→ November 3, 2011
→ By

Sugar.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up, and I chatted about that and other stuff today as well.

—

I’d had Sugar – the 2008 baseball movie, as there are a few films by that tile – saved up on the DVR for months before finally getting around to watching it last night, since I was distracted by The Wire when I had some free time to sit and watch a show. Sugar might be the best pure baseball movie I’ve seen, except that at heart it’s not really a baseball movie, but a movie about being the ultimate fish out of water, and how baseball exploits one of its most dedicated underclasses.

Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic with arm strength but no real second pitch who signed at some point with the Kansas City Knights before the movie began for just $15,000. Early in the film, an American scout for the Knights visits the team’s academy in Boca Chica and teaches Sugar how to through a spike or knuckle curve, which becomes a separator for him and earns him an invite to spring training and eventually a spot in the rotation of the Bridgetown (Iowa) Swing, KC’s low-A affiliate. Once there, however, things don’t go as smoothly as Sugar and his family had hoped, either on the field, where a minor injury throws off his entire season, or off of it, where he’s isolated by age, culture, and language.

The film’s pacing was a real strength – there’s no racing through the early stages to rush to get Sugar to the U.S., so viewers unfamiliar with the feeder system in the Dominican Republic see something of where these players come from and how tough the odds are against them even getting to the U.S. This isn’t exploitation along the lines of slave labor or sweat shops, but these players often sign for very little money at 16 because their other economic opportunities are limited or nonexistent. Sugar doesn’t focus too much on the baseball season because the team’s performance is secondary to the story of the players; even when we see game action, it’s backdrop.

(The cinematography during those game sequences was really uneven; close-up shots of players throwing the ball around the infield were jerky and hard to watch, but the shots of Sugar pitching were perfect, right down to the change in angles from showing his face to showing the pitch reach the batter.)

Sugar himself is the only fully-developed character, but unlike many single-character movies, the various side characters who play significant roles still manage to contribute to the story without letting their one-dimensionality get in the movie’s way. Sugar stays with the Higgins family, an older couple on a farm a good distance from Bridgetown, providing the ultimate culture shock for Sugar, establishing just how out of water he is in Iowa and how much he’s hindered by language even in the most basic aspects of life, and adding a few moments of humor (the wife telling him to put “sopa” in the washing machine rather than “jabon”). And when things start to fall apart for Sugar, it’s to the Higgins that he turns, because his family has become so wrapped up in his potential for a lucrative baseball career that they are no longer there to support him. We never learn much about the Higgins’, but we shouldn’t – they fulfilled a critical role without unnecessary tangents.

The actor who plays Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto, wasn’t a professional actor but was seen playing baseball by the directors after their casting call didn’t turn up the ideal candidate. (Or so the story goes.) That use of non-professionals reminded me of City of God, a Brazilian film that also used local kids from the dangerous barrio of that name in Rio de Janeiro in what remains one of the best movies I’ve seen. In both movies, which couldn’t be more different in tone or subject matter, there’s a lack of polish to the central characters that makes them look and sound more real.

I mentioned on Twitter that there were minor inaccuracies, but I was happy to forgive them because they were there in service of a stronger plot and consistent pacing. For a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic to pick up a spike curveball one fall/winter, then earn an invite to spring training, and then be assigned to a full-season club as a starter is not impossible, but it’s extremely unlikely – and the type of pitcher who’d travel that path wouldn’t find himself in the position Sugar was in later in the film. And that spike curveball is a problem – Sugar is seen throwing it for strikes once he gets the hang of it, but it’s probably the hardest pitch to command, and very few big leaguers throw it; it’s more common for player development folks to convert pitchers from the spike to a traditional curveball or to a slider because the spike is so often in the dirt. I also found it odd that the Stanford alum was so slow to pick up on Sugar’s lack of English skills, but then again, he was also a really nice guy when we know all Stanford alumni are insufferable.

