Seth Jones Appreciation, MLB's Same Old Song And Dance

We've got an ode to a player I wouldn't have thought there would be one for, and then dealing with the same complaints about the MLB Playoffs.

Sector 1901 - Seth Jones Appreciation

It takes a lot for fans to feel sorry for a player. And I don't know that anyone should feel sorry for Seth Jones. He's getting paid handsomely to play a game, which is always the default. He seems to have a pretty distant relationship with the media and fans, which is fine and his choice. Lord knows I had my fun badgering his mother on Twitter given what we know about her, because I'm a dickhead.

But it's that contract that drives a lot of ire toward Jones, even though he hardly forced Stan Bowman to offer it to him while Bowman was in an utter panic about how to save his job (didn't work). And it's not Jones's fault that price tag meant to fans that he was supposed to be more than he was and is.

Jones has always been solid more than spectacular. A steadying presence who does most everything well without really doing anything great. Again, some of this is the Hawks' problem of trying to categorize everything into the prism of what came before. They had no problem letting fans make the connection of making a big trade for Jones and paying him a ton means he's supposed to be Duncan Keith. They're just totally different players.

Jones was also sold a bill of goods. That's not to completely absolve him or whoever was advising him. Had Jones asked any one of us before the trade, we could have easily told him the Hawks were headed for the dumpster and if his true goal was to be on a winner, this wasn't the place. Though none of us could have predicted that Bowman would get caught up in the Kyle Beach scandal and have to fall on his sword which immediately led to a complete teardown that Bowman probably wouldn't have engineered. Some of this stuff came out of the blue.

Watching the Hawks last night, and most of last season, I always find myself noticing just how adult Jones's game is. While the other, more vocal and self-identifying leaders are doing whatever they can to get noticed, both good and bad, Jones just plays his game.

Last night, it was as clean as it usually is. Jones had nine puck-retrieval opportunities last night, and every single one of them got out of the zone. He had one of the better possession numbers as he always does. Nothing he did jumped off the screen, it was just efficient and got the Hawks out of the zone and up the ice. It was as it's supposed to be, nothing more, nothing less.

That was the story last year, too. Alex Vlasic's development, despite what the Hawks and everyone around them wants to tell you, is just as much a credit to being Jones's partner as it is to whatever sentence he had to serve in Rockford. Having a partner that he always knew exactly where he was going to be, what he was going to do, and could bail him out most of the time is a platform from which any young d-man with even a hint of talent could benefit from.

It's hardly a shock that going over last year's stats, pretty much everyone's possession-metrics improve when on the ice with Jones and falls without. Jones is a unique player in that he can be both the puck-pusher or the free safety, and he still skates well enough to change between both when needed. He's also not quite good enough at either to be special. He can't, and wasn't ever, Quinn Hughes. Nor was he solid enough to be Jaccob Slavin. He's in the second tier, which is totally fine for where a team like the Hawks is.

I promise I'll stop harping on this, but after Vlasic got his Jones-partnership last year, the Hawks could have developed Kevin Korchinski just as well this year by partnering him with Jones for 40-50 games. I have no doubt the difference in Korch's game would have been easily noticeable, while Vlasic could have taken everything he gained last year to play with Martinez or Murphy or whoever else this season.

Jones wasn't brought here to be a Jedi master to whatever padawan the Hawks had to pair up with him. If asked he'd probably tell you it's not something he wanted to do. The Hawks wouldn't ever publicly state that's his role now, but Jones's game just lends itself to that given where the Hawks are in their arc.

Jones is going to be 32 or 33 before the Hawks are playing in games that matter again. Who knows what he'll be doing then, or if he'll even be here. It's not his responsibility that everything that was advertised about his arrival was wrong or eventually went off-course. He's done what he basically has always done. He plays the game cleanly, smoothly, and mostly correctly. Given all the chaos the Hawks have elsewhere, it's relaxing to watch.

It comes every fall. Whenever one of the teams that had a bye in the MLB postseason beefs it in the Division Series, there's some teeth-gnashing about how the system could be changed to make regular season records more weighted. I know, because I'm usually one of them. And then soon after I come to the conclusion that I'm just longing for a game that's gone forever, the one I remember from when I was younger.

We can sit here all day and try to come up with systems that would favor the teams that win the most games. Start them with a 1-0 lead. Play every day instead of the off-days to make it more like the regular season and make teams use their whole rosters as they had been for the previous six months. Make the Division Series seven games (though this one might come to fruition one day). But the thing is, MLB doesn't really care about any of this.

They get their cruise ship full of cash for the expanded playoffs. The league likes the drama of anything happening, especially in the Division Series. They like the regular season watered down and the lack of impetus it then rewards. This isn't ever changing.

Yeah, I feel like a schmuck watching baseball for six months and then having everything I think I know from doing so being tossed out after less than a week. The Phillies are better than the Mets. We have six months of evidence of that. They lost three of four games, which at one point this year they did the same against the Rockies and Giants. They lost four of five against the A's and Pirates at one point. It's just random.

I guess at some point I'll have to come to terms with the fact that April-September isn't a regular season so much as a drawn out group stage. The playoffs the knockout portion of what is now a seven-month tournament. MLB isn't really interested in handing the trophy to the best team. It hands the trophy to whoever wins the tournament. There was a time when baseball wanted to stand out from the rest and keep its champions and those who compete to be so restricted to the truly great. That time is gone. It isn't coming back. I'm old. The cosmic ballet, goes one.

Please share with whoever you think would or wouldn't enjoy it, as a joke. It's free for at least the next six weeks and we'd like to widen the net as best we can.