fic: the war criminal: appendix a ("a completely teal-deer primer on the game of baseball")
Baseball Primer
Okay, so odds are probably good you don't know much about baseball. That's cool. I know dick about curling, or being a lawyer, or the US Marine Corps. But I do know my baseball; I know history and I know theory and I know method, and my favorite part of the game is pitching.
But anyway, let's say you're not an American, or you are an American but you just don't know anything about baseball. So here's a handy-dandy reference post for you!
History of the Game
Baseball is a uniquely American sport (which spread to the Pacific Rim and Latin America) that owes some provenance to British cricket, and some to a century of argument and refinement. I won't bore you with the history of baseball, except to tell you the story that it was invented by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, is a big fat myth. It grew organically out of cricket and the usual American drive to take shit and make it our own.
A baseball game lasts nine frames, called innings, which contain three outs each. After the third out is recorded, the two teams swap offense and defense. Baseball is the only game I can think of where the defense handles the ball, and the ball has nothing to do with scoring a point (called a "run"). The object is to score more runs than the other team in those nine innings, although games can and do go into extra innings until someone scores a run, it starts raining, or the world ends.
That's a ridiculously simple explanation, but it's enough for this story.
Professional Teams
There are currently thirty Major League teams spread unequally across two leagues, the fourteen-team American League and the sixteen-team National League. Each league is today divided into three divisions: East, Central, and West. The AL East contains the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays, and Toronto Blue Jays. The AL Central contains the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, and Minnesota Twins. The AL West contains the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Oakland Athletics, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers. The NL East contains the Atlanta Braves, Florida Marlins, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, and Washington Nationals. The NL Central contains the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates, and St. Louis Cardinals. The NL West contains the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, and San Francisco Giants.
The NL is the older of the two, founded in 1876, while the American League didn't come about until 1903. Before the advent of the Designated Hitter (DH) in the AL in 1973, there wasn't really much difference between the two leagues in terms of rules (and I won't bore you with what exactly was different, because a, it doesn't matter for the story, and b, it's nit-picky and no longer relevant), and today that's essentially all that is different.
The designated hitter is exactly, that, a guy who only bats. In the NL, which lacks the DH, the pitcher has to bat. The DH doesn't play a defensive position, and generally he's a power hitter who runs poorly, and often one of the highest-paid players on the team. The DH is possibly baseball's most divisive rule. Baseball purists scorn it, and people don't mind it point out that having pitchers bat is the dullest thing in the world (which it is, no matter how you slice it). Some pitchers are good with a bat, but most of them are pathetically bad. The late-middle innings of a National League game can be godawful boring, and that's from someone who loves baseball. This is one reason the average National League lineup is weaker than the average AL lineup, and one reason why the Philadelphia Phillies dominate the league so effectively of late: they're built like an AL team (two of their most productive players are their shortstop and second baseman, two positions that aren't traditionally offense-oriented).
For many years, the NL was the dominant league. The NL was generally more progressive, and thanks to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, baseball was racially reintegrated in 1947 (I say "re-integrated because a pair of African-American brothers from Ohio played in the National League in the nineteenth century, but that's not important, either). The dominant National League teams of the mid-twentieth century were the teams that embraced this multi-cultural approach to team construction: the Dodgers and the Giants mostly (Robinson, Willie Mays, others), but also the Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, they of the contemporary seventeen consecutive losing seasons were once great) and Cincinnati Reds (look at the "Big Red Machine" teams of the mid-1970s).
In the American League, for most of the twentieth century, it was pretty much just the Yankees. No, seriously. It's kind of pathetic. No wonder mid-century literature is obsessed with the Giants and Dodgers and Pirates and the rest of the National League, because the AL had almost no parity. The Yankees have won 40 AL pennants in the 107 years the league has existed, and they didn't win their first until 1923 (and there was one season with no pennant winners, because the season ended in a players' strike in August).
The Cleveland Indians were the first AL team to reintegrate, with Larry Doby's debut just a few months after Jackie Robinson's (the Indians would also be the first team to field a black manager, in Frank Robinson-no relation to Jackie-in the '70s), but few other AL teams embraced the black players. The Red Sox didn't field their first black player until 1959, twelve years after Jackie Robinson's debut! The Yankees are unique in that they had all kinds of success in the mid-century (witness Yogi Berra's ten World Series rings) despite being a bunch of white guys, but they were very much the exception. The only other AL teams to win pennants in the '50s, for example, both had diverse squads (the '54 Indians and '59 Chicago White Sox, and both were managed by the same guy, Al Lopez). In September 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates would be the first team to field an all black and Latino lineup (and they won the World Series that year, so it's gotta tell you something; Roberto Clemente was one of them, and Doc Ellis who once pitched a no-hitter high on acid).
