Let’s make fun of Bill McClellan in the style of FJM in which we mock every word of his most recent column (minus the acerbic wit that made FJM brilliant). Shall we?
Let’s.
For as long as I have lived here, Cardinals fans have called themselves the best fans in baseball. At one time that claim had to do with a certain level of sophistication.
The “best fans in baseball” is a lame claim, true. I’m skeptical about whether fans are any more or less sophisticated now than they were in whatever era Bill McClellan deems to be a more nuanced and subtle age. It’s likely that the subset of fans who get all their information from the radio have suffered in sophistication following Jack Buck’s retirement. I love Mike Shannon as much as the next fan, but he definitely comes up short of Buck’s high standard when it came to calling a game while unobtrusively teaching it.
Cardinals fans would applaud a batter who gave himself up and moved a runner to third by hitting to the right side with no outs. They appreciated a hitter who’d take a couple of pitches to give a potential base stealer a chance to run. Cardinals fans knew their baseball and appreciated effort.
How surprising that Bill McClellan, who came to St. Louis in 1980, considers his formative years in the ’80s to be the Golden Age of baseball fan sophistication. Trust me, Bill: fans still appreciate stolen bases and runners advancing but are sophisticated enough now to understand how risky base stealing is and how much more valuable the out “given up” is to the advancement of that base runner in almost all situations. We might appreciate that a well placed, poorly hit ball with a runner on first and no outs is less bad than a poorly placed, poorly hit ball, but you’ll have to forgive us for not exploding in joyous revelry at the marginal benefit. And as for taking a couple pitches: I may never have applauded Rick Ankiel more gratefully than after he walked to end a 17-pitch plate appearance, although perhaps McClellan shook his head at such lawyer-ball when Ank failed to ground out to the right side in that men-on, no out situation.
In fact, they demanded effort. In August 1981, when Garry Templeton didn’t run out a ground ball, the fans booed, and he responded with an obscene gesture. Next thing you know, he was traded to San Diego for Ozzie Smith.
This conflates a lot of history. Templeton already had a prickly relationship with the fans. At the time (Aug. 26, 1981), he was getting on base at a .291 clip as a lead-off hitter with a .261 batting average and a below-average defender at shortstop. He hadn’t walked in almost three months (with plenty of time lost to injury). His backup was a home-grown switch-hitter who’d been filling in during Templeton’s lengthy stints on the DL and was sporting a .333 average on 8/26/1981.
I’m not so sure they’d boo Templeton now.
Nonsense. Of course he would get booed, just like Tino Martinez was when he was stinking it up at 1st while Pujols was stuck in left with a bum throwing arm. I’m sure Miguel Cairo was heckled back in 2003 when he’d give Bo Hart a breather, and Miguel Cairo never had any personality conflicts with St. Louis fans. (He just wasn’t as good a baseball hitter as we would have liked.)
Last year, when Yadier Molina didn’t run out a pop-up and announcer Al Hrabosky had the audacity to mention that fact, manager Tony La Russa was angry. He said that Hrabosky “should be ashamed of himself.”
Here’s the video of the play in question. Bases loaded, Molina pops up to shallow left. Theriot goes out to field it, runners stay put so they aren’t doubled off when the ball’s caught in the shallow outfield. Soriano botches the play and drops the ball, all the runners move up a base, but Ankiel is thrown out at 2nd. Molina is safe at first. If McClellan thinks the fans should have booed Molina for that play, he’s a fool, if only because they’d all be looking to the outfield and not at Molina’s hustle to pass up Ankiel on the bases. If he doesn’t think the fans should have booed him, he’s talking out of his ass.
It was not as if Hrabosky slammed Molina. According to a newspaper account, Hrabosky said, “Molina did not run at all. I’m not saying you’ve got to sprint down there, but you’ve got to do something a little more than this. That’s terrible.”
He was safe. He drove in a run. Hrabosky’s a clown. McClellan’s some kind of whimsy writer who’s decided to do his column about sports, one of the few sections of the newspaper where reporters have set beats that they genuinely know how to research on their own (in the case of very good writers like D. Goold.)
That pales compared to what old-timers like Harry Caray used to say about players, but that was then and this is now. Criticism is no longer considered fair play.
The Cardinals had one sub-.500 team in the last decade and have been one of the most successful teams of late. The Cardinals won the World Series in 1945 1946, Caray’s second season with the team and didn’t make the postseason again until the memorable 1964 season. In the interim, Caray covered teams far more frustrating than the 2007 rebuilding year or the 2003 bullpen craptacular.
The best fans in baseball have evolved into the most devoted fans.
As I said, we never were the best fans in baseball, and it’s silly and arrogant to claim it’s so. And if you want to hear about our fan’s recent devotion, give franchise saves leader Jason Isringhausen a phone call.
