If it’s November, then it must be baseball awards season. Gloves of Gold, Bats of Silver, and Youngs of Cy are handed out to those deserving and otherwise, stirring up controversy even as they institutionalize the idiocy for future generations. Let’s face it, no one is going to put an asterisk next to Nate McLouth’s Gold Glove, or K-Rod’s second Rolaids Relief Man of the Year award. Those will live in infamy, for at least the week, before being forgotten and somewhat paradoxically, being etched in history. Still, the angry talk about who gets to vote for whom, and who has the right to crown someone as “most valuable” will continue, wasting scads of valuable oxygen pockets, with only one simple solution. We must unite behind a single voter, who gives awards out subject to his whim, after careful consideration and/or quick and tenuous association with something vaguely pop cultural. So, in hopes that you will esteem me with just such an honor, I present the only 2008 baseball awards that matter, the Seanies:
The Hardees Thickburger – Joe Blanton and the Philadelphia Phillies
I travel a fair deal for my job. It takes me to such exotic locations as the middle Eastern Shore of Maryland and the mountainous terrain of Garrett County, where the KKK makes its home away from home. Many times, I don’t have the time or willpower to locate the “good” local restaurant and am forced to consider the fast food options.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the Mid-Atlantic region is basically a dead zone for good fast food. We are too far north to have excellent barbeque stands, chicken huts or taco stations every 20 miles on the interstate, and too far south to overcome the lack of quality with sheer quantity of choices. So the options are basically: McDonald’s, BK, Arby’s, a second-rate Waffle House,* Wendy’s and KFC. There are Popeye’s and Pizza Huts sprinkled throughout the area, and like The Boxer, there were times when I was so lonesome, I took some comfort there. But for me, there are days when only one thing will do: a Hardees burger.** Hardees has a weird little history in my area, having been everywhere not less than 15 years ago, then having some sort of disastrous combination with Roy Rogers, then ALL Hardees and Roy Rogers closing, and finally, experiencing a renaissance in the last 3-4 years. And when they came back, it was with a vengeance, and more to the point, with giant, somewhat tasty, burgers.
So I will drive 15-20 miles out of my way if I know there to be a Hardees in the area, passing numerous burger chains on the way. Then I order some disgusting combination of beef, fat, cheese and fat (with fries and a DIET coke, thanks) and eat until I black out. This usually works very poorly with my digestional track, ala days 20+ from Supersize Me. But there are rare occurrences, days where the light shines on this particularly canine posterior, and I am fine. Sleepy, but fine.
The Hardees Thickburger award recognizes the situation where all the odds (and patties) are stacked against you, yet somehow, miraculously, you avoid major heart failure and/or diarrhea. When the Philadelphia Phillies traded for Joe Blanton, they traded for an almost perfectly average pitcher whose best season was his rookie campaign four years in the past. They put him in an unfamiliar league, in a homer-friendly ballpark and forced him to bat.
And yet, the Philadelphia Phillies are World Series champions. Joe Blanton is undefeated as a Philly, hit a homerun in the World Series and had only mild gopheritis as a National Leaguer. Some combination of amazing luck, replacing Kyle Kendrick’s whiplashed neck and the National League being a far easier league in which to pitch has allowed for the first true Hardees Thickburger award to be given to Joe Blanton and the Philadelphia Phillies!
The Hank Moody Trophy, as well as the Dr. Gregory House Lifetime Achievement Award – Manny Ramirez, Red Sox/Dodgers/Olympiacos/Highest Bidder
There are very few TV shows that survive with openly detestable protagonists. I don’t mean people you personally hate, because Grey’s Anatomy is still running strong, despite having a collection of the least approachable actors/characters ever to grace the small screen.*** I mean characters that are written to be hated, misanthropes who hate themselves almost as much as they hate everyone else. Characters like David Duchovny’s Hank Moody on Californication or Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House on, well, House. The trick seems to be two-fold. First, they have to amazingly talented at their main job. People who hate people don’t stick around very long in positions unless their production simply can’t be replaced. Hank Moody wrote a novel beloved by all, much to his own chagrin. House can tell if you have rabies by drawings you once did for a comic book. Both very good traits if you are an author or a doctor, respectively.
