Will Rawlings catch grief for its anniversary Gold Gloves?
The articles have begun to flow about the announcement of the 50th anniversary Rawlings Gold Glove team. Rawlings makes all kinds of sporting goods, but it’s most famous for its baseball gloves — a reputation that the company reinforces by sponsoring Major League Baseball’s Gold Glove awards, given annually to the best fielder at each position in each league. Earlier this year, Rawlings put out a ballot of the top defensive players at each position; the names on the ballot were selected by a panel of experts from the entire list of 250-plus Gold Glove winners since 1957. The anniversary team is clearly a chance for Rawlings to reap a lot of positive nostalgia public relations as fans relive their memories of 50 years of great players. My prediction: Rawlings will get lots of press from the annoucement, but maybe not all of the type it bargained for.
This will take a minute to explain, so please bear with me: Any poll like this will draw a lot of reaction from fans, and start a million friendly arguments about who should and shouldn’t have been on the final list. Rawlings will certainly welcome this kind of response, and ESPN, for one, is already making hay with it by running a poll asking who’s the best ever out of the nine finalists on the Rawlings list, who’s the best defender from the era before the Gold Gloves were handed out, which player should have been included in the final ballot, and which player on the ballot was worst served by the outcome.
I know a number of professional baseball analysts. These people live, breathe, and eat baseball, and their Web sites and discussion boards draw scads of fans. Already today I’ve talked with a couple of these folks about the Rawlings list. Several of the men on the list draw no complaints from them; Hall of Famers like Willie Mays, Ozzie Smith, and Brooks Robinson are the usual suspects when it comes to discussions of all-time-best defense. Other choices drew some debate (Junior Griffey over Andruw Jones?) or outright rejection (Joe Morgan was not better with the glove than Bill Mazeroski). But these are the reactions you would expect for any (semi-)official pantheon like this. Yet there’s a problem with the Rawlings list that goes beyond these debates: the mystifying inclusion of Wes Parker at first base.
At his ESPN blog (subscription required), my friend Rob Neyer wrote this:
I know there’s still a lot of 2007 left. Nevertheless, I’m confident in saying that nothing will surprise me more in 2007 than Wes Parker being named as the greatest first baseman of the last 50 years.
Rob and me both.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Parker’s inclusion in itself isn’t a bad thing. On the baseball-geek side, there’s not a person in the world who can say a bad thing about Parker’s defense. Everyone who played with him acknowledged his incredible skill with the glove. The problem comes when you consider that the Rawlings ballot was a popularity contest voted on by oodles of ordinary fans, not baseball geeks. Which leads us to the question: Wes Parker? With all respect to the man, how many fans today even know who Wes Parker is? His emergence from (relative) obscurity has already been played up today in stories about Parker. Since Parker seems like a fine human being, and since his presence on the list brings back memories of the great Dodgers dynasty of the 1960s, his inclusion is all to the good.
But . . . how in the world did a plurality of today’s baseball fans — much less a 53% majority — select Wes Parker on the Rawlings ballot? Literally, how? I can tell you from long experience that most baseball fans wouldn’t recognize Parker’s name. If you were a Dodger fan in the 1960s, sure. If you’re a baseball geek like me who would sit around and have a debate about the best defensive first basemen ever, sure — you would mention Parker alongside non-superstar glove wizards like Vic Power, John Olerud, or J. T. Snow. (I told you I was a geek.)
More to the point, though, you would mention Parker alongside the two men he beat on the Rawlings ballot, Keith Hernandez and Don Mattingly. Set aside the fact that many knowledgeable observers consider Hernandez the best defensive first baseman ever, because the Rawlings vote wasn’t the verdict of a blue-ribbon panel. Set aside the fact that the two also-rans each won more Gold Gloves than Parker — nine for Mattingly and 11 for Hernandez in comparison to six for Parker — because “upsets” like this happened for other spots on the final list. Focus, instead, on the fact that Hernandez and Mattingly were enormously popular players for the two New York franchises in the 1980s. Each of them is far better known today than Wes Parker.
