Adopt a Prospect 3.4: Why I Like JT Chargois More than A-Rod

More interesting that Target Field

It has not been an easy last two weeks for our Adopted Prospect: Mr. Jon Tiberius Chargois (okay it's Jon Thomas...but give me some nerd slack). He had his worst outing of the year giving up 6 earned runs on three walks and three hits, and the breezy dominance that made Chargois a Florida State League All-Star seems like a distant memory compared to his current form.


And yet, this weekend, as the Twins got snake bitten (again) by the Yankees and their complicated, record-book busting (again) DH Alex Rodriguez, I found myself eagerly turning away from the superlative performances of A-Rod at Target Field, to the minor league box scores for word of Chargois.


It may seem like a silly comparison: Alex Rodriguez, love him or hate him, will go down in the annals of baseball history; JT Chargois will be in this odd little corner of cyber space...but probably, not much else. And while the part of me that loves athletic excellence is inclined to see the very best players do their very best work, a much larger part of me wants to cheer for Chargois much MUCH more than A-Rod.

The reasons I care more about a AA reliever than the fourth most prestigious home run hitter in baseball doesn't depend on the history of a rivalry, or the fact that one is paid by Minnesota billionaires and the other is paid by New York billionaires. It comes back to the fact that Sports is the rare entertainment that demands honesty.

Other entertainments live on the other side of truth. Movies and books are fictional. Music and even visual arts (painting and sculpture) are as much about what people (and record companies) know will sell, rather than purely what people have lived or feel.

But sports demands honesty. Do your best, play fair, and may the best team win. Do that, and we'll root, root, root for the rest of our lives.

Therein lies the problem. A-Rod is fundamentally dishonest: he didn't trust his best to be good enough, he didn't play fairly with those who stayed clean, and he tried to rig the game so his team would be better than the best.

No question, A-Rod is entertaining, powerful and impressive (even more so on PEDs). But that was a fiction. He insisted he was legitimate twice, once while using and once after getting caught in two more moments of dishonesty. If he was a pro-wrestler, or doing some crazy in-depth performance art it could be strangely intriguing, but instead it's just fake, false and infuriating to watch.

That's why I like a middling AA prospect and can't stand one of the best power-hitters in over a century of baseball. Because JT Chargois is not perfect and makes no pretenses about it. His scuffles at AA are part of the game, an honest failure, just as his run of scoreless innings from April to June was an honest success.

I don't like Alex Rodriguez. I don't wish him ill. I don't hope he suffers. I just wish he were more like JT Chargois.

Adopt a Prospect 3.3: Interest Spike

Once a month we check in on our adopted prospect, JT Chargois, bring him soup, pat him on the back, whisper sweet nothings about his rapidly improving performances to Terry Ryan in the hopes that he becomes a pitcher ready to make meaningful contributions to the Twins in the near future.

When last we checked in on JT Chargois he was starting the long road back to pitching domination.

That road got a little shorter in the interim.


Chargois was promoted to Chattanooga on May 26th. To be sure the literal road from Chattanooga to the Twin Cities is shorter than the one from Fort Myers (about 700 miles shorter), but it's also metaphorically shorter (what with the higher level of competition and all), and even setting that aside a promotion this quickly into the season, a promotion back up to the level that many of his peers are already at, speaks to just how close Chargois is to getting his game back where he wants it to be (he's now half-a-year younger than his competitors rather than nearly a full year older).

He ran off a month worth of outings without allowing an earned run. He boosted his strike out records (due, we have no doubt, to particularly spiky curve ball). And he doubled his save tally as he became more and more comfortable with high leverage and late innings.


So is it fair to say that interest in JT "Spike" Chargois is..."spiking"?

Yes...but a better question is: what will Chargois do now that interest has?

After all, anyone can get an interest spike. (Hell, random lurkers make my page look popular on utterly random days.) But the better consideration is what I should do with those new eyeballs. How I can keep their attention and remain memorable.

Spikes are great on lots of things: punk-rock-jewelry, stegosaurii, Curveballs of Doom, but on interest graphs...they're aberrations, nothing more, nothing less.

So, what next for Chargois? Well...he started off in Chattanooga with a rocky outing, loading the bases on three singles, and though he didn't cede a run, it was more base runners than he'd allowed since the ugliness of April 13th (the last time he gave up an earned run). And like that unfortunate outing, he's been better but not amazing in his two outings since. He'll have a hard time cracking through the supremely talented relief corps in Chattanooga, but other pitchers will see interest spike, other outings will show his gifts.

We call Chargois "spike" for his talent, his pitch and (ideally) his demeanor, not for mere flashes of greatness. We trust there will be a long and positive Chattanooga season ahead of him, even though the fun of Ft. Meyers is firmly in his rearview mirror.