Dick Allen Award: No apparent end to Cardinal dominance

The first month of a new season reveals the same general run of results for the Dick Allen Award. The St. Louis Cardinals captured the prize during their first series of the season and they still have not let it go.

Matt Carpenter is batting .379 with a 1.085 OPS as the St. Louis Cardinals, once again, have established their dominance for the Dick Allen Award (Johnmaxmena2/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

One of these seasons, perhaps, the St. Louis Cardinals won't all but own the Dick Allen Award. But that might not be this season.

We've been following this National League traveling prize, privately and otherwise, for five years now, and the Cardinals always hold it more than anyone else. It's got to be a measure of something. It does say this much: The Cardinals are one club that can win series after series after series. They've got a way of holding the Allen as if it had handles.

Look here, now. The Cardinals took the Aaron from the Chicago Cubs in a two-game split to begin the season, and they now have defended it six consecutive times. The most recent defense came this week, when the Cards won three of four against the Philadelphia Phillies in St. Louis.

After winning the Allen from the Cubs in a shortened series to start the season, the Cardinals defended it by winning two of three on the road against the Cincinnati Reds, then winning two of three from the Milwaukee Brewers in St. Louis, then beating the Reds three straight at home, then winning two of three on the road against the Washington Nationals, then winning two of three against the Brewers in Milwaukee.

The Cardinals have the best pitching anywhere right now, leading the National League with a 2.43 staff ERA. It might not last, but we'll see. The one starting pitcher who has proven he can do it all year in the NL, Adam Wainwright, now is expected to miss the remainder of this season after surgery on his left Achilles tendon.

There is no problem to this point with the St. Louis bullpen. While relievers across the NL are tossing a 3.52 ERA, St. Louis relievers are just a little more than half of that, 1.88, best mark in the league through April 28.

Cardinals closer Trevor Rosenthal still has control problems, walking four hitters in eight innings. But he has only allowed two hits, so his WHIP is an almost nothing 0.692.

The Cardinals also have some hitting going on, particularly outfielder Matt Holliday (.379 batting average, .985 OPS) and second baseman Matt Carpenter (.379, 1.085). Even with those performances, though, the Cardinals still were only eighth in the NL with 92 runs.

The Cardinals are putting the Allen on the line this weekend with three at home against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

2015 Dick Allen (National League) standings and results

Standings

                        W    L    P    T    G    D    A

St. Louis          15    6    7     1    19    6     6

Chicago            1     1    1     0     2     0     1

Milwaukee         2     4    2     0     0     0     0

Washington       1     2    1     0     0     0     0

Philadelphia       1     3    1     0     0     0     0

Cincinnati          1     5    2     0     0     0     0

W — Wins. L — Losses. P — Times played for title. T — Titles won. G — Number of games that team held title after winning it. D — Title defenses. A — Title defense attempts.

Results

St. Louis 1, Chicago 1 — April 5-8 at Chicago (St. Louis wins total runs tiebreaker, 3-2.)

St. Louis 2, Cincinnati 1 — April 10-12 at Cincinnati.

St. Louis 2, Milwaukee 1 — April 13-16 at St. Louis.

St. Louis 3, Cincinnati 0 — April 17-19 at St. Louis.

St. Louis 2, Washington 1 — April 21-23 at Washington.

St. Louis 2, Milwaukee 1 — April 24-26 at Milwaukee.

St. Louis 3, Philadelphia 1 — April 27-30 at St. Louis.

Haren hangs on with big start at Big A

Dodgers pitcher Dan Haren is a Los Angeles-area product who formerly pitched for the Angels. Haren returned to the Big A Wednesday night and shut down the Angels, helping the Dodgers to a 2-1 win and securing, for the time being, his place in the city team's starting rotation.

Pitching for the Dodgers, Dan Haren returned to his old haunts at Angel Stadium Wednesday night and actually looked something like this (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles area produces more Major League Baseball Players than any other region in the world. That's not a bulletin, of course. The population base is enormous and the weather is great.

