Perception vs. Reality

[barzilla]

When I woke up this morning I took a look at Houston's leading misinformation source (The Chronicle) and saw a story and column that struck a chord with me. You see, I'm a baseball fan, Texans fan, and Rockets fan. You could ask me who is starting at small forward for whoever and I probably wouldn't know. Ask me the same question about a second baseman and I'm usually all over it. Yet, I do pay attention to the Rockets and Texans specifically. Here were the two items of interest.

Item 1: Richard Justice asserts the Astros are one hitter short.
Item 2: The Rockets are talking to Derek Anderson

Let me cut to the chase: the perception is that the Astros don't do what needs to be done while the Rockets are always trying to fill those holes. Coming into the off-season, the Rockets identified athletic big man and guard as the biggest needs. Within the next few days they will likely have filled those needs. At least, they would have signed someone designed to fill those needs.

On the other hand, the Astros watch as they score 3 runs or less in nearly half of their games while the likes of Ken Griffey Jr., Mike Sweeney, and Moises Alou dangle there for the taking. Before the deadline, we could throw Adam Dunn into that discussion. Heck, Jose Cruz Jr. gets cut TWICE and this team does little to bring him in. I'm sure that makes daddy feel warm and fuzzy.

When we deal with perceptions we deal with SOME fact. The facts in this case dictate that the Rockets bring in someone significant (or make significant trades) nearly every season while you can count the number of significant moves the Astros have made on one hand (in the last decade).

That is the perception, but what is the REALITY? Well, to be perfectly blunt, since 1995, the Astros and Rockets have advanced to the exact same place in their sport: within one round of the Finals. So, the Astros lack of moves could be an indictment or it could be one for the Rockets. After all, the Rockets spent five or six years in the lottery.

It must be hard being in Houston if your Drayton McLane. You're the best owner the Astros have had and you still get compared to Les Alexander. Alexander is the anti-McLane. He doesn't talk to the press, he doesn't have the southern colloquialisms, and you hardly ever see him, but he continues to fund the Rockets to the top end of the scale. He has never turned down a deal because it was too expensive for him. Fair to compare the two? We're talking two different sports, the Rockets had a top end payroll of 61 million this past year, so of course it's easier for Alexander to open the checkbook.

Trades are easier in the NBA in many ways because you're always dealing NBA talent for NBA talent. What do you do when teams want Fernando Nieve or Troy Patten? Do you deal Hunter Pence? The fact remains that all of us (me included) can grouse at the Astros sitting around and watching their offense drag their season down like an anvil. The devil is in the details. What do the Reds want for Griffey? What do the Royals want for Sweeney? What happens to our future payrolls when we get these guys? Will any of the young players mentioned in the deal become stars? For every Scott Elarton and Derek Bell or Roger Clemens deal we can slap our forehead about there is the leaving Bob Abreu unprotected head slapper to go with it. No one knows what the future holds.

[PissedPrincess]

I'm a Texans fan too. :wavey2:

[Sandy]

Nice post Barz.

I think one of the points you hinted at - but maybe not quite strongly enough - comparing NBA to MLB (or NFL for that matter) is comparing Apples to Okra.

When you've got a salary cap and extremely specific salary constraints, you're in a VASTLY different trading environment than MLB. The inequity of revenue is also a major concern - and while I know NFL revenue is pretty darn flat across the league, I'm not as clear on revenue differences in the NBA.

When you compare MLB (minor leagues, no salary cap, little revenue sharing, LONG apprenticeship before competency) to other sports:

NFL (no minor league, salary cap, near equal revenue sharing, 1-2 year apprenticeship to achieve stardom).

NBA (no minor league, salary cap, ???? revenue sharing, immediate stardom)

Attempting to compare willingness to trade becomes a fools errand. Heck, football teams do close to zero trading DURING a season.

NBA and MLB may be closer together in terms of in-season trading dynamics, but there's still WAY too many vastly different variables in play economically to allow any sort of easy comparison.

In the end, the VAST bulk of MLB deadline deals are Team A trading away the future for the present and team B trading away the present for the future. How many fans would laud the Beltran deal as the best move made by Houston in the last decade? How many would say that losing guys like Dotel, Buck, Saarloos, etc. was worth it? How many would say it, even though Beltran didn't stay?

The press corps has a long-standing tradition of only looking at one side of the future vs. present tradeoff at any particular moment. In a league where apprenticeship from pheenom to producing player can take 5+ years, whereas you typically see results in the NBA by year 2 or never.

