• What difference does it make what position Jeff Kent played?

    In certain cases defense can be a determining factor (or the factor in the case of Ozzie Smith) for a player getting into the Hall of Fame; if a catcher puts up the offensive numbers to get into the Hall while enduring the physical stress; dealing with the pitchers; calling a game; and running the team on the field, then his offensive numbers shouldn’t be expected to be as good as a player from another position; but the constant talk about Jeff Kent being at or near the top of all the offensive numbers for a second baseman is perplexing because it shouldn’t matter. Kent was (at best) an average defensive second baseman; his defense or position shouldn’t be a factor in whether he is or isn’t voted into the Hall of Fame.
    If Kent is elected, it will be because of his bat; but would he be such a sure-fire HOFer if he had been positioned 50 feet to the right and played first base instead of second? What if he was shifted 110 feet to the left and was playing third base? Would he then be such a great candidate based on his offensive numbers? I can’t believe that Kent would’ve been much better or worse with the glove at another position than he was at second base; and if that’s the case, then his defensive position should have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he’ll receive the sport’s ultimate honor.
    Let’s say Kent was a third baseman instead of a second baseman; would he then be referred to in such a reverential tone? Ron Santo’s career numbers are very close to Kent’s, but Santo’s still waiting for the Hall of Fame call that he deserves and he was a five-time Gold Glove winner at third base; Kent wouldn’t have been a Gold Glove third baseman just like he wasn’t a Gold Glove second baseman. What would happen then? 
    There’s a difference between a player who is a second baseman and a player who’s playing second base. Ryne Sandberg was a second baseman; Roberto Alomar was a second baseman; Bill Mazeroski was a second baseman; Jeff Kent was a player whose bat needed to be in the lineup and second base was as good a place as any to put him since he could do the least amount of damage defensively and play the position passably, try hard and turn a good double play while driving in plenty of runs. This is why the positional argument doesn’t make sense anywhere but catcher.
    Let’s take another example. What if a team looks at a Nick Swisher-type hitter and his power/on base combination and says, “we need a center fielder; he’s not that great at the position, but I’ll live with his defense as long as he hits 25-30 homers and gets on base at a .350-.370 clip.” So, he plays center field for the rest of his career and ends up with 400 homers and numbers similar to those of Jim Edmonds. Edmonds has a case for being a Hall of Famer with his offensive numbers and superlative defense; but the Swisher-type player’s below average center field play would keep him from getting any recognition despite his offensive numbers. He wouldn’t get any support as a Hall of Famer because it would be known that he wasn’t a good center fielder; he was just out there through necessity and that there was nowhere else to put him. But say someone said, “let’s make him a second baseman” and he worked very hard, learned to turn the double play and ended up in the same ballpark defensively as Kent; what would the view of him be then? Would he be called a “great hitting second baseman” and get support because of a random position switch?
    Kent is being given credit for something that had very little to do with his defense and a great deal to do with what was convenient. He wasn’t a bad defensive second baseman, but he shouldn’t be given credit for playing that position since his defense wouldn’t have been any worse had he been playing first base, third base or left field. In most cases, players are either elected because of their all around game or because of their bats and with Jeff Kent, his average defense shouldn’t enter into the equation because he wasn’t a second baseman, he was a guy playing second base who happened to put up big numbers while there.

• Mark McGwire’s estranged brother hawks a book proposal:

    Until Jay McGwire slithered out of the brush, the only brother of Mark McGwire I was aware of was the failed NFL quarterback Dan McGwire. Let me say right here that the only way this book “detailing” Mark’s PED usage is going to see the light of day is through self-publishing or print-on-demand; even if that’s the case, no one’s going to buy it. The story itself has become tiresome; I don’t think anyone who previously might’ve been interested in the story is paying close enough attention now to want to read a book that sounds like the juiciest (heh) bits are going to be in the proposal and on the dustjacket; and Jay McGwire’s motives are, shall we say, dubious given his statements. The most laughable of which is the following (culled from ESPN.com):

“Mark is a man I think most would like to forgive because his reason
wasn’t nefarious — it was for survival,” he wrote, according to the
proposal. “My bringing the truth to surface about Mark is out of love.
I want Mark to live in truth to see the light, to come to repentance so
he can live in freedom — which is the only way to live. “

    There’s a self-righteous and dogmatic nature to the above statement that looks designed to cast Jay in a newly-found religious light; the transparency of this entire charade is clear: Jay McGwire saw that Kirk Radomski got a book deal as the interest in this sordid affair wanes to the point of non-existence and is trying to cash in and use buzzwords as “repentance” and “freedom” to garner attention for his proposal. A few years ago, a publishing house might’ve rolled the dice with a small printing of this manuscript to see if anyone bought it, but the state of the publishing industry along with the economy is going to land this book proposal not in the slush pile, but in the circular file where it belongs.

