Thinking out loud – Page 5

Giant shadows

On June 20, 2015

By Jon Weisman

I’ll admit to being a bit at a loss for words as I start this.

In part, that’s because I’ve said just about everything I want to say about the irrelevance of regular-season performance against a specific opponent when it comes to October (“Winning opponents: It just doesn’t matter”) as well as the slippery meaning of “winning opponents” as a concept (“How the Dodgers lose for winning”) I’m not a big fan of repeating myself.

I’ve only tangentially addressed the emotional aspect of Dodger fans watching their team lose nine of its first 11 against the Giants in 2015, but there might not be a lot to add there either, other than to remind people that it’s only bad until it gets good again — and it could get good again at any moment.

One year ago today, the 2014 World Champions lost their sixth straight game. By June 30, their National League West lead — 9 1/2 games earlier in the month — was gone. June was miserable for San Francisco, and look how things ended there.

Anyway, I’ve begun writing this piece in the seventh inning, with the Dodgers down, 6-2, and I’m going down this face-the-negative path even though I truly believe the Dodgers could come back and win the game by the time I finish, because we’re talking about baseball, not systemic poverty.

I saw “Inside Out” today, and really, you have to see this movie, because besides being fantastic on its own terms, it describes, without even intending to, the emotional musical chairs of being a baseball fan. It’s such a reactionary activity, and so natural to embrace those extremes, even though sometimes, it does us little good.

The quandary Dodger fans are in is this — they’re not just battling the uncertainty of this season, they’re bearing the psychological weight of Potential Year 27 Without a Title. No Dodger fan below the age of 87 (i.e., someone who was at least 27 years old in June 1955) has had it worse than the current generation.

Each additional tick of the clock without a title doesn’t anesthetize you to the pain, it expands it. Each run allowed, each loss suffered, each opportunity wasted, makes relief and celebration seem that much farther away.

What I would suggest is that if a World Series title is truly the main goal (and why wouldn’t it be), then you have to be prepared to ride out the bad times that hammer every eventual champion sometime during the season. No team goes through 162 games unscathed. It just doesn’t happen.

Nine losses in 11 games against the Giants before June really are irrelevant as far as October. Miserable, yes, but irrelevant. I’ll always get a ton of pushback on that point, but the evidence is absolutely clear on my side. The Giants lost eight of their last 11 to the Dodgers in 2014, and who in San Francisco cares now?

On the other hand, if you’re someone who simply lives in the moment, and doesn’t attach larger significance to the lousy ones the Dodgers have been having this week, then I can’t help you, but you don’t need my help. You know that change is always on the horizon, and sunshine is always around the corner from the shadows.

I guess I’m guilty of repeating myself after all.

It’s a great night for baseball

By Jon Weisman

On May 14, 2015

In Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

My dad, who introduced me to baseball, turns 80 today.

It’s not that, without his influence, I might not have discovered baseball or fallen in love with it. And in some ways, I’m a different kind of fan than he is. I’m more single-mindedly devoted to the Dodgers, more sabermetrically oriented.

And yet, it’s impossible for me to separate my baseball upbringing and baseball life from my dad, who took me to my first games, who first showed me the Baseball Encyclopedia and Street & Smith’s, who bought my first All-Star Baseball and Strat-o-Matic games and my Sporting News subscription, who introduced me to “Strange but True Baseball Stories” and “The Kid from Tomkinsville,” who allowed me to make my deal with the devil for what he called a lifetime pass to the Dodgers in 1982.

I still recall riding in the back of our ’76 Plymouth van with a new pack of baseball cards, one of them a historical Walter Johnson card, and I was sure I could catch him in ignorance by asking how many strikeouts Johnson had in his career. When my dad shot back at me “3,509,” that moment, as much as any other in my life, might have shaped me as a baseball fan. It wasn’t just a game. It was a history. It was a lifetime devotion that would never stop repaying your investment.

All this from a Cubs fan who has been waiting 70 years to return to Wrigley Field for a World Series game, like the one he went to at age 10 in 1945.

By happy accident, something I couldn’t have planned even if I tried, my daughter’s school choir is singing the National Anthem before tonight’s game. On his 80th birthday. So months ago, my dad and my extended family made plans to celebrate his birthday here at Dodger Stadium tonight. It’s been something I’ve been looking forward to for months, a confluence of events so great but so unlikely, almost as unlikely as … mid-May thunderstorms in drought-stricken Southern California.

