As noted earlier here, given all of the incredible disappointments over the years, there must be a special place in Heaven for folks who continue to follow Houston sports teams.
The latest example The Stros haven’t even held their first full team workout in Spring Training yet, but the news is already . . . well, . . not so good.
First, Baseball Prospectus lists precisely one Stros farmhand — catcher Jason Castro — in its Top 100 baseball prospects, and Castro is no. 76 on that list. I guess that new "build from within" program is going to take some time.
Or course, this comes on the heels of an extremely quiet winter for the Stros, who didn’t make any major moves in a depressed free agent market. They aren’t admitting it, but Stros management apparently realizes that this club’s window for competing for a playoff spot is closed.
Although an improbable 36-18 second-half record allowed last season’s Stros to win 86 games and at least con some naive fans into thinking that they actually had a chance for the NL wild-card spot, Baseball Prospectus‘ PECOTA prediction system projects this season’s Stros to contend for the league’s worst team. PECOTA has the Stros topping the woeful Pirates by only one win, 65 to 64.
In view of that, it probably makes sense that the Stros spent most of the off-season cutting costs. In one of their key moves, the Stros withdrew a $27 million three-year offer to reasonably effective pitcher Randy Wolf in favor of a relatively cheap, one-year, $2 million deal with 36 year-old lefty Mike Hampton, who has pitched a total of 147 innings over the past four seasons.
Granted, that’s not much production over that stretch. But that means chances are he’ll break out and be more productive this season, right?
Well, so much for that theory.
Finally, to put a punctuation mark on another dismal day of following Houston sports teams, I flicked on the car radio to a local sports talk show Monday afternoon while driving between meetings.
The two hosts and a caller were addressing Michael Lewis‘ NY Sunday Times Magazine article about Rockets forward Shane Battier.
In the article, Lewis provides an in-depth analysis of how the Rockets are on the cutting-edge of modifying traditional statistical analysis to find undervalued players such as Battier. It is clearly one of the most interesting, erudite, well-researched and important articles written about sports so far this year.
Despite that, Here is how the conversation went between the two sports talk radio hosts and their caller:
Caller: "Have you guys read the Michael Lewis article in the New York Times about Shane Battier and the Rockets?"
Host One: "I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet."
Host Two: "Oh yeah, I also heard about it, but I haven’t read it yet, either. What’s it all about?"
Caller: "Well, I haven’t read the article, either. I was hoping you guys had read it and could tell me about it."
Mercifully, I turned off the radio.
Chalk it up to just another episode in the continuing sordid story of following Houston sports teams.
Those NYT Mag stories are so long. Who has time to read? Even if your profession is covering sports, when would you have time to watch the MMA matches on the tee-vee and scour the YouTube and get drunk? If you can’t finish it during a average-length visit to the john, to heck with it. Sheesh!
I read the NY Times’s similarly fascinating on Mike Leach several years ago (by the same author, natch), and I can’t remember any radio host, local or national, discussing it at all. But I wonder if this owes more to the low resolution quality of Radio/TV.
Borrowing from Edward Tufte a bit, low-information outlets like television and radio are inherently hampered by time / space. The information-per-second ratio is pretty terrible compared with newspapers, magazines, books, and blogs. The printed word is much more suited to communicating complex ideas like the economics of sport. Even if local radio hosts wanted to cover the article (and, you’re right, they don’t), they couldn’t do so efficiently.
So we’re left with crappy, half-hearted stories about Bret Farve retiring (again). I don’t even know why I listen.
Still, I refuse to believe that sports radio/tv is vapid entirely because its listeners and journalists are vapid. You and me and others like us are proof smart fans exist. But the limitations of the medium are discouraging. Even smartly done shows like The Sports Reporters must dumb down if they are to fit through the eye-of-the-needle content stream of ESPN and sports radio.