The climate today is very different. The American League has lost just three All-Star games in my lifetime (I was born in 1988) and tied once (in 2002). The AL is the league with the Yankees and Red Sox, teams with massive fan-bases and huge revenue streams, and the ability to turn that money into expensive free agents. Just one member of the Yankees' infield is paid less than $20 million a year, second baseman Robinson Cano. The Red Sox are a particularly interesting case because they're a beautifully run franchise in addition to being moneyed, applying the strategic player acquisition techniques used by smaller market teams while retaining the ability to resign their homegrown stars, cover up for problems (like their inability to develop a shortstop in the last decade), and bounce back. They also draft ridiculously well considering they usually have one of the last picks in the first round, if they have a first round pick at all (a team forfeits its first round pick if they sign one of the "type-A" top-tier free agents, although what determines type-A status is somewhat mysterious and often downright WTF), but then again, some draftees "fall" to lower picks because of perceived signability issues (see: Detroit snagging Rick Porcello with the 27th pick of the 2007 draft, the year after they won the AL pennant). All of this makes the Red Sox dangerous.
Because of the financial climate of baseball, there is a certain adage that a team better "catch lightning in a bottle" and hope all its good young stars gel together quickly to produce a pennant (winning the league) and hopefully a World Series ring before losing all its stars to free agency and the big market teams (see: 2006 Oakland Athletics; 2007 Cleveland Indians; Tampa Bay Rays, 2008 and 2010 versions of). It's kind of indicative that fourteen different teams won pennants in the last decade, but the big-market/big-payroll guys were the ones who appear more than once: the Yankees, Red Sox, and recently, Phillies (okay, and the Cardinals, too, but their World Series win in 2006 is kind of an outlier, and we'll get to that later).
Anyway, sometime between the mid-80s and today, the AL became the dominant league. Baseball is a game of averages, to use a line from the story, and stuff tends to occur in cycles. The 1960s, for example, featured utterly dominant pitching in the form of stars like St. Louis's Bob Gibson, Dodgers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, Detroit's Denny McLain (baseball's last 30-game winner in 1968, which will almost certainly never be accomplished again, as most starters only make about 33 or 34 starts in a season today; McLain was also truly a dirtbag), and others, and culminated with 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. That year, Gibson and McClain won both Cy Young and MVP awards (and took their respective teams to the World Series, although McClain didn't really contribute anything and Gibson lost game 7, and Detroit is maybe only still a city because of this World Series, I shit you not-see 1967 Detroit race riots). The decade began with Yankees Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle (who were basically J2 hitting homeruns and being adorable together) chasing Babe Ruth's single-season homerun record-Maris broke it in 1961-and ended with pitching so dominant they changed the rules of the game to swing the balance back to the hitter.
That swing almost certainly has something to do with the introduction of the DH in 1973 and the advent of free agency in '76 (although pitcher Catfish Hunter was the first free agent, in 1974, but because of a contract loophole and not because of legal stuff like what came two years later). Before '76, all baseball contracts contained something called the reserve clause, which meant a player was basically bound to a single team for life unless they released him or traded him to some other team (to which he was then bound-that's why Jackie Robinson retired, instead of playing for the Giants after the Dodgers traded him). That's why all those Yankee greats were Yankees for their whole careers, why Ted Williams only got to play in the one World Series (stuck in Boston as he was), and why historical players' career stat sheets look weird to us.
And we could talk about steroids, and probably we should, but we won't. Because they're not important to this story. A previous version of this story, written over a year ago and not for the j2_everafter challenge but for my own amusement, featured a Jared who made the majors but washed out after injuries stemming from steroid use when he was younger. But it got to politicky, and it was boring and sad and dramatical in a bad way, and I refashioned it into other things.
But anyway, the steroid era probably begins with Tony LaRussa's late-1980s Oakland A's teams (Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco in one place, after all), persists through the 90s, and explodes in the early aughts with Barry Bonds and his 73-homerun season. And then came the Mitchell Report and congressional inquests (because the US government has always had its paws on baseball, because MLB has antitrust exemption), and guys with historically great stats will never sniff the Hall of Fame because they're tainted by the whole cheater thing. It's worth noting that drugs have always been used in baseball: cocaine, amphetamines, other stimulants. Look at Mickey Mantle the alcoholic and Tim Lincecum's drug bust over the offseason. Doc Ellis's no-hitter pitched on an acid trip. And no one seems to give a shit that PEDs are all over the NFL, but maybe it's because your average baseball player looks like a normal human being and not a giant or a golem. I don't know.
