On Babbler and Tabbler, stick-tapping the Frozen Four, Ontario's governmental fail, and 40 years since Fernandomania
A Doug Ford surrogate confirmed Ontario's fears about failed governance, and it's also been 40 years since Fernandomania, but what did MLB not learn from that time?
Midmorning snark break
Babbler and Tabler are back
Thursday night marked the Toronto Blue Jays’ first television-and-audio simulcast with Buck Martinez on play-by-play and Pat Tabler as the analyst. In and of itself, the unique-to-Rogers format can be pulled off with a really skilled commentary team and a producer who is in the talent’s ears reminding them about the audience who do not have the visuals. Dan Shulman was on PBP with Martinez on colour for the Jays’ first six road games. One had the sense that Shulman was drilling to use his words wisely. Thursday, Buck’n’Pat at times seemed to completely forget they were also on the radio, particularly when there was a lengthy review of a close play at first base in the late innings.
I know, I know. A fan in Canada should pay for both Sportsnet and MLB.tv subscriptions. The latter only offers audio feeds from Jays games unless you use a VPN. And it was only their first game for the duo that a friend tagged as Babbler and Tabler a few years ago, so they should get some benefit of the doubt that they will be more conscientious with game details.
The actual reason, by the way, for searching for Martinez on Twitter was that Buck had voiced support for the automatic runner in extra innings rule. I actually like it, too.
Cawlidge hockey should be bigger. One theory on why it is not.
Something that 2010 Sags probably did not expect 2021 Sags to say is that U.S. college hockey is sort of done dirty by the dollar-grubbing NCAA. After all, I was on a junior hockey beat for a long time.
The Great American shamamateurism-industrial complex’s two cash cows, of course, are King Football and the men’s Division 1 basketball tournament. One positive development to come out the arc of the women’s tournament is that progressive-minded players such as Oregon’s Sedona Prince and sportswriters such as Sally Jenkins have called BS on how the suit dummies sell the female athletes short. Connecticut Huskies star Paige Bueckers has more marketability than 99.95 percent of male players, and ideally her marketability will follow her into the WNBA. Hopefully more sports fans are putting that into their hearts.
Well, some of that second- and third-wave feminism needs to be co-opted by college hockey advocates. The insistence that only football and men’s basketball matters hurts the growth of hockey in the Incited States, too. When college hockey advocates would kvetch about teenage players from Gretzky generation states, namely California, opting to play major junior in Canadian-run leagues instead of going to school, I would point out that part of the problem was the lack of hockey teams at schools that also play major-conference football. And Americans develop their sports consciousness by being true to one’s school, so it probably is in interest of an NHL vertical to also have a D1 team in their market.
The SportsLit episode that Neil Acharya and I recently made with player agent Ryan Minkoff, whose memoir Thin Ice covers his years in club hockey at the University of Washington, was a chance to explore that. Only nine of the 65 D-1 schools that play ‘Power Five football’ also sponsor a men’s hockey program. Arizona State is the only one outside of the U.S. snowbelt.1 It just looks like a missed opportunity to pair the traditional frenzy of college sports fans with the atmosphere of a competitive live hockey game. And there might be wider interest if schools with more name recognition than St. Cloud State and UMass were playing in the championship game.
Just a thought. The reason it won’t happen is because of budget bloat in King Football. Men’s and women’s hockey are typically the second- and third-most expensive team sports. But it is obvious the scale of NCAA hockey has fallen well behind the size of the American talent pool, and the pool of international players who would love to play.
Sylvia Jones said the quiet part loud
Welp, the opposition parties in Ontario were handed the best attack ad they can use in the 2022 provincial election — which, of course, means they will not use it.
Sylvia Jones, the solicitor general of Ontario’s government for the property developers, admitted flat-out that they have escalated the effects of the COVID19 pandemic. Jones told CBC Ottawa: “We wanted to make sure that the modelling was actually showing up in our hospitals.”
So much for the bromide that where there is smoke, there is fire. Or — to put it in relatable terms for the monied class — that you always check the long-term weather forecast before you plan a cottage weekend or a ski trip after asking everyone else to stay home.
Whether that was out of cynicism that the Government For The Property Developers could cheap out with trying to protect Ontario and not hurt their voting base, or being too prideful to understand why biostatisticians develop predictive models is unclear. Either way, it is really bad.
But it really is not about the party’s ignorance and/or incompetence. They have shown us who they are, always putting business and donors first, and have shown us that they are not likely to change. I only call it out since I would like there to be a greater understanding that it ain’t your parents’ or grandparents’ Blue team in Ontario or federal politics anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. And, ultimately, the other parties will have to figure out a way to get voters to realize it is in their interest to have elected representatives who have a screw’s clue about science. The problem goes a lot farther than Premier Doug Ford. It would be the same if someone else was the party leader.