Heck, you can't compare the Yankees making deals in MLB to the Astros, so bringing up the NBA doesn't seem at all constructive.

[barzilla]

Good points and you're absolutely right Sandy. Betting on futures is what makes baseball trades so difficult. Living in the now is easy enough but when we talk about legacy we have to take everything into account. What happens if John Buck and Kirk Saarloos become all-stars? What happens if they become busts? Do we look at those deals differently?

There is nothing more valuable in baseball than a young superstar. If you're lucky to find the next Zach Duke you can do great things because you can then spend money on other positions. Some GMs are good at that (Terry Ryan, Billy Beane, John Schurholz) while others continued to get burned (Chuck LeMar, Brian Cashman/The Boss, Any Mets GM). We can never underestimate the financial implications of selling the future for now. Brad Ausmus is likely on his last legs. Who is taking his place? Gimenez? Please. Now, you have to either trade or buy a new catcher. On the flip side, keeping guys like Nieve and Patten will only help us when the likes of Clemens and Pettitte go on their way. Instead of going out and buying mediocre pitching, we can insert a young pitcher and perhaps hit it big. More often than not, young pitchers struggle like Rodriguez and Astacio at first but every once in awhile you get a Roy Oswalt. Are Patten or Nieve the first kind or the rare kind? We don't know, but if just one of them becomes another Oswalt we will be in great shape.

[PopTop]

When I woke up this morning I took a look at Houston's leading misinformation source (The Chronicle) and saw a story and column that struck a chord with me. Why do you continually torture yourself like that?! ;)

PERCEPTION
Daily newspapers help keep you informed with objective and unbiased reporting, real hard-hitting journalism.

REALITY
Daily newspapers really only have two priorities - sell advertising and increase the circulation so they can raise advertising rates.

[barzilla]

Why do you continually torture yourself like that?! ;)

PERCEPTION
Daily newspapers help keep you informed with objective and unbiased reporting, real hard-hitting journalism.

REALITY
Daily newspapers really only have two priorities - sell advertising and increase the circulation so they can raise advertising rates.

Amen Pops and that is the whole story there. Journalistic ethics (fast becoming one of the truer oxymorons) are disappearing faster than you can say "Around the Horn". The "report" that Roger Clemens and Johnny Damon will be outed as steroid users is shameful at best and libel at worst. Zero sources. That's right folks, that's the new gold standard in reporting. It makes the John P. Lopez "If the Astros don't trade for Alou they are cheap" column look like Pulitzer material.

All of this mess makes me recall the letter we got from our student body president when I wrote for the college paper. He said we needed to "make more news." I know what he meant, but like I said then, you REALLY don't want me to make news do you?

I think though that the perception is out there whether the Chronicle reports it or not. Drayton WAS a cheap owner up until he started to sign Bagwell, Kent, Clemens, and Pettitte to those long-term contracts between 2001 and 2004. Perception (grounded in reality) like that is hard to overcome. This is especially true after an off-season of doing very little followed by a deadline-plus doing even less.

[PopTop]

All of this mess makes me recall the letter we got from our student body president when I wrote for the college paper. He said we needed to "make more news." I know what he meant, but like I said then, you REALLY don't want me to make news do you?Wasn't aware you wrote for the Horned Frog Daily. That reminds me of when I worked for The Battalion at A&M which was (and I assume still is) controlled heavily by the university (i.e., the Corps). Some group put in for an advertisement for a sort of Gay Awareness Day on campus. At first, the university said, no way, no effing way!

But they had to do it since they were officially recognized as a club or fraternity by the school. The ad pretty much read something like: "Next Tuesday is Gay Awareness Day here at Texas A&M. We ask everyone who supports Gay Rights to wear blue jeans to school that day."

Ok, I'm not sure what most college students wear to class these days, but I'm guessing there are a lot of jeans. Same as 25-30 years agowhen this happened, and especially when you think that A&M is known as much for being a school for farmers as it is engineers and ROTC. So there were naturally going to be jeans worn to class that day. The university was poised for some big confrontation, and we were told in advance that under no circumstances was The Battalion going to cover and report on the event. But we went to the little rally anyway. No big showdown, really. Just a bunch of rednecks who showed up for a few minutes carrying signs that read "No queer is going to get me out of my jeans" and stuff like that.

