Out at Home, Out for the Season: The Play that Cost the Tigers the 2010 Division Title

Everyone knows that Jim Leyland is a great baseball manager. He’s managed in over 2,800 games in the major leagues for the Pirates (eleven years), the Marlins (two years), the Rockies (one year), and the Tigers (four-and-a-half years and counting). He’s only the seventh manager in history to win pennants in both the National and American Leagues and a three-time Manager of the Year Award winner. He’s also a very good guy, respected, admired, and well liked by players, owners, and members of the press.

But, you know, even Jim Leyland makes mistakes. He made a fairly big one during a night game with the Toronto Blue Jays on July 24. And Leyland’s veteran third base coach, Gene Lamont, made an even bigger one.

Here’s what happened: Magglio Ordonez, the Tiger’s popular veteran right fielder and the team’s second best hitter, was suffering the effects of a sprained ankle and was unable to play the outfield. But he could still swing the bat and Leyland wanted him in there. At this point in the season, considering the status of the American League Central Division (the Tigers, Twins and the White Sox were in a three-way fight for the lead), every game was important. For several games Magglio had been in the line-up as the designated hitter, and Leyland decided to play him again in that role. This meant, of course, that Magglio would play offense and hit, but he would not play defense where, in his position in right field, he’d have to do a lot of running.

In the third inning, rookie centerfielder Austin Jackson singled. Magglio walked. At this point, Magglio was no longer a hitter; he’d become a runner. But he was not supposed to run. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run at all, it’s just that he’d have to run on his bum right ankle. The issue before Leyland thus became whether or not to remove Magglio for a pinch-runner. Doing that, of course, would remove him — and his bat — from the lineup for the remainder of the game. Leyland made the decision to leave Magglio in the game.

Next up was the clean-up hitter, Miguel Cabrera, who many regard as the best offensive player in baseball right now and who is a candidate for the coveted Triple Crown (first in batting average, runs batted in, and home runs over an entire season). At the time, Miguel was hitting around .349, had about 24 home runs, about 85 rbi’s and, in addition, led the Major Leagues in doubles with about 32. All of this meant that there was a very good likelihood that Cabrera would put the ball into play and turn Magglio into a baserunner, big time. Nobody seemed to be thinking about it, but Magglio was put in a very vulnerable situation.

And that’s just what happened. Miguel Cabrera lined a double into the gap off the wall in right-center, and Magglio began circling the bases, running as fast as he possibly could. Depending on how far and where the ball is hit, how quickly it is recovered by an outfielder and how quickly and accurately it is relayed by an infielder to the catcher, runners on first often score on a double. But not always; it depends on all those factors. It also depends on the speed of the baserunner. Which depends, in large part, on the condition of his wheels.

Jackson, starting from second base, scored easily. However, it was evident — or should have been — that an attempt by Magglio to score from first on Cabrera’s double would, at the very least, wind up in a close play at home. Nonetheless, as he approached third base, Gene Lamont, coaching at third base, waived Magglio home. As the play continued to develop and the ball was being relayed home, there was no doubt — to the experienced Lamont or anyone else watching — that Magglio would have to slide in order to avoid being tagged out. Lamont’s decision to push Magglio to score on Cabrera’s double — the second coaching decision affecting the play — put Magglio at risk even more than the earlier decision to allow him to run the bases. And if the first decision was questionable, this one was disastrous.

Why was Magglio placed at risk by these decisions? The answer to that is pretty obvious. Magglio was put at risk when he was made a baserunner because he had a sprained ankle, an injury that occurs when the ligaments in the ankle are forced beyond their normal range of motion and are torn. Ligaments are tough, elastic bands of fibrous tissue that connect one bone to another and help stabilize joints, preventing excessive movement. Magglio was at risk because he was put into a position where he would be required to run, and possibly run hard, and where the stability of his ankle would very likely be tested to the max.

Well, we now know how it turned out. Magglio was laboring as he rounded third and headed for home. He did have to slide, which he did, and he was tagged out, about ten feet from home plate — it wasn’t even close. (He shouldn’t have been sent home even had he been in the best of health.) Far more important, however, was that in the process of sliding the cleats on Magglio’s right foot dug slightly into the dirt around home plate resulting in his ankle being again twisted. His ankle ligaments not being sufficient to withstand the trauma and maintain stability of the joint, Magglio suffered a fracture to his already injured right ankle. He will be out of action for six to eight weeks, and will probably not return until after September 1.

