More Gammons

Peter Gammons now has a column that is essentially a writing out of the thoughts he expressed after Game 7 on SportsCenter, to which I responded on Thursday. This time he tries to buttress his "Hitting? What hitting? It's all about pitching!" argument by submitting, in as obnoxious a tone as possible, that Keith Foulke should have been the World Series MVP:

If Major League Baseball actually took such things seriously, Foulke would have been the MVP of the World Series; Fox didn't consider Foulke enough of a name to give him the award.

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to call this proposal of Foulke-as-MVP ludicrous; one can, in fact, make a quite reasonable argument, mostly because there was no clear-cut MVP in the short series. I would, myself, disagree. Foulke did have one truly big appearance in Game 1, where he managed to get the final two outs of the 8th inning with the bases loaded by inducing two Cardinals hitters to not hit it to Ramirez. (Although he did allow a hit to Renteria, the first batter he faced, that inning. No base hit, no Manny throwing error.) He then got through the 9th in 4 batters to get the win after Bellhorn's homer. But in his remaining appearances in games 2, 3, and 4, he entered the game with leads of 4, 4, and 3 runs and 4 or fewer outs to get each time. Big deal. To blow one of those leads would have required a choke of Buckner-like proportions.

Now, as I say, I am willing to concede that an argument can be made. But certainly the most you can say here is that "You can argue that Foulke should have been MVP." To say that MLB and Fox are idiots or involved in a conspiracy for not thinking just like Gammons is pure egotistical drivel.

Gammons quite possibly breaches the bounds of drivel not once but twice in the same paragraph, when he goes on to say:

Foulke finished all four games against the Cardinals, and allowed a Larry Walker home run with a 4-0 lead in Game 3 because he knew a walk could ignite a rally and invited hitters to try to take him deep until it got close.

I'm going to give King Pete the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that this is not what he means, but this sounds dangerously close to the Stupidest Baseball Announcer Aphorism Ever: the idea that it's better to hit, say, a double than a home run in certain situations, because the double leaves someone on base, thus "keeping the rally going," you see. (Generally announcers suggest this in situations where a home run would not be enough for the rallying team to tie the game. And yes, I really have heard more than one announcer say this.) This gem of Conventional Wisdom is easily discredited by the suggestion that, well, if a guy does screw up and hit a home run, why doesn't he just stop at second?