For a quick 10 points name the team (all are on the same team in 2009), and each of the players. (This is probably pretty easy.) .
Player A
Career .249/.356/.499 (180 home runs)
2009 .222/.366/.531 (17 home runs)
Player B
Career: .257/.367/.481 (252 home runs)
2009: .250/.349/.315 (1 home run)
Player C
Career: .241/.314/.442 (27 home runs)
2009: .304/.418/.676 (12 home runs)
Player D
Career: .285/.358/.552 (40 home runs, 9 steals, never caught stealing)
2009: .313/.392/.596 (13 home runs, 2 steals)
Player E
Career: .295/.333/.435 (74 home runs, 336 steals)
2009: .321/.383/.442 (4 home runs, 34 steals)
Player F
Career: .269/.360/.411 (41 home runs, 98 steals)
2009: .216/.314/.319 (3 home runs, 17 steals)
And these are the featured comments, as of right now (on the bottom of the MLB.com main page):
Labeled "Blogs":
The Phillies must have heard my rant ... Chan Ho Park is now in the bullpen. J.A. Happ will take his place in the rotation. YAY!"
-- The View From New Jersey
Philadelphia was otherwise going to leave Park in the rotation, but then a lone blogger showed them the error of their ways.
Labeled "Message Boards":
Juan Pierre is doing just as good as Manny in left field. That is, besides the home runs. Still getting on base and driving in runs.
-- Ramirez_99
Manny Ramirez has a .492 on-base percentage and 20 RBI in 120 plate appearances with the Dodgers this year.
Juan Pierre has a .478 on-base percentage (yeah, this shocked me too, and somewhat deflates my head of steam on this post) and 12 RBI in 93 plate appearances.
Pierre, reaching base 10% more frequently than his career best, still fell a hair short of what Manny's been doing ever since he got to LA (his top four full-season OBPs are .457, .450, .442, and .439).
The RBI per plate appearance difference is big but probably meaningless - I imagine Pierre gets far fewer runners in scoring position from the leadoff spot than Manny did from the middle of the lineup. RBI in general are a red herring, but I'm working directly with what the commenter chose to cite (and MLB chose to highlight).
In seven leagues (two Scoresheet, two roto, two head-to-head, one "suck league" (i.e. the object is to find players who will play badly, frequently)) I am currently:
1st of 9
1st of 12
1st (tie) of 12
1st of 10
1st (tie) of 10
3rd of 16
9th of 14
I don't think I'd ever previously had an in-season (i.e. not the first or second day) share of the lead in that many leagues at once, but the real milestone here comes from the 9th place team:
2 3 5 2 2 12.5 10 11 14 14
On the left are R, RBI, SB, Total Bases, and OBP (total of 14 standings points).
On the right are Wins, Saves, Strikeouts, ERA and WHIP (latter two are each 14 points by themselves).
While we're here: the regular expression /^V.*?t.*?o$/ makes me sad, though it also makes me wonder whether the match qualifies as ironic.
Well so much for all the metaphors between sports officiating and politics this week:
If I had umpired this game, upon being shown the Rays' lineup card, I would have immediately said "Longoria's the DH." If the game were played under protest, it would be played under protest.
(I'm reasonably sure I would not have needed 13 minutes to sort it all out.)
The relevant rules are in the Baseball Think Factory thread; I think a lot depends on the most reasonable definition/application of the verb "designate" (as in "designate a hitter for the pitcher."
Joe Posnanski is making this more complicated than it needs to be (in my opinion):
Pete Rose recently opined that steroid users are worse than players who bet on baseball*, but that he'd still vote for people like Alex Rodriguez to get into baseball's Hall of Fame.
This is nakedly self-serving, of course, and the relevant syllogism is quite simple (yet for some reason not at all the same as the one Posnanski starts with):
A. Steroid use is even worse than betting on your own sport
B. But steroid use still isn't bad enough to keep an otherwise obviously deserving candidate out of the Hall of Fame
Therefore C. betting on your own sport obviously isn't bad enough to keep an otherwise obviously deserving candidate out of the Hall of Fame
*- I of course strongly believe that part A is false:
Gambling on your own sport creates the likelihood (close to zero, but anything more than zero is unacceptable) that you will do things adverse to the interests of your own team. I assume you've long since understood that even betting on your own team creates these misaligned incentives, unless you always bet exactly the same amount game after game.