Sigh …

I’m still optimistic we’ll get everything in, even if there are delays. We’re celebrating a life today, and what is life without delays? As much of a fan as he is, I know my dad is more excited to see all of us together and see his granddaughter singing — even singin’ in the rain — than the game itself.

So yes, it’s a great night for baseball.

Behold: The case against the DH

By Jon Weisman

On April 27, 2015

In Thinking out loud

Hyun-Jin Ryu is 7 for 47 at the plate as a Dodger, and yet baseball lives on. (Juan Ocampo/Los Angeles Dodgers)

By Jon Weisman

It’s like a DH-nado hit baseball over the weekend.

Maybe it’s the online circles I travel in, but renewed advocacy for bringing the designated hitter to the National League seems to be everywhere you turn.

The spark seems to have been the injuries in the past week to ace pitchers Max Scherzer of Washington (April 23) and Adam Wainwright of St. Louis (April 25) suffered while batting. The discussion actually goes far beyond pitcher health, so I mention this only to explain why this is all happening right now.

Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk made a number of wide-ranging arguments in his pro-DH piece, followed in short order by such writers as Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, David Schoenfield at ESPN.com and Cliff Corcoran and Jay Jaffe at SI.com. Calcaterra had his own follow-up piece today, in the wake of lengthy debate at Baseball Think Factory.

Resembling nearly every political debate, there have been legitimate points mixed with straw-men arguments and a tendency to reduce the opposing side to close-minded bullies. And I was really comfortable paying it little mind, filing it away as part of a debate that has spanned nearly my entire lifetime, but today, the conversation seemed to take such a one-sided turn that I felt the need to speak up for the anti-DH side.

So, here are the main arguments the pro-DH crowd is making, and my counterpoints …

Alex Guerrero and ‘Awakenings’

By Jon Weisman

On April 24, 2015

In Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

Three kids and nearly 13 years into being a dad, my belief in my kids’ athletic skills is about what most people had in Alex Guerrero in January, or Dee Gordon the previous January, or Marlon Anderson and Ronnie Belliard immediately after their “Why bother?” acquisitions in the summers of recent pasts.

Which is to say, practically hopeless.

A couple of months ago, during my 7-year-old’s basketball season, there was what I call an “Awakenings” moment.

Youngest Master Weisman can string some baskets together from about five feet out in the driveway, but that’s been about it. In his league games at our local rec center, games he enjoyed mainly for being with the other kids, little was happening aside from his amusing clown-car dashes from one end of the court to another.

Then, on consecutive Saturdays, he went nuts. One of the parents tallies rebounds, assists and steals (not points, because of course, we’re not those kind of parents), and my kid had 14 rebounds. And I knew he had scored three or four baskets. It was unprecedented.

The next week, I decided to keep track myself, and my son had his first double-double, on a basketball court or at In ‘N Out or anywhere. This kid had 10 points and 15 rebounds. It was unbelievable.

And as cynical as I can be about my children and sports, I thought there might have been an actual breakthrough.

There wasn’t. The next week, the scoring disappeared, the rebounding almost entirely disappeared. He was the player he had been before those two crazy weeks when everything fell into place.

That doesn’t say anything about what his future will bring, and it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have celebrated the Awakening while it happened. But it is a reminder that what’s right in front of your face isn’t necessarily reality.

Yasiel Puig hit fourth homer in his 19th plate apperance of 2013. Alex Guerrero hit fourth homer in his 18th plate appearance of 2015.

— Dodger Insider (@DodgerInsider) April 23, 2015

Alex Guerrero is having a wondrous month, and I’m certainly more inclined to believe in his athletic skills than I was in those of my youngest boy. In February, I watched Guerrero field (which has been considered his missing link since nearly the day he joined the Dodgers) and hit, and wondered what deficiencies I wasn’t seeing. March came, and nothing changed, even as the talk continued to be that he was being handed a roster spot out of obligation rather than reward. Now it’s April, and he’s the Cuban Yasiel Puig.

Or he’s this:

Of course, Guerrero is younger (28) than Anderson or Belliard were. I’m definitely sympathetic to the idea that Guerrero should be given a chance to show how much of this breakout performance is real. No one’s going to be happier if he’s Roy Hobbs than me.

