Breaking Down How Media Creates Narrative During Exhausting MLB Season

The Major League Baseball regular season is a story in itself. There are games every day starting in early April all the way through the end of October. With so much time to break down so many things, the media takes it upon itself to create more news than there really is. 

That is not to say the media is wrong—it is just the way things get done in baseball because everything takes so much longer to really develop than in other sports. 

As we all know, there are 162 games in baseball's regular season. Compare that to just 82 games in a normal NBA or NHL season, 30-35 games in college basketball, 16 in the NFL and 13-15 in college football—you are going to be scrambling to find things to talk about. 

Plus, while other sports will have two or three off-days at a time, baseball goes on every single day for six months. The media has to react to what is going on, no matter what it is. 

Prime Examples

"Bobby Managing For Short Stay In Boston"

That was a headline taken directly from the New York Daily News on Saturday, April 21, the same day the Boston Red Sox blew a 9-0 lead against the New York Yankees in Fenway Park. 

That game came the same week as the Bobby Valentine-Kevin Youkilis stuff  was going on, and the team's record after that game was 4-10. 

Naturally, there was a lot of panic from fans and the media about how the Red Sox were starting to fall apart under their new manager, just two weeks into the season.

Of course, not a lot of people seemed to be talking about the fact that the bullpen has the worst ERA in baseball, the three starting outfielders today were not even on the team's radar in spring training and Clay Buchholz is getting lit up like a Christmas tree. 

Here we are, just 10 days after the Boston Massacre, and all that talk has died down. Why? Because the Red Sox have gone 7-2 in their last nine games. 

"So Far Pujols Is A $240 Million Mistake"

That headline was the theme of a column by Associated Press writer Tim Dahlberg on April 28, as he tried to get to the heart of Albert Pujols' ongoing streak of games without a home run. 

To Dahlberg's credit, he does admit that the sample size is still incredibly small and that there is a lot of time left in the season. 

But the idea he is getting at seems to be picking up steam day after day, with so many wondering if the Angels made a mistake signing Pujols and if he regrets leaving St. Louis, now that he has gone one month without hitting a homer and is hitting .208/.255/.292 with five RBI, by far the lowest walk rate of his career (5.9 percent) and second highest strikeout rate (13.7). 

Yet you have to dig deeper to really get into the crux of the problem with Pujols. He has just been the victim of bad luck so far. His batting average on balls in play is just .244, nearly 70 points below his career average. His line-drive percentage is 23.2, the highest of his career. His groundball percentage of 40.2 is right in line with his career mark. 

The Justin Verlander MVP Case

Taking things back to last year's awards season, Justin Verlander did not win the MVP award because he was the best or most valuable player in the American League—he wasn't.

But because the media was able to create the story of this pitcher who won 24 games for a team that went on a remarkable run in the second half of the season, made the playoffs, and he won 12 straight starts from July 21-September 18, Verlander got the award. 

The narrative becomes more important than the actual numbers. If Verlander had won the same number of games without that winning streak in "crucial" games—as if the games at the start of the season have no bearing on making the playoffs—he probably wouldn't have won the award. At least, it would have been a much closer race. (Boston centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury finished 38 points behind Verlander.)

Time of Year Means Everything

You are going to hear far more stories about the good and bad in baseball at the beginning of the year because everything gets compounded. We all have expectations for teams and players when the season begins, so when there is a surprise right out of the gate—positive or negative—we have to analyze every little detail.

The Cleveland Indians were on nobody's radar last year, but they got out to a 30-15 start, and everyone was wondering how they were doing it. Well, luck was playing a big role in their success, and they played down to their talent level the rest of the year to finish 80-82. 

All the talk about Pujols, the Red Sox, even the surprise start of the Baltimore Orioles this year can be directly attributed to the fact that it happened at the start of the year. If this was the middle of the year, no one would be talking about a rough stretch for Boston or a hot streak for Baltimore because it would just be a blip on the radar. 

Conclusion

There have been a lot of stories that have come out about various players and teams in Major League Baseball after the first month of the season. While they are fun to read and talk about, don't start buying into every little thing that goes right or wrong for a player or team. 

If a team gets off to a hot start, no one wants to look at their schedule, just the fact they are winning games.

For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers (17-7) have the best record in baseball right now. But they have played 13 games against San Diego, Pittsburgh and Houston, going 11-2 in those games. 

They will fall back to the pack when they start playing quality competition; it just so happens that their schedule set them up to get off to a fast start. 

When all the games are played at the end of September, almost every player and team will be right where we expected them to be when things started in April. There are always going to be some outliers, but things fall into place the longer the season goes on. 

Enjoy the stories that the media has brought you so far, look forward to the ones they will come up with over the next five months, but don't start buying into a lot of them until the sample size is big enough to give us a real understanding of what is going on. 

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