There’s a reason they play 162 games.
Now that one of baseball’s oldest clichés is out of the way — though not completely understood by some locals — it’s time to acknowledge that major league baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, though that may be just behind the “162 games” cliché on the game’s all-time list.
A few weeks ago I wrote a column on Danny Espinosa, the Nationals’ rookie second baseman. At the time it was written, Espinosa led NL rookies in a few offensive categories and had impressed everyone with his glove. I later received a scathing email from Edward, who wrote “You consistently support Danny Espinosa, even though his statistics, frankly, indicate that at .218, 321, .446, he is not even an average baseball player and is not even in the upper half of players at his position in the National League.” Edward went on to say that along with Espinosa, Ian Desmond was an inferior quality player, and that both Mike Rizzo and Jim Riggleman were abject failures at their jobs. Edward was not a happy guy.
I don’t know, it just seems to me that gauging a team’s whole season on the basis of the first two months is somewhat short-sighted. History — and no pro sport has a richer history than baseball — shows that dozens of teams and hundreds, maybe thousands, of players have recovered from slow starts to have very productive years. For a rookie, Espinosa has impressed a lot of inside-the-game types. His left-handed stroke has gotten shorter, his glove is still well above average (his range at second may be the best in the NL), and in the past week-and-a-half he raised his average to .233, with an OPS near .800.
My Saturday morning MASN colleague Mike Wallace said last week that he thought Espinosa would finish the year around .260, and while that’s ambitious, if he tops 20 HRs and 75 RBI, it won’t matter if he gets there or not.
There’s a theory that’s been thrown around my section of the press box that DC-area fans may tend to look at things through NFL eyes. That is, if a club loses three-in-a-row, you need to fire the coach, filet the owner, change the quarterback, and wait until next year. Going 33 years without a major league baseball team was like never having one in the first place. Kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s had no team to call their own unless they could get Dad to schlep them up the Parkway to see the Orioles. Big league baseball was no longer an everyday endeavor around the house like it is in established major league cities.
So, to Edward, and any other local fans who perceived that the 2011 season was lost before the official arrival of summer, try and exhale a little bit. Find a comfortable chair. Visit a petting zoo. Relax.
This is a pretty long ride.
Examiner columnist Phil Wood is a baseball historian and contributor to MASN’s Nats Xtra. Contact him at [email protected].
