What's the Big Deal?
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”-William Shakespeare
“I don't know how to put this, but…I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important.”- Ron Burgundy
Running a successful sports franchise is all about one thing: identifying, acquiring and developing the next Big Deal.
When the history of the 2006 Red Sox is written, we’ll remember it in one of three ways. Either:
1. Their faith in their young pitchers was rewarded when they staged a huge comeback and won the championship.
2. They sacrificed this season, but built a perennial contender for years to come when they refused to trade away any of their young pitchers. Or
3. The Sox became a perennial also-ran because they got suckered into believing all their young pitchers would turn out to be Big Deals.
Last month at the trading deadline, by all accounts, Theo Epstein passed on the chance to acquire some veteran help that maybe could’ve made the Sox the World Series favorite because the price of poker included giving up the organization’s top pitching prospects: Manny Delcarmen, Craig Hansen and especially, Jon Lester. The reports say that Theo took a pass because he’s thinking long-term: he’s hoping each of these guy will turn out to be Big Deals.
For this decision, Theo is getting his ass kicked by the Boston media. They’re hammering him because team looks like it’s free-falling out of the playoff race. Delcarmen and Hansen look average at best. Lester is doing the impossible: demonstrating that you can be a young lefty who throws in the mid 90’s, and still not be able to pitch four good innings. And the press, who spent the last two years telling us what Big Deals these kids would be, is killing Theo for sticking to his guns.
It’s kind of ironic, actually. The same press that built Theo up to be such a Big Deal is now making a big deal out of the fact that Theo, believing the rookies will be Big Deals, didn’t pull off any big deals.
OK, so maybe Lester will be the next Scott Kazmir. Or maybe he’ll be the next Robinson Checo. Who knows? But judgment calls like this are what guys like Theo build their entire careers on. If he’s right, he spends the next twenty years boinking every B.U. coed in a pink Red Sox hat on his way to Cooperstown. If he’s wrong, he ends up like Dan Duquette, singing off-key in a baseball musical in some half-empty community theater in Pittsfield.
And while it’s easy to sit back at our Powerbooks and fire verbal Rocket Propelled Grenades at the guys who are wrong about such things, the fact is that everyone is wrong about the next Big Deal a lot more often than they’re right. For every can’t miss, blue-chip prospect who comes through as expected, there’s a complete bust. Jonathan Papelbon, for example, has proven he’s a Big Deal; the kid’s pitched like he was rocketed to Earth as a child. But for every Papelbon there’s a Calvin Schiraldi. For every Carson Palmer, there’s a Tim Couch. For every Alyssa Milano, there’s an Olsen twin (OK, I realize that’s a 1-to-2 ratio, but you get my point).
All this is made more ironic by the fact that Tiger Woods just finished crushing the field at the PGA Championship. It’s quite possible that no one in the history of sports has had to deal with the pressure of being the next Big Deal more than Tiger. He’s the patron saint of Big Deals. When he was 3 years-old and was hitting perfect tee shots in front of Bob Hope on “The Mike Douglas Show“, there were people assuming even then he’d re-write the golf record book. My memory is a little hazy, but I seem to remember that I myself I turned to whoever was sitting next to me and said, “You know what? This kid is gonna be good. I’m predicting right now he’ll win 12 Majors before his 31st birthday.” (Then I went on to suggest investing in that Seattle company that was writing all the software for IBM. At least that’s how I remember it.) And yet Woods is a Bigger Deal than anyone imagined.
But Tiger is the exception. The Big Deal usually comes out of nowhere. Tom Brady is the patron saint of that. It’s not like he went on Letterman when he was a kid and threw perfect 50 yard spirals for Art Donovan. In fact, I went to Patriots’ Training Camp in 2001, and I swear there were at least three dozen people in the stands wearing Michael Bishop jerseys because at that time Bishop, who was still ahead of Brady on the depth chart, was supposed to be the next Big Deal. To his credit Bishop said recently he knew even then that it was Brady, not he, who was going to be a Big Deal. (I should point out he was pumping my gas at the time.)
It’s dangerous to anoint someone the next Big Deal on the basis of what they do in pre-season games, but sometimes you can just tell. In retrospect, it was insane for people to get so excited about Bishop, but when Curtis Martin first ran the ball for the Patriots, you just could see the guy was going to be special. The same goes right now for Laurence Maroney. Granted, the kid has only played four quarters of exhibition football, but an Ozark cavefish can see that this kid is a Big Deal in the making.
Sometimes the media forces us to accept the fact that a guy is a Big Deal. In my lifetime, I’ve met maybe two people who were fans of bicycle racing, and yet for seven years we all found ourselves powerless against the relentless onslaught of Lance Armstrong’s media-concocted Big Dealism. And a Big Deal was born.
For other guys, their Big Dealosity is undeniable to the point when you can’t remember them ever NOT being a Big Deal. Paul Pierce comes to mind. He was the 15th consecutive first round draft pick that the Celtics claimed “fell right into our laps,“ but you just knew that this time it was true. And he’s been a Big Deal ever since. Al Jefferson’s Big Dealishness established itself early in his rookie season, when he showed he was capable of backing Shaq into the paint and scoring at will. But the jury is still out on him. His sophomore season he was a complete bust, and no bona fide Big Deal has more than one bad season in a row.
Being a Big Deal means different things to different teams. The Bruins this week signed first round draft pick Phil Kessel to a contract. In announcing the deal, GM peter Chiarelli said, "Phil is a player with world-class speed and gifted offensive talents.” In other words, Bruins management thinks Kessel is a future Big Deal. And if you’ve been following the B’s long enough, you know that means when the team tanks in Kessel’s third season, management has someone to blame.
But I have to think that if none of the rookies work out in the long run, Theo will take the blame for a bad judgment call. As a former Big Deal himself, it’d be the least he can do.