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Welcoming back baseball

7/23/2020

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​by Jared Greenspan

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. -- A. Bartlett Giamatti

There’s nothing quite like Opening Day. 

As soon as the season ends, the countdown to the next begins. Those five months without baseball -- those long, arduous winter months -- often seem endless. That date you have circled on your calendar creeps and crawls closer, ever so slowly. 

On the morning it arrives, hope springs eternal. A routine Thursday morning is met with pep and vim, rather than usual dread. The air is crisp, abound with good cheer and unbridled optimism. 

For one day, you take everything -- the expectations, the past results, the negativity, the reality -- and throw it out the window. None of that will be needed on this day. 

Your team, the one you love with a passion and, simultaneously, hate with fury, has a clean slate. No stains. No blemishes. For one day, your team is in first place. 

162 games, spread out over six months, lie ahead. If you squint just hard enough, you can make out that ever-winding narrow path to glory. Well, if this happens and this happens and then this happens, then… 

You convince yourself that maybe, just maybe, it’s possible. This is your team’s year. 

Opening Day marks a cause for celebration. Friends and families cluster around televisions; kids play hooky from school; adults call in sick from work. The luckiest ones journey to the ballpark to root alongside 40,000 strangers who, for the day, become their closest friends.

There’s no better feeling. 

Thursday evening, Washington’s Max Scherzer will take the mound at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and hurl the first pitch of the 2020 MLB season to Aaron Hicks of the Yankees. Baseball, on the heels of an atypically long nine-month hiatus, will finally be back. 

Opening Day, though, won’t be the same. The optimism that accompanies the occasion will be dampened and earmarked by the peculiar. 

In 2020, baseball will play amidst a disconcerting backdrop -- a country marred in a devastating pandemic, the coronavirus running wild and showing no signs of letting up. 

And so on this Opening Day, there will be no pilgrimages to the ballpark made by fathers and sons, mothers and daughters and lifelong friends. There will be no festivities or player introductions. There will be no roaring from the crowd. There will be no ring ceremony for the Nationals, the reigning World Series champions. 

Memories will be put on hold.

Instead, as baseball begins its treacherous task of navigating the merciless ways of the pandemic, there will be masks, social distancing and COVID tests -- all newfound staples of a post-coronavirus society. Artificial crowd noise, auto-generated via Playstation’s MLB The Show video game, will ring hollow in cavernous ballparks. Mute cardboard cutouts will occupy the seats meant for raucous fanatics. 

By now, the 2020 MLB season should be 90 games deep. The contenders would have separated themselves from the pretenders. The All-Star game and Home Run Derby would have been firmly in the rearview mirror. Rumors would be swirling, with the trade deadline looming around the corner. 

Now, even with Opening Day on the doorstep, the very prospect of a 2020 season is fragile. One misstep in following protocol by one player could make everything come tumbling down in September, or October, or next week. 

It might not even take a misstep to bring everything crashing to the ground. Thursday, a mere five hours before the opener, Nationals star Juan Soto tested positive for coronavirus. Soto, while asymptomatic, will have to register two clean COVID tests before being cleared to return. In other words, his absence is sure to be a matter of weeks, not days.

Soto has been a full participant in Washington’s summer camp up to this point, meaning that he’s interacted with players, coaches and trainers. It’s certainly possible — if not likely — that he infected a teammate. And yet Washington, minus Soto, is full steam ahead for their game tonight against the Yankees. They scrimmaged Baltimore two days ago. It’s easy to see, now, just how quickly this can spread. 

In a situation as unprecedented, the unpredictable is omnipresent. Unknowns are multiplying. Health risks are staggering and worrisome. 

There’s a common belief, however naive and short-sighted it may be, that baseball possesses an ability to heal, on both an individual level and a national one. As America’s pastime, baseball has been a recreational diversion to an ailing country countless times before -- during World War I and World War II, in the aftermath of 9-11, following the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Baseball, through both thick and thin, has been there for us. 

