“It’s like springtime–cold one day, hot the next day. When you have a young team, you have a tendency to be inconsistent.” -Dusty Baker
A reader left me this quote in a comment, and asked what I thought. My first reaction is that he’s exactly right. But I think she wanted more than that.
Why are young teams prone to inconsistency? I mean, they spend all that time being seasoned in the minor leagues, shouldn’t they be ready for the Bigs?
Yes and no.
The thing is that everyone in the Major Leagues is good. No, not good, great. Think about it. There are only 750 active roster spots in the Major Leagues, and people from all over the world compete to occupy these spots. However, everyone in the minor leagues is not great. There are some greats, merely waiting for their chance to show the parent club what they can do. But there are also people who will never make the jump from AAA to the Major Leagues.
This leads to the first reason for this inconsistency. For batters, even the opposing team’s number 5 starter is better than most of the pitchers he’s faced before. For pitchers, there are no longer easy outs (except the pitcher in NL games) in the lineup. At least not compared to the AAA teams.
Along with the opposition’s increased talent, there is a lot of pressure on young players, especially one’s making their debut. They have to perform well or risk being sent back to the farm. Where a veteran can endure a slump and not really worry about being sent back down, a rookie might not have won the club’s confidence yet. Not to mention the “Jersey Shock” (copyright me) of stepping into the box for first time and seeing Johnathan Papelbon ready to throw the ball a zillion miles an hour at you, or toeing the rubber and trying to figure out how to make sure Albert Pujols isn’t going to knock your pitch out of the atmosphere.
But even with all that, the biggest reason that young teams are so inconsistent is that they just don’t have a lot of experience. As I said, everyone in the Major Leagues is great. And this greatness is often recognized early in a player’s career. Talented players tend to fast-track through the Majors, so they will have only played a few years (sometimes less) before their baptism of fire in the Majors.
Therefore, they haven’t learned what to do when they don’t have command of their fastball. In the Minors, you can throw a fastball by a number of players. In the Majors, even if you throw 100 mph, if you groove it down the middle, and they know it’s coming, it’s going to get hit. Similarly, young hitters who have a hole in their swing will find pitchers able to consistently use it against them.
Conversely, their opponents have not only learned this lessons, they can recongize when a rookie is in trouble and know just how to exploit the weakness.
The Reds are a pretty young team, but they’re doing alright. I’m really interested to see what Dusty can do with a young team. Previously he’s always had a superstar or two (Bonds, Sosa, Griffey Jr.) to carry his teams.
