More nuts

Joe Liggins was seen with near? LaTroy Hawkins at some kind of Indiana basketball event (scroll down).

Hawkins is an interesting character for Pirate fans to consider. He's clearly the best reliever in the Cubs bullpen. He's one of the best in the National League. But last year he struggled some and some Cub fans are ready to shit-can him for a retread like Ryan Dempster. Hendry and Baker are playing it cool about the closer situation, not wanting to give someone the title and the added pressure. The Cubs are all about trading or not trading Sammy Sosa right now.

I know all this because Hawkins is on one of my teams in a deep NL-only keeper league. I look in at my players every now and then.

The story with Hawkins appears to be this. Dusty Baker knows that Hawkins is his best reliever. Some Chicago reporters have written that the Cubs intend to use him in the eighth inning. With that, we've also seen reports that the people in Chicago have come around to the way of thinking that regards the eighth inning as more important than the ninth inning. And it is, you know. If your setup man gives up a game-tying run, your best reliever - if that's your closer - doesn't get the chance to keep the lead.

It looks to me like the Cubs intend to use Hawkins as a two-inning closer and/or an eighth-inning setup guy. If he gets three easy outs in the eighth and hasn't been overworked lately, Dusty Baker is not taking him out of the game.

This is relevant to Pirate fans for two reasons. One, we're gonna play the Cubs a lot. Two, some Pirate fans were upset when the team decided to re-sign Jose Mesa to pitch the ninth inning. As I figure it, the Mesa signing ensures that our best relievers, Mike Gonzalez and Salomon Torres, pitch in seventh and eighth innings. All hail Jose Mesa, he's a big gob of mature guile, but in terms of pure stuff, he's not the relief ace of the future. Now all we need to do is find a way to convince Joe Liggins to not yank Gonzalez and/or Torres if they have a quick 1-2-3 inning.

Another interesting Pirate-related article is this one. Here Rocky Nelson, the cornerman from the 1960 World Series team, complains about the high salaries of modern baseball players. There really is something to this. There's no doubt that the average baseball fan's attachment to the players has changed, especially over the last thirty years, and the high salaries are a big part of it. Is it any wonder that players are less respected and loved? One big complaint about "sabermetrics" is that its practioners don't love the game and the players the same way the old-timers did. How can we?

More so than football, baseball only succeeds as an entertainment on a daily basis. It's a soap opera. Historically, the stars of the soap opera were average Joes. Not so any more. The players are not only above-average in terms of raw ability. They are also well into the top tax bracket. In the decades after the Great Depression, a middle class appeared and prospered in America. There had never really been a middle class before, and more and more people are now becoming aware of the fact that this middle class has disappeared. Over the course of the century, the players have migrated into the ranks of the economic elite. Who really cares? Clearly some people - like Rocky Nelson - they care.

Is it any wonder that one of the tenets of the new way of following the game insists so stridently that most players are close to "replacement level" in terms of talent and ability? I wonder if the rising salaries are a context that at least partially explains why so many fans are eager to get their rocks off telling the world that Rob Mackowiak is "just average." There's a definite desire to take most of these guys down a notch in some of the writing about the sport.

Sports Illustrated has been profiling players in way that reminds me of GQ. This is not the way to go, I think. People turn to sports for a diversion from the drudgery and predictability and (sometimes) hopelessness of their everyday lives. Reminding fans that the players now live the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - even if most of them don't - is not the way to do it. I don't want to read about how much they like certain kinds of cars or Bacco Bucci shoes. It doesn't add to my pleasure when I get back to watching the games. If we're going to talk about their money, maybe we should be talking about the players who invest it responsibly. Or maybe we shouldn't talk about the money at all. There's plenty else to discuss.