But the filmmakers here seemed to be in command of the points where they bent reality. Moving Sugar along so quickly is necessary; the alternatives are a much longer film or inserting a “six months later…” gap. The spike curveball isn’t the ideal pitch for that situation, but it has a benefit – the grip used to throw one is so unusual relative to those on other pitches that it would be evident to non-baseball fans that this was a new pitch for Sugar. Even when the waitress in the famous “fren toas” scene read a little false to me when she asked Sugar how he wanted his eggs, but that slight off-note came back around thirty seconds later when she brought the food to the table in one of the best scenes in the film.

It would be impossible to avoid comparing Sugar to that baseball movie that came out earlier this fall, which I didn’t like as a movie or as a baseball movie. Sugar has moments of sentiment, but there’s no manipulation of the audience to create them. The main character’s struggles, even though they will be foreign to most U.S. viewers, resonated far more strongly with me because they get at fundamental human needs – the need to belong, to fit in, to succeed, to live up to others’ expectations. And while Sugar doesn’t have a villain on the order of the fictionalized Grady Fuson, it should open some eyes to how much the current system exploits young Latin American players, particularly Dominican players, and discards them if they’re no longer useful to their parent clubs. Some major league teams are better at assimilating Latin American players – particularly in terms of teaching them English – but some are worse, and I know of none that help players once they’re released. (And don’t get me started on our nation’s immigration policies.) The directors made these issues evident to viewers without letting them interfere with the story. This film is about Sugar Santos and his own personal development because of baseball, for better and later for worse, and it deserves a much, much wider audience than it has received to date.

(I might have been kidding about the Stanford stuff, though.)

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→ September 14, 2011
→ By

Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Job opening in the baseball industry.

An industry contact of mine is looking to fill an entry-level analyst position and asked me to post this here for my readers. It’s a good opportunity for someone who fits their requirements. Just to be clear, this job is not connected to ESPN or to me personally, and I can’t answer any questions about the position. Good luck.

—

We have a position available for recent college graduates with a passion for baseball. We are a well-known sports entity, and we are hiring an analyst in our MLB research group. This position is in Southern California (relocation not provided).

Ideally, we are seeking a recent graduate (entry level or 1-2 years of experience). A bachelor’s degree (or better) from a prestigious university is preferred, but sufficient relevant experience will be considered. Experience in the team-sports environment is heavily preferred.

If interested, please reply to the following address by September 9: baseballresume@gmail.com

In the subject line of the email, please put “Research Job.”

The body of your email should first contain your resume, appropriately formatted. In addition to the traditional resume information, please be sure to include any details about athletic experience.

Below your resume, please put 1) your full contact information, 2) how you obtained this listing, and 3) your minimum annual salary requirement. The salary requirement needs to be a specific dollar figure. Applications without that information will not be considered.

No cover letters or attachments. Responses with attachments will be discarded.

Candidates must be able to get themselves to Southern California for an interview. Thank you for your interest!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ November 3, 2010
→ By

Mint Condition.

UPDATE: Folks, the line about Old Hoss Radbourn being my alter ego is a joke. I’m not Hoss, but he and I have had some fun with the rumor that I am. He’s incredibly clever and I’m flattered to be thought the source, but it’s not me.

—

I received a comp copy of Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession back in the spring through my connection with the guys at mental floss, but got backed up in my reading between the move and writing playoff previews that I just got around to the book now. If you’ve got any history of collecting baseball cards (I do) or an interest in that tangential part of baseball history, I highly recommend the book, a quick, fun, occasionally funny run through the history of the baseball card, one that disabused me of a handful of card myths I thought were true.

Jamieson, who must be roughly my age as he too collected a hoard of cards that are no longer worth the cardboard they’re printed on, goes back to the origins of the baseball card as a way to sell tobacco, allegedly to adults but, hey, if a few kids caught the leaf habit, so much the better. Many of those tobacco cards are, of course, major collectors’ items today, but what I didn’t realize is that they’re rare not just because they weren’t kept but because they varied so widely – manufacturers would issue many different cards per player, with different brands advertised on the backs or different portraits on the fronts, for example. Jamieson discusses the history and myth behind the T206 Honus Wagner card, but also points out that it’s not the rarest card in history (another card in the same set, the T206 “Slow” Joe Doyle error card, is definitely rarer). Instead, Jamieson posits, the Wagner card became more valuable because it was deemed valuable in the first place: The media attention paid to the card when it sold for record-breaking sums made it more desirable to other, status-seeking collectors down the road.