• Mets sign Freddy Garcia to a minor league deal:

    The Mets and Yankees were said to be the last two teams standing for Freddy Garcia as he decided where he wanted to try and play; the Mets were probably the choice because Garcia saw a better chance of making the starting rotation in Queens. This is a low risk signing for the Mets that shouldn’t be seen as anything more than throwing something at the wall and hoping it sticks.
    Garcia was remarkably durable during his first eight seasons with the Mariners and White Sox and that workload and durability has caught up to him as he’s pitched poorly in 14 games over the past two years for the Phillies and Tigers. Garcia’s injury issues also popped up in the Venezuelan Winter League as he tried to prove to interested teams that he’s finally healthy. The reports have insisted that Garcia’s recent health woes are muscular and not structural; we’ll see.
    Garcia’s mechanics were never particularly smooth (he makes a very long circle with his arm as he draws it back and lands on a stiff front leg with little leg drive), and he’s going to be 34 in June. Even if he makes the Mets rotation and stays relatively healthy, I wouldn’t expect much use from him. If the Mets think this is going to solve the problem of the middle of their rotation, they’re in for a big surprise; continuing to pursue Oliver Perez or Ben Sheets and making sure they get one of them would be the wisest course of action with or without Garcia.

• Jeff Kent is set to announce his retirement–let the Hall of Fame debate begin and last for five long years:

    “We got what for David Cone? Jeff who?!? That’s all?!?”
    This was the overwhelming reaction on August 27th-28th, 1992 when the news of the Mets trade of David Cone to the Blue Jays broke and spread throughout New York. If someone had said, on the day of that trade and the subsequent four years that Kent spent with the Mets, that one of the three players involved in the deal (Kent, Cone and Ryan Thompson) would be heading toward the Hall of Fame, Cone would’ve been the first obvious candidate and, in looking at Thompson’s power potential, tools and bluster, he would’ve been mentioned ahead of Kent as well. Since then, Kent has become, in some circles, a no-doubt Hall of Famer even with his abrasive personality that wore on teammates, media and management. Despite what anyone says in retrospect, nobody saw that coming.
    Jeff Kent was a 20th round draft pick of the Blue Jays in 1989 out of the University of California. His minor league numbers showed great potential; but what has to be understood during those all too recent times was that there weren’t as many people paying close attention to the stats of minor league players; nor were such stats available at the click of a button. Those that wanted to sift through those numbers and find such potentially great hidden gems either had too much time on their hands, didn’t have the issue of maintaining a life to get in the way, or both.
    When the Mets traded for Kent, GM Al Harazin was already under fire for being the architect of “The Worst Team Money Could Buy”; he was known as a financial/business guy in the Mets front office who found himself thrust into the spotlight when Joe McIlvaine took the Padres GM job in 1991; looking back, Cone, at age 29 could have yielded a greater on paper return than Kent and Thompson; and this was before the precedent of non-contending teams trading impending free agents for prospects became such a common and accepted practice; but it also shows that no matter who’s making the deals or why, there’s no way of knowing what a prospect is going to become.
    Did Harazin see Kent’s numbers and say, “this guy’s gonna be a player”? Probably not; my guess is he got a couple of good reports from his scouts on Kent and Thompson (and if I had to guess, I’d say Thompson was considered more of a blue chipper than Kent) and made the move quickly before the press got the word that Cone was on the market. Kent’s personality irritated the Mets veterans as he very quickly gained the reputation of a loner who was better off being ignored and that never changed throughout his career.
    On the field with the Mets, Kent was an okay player; nothing great and he did little to indicate that he’d develop the way he did. He looked like a guy who’d hit his 20 homers; drive in his 80 runs; play passable defense at second base; and be easily replaceable when the time came. It’s also conveniently forgotten that it wasn’t just the Mets that let Kent go; the Mets made a move that was universally applauded late in the 1996 season when Carlos Baerga—-an All Star second baseman who was considered in a class (although a notch below) Roberto Alomar, and in the midst of what looked like an off year—-became available for Kent and Jose Vizcaino. There was no reason to expect Baerga to collapse the way he did at age 28 for the Mets and decline into the journeyman that he became. Kent had 10 extra base hits in 39 games with the Indians late in the 1996 season and did nothing in the playoffs; the Indians turned around and traded Kent, Vizcaino and Julian Tavarez to the Giants for Matt Williams. It was in San Francisco that Kent found his alter ego (on and off the field) in Barry Bonds.
    As despised as Bonds was by teammates and the media, Kent was as, if not more, reviled. The reason the two were said to hate each other with such a passion (that occasionally became physical, both publicly and privately) was that they were mirror images of each other; but on the field, they (like other sets of teammates who hated each other, Ron Cey and Steve Garvey for example) created magic. Would Kent have become the statistical Hall of Famer he became without that shotgun marriage to Bonds? Did Giants GM Brian Sabean predict that was going to happen? It’s hard to imagine that being the case, but that’s how it turned out. Kent won an MVP and put up huge RBI totals with Bonds as his teammate.   
    When he left the Giants to join the Astros and Dodgers as he wound down his career, he still put up big numbers, but not as big as he did with Bonds. Kent was a prime example of a player who evolved to the best of his ability and took advantage of a historic player buttressing him and allowing him to put up the numbers that took him from a guy who was considered a workmanlike cog in a machine into a likely Hall of Famer.
    Kent is so stubborn, so difficult to deal with, that admitting Bonds’s contribution would be the equivalent of waterboarding
himself, but it can’t be denied that he wouldn’t have become the RBI machine he was without Bonds, and without Bonds he wouldn’t even be considered a Hall of Famer.
    The ironic part of all of that will be seen in five years as there will still be a debate as to whether Bonds is going to be voted into the Hall of Fame because of his perceived guilt in using performance enhancing drugs (and he’s still going to be waiting for an induction that may never come), but Kent will either be elected or be close to election with the ultimate honor to come within another couple of years. Will Kent admit Bonds’s contribution privately? Or will his irascible nature cling to the inaccurate belief that he would’ve made it anyway, even though he wouldn’t have.