This go around, something feels different. Baseball is back, and while it may be able to divert, it surely can’t rescue. It’s reasonable to wonder whether, on an ethics standpoint, if it’s right to exhibit fanfare and optimism over a baseball season while 145,000 (and counting) Americans won’t be alive to witness it. 

What’s become clear from the coronavirus is that sports are a luxury, perhaps a reward, for a functioning society. New Zealand, a country that has effectively squashed the coronavirus, is reaping the benefits of such, having hosted live sporting events with full capacity stadiums as early as last month. The United States is eons away from matching New Zealand’s success in combatting the pandemic. And thus, the morality of resuming sports while a crippling virus rages on, largely unrestrained, remains in question. 

And yet you find yourself anxiously counting down the hours to first pitch, much like any other year. That’s okay. When the games start, you’ll feel the emotions. You’ll cheer. You’ll scream. You’ll feel joy. You’ll feel heartbreak. You’ll be lost in the game of baseball. It’s all inevitable. 

We need baseball back. Yet we also need to  keep perspective. For one season, at least, the reality that exists outside the baseball diamond should stick with us as we get swept up in the 60-game sprint. 

Baseball can distract. But it shouldn’t be a reason to forget.



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Fixing Baseball in 15 Easy Steps

6/15/2020

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Moments like this one are why we watch. Image from Bless You Boys
By: Nick Hornburg

Major League Baseball is not in a great situation right now. Some of it is not the fault of anybody involved (the global pandemic certainly qualifies as an undeserved obstacle), but a lot of baseball’s problems have been self-inflicted, and have existed for years predating the pandemic. Declining relevance, stagnant attendance, a tanking epidemic, dreadful labor relations, and a league office that oscillates between clueless and malicious have combined to put the game of baseball on shaky ground in the sports world. Fortunately, baseball is still flush with money at the moment, but it remains that America’s Pastime needs to get its act together going forward if it wants to remain an important part of the American sports calendar. Here are 15 reforms that baseball should implement in order to better grow the game, increase attendance, restore its reputation, and improve the product:

League Reforms

Bring Back the Montreal Expos
Regardless of what happens to the 2020 MLB season, the league is about to take a financial and reputational beating. The last time a massive interruption happened, which was the 1994-95 strike, the league kicked the tires on expansion, ultimately adding the Diamondbacks and the Rays in 1998. Consequently, it stands to reason that expansion is on the horizon once again, and it wouldn’t feel right if the league didn’t come full circle and expand through the return of the highest-profile casualty of the 1994-95 lockout: The Montreal Expos. Quebec’s MLB team died a slow death after a very good Expos team was derailed by the strike, and the time has come to right this wrong. Montreal should be more than capable of supporting a team, and revenue sharing (and hopefully a more responsible owner) should be able to insure against history repeating itself with the Expos’ decline. The Expos would return to the National League.

Add an Expansion Team in Portland
31 is a weird number. That’s why the NHL didn’t sit around for too long after adding Vegas before working on another expansion franchise, and that’s why baseball can’t stop at just bringing back the Expos. Portland has proven itself to be a decent city for sports teams. The Blazers have always had great fans, and the Timbers and Thorns (Portland’s MLS and NWSL teams) have consistently been well-supported as well. Portland’s location is also optimal, with potential for a Pacific Northwest Rivalry with Seattle, as well as ensuring the Mariners are a bit less lonely up in the northern corner of the country. Seeing as the Expos would head back to the National League, a Portland team would join the American League.

Realign the Divisions
With two expansion teams up and running, the league now stands at 32 teams. This makes the current division alignment impossible, or at least really strange. There are a few different ways one can realign the divisions, but for the purposes of making scheduling easy (more on that below), I’m going to submit that each league should have four divisions with four teams, sorted by geography, with this alignment:

AL East: Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Orioles
AL North: Tigers, Indians, White Sox, Twins
AL South: Royals, Rangers, Astros, Rays
AL West: Angles, Athletics, Mariners, Portland

NL East: Phillies, Mets, Expos, Pirates
NL North: Cardinals, Cubs, Brewers, Rockies
NL South: Nationals, Braves, Reds, Marlins
NL West: Dodgers, Giants, Padres, Diamondbacks

With this alignment, the biggest rivalries (e.g. Yankees-Red Sox, Cardinals-Cubs, Dodgers-Giants) are preserved, and geographic ties are largely maintained.

