Stackhouse’s 10 Weekend Thoughts
1 – SWAYMAN – I’ve been watching the Jeremy Swayman soap opera unfold with great interest as both he and the Bruins seem pitted in to hard line positions in the contract dispute and the Bruins are going to roll the dice on Joonas Korpisalo as their number one goalie and Jiri Patera as the back up until they can settle the Swayman matter. Swayman is butt hurt over an arbitration case last year when Boston’s management made the case that Swayman hadn’t enjoyed any playoff success in arguing to pay him less than he wanted prior to last season. The truth hurts. Swayman was ordinary in his brief playoff work up until this past Spring. If I was in charge of the Bruins, I’d make a trade for John Gibson, who is set to make $6.4-million per year for each of the next three seasons, and I’d tell Swayman to not waste time sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring. He can sit and rot. No contract, no trade. He can sit. Then in the offseason, he can take a $5-million a year offer or sit again. The reality is the Ducks would love to get rid of Gibson so the cost won’t be great and the salary would be less than you’d have to pay Swayman and the difference in caliber between the two is marginal. Under Boston’s system, Gibson would be plenty good enough.
2 – NHL PRESEASON – While I’ve never been one to subscribe to overreactions in hockey, I have to point out that when it comes to the NHL preseason, much of it is a total waste of time and an unnecessary injury risk for star players. Everyone arrives in camp in peak physical condition and shouldn’t need more than 1-2 games to get the feel back. You can wait until the regular season actually starts to do all of this. As it is, you see teams who will sit players an extra game or an extra week to nurse a nagging injury and that is during a schedule that counts in the standings but yet it’s imperative to play valuable players in games that don’t count? Patrik Laine and Drew Doughty may miss the entire year because of injuries incurred during pointless games and yet you hear teams comment during the regular season that they don’t want to ‘rush’ a player back even though there is way more on the line.
3 – LOPSIDED ROSTERS – Here’s another thing about the preseason that makes it even more insane to risk injuries: You get these games where the home team dresses a lineup that is close to the regular roster and the away team brings a minor league team because even though it’s crucial to play top players to get them in shape, you don’t want to put extra strain on their bodies by making them fly a couple of hours to suit up. The games end up lopsided and, again, as we saw in the Laine injury you have players who have no business being on the ice with superstars. NHL teams know what their rosters are going to be, aside from the last 2-3 spots, even before camp begins. Shorten the preseason to 3 games. Increase the roster size for the first month to 26-27 players so teams can work some different players in and out of the lineup and then reduce it to 22 on November 1st. It doesn’t need to be rocket science. For example, future Winnipeg Jets Braden Yager and Colby Barlow are headed back to junior no matter what anyways, so if you want to see them in action against true NHLers just carry them into the regular season for 2 weeks and give them 3-4 games experience in games that matter.
4 – PETE ROSE – Some of the tributes I’ve seen from baseball people praising Pete Rose ring hollow to me. Rose was persona non grata through Major League Baseball for the last thirty-five years and the people who, quietly, supported him had zero courage to step up and pressure the stiffs who run the sport to admit him into the Hall of Fame. Rose admitted to betting on games but I feel like he never ever would have fixed a loss or done anything that would have made the Reds less competitive. Rose’s desire to win was far too great. Furthermore, Major League Baseball has taken less of a stance on players like Marcel Ozuna and Aroldis Chapman. In Ozuna’s case, witnesses saw him strangling his wife while Chapman choked his girlfriend and then left the house and returned with a handgun and fired eight shots into the home. For that he got 30 games. But Rose got life even after acknowledging his wrongdoing and begging for reinstatement. Today, you can go to a Reds game and there is a sports book right in the stadium. What the sport did to him was and remains nothing short of gross and if, at some point, he gets admitted into the Hall posthumously that will be an even greater injustice because he absolutely should have been alive to enjoy and savor that well deserved moment.
5 – BAUER – Another notable Major League Baseball outcast is Trevor Bauer, who everyone says isn’t capable of pitching anymore because he’s been out of the Big Leagues for too long. Well, he just finished a pro season in Mexico where he went 10-and-0 with a 2.48-ERA and 120-strikeouts in 83-innings. While the Mexican independent league isn’t anything close to MLB, I think Bauer has shown enough to warrant a minimum salary from someone especially when you consider the Arizona Diamondbacks forked over $47-million for two years to watch Jordan Montgomery stink up the joint every five days and finish with a 6.23-ERA. Arizona’s owner even publicly admitted it was his team’s biggest mistake (signing Montgomery). It sparked Bauer to post on his social media that the D-Backs could have signed a Cy Young winner for league minimum. He’s not wrong and I’d bet my yearly salary he’d be better than Montgomery was.
