The great baseball writer, Bill James, pointed out that the difference in ability between the most famous and successful ball players in the major leagues and the top tier of potential replacement players in the minor leagues is really not all that great. We think the difference is monumental– because the media give obsessive, monomaniacal attention to the players at the top level. We think, what will the Yankees do without Derek Jeter– they’ll never win another World Series! But the reality is that Jeter is only a bit better than his top potential replacement, and that difference is just a small portion of the abilities of the New York Yankees as a whole. In other words, the Yankees will generally do just about as well without Jeter as with him.
Want proof? Check out the stats of any team that trades away (or loses) one of their famous superstars. You will find that they often perform as well or even better without him.
Or all you have to do is study the stats. Pick any moment during the regular season and look at the key statistical measures of performance in baseball. Recognize all the names? Probably a few, but not all of them. Over and over again you will find the names of people you never heard of, in the top ten in the league in ERA, or OPS, or fielding percentage, or what have you. (One obvious current example: Jose Bautista from the Blue Jays leads the league in home runs.) You ask yourself, who are these nobodies? How can they possibly be in the top ten when I’ve never heard of them? The answer is, those nobodies are usually younger players who are actually performing at a higher level than their famous team-mates are. They are often actually performing better than Derek Jeter. They are often paid 1/10 or less what the famous team-mate makes.
To add to the distorting effect, established players who had big years in the past are often rewarded with huge contracts on the expectation– almost always erroneous– that they will do the same or better in the future. Then, because they have big contracts, the can’t just sit on the bench making the manager look like a fool. They must be put into the field to “prove” that the team made the right decision in giving him a big contract. Often, a superb prospect languishes on the bench, waiting for the star to come out of his slump… so he can be traded.
That seems to shock some people who seem to have this naive faith in the media to correctly size things. Why would there be 25,000 articles about Jeter and only one article about his potential replacement, if they were roughly comparable? Well, obviously because you can sell more newspapers if you can convince the general public that Jeter is very, very, very important, and that his performance on the field is nearly god-like, and that the Yankees would be a gang of pus-spurting whinnying whine-bots without him, and they need to read about him.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you will want to read about Jeter because we put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You will want to see “Avatar” because every general interest magazine in the country has run an article about this movie– as if they just decided to do that on their own, and you want to watch Barbara Walters interview Sandra Bulloch because Sandra Bulloch is very important and brilliant because Barbara Walters allowed her to suck up to her and snag an interview.
Which leads me to my point: it should surprise nobody that the Swiss Olympic Hockey team is competitive with both Canada and the U.S. even if most of the Swiss players are nobodies. They are not famous, but they are not all that far below the NHL’s best in terms of talent and ability, and it only seems shocking to us that Sidney Crosby couldn’t single-handedly destroy them.
The shock of the Olympics hockey tournament for me was not the Swiss or the Americans. It was Canada defeating Russia– manhandling them, really– 7-3. I cannot recall a game in which, in international competition, Canada so dominated an extremely competitive opponent. It may have been the best game ever played by a Canadian team in World competition. All right– I’m exaggerating. I don’t know. It’s just the best, most complete game I’ve ever seen Canada play. They were intense and fast and crisp and utterly at ease tearing circles around a very, very good Russian Team.
I suspect that the reason Canada had trouble with the Swiss and the Americans and the Slovakians was because they didn’t get a 3-goal lead. Instead, with a 2-goal lead, Babcock chose to go to a 1-2-2 formation and play defense. This, of course, is a repudiation of the strategy that proved successful, and an attempt to embrace a failed strategy instead. The Americans must have thought, “thank God they stopped trying to score on us– we were getting creamed.”
Baseball teams, famously, do the same thing when they bring in a defensive replacement for the good hitter who can’t field very well. If this improved your team’s chances of winning, why not do it from the start? Your good-hitting/poor-fielding player may well already have cost your team the runs that give your opponent the lead, and the defensive player won’t hit the home-run in extra-innings that wins the game. It’s not logical.
The this way, the manager can claim that he managed and take credit for good luck.
“I’m living proof that dreams do come true.” Ozzy Osbourne.
The most charming moment of the Olympics: Charles Hamelin’s girlfriend Marianne St-Gelais going nuts during the final laps of the 500 metre race as Hamelin pulled ahead and then hung on to take the gold medal. St-Gelais also medaled, silver, in the women’s 500m.
I would give her a medal for her performance in the stands, for pure, unadulterated joy.