Steroids, on the other hand, amount to going to great lengths (perhaps unacceptably great lengths) in favor of the interests of your own team. My sense is that they're considered to be wrong because of, in roughly descending order:
1) the long-term harm to the person taking them
2) the degree to which they give an unfair advantage now, i.e. that they hurt one's opponent (rather than one's own team; incidentally, my gut reaction is that the allegation alluded to here is utter hogwash, but that if it were true then it would be 1,000 times worse than any doping scandal I know of).
3) they set a bad example For The Children (which really relates more to #1)
4) supposedly they cheat the fans out of something (but really, isn't the opposite true? - if batters are making more contact and hitting balls further, but conversely pitches are throwing harder nastier stuff, and the best players are staying healthier longer, on balance shouldn't this make the game 20-25% more entertaining across the board?)
Check it out: May 8, and again May 10!
I saw something on the ESPN.com front page that incensed me.
No, it wasn't this (Ramirez suspended 50 games); it was this (Tennessee signs football player who once took part in a rape).
Suppose for the sake of argument that you didn't care about sports. Then it would never matter to you who Manny Ramirez was, or how he became what he was, except when he went on Leno or were cited by The Onion or led his team to a championship that caused hysteria and/or traffic jams in your home town.
You can cheerfully ignore a juicer, not so much a sexual predator.
Taking on some obvious points:
1. Don't I strenuously oppose (the overuse of) sex offender registries, and by implication strenuously support equitable treatment for people who've already done their time?
There's a vast difference between not ostracizing someone, and treating that person as a demigod. Not that being recruited to a major college football program is a priori some sort of exaltation... except that you and I all know that in practice it is. In practice, big-program college athletes get the kind of treatment that would make one think he's bullet-proof. Think of the old confrontation cliche: "Who are they going to believe? Me, the star athlete, or you [etc.]?"
2. Wasn't I quite outspoken about the Duke lacrosse players? Yes, because (as should be obvious by now) they were falsely accused, and were railroaded by people with an axe to grind or fame to claim or both. Ironically, one of the biggest villains in the Duke lacrosse abomination is heavily involved in the recent smearing of a baseball player.
3. Tiptoeing away from sexual predation and back to steroids: How can I claim that it will never affect you, when it sets a bad example for the children [etc. etc.]? Spare me. Yes, kids look up to their heroes, and will do foolish things if their heroes do them. Parenting isn't easy, as I... probably more accurate that I'm about to learn than that I know (a seven-month-old can't get into much trouble yet)... but still, where were these kids parents?!? At some point, hokey as this sounds, you have to trot out the "If Manny jumped off a cliff..." hypothetical.
Anyway, what outraged me most was that the drug suspension story will get about 100x as much press coverage and hand-wringing discussion as it really needs, while the opposite will be true of the ex-rapist. (I can only imagine the "where is she now?" of the girl on the other end of that.)
I learned from Deadspin that Ken Macha claims to hide in the bathroom when Trevor Hoffman takes the mound in Milwaukee, because Hoffman's theme music is so loud (Game Notes) section.
What do the San Diego Padres play for Hoffman's replacement (and is it a bad thing that we missed out on the obvious name wordplay)?
I have 219 players (but fewer than 200 distinct players) across seven fantasy rosters. One of those fantasy teams, Baby Eisenstein, is in the Kimera Bartee Open, a "suck league." Meanwhile the two Scoresheet teams are in AL-only and NL-only universes, so there's an effective limit of five teams on which I'd have the same player. Anyway...
