Phasing out Blyleven

With the World Series wrapped up, teams are now free to start making moves and announcments.

The Twins had already replaced their manager. They still have a coaching staff to name and a bunch of roster moves to make. And the question of Joe Mauer -- retiring or returning? -- remains unanswered.

But the big news of Monday was about the TV broadcasts. Bert Blyleven is being phased out as the main analyst -- 80 games in 2018, 50 in 2019, 20 in 2020.

That news actually came from the 67-year-old Blyleven, who first tweeted that he's putting his condo in downtown Minneapolis up for sale, then explained that the Twins and Fox Sports North "offered me less games for the next 2 seasons because they said they are going in another direction. I agreed to their request."

I am too old to be part of FSN's target demographic, and a captive audience anyway. Nobody is picking analysts to try to get me to tune in. But as fond as I am of Blyleven the pitcher, I long ago wearied of  his constant complaints about how the game has changed since his day. The same applies to Jack Morris.

I've suggested a few times here that a quality local broadcast reflects the outlook and priorities of the organization. I don't believe the Twins broadcast analysts, TV or radio, have consistently met that standard since the Terry Ryan era ended.

The hidden problem

Jorge Polanco fails to handle a "base hit"
off the bat of Lorenzo Cain with two outs
in the sixth inning Sunday. The next batter
doubled Cain home for what proved to be
the winning run.

I voiced optimism here about the Twins direction last week. Then they went to Kansas City and got swept. Two blowouts, one extra-inning rain-interrupted marathon, one pitchers duel -- all with the same "L" for the standings.

One of my pet theories about "intelligent fandom" is that the broadcasters reflect the thinking of the organization. Dick Bremer, Bert Blyleven, Cory Provus, Dan Gladden -- these guys are not only around the team (as are the beat writers), they hold their jobs at the mercy of the team (unlike the beat writers). When Billy Beane was in the process of imposing the use of advanced stats on the Oakland A's almost 20 years ago, their TV broadcasts rather quickly ditched the traditional "triple crown stats" on their graphics to show on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

So when Bremer spends much of his airtime bewailing the Twins starting pitching while barely acknowledging the flawed fielding, the presumption here is that he's reflecting the thinking of the manager and coaches.

There's really not much good to say about the Twins starting pitching in three of those four games in Kansas City. Tyler Duffey, Jose Berrios and Hector Santiago all had short starts, and that strains the already strained bullpen.

But defense is the hidden problem. The Kansas City Star on Friday described a pair of plays by Minnesota outfielders Eddie Rosario and Robbie Grossman on Thursday as "two of the worst defensive plays of the year." The video-laden breakdown linked to above concluded:

According to FanGraphs, the Twins’ defense has a negative-25.3 runs saved, the second-worst in the American League.

Yeah.

Sunday's final, and decisive, run was handed to Kansas City by the Twins fielding, specifically the shortstop play of Jorge Polanco. As has been noted here, the heavy use of Polanco at short in recent weeks directly contradicts the obvious conclusion drawn by the farm system, which devoted more than two seasons to playing him at shortstop and decided he's not a shortstop.

Polanco, as depicted above, failed to come up with a grounder in the sixth inning. Blyleven and Bremer were still questioning the scoring call when Eric Hosmer doubled over Rosario's head (might Byron Buxton have reached that ball?) to score Cain from first base -- and suddenly the TV talk went from a missed out to a pair of two-out hits.

I say this a lot: The easiest way to improve the pitching staff is to improve the defense. That we don't hear that from the broadcasters suggests that they aren't hearing that from the organization.

R

eIad more here: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/for-petes-sake/article96623782.html#storylink=cpy

Dick Bremer Disease

It occurred to me Wednesday afternoon that there is probably no more difficult job in Minnesota sports right now than broadcasting Twins games.

Unlike the newspaper writers, the broadcasters are under team control. Part of the job is to hype and shill and sell tickets. And it is not easy to talk with enthusiasm this month about the 2016 Twins, especially when, unlike the rest of us, they have to sit there and actually watch all of it.

