The title says it all, folks.
If you're a fan of any Major League Baseball team anywhere in America (or even Toronto), chances are you've heard these unsettling sentences uttered before. They come from your manager, your pitching coach, the bat boy, your general manager, and sometimes even your owner (if he crawls out of his hole for the afternoon and grants an interview).
Well, maybe not if your fandom lies with New York, Boston, Los Angeles or Chicago. but I digress.
Everybody else, though, I guess I'm talking to you. The mid to small-market teams in MLB have all used these five phrases to describe how their team operates from season to season. Sometimes the order in which they're said changes. Sometimes certain things apply one year and not the next. But, bottom line, if you're a fan of any MLB team not from one of the four Super Power cities, you've heard these prhases and instantly thought about punching something or someone, but probably didn't in the end. But you wanted to!
Behold:
1.)"We're going to platoon (insert player) and (insert player) at (insert position here)"--Ah, the classic player platoon. It's a time-honored tradition in MLB to use these, and most every team has used it at one time or another. Some teams do it more than others, but it doesn't matter. In all honesty, the platoon is complete B.S. It is the highest level of coach-speak, and is the perfect way to say "Hey! We have these two marginal players who make next to nothing and both play right field. We can't release them right away, so let's give them both uniforms and playing time depending on the pitching match-up. They'll both suck equally, and it'll look like we're exhausting our options on how to get better." That, people, is your basic platoon. I challenge you to name me one World Series champion who platooned players at any single key position on the diamond. Good luck to you.
2.)"We're going to go with the closer by committee"--Oh dear. This one's never good to hear, because it's a basic admission that your front office has failed miserably in its evaluation of pitching talent somewhere along the line. When your manager uses a dart board with the pictures of six different guys on it to determine who's going in in the ninth to hold a one-run lead, it means your team will not be playing meaningful baseball past July 1st. If your team has gone through this painful process, chances are you didn't even watch the ninth inning of games that season. You already knew how it would turn out.
3.) "We're giving (insert player name here) a two-year contract with a club option for a third"--You see, on the surface this one doesn't sound so bad. Every offseason, a ton of free agents get this very contract, on the aforementioned terms, and sign on the dotted line without so much as a second read-through. But the dirty little secret of this sweetheart deal is that your front office is offering this
contract with one hand while crossing the fingers with the other. If your general manager hands a player a contract with only a couple years on it and a club option, and one of the major points said general manager hammers home to the media is that there's a club option in the first place, then he's saying he's not confident in his signing. Your front office is saying "We like what we've seen from this guy in recent years, but he's a.)getting old, b.)has diminishing skills, c.)has lost focus recently, d.) might be a problem child, but we're not sure, e.) is Manny Ramirez." Any of these traits are bad signs, but every year so many teams reveal how unsure of their own research and data they are when they throw around all these club options. Sure, it's a way to save money if a guy tanks. But, most importantly for the suits who are trying to keep their jobs any way they can, it's a way to save face.4.) "We're in a rebuilding mode."--What can I say that the phrase doesn't say itself? Not much. But the interesting thing about this one is that it has applied to just about every team in MLB at some point, even the big boys. People forget the Yankees were terrible from the early 1980s up until 1994. The Red Sox were merely
good, not great, before 2004. The Dodgers went a pretty long stretch in the last decade before making the playoffs again. The pope has said more swear words in the last two weeks than the two Chicago teams have won championships. Every team goes through this process in order to eventually get better, except for those teams (Kansas City and Colorado, please stand up)that seem to rebuild every other year because their personnel decisions are so God-awful they have no choice. There's nothing fun about rebuilding. It's the organization's way of saying "We're exercising our right to openly suck for X amount of years until we get some trades and draft picks correct. Come to the stadium if you feel like it. Our bad." Assuredly, tickets will be available to every home game at that point, and you can get them two minutes before the first pitch, all to see a collection of guys who probably have helped bag your groceries at one point...and Todd Helton...5.) "He's a great clubhouse presence"--Nothing irks me more than this one. This baby is the gem of MLB manager-speak, the Hope Diamond, if you will. This phrase is the manager's last resort when confronted by any decent reporter worth his salt on the topic of why a has-been or non-contributor still gets a locker, a uniform and a seat on the team plane. This phrase is used for the clingers-on, the guys who are too old
to be considered "on the rise" or "in his prime". Nope. These are the guys who are just around to play Nintendo with the younger kids before and after games, eat up some of the postgame buffet and occasionally tell the young hotshot on the team how to properly lather pine tar on his bat. And notice how your team's "great clubhouse presence" is usually a guy who, even in his prime, wasn't that great to begin with, a guy who, in his best season, hit around .250 with 50 RBI. The phrase is always attributed to the chronically mediocre. You know who these players are. Every team in baseball has at least one. If your team has two, see a doctor immediately.So there you have it. When it comes to Major League Baseball and being a fan of any team that isn't one of the free-spenders, there are five phrases you've likely heard someone in the organization say at some point in your life that are poison to the ears. Now if only we could avoid them.