FOUR TEAMS
Kelly Johnson (2B-ATL)
Justin Masterson (P-BOS)
*Rick Porcello (P-DET)
THREE TEAMS
*Emilio Bonifacio (2B-FLA)
Jay Bruce (OF-CIN)
**Zack Greinke (P-KC)
Joey Votto (1B-CIN)
*- one of them is Baby Eisenstein (think of it as hedging)
**- would've been four but for a pre-season deal straight-up for Carlos Pena
TWO TEAMS
Heath Bell (P-SD)
Carlos Beltran (OF-NYM)
Dave Bush (P-MIL)
Asdrubal Cabrera (SS-CLE)
Yunel Escobar (SS-ATL)
Neftali Feliz (P-TEX)
Adam Jones (OF-BAL)
Chipper Jones (3B-ATL)
Hiroki Kuroda (P-LAD)
Brian McCann (C-ATL)
##Yadier Molina (C-STL)
*Jamie Moyer (P-PHI)
Hunter Pence (OF-HOU)
Chad Qualls (P-ARI)
Mariano Rivera (P-NYY)
Justin Upton (OF-ARI)
Javier Vaqzuer (P-ATL)
Matt Wieters (C-BAL)
*Michael Young (SS-TEX)
##Ben Zobrist (SS-TB)
##- both of the Molina pickups were to cover injuries to McCann and Ryan Domit; coincidentally those are both also my Matt Wieters teams. meanwhile I got Zobrist in a second league just this morning to fill in for Stephen Drew
I've dropped 16 players since drafting them:
TWO DROPS
Cristian Guzman (after his terrible start spring training but before he started strong, and long before he hit the DL. I never had to play him (except maybe an off day))
ONE DROP (not from the suck league):
Mike Fontenot: to pick up Bonifacio (not very well thought-out, eh?)
Jon Garland
Damaso Marte: to pick up Porcello before the season began (whew!)
Micah Owings
Skip Schumaker (FA pickup for 2B eligibility, dropped soon after for Bonifacio)
Chad Tracy (a $1 1B, part of why the Greinke-Pena deal happened)
Carlos Villanueva
ONE DROP (from the suck league):
Chris Volstad (otherwise would have been on the TWO TEAMS list above)
Jason Motte
Jose Morales (third-string Twins catcher)
Jason McDonald
John Baker
Brian Anderson (subsequently picked up again)
Nick Adenhart (rest in peace)
"[Milton] Bradley has missed several games with a groin issue. There's still no update on his two-game suspension appeal."
--Milton Bradley
Even though I've come to despise this particular pun (it was run into the ground back when MB was an Expo), I still have to call this out as failure to game the system.
(Who in baseball doesn't know that you have a two-game suspension, and happen also to be day-to-day with an injury, you drop the appeal when convenient?)
Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 Alameda Islanders outfield (stats thru April 20), in descending order of On Base plus Slugging:
Brad Hawpe .270/.372/.649
Pat Burrell .225/.319/.350
Jacoby Ellsbury .268/.305/.304
Carl Crawford .241/.263/.333
Jay Bruce .176/.263/.294
Milton Bradley .053/.308/.211
Justin Upton .182/.270/.242
At least Hawpe is doing well. (This is a 12-team head-to-head league where AVG, OBP, and SLG are each among the (14) categories. Six OF spots, plus a Util. My putting an OF in the Util spot would bench Todd Helton (and his lofty .231/.273/.282).)
They currently think of Dallas Braden as their ace (with Duchscherer injured). I'm glad Braden is doing better now than in past years, but it's still unsettling.
This is why I can't quite buy the A's as a contender. That and the "casual fan whose baseball knowledge is five years out of date but who found himself doing a fantasy draft" lineup vibe (Nomar, Orlando Cabrera, the return of Jason Giambi).
In general, I strongly believe that people vastly over-fixate on the deaths of celebrities as opposed to the deaths of ordinary people. If, for example, dozens of people die in a car accident on a given day, it strikes me as a bit unseemly to dwell significantly more on the famous one than on the anonymous ones.
And yet...
Perhaps I've just been insanely, 99th percentile lucky when it comes to my closest friends (or family, or even general acquaintances) staying alive from day to day. A couple of high school classmates killed themselves; I've learned through Facebook that other classmates are cancer survivors (and fervently hope they continue to thrive). My general impression is that my personal experience with this is way less frequent than a typical person my age.
So we expand the universe of "people I know" -- or rather, claim to know. I generally don't bond with celebrities (quite the opposite), and rather disdain people who do, but (partly because of fantasy baseball) I feel an irrational connection to baseball players.
