these balls were not round at all but rather flat and roughly square. This affected the pitching more than the hitting but nobody cared. The bat was sometimes an actual baseball bat but most often we used a pick handle, which wasn’t round either but great for bat speed. Gloves were extraneous and disdained. The batter’s box was at the foot of the back porch steps. The pitcher’s “rubber” was on a line with the second garage window, the one farthest from home plate. We would mark a line with our feet but you could tell that you were in the correct position by looking at your reflection in the garage window. There were no bases unless you had teams but generally it was one on one with me and brother Jimmy, who was a year older. Occasionally it would become more of a family affair with my brother Paul joining Jimmy’s side against me and our dad. In those cases, the corner of the garage became first base and we would go first to home, sort of like cricket.

The layout of our backyard “field” was even stranger than the Polo Grounds that the New York Giants played in. We had a two car garage with wooden doors that swung open east and west and halfway across the door closest to us was the right field foul line. The left field line was extremely narrow for political reasons. Facing the pitcher as a right handed batter, to your left would be our next door neighbors’ back yard. The Sherbines’ driveway was on the border line, so to speak, because they entered from the alley whereas our driveway was accessed from the street and was on the other side of our house. Therefore the bushes planted next to our yard just before theirs became foul territory because, while the Sherbines were somewhat tolerant of our shenanigans, they were not amused by the fetching of foul balls into their backyard. That’s how I learned not to be a pull hitter. Now, if you hit one on a fly to the alley past their property, it would be fair. There were lots of ground rules like that.

So without bases, how did Jimmy and I determine hits and runs? It was the length of the hit before the stocking ball hit the ground. If you got it past the sidewalk that ended just before the garage, it was a single. Past that second window toward the alley was a double. Into the alley on a fly was a triple. Beyond the alley and into the neighbors’ yards on the other side was a home run. It was doubly important not to yield a homer to center or right because then the pitcher would have to deal with a feisty dog in order to retrieve the ball and often, in those cases, re-wrap the sock. Any ball caught on the fly was an out; balls not making it as far as singles territory were ground outs.

I lost a lot. Jimmy was just a year older, but he was a lot better. We both threw pretty hard for adolescents but he was more accurate. Despite being younger and less skilled, I was not necessarily learning to be a better sport. It got rather antagonistic at times. He would start bragging about how far that last homer had gone and I might be tempted to throw the next pitch at him. Getting hit wouldn’t hurt much unless our ball had been rained on and hardened up a bit, but of course it was an insult. We would sometimes be in angry moods anyway. The games would start on Sunday afternoons after we had been altar boys at 7 AM Mass so that we could finish our Sunday paper route before noon so we’d be a bit tired going in. Plus we umpired the games ourselves and balls and strikes had to be agreed upon, so to speak. His strategy was to let me walk him two or three times and then blast one. In retrospect, that was a good strategy but at the time I was kind of Puerto Rican as in, “Swing the bat, asshole!”. The fights sometimes got physical but then the commissioner, our mother, would threaten to call the game and we would try to cool off. Most of the time the war was peaceful, though.

When I was batting I also liked to be the stadium announcer as in “Now batting, number 9. Bill Mazeroski, etc. The other thing I liked to do was mimic the form of players I’d recently seen on television. I would try to pitch like Jim “Mudcat” Grant or affect the batting stance of Roberto Clemente or Dick Stuart. I’d watch an inning or two if a game was on TV but not be able to sit still anymore and go out to mimic those players. I could keep Jimmy in a better mood in this way but he would usually still pound me. We lived between Pittsburgh and Cleveland so those were our guys to root for and try to emulate.

Whiffle ball came along one day and, while that was fun and funny in a different way, stocking ball somehow seemed more like the real thing. I’d like to play today.

Surreal has become one of those overused terms used more and more by athletes and their coaches to describe things that happen in the course of events and, while occasionally it may be apt, too often it is not. For instance, if a pitcher from the American League has to bat in an interleague game or the World Series and he hits a triple off a Cy Young Award winning pitcher, that’s an unusual thing but it’s not surreal. Now, if a manager called time out and approached the mound in order to replace his pitcher and the pitcher suddenly transformed into a giant cockroach and bit the manager’s head off, that would be surreal, like Jefferson Airplane’s pillow. The 2016 World Series managed to come close to being surreal, especially when rain starting pouring down as extra innings approached but let’s just call it bizarre and go from there.

