Amid daily seismic shifts in the calculus comes the part of the baseball calendar in which writers and fans assess the emotional outlook of the season for each team. The goals and going-for-it-ness. Most expectations won’t be met in the end. But that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that some of them will be met with eye rolls and incredulity in the moment.
Hal Steinbrenner — managing partner of the best-known baseball team in the world and a member of the MLB negotiating committee responsible for both the 99-day lockout and the deal that ended it — had an easy enough time addressing whether the New York Yankees’ goal has changed from the usual championship or bust.
“It has not,” Steinbrenner said at Yankees camp in Tampa last week.
In fact, he’s optimistic.
“Because I think they have what it takes. This is a championship-caliber team.”
Yankees fans frustrated by a decade-plus ring drought may quibble, but it’s a believable enough public position for an owner to take before they’ve played any meaningful games. Especially an owner that has, as Steinbrenner was adamant to specify, already spent enough to pass the newly raised luxury-tax threshold.
Being a baseball team owner is a funny bit of a business for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the very idea of wanting to beat the other owners is baked into the premise, but defending their actions (or inactions) is an unspoken part of the job. And perhaps never more so than on the heels of a contentious labor battle against the players, who serve as something like either medieval champions or faceless chess pieces in the owners’ efforts to best one another.
And so, asked if the other owners shared his goals — if they, too, are Trying To Win — Steinbrenner demonstrated how hard it is to answer that honestly.
“I would hope so for the sake of their fan base. Absolutely. I would hope so,” he said. “Not one fan should come to spring training thinking their team has no chance to win a division, no chance to make the playoffs. That can only be bad for the industry as a whole.”
Mmm. Mhmm.
At least MLB commissioner Rob Manfred hedged a little bit when he said, at the news conference to announce the new CBA deal, “I think, almost without exception, that clubs try to do the right thing. They want to win.”
The players, for their part, are a little less performatively naive.
“There are times when you have to break down, and we understand that. We’re just trying to minimize the amount of time it will take to come back,” Minnesota Twins MLBPA player rep Taylor Rogers said. “We just want to shorten that window.”
“I think a lot of the problems that some people in the player group had is that it’s just so obvious,” Rhys Hoskins, the Philadelphia Phillies player rep said.
“Trying” is sort of a quaint lens through which to view professional sports. But after the first week of spring training, there’s no concept more consistently at the forefront of analysis or more fraught. I think about whether teams are trying with respect to everything they do. I think about what it means for a conglomerate to try at all. Whether stupidly trying more is better than strategically trying less. What about trying hard and coming up short?
Is trying always a euphemism for spending? In which case, can anyone except the controlling owner try? Do you measure it in dollars? What about zero-sum wins — whether it’s for free agents or games or rings? The essence of sports is physical effort and yet, somehow, that part is elided by the discourse around trying.
The part where it’s baseball’s biggest buzzword feels new-ish, but I realized I’ve been writing about trying all along. I’ve written about how the measure of a good baseball season is how many teams tried and failed to make the postseason. And how fans shouldn’t stop expecting effort, even in the face of ample cause to become skeptical and cynical. I spent the past three months writing about attempts to incentivize trying. And once, in the midst of that, about the inherent fallacy in trying to do so.
An informal taxonomy of trying has emerged in the way baseball consumers understand the waning offseason.
Teams that tried strategically: the Atlanta Braves, who parlayed a painful breakup with the beloved Freddie Freeman into an upgrade in Matt Olson and have since supplemented by a series of savvy small moves; or the Minnesota Twins, whose bevy of post-lockout moves gave them the payroll space to surprise everyone by signing the biggest free agent of the offseason.
Teams that tried seemingly without sense: the Colorado Rockies, who are paying Kris Bryant $182 million to be stuck with them for the better part of the next decade a year after shipping out Nolan Arrenado and letting Trevor Story walk. Also, this is always the Los Angeles Angels’ MO.
The Phillies — who spent $179 million on two top-tier sluggers to supplement an already defensively challenged team and go over the luxury-tax threshold for the first time — tried with a singular logic that will prove sufficient or silly.
Teams that are all in on effort: the new-money New York Mets and star-studded Los Angeles Dodgers.
And teams that aren’t trying: the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland A’s emerged from the lockout eager to offload the players who made them 2021 postseason contenders in deference to an arbitrary budget.
It’s the laziness, the obvious lack of even bothering to try, that offends.
The Yankees, for their part, seem mired in some sort of middle ground, unwilling to expend the kind of effort/capital their fans feel they should and so the effort/capital they have spent seems misplaced.
Our interest in effort, though, will soon be vastly overshadowed by our obsession with results, and the way trying looks different in retrospect. The amorphous, overarching team effort is interesting as a metric only speculatively. Restraint is smart if it works. Losses make a mockery of lofty goals.
It’s never been easier to argue that “winning” the offseason has little bearing on one week of games seven months from now — assuming you make it that far. This is an inherent tension in baseball: the increasingly inescapable truth that a team can’t change its fortune through a single splashy signing (or even a generational talent). If we know that, do we even really know what Trying looks like?
Twenty-nine teams go home disappointed every year, regardless of how hard they tried — but if anything, that’s an argument for trying, even in the absence of any sort of guarantee. And here the physical, athletic manifestations of effort by the players themselves become a relevant parallel. All that trying is in service of something specific: a championship. But since the whole point is to have a summer of something worth watching, well, it’s really about the effort, not the endgame.
