When I finished my last book, I was not necessarily sure what book I wanted to read next. None of the books I had at my immediate disposal really captured my attention. I thought I was going to read another college football/basketball book, but then I stumbled upon a little piece about God Save the Fan, a book by Will Leitch, the editor of the popular Deadspin sports blog, in that week's Sports Illustrated. I was familiar with Deadspin, but didn't really read it that often. I knew enough to know that the blog put a very humorous, satirical slant on sports, and I was interested in the premise of the book, so I picked it up.
I was not disappointed. This was easily the best book I've read so far in terms of pure entertainment value. Leitch is extremely witty, irreverant, and exceptionally insightful. He takes to task all the various forces that he believes have taken the fun out of sports for fans, and that's pretty much everyone - players, owners, and the media, and then proceeds to instruct us fans as to how he believes we can take our sports back. One thing I realized from reading the book is that, in my own writings, I was often trying to make a polished, safe take, and not really letting my own voice and opinions carry through. Not always the case of course, but I had a run of entries like that, and I'm trying to get back to them.
Of course, with someone so opiniated, I didn't even come close to agreeing with everything he said, but still he struck me as highly perceptive, and I really enjoyed his barbs against the mainstream media (Surprised, aren't you?) The thing that impressed me the most (and was most unexpected by the time I got to it) was his discussion on athletes that talk about God. Leitch is clearly not coming from a Christian perspective, and given his general level of irreverence, when I saw the title for that chapter, I stopped my reading for that day, simply because I expected he was going to upset me, and I wanted to come into it fresh. Couldn't have been more wrong. His treatment of that was one of the better ones I've seen, noticing the clear distinction between those athletes who demonstrate a genuine faith in God, and those who just throw out those words. He also grasped very well the understanding that just because an athlete believes that God was with him out there on the field, doesn't mean that he thinks God was ONLY with him. Very well done, very impressed, as I was with the book as a whole.
It's baseball time, so I will next pick one of the baseball books off my stack. In honor of my coming trip to Phillies spring training, I'll be reading Clearing the Bases, by Phillie legend and the greatest third baseman to play the game, Mike Schmidt.
2 months ago
6 comments:
I'll be reading Clearing the Bases, by Phillie legend and the greatest third baseman to play the game, Mike Schmidt.
I have a friend who is a Phillies fan and we have had, on occasion, titanic arguments about whether Mike Schmidt is the greatest third baseman ever or, for that matter, any good at all. Needless to say, it is the Phillies fan who doesn't think Schmidt is any good. "A prophet is without honor only in his own country" is more true of Mike Schmidt than possibly any other player in history. The best third baseman of all time isn't even all that close. George Brett and Eddie Mathews, I suppose, but it's hard to imagine picking either of them over Schmidt.
While the level of resentment Schmidt actually gets from Phillies fans is, much like many other aspects of Phillie fan behavior, overblown, I have no doubt that there are idiots like the one you describe.
As for the debate itself, I had never really closely examined the closest competitors until a few months ago, when someone actually wanted to argue the point with me for the first time I can ever remember.
This person was championing Brett, which I found to be a joke on a number of levels - the primary one being that Brett played over 1/3 of his games in his career at 1B or DH. That argument mainly centered on Brett's vastly superior batting average, which I throw out the window since Schmidt had a higher career OBP. Matthews is actually closer than I would have thought, but they were very similar offensive players, and pretty much everything Matthews did well, Schmidt was just a bit better at.
Where Schmidt always breaks the discussion wide open is when you add defense, because he was a 10 time Gold Glove winner. Now, I'm exceedingly skeptical of the Gold Glove award these days, so I don't lend that as much weight as some do, and I'm too young to have ever seen Schmidt playing defense in his prime, but he clearly was considered to be the finest defensive 3B of his day, something you can't say about any of the other players who at least merit consideration as the best offensive 3B ever.