He jumps forward a bit to the period after World War II when the card industry really boomed with the introduction of Bowman and Topps cards, as well as the latter’s monopolization of the industry that lasted until Fleer won an antitrust lawsuit in 1981. Topps’ actions to create and defend a monopoly occurred at the same time that the MLB Players’ Association was getting started, and while at first the MLBPA was willing to let Topps have its run of the joint, Marvin Miller’s first order of business was to end Topps’ free ride and begin returning that lost value to the players – making the union, which was battling one monopoly in MLB management, a willing partner to another monopoly in the baseball card realm. From there, Jamieson chronicles the rise and fall of the collectors’ boom in baseball cards, drawing much of his material from Pete Williams’ 1995 book Card Sharks, on the formation of Upper Deck and the creative destruction it brought to the baseball card industry, a very good story in its own right.

Jamieson keeps the book from turning into dry history by, naturally, finding and discussing a few notable eccentrics along the way. I particularly enjoyed the section on Woody Gelman, longtime head of Topps’ Product Development team and the creator of, among other icons, Bazooka Joe and the Mars Attacks! series. (I remember seeing Topps’ Wacky Packages as a kid, possibly the first time I ever ran into (or understood) parody in any form, but I don’t think I realized until I read this book that they were a Topps product.) Jamieson also takes us inside the collection of a former owner of that T206 Wagner, and looks at the rise of both card auction outfits, card authentication services, and the “ethical” card doctor who doctors worthless cards to better understand how fraudsters do it to create valuable ones. And I’d be remiss if I omitted the part my alter ego friend Old Hoss Radbourn played in the book, with a quietly extended middle finger in a few early cards of himself. That’s right: Old Hoss may have invented photobombing.

The book ends with a lament on the slow death of baseball cards, a phenomenon for which Jamieson explores various causes but can’t pinpoint a single reason for boys’ lack of interest in something so innate to his (and my) childhood. (I will offer that steroids have jack squat to do with it, since interest in MLB and minor league baseball grew substantially during the “steroid era.”) I do agree with his point that cheapening the core product by adding “chase cards” – prizes, limited edition cards, or other package inserts that weren’t just plain old cards of everyday players – didn’t help, but I think the fact that the cards themselves lack any interactivity is a huge part of why they’ve fallen so far out of favor. If you’re a kid today, what are you going to do with a pack of baseball cards? There’s no game or challenge involved, and I’d be hard-pressed to explain to an 8-year-old boy why I thought baseball cards were fun. They just were. The cards haven’t really changed, but maybe the definition of fun has.

At about 240 pages, Mint Condition is a very quick read, well under four hours for me, but in that short space it managed to fill a gap in my knowledge of baseball history, one I doubt I would have explored on my own since I left my baseball card affinity back the 1980s. Aside from the unsatisfying conclusion and some need for a better copyeditor, it’s well worth your time.

Next up: I’m crawling through the desert of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt.

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→ June 7, 2010
→ By

Draft day 2010.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS tonight during the draft, probably once a half hour, starting at 7:10 and 7:40 pm EDT. When I’m not in the studio I’ll be live-blogging with Jason Churchill on ESPN.com, and there’s a Cover It Live event as well. Also scheduled to be on The FAN 590 in Toronto tonight at 6:05 pm.

All my draft content is up now. The last full mock draft is up, and you can see the full index of player cards, maybe 110-120 … I lost count. I chatted today and will chat again Tuesday at 1 pm.

Thank you all for bearing with me over the last few weeks. I should have a dish post or two up later this week before I head out on vacation.

