The Final Beauty of David Freese

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

David Richard Freese is 28 years old and looks a bit like a young Sean Penn. He was born in Corpus Christi, TX, but grew up in the St. Louis, MO metropolitan area. He grew up a Cardinals fan, of course. He almost went to school with Ryan Howard; he was four years behind Philadelphia's first baseman at West Lafayette High.

In a way, Freese is lucky: born in 1983, he drifts through the bittersweet 1985 and 1987 postseasons. The Cardinals began October in first place in the NL East both those years under manager Whitey Herzog, forced Game 7 of the World Series both years—and lost. Here's a sign of how much times have changed: in 1985, they were bested by the Kansas City Royals; in 1987, by the Minnesota Twins.

It is October 28, 2011. The Twins' and Royals' seasons ended almost a month ago, both bitter disappointments, but David Freese is still playing. In fact, he's less than twenty-four hours removed from the best game of his life, when he tripled in the bottom of the ninth with two strikes, two outs and two on, to tie the game, then ended it in the eleventh with a walk-off solo shot to straightaway center.

This Isn't Chess: A La Russa Rhapsody

Apart from a bizarre attempt at pardoning Mark McGwire's very public use of androstenedione, I can't think of any time Jayson Stark has written something objectionable or especially silly. True, he might have, and I might have missed it. Otherwise he comes off like a good guy who loves talking about trades and spring training, and mostly he seems to get things right. Yesterday, not so much:

Maybe he's a long-lost relative of Anatoly Karpov. It's possible he grew up with Boris Spassky. Or maybe he just ran into Garry Kasparov at a chicken dinner someplace.

But once again Wednesday night, that noted grandmaster of the emerald chess board, Mr. Tony La Russa, checkmated his way through the World Chess Championships of October, at his Karpovian best.

Analogies like this are tempting, especially with La Russa, who probably does everything he can to suggest them to sportswriters, without overtly making a recommendation or editing their notes. His aloof, baseball traditionalist-craftsman image invites the analogy, drawing twerp satellites like George Will spinning on axes of doggerel into his orbit, reflecting light back at him. The only problem with the analogy is that it's really dumb.

Deadspin: Undervaluing 'Moneyball'

The new Brad Pitt vehicle based on Michael Lewis' bestselling book and a script by the authors of Schindler's Facebook has been getting unfairly blasted by exactly the sorts of people who you'd think would be in love with it: sports nerds. The negative reactions seem to come down to upset superfans, churlish nitpickers and cynics who see the movie as a chance to pimp their criticisms of the book again.

They're all wrong, of course, but funnily enough this was a lesson I learned because of — not in spite of — old people. Find out what you can learn about movies from sitting in a flickering antechamber to the hereafter with a bunch of people whose eternal Subway Club Cards are just one punch away from the big freebie.

Click the East Coast Bias-Sized Jeter to take this incredible journey:


Also, please come back this week as we recommence the annual death march into the 2011 MLB Postseason. Until then, feel free to check out the playoff and Series blogs from the 2010 MLB Postseason and the 2009 MLB Postseason.

Jonah Keri's 'The Extra 2%'

I like Jonah Keri. Apart from a calculus teacher who brought a hammer dulcimer to class and a trigonometry teacher who let us turn in homework only weekly, he's one of few people who've taught me things involving mathematics without engendering any sense of malice. He also has the best intro music in all of podcasting, and I suspect he makes beautiful, tender Canadian love.

More importantly, he wrote The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, the first smart book about the Tampa Bay Rays. Unless you consider brick-sized coffee-table commemorative editions with photos and cut-and-paste promotional text "good," it's essentially the first good book about the team at all, which makes it frustrating that it's often oblique about its main topic and instead feels far more enjoyable and touching in a way that Keri probably didn't initially intend.

Ostensibly, Keri's book should exhibit a kind beautiful meeting of talent and topic. He's a contributor to Baseball Prospectus and a co-writer of their Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. So he not only marries writing chops to sabermetric bona fides, but the subtitle of this book alone tells you how right he is for the job.