That’s why La Russa felt comfortable in 2008 suggesting the team sign Barry Bonds. He knew Cardinals fans would embrace him. After all, he’d be a Cardinal.
Bull. Shit. La Russa knew that Barry Bonds is the second best hitter in the history of baseball (after the Babe) and I guess he trusted the anti-PED regime enough to give him a shot. The fans would have had a prickly relationship with Bonds just as we had with Templeton during his successful years prior to 1981.
There is something heartwarming about this unconditional love for all things Cardinal, but something strange, too. “The Stepford Wives” meet “Field of Dreams.”
I understand. You’re nostalgic for the ’80s, when baseball fans weren’t the non-booing automatons watching an imaginary game in the bleachers with a famous, reclusive author they’d kidnapped. What is this supposed to be except a childish insult at today’s youths?
Last year, I heard normally sensible people suggesting that Matt Holliday would re-sign with the Cardinals if the fans somehow demonstrated the depth of their love. Huh? It’s not all about money? No, said the most devoted fans in baseball. Love can conquer all.
I suppose it’s possible that there is a non-zero-cardinality intersection for the sets of Cardinal fans, hippies, and sensible people, but this anecdote only tells me that some of your friends are dopes.
After Holliday dropped a fly ball in the playoffs, the Cardinals fans gave him a standing ovation when the team returned home.
Matt Holliday put up a 168 OPS+ after joining the Cardinals. The last time the Cardinals had a player aside from Albert Pujols put up offensive numbers that far better than league average was the great MV3 season of 2004, when Jim Edmonds had an OPS+ of 170 (Scott Rolen was at 157, a league-average player is at 100.)
Now try to follow this, McClellan: Win Expectancy measures the percentage of the time the home team wins a game given a particular game situation. Before Holliday took that line drive to the groin, we were up by one on the road with two outs in the ninth and the bases empty. 17.3% of games played from 1977 through 2006 in which the identical situation came up were won by the home team (see for yourself), so the teams that had been in the Cardinals situation went on to win 82.7% of the time. After Holliday misplayed Loney’s drive, the situation was visiting team up by a run, two outs, runner on second. The visiting team won in such a situation 81.6% of the time. Holliday had gotten us to the playoffs, then cost us, historically, a little over a percentage point in win expectancy with that play. Ryan Franklin, who’d struggled down the stretch, then walked a batter, gave up a tying single on a cock-high curve to Jabba the Hutt that with a little luck would have been hit slightly earlier and been nabbed by Brenden Ryan, walked another batter, and gave up another single to send everyone home.
Two days later, do you expect fans to greet Matt Holliday at the start of an elimination game in the NLDS with a round of catcalls after the boost he’d provided in the regular season? Perhaps if the Cards had managed a lead and Tony went to Franklin to close it out you would have heard some booing, but I’d expect nervous clapping would be more widespread.
These demonstrations of unconditional love can be classy or strange.
The fans’ love for Matt Holliday was surely conditional on him either getting his bat going in Game 3 of the NLDS (many fans soured on him after that series, trust me) or on him re-signing with the Cardinals (some are soured on him for the way Boras extended the negotiations and all but a small minority would have hated him if he’d gone to the Mets. If he’d signed with a NL Central team, he would be the most reviled visiting player in St. Louis in 2010 and beyond.)
I thought it was strange when La Russa was given a standing ovation by a spring-training crowd the day after being arrested for driving under the influence
The folks who show up to Spring Training are a pretty die-hard bunch. McClellan sees strange devotion and unconditional love; I see forgiveness and support. It’s difficult to communicate complex messages in cheering crowd. It’s just too difficult to coordinate a chant of: “You made a mistake and are getting destroyed in the press. We don’t particularly respect the press because of their pack mentality. Don’t screw up like this again. We hope this isn’t a distraction at your job. Get past this and win some games this year.”
[B]ut I thought it was classy when Cardinals fans gave Jim Edmonds an ovation when he returned as a Cub. After all, Edmonds had some big years here. Had the ovation for Holliday been of that variety — a thank you for the good half-year he had here — I’d have thought it was classy. But it seemed more about “Stay here. We love you.”
Are all standing ovations either Classy or Strange? Can’t there be supportive standing ovations? I was enthusiastically part of the standing ovation we gave to Larry Walker after his first plate appearance in Busch Stadium. (A strikeout). I don’t know how that fit into McClellan’s Bi-Modal Ontology of the Standing O, but I liked it and Larry liked it. I imagine the fans at game 3 liked cheering for Holliday after he’d had a bad game and needed a good one; I imagine he did, too. I also think cheering for a guy when’s he’s introduced to the field makes more sense than booing for him.