• Baseball should step in and expedite the sale of the Padres to Jeff Moorad:

    You know things are bad when veterans clinging to their last year or two in the big leagues are spurning the Padres for deals elsewhere; deals in which they’re going to get far less playing time than they would’ve in San Diego. Such is the case with Brad Ausmus and Omar Vizquel.
    Ausmus signed with the Dodgers rather than the Padres and unless Russell Martin gets hurt, Ausmus will be lucky to get 150 at bats next year as his backup because Dodgers manager Joe Torre rides his starting catcher every single day with rare off days sprinkled infrequently throughout the season. The Padres wanted Ausmus to tutor young Nick Hundley, but the prospect of going through a season that promises to be historically hideous must not have appealed to Ausmus as much as playing for a team that should be hanging around contention like the Dodgers. (The Padres responded by signing the solid veteran Henry Blanco to fill the role as backup/tutor for Hundley.)
    In Vizquel’s case, the Padres had interest in him being their shortstop but he chose to take a minor league deal with the Rangers knowing that his main job is to be a backup and tutor to 19-year-old prospect Elvis Andrus and help the rookie essentially cut into Vizquel’s playing time. At their ages, Ausmus and Vizquel look like they decided that they’d rather have a chance to win a few more games than suffer with a team that’s not going to have anyone watching them; is going to lose 100+ games; and is in front office turmoil.
    Baseball should step in and get the Padres sale to Jeff Moorad done as quickly as possible for the good of the franchise. Things are supposedly moving along, but every day that the Padres are functioning knowing that they have the sale hanging over their heads is another day that there can’t be a new start without the current management in place. This situation is different from that of the soon-to-be-sold Cubs because the Cubs, while keeping an eye on their payroll, are cutting some big salaries (Jason Marquis, Mark DeRosa) to acquire other big salaries (Milton Bradley). The Padres are a different story. They’ve been destroyed by the ineptitude of Sandy Alderson and his heavy-handed grandstanding and they’re not even able to attract players who would usually just be happy to have the job. It’s bad for baseball to have a team with literally no chance of competing and, while it’s on the way to being rectified, they’re going to have to endure a year worse than 2008 on and off the field and once Moorad takes over, it’s going to be that much harder for him to repair the fissures that this mess has created.