The World Baseball Classic ended last night, and to be honest? I thought the script was a little trite. The best Japanese player of his time pitching to the best American player of his time with two outs in the ninth inning? The two being teammates during the MLB season? The count going full? Them both being unnaturally likable? I know the game was in Florida, but keep Disney’s hands out of my World Baseball Classic.
It was, to repeat what so many others have already said, a great moment for the game of baseball, and part of what made it so great was the way the stakes were assembled: There was the thrill of a championship without the disappointment of losing. Sure, some American players and fans are upset, but there’s usually a balance between happiness and sadness when the champagne is being popped. There was a heavy imbalance last night, and it favored joy.
GOAT debates are often insufferable. This owes largely to just how good both LeBron James and Michael Jordan were and are at basketball. It was too good of a debate, and we overdid it. But hear me out:
The debate over the greatest baseball player, right now or of all time, is electric.
We aren’t going to get into the all-time greatest baseball player right now. Maybe this summer, when we have a little more time and a lot fewer distractions. One thing I’d like to toss into the mix, and I wish I remembered which of my friends brought this up to me, is that while today’s players would certainly dominate those of yesteryear, it’d be interesting to see yesteryear’s players with today’s science and training. I know there’s more to the domination than that—Babe Ruth played at a time when a large portion of the population wasn’t allowed to play in the Major Leagues—but I think we’ve overcorrected, as an industry, on how much to respect the players of the past. Bob Cousy might have played against plumbers and firemen, but that wasn’t his fault.
Instead, let’s talk about who’s the greatest baseball player of the moment. I’ll offer five, with two honorable mentions:
First, the honorable mentions: Mookie Betts and Trea Turner. Neither of these guys is the best in the game right now, and Turner’s never won an MVP or come all that close to doing so. But if you wanted to make a six-year-old fall in love with baseball, it would be hard to top showing them these two guys. In terms of pure athleticism and skill and style and joy (there’s that word again), few top Betts and Turner, and their presence on some of the most prominent teams of the last decade separates them from guys like José Ramírez who’ve been very good on very good teams but haven’t gotten as much of a national spotlight (like Cousy’s opposition, this is through no fault of their own).
Second, the guy you’d want most in one game: Jacob deGrom. If you had one baseball game to win, and everyone in the world was fully healthy, you would pick Jacob deGrom first. Relievers just aren’t effective enough to be as good as he is, day in and day out, when he’s capable of taking the mound. In one game, you would rather have as many innings of deGrom as you could get than a staff full of the best single innings out there. The man is more dominant than any other player alive today.
Third, the guy you’d want most over the next ten years: Juan Soto. 24 years old, a batting title and a World Series under his belt, powerful and fast and—like a lot of players on this list—joyful, Soto projects like no one else in the sport. Over the last four seasons, he’s right behind Turner and Betts and Aaron Judge in total productivity, and he has yet to get even close to what’s generally believed to be a player’s prime, his 27 to 30 year-old seasons. Is Soto the greatest right now? Probably not. But it feels like a matter of time.
Fourth, the guy you’d want most over the last ten years: Mike Trout. I have a feeling Trout’s at-bat against Ohtani last night will live on for baseball fans. It won’t live on like the World Cup Final between Messi and Mbappé will resonate for soccer fans, but that’s a difference between baseball and soccer: The World Baseball Classic is not the World Cup. The importance is flipped. Nothing is bigger in soccer than the World Cup. The World Series is bigger than the World Baseball Classic. Anyway, with Trout entering his thirties and having not played 150 games since 2016, he’s entering a new era. Part of the problem with the baseball GOAT debate in recent years was that the present-day answer was easy. The present-day answer was Trout. He’s going to start aging more, and he probably already has, and he’s still one of the best in the game, but he’s not head and shoulders above the rest like he’s been since 2012.
Fifth, the guy who was the best last year: Aaron Judge. Hear me out on this, but Judge was working with a disadvantage against Ohtani in last year’s AL MVP race. Ohtani had a novelty about him, and a magic quality. Judge? He was just hitting home runs. Tons and tons and tons of home runs. If Ohtani was the Kansas City Chiefs, captivating visually and mesmerizing technically, Judge was the Navy Midshipmen, slamming the ball into the line again and again and again. It’s weird to say that home runs are undervalued, but they are. We’re used to them, and the steroid era and the juiced ball era have desensitized us to their grandeur. Judge had to take something we were used to and do it so well it outshone even something we’d never seen in our collective lifetimes. And he did it.
