May 14th: Gun Slingers Beware

After a Rookie of the Year win and a third place finish in the Cy Young voting, Jose Fernandez was sitting pretty in Miami. The team began the season with the best home record in baseball, and was an overall shock, undoubtedly, at least in part, due to their young stud ace.

That all came to a screeching halt on Monday when Twitter began to blow up with rumors that Fernandez was being put on the Disabled List. What began as an elbow strain eventually became a season-ending possibility. Although the Marlins will continue to evaluate the situation, it looks like they will be without their best pitcher for the year.

Fernandez joins a long list of young flame-throwers who have lost a year to arm surgery, most notably Stephen Strasburg of the Nationals and Matt Harvey of the Mets. In each case, the game’s brightest pitching stars are sustaining arm injuries that require major surgery.

What, though, does this growing trend say about the future of the game? Young guns are an important part of building a dynasty, but the need to wait an extra year can not only cause a pause in a playoff push but can also risk the player not recovering in the ways that the team may want.

Another piece of the puzzle is the ethical issues associated with asking players to give their all in a way that will almost inevitably lead to injury. It isn’t that these players are being mismanaged in the majors. They are being coached to the point of injury from the time they first demonstrate their unbelievable skills. This may be as early as middle school. A kid who can throw the hardest becomes the biggest star of his high school team, his college club, and even his minor league affiliate for the franchise that will be betting the farm on him. This gets to the complexity of the issue: these players are being asked to perform, to play for their team, in ways that will both get them the big contract, but also the big hurt.

Going forward, coaches at every level needed to be trained what to do when they are blessed with talented young men to throw the baseball. While a young kid might want to pitch every inning of the season, it is to a disadvantage for his long-term success to put that much strain on his elbow.

For the Marlins, and all of major league baseball, the best they can hope for is a speedy recovery and a 2015 return of the same dominant star from the past. As eyebrows begin to go up, though, about the new epidemic of elbow injuries, it is clear that something is going to have to change. It might be a new era of hitting dominance. It may be a new era of subtle, finnessed pitching rather than knockdown heat. EIther way, the injury to Fernandez is, quite possibly, the beginning of a change in Major League Baseball.

February 28th: American League Preview

Last week, ZPLF made predictions about the 2014 National League results. This week, it’s the American League’s turn.

AL EAST:

1. Boston Red Sox: Logic says that a team that wins the World Series and keeps its roster pretty much intact should be the favorite to make another run. The 2014 Red Sox should look pretty good, with Dustin Pedroia leading the club both on and off the field. Another AL East title is well within grasp.

2. New York Yankees: The Yankees missed the playoffs for the second time in the last 20 years, and, as they did after the 2008 season, went out and spent a ton of money. The starting lineup features 5 new faces, with 18 All-Star games between them. The only fly in the ointment is that the Yankees are an old team, with every player over the age of 30. This team is totally dependent on the new guys being able to play Yankees style ball.

3. Tampa Bay Rays: We’ve all made the mistake of thinking the Rays will slide. On paper, they shouldn’t be as competitive as they are. They will, though, remain competitive in the tough AL East, but they may be missing the star power to overtake the bigger superpowers of the Red Sox and Yankees.

4. Baltimore Orioles: Last year was a disappointment after the excitement of a 2012 playoff appearance. This off-season, the Orioles added some significant pieces, including Nelson Cruz and Ubaldo Jimenez in the past few weeks. This would be a playoff team in most other divisions, but this looks like a fourth place finisher.

5. Toronto Blue Jays: Oh, what a difference one year makes. Last year, this team was the disappointment of the season after a big off-season left them looking like contenders. This year, it appears as though very little was done to improve a team that finished at the bottom of a stacked division. If 7 big time new players can’t help this team win, I’m not sure anything can.

AL Central:

1. Detroit Tigers: New manager Brad Ausmus has huge shoes to fill, but having a two-time reigning MVP on your team can’t hurt. The pitching remains dominant, the lineup looks solid, and there are no gaping holes in a team that has won three straight division titles. Barring unforeseen circumstances, it doesn’t look like anything is going to change that.