Baseball is different from the other three major North American sports in its economic structure. It's interesting that for all its capitalistic airs, America's favorite sport-football-is intensely socialistic in structure. Baseball, however, is not. Baseball is today a game of haves and have-nots, and the 2009 season was perhaps the most painful example of this for an Indians fan (i.e. me). In 2008, the Indians traded reigning AL Cy Young winner C.C. Sabathia (he didn't drop the periods 'til he was a Yankee; in Cleveland we regard this as him also dropping his soul) to the Milwaukee Brewers for four prospects. After the season, Sabathia signed with the New York Yankees for approximately a bajillion dollars over seven years, following a long-standing tradition of the Yankees gobbling up all the brightest stars just 'cause they can (and, more importantly, being able to retain the few stars they manage to grow for themselves; Derek Jeter'll never wear another uniform, which is something that cannot be said for too many guys these days). In 2009, the Indians traded reigning Cy Young winner Cliff Lee to the Phillies for another package of prospects in what shortsighted ninnies call a terrible deal (and seriously, we're only just seeing how awesome deals made in 2002 were, so how can we possibly judge a deal made last summer? Sorry, there's a pet peeve of mine). In a quirk of this-could-only-happen-to-Cleveland (the most miserable city in America, according to Forbes!), Sabathia and Lee faced each other in Game 1 of the 2009 World Series.
Teal deer yet?
I could talk about Moneyball for a while, and probably should, but I won't. I will, however, direct you here to the reference post candle_beck made for her own massive canon of baseball fic, because Moneyball is about the early-aughts Oakland A's and so is most of CB's fic. I'd be interested in reading all of the stuff that didn't make it into the book, from the author's extensive player interviews, but that's just me. But Moneyball is about how the economic structure of baseball is unfair, so small-market teams like Oakland (and Cleveland and Minnesota and Tampa Bay; sadly these are the only three small-market AL teams who really ever have much success in the post-Moneyball world, either because the Yankees/Red Sox juggernaut kills the AL East for everyone else, or they're just run really poorly, like the Kansas City Royals) have to be creative in order to be successful.
For the purposes of THIS story, though, this big market-small market dichotomy is important. In the story, the Cleveland Indians drafted both Js in 1994's Rule 4 draft (which just means they were amateurs, Jared in high school and Jensen college). The Indians were very bad in 1993, so they had a high pick in the draft (for example, the team with the worst record the year before gets the first overall pick, which is how the Washington Nationals will get Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper in consecutive years). Jared washes out, so he's not relevant, but Jensen makes his Major League debut in May 1998. His first year of salary arbitration eligibility is 2000, and after that season the Indians trade him to the Los Angeles Angels for a couple of guys who don't work out (c'est la vie; the Indians still trade Bartolo Colon to the Expos in 2002, robbing them blind of Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee, and Brandon Phillips). Jensen wins the 2001 Cy Young, then the Angels win the 2002 World Series, which is his last season under club control. Jensen then resigns with the Angels for three years and lots of money. Wins the 2005 Cy Young award, and enters Free Agency for real. He signs a four-year deal with the Chicago Cubs for a ridiculous amount of money (but not, like, Barry Zito territory here-you did read CB's post, right?). Which brings us neatly up to the 2010 season, which is the action of this story. See how that works?
Pitching
Baseball is, at its simplest, a standoff between two people: the pitcher and the batter.
(I can't track it down, but this past season a pitcher I want to say was Rich Harden pitched a game that was entirely defense-neutral, as in every out he recorded he recorded himself, either by strikeout or catching or fielding the ball himself… which is why I think it was Harden, but like I said, I can't track it down [unrelated, but here's a fancy way of backing up my picking him to be at the 2010 ASG, which is kind of a ridiculous pick, I know, but dammit, I want that "surly-looking Rangers couch"] unless it's this game, April 15 against the Rockies, but I don't think it is, and it makes me tired just looking at a line of 92 pitches in just three innings).