A quick look at the player biographies on baseball-reference.com reveals that 185 players who have appeared in big league games this year were born in California, many more than any other state. Of those, 107 are natives of the Los Angeles area, which we're counting here as all of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, plus nearby portions of San Bernadino and Riverside Counties. If we throw in three guys from Bakersfield, which is 100 miles out in Kern County, it becomes 110.

By comparison, the entire fertile state of Texas has 100 natives who have appeared this season in the major leagues, and the entire state of Florida has 79 players. So, the Los Angeles area is king when it comes to producing big league players, hands down. Watch the Dodgers games on television (if you can) and Vin Scully is constantly pointing out that some player is a local kid.

(As a side note, and with absolutely nothing to document it, a writer recalls from past research that Texas generally produces the most football players who sign Division I scholarships out of high school, but California produces the most NFL players.)

Anyway, Los Angeles is where it's at for generating Major League Baseball's players. And, still, we seldom see an event quite like what happened Wednesday night at Angel Stadium.

Then and there, we saw a Los Angeles player who has pitched for both Los Angeles clubs throw a nice game for one against the other. It was 33-year-old Dan Haren, born in Monterey Park, a player on the back end of his career (he turns 34 on Sept. 17), taking a two-hitter into the eighth inning for the Dodgers, who produced a 2-1 win against the Angels.

Haren finished the game with no walks in 7 1/3 innings, allowing only three hits. He threw 87 pitches, 57 of them for strikes. Haren left the game after Erick Aybar scratched out a bunt single with one out in the eighth. Dodgers relievers J.P. Howell and Brandon League couldn't keep Aybar from scoring, so there was that blemish. But so what?

It remains a huge night for Haren, who blew up a 10.03 ERA and an 0-5 record in his most recent five starts. This time, the Angels couldn't touch him for most of the night. He took a perfect game into the sixth inning, when Hank Conger, a former battery mate with the Angels, reached him for a single.

Haren has pitched well throughout his career at Angel Stadium, where he is 20-18 with a lifetime ERA of 3.20 in 46 games (45 starts). It's a bit of a different story for him lifetime at Dodger Stadium, where he is 6-6 with a 3.80 ERA in 18 games, all starts. At Dodger Stadium this year, Haren is 4-3 with a 4.05 ERA in 10 games, all starts.

Of course, Haren was in a different phase of his career when he took most of those starts at Angel Stadium. He was a premium guy then, good enough that the Angels traded Patrick Corbin, Joe Saunders, Tyler Skaggs and Rafael Rodriguez to get him from the Arizona Diamondbacks at the non-waiver trading deadline in 2010. Haren did what the Angels brought him in to do for the rest of that season, going only 5-4 but with an ERA of 2.87 and a pitching WAR of 2.7 in just those 14 starts.

It wasn't actually Haren's fault that the trade blew up on the Angels. Entering games of July 25 that year, the day they made the trade, they were 52-48, second place in the American League West and six games behind the Texas Rangers. They were trying to make a move. But they immediately lost four straight and eight of their next 10 to fall 10 games behind. They just shut down offensively. From the day of the trade to the end of the season, the team fashioned a long slash of .234/.297/.370/.666 as it went 28-34. The Angels finished 80-82, 10 games down.

Haren also was terrific for the Angels in 2011, finishing 16-10 with a 3.17 ERA and 4.3 WAR in 238 1/3 innings to finish seventh in the AL's Cy Young voting. Again, though, the Angels didn't have it offensively, finishing 10th in the league with 667 runs scored. They finished a distant second, 86-76.

Haren hit the age of 31 in 2012 and we began to see his decline. Back troubles started getting the better of him as he finished 12-13 with a 4.33 ERA and a WAR of minus-0.4. His contract expired and he went to the Washington Nationals in 2013. As he struggled there, Corbin made the NL All-Star team for Arizona with a 14-8, 3.41 performance, and some commenced with the easy second guess about whether the Angels should have made that trade.