After the game, Johnny Damon (who, because of a bad back, also hasn’t been playing recently) told reporters: “I saw his right foot go another direction and I was hoping it was just a sprain, but unfortunately it was more severe. Anytime you lose a guy like that, it’s huge. He’s the No. 3 hitter. He’s that bridge from me to Cabrera, so it’s tough. And the length of time we’re going to lose him — it’s six to eight weeks. So we know that could very well be the [end of his] season.”

And, most likely, it was also the end of the Tigers’ season, the end of their hopes to win a division title this year and to get into post-season play. Leyland couldn’t have known it at the time he let Magglio run the bases, but three innings later Carlos Guillen, the Tiger’s star second baseman, would suffer a right calf strain that would place him on the 15-day disabled list. On the other hand, it was known at the time that Brandon Inge, the able and likeable Tigers’ third baseman, in a game with the Texas Rangers six days earlier had suffered a broken hand after being struck by a pitch. Inge was not expected to return for four-to-six weeks.

Thus, in the course of a week, three of the Tiger’s first seven hitters wound up out of commission for extended periods of time. Moreover, with the trading deadline approaching on July 31, there was no way the damage could be repaired simply by engaging in one or more “rent-a-player”-type trades that have recently become part of the baseball scene. (These trades involve a contending team sending secondary players and/or minor league prospects, often good ones, to other teams for established players who will become free agents at the end of the season. The star players in the trades may only play for the contender until their contracts expire at the end of the season; thus the term “rent-a-player.”)

In a post-game interview, Jim Leyland told reporters that “We’ve got to revamp this whole thing now. I haven’t even talked to [general manager Dave Dombrowski] yet. I have no idea who’s coming up [from the minors to replace Ordonez and Guillen]. I have no idea what we’re doing.”

The Tigers were suddenly in a terrible position, particularly because they’ve relied so heavily this season on rookies — Austin Jackson, Brennan Boesch, Scott Sizemore, Danny Worth, Alex Avila and Robbie Weinhardt. Later on, Dombrowski said that he had no intention of trading away these guys or every other good prospect in the Tiger’s organization for end-of-the-season starters in an effort that would be problematic, at best. Arguably, the Tigers needed another good bat in the lineup to make it to the play-offs even before the injuries occurred, and while you can sometimes fill a spot, or even a couple of spots with prospects-for-veteran type trades, there’s only a slim possibility of repairing the wide-spread damage the Tigers have suffered that way.

On July 30, in the first game of a series in Boston with the Red Sox, Jhonny Peralta, just obtained from Cleveland in a trade, homered twice that night in his first appearance as a Tiger. While the Tigers held on to win, staving off a grand slam home run by David Ortiz in the 9th inning, I noticed that the last three batters for the Tigers were hitting .187, .201, and .210, respectively. This at a time when 31% of the Tigers’ run production was coming from one man, Miguel Cabrera, and when the Tigers had won only 4 of their last 18 games since the All-Star break when they were in first place in the division. (They’re now in a free-fall, 7.0 games behind the White Sox and 6.5 behind the Twins.) With an offensive weakness that profound, the only reason that the Tigers are hanging on to third place is that Kansas City and Cleveland (the other two teams in the Central Division) are playing so poorly. But now it’s virtually impossible that the Tigers will be able win the division this year.

Admittedly, this analysis has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Nonetheless, though Leyland’s decision to let Ordonez run ahead of Cabrera was not terrible, it was, I think, a mistake. But hindsight or not, Lamont’s decision to waive him home was surely a mistake and was indeed terrible.

So it was. The decisions regarding how to play Magglio Ordonez on July 24 in the game against the Blue Jays were deadly for the Tigers’ hopes for the post-season this year. Once a contender, they now have a very little chance of passing the Twins and the White Sox, and because of their mediocre record (they’re only playing around .500 for the season) they’re already out of the wild card race.

And those decisions didn’t do Magglio Ordonez much good either. Not only was he enjoying another very good year, but at the time of his injury he was 175 plate appearances of 54 games shy of the vesting option in his contract that would guarantee him $15 million in 2011. As one reporter pointed out, the odds of that happening at this point are somewhere between slim and none.

It’s likely that very few fans realized just how important those decisions were on July 24th — both occurring in a game played two-and-a-half months before the end of the season. But they probably meant the end of a successful season in 2010 for both the Tigers and for Magglio Ordonez.