Murder, Suicide, Fire, Theft, Racism and Boners: Cait Murphy's Case for Baseball's Greatest Season

At the heart of Cait Murphy's very entertaining Crazy '08 is a simple thesis: that the 1908 baseball season is the greatest in the history of the game. To prove this, she combines daily results for a handful of teams over the 154-game season with character studies of the richly idiosyncratic founding fathers of the national pastime and a selective but enlightening contextual look at American culture and baseball at the turn of the last century. Both approaches have their benefits and shortcomings, and while simultaneously pursuing them provides a natural counterpoint that helps to pace the season and deepen our understanding of it, both elements can at times inhibit the other from feeling fully realized.

On an "and then what happened?" level Murphy's approach is efficient and fairly easy to grasp. She focuses on a team's fortunes over the course of a few weeks, then switches to another team, allowing us to watch the see-sawing of luck, injury, slump and serendipity peculiar to baseball's long season. Non-fans frequently make the complaint that this is exactly what's wrong with baseball — its interminable pace both in-game and over the course of the year. These people are idiots. To the purist or even a lightly engaged fan, this is the essence of baseball: a long journey that inevitably wrenches honesty from the performance of its players, tempering hot streaks during (then) 154 games with their counterparts, the slumps, at the end giving us a fairer idea of the capabilities of all involved.

Thus Murphy shows us the New York Giants on a roll and then suddenly dropping games to weaker opponents. Pitchers lose "their stuff" for a few games and give up heartbreaking losses. Giants legend and Hall of Famer, the gentlemanly Christy Mathewson, comes into a game with an arm that feels like jello, or meets a batter whose owned him for years now and gives up another hit. The Pirates, Cubs and Giants rise and fall in the standings, while other teams languish in the basement. Of course, even under the best of circumstances, this style of recap doesn't always work.

Harry Potter and the NFL Wild Card Weekend

Somewhere around hour #6 of the first day of NFL Wild Card weekend, I began to suspect that I'd been cured of my loathing of sports announcers.

Nearly two years spent luxuriating in the NFL Red Zone channel's absence of commercials and its frenetic jumps from game to game and from big play to big play meant that I'd experienced unmediated football. When big important things are happening in the game is when most announcers are too focused to go on inane time-filling mental jags. I had been spared about 30 weeks' worth of ads about THE ONLY TRUCK WITH A HEMI, Lipitor and dick medicine, and also "end zone" reporting from the obese Tony Siragusa, who needs to have a heart attack from mistaking his dick medicine for Lipitor — then have his corpse dragged into a ditch by a truck.

I was cheerful and, at times, a little bit rueful. This was fun. Who could fail to have total fun while watching football, and why had I failed at that so long? Could it be that I hadn't given people a fair shake?—that so much familiarity over so many years bred such contempt that I willfully blinded myself even to some announcers' good qualities? Were they actually good people, and was I actually just the jerk?

On the second day, during the fourth game of the weekend, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dispelled all my doubts in less than three minutes. They didn't just suck; they sucked expeditiously. They sucked like they'd just gotten hired at Suck Co. by the Director of Suckery, and they were still in their 30 day probationary period wherein they could be terminated instantly for failure to suck hard, suck often and suck with vigor. Their ratio of minutes spent talking to minutes in which they were sucking approached one. They were truly doing yeoman's work, if "yeoman" is old English for the blowjob caddy on a ship that's falling apart because the people who built and run it are all assholes.

What I had forgotten to take into account was that minor but cherished delight of the NFL playoffs: that networks send out their best people to cover games because their limited broadcasting access allows them to know which is the game to cover. (For instance, of the four games this weekend, NBC covered the first two, while CBS and FOX covered the next two.) Generally, the people who have been around the longest are the people who viewers complain about the least, so networks send out the veterans expecting to satisfy the viewership.

