Gammons: Expect More Youth in 2009, and More on Him

Peter Gammons has a good if somewhat logically tortured piece at ESPN.com discussing the youth movement that has encompassed baseball, arguing that this has increasingly become a path to success for teams.  It’s well worth reading, and Gammons makes good points when illustrating that a good many stars are young players who helped to re-orient the game to one centered less around power and more around speed.  I welcome that, though I surely don’t want power diminished too much from the equation, not only because of its flair and not only because the Yankees have a power-oriented team (that should nonetheless run more than it does), but also because I don’t believe that speed and power are mutually exclusive features of the game or even successful teams.

What I find curious are a few aspects of Gammons’s piece worth probing.   The first is that Gammons opens his piece by connecting the new if not-quite explained era of baseball in his article with a discussion of the frequency of testing for banned substances.  He does so with a quote from a Red Sox player from the 2008 ALCS saying that he had allegedly been tested five times in three weeks, and that he was “the wrong guy to be tested.”  Says who?  He then proceeds to discuss the trajectory of the game possibly getting younger which, if it does, is fine with me–that 35 could be the new 40.

What I find odd about this is his connection in the first half of his article between the use of banned substances, power, and age.  While for some this is certainly the case, for many it doesn’t help us to understand the use of banned substances among a variety of players.  For example, it doesn’t help explain why, for example, many pitchers have turned to using PEDs regardless of age.  Nor does it help to explain the prevalence of younger, often minor-league players who have tested positive for banned substances in the last two years.  Additionally, it does not fully explain players’ taking banned substances when recovering from injuries.  When Andy Pettite was recovering from elbow tendinitis in 2002, he took HGH several times–by his own admission after the allegations within The Mitchell Report (page 176) surfaced.  When he did so, he was about to turn 30.  That’s neither 35 nor, in this era of sophisticated weight training, over the hill.

What does help to explain this is that players who feel the need to gain an edge have too frequently turned to PEDs to try to do so–regardless of age.  For some, it has perhaps been to enhance their home-run power.  But can we really think that, should baseball become more speed oriented, some players will not turn to banned substances if they feel that they may give them an edge to stay fast, to throw out fast runners from the outfield, infield, or behind the plate, to get fast players with or without power out at the plate?  Yes, baseball might become faster and younger.  That hardly excludes the possibility that players might turn to PEDs for an edge.  They may just do so for different reasons, or turn to different PEDs.

I also find Gammons’s connection between the Red Sox drafting Jacoby Ellsbury and Jed Lowrie, the team’s success, and Boston GM Theo Epstein’s statement to team scouts in 2005 that “The game is going to change, and we’d better be prepared for it” intriguing and presumptuous for various reasons.  For starters, it implies an awareness if not outright complicity among baseball executives between the prevalence of home-run power and team success.  For all the focus on individual players’ taking steroids as purportedly reflective of personal weakness and not, say, a culture in which banned substances were acceptable if not preferred, I have no doubt especially after reading The Mitchell Report that management was not by any means a distant entity within this culture.  But since Gammons has followed Boston so assiduously for decades, I’m honestly surprised that he didn’t consider something else so obvious to Red Sox partisans and those of other teams alike–that Boston had almost exclusively relied on power for decades.  Could it not have also been that Boston’s management might have desired a more diverse offense from what it had been for decades, predating the steroids era, and as their sluggers aged?  To wit, check out Boston’s stolen base and home run numbers in the three decades before their 2004 World Series championship:

• 1974: 104 SB (7th in AL), 109 HR (8th in AL)
• 1975: 66 SB (10th), 134 HR (4th)
• 1976: 95 SB (9th), 134 HR (1st)
• 1977: 66 SB (11th), 213 HR (1st)
• 1978: 74 SB (12th), 172 HR (2nd)
• 1979: 60 SB (14th), 194 HR (1st))
• 1980: 79 SB (10th), 162 HR (3rd)
• 1981: 32 SB (14th), 90 HR (5th)
• 1982: 42 SB (13th), 136 HR (8th)
• 1983: 30 SB (14th), 142 HR (7th)
• 1984: 38 SB (14th), 181 HR (2nd)
• 1985: 66 SB (14th), 162 HR (5th)
• 1986: 41 SB (14th), 144 HR (11th)
• 1987: 77 SB (13th), 174 HR (9th)
• 1988: 65 SB (14th), 124 HR (10th)
• 1989: 56 SB (14th), 108 HR (12th)
• 1990: 53 SB (14th), 106 HR (12th)
• 1991: 59 SB (13th), 126 HR (9th)
• 1992: 44 SB (14th), 84 HR (12th)
• 1993: 73 SB (12th), 114 HR (13th)
• 1994: 81 SB (6th), 120 HR (8th)
• 1995: 99 SB (8th), 175 HR (4th)
• 1996: 91 SB (8th), 209 HR (6th)
• 1997: 68 SB (13th), 185 HR (6th)
• 1998: 72 SB (14th), 205 HR (5th)
• 1999: 67 SB (14th), 176 HR (9th)
• 2000:43 SB (13th), 167 HR (11th)
• 2001: 46 SB (14th), 198 HR (6th)
• 2002: 80 SB (7th), 177 HR (7th)
• 2003: 88 SB (9th), 238 HR (2nd)