What If They Threw a War and Nobody Came?

The funniest thing in the newspaper yesterday (Sunday, June 27) was not in the funny pages, but in an article in The New York Times concerning recent developments in Afghanistan. After recapping the stunning dismissal of General McChrystal and the apparent efforts of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to negotiate a peace directly with Taliban leaders and their Pakistani backers, the author, Scott Shane, made this statement in a stand-alone paragraph:

"Even as the Obama administration smoothly handled the McChrystal flap and regrouped behind the Afghanistan policy, word came in a report in The New York Times on Friday of diplomatic maneuvering between Afghan and Pakistani leaders that could result in a separate peace, potentially leaving the American generals with 100,000 troops and no one to fight."

Call me perverse, but this, I think, is simply hilarious.

Nuclear Transparency

In a tiny obscure wire service article tucked away on the back page of the Traverse City Record-Eagle a few days ago was a report that, "in an unprecedented accounting of a secretive arsenal," the Pentagon had announced that the United States has 5,113 nuclear warheads in its stockpile and "several thousand" more "awaiting the junkpile." Hillary Clinton, speaking at the U.N., said that the disclosure was in the interests of "transparency."

A quick look at Google tells me that there are 336 cities in the world with a population over one million, and another 256 with a population of between 600,000 and a million. Accordingly, if we were to drop one nuclear bomb on each of those 592 cities, we’d still have 4,521 left over. Hmmm. Tough decisions ahead. Just what will we do with all those unused bombs? Well, you never know, do you, when a little extra will come in handy.

Since we’ve experienced the awesome fright of the shoe-bomber, the underpants-bomber, and now the Times Square non-bomber, hopefully we’ve learned several times over that it always pays to have a few of the really big bombs in reserve. We just can't have too many of those nukes at the ready.

So, the Times Square scare notwithstanding, if you missed the article and are learning about this now for the first time, I’ll bet you’re feeling safer already.

Aren’t you?

Oh, and by the way, where the hell is that "junkpile" located? We could use a little transparency on that subject, too, Hillary.

Weekend News

Allies Attacking Big Taliban Haven in Afghan South: Aim Is to Install Government Forces to Keep Insurgents Out of Area

New York Times, Saturday, February 13

After Bullets, the Real Test: How to Keep the Taliban Out
New York Times, Saturday, February 13

Afghan Bomb Wounds U.S. Soldiers
New York Times, Saturday, February 13

Bombs Slow U.S. Advance: NATO Says It Hopes to Secure Marjah and Surrounding Area Within Days
Traverse City Record-Eagle, Sunday, February 14

Afghan Attack Gives Marines a Taste of War: Alone as the Vanguard in Taliban Territory
New York Times, Sunday, February 14

Errant U.S. Rocket Strike Kills Civilians in Afghanistan
New York Times, Sunday, February 14

U.S. Rockets Slam Into Afghan Home, Killing 12: Troops Face "Death at Every Corner" in Offensive’s 2nd Day
Traverse City Record-Eagle, Monday, February 15

Caught In the Open: A Firefight With the Taliban: Intense Gunfight Illustrates Issues in Battling Insurgents
Traverse City Record-Eagle, Monday February 15
　
Sure is good to be back reading headlines reporting the military exploits of the U.S. waging war in a foreign land, isn’t it? After the election of Barack Obama, I was a little concerned — thought perhaps we were going to lose our touch.

The Senate's Newest Game: "Planetary Chicken"

We are in a race against time. Mother Nature isn’t sitting around waiting for us to get our political act together.

Representative Jay Inslee (D. WA)

In the long term, the fossil-fuel industry is going to lose this war. But in the short term, they are doing everything they can to delay the revolution. For them, what this fight is really about is buying precious time to maximize profits from carbon sources. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Kevin Knobloch
President, Union of Concerned Scientists

As you may know, “emissions trading” (also known as “cap and trade”) is an administrative approach designed to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.

“Cap and trade” [hereinafter sometimes “C&T”], has not been the preferred approach of the Obama Administration. While recently the President has said he will accept a C&T policy that encompasses the entire economy, his preference was once for a system of regulating the emission of heat-trapping gases administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. (Just after he took office, President Obama appointed Carol Browner, the head of the EPA under Bill Clinton, as “climate czar.”) But this kind of governmental regulation — once used successfully in winning World War II and in other such unimportant contexts — is anathema to conservatives and opposed almost unanimously by Republicans in Congress.