A Shorter and More Uniform Schedule
A long season is pretty much mandatory for baseball, but 162 games is a bit too much. Interleague play, another post-strike invention intended to revive interest in the game, is fun in certain circumstances, but seems a bit unnecessary otherwise and desperately needs to be reduced. Just as well, intra-league play needs to be standardized, with each team playing the same number of games against each divisional opponent every year. In practice, such a schedule looks something like this:

20 Games * 3 Divisional Opponents = 60
6 Games * 12 Non-Division League Opponents = 72
6 Games * 2 Interleague Opponents = 12

This adds up to 144 games, where each team plays both a home series and a road series against each team in their league, playing either three or four (either 3 + 3 + 4 or 3 + 3 + 2 + 2) home series and three or four road series against divisional opponents. In the interleague portion of the schedule, each team plays a home series and a road series against two teams from the other league. Some interleague series would be played every year (Yankees-Mets, Cubs-White Sox, Dodgers-Angels, Blue Jays-Expos, Indians-Reds, Cardinals-Royals, Giants-Athletics, Rays-Marlins and Orioles-Nationals come to mind), while the rest will alternate each year.

Expand the Playoffs
Show me a league with a boring postseason and I will show you a league that doesn’t exist. Baseball’s playoff system, while doubtlessly fun and intriguing, is the smallest of the four big American sports. After having four teams per league for a while, the playoffs expanded to five per league with the introduction of the wild card game in 2012. The wild card game has never failed to disappoint, but the early rounds of the playoffs need to be improved upon, and expanding the playoffs is a big part of that. Given that the league realignment I mention above involves creating four divisions in each league, I propose that each league have seven teams in the playoffs (fourteen total), which consists of the four division winners, as well as three wild card teams. The winningest division winner receives a bye (similar to the NFL), while each remaining division winner plays a wild card team in a modified best of three series: The division winner starts the series with a 1-0 lead, so they only have to win once to advance to the Division Series, while the wild card teams would need to win two in a row in order to advance. This preserves both the randomness and unpredictability of the early rounds of the playoffs and the value of division titles. Beyond adding this early round, the Division Series should grow to a best of seven series, just like the Championship Series and the World Series, which should increase the likelihood of the better teams winning. Having more playoff spots up for grabs should also encourage more teams to try to contend in any given year.

Institute a Salary Floor
With all the talk of the problems of tanking in Basketball, not enough attention is paid to Baseball’s widespread tanking problem. Much of the concerns about Baseball’s decline are rooted in falling attendance numbers throughout the league, but when you look closer, the attendance numbers are not indicative of a dying sport. Instead, they are indicative of a large portion of the major leagues not even pretending to try to field a winning team at any one point, and the decline in payrolls league wide reflects that. Baseball fans have demonstrated time and time again that they will go to stadiums to watch teams that aren’t contenders (the 2008 Tigers averaged 39,000 fans per game; they went 74-88). What they won’t pay to see are teams that are drifting with no real intent (the 2019 Tigers average 18,000 fans per game; they went 47-114). The most straightforward solution is a salary floor. Teams should be required to spend enough money to ensure a living, breathing baseball team. This will improve the product league wide, and it will help the veteran players who are currently getting screwed by the penny pinching of the 19 teams that aren’t competing for the World Series. The argument against a floor is that some teams have been able to do well with low payrolls over a long period of time, but even that argument is flimsy. The poster child for small market success is the Oakland A’s. In 2002 (the Moneyball season), the Oakland A’s payroll was 30% of its market value. In 2019, that number stood at 10%. If payrolls grew with market value, every franchise in baseball would have a payroll of at least $300 Million today. I’m not asking for that, I’m merely asking that every franchise invest in putting actual major league players on the field every year. It will improve the product, increase gate receipts, and avoid embarrassments like Dallas Keuchel not getting a contract until after the 2019 season started.

