Baseballhead:
The Good, The Bad and the Umpires

Michael Cox

Welcome once again to Baseballhead, the column that would happily go over to Quokka.com and look at arty text and still photos of climbers admiring a rock face on a daily basis, if only they would stop letting the interns write their TV ads and making billboards that look like 1989 rave fliers.

First off, if you haven't already noticed, by popular request our live scoreboard now auto-refreshes every minute. Unfortunately, this currently has the side effect of making the game logs and box scores do the same, so please drop a note if that's a problem for you. So far this week nobody's complained, so I have no reason to think it's a big deal.

Moving on, I've been looking back on the last few Baseballheads, and I realized that I haven't had much good to say about many things. In that spirit, a good, positive column (Vegas line gives 3-2 odds on my inability to keep it up, however).

Let's start off with a team that's been impressing me lately -- namely the Oakland Athletics, who caught everyone's attention when their ragtag "small market" gang managed to utterly embarrass the FOX Dodgers about a week ago. With decent pitching at their core (a respectable -- for 1999 -- 4.61 ERA and the third-fewest walks in the AL) they've been able to win quite a few close games, unlike, say, the Mariners.

And despite the transitional period team ownership is in (with no new ballpark on the horizon, they're currently up for sale and speculation is they'll move their northern Cal home to San Jose or Sacramento) they've been remarkably well-run. Art Howe did some good work in Houston when the 'Stros were a young club, and he continues to do a good job here. GM Billy Beane has been given a green light to augment the team's youth with a number of admittedly past-their-prime vets like Tim Raines and Mike MacFarlane, but the return on the investment has been an almost 30% rise in attendance this season.

Although it would be foolish to expect, for example, John Jaha to keep up his 1.023 OPS, there are others who could pick up the slack, and when I say "others" I clearly mean Ben Grieve, who is snapping out of his disastrous first couple of months, albeit slowly. In fact, expect the team's fortunes to rise as its youngsters shake off their early stumbles, while the rest of the AL West continues to make waiting at the bus stop look more exciting.

I was going to include the Indians as another good example of a likable team, until I remembered Robbie Alomar, Wil Cordero and some fans who aspire to be New Yorkers (until they discover the world of all-caps Usenet posts, however, they'll never be the equals of their Gotham brethren). However, the rest of the Cleveland gang are A-OK in my book.

Item: Umpire John Shulock got himself a little press this week by scrawling a little message in the infield dirt, indicating he doesn't understand why pitchers throw so many pitches out of the strike zone. (It actually said, "3-2 why?" but I won't address the umpire literacy question at this time.) He even took some time to tell the media how befuddled he was by that conundrum. He'd have posed for papparazzi, if any had cared.

Your strike zone calls stink, and stink worse as time goes by, and you're dumping on the pitchers? This, my friends, is an example of why the MLBPA ranked Shulock the third-worst in respect for players in the AL. But this just put the icing on another week week of watching umps bumble their way through bad calls and mighty morphin' strike zones.

Now I've not only blown my above promise, but I've gotten started on umps, which is something I promised I would lay off for a few weeks. I even stayed mum about Greg Kosc's performance a week ago during a Mariners-Giants tilt, wherein he was calling pitches seemingly at random, giving low strikes at the beginning of the game, then moving the whole strike zone up about six inches after the fifth.

But Shulock's idiotic grandstanding, coupled with an unbelievably stupid maneuver by Al Clark in Detroit, made them the poster children for the need to do something about the kind of umpiring that makes the "Hey, Vern" guy look like a Rhodes scholar. Clark was umpiring at second base as Ken Griffey Jr. stole second, sliding in just under the tag. Clark quickly and forcefully motioned "safe," and then incredibly changed the call. That's right, he overruled himself and called Griffey out, explaining that he'd "eat some crow if it means making the right call."

It wasn't the right call. It was the wrong call. But what's important about that is the reversal, which is something Sister Harry Wendlestedt will rap your knuckles for if you do it at his training camp. This can only mean one thing -- MLB's highly tenured, job-security-lovin' umps are now making it up as they go along. Improvising. Tossing the rulebook out the window and doing it their way. Hey! Let's use replay today, alright? Lemme try and jump in front of an already charging Manny Ramirez and dare him to touch me. Oooh, that call might be wrong, so lemme call it the other way now.

If I had any blood left in my veins, it'd be boiling.

Item: So it's not a 90-day suspension. Darryl Strawberry's transgressions against his team, the fans and himself earned him an incredible 120 days, less time served. He could even be back doing minor-league rehab by the end of July. With the current junta in charge down at the MLB Players' Ass., our Bud Selig had to find the worst punishment that he could enforce without having Gene Orza attempt to gouge out his eyeballs (remember that it was Orza who got Lattrell Spreewell's punishment lessened, and you get a picture of the guy's soul).

On the other hand, a steel cage ultimate fighting match between Orza and Selig might draw a decent pay-per-view audience. Memo to self...

But take heart, for rumblings from no less than Joe Torre indicate that Strawberry may have to become the baseball equivalent of Spree, play-wise, to be considered by the big club. With his "specially-renegotiated" deal, he might just spend what may be the last year of his career getting mercilessly booed in AAA Columbus. And while that may not be justice, it is kinda poetic...

Item: The Angels re-upped manager Terry Collins for an indeterminate time period at an indeterminate fee, even though several players met with team officials to ask for a new skipper. Two lessons learned: 1) Angels management is smarter than I thought; 2) The players apparently think Collins was behind the team's key injuries.

On the other hand, maybe he's been calling Tim Salmon and Jim Edmonds pansies, daring them to suit up and "play like a man," and we just haven't heard about it.

Stop Press: Albert Belle attempted a one-man petition drive Tuesday night to boycott the team's scheduled exhibition against AAA Rochester on August 2. He managed to collect only one name before the team's brass apparently indicated how much of his pay would be forfeited should such a boycott occur. As we know from his website, he's a shrewd financial manager, so I'd presume that such a penalty was not to his liking.

However, his website also indicates that he's just misunderstood, failing to sign autographs because of congenital tendon pain in his writing hand , and on a perpetual quest to find elderly ladies to help across busy intersections. And his agent didn't say to write that. Honest.

about the author

Michael Cox sincerely apologizes for the e-mail he hasn't answered yet, and really hopes that little English boy will survive without his business card. No more chain letters, please, at mc@strikethree.com.