What is more self-aggrandizing in baseball? Bat flips or retirement tours?

One of the cool things about having a lot of baseball fan Facebook friends is being able to test out ideas quickly. Like my theory of baseball celebrations. I had a hunch that if you did a Venn diagram of MLB fans who disliked Jose Bautista's bat flip and the like, and who say things like "Act like you've been there before," there would be very little overlap.

Generally speaking, the types of people who dislike individual in-game celebrations such as flamboyant home run trots and closers going nuts at the end of the game say things like "Act like you've been there before." (But many of those players haven't been there before, like Joey Bats finally making the playoffs after a long career. Thus, their happiness.) and "Play the game the right way." (Although left unsaid is who gets to define what the "right way" is.) 

                   

These comments mean: Don't show any emotion. Don't draw attention to yourself. Be as sober as a church mouse. (In case you haven't figured it out already, I am NOT in this category!  I like players being human and showing human emotions! Unless it involves celebrations against the Yankees, and then I'm totally opposed. Heh!)

Anyhow, my theory (really, a hunch at first) was that these traditionalists would be the kinds of people who would be fans of players who have had long enough careers to do retirement ceremonies. It seemed to me that somebody who would be excited over, say, Derek Jeter's retirement tour, would be the type of person who liked Jeter because he Played the Game the Right Way. On the other hand, those of us, like myself, who like the spontaneous show of emotions in the game may not like the way that these retirement tours have been so formalized and commodified. 

As I wrote in this space (and got tons of grief for) in 2014, I was sick of Jeter's retirement tour by the All-Star Break, And my disdain for it only grew as it got even more over the top over the year.

We recently had a funny discussion on Facebook about it, over the fact that Mark, the president of my running club, who also works as a background actor, was in one of the Jeter commercials. When Josh, another background actor and our club's publicity director, told me that, I asked if El Presidente was in the Gatorade "My Way" ad. Josh said that wasn't the ad, and described it this way: "There was another commercial that showed [Jeter] even more reverent if you could believe that." As soon as I heard that description, I immediately knew he was talking about the Nike "Re2pect" commerical. So if you thought those were real fans in the stands, I've got news for you: they were actors, and at least one of them -- our friend Mark -- is a Mets fan! Heh.

Anyhow, that is basically what I found on Facebook -- that people who like the one thing generally don't like the other, and vice versa. And, at any rate, very few Yankee fans want to cheer for David Ortiz in his last game at Yankee Stadium. I predict that Ortiz will face a bigger public backlash on his tour, especially if either he or the Sox are doing poorly.

The thing of it is, these retirement tours not only about worshiping a particular player, but they also can hurt team goals in a way that a bat flip never did. If Joe Girardi had been able to move Jeter down the lineup, would they have made the playoffs? Maybe so. But instead, the team was all about a season2watch, not a team2watch.

The two retirements I admire the most are Paul O'Neill's and Mike Mussina's. Savvy Yankee fans serenaded O'Neill in Game 5 of the 2001 World Series (even Red Sox fan Sully from Sully Baseball was impressed by that.) And Mussina, of course, decided it would be his last year, left it all on the field, won 20 games, and then announced his retirement.

What's the showbiz adage? Always leave them wanting more? These retirement tours do the opposite. They make you sick of the player. And they've become pretty joyless affairs over time. The last truly "wow" gift was Rob Gardenhire saving Twins' bats broken from hitting off Mariano Rivera, and having them made into a rocking chair. After that, the gifts have become boring, as have the ceremonies in each city. And I'm sure I will rolling my eyes all year at Ortiz's farewell. Oy.

Where do you stand on this issue? Tell us about it!

Mike Mussina says Joe Torre has some explaining to do

When I was on the subway the other day, I heard a young teenage boy discussing Joe Torre's "The Yankee Years" with his mother. The kid called Torre a "snitch."

In an appearance on the Michael Kay Show yesterday, David Wells called his old manager "a punk" and threatened to punch him.

Is that going to be Torre's legacy now? From Joey Four Rings to Torre the Snitch? Hope he enjoys all that money he's getting from trashing the clubhouse code.

Ian O'Connor, who has written very critically about Alex Rodriguez in the past, said that Torre had even more negative things to say about A-Rod:

Torre co-authored a book that, among many other things, reveals that Rodriguez was known as "A-Fraud" in his own clubhouse.

Torre neglected to mention that he would call A-Rod a five-letter word far more degrading than "fraud" before fellow members of the Yankee family.

Some leader of men, eh?

I have to say, I'm really enjoying reading all the revelations of the real Joe Torre coming out this week. It's so delicious to see the curtain revealed to show what a phony St. Joe really is.

Heck, even Mike Mussina, who cooperated with the book, is ripping Joe for violating the code.

“Joe has started something that a lot of people are going to have to answer to,” Mussina told the Bergen Record's Bob Klapisch. “Joe’s going to have to answer to it too, but it won’t be as bad for him because he’s with the Dodgers now. But it’s going to be bad for the guys he left behind.”

Mussina also told Klapisch:

“As a ballplayer you need to know who you have to watch out for and who you can trust. First and foremost, you should be able to trust your manager.

“I mean, people knew that Brown was out there, and that Randy was ornery all the time. And Pavano is whoever he is. But if you’re their manager, you can’t go out and write about them like that."

Incidentally, I highly recommend checking out the entire Klapisch column - it's a good read.

I don't think Mussina violated the clubhouse code with his own quotes in the book - he just did his usual sardonic and snippy observations - but I do wonder why he cooperated with it at all. Maybe it was to defend the non-rings guys.

Michael Kay has been flipping out all week about what Moose said in the book about Mariano Rivera. I think what Mussina was trying to say, in a very inept way, is that if Mo had held on to get the save in 2004, that we would have a very different opinion of those years. But the post-2000 guys are the ones always get the blame for the playoff failures.

When asked about what Mussina said, Jeff Nelson said on MLB Network the old adage about how you win as a team, and lose as a team. And he's right.

But did Torre believe that? Given the way he's acted over the years, and the way he negatively described every player who wasn't this guy, I don't think so.

So much for Joe being able to keep all those egos at bay. A good manager would have never let all the "us vs. them" stuff happen on his own team. But Joe didn't just allow this stuff to go on - he encouraged it, fed off of it, and now has made money writing about it. Classy!

What do you think? Leave us a comment!