So it was with sour amusement that I listened to Dick Bremer and Roy Smalley cling to the notion that 2015 represented the "real" Twins. The 2015 Twins had one extraordinary month (May) and played below .500 in every other month. That was enough to keep them in the playoff chase until the final weekend.

We all share, to one degree or another, the tendency to believe that a certain player's best short-term performance is his true level of ability. Bremer has vocalized that tendency so often over the years that I started calling it "Dick Bremer Disease." Torii Hunter reached the All Star break in 2002 with his batting average above .300, and Bremer spent a couple years talking about Hunter as a .300 hitter. He recently referred to Kurt Suzuki as "an All-Star" in the context of him being part of a challenging part of the lineup facing an opposing reliever. For Bremer, presumably, Suzuki's April-July in 2014 was the "real" Suzuki, and the rest of his career the aberration.

This was, I think, the first case of Dick Bremer Disease applied to the entire team. But, as I say, he's expected to speak well of this bunch. How to do that and maintain any credibility is his problem.

A step in the right direction for TV baseball

John Smoltz will join Joe Buck as Fox's primary
baseball broadcast team in 2016.

Fox is revamping its primary baseball broadcast team, and there are two pluses for the fans.

• Harold Reynolds is out, replaced by John Smoltz;
• It will be a two-man booth.

Joe Buck will remain the play-by-play guy, and other than the fact that he's on record as preferring to call football games, that's OK. There are better play-by-play announcers, but Buck's a pro.

I'm a little sorry to see Tom Verducci bounced, but my regrets there are mainly theoretical. He might do well in a two-man booth, but he was stuck splitting time with Reynolds, and nobody was going to shine under those circumstances. Reynolds will drag anyone down to his inane level. And Fox simply isn't creative enough to break out of the the "we gotta have somebody who played the game in the booth" mold.

The big thing, really, is just two voices. Two is better than three. Heck, one is better than two, as illustrated by the career of Vin Scully. I'm sure no broadcaster wants to call all nine innings as a solo voice, but there are few broadcasts that wouldn't be better with less babble about the evils of the pitch count. (This is particularly true of Fox Sports North's crew.)

Notes, quotes and comments

Tough times for those of us needing our Twins fix: Rained out on Sunday, scheduled day off Monday, and a weather forecast that suggests it will be difficult to get the Dodgers series played.

(They probably will play the games anyway, because it's darn difficult to reschedule these interleague series — and why do the schedulemakers give the Twins home interleague series in April against teams like Miami and Los Angeles anyway?)

Let's poke around for stuff for today's post:

* The Twins' TV broadcast crew came in seventh in the Awful Announcing website's fan poll. That's considerably higher than I would have expected, and indeed, the writer found it odd:

This rating is a little puzzling, because many of the negative comments were directed towards the regular crew of (Dick) Bremer and (Bert) Blyleven, and most of the praise was devoted toward part-time analyst Tom Kelly.

I'm always disappointed when I'm working during a game for which TK's in the booth.  I don't know that a dozen games or so of Kelly's work balances out the dreck from Blyleven.

I find myself muting the TV more often than I used to — such as when Blyleven launches into his daily pitch count rant — and the overall lack of comprehension among the broadcasters (radio and TV) of where analytics are taking the game does the audience a disservice. Blyleven (and Dan Gladden on the radio side) really need to modernize their thinking, or at least understand what they're railing against.

* Peter Gammons wrote this piece on Chris Colabello. I recommend it not only because it's about a Twins player, but because it is so Gammons-esque: Overwritten and sentimental, with a lengthy extraneous Dylan quote stuck in the middle. Gammons has been a great baseball writer for decades, but he needs an editor.

* This chart has Trevor Plouffe seventh in the majors at hard-hit ball rate so far this year, a very good sign for the Twins third baseman.

