Gifts (or, Addition by Subtraction)

Matt Bruce

As you read this, I may still be recovering from a Thursday-night Christmas party in Bristol, Connecticut. My original plan had been to give you the inside scoop on my corporate siblings, whether Boomer knows how to whoop it up and just how funny Stuart Scott is in person.

Then somebody e-mailed me an anonymous photograph from an unknown office shindig, where some young lady is caught in a really embarrassing pose. That poor girl deserved her privacy. Not that TV celebrities are very private people themselves, but I think the world is better off not knowing whether Dan Patrick does the limbo without any underwear.

The holiday season is all about giving. It is also all about patience -- which means that if anything remarkable happened in Bristol, then soon enough you'll found out about it here.

Baseball Weekly managing editor Paul White is not a big fan of patience, at least not for certain teams. "Rangers' torpid manner could haunt them," blares the headline over his column in the December 15-21 McWeekly. His thesis is that the Texas Rangers' inaction cost them Todd Zeile, and that the loss of Zeile may cost them the American League West title next year.

As White puts it, "that steady diet of 20-something homers and 90 RBI is a nice fit in a good lineup." Maybe 10 or 20 years ago it was. In this era, 20 home runs are about as meaningful as a dozen used to be, while 90 RBI have never been meaningful in their own right. Neither of those figures justifies giving free-agent money to a declining veteran as long as young talent is available.

Suppose that a favorite relative of yours liked to give you gift subscriptions to a certain magazine. Maybe it's a magazine you like to read, if not necessarily one for which you would willingly pay the full subscription rate. If, some year, you received the "gift" subscription but also got billed for it, you would have reason to be angry. That's exactly the sort of gift the Rangers presented to New York, though.

The metaphor doesn't completely work, of course. Nobody forced the Mets to take Zeile, much less to pass him off as a first baseman. And you might say that only one team can have Zeile, where millions of people can subscribe to a given magazine. The problem is that there are too many players in the league as good as (or better than) Zeile for him to be worth all that much. The man himself has been passed from team to team like a quart of malt liquor, as organizations realize just how replaceable that type of player is.

White does a nice job chronicling the addition-by-subtraction that the Rangers have carried on since October. First Juan Gonzalez was parlayed into Gabe Kapler plus a slew of pitching talent. Then Tom Goodwin was told (or should have been told) not to let the door hit his derriere as he cleared out to make room for Ruben Mateo. Now, instead of Zeile, a rookie named Mike Lamb will man the hot corner and likely earn the major-league minimum.

Lamb probably would have been a fun player to watch this past summer, had I still lived in Tulsa. He hit .324/.386/.551 and led the Texas League with 51 doubles. Although he committed 28 errors, he was second among TL third basemen with 284 assists. The 24-year-old Lamb set a league record with 49 consecutive errorless games; the 34-year-old Zeile lead major league baseball in errors in the 1990s.

White admits that Mateo, Kapler, and Lamb will look really good in the lineup two or three years from now but suggests that the Rangers are vulnerable in 2000. He believes that the Mariners should be favored if Junior stays, especially with the addition of Jon Olerud. He perceives irony in the fact that the Olerud deal itself led the Mets to pursue Zeile.

Well, of course the Griffey-led Mariners should be the division favorites if the Rangers can play no better than they did last year. The Division Series debacle demonstrated that the Rangers, as much as I love them, were an inferior team to the Yankees. Since Todd Zeile was not going to be what put them over the top next season, it makes more sense to try to outclass the Yankees over the next decade than it does to try to hold off Seattle for one more year.

According to White, Texas GM Doug Melvin seems committed to at least 400 plate appearances for Lamb next year. That observation gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. While the Rangers are happy to present white-elephant gifts to the Rockies, Tigers and Mets, it would be all for naught if they let a "one-year bridge" like Ed Sprague become a white elephant amongst their own.

The AL West should be fun to watch in 2000. The battle has been joined, at least if Griffey stays. No matter what happens, here's hoping that for the Rangers or Mariners, the festive spirit will begin in late October one of these years.

about the author

Matt Bruce longs for the days when good old-fashioned baseball players settled disputes by getting drunk and punching each other. Let him know that the pay-per-view market wouldn't hurt either at mb@strikethree.com.