Why We Miss the Obvious (Mariners Edition)

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http://joeposnanski.si.com/2010/08/09/why-we-miss-the-obvious-mariners-edition/



It all seems so obvious now, doesn’t it? Bringing back Ken Griffey Jr.?
Trading for Milton Bradley? Giving 32-year-old Chone Figgins (and his
lifetime 99 OPS+) a big-money, four-year deal based mostly on one good season
(and then moving him to second base)? Signing 32-year-old Jack Wilson to a
multi-year contract though he had not played a full season in two years?
Going into the season with Rob Johnson, and his 58 career OPS+, slotted as
the regular catcher? Trading for light-hitting Casey Kotchman and inserting
him as the Opening Day No. 3 hitter? Building up all sorts of hopes about Ian
Snell as a No. 3 starter? Making the moves of a “contender” when the team
finished dead last in the American League in runs scored in 2009 and was
outscored by 52 runs? Trading a 25-year-old one-time phenom Brandon Morrow
and his 98-mph fastball for an older, hard-throwing reliever with the same
first name (Brandon League)? Expecting another low ERA closer year from David
Aardsma? Letting go of Russell Branyan, who was one of only two good
offensive players on the team in 2009 (he led the team in OPS+)?

Yes, it seems so obvious now that the Seattle Mariners were likely to have a
terrible crash this season. And it probably should have seemed obvious in
February, too. And it probably WAS obvious then — Monday’s firing of
manager Don Wakamatsu was etched in stone back before spring training.

But a whole lot of us missed it. Why?

I tend to think of it as the “12 Angry Men Syndrome.” I hope you have seen
the movie 12 Angry Men… and if you have not, I hope you will stop reading
this immediately and go Netflix it or iTunes it or borrow it from your public
library or whatever. It is absolutely one of my favorite movies… but anyway,
you probably know the plot. A young man is charged with killing his father,
and all the evidence seems to point toward his guilt. The father and son were
heard fighting. An old man downstairs claimed to hear the defendant yell, “I
’m going to kill you,” and then claimed to race to the door to see him
fleeing the scene. The defendant was apparently saddled with an incompetent
public defender. A woman claimed to see him kill the man through the windows
of a moving El. The defendant himself claimed he was at the movies but, under
questioning, could not remember what movie. The defendant also admitted
buying a switchblade the night of the murder.

OK, well, the movie is about the 12 men on the jury, and how things are not
always as they seem, and how seemingly incontrovertible evidence can have
many different shades and angles. But for me, the movie is also about
something else: How MOMENTUM can change the way people look at something. At
the start of the movie, 11 of the 12 vote guilty. The momentum for “guilty”
 is overpowering. Eleven of the people — even the good-hearted and
conscientious people who took their role on the jury seriously — simply
cannot see a non-guilty option.

And slowly, at first because of the determination of one man, but soon as a
collective effort, the evidence begins to lose its power. One person changes
his vote. Then another. Then another. We don’t know, even in the end, if the
defendant killed his father. We only know that what should have seemed
obvious at the start was not obvious… clarity created doubt, and doubt
created clarity. The woman wore glasses. The old man couldn’t race to the
door. The passing El train would have made it impossible to hear anything.
And the fog lifts.

The story is of the 12 angry men trying to see through that fog. But the fog
itself interests me just as much. It seems to me that it is human nature to
get lost in that fog, human nature to follow the narrative. Some of the
greatest recent movie twists — The Sixth Sense, Primal Fear, The Usual
Suspects, Memento, House of Games — are great not because they lead us in
one direction, but because they did not lead us that way. They let our minds
go naturally in that one direction. They let us make our assumptions, let us
believe what we want to believe. That’s why the ending is such a shock. We
as human beings have a habit of believing what we would like to believe.

The Seattle Mariners were a team to believe in. Why not? Here was a team that
won 85 games last year, at least in part because it was the best defensive
team in baseball. What a defense! Franklin Gutierrez in center field had one
of the great defensive seasons in memory. Ichiro was fabulous Ichiro. Adrian
Beltre was, as usual, a defensive marvel. And so on. The Mariners were so
good defensively that even having Yuni Betancourt for half the season did not
prevent them from having, by far, the most defensive runs saved, according to
the Dewan defensive system. They also featured one of the great pitchers in
baseball, Felix Hernandez. This was a team to love!

Sure, there were problems. The Mariners may have won 85 games, but their
Pythagorean Record — which calculates a won-loss percentage based on runs
scored and allowed — showed that they probably should have won closer to 75.
Their spectacular 35-20 record in one-run games looked terrific (see what
great defense can do!) but there was absolutely no reason to believe that it
was repeatable. No reason… except that we wanted to believe.

And then, the Mariners made bold moves in the off-season. They signed
Figgins, who was coming off an outstanding season (and is an extremely fun
player to watch). His .395 on-base percentage was a career high, so were his
30 doubles, and his league-leading 101 walks were 36 more than he had ever
had in a season before. The numbers — and observation — showed him to be a
tremendous defensive third baseman. And he was still fast. There was so much
to like about the signing. Then again, if baseball fans like me had been in a
different state of mind, we might have said: Hmm, Figgins is going to be 32,
he had an 82 OPS+ the year before, he led the league in caught stealing… I’
m just not sure about this.

