Red Sox: At Sea, Looking to Space

“Ever since Theo Epstein was taken to the woodshed for his ‘bridge year’ projection, the Sox have been unwilling to admit they are anything less than championship-driven. So even though it’s obvious that this season is flushed down the tidy bowl, the Sox feel they have to keep telling you they have not given up.”-- Dan Shaughnessy, “It’s Time to Look to Future,” Boston Globe, August 20, 2012

Judging from this picture, I’d say there’s at least one guy who has given up on the season, wouldn’t you?

As I watched the Boston Red Sox lose their weekend series to the New York Yankees, the spirit of giving engulfed me. I can’t recall having the holiday mood hit me in mid-August rather than December, but it’s not every day that a) the Bosox fall 13 ½ games out of first place, and b) resign themselves to missing out on not only one wild-card berth in the American League playoffs, but two.

To the Red Sox players, I’m sending their own personal telescopes. There was a time when only the ‘70s pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee might have appreciated the gesture, and I suspect that none of the players have ever had any prior interest in astronomy. But they’re so far out that a telescope will be the only way they’ll see the playoffs at this late point in the season.

I’m doing so also because, the way things have been going the last few years, at least some of their players have spent their hard-earned millions on clubhouse chicken and beer, as well as on cellphone charges for texting their owner and general manager in an attempt to oust their manager (the disgusted fellow in the photo; more about him in a minute).

My second gift goes to Mets GM Sandy Alderson: a DVD of the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny. It’s not merely because it’s a classic (almost guaranteed, with Humphrey Bogart starring), but because it features a type of character that every baseball front office fears, and whom, I’m afraid, Alderson now has.

I’m not sure what the naval lingo is for such a person, but in the baseball community he’s referred to as a “clubhouse lawyer.” The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary defines such an individual as a “player given to complaining and talking of reform and ‘rights,’” but the old catcher and announcer Joe Garagiola has a more succinct definition: “a .201 hitter who isn’t playing. He gripes about everything….And he’s a perpetual second guesser.”

Who is this fellow given to fine whines? Again, we’ll get to that--be patient. (Something that Bosox fans, admittedly, have not been able to do in recent years.) In the meantime, The Caine Mutiny will offer instructive lessons for Alderson—and Met fans, too—on the impact of such an individual.

In the movie, this type of complainer is played by Fred MacMurray, in one of his least characteristic, least sympathetic (i.e., best) roles. His character, Lt. Tom Keefer, a communications officer for the Caine, is, appropriately enough, a writer (strike one—you never can trust those guys!). Keefer has enough against the skipper of his ship to want to spark a mutiny against him, but he does not want to take responsibility for it. So he plants a bug in the ear of the nice, but callow and susceptible executive officer, Lt. Steve Maryk (played by Van Johnson) who, when the time comes, orders to sick bay the commander, Captain Philip Queeg (played by Bogie).

From the moment he steps aboard the Caine, Queeg might be the guy in charge, but he’s an odd duck. In fact, his many quirks make it easy for Keefer to depict him to Maryk as kind of nutty. Which—well, he is.

Hmmm…someone in authority whose many quirks make him an easy mark for murmurous mutineers…Who does that sound like in baseball?

That clue was so easy that you must be wondering, “Why isn’t Bobby Valentine screaming, ‘Have any of you an explanation for the quart of missing strawberries?’ And why hasn’t he started rolling marble-sized steel balls in his fists as he’s interrogated by the media?”

Good questions—and I’ve had my own about him, such as why he ever got to the point of no return with Kevin Youkilis, as much of a gamer as anyone who ever put on the Red Sox uniform. Quite a few Mets fans, I gather, had a few questions about Bobby V, too, when he was managing that squad. (In one incident,  he got thrown out of a game, only to re-emerge in the dugout with a fake mustache and sunglasses—like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit. You know—the one where Dana Carvey, as George H.W. Bush, gets tossed from his son’s Presidential debate with Al Gore, only to come back later as “Jorge H.W.B.,” dressed in a poncho and sombrero.)

Captain Queeg was overthrown in a typhoon. During a perfect storm a few weeks ago—the worst set of injuries to befall a major league club in a generation, lackluster performers by the two leading starting pitchers, Valentine making starter Jon Lester labor through a hideous loss—a cadre of Bosox players tried to do the same thing to their skipper.

The Red Sox equivalent of MacMurray’s Tom Keefer is Kelly Shoppach. Make that “was,” because the Red Sox, despite their injury plague, sent him to the Mets. Shoppach swears up and down that a) there wasn’t a Bobby Valentine mutiny, and b) he wasn’t around for the mutiny/gripefest/whatever you want to call it anyway, so how could he have led it?

But then he would claim that, wouldn’t he?

Granted, Shoppach is not a novelist, like Keefer, but we have to make allowances for falling standards these days. He did the next best thing that this generation of bank account-swollen, brain-shrunken players can do—according to reports, he borrowed the cellphone of Adrian Gonzalez, a star whose complaints were liable to be taken more seriously by management, and texted the Red Sox hierarchy about the need to hold a meeting.

On the Red Sox, the role of Lt. Maryk is being taken by three people: Gonzalez, who was used by Shoppach; second baseman Dustin Pedroia, (probably) unfairly tagged by initial media reports as the leader of the player revolt; and owner John Henry and president Larry Lucchino, who met with the vocal anti-Valentine faction.

Alderson should be very careful about Shoppach. It’s one thing to have on your squad a superstar who throws his weight against a manager, but a thirtysomething backup catcher batting .250? How desperate are the Mets to get through the rest of this season, anyway?

Alderson’s manager, Terry Collins, has received much credit for maintaining the Mets’ esprit d’corps in the first half of the season, when they were expected to be a woebegone crew because of the financial mess in which their owners, the Wilpon family, found themselves. But now, with Shoppach in the dugout, don’t be surprised to read anonymous quotes in the newspapers, asking, say, if it was really in the long-term interests of the team to allow Johan Santana to complete his no-hitter.

Unlike many Yankee (and, I might add, Mets) fans, I hold no quarrel with the other major-league baseball team in New York. I want New York to have both of its squads in the playoffs. The only thing better than a pennant race in the city would be a double pennant race. So many depend on it—not the players, of course (even a World Series would be penny-ante stuff for these millionaires), but it would be for the ballpark staff, the media beat reporters, and even to fans beset by bewildering times.

Alderson’s manager, Terry Collins, has received much credit for maintaining the Mets’ esprit d’corps in the first half of the season, when they were expected to be a woebegone crew because of the financial mess in which their owners, the Wilpon family, found themselves. But now, with Shoppach in the dugout, don’t be surprised to read anonymous quotes in the newspapers, asking, say, if it was really in the long-term interests of the team to allow Johan Santana to complete his no-hitter.

Unlike many Yankee (and, I might add, Mets) fans, I hold no quarrel with the other major-league baseball team in New York. I want New York to have both of its squads in the playoffs. The only thing better than a pennant race in the city would be a double pennant race. So many depend on it—not the players, of course (even a World Series would be penny-ante stuff for these millionaires), but it would be for the ballpark staff, the media beat reporters, and even to fans beset by bewildering times.

Yet the task of building such a winner will be heightened enormously if Shoppach continues to act the way he does. Even the Bosox tired of him. If the Mets do, too, they should seriously consider seating Shoppach on the edge of bench—and with it, the next would-be gripers.