The return of Jack Morris

A few weeks ago, the Chicago Cubs hired Ron Coomer as the analyst for their radio broadcasts. This opened a role on FSN, where Coomer did a great deal of the pre-game and post-game studio (or in-stadium) blather (switching off with Roy Smalley and Tim Laudner).

On Friday the Twins announced that Jack Morris was joining the broadcast team, presumably in the Coomer role.

Sigh.

Morris was, a few years ago, a radio fill-in for the Twins. Like Dan Gladden, he came off as a stubborn old-timer convinced that there is no new knowledge to be gleaned. What he knew -- or merely thought he knew -- when he was playing is all that one can know, or needs to know, today.

I specifically remember a game in which Morris went on a lengthy rant about how foolish teams were to shift Jim Thome as a dead pull hitter in the infield while playing him straight away in the outfield. Morris didn't know Thome's hit charts. Thome hit maybe two groundballs a year toward left field, but hit fly balls that way regularly. Morris didn't know that, and didn't care to know that. The problem was, he then inflicted his ignorance on his audience.

The Twins broadcast teams have been riddled for years with this failing. Bert Blyleven. Gladden. Morris. In an era in which most team's decision makers are delving deeply into statistical analysis, the Twins' broadcast analysts either cannot or will not learn enough about it to inform their audience. One possibility, of course, is that the broadcasters accurately reflected the organization's interest in the subject.

One of Paul Molitor's duties on the coaching staff will be defensive positioning, and he has said that he expects to employ more elaborate overshifts and to rely heavily on hit chart data. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with the traditionalists in the broadcast booths. The Jack Morris I heard a few years ago would be baffled.

A new voice heard from

Josh Whetzel

As you probably know, John Gordon is hanging up the microphone after this season.

Fine by me; I won't be writing any glowing farewells. It's no secret that I have for years regarded the Twins radio broadcasts as borderline incompetent, and I've generally blamed Gordon as the lead figure on those broadcasts. That may be an unfair assessment — it's quite possible that with the amount of promo material foisted on the broadcasters Vin Scully would be hard pressed to pay attention to the game — but that's my opinion. I like knowing where the baserunners are, just where that drive to "left-right-center field" went and even if it was caught.  Gordon and Gladden don't always bother with such details.

Today a fellow named Josh Whetzel was doing the game from New York with Gordon. Whetzel has been doing the broadcasts for the Rochester Red Wings for nine years, and he has a pretty good reputation.

Having Whetzel fill in for Gladden for this one-game trip to Yankee Stadium probably saved somebody a bit of travel money, and gave Whetzel a real-life tryout for the major league job.

He was easy to listen to, spoke in complete sentences, told us listeners what happened and didn't impose some goofy schick. Me like. I hope he gets the full-time gig next year.

TK as a broadcaster

Judging from what I hear, a lot of fans are enjoying Tom Kelly's brief sojourn into the Twins broadcasting booth.

TK in 1987, when the manager
was younger than some
of his players.

I'm among them, although I suspect that a lot of it is Blyleven fatigue. A full season (or more) of Kelly's mumbling would probably grow just as tiresome as Bert's repeated pitch count rants and assertions that "you have to do the little things" "at the major league level" even if you're "the best athlete on the field."

In that sense, just about anybody would do in the booth. ABB -- Anybody But Bert -- would make the broadcasts fresh and different. Whether that's what Fox Sports North, the Twins (who have the final say over the broadcast crew) or the audience want is another matter.

For myself, I want to learn something more about the game, and at risk of bragging, at this stage that's a high bar to set. I can't remember the last truly novel insight to the game I gleaned from Blyleven.

Kelly and his stopwatch (for timing the pitcher's delivery, a means of determining if the base runner can steal) is a dose of real-time scouting in the booth. His thoughts Friday on Gavin Floyd's inconsistent use of the slide step — that Floyd would be better off if he made it his standard stretch delivery — was both common-sensical and delivered with an acknowledgement of the potential trade-off. Kelly's enthusiasm for both Rene Tosoni and Ben Revere belied his reputation as a hard man for young players to please.