A week later we tried to run a bogus ad through the system. We made up some goofy club name to make us sound like a Christian Students group and wanted our ad to read, "Next Tuesday is Religions of the World Day. Everyone who believes in one religion or another should go topless." We didn't get our ad in, naturally. But the official rejection was that we were not a real school club or fraternity, not that we were just a bunch of silly guys going to a school with a, at the time, ratio of almost 4-to-1 males to females.

[barzilla]

Pops,

That's a funny story. Since we're swaping stories I thought I'd introduce this one for the peanut gallery. The humor is a little more sordid and morbid, but I think it illustrates what the average journalist is thinking.......

In my junior year I was promoted to Opinion Editor at the Daily Skiff. The school didn't control our paper as much as the Batallion and we have one of the better college papers around. Every afternoon, the editors would get together to meet to discuss issues and agree on the staff editorial. A student in my dorm had been arrested (READ: NOT CHARGED) for rape. At this point, we knew he had been arrested. The debate was whether we should run a story with his name and picture. I had no problem with the name part, but the picture part bothered me. After all, he hadn't been charged with the crime yet. I was easily outvoted.

The only question they asked of our faculty advisor was, "can we do it?" The managing editor (a real witch with a capital B) told me, "Scott, you just don't understand, you're not a journalism major" in about as condescending a tone as possible. You see, I was a mere political science major, so what could I possibly know about journalism ethics. Well, I knew enough to know that sometimes it's more beneficial to ask "should I do something" than "can I do something". Yet, every time that kind of ethical question came up (it happened more than once) the all-knowing journalism majors always went with what they could do and never asked themselves that harder question.

All of you are probably on baited breath waiting to hear the result of this tale. Well, as it turned out, the girl made it up and the DA's office never even presented it to a grand jury. However, the student had to transfer to another university because of the stigma involved. Yet, here is the morbidly funny part. The student had an identical twin that also went to TCU. Of course, the almighty journalism majors never bothered to entertain that possibility. You see, that's what you get when you ask yourself "can I do this" instead of "should I do this". Despite this fact, I was always seen as "simply not understanding" because I was just a political science major.

[Sandy]

barz,

Nice story. While I was never on a school paper (closest I got was club reporter for my local 4-H club, which meant I got a couple of inches in the county newspaper every month), I had a roomie who was editor of the "Technician", which is the NC State newspaper, during the early 70s.

He told me his #1 rule as editor was that NO reporter was ever allowed to use the word "NOW". The most common typo for "NOW" is "NOT" - and vice versa - which can be REALLY bad for any hope of accuracy, since in most cases replacing one with the other will result in a 180 degree shift in meaning.

That aside - he did tell me that he did occasionally run into ethical questions, which even 20 years later, he wasn't completely satisfied whether he'd made the right choice at the time.

The big one was one where there was a student protest (subject irrelevant), and the Dean agreed to meet with these people (sit-in, IIRC). Anyway, whatever occured at the meeting did NOT go well. As it happens, Howard, (my roomie and the editor), just happened to call the Dean's house for comment just as he was coming in the front door. The Dean was late getting home, hungry, frustrated, and the answer to the initial question was an angry, bitter speech on how the kids were a bunch of idiots, etc. -- basically, a cornacopia of invective, which would've made stellar headlines, and been a potential flashpoint to who knows what. After a couple more questions, the Dean sort of spat out that he was hungry and needed to say hello to his family and hung up.

Howard waited an hour and called back. The Dean apologized for the outburst, and then managed to state his views calmly and clearly w/o invective and without language that was certain to inflame an already tense situation. Howard published only the second set of responses. Personally, I think he made the right call, but it definitely made me appreciate a bit more the complexities involved in putting out the news.

[barzilla]

That is a quandary, but one thing I learned very early on is that you have to weigh the value of getting that story (Dean flies off the handle) with the value of future stories. I'll bet the Dean was very appreciative of your friend using the second set of quotes and probably was more open to providing info on future stories.

Of course, there is a drawback to this line of thinking. In the baseball world, we get beatwriters that give managers, GMs, and owners mulligans because they want to preserve that relationship for future stories. This is good up to a certain extent. Sometimes, these executives need to have their feet held to the fire when they do something stupid. Ever since I applied for employment with the Astros and ever since I've met Tal Smith and Tim Purpura, I have not been as critical. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I'm not sure if I'm less critical because I somehow have gained a deeper understanding or if I'm letting personal stuff get in the way.