NFL Draft weekend is easily one of the most interesting, and from a homework standpoint, most unproductive weekends of the year.
Actually, I’ve always found the draft somewhat boring and anticlimactic—you sit there for hours listening to Chris Berman and Mel Kiper Jr. (whose eyes seem to get beadier with each passing year), and then your team picks the guy you thought they would anyway. Nevertheless, as a loyal Jets fan, I feel compelled to watch my team choose its annual draft day bust. Seriously, is there a team with a worse record in draft history in any sport?Although I would have loved to see Glenn Dorsey, certainly the best player coming out this season, fall one more pick to the Jets, I was generally very happy with the results.
Nevertheless, I think the NFL Draft is best left to ESPN’s many scouts for analysis. Quite simply, with over two hundred draft picks, and no really useful statistical metric to stack these guys against one another, there is little way the average fan can really appreciate what is going on until September rolls around— so let’s talk about something I do know…
How about Tampa Bay? No, not the Bucs… No, I’m talking about the Rays.
Don’t know if anyone noticed, but the Tampa Bay Rays (!) just swept the Boston Red Sox (!!) to gain a share of the lead in the AL East, the latest in the season Tampa has ever had even a share of the division lead. Incredibly, they’ve done it without the contributions of Scott Kazmir, their ace left-hander, or Matt Garza, or even a top-notch James Shields, whose apparently been slowed by mechanical issues. The key to their success? Amazingly, it’s the ‘pen, which (at least on Sunday) leads the majors in ERA, a year after posting a mark over 6.
Now, I don’t want to make too much of the Rays’ recent success. Five games is five games, and over the course of the 182 game season, the Sox and Yanks will obviously bury the Rays, as usual. Nevertheless, the Rays shouldn’t be dismissed—contrary to their history, Tampa has ceased simply collecting athletes, and is now fielding players who can actually hit for power, get on base, and strike batters out. With Pena, Crawford, Upton, and newcomer Evan Longoria, the D-Rays might not score like the Yanks, but they won’t exactly be the Royals. In fact, they might have the 3rd best offense in the division, with Frank Thomas departing from Toronto.And the pitching, though, as Kazmir’s injury has demonstrated, full of question marks, could be fantastic. Shields is no fluke (his K/BB ratio is for real), and Kazmir is still young and has room for growth. Garza has ace-capability, and even though they were battered at times last year, Andy Sonnanstine and Edwin Jackson both showed the ability to miss bats. The days of Mark Hendrickson and Victor Zambrano are over.
So what’s my point? Who really cares about the Rays, really? We all know that the Yanks or Sox will win the East, and probably win it all.
Well, yes. That’s probably the case. The example of the Rays, however, is an interesting case study in what has been a wacky season in baseball, thus far. The team everyone thought would be historically bad, Baltimore, has been sitting atop the East for a week or so now. Chicago, projected by PETCOA to degrade yet again, is winning the Central. Florida is beating the Mets, Braves and Phils. St. Louis is defying the odds and the injuries, and is off to a fast start. Detroit can’t score. Arizona, 14th in the NL in runs last year, is one of the league’s leading offenses this year, despite adding no outside players.
What the heck is happening?It’s too early to tell, and it will take a few months for win totals to adjust to run differentials, but I maintain a sliver of hope that this season represents a departure from seasons past: maybe, just maybe, MLB has gotten a small dose of parity. Critics noted before the season began that 8 or 9 teams in the NL (Mets, Phils, Braves, Cubs, Brewers, D’backs, Rox, Pods, Dodgers) were virtually neck and neck. Now I’m relatively young, but I can’t remember a season where things looked this wide open from the very start of the season.
