April 25, 2008
Youth Versus Experience
Via MLB Fanhouse, a great column by Doug Glanville on veterans stepping aside for younger players.
In theory, I had come to the Yankees ready to play ball "from Day One." The idea that my history didn't give me the benefit of the doubt was disconcerting. Because there was this younger kid, who played a little better than I did that spring and who would certainly be less expensive. I'd had a bad week, and he'd had a good week, and that made all the difference.
I understood that I was now entrenched on the other side of the bell curve. I was sliding downward into the "long in the tooth" spiked pit. My competition's relatively minimal major league experience had become more valuable, in a way, than my library of experience. Somehow I had missed the transition point in my career where my value to a team had intersected with the value of a new kid on the block.
Doug is very realistic about this, and even says for the good of the game vets should step aside when timeless players (like A-Rod) come along.
Posted by David Pinto at
12:24 PM
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I just want to say that I find Glanville's pieces shockingly good. He's maybe the best player writing about baseball since Brosnan and, in a different vein, Bouton.
I become more of a fan of Doug Glanville every time I read stuff from or about him. He's refreshingly honest.
from ivy50.com/blackHistory/story.aspx?sid=9/28/2006
Glanville was a true credit to UPenn...and enginneering
His devotion to academics, however, made scouts doubt his desire. One game, against Temple in the spring of 1991, crystallized their doubts. A number of scouts were at the game -- but Glanville wasn't. He was studying for finals. "I took a lot of heat for the Temple game," he now says.
It didn't end there. He was drafted in the first round by the Chicago Cubs, but contract negotiations were tinged by the perception that Glanville lacked the desire to play. "Doug needs to sit down and decide if he wants to play or not," Cubs scouting director Dick Balderson told Baseball America in 1991.