Mediocre March

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Congratulations MLB.

With the defending world champion Texas Rangers fading fast, Major League Baseball is all but guaranteed of not having a repeat World Series winner this year. This will make it 24 straight seasons no MLB team has been able to repeat.

The Rangers beat the Diamondbacks last year to win the World Series, and Arizona only got into the playoffs because they were the last of six wild card teams. The D-Backs won all of 84 games and were so pitching-thin during the World Series they had to use a bullpen game, showing how watered down and how much the bar has been lowered in Major League Baseball.

The Rangers aren’t even going to make the watered-down playoffs this year. Going into Wednesday, the Rangers were 9.5 games out in the AL West and 10 games out in the wild card.

Perhaps MLB should change its name to Mediocre Baseball League because that is exactly what the the Manfred Baseball League has become, and that took a lot of bad planning and bad decisions to put MLB in its current bad place.

Over in the NL, the Giants, Cardinals, Reds and Cubs are still in “the race’’ for the final wild card spot and as of Wednesday, none of those teams were over .500. The Roller Coaster Mets, three games over .500 after having lost four straight, were in the thick of things as those teams chasing the slumping Braves.

The Yankees are the last team to repeat, having won the World Series in 1998, ’99 and 2000. Before that, you must go back to the 1992-93 Toronto Blue Jays to find a repeat winner.

Those Yankees of that Three-peat era were much different than the current Yankees. Those Yankees had George Steinbrenner – the relentless owner as a driving force – and a keen baseball mind in Stick Michael making baseball decisions.

Now it is Hal Steinbrenner in charge and a legion of analytics-based baseball people. The Yankees do have Aaron Judge and free agent to be Juan Soto – and that home run tag-team could take them a long way in the 2024 postseason.

The art of winning is a lost cause these days, it is all about protecting the players from injury (and they still get hurt) and building that “sustainable’’ playoff team.

Or they could collapse in October like recent Yankee teams. The Yankees did not even make the playoffs last season and have not won a World Series since 2009.

No NL team has won back-to-back World Series titles since the Big Red Machine of 1975-76.

The San Francisco Giants of the Brian Sabean days won World Series titles in 2010, ’12 and ’14. Sabean did so well he could not find another job in charge of a team (who would want a three-time World Series winning baseball man in charge when you can hire someone who played club lacrosse at UCLA, or any number of Ivy Leaguers who took an analytics course and watched the movie Moneyball) and Sabean is now a senior advisor for the Yankees. How much advising the Yankees allow him to do is not known.

At least Sabean is in the game. Many baseball people are on the outside looking in wondering what happened to the game, ie: the glut of hitters batting under .200 but keeping their starting positions. The lack of situational awareness and hitting. The loss of base-running skills. The lack of bunting and strategy. The pure inability to bunt – check out Alex Verdugo’s recent popup attempt against the mighty White Sox. The absence of hit and run plays. The over-reliance on body armor for hitters, which has now found its way to baserunning with the comical oven mitts.

What’s next? With the Yankees Jazz Chisholm hurting his elbow sliding home, much like Gleyber Torres once did, are the over-protective Lords of Baseball now going to have runners wearing elbow oven mitts?

Here is a suggestion. How about having sliding practice in spring training or once every few months to teach players the proper way to slide and even better, when sliding into home, go feet first. Yes, Pete Rose perfected the headfirst slide but that was hard-nosed Pete Rose who also perfected the proper way to land headfirst, these players flop into home and other bases like beached whales. Kerplunk.

Here’s a thought: Hire baseball people who know baseball and let them do their jobs.

I talked to a World Series winning baseball man on Wednesday and he was totally perplexed with what has become of baseball.

“It’s terrible and it is so hard to watch,’’ he said. “There is no strategy anymore. There is no more small ball. It’s just exit velo, launch angle and spin rate. You have to use six, seven, eight, nine pitchers to get through a game. Starters barely give you five innings. The thing that really gets me is that if a starter struggles in the first or second inning, he’s getting the shit kicked out of him, they let him stay in the game because ‘We want him to get his five innings in.’

