Cubs Lean on Anthony Rizzo to be the Cornerstone of the Future

(Jake Roth/US Presswire)

By Lincoln Hamilton | @LHamiltonPP

(Cover Story for August Issue of Big Leagues Monthly | Magazine)

One of the biggest and, oftentimes, most misunderstood findings of baseball’s analytical revolution concerns a player’s ability in the clutch. For generations players and coaches, writers and announcers, die-hard and casual fans alike have bemoaned or glorified certain players based on how they performed when the game was on the line. How players faired when the chips are down, their backs are against the wall, and any other clichés surround them said more about their character as men than their specific abilities as a player.

An otherwise mediocre player can be lauded as a “gamer,” “winner,” and, the highest of compliments, the axiomatic “Baseball Player” based on a string of achievements when the outcome of the game was in doubt. The reasons for winning and losing went beyond skill and moved toward virtue. The good guys win. Losing means a lack of desire or strength of will.

We create these narratives from the outside in sports in order to give meaning and order to our lives. Good things happened to the grasshopper because he was industrious, George Washington because he was honest, and David Eckstein because he tried so hard. Cues on how to act in our daily lives can be taken from a fable, history, or a diminutive middle infielder. Stories make morals easily digestible.

But, in business, objective truth is more useful than compelling stories. Are some people or teams just destined to fail? Via moral defect? Or curse?

Statistical studies have not found evidence to support such claims. More or less, a big league baseball player is who he is regardless of the game situation.

This is not to say, however, that clutch, as a concept, does not exist in baseball. It does. Clutch is just sportsy talk for stress. Baseball players are human beings. Human beings feel stress, and stress does have real, actual, measurable effects on people in a whole host of ways.

The statisticians who found a lack of “clutchiness” in major league baseball weren’t nerds sitting in their mother’s basements unable to recognize basic human emotions. They were men who stumbled onto something altogether more fascinating; a seismic shift in how we ought to internalize the narrative of character in major league baseball.

What they, and this subject has been studied from every conceivable angle, discovered was a lack of evidence for a discrepancy in clutch ability between big leaguers. Clutch, as a concept, is a zero-sum game. If player-X is clutch, it means player-Y is not. For someone to win, another must lose. In attempting to measure clutch ability the only way is to look for the relative clutch ability of competing players. The real finding of these studies is that all big league players have the ability to handle stress, roughly, equally well.

Coming through in the clutch isn’t the figment of an overactive storyteller’s mind; it’s a basic requirement for making the big leagues. Certain players don’t succeed because they’re able to focus on the task at hand, not dwell on past misfortune, and manage stress. Games are won because of skill. But, that strength of character is a prerequisite to play the game at all.

That’s a prerequisite Anthony Rizzo certainly meets. Drafted in the sixth round of the 2007 Major League Player Draft out of the same Florida high school that gave the world three-fifths of the utterly mediocre pop-punk band New Found Glory as well as Mrs. Adam Sandler (isn’t Wikipedia cool?), Rizzo signed an above-slot deal and was set to stroll down easy street. With youth, wealth, and skill Rizzo’s life was one great multitudes of men would envy, until his diagnosis.

In May 2008, Rizzo was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. All of a sudden, the fact that he was hitting .373 as an 18-year-old in the Sally League didn’t matter so much. Rizzo was a sick young man. Fortunately, his lymphoma responded well to chemotherapy. If there’s such a thing as a cancer you’d want to have, Hodgkin’s isn’t a terrible choice. The long-term prognosis is generally good if, as is always the case, it’s caught early. Yet being face-to-face with ‘optimistic’ numbers like an 83.9 percent five-year survival rate has a tendency to make one focus on the 16.1 percent who don’t make it.

Rizzo went into the 2008 baseball season as another young, talented kid focused on making the big leagues. He ended 2008 as a young, talented kid focused on survival. He entered the 2009 as a man with perspective on life. Ironically, that new perspective, earned threw trial, left him with one of the prerequisites for achieving his goal. After a cancer diagnosis, stepping in as the tying run seems less stressful.

*****

A Sunday, August 5th game pitted the Chicago Cubs against the resurgent Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cubbies, entering the afternoon tilt in Chavez Ravine looking to avoid a series sweep, would send to the mound 29-year-old journeyman Justin Germano against the Dodgers’ Joe Blanton. Each hurler making his first start for a new team.

Rizzo kicked off the scoring by singling in David DeJesus with one out in the first. Both pitchers acquitted themselves well in their team debuts by pitching into, Blanton out of, the sixth inning and allowing just two earned runs.

Though the true difference in talent level between the two starters might be smaller than your initial gut reaction, the two starters symbolize their respective team’s trajectories. Blanton was purchased from the struggling Philadelphia Phillies to bolster the back end of the Dodgers’ pitching staff as they prepare for a playoff run against their longtime intrastate rivals, the San Francisco Giants. Germano was purchased from the struggling Boston Red Sox in order to fill the vacant roster spot of recently traded All-Star, Ryan Dempster. One man - a big league veteran looking to help his team into the playoffs, the other - a career minor leaguer just happy to get another shot as his team wallows 20 games out of first place.

Rizzo would contribute again as his seventh inning sacrifice fly cut the Dodgers lead 3-4. The teams would trade blows until the ninth when Rizzo, the face of the Cubs’ future hopes, stepped in the batter’s box against Dodgers’ closer Kenly Jansen, who is a six-foot-five 260 pound behemoth with a career strikeout mark of 14.7 per nine innings. To put that number in perspective, Randy Johnson struck out 13.4 batters in 2001, which is the all-time single season mark for a starter. Jansen is over a full whiff a game better than The Big Unit in the best strikeout season ever for a starter. Jansen’s 2011 mark of 16.1 K/9 is the second best ever for any pitcher with at least 50 innings. The only one better? Aroldis Chapman, this year!