2. Kansas City Royals: A young nucleus with a focus on defense, the Royals look primed for a long run of success. Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas will decide how far this team goes, as they attempt to blossom into the superstars everyone is expecting from them. This is my pick for most exciting team to watch.

3. Cleveland Indians: A brilliant run to the playoffs last year left the city of Cleveland hopping with excitement. The arrival of hometown hero Nick Swisher has revitalized the city and brought hope for the future. Unfortunately for the Tribe, not a lot was done to improve upon last year’s Wild Card game losing team. Another good season appears in the books, but not a good enough one for another Cinderella story.

4. Chicago White Sox: The Sox were a confusingly, atrociously bad team last year. Make that the third worst team in Major League Baseball. The off-season brought some good young talent, including the hopeful superstar Jose Abreu. The pitching staff looks weak, except for Chris Sale, who was the one bright spot on last year’s team. This team will be streaky and most likely downright mediocre.

5. Minnesota Twins: How often does a team get considerably better, yet move down in the standings? This appears to be what will happen to the Twins, as the addition of pitchers Phil Hughes and Ricky Nolasco won’t be enough to bring the team to contention. The future looks bright, though, as prospects Oswaldo Arcia, Byron Buxton, and Miguel Sano patiently await their arrival in the Bigs.

AL West:

1. Texas Rangers: The Ranger have proven time and time again that they are going to beat you with the bat, and let the pitching staff figure itself out. The additions of Prince Fielder and Shin-Soo Choo add two of the most important ingredients to a powerful offense. There will definitely be a void in leadership after the departure of Ian Kinsler, but as long as the team finds a way to come together, things should be looking big in Dallas.

2. Oakland Athletics: Don’t ask me to name three members of the Oakland A’s organization, because I probably can’t. I haven’t been able to name a non-Cuban or non-cereal character in the last three years, yet that hasn’t keep the A’s from winning two straight division championships. It has become impossible to count this team out, but they aren’t in a place worth predicting big things consistently yet, either.

3. Los Angeles Angels: Having the best player in baseball will do great things for an organization. The Angels have been disappointing for the past two years, but a healthy Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton in the same lineup as Mike Trout make a team impossible to ignore. The pitching has been the issue, and there hasn’t been much done to make it better. We’ll see if Tyler Skaggs can make this team a viable contender.

4. Seattle Mariners: The Mariners win the award for most busy off-season, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into regular season success. Robinson Cano will sell tickets, but he isn’t enough to launch this team into a real division race. I expect the Mariners to serve as spoilers for the race between the Rangers and A’s.

5. Houston Astros: The rebuilding process is a long a tired one for Astros fans. The addition of Dexter Fowler will make this team a little better than the 111 loss team from a year ago. Plus, the development of double-play combination Jose Altuve and Jonathan Villar looks to be one to watch. This will be bad in 2014 for Houston, but not as bad as many might believe.

February 13th - Old News

Waking up in America, Olympic events are just wrapping up. Some events happen just as most Americans are getting up, but the majority are taking place while we sleep. To help keep us in the loop, NBC and its affiliates have been compiling the best of the competitions to be put on the air during the domestic primetime spot. This allows fans to get in on the action and catch up on what they may have missed.

This would be great if it weren’t for one problem: anyone who actually cares about the games already knows what happened. ESPN is well ahead on that issue, sending alerts and updates on most major Olympic events as they happen. Before I even have time to turn on the TV, I’ve already been updated on the night’s festivities.

The 24-hour news cycle that has become the standard no longer allows for the notion of “primetime television,” at least not in terms of rebroadcasting. If something is happening, the public wants to know about it as soon as it happens, not on a delay or after it has been compiled in a neat presentation afterward. What could be a neater package than 140 characters?