But I also feel that the Dodgers are thoroughly justified in any skepticism they’ve built in more than a year of close observation. Even after four homers in 19 at-bats, it’s not clear that Guerrero is a better all-around player than the defensively dependable Juan Uribe (the fifth-best third baseman in the National League last year), or Justin Turner, whom Don Mattingly justifiably pointed out was basically Alex Guerrero at the plate last year and who had three doubles in a game only five days ago.

The question with Guerrero, as is the case with every Major League player, will be whether he can make the adjustments once the opposition adjusts to him. The best you can confirm for Guerrero us that he has earned the opportunity to try. Good for him, and good for the Dodgers.

But it’s naive to believe that Guerrero has proven himself beyond doubt, arrogant to suggest that the answer is obvious, and unfair to pronounce death sentences on any other players based on 15 games. Maybe Uribe is nearing the end of the line, but the perils of counting him out prematurely are underscored by how valuable he was in 2013-14.

I’m eager to see what happens next for Guerrero, with my heart wide open, but my eyes as well.

There is a clock in baseball

By Jon Weisman

On March 27, 2015

In Thinking out loud

Currently. #OpeningDayLA can't come soon enough.

A post shared by Los Angeles Dodgers (@dodgers) on Mar 27, 2015 at 12:43pm PDT

Giants at Dodgers, 7:05 p.m.
Jimmy Rollins, SS
Yasiel Puig, RF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Howie Kendrick, 2B
Carl Crawford, LF
Juan Uribe, 3B
Joc Pederson, CF
A.J. Ellis, C
Zack Greinke, P

Note: Brandon League is expected to be out of action for months, reports Ken Gurnick of MLB.com.

By Jon Weisman

Anyone who knows me — really knows me — knows that if I could be paid to do nothing but sit on a couch and read and watch TV, I would take that job in a minute.

But having been commissioned to go into work each day, the ache to make an impact is intense, the reward in succeeding considerable, and the perception of falling short distressful.

No more than eight Dodgers can be everyday players in a given season, and in reality, the number is maybe half that. Taking health and competition into account, only Adrian Gonzalez, Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins and Yasiel Puig can really know that they’ll have every opportunity to max their potential in 2015 — and even then, there will be probably be bumps and setbacks along the way.

For everyone else, there will be days when they want to make a difference, but just can’t.

Catchers are not 150-game-a-season players, and certainly not for the Dodgers, with A.J. Ellis and Yasmani Grandal combining two starter resumes into one position. Heaven love the Uribear, but Juan Uribe doesn’t figure to have the legs to shoulder a full season’s load at third base. Carl Crawford learned to live with being a platoon player in 2014.

Fifty years after Jim Lefebvre made his Major League debut on Opening Day and ended up playing 157 games for the Dodgers, Joc Pederson does have the opportunity to do something similar. Pederson is 22 going on 23, an age where you can be thrilled by your potential, yet unable to possibly appreciate how precious that potential is. In any case, what Pederson’s 2015 will look like remains to be seen.

This brings me to Andre Ethier, who is an almost perfect 10.03 years older than Pederson. As the uncertainty over Ethier’s place in the Dodger lineup continues — perhaps nearing a fast resolution, perhaps not — I can’t help thinking how much it must gnaw at him. If you have a belief in yourself, a belief in what you could be doing or what you should be doing, when you’re not fulfilling that vision (however much you blame your circumstances or yourself), nothing easily eases that angst. You need a shot of perspective to channel your frustration into something that motivates rather than deflates.

The cynics are lining up against you, the wide-eyed are rooting for you, but none of it matters. You march those moments alone.

Baseball is famously said to be the game without a clock (pace-of-play discussions notwithstanding), but deeper down, we know that the clock is very much ingrained in the game. It’s the clock that ticks away a ballplayer’s time in the sun, the fates privately setting when the final buzzer will sound.

Outsiders like us pay polite lip service to the player who accepts a reduced role without complaint, as Ethier did in the second half of 2014, but do we also take it for granted? Stomaching your setbacks is so hard. Though I won’t deny that a Major Leaguer’s salary cushions the blow, it’s not about the money. Money reduces stress, but it doesn’t solve for self-worth.

I’m not suggesting things can go any differently. In a talented universe, there simply isn’t room for everyone to thrive. You have to go for your wins, stare down your losses, constantly regroup. Some sunsets go quickly, but some linger a beautiful long while. You don’t know which sunset is yours until it comes.

