So a couple of months ago, I entered the BP Idol competition at Baseball Prospectus.
You can see how things are going with that here. My entry was deemed not good enough to make it to the final 10 and after actually reading the final 10, I saw precisely why.
That said, I might as well publish it somewhere, so here goes. This was my BP Idol entry. All stats are as of late April.
Taking BP Idol As Literally As PossibleBy Greg Salvatore
When I first saw “BP Idol” my mind didn’t immediately go to a gig at Baseball Prospectus. It jogged up memories of running in the left-field bleacher area at Chase Field (nee Bank One Ballpark) in the fall of my sophomore year at Arizona State, trying to catch some of Alex Cabrera’s batting practice bombs and marveling at the unthinkable trajectory of the ones too deep to track down.
Never has a player who only had a handful of games in the Major Leagues left such an impression on me. Years later, I was glad to see he was able to at least turn his prodigious batting practice power into a Japanese home run record.
So as Carl Spackler might say, he has that going for him, which is nice.
Alex Cabrera is definitely
my BP Idol. He is The Hives of baseball. I bet sometime around September 2000, I was standing in those left-field bleachers thinking, “Man, Alex Cabrera is going to be a monster,” and “‘I Hate To Say I Told You So’ is going to be the new rock superanthem.” I wasn’t batting for a very high average in 2000, as my weak grades and sparse dating record could confirm, and while I’m paraphrasing the quotes, I certainly did swing and miss on both of those topics.
Oh, but to compare them to each other? Cabrera flamed out quickly in America, as 28-year-old positionless career minor leaguers are wont to do, and The Hives had
Veni Vidi Vicious, but never quite got worldwide fame and fortune, and, well, I think the comparison holds up. So it got me wondering what some other baseball players might be if they were rock bands. And then I thought this comparison stuff was a hackneyed idea. And then I didn’t care and wrote it anyway.
Carlos Beltran — Radiohead
1999 R.O.Y., four All-Star Games, never led the league in any offensive stat in a single season
Beltran not only does everything on a baseball field, he does everything
well. He is probably the smoothest, most technically sound all-around player in baseball. He’ll make the All-Star team, he’ll go early in your fantasy draft and he’s generally accepted as terrific. Years from now, we’ll all look back on Beltran as an outstanding baseball player. But if you ask 100 layman baseball fans about Beltran, you’re guaranteed to get more than a few who just do not understand what all of the hullabaloo is about. They wouldn’t put him in their top 10, and don’t quite understand why others do.
Radiohead — as brilliant as fans and critics will argue they are — has never had a No. 1 song on any Billboard chart, topping out at No. 2 on the Modern Rock Tracks list with “Creep.” Only one other tune,
Kid A’s “Optimistic” cracked the Top 10, reaching No. 10 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2000.
Manny Ramirez — The Black CrowesNine top-10 MVP finishes, 510 career home runs, many crazy (even if apocryphal) stories
His curious, dysfunctional ways could make him Oasis, but as good as Oasis is or was, there’s nothing revolutionary about their sound. And Manny is really unlike any other player (or person) we’ve ever seen. So even though Oasis has sold considerably more records worldwide, we’ll go with the Brits’ “Tour of Brotherly Love” mates, who have the two distinctions of being quite successful and coolly unique. They made a soulful rock harmonica hip even before Blues Traveler and they pulled out a gospel choir on both “Remedy” and “Soul Singing.”
The Black Crowes have had six songs reach No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and 17 in the top 10.
Southern Harmony And The Musical Companion hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1992, and Shake Your Money Maker hit No. 4 in 1991. They’ve been a consistent and controversial force for almost 20 years.
Alex Rodriguez — Coldplay11th best slugging percentage all-time, 12th most home runs all time, richest player in historyRodriguez is undeniably amazing. He’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer and almost certainly the best player many of us have ever seen. A-Rod has led the league in home runs five times, slugging four times, OPS and adjusted OPS twice. He’s been to 12 All-Star Games, collected three MVPs and a pair of gold gloves. And while few people may claim to be A-Rod fans, they’re still voting him into the All-Star Game every year.