Get Rid of the All-Star Game
You and I both know that All-Star games are not enjoyable. The All-Star break provides a nice gap in the season and allows a much-needed break for the players, but the game itself is dreadful. What is not dreadful is the Home Run Derby. Consequently, Baseball’s best move would be to drop the All-Star Game entirely and have more skills competitions. All-Star games are a good idea in theory, a game in which all of the best players are on one field playing against each other. But in reality, it’s pretty boring and not worth the risk for pitchers. On the other hand, skills competitions involving baserunning, fielding, directional hitting and throwing from the outfield, in addition to the Home Run Derby, would make for a much more riveting All-Star break.

Pay Minor League Baseball Players More
This is an issue that has gained a lot of traction in recent years, and it’s something that is long overdue. Most minor league players would be better off economically working at Walmart, and in a league that is structured such that the farm system is the lifeblood of any team that can’t print money every year in free agency (read: the Yankees), it’s just bad practice. When minor league players are paid more, they can stay in the game longer and take more time to develop, which leads to better players and stronger farm systems.

Gameplay Reforms

Implement the Designated Hitter Rule in the National League
The exception proves the rule. Zack Greinke is a passable hitter. Most pitchers aren’t. Since the introduction of the Designated Hitter, the American League has been the better hitting league every single year, and it looks like the National League has finally relented. It looks like the National League will use designated hitters if the 2020 season actually happens, and this could be the catalyst for the permanent addition of the position league-wide. Regardless of whether it is or not, it is encouraging to see that it looks like the Universal DH will be a reality within the next few years.

Allow Teams to Hold Larger Rosters and Scratch Players
As of 2020, major league teams carry 26 players on the roster, before expanding to 40 in September, dressing 28 on any given day. This is a step in the right direction, but I think something is being overlooked. The 26-man roster includes the starting pitching staff, four of whom have no chance of playing on any given day because they aren’t starting, so in reality, a team only has 22 players available on any given day. A good solution is to expand active rosters to 30 players, but only dress 25. This allows teams to scratch starting pitchers on their off days, instead of making them stand around awkwardly in the dugout when they know they won’t pitch, while filling their spots with extra relievers or hitters. Teams also wouldn’t need to use the injured list as much; in the case of short term injuries, a player can be scratched for a few games instead of going on the injured list. This also means more spots on major league rosters for young players, as well as the veteran middle class that has been getting squeezed the last few years.

Implement a Pitch Clock
Baseball’s pace of play debate will probably never end. The baseball neckbeards maintain that game length is not a problem and attempts to speed the game up devalue the chess game that the game can be at the highest level, while many others argue that today’s game drags unnecessarily, and the tension of the game has long since devolved into boredom. I am not here to tell people what’s boring and what isn’t, but baseball games have gotten progressively longer over the past 30 years, and the biggest culprit is an increase in the time between pitches. While cracking down on game length may not necessarily make the game better in the minds of baseball’s most dedicated fans, it will make the game more accessible to more people, as it’s easier to convince people to go to the ballpark for two and a half hours than for three and a half hours. A pitch clock is the simplest way to shave 20-30 minutes from every game, and it shouldn’t even be that big of an adjustment. Pitchers have demonstrated that they are generally capable of picking up the pace, and a pitch clock forces that adjustment. The enforcement would be simple for both pitchers and hitter: once fifteen seconds have passed after the pitcher has received a ball from the catcher, if the pitcher is not set, a ball is assessed, or if the hitter is not in their stance, a strike is assessed. This should cut down on the excesses of the slowest pitchers and hitters, while making games shorter and easier to stay with for the duration of the game, and hopefully, ensure that only a minority of nine-inning games extend beyond three hours.

