Let's just pretend nobody has played any baseball for the last twenty years

So I read some more Plaschke just to enjoy the stupid.  This article was written just after the Ryan Braun announcement.  Most of it is gloomy and boring complaining about how clean players are getting lumped in with the dirty and are getting punished like the people in Sodom who weren't... being bad. If only human beings had figured out a way to set up a perfect system of justice by now!  It's only been thousands of years!
The whole article isn't worth discussing, but the last two paragraphs have a noteworthy amount of stupid:

Kemp did have the right idea Tuesday when he said that he thought Braun's MVP award should be stripped. If the Heisman folks can take away Reggie Bush's trophy for a rules infraction that did not involve his performance, why can't baseball do the same for a player whose infraction was only about his performance?

Because baseball players have the most powerful union in sports and the owners can't just do whatever the heck they want to.  Also, the commissioner doesn't even award the trophy: the BBWAA does.  Good lord, you'd think that Bill would know that, given that he's a MEMBER (albeit non-voting, per Wikipedia).  

On the other hand, college athletes are not unionized and generally have the least amount of power of any athlete around.  In the case of college football the relative power of the players in their economic and legal world is tiny. I think that coaches, ADs and university administrators are actually allowed to poop on those athletes and they are required to enjoy it.

How can the nation's second-largest metropolitan paper employ a senior sportswriter who doesn't seem to realize this?

Heck, strip all the awards of all the juicers. Just don't give another one to anyone, lest you have to eventually strip it again. 

What a good plan.  Let's just pretend no baseball was even played after 1995.  La la la la it's all to hard to think about it so let's just call it all off.

You know, it's not pleasant, but the only way through this steroid foolishness is to investigate the investigable, punish the provable, and use our common-sense judgment for the rest. It's not as easy as it would be if we simply ignored it, or if we went on a mad witch-hunt against it... but it's really the only way forward.  Now that the baseball players' union is coming around to stricter punishments, we may indeed be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of PED stuff.  If the players themselves are on board with a cleaner game, change will happen.

No offense to my editors, but they should have structured the top of that chart to resemble a baseball clubhouse's credibility when it comes to drug cheats. They should have left it empty.

Bill is referencing a chart his editors made, which replaced award winners of known or strongly suspected cheaters with the 2nd place finishers.  We've heard it all before.  I like how he asks his editors for pardon for his bold suggestion.  Pretty lofty of Bill to be polite when he suggests something stupid.  

The worst part about these suggestions is that the writers implicitly don't think the fans are smart enough to consider the context of any numbers.  I'm kind of insulted.  Decent baseball fans have always been able to have sensible discussions about fluctuations in baseball statistics - any fan can look at the years 1930 and 1968 and evaluate a hitter's performance within the diametrically opposed offensive environments. Bill doesn't seem to think so. But trusting in the general wisdom of the public to judge wisely in the long run doesn't make for hits on his columns today.

Good Old Bill Plaschke

So I wanted to find something stupid.  I don't know if I am just off my game, but it's harder to find outright stupid on ESPN.com these days, so I decided to read some of Bill Plaschke's latest screed. Here's a recent puff piece about a grindy old  white middle infielder!  I'll bet you didn't realize the greatness of a truly unsung Dodger hero: Mark Ellis.

As the sports world is learning with every jaw-dropping win, these suddenly delightful Dodgers are a team of many faces.

As opposed to the crosstown Angels, who are a team of ONE FACE.  And it's the face of Ernesto Frieri.

They include Yasiel Puig's giant look of wonder, Juan Uribe's impish grin, A.J. Ellis' grimace,Clayton Kershaw's scowl, and occasionally even Don Mattingly's smile.

That is a lot of faces.  The Dodgers sound like a bunch of manic depressives.  And if there's any word that describes Juan Uribe, a 33 year old man, it's impish.

Then there is The Stare. It's solid, expressionless, powerful in its confident calm, a constant in the Dodgers' dizzying array of emotion.

"Solid, expressionless, powerful in its confident calm". Woah!  That's a lot of adjectives. "Dizzying array".  I'm getting vertigo just reading this stuff. It sure sounds like these Dodgers need Mark Ellis to calm things down. He's the Zoloft of baseball players.

Dodgers fans know The Stare. They see it on Ellis from the moment he steps on to the field, as endemic to his appearance as the blue lettering across his chest.

Uniforms are endemic to players... until they take them off at the end of the game.  Unless maybe Mark Ellis has a Dodgers tattoo on his chest. It's all part of his confident calm.