I've felt numb since reading the news. I felt the same way about Joe Kennedy, and Cory Lidle, and Darryl Kile, and Mike Darr, and (the first time anything like this hit me) Steve Olin and Tim Crews (though I'd forgotten their names, and had to find them via Bob Ojeda).
(By contrast: Josh Hancock's death didn't move me, partly because so many people reacted disgustingly to it. And the NFL players lost at sea almost motivated me to write something like the first paragraph, only I never got around to it.)
Anyhow, have some thoughts and prayers to the Adenhart family.
Unsettling asides: I just skimmed this article (which, unlike this one, has no Editor's Note) Tuesday evening during the Kimera Bartee Open draft. And even more unsettling, the headline on the Angels' recap on this Gameday Wrap is still the same ("Adenhart let down"). Rob Neyer's observance makes the right point about unluckiness and perspective.
Dwight coined that phrase as regards this sick story (only the Pirates...), Craig learned that there are no Google hits on it (yet), QED...
If Schilling can announce his retirement on his blog, then by golly I can announce Schilling's retirement on mine.
(It's no worse than when "ESPN's [name of personality] has learned that [hours-old news story that ESPN only wishes it had broken].")
(Scoresheet = simulation baseball, with outcome probabilities based on the real stats of that past week and playing time capped by real-life playing time.)
You still get a guy's stats if he changes leagues, but as of the keeper deadline, your limit of 13 non-rookies includes no more than two crossover players. Your 13 kept players represent rounds 1-13; any rookie keeps represent round 35, 34, etc. (All picks are tradeable.)
Zack Greinke
Carlos Lee
Justin Verlander
Andy Pettitte
Francisco Rodriguez
Billy Butler
Robinson Cano
Michael Young
Alexei Ramirez
Carlos Lee
Adam Jones
J.D. Drew
Jack Cust
14. Jeff Clement
15. Justin Masterson
16. Jeremy Bonderman
(I traded away my R17 pick last August - the trade turns out to be Kendry Morales for Ben Zobrist + six weeks of Adam Lind, although Morales could just as easily have turned out to be Jose Arredondo, Dioner Navarro, David Huff, or Sean Gallagher)
18. Russell Branyan
19. David Dejesus
20. Tyler Flowers
21. Aaron Heilman
22. Brad Ziegler
23. Kenji Johjima
24. Xavier Nady
25. Daric Barton
26. Carlos Silva
27. Brad Penny
28. Gary Sheffield
29. Josh Outman
30. Brian Tallet
31. George Kottaras
32a (acquired last August) Ben Zobrist
32b. Adrian Cardenas
Neftali Feliz
Carlos Rosa
Gordon Beckham
Expected Lineup Card (we slot 30, then the rest are a taxi squad)
1. Drew / Young
2. Dejesus / Butler
3. Cust / Jones
4. Ca. Lee
5. Branyan / Nady
6. Al. Ramirez
7. Barton / Sheffield
8. Clement / Johjima
9. Cano / Zobrist
(no, seven platoons is not at all typical; the usual would be more like 2-3; a side effect of this is that every hitter on my 30-man is at least a part-time starter)
1. Greinke
2. Cl. Lee (L)
3. Verlander
4. Pettitte (L)
5. Bonderman
--
Masterson
Outman (L) (I realize he might not start the year in the majors)
Silva
Penny
Feliz (definitely won't start the year in the majors, at least shouldn't)
--
Tallet (L)
Ziegler
Heilman
--
K-Rod
Rosa
Kottaras
Flowers
Beckham
Cardenas
16 teams * 25 roster spots = 400 picks!
Last year: 14 teams, but everyone seemed to bid as though there were 12 teams. This year, early on everyone seemed to bid as though there were 20 teams. Two hypotheses about that:
A. People who left money on the table last year felt stupid for doing so, and wanted to be sure this year they spent all 260.
B. Nobody thinks to adjust expected auction prices from a 12-team league (10-team? I forget the fantasy auction counterpart of Standard Temperature and Pressure) to a 14-team league (even though it's 520 more in play chasing the same Major League universe) but everyone adjusted, and perhaps some people overcompensated, for the difference between 12 and 16.