My friend, by the way, is very, very far from being an idiot. He was the retired CEO of a statistical analysis company and a very clever man. He was simply misled by the Philadelphia sports press which didn't like Schmidt because A) he struck out a lot and B) he didn't hit for a high batting average in an era when sabermetrics did not yet exist and batting average was still considered the gold standard. He had also been fooled into thinking that Schmidt was not a "clutch" hitter. He recalled, for example, a stat that Schmidt hit for a very low average with men in scoring position. I was able to dig up the stats and show that Schmidt, over the course of his career, hit a little higher than his normal average with men in scoring position (as most people do). I assumed he had seen a single season stat and those numbers vary wildly. But I don't believe it's overblown at all. I vividly remember Schmidt being booed frequently at Phillies games (though certainly not all the time), especially if he struck out with men on base to end the inning. Name another player as great as Schmidt, playing for the team his entire career, who got booed like that. I believe this was driven by two things: first, his first full season as a 23 year-old reasonably well-touted rookie, he hit .196 in 132 games. He had a hard time living down that poor first impression. Second, while Schmidt did lots and lots of things well, hitting for average was not one of the things he did well and, at that time, the press and fans were heavily focused on batting average since this was before the Bill James Revolution.
Nobody is all that close to Schmidt, in my opinion, including Brett and Mathews. I did see Schmidt play in his prime. His principal athletic gifts on defense were an absolute cannon of an arm and considerable range afield. I'm guessing Brooks Robinson was probably better as Schmidt didn't have quite Brooksie's quickness and reflexes. Mathews does have the distinction of being perhaps the best player in baseball history never to win an MVP (well, him or Mel Ott). Schmidt's run of domination in leading his league in home runs over his career (eight times leading the league in twelve years) is one of the three most remarkable runs of domination in that category, after only Babe Ruth and Ralph Kiner (who led the NL for seven straight years).
Oh, by the way, I can think of perhaps one player who got booed by his hometown fans even though he was great and always played for them. That being Ted Williams. But Boston fans didn't boo Williams because they thought he was bad, but because they thought he was a jerk.
See, there's a difference between the kind of booing you're talking about Schmidt receiving, and having actual resentment towards a player. Schmidt got the boos in situations, no doubt. I just think that the Phillie fan who doesn't have an appreciation for the kind of player Mike Schmidt was is the exception, rather than the rule.
There's a segment of Phillies fans that are going to boo a poor performance, no matter who it comes from. Not saying that's necessarily appropriate, but it gets made out to be much more than it actually is.
All of that said, don't get me started on the sports media in that town. I get very limited doses of it, being some 2 hours away, thankfully. I was at 6 regular season games this year, generally would listen to WIP (Philly sports talk) on the road in and out, and it was usually enough to make my head explode. My "favorite" incident was as I was listening to it after a game in May. It had been a beautiful night, Cole Hamels had pitched a great game, and the Phillies had won in front of what was a near sellout crowd, and the host was basically chastising the city for continuing to show up to watch the mediocre product that ownership was putting on the field.
I'm still not sure that you're getting what I mean. Perhaps you had to be there. There was a sizable contingent of Phillies fans who did not think Mike Schmidt was a good hitter at all. They knew he could hit home runs, but they focused on the fact that he'd hit .250, struck out too much, "couldn't hit in the clutch," and didn't hit in the postseason. They had no understanding of how valuable those home runs were. (In those days, it was common for the cognoscenti to dismiss power stats as being simply gaudy numbers that didn't win games. The origin of this was in a number of controversial MVP battles waged back in the '40s between Ted Williams and various Yankees.) They didn't even know that Schmidt walked 100 times a year and wouldn't have cared if they did. I'm not sure you quite understand how much Bill James and the rest of the sabermetricians revolutionized how we think about baseball. It wasn't until late in his career, when he was chasing 500 homers, that Phillies fans began to embrace Schmidt and many of them never did.
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