 He stares at the hitter from the field, the pitcher from the plate, the game from the dugout, the giant season from his small spot.

Bill, thanks for illustrating for us readers.  It makes the baseball game come alive in our minds.  We can imagine where Mark Ellis stands!   Except for that last one: where exactly is this "small spot" that Mark Ellis is staring at the giant season?

Is Mark Ellis's spot any smaller than other players' spots?

It's also apparently really cute when Mark Ellis' 6-year-old son, Briggs, imitates it while playing tee ball in the middle of his living room.

"Yeah, he taps the bat on the ground and then goes into that look,'' said Ellis with a laugh. "I'm thinking, you know, he's really got it down."

"Oh, c'mon, sometimes I laugh at Puig and Uribe; the cameras just don't catch that,'' he said.

Guess not.

Even Mark seems to understand basic sampling.  If only Bill would learn that lesson.  

You could see The Stare in high definition Wednesday night in Toronto when Ellis calmly strolled to the plate in the 10th inning with no hits in his previous four at-bats to face a pitcher he had never seen.

Stare. Strike one. Stare. Strike two. Stare. Boom.

Bill is varying his sentence length, folks. That's a tip for you young writers out there!  The short sentences really heighten the drama.

Ellis launched a rocket off Juan Perez into the Rogers Centre second deck for a two-run, tiebreaking home run, then quickly rounded the bases as if hurrying back to work after a long lunch break. His teammates surrounded him in giddiness, but The Stare remained for another half-inning until the Dodgers had finished off an improbable 8-3 victory.

An excellent story. Except that Mark Ellis would never take a long lunch break, since he is busy working and staring and grinding.

"We still had work to do," Ellis said. "I have always been taught, this is only three hours of your life, and if you can't give it your full concentration for three hours, then maybe you should do something else."

I like the "maybe" in here, as though Ellis didn't want to offend anyone, like the guy with the fifth-most home runs in major league history, who doesn't have to give his full concentration even in the ninth inning of playoff games when there are bikini models in the stands.  He probably doesn't want to earn that guy's enmity.  Maybe he should do something else.  Actually, maybe he will!

Ellis, who is the oldest member of the regular lineup at age 36, did not start in Thursday's homecoming loss to the Cincinnati Reds at Dodger Stadium because he was batting a career .091 against Reds starter Mat Latos.

Too bad, because the Dodgers are 37-23 when he starts, and that doesn't begin to measure his solid-as-South-Dakota impact on this year's team.

Oh man.  I don't even know where to start here.  Rather than recognizing that Ellis's .091 average is only 11 ABs, he mentions that the Dodgers have won a lot of games when he started.  It's the worst stat ever, and even major news outlets occasionally misuse it to a staggering extent.  

Also, what makes South Dakota more solid than any other state?  Mount Rushmore or something?  Is Mount Rushmore solider than the other mountains?  I bet Alaska is pretty darn solid.  Is he just looking for alliteration?  I guess South Dakota is a lot more solid than South Carolina.  Or the Susquehanna river.  Or San Francisco. 

Oh yeah, he learned The Stare while growing up in Rapid City, S.D., a place where the good people wear their stoicism like overcoats, a place where he didn't play high school baseball because it was too cold for a high school baseball season.

Oh, ok.  Mark Ellis is from South Dakota, where people are more morally solid than in South Carolina.  Well, I guess South Dakota's only institutional racism was against Native Americans, so that's half as many institutional racisms as South Carolina. And in South Carolina people can't wear their stoicism like overcoats, because they don't even need overcoats.

"That's the way we are up there, we never get too high or low,'' Ellis said. "Like those NFL players and those touchdown dances? We're not too high on that.''

Good old fashioned grinders. 

It is this attitude that helped Ellis endure an injury last season that nearly cost him his leg after he was hit by the St. Louis Cardinals' Tyler Greene while attempting to turn a double play. It is also an attitude that has helped him thrive this year in connecting when it counts.

Two bold stats: With a runner on third and fewer than two out, he is hitting .727 with 19 RBIs in 17 plate appearance. In tie games, he is .329 with three of his five home runs.

Last year, in 14 PA with a runner on 3rd and less than 2 outs, Mark Ellis scored a measly 36% of the runners.  His career number is 50%.  Sure makes his 2013 numbers seem like random variation rather than the results of The Stare.  Ostensibly, Mark Ellis has had The Stare since his boyhood in solid-old-South Dakota.  Maybe it only really takes effect and makes him clutch when  he is surrounded by a hysterical bunch of manic depressives.

