Where is the next Ted Williams, the next guy who can hit a ball at .400 or better for a season? Nowhere in sight.  Professional baseball has swapped intuition for science over the last forty years. It has been an unqualified failure.

Name the .400 hitters:  Cobb. Hornsby. Lajoie. Williams.

We have no .400 hitters in the Free Agency or the Steroids Eras of the game.  A-Rod got close, but more on him, later.

Name the top  pitchers in the history of the game: Lefty Grove, Tom Seaver, Walter Johnson, Smokey Joe Williams, Satchel Paige, Cy Young, Nolan Ryan. Roger Clemens is compromised. Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux
and a handful of the rest of the Braves' old power rotation might be the few from this era to shine, but most do not hold a candle to pitchers from an era marked more by hardship and sacrifice than science and statistics.

Trainers and workout regimines have improved conditioning, yet they continually fail to produce a better hitter. Pitchers like Paige, who could go the distance for two or three games in a day, or hitters like Williams, have no rivals in the modern game.

Why?

On the plate side, there are certainly guys like Bonds who can see the ball well. There are hurlers that can locate pitches to near perfection.

The green grass has given way under the mighty weight of green graft. The money and the deals which the MLB Player's Association have struck with the owners are undermining play in the game.

Money, which should be a reward for achievement after it has happened, is thrown in such gross amounts at young people in expectation of what they might accomplish, that it is actually preventing them from accomplishing much.

Records fall, from time to time, but you don't have the driving competition that you have had in generations past.

These days, records mean nothing. Guys like Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds sullied that kind of achievement.

Bonds, easily one of the most gifted players in the game, did not get that record-breaking fire, for real, until McGwire and Sosa where blowing away baseballs on the juice.

Steroids, for Bonds, I believe were a means to an end that he could have achieved by giving a damn earlier in his career.

Aaron set the all-time home run record in less time.  His formulative years were spent in the last generation of the Negro Leagues.  Every African-American ballplayer from that era, from Aaron to Mays to McCovey to Campanella, came into white baseball fired up on nearly a century of discrimination. They had something to prove.

By contrast, today's scientifically farm-raised player is like farm-raised fish. We've increased the yield, and attractiveness of the crop, with a decided lack of flair and flavor.

Hardship  forges excellence.  Success springing out of perspiration is good, but desperation can foster inspiration, and ultimately, greatness. Is it any wonder that some of the best players in the modern game  are from parts of the world where players come from nothing to achieve everything?

The game itself has become fat, and cautious. 

Carlos Gomez is the wind, but he will never have a shot at Rickey Henderson's base stealing record. High-value athletes can't afford to get injured.  That's not the player, invoking that concern, by the way. That's the club, watching out for the millions of dollars that it puts out on the field.

Ty Cobb would not be sliding spikes-first at anyone. He would get fined for jeopardizing a high-value contract. Pete Rose would not be knocking anyone out to steal home.  Someone could get hurt.  

Is that still baseball, though?

Every year, we send dozens of players into the major leagues who have shown a lot of fire and tenacity as athletes in MiLB.  Every year they will step up to the plate. Most will have great first MLB seasons.  Some even may go so far as to capture a rookie title, or help their clubs make it to the post-season.

You may see a Maris, with that clear, burning desire from day one, to make themselves the record-holders of some niche in the books, but it does not last long.  After a while, they become as complacent as the other ones who sit on fat major league contracts.

Anyone congratulating the Yankees on their World Series win should savor the moment. Statistically, the club with the overpaid mercenaries seldom gets to the big dance in a world where most clubs mix vets and hungry young players to try and kick-start more aggressive team play.

A-Rod, the most overpaid player for his talent in the history of the game, has an intellectual laziness about baseball that will prevent him from ever attaining his full potential.

Mike Piazza was largely the same way.  The big home runs were fun to watch, but he did not play for team or town. A big bat,  he never developed the defensive skills of a Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra or Josh Gibson, or the heart or baseball mind of a Mike Scioscia.

The problem is not in the conditioning of the five tools, but in the sixth, both on the field and in the front

In 1953, Ted Williams was having a comeback season, after spending the prior one largely on the DL. He hit .400 in his 34 games, and the Red Sox were considering sitting him down to preserve that mark for the remainder of the season. Williams was incensed, and demanded to be put in. He knocked in enough to drive up his average to .407 that season. 

That determined head, now frozen, was what made him greater than generations of other players.

He was not a poorly paid player for his era, but he was not grossly overpaid.  Athletes of that era knew that whatever their future held, being remembered for what they did in that moment meant the difference between a life of comfort and future endorsements, being enshrined in the public consciousness, and operating an elevator in Manhattan.

To be a Willie Mays or a Hank Aaron or a Cal Ripken requires a sharpness of mind, or a singlemindedness of purpose that seems to wilt like a fern in the direct sunlight of millions of dollars raining down on the heads of these athletes.