Corey Kluber, Francisco Lindor,Jason Kipnis and most of those tough, gritty, never say die Clevelanders will most assuredly remain in contention for the World Series for many years to come even if some veterans like Carlos Santana and Rajai Davis begin to fade away. Cleveland, playing without some of its best players due to injuries (Michael Brantley, Carlos Carrasco, most of Danny Salazar) went up against the powerhouse Cubs and very nearly pulled it off. The midseason acquisition of Andrew Miller obviously helped a lot but the core of this team is solid. Their one vulnerability is outfield defense, which finally showed itself in the last two games, but the return of Brantley will help that problem. This team seemed to take many observers by surprise, but that is only because we hadn’t seen them very much and their success through most of the playoffs confirmed my prejudice that strong starting pitching is still the basis of winning baseball.

Jake Arrieta‘s home run and a pleasant sprinkling of other hits by pitchers throughout the playoffs confirmed another prejudice—that the designated sitter is for slow pitch softball only. Also, I think we saw ample evidence that teams with players that know how to bunt successfully and are willing to do it can score more runs than the teams that prefer to pop up or hit into double plays. Another difference that pitchers batting makes is that the managers may choose to use a pinch hitter at times to replace them. This might have fouled up Madman Maddon’s overuse of Aroldis Chapman in the sixth and seventh games. The Cubs won the series but, while I have long been a Joe Maddon fan because of his unorthodox thinking and refreshing approach, I think he was blowing the series for his team but that his players picked him up, as they say. Arrieta and Hendricks both came out of their last starts too soon. Maddon was reminding me of the tight sphincter reaction of Matt Williams‘ removal of Jordan Zimmermann a couple of playoffs ago that helped the Giants eventually beat the Nationals in the 2014 N.L. championship series. I think sometimes that a manager who, like us in our uneasy chairs rooting at home, gets nervous and feels like he just has to do something so he changes pitchers. Maddon, having won, is covered, but here’s what I think the repercussions of that kind of maneuvering are: the starter pulled too soon is shown a lack of confidence which may surface in the future to the detriment of the team and himself; the rest of the bullpen gets a loud and clear message that they are thought not good enough and, as in the seventh game, when they have to be used after all, the message may be resonating. Is that putting too much psychology into it? Aren’t these big boys playing at the highest level who are confident, secure people? Well, so far, humans are still human. As for Chapman, maybe he is that strong. Or, maybe things won’t be so rosy when spring training rolls around for whatever team he pitches for next.

All of that brings up another favorite prejudice of mine, the almost absurdly funny fascination with the closer as I described in a previous diatribe. Francona, unlike Maddon, was pretty much forced to use the bullpen earlier and more frequently due to the fact that two of his starters were injured in September and the probably correct decision was made to use only three starters. Thus, the way Andrew Miller was used was more like the way relievers were used back in the day: get us out of trouble now. I predict that the whole emphasis on “closers” will one day, perhaps soon, go away.

It was a great series after all, however, and my one last complaint is that it’s too bad that so many young (and old!) people were not able to enjoy it “live” because Generalissimo Rupert had to have all night games. Many bright stars like Javier Baez, Roberto Perez, Addison Russell, and Kyle Schwarber were on display and gave us thrills. And Kyle Hendricks. Maybe the real reason I got mad at Maddon was that he ruined my quip that, with the game so near the rock and roll Hall of Fame, my money was on Hendrix.

How have the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians done in the World Series versus each other? Well, we don’t know, because they haven’t faced each other in all of the more than 100 years that they have been around. The last time Cleveland played in the Fall-Winter Classic was 1997, long before Google had replaced the public library system and Bill Clinton had begun grooming himself to be First Gentleman. As you must have heard Joe Buck say a thousand times during the National League championship series, the Cubs haven’t been there since 1945, which was even before the Ed Sullivan show. One would have thought that these two ancient organizations would have battled each other at some point, but nope. I looked it up, with very little help from Google.

It seems a bit quaint now, but 1945 occurred in a period once described as the war years, roughly the first half of the decade of the 40s as far as the United States was concerned. Wars weren’t supposed to last forever then and another difference was the military draft, which meant that many ballplayers either enlisted on their own or were “selected” to join the fight. The effect on major league baseball was a well documented dilution of the talent pool that meant that more youngsters and aging veterans of the baseball wars dotted every roster. The 1944 Cubs had finished fourth in the eight team league, 30 games behind the pennant winning Cardinals. Stan Musial was one of the Cardinals who wasn’t around for the 1945 season and Chicago replaced St. Louis as N.L. champs by three games. Those Cubs were led by Phil Cavaretta, Stan Hack, Peanuts Lowrey and Andy Pafko. The pitching staff was strong,as Hank Wyse and Claude Passeau, who had combined for 31 wins the previous year, upped their total wins to 39 in ’45. Those Cubs lost to Detroit in seven games as Hank Greenburg returned from military service in time to slug two World Series home runs and the Tigers were champs. It was the tenth pennant of the 20th century for the Cubs and we haven’t seen them in the Series since. Some goat kicked Mrs. O’Leary’s cow or something.