There are times when Kelly doesn't go far enough, when he softens or blurs his point, I assume to avoid criticizing somebody. Example: On Thursday, Ron Gardenhire had Jason Repko pinch-hit for Tosoni, and Dick "Richard" Bremer asked Kelly if it might not be wiser to keep Repko available, since the Twins had the lead. Kelly's response focused on the immediate opportunity to add runs against a left-handed pitcher, and didn't mention that the change would also strengthen the outfield defense. (To be fair, Repko went out on the first pitch to end the inning, so Kelly may not have had time to get to the defensive gain from the switch.)

Bremer is clearly amused by Kelly's sarcastic digs at one of  Blyleven's favorite chestnuts, that "best athlete on the field" line. I don't know that he's so amused by Kelly calling him "Richard" all the time. (I had theorized that TK simply doesn't want to say "Dick" on the air, especially when he initially identified 1970s White Sox slugger Dick Allen as "Richard Allen," but then a bit later Kelly called the old player "Dick.")

TK in the booth is clearly not going to be a long-term thing. I'm pretty sure he prefers his scouting/teaching/evaluating role. But I do wonder if the positive reaction to his stint in the booth might lead the organization to ponder the possibility of replacing Blyleven.

John Gordon's last season

It was already known that John Gordon was sharply cutting back on his broadcast schedule in the coming season. The veteran Twins radio announcer is to call 90 regular season games this year -- that's slightly more than half the team's games.

But now he's announced that this will be his final season, period.

I've been critical of his work for some time. A few years ago I ran, as part of my print column, a semi-regular feature dubbed The Gordon Files, in which I attempted to chronicle some of his inanities, such as informing listeners that "Carlos Santana" was scheduled to start a particular game. (Carlos Silva? Johan Santana? Or the guitarist?) I abandoned it for a variety of reasons, one of them being my own errors, and another being that it was seen in some corners as mean-spirited.

Which was never the intent. I have nothing against John Gordon; I'm sure he's a prince of a man and a hard worker. I have a problem with the quality of the work.

As a listener, I want to know where the baserunners ended up after a single. Gordon doesn't always tell us. (Nor does Dan Gladden; the two often seem locked in a conspiracy to keep the listeners ignorant of what's happening,) It irritated me last summer when Gordon told us that Jim Thome was scoring on a ball hit into the gap and Thome was thrown out about five seconds afterwards.

I know I would be a poor announcer myself. I would stutter and stammer and talk too fast and fail to enunciate clearly, because I do those things without a mic in my face. I would probably be too disorganized to keep up with the constant stream of promos that get in the way of describing the game.

But my own inability to throw a major-league level breaking ball doesn't mean I can't evaluate a pitcher and find him wanting. This is the major leagues, he holds a major-league job, and (my opinion) he doesn't do it on a major-league level.

Now his exit is in sight, and I will strive this season to stifle my complaints. And it's entirely possible that more rest will mean better broadcasts; it's been my observation that he's worse on day games after night games.

A change of the guard on Sunday Night Baseball

Joe Morgan: Great player,
less than great broadcaster

Jon Miller: Please, may
we have more?

ESPN has dumped Jon Miller and Joe Morgan from their Sunday Night Baseball booth.

Morgan I won't miss; as with most players-turned-analysts (and yes, the Twins broadcasters, TV and radio both, are included in this), he makes the mute button a blessing.

Miller, on the other hand, was and remains an excellent play-by-play man.

He should have been kept — under the Vin Scully Rule. Scully does his innings for the Dodgers solo. No second (or third) voice to get in the way.

That's not the current style in the broadcast world, be it ESPN, Fox, CBS or NBC. They all seem afraid that one person will bore us. They haven't figured out that (1) less is more and (2) pointless blather is what bores us.

A loss to make me crabby

Or maybe it's just adding to the rest of my stress.