The 2004 Red Sox team that won the Series stole 68 bases (11th in the AL) and belted 222 homers, good for 4th in the AL.  It also had several key players over 30, including one in Johnny Damon who had been the team’s biggest stolen base threat and, after 2005, was becoming a free agent.  Nor am I diminishing Epstein’s abilities as a GM, for I think he’s done a terrific job and built the organization–not just team–in effectively innovative ways.  All I’m saying is this: both historical circumstances in which 3/5 of the previous 30 seasons was Boston dead-last or next-to-last in stolen bases, and contemporary conditions with a deep, talented, and terrific but somewhat older team in 2004 may have influenced Boston’s thinking that it needed to diversify its offense.  The history of Boston’s reliance on power over speed should have been evident to Gammons, of all people.  To affix this moderate organizational shift simply to the steroids era and Epstein’s envisioning its likely end, to me, attributes too much to PEDs and presentism and not enough to management’s possible assessment of long-term on-field qualities–for example, the importance of having a Dave Roberts on the roster in 2004.  I think we understand each other, at least somewhat.

Lastly–and regular readers know that I don’t frequently allege anti-Yankees bias at ESPN–Gammons spends considerable time in this article, as in his last one, caterwauling about the Yankees’ spending on a new stadium and free agents, as well as on corporate box prices.  Yet he snuck in the fact that Boston’s prices for a family of four to attend a Red Sox game on average were $250, not including parking.  He also didn’t mention that, through 2008, the Red Sox averaged the highest ticket prices in the majors–and not necessarily to keep up with the Yankees but, as a major corporation, to make money, the primary purpose of any corporation including the Yankees, to be honest.  He’s more than willing to spend time criticizing the Yankees for their financial approach, but downplays the role that the Red Sox have had in altering the finances of the game.  Instead, he casts Boston management as ahead of the curve in reading the contours of the game, rather than acting as a willing and eager participant in its trends of relying on home runs instead of speed, veterans instead of youth, and conducting itself as a business not unlike their rival Yankees.

Gammons writes very well and has lots to say about the game. I genuinely appreciate his work, and I’m not necessarily in disagreement with the crux of his fine article.  Yet what never ceases to amaze me is his ability to, both one week earlier and today, criticize the Yankees (rightly or wrongly) for their business model while ignoring the degree to which the Red Sox he covers and admires have to various degrees and measures of success embraced just such a model.

The conclusion of his article is rather mystifying.  After rightly pointing out that 20 different teams have won the World Series in the last 30 years, while at the same time 14 different teams have won the Super Bowl, 13 the Stanley Cup, and 9 the NBA Championship, he sums up by saying, “So the end hasn’t come. But, as Sam Cooke reminds us, a change is going to come.”  What change is that?  Gammons begins his piece by discussing changes in the game revolving around youth and anti-PED testing, then shifts into a discussion of payroll before concluding with evidence to show that, for all the righteous indignation about team payrolls in baseball, what is at times mistakenly referred to as parity in the major leagues exists to a greater degree than in sports with a salary cap.  So we’re left to wonder, to what changes is Gammons referring?  Speed over power?  Youth over age and experience?  Financial restraint bordering on penny-pinching over heavy spending?  Here, my critique of Gammons’s article is as much structural as it is substantive, for he braids too many thick topical threads together without sufficiently discussing each in detail before making connections that, to various degrees, are tenuous.

I too think changes are coming in baseball with the expiration of the CBA after the 2011 season.  Whether they’re good or bad, we’ll see, and I intend to explore these in further detail soon here at The Heartland.  But examining those possible changes, as well as the impact of PEDs and testing for them on the game, and any shift toward a speed-oriented baseball era, require significantly more attention and detail than a 1,000 word story.