Bring on the Winter

 

So that’s it. The Boston Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies to win the 2007 World Series and another baseball season comes to a close. You’d think that, as such a big fan of the game, I’d be sad to watch the year end, but to tell the truth, I’m glad to see the back of the ’07 season.

           
The year didn’t start well (if you look back to my post on the Oakland A’s off-season from the spring) for Oakland, and just never got on track. As an Athletics fan, I was used to slow starts (I can’t remember the last time the A’s entered June with a winning record), but I was also used to the team rallying in the second half of the season. For weeks after the All Star Break I kept watching A’s games, waiting for the team to catch on to their season plot, start winning games, and come back to take the American League West. I kept waiting, and waiting… and waiting. Then, out of nowhere, it was August and the A’s were still a losing team.

 

This was the year that the A’s stopped “getting good” in the second half. An inexperienced coaching staff and a steady stream of devastating injuries made sure this team didn’t mount their traditional comeback, and it left Oakland fans wondering where it all went wrong. For next season, all that fans can do is hope the A’s stay healthy (which has been a problem for a few years) and pray that they remember how a season is supposed to go in Oakland – start slow, get hot, and fade in the playoffs. 

 

Of course, the playoffs weren’t much better. A string of disappointing early rounds led to possibly the most boring World Series I’ve ever watched. From the time the playoffs started, most of the baseball world knew that the fight for the National League pennant was just teams trying their hardest for the honor of losing to whoever won in the AL. The Boston Red Sox simply demoralized the Colorado Rockies in four games, which were, for anyone other than Sox fans, painful to watch. In the end, I would guess that I watched about four total innings of the World Series, and I think that was plenty.

 

This hasn’t been a great year, for A’s fans or fans of Major League Baseball in general. Thankfully, the Red Sox put a mercifully quick end to this year by sweeping the Rockies, and we can look to 2008 with hope of a better – if not more entertaining – season. Our long national nightmare is over. I’m such a nerd…

Watching History I’d Rather Not See

It’s a beautiful summer day at Wrigley Field. The thunderstorms that soaked the area the night before are nowhere to be found, and Barry Bonds steps up to the plate in the second inning to a chorus of boos. It was a great day: the Cubs were leading 4-0 (and would go on to win the game 9-8), I was seeing my first game from inside the “friendly confines,” and I was emphatically jeering my least favorite player in baseball.

Then Barry had to ruin it by blasting the first pitch he saw for his 752^nd career home run.

I knew it, pitcher Ted Lilly knew it, and the 40,000 other people at Wrigley knew it the second Bonds swung his bat. The ball sailed out of park and onto North Sheffield Avenue putting him one home run closer to Hank Aaron’s all-time record of 755.

And as he rounded the bases, I booed.

In the seventh inning, he did it again, this time with a three-run shot that barely cleared the ivy-covered walls of the Wrigley outfield for number 753. Again, I booed.

As you may be able to tell by now, I’m not a big fan of Barry Bonds. I think he’s a part of a steroid trend that is ruining baseball, and I’m more excited about Bonds being indicted for perjury than I am about him passing Aaron’s record. So, watching Barry’s steroid-inflated head (it’s grown a full hat size since 199 round the bases (again) while booing my head off (again), I was conflicted.

Yes, Bonds is in my mind the worst thing to happen to baseball in a very long time, and yes, I can’t stand him. But I had just seen two impressive home runs (one literally out of the ballpark, the other into a stiff Chicago wind) to put a player within two homers of what many writes call the most hallowed records in sports.

How was I supposed to feel? Should I be angry I had seen a ‘roid-raging jerk (I doubt stronger language would be allowed) bring himself closer to a record? Or should I save my ticket, game program, and hot dog wrapper to sell on eBay, and be excited to have seen the home runs?

I’ve since decided to do both. I still can’t stand Barry Bonds and I’m still waiting for people (i.e. federal prosecutors and grand juries) to confirm he lied under oath about taking steroids. Then again, I got to see a fantastic ballgame at the best stadium in the baseball, not to mention a couple of extraordinary home runs by a person on his way to breaking the all-time record.

Even if that person is a steroid-pumping, fan-hating, under-oath-to-a-grand-jury-lying cheater.

Baseball Hall of Fame

This shouldn’t be Mark McGuire’s ballot to not shine. As an A’s fan, even I have to say that he doesn’t deserve to get into the Hall of Fame (HOF) – not on the first ballot, not on any ballot. In a Cooperstown class that has seen Cal Ripken, Jr. and Tony Gwynn get some of the highest vote percentages in HOF history, the word will be all about how little Mark McGuire got.

Ripken received 98.53% (537 of 545 ballots cast), well more than the 75% needed to get into the Hall. He fell just short of the record of 98.83% set by Tom Seaver. Gwynn came close to that record, too with 97.6%. But despite these two great players who did so much for the game, the big story has been McGuire. By receiving just 23.5% of the vote, all of the polls were proved correct, and the former Bash Brother was denied a spot in the hall. The other half of that forearm-slapping duo, Jose Canseco, received just 1.1%.

In an effort not to be a part of the problem, I’ll talk about the great careers that Ripken and Gwynn had, and not the 2007 non-election of Big Mac.

Gwynn and Ripken were always the “good-guys” of baseball, and it’s hard to find somebody who thinks they were a bad influence on the game. There is no controversy with Tony and Cal, only fond memories of a time when steroids were (if not gone) than out of the picture.

Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played record, and by the time he was done had started in 2,632 games without a day off. Though this is his most famous record, he also has over 400 home runs, owns the record for being the oldest man to hit a homer in the All-Star Game (although the pitcher was basically having batting practice with Cal) and is a member of the prestigious 3,000 hit club. He joins six other former Baltimore Orioles players who were also elected on their first ballot.

Tony Gwynn is also a 3,000 hit club member, but is most famous for a “what could have been” moment. In 1994, Gwynn was on pace to become the first player since the great Ted Williams to hit .400 for a season, until the year was cut short by the famous ’94 strike. He currently coaches at his alma mater, San Diego State.   

So congrats to Tony and Cal, they were the guys who remind us of what used to be great about baseball. Their era was ignorant –  if not clean – of performance enhancing drugs, and they were the last of a generation of great players from before the steroid era of today. Hopefully, McGuire and Canseco won’t be such a big story next year, and with any luck, the 2008 class will have guys as good as Ripken and Gwynn.