Anyway, the point is Rizzo was facing a really tough pitcher and baseball is cool – Jansen possesses the type of dominant, electric arm that minor leaguers just don’t get to face. Rizzo smashed a Jansen fastball into the right field seats of Dodger Stadium tying the game and giving Cub fans hope that their future promise may lead to present success.

Unfortunately for the Cubs, that feeling wouldn’t last past the bottom of the inning as Hanley Ramirez, himself a former franchise player nabbed by the Dodgers’ to fortify the left side of their infield, knocked home super star Matt Kemp. Los Angeles wins. Chicago loses. Two clubs on divergent paths towards the same goal, only Los Angeles is much closer to the goal than the loveable Cubs.

Despite a season filled with disappointment, even by Cubs’ standards, that particular Sunday game was the most highly anticipated since the perpetual optimism of Opening Day. The reason had little to do with their storied opponent in the middle of an enviable season or the Cub debut of Germano. It was, instead, the debut of two other Cubs. Brett Jackson and Joshua Vitters each had their contracts purchased and were dispatched from Triple-A Iowa to an entirely different world. Donning the road grays for the first time, Jackson and Vitters represented the arrival of a new step in the Cubs’ rebuilding process.

Jackson, the Cubs first round draft pick in 2009 out of Cal, is a supreme athlete. A center fielder with speed to burn, he covers the alleys with grace and possesses formidable arm strength. A little loop with his hands during his loading phase adds some length to his swing. While he possesses above-average power for a center fielder, that power often comes at the expense of contact.

Jackson was boasting a very solid 10.1 percent walk rate at the time of his call-up. Among everyday center fielders, only Dexter Fowler, Austin Jackson, and Curtis Granderson have walked more often than Jackson’s Triple-A rate, and that number was actually his lowest mark since his first full pro season. Even though he’s not without his flaws, Jackson’s combination of defense, power and patience gives Cubs fans enough reason to believe that he can be part of the solution moving forward.

While the concern about Jackson’s future stems from doubt about his hit tool, hitting has always come easy for Vitters. Perhaps, it’s been too easy. The strapping third baseman has always had a Kate Upton-like beautiful right-handed swing. With explosive wrists, strong hands, hip rotation, balance, his swing gives him the ability to seemingly hit any and everything. Unfortunately, he knows this, so he tries to hit everything. That gorgeous swing got him taken number three overall in the 2007 draft, but his lack of patience sent his prospect stock tumbling like the Facebook IPO.

The 2012 season has been a sort of a bounce back for Vitters. The 6.6 percent walk rate he posted for the Iowa Cubs was the highest of any minor league stop in which he’s had at least 100 plate appearances, and his .304/.356/.513 slash line meant he created runs at a clip nearly 20 percent better than the average Triple-A hitter. His improvement could hardly have come at a better time.

Ian Stewart, 27, was brought over in the offseason to man the hot corner for the Cubs. Stewart was abysmal in 2011, hitting .156/.243/.221, but Chicago hoped that an offseason to recover from nagging wrist issues and a return to normal luck – he hit only .224 on balls in play in 2011 which was an unsustainably low mark and nearly 70 points off his career BABIP – would bring a return to his form when he had three year run as a solid everyday player for the Colorado Rockies from ages 23-25.

Stewart did improve on his 2011, but only in the way that a dead cat will bounce when it falls from a great height. Surgery on his ailing wrist will likely sideline him for much of the remaining season. Enter Vitters, as Chicago was in desperate need of help at third base. There are holes in his game, his ultra-aggressive style and the fact that he’s unlikely to have any great shakes defensively, but he represents something that the Cubs didn’t have much of on their big-league roster: hope for the future.

Second baseman Darwin Barney is a fan favorite but, at 26, would be approaching 30 years-old by the time the Cubs could reasonably field a competitive team. Age tends not to be kind to single hitters like Barney. First baseman and occasional right fielder Bryan LaHair (Spanish for “the hair”) represented Chicago in the All-Star game, but batting .374 on balls in play while striking out one-third of the time is not a recipe for future success. Before the arrival of Jackson and Vitters, the only two everyday players you could make the case would still be playing for a contending Cubs team three-to-five years down the line were Starlin Castro and Rizzo.

Castro’s 2012 season has yet to build on his remarkable 2011, when he became just the third shortstop and tenth player overall in big league history to record 200 or more hits before his age-22 season. Improvements on defense have helped offset a 32-point drop in batting average and have maintained Castro’s status as one of the game’s premier young shortstops despite occasional bouts of petulance. He’s never likely to walk much and might not ever win a Gold Glove, but Castro is already one of the best pure hitters at his position and has power that belies his lithe frame. While he could settle in the “just pretty good” camp, Castro at least has the ability to be someone you build around long-term.

So does Anthony Rizzo. One of the first moves of the new Theo Epstein-lead front office, acquiring Rizzo for fire-baller Andrew Cashner showed an inspiring ability to manage a club’s assets. Swapping a likely reliever for a potential middle-of-the-order everyday player is a pretty easy decision, if you have faith in the player. The move from San Diego to Chicago’s North Side marked the third organization Rizzo has played for in his brief professional tenure and the third time that Cubs General Manager Jed Hoyer was a key front office decision maker for Rizzo’s team. It’s safe to say, after acquiring Rizzo for the third time, that Hoyer has faith in him as a baseball player and a person.

Baseball is a game only played by those who can overcome failure. The Chicago Cubs hope that Anthony Rizzo and his new teammates can finally help them overcome a century of disappointment.

 

Lincoln Hamilton is a Senior Writer for Big Leagues Monthly| Magazine, he is also a Senior Scout for Project Prospect.