Sixth, the guy who should be the best this year: Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani is the MVP favorite, and it’s not just hype. Using FanGraphs’s Depth Charts projections (and I’ve tried to avoid using WAR so far in this post, because we don’t need it right now to have the debate), Ohtani is narrowly expected to best Judge and the rest of the majors in WAR in 2023. If he does it, and if he does it through a full season of both pitching and hitting, it will be the second time in three years, and in a way that we haven’t seen it done, not even in the time of Ruth (Ruth only overlapped as a full-time hitter and pitcher through 1919, right before his power really came through in earnest). Which is why reasonably, he’s probably the answer to our actual question. Right now? Shohei Ohtani is the greatest player in the game. Which makes moments like last night’s even more full of joy.
Georgetown Could Do Better Than Ed Cooley
We covered this a little already, but two thoughts on Ed Cooley:
First, Providence isn’t as bad a job as some are suddenly saying it is. Friar students absolutely love their team, they pack that arena, and they play big games on basic cable and/or Fox all the time thanks to their membership in the Big East. They’re comfortably in a power conference, and they’re close to great recruiting territory on the East Coast. Providence is a good job. One of the fifty or sixty best in college basketball. Is Georgetown better? Probably, yeah. But Providence is a good job.
Second, Ed Cooley didn’t do as well at Providence as some are saying he did. His greatest accomplishment was making five straight NCAA Tournaments, and that is a great accomplishment, but none of those teams were good enough to be expected to do anything once there. Of the five, three were bubble teams who stayed on the upper side and one earned a 6-seed. Last year was a good year for the team, but only if you don’t look closely. They “won the Big East” despite finishing half a game behind Villanova, having missed games against UConn, Creighton, and Seton Hall due to Covid while Jay Wright played a full league schedule. It’s no one’s fault that Providence missed those games, but it’s—pardon my language—a bullshit conference title, and the Sweet Sixteen that followed required going through South Dakota State and Richmond. Is Ed Cooley a good coach? Sure. Was he very likable up until this recent turn? Absolutely. But if Georgetown’s as good a job as Cooley’s waterboys on Twitter say it is, Georgetown could do better than Ed Cooley.
In a funny twist, Providence is following the same sort of groupthink as it hires Kim English, a guy who in two seasons as a head coach has finished ninth and fifth in a 1.5-bid league. Kim English hasn’t made an NIT. He’s savvy and he’s great with the media, but that can be a detriment in getting a reasonable evaluation from said media. He could work out, but if he hadn’t become a trendy “name to watch” eighteen months ago, no one would have eyes on him. A bunch of bloggers made a guess, that guess wasn’t emphatically proved wrong, and now Providence seems to have followed the mindset. Wacky. It’s not like English was bringing five-stars to Fairfax, either. Not even four-stars.
The last coaching carousel note of the day is another weird one: Mike Brey is not the new coach at South Florida. He interviewed, but he’s said he didn’t get the job. I’m curious what happened here, but it’s a good reminder to tap the brakes with these announcements when they’re not publicly confirmed by at least one of the two parties involved. All I know is that it was announced through “sources,” and then Brey was relaying that he didn’t get it and would instead be trying TV for next year. Which makes one explanation (and I’m guessing here) that either Brey assumed he’d get it once they offered him an interview or that someone else assumed Brey would get it once they offered him an interview. He didn’t get it, and it doesn’t sound like George Mason is on the table.
Help Me Learn the NBA Play-In Format
The Bulls have insisted on staying in the mix for 10th place in the East, which is a way of trading potential future happiness for one or two fun nights of getting to cheer for them in a playoff environment. With only eleven games to play, though, and with 6th place four games above and 11th place 2.5 games behind, I think I need to learn how the whole play-in tournament works. Let’s check Wikipedia.
The format is similar to the first two rounds of the Page–McIntyre system for a four-team playoff. The 9th place team hosts the 10th place team in an elimination game. The 7th hosts the 8th place team in the double-chance game, with the winner advancing as the 7-seed. The loser of this game then hosts the winner of the elimination game between the 9th and 10th place teams to determine the 8-seed. The NBA’s regular playoff format then proceeds as normal.
Get all that? Me neither, I don’t think. Let’s screenshot their bracket.
Oh, cool. So if the Bulls finish 7th or 8th, they need to win one of two games to make the playoffs. If they finish 9th or 10th, they have to win twice in a row. I can handle that. Thank you, Wikipedia.
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Bulls game against the Sixers again tonight, NIT quarterfinals tonight, probably some good hockey and other NBA but you’re talking to the wrong guy right now on those two. Soon, we will understand again.
Oop, last thing: Eli King entered the transfer portal for Iowa State. We’ll have more offseason Cyclones stuff soon, for the faithful, but that just came across my desk. We’ll see if he ends up leaving or not. Not the biggest loss, but seemed like a good bench guy.