So, over the past year or so, by default, C&T has become the only remaining alternative. (Interestingly, C&T was first proposed in the Senate in 2003 by John McCain and Joe Lieberman. McCain, however, forever the flip-flopper, is now against it.) It works like this: A central authority (usually a governmental body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances, or credits, which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emission allowance must buy credits from those who pollute less on an open market. This enables polluters to decide for themselves whether it’s cheaper to cut emissions or buy credits. The transfer of credits is referred to as a trade.

In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, those who can reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest cost to society. One of the big arguments used to attract conservatives to C&T is that it is “market-based,” that it “cut climate pollution by harnessing the power of the free market.”

One of the most oft-cited right-wing objections to C&T is that charging a polluter to pollute is actually (heaven forbid!) a tax. This is not altogether an unfair characterization. For those familiar with professional baseball, it’s a little like the New York Yankees, who have a team payroll in excess of $200 million (as opposed to the Florida Marlins, who have a team payroll of about $30 million), being forced to pay a “luxury tax” to the teams less financially endowed for the privilege of spending in excess of a specified limit (i.e., a cap) and thereby buying up a whole lot of the best players. This makes sense for the Yankees because, on top of their big market, with the better players they can win such things as the World Series, and thus make a lot more money, more than enough to cover their luxury taxes. So it is with the big carbon emitters (or big investment banks, or big pharmacueticals, or big health insurers, etc., etc.). It seems that in this country, in the name of free enterprise, the rich guys are given room to do pretty much whatever they damn well please.

In any event, C&T conceptually is shot-through with problems, the most obvious being that there’s no guarantee that the total level of emissions will be reduced; about all we can expect is that though the smaller emitters are likely to get smaller the bigger ones will likely get bigger. The fact is that “tracking CO2 from millions of sources poses a daunting challenge, and granting too many loopholes known as “carbon offsets” could render the entire system meaningless.” Another is that C&T “is almost perfectly designed for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific Congressional districts.”

Oh, well. At least, in theory, it’s capitalistic all the way down, and, besides, it’s sooo American.

Nonetheless, just as it was about to be considered by the United States Senate, C&T lost its luster. For you see, Scott Brown, the newest member of that august body, went on record as opposing the idea in his campaign to claim Teddy Kennedy’s seat. If you’re about to say, “So what?” — wait just a minute. Brown’s success at the polls means there are now 41 Republican votes in the Senate and, as we all have learned in the past few years, whichever party controls 41 seats in the Senate controls the Senate. (The day after the election, a headline in the website of The Village Voice smartly announced: “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority.”) Never mind that this is still the largest majority either party has held in the Senate in 30 years. Never mind that as kids we learned that a democracy is supposed to run on majority rule, and that majority rule means rule by a majority of one, and that these days the Senate is comprised of 100 members. Be that as it may, as it now stands the C&T proposal is hovering on the lip of the dumpster.

In the face of these political realities, in his State of the Union address President Obama asked Congress “to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” But it didn’t take much time for the demise of the concept to be announced a few days after the speech by Senator Lindsey Graham (R. SC), who noted that “the cap and trade bills in the House and Senate are going nowhere.” Even Senator John Kerry (D. MA), a Democratic leader in the fight for energy legislation, admitted that he “can’t tell you whether it [passage of an energy bill] will happen this year or not.” On the very day of the SOU speech, The New York Times reported: “Some leaders in the energy industry were almost gleeful in pronouncing cap and trade dead for the year. They see an opportunity to win support from Congress for their businesses and to delay indefinitely the costs of reducing pollution from heat-trapping gases.” How sad is that?

But, once again — ta, da — wait just a minute. Two senators, Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat, and Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, have proposed a system known as “cap and dividend.” (This has bipartisan appeal because the “cap” idea sounds good to Democrats and “dividend” sounds good to Republicans.) Their proposal contemplates that power plants, steel mills, refineries and other major carbon emitters would have to pay for permits to pollute, with all the money being rebated to consumers to cover the higher costs of energy and manufactured goods. What geniuses these senators are!

But, hmmm. Let’s get this straight. We’re going to put a cap on the amount of emissions, but those emitters who can afford it (once again, the big ones) will buy permits to emit. These emitters by permit will therefore incur increased costs of production, which, in turn, will be passed on to consumers. But do not fear, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer — they’re thinking about you over in the Senate. You’ll be recompensed for your higher energy bills in the form of a rebate paid to you by the government out of funds raised by selling the permits. If this works, which is doubtful, it means that the real cost of generating emissions will be funneled backward 360 degrees and ultimately be borne by the emitters after all. (Yea, right.)