Any way ... the Twins lost Thursday because Nick Punto fumbled a two-out grounder to allow a run to score and because their two most reliable late-inning relievers — or at least the two Ron Gardenhire most wants to rely on — each coughed up a run in the ninth and 10th innings. It happens.

I'd like to go on an Alfonso Marquez (photo) rant here, but I don't want to overstate the importance of his hallucinatory safe call at third base in the 10th inning. Kelly Stoppach never got any further. The only damage caused was to Gardenhire's bank account, since he'll be fined for the ejection that followed; to Michael Cuddyer's fielding percentage, since he was charged with an error; and the extra pitches required to get out of the inning. Had Marquez gotten the call right, the Twins would still have lost that game.

And I don't want to overstate an evaluation of Marquez as an umpire. I really don't know if he's as bad as I think he is. He might be a competent, or better, umpire who simply made a mistake. It happens.

That call certainly bore the hallmarks of incompetence, however.

---

Silly broadcaster comment: Joe Mauer led off the bottom of the eight inning with a double. Justin Morneau followed with a fly ball to right, with Mauer advancing to third. And Dan Gladden said of Morneau: He did his job.

Not really. Morneau is the cleanup hitter. His job — not that he can be expected to be successful 100 percent of the time, or even 50 percent of it — when the go-ahead run is in scoring position, is to bring him home.

A give-yourself-up at-bat is the moral equivalent of a sacrifice bunt. As I wrote Thursday, I love the bunt. But you don't bunt Morneau in that situation, because you're looking for more than trading an out for a base from him. Matt Tolbert, Punto, Drew Butera — with those guys, it's a different story.

Morneau's fly ball helped. It set up Jason Kubel's sac fly, which set up Jon Rauch's blown save. But it simply passed the job of getting Mauer home to the next guy.

A void in the booth

The great ones are going, and they aren't being replaced.

Ernie Harwell on Tuesday became the latest baseball voice to fall permanently silent. There's been a string of them in recent years — Herb Carneal here, Harry Kalas in Philadelphia, Phil Rizzuto and Lindsey Nelson in New York, Herb Score in Cleveland, Jack Buck in St. Louis, Harry and Skip Carey ... They were all radio guys first and foremost. Most of them did TV, some of them a lot of TV, because that's where the audience has migrated over the years, but they all started on the radio side years ago, when the TV broadcasts were relatively rare.

On the same day that Harwell died, John Gordon completely and utterly botched the call on a key play of the Twins-Tigers game. In the ninth inning, with Detroit's Alex Avila on second, Ramon Santiago hit a grounder to the shortstop hole. Gordon's call went something like this:

Base hit! A diving stop by Everett! Oh!

At which point, perhaps because he was aware that he had just misidentified J.J. Hardy, he got all tongue-tied and unable to describe how Hardy saw Avila rounding third base, threw the ball to Nick Punto, who then ran Avila down.

You probably didn't hear Gordon butcher the call. If you did, you couldn't possibly have figured out what was going on. That's the thing about radio: If the announcer is inattentive or inarticulate, there's no visual to save the day.

It's tough work. I'm sure I'd be terrible at the job, starting with the limitations of my voice and including all the other aspects of it, including those that the listener is unaware of.

My real point: There are doubtless good, even great, young play-by-play men out there. But they're doing TV, not radio. It's easier and it pays better. And the guys who mastered the art in the era when radio was all we fans had most days — they are dying off.

Nonsense uttered by broadcasters on Saturday

I know it does no good to gripe about the announcers, at least in the sense that it will result in any changes, but every so often I just have to get something off my chest.

Saturday was one such day.

Inanity No. 1

Tim McCarver during the Seattle Mariners-Chicago White Sox game on Fox: "When you look at Ichiro, the first thing you notice are his shoes." Uh, no. I don't think I've ever noticed his shoes. Until now.