Second, you have to rewrite their character more or less every season. House has, in a few seasons, gone from being a miser due to (a) women issues, (b) leg issues, (c) pain pill addiction, (d) an unloving father, (e) sheer will to remain a miser, (f) co-workers lying to him and attempting to control him, (g) loneliness and (h) losing friends. That’s a long laundry list of reasons, and each was introduced to give him a modicum of humanity and the slightest notion of excuse for his bad behavior. Moody went from a womanizing alcoholic pining for his ex to a protective father figure and (relatively) chaste angel jilted by his ex in 1.5 seasons. I guess the premium channels have to respond quicker to loss of viewers than network television. I’ll call that the Grey’s Anatomy Axiom….or GAAAAAAAA!!!! for short.
Lots of people hate baseball players. Lots of baseball fans hate specific baseball players. Perhaps no player was more detested this year than Manny Ramirez, perhaps because he is the perfect storm of a hate-able player. He is supremely talented, but at times doesn’t seem to try. He is outspoken. He has dreadlocks. He uses his abilities to leverage certain situations in his favor. He whines about making only 20 million dollars, while average fans can’t even fathom that amount of money. Barry Bonds is retired in all but name.
Manny has overcome this, largely through changing the manner of hatred. Just in the past 2-3 years, we’ve gone from “Manny Being Manny,” to “Manny pushing an old guy” to “Manny doesn’t try” to “Manny loves baseball” to “Manny can’t make an out in a Dodgers uniform.” In the end, he’s probably still exactly the same player he was when he played in Cleveland, when he helped Boston win multiple World Series, when he allowed Boras to force his way out of Boston, and when he said his services were up for grabs by the highest and longest bidder. He changes just enough to keep him likeable, or at least employable.
For never changing at heart, but constantly changing to all around; for combining superior production with the intense and fiery hatred of fans, Manny Ramirez is awarded both this year’s Hank Moody Award and the Dr. Gregory House Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial – The Washington Nationals
In “Self-Reliance,” the most Transcendentalist remarks that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He doesn’t necessarily explain what makes a particular consistency “foolish” or “wise,” but I think most of us can sort of tell.
For instance, let’s say that you have something that is pretty valuable to you and extremely valuable to someone else. You have a nearly infinite number of options.***** Most of those options turn out well for you. You can use the widget for your own personal benefit, you can barter it to get something even more beneficial to you. Heck, if you want, you can make other men kings by bestowing the widget on them, garnering great favor for the future. There are very few ways of destroying its worth to you. The only thing you probably shouldn’t do is (a) adopt a plan to slowly destroy the widget’s value to yourself while withholding it from others, (b) while simultaneously making it clear to others that the widget will no longer hold value for them in the immediate future and could be had for free if they just wait long enough, and then (c) actually making the widget free. Yup, that’s probably the one thing you shouldn’t do. It’s consistent, sure, but it seems pretty foolishly consistent.
So with no further ado, I give you the Washington Nationals, and the ever popular Cordero widget. Chad Cordero is not, I repeat NOT, a great pitcher (or widget). He is a pretty decent relief pitcher and one of the few recognizable players on a franchise that aches for adoption in the Home of the Redskins. He’s 26 years old, has been an All-Star, and even once received a vote in the Cy Young Award balloting. In 2006 and 2007, while he was providing pretty good though not outstanding relief performance, there were trade talks throughout the league about Cordero, as Washington slowly ran him down and rebuffed any comers. In 2008, when spring training came around and Chad was losing pitch speed, the Nats kept sending him out. Shockingly, he was injured and was shut down for the season.
In July, despite having Cordero under arbitration-control for another year, the Nats signaled their decision to non-tender Cordero, coming as a shock to everyone ever born, including Cordero (research confirms he was, in fact, born). The talk was generally dismissive, suggesting that the Nationals would eventually come to their senses, and keep him around in case he was able to come back from the injury and regain any value he once had to them. On October 30th, the Nationals outrighted Cordero to Triple-A, giving him the option to refuse the assignment and become a free agent, which he promptly did. Widgets are smart like that.
So, if you’re going down the checklist, the Nationals (a) adopted a plan to slowly destroy the value of Cordero as a relief pitcher while withholding him from other teams, (b) made it clear to teams that he wasn’t going to help them in the near term and could be had for free at the end of the season, and (c) made him a free agent. Ladies and gentlemen, the winners of the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial, the WASHINGTON NATIONALS!!!!
