|
On Wednesday night, the Rays’ Wander Franco uncorked one of the coolest moves I’ve seen on a baseball field in a long, long time. You can see it right there above, same as yesterday's kicker. In the midst of fielding a hot grounder, Franco flips the ball up in the air, watches it float in front of his eyes for a second, plucks it and fires it on to first for the easy out. It’s everything I love about baseball in one play.
Settle in. I’m going for a slow wind-up here.
At its finest, baseball is the best of all games. Unlike football, which is primarily an exercise in aggressive piecemeal acquisition of territory, or basketball, which is defined by limits — the hoop, the court, the clock — baseball is, in the purest sense, limitless. The foul lines go on forever, and so, in theory, can the game. The sport’s signature moment is the towering home run, an uncatchable, unstoppable slice of instant immortality.
Baseball sits at the center of two axes — head/heart and past/future. All four points on the compass have to be in alignment, or the sport is out of balance and out of favor with the public.
Consider:
• Too much emphasis on the “head” side of baseball — hard numbers, analytics and statistics — leads to soul-killing debacles like the shift and rotating relievers, turning the game into a boring three-true-outcomes (home run, strikeout, walk) parade.
• Too much emphasis on the “heart” leads to I-before-team, me-first strutting and arrogance, and in the front office, a focus on gut feelings over hard data.
• Too much focus on the future cuts baseball off from its long, glorious legacy, sacrificing tradition and history to chase fleeting trends and shallow gains. (For instance: Ever notice how hard it is now to watch your local team on broadcast TV? Yeah.)
• Too much focus on the past keeps the game stuck in historical mud, consumed with the garbage of Unwritten Rules. Times change, and baseball can change with them — if fans and players will let it.
Which brings us back around to Franco. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s just 22 years old — yes, he was born in the 2000s, we're all old — and he's already well on the way to capitalizing on all the promise he showed as he worked his way up to The Show. The Rays are the best team in baseball, and Franco — who’s already notched a WAR (Wins Above Replacement) of 1.8 — is a key reason why.
Now, when Franco’s play hit social media last night, there was plenty of admiration, yes, but a fair amount of “that’s not proper baseball”-type complaining. The head and the heart, past and future, at war once again.
But all the “play the game the right way!” grousing misses the fundamental point: Franco tossed off a little showmanship, yes, but he made the play. Bookending that little ball flip, he gloved a hot liner in textbook position and executed a magnificent throw to first, nailing the batter by almost two steps. Shoot, he had enough time to toss that ball up onto the top of his head, like a chef at a Japanese steakhouse flipping shrimp.
Had Franco bobbled that ball, or thrown it into the seats, or in any way cost his team, his manager and teammates could and should have chewed him to the bone. But that didn’t happen. He added a little flair to the mix, and turned a routine play into one for the ages. Franco’s play embodies another great thing about baseball: Every single game, you might just see something you’ve never seen before.
Baseball is full of players, coaches and fans who seem to forget that this is, at its heart, a game, and games — pastimes, you might even call them — are supposed to be fun. We all get enough drudgery, disapproval and division outside the ballpark, we don’t need to add to it once we’re inside. After all, there’s a reason the first two words after the National Anthem aren’t “Work ball!”
Play ball, everybody. Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you back here Monday.
—Follow Jay Busbee on Twitter
Readers react: You've heard from us, now we want to hear from you. Hit us up at readandreact@yahoosports.com with thoughts on fun baseball or anything else in today's newsletter, and you might just see your words below.
|