But events in baseball have a way of working around. Corbin is out for the 2014 season after Tommy John surgery on his left elbow in spring training. The Angels brought Skaggs back in the winter deal that sent Mark Trumbo to Arizona, and the young left-hander, injured now, has been pretty solid as No. 5 starters go. Haren signed a deal last winter with the Dodgers, sealing his return to Los Angeles.

But the 2014 season has not been an easy ride for the aging right-hander, either. Through last week's games, Haren was 8-9 with a 4.71 ERA in 22 starts. He actually looked like a nice add through May, his first 11 starts, which added up to 68 2/3 innings, a 5-3 record and a 3.28 ERA. But his next 11 starts put all that to question – 3-6, a 6.52 ERA and 14 homers allowed in 58 innings. In the last seven of those starts, he lasted more than five innings only twice. Everyone knew his spot in the starting rotation was in peril.

And then, on Wednesday night, Haren reappeared at Angel Stadium, had the Angels eating out of his hand and reclaimed, for the time being, his tenuous spot in the Dodgers rotation.

Haren pitched high school ball at Bishop Amat in La Puente, graduating in 1998. He went up the coast for college at Pepperdine, from which the St. Louis Cardinals selected him in the second round of the 2001 June draft. The Cardinals brought him up in 2003 and bounced him up and down for a couple of years, but he was good enough to make all of their postseason rosters as the Cardinals went to the 2004 World Series, which they lost to the Boston Red Sox.

That winter, the Cardinals traded Haren, Daric Barton and Kiko Calero to the Oakland Athletics for Mark Mulder. Haren flourished with the Athletics – 43-34 with a 3.64 ERA and 11.4 WAR in 102 starts over three seasons. Being a good player who was getting into arbitration at that point, Haren became too expensive for the Athletics and they dealt him to the Diamondbacks in an eight-player deal that sent six players to Oakland.

Though everyone should agree that Oakland general manager Billy Beane has done a fine job with limited resources, we can't say he ended up with much from that deal. The best player he got back was Carlos Gonzalez, who he packaged with Huston Street and Greg Smith (another player from the large trade) a year later to acquire Matt Holliday from the Colorado Rockies. Gonzalez and Street have gone on to become All-Stars. The A's basically rented Holliday for 93 games before flipping the impending free agent to the Cardinals for three players who will amount to nothing.

Meantime, Haren pitched All-Star seasons for the Diamondbacks in 2008 and 2009, a combined 30-18 with a 3.23 ERA and 12.6 WAR in 66 starts. That's why the Angels were willing to pay high for him in the middle of 2010, his age 29 season.

Wednesday night, the Angels and their fans saw the guy for whom they traded way back then. The Dodgers saw a guy who is hanging on to his career at age 33, and making a serious bid to do so.

If Wednesday night is an indication, Haren will hang on for a bit longer. He vests for 2015 with the Dodgers at $10 million if he pitches 180 innings this season. Wednesday's performance brings him up to 134 innings, meaning he needs just another 46 innings. With the Dodgers trying to maintain a 2 1/2 game lead on the San Francisco Giants in the National League West, they will not bench that kind of  production just to save $10 million next year. It remains for Haren to keep producing it, or something enough like it.

Editor's note: All advanced statistics in this piece are from or are extrapolated from Baseball-Reference.com.

Dodgers have right matchups to beat St. Louis in NLCS

With all the metrics going around baseball these days, the simplest might still be the most predictive. And when we look at the simple numbers pertaining to right-handers against left-handers, it becomes very hard to believe the St. Louis Cardinals can last against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series.