"This game takes all kinds, and Mark is one of those kinds," said Mattingly, the Dodgers' manager. "He's solid … bread and butter … nothing flashy, just gets it done."

While the hitting stars such as Puig and Hanley Ramirez get the headlines, it is the guys paddling furiously below who have fueled this Dodgers uprising, guys such as the Ellis duo, Skip Schumaker,Nick Punto and Jerry Hairston Jr.

Mark Ellis WAR: 1.9, AJ Ellis  WAR: 2.2, Skip Schumaker WAR: -0.4, Nick Punto WAR: 0.8, Jerry Hairston Jr. WAR 0.0.  I bet the "Ellis duo" feels like the just citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah who got lumped in with all the assholes and everyone went down together in a flaming destruction. 

OK, that analogy doesn't make a lot of sense.

The Stare symbolizes those guys. The Stare is what makes you think this hot streak can endure.

The Stare.  The Stare.  The Stare.  The Stare.  That's what makes you think the Dodgers will keep winning, not Clayton Kershaw's 1.87 ERA or Hanley Ramirez and Yasiel Puig OPSing over 1 in over 200 PA.

Ellis eventually played Thursday, batting in the ninth inning, knocking a pinch single into right field against a zillion-mile-a-hour fastball from Aroldis Chapman. He was stranded on third base as the game ended, but at least he was there. He's pretty much always there.

Mark Ellis: always there.

"This is what we do, this is our job," Ellis said. "You just get it done."

That was a very meaningful insight, Mark Ellis.

Three hours, and one stare, at a time.

Two examples of Mark Ellis's late-game hits and a couple of misplaced stats and a facial expression.  BOOM.  Plaschke gold.  

This Is Nitpicking. Or Is It?

I like reading things that have a nice, smooth flow to them.

It's hard to explain what I'm talking about.

I mean, I'm not (nor will I ever be) a good writer.

But I can tell you that when an article contains too many one sentence paragraphs, it becomes annoying to read.

Choppy formatting is distracting.

When two sentences are about the same general idea, it's ok to let them touch each other.

They're not going to cancel each other out or something.

Do you know what I mean?

Bill Plaschke sure doesn't.

Five minutes into spring cleaning, and Matt Kemp and I are already having a fight.

"I'll buy," I said, holding out my credit card to the man working the cash register at Mack Daddy's, a soul food place next to his gym on a cluttered street.

"No, no, no," he said, pulling out a large bill to pay for his food.

"Listen," I said. "I buy for young players. I always have. When you make the big money, you can buy mine."

"No, dude," he said, firmly. "I can pay my own way."

He gets a plate full of catfish nuggets. I get a side dish of insight.

Five minutes into spring cleaning, and already I like Matt Kemp better than last year.

What seemed like clubhouse defiance is now calm confidence.

That deer-in-the-headlights look has become an unfettered focus.

"Last year when I heard that trade talk, I got really scared," Kemp said. "I wanted to call Ned Colletti and say, 'Please, please, let me stay.' I love the fans. I love my friends. I love the Dodgers.' "

He shakes his head with a relieved smile.

"Now that I'm still here, it's time to show Los Angeles how much fun we can have by staying together," he said. "It's time to make some history."

The Dodgers listened. The Dodgers bought. Now the entire Dodgers nation will be watching.

Matt Kemp will pay his own way?

The Dodgers' season depends on it.

Their unwillingness to deal him prevented them from obtaining this winter's top traded pitchers -- Johan Santana, Erik Bedard or Dan Haren.

The Dodgers believe that by keeping his cannon in the middle of their lineup, Kemp would blow enough smoke to shroud the hole at the top of their rotation.

"The Dodgers had an opportunity to move him," said Dave Stewart, Kemp's agent. "But they see the value."

Kemp saves them money. He saves them angry questions from fans who want to see the Dodgers kids grow together.

Now Matt Kemp has to save the season.

I'll cut him a break for the dialog he shared with Kemp because that exchange is best captured with multiple paragraph breaks. But even if you exclude that little segment, you've still got ten paragraphs with exactly one sentence in this part of the article. Most of the other paragraphs have two. (The rest of the article isn't much different.) As my extremely obnoxious and over the top intro demonstrates, that's a pain in the ass to read. I have no idea why Plaschke gets paid to put his thoughts into words. I guess the world needs both Gods and clods. Plus, someone on Around The Horn has to occasionally out-moron Mariotti, right? Feel free to leave comments in
Bill Plaschke's style.