(Scene: It is 2017. DOUG, a baseball blogger, is sitting at his computer trying to think of something to write about an objectively godawful team)
DOUG: Why isn’t anything about this team interesting? I’ve already put all my eggs in the Jae-gyun Hwang Is The Future basket, and now I look like an idiot! I mean, there are still some good players here. Bumgarner is obviously excellent. Posey’s not going anywhere for a long, long time. I like the Brandons. But as a whole, they’re so uninteresting!
(Getting animated now, Doug gets up and starts pacing around the room.)
DOUG: Why can’t the Giants get some real stars? I mean, imagine Buster Posey being teammates with Andrew McCutchen! That team would be unstoppable! Or imagine seeing Evan Longoria play behind Bumgarner. What a team that would be! Just think about Mike Trout in center, or Bryce Harper in right. God, I’d love to live in that world. I wish that for just one year, Brandon Crawford could play with, like, Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt.
(In the corner of the room, the cursed monkey’s paw Doug got from a mysterious street kiosk on the shores of Lake Titicaca curls a finger. He whips around, having seen some movement out of the corner of his eye.)
DOUG: I, uh…I think it was always like that.
Yes, Brandon Crawford agreed to a deal with the St Louis Cardinals yesterday, and now he will be teammates with Arenado and Goldschmidt. The Cardinals make sense as a landing spot for him — they don’t need a starter, necessarily, but they are handing the position off to an untested rookie in Masyn Winn, and if anything goes wrong, Crawford will be a nice security blanket for them. If that goes right, then he’ll be a solid backup.
As Grant Brisbee pointed out yesterday, Crawford never could have served the same function as a Giant. We’re all Homer Simpson, and Crawford is Poochie, and all of our ideas will involve him starting at shortstop and/or being louder, angrier, and having a time machine. The same way that there aren’t going to be spontaneous “We want Nick Ahmed” chants at Oracle Park this year, there will also be no “What does Masyn Winn’s cold streak mean for Brandon Crawford?” articles because no one in St. Louis will care.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, they are the Best Fans In Baseball, and every last one of them has already learned Brandon Crawford’s dog’s middle name, but even still. He doesn’t mean anything special to them, and when you’re looking for a backup, that’s what you need. From his end, he wasn’t going to have a better shot at playing time than this, so off he decided to go to St. Louis.
Except, well, really? The Cardinals? The stupid Cardinals?
Brandon Crawford is obviously an inner circle member of the Great Giants Hall of Fame. His last game in September inspired reflection, tears, and hagiographies. He was the childhood Giants fan who ended up their starting shortstop for more than a decade, and the clubhouse leader, and the franchise icon, and the last unbroken link to the championship teams.
The St Louis Cardinals are obviously an inner circle member of the Dumb Teams That Suck Hall of Fame. They’re a bunch of stupid jerks who are full of themselves and no one likes them and they smell but their dad is friends with the principal so YOU get in trouble if you say they smell even though EVERYONE knows they smell and if they would just take a shower in the morning like EVERYBODY ELSE there wouldn’t be an issue and why is it YOUR fault for noticing that? It’s not fair. It’s not fair!
So Brandon Crawford going there seems wrong. It is the kind of thing that makes you want to incoherently yell, “Will Clark Jose Oquendo Ozzie Smith!” except all mashed together so no one knows exactly what you’re saying, but you feel very self-righteous about it. It makes you think about Jon Miller in 2002 yelling, “The Cardinals are dead!” and wondering why Crawford would go there, of all places that aren’t Los Angeles. What about Marco Scutaro and Barry Zito and Michael Morse and Travis Ishikawa? How could you betray them like this, Brandon Crawford?
And the answer is, very simply, he wants to keep playing. Crawford has the entire rest of his life to not be a professional baseball player, but while someone will let him keep playing in the majors, that’s what he’s going to do. I’ve seen some people wonder why he doesn’t just retire. He got to play for one team for his entire career, and it was his childhood team, and he won a couple World Series and was an All-Star and accomplished everything. What more is there?
And I think the answer is simply that he likes it. He likes to play, and he likes to think of himself as a baseball player, and now he can do it more, and there isn’t a lot more to it. Yes, it would be cool to emulate the Hall of Fame shortstops like Derek Jeter, Barry Larkin, and Cal Ripken Jr and only ever play for one team, but if that team has moved on, then you can too. Just from the championship teams in San Francisco, yes, Buster Posey and Matt Cain played their whole careers in one uniform, but Tim Lincecum and Brandon Belt and Madison Bumgarner didn’t. Guys move on. It’s how the game works. It’s how life works.
It would have been emotionally satisfying for Brandon Crawford to have packed it in after the last game of 2023, tell everyone that he had a good run, and say goodbye to his playing career. That would have wrapped everything up in a neat bow. But Crawford doesn’t owe us a bow. He owes himself the chance to play this game for as long as he can, so good for him. I’m giving him my support, even if it’ll be really bizarre to see him wearing Cardinals red.
Maestro - I remember reading in 'Son of Ball Four' Jim Bouton explaining to his wife why he gave up a 6-figure broadcasting salary to attempt a baseball comeback @ the age of 40. Something like, 'Honey, when you're dead, you're dead for a long time.'
Maybe the real lesson is 'Baseball really IS Life.'