Three years later, The Cleveland Indians had to beat both Boston teams to do it, but they were World Series winners over the Boston Braves in six games after beating the Red Sox in a playoff for the American League pennant. Cleveland has been to the Series thrice since then, getting swept by the Giants in 1954, losing in six games to the Braves in ’95, and losing in seven to the Florida Marlins in ’97. So an organization that hasn’t won it all since the forties is going to do it this year provided both cities on the Great Lakes are not frozen over before Halloween.

The 1995 Cleveland team had a parallel to the ’54 bunch in that it dominated its league with a 100-44 short season record followed by a sweep of the Red Sox and a six game league championship series win over Seattle. The 1954 Cleveland team won 111 games to beat the perennial A.L. winning New York Yankees by eight games. However, though the World Series losses by each team were considered upsets, the National League teams may well have been the stronger teams overall. The Mike Hargrove managed Cleveland teams would win their division again in ’96 and ’97, but the team that made it to the World Series in ’97 finished just 11 games over .500. Those Indians had the fewest wins of any of the post season entries for the A.L. but Jaret Wright and Orel Hershiser led the team that had a regular season team ERA of 4.73 past the Yankees and Orioles to face the wild card team of destiny from the N.L., Florida, for all of the marbles. There were some sluggers on that Cleveland roster:Albert Belle, who had hit 50 homers in 1995 and 48 in ’96,was no longer around but Jim Thome, Matt Williams,Manny Ramirez,David Justice and Sandy Alomar Jr. all hit between 21 and 40 home runs and the team totaled 220. There were no rumors that the clubhouse water cooler had been replaced by a steroids bar. It was just the times, man. At any rate, Miami’s team of destiny won it in seven games and now, 19 years later, Cleveland is back.

It says here that Joe Maddon and the cuddly Cubbies are stronger defensively, have more power, more pitching, and better depth. It also says here that Terry Francona and the team he manages have been under rated all season long and are likely to push it to six or seven games and maybe even win. Perhaps all drones have been grounded and the talent that many of us haven’t seen enough of will surprise the experts yet again. They have Francisco Lindor, Cody Allen, Corey Kluber and others we have not heard so much about or seen play very often. They also have good veteran strength with Mike Napoli, Carlos Santana, and the unbelievable Andrew Miller. There will be different people celebrating this year, that is assured. I only ask one thing of each contestant. If Chicago wins, please go back to just day baseball at Wrigley Field. If Cleveland wins, please please please lose that hideous Wahoo Sam logo.

It’s almost time to put the television into off season mode, a lethargic semi-retirement thing that will last until the black headed grosbeaks return to us from Costa Rica or Mexico as they do every April to make their babies. There promises to be more international soccer available on the tube this winter and that is a good thing but, for the most part, the old machine will be resting.

The head and heart experts tell us that nostalgia is not a good thing to slide into, that staying in the present is best for our souls. I do not yearn for the days of Eisenhower, cars without seat belts, or Lawrence Welk, but I do miss that brief moment in time when baseball was all over the place with TBS when Ted was still around, WGN when the only thing it really had to offer was the Cubs, and ESPN before it got bought up by ABC or Disney or China or whatever. We had Harry Carey, Chip Carey, John Sterling and a host of other colorful characters entertaining us with live baseball at all hours and we got to watch all of the teams, not just the Yankees and Red Sox. I sometimes wonder how there can be a Golf Channel and yet not a Baseball Channel where we could view classic games from the past or winter ball or any number of programs to satiate the baseball glutton. Or perhaps I could, as the smart ass who came into my coffee shop one day suggested, “get a life”. Nowadays, of course, we have mlb.com, but I will save my ranting about the deterioration of that ad clustered site for another day. It ain’t the same. Boss Rupert rules the day and we are just consumers. One thing I will not miss is the commercial where the guy in the suit falls backward into the swimming pool and then drives away in his Lincoln like it’s a cool thing. I will miss the Flex Seal guy though because he is so earnest.

Now is a good time to add my thoughts about the departure of two great voices from my southern California days, Vin Scully and Dick Enberg. Scully, as even people who don’t follow the game know, was the voice of the Dodgers ever since the Whiskey Rebellion and is widely recognized as the best broadcaster of sports of all time. I was a Pirates fan when I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 but, before long, Vin pulled me in and convinced me that, not only were the Dodgers the premier baseball organization in baseball but also that Farmer John bacon and sausage were things I could not live without. Dick Enberg tried his best to make the Angels palatable and got me listening in my car, which is where LA people spend most of their time. He also covered the Rams and UCLA basketball when those teams were very good and, despite a sort of altar boy appearance and delivery, was very good.