Marketing Reforms

More Original Offseason Content
Moneyball is a great movie, but I can only watch it so many times before I cry out for more during the offseason. Baseball’s in-season programming is actually pretty good, but the offseason leaves much to be desired, particularly once football season ends and airtime is there for the taking. Baseball’s recent history is a gold mine for potential documentaries, but too often there doesn’t seem to be tons of interest in making them, which is a massive oversight that is seemingly magnified by the success of The Last Dance. Baseball should make a habit of producing offseason content about recently retired players and noteworthy teams of the preceding fifteen years, which at any given point would represent the memories that the 18-30 bracket would love to relive. For example, the last generation of baseball has given us the careers of memorable players like Joe Mauer, David Ortiz, Mark Buehrle and Ichiro, as well as teams that are memorable for the right reasons (2004 Red Sox, 2006 Cardinals, 2008 Phillies) and the wrong reasons (2007 Mets, 2011 Red Sox). There is no reason not to produce more documentaries on these stories, as they have the power to remind viewers why they appreciated these players and teams when they happened, and provide more insight into what was really going on in the game in these past years.

Ease Up on Regional Blackouts
It is absolutely absurd how hard baseball works to limit the number of people who can watch baseball games. Baseball’s regional blackout policy, designed to protect MLB’s TV deals with regional networks, is the most restrictive of the leagues, a flaw which is even more pronounced in the age of cord-cutting. Blackouts, in and of themselves, are not a particularly problematic concept. They’re good for protecting regional networks, and it isn’t unreasonable to expect viewers to pay for their local sports network, but in the linked article above, you’ll notice that Baseball’s blackout regions are massive, with tons of overlap (six teams are blacked out to viewers in Las Vegas), which both cheapens streaming options and makes it unnecessarily difficult for viewers to watch their teams. By making blackouts less restrictive (there is no reason for any MLB team, let alone four, to be blacked out in Buffalo), the league enhances its own streaming platform (MLB.tv) and allows more people to watch games.

Better Game Scheduling
Baseball’s problems with marketing its best players are well documented, but sometimes I think the discussion loses sight of something very important, and that is that the easiest way to market star players is to simply get more people to watch them play. Baseball has generally done a terrible job with this, particularly with players on the West Coast. Mike Trout is the best player in the league, but when his home games are played at 10:00 PM EST every night because he plays in Anaheim, nowhere near enough people are going to watch him. The same problem exists with Clayton Kershaw, Ketel Marte, Nolan Arenado, Cody Bellinger and Manny Machado, and it was a big part of why neither King Felix nor Ichiro ever got the exposure they deserved (playing on bad teams every year didn’t help either). I understand that during the week, there isn’t much that can be done, but on weekends, there is absolutely no reason for any West Coast game, or any game, for that matter, to start later than 8:00 PM EST.

Better Coverage Options for College Baseball
Adley Rutschman, the top pick in the 2019 MLB draft, hit .400 in back to back seasons at Oregon State. Spencer Torkelson, the top pick in the 2020 MLB draft, broke the Pac-12 single season home run record for a Freshman at Arizona State back in 2018, a record previously held by some guy named Barry Bonds. The average baseball fan has never heard of either of them, because watching College Baseball is damn near impossible for most baseball fans. Baseball is a bit unique in that unlike the NBA and NFL, Major League Baseball emerged as a major force in the American sports landscape before, instead of after, its college counterpart, and accordingly, college baseball is never going to carry the weight of college football or college basketball. With that being said, even though there are a few years separating players being drafted and players reaching the major leagues in baseball, it remains that college baseball players represent the future of Major League Baseball, which was even more pronounced this year, with more college players being taken in the first 100 picks in the 2020 draft than any MLB draft in history. College Baseball is fun and, like its football counterpart, includes elements that are not often seen at the highest level (baseball traditionalists should love the college game’s relatively conservative use of shifts and more liberal use of bunting and stealing). Just as well, being able to follow the College Baseball regular season makes the College World Series (one of the most underrated postseasons in the sports world) all the more fun, and gives fans a greater insight into Major League Baseball’s biggest feeder.

