A Pretty Excellent Definition of “Stardom”
Top of the Order, edited by Sean Manning, is an anthology full of 25 brief paeans — each written by a notable author — to said authors’ favorite baseball players.
As is almost the rule for an anthology, the quality of the work is uneven. That said, Steve Almond — author of Candyfreak and Not That You Asked — delivers this pretty excellent definition of stardom while discussing Rickey Henderson.
Blockquotation (bold mine):
[Henderson] went two for four in his debut, with a stolen base. I listened to that game on my trusty Panasonic radio. I saw him for the first time a few days later, during one of Oakland’s rare televised contests. I was instantly and violently transfixed. It wasn’t just the crazy stance or the preening manner or the freakish marriage of bulk and speed, but the powerful sense that you had to watch Rickey, because if you didn’t you were going to miss something unprecedented.
This is the first and final signifier of stardom: that your presence on the field suggests possibility. Because possibility — some new miracle carved from air, some abrupt confrontation between grace and peril — is the reason we watch sports. Michael Jordan had it. Wayne Gretzky. Barry Sanders. The British football Paul Gascoigne. And Rickey — the stuff came off him like sparks.
Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.
So are we to assume that Ryne Duren achieved stardom? Dave Kingman? Vince Coleman? Rob Deer? Because each of them, when present on the field, suggested possibility … although not necessarily of the kind the author had in mind.
BB – To answer your question, I think we should always be at our smartest, which means we shouldn’t IGNORE what we know to be true about winning baseball games and the events that lead most directly to that end.
With Vince Coleman, for example, he stole a lot of bases, which I suppose is exciting, but he also didn’t really get on base a whole lot and — surprisingly, to me — doesn’t come out strongly in the fielding metrics we have available. We can say pretty assuredly that he was overrated and there’s nothing very appealing about that sort of player.
So, I think it’s important that we sort of calibrate our idea of “possibility” to correlate with what wins games (which, this is a departure from Almond’s notion of the possible). Like, it’s hard now for me, personally, to take GREAT joy in a stolen base if I know that it comes at an inappropriate time in a game (like with no outs and Albert Pujols or Joey Votto batting, for example) or from a player who’s successful on, say, less than two-thirds of his attempts.
On the other hand, Colby Lewis’s first start for the Rangers was, like, an exercise in possibility. Here was a player who’d been almost totally forgotten, but who’d dominated in Japan and who was rated pretty highly by CHONE and (to a slightly lesser degree) ZiPS. He was relatively unknown and yet supposedly excellent.
That’s a pretty hot combo deal: unknown but supposedly excellent. Either with advanced stats or scouting, that’s always what we’re looking for, yes? Of course, there are very few legitimate finds. For the most part, the draft is efficient. For the most part, prospect lists are accurate. For the most part, the most talented players are given due recognition.
The possible, when it occurs, occurs when we identify the occasional inefficiency in these things and then take some kind of ownership over our findings.
This doesn’t need to come in the form of an article at FanGraphs, either. It could be as simple as telling your dumb friend that “Colby Lewis is gonna be awesome this year.” And when your friend’s like, “You’re an idiot,” you can remind him, on October 30th, after Lewis has just made his third excellent consecutive postseason start, that, no, in fact, HE is an idiot.