This can still get screwed up, though. FOX Sports, for instance, is categorically horrible, which is how their premier announcing team can be universally regarded as the worst one on their payroll. Buck and Aikman have reached the top of the pyramid — and with any luck they will be entombed in it soon — but it's as if Egyptian civilization was based on the glory and immortality of turds. FOX Sports' national football (and baseball) empire is a ziggurat of cowpats lorded over by retards.

Let's go to the games.

Having a McCarver Moment: ALCS Games 1 & 2

It was not a day well-planned. When you spend about four hours watching DVDs of The A-Team looking for godawful effects shots that you can rip off and insert in a deliberately godawful promotional video and then feel too wiped out to watch playoff baseball, you have gravely miscalculated.

But I had fun. I was with good people, and I think I strained something laughing when I saw the guy who played Rasczak in Starship Troopers guest starring as an evil taxi company mastermind who wore skin-tight nylon pants with no zippers or buttons up front, a prominent dong-bulge and a 1980s-sized cell phone improbably jammed in a pocket.

Still, when you wind up falling asleep in your chair after one inning of the first game of the American League Championship Series, you have managed your time poorly. You've done worse when you wake up and realize you didn't set the DVR to record the game. Consider this my McCarver Moment of the 2009 playoffs. Because of it, the Game One recap is going to be awfully short.

No Postseason Shower's More Delicious Than Tony La Russa's Tears

Tony La Russa is a good baseball manager. He takes teams to the postseason; he gets unexpected performances out of seemingly mediocre players. He has won championships. You could fill a railcar with sportswriters bound for ovens he designed, and they would nevertheless still lazily anoint him as humanity's closest thing to a baseball godhead. As I've said before, I hate the guy.

My antipathy for the man owes more to his press than anything he's done. But he's never repudiated his press and has instead encouraged it. There's something detached about him (a trait his followers attribute to some serenity from a higher perspective) that seems to suggest that it would be gauche for him to toot his own horn, but he wouldn't dream of pushing away someone tooting his for him. He's become his presentation, with only rare-to-nonexistent demurral. Since baseball beat writers who pretend to poetry and a spiritual understanding of what happens between actions on a baseball diamond lionize his micromanagerial maneuvering — and since their plaudits tend to manufacture a reality out of convenience or apathy — this vision of La Russa as a calculatingly remote man-shaped baseball sublimity will likely endure for generations.

Baseball Morons: A New Challenger Has Entered the Ring!

Any time you've got Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan calling games on a Saturday and Sunday, you have to be a potently stupid bastard to win the distinction of biggest baseball idiot of the weekend. But, hey, let it be said from here on out: anyone who underestimates Thom Brenneman has no one to blame but himself.

There was something unsettlingly familiar about hearing Brenneman on Saturday, calling the Rays-Mets game with McCarver. Maybe it's that Brenneman is now famously incompetent, netting his own post label at Awful Announcing. Maybe it was his legendarily terrible commentary during this year's BCS Championship Game, which I suspect I would have remembered more if a drunk hadn't obliterated my neighbor's brick mailbox with a Chevy Malibu during halftime. Or maybe it was just the soothing noise of Tim McCarver being stupid next to someone generic, undertalented and wedged into the booth with the full force of papa's influence. That explanation seems most fitting of all. Like Joe Buck, Thom Brenneman was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple: he got his start calling Cincinnati Reds games in the booth with his daddy.

'Mind Game': Baseball Saga and Stats

Part of the problem for any fan of the new analysis of baseball is that it's dorky. There's math involved. A lot of it. Picking up any book on sabermetrics (a term inspired by SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research) or clicking on an article from Baseball Prospectus (BP) feels a lot like one of those dreams where you think you're going to make a You Sandwich between Kate Winslet and Rachel Weisz and — as you push the doors open to what you know will be a Sexeteria with an indoor champagne pool and high-def recording devices to prove that, yes, this happened — you instead stumble into a room where someone's administering a mandatory Advanced Calculus SAT II exam.

Also, you're naked and your penis is missing, and you're holding a TI-81 calculator that, regardless of what input you give it, keeps coming up, "DUDE YOUR PENIS IS MISSING," and, "LOL."