6 – SNELL CHECKS OUT EARLY – Bauer, you can easily tell, has also come to appreciate the honor of being a Major League player. You can’t say the same for Blake Snell, who declined to take the mound for his final start of the year because his team was not in a playoff position and he wasn’t facing a team that had any playoff aspirations on the line. Snell had a strong finish to the year but he still only threw 104 innings overall and he has a player opt out in his contract for this offseason. Snell was cranky that nobody wanted to pay him upwards of $200-million so he settled on a 2-year contract with San Francisco and made $24-million this season. If he goes back on the market, my guess is that he’s going to be met with a similar situation as last year. It should be even worse than that for him and all other starting pitchers for that matter. You have actual playoff teams in MLB using ‘openers’ who make barely league minimum and it’s working so why do you need to pay Snell and Montgomery $20-million a year?
7 – PLAYER/COACH – A lot of videos have been popping up on my social media feeds showing some of Pete Rose’s more memorable moments as a Major League player. One of them was when he singled to left as a 44-year-old Player/Manager to take over top spot for career hits with 4192. I also saw a video this week of Connor McDavid throwing a tirade (intended to motivate his teammates) during an intermission of the Oilers’ Stanley Cup final series against Florida and it got me to wondering if the Player/Coach dual role that we don’t ever see anymore in pro sports would be something that would have some success if a team wanted to bring it back. Young athletes tend to respect and give more credibility to those who are still capable of doing some of the things they, themselves, are doing and I just wonder if Justin Verlander would be a good manager while also staying on the roster as a starting pitcher every so often. There are other examples too where I think a player could be almost ready to pack it in, but may make a good coach (Nick Foligno, Justin Turner, Marc-Andre Fleury come immediately to mind).
8 – PLAYER ASSISTANCE – The NHL has announced Jack Campbell has entered the Player Assistance Program. It’s great that he’s getting help, but I wonder why the league makes such an announcement at all? Just say he’s injured with an upper body injury and will be out indefinitely rather than have every fan know that he’s dealing with demons. This used to be the case when the NHL used third-party rehabilitation programs. You’d be surprised how many players were not actually ‘injured’ 10-20 years ago.
9 – SPORTS DEATHS – It was a sad week in professional sports with Pete Rose passing away at the age of 83 and Dikembe Mutombo passing away at the age of 59 (brain cancer). Another sports figure who folks in western Manitoba certainly knew well, former CKX broadcaster Dean Jago, also passed away at the age of 60 (heart attack). I know that I’ve written a lot about premature deaths and a lot of you don’t like it for various reasons. Some of you think I’m nuts, some of you just don’t like to confront the new reality, and some of you just don’t like to discuss the topic at all. Here’s what I can tell you from a brief conversation with a funeral director at a local department store a number of weeks ago: I asked him if he has been busier over the last few years and he, quickly, said that while he hasn’t run numbers he can definitely say that people are dying at a younger age than they used to. A health worker, who I greatly respect but disagree with on a lot of viewpoints, feels that while we should have the technology to live longer we are also ingesting horrible food into our bodies and maybe we should look into that but here’s the truth – nobody is interested in any of this. You live until you die and that’s that.
10 – POLITICS – Finally, I will close on a political comment and while I’m not supposed to deviate from sports on here I’m going to do it this week because it’s election season and this comment is agnostic to Party anyways so I feel like nobody should take offense to it. As I watch what’s happening in the United States and as I see the campaign unfold in Saskatchewan I can’t help but won der why all of these goodies that are being promised by incumbent governments weren’t just passed into legislation a year or more ago. Parties in power should be working hard over their 4+ years to run on their history, not on a future that makes people skeptical about its intentions. If you need it spelled out for you, the governing Party in the US is considered liberal while the one in Saskatchewan is conservative so I’m not picking on a particular side. What I would say is that just about all of them have forgotten the job description of being in government – which is to serve the public not your political Party and the goal should be to make life better for those you serve rather than better for yourself. Think about that as you go to the polls in a number of weeks.
(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster)