The “All Summer Long” Prize – Aaron Rowand and the San Francisco Giants
There are occasionally things so predictably terrible that, by the time the terrible arrives, you have already steeled yourself to it, and the outcome seems less bad than it actually may be. This is more likely to occur when the individual actions or ingredients of the disaster are palatable or downright likeable. Take Kid Rock’s 37th paean to summer, women, drugs and rock n’ roll.
When I first heard that Kid Rock would be doing some sort of mashup of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” I cried a little. Don’t get me wrong, I love the two songs (to do otherwise might actually be grounds for punishment in musical circles), and I even deeply respect Kid Rock. He is an extremely talented musician who happened to find his niche in a section of the musical sphere that most people don’t give its full due. ******
But there is something so obviously wrong with the combination that I wept for all three ingredients, even as I attempted to prepare myself for the worst. Then, of course, I heard the song. It was terrible, but so long as I forgot what was really happening (two great songs being cheapened by a good musician’s second-rate money-mongering), it was listenable.
Now, in no way do I think that either the San Francisco Giants or Aaron Rowand approach Skynyrd or Zevon levels. More like early Madonna and ABBA Teens, perhaps. I don’t have a specific great love for either, but respected generally what each did or was trying to do. The Giants seemed to be struggling post-Bonds, but were making it a priority to give room and time to their youngsters. Aaron Rowand is a largely average OF with enough variance in his performance to be a useful player on a good team in his “great” years. Hell, his top three comparables by the end of this year were Jeffrey Hammonds, Shea Hillenbrand, and Ivan Calderon. But he tries, and he provides excitement to the fan who doesn’t know that running into fences isn’t a measurable good to the team.
So when the Giants decided to give a 30 year-old OF 60 million dollars over five years, after one good (but still not great) season, and a more telling average line in the .285/.345/.465 range, I sighed a little. This was not going to end well. Rowand claimed that the Giants would make the playoffs in early February, and put forth his best effort all season. Still, Rowand regressed to his mean and the Giants finished 12 games out of the playoffs despite being in a division full of barely .500 teams. The closest Rowand got to experiencing October was when his cousin (“Big Game”???? James Shields) took the mound for the Tampa Bay Rays. There are four more years on his contract, and it’s unlikely the Giants have seen his worst season.
For the ability to take a few things that most people can get behind and combine them into something so bad it instills fears before the actual mixing, Robert James Ritchie presents the “All Summer Long” Prize to the San Francisco Giants and Aaron Rowand.
* Don’t get me wrong, I sickeningly LOVE Waffle Houses, at least in the South. In Maryland, I believe there are two which I have visited. Both were beyond foul. And not in the usual good way of Waffle Houses. Something they do here just makes your clothes stick to the tables in a different way than they do in the south. For shame.
** Coincidentally, there are days where all I want to do is spend the afternoon or the evening in the closest and most opportune public bathroom.
*** If this were written like a Meredith Grey voiceover: “Sure, the little lady and “guy who had to be replaced because he couldn’t stop punching gay dudes and being a general bastard” have some chops, but in the end, aren’t we all just a little annoying? Isn’t that what makes us human? If I can’t choose between my career and my career with romantic interest in a co-worker, doesn’t that just mean I am human? Isn’t the annoying way we have sex with each other while patients die around us indicative of America in general? Isn’t that why our show is watched and our every moves followed by an obscene number of people every week?” (Sean punches self and weeps for mankind)****
**** Actually, I am not done with this rant. Worse than the hackneyed storylines and the completely implausible work atmosphere are the devoted fans of the show. If I hear one more woman (or man) attempt to tell me the show promotes strong female characters, I will strongly consider destroying everything that is in any way connected with this show. That includes “Private Practice,” Shonda Rhimes (even if Princess Diaries 2 was absolutely engaging), ABC, Disney, ESPN and the Earth. Be warned.
***** One of the other things that tends to stick with people is how Emerson described his central doctrine: “The infinitude of the private man.” Just putting that out there.
****** In case you were counting, the musical landscape went 3-D in the space of one sentence. Quite the growth rate.