ANYWAY. So. Pitching. It's my favorite part of the game. This chick doesn't really "dig the long ball" (as the saying goes), and my biggest dream is to see a no-hitter in person. Give me a tight, intense one-nothing pitchers' duel over a ridiculous 14-13 slug-fest (not that such games aren't fun, of course; I listened to that one on the radio and I kept saying to my cat, "Seriously? Seriously??" until it was over, while she blinked at me adoringly and seemed annoyed that I had the volume up so loud). I listened to both no-hitters on the radio last year, Jonathan Sanchez's in San Francisco and Mark Buehrle's perfect game against the Rays; I really thought Sanchez's was more exciting, awesome defensive play by the White Sox centerfielder notwithstanding.
(I own a whole bunch of baseball t-shirts with player names on the back, and except for my Mark DeRosa Indians shirt I bought the exact day they traded him to St. Louis last season, they're all pitchers: Cliff Lee (x2), Rick Porcello, Barry Zito, Justin Masterson, and Rich Harden)
Pitchers come in two flavors: starters and relievers. There's some counterintuitive qualifications for what makes a guy one or ther other, but generally starters are the better pitchers simply by virtue of having better "stuff" or more pitches in their arsenals, and sometimes they're just more durable. A good example of the latter is Kerry Wood, who had arguably some of the best stuff in baseball (once throwing a twenty-strikeout game, and there are only 27 outs in a regulation-length game, so yeah), but he broke down from overuse when he was very young, and after a couple of years mostly lost, he came back as a closer and has been successful (when his team can offer save opportunities, anyway).
A starting pitcher begins the game in the first inning. He throws from a ten-inch high mound of dirt located sixty feet, six inches from home plate, where the batter, catcher, and umpire are located. Well, actually, there's a strip of rubber on the mound (called, descriptively, "the rubber") to use sort of as a kickplate, and that is sixty feet, six inches from the plate, so really, a pitcher like Randy Johnson (six-foot-ten) with a massive stride and massive armspan is really only releasing the ball some fifty-two feet from the plate. Johnson was one of the best pitchers of the last twenty-five years, so there's something to be said for being ridiculously tall. CC Sabathia is 6'7", and Verlander, Wood, and Porcello are all 6'5".
(not that you have to be tall; the Braves' Tim Hudson is like 5'10" or 5'11" standing up as straight as he can, and he's very, very good when he's healthy. The Indians have one of those little guys, too, in Aaron Laffey. Hudson and Laffey are more finesse/groundball type of pitcher, though. There aren't too many power pitchers under six-three or so, though, and I can't think of any flame-throwing starters under that height except the aforementioned Harden, and he's always hurt. And then there's Tim Lincecum, who's even tinier than Hudson at about 5'9" and 160 pounds, but there's more than one reason they call him "The Freak." He's truly a category by himself)
There are basically two kinds of pitches: fastballs and offspeed pitches, and both of those come in several varieties. Don't worry about the names so much. Fastballs come in two- and four-seam versions (thrown with different grips on the stitches, hence the names), plus split-finger ("splitter") and cut ("cutter," which is Yankee closer Mariano Rivera's bread and butter, and why Dan Haren was so very good for most of last year). The two-seamer is the sinker, because it sinks on its way to the plate, which induces a lot of groundballs. Offspeed pitches include changeups (so-called because they're slow and when used in conjunction with fastballs and enough difference in speed between them are a change of pace that's difficult for most hitters to adjust to), and breaking balls, and those are further divided into curveballs (which, yes, really do curve), sliders (which are basically fast curveballs that move differently), screwballs and knucklecurves (Mike Mussina threw one of these, but they're pretty uncommon). There's also the knuckleball, which is something else entirely, but only one guy throws it in the Majors today, and that's Boston's Tim Wakefield. It's very, very hard to catch.
The curveball, by virtue of how it's thrown, has a way of destroying a pitcher's arm. 1960s Dodger star Sandy Koufax had probably the best curve in history, and he retired after the '66 season with a dead arm, age 31 (and he's the youngest person ever inducted to the Hall of Fame). This is another reason Barry Zito's so weird, because he's never had an arm injury despite relying heavily on his incredibly good curve; then again, his fastball isn't very fast, and, well, he's Barry Zito.
Before 1974, when LA Dodgers pitcher Tommy John underwent the first successful ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery, many pitchers saw their careers come to early ends simply because, due to the repetitive stress of the throwing motion, their elbows essentially wore out. Today, more than one in nine pitchers in baseball has a Tommy John scar on the elbow of his pitching arm, and in the last decade or so, the trend has seen younger and younger pitchers going under the knife.
