More on Reyes

As I understand it, the common gripe against Reyes' tactics last Wednesday are that "batting titles should be reserved for heroes, not cowards," and that bunting for a base hit his first time up and then taking himself out of the game in order to (in all probability) beat Ryan Braun for the batting championship. So, some problems with this.


First of all, I'm not much of a fan of the word "coward," but if we wanted some kind of operational definition of cowardice it would need to involve fear. You could say, for instance, that a player who shied away from the outfield fence in the World Series and thereby failed to catch a fly ball and cost their team the Series had been, at least somewhat, cowardly, in being too afraid of the physical harm attendant to crashing into the wall. Or that a pitcher who pathologically "nibbled" around the edge of the strike zone when there were runners in scoring position, leading to lots of walks and lots of runs allowed, was cowardly because they were scared to throw a ball that was even remotely hittable.

But not all fear is cowardace. We disapprove of the outfielder and the pitcher in the above paragraph because, by giving in to their fears, they hurt their team's chances at winning. There are plenty of times when one acts based on rational, baseball-related fears to improve the team's winning percentage. A medium-level base stealer is at first base in the ninth inning and two outs, his team down by one run, but it's Pudge Rodriguez behind the plate, so even though it would be very helpful for the team if he could steal second, he doesn't because he's afraid (rightly) that he'd be thrown out and end the game. Good for him. Or, there are runners on second and third and one out in the ninth and Albert Pujols coming up, his team down by one run. The relief pitcher, (rightly) scared that Pujols would be very likely to get a hit, or at least put the ball in play so that his team scored the tying run, walks him intentionally. Good for him. That's not cowardice, that's reasonable caution.

Cowardice, in other words, can only be reasonably defined in the sports world as a state of mind in which fear of something, either failure or pain or something else, prevents you from trying your best to win. Trying to win, but using caution and strategy instead of just saying "well, every plate appearance I take (or every batter I face) I'll try my hardest to achieve a good result, roll those dice, and hope that I win instead of the other guy" is not cowardice. Managers use strategy all the time, which doesn't make them cowards. If a golfer has a big lead on the last nine holes of a tournament, they will often take a more conservative approach, just trying to hit fairways and greens and avoid bogeys, but not particularly trying for more birdies. Doesn't make them a coward. In timed team sports, teams with large leads late will often just run out the clock, rather than trying to add to their lead and allow the other team the infinitesimal chance of a turnover and a comeback. Doesn't make them cowards. Similarly, Reyes chose to use a bit of strategy to win the batting title. He didn't like the odds that he would make too many outs during the rest of the game as well as he liked the odds that Braun wouldn't go 3-4. By getting 180 hits in his first 536 at-bats, he earned the right to make that choice.

(As an aside, yeah, maybe by not taking three more at-bats he lowered the team's odds of getting 77 wins on the year rather than 76, but they did win the game anyway, he may have been exhausted by that point, and the 77th win of the year is meaningless, especially compared to a batting title.)

Secondly, and most passionately, the entire terms of this debate are f@cked up. "Batting titles should be reserved for heroes, not cowards." That suggests that someone like Ted Williams, who famously went 6-8 in a doubleheader on the last day of the season to raise his average from .3996 to .406, is a Hero, while Reyes is a Coward. I've already mentioned that I have a problem with the word Coward. But the idea that being all Macho in the William-esque fashion is being Heroic is an insult to actual heroes. The people of all races who, throughout the South during the civil rights movement, risked their social standing, their livelihoods, their lives, and those of their families to help topple institutional racism, were heroes. The people who risked/sacrificed their lives on September 11th to try and save other people's, were heroes. Someone who disdains strategies that would raise their odds of winning a batting title, is not a hero.

Maybe we can define a kind of "trivial hero," like the journeyman utility infielder who hits a two-out, two-strike game-tying home run in Game 7 of the World Series. We would normally refer to that person as the "hero of the World Series." But that just means that, under pressure, they performed spectacularly well and contributed tremendously to their cause. (In case you're wondering, the last three days of the season with a batting title on the line, Jose Reyes went 7 for 11 with a double, two stolen bases, three runs scored, four driven in, a sacrifice fly, and, oh yeah, two home runs. Kind of an inspired performance under pressure, huh?) But that's a very specific use of the word "hero." In particular, it does not have any particular moral connotations, just that someone performed impressively/clutchly. Words like "hero" and "coward" are used in this context to signal that the person talking doesn't actually have an ethical argument to make, but they still want to pontificate about how contemptible someone else's actions were. Reyes chose to use a somewhat cautious strategy in his pursuit of the batting title, which both had a very high probability of working and did, in fact, work. He was trying, among other things, to do something for his team. It is what it is, people.

Finally, a word about the psychology of the individual Mets fan, or, in other words, what they're like.* I can't speak about what's going on in the brain of anyone who isn't a Mets fan, except that people who aren't Mets fans always seem to have a desire to dislike Reyes, maybe because he kicks their asses routinely. But I have a feeling that approximately 0% of the anger coming from Mets fans is about the incident on Wednesday, and approximately 100% of it is anger and frustration about the fact that Jose is quite possibly going to leave the Mets this offseason. Here's a thought experiment to demonstrate this: if Reyes were already under contract for next year, would any Mets fan have been objecting to any of this? Emphatically not. The only real problem for Mets fans is that that was, or might have been, Reyes' last action as a New York Met. We all wanted to see him hit one more triple into the right-center gap, or swipe another base, or dance off third trying to draw a balk just one more time. One more special Reyes defensive play, or one more flash of his sneaky power. Something. Not that we weren't happy to see him bunt for a hit, we were, but seriously, that's what he's leaving us with? A bunt single, followed by a pinch-runner before anyone had figured out what was going on? That can't be it, right?

I sympathize. I was pissed when it happened, because I had made plans to smuggle my computer into Astronomy class to watch his last at-bat as a Met, plans that ended up being moot. But what's really going on here is that we don't want him to leave us. Not like this, not now. Not like anything, not ever. And if he doesn't leave us, at least not now and not like this, then all will be forgiven and, especially, forgotten. Everything except the batting title, the two home runs he hit on Tuesday, and the spectacular, MVP-caliber (modulo some injuries) season he turned in in 2011. And the tremendous play we would be able to expect from him in 2012, and thereafter. So when a Mets fan calls in to WFAN to criticize Reyes, they're not criticizing his decision to bunt for a base hit, or his decision to come out of the game. They're criticizing the fact that he might, shortly, decide to leave the New York Mets. That's all, and that's enough.