12/18 Royals Links: More Oswalt Talk, the 1990 Royals, Bonds, Bucs, Beauty

Suppose the Royals pitching is miraculously effective this year and they find themselves in contention with the Tigers late in the season for 1st place in the AL Central. Their lineup features a bunch of guys with shiny batting averages, so the common assumption is that the offense is great. However, in spite of averaging about 12 hits a night they play a stretch of games in late August and early September in which they often fall short by one or two runs (with the pitching holding up all the while, so clearly this analogy is nothing but a fantasy), and they ultimately fall out of the race with about 10 days to go.

Almost everywhere people are talking about the Royals, on the TV broadcasts, in print, and on Facebook, you hear or read that the reason the team has fallen out of the race is that the young hitters haven’t yet learned to be unselfish and to make productive outs. They didn’t score enough runs because they didn’t move enough runners up. “The selfish young Royals” becomes an Internet meme. On Facebook there is a groundswell of support to name Chris Getz the team captain for 2013.

At the very height of this tide, Rany posts a long piece (long even for him) about how great it was to root for a Royals team that was in the thick of the race until the very end of summer. Just to follow a team playing meaningful baseball through the back end of the schedule was marvelous, even redemptive. He says is in love with the Royals and can’t wait until spring.

In response to a link to Rany’s article posted on Facebook, a poster invites others into a discussion of Rany’s article with the following question: “Has Rany failed to condemn the team for its lack of productive outs because he is blinded by enthusiasm?”

Instead of responding by talking about Rany’s article, I attempt to rebut the question by offering the view that the Royals’ offense, in spite of the shiny batting average, was insufficient because of its merely pedestrian on-base percentage. This is not the discussion the original poster wanted to have, and the exchange, frustrating for both parties, goes nowhere.

In the offseason the Royals reacquire Willie Bloomquist.

what I say the author’s intent was
or
what I think the correct/fair sentence was
(or both)

So here’s a summary in a concise but not-all-that-concise couple paragraphs:

I think that the author feels that Bonds got a lesser sentence than was probably deserved for the conviction. This is based on only a few remarks, in particular the “slap on the wrist” line, so I could be totally misreading it. What took us off track is that if the author did feel this way (big IF), then it doesn’t matter whether he (or I or you or the 100 commenters who agreed with him) was right or wrong about the correctness of the conviction/sentence: his opinion (or yours or mine or anyone else’s) on the events as he saw them is what’s at issue.

As for the real life matter of whether the conviction or the sentence were justified and correct, it seems we’re making no headway. My stance right now is that I have yet to see an example of an obstruction of justice conviction where the sentence was as low as (or less than) Bonds’s, which makes me extremely skeptical. My knowledge of precedent is very thin, and I’d be glad to learn that there is precedent that supports the sentence (and I’d be glad to learn that it wasn’t as whimsical as it seemed).

Not that either interpretation is right/wrong or better/worse. When he says “when I think of Barry Bonds, I’m going to think about baseball. Good baseball — the best I’ve ever seen”, you get the impression that his relationship (if you will) to Bonds is interesting because it’s above or at least separate from the trial and conviction (please correct me if I’m off-base in paraphrasing you), while my take is that I agree he is looking past the trial and conviction—and the correctness of the outcome—which is a problem.