Hints of collusion laughable
Posted: Monday, January 26, 2009 4:56 PM
FIVE SWINGS:
1. MULTIPLE PUBLICATIONS AND WEB SITES…have outlined the All-Star caliber team of unsigned free agents. Watch "Meet the Press" Sunday morning and listen to the tales of economic doom we face as a country then read various accounts of the slow free agent signings featuring the word collusion and it's impossible to keep from laughing.
The gall of agents has no limit. Neither does the sense of entitlement wired into players. And the owners are also to blame. But every time over the 30-plus years of free agency that anyone has tried to exercise any caution/restraint/thought on free agents, collusion is tossed into the conversation.
Again, the owners are partly to blame after being nailed in their clumsy attempts to control the market in the late 1980s. That sad chapter is always cited by the aggrieved as justification to fear a repeat. But I have several conversations every day with friends across the sports landscape that have lost jobs in the last two months. That's real. And then I'm supposed to feel that a player has a grievance when no four-year, $40 million offer comes his way. Please.
2. WHICH BRINGS ME TO BEN SHEETS...He started last summer's All-Star Game and now hopes for a two-year deal. In some accounts, I read that he is unfairly victimized by the market.
Here's his resume: Last year was the first time in four years that he made at least 25 starts. He hasn't reached 200 innings in five years and in the final 15 games of last season, with his team in a desperate chase for the postseason, Sheets made two starts for a total of 4.1 innings. Over the same span, CC Sabathia made four starts, working 28.2 innings including the final day complete game that clinched a wild-card berth. Sabathia was rewarded for durability. Sheets will be paid as an injury-prone risk. The numbers bear out these conclusions.
What am I missing?
3. GREAT STATS FROM JEFF FLETCHER…a longtime Bay Area baseball writer now on his own website, baybridgebaseball.com. Fletcher attacked the question of Matt Holliday's home/road split. We've been conditioned to the huge discrepancy of all Colorado hitters but Fletcher took the analysis further and wondered how Holliday hit over the course of road trips.
His study found that Holliday's basic split (.357 home/.281 road) held during the first five games of road trips. Holliday averaged .277 over the first two games of trips and went to .291 by the fifth game. What is striking is that by the eighth game of road trips, few last longer than 9 or 10 games, Holliday was at .356. The numbers show there to be an adjustment period -- the longer Holliday was away from Coors Field, the more success he enjoyed at the plate.
I don't know if the A's had that info when they traded for Holliday but I have no doubt that agent Scott Boras will present them prominently in the Holliday Testament due for publication this fall.
4. BEST STORY OF THE WEEK…Oregon State basketball and its coach Craig Robinson. A dream week for the First Brother-In-Law started with a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, a second-row seat at the Inauguration and ended with a road sweep for the Beavers, their first in six years.
A team that went 0-19 in conference play last year (including a first-round tournament loss) and was completely embarrassed at every turn is now forging a new identity. Proof was the manner in which they won two games on the other team's floor -- by outplaying California in the final five minutes and thoroughly waxing Stanford for 40 minutes.
But Robinson is a story aside from the team. He is incredibly engaging, cooperative and brilliant in using newfound media attention to promote his program. Accounts from the players say he has been demanding, bringing structure to a team starved for direction. In two separate conversations this month, Robinson has taken no credit for the turnaround. Praise is spread throughout his team, to players who have responded to the challenges given them to assistant coaches who ran the team while the boss was at the Inauguration.
In over two decades of covering college basketball, never have I heard a head coach say that he was "training my assistants to be head coaches," as Robinson told me Saturday. Rare is the head coach who commands a standing ovation, as Robinson received walking on the court in Berkeley Thursday night BEFORE the game.
After Saturday's win at Stanford, close to 50 fans hovered near the courtside table to hear Robinson's radio interview, then waited to shake his hand and perhaps gain an autograph. I don't know Michelle Robinson Obama or her husband. If the siblings share personality traits, if the family bonds are strong, then we have gained a spectacular First Lady and a President with excellent judgment. Here's what I do know: Oregon State athletic director Bob DeCarolis made a great hire. And now he has an athletic director’s nightmare -- worrying about keeping Robinson in Corvallis.
5. GREAT NEW YORK TIMES STORY…Saturday on Brandon Jennings, the Californian who couldn't get the test scores necessary to play for Arizona and jumped at an offer to play for cash in Italy. At season's start, I mentioned that this was the biggest story of the college basketball season.
Would Jennings be a pioneer? The New York Times story casts doubt on that, Jennings outlining the harsh reality of a teen playing with men in a foreign country. Pay is erratic and so is playing time says Jennings.
I have no love of the "1-and-done" college player on several levels, foremost being the absurdity of associating said players with any concept of academic or student life. Those with enough skill to be drafted and those with no interest in college should not play the college game, even for one year. But the Jennings experiment -- and remember it was forced on him by ineligibility and the salesmanship of Sonny Vaccaro -- strikes me as a very low-risk play.
At least the "1-and-done" player receives campus adulation and national television fawning for the four months of his college season. What teenager do you know who wouldn't like that?