Looking back on it a year later, there were some breathtaking good values (lucky breaks?) on my $1-apiece 2008 pitching staff. (And some clinkers, to be sure. Well, two clinkers, one of whom I took for $1 again this year. One of these year's he'll figure it out (bonus points if that comment alone was enough for you to deduce who this is).)
C,1B,2B,3B,SS,LF,CF,RF,OF,Util
SP,SP,SP,SP,SP,RP,RP,RP,P
Six bench spots, cap of nine (9) SP per team. (8 last year)
TB, OBP, Runs, RBI, SB
Quality Starts, Saves, Strikeouts, ERA, WHIP
El Diablo con Dinero (2009)
C Russell Martin 24
1B Joey Votto 19
2B Rickie Weeks 17
3B Chipper Jones 21
SS Stephen Drew 21
LF Adam Dunn 19
CF B.J. Upton 30
RF Jay Bruce 19
OF Chris Young 10
Util Elijah Dukes 7
Bench Edwin Encarnacion 6
Bench Chad Tracy 1
SP Zack Greinke 19
SP Dave Bush 4
SP Joe Blanton 3
SP Daniel Cabrera 1
SP Andrew Miller 1
RP Jonathan Broxton 16
RP Heath Bell 15
RP J.J. Putz 2
P Cory Wade 1
Bench Kevin Correia 1
Bench Jarrod Washburn 1
Bench Koji Uehara 1
Bench Micah Owings 1
El Diablo con Dinero (2008)
Pos Name Team Salary
C Josh Bard Padres (SDP) 1
1B Albert Pujols Cardinals (STL) 48
2B Brian Roberts Orioles (BAL) 27
3B David Wright Mets (NYM) 55
SS Jose Reyes Mets (NYM) 52
OF Chris B. Young Diamondbacks (ARI) 27
OF Adam Dunn Reds (CIN) 24
OF Jacoby Ellsbury Red Sox (BOS) 9
OF Matt Diaz Braves (ATL) 1
U Conor Jackson Diamondbacks (ARI) 1
U Mike Jacobs Marlins (FLA) 1
U Austin Kearns Nationals (WAS) 1
U Adam Jones Orioles (BAL) 1
P Matt Garza Devil Rays (TAM) 1
P Mike Mussina Yankees (NYY) 1
P Nate Robertson Tigers (DET) 1
P Hiroki Kuroda Dodgers (LAD) 1
P Scott Baker Twins (MIN) 1
P Daniel Cabrera Orioles (BAL) 1
P C.J. Wilson Rangers (TEX) 1
P Justin Duchscherer Athletics (OAK) 1
P Brian Wilson Giants (SFG) 1
R Kevin Slowey Twins (MIN) 1
R Jamie Moyer Phillies (PHI) 1
R Peter Moylan Braves (ATL) 1
(Really, "air effects." Humidity, pressure, etc.)
In Arizona: Angels, Royals combine for 15 home runs
In Florida: Nolasco, 2 relievers combine to no-hit Tigers
Don't be fooled by either.
Both on Yahoo!, for ease of cut-and-paste. One was asynchronous (via web from the Thursday before last to last Tuesday), one was mostly Saturday morning.
Your scavenger hunt: find...
1. The most egregious, hideous overdraft on either of these lists. (It's not even close; I had a moment of irrational need.)
2. The pick most likely to be mistakenly described by others as an overdraft.
3. The guy who was such a mind-boggling steal in one draft that I made up for it by overdrafting him (not by that much, once you factor in keeper inflation) in the other league.
4. For each league, the non-keeper pick on which I had the most time-consuming decision.
5. Not shown here (by definition), the players in each league whom I was most frustrated not to get with my first non-keeper. One had no chance of getting to me (despite being so underrated by Average Draft Position); the other was drafted one pick ahead of me.
