Walking Away From the Game, Part Two

Ian Snell announced his retirement Tuesday.  Former reliever Steve Karsay, whose shoulder is held together with rubber bands and barbed wire, shared these thoughts through the miracle of Twitter:

Really? Snell retired at 29 after being sent down by Cards. Does he know how lucky he is?

Know how many guys who had to retire because of injury would kill to be in his shoes? Myself included!

An even more entertaining insight comes from Cardinals GM John Mozeliak, whose tone exudes the feeling of having to work with Ian Snell on a daily basis:

"The initial hope was he was going to be someone who could give us protection at Memphis," Mozeliak said.  "Someone is going to have to step up. It’s not a huge hit to us at this point."

I have to admit, I like Ian Snell.  I don’t like him as a baseball player, obviously, nor do I like him as a person.  Instead, I like Ian Snell because he makes no sense: trying to understand him is like trying to understand a sinkhole.  You know there’s a rational explanation for him, deep in the math and science of it all, but it’s more fun to think of him as a cruel act of an unsympathetic deity.  It makes no sense that Ian Snell did as well as he did in 2007, it’s equally puzzling that he did so poorly, given his talent, in 2010.  For him to retire any other way than this (before a game, no less – classic Snell!) would be a letdown.  This way he’s like an M. Night Shyamalan movie that never ends.  In a perfect world, he’ll disappear entirely, only to appear every ten years like Bobby Fischer, being detained by airport security and lobbing obscenities at Neal Huntington.

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On a somewhat related topic, I recently wrote an article about the greatest final seasons by voluntary retirees since World War 2.  For pitchers, that list is significantly shorter:

Because of the nature of pitching, this list is much more subjective than the previous one.  You could make the argument for adding Andy Pettitte to the list, considering his courtship by Brian Cashman last offseason.  But given that he could only manage 21 starts in 2001, and suffered a variety of unrelated injuries throughout the season, it would be difficult to consider him "healthy", even after an offseason of rest.  Sadly, the act of pitching a baseball is the kind of thing that forces people into wearing Bitter Beer Faces, and it’s a rare man who can survive into his late thirties without being ground by the mill.  We’re left with two of them, similar pitchers with very different careers.

We all remember Mussina, who walked away after his best season since 2003 in order to spend time with his family.  He accumulated a brilliant 270-153 record on generally brilliant teams, played in five all-star games, and never quite won a Cy Young award.  We have almost all forgotten Larry Jackson, who accumulated a pedestrian 194-183 record on some extremely pedestrian teams, the Cardinals of the fifties and the Cubs and Phillies of the sixties.  He played in four all-star games, and never quite won a Cy Young award.  Mussina will someday get in the Hall of Fame, accumulating 74.8 WAR; Jackson, with his 55.6 WAR, got four pages in Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season.

What make the two so interesting are the opportunities presented to them.  Mussina never won a ring, but certainly got awfully close, starting 21 career games in the playoffs and reaching the World Series twice.  Jackson’s teams, in his fourteen-year tenure, never finished closer than eight games back.   But when Mussina spoke of retirement, he reflected more on his personal legacy than his team; he didn’t want to limp toward 300 wins, fight for or lose a job.  Winning a championship simply didn’t seem to matter to him.  The Yankees, who won the World Series the year before Mussina signed on, won again the year after he left.

For Jackson, winning was all that mattered.  But unlike Mussina, he didn’t exactly leave the game on his own terms.  Instead, he was chosen as the 23rd pick in the 1968 National League Expansion Draft by the Montreal Expos, two picks after future Mariners manager Maury Wills.  But even though he had plenty left in the tank, the losing had gotten to be enough for Jackson.  He simply never showed up in Montreal, and quit the game.  Philadelphia was forced to send a compensation pick in Bobby Wine to the poor Expos, whose feelings were badly hurt.  Jackson moved on to politics, but unfortunately for him, his record never really improved.

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Ian Snell was, to understate the issue, not quite in the class of these two pitchers.  No retiree in Mariners history really is.  In fact, the only voluntarily retired M’s pitcher might be Kazuhiro Sasaki, if you ignore the fact that he didn’t really retire (he pitched two more seasons with the Yokohama BayStars) and that it wasn’t really voluntary (The P-I reported that the M’s ownership group banished him as punishment for his philandering).  Still, he could have swallowed his pride and the $8.5 million dollars owed to him, and made the entire year of 2004 Suntory Time.  So he deserves at least a little credit.

The rarity of being able to walk away from the game is only magnified by the rarity for a starting pitcher to survive his mid-thirties intact.  Although a rare pitcher can become "crafty", honing their accuracy to such a degree that they can survive their deteriorating fastballs, the vast majority simply become hittable.  Even Ian Snell, at 29, was not the Ian Snell of 26; it’s just that Snell, who quite possibly is the opposite of the word crafty, landed so heavily whence came the fall.  In perspective, it makes what Mike Mussina and Larry Jackson were able to accomplish all the more impressive.