Idiots Write About Sports

Phil Garner was an outstanding baseball player.

This observation from Fox’s Game Two telecast comes to us from Tim McCarver, who apparently hates the sound of silence so much, he must fill the air with the chatter of vague, unsupported compliments, lest the audience have a blab-free moment or two to enjoy the ballgame.

Full-disclosure: I was but a young’un when Phil Garner was in his prime, so I can’t give any first-hand testimony as to his ball-playing prowess. To me, he was the capable utility infielder with the bushy mustache sporting that blindingly awful multi-colored jersey the Astros favored in the early 1980s. I will stipulate that it takes some degree of talent to play big league baseball for 16 seasons, and that being a useful component on a World Championship team — ladies and gentlemen, your 1979 We Are Family Pirates! — should count for something. (I am excluding Garner’s time with the 1973 and 1974 Athletics since he played in all of 39 games over those two seasons and not a single one of those was in the postseason.) So I look at Phil Garner’s career and words like “solid” and “better than average” come to mind.

But Tim McCarver says outstanding. Really?

Here are the player’s most similar to Phil Garner, along with their similarity scores, according to Baseball-Reference.com:

1. Juan Samuel (905)
2. Tony Cuccinello (897)
3. Don Money (895)
4. Jim Fregosi (891)
5. Granny Hamner (886)
6. Jorge Orta (884)
7. Shawon Dunston (882)
8. Harry Steinfeldt (881)
9. Royce Clayton (880)
10. Mark McLemore (878)

I see a lot of fair-to-good players there. But nobody who I’d call outstanding. Do the Similarity Score by Age, and names like Mariano Duncan and Tony Bernazard start popping up. Again, perhaps Tim McCarver’s definition of “outstanding” means something different than mine.

Or to put it another way, if Phil Garner was an oustanding ballplayer than what was Willie Stargell, his teammate on that Pirates team? Really outstanding? Outstanding-plus? Outstanding to infinity? How about Reggie Jackson? He played with Garner in Oakland. Is he outstanding too? Or better than outstanding? Help me out here, Tim — I’m trying to gauge the range of outstandingness.

I don’t mean to belabor the point — Hey! I’ve got something in common with Tim McCarver, after all — but this is a little bit more than a garden variety case of semantics. McCarver is an analyst, someone who should be using his level of expertise and experience to give us commoners perspective, understanding and insigt to the action taking place on the field. That requires a certain preciseness of language, even if it means you don’t get to suck up to the manager of the NL pennant-winner by wildly overpraising his playing career.

By not using clearly defined terms to convey your points, you are not delivering the perspective or insight your position requires. Which raises the question: why the hell are you even in the booth if you can’t be bothered to do that? We’d be better off listening to the talking baseball than you.

"Outstanding" is a little much, though Garner was a better player than his simscore list indicates, for three reasons. All of those guys, or most of them, played in higher-offense environments than Garner, who played in a fairly neutral era but a lot of it in pitchers' parks. He spent a lot of his career in the Astrodome when it was the Astrodome and was impossible to hit home runs in. I don't know about "outstanding" but in 1977-79, and '82 he was pretty darned good. BP's translated statistics have him hitting 175 homers in his career, with a peak of 21 three times, and a career .268/.335/.439 line.

Should preview next time... The other reason (besides era and parks) is that he could play two positions rather well (and wasn't a disaster if pressed into duty as a shortstop) unlike someone like Samuel, who couldn't play two positions at all but kept trying anyway.

"I don't know about "outstanding" but in 1977-79, and '82 he was pretty darned good."

Well, sure, Mac, but you and I are reasonable people who understand that while "pretty darned good" is nothing to sneeze at, it's a few exits down the interstate from Outstanding-ville.

Tim McCarver, in contrast, is a superlative-spouting chucklehead.

I think we can agree on that.

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