Speaking of Ford, while Twitter is a hellsite, sometimes one’s feed does put two weeks back-to-back in a way that fosters a moment of clarity:
SportsLit Segue — 9 April
Baseball is not necessarily better or worse in 2021 than it was on this date in 1981 when Fernandomania was born — it is just less friendly to narrative.
Imagine how a manager today would have worked around the scenario the recently departed Tommy Lasorda faced before opening day forty years ago. The Los Angeles Dodgers had three seasoned starting pitchers — Jerry Reuss, Bob Welch and Burt Hooton — with some minor aches and pains. Two others, Dave Goltz and Rick Sutcliffe, were fatigued after pitching in the annual exhibition series against the California Angels.
Yep, it probably would have meant a bullpen day on opening day, one interchangeable power arm after another coming out to take an inning or two. Then there would have been a quick shuffle with the alternate training site to restock the interchangeable power arms. That galaxy-brained contagion was almost four decades away, so the next man up was 20-year-old rookie lefthander Fernando Valenzuela, who had only pitched out of the bullpen as a late-season callup in ’80.
Now you know the rest of the story. The unassuming-looking Valenzuela, with his screwball that broke in on lefty batters, essayed a five-hit, two-walk complete-game shutout against the division-rival Houston Astros. He twirled nine innings in each of his first eight starts,2 and his identity and inimitable style gave the Dodgers the Mexican marquee player that general manager Al Campanis — yep, same guy — always believed the organization desperately needed in diverse Southern California, even when it was setting attendance records: “a Mexican Sandy Koufax, somebody to activate Latinos the way that the Hall of Fame left-hander had activated Jews.”
It was a happening. The story of the connection that Valenzuela’s brilliance fostered between Los Angeles’s Latinx community and the Dodgers was explored by director Cruz Angeles in an ESPN 30-for-30 doc, Fernando Nation (ESPN Films, 2010). Valenzuela is now one of the Dodgers’ Spanish-language announcers, so he is still making new fans.
Nineteen eighty-one might also be the Most Interesting Baseball Season to sports seekers who only pay casual attention to the game. The players’ association went on a defensive strike that lasted 57 days from mid-June through to early August. In a bid to regain fan interest, both leagues decided to reset all teams’ records to 0-0 in a split-season format that required an extra tier of playoffs, with eight teams qualifying instead of four. It was messy — the Cincinnati Reds contrived to miss the playoffs despite having the best overall record of all 26 teams; the St. Louis Cardinals were left out in spite of having the best record in their division; and the Kansas City Royals qualified despite a losing record — but life and people are messy sometimes too.
The playoff format in 1981 was a template for the wild-card era that began in the mid-1990s. However, a long view might be that baseball learned the wrong lesson from it over the years as it continued to lose ground to King Football for the public’s attention in the late summer. Expanding the playoffs meant removing some of the tension that was unique to a sport that is all about the six-month grind of trying to forestall failure in a game that has so much of it — you know the cliché that a batter who fails six times out of 10 is still a star, since that’s a .400 on-base average.
It is understandable that MLB always wants to maximize revenues from the playoffs October. The regular-season structure and playoff criteria, however, tells the public that they can tune out for a couple months, and that is no way to keep the audience. The likely playoff teams become apparent after 100 or so games, so a lot of people turn their attention elsewhere and possibly don’t come back. There should be more focus on building in more drama to the regular season, instead of just expecting a buy-in on the idea that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
That 1981 season has spawned some solid baseball books. The Dodgers’ story is told in Jason Turbow’s They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen: The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), which is quoted above. Jeff Katz’s Split Season 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) is an excellent narrative of that unique year. A Canadian perspective also comes from Danny Gallagher in Blue Monday: The Expos, The Dodgers And The Home Run That Changed Everything (Dundurn Press, 2018).
Circling back to the evolution, or devolution, of pitcher usage, the arc of Valenzuela’s career is something to share with every “back when men pitched” Boomer. Now, it actually turns out the truism about how batters gain a huge advantage on a pitcher’s third time through the lineup may be overstated. It is seemingly not as extreme; it happens to be that “much of the reported difference is simply the group of batters who they happen to see the third time through,” since the most gifted batters hit at the top of the order. Being left cold when a pitcher is removed after four or five innings is an understandable intuitive response.
But the pendulum should not swing back all the way, as Valenzuela’s career arc illustrates. He threw 233 innings as a 20-year-old in 1981, counting the playoffs. He averaged nearly 270 over the next six years, and was basically done as a frontline starting pitcher by his age-27 year, when he began to have elbow problems.
The economic scale of MLB dictates proceeding more carefully. It is not so much that teams want to lose their investment in a pitcher. It is probably more about what the players want. It is a business, and they would prefer to have a chance to pitch into their 30s and make that Tanner Roark income, although ideally not with Tanner Roark results, unless you are a hitter on another team.
That might be a cheap swipe, but it is all part of furthering a holistic view of our games.
Syracuse University has a D1 women’s team.
Seven complete games, and a nine-inning stint in a game that went to extra innings.