Meetings change ... for better?
Unlike the old days, action lags, though possibilities remain
Love when a guy straight up says "unlike the old days" -- it's a handy heads up that I should immediately bookmark the article and start ridiculing.
Back in the day, before the Internet, digital music and VORP ratings, baseball's winter meetings used to be almost as much about debauchery as business. They were not considered to be in session until some well-known executive had fallen flat on his back off a bar stool or a trade had been made in a washroom, just before somebody vomited.
Doesn't this sort of sound like the 24-year-old who comes back to his old high school and brags about how crazy it used to be at Eisenhower High when him and Mikey Rags and Paul Shutson used to drink beer while doing the rope climb and remember that one time when Mikey took a shit inside the guidance counselor's file cabinet? That was awesome!!!
We're talking about baseball executives. Executives. But Phil is straight-facedly saying that he misses how often they used to vomit.
There were some downsides to this, of course. Fistfights weren't that uncommon. You could oversleep and miss the Rule 5 draft. And sometimes the owner of a team would get confused and trade for Domingo Ramos when it had been Damaso Garcia his scouts had recommended.
Those brown people all look and sound alike! Again, just to be clear, Phil's getting misty-eyed about guys getting drunk and violent and basically completely fucking over their team's fans by overfuckingsleeping. Can you imagine if Brian Sabean held a press conference and was like, "Sorry, friends, I missed out on some great trades because I had to have myself a fourteen-hour whiskey nap." Actually, Sabean might be better off completely horse piss drunk.
It wasn't a perfect world, but at least then the people who took themselves too seriously stood out. And things happened.
It wasn't a perfect world, but at least guys were punching each other in the face and vomiting into each other's butts. And there warn't no fucking computerfaces nerding up my field of vision!
I wonder why general managers tend to take themselves seriously these days. Is it because they're responsible for multi-million dollar assets and they aren't professional fuck-ups for a living?
At last week's meetings in Nashville, the Ivy League numbers crunchers and lawyers paraded around the Opryland Hotel like accountants on the eve of an audit. In the end, nobody covered themselves in glory except perhaps Detroit general manager Dave Dombrowski.
Dave Dombrowski went to Cornell, an Ivy League school, for a while before transferring to Western Michigan. He was a wunderkind who became general manager of the Expos at age 31 -- the youngest in baseball at the time. I bet he has crunchered numbersons, or at the very least has gentlemen who cruncher them for him.
Phil, I'm sorry the baseball winter meetings are no longer the rootinest, tootinest, topsy-turvy pastiche of the Old West you believed them to be in the past. These men have jobs to do. They may wear suits now. They may even -- gasp -- wear glasses or have college degrees. Some of them use statistical analysis, perhaps because it helps them avoid doing things like proposing that the White Sox trade Mark Buehrle and Joe Crede for A-Rod, Melky Cabrera, and a couple of live arms. Or believing that Kevin Millwood (WHIP of 1.62 last year!) from ages 31 to 35 at 12 million dollars a year is a good deal. Or telling us, point-blank, before the 2007 season: "Don't be surprised if Erstad's play is bigger than the headlines given his signing." (Erstad, 2007: .645 OPS.)
You know who did do these things, Phil? You did.
But to your credit, you did so with vomit all over your fucking shirt.
Labels: phil rogers, vomit, vorp