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Dusty Baker's  Gotta Go

10/19/2017

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By Max Brill

Dusty Baker, Nationals manager for the past two seasons, epitomizes “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” He has never won a World Series. At this rate, he never will. He has only ever been to the Fall Classic once; in 2002 Baker led the Giants to the World Series only to be dispatched by Mike Scioscia's Anaheim Angels in seven games. Baker and the Giants even held a five run lead heading into the seventh inning of game six (they held a 3-2 series lead, so had they won game six, they would have captured the series), but managed to blow that. Baker has managed four different teams for 22 seasons total and has captured only one league pennant. He has only won one playoff series aside from the year he took the Giants to the World Series. If you take all of the postseason series he’s managed, he’s 3-8 all-time, 3-9 if you include his 2013 Wild Card Game loss. He has a 23-32 record, good for a .418 postseason win percentage.

So why do teams keep hiring this guy? Because, contrary to what his postseason record might have you believe, he wins. Baker ranks 14th all-time among managers with 1863 regular season wins, and it’s not as though those wins are coming from just managing for a long period of time; his career win percentage is .532.

I should rephrase my statement from the previous paragraph. He appears to win. Not that the wins are an illusion or anything like that, but if you look at the rosters that he has managed into the postseason, they're not short on talent in any way, shape, or form. Aside from the 1997 Giants (who, for the record, had Barry Bonds leading the way), the rosters he has been handed have, for the most part, just been talented enough to get to the postseason. Let's take a look:

2000 Giants
This season just screams steroid era. Aside from the aforementioned Bonds (who led the team with 49 HR and an obscene .306/.440/.688 triple-slash), the team also had Jeff Kent, who, at age 32, posted career-bests in each leg of his triple-slash (.334/.424/.596), and a then-career-high of 33 long balls. At age 32. And as if that weren't enough, 35-year-old RF Ellis Burks posted a .344/.419/.606 triple-slash along with 24 HR. Burks, who had only hit 20 HR twice in the first nine years of his career, went on to average just under thirty HR a year for his age-31 through age-37 seasons. If that doesn't scream steroids, I don't know what does.

The Giants offense posted the most WAR of any MLB club in 2000, and the 5th-most WAR of any National League club. To be fair, though, when steroids factor into the equation, if your hitting can carry the load, your pitching just has to be average. Additionally, managers tend to have a rather negligible effect over the course of the season on win total (this FiveThirtyEight article goes more in depth, but to summarize: you can't really prove if a manager is better or worse than average), so as long as Dusty didn't bench Bonds, Kent, and and Burks every day, this team was basically a shoo-in for the playoffs.

2002 Giants
I don't really have to say much about this season. This was not Bonds' 232-walk season, but he still got on base three out of every five at-bats (his OBP was .582). If you have a guy that produces 12.7 fWAR in a season, you're gonna make the playoffs. It doesn't hurt that Kent also posted 6.7 fWAR at age 34. This team, once again, led the big leagues in offensive fWAR, and finished third in the National League (8th overall) in pitching WAR. Any old MLB manager probably could have taken these guys to the playoffs. Dusty got them to the World Series (where they lost), which is certainly an accomplishment, but they didn't get the ring, and some of the loss can probably be attributed to the fact that Dusty hit Bonds fourth the entire series. Kenny Lofton and Rich Aurilia, who hit first and second, respectively, in that series, had 34 and 33 plate appearances (again, respectively). If Bonds had hit second in place of Aurilia, the Giants would have had two additional baserunners over the course of the series, which doesn't seem like a lot, but that probably would have put Bonds in scoring position at least one additional time during the series. Two of the games that the Angels won were decided by one run, so that could have been a huge difference maker. Obviously I'm speaking in hypotheticals, and the likelihood that any of this would have actually happened is relatively unlikely. It also demonstrates the fact that a manager has a rather negligible impact on the game (shifting Bonds two spots in the order would have resulted in two more baserunners in seven games, which is really not a lot). My point: they lost, and Dusty did not optimize his team's chances at winning. Are we starting to see a trend here?