Of course, the Cantwell-Collins idea is no better than its progenitor, for it, too, is unlikely to decrease emissions at a level commensurate with our 2020 goals. But that’s no surprise, since it really isn’t designed to impact on emissions significantly in the first place; it’s designed to titillate conservatives “on both sides of the aisle,” as they say, into the fantasy that they’re actually accomplishing something. The United States Senate has no better insight into the importance of combating global warming than it does understanding of what’s meant by majority rule.

When all is said and done, it all comes down to nothing more than another senatorial circle jerk. Remember that the Senate’s complete lack of will to act last fall “helped torpedo the talks in Copenhagen, which not only failed to produce a binding treaty but postponed meaningful action until 2015.” As a result of that debacle, we are now “staring into the abyss,” says Dan Dudek, chief economist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “The United States and other developed countries must cut carbon emissions by 80 to 95 percent over the next few decades to avoid very serious climate change,” Robert S. Eschelman writes in the The Nation. So far, our efforts are “Lilliputian.” Atmospheric CO2 concentration, in case you wondered, is now somewhere around 390 ppm.

But once again, there appears to be a light, however dim, at the end of this seemingly endless tunnel. The light emanates from the EPA option for regulating carbon emissions, an option available to the president that can be implemented without the intervention of Congress. Simply put, he can impose the needed regulations by executive order — just as President Roosevelt imposed price controls during World War II. (Query: Which is more important, defeating Hitler or saving the planet? Hmmm.) The president, of course, is well aware that he has the power to do just that. Writing in the recent issue of Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell reports that President Obama,“a month after taking office, moved to implement a 2007 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court empowering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.”

“The threat to Big Coal and Big Oil was implicit,” Goodell continues, noting that “if energy interests balked at working with Congress to create a new system to curb carbon pollution, the administration would simply unleash federal regulators.” In similar vein, “if Congress does nothing,” warned Sen. Barbara Boxer, who was spearheading climate legislation as chair of the Senate Environment Committee, “we will be watching EPA do our job.” This is the very threat voiced by Senators Kerry and Graham last October when, in support of their proposed cut and trade legislation in the Senate, they jointly wrote in The New York Times that, should Congress fail to act on climate change, “the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations.” “Imposed regulations,” they added, “are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.”

The current diddling in Congress makes the EPA alternative all the more likely, and all the more attractive. The big question, of course, is when the talking stops and the crunching begins, will the president have the guts to flip the switch, and divert his effort from the track heading up toward Capital Hill to the one leading to the Environmental Protection Agency?

If Congress defaults, and President Obama goes the EPA route, the political fallout from conservatives will be immense. Glenn Beck has already gone on record charging the industry-friendly market-based C&T bill is an instrument of government control and communist bureaucracy. “They are going to take our financial systems, and then they are going to nationalize industry, and then they are going to nationalize energy,” he blustered, adding that those who support pending C&T legislation “have exposed themselves quite honestly, I think, as treasonous.” Should the Obama administration actually turn to the EPA, you can imagine what Beck and his colleagues at Fox will have to say. On several occasions, one rather recent, the president has said that he would rather be a good and courageous president for one term than a poor, ineffectual one for two terms. It may come to that.

Bill McKibbon says that, right now, getting carbon emissions under control is “nothing more than a dream. Making it real depends on how hard we push the system. There’s no question it’s capable of responding, and no question that left to its own devices it won’t.” The kind of movement required to make the push, McKibbon contends, needs to grow and to grow now. “We’ll need civil disobedience, of the kind that blockaded Congress’s coal-fired power plant last spring; we’ll need symbolic witness, like 350.org; we’ll need old-fashioned lobbying.”

For the moment, despite the consequences, there are two questions hanging fire: First, will the president have the guts to do what he should, to do what’s right? And second, whatever he may do, will the American people have the guts to “push the system,” push it hard?

The answer to neither one of these questions is assured, and the likelihood that either will be in the affirmative is questionable. But for those of us who are even half-way paying attention, our moral and political obligations are clear: we should do what Bill McKibbon suggests — civil disobedience, symbolic witness, old-fashioned lobbying.

And I guess we’d better get on with doing them real soon.