Five Things I've Learned (Baseball Think Factory)
1. Alcedes Escobar can play.
Chris Coghlan won the MVP award - hard not to give it to the local guy
whose 3-run HR broke the game open - but Escobar was far and away the
best player on the field. In the first inning, he alertly took second
on a run-scoring single when Rashad Eldridge overshot the cutoff man,
which put him in position to score a second run on a passed ball later
in the inning. In the fifth, he smacked a hard grounder through the
hole to left for a single, scoring ahead of Coghlan’s bomb. He also
connected solidly in his other two plate appearances, lining to left
and hammering another grounder which unfortunately went right to
Russell Mitchell who started a 5-4-3 DP. Escobar also converted two
dazzlers on D, taking hits away from Juan Gonzalez and Ricardo Nanita,
and nearly contributed a third in the ninth inning when he dove in the
hole to stop Bryan Byrne’s shot but couldn’t quite get enough on the
throw - the play did save a run. Milwaukee’s going to have an
interesting decision to make soon - do they try to get value for Weeks
or Hardy this offseason, or do they give Escobar some AAA time in 2009?
Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money.
