After the Twins and Cardinals went out with nary a whimper in round one (along with our adopted and adored Colorado Rockies), Midwest baseball fans were officially resigned to bandwagon jumping for the duration of the '09 season. What's more, with the final four teams hailing from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Anaheim, many of us at the Alliance have paid as much attention to the peerlessly engrossing Arizona Fall League as we have to the World Series. Here to fill us in on the Phillies NLCS drubbing of the Dodgers (the 'Ticklefight in Tinseltown, if you will) is the LA Times' resident guru of overwrought, flowery self-indulgence. What follows are samplings from the annals of Plaschke:
OCTOBER 17, 2009
Destiny is not always about a fireworks show. Destiny is sometimes about a fight.
When, pray tell, is destiny about a fireworks show? Or, for that matter, a fight? And what in sweet hell does it even mean for destiny to be "about" something? This is complete and utter nonsense. Linguistic auto-fellatio even, masturbatory pontification masquerading as journalistic insight. Ugh. Additionally, this column was written to affirm Los Angeles' "team of destiny" status, a cliche so hackneyed that any team christened with it should be immediately doomed to defeat by the Baseball Gods. How felicitous the Dodgers were smitten. Next column!
OCTOBER 22, 2009
Nowhere, fast. So describes the journey of the 2009 Dodgers, which ended Wednesday in a recognizably battered heap in the darkest part of a familiar dead end.
There has to be a better way of saying that; there just has to be. How about this: 'For the second year in a row, Philadelphia represents the end of the line for the languid Los Angeles Dodgers, who have fallen into an alarming rut.' Better, right? That took six-and-a-half seconds.
As for LA: that's karma, bitch. Don't act like this it's novel. Winter, 1997. Roger Clemens spurns the Red Sox and signs with the Blue Jays. The Baseball Gods are, of course, pleased (thou shalt fuck Boston), and they orchestrate Jose Canseco's arrival in Toronto. The two hit it off, bing-bang-boom: consecutive Cy Young's. Karma. Kirby Puckett, on the other hand, convinces everyone he's one of the game's true "good guys," while spending nights and off-days going all Steve Phillips on bitches. Well Kirby, you can't hide from the Baseball Gods. Enter Dennis Martinez, "El Presidente," the reckoner. POW! Lights out. Karma.
(By the way, I know Clemens signed in '97 and Canseco in '98, a year after the Rocket's forth Cy Young. And I know that this puts my argument in rather firm discord with the basic facets of chronology. But seeing as no other world religion appears concerned with factual congruity, I think I'll just leave it.)
Again it was the Philadelphia Phillies dancing on the grass. Again, it was the Dodgers staring from the dugout. Again, it was three wins and three light years from a World Series.
Again it was the readers straining to parse out coherent thoughts from Plaschke's preposterous sentence/paragraphs (*note: average paragraph length in a Bill Plaschke column: 1.002538 sentences).
Out on the Citizens Bank Field, the Phillies were bubbly wet and giddily swaggering after a 10-4 pounding.
I entered "bubbly wet" into my search bar, just to see what happened. A sampling of the returns:
- Fartsinajar.net (no comment)
- Babycenter.com's page on 'pyloric stenosis' ("All babies spit up--in a bubbly, wet-burp way. Forceful or projectile vomiting...")
- Chicago.backpage listing for 'Super bubbly and wet Italian and Spanish mix' ("...ready to please you right now!" I bet.)
- Urban dictionary entry for "wet dump" (again, no comment)
- Acid reflux board index: "Why do I have so much phlegm?" (ditto)
Ramirez hit .263 this series with one extra-base hit and countless blown opportunities, and talk about faith.
Not sure how faith entered the discussion, but hey, that's Plaschke. The man's not afraid to keep his readership on their toes with a malapropos verbal hedge every few sentences.
The Dodgers must spend the winter praying that Ramirez relearns to hit with an untainted body.
Boom! Just when you'd begun to suspect this "column" was actually a list of characteristically puerile tweats from Tim McCarver, Plaschke serves up a little continuity between sentences. Get it? Faith...prayer! Now the previous sentence almost makes sense.
(In all fairness, the sentences themselves are less nonsensical than we've come to expect from Bill. Unfortunately, they're ass-backwards, which is straight from Bill Plaschke's SentenceFuck: A Beatwriter's Guide to Histrionics. How about this: "blah blah blah must spend the winter praying blah blah blah...talk about faith!" More coherent, right? That took 1.2 seconds.)
To his point, I'm sure sentiments on the vitality of Manny's aging, nonsteroidal body are echoed by much of Tinseltown. But Ramirez's OPS numbers in the three full months following his reinstatement read .931, .881, .892. Remember Ryan Howard, Bill, the Subway-slangin' behemoth you've written so glowingly about in the past? He had a .931 OPS in 2009, up from an .882 showing in '08. And what about Chase Utley, Raul Ibanez and Jayson Werth--the heart of the Phillies lineup--fresh off a defacing the LA pitching staff? .905, .899 and .875 OPS's, respectively. Perhaps Plaschke should spend his offseason pondering the rather spectacular aberration that was the 37 year-old Ramirez's 1.232 OPS in 2008 (222 PA's), as this was 200 points higher than ManRam's career average, and over 100 OPS points higher than Albert Pujols has managed in any one season. A .900 OPS is damn good for a soon-to-be 38 year-old; no other Dodger managed even an .870 clip in '09. What's more, this wasn't terribly difficult to foresee: Manny's OPS offerings during his final two seasons in Boston were "only" .881 and .927. We all know that Manny B. Manny is the favored punching bag of Bill Plaschke...still, there have to be others to blame, right? RIGHT?!? You bet your ass there are...let me take you back a few days. Next column!
