A Rockie And A Hard Place

We’ve reached the Naked Lunch point of the Fantasy Baseball season—that moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. That of course doesn’t mean that we all know where we’re going to finish in our leagues. But it does mean that we know pretty much whom we’re going to finish with or be finished by. Sure, there will be unforeseen September call-ups galore, and also some waiver deals that send role players to contenders. But except for the prime prospects—Hector Olivera isn’t in the majors to sit on the bench, and Javier Baez probably isn’t either—no one knows which of the newly-summoned hitters might play regularly, or which pitchers might get plugged into a starting rotation and have some chance of success there.

Anyway, we certainly don’t. And this created a quandary for us, in our capacity of would-be timely bloggers. Thirty blog installments in, we’ve already told you about the guys we like and don’t like who’ve been around during the season. We don’t know any more than you do about who among the newbies is going to (a) play and (b) be good. And if you’re reading this, need stolen bases and nothing else, and thus can afford to have an otherwise-uninhabited spot in your starting lineup, you’ve probably already acquired the amazing Quintin Berry and his spotless SB record; you don’t need our input.

So we had nothing to blog about, until we heard that one of our heroes had died. That would be the writer/neurologist Oliver Sacks, the Mickey Mantle of his hybrid profession. Casey Stengel, marveling at Mantle, said that he “has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster.” Similarly, Sacks wrote better than any doctor—we mean English prose, so don’t tell us about Chekhov or William Carlos Williams—and doctored better than any writer. His specialty was describing the strange things a brain can do when its owner isn’t looking or hasn’t been nice to it. And this, needless to say, made us think of Justin Morneau.

Morneau, of course, is a former MVP whose quest for the title of Best British Columbian Baseball Player Ever got derailed by a concussion he suffered when kneed in the head in 2010. (He’s the undisputed Number Two.) A boyhood spent as a target for hockey pucks can’t have helped him any on this score. Morneau missed a lot of time in 2010 and 2011, and looked and evidently felt kind of clueless through the end of the 2013 season. He came back strong with the Rockies last season, although he spent some time on the DL with a “strained neck,” which, we gather, is a symptom that can be part of post-concussion syndrome. Then, in May of this year, Morneau, playing first base for the Rockies, dived for a ball, felt dizzy, and has been on the DL ever since with “concussion symptoms.” He says he feels okay now, though, and for the past week or so, he’s been rehearsing for his return to the bigs by terrorizing minor league pitching. There’s a good chance the Rockies, locked in a vicious struggle to avoid the worst record in baseball, will activate him this week.

We’ve been asking ourselves whether Morneau’s nuts. That’s where Sacks comes in, sort of. The rap on Sacks’s work—which in our view is unjust—is that he makes brain injuries and Alzheimer’s sound like good times and lotsa laffs. In fact, as anyone who’s spent some time with a demented loved one knows, they ain’t. Dementia is so horrible that it makes us feel bad for Jim McMahon, which we hadn’t thought possible. And serial concussions and early dementia are related.

But Morneau doesn’t need our help to take care of himself, and anyway, as we’ve said several times, Fantasy Baseball requires a certain sang froid—the recognition that you’re not drafting Justin Morneau, but rather a bunch of stats to which the Justin Morneau label is attached. So we were curious: How has Morneau done coming off the DL mid-season after a neck-up injury? Should we embrace him (or rather, his stats)? Eschew him (ditto)? We accordingly investigated. We didn’t consider Morneau’s performance at the start of the 2011 season, after he’d spent the last three months of 2010 on the DL and had the off-season to recuperate. Nor did we consider his stats after his short stay on the DL for “wrist inflammation” in 2012, which were outstanding. We looked only at the 20 games after Morneau’s 2014 return and the 14 games he played in August 2011 between DL stints for neck-up problems. We wondered: is there really no difference for Morneau before and after he (re)injures his head? And is there no difference for the pitchers who face him? Nobody wants to be Carl Mays, even Carl Mays.

What we found is interesting enough to tell you about, if not to act upon. The ho-hum stuff first: No incarnation of Morneau is going to steal bases. Runs and RBIs? Sure, he’s a left-handed hitter with and frequently in Colorado (14 of whose last 30 games are at home), so he’ll get some no matter what happens, as long as he plays. Here’s the other stuff. Immediately post-DL in 2011 and 2014, Morneau had a .288 BA and a .369 OBP, including 125 AB, 15 BB, 1 HBP, and 1 HR. In all other games between his post-DL 2011 and his pre-DL 2015, he had a .279 BA and a .340 OBP, including 1605 AB, 126 BB, 22 HBP, and 55 HR.

The picture this conjures up for us is of post-DL Morneau and his adversaries tiptoeing around each other. The pitchers aren’t throwing near Morneau, and Morneau, insofar as he’s getting pitches to hit, isn’t going after them with reckless abandon. Even if this surmise is correct, does it matter to us? Maybe a little. Morneau, always an OBP stud, becomes even more so, with the increase in walks outweighing the decline in HBP. More importantly, it appears that, if home runs are what you need, you should look somewhere else. We’re surprised too.

All right, so our Morneau study lacks academic rigor. It’s still a bit suggestive, isn’t it?