The New York Times describes last night's Orioles victory over the Mets as
a practically unprecedented comeback by the Orioles, who had lost each of their previous 34 games when trailing after eight innings.
Setting aside the problematic syntax (which seems to say the Orioles were on a 34-game losing streak going into last night's game), the "after eight innings" standard is a little misleading. Last month, I took Mack to a matinee against the Blue Jays, his first-ever ballgame. More.
In a piece today about how the Washington Nationals' TV ratings are up this year, the Washington Post supplies a damning measurement of the franchise's unpopularity:
Even importing one warm body from every household that's tuning into to an average broadcast and adding that person to the existing average crowd would not fill Nationals Park; no other franchise faces a similar situation. In the Washington market, even the Baltimore Orioles (with a 0.75 rating) out-draw the Nationals.
How could anyone have foreseen that stealing the Montreal Expos would be such a failure? In 2002, for Washington City Paper, I consulted the historical record:
Here's how the longest-lived Senators, the 1901-1960 version, ranked in attendance in their last 10 years in the eight-team American League, before they pulled up the bases and went off to be the Minnesota Twins: sixth, sixth, sixth, seventh, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth.
Is that because the Senators were moribund by then, their fans put off by 50-some years of losing? Here's where their attendance ranked at the dawn of the century, in the first 10 years of the American League: fifth, seventh, eighth, eighth, seventh, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, seventh.
...
The Senators were unpopular when they were good (eight winning seasons between 1924 and 1933), and they were unpopular when they were bad. They were unpopular in a crumbling old ballpark and in a pair of brand-new ones. They were unpopular in war and in peace, in the depths of the Depression and in the postwar boom. Only once, when the G.I.s came home in 1946, did they top 1 million in attendance--and that still only ranked fifth in the league.
Montreal, by comparison, was a baseball hotbed.
When I was doing the piece, the Orioles told me that at their games, the no-show rate among people who'd bought tickets was about 20 percent, and that other teams were getting similar results. When I asked Major League Baseball for a complete set of no-show figures, the commissioner's office denied that any such figures existed at all. According to an MLB spokesperson, despite the fact that all the clubs kept a count of tickets sold and all the clubs had turnstiles at the gates, no one was subtracting the turnstile count from the ticket count and recording the difference. Really. Even though the Orioles had read to me from a list of those figures. That was what the commissioner's office said. The Orioles' version of things seemed more plausible, and more worrisome:
What the no-show rate says is that a rise in fandom isn't what's driving baseball's latest boom. Pundits worry that another strike might break the hearts of children and make dedicated fans stopped going to the ballpark. But baseball could see an overnight 20 percent drop in the gate if the people who already skip games merely stop buying tickets. The game is on the bubble along with everyone else.
In the Boston Globe today, I have a piece about the unhappy consumer experience of having a perfectly good product (e.g. Jack Purcells) "improved" until it's no longer what you wanted in the first place. (Reader reactions: "a collection of cranky rants by someone over the hill and afraid of change in any way"..."wrong and poorly thought out"...."You really need to get a life dude.")
As if in commemoration, when I went to the Giant this morning, I encountered a display stand full of no-boil lasagna noodles, a terrible substitute for real lasagna noodles and one which I thought had crept quietly back to hell after nearly taking over the market. I hope this doesn't mean the fake noodles are rallying.
Then when I went to buy a GE 150-watt light bulb, I discovered that the entire GE light-bulb section had been replaced with the Sylvania CFL Center--the Giant having evidently decided to embrace the dim, off-color, mercury-tainted environmentally pious compact-fluorescent-lit future I wrote about for the Observer a while ago.
Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours of doing something to achieve success at it. So as of today, I'm only about 9,974 hours away from getting people to stop taking Malcolm Gladwell seriously. The first 25 or so hours, I spent reporting and writing a piece for the Observer in 2006. Today I added maybe another hour of work for The Awl (though we spent some of that time on Adam Gopnik) trying to deal with Gladwell's insane contention that Rick Pitino and his 1996 Kentucky Wildcats were basketball overachievers, who defeated more-talented Goliaths through innovative strategy. Really. Poor Rick Pitino was stuck with only one player who went on to be an NBA All-Star. Only one future All-Star! How could any team succeed at college basketball with so little talent going for it?
In the Washington Post, I'm praising the National Enquirer. (Reader reactions: "The author is as sleezy as the tabloids are"..."With the Obamatons hell-bent to bring back the 'fairness doctrine' there will no longer be dirt on any 'liberal' type politician.")