The St. Louis Cardinals bagged two of their three wins against the Dodgers this year because Pete Kozma (above) hit two doubles against Clayton Kershaw. What are the chances of that happening again? (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Dodgers will begin their National League Championship Series (NLCS) this evening against the St. Louis Cardinals in St. Louis, seeking their first trip to the World Series since 1988, when they posted an unlikely victory against the heavily favored Oakland Athletics.

The predictions are running about even. Outwardly, at least, it does shape up as an even series between two divisional championships.

However, a couple aspects of this matchup indicate that the Dodgers enter with compelling advantages. Simply, the Dodgers match up very well with the Cardinals. Although the Dodgers won the season series only 4-3, a couple of those Cardinals wins turned on occurrences that one would not expect to come up with any regularity.

We're picking the Dodgers, not because they are local, but because they are left-handed. The Dodgers match up so well with the Cardinals that we wouldn't be one bit surprised if they wrap it up in fewer than seven games. Maybe five or six, which also would stand the Dodgers well entering the World Series.

We have mentioned several times here that the Dodgers are vulnerable to left-handed pitching, and when their National League Division Series (NLDS) with the Atlanta Braves was tied, 1-1, we went so far as to say that the Braves lost the series before it started because they shorted themselves on left-handed pitching.

But do you know who really can't hit left-handed pitching? The Cardinals. They are absolutely the worst team in the National League at hitting left-handed pitching. And the Dodgers will throw them at least two left-handers in the first four games, and four, maybe even five, if it goes seven. That depends on how the Dodgers approach Game 4, for which they have not announced a starting pitcher.

We already know the Dodgers will send lefties Clayton Kershaw and Hyun-jin Ryu to the mound in Games 2 and 3. If they're feeling adventurous, they might want to try lefty Chris Capuano in Game 4. Generally, you'd rather throw power pitching at the Cardinals -- generally, you'd rather throw power pitching at everybody every day -- but it will depend on how the series progresses. If the Dodgers hold a 2-1 or 3-0 lead going to Game 4, Capuano is a good call. If Capuano can maintain an effective sinker-changeup game, he can lock them up (compare this and this with this).

On the flip side, knowing the Dodgers at the top of their game can only be slowed down by a good left-handed starting pitcher, the Cardinals don't have any. They only threw 21 starts by left-handed pitchers all year, and none of their left-handers figure in their rotation for the NLCS.

This is Christmas for the Dodgers. As we've noted before, showing a lefty to the Dodgers turns leadoff hitter Carl Crawford into nothing. Against lefties this year, Crawford batted .206 with a .551 OPS. Notice, Crawford wasn't nothing against the right-handed Braves. He hit three homers.

Left-handers turn Andre Ethier into almost nothing -- .221 batting average and .613 OPS. Juan Uribe (.308 on-base percentage against lefties) and A.J. Ellis (.200 batting average against lefties) are just a tiny bit of something against lefties. Uribe will run into a left-handed slant now and then (six homers) and Ellis can tap them for walks (17 walks, .330 on-base percentage). Nick Punto bats .309 against lefties, but it's such a flaccid .309 that his on-base (.362) actually is higher than his slugging (.361).

In short, the Dodgers have virtually no chance of scoring against lefties until the order turns to Yasiel Puig and Hanley Ramirez.

The Dodgers will have to worry about none of this for the first five or six innings of any game, unless, of course, they beat up the Cardinals right-handed starters well enough to send them showering.

When we look this Dodgers order up and down, well, look at these OPS readings against right-handers: Ramirez (1.001), Puig (.897), Ethier (.854), Adrian Gonzalez (.829), Crawford (.796), Uribe (.765). Let's even throw in Game 1 starting pitcher Zach Greinke -- .715.

Nobody questions that the Cardinals have real talent among their right-handed starting pitchers. But this is the NLCS. We're not playing against the Chicago Cubs anymore. Weaknesses are exposed here. The lack of left-handed starting pitchers already has been exposed on the Braves, and it's waiting to be exposed on the Cardinals. Getting through this Dodgers lineup with right-handed starters every day is a task perhaps too large.

