Most baseball fans consider themselves seers in one way or another because they are more astute judges of talent than the managers and general managers of the major leagues, or because they have a deep faith in one team or another, they believe they know the eventual outcome of the season ahead. Pick-the-divisions baseball pools have always been popular, and the ever-increasing number of Rotisserie leagues testifies to the number of stats-conscious baseball eggheads–the Bill Jamesians–who, if they aren’t exactly sure of the future, at least believe they know the reasons for past mistakes and therefore will not repeat them (picking the Cleveland Indians in the American League East, for instance). Of course, there is never any shortage of fools who buy season tickets believing they will have bragging rights over play-off seats when last year’s sixth-place team comes in first–unless, of course, expressway repairs, a youth movement, and general mismanagement conspire to slow ticket sales to a trickle. Yet, here we are, I think, getting ahead of ourselves by getting a little too literal-minded too soon; we should pause, for one final moment, before settling into the baseball season and the actual personages who will concern us in their usual unusual fashion for the next three calendar seasons.
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There is, I believe, a certain instinct to sports forecasting, and of course the more knowledge this instinct is based upon the more likely the forecast will prove true. I’m a great believer in a pick feeling right (mea culpa to the Jamesians–Bill, again, not Ellen–for whom such talk is blasphemy). Everyone’s favorites, this year–the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates–are not my picks simply because they don’t yet feel right; give them both another year to ripen. When I was a boy, this attitude toward feel was as literal as a second baseman’s feel for knowing where the bag is on the double play. I’d pore slowly, baseball card by baseball card, through the rosters of each team. I believed I could tell the successful budding stars from the unsuccessful, and I must admit that I based most of my impressions not on the back of the cards–the stats–but on the front, by the way the ball players looked. Joe Rudi, in his early days with the Oakland As, looked like a ball player, and Aurelio Rodriguez was a certain star, I was sure, because only a future star could have a baseball card that made him look as if one sideburn were shaved and the other earlobe low. I’d flip, slowly, through the cards, in an invisible cloud of baseball-gum aroma and the players’ very beings seemed to enter my consciousness through my fingertips. In the pattern of most baseball fans, I believe sometimes that I knew more about the game than I do now, because my unclouded mind had more capacity for baseball trivia than it does now. (I still remember that “Wahoo” Sam Crawford holds the lifetime record for most triples, but I can’t remember the exact number, although 532 comes quickly to mind.) In short, I knew a lot of facts and figures back then, but I also believed more then, believed in a way only children and tiny minds can believe. It made for better predictions.
The separation of wheat from chaff is the big concern at this point on the south side. If all these players the Sox are investing their future in play up to their considerable potential, then it’s true the Sox will compete for first place in the division. (“Anything can happen!” is their motto this year; if that doesn’t foretell bad times, nothing does.) The Sox, however, are not going to be so lucky. Melido Perez is 22 (as in, “just turned 22,” not “will turn 23 during the season”), and he is going to have some tough times. Jack McDowell is a month older, and he is not yet a year out of college. Also, he got hit a lot harder at Class AA Birmingham last year than at the major-league level–in a similar number of innings–and that is a finding that demands to even itself out somewhere down the road. The Sox are going into the season with two castoffs from the Saint Louis Cardinals as the mainstays of their pitching staff–Ricky Horton and Dave LaPoint. The ancient albino Jerry Reuss appears ready to join the staff as a fifth starter, for all those statisticians who base their picks on average age of players; he should almost double the Sox’. On the other hand, Bobby Thigpen has a clear route to becoming one of the league’s best relievers. Without Bob James to distract Fregosi, he will now have to stick with Thigpen through good times and bad–the sort of treatment all great relievers receive, simply because they deserve it. (Remember the awful start the Philadelphia Phillies’ Steve Bedrosian endured last year; he went on to win the Cy Young Award.)
Give me the Cubs in third, with Sutcliffe and Maddux enjoying good seasons and Calvin Schiraldi returning to the bull pen to help “Goose” Gossage before the season’s out. Mets return to first.