As the hapless Orioles prepare to end what they're now calling "the Felix Pie experiment," here are some numbers to consider:
1. CF/RF, age 24: 364 career plate appearances, 13 doubles, 4 triples, 1 HR, .212 average / .272 OBP / .286 SLG
2. CF/LF, age 24: 348 career plate appearances, 14 doubles, 4 triples, 4 HR, .213 average / .278 OBP/ .315 SLG
No. 2 is Pie, one month into his age 24 season and apparently on his way to the end of the bench, if not to waivers. No. 1 is Brady Anderson.
I should note here that I hated the 24-year-old Brady Anderson. I hated the 25-year-old Anderson (.207 / .324 / .312) even more. By the time he was 26 (.231 / .327 / .308), I loathed him so much I turned my back on a game, staring out over the Memorial Stadium parking lot from the top row, when he came on to pinch-hit against the White Sox in a close game. He tripled.
So I am all too aware of how infuriating it can be to watch a young prospect with a lot of advance praise and no major-league results while he flails away at the plate, game after game, automatic out after automatic out. And Pie's automatic outs have been part of a disaster at the bottom of the order, in which the Orioles' 7 through 9 hitters have been worse than any other team's--including all the National League teams with the pitchers batting.
But I will be more infuriated if they take Pie out of the lineup.
The Sun--sorry, under the idiot rebranding, The BALTIMORE Sun--effectively quit the newspaper business this week. The layoff of 40 people, 20 percent of the newsroom staff, followed a mass firing of editors, including copy chief John McIntyre, who was one of the last people struggling to make what was left of The Sun read like a professional newspaper.
News of this latest, possibly mortal wound to the city's daily paper, meanwhile, rated two paragraphs on the Web site of City Paper, the newspaper I used to cover The Sun for, back in the era when City Paper used to cover The Sun. Now, it looks like that's other people's work:
This via Romanesko, the Baltimore Brew, and Editor & Publisher
The reference to those three sources that broke the news ahead of City Paper was later amended, so that "Romenesko" is now spelled correctly.
George Will, who habitually wears a bow tie despite being neither a butcher nor a chemist, complains today about the popular American affectation of wearing laborers' dungarees, even if one is not a laborer. This wearing of denim--which was drawn to his attention by an article in the Wall Street Journal (which he freely cites to pad his word count)--reflects America's hopeless fixation on juvenile frivolity, writes Will, the author of two books about the game of baseball.
Any loss to the Yankees is a bitter loss, but what made today's series-closing defeat particularly depressing was that the Orioles got a not-terrible performance from their starting pitcher, Alfredo Simon. Everyone expects starting pitching to be the worst feature of this team, and it almost certainly will be. This is not because the Orioles are making a necessary sacrifice while they wait for their can't-miss young arms to come up in 2010 or 2011. It's because they refused to pick up any medium-priced stopgapveterans--treating the back three-fifths of the rotation this year the way they treated the shortstop position last year, as a gaping unfilled hole, to symbolize the fact that it's just too tough and expensive to send a full, actual major-league team out to play 162 games every year.
So sooner or later, unless the Orioles get phenomenally lucky, and unless Mark Hendrickson turns into someone other than Mark Hendrickson, they are going to consistently get their brains beaten in, from the first inning on, between 40 and 60 percent of the time. And not long after that happens, the bullpen will be shredded to pulp, the way it was last year. And despite having a solid lineup, a good defense, and an outfield that is better man for man than the Yankees' outfield, they will lose a lot of games.
I hope I am wrong about this. I also hope I win the Powerball next time the jackpot gets big, so I can buy The Sun before it goes out of business.
At any rate, what was disheartening about the Yankees series, despite the two wins, was that if anything, the bullpen seemed to be trying to fall apart before the starters could put any strain on it. Yesterday, Japanese baseball pioneer Koji "Pumpsie" Uehara pitched a decent game, and the hitters provided plenty of run support. Then, when it was all but over, Dennis Sarfate came on. Watching Sarfate pitch--with his plunging curveball, live fastball, and random pitch placement--is like watching a man try to put out a kitchen fire by switching randomly back and forth between using a fire extinguisher and using a propane tank. An easy win turned into a panic-inducing near-collapse.
Today, Alfredo Simon pitched five adequate innings and handed the ball to Brian Bass. And watching Brian Bass pitch? Watching Brian Bass pitch was like watching a man try to put out a kitchen fire using a spray can of Pam.