I’m not sure why, especially in light of crazy spending in recent years, but it seems the playing field has levelled somewhat in baseball in recent seasons. Some call it mediocrity, but I think parity is wonderful, both for the fans and for the game. Any thoughts on if, why, and whether it’s a good thing that parity might be reaching MLB?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron Nathan (anathan10) // Apr 30, 2008 at 10:31 am
It’s a great thing, because pennant races are awesome– but the benefits of parity are offset somewhat by only admitting four teams from each league into the playoffs. In the AL, where you’ve got two dominant teams in one division, it’s a safe bet that there will only be two interesting races come September. And Yanks-Red Sox for the wildcard/division isn’t “interesting,” I’m sorry. Interesting–compelling–is when your team actually might not make the playoffs. It’s a sign of the complacency and decadence of those two dynasties, respectively, that anyone would care at all whether their team won the division or limped in the back door. The NHL and the NBA show the flip side of this coin— taking 8 from each conference makes the playoffs like another session of the regular season, with the bottom feeders farmed out. Not ideal, either–I don’t want to see a team with a .500 winning percentage in the playoffs, unless that team is the 1973 Mets, in which case that’s fine by me.
2 Sam Rudman (srudman09) // Apr 30, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I didn’t know you were a jets fan, my condolences. That said, gotta love the Vernon Gholston pick, the guy has no ceiling and no floor. Anything could happen with him, thats the funnest kind of draft pick. As for me and my patriots, I guess I will just have to make due with another All-SEC pedigree perennial pro-bowler, ho hum.
3 Doug Eickman (deickman09) // Apr 30, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Wow, a Yanks fan who I actually agree with.. hmm. Yeah, you raise an interesting question of playoff size. My own opinion on this is somewhat complicated, and I think a straight comparison to basketball and football is helpful, but a bit misleading.
Basketball’s playoffs are obviously too large, and any league that allows an Atlanta Hawks-ish team in to its postseason is crazy. (Then again, they have beat the C’s twice…). Football, as is usually the case, has the best system, and the byes and 4 total rounds is the perfect balance of a long and arduous path for the winner and a short enough time frame to keep interest.
That said, I don’t know that I would want baseball to adopt a 4 round 12 team playoff, because I think the baseball playoffs are a hell of a lot more random than the NFL playoffs (though, they are somewhat random, as this years Super Bowl demonstrated). In baseball, teams rarely have winning percentages over .600, which is why it is necessary to play 162 games a year to determine who is really best. In football, a dominantly better team will win the game probably 75% of the time, maybe even more. In baseball, if you put last years Red Sox against any given team, they probably win 59% of the time, meaning that a seven game set would, on average, go to a seventh game. And anything can happen in one game. So including more teams would penalize good teams even more than the current setup already does by making the playoff a 1/12 proposition, almost literally. That said, until baseball faces up to its revenue disparity problem more fully, I would probably be in favor of it to give small market teams like Tampa Bay an achievable goal. Maybe the Japanese system, where the wild card team starts the series down a game, is best? I dunno.
Hehe, yeah, Ghlolston is the type of roll the dice pick I love. The Draft is all about these make or break players.. otherwise it’s no fun.
4 Aaron Nathan (anathan10) // Apr 30, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Yanks fan…? You couldn’t be talking about me…!? To give you an idea, every time you mentioned S— K— above, I got cold shivers and stuck a needle in my effigy of Jim Duquette. As for the J E T S Jetsjetsjets, could someone tell me why Chris Baker+Bubba Franks+30th overall pick at TE = prudent? I think I saw Bryan Thomas on the phone, making that pick himself. Ed Reed should have been a Jet. I’m still mad.
And I agree re baseball playoff size. No one complained in the Golden Age, when it was 1/10– they Waited Till Next Year. I wouldn’t change a thing.
5 Eric Schultz (eschultz10) // Apr 30, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Wow, a Mets fan mentioning Kazmir and Zambrano in the same post. You’ve got some stones there. The Rays do have the makings of a scarily talented team in the next few seasons, with a number of young players about to hit their peak. If they are willing to spend the money to keep Kazmir, Crawford and Upton, we could be looking at a real contender as both the Yankees and Red Sox have aging cores.