“If the guy can’t them out in the first inning, get his ass out of there, maybe you have a chance to win the game. Try to win the game.’’

That comment makes too much sense. The art of winning is a lost cause these days, it is all about protecting the players from injury (and they still get hurt) and building that “sustainable’’ playoff team.

Meanwhile, no team has repeated as a World Series champion for 24 years.

“Another thing,’’ the baseball man said. “These managers don’t want to manage. They don’t want to make decisions. They don’t want to tell a guy to bunt or pinch hit for someone because they don’t want to hurt the player’s feelings. They are just trying to keep the player on their side, trying to make everyone happy instead of making the tough decisions because that’s how they keep their jobs. They don’t want any of the players to be upset with them. You know how many times I’ve seen a tie game in the eighth or ninth inning, runners on first and second and they don’t bunt them over to get a run? They are going to let this guy hit, they got a .180 hitter, and they won’t bunt him and then he pops up, next guy double play, and next inning they get beat. Put the bunt down. Who cares if the player doesn’t like it, but they are all so worried about hurting the player’s feelings. That would mess up the chemistry.”

“You can’t worry about that and be a manager. All these managers are scared. They keep their job by keeping everybody happy. They worry more today about someone not getting hurt than winning the game. It’s like, ‘We can’t use this guy because he pitched two nights in a row.’ Tough shit.

“You see all the time someone else needs Tommy John surgery. I learned a long time ago that you have a greater chance of hurting your arm with inactivity than activity,’’ the lifetime baseball man said. “And I see a lot of bad mechanics these days because they’ve got college coaches as pitching coaches. I don’t even know any of these pitching coaches now. It’s gotten to the point where they let the analytic people tell them who to pitch and when to pitch and what pitches to throw. If you want a job you have to go through analytics.’’

That’s the truth. They are not managers; they are just an extension of the HR Department that happen to work in the dugout. And I don’t mean Home Run, I mean Human Resources.

This was one baseball man talking but I have heard similar comments from a legion of baseball men the last few years. The game is broken, and those now in charge don’t want to fix it. They don’t know how to fix it.

And let’s not forget: The cost of excellence is high.

“The owners don’t want to spend the money,’’ the baseball man said, growing more irritated. “And they are bringing in all kinds of money.’’

The Pirates are one of those teams not spending money. Pity the poor Pirates fan. The Pirates have a generational talent in pitcher Paul Skenes – and other good arms – but have not built a team around them, wasting all that pitching talent. The Pirates have lost 10 straight and find themselves eight games under .500 and 7 1/2 back in “the race’’ for the final NL wild card. Of the 13 position players on the roster, 11 of them are hitting under .250, most of them way under .250 and three players are hitting under .198.

The NL Central is a joke. The Cardinals are a huge money-making team. They have not won more than two games in a row over the last 44 games, and they are a mess offensively.

Here are the bottom five teams with runners in scoring position, three of them happen to come from the NL Central. The AL Central White Sox, of course, are at the bottom of the list with a pathetic .213 batting average with RISP. Then come the Rays, who don’t want to keep their hitters, at .218, the always overrated Cubs at .225, the Pirates at .228 and the Cardinals at .229.

The lack of situational hitting on these teams is beyond terrible.

But that is just one side of the game.

“Look at all the arm problems in baseball, we never had problems like that, I remember one year,’’ the baseball man said of a team he was running at the time, “we only had three guys on the disabled list all year. If someone had a little tightness in their arm, we’d say, take a few days off. I’ve got somebody else in the bullpen. Now if you get a hangnail, you have to bring up a guy from AA or AAA.’’

The baseball man let out a deep sigh and then said, “Oh well, we are just spinning our wheels talking about it.’’

Yes, the frustration runs deep about the mediocre state of the game.

Meanwhile, over in the NFL it is a much different world. It doesn’t always work out, of course, but teams seem to try their best to win in the NFL and the NFL has become America’s Game. The Kansas City Chiefs are looking for their third straight Super Bowl victory, trying to become that Dynasty the New England Patriots became under Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

You don’t have to love the Chiefs, but you have to respect them.

Bottom line: Fans love excellence, not mediocrity.