Fire Gardy

Posnanski has yet another great post up (he’s got about a .990 blogOBP, which is pretty incredible — it’s probably higher than Bill Simmons, definitely higher than Rob Neyer, and without question higher than mine … I’m like the Carlos Gomez of blogging).

This time around, he’s talking about the difference between Adam Dunn and Willie Bloomquist.

As some of you may know, Adam Dunn is a big lumbering slugger. A base clogger with a low batting average who walks a lot and hits home runs. He attempts to play left field, though that’s probably only because he’s always played in the NL — he’s brutal in the field. He’s essentially the prototypical masher, and he’s even been accused of not liking baseball. He plays ball like it’s his job, and he performs his job efficiently and without passion.

Of less interest is Willie Bloomquist, who is essentially the opposite. He can play every position, and clearly loves baseball. He runs around the diamond with passion, and is built from the stuff that inspires young children. Except he hit exactly one extra base hit in 2008, and doesn’t draw any walks. His brand of ball is often exciting, but doesn’t always end up scoring the most runs.

And my point is that I believe every baseball fan, at his/her core, leans Dunn or Bloomquist.* People who believe that on-base percentage and slugging are the most significant things, that defense and speed are overrated, that what matters is what you do and not how you look doing it lean heavily Dunn. The New York Yankees have leaned heavily Dunn: Get on base, slug the ball, don’t worry too much about catching it. And so on.

As soon as I read that, I was thinking about myself and the Twins. Philosophically, I believe I lean toward the Bloomquist way; I thoroughly enjoy the smaller things about baseball, a good play in the field, and I like swinging at the first pitch and I don’t like watching walks. At the same time, however, I understand intellectually that it’s not realistic to find nine players who can field well and hit .330 with a bit of power — in fact, it’s remarkable that we have two of them on the same team at the same time*. Drawing walks and hitting home runs is a better, more consistent way of scoring more runs, which is really the crux of the game.

A lineup full of Albert Pujols would score over 1400 runs per season. He hits for average and power, and he draws walks. He’s basically just awesome. The only thing that could be better is if he were a switch hitter and/or a shortstop. But those are pretty unreasonable demands for the best player in the sport.

The Twins, as an organization, lean drastically toward Bloomquist. If we weren’t stuffed to the gills with outfielders and utility players, we’d probably have been in the running for Bloomquist — he’s the type of player the Twins like to have. The only guy on the team who draws walks is Mauer*, and the only reason he’s there is because he’s the hometown boy and we got absurdly lucky.

Also Span, but the only reason he’s there is because we didn’t know he’d draw walks at the major league level — he never did in the minors. Well, the real reason he’s there is because we thought he’d be the next Torii Hunter back in 2002. That means we thought he wouldn’t draw any walks. Also, are we all convinced now that Span is going to be good forever? Up until Spring Training last year, he was a complete and unmitigated bust in everyone’s eyes but his own. By Opening Day, he may not have been a bust but he still sucked. Now he’s the third best hitter on our team after Mauer and Morneau and is the established leadoff hitter. Maybe players can turn the corner like that after having almost no success in the minors; maybe the eye surgery really made that big a difference; maybe his five-six years in the minors are meaningless and his one year in the majors is his true level of talent. But maybe not. Why are we all convinced all of a sudden?

Of course, Posnanski is one of the few people outside of Minnesota that seems to think regularly of Minnesota. I think part of that is because he’s spent his life in Cleveland and Kansas City, rather than New York and Boston and LA, and therefore notices and respects a place like Minnesota because of both proximity and the apparently consistent ability to do more with the same meager resources.

At the same time, there are plenty of people in the game and in the stands who believe that you win by doing the little things, by playing defense and running out ground balls and playing the game with passion every day. They lean heavily Bloomquist. The Minnesota Twins, for instance, lean Bloomquist.. The Twins run and catch the ball and they have not worried too much about power or on-base percentage. This, no doubt, frustrates the heck out of a lot of Dunn-leaning Twins fans.

Yes, here in the blogosphere, there are a lot of angry Twins fans. They don’t understand why the Twins are stuck on guys like Punto rather than guys like Dunn. They feel like the team is overrating defense and versatility and underrating walks and power. Maybe they’re right, but the thing is, that’s who the Twins are. It’s what they’ve always been. Some teams have changed their philosophies over the years — they fire their GMs and managers and replace the front office to get a new philosophy installed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes the organization doesn’t wait long enough to find out and starts over. The Twins value loyalty, and have never done that. They stick with their front office until they decide to retire, then allow them to name their own successor. We may be annoyed by this, and fear the the next manager will be Scott Ullger rather than Stu/Stan Cliburn, but this is how it works in Twins Territory.

So I think we should try not to really get our hopes up about signing Adam Dunn or Manny Ramirez, even though thinking about it is fun for a little while.

We should stop hoping that Gardy wakes up one morning having had a revelation during the night that walks are important and we should try to value getting on base and scoring runs as opposed to hacking at every pitch we can see. It’s not going to happen*.

Which is too bad, since it’s kind of the point of this blog. Oh well. Just like Gardy’s not going to stop, neither are we. Will it be like the unstoppable force meets the immovable object? Or will it be more like the less cliched, more likely scenario in which the force is not technically unstoppable nor is the object truly immovable, and they don’t end up meeting at all? You decide.

But at least the Twins organization knows who they are. Dayton Moore of the Royals has been saying since he got there that he believes in OBP and it’ll help them score more runs and he’s going to instill in his players the wisdom of the bible of OBP. Except then he always turns around and acquires guys with a .300 OBP, which just isn’t helping the cause. At least when we pick up a .300 OBP guy we don’t say “he gets on base a lot,” which is how Moore described Bloomquist.

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