2003 Cubs
The Cubs starting rotation in 2003 featured three pitchers that finished in the top-25 in baseball in fWAR. Mark Prior posted nearly 8 fWAR (7.8), and Carlos Zambrano and Kerry Wood compiled 4.7 and 4.2 fWAR, respectively. All three of these starters also finished in the top-10 in the big leagues in ERA. When your offense is at least league average (which the Cubs were in 2003; they finished 18th in the bigs and 9th in the Senior Circuit for offensive fWAR), it's hard not to make the playoffs with a pitching staff that deadly.

However, the team only made it to the NLCS, where they lost in seven games to the Marlins. This was the series with the infamous Steve Bartman incident (Game 6). Many regard that as the turning point of the series, but people seem to forget that after the Bartman mishap, Dusty Baker left Prior in to face Ivan Rodriguez. Rodriguez was, to that point, a career .304/.344/.488 hitter, certainly one of the Marlins' most lethal sluggers, and Prior was already 114 pitches deep into his outing. Prior allowed a hit, and as if that weren't already enough, Dusty left Prior in to face two more of the most lethal hitters in the Florida lineup: Miguel Cabrera and Derrek Lee. Unsurprisingly, after throwing 117 pitches (leading up to Cabrera's AB), and 118 pitches (leading up to Lee's AB), Prior allowed back-to-back baserunners, granted Cabrera reached on an error. The Cabrera error was a little unlucky, but Lee's double was a liner right down the third-base line. As much as I would like to hop on the bandwagon and blame Bartman for the loss, Dusty should have taken Prior out after the walk and wild pitch to Pudge. Great management may not lead to wins, but poor management begets losses.

There's also the fact that a lot of people blame Mark Prior's early exit from baseball on Dusty's overuse of him. From 2002 to 2003, Prior's innings workload more than doubled. We know now that innings should be gradually increased for youngsters to protect their arms, so we need to cut Dusty a little slack, but still, Baker is credited with killing the careers of Prior and Kerry Wood. Whether it's actually his fault the two of them faltered on their own accord remains unknown, but Baker's use of them definitely played a factor. Let's move on.

2010 Reds
The Reds finished, you guessed it, first in offensive fWAR in 2010. Led by the likes of future Hall of Famer Joey Votto (side note: he is the perfect baseball player), Jay Bruce (please come back to the Mets), and potential Hall of Famer Scott Rolen, this team cruised to a 91-71 record, and won the NL Central by 5 games over the St. Louis Cardinals. I reiterate: it's easy to make it to the postseason if you have a good team handed to you. Over 162 games, generally speaking, the most talented teams should end up on top, and that's what happened here.
The Reds' 2010 pitching wasn't anything to write home about, they were roughly league average (17th overall in baseball in pitching fWAR, 9th in the National League). They went on to get swept in the NLDS. There's not much you can do when you get no-hit in game one and you get only 11 hits in 27 innings over the course of the series, so I don't think Dusty could have done much to give this team a better shot in 2010. That being said, hitting light-hitting SS Orlando Cabrera ahead of Votto, Rolen, and Bruce in games 1 and 2 certainly did not help.

2012 Reds
The 2012 Reds didn't lead the league in offensive fWAR (they were 9th overall), but they made up for it by leading the National League in pitching fWAR (they were third overall, behind the Tigers and Rays). As I've said before, it's easy to manage a good team to the postseason. The Reds went 97-65 and won their division by 9 games, again over the Cardinals, and then went on to lose in the NLDS in five games to the eventual World Series winners, the San Francisco Giants. All of the games in that series were decided by at least two runs save for game three, which was a 2-1 Giants victory in 10 innings. I'm going to zoom in on that because I think Baker impacted that game the most of any in the series with his game management.
In the 10th inning, Baker put in Jonathan Broxton, which isn't a bad move in itself. Broxton went on to get back-to-back strikeouts after allowing the first two men to reach base. Catcher Ryan Hanigan then allowed a passed ball, so the baserunners moved up to second and third, but instead of walking Joaquin Arias to get to the pitcher's spot (and Bruce Bochy let the pitcher hit! That's even worse than Baker's blunder!) he allowed Broxton to pitch to Arias, who put the ball in play and got a run in on an error. Obviously the error isn't Baker's fault, but if Giants' pitcher Sergio Romo was standing in the on-deck circle and Baker chose to pitch to the guy who can hit instead of the guy who can't, that's just bad managing.