On the other side, the Cardinals batted .238 with a .672 OPS this year against lefties. Both ranked 13th in the 15-team National League. Their on-base percentage was .301. Only the Cubs (.298) were worse. Their slugging was .371, which ranked 12th.

Bear in mind, this Cardinals team is a slugging bunch. Overall this year, they ranked first in runs (783) and on-base percentage (.342), second in OPS (.733) and third in slugging (.401). But they did all of that -- and much more, really -- against right-handed pitching.

Moral of the story: Don't throw right-handers at the Cardinals. The Dodgers shall take heed, because that's how they are built. They can -- and will -- make the Cardinals deal with left-handed pitching.

Take a look at the Cardinals and their OPS readings against lefties and righties, showing lefties first and righties second: Matt Adams (.654 and .876), Carlos Beltran (.729 and .871), Matt Carpenter (.820 and .897), Daniel Delasco (.529 and .684), David Freese (.811 and .629), Matt Holliday (.799 and .903), Jon Jay (.620 and .749), Pete Kozma (.536 and .554) and Yadier Molina (.883 and .823).  

Of all these hitters, only Molina and Freese are better against left-handers. Holliday, Beltran, Adams, Jay and Delasco all are more than 100 points worse against left-handers, while Carpenter is 77 points worse and Kozma is so small either way that it doesn't matter.

That said, baseball is a funny game. It has often been noted that Kershaw lost twice to the Cardinals this year. But look at how it happened.

The first time was a 5-3 St. Louis win at Dodger Stadium on May 26. The Cardinals scored three times in the second inning when Kershaw walked two hitters and Kozma hit a three-run double to left. Kershaw left the game after allowing four runs in seven innings.

The second time was a 5-1 St. Louis win at Busch Stadium on Aug. 6. With one out in the fifth inning of a scoreless tie, Jay doubled against Kershaw, then Tony Cruz singled him in, Kozma doubled Cruz to third and Joe Kelly grounded out to drive in Cruz. The next hitter, Carpenter, grounded out to end the inning. Kershaw's line at the end showed six innings and two runs.

In essence here, Pete Kozma beat Clayton Kershaw twice. What are the chances of that lightning striking for a third time? If Kozma even puts a bat on the ball against Kershaw in this series, it might qualify as a major upset.

One more factor for the Dodgers, and this, again, pertains to Kershaw, who pitched six innings without giving up an earned run in the Dodgers' Game 4 win against the Braves to finish the NLDS. If the Dodgers hadn't won that game -- and they won it largely because Kershaw pitched so well -- then the NLDS would have moved to Atlanta with Greinke pitching Game 5. As it happens, Greinke instead is pitching Game 1 of the NLCS in St. Louis.

As it happens, Greinke has taken four starts at Busch Stadium in his career, and all of them have been quality. In none of them did he last fewer than six innings, and in none of them did he allow more than two runs. Greinke took one start this year in St. Louis, a 3-2 win on Aug. 5 during which he allowed two runs in 6 1/3 innings.

It also happens that Greinke took no starts this season in Atlanta. However, he has taken two starts during his career in Atlanta, and neither were quality, totaling 11 innings and seven earned runs for a 5.73 ERA. As it turned out, then, Kershaw's Game 4 outing set up Greinke for his favorable scenario and rescued him from his unfavorable scenario.

It's just breaking right for the Dodgers here. The Cardinals are an excellent team and they've got a postseason history that says they overcome the odds. But it always comes down to matchups, and the matchups clearly favor the Dodgers. For the Cardinals to prevail in this series, they will have to beat the odds once again.

Wild card playoffs awash in absurdity, tragedy

Baseball is a game of tragedy and absurdity. Friday's one-game wild card round of playoffs showed us both. Absurdly, the Atlanta Braves booted their way out of the postseason and later complained, with justification, that they were robbed. For tragedy, we give you Josh Hamilton and the Texas Rangers.