OCTOBER 19, 2009
For the Dodgers to fufill [their] promise, the first bit of education must occur in the front office, which needs to realize something that everyone from here to Nicaragua now understands. They need an ace, or they will continue to be NLCS jokers.
Get it? Because Vicente Padilla is Nicaraguan! And he embarrassed himself and his countrymen by going 1-1 with a 3.63 ERA and a 0.923 WHIP in the postseason (wait, que?), before returning to his homeland and sustaining a gunshot wound to the leg. (By the way, that last thing is true.)
The fact that they had to start castoff Vicente Padilla in Wednesday's critical game makes one sort of statement. The fact that Padilla was a complete wreck, giving up six runs in three innings, just confirms that statement.
Padilla had gone 4-0 with a 130 ERA+ in seven regular season starts with the Dodgers, logging 8.7 SO/9 (while walking only 2.7). In the 14.1 postseason innings he pitched coming into game five, Padilla had given up eight hits, culminating in a grand total of one earned run (a Ryan Howard solo homer). How was Joe Torre forced to start Vicente Padilla? That's like saying James Lipton was forced to pop a trouser-ripping erection during the critic's screening of There Will Be Blood. Rather, Torre was compelled to start Padilla, most-likely overwhelmingly so, by a deep-seated preference for shitty veterans. If the history of Torre has taught us anything, it's that his Achilles heel is an over-reliance on mediocre journeymen (see: Pierre, Juan, '08), often in lieu of uber-talented young enigmas (see: Kemp, Matt, '08). Enter Clayton Kershaw. After an admittedly rough game one start, Torre could have thrown Kershaw on five days rest for game five, yet on the basis of a shaky game one performance, he had been exiled from the rotation. If you want to criticize a decision, start there. Or question the thought process behind awarding Hiroki Kuroda the game three start, bumping Randy Wolf to game four and effectively squelching any chance he had of starting multiple games in the series. Obviously this is an easy move to lambaste in retrospect, as Kuroda turned in a Don Larson performance in that lone postseason start (that's Don Larson circa 2009, two months after his eightieth birthday). And there is logic to pitching a right-hander against a heavily left-handed Phillies lineup, though Ryan Howard's performance may have single-handedly justified throwing a southpaw. But Wolf was the Dodgers most consistent pitcher over the course of the regular season (214.1 IP, 1.10 WHIP, 129 ERA+), and their second most effective starter behind Kershaw.
On a blustery night featuring timid Dodgers offerings and furious Phillies hacks amid an angry stadium awash in blue blood, you know what I would have liked to see?
Certain arctic fish have antifreeze glycoproteins in their blood, rendering their plasma a rather brilliant cyan. I would like to see a liter of it dumped on Plaschke's keyboard every time a potential metaphor enters his maundering little mind. Not an act of malice, just a visual reminder that he is a pompous, rambling boob.
I would have liked to see those Dodgers prospects whom they liked more than Cliff Lee. Who are those guys? Where are those guys? They needed to be here, and we needed to see why.
I assume Plaschke is referring to the only rumor linking Cliff Lee to the Dodgers that I was able to find: a July Ken Rosenthal report stating that the Dodgers were looking to deal a package including James Loney and either Clayton Kershaw or Chad Billingsley for Lee and Victor Martinez. So the Dodgers didn't pull the trigger because of some kind of morose, misguided fascination with James Loney? And where are these prospects you speak so ambiguously of? Oh, you made them up so that you wouldn't have to reconcile your asinine point with Loney's .353/.421/.706 NLCS line? While it is reasonable to conclude prospects would need to be included for this package to entice (seriously, James Loney?), the fact of the matter is no prospects were mentioned in the Lee-to-the-Dodgers rumor. And Cleveland is not trading their two best players for established, vanilla major leaguers; trades like this just don't happen. Mark Shapiro knows his team is going into rebuilding mode. As such, they need high-upside young talent, not predictably mediocre veterans who will be over thirty years old by the time the Tribe can reasonably expect to compete. Perhaps a relative youngster like Billingsley makes sense, but only when packaged with an 'elite' double or triple-A prospect such as Ivan Dejesus, Scott Elbert, Andrew Lambo (who has struggled this season), James McDonald (ditto as a ML starter), or Ethan Martin, plus some combination of lower-level minor league talent.
That's all. Or, as Bill Plaschke would say, "On a cold Wednesday afternoon, littered with incongruent thoughts and the smell of hope rising with the refreshing vitality that merely three days left until the weekend can infuse...dumpster babies."