But, few people were in a doubting mood in the offseason. It was a lot more
fun to LIKE the Mariners. Then, about 10 days later, they traded for Cliff
Lee, and the hysteria jumped three more notches. Holy cow… Felix Hernandez
AND Cliff Lee AND that incredible defense? Wow! And Ichiro and Figgins on top
of that lineup? Wow!

OK, so they still had the worst offense in the American League. But, they
started picking up a few guys… Kotchman, Bradley, they brought back Mike
Sweeney. Well, um, something might work out. And anyway, that defense! That
pitching! I’m not saying that everybody fell for it — maybe you were like
the 12th angry man and expected the Mariners to collapse. But I kind of fell
for it…

…that is, until I talked with a buddy of mine, Chardon Jimmy, a couple of
weeks before the season began. Chardon Jimmy can be a cynical sort, and he
said something like: “Are the Mariners REALLY that good?” And we started
talking it through, and all at once we both realized that Mariners evidence,
like the evidence in 12 Angry Men, was actually pretty shaky. We both
realized that Seattle’s terrible offense was still terrible — maybe even
worse than the year before (without Branyan). We both realized that while
Hernandez and Lee were an amazing 1-2 punch, Lee was hurt, the rest of the
rotation was not good, Aardsma was a pretty good bet this time around to blow
a few games that the Mariners could not afford to blow in the late innings.
And anyway you can’t win games consistently when you can’t score runs. The
Milton Bradley acquisition seemed like a giant “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!”
 thing. And while it was fun to believe that great defense could do miracles,
well, as Sinatra sang*, there was room for doubt.

*Over the weekend, Margo and I were in New York and we saw the Sinatra
Broadway show “Come Fly Away.” I’m obviously no theater critic and do not
understand the various depths of dance, but I could not stand it. It’s
Sinatra singing, and people dancing, and the whole time, I felt like the Mel
Brooks character in The Critic. I’m thinking, “Wait a minute, she’s in
love with him now? I thought she was in love with the other guy? And, wait, he
’s taking off his shirt? We’re at a bachelorette party now? I could have
listened to my Sinatra albums at home and bought a small computer for what I
paid for this show. And wait, who the hell is that guy?”

Narratives have all kinds of power. The story starts to go one way, and it
picks up a little momentum, a couple of additions, a bit more speed and
before you know it, the narrative becomes reality. The narrative: Tiger Woods
will come back after his tabloid dance and be a great golfer again (maybe
even better than before). Lots of people believed it. Then, he finished
fourth at the Masters, which pushed the narrative to the next level. More
people believed. Then, after some bad performances, he finished fourth again
at the U.S. Open to push the narrative to an even higher plateau.

And, when I wrote that, hey, Tiger is almost 35, and golfers do not actually
age all that well (despite the powerful narrative that they compete well into
their 40s), and he’s having trouble with his putting for the first time, and
his swing is kind of shaky, and golfers can’t dominate forever, and once
things in golf start going south they usually keeps going south… well, I got
a whole lot of people who called me the biggest idiot in the history of
Western Civilization (and, to be fair, a lot of people who agreed… I was
hardly alone on the island). Now, Tiger Woods is coming off his worst week of
golf EVER — a performance so staggeringly wretched that people who watched
him wonder if he even cares anymore — and he’s STILL the betting favorite
to the win the PGA Championship. The power of narrative.

This sort of thing happens all the time, in and out of sports. The Mariners
did not have a smart off-season, not at all. It’s seems pretty easy to see
that now. It seems pretty easy to see that GM Jack Zduriencik (perhaps pushed
by ownership and fan pressures) thoroughly overestimated his team, made
short-term decisions as if Seattle was only a player or two away from
contending, did not consider (or could not consider) that Ken Griffey’s
deterioration as a player could be a distraction, did not consider (or was
willing to take the chance) that Milton Bradley would certainly be a
distraction, did not plan for the Figgins drop-off, and did not appreciate
that a team without even the slightest ability to get on base and without any
power (the Mariners are dead last in baseball in OBP and SLG — and that
includes the National League, where pitchers hit) cannot expect to win, no
matter how good the pitching and defense.

I so clearly remember the 1987 Cleveland Indians… the team that ended up on
the cover of Sports Illustrated. The cover read: “Believe it! Cleveland is
the best team in the American League.” There was absolutely no reason to
believe it. The 1986 Indians had won 84 games (after losing 100 in 1985) with
a terrible and old pitching staff (Their second-best pitcher was 47-year-old
Phil Niekro — their TWO best pitchers were knuckleballers). But they had won
more than they lost by leading the league in batting average, slugging
percentage and by scoring a bunch of runs (they were last, though, in walks —
 a pretty decent sign that things could turn bad when their luck changed).
The narrative that things had changed in Cleveland was strong, and the Sports
Illustrated cover strengthened it, and the excitement of young power hitters
like Joe Carter, Brook Jacoby and Cory Snyder (all would hit 30-plus homers)
made it even more appealing. So many of us WANTED it to be true. I did
believe it.

But wanting it to be true doesn’t make it true. The Indians lost 100 games
again. I thought then that it was bad luck, but it was a bad narrative. This
year’s Mariners are on pace to lose 100, too. Yes, all those promising
narratives written in February end up in the trash can. And we are left
wondering what ever made us believe in the first place.

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