New York Nine

When one looks at Showalter’s history as a manager it is clear from both his record and the later success his teams go onto that his presence has helped a few organizations in his time. Beginning with my Yankees in 1992, Showalter took a franchise that was floundering in doldrums of the AL East to quickly a team in the playoffs, making the wild card in 1995 with a 79-65 record. Of course, the next year Joe Torre would lead the team to its first World Series since 1978, but this was clearly Buck’s team. In the absence of Steinbrenner who was banned from the game, along with General Manager Gene Michael Buck put the pieces in place for a team that could winning immediately because of his eye on statistics;

We were looking at hitter-pitcher match-ups way back when. I was keeping them in the minor leagues and when I first started managing the Yankees you had matchups against guys and where they hit the ball. It was an advance scout doing it. Now a lot of people are taking their advance scouts off the road and doing certain things off the TV screen and whatever, but the problem with that is certain things go on in a game that you can only get from being there and from watching off the ball. I challenge guys all the time to be involved in watching off the ball, in the dugout, during batting practice, during infield, and their interaction with teammates. It paints a story for you every night if you'll just watch things other than the game itself. The use of data has evolved, but there are very few things that have come in where people go, “Wow, I've never thought about that.” And you never confuse change with a lack of respect for tradition .

By trading for guys like Paul O’Neill and drafting guys like Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter, Buck helped build the dynasty that would go on to dominate the latter part of the 1990s. The same is true of his next team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, a new franchise that he took from winning 65 games to 100 in one season. Again, ultimately the team would part ways with Buck after the 2000 season and eventually win the World Series against the Yankees, but much like his former team it was his team who won that season and played his way with his players. Clearly, his career managerial record, nearly 900 wins and an above .500 winning percentage, as well as the success of his teams following speak for themselves. Buck has firmly established himself as the right manager to help turn around floundering franchises and give them an identity and a winning attitude; such traits are precisely what Baltimore needs right now.

Of course, Buck clearly has an impact on young players helping them develop and grow, but Showalter does not rely on the force of his personality alone. Indeed, as evidenced by the quote above, Buck has distinguished himself as a manager with a keen eye for knowing what makes a team better by embracing the “Moneyball” mantra of statistics. Recently, Hardball Times unearthed several interesting statistics about Buck’s managing style that shows displays his reliance on stats and his success from them, notably his ability to put high on-base guys at the top of his order, routinely being at the top of the league in OBP in the one and two lineup slots ;

Year Team No. 1 No. 2

1992 NYY 0.328 0.328 0.329

1993 NYY 0.353 0.354 0.345

1994 NYY 0.374 0.388 0.420

1995 NYY 0.357 0.359 0.409

1998 ARI 0.314 0.340 0.306

1999 ARI 0.347 0.326 0.382

2000 ARI 0.333 0.311 0.353

2003 TEX 0.330 0.324 0.347

2004 TEX 0.329 0.354 0.349

2005 TEX 0.329 0.321 0.385

2006 TEX 0.338 0.361 0.356

To the untrained eye, this may appear to be unimportant, but it reveals Buck’s awareness to need to get guys on base in front of run producers to score runs. By putting more guys on base in front of them, Buck’s teams score more runs and in turn win more games. This stress of the virtues of patience has in turn worn off on his players and resulted in producing fourteen players whose single season home run bests under Buck, including Jim Leyritz, Steve Finley and Jay Bell; hell even Gary Matthews Jr., hit under him (although steroids probably had more to do with that). To be sure, the proof is in the numbers, and the numbers show that players have responded to his leadership and improved significantly.

History suggests that Buck will succeed in Baltimore and in truth it appears to already be happening. With six wins in seven games, three of them of the walk-off variety, the team just looks so much better, pitching well, hitting well, and playing with a renewed vigor that Baltimore hasn’t seen in some time. Of course, this is an absurdly small sample size so far and the team could very easily regress right back to the team that has become the laughingstock of the junior circuit; after all its not like he’s gone and replaced all those stiffs with actual ballplayers. Nevertheless, through the force of his personality and his highly intelligent managerial style, it seems clear that Baltimore will only improve under his tutelage and quite possibly regain some respectability to a once proud franchise.