2016 Nationals
I want to mention briefly that the Reds made the NL Wild Card Game in 2013, but since it was just a one-game playoff, I'm not going to bother doing a whole writeup. The Pirates led the Reds 5-1 by the end of the fourth inning, so, again, there isn't much Dusty could have done to make it better for the Reds. On to the 2016 Nats.
The 2016 Nationals were second in baseball in pitching fWAR and seventh in hitting fWAR. They won the National League East rather handily (8 games over my beloved Mets) and then lost in five games in the NLDS to the Los Angeles Dodgers. In this series, Daniel Murphy hit fourth consistently. I couldn't tell you why, but that's what Dusty chose to do. He hit behind Jayson Werth. An MVP candidate hit behind Jayson Werth. Anthony Rendon also hit behind Werth. And this wasn't the last time Baker put together a lineup like this in a postseason series. This, for me, would be the beginning of the end of my patience with Baker if I was a Nationals fan. As if that weren't bad enough, though, he went on to construct an absolutely heinous lineup for games four and five of the 2017 NLDS, and that's what prompted me to write this post.

2017 Nationals
The 2017 Nationals obliterated the NL East (to be fair, though, most good teams would have). They won the division by 20 games with a 97-65 record, finished 6th in offensive fWAR, and 7th in pitching fWAR. Another good team that Dusty got the keys to and couldn't take to the promised land. One or two seasons with a good team and no results in the postseason could be a fluke, but seven postseason appearances with good teams and a lack of a World Series win seems to indicate something bigger about the manager. But if you don't believe me, check out the lineup Dusty Baker trotted out for games four and five of the NLDS against the Cubs:

Click here to see the lineup.
(Image courtesy of @Nationals on Twitter)


​The game five lineup was identical except Gio Gonzalez was the starting pitcher. I have so many questions about this lineup:
  1. Why is Jayson Werth hitting second? You have Harper, Zimmerman, Murphy, and Rendon, all of whom are better hitters than Werth, hitting below him. Why?
  2. Why is Anthony Rendon hitting sixth? If Baker just flipped Werth and Rendon this lineup would look so much better, but instead he has an MVP candidate hitting at the bottom of the middle-third of the order.
I have other questions too, like why Murphy is hitting behind Zimmerman, why Harper isn't hitting second, and more. Basically, I think that given the players that are in this lineup, this is one of the worst ways Baker could have configured it.

The Nationals went on to win the fourth game of the series, but lost the fifth. Whether that is actually due to lineup construction is unlikely, but the point is more that if he had hit Rendon in the two hole instead of Werth, the Cubs would have had to go through Turner-Rendon-Harper in the final inning, instead of Turner-Werth-Harper. Which one looks more daunting? It's pretty obviously the first combo of hitters. I don't know if Rendon would have actually reached base in that plate appearance, but he would have had a better chance of reaching base than Werth, I'm nearly certain of that. Yet another example of poor management not maximizing a team's chances to win. I'm not blaming the loss on him alone, but some of the blame has to be placed on Baker.

Here we have seven examples of a Baker-led teams that made it to the postseason and then couldn't finish the job once they got there. I don't work in the Nationals' front office, but if I did, I think it would be time for the franchise to part ways with Dusty Baker.

To read more by Max, check out his blog, Musings of a Baseball Addict.

(Image Credit: ABC News)

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