Today’s Sunday News column, plus a couple additions observations at the bottom:
The Phillies’ Raul Ibanez has 21 home runs through Friday, among overall offensive numbers that, if the season ended today, would make him a serious candidate for National League MVP.
He’s 37, and has never hit more than 33 homers in a season, and more than 24 only once.
Jerod Morris — just a guy, out there in America — has Ibanez on his fantasy team.
Morris’ fantasy league has a message board on the Internet, and fantasy leagues being the chop-busting fraternities that they are, a message showed up on the board recently that read, in part:
sorry, crean, [Morris’s team is called Hitting Crean-Up] but i must call bull#!@* on raul ibanez …
where have we seen this before? a recent 37th birthday is celebrated with a career year in home runs??? …
i thought they were testing???
That was not, Morris knew and so do you since you both live on Earth, a reference to the SATs.
Morris’ instinct, of course, was to return chop-busting serve. Instead, “I resisted the urge to fire back a gut-reaction retort and decided to do a little investigation,” he wrote on a Web site, midwestsportsfans.com, to which he contributes under the moniker “JRod.”
In short, Morris tried to figure out if there was any logical explanation for Ibanez’ monster season in light of his advanced age.
He looked at a lot of things. That’s actually an understatement.
“Maybe he was energized by joining the defending World Series champs,” Morris wrote.
“Maybe he is seeing better pitches by joining a lineup that includes Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Shane Victorino.
“Maybe he is in the midst of a run of good luck in which he’s seeing good pitches to hit at above-average hitters parks and finding himself facing terrible pitchers even at the tougher hitters parks he’s played in.
“Maybe Raul Ibanez is simply a ‘freak,’ and has been a late bloomer with a career track that refuses to follow the norm.”
Morris did find, interestingly, that almost all Ibanez’ homers have come either in great home-run parks (Citizens Bank Park, Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Coors Field in Colorado and, apparently, the new Yankee Stadium) or against pitchers who have slow-pitch softball ERAs.
(Joe Posnanski, the great Kansas City Star columnist who knows Ibanez well from his time with the Royals, pointed out in a blog post defending Morris that every year since 2001, Ibanez has had a stretch of 50 or so games when he hit like Ted Williams. This year’s stretch just happened to begin on Opening Day.)
Still in all, Morris reached no grand conclusions, which is no surprise and beside the point, since as he admitted, “We have to acknowledge the obvious caveat that 55 games is not a full season and is still a relatively small sample size.”
What matters is the piece ran to 2,000 words of data and analysis. It was the kind of thing “journalists” ought to do but generally don’t, since it’s much easier to dismiss it as the purview of uncredentialed stat geeks in pajamas mainlining Mountain Dew and Cocoa Puffs while staring at the Internet in their mom’s basement.
At least, that’s what ought to matter. What has come to matter is the single paragraph in which Morris acknowledged what he called, “the elephant in the room.”
“Any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer.”
Which is simply true. That isn’t Ibanez’ fault, but it is the fault of Ibanez’ sport and his union and, indirectly, of the negligence of Old Media-types who, at every chance, jump all over the credibility of the Jerod Morrises of the world (pajamas, Cocoa Puffs, mom’s basement, etc.).
Enter John Gonzalez of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who saw Morris’ piece. Guess which paragraph he built a column on. The Inquirer came back the next day with Ibanez’ outraged denial of something he wasn’t accused of.
(That, by the way, was the one good thing that came of this. If you take Ibanez’ reaction and throw out the part where he called Morris an idiot and a coward, you get what must be the strongest, least equivocal statement an athlete has ever made about performance-enhancing drugs:
“You can have my urine, my hair, my blood, my stool — anything you can test,” Ibanez said. “I’ll give you back every dime I’ve ever made [if the test is positive].”
That’s way beyond Rafael Palmeiro waving his finger at Congress. That’s a guy saying, “Cut me open. If you find anything, take my money.”
We don’t need your stool, Raul. I mean, ewwww. Otherwise, bravo.)
Back at the endless news cycle, Comcast SportsNet’s “Daily News Live” panel tore into Morris that evening, and soon Morris was on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” having Fox national baseball correspondent Ken Rosenthal roll his eyes at him.
The journalists were outraged by what they were determined to see as Morris’ salacious implication. So outraged they shared it with a wider audience.
This Space is so tired of dumbness masquerading as morality. It is so tired of the Philadelphia sports media, too much of which sees as its master not truth or detail or nuance but the self-indulgent, pretend-angst of Philadelphia sports fans.
As a show of solidarity with Jerod Morris, I am writing this in my basement, in my underwear.
My mom’s basement doesn’t have Internet access, and I don’t own pajamas.
This was one of those columns I foooled around with for too long- trying to knock it out of the park and not quite explaining myself to my own satisfaction. I guess my point is this guy, Morris, did an interesting and extensive analysis of Ibanez’ hot start… So the Philly media ignores the interesting and extensive analysis so it can slap Morris around because he deigned to mention the so obvious it;s banal “elephant in the room.” Here’s the thing- you’ll never see this kind of analysis in the Philly media. It’s called belittling what you don’t understand.
