Baseballhead:
Cursed, Or Just Cursing?

Michael Cox

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Baseballhead, where we recently used four little words that effectively broke the nasty cycle of our having to host the family's Thanksgiving dinner: catered by White Castle.

Most of the time, being a semi-enlightened partial stat-head is a positive. I can accurately debate the point that Barry Bonds is the greatest player of this era, that the Mets could have saved several million dollars by replacing Rey Ordonez with whomever they had kicking around at AAA, and that A-Rod got hosed on this year's AL MVP even worse than Albert Belle did. Knowledge is power.

But there are times when knowledge is also fear. Have you ever seen The Dead Zone? (The movie version with Christopher Walken, that is -- Walken is the only actor alive who sounds like he's doing an impression of himself when he's speaking normally, making him my favorite actor.) Remember the dread Walken's character felt, knowing that simply by touching another person he could see some horrific event in that person's future?

Sometimes statistical knowledge is like that. You almost absolutely know a team's move is going to fail. You can try and alert everyone, but the team's fans are hoping for the best anyway. The media can't say anything bad or else none of the players will speak to them. You can only wait for the train wreck and try not to say "I told you so."

Recently the Phillies, who cheated fate by taking an extra year to suffer the carnage most predicted would occur in 2001, signed their replacement for the recently departed Scott Rolen. Trouble is, they chose a player whose photo appears in my dictionary (The Oxford New Collegiate Ironic Photo Dictionary, if you'd like a copy) under the word "mediocre": David Bell.

Now, Bell is a "baseball man's" dream: He's a "team player," every team he's played on has been a winner, all the Giants who still speak to Rick Reilly love him, and he's got that square jaw chicks dig. Plus his last name is Bell.

Listen to manager Larry "Aww, Rolen Sucked Anyway" Bowa extoll Bell's virtues:

''His work ethic is second to none. He's always prepared, plays the game the way it's supposed to be played. He's very unselfish, knows how to play and has come from winning teams.

"He could care less about his numbers. He cares about winning. When you have guys on the same page, that care only about winning, that's how you become a winning team."

Note that nowhere in these two paragraphs did Bowa call Bell a good hitter, which your third baseman should surely be. Neither did Bowa explain how all that caring translates into the winning. It's also likely that Bowa hopes Bell doesn't take a break from all that caring, as he apparently did in 1999 when the Mariners finished 77-85.

aying my hands on this wire story, I see in my mind a vivid image of David Bell being boisterously booed by the populace of Philadelphia. It's bad enough that the Phillies dynamited all their bridges with Rolen (and quite ironic, considering their current lust for the aging Jim Thome). Signing a $4 million-a-year deal that will make Bell untradeable after the booing begins is even sillier.

And Bell is one of the lucky ones. Pity poor Gary DiSarcina. On second thought, don't pity poor Gary DiSarcina.

For years "DiSar" was widely known as the clubhouse caulk that made the Anaheim Angels winners, and as the team began cruising to a 1995 division title the plucky shortstop was lavished with praise from his teammates. In fact, his late-season injury was cited as one of the factors which allowed the Mariners to catch up to the Halos in September.

A series of injuries finally put DiSarcina on the shelf for good in 2000 as the team was finishing in last place and teammates bickered openly around him. His replacement, David Eckstein, not only got to touch a World Series trophy, but also was credited with being the clubhouse caulk that made the Angels winners. Honey, I Re-Caulked The Ballclub (and it cost surprisingly little).

Nuke Laloosh once said, "This is a very simple game. You throw the ball. You catch the ball. You hit the ball." The same could easily be said about GMs: You find players who demonstrate good baseball skills. You try not to pay too much for those players. You let them play.

But somehow that simplicity gets clouded by "baseball men" who desperately want you to believe that there's a magic formula to it all, with dangerously complex variables such as "chemistry" and "unselfishness" that are just as necessary as "talent" and "proven ability to hit a baseball." Just to prove their superior mental abilities, pick an number between 1 and 50 consisting of two different odd digits and they'll guess it.

37, right?

about the author

Michael Cox's next trick will be to spend three days atop Jason Giambi without food or water. Place your wagers at mc@strikethree.com.