This brings us to a conundrum. With every bit of due respect to the kindly Mr. Parker and his awesome defensive skills, he’s a relatively obscure player who drew 53% of a fan vote ahead of the beloved former Yankee captain Mattingly and the Mets stalwart who holds the record for the most Gold Gloves at first base. Both of these men won MVP awards, and both of whom played 20 years more recently than Parker. Heck, Mattingly appeared on The Simpsons and Hernandez did a famous turn on Seinfeld. Now again, how did a fan vote come to this verdict? The simplest inference I can come up with is . . . it didn’t.
Inference, mind you. I’m not laying an accusation at the feet of Rawlings or whichever company ran the balloting for it. Maybe there were no errors anywhere in the process, and Parker got in because thousands of Dodger fans from way back made a point of voting for their man. I hope so, and I hope that the feel-good glow around Wes Parker keeps up, because who can begrudge him his day in the sun? Still, his selection smells like a mistake. Whether that could imply a computer glitch, overzealous supporters stuffing the online ballot box, or something actually nefarious, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rawlings comes in for a grilling about how Parker won. That’s the kind of negative attention I fear Rawlings may face, and if you think that not many baseball fans will follow logic as detailed as this and come to the same inference that I did — well, hard-bitten baseball fans tend not to let this kind of thing alone.
Then again, maybe the company would welcome the attention. I mean, when’s the last time you gave good ol’ Rawlings a thought? There’s always a new generation of Little Leaguers coming up — my own son starts fall ball in a couple of weeks — and those little players need the bats and gloves and helmets that Rawlings makes. A manageable dash of controversy about a nice guy like Wes Parker might not be the worst thing in the world for the company, so long as it keeps the Rawlings name in the news.
Category: The business of sports3 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Subscribe to the RSS Feed
[...] given company that wouldn’t fit in the original article. As my occasional dissertation-length posts attest, I can use some elbow room for pontificating bloviating offering additional [...]
I cannot believe this writer would question the integrity of a fan-based election held by the world’s foremost sporting goods company affiliated with baseball, simply because the final outcome did not jibe with his own choices. I saw Parker play. He was the best, pure and simple. And a nice guy, too. Keith Hernandez was certainly a fine fielder, but is regarded in many circles as a boring, self-absorbed, egotistical jackass. And that usually doesn’t win too many votes in a popularity contest. Don Mattingly — also a terrific fielder — was such a good hitter and quiet leader that it may have overshadowed his fine work in the field. Parker was a good doubles hitter, he lead the league in that category once, but was reknowned as a splendid fielder above all else. A perfect choice for the Gold Glove team, in my humble opinion.
Hi, “A fan of the game.” — It’s always nice to meet someone who shares my love of baseball, so thank you for taking the time to comment. Let me hasten to add that you could well be right that Parker was the very best gloveman ever to play first base. (Note the nice things I said above about his fielding and his character.) And it’s no skin off my nose that he won this award — good for him.
Your criticism of my post, though, doesn’t hold up. You’d have to overlook a lot of what I said here to suggest that my questions arose “simply because the final outcome did not jibe with [my] own choices.” My questions arose because Hernandez and Mattingly are a lot — a LOT — more famous than Parker.
This isn’t a debate about their merits as fielders, but an observation about the *obvious* disparity in their fame for average fans of the game. In popularity contests like this, you expect the most famous players to poll the best, unless we’re talking about famous guys with BIG character flaws like Pete Rose or Albert Belle. Hernandez was a jerk, but hardly a sociopath, and he’s been a major feature of every barstool conversation held in the past twenty years on the subject of the game’s greatest fielding first basemen. Mattingly is universally beloved among the biggest single fanbase in the game. Ergo, it strikes me as strange that a MUCH less famous player was chosen ahead of them.
It’s not a matter of favoring my own choices — it’s a matter of wondering how in the world such an outcome happened, given what we could expect about the outcomes of a contest like this.