If you’ve ever watched a sporting event with real significance, though, you don’t need to be told what 140 characters fail to get across. You don’t get the pit in your stomach from the anxiety of seeing your team or favorite athlete put themselves on the line. You don’t feel the rush of joy when that athlete or team pulls away with the win. You don’t feel the confusion of a loss, and the disappointment that ensues. We might want to know what happened, but we live to see how it happened.

With that in mind, we’re pretty much stuck. How do we feel all of the excitement that comes with the Olympics, yet also get all the information as its happening on the other side of the globe?

There isn’t really a good answer. Nobody faults ESPN and the sporting world for getting us the news quickly. Quite the opposite. We would be upset if they didn’t. Yet NBC is also doing the best they can to get us the full package of the Olympic experience, and do it in the context of American life.

The reality is that the way different countries interact with the Olympics will have to change not only based on the location but also in conjunction with the technologies available. The days of watching suspenseful events on an American timeframe are over, leaving a few options.

One is, of course, to stay up late into the night or wake up ridiculously early to catch things as they happen. Nocturnal behavior isn’t usually recommended, but I’m sure your friends and colleagues would understand if you explained that you simply couldn’t miss the curling champions of the world (ok, maybe they’d judge you a little)

Short of that, though, some form of adaptation is going to have to happen, either by the consumer or by the producer. This year is one of the first where technologies are as easily accessible as they ever have been. Twitter and Facebook were hardly around in 2010, let alone as widely used as they are now. Maybe the change will come in the form of a new technology. Maybe we will find new ways of broadcasting to meet the changed expectations. Maybe the notion of “primetime” will change to reflect the new “news cycle.” This is still a young system, and one that has some work to do in working out the kinks. But, when all is said and done, the Olympics will hold our attention, and ESPN and NBC will find ways to keep it that way.

January 24th: Full Court Press

My biggest complaint about basketball was always that it is emotionally abusive. The flow of momentum is so temporary that it is nearly impossible to know the trajectory of the game based on the first quarter, or even the third. The old saying “the last two minutes are all that matters,” is even more extreme. It isn’t an oddity to see a 20 point lead evaporate, only to be regained.

January, though, can do strange things to sports fans. With baseball’s slowest off-season in recent memory and the impossibility of finding hockey on national television, the only weekday sports option is to be found on the hardwood. I’ve begun to follow the NBA as well as college basketball a little more intensely. More so than the NCAA, professional basketball is like nothing else in the sporting world.

In any team sport, there are superstars who define the organization. In the NBA, those superstars often transcend their team. In most sports, fans follow a team primarily, with one or two players who catch some extra attention. Basketball sees team fans, sure, but more importantly, you’re a Kobe fan, a LeBron fan, a Durant fan. Following a player is more possible because, with only 5 players at a time, an individual has more of an impact on the outcome of the game.

For all of their challenges, though, the NBA’s marketing department has made quite a bold statement, especially recently. It is enormously difficult to maintain fan excitement over the course of an 82 game season. To solve the problem, the NBA marketing department comes up with countless ways to make individual games more exciting.

On Christmas day, the league used new jerseys with sleeves in an attempt to give the players a new look. It was recently released that the All-star game would also feature similar jerseys. Earlier this month, the Heat and Nets played a game while wearing nickname jerseys, an event that also will repeat throughout the year.  While both of these promotions focus primarily on attempting to sell more basketball swag, it demonstrates a kind of promotional mojo that should serve the league well, at least from the creativity standpoint. The caveat to that is, of course, ensuring that the intent is to offer a unique fan experience, rather than simply turning into a purely money driven operation.

Even with the promotions, though, the challenge of making an 82 game regular season exciting is one that will continue to cause fans to walk away, to get lazy during the year. Once April rolls around, though, being an NBA fan becomes contagious. The playoffs add the intensity that becomes a scarcity during the regular season. Funny how the threat of going home can make the game come alive.

Some of the challenges that professional basketball faces are unique to the NBA, while some are present in all major sports. The league has made significant attempts to find solutions and have varying levels of success. The commitment itself will, hopefully, help professional basketball continue to be relevant and exciting for fans.