6 bgoldfarb09 (bgoldfarb09) // May 1, 2008 at 2:40 am
It’s funny… baseball, because it lacks a salary cap, is often branded as the least ‘fair’ of the major sports. And it’s true that payroll discrepancies doom some teams: the Pirates will never be competitive, while the Steelers are constantly elite. But among the 20 or so baseball teams who can spend reasonable amounts of money, the level of parity is actually pretty extraordinary. Sure, the Yankees and the Sox will always be contenders - and probably playoff teams - but the nature of the sport dictates that the postseason is generally a crapshoot, and thus there’s plenty of turnover from World Series to World Series. The last decade has seen dynasties reign in basketball (the Spurs) and football (the Pats), but from 2000 to 2006, MLB crowned a different champion each year. That, to me, seems thanks to the supremacy of starting pitching: a mediocre team can ride hot pitchers a long way. Witness the impacts of Schilling/Johnson in ‘01, Beckett in ‘03 (and ‘07 for that matter), Garland/Buerhle in ‘05, and though it pains me to recall, Jeff Suppan in ‘06. The Spurs can ride the consistently brilliant Tim Duncan to a title every year, but due to the fickleness of pitchers and the frequency of arm injuries, it’s almost impossible to assemble a dominant staff for multiple years. There’s no way Jeff Suppan will ever replicate his miraculous ‘06 run; thus, the Cardinals could never be a dynasty. So really, parity is built into baseball - not so much in pennant races, but certainly in the postseason.
Also, Doug, in regards to the idea that elite football teams are more dominant than elite baseball teams, I think that’s a symptom of small sample size, and not anything inherent in the two sports. Sixteen games is simply not long enough to assess the true talents of a team. If you chose a 16-game sample in the middle of August and used that to assess an entire baseball season, well, the Seattle Mariners might happen to go 12-4, and thus you would conclude that they were the best team in the majors. But over the course of an extended baseball season, these things average out, and all teams wind up between .400 and .600. My hunch is that if the Patriots and, say, the Jets played 162 games, the Pats’ dominance wouldn’t be nearly as exaggerated as it is over a 16-game slate.
Anyway, this AmhPub thing is fun. Next topic: who gets bumped from the rotation when Pedro gets back, Pelfrey or Figueroa?
7 Sam Rudman (srudman09) // May 1, 2008 at 11:02 am
Doug this is a request, I need an NBA playoffs post, I need it. For the first time in recent memory the NBA dominated NCAA hoops this year. My Celtics are back in a big way, Chris Paul and Deron Williams have saved the point guard position, the Spurs look as dominant as ever. Please, throw me a bone here.
8 Doug Eickman (deickman09) // May 7, 2008 at 2:37 am
Request answered… but seriously, what else is there to write about this time of year?
Aaron, my bad.. I somehow seem to have gotten my growing number of readers confused. Nice to hear some understanding about the non Ed Reed pick… still venting from that. Kerry Rhodes ain’t a bad consolation prize…
Ben, I love intersport comparisons, so I could go on about this for ages and probably will… I think the basketball point you make is well take but somewhat unfair… basketball is amazing in that it is undeniably a team sport, yet it is remarkably star-dominated. Dynasties seem to happen happen there more easily than any other sport because if you have that great player, that Duncan or Shaq, there is little anyone can do to stop you. Part of what is fascinating about the NBA to me is that we seem to be at the crossroads of dynasties.. the Spurs are perhaps fading while the C’s or Hornets are waxing… I’m not sure. But I think that is why basketball suffers from a lack of championship parity.
I don’t know if football’s winning percentage would be affected by more games… it’s an interesting an open question. I tend to think that baseball is more random if only because in baseball you can do everything right (or wrong) and still fail. For example, a line drive to 3rd is an out while a soft hit up the line might go for a double or triple. I just can’t think of anything in football that is that random. I think if football had baseball’s salary system and played 162 games the winning percentages of the best teams would be in the .750 range. As is, the NFL is a really even league in terms of talent. Hence the Jets seem to alternate every year between 10-6 and 4-12. So yes, 162 games might cause the Jets to find some exploitable flaw (perhaps a pass rusher.. hmm maybe Calvin Pace or Vernon Gholston?) and play better. But I’d still say baseball’s more random.
In either case, it’s all fascinating..
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