Other links of interest:
Baseball-reference.com
Baseball Prospectus
Baseballalmanac.com
Retrosheet
Cot's Baseball Contracts
Okay, so odds are probably good you don't know much about baseball. That's cool. I know dick about curling, or being a lawyer, or the US Marine Corps. But I do know my baseball; I know history and I know theory and I know method, and my favorite part of the game is pitching.
But anyway, let's say you're not an American, or you are an American but you just don't know anything about baseball. So here's a handy-dandy reference post for you!
History of the Game
Baseball is a uniquely American sport (which spread to the Pacific Rim and Latin America) that owes some provenance to British cricket, and some to a century of argument and refinement. I won't bore you with the history of baseball, except to tell you the story that it was invented by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, is a big fat myth. It grew organically out of cricket and the usual American drive to take shit and make it our own.
A baseball game lasts nine frames, called innings, which contain three outs each. After the third out is recorded, the two teams swap offense and defense. Baseball is the only game I can think of where the defense handles the ball, and the ball has nothing to do with scoring a point (called a "run"). The object is to score more runs than the other team in those nine innings, although games can and do go into extra innings until someone scores a run, it starts raining, or the world ends.
That's a ridiculously simple explanation, but it's enough for this story.
Professional Teams
There are currently thirty Major League teams spread unequally across two leagues, the fourteen-team American League and the sixteen-team National League. Each league is today divided into three divisions: East, Central, and West. The AL East contains the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays, and Toronto Blue Jays. The AL Central contains the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, and Minnesota Twins. The AL West contains the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Oakland Athletics, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers. The NL East contains the Atlanta Braves, Florida Marlins, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, and Washington Nationals. The NL Central contains the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates, and St. Louis Cardinals. The NL West contains the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, and San Francisco Giants.
The NL is the older of the two, founded in 1876, while the American League didn't come about until 1903. Before the advent of the Designated Hitter (DH) in the AL in 1973, there wasn't really much difference between the two leagues in terms of rules (and I won't bore you with what exactly was different, because a, it doesn't matter for the story, and b, it's nit-picky and no longer relevant), and today that's essentially all that is different.
The designated hitter is exactly, that, a guy who only bats. In the NL, which lacks the DH, the pitcher has to bat. The DH doesn't play a defensive position, and generally he's a power hitter who runs poorly, and often one of the highest-paid players on the team. The DH is possibly baseball's most divisive rule. Baseball purists scorn it, and people don't mind it point out that having pitchers bat is the dullest thing in the world (which it is, no matter how you slice it). Some pitchers are good with a bat, but most of them are pathetically bad. The late-middle innings of a National League game can be godawful boring, and that's from someone who loves baseball. This is one reason the average National League lineup is weaker than the average AL lineup, and one reason why the Philadelphia Phillies dominate the league so effectively of late: they're built like an AL team (two of their most productive players are their shortstop and second baseman, two positions that aren't traditionally offense-oriented).
For many years, the NL was the dominant league. The NL was generally more progressive, and thanks to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, baseball was racially reintegrated in 1947 (I say "re-integrated because a pair of African-American brothers from Ohio played in the National League in the nineteenth century, but that's not important, either). The dominant National League teams of the mid-twentieth century were the teams that embraced this multi-cultural approach to team construction: the Dodgers and the Giants mostly (Robinson, Willie Mays, others), but also the Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, they of the contemporary seventeen consecutive losing seasons were once great) and Cincinnati Reds (look at the "Big Red Machine" teams of the mid-1970s).
In the American League, for most of the twentieth century, it was pretty much just the Yankees. No, seriously. It's kind of pathetic. No wonder mid-century literature is obsessed with the Giants and Dodgers and Pirates and the rest of the National League, because the AL had almost no parity. The Yankees have won 40 AL pennants in the 107 years the league has existed, and they didn't win their first until 1923 (and there was one season with no pennant winners, because the season ended in a players' strike in August).
The Cleveland Indians were the first AL team to reintegrate, with Larry Doby's debut just a few months after Jackie Robinson's (the Indians would also be the first team to field a black manager, in Frank Robinson-no relation to Jackie-in the '70s), but few other AL teams embraced the black players. The Red Sox didn't field their first black player until 1959, twelve years after Jackie Robinson's debut! The Yankees are unique in that they had all kinds of success in the mid-century (witness Yogi Berra's ten World Series rings) despite being a bunch of white guys, but they were very much the exception. The only other AL teams to win pennants in the '50s, for example, both had diverse squads (the '54 Indians and '59 Chicago White Sox, and both were managed by the same guy, Al Lopez). In September 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates would be the first team to field an all black and Latino lineup (and they won the World Series that year, so it's gotta tell you something; Roberto Clemente was one of them, and Doc Ellis who once pitched a no-hitter high on acid).