Josh Hamilton probably played his last game for the Texas Rangers in the American League wild card round (Keith Allison, http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/2752004750. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Baseball is based in failure, which is why it never fails to arouse a sense of the tragic.

Our newest dramatic tragedy in the game is the Texas Rangers, a better than average team -- nay, the best in the American League! -- brought down by its flaws, none more compelling than center fielder Josh Hamilton, a tragedy unto himself.

Baseball also is a theater of the absurd, though a play written not by Beckett or Albee, but by the writers of the infield fly rule, who, in their defense, wished only to quell one of the game's intrinsic absurdities -- the base runner who is at once forced and not forced. 

Early logicians, working long before Alexander Cartwright, were certain that the same thing could not both be and not be. But Schrodinger's black cat curled itself around a fall Southern evening Friday and we witnessed, again, that even if the same thing could both be and not be, we can't act on that. We must pick one. And pick it in time. And hope we get it right.

Sometimes, we don't, and so absurdity piles upon absurdity, until the players who have earned nothing through their feeble antics are complaining, legitimately, that they wuz screwed.

But the ludicrous plays favorites, too, so as one side winces, the other smiles, working happily along the lines of absurdity, finessing them for victory. That happens to be the calling card of the St. Louis Cardinals, the last team in last year's playoffs before winning the World Series, and the last team in this year's playoffs before winning their twisted National League wild card game in Atlanta Friday night.

The baseball postseason has begun. The solid, hard-won realities of the long run no longer hold. Tragedy and absurdity live here, in the time line of the short series.

The Cardinals beat Atlanta, 6-3, not necessarily deserving it, but graciously accepting it. The Braves out-hit the Cardinals, 12-6. But the Braves also made three errors. A throwing error by Atlanta third baseman Chipper Jones, the likely Hall of Famer playing for the final time, opened up a three-run fourth for the Cardinals, giving them a 3-2 lead. A throwing error in the seventh by Braves shortstop Andrelton Simmons led to a two-run inning, giving the Cardinals a 6-2 lead.

The Braves attempted a comeback in the eighth. With one out and runners at first and second, Simmons hit a drifting pop up into short left field. The Cardinals shortstop, Pete Kozma, followed the ball going back, while left fielder Matt Holliday approached the ball coming in. The ball stayed in the air for a long time. The runners were frozen.

Finally, just as the ball was coming down, left field line umpire Tim Holbrook called the infield fly rule. At that moment, it appeared, Kozma and Holliday both gave up on the ball and it fell between them. The runners both advanced. However, had Holbrook not called for the infield fly rule, Simmons would have been safe at first, assuming the Cardinals fielders wouldn't have played the ball differently. With the call, though, Simmons was automatically out.

Atlanta manager Fredi Gonzalez came out to argue. Outraged fans pelted the field with garbage. The game was delayed for a little more than 20 minutes. The Braves wound up protesting the game.

But the commissioner's office denied the protest. So, the Braves may protest injustice, but their complaints ring hollow because of their own incompetence. The Cardinals advance to play against NL top seed Washington, not necessarily deserving to win. However, the Braves deserved to lose and the Cardinals took advantage, which is good enough to win.

Friday's American League wild card winner, the Baltimore Orioles, really were onlookers with the rest of us as a fine Texas Rangers operation that just never got it done completed its autumn unraveling.

The Rangers won AL pennants in 2010 and 2011 without winning the World Series. They had it won in Game 6 last year, but right fielder Nelson Cruz couldn't make the championship catch on a two-out fly ball in the ninth by the Cardinals' David Freese, who cleared the bases with a triple to tie the game and keep the Cardinals alive.

Being that close and missing, the Rangers came to this season hungry and held first place in the AL West for 178 days. They held a five game lead on the Oakland Athletics with nine games left. But the Rangers lost seven of those games.