After my experience in Baltimore last month my feelings about baseball on the beltway were undoubtedly a little disheartened. To be sure, I knew that the experience of watching baseball for any team aside from the Yankees was going to be rather different and most likely not so rosy, but the contrast to Baltimore was appalling. Any semblance of hope or excitement of the game seemed to have vanished from their sports consciousness and in its place remained a general malaise of despair. Thankfully, I am fortunate enough to live near two baseball teams in Northern Virginia and the team by the Potamac, the Washington Nationals, has presented a much brighter and hopeful glimpse of baseball fandom. As I stated before, Washington, D.C. is hardly a great baseball town because it lacks a rich history or a dedicated fanbase and the hopes of changing that were not great initially. The Senators (both incarnations) had long left town by the time the Expos moved down here, a team that has been notoriously bad and cheap, and subsequently there was very little appetite for the game. This is because by all accounts, D.C. was then and is now a fervent football town; Washingtonians love themselves some Redskins football, and regardless of how much Dan Synder screws things up and makes them a laughingstock they care about that team 365 days a year. However, a new star in the making has emerged for the Washington Nationals and has brought hope to the team and created a great deal of excitement and good feelings about our national pastime. His name is Stephen Strasburg, you may have heard of him if you’ve heard anything about sports recently, and his arrival on the big stage has transformed sports landscape here in D.C., and brought hope to a formerly hopeless sports town.




This past July 4th weekend I attended my first Nationals game, also against the Mets, where Strasburg was pitching, and my experience at the game could not have been more different than the one I had in Baltimroe. Of course, it’s really not fair to compare a game by the Orioles pitched by one of the worst starting pitchers in the game right now (Millwood has an embarrassing 5.77ERA) to the hottest pitching prospect in recent years because the expectations are so different. Truly, who gets excited about a guy pitching to a 5.77 ERA? While this may be true and the expectations are different, as time as gone on I have seen these games to both represent the zeitgeist of the team at this time; these games serve as a microcosm for where the team is heading and the pulse of the fan base. While Baltimore’s prospects have fared poorly and overpaid veterans have failed to deliver and provide no hope, in Washington the hope and excitement is palatable. From the time I got onto the Metro to the time I arrived I was surrounded by people of all ages dressed top to bottom in National Red, excited and anxious to see the great Strasburg pitch on a beautiful (if not sweltering) afternoon. Indeed, as someone who takes the metro everyday to work this summer I’m used to be crammed like a sardine everyday on my commute, but this was unprecedented; the metro stations were literally packed to the gills with fans hoping to get to the game early. By all accounts my experience here was dramatically juxtaposed to my experience in Baltimore; everyone in town knew about Strasburg and the promise he had and they were ready, these people wanted to be baseball fans and this kid was their chance.



When I finally got to the stadium the fans there did not disappoint my expectations that had been built up on my 50 minute metro ride to the Navy Yard at all. Washington also has a new stadium, Nationals Park, although it has hardly gotten the same acclaim that Camden Yards has had showered on it over the years, but for my money it did not disappoint. The actual structure of the stadium was rather unimpressive, but the buzz around the streets surrounding the stadium and in the park itself made it somewhere that you wanted to be that day. Everywhere you went the streets and hallways were packed, the bars overflowing with young and old ready for a day of baseball and sun. In the park, the large bar in the middle and indeed everywhere was full of people coming and going, giving it the feeling of a party of sorts with a few thousand of your closest friends and that feeling did not dissipate with the beginning of the game.



Despite the buildup of the game, Strasburg pitching, a FOX national broadcast with everyone’s favorite broadcast team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (that was sarcastic to those who couldn’t pick it up) the game itself left something to be desired. Mired in the unbelievable heat, the Great Strasburg looked uncomfortable and unsettled, battling himself and the elements as much as the Mets hitters for five innings, however this did not diminish the atmosphere of the game. While there was a loud vocal Mets minority (as Mets fans are wont to be) the Nats fans endured the heat and cheered on their Savior to gut through his outing, which he did allowing only two runs in five innings despite a number of walks and hits that were rather uncharacteristic of him. And even after his departure the majority of the fans remained, hoping to see their team break through the Mets soft bullpen, which it did finally against my least favorite reliever, Francisco Rodriguez (seriously K-Rod, you throw 88-90 now, you kind of blow, spare me the gyrations on the mound). All and all it was a big day for the Nats and Nats baseball fandom as well. Unlike the brow-beaten fans of Baltimore, the Nats fans wanted to hope and were willing to see Strasburg struggle and not lose all despair; they fought back in the end and their patience was rewarded.



Although this Nationals team has a lot of work to do before they’re really in competition with the big dogs of the Senior Circuit (their rotation after Strasburg is still iffy and their lineup has some glaring holes) but at the very least hope springs eternal for baseball in Washington D.C. Armed with Strasburg and now Bryce Harper, a prospect Sports Illustrated called the “LeBron James of Baseball,” (in regards to talent and not him being an arrogant prick like LeBron) the Nationals are laying a promising foundation of young talent that is already showing some success at the major league level. Such boundless possibilities with such talented players have made Washington yearn to have what so many other cities in America have and become a great baseball town. It remains to see whether these hopes come to fruition or if Strasburg and Harper can live up to such lofty expectations, but at the very least the groundswell of support has begun and the possibility of a better tomorrow has come into focus here in our Nation’s Capitol.