The climate today is very different. The American League has lost just three All-Star games in my lifetime (I was born in 1988) and tied once (in 2002). The AL is the league with the Yankees and Red Sox, teams with massive fan-bases and huge revenue streams, and the ability to turn that money into expensive free agents. Just one member of the Yankees' infield is paid less than $20 million a year, second baseman Robinson Cano. The Red Sox are a particularly interesting case because they're a beautifully run franchise in addition to being moneyed, applying the strategic player acquisition techniques used by smaller market teams while retaining the ability to resign their homegrown stars, cover up for problems (like their inability to develop a shortstop in the last decade), and bounce back. They also draft ridiculously well considering they usually have one of the last picks in the first round, if they have a first round pick at all (a team forfeits its first round pick if they sign one of the "type-A" top-tier free agents, although what determines type-A status is somewhat mysterious and often downright WTF), but then again, some draftees "fall" to lower picks because of perceived signability issues (see: Detroit snagging Rick Porcello with the 27th pick of the 2007 draft, the year after they won the AL pennant). All of this makes the Red Sox dangerous.
Because of the financial climate of baseball, there is a certain adage that a team better "catch lightning in a bottle" and hope all its good young stars gel together quickly to produce a pennant (winning the league) and hopefully a World Series ring before losing all its stars to free agency and the big market teams (see: 2006 Oakland Athletics; 2007 Cleveland Indians; Tampa Bay Rays, 2008 and 2010 versions of). It's kind of indicative that fourteen different teams won pennants in the last decade, but the big-market/big-payroll guys were the ones who appear more than once: the Yankees, Red Sox, and recently, Phillies (okay, and the Cardinals, too, but their World Series win in 2006 is kind of an outlier, and we'll get to that later).
Anyway, sometime between the mid-80s and today, the AL became the dominant league. Baseball is a game of averages, to use a line from the story, and stuff tends to occur in cycles. The 1960s, for example, featured utterly dominant pitching in the form of stars like St. Louis's Bob Gibson, Dodgers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, Detroit's Denny McLain (baseball's last 30-game winner in 1968, which will almost certainly never be accomplished again, as most starters only make about 33 or 34 starts in a season today; McLain was also truly a dirtbag), and others, and culminated with 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. That year, Gibson and McClain won both Cy Young and MVP awards (and took their respective teams to the World Series, although McClain didn't really contribute anything and Gibson lost game 7, and Detroit is maybe only still a city because of this World Series, I shit you not-see 1967 Detroit race riots). The decade began with Yankees Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle (who were basically J2 hitting homeruns and being adorable together) chasing Babe Ruth's single-season homerun record-Maris broke it in 1961-and ended with pitching so dominant they changed the rules of the game to swing the balance back to the hitter.
That swing almost certainly has something to do with the introduction of the DH in 1973 and the advent of free agency in '76 (although pitcher Catfish Hunter was the first free agent, in 1974, but because of a contract loophole and not because of legal stuff like what came two years later). Before '76, all baseball contracts contained something called the reserve clause, which meant a player was basically bound to a single team for life unless they released him or traded him to some other team (to which he was then bound-that's why Jackie Robinson retired, instead of playing for the Giants after the Dodgers traded him). That's why all those Yankee greats were Yankees for their whole careers, why Ted Williams only got to play in the one World Series (stuck in Boston as he was), and why historical players' career stat sheets look weird to us.
And we could talk about steroids, and probably we should, but we won't. Because they're not important to this story. A previous version of this story, written over a year ago and not for the j2_everafter challenge but for my own amusement, featured a Jared who made the majors but washed out after injuries stemming from steroid use when he was younger. But it got to politicky, and it was boring and sad and dramatical in a bad way, and I refashioned it into other things.
But anyway, the steroid era probably begins with Tony LaRussa's late-1980s Oakland A's teams (Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco in one place, after all), persists through the 90s, and explodes in the early aughts with Barry Bonds and his 73-homerun season. And then came the Mitchell Report and congressional inquests (because the US government has always had its paws on baseball, because MLB has antitrust exemption), and guys with historically great stats will never sniff the Hall of Fame because they're tainted by the whole cheater thing. It's worth noting that drugs have always been used in baseball: cocaine, amphetamines, other stimulants. Look at Mickey Mantle the alcoholic and Tim Lincecum's drug bust over the offseason. Doc Ellis's no-hitter pitched on an acid trip. And no one seems to give a shit that PEDs are all over the NFL, but maybe it's because your average baseball player looks like a normal human being and not a giant or a golem. I don't know.