Time comes to a blessed halt at Spring Training

By Jon Weisman

On March 1, 2015

In Spring Training, Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

GLENDALE, Ariz. — This is the year that Spring Training seduced me.

I had enjoyed my two previous trips, in 1993 and 2014, enjoyed the juxtaposition of Major League ballplayers with minor-league atmosphere. How could you not appreciate the uniqueness of the scene, how could you not see the romance?

And yet, I don’t know that I ever found it as simply lovely as I did this week at Camelback.

Keep in mind, I’m not like the pros in this organization. My trip was all of five days, not six weeks. I’m here and gone, with only a snapshot of the grind that preseason life becomes. I also managed to avoid the scorching heat that can break the spirit of any man. The Fahrenheits never passed 80, and the weather brought monotony-defying combinations of sun, wind, clouds and harmless rain.

For my short visit, the peace and beauty of the scene, the feeling of serenity threading through the earnest labor on the ballfields surrounding me, left me wanting more.

Odd, isn’t it, that I can sympathize with the ongoing concerns about MLB’s pace of play … then look down at my phone out on a distant field, see that three hours have passed and wonder where they went.

Or maybe it’s that this year, I’ve felt a new desire to slow down time. In recent years, I’ve strained to get from Point A to Point B on the calendar, trying to get tasks behind me so that I don’t have to fret them. Then, during the past few months, I became newly aware of how my kids seem to be racing away from their youth.

It was something shy of a New Year’s resolution, but I began the year by making a conscious effort not to be so focused on the future at the expense of the present. Two months in, it has paid off.

I know we’re all eager to get to the regular season, when the games count. But to take a walk in the park, through ballfields stripped to baseball’s essence, to feel the rays and the breeze and the dust of Arizona, to go out 0-0 and come back 0-0, neither a winner nor a loser, just a part of a timeless scene, is painlessly cathartic.

My dad turns 80 in May. I think I need to spend a day or two like this with him.

On clubhouse reporting …

By Jon Weisman

On February 24, 2015

In Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

When Dodger pitcher Brandon McCarthy and writer Molly Knight struck up a spontaneous — and particularly interesting — conversation about clubhouse journalism late Monday on Twitter (captured here by Lana Berry on Storify), it struck a nerve within me because of all the mental wrestling I’ve done on the subject. I was lucky I was able to fall asleep last night.

There wasn’t really a place for me to jump into their exchange, but given 36 hours between their chat and my own departure for Spring Training, here is a semi-coherent window into my mindset and experience.

The politics of fandom

By Jon Weisman

On February 9, 2015

In Fans, Thinking out loud

Photos by Juan Ocampo/Los Angeles Dodgers

By Jon Weisman

It’s easy, even conventional, to think of a team’s rooters as something like a singular, cohesive voting bloc, which is why we have terms like “Dodger fans” or “Red Sox Nation.” And fundamentally, Dodger fans do share a common goal, a common dream. We are Dodger fans, they are Giants fans — over there are Angels fans and Padres fans, and so on from one side of the continent to the other, all of us wearing our colors and our pride in an annual baseball Olympics.

But within a fanbase, just like within a city, state or country, there are deep divisions, with different politics, different attitudes and often a real struggle to connect, whether played out in ballpark conversations or on social media. We’re factionalized and entrenched in our beliefs, and our common passion seems at times only to intensify the divisions rather than bridge them.

After the Dodgers serpentined through an 8-5, 14-inning, 51-player, 334-minute, 467-pitch loss to the Washington Nationals on September 3, I found myself frustrated more by these inner conflicts than by the Dodgers’ inability to come out on top. The loss was painful, the anger more so.

Not everyone feels this way. Depending how you follow the Dodgers, depending on what you read, how much you interact on Twitter or comment rooms or how like-minded you and your friends are, these divisions might barely exist for you, if at all. Depending on your personality, they might not even matter.

But if you navigate the different, conflicting worlds, a day like September 3 rubbed the edges raw.

It has been some day

By Jon Weisman

On December 10, 2014

In Thinking out loud, Transactions

By Jon Weisman

To say the least, I’ve been following today’s Winter Meetings extravaganza with personal as well as professional interest.

I’ve been writing, rewriting, rewriting … but the piece I want to end up with needs to wait until the dust settles.

In the meantime, travel to dodgers.com for the latest news.

