I’m an unabashed Joss Whedon fan. I loved television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and can actually stomach Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson in the movie version.* Angel carried the torch while Buffy spun out of control in later seasons, and the various trailers for Dollhouse have me looking forward to a Fox midseason show, which signals that the apocalypse may be nigh. Like Sorkin and Abrams, Whedon has a style that pervades all his work, allowing lines to be drawn between the shows. Sure, it helps that he uses the same five actors in every series, but the writing style’s mix of humour and meaningful drama can be traced as far back as the Roseanne episodes he penned. So believe me when I say that I have every possible amount of faith in Joss Whedon’s ability to entertain, even if he graduated from the Clint Eastwood “Women are simultaneously the downfall and salvation of men” school of thought.**
Which brings us to Firefly. Judging from the fact that it was cancelled after one season, not many of you saw it. Judging from the fact that a feature-length film, Serenity, was developed after the cancellation, those that did see it loved it. In fact, I have friends who swear it’s the best of Whedon’s shows and was the one most prematurely cancelled. Thirteen episodes and a movie have them convinced that the characters were richer, the dialogue better written and the scope of the show somehow greater. Were the show to have continued, they say, it would have surpassed any of Whedon’s prior efforts.
Except it didn’t. It didn’t do either of those things; it failed to do the latter most fundamentally because it failed to do the former. Which is no small thing.
----------------------------------------------
We make this mistake constantly in evaluating baseball players, primarily among very young players with hot starts to their careers and players just past their peak who have not yet reached the truly precipitous decline years. The first is sort of obvious, and comes in a variety of forms: we predict greater things for players than they are likely capable of, we overlook great seasons for rookies or young players when it comes to awards because we expect they will have many more shots and the older players they are competing with for those awards will not, and we make great players of the seriously injured. The latter category is made up mostly of high K pitchers who dominate for 2-3 years and then suffer some terrible tragedy. Or you know, suffer being a high K pitcher who puts 100% of his body into dominating the league for 2-3 years. It’s an interesting phenomenon, but not terribly difficult to reason out. People have a pretty poor history of correctly understanding small sample sizes (or really anything that has to do with numbers), of wishing for the best, of completely ignoring the fact that TINSTAAPP.
The second mistake says something different about us, largely because some of the time it’s not even a mistake. Think about every article discussing which current players will make the Hall of Fame. There are at least two on this site, and many more elsewhere.
Hidden somewhere in most of these articles, you will find something like this: "Player X ranks 10th all-time at his position in Batting average, On-Base Percentage AND Slugging Percentage. He may only be 30, but he's almost cemented his place in Cooperstown." Given the state of both amateur and professional writing, you may also find a few grammatical errors, but that is neither here nor there. Or at least hopefully not here.
There is something inviting about these arguments. They can use some of the best statistics the world currently has to offer. They seem to do what we want, comparing players across times, using numbers adjusted for all sorts of things. All, that is, except for time itself, and the inevitable waning of abilities. Player X may very well be worthy of the Hall of Fame by the end of his career, but these arguments are not, and should not be considered, persuasive. That they are offered at all is a sign either of misunderstanding or manipulation of facts in pursuit of an answer already arrived at.
There is no dispute that players eventually reach a decline phase of their career (unless that career is unnaturally shortened for other reasons). The reasons for this are many, some understood and others not, but your favorite player will eventually experience a precipitous drop in his ability to play the game. On the plus side, so you will the best player on your bitter rival.
No one will take away his homeruns, or RBIs, games won, or stolen bases. But sure enough, given enough time, and enough natural decline in abilities, the rate stats will click backwards. His batting average will drop, no matter where it started. OBP, Slugging, OPS, OPS+, and on down the line, all follow. ERA and WHIP do the same, generally.
Frank Thomas is a wonderful example. In his age 32 season (2000), Thomas hit 43 homers and 143 RBI, with a line of .328/.436/.625. This gave him an adjusted OPS of 163. It was the last great full season of his career.**** It also decreased his career numbers in some of those categories. And the fall continued. Before 2000, Frank Thomas’ career line was roughly .320/.440/.573 with an adjusted OPS in the 170 range. His career line has since fallen to .301/.419/.555 and an adjusted OPS of 156. Still amazing numbers, but look at what it does to his rankings:
His pre-2000 numbers would place him around 54th all-time in batting average, 7th all-time in OBP, 14th-15th in Slugging, and somewhere between 6th and 9th in adjusted OPS. Instead, he is now 192nd in batting average, 21st in OBP, 24th in Slugging and 20th in adjusted OPS. Still alarmingly good numbers, but the difference between an all-time great and “just” a Hall of Famer.
Derek Jeter is currently getting this treatment, and I have strong suspicions that eventually we will see it with A-Rod and Pujols, even as they deliver a longer peak than most players can hope for. Players hit an inflection point, and when they do, they begin getting worse. They may not always put up uniformly inferior statistics, but there is only so long that their bodies can beat back nature and defy the trend.*****
There is a constant rush to proclaim players as better than someone else, so that we can “enjoy” and “appreciate” that player while they are active. I am all for enjoying and appreciating what we are watching, and think that far too often we let players slide through the cracks. However, we should be very careful to qualify what exactly we mean by “better than,” lest we end up jumping the gun, and praising the baseball equivalent of the Buffy musical, while a predictably disastrous Season 7 of terribleness sits just over the horizon.
* I’m pretty sure that watching Donald Sutherland collect one of his many paychecks in terrible early 90s movies has some sort of palliative effect. The most reputable of the list include Backdraft, JFK, Red Hot and the not-nearly-maligned-enough Six Degrees of Separation. Anyone who wants to argue convincingly that Will Smith was (or is) a good actor must start by trying to defend that movie.
** I don’t know where this Eve complex came from. In many of his earliest movies, there were no women at all, or a simple love interest. Then he directed Play Misty for Me, and a theme was born. Of his four most prominent critical successes as a director, three have women as the prime movers, the drivers behind the story. Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby all have some mixture of salvation, devotion and destruction wrapped up in women, sometimes one and sometimes a few. I don’t actually know what that says about Clint, about us, or about film critics, but it’s hard to watch any of his movies without gleaning some mixture of misogyny and women-worship.***
*** This note doesn’t actually have anything to do with the note above, and it especially has nothing to do with the article to which the note above is attached, but I figured it needed saying. I’m currently split-screening the Dylan “biopic” I’m Not There with the playoffs because, well, let’s just say TBS announcers are not my ideal team. So as I watch, it occurs to me that I don’t really care about the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dylan, so much so that it sometimes bothers me that my wife hates every single thing about him (including this movie). And I love films, especially films that attempt to tell stories in a different way, no matter how flawed or contrived. But I just don’t care enough about either to pay attention to the movie. It may very well be great; most people I know who have seen it swear to its power. I think its most similar to David Justice’s Yankee years. I always liked David Justice, and I enjoyed watching the Yankees storming through the playoffs during their amazing run at the turn of the century. But by the time David Justice won the ALCS MVP in 2000, I wasn’t much interested. Of course, Dylan never beat up Halle Berry or got his name into the Mitchell Report. So it’s similar, but not identical.
**** Yes, he had outstanding seasons in 2003, 2004 and 2006, but 2004 was not a full season, and the other two do not quite match up with what I would call a “great” Frank Thomas season. They are probably somewhere in the 9th or 10th best Big Hurt season. So in a 19-year career, those years are probably more of a Medium Hurt.
*****Unless they are Barry Bonds, in which case they most likely snack on nuns and drink the blood of virginal kittens just rescued from trees by one-armed firefighters.