As a relatively newly minted NBA fan, I have plenty more to learn. At the very least, the league succeeded at getting my attention.

- Follow "ZP: Left Fielder" on Twitter at @ZPLeftFielder or "The Zoot Perspective" at @ZootPerspective for more from ZPMedia

The Fan Maker

Dear Mr. Prior,

It was with sadness that I learned of your retirement from Major League Baseball. For a player who showed so much potential, a flash of brilliance, it is always disappointing to know that we must close the book with no hope for a comeback.

I was 10 in 2002 when you made your debut with my hometown Chicago Cubs. It didn’t take long for you to become a household name, which most certainly included my home.

Until that year, I had only been to one Cubs game. I was a mild fan. As the 2002 season began, though, I couldn’t avoid the excitement swirling around. I began to follow the team with you in the middle of it. You were relatable, a young star bringing baseball to a city. I would check the newspaper every day, just to see what you’d done. When I went to a Cubs game that season, I bought a collector baseball with your name and jersey number on the back. Today, that collection has swelled to over 40 from more than 20 ball clubs, and yours still holds the top spot on the shelf.

By 2003, “Prior Fever” in Chicago had reached critical mass. You didn’t let us down, with an All-Star selection and a third-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting. We would have elected you mayor of the city if given the chance. Your numbers could have spoken for themselves. Instead, the Cubs won the National League Central and brought playoff baseball to the North Side for the first time in 6 seasons. Between you and Kerry Wood, it didn’t matter what happened on offense, you would shut things down on the mound.

The Marlins series was epic. The Cubs seemed in the driver’s seat. Maybe it was just my bias, or the skew of Monday Morning Quarterbacking, but it just felt like our year. In game 6, you threw 7 innings of a masterpiece. In the eighth inning, everything changed. Maybe it was the Bartman play. Maybe it was Alex Gonzalez’s booted ground ball. Maybe it was a curse placed on us by an angry goat owner. Whatever it was, the momentum swung and that was the end of things. We fought, clawed and begged. But the loss from that game gave all of the positive momentum to Florida, who overcame another Cubs lead and took the World Series by storm.

Watching the ending of that series, I cried. I had never cried because of baseball before. I was old enough to know that there was no crying in baseball, yet loved the game enough to know that there absolutely is.

As we would come to learn, though, the ending of that playoff series was also the end of your dominance. Flashes of brilliance from then on were permeated by periods of injury and struggles. Your tenure with the Cubs ended, and you bounced around the league, looking for different places to restart your career. All the while, your fans hoped. I hoped. I followed each team, wishing that a roster spot would open up and that number 22 would come out of that bullpen.

In reality, it seems, it wasn’t meant to be. Now, though, you have the opportunity to move on to the next part of your journey. Front office management, where you can make careers for the next generation of baseball stars, broadcasting, where you can give life to the best sport in the world, or coaching, where you can craft a new arm, a better swing. All of these opportunities come together to allow you to do what you’ve been doing since May 22, 2002: making baseball a magical experience for those who get to watch you play.

So this retirement is a party, not a funeral. We celebrate the brilliance of a couple of seasons of unhittable dominance. We remember the incredible emotions that came with being a Mark Prior fan. And we thank you, I thank you, for giving me the best thing any ten year old could ever ask for: a baseball hero.

Your fan,

Austin Zoot

Five are Fighting

After their second loss to the Broncos in three weeks, Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid took the podium for his post-game interview. In his statements, he talked about the need to look forward and focus on getting to the playoffs. He remarked that unlike in the BCS, one loss in the NFL regular season is not enough to tank a championship drive.

This was a particularly touchy subject in the state of Alabama this past weekend. With one second left in the Iron Bowl, Auburn took an Alabama missed field goal back 100 yards to stun the two-time defending champions. Not only was this an epic ending to a well-played football game, but it also shattered Alabama’s dreams of a third straight title.

