THE NEW YORKER IAN CROUCH
The deadline has arrived for players to join their teams for spring training, and so we can say goodbye to the mostly unhappy season of baseball, when the game isn’t played—the one full of trade talks and free agents; of old grudges aired by departed players and managers; of controversial Hall of Fame votes and the still-too-present problem of performance-enhancing drugs dispensed by quack doctors in shady clinics. We get, instead, a season that still has the possibility to bring joy, beginning with familiar and new faces arriving in warm southern locales
to do a few casual wind sprints, some stretching exercises, and play a month of practice ball. There is drama for the players in spring warmup games, mostly for the young and old guys trying to make the major-league club. But for the fans, spring training is just a gentle nudge, giving us a few clips of baseball among the palm trees of Florida or desertscapes of Arizona, and preparing a spot in the mind for the real games to come.
As we wait for Opening Day, though, there are a few winter happenings worthy of note.
Realignments
The Houston Astros, who spent their first fifty-one years playing in the National League, have jumped to the American League, and will be the fifth team in the A.L. West. This marks the first time that a team has switched leagues since 1998, when the Brewers left the A.L. for the N.L. The Astros will take the field, on March 31st, clad in new retro-style uniforms that embrace the great orange of years past—though, alas, they’ve not taken full advantage of the gonzo-color possibilities of team history. (Somewhere, the winged Brewster McCloud is disappointed.)
There is not, however, much history that the team is eager to repeat, save for its lone World Series appearance in 2005, when it was swept by the White Sox. The Astros haven’t been back to the playoffs since, and have been the worst team in baseball for the past two seasons. The coming change of scenery doesn’t seem, on the face of it, to offer much hope: they join a division full of playoff contenders, including the Rangers, Angels, and A’s.
Meanwhile, there has been another realignment in baseball—unofficial but no less important. The seat of power in the game has moved to California, as it has from time to time since the Giants and Dodgers opened up shop out West for the 1958 season. This offseason, the Dodgers finalized a television deal with Time Warner Cable worth between seven and eight billion dollars over the next twenty-five years. Under new ownership, and now backed by nearly unlimited funds, the Dodgers have embarked on a major spending spree. It started last season, when they traded with Miami for Hanley Ramirez, and then with Boston for Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Adrian Gonzalez—taking on in the process what seemed like most of the Red Sox payroll. The binge continued this off-season with the acquisition of the big-ticket pitcher Zack Greinke. As Nick Traverse writes at our new business hub, the Dodgers will have the highest payroll in baseball, outspending even the Yankees, who have held the top spot since 1998.
Thirty miles south, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have added even more talent (though, blessedly, no more city names) to what has become a franchise full of all-stars. This season, Josh Hamilton joins Albert Pujols and Mark Trumbo on a batting lineup poised to score a ton of runs. And, in the twenty-one-year-old outfielder Mike Trout, the Angels have a man who is unquestionably the most exciting young player in the league. Up north, the Giants are the defending World Series champs, and the A’s are coming off a surprise playoff appearance. Rounding out the state, even the lowly Padres promise to be more exciting this year: they’ve decided to bring in the fences at Petco Park, which should lead to a few more home runs for the home team (and likely for the visitors as well, but never mind).
Back east, where both the Yankees and Red Sox have cut their payrolls, a new bright spot of conspicuous baseball consumption can now be found north of the border, in Toronto, where the Blue Jays have decided to win the American League East—or at least to go broke trying. Big signings include Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, and Mark Buehrle. They’ll spend about forty million more than they did last season. And Toronto is now home to the game’s most fascinating pitcher, R. A. Dickey, who won the Cy Young Award last year pitching for the Mets and then, in now-typical Flushing fashion, was sent away to float his knuckleballs for someone else. Canadians are likely to love Dickey’s introspective personality and literary sensibility; should he continue his fine late-career form, players in the American League will be less charmed.
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Bullpen 2.0
Designer drugs and massive cultural evolution aside, baseball hasn’t changed that much over the years. And so the little alterations stand out, like when the league announced this winter that stadiums would be ditching landline dugout-to-bullpen phones in favor of spiffy new cell phones provided by T-Mobile (which, it probably doesn’t need to be said, is the “Official Wireless Sponsor of Major League Baseball.”) Managers have been using dugout phones to send relief-pitcher orders and other instructions out to the bullpen since way back in the nineteen-thirties. (Before that, semaphore.) Change may be overdue: it was a screwy connection that reportedly caused a pitcher mixup during the 2011 World Series, when Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa asked for one reliever but was given another—a mistake that ended in a loss. Still, the jokes started flowing fast after news broke of the new arrangement: crusty old managers hiring gum-snapping teen-agers to handle texts, ballplayers tweeting between at-bats, Angry Birds run amok. Probably not, but the new cell-phone holders that will appear in dugouts and bullpens across the country are a garish bright pink, and the whole thing has led baseball suits to use phrases like “unique communications Platform”—proving that the only thing that could make baseball jargon worse is adding marketing nonsense into the mix.
The transition could pass without major incident, but one unconsidered wrinkle may pose a problem: the bullpen call is often made in moments of managerial duress—runners in scoring position, the game on the line, the guy you have out their faltering badly—and the old, sturdy landline receiver surely was on the wrong end of some rough use. (“Johnson is shit out there. Give me the lefty.” Slam.) Now, as in the old Jerry Seinfeld bit about the drawbacks of the cordless phone, a manager will have to bark his orders and then carefully return the dainty smartphone to its charging slot. A few phones might get tossed around this season, and at the very least, I fear for the other objects in the dugout. Watch out, water jugs, and bats beware.
Photograph: Cliff Welch/Corbis.
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