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I was standing around the batting cage last Monday, watching Cody Ransom swing. The ball was jumping off his bat. So I asked Astros minor league coordinator Tom Weidenbauer about him. “He’s got all the tools,” Weidy told me. “He’s got good power, pretty good speed and he’s got good hands and a good arm. But he still needs to become more consistent.”
This is a common thought. Players know how well they can play and want to play that way consisitently. But, the nature of the sport makes this nearly impossible to do. Every player has streaks and slumps.
A few minutes later, I talked to Jason Lane, who had just been demoted from Houston to Round Rock. “What are you working on?” I asked. “Nothing in particular,” he said. “I’m just enjoying playing every day. The way it was the last month in Houston, I didn’t play enough to get comfortable. If you only get two or three at bats a week, you start to lose your feel for the game. In fact, when I got down here and got on base a few times, it felt weird. Then I realized I hadn’t been on base in a couple of weeks.”
Jason had a disappointing season in 2006. So he went to winterball to get the feel back. He had a good winter season and performed well at spring training – a long stretch of consistently good work, but not during the major league season. On opening day, he was an important member of the Astros team and had a chance to play every day. Then he went into a slump, and became a pinch hitter and part time player.
On a weak team, Jason may have been allowed more time to “play through” his slump. But the Astros have been playoff contenders almost every year for the last decade and last year they fell barely short of that goal. If Jason had hit better in 2006, they may have made it to post season. Understandably, the Astros stopped starting him this year, and after a few weeks on the bench, sent him down.
Jason knows it’s not just him. It’s an irony that is built into the system. If you don’t play well, you sit. But if you sit too long, you often don’t play well when you finally get a chance. To get a starting job and keep it though a slump, you have to have shown enough consistency in the past to convince the decision makers that you will come out of your slump and get hot again.
“I can’t believe Jason’s had such a good attitude,” my broadcast partner Mike Capps said. “He’s always in a good mood and he’s been working hard.”
A lot of players are bitter when they get sent down. They complain about not getting a good enough chance. But Jason is more mature than the average player. He knows the system isn’t perfectly fair, and he accepts that fact.
To the average player who complains about not getting a good chance, I often feel like saying, “Your numbers reflect your contribution to the team. If you want to know what unfair is, get a real job, do it well, and then see how you feel when the owner of the business hires his son to be your boss. That can’t happen in baseball.” |