The season, though, is not quite over yet, although the teams that have been getting mowed by the Chicago Cubs may dispute that. What about some of those teams that are already finished? We are down to the Blue Jays, Cubs, Dodgers and the Wahoo Sams now, but while everybody is repeating themselves about those guys, let’s have a quick look at some of the also rans.

The best thing that can be said about the Cubs-Giants series is that it was a great advertisement against the designated sitter. Let those pitchers bat and make those hitters field! It became obvious that the Giants need a “closer” (hate to use that word) but what they also are in need of is a right side power hitting outfielder who can run and throw. It’s very doubtful that Mac Williamson will be that guy but their current crop of flychasers are all approaching Social Security days.

The Kansas City Royals’ reign as champs is over now after they succumbed, yes, to injuries but also to a serious drop in effectiveness by their starting pitchers. I think that they will return as contenders but Cleveland has become the class of that division and will not be going away.

The Houston Astros fell back a bit in 2016 but there is too much talent there to dismiss that team and the Texas Rangers will remain strong as well although stalwart veterans Adrian Beltre and Cole Hamels aren’t getting any younger. We seem to be thinking this every season, but Seattle could be threatening with a little tweaking and some luck.

The final season for David Ortiz found the roller coaster decade for the Boston Red Sox zooming toward the top before they were sidetracked by the determined Franconas. Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, and gritty veteran Dustin Pedroia got surprising help from Hanley Ramirez and Jackie Bradley but there is no telling where that erratic pitching staff will take them next time. The Orioles pound the ball in that little park and Buck Showalter is nowhere near as foolish as he looked in that last game but they are a big question mark after a somewhat bizarre season.

The Pittsburgh Pirates suddenly appeared to become committed to mediocrity this year and, if that persists, they will continue to drop back to their old ways of hoping and moping. Andrew McCutchen needs his dreads back and some serious upgrading of the infield defense. The Cardinals will be back because they just about always are. The three teams in the N.L. West not named Dodgers or Giants are considering merging into one team in order to contend. It’s unfortunate what happened to the Marlins but that division has two over rated teams at the top and Miami still has lots of talent. The Phillies will be my dark horse choice next year.

Okay, now we can all go back to watching Joe Buck try to complete a coherent sentence.

At first it seemed like the best way to attempt to summarize this season for the San Francisco Giants would be to ingest some high quality hallucinogenic mushrooms and just start scribbling. However, one never really knows what doing something like that will lead to and there was work and other responsibilities so I didn’t. Besides, I didn’t have any to eat. It likely would have made it all make more sense, though.

On Sunday, July 10, the Giants beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 4-0 as Madison Bumgarner won his tenth game against four losses. The team thus arrived at the All Star break with a 57-33 record and a 6.5 game lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West. Their record was the best in all of major league baseball at the time, three games better than either the Texas Rangers or the Chicago Cubs. Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto,and Jeff Samardzija had a combined won-loss record of 32-10. Cueto (13-1) was deservedly named to start the All Star game in San Diego. Bumgarner pitched a one hitter that day with 14 strikeouts. Brandon Belt, Buster Posey, and Brandon Crawford were each hitting pretty well at the time. So the fact that second baseman Joe Panik, right fielder Hunter Pence (no relation to the Cro-Magnon governor of Indiana), and third baseman Matt Duffy were all out of the lineup for extended periods didn’t seem to be hurting them. Besides that, veteran starting pitchers Jake Peavy and Matt Cain were combining periods of ill health with periods of ineffective pitching. People like Reuben Tejada, Grant Green, and Mac Williamson were filling in. Yet, there the Giants were, on top of it all.

Then the Giants got Pence and Panik back and traded Duffy for what looked like a better pitching bet in lefty Matt Moore. They then proceeded to take eleven weeks off, losing 41 of 66 games to fall hopelessly behind the Dodgers. The Giants found every conceivable way to lose games. The bullpen went from mediocre to not very good to scary. The hitting, especially with runners in scoring position, virtually disappeared. Samardzija was giving up a lot of long balls. Posey went two months without a home run. Manager Bruce Bochy got disrespected on the field by relievers Santiago Casilla and Sergio Romo and, at one point, had to spend a night in a hospital. The fielding, a constant plus over the last few seasons, had some bad times as well. Even the great Giants announcing crew seemed to lose their spirit and sound sullen and defeated.

Finally, at the end of September, their last road trip ended with losses in two of three games in L.A. and a slit of four in San Diego that the Giants simply just had to win. Oh, well, we thought, October just means it’s that much closer to April. Hello, wait! The last home stand featured what seems like a resurrection. Starting with a 12-3 blasting of Colorado, they won 5 of the final six games including a sweep of the Dodgers who, admittedly, had already clinched. Now a wild card game featuring Bumgarner at his best and the unheralded Conor Gillaspie. What’s going on? Now,in my own words of just a few days ago, they are bear bait. Well, we’ll see.