Before Players Association propenents start jumping me on the merits of the bad old days where the owners took the lions' share of the gate and left players with nothing, allow me to wholeheartedly say: I agree. 

That was an injustice of epic proportion.  Guys like Ruth, Williams, and DeMaggio were well paid in their day, but they were worth far more than what they ever received from ownership.

The problem is that the payroll pendulum has swung too far the other way. Athletes are being overpaid, and contractually coddled. Even the anti-doping rules have been bent and fashioned to accommodate the PA.

The Steroids Era has more hands in the pie as well. You have agents like Scott Boras and business managers who were never around in the pre-free agency days of the game. You have more voices than a manager or the coaches advising players on performance, and how to extract as much out of the hides of ownership at MLB as possible. 

If you look at the record, though, and look at the records legitimately set, if you exclude the allegedly tainted records of Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, et al, it is clear that the days of baseball intuition and mysticism, of hardship and hatred for ownership, produced greater athletes and better baseball than anything since the Mets former skipper Davey Johnson discovered the spreadsheet.

Better Baseball Through Science? Hardly.

Some people would like to canonize Bill James, the father of sabremetrics. I would like to keel-haul him.  The studies of numbers and tendencies has produced a quality ballplayer much in the same way that standardized, scientific food principles have helped McDonalds create a hamburger.

It never looks like the picture up on the wall, whether it's the Big Mac the burger or Big Mac the player.

Just like the ancient Greek and Roman oracles of old, it is unlikely that the baseball alchemists and their computers are going away.  All of those people earning degrees in sports medicine and kinesiology are going to be with us, as will the primordial ooze that puts on leisure suits and calls themselves sports agents.

To get ESPN and the BWAA to focus more on stats on the field than the payroll numbers and police blotter off of the field, MLB and the MLBPA need to use some of their monopolistic and collusive powers for good, not evil.

I call it positive cooption.

Baseball players need to keep their heads in the game, and on the game. It happens in MiLB, so there is no reason to suggest, with some alterations, MLB could not get back to basics as well.

We in the media, and the general public, need to get away from judging a player by their paycheck, not their average. Keep the focus on stats and records.

There should be three very short windows, no more than a week each, to conduct trades and player signings. The fewer the better, because the two to three weeks prior to each will have huge media ramp-ups. Contracts are not "discussed," but most front offices leak like the screen door on a submarine.

Use blind trusts. Let the owners and the agents, who aren't going away, work out the business side on the side. Don't involve the players. Politicians enter into blind financial trusts so that their judgments on policy will not be considered bought or tainted.  Let ballplayers play ball, and appreciate each other for what they can do to a baseball, not what Scott Boras can do to their paychecks.

Plug leaks. Enforce the no-trade, no trade gossip ban.  Other than at the approved signing/trade weeks, Commissioner Selig, or whomever would be his replacement, should put a zero-tolerance ban on violating the blind trust system. Under Rule 15(d) Selig can put any player, agent, sports writer, front office person, or even Joe the Hot Dog Guy on the Ineligible List, and suspend them from entering a ballpark for a year or more. Use that broad power to get the media flow and the fan buzz back on to the game itself.

End incentivized contracts.  Look at J.D. Drew and other pay-for-perq players. They don't ever really work out that well. You may get a slightly better season out of a player, but trying to get players to jump through hoops to pick up bonus money has not been turning out Ted Williamses.

Technology limitation. Some technologies, like the playback systems that let players study other players habits and tendencies, are just fine. Pitch counts? Not so nifty. They take the heart out of the competitor. If a guy is struggling, pull him. Otherwise let the fans experience the mastery of the pitcher who can go the distance, and play through adversity.

Limiting down middle-releivers also will enable more teams to avail themselves of top-drawer pitching without Bud Selig's feared "dilution." For the millions most big-time pitchers will make in a career, put in a little more risk to go with the ocean of low-challenge reward out there currently.

Media Retooling - Use the MLB Network for a revival of praise for the lost arts of hitting for contact and base stealing. The pedestal of media coverage should not be reserved solely for home run hitters. If it plays on the home channel, perhaps Fox, ESPN and the others will stop yakking about contracts and player arrests, and start talking some baseball again.

Accountability - Make rules against drug use in baseball that conform to the Major League Rules and enforce them.  End the practice of using sidebar deals with the PA to treat cheating with drugs as a matter of labor law rather than what it really is: CHEATING.

To get beyond the Steroids era, and to find the next .400 hitter like Williams, or the next real Hank Aaron, we need to look past the science and statistics that have boxed out exceptional performances and promote the nearly lost and arcane arts of the golden era of the game of professional baseball that operate more on instinct than sabremetric insight..

MLB has to think outside the box to get the game out of the box in which it has become trapped.

My shiny two.