And, meanwhile, we’re all still waiting for that A’s-Tigers American League Championship Series to begin.
It’s quite possible that no subject in sports receives more unrequited hype than baseball’s trading deadline, which is quite a statement, yes, seeing how much effort was put into documenting the NFL career of Tim Tebow.
A year ago this week, everyone was convinced Oakland and Detroit – based on the landscape-altering pitching acquisitions both teams had just made – were shoo-ins to meet in the 2014 ALCS.
It was so obvious even DeAndre Jordan never wavered in his commitment to the notion. The A’s added Jon Lester and the Tigers picked up David Price, and how could such brazen moves possibly not determine the fate of an entire league?
The only thing left to be resolved was which team would emerge from the NL to lose to the A’s-Tigers survivor in the World Series.
As it turned out, Oakland and Detroit instead came up just a little short: they combined to win zero playoff games.
Still, this devastating and indisputable fact won’t even in the slightest bit discourage people this week from again making preposterous, sweeping projections based on the trades that happen between now and 1 p.m. PDT Friday.
Personally, I can’t wait for those post-deadline stories identifying the winners and losers, grading each team and every deal and sounding so authoritative that it can be easy to forget that the observations might as well be coming from a roomful of iPad-armed monkeys.
I understand that instant analysis is a part of this business. And the roughly 196 Web sites dedicated to following the whereabouts of all-important players like Kelly Johnson exist for a reason.
But just keep in mind that, as it relates to what really will happen over the final two months of the regular season and in the playoffs, all this scrutiny should be received with an equal and opposite amount of skepticism.
In other words, it could be a very minor deal that ultimately makes the major difference, which might explain the Angels’ strategy so far, following up their trade for Shane Victorino by adding David DeJesus and then David Murphy.
The Angels might not win the World Series, but I love their chances if baseball becomes a contest to see who can make the most overwhelming number of underwhelming acquisitions.
The truth, though, is that the Angels might have the right approach, given how little the events of late July can eventually matter by the time mid-October rolls around.
Baseball, you see, isn’t like the weather in San Diego; it just isn’t that easy to forecast. Like San Diego’s current team, the 2015 Padres, baseball can’t be counted on to deliver anything that’s expected.
If it were a simple sport to predict, I wouldn’t have picked Boston to finish last in the AL East in 2013, the same year the Red Sox, if you want to get technical, won the World Series.
For whatever reason, baseball is the game where we tend to overthink everything and outthink everyone, including ourselves. We’re convinced we’re smarter than baseball, when, in comparison, we have the mental capacity of a rosin bag.
There are entirely too many moving parts, too many performances that hinge on other performances to draw bankable conclusions based on the presence of a single player, no matter how much everyone loves Cole Hamels.
Trying to solve baseball is one of the things that led to the analytics movement now threatening to take a sport that’s already too boring too often into the realm of the wholly comatose.
This week, the advanced metrics age and the trade deadline hype came together in the form of one brilliant paragraph contained in various reports regarding Kansas City’s acquisition of Ben Zobrist.
“According to ESPN’s Stats & Information,” the paragraph began, “only three position players – Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano and Adrian Beltre – have accumulated more wins above replacement (WAR) than Zobrist since 2009.”
So, based on this measure, the Royals were better off getting Zobrist than, say, Mike Trout, who, admittedly, wasn’t even accumulating big-league wins above replacement until 2011.
This is nonsense, of course. But the point is a lot of the analysis spawned by the trade deadline will prove to be nonsense, too, logical, factual-based observations that baseball and its maddening nuances ultimately will dismiss as gibberish.
Remember, San Francisco has won three of the past five World Series titles and, never once during that streak of absurd success, entered a season or postseason as the projected odds-on favorite.
By the way, know how many players the eventual champion Giants had in the top 50 in WAR last season? Two. The Angels had more. So did the Tigers. And the Indians, Pirates, Mariners, White Sox and Reds – teams that totaled no playoff victories.
So enjoy the trade deadline bluster, just don’t buy every word you read and hear. There’s a lot more to the hype than you might think. Also a lot less.
Speaking of which, the Philadelphia Eagles open training camp Saturday, when, among other hopefuls, they’ll welcome Tim Tebow.
Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com