Baseball is different from the other three major North American sports in its economic structure. It's interesting that for all its capitalistic airs, America's favorite sport-football-is intensely socialistic in structure. Baseball, however, is not. Baseball is today a game of haves and have-nots, and the 2009 season was perhaps the most painful example of this for an Indians fan (i.e. me). In 2008, the Indians traded reigning AL Cy Young winner C.C. Sabathia (he didn't drop the periods 'til he was a Yankee; in Cleveland we regard this as him also dropping his soul) to the Milwaukee Brewers for four prospects. After the season, Sabathia signed with the New York Yankees for approximately a bajillion dollars over seven years, following a long-standing tradition of the Yankees gobbling up all the brightest stars just 'cause they can (and, more importantly, being able to retain the few stars they manage to grow for themselves; Derek Jeter'll never wear another uniform, which is something that cannot be said for too many guys these days). In 2009, the Indians traded reigning Cy Young winner Cliff Lee to the Phillies for another package of prospects in what shortsighted ninnies call a terrible deal (and seriously, we're only just seeing how awesome deals made in 2002 were, so how can we possibly judge a deal made last summer? Sorry, there's a pet peeve of mine). In a quirk of this-could-only-happen-to-Cleveland (the most miserable city in America, according to Forbes!), Sabathia and Lee faced each other in Game 1 of the 2009 World Series.
Teal deer yet?
I could talk about Moneyball for a while, and probably should, but I won't. I will, however, direct you here to the reference post candle_beck made for her own massive canon of baseball fic, because Moneyball is about the early-aughts Oakland A's and so is most of CB's fic. I'd be interested in reading all of the stuff that didn't make it into the book, from the author's extensive player interviews, but that's just me. But Moneyball is about how the economic structure of baseball is unfair, so small-market teams like Oakland (and Cleveland and Minnesota and Tampa Bay; sadly these are the only three small-market AL teams who really ever have much success in the post-Moneyball world, either because the Yankees/Red Sox juggernaut kills the AL East for everyone else, or they're just run really poorly, like the Kansas City Royals) have to be creative in order to be successful.
For the purposes of THIS story, though, this big market-small market dichotomy is important. In the story, the Cleveland Indians drafted both Js in 1994's Rule 4 draft (which just means they were amateurs, Jared in high school and Jensen college). The Indians were very bad in 1993, so they had a high pick in the draft (for example, the team with the worst record the year before gets the first overall pick, which is how the Washington Nationals will get Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper in consecutive years). Jared washes out, so he's not relevant, but Jensen makes his Major League debut in May 1998. His first year of salary arbitration eligibility is 2000, and after that season the Indians trade him to the Los Angeles Angels for a couple of guys who don't work out (c'est la vie; the Indians still trade Bartolo Colon to the Expos in 2002, robbing them blind of Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee, and Brandon Phillips). Jensen wins the 2001 Cy Young, then the Angels win the 2002 World Series, which is his last season under club control. Jensen then resigns with the Angels for three years and lots of money. Wins the 2005 Cy Young award, and enters Free Agency for real. He signs a four-year deal with the Chicago Cubs for a ridiculous amount of money (but not, like, Barry Zito territory here-you did read CB's post, right?). Which brings us neatly up to the 2010 season, which is the action of this story. See how that works?
Pitching
Baseball is, at its simplest, a standoff between two people: the pitcher and the batter.
(I can't track it down, but this past season a pitcher I want to say was Rich Harden pitched a game that was entirely defense-neutral, as in every out he recorded he recorded himself, either by strikeout or catching or fielding the ball himself… which is why I think it was Harden, but like I said, I can't track it down [unrelated, but here's a fancy way of backing up my picking him to be at the 2010 ASG, which is kind of a ridiculous pick, I know, but dammit, I want that "surly-looking Rangers couch"] unless it's this game, April 15 against the Rockies, but I don't think it is, and it makes me tired just looking at a line of 92 pitches in just three innings).
