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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, August 24, 2009
Watch in horror as the obviously still-concussed Maury Allen hands out THE WIMPINESS AWARD (also known as The J. R. Richard Award)
This is not to say the Mets are the wimpiest of teams. That’s just the way baseball and all sports seem to go these days. Get injured and take time off. Rehab in Florida. Play against minor league teams.
It just seems to be showing up more around the Mets than around any other team because of the blown pennants in recent years with nobody to blame. This year they can blame the injuries to their stars and soak the fans for those expensive seats again at Citi Field next year.
In another time players played through injuries because they had one year contracts, the competition for jobs was brutal and macho mania was part of the scene.
The Yankees of 1949 won the American league pennant under rookie manager Casey Stengel despite something like 79 major injuries during the year, especially the heel injury to Joe DiMaggio. He sat out the season until a June series against the Red Sox, destroyed them in four games and led the Yankees to a title. Of course, he had to play the last two games of the year with walking pneumonia.
The Mets last won a World Series 23 years ago. It is hard to imagine them winning another with their new history of chokiness and wimpiness.
Repoz
Posted: August 24, 2009 at 04:01 PM | 27 comment(s)
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1. Dan The Mediocre Posted: August 24, 2009 at 04:20 PM (#3303363)No, what happened to it is that players got together and decided that they didn't want to be treated like indentured servants anymore. Players only "played hurt" because their paycheck depended on it. Now that players are rightfully compensated for their services, there's less of an incentive to kill yourself just to stay in the lineup.
A half season for a ####### heel injury? What a #####.
Stop! You're both right!
Players started getting bigger and longer term contracts, making them less likely to play through a short term injury (and risk turning it into a long terms), since they weren't just playing for today anymore. Teams were less likely to push players to play through an injury (except for the Pirates), since they knew that turning a short term injury into a long term injury would hurt their team in the future, since that player was under contract for big dollars for the next four years (and that a bad reputation on that would also hurt their ability to attract free agent and draft talent at market rates).
Basically, both parties got smarter about the costs and benefits of playing hurt.
Apparently the idiot John Maine wasn't informed.
Would Allen prefer that instead of being "wimpy", all the other Mets players behaved like Maine?
Absolutely. But let's face it, the owners would have loved to stick with the play-hurt status quo if the player's hadn't gotten their due.
Time to link this thread again.
Yeah, I thought that was an odd example to choose of players playing through pain, to show the year that DiMaggio missed half the season with an injury.
I believe that Paul Konerko was playing through a broken thumb through most of the 2008 season. It definitely hurt the team, as Konerko played like crap most of the year.
Not me. If it's one of The Columnists, I know I'm gonna Dimaggio it.
Second that. I play a lot of baseball and softball, and though I've been fortunate enough to do it for 20 years without major injury, there's always some damn thing hurt -- hand, foot, knee, SOMEthing.
In the same way that most people don't appreciate just how good the worst major-leaguer is, I think most people don't appreciate how much playing every day beats up your body: catchers especially, but really all of them.
Did Carl Pavano malinger in the Yankee years? Boy, I'm not qualified to say, and I'm uncomfortable even guessing.
No snark - there has to be something - a certain harm - to your professional pride if you consider yourself an excellent baseballer yet your team has done what the Mets have done the last few years.
Hey, give Maury some major pain-cred!
Even after Ross Bagdasarian was cremated to the max...Maury kept right on working!
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