Despite my robust and even intimidating masculinity, I feel like this all the time when I turn the page or scroll down the BP site to discover another one of those statistical charts that looks like Arsenio's autograph at the beginning of his show, superimposed on another Arsenio autograph, and another, and all curiously dotted a lot like his name had twenty-seven I's in it. I should be about to have fun, but all I've got is this very intelligent stuff I don't get. It's dispiriting. It makes you feel like a moron, like there's a whole other level of the book slipping past you.

Leftover Thoughts About the MLB Playoffs

I had originally intended to write an extended postmortem on the World Series, but I found myself even weeks later still in a funk about the Rays' performance. Whining didn't seem entertaining or appropriate, especially when you consider that even the Rays' appearance in the World Series was a tremendous gift of the Baseball Gods.

Besides, looking back, I'd already talked about much of the origins of the failure. And while I could have gone into the specifics of the loss, there doesn't seem to be much call for it. Even though hundreds of thousands of women Obamaniacs across the country probably verge on the orgasmic when you mention Nate Silver and the numbers "538," probably few are interested in Nate's "secret sauce" in the WXRL, FRAA and EqK9 sense.

Suffice to say that, in the quantifiable sense (WXRL), Rays' manager Joe Maddon continued making inexplicable and barely defensible bullpen moves, repeatedly sending out the skill-poor and luck-middle-classed Dan Wheeler, despite having to propel him onto the field via the giant barbecue fork in his back. Meanwhile, in the gritty, gutty, Ecksteiny and amorphous world of baseball instinct, the Rays' batters probably beat themselves. Wound up tight with the pressure of the stage on which they found themselves, their at-bats seemed desperate, their swings enormous and incommensurate with the situation. Put simply: they were trying too hard.

I'm Not Sure Anyone Can Dislike the New York Mets

But I do know what my immediate response was when the Mets failed to make the postseason again this year: BWAAAAAA AHAHAHAHAH AAAAAAAHA HAHAHAHA.

Then I felt guilty.

Two years ago, Endy Chávez robbed the Cardinals of a potential game-winning home run, only to see another Cards player hit a freak homer, followed by the Mets' best hitter striking out while looking at a curveball. Last year, on the last day of the season, the Mets lost their final game to the Florida Marlins. Just weeks earlier, with 17 games left, they had a seven-game lead on their division before embarking on a historic collapse. The loss eliminated them from the playoffs.

During the offseason, they traded for AL pitching ace Johann Santana, hoping to close off a major chink in their armor. Instead, Santana got little run support, winning far fewer games than expected. He routinely delivered incredible pitching performances that gave his team easy win opportunities that went unrealized. Often, a matter of one run made all the difference. On the last day of this season — indeed, the last game ever in Shea Stadium, the Mets' longtime home — the Florida Marlins again eliminated the Mets from playoff contention.

'Baseball Between the Numbers'

By now you might have noticed that I've mentioned baseball here a lot. The frequency of its discussion is entirely coincidental. The local team doesn't suck this year, prompting interest; pennant races heat up a little more each passing week, prompting more; and the non-baseball books I reserved from the local library keep getting renewed by whatever glacial readers currently have them, prompting the baseball books I reserved to keep coming in one after another.

Also, a few weeks ago, I read a review of one baseball book, which inspired me to check it out. While reading criticism of it, the critic mentioned and praised another baseball book, which I looked into, which led to the namedropping of another book and yet another. At that point, I figured I should try to cover all the bases (pardon the expression) and just read whatever everyone apparently considered to be the new "classic" sportswriting. After all, it beats another round of Nazis having their frostbitten toes gnawed off by mice.

As to why I'd be interested in baseball books in the first place, I enjoy the game. Even if I didn't, I'd probably affect an appreciation of it, considering The Wife absolutely loathes football, and at some point you just need to watch sports for no particular reason other than to watch sports. (Thankfully, she thinks baseball's all right.) But I also especially enjoy relearning about a game I learned in childhood by applying to it sabermetrics, the attempt to understand baseball from new, mathematically quantifiable standpoints.