When rankings were officially announced on Monday, Alabama had dropped to fourth with undefeated Florida State and Ohio State in the top two spots, and Auburn, for their 11-1 season, and unseating of the Crimson Tide, moved to third.

The challenge becomes analyzing teams with different records for ranking purposes. Should Ohio State, who went 12-0 and extended the longest winning streak in the BCS, play for a national championship instead of a one-loss SEC school who may have had a much tougher schedule?

Here’s what it comes down to (or, at the very least, should come down to): if team A and team B played one another on neutral turf, who would win? The rankings play such a significant role in the bowl selection process that it is unrealistic to go solely based on record.

Missouri was six inches to the left of a perfect season. Ohio State has one because one play went their way. Alabama and Auburn were separated by one second. Any of these teams could very well compete against Florida State, the fairly unquestionable top team right now. When considered in terms of head-to-head matchups, though, there seems to be a pretty clear way to sort through it all.

Ohio State has not played nearly the competition that the SEC deals with on any given Saturday. Michigan, Illinois, and Purdue do not stack up the same way as LSU, Texas A & M, and South Carolina. Within the context of conference difficulty, all of a sudden, a 12-0 Ohio State starts to look like a 12-0 Northern Illinois University, who find themselves ranked 14.

Within the SEC, teams cannot simply use single games to lead to a ranking. Realistically, if Alabama played Auburn again tomorrow, even in Auburn, my money would be rolling with the Tide. Same goes for Alabama and Mizzou, Ohio State, or anyone else, frankly.

The hope is that next year’s shift to a four team playoff will alleviate their challenges. That doesn’t bring any solace to the five legitimate championship contenders who are fighting for dear life in the hopes of earning one of the two spots.

There is plenty of football left to play before bowl selections are made, but if the last day of the regular season is any indication, the answers won’t get any easier.

Twin Billing?

As the Hot Stove starts to heat up, MLB teams are attempting to decide the direction to take their organizations. Whether to pursue the hottest free agents or seek a trade, to look outside for help or to focus on internal matters to strengthen the team, teams have a big few months ahead of them.

For the Minnesota Twins, this is a question that requires some fan input. Last week, the Twins posted on their Twitter account “Give us your list of the top 3 free agents you think the Twins should pursue using #TwinsHotStove. We’ll talk about fan answers on the show.”

While representing a small social media gimmick, the Twins get to the heart of a very important question in putting together a team from year to year. What is the role of the fan? Do the ticket holders have a part in constructing the team that will take the field 162 times?

The reality is that the Twins will most likely do very little, if anything, with the information they receive from their twitter account. Fans aren’t really qualified to make organizational decisions, especially when they are playing with hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, though, those dollars originated, at least partially, in the pockets of the fans, and thus, they have an argument for contributing.

While baseball has blossomed into a trillion dollar industry, it’s true intent is to entertain. The fans are, or at least should be, the focus of the organization. This doesn’t appear to be the case when you view negotiations with players that include no-trade clauses and contract incentives and stipulations. The game has shifted to focus instead on the players and the front office.

While asking fans which players in particular they would want to see in their teams uniform may not be realistic, it is not unreasonable to ask what kind of team they would like to see. Take a look at the Houston Astros. Who in their right minds is excited about the Astros? Their fan-base is the pity of everybody, except maybe the loveable losers of Chicago, and the future doesn’t look particularly bright. The front office is promising that things will get better, but that doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon. The money that is being spent is being done in a way that will replenish the farm system and get the team ready for the future. At the same time, though, that means that being an Astros fan, at least for the next, oh, half decade is going to be an abysmal thing.

For fans to be able to select the overall direction of the team, whether it be rebuilding for the future as the Cubs appear to be doing or a win-now mentality the likes of which the Yankees almost always embody, is not an unrealistic request. If teams really expect to see fans pay their dollars to see their organization, it is not unrealistic to expect that they would have some kind of input.

This is unlikely to become a reality any time soon in any of the major sports fields, but that twitter is as good a place as any to start.