Musings on the Hot Stove

This always happens.  For a few weeks every December, baseball holds its winter meetings and returns to the spotlight.  The NBA and NHL have only just begun (and that’s assuming you consider the NHL a true professional sports league at this point), and most of the trade rumors and free agent signings occur midweek, so they don’t compete with the meat of the NFL.  Over the past few days, conversations at the office have focused not on Brandon Jacobs’ knee or Plaxico Buress’ impersonation of Cheddar Bob from 8 Mile, but on baseball.  At the school where I work, impromptu discussions touching on the validity of Sabathia, the effectiveness of Burnett, and A-Rod’s inability to hit a fastball in a fastball count have arisen in various environments: the teachers’ lounge, the cafeteria, during class time, it didn’t matter.  For a brief instant, baseball returned to our general consciousness, and with it came feelings of the warmth of spring, excitement for the future, and the odd feeling that the business of the game may have gotten a little out of hand.

As always, here are a variety of thoughts on the Hot Stove League.

Why is it called the “Hot Stove?” Seriously, who coined this phrase?  When did it become the widely accepted and used vernacular in describing the state of the MLB during these days of rumors, trades, and signings?  ESPN reports daily on the “Hot Stove”, blogs have sprung up devoted entirely to reporting on this sizzling range, and MLB.com has its own Hot Stove graphic that plays before every new video.

Recently, the analogy has become a part of our nomenclature, but is it really the best description of the state of the league?  Why not the Circus Juggler League, because teams have so many balls in the air?  How about the Swinging 70s League, because players and teams are bound to trade partners?  Sure, the stove imagery works because it provides us with the front burner players, such as CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, and players languishing on the back burner like Johnny Gomes, Jody Gathright, and Chris Capuano.  However, it doesn’t seem to take into account other aspects of the pursuit of free agents, most notably the fact that only certain teams tend to be in the running for the big names.

I suggest that we now refer to this time of year as the Eighth Grade League.  Just like eighth graders, players exchange teams in rapid succession, there are nosy and manipulative agents intervening and playing the roles of parents, the league has a specific hierarchy of popularity, and in the long term most of these relationships will have very little impact on the player or the franchise.  This winter, the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, and Angels have been the popular kids forcing other teams to either emulate them or pick up the scraps in their wake.  The Nationals and Marlins have been the kids in the A/V club that play World of Warcraft every day after school.  In recent years, the Yankees have become that eighth grade boy that has dated just about every girl in his grade and now has been forced to either try to bring some seventh grade girl along early (Phil Hughes) or wade over his head into the riskier pool of more experienced ninth graders (CC Sabathia).

Pitching Floods New York .  Imagine Martin Landau as Entourage’s star producerBob Ryan addressing the Mets and Yankees in this way:  What if I told you we could get a top of the line closer and use him as a set-up man; a hard throwing, right-handed starter that consistently pitches his best against our team; last season’s best closer, who just set the record for saves in a season; and the most sought after pitcher in this year’s free agent class, a perennial Cy Young Award contender, who happens to be a left hander that can start on Opening Day and can immediately erase the sour taste in our mouths from last season, all for the very reasonable price of $280.5 million dollars?  Is that something you might be interested in?

Apparently, Mets GM Omar Minaya couldn’t get a bagel last season without New Yorkers begging him to shore up the shaky bullpen.  He’s done just that, signing Francicso Rodriguez for three years and acquiring J.J. Putz in a 12 player trade.  On paper, this move addresses a main concern.  A lunching seventh grader furthersummarized the situation, saying, “If Putz does well, the Jews in New York are going to love him.”  He then went to get more chicken nuggets.

Similarly, the Yankees addressed their starting pitching woes by signing the alphabet soup combination of starters, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett.  Though both players come with baggage – 28-year-old Sabathia, who signed for seven years, weighs close to 300 lbs and has thrown roughly 3,000 innings in the past two seasons; while 32-year-old Burnett has a tendency to get hurt – on paper, they have solidified and strengthened the Yankees’ very mediocre starting rotation.  Where New York’s staff once comprised Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain, Andy Pettitte (maybe), Phil Hughes, and Dan Giese; it now includes Sabathia, Burnett, Wang, Chamberlain, and Pettitte (maybe).  That’s a significant upgrade.

Don’t forget, both these teams will debut new home ballparks.  One way to ensure that they fill the seats was to specifically tackle the desires of the fans.  Whether this sets the stage for another Subway Series still remains to be determined.

Lots of Big Names Still Available. The Indians just signed closer Kerry Wood to a two year deal, and the Angels just offered Teixeira an eight year deal before leaving Vegas.  Other than that, headline players are still out there to snatch up.  The list of available free agents includes Manny Ramirez, Derek Lowe, Ben Sheets, and closers Takashi Saito and Brian Fuentes, to name a few.  Teams not on the top of the Eighth Grade League’s popularity pyramid can still make some noise and improve at various positions.  The excitement will not end just because the GMs are making like Nicholas Cage and leaving Las Vegas.

Note to the Cincinnati Reds:  Bringing in Arthur Rhodes this early in the off-season for two years and four million dollars does not count as “making noise.”  The only noise created by this addition will be the silence in the Great American Ballpark after he gives up another double to blow a Johnny Cueto win for the third time in a row.  The angry callers on the sports talk radio shows of the following day also do not count as “noise.”

The Business of Baseball Is Currently a Very Dangerous Proposition. In these harsh economic times, the MLB walks a very fine line.  While middle class Americans lose their homes and jobs at a staggering rate, athletes that ostensibly work eight months out of the year (give-or-take) will never have to worry about a mortgage payment again.  CC Sabathia could have walked into Brian Cashman’s suite with his entourage and agent all pushing empty wheel barrows.  He could have then asked Cashman to fill those wheel barrows with stacks of thousand-dollar bills Weimar Republic style and Cashman would have done so without hesitation.

After the Yankees announced that they had finalized the Sabathia deal, my parents had the following conversation (some of this has been embellished):

Mom:  It’s sick and unjustifiable that in this economic climate the Yankees can just throw around money like this.  Why does someone who pitches every 5 days need tobe paid exponentially more than a police officer or New York City public school teacher?

Dad:  Does this mean when they send the solicitations for our season tickets, we won’t be renewing them at the higher price?

Mom:  What are you, crazy?  Of course we’ll buy them.  How else would we see the Yankees live?

As a Yankee fan, every year the Eighth Grade League rears its head, I feel a sense of gnawing guilt.  Are Cashman and company doing anything ethically wrong when they corner the market on pitching or drive the bargaining price up on a player like Teixiera?  Of course not, that’s the laissez faire capitalist system our country has developed.  Do their actions add validity to the claims that small market teams cannot consistently compete in this economic structure?  Absolutely.  Baseball’s business is a microcosm of today’s American society: every year, the chasm between the haves and the have-nots widens.

However, the league currently treads on dangerous ground.  Between the late start times of the playoffs, the growing expenses of baseball equipment, and the disappearance of the sandlot, baseball is losing its youthful fan-base.  As a result, its constituency is becoming increasingly older and probably economically falls mostly in the middle class.  As player contracts rise exorbitantly along with the price of tickets and concessions, the league is in danger of turning off its main demographic.  I’m not saying we need to go the way of Ted Denslow’s beliefs from BASEketball and “return to the days where players were treated like indentured servants.”  In an era where banks and core American businesses demand hundreds of billions of dollars from a government already trillions in debt, Major League Baseball needs to tread very cautiously.