Inanity No. 2

Twins radio announcer Dan Gladden, describing Kansas City starter Luke Hochevar: "He's clearly their predominant starting pitcher, their No. 1 guy." No, I think it's Zach Greinke.

Inanity No. 3

Twins TV analysts Bert Blyleven and Ron Coomer pitching Justin Morneau as the best defensive first baseman in the league. He isn't, and won't be as long as Mark Teixiera, Carlos Pena and Kevin Youkilis are in the AL and playing first base. Morneau simply isn't as mobile as those three.

All they do with such homeristic contentions is undermine their credibility.

Inanity No. 4

Blyleven, late in the extra-inning game with the Royals, dismissing the problem of Alex Burnett having warmed up repeatedly in the early innings: "That was two hours ago."

Boneheaded broadcasters

I received a couple of e-mails during the past few days from a reader in Japan. (Ain't the Internet grand?)

Chris Oleson is, according to his messages, a former MSU J-school student roughly my age (his time at MSU corresponds closely to mine at the University of Minnesota) now in Japan. As such, his exposure to the World Series came with Rick Sutcliffe.

Message one (slightly edited), under the subject line "Rick Sutcliffe is an idiot"):

I had to relate what Sutcliffe just said on the international World Series broadcast (I'm in Japan). He said that in the National League a good manager is worth 20 or 25 games because the job is so much more difficult since it [doesn't have] the dh. He then said that [Charlie] Manuel liked managingin the league because the job was more cerebral. I [nearly] choked on my popcorn.

Message two, subject line "Rick Sutcliffe is an idiot: Redux!"

In a later game he calculated that 65% of Jimmy Rollins' game is running the bases and stealing. I'm not much of a Rollins fan, but such "math" is indeed questionable.

Yeah.

Taking the second claim first: The Baseball Info Systems baserunning analysis I wrote about in a Sunday post says Rollins (photo above) added 15 bases to the Phillies as a basestealer — and zero as a baserunner. If that's two-thirds of what Rollins does for the Phillies, he's out of a job.

Of course, it isn't. He's a former MVP; he's won (and deserved) Gold Gloves. He didn't have a real good 2009, but he contributes more than 21 bases a season to the Phillies.

As for the notion that a National League manager can be worth 25 wins a season for his tactical acumen: That's about one a week. The Phillies won 93 games last season. Does Sutcliffe really believe that if (picking on a manager who gets a lot of grief from his team's fans) Trey Hillman were managing the Phillies they'd become a 68-win team?

Nonsense. The truth of the matter is that, in terms of tactical moves — when to bunt, when to pinch-hit, when to order a steal or hit-and-run — managers are pretty much interchangeable. The DH makes a difference in how often teams bunt, but the difference is that the bunt in automatic with pitchers in the NL. Indeed, as Bill James detailed back when Sutcliffe was pitching, there is more variation in the AL about when to bunt than there is in the NL.

Sufcliffe's forte as an announcer is the totally made up stat, delivered with Olympian emphasis and self-assurance and ludicrous to anybody with a functioning mind. He is, as an analyst, worse than useless; he peddles fiction and nonsense.

---

As long as I'm bleating about broadcasters making stuff up, here's a lovely nugget I've saved up from the Twins-Yankees playoff series. The glories of Skip Carey on TBS were such that I resorted for a time to turning the sound off on the TV and listening to the radio. That didn't last long, mainly because the radio description was about eight seconds ahead of the TV images.

Anyway, at one point Dan Gladden started in on Andy Pettitte and steroids. In Gladden's universe, Pettitte blamed it on tainted supplements.

Wrong! That's the excuse of Juan Rincon, J.C. Romero, David Ortiz and assorted others, including a few football players.

Pettitte, upon being implicated by Brian McNamee (once Roger Clemens' personal trainer), admitted injecting himself once with human growth hormone while dealing with an elbow injury. Then, by Pettitte's description, he thought better of it and abandoned that course of action.

There's a big difference between Ortiz's explanation and Pettitte's. And those differences aren't that difficult to find.