Caricature Oversaturation

So the local paper, the Sacramento Bee, loves to pretend like they're in the know more than they are. While Nick Peters, recently nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame, is a reporter in the traditional sense, the Sports section offers a cavalcade of commentary that stretches from able to laughable. There's a decided Giants slant--I challenge anyone to counter that assessment--and hence the coverage of the just-as-local Oakland Athletics suffers. But, desperate to cover up this lack of knowledge, the Sacramento Bee sports journalists employ the wildly exciting technique of outdated caricature to convey the idea that they care more about the A's than, you know, the presence of the River Cats suggests they should. Take note of a line from Ailene Voisin's column today about the consequences of the Danny Haren and Nick Swisher trades:

Even Beane has changed. The longtime A's executive spends more time chatting with doctors than calculating his beloved on-base statistics. He has become a master of late-night thievery, having poached excessively from all of his A's farm teams and accounting for an absurd 180 moves alone with the River Cats.

What we see here is an attempt to paint Billy Beane as something beyond his role as MLB GM, and an antiquated image of Beane as the Moneyball stochastic hero that Michael Lewis wove. While it's admirable that the Bee staff has pop-culture caliber knowledge about what amounts to a two-sentence summary of Lewis' bestseller, it serves no purpose beside pure caricature, building a public persona about Beane that doesn't necessarily fit. It just seems lazy to me, because there's no way that Voisin is attempting to glorify Beane; if she and her fellow writers did, they would likely have a better command of sabermetrics, even in the most basics forms, which their fascination with wins, losses, and RBIs--as well as the persistent OBP Billy Beane references--suggests they don't.

Putting the lazy characterization aside for a moment, then, we can also take note of a bitter stab at the A's for "poaching excessively" from the AAA champion River Cats, only to bring up the minor league stars for a "meaningless" end of the MLB season. While this sort of blatant fandom is, at its most optimistic, understandable, it completely misses both the point of AAA baseball's existence and the players' (Daric Barton, Jerry Blevins, etc.) own interests. In the first regard, minor league baseball exists for the betterment of the MLB franchises; nice as it is that the River Cats typically excel in the standings, winning AAA championship banners does little more than decorate Raley Field. As for the latter, if you're Barton or Blevins, what do you prefer: sticking around for a meaningless minor league championship game in Oklahoma City, or collecting Major League pension time and making your Major League debut? If even one minor leaguer would pick the former, then the drug testing policies in MiLB aren't sufficient.