The old prospect

By Jon Weisman

On November 17, 2014

In Thinking out loud

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH6ri4yasfk&w=550&h=309]

“An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own …”

— Shakespeare, pre-Vin Scully

By Jon Weisman

It was probably the pinnacle of my athletic career, and I can’t really explain why it happened, when it happened.

The consolation prize: Why the World Series matters most, but the regular season still matters

By Jon Weisman

On October 29, 2014

In Postseason, Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

Now that Madison Bumgarner has gone full Hershiser and then some, now that the San Francisco Giants have a well-earned dynasty of three World Series titles in five years, now that history has recorded this all in fresh ink, I’ve reached the stage of acceptance with the 2014 season.

But I am left with a sincere question …

Clayton Kershaw will win the National League Cy Young Award and maybe the MVP, the Dodgers won the NL West, and all anyone will say this winter is how they are inferior to Bumgarner and the Giants. I’m not denying people the right to say it.

But if winning the World Series is all that matters, and what you do in the regular season matters not at all if you win the World Series, and if how you finish in the regular season gives no hint about whether you’re going to win the World Series, then why worry about what is happening during the regular season?

Time and urgency, winning and losing

By Jon Weisman

On October 27, 2014

In Thinking out loud

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g450eyrN7Pg&w=550&h=309]

By Jon Weisman

Somewhere right now, someone is driving a car and texting about the horrors of ebola.

But let me get back to that …

Live and let die

By Jon Weisman

On October 14, 2014

In Thinking out loud

[mlbvideo id=”36780953″ width=”550″ height=”308″ /]

By Jon Weisman

Almost all the time, I spend too much time worrying about my own house to worry about anyone else’s.

Then comes the time when the Giants are still playing baseball and the Dodgers aren’t, and the bitterness creeps in. Postseason baseball in San Francisco tolerable as a fluke, but as a recurring event, it’s brutal to suffer through. And it hasn’t been helped by the Cardinals flying on, oblivious to any concept of whose turn it is to bask in October’s magic glow.

The blockheads

By Jon Weisman

On October 13, 2014

In Thinking out loud

By Jon Weisman

Sometimes I wonder why Charlie Brown got so much abuse.

I’ve reread a ton of “Peanuts” over the past year with my kids, comics I had practically memorized to begin with, and at a certain point you wonder just what’s going on. You’ll see Charlie Brown with a healthy relationship with several characters, most of all Linus, who is respected throughout the neighborhood and whose addictions to a blanket, thumbsucking and the Great Pumpkin are tolerated by everyone except Lucy (who is intolerant of just about everything).

Charlie Brown is clearly a worthwhile member of the community, not only a good listener but frequently a good advisor and often surprisingly resourceful. There’s little he wouldn’t do for another human being, much less his dog. But then, not infrequently, you’ll see someone like Violet absolutely tee off on him, filling four panels with how worthless he is.

And you realize what’s going on. Charlie Brown doesn’t do well in school or in sports or with red-haired girls or in any other tangible activity. He has been a loser, in the literal sense, all his life. That’s all that matters.

Meanwhile, at Dodger Stadium …

By Jon Weisman

On October 6, 2014

In Thinking out loud

By Claire Miller

Most people wake up Monday morning dreading to go into the office. The weekend is over, and it’s back to the daily grind. But when you work for an organization whose product is unpredictable, Monday mornings aren’t so mundane. Especially when your product is the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that is about to play Game 3 of the National League Division Series in St. Louis.

Needless to say, this Monday isn’t an ordinary Monday at the office for us. We’re not hosting, so there’s no pregame preparations to take care of or commotion that comes along with the game-day hustle and bustle. It’s pretty quiet among the cubicles, but you can almost hear everyone’s minds buzzing with the same thought: What’s going to happen tonight?

Dodger Thoughts

Jon Weisman's outlet for dealing psychologically with the Los Angeles Dodgers, baseball and life

Category: Thinking out loud (Page 5 of 8)

Giant shadows

It’s a great night for baseball

Behold: The case against the DH

Alex Guerrero and ‘Awakenings’

There is a clock in baseball

Time comes to a blessed halt at Spring Training

On clubhouse reporting …

The politics of fandom

It has been some day

The old prospect

The consolation prize: Why the World Series matters most, but the regular season still matters

Time and urgency, winning and losing

Live and let die

The blockheads

Meanwhile, at Dodger Stadium …

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