Our conversation yesterday about the differences between Joba Chamberlain the prospect and Joba Chamberlain the major league pitcher, and yet another spring training story about Jesus Montero, got me thinking about baseball’s contemporary obsession with rookie prospects.
Baseball fans have developed a fetish-like obsession with rookie prospects. Look at some of the Web baseball chatter and you’ll see more talk about Jenrry Mejia or Jesus Montero than, say, Nick Swisher or Jeff Francouer. I get that. Swisher and Francouer are what they are, Montero and Mejia are like the Treasure of the Sierra Madre–a mythical hoarde of gold offering the potential to change franchises.
This kind of attitude has led fans to borderline delusional beliefs–see my post marveling that a blogger might actually ask: “Why would the Yanks be interested in Joe Mauer when they have Jesus Montero?”–and obsessional practices–people scour the minor league stats and publications like Baseball America to be the first to identify “the next Dwight Gooden” or “the next Derek Jeter;” they project inevitable future greatness on every touted kid who comes along, and concoct some kind of excuse when greatness doesn’t come to pass (witness the almost universal believe among Yankees fans that Joba would have certainly been the next Roger Clemens if the Yanks hadn’t asked him to spend time both as a starter and as reliever).
There’s always been an interest in the hotshot kid in baseball. People like to root for their a kid they way they like to root for an underdog, plus it’s human nature to be fascinated by the new but take for granted the seasoned professional. Sure, with a rebuilding team, or a team like the Mets–which has underachieved with its veterans and with its fans naturally latch on to young players, I get that too. And I understand why owners and general managers are tightly focused on prospects–you can get more years of peak performance out of a given player at a reasonable price if you can develop that player than if you have to sign that player as a free agent at his peak.
But among certain fans the rookie obsession has a fevered, cultish quality. It wasn’t always thus. Prospects were once prospects. Yeah, people got excited about talented youngsters who came along–Munson, Seaver, Ryan–but they weren’t obsessively on the lookout for the next kid, and they weren’t unnaturally attached to the blank slate of their unrealized potential.
I think there are two factors that have driven the modern cult of the prospect. The first is the long-term impact of free agency. The cult of the prospect has definitely expanded slowly but inexorably over the past 30 years as players have spent fewer and fewer years with the clubs they came up with, and, as smaller revenue teams have found it harder and harder to field a world class team. These are conditions that lead fans to cling to prospects, often investing them with powers beyond mortal men, but mostly clinging tightly to the fact that “they” are ours. In years before the end of the reserve clause; when baseball player salaries were conceivable, obtainable salaries for most fans; when players took the subway to the park, lived in the neighborhood, and worked day jobs in the offseason; and when players had no choice other than to spend their entire careers basically indentured to a single franchise, fans had a kind of attachment to and identification with the players that is not longer possible in the case of superstar veterans, but a kid, just up from the minors, with a chance to stick for many years, offers fans something proprietary to which to cling. Kids also offer fans something with which they can identify–they toil for minor league salaries, carry their own bags, travel by bus. The identification is an illusion of course, top baseball prospect are often coddled and always talented in a way that the rest of us can’t really imagine. But these kids are still easier to identify with than Johnny Damon driving to the Winter Meetings in his Ferrari or Derek Jeter frolicking in the waves with Mika Kelly.
The second factor is fantasy baseball. The growth of fantasy leagues have given many fans an incentive to look for “bargains” among kids much as GMs do (although the GMs are picking the kids out of high school and developing them). It’s fantasy baseball I think that leads fans to an extreme reliance on and almost religious belief in statistical projections for kids. And this kind of faith leads to the kind of rationalizations we hear when prospects don’t pan out (I couldn’t have been wrong, the system I believe in couldn’t have been wrong, it must have been Yankee coaches).
Now, I have nothing against free agency. The reserve clause was an Anti-American abomination (as is any anti-trust pass sports leagues get to allow franchise owners to act in collusion). I also have nothing against fantasy baseball–I’ve played occasionally though it’s not really my bag, I’m not a gamer of any sort. But I do have something against obsessively clinging to the believe that every prospect who comes along is the redeemer.
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