Coldplay plays to sold-out arenas all around the world. They’ve had seven top-10 tracks. Two of their albums have hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and another cracked the top 5. Frontman Chris Martin even made a very funny appearance on the HBO show
Extras. They’re undeniably great at what they do, yet have an ability to be eminently dislikable at the same time. I’d venture to say the reason you’d meet more fans of Coldplay than A-Rod is because Coldplay doesn’t play for the Yankees.
Travis Hafner — The Shins2004-2007 – 127 home runs, 155 OPS +, twice led MLB in OPS+Hafner was a fairly old rookie when he made his big-league debut two months after turning 25 in 2002. When he finally got a chance to play every day in 2004, he exploded, leading the league with a 162 adjusted OPS. By 2006, Hafner was possibly the best hitter in the American League, leading the circuit in slugging, OPS and adjusted OPS, and had a second-consecutive top-10 MVP finish (yet, somewhat amazingly, has never been to an All-Star Game).
The Shins dropped
Oh, Inverted World in June of 2001, and followed it up with the slightly more successful
Chutes Too Narrow in 2003. But the band never blew up until the Oh, Inverted World songs “Caring is Creepy” and “New Slang” appeared in the 2004 film
Garden State (and Natalie Portman name-dropped the band, telling us that “Caring is Creepy” would, “change your life, I swear”). By 2007, the album
Wincing the Night Away peaked at the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200, the single “Phantom Limb” reached No. 16 on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Chris Carpenter — The Killers2005: 21-5, 2.83 ERA, won N.L. Cy Young Award, started the All-Star GameThough Carpenter isn’t going to end up in Cooperstown, he was fantastic from 2004-06, with a 51-18 record, a 3.10 ERA, two All-Star Games and a Cy Young Award. The year after injury kept the New Hampshire native from pitching in his hometown World Series against Boston in 2004, he was a machine, winning the Cy Young and picking up his only top-10 MVP finish.
The Killers were equally huge at the time, as 2004’s
Hot Fuss went multi-platinum with five Grammy nominations over the same three-year span that Carpenter dominated, and three top-10 songs on the 2005 Modern Rock Tracks charts. The Killers may wind up being a very successful but otherwise forgettable act in the history of rock, but you’ll never be able to deny that 2005 was the year of The Killers, and Carpenter.
Carlos Quentin — Kings of Leon2007: .298 OBP, .647 OPS, 63 OPS +2008: .394 OBP, .965 OPS, 148 OPS+Quentin’s name was one that baseball fans had heard for quite some time, even before his breakout season in 2008. He had a very successful college career at Stanford, was a first-round pick, was Baseball America’s No. 1 ranked D-backs prospect in 2005 and No. 3 in 2006, and homered in his first big league game. But then he had a false start in his first full season in Arizona. He hurt his shoulder in spring training, posted a .647 OPS in 229 at-bats in 2007 and was traded in the offseason. The next year, he hit 36 home runs, appeared in the All-Star Game, and finished fifth in MVP voting. The hype was warranted, it’s just that this flower bloomed a little slower than people expected.
Kings of Leon has been well known in the industry for years. They’ve played the Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals, yet five years after their debut album they still didn’t have even a single hit song. The British magazine
NME spent most of their review of the 2007 album
Because of the Times wondering where all the band’s would-be success was, closing with “As it stands, ‘
Because Of The Times’ cements Kings Of Leon as one of the great American bands of our times.” But the album didn’t sell and none of its songs charted. But then they dropped
Only By The Night in 2008. Out since September, it’s already gone platinum many times over and they’ve had two songs, “Use Somebody” and “Sex On Fire” reach No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. It turns out all that Kings of Leon hype was legit after all.
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