Not surprisingly, at the end of the year, the ovation meant nothing. Holliday became a free agent. He even indicated a preference for the big-market teams on the coasts, but that did not work out, and he signed a $120 million contract to come back here. That was great news for the Cardinals, but I still hear people talking about how Holliday ended up where he wanted to be.
How did he indicate a preference for the coasts? He’s consistently said that he wanted a long-term contract with a no-trade clause. His agent wanted to get him Texeira money and flirted with the deep-pockets, big-market coastal teams in an attempt to shake that kind of coin loose, if only to drive the negotiations with the Cardinals. (Did McClellan take seriously the reports of the East Coast Orioles designs on Matt Holliday?) Holliday signed for one fewer year and $60 million less than Texeira’s contract and includes $2 million dollars of annual salary deferred without interest, for the record. The contract is similarly a year shorter than the extension Rolen signed with the Cards after the season we acquired him via trade. He got a fair contract for a free agent of his skill and durability. I look forward to watching him play for the next several years and pity bitter nostalgists whose memories to be made will be marred by Scott Boras’ posturing.
He didn’t. That body of water near Busch Stadium is not an ocean. It’s a river. You can see across it. That’s a clue it’s not an ocean.
This paragraph mocks itself.
The latest standing ovation, of course, was given to Mark McGwire at the team’s Winter Warm-Up last weekend. Again, it seemed a demonstration of unconditional love.
Love for Mark McGwire is conditional on how well the Cardinals bat this season. He’s done good work with Skip Schumaker and Chris Duncan (who was a potent bat in our lineup when healthy). If Brenden Ryan, who’s working out with McGwire this offseason, breaks camp with some ability to take walks and drive the ball, Mark McGwire will deserve all the credit he gets.
The standing ovation, I’d wager, was largely as enthusiastic as it was after the high-horsed media coverage of his confession. My immediate reaction was similar to that of baseball’s greatest active writer, Joe Posnanski. It was the Top Story on Robin Meade’s show when I woke up, where the Chicago native sports reporter was glowing in his shock and disdain for McGwire. McClellan’s colleague Bernie Micklasz put it well:
Never surprised by my media brethren. Step 1: moralize and demand that McGwire come clean; Step: 2: moralize and condemn when he does.
That’s how it happened, let no one imagine it otherwise.
At that same event, Jack Clark was booed. The former Cardinals slugger had had the temerity to call McGwire a cheat and a fraud, and to say that all the steroid users should be banned from baseball.
Jack the Ripper’s ’87 season should have been enough to earn him the love of all Cardinals fans in perpetuity. I don’t agree with his opinion here, though. McGwire’s the whipping boy right now, but he’s been more honorable about his steroids use by admitting to it late than, for example, Rafael Palmeiro, who vigorously denied using before being outed by leaked test results; or Sammy Sosa, who feigned ignorance of the English language at the hearing that turned Mark McGwire from the man who saved baseball from the strike into the butt of jokes.
I don’t feel that strongly about it myself. I wouldn’t even ban steroid users from the Hall of Fame. That’s a subjective thing anyway — why aren’t Ted Simmons and Ken Boyer in the Hall?
Everything he’s written here is unobjectionable.
[S]o I’d look at the steroid users and try to figure out if they’d have been superstars without performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds and Roger Clemens? Yes.
How did McClellan come to these (certainly correct) conclusions?
McGwire? Without steroids, he was at best Dave Kingman.
This is pure horse shit. Dave Kingman walked in 8.2% of his career plate appearances. Mark McGwire walked in 17.2% of his plate appearances. McGwire slugged over .600 in ten of sixteen seasons and over .700 in four seasons; Kingman slugged over .600 once in his sixteen seasons. I don’t have any reason to believe that steroids are anything resembling a magical route to hitting baseballs as well as Mark McGwire did in his career, even if you start at Kingman’s level, assuming he didn’t use, too. The fact that the vast majority of players who are known to have failed a drug test were, frankly, lousy players is evidence enough of that. That professional writers are perpetuating the myth that steroids are just that effective strikes me as irresponsible. For what I consider the most reasonable responses to McGwire’s confession: pick a Dan, either Dan.
While I would not put him in the Hall of Fame, I would not ban him from baseball. I believe in the redemptive power of forgiveness. But to forgive is one thing and to cheer wildly is another. The most devoted fans in baseball would give McGwire a standing ovation. The best fans in baseball would not. They would have too much respect for the game.
He was an exciting player to watch and people are excited to see if he can improve our offense. Give ‘em a break.
That’s all. I just spent a couple of hours making fun of a crap whimsy column. Last time I’ll ever read Bill McClellan.
If you need some brain-soap after reading that column, here’s some good stuff.