ANYWAY. So. Pitching. It's my favorite part of the game. This chick doesn't really "dig the long ball" (as the saying goes), and my biggest dream is to see a no-hitter in person. Give me a tight, intense one-nothing pitchers' duel over a ridiculous 14-13 slug-fest (not that such games aren't fun, of course; I listened to that one on the radio and I kept saying to my cat, "Seriously? Seriously??" until it was over, while she blinked at me adoringly and seemed annoyed that I had the volume up so loud). I listened to both no-hitters on the radio last year, Jonathan Sanchez's in San Francisco and Mark Buehrle's perfect game against the Rays; I really thought Sanchez's was more exciting, awesome defensive play by the White Sox centerfielder notwithstanding.
(I own a whole bunch of baseball t-shirts with player names on the back, and except for my Mark DeRosa Indians shirt I bought the exact day they traded him to St. Louis last season, they're all pitchers: Cliff Lee (x2), Rick Porcello, Barry Zito, Justin Masterson, and Rich Harden)
Pitchers come in two flavors: starters and relievers. There's some counterintuitive qualifications for what makes a guy one or ther other, but generally starters are the better pitchers simply by virtue of having better "stuff" or more pitches in their arsenals, and sometimes they're just more durable. A good example of the latter is Kerry Wood, who had arguably some of the best stuff in baseball (once throwing a twenty-strikeout game, and there are only 27 outs in a regulation-length game, so yeah), but he broke down from overuse when he was very young, and after a couple of years mostly lost, he came back as a closer and has been successful (when his team can offer save opportunities, anyway).
A starting pitcher begins the game in the first inning. He throws from a ten-inch high mound of dirt located sixty feet, six inches from home plate, where the batter, catcher, and umpire are located. Well, actually, there's a strip of rubber on the mound (called, descriptively, "the rubber") to use sort of as a kickplate, and that is sixty feet, six inches from the plate, so really, a pitcher like Randy Johnson (six-foot-ten) with a massive stride and massive armspan is really only releasing the ball some fifty-two feet from the plate. Johnson was one of the best pitchers of the last twenty-five years, so there's something to be said for being ridiculously tall. CC Sabathia is 6'7", and Verlander, Wood, and Porcello are all 6'5".
(not that you have to be tall; the Braves' Tim Hudson is like 5'10" or 5'11" standing up as straight as he can, and he's very, very good when he's healthy. The Indians have one of those little guys, too, in Aaron Laffey. Hudson and Laffey are more finesse/groundball type of pitcher, though. There aren't too many power pitchers under six-three or so, though, and I can't think of any flame-throwing starters under that height except the aforementioned Harden, and he's always hurt. And then there's Tim Lincecum, who's even tinier than Hudson at about 5'9" and 160 pounds, but there's more than one reason they call him "The Freak." He's truly a category by himself)
There are basically two kinds of pitches: fastballs and offspeed pitches, and both of those come in several varieties. Don't worry about the names so much. Fastballs come in two- and four-seam versions (thrown with different grips on the stitches, hence the names), plus split-finger ("splitter") and cut ("cutter," which is Yankee closer Mariano Rivera's bread and butter, and why Dan Haren was so very good for most of last year). The two-seamer is the sinker, because it sinks on its way to the plate, which induces a lot of groundballs. Offspeed pitches include changeups (so-called because they're slow and when used in conjunction with fastballs and enough difference in speed between them are a change of pace that's difficult for most hitters to adjust to), and breaking balls, and those are further divided into curveballs (which, yes, really do curve), sliders (which are basically fast curveballs that move differently), screwballs and knucklecurves (Mike Mussina threw one of these, but they're pretty uncommon). There's also the knuckleball, which is something else entirely, but only one guy throws it in the Majors today, and that's Boston's Tim Wakefield. It's very, very hard to catch.
The curveball, by virtue of how it's thrown, has a way of destroying a pitcher's arm. 1960s Dodger star Sandy Koufax had probably the best curve in history, and he retired after the '66 season with a dead arm, age 31 (and he's the youngest person ever inducted to the Hall of Fame). This is another reason Barry Zito's so weird, because he's never had an arm injury despite relying heavily on his incredibly good curve; then again, his fastball isn't very fast, and, well, he's Barry Zito.
Before 1974, when LA Dodgers pitcher Tommy John underwent the first successful ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery, many pitchers saw their careers come to early ends simply because, due to the repetitive stress of the throwing motion, their elbows essentially wore out. Today, more than one in nine pitchers in baseball has a Tommy John scar on the elbow of his pitching arm, and in the last decade or so, the trend has seen younger and younger pitchers going under the knife.
Other links of interest:
Baseball-reference.com
Baseball Prospectus
Baseballalmanac.com
Retrosheet
Cot's Baseball Contracts