SAN DIEGO—The All Star Game is really Coachella, or, if you missed that, October’s Desert Trip in Indio, CA. It matters because it is a three day festival, especially when you get San Diego weather (remind me: why don’t I live here?), the sport’s most underappreciated great park (thank you, Larry Lucchino, as you and Janet Marie Smith are thanked for Camden Yards and the 21st Century Fenway) and a celebration masterfully managed by the Padres and MLB.
But, to be honest, the four best pitchers in baseball by Wins Above Replacement did not appear. Clayton Kershaw is hurt, Madison Bumgarner and Danny Salazar pitched on the weekend and Jake Arrieta, after seeing his career innings high jump from 156 to 248, needed a break.
Kershaw is one case. Bumgarner, Salazar and Arrieta, on the other hand, did not pitch because the All Star Game does not count the way the regular season games of the Giants, Indians and Cubs count. Home Field Advantage versus no Home Field Advantage promotion—if Bumgarner, Salazar and Arrieta don’t pitch well from Friday into October, their home field for the seventh game of the world series will be their living rooms.
Players put on a good show. Blossoming, unassuming superstars like Kris Bryant, Eric Hosmer, Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts and Salvador Perez put on mind-boggling shows. Giancarlo Stanton and Todd Frazier weren’t in the actual game, but their passion brought them into town for a Home Run Derby that made them compelling figures, for baseball, and for their Marlins and White Sox.
But there were players who let their clubs know they’d rather spend three days with their families then to fly across the country. Few people love this business more than Adam Jones, who happens to be from San Diego, but if you go back and check the Orioles schedule the last month, you understand why he needed time with his family.
When Rob Manfred and Tony Clark met the media Tuesday, the schedule issue was addressed. Management argues that if the schedule is cut back to, say, 154 games, player revenues have to be addressed. Clark argues that if players are properly rested they can be available for a higher percentage of the scheduled games, and play at higher performance level.
We have to be fair and acknowledge that there are two sides to this. It is reality in the non-amphetamine era, and when we do not have accountable, devoted health and conditioning freaks like Arrieta and Jose Bautista in this exhibition, it further underlines the problem with 6 am hotel arrivals, night games on getaway days and 8 pm Sunday night games. One night I heard former major league players on television making fun of current players needing rest. So did a particular general manager, who before they went to commercial texted me, “they forgot to mention their greenies.”
We should be thankful for the concerns throughout the business from Dr. James Andrews to Scott Boras about the fraying of young pitchers; if you saw the incredible Mark Fidrych special on MLB Network, you were reminded of what happened when a 21-year old kid off a farm in Central Massachusetts, a kid who’d thrown 34 and 171 innings in his two professional seasons, started 29 games, threw 24 complete games, totaled 250 1/3 innings and made 14 of those starts on three days rest.
For the rest of his career, he started 27 games, won eight and never threw as many as 82 innings. After watching the show and remembering what ‘The Bird’ did for baseball in Detroit and baseball in general, I thought about the game today, the schedule and how the Marlins, Blue Jays and Mets monitor the seasons of Jose Fernandez, Aaron Sanchez, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz. And that while none of them will be subjected to the kind of three days rest abuse that in the seventies changed the careers of Mark Fidrych and Frank Tanana—who was Kershaw before Clayton was born—now must deal with a schedule that is geared to local television, not the long-term vision of maintaining the health and strength of its young stars, especially pitchers.
There needs to be months of open-minded, two-way discussions about these matters. Players have to appreciate that if their owners make money, they make money. Owners have to appreciate the fraying of their products. Front office analytic staffs have to understand that starting pitchers have to occasionally get 21 outs, and that relievers physically do not withstand being used like laptops. The Orioles have the most wins in the American League East from 2012 to this All Star Break because of the way Buck Showalter uses his bullpen, which in 2016 means not using any reliever three straight days, often resisting the temptation to win the day by using Zach Britton a third day when he is arguably the best relief pitcher in the business.
The game is not the same without the stars. It is not the same when managers are trying to play with three man benches, a function of the schedule, of the analytical disregard for the humanity of pitchers, and by managers who don’t understand what Earl Weaver meant when he said “if a manager is afraid to lose one game, in the end, he will lose games that really matter.”
Don’t blame Terry Francona and Bruce Bochy for using Salazar and Bumgarner in games that matter; winning the world series matters, and those two HOF managers have five rings between them. Let Manfred, Clark and all the smart people they have around them discuss the reality of the baseball business. It isn’t about dogma or Curt Flood or militancy, it is about the game they love.
The All Star Game did have a ninth inning Britton-Paul Goldschmidt match-up that I hoped for long before Chris Sale’s first pitch, but it did not include Kershaw, Bumgarner, Salazar or Arrieta. Tip O’Neill once told me that a big part of negotiating with Ronald Reagan was their ability to tell one another, ‘this is what I need, you tell me what you need, and we’ll go from there.”
What owners and the Players Association need is the best players on the field and the game to be played, not struck. And they can move on from there.