On the last day of the season, with the Rangers and Athletics tied for first place and playing each other in Oakland, the Rangers took a 5-1 lead in the third inning. Playing an Oakland club with nothing to lose, the Rangers celebrated in their dugout. It would be the last happy moment, capping three years of happy moments, for the club that couldn’t ever get it all the way done.

In the fourth, the A's tied it, 5-5. Later in the inning, Hamilton blew a fly ball in center field, allowing in two more runs. The A's were on their way to a 12-5 win and the division title. Suddenly, the Rangers were relegated to wild card status facing a one-and-done mandate, predicting an ill future for a club playing badly. The Rangers would take it up in their own park against this year’s four-leaf clover of a baseball team, the Orioles, the break-even club that broke through by winning 29 of 38 one-run games.

There, it all came back to that beautiful, haunted athlete.

The Tampa Bay Rays (the Devil Rays, then) certainly understood the talent when they took 18-year-old Josh Hamilton from Raleigh, NC, with the first overall pick in 1999. But serious drug problems ruined his early twenties. At 22, he was out of the game.

Just for kicks, apparently, the Chicago Cubs took Hamilton from Tampa Bay in the 2006 Rule 5 Draft. That day, the Cincinnati Reds purchased Hamilton from the Cubs. The Reds paired Hamilton with a sobriety coach, the brother of manager Jerry Narron, and the world discovered that year the talent that had been forgotten.

And when the Reds moved Hamilton to Texas in a trade for right hander Edinson Volquez a year later, a superstar was born, and a two-time pennant winner in Texas came with him. In 2008, Hamilton mesmerized baseball fans with 28 bombs in the first round of the home run derby at Yankee Stadium. In 2010, Hamilton batted .359 and won the AL MVP.  Even this year, he struck his career high with 43 homers. He even stayed off the disabled list for the first time since 2008.

But Hamilton relapsed last winter, and the clock thus began on his time with the Rangers, with whom his contract was to expire after this season. Hamilton is said to be disturbed by an incident earlier this year, when he tossed a ball up to the stands and a fan plunged to his death trying to catch it. Anyone would be disturbed.

This is a fellow with a substance abuse problem who now had blood on his hands, albeit unintentionally.

Since July 7, the day the man died, Hamilton is a .254 hitter.

With his relapse, Hamilton already was on a short leash. By the All-Star break, he wasn't producing as we have seen, though he was named to the AL All-Star team. At the start of August, the Rangers and Hamilton suspended contract negotiations. Hamilton reportedly began having vision and sinus problems. And the Rangers faltered. From Sept. 1, they were 15-16 until the end of the season. 

Then came the debacle in Oakland, followed by a testy exchange in the dugout between Hamilton and Rangers manager Ron Washington. Sometime around then, a Rangers official told Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Randy Galloway that Hamilton isn't coming back to the Rangers even if he plays for free.

So, Hamilton went to the wild card game against Baltimore with a lot on the line. He lost all of it.

Batting in the first, Rangers down, 1-0, runners on first and third with no outs, Hamilton hit into a double play on the first pitch. A run scored to tie the game, but the big inning was dead. Hamilton batted again in the third with a runner on first and two out, game still tied. He struck out, looking at the third pitch. Hamilton led off the sixth with a first-pitch ground out to the pitcher.

Hamilton had one more chance, coming up in the eighth with two out, the Rangers down, 3-1, and Ian Kinsler at second base. The Orioles brought in lefty Brian Matusz. And Hamilton whiffed on three pitches, going for the tying run and neglecting to cut down his swing with two strikes.

Now, and awfully suddenly, Hamilton is a pariah where he once was a hero. He doesn't have a major league contract. He will be 32 next year. He'll sign somewhere, but not for anything near what his talent dictates. He has a substance abuse problem. And he has a man's death on his head.

Tragic. Wonder what he's doing now.