Alameda Islanders
Teams: 12
Scoring Type: Head-to-Head
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, IF, LF, CF, RF, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, HR, RBI, SB, FPCT, AVG, OBP, SLG, W, SV, K, HLD, ERA, WHIP
(First eight rounds are each team's keepers: in other words one can keep a guy his whole career, or until he declines just far enough no longer to be one of a team's eight best. (e.g. Derek Jeter))
Round Pick Player Position
1. (11) David Wright 3B
2. (23) Brian McCann C
3. (35) Justin Morneau 1B
4. (47) Carl Crawford LF
5. (59) Jacoby Ellsbury LF,CF,RF
6. (71) Jay Bruce LF,CF,RF
7. (83) Derrek Lee 1B
8. (95) Joakim Soria RP
9. (107) Justin Upton RF
10. (119) Brad Hawpe RF
11. (131) Milton Bradley RF
12. (143) Kelly Johnson 2B
13. (155) Javier Vázquez SP
14. (167) Pat Burrell LF
15. (179) Brett Myers SP
16. (191) Zack Greinke SP
17. (203) Kevin Slowey SP
18. (215) Chad Qualls RP
19. (227) Mike Fontenot 2B
20. (239) Nick Johnson 1B
21. (251) Todd Helton 1B
22. (263) Fausto Carmona SP
23. (275) Hiroki Kuroda SP
24. (287) Asdrubal Cabrera 2B,SS
25. (299) Carlos Villanueva SP,RP
26. (311) Jonathan Sánchez SP
27. (323) Ryan Madson RP
28. (335) Dámaso Marte RP
IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.
(better team name coming soon)
Teams: 16
Scoring Type: Rotisserie
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, RP, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, RBI, SB, TB, OBP, W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP
(Keepers slotted in-line: escalating compensation; for example, I will have the option to keep Matt Wieters for a 5th-round pick next year; if I do, I will subsequently have the option to keep him a 2nd-round pick in 2011)
Round Pick Player Position
1. (9) CC Sabathia SP
2. (20) Brandon Webb SP
3. (40) Mariano Rivera RP
4. (45) Joey Votto 1B
(first four rounds took place by e-mail to save everyone some time Saturday morning, but Yahoo! works quickly enough now that I suspect the e-mail thing was superfluous)
5. (68) Hunter Pence OF
6. (73) Matt Wieters C
7. (96) Chad Qualls RP
8. (101) Brian McCann C
9. (124) Conor Jackson 1B,OF
10. (129) Matt LaPorta 1B,OF
11. (152) Chris Davis 1B,3B
12. (157) Matt Garza SP
13. (180) Adam LaRoche 1B
14. (185) Kelly Johnson 2B
15. (208) Yunel Escobar SS
(had to leave here, so from this point on it's my Pre-Rankings)
16. (213) Zack Greinke SP
17. (236) Justin Masterson SP,RP
18. (241) Travis Snider OF
19. (264) Neftali Feliz SP
20. (269) James Shields SP
21. (292) Cristian Guzmán SS
22. (297) Ryan Spilborghs OF
23. (320) Rafael Soriano RP
24. (325) Asdrubal Cabrera 2B,SS
A partial list:
1. Wink Martindale: I tried to write him a fan letter when I was six.
2. Tim McCarver (back when he was paired with Al Michaels, of course): The expository style of making the same point five times in a row is probably better for kids than adults.
3. Rick Reilly: just as I was taking masochistic glee in these parodies, I realized to my horror that I had thoroughly enjoyed his column when he first joined Sports Illustrated.
Take this, then tell me about it.
I'm a triangle. At the time it was a really easy choice.
(Something that's not actually part of the test, but that I thought might turn out to be: In what configuration did you draw your shapes? I have a circle, then a square directly to the left of the circle, then a triangle on top (pointing up), then a squiggly line to the right, as tall as the circle and triangle combined.)
Having read the diagnosis I'd say the triangle is the least bad description of me. Definitely not the circle, too good at improvisation to be the square, and too [the only adjectives that fit here reek of hubris] to be the squiggly even though, from the descriptions, that would be my 1A to the triangle's 1.
Deadspin gave Pearlman this guest column, in which he asks a surprisingly stupid question:
"Will someone please tell me what, in the name of Steve Balboni, were ARod's teammates doing at today's press conference? Why were they there? Why were they supporting this man and his actions?"