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→ February 19, 2010
→ By

Draft blog is live.

Incredibly premature ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up now, for Insiders, as is my piece on Bryce Harper, Levon Washington, and a few JC arms. Jason Churchill’s first piece on the draft blog, previewing the first weekend in the Division 1 season, is also live.

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→ February 6, 2010
→ By

Game Six.

I received a review copy of Mark Frost’s Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime in October, but just got to it now because my book queue at the time was running around 3-4 months. (Thanks to Ulysses and Christmas, it’s now closer to six.) I started it right after finishing Mrs. Dalloway (more on that book later) and put it down before I got to page 20, because it is garbage – florid prose with huge, unsourced, inaccurate statements on baseball would kill even a great story, which I’m not sure Game Six even offers. The phrase that killed me was in a fanboyish passage on Fred Lynn: “what was beyond dispute the most sensational rookie season of any player in the history of pro baseball…” If Frost wants to argue that Lynn had what was – to that point, I assume – the greatest rookie season in MLB history, I suppose there’s a case to be made, and he could probably weasel out of an argument behind his bizarre choice of “most sensational,” which now joins “most feared” in the pantheon of phrases the innumerate like to use to try to argue their way past the stats they don’t understand. But “beyond dispute” set off alarm bells – in a book with no stats or sources, it’s like saying “check my work” – and it didn’t take long to cook up a dispute:

Player Year Age OPS+ wRC+ wOBA
Ted Williams 1939 20 160 168 .464
Dick Allen 1964 22 162 167 .403
Fred Lynn 1975 23 161 163 .427

(OPS+ from Baseball-Reference; wRC+ and wOBA from Fangraphs.)

So Ted Williams – who, by the way, played for one of the two teams in Frost’s book – had 37 points of wOBA+ over Lynn despite being three years younger during his rookie season. But it is “beyond dispute” that Lynn’s season was the “most sensational” ever by a rookie? Okay, sparky. I’ll just put the book down now, because when I read a baseball book, I want it to at least get the baseball stuff right.

That quote wasn’t the only problem I found in the first fifteen pages; Frost is clearly out to lionize his subjects, including the reporters who covered the game, and he prints inner monologues from long-dead people that have to be his own interpretations or creations, which had me questioning every statement that wasn’t backed up by an actual quote from someone involved in or covering the game. If this was a book about a famous soccer match, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed these inaccuracies or errors and just kept right on moving, but knowing a little about the game and even knowing some of the people mentioned in the book (or at worst being two degrees away), I found it unreadable.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ January 27, 2010
→ By

The prospect package.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up this morning, and it will all be followed on Thursday morning by the master ranking of the top 100 prospects plus top tens for all 30 organizations and an article on the ten guys who just missed the main 100. ESPNDeportes.com will have my ranking of the top 40 Latin American prospects in the minors, limited to players born outside the U.S.

I’ll chat Thursday at 1 pm, and I believe we have two other prospects chatting tomorrow, including #1 overall prospect Jason Heyward.

And on Friday, I’ll have an article on at least one sleeper in each organization who could make the big leap on to the list next year; last year’s list had around 32 names in total, and I think 14 ended up on this year’s top 100.

As for the dish, I hope to resume regular blogging tomorrow night, probably with a long-overdue writeup of Power Grid. Thanks for your patience.

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→ July 14, 2009
→ By

Keith & Jason podcast #2.

Available for stream or download. Topics included the Futures Game and the idea of “untouchable” prospects in trades.

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→ July 4, 2009
→ By

Matt Wieters Facts: The T-shirt.

I’m sure a few of you have seen the Matt Wieters tribute site, Matt Wieters Facts, which includes a quote they pulled from one of my chats: “Sliced bread is actually the best thing since Matt Wieters.” The guys at MWF threw that quote on a T-shirt with a graphic of sliced bread (of course), and they’ve agreed to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the shirt to the GlobalGiving project to help disabled children in Kenya.

That was some pretty good bread, though.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,