If my wife, or my son, or some other close family member were ever accused of a serious crime, I would attend the trial as frequently as possible. Even if I knew they were guilty, I would still be there. I presume it's obvious why.
Baseball teammates are almost, but not quite, like family members. No matter what happens this spring, it's reasonable to assume that all the Yankees (including Rodriguez) will spend the next six months in very close quarters, their professional livelihoods depending in part on each other.
While we're here... I'll preface this by reminding you that I absolutely despite the "Stop snitching" movement and everything it stands for. (Carmelo Anthony's name happened to come up in conversation at work today.) Pearlman accomplished a lot today, in that he almost--almost--gave me (of all people) sympathy for (of all things) the "stop snitching" meme.
Without looking it up, which three of the eight stat lines below (by the same player) were for seasons in which we now know that the player took Performance Enhancing Drugs? (Since they're also the only three seasons in which that player's home games were in a notoriously hitter-friendly ballpark, they should be immediately obvious to you, right?)
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG
162 605 124 194 29 1 48 130 21 6 91 139 .321 .421 .610
162 632 133 201 34 1 52 135 18 3 75 131 .318 .399 .622
148 554 134 175 34 2 41 132 15 4 100 121 .316 .420 .606
158 583 143 183 31 0 54 156 24 4 95 120 .314 .422 .645
161 686 123 213 35 5 42 124 46 13 45 121 .310 .360 .560
162 624 125 187 27 2 57 142 9 4 87 122 .300 .392 .623
161 607 124 181 30 6 47 118 17 3 87 126 .298 .396 .600
155 601 112 172 24 2 36 106 28 4 80 131 .286 .375 .512
What, if anything, should we conclude from any difficulty in distinguishing between those stat lines? (I see two logical conclusions: the one I'll draw is vastly more benign than the one I suspect most other people will draw.)
"...John and Becky and the folks at Goldman Sachs..."
---from this article
The article linked here marks at least the 10th time in 2008 that I saw someone go out of his way to make the case that there absolutely no collusion involved in Barry Bonds remaining unsigned in 2008.
Compared to that, I don't think I actually saw anyone bother to make the case that there was. (My own personal res ipsa observation doesn't count.)
...but Whitey Herzog is still gung-ho for it. The comments on the link are mostly dead-on, of course.
So I wonder how much of the decision to become* a hardcore fan of a baseball team, and to attend oodles of that team's games in person, is driven by the chance not just to see your team in the World Series but even to see your team in person in the World Series. Probably not a huge amount, but certainly more than zero. I've seen three World Series games in person, and not even for "my" team. I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
*- "process of becoming"? - depends on how conscious an act you think it is
Incidentally, the day after the World Series ends is the saddest day of the year. That says more about the year in general than that day itself, but still.
For a quick 10 points, what happened next?
Answer at the end of this article.
"Jimmy Rollins, a friend of superstar free-agent pitcher CC Sabathia dating back to their upbringing outside Oakland, Calif., [...]"
--the start of this Jon Heyman article in Sports Illustrated
They lived 30 miles apart (or at least went to high school 30 miles apart; for all I know they lived 29 miles apart).
Damning evidence here, linked from Joe Posnanski.
Most of what's wrong with baseball these days follows directly from the commissioner, and his management style (or palpable lack thereof), and his public relations style (or even more egregious lack thereof). I don't know if I've ever seen anyone more prone to failure to think ahead, indecision, gratuitous tyranny, and even more gratuitous attempts to deflect blame.
Consider everything Major League Baseball has done in the last 10-15 years. In the history of sport, has any one man ever come closer to singlehandedly derailing a league that big, other than via gambling ties or similar corruption?
I'd wondered whether it was too over-the-top for me to root for Tampa Bay in Game 2 and Game 6 despite rooting for Philadelphia in any other World Series game. Based on Julia's reaction to my explanation, apparently it wasn't.
So we're both agog now: Apparently it's not okay to take steroids, and not even okay to smoke dope, but just fine to beat your wife in public?
There's no such thing as a bandwagon. There's just people deciding that the product has become good enough to invest their time and money in.
--King Kaufman
Now I still think we should mercilessly mock anyone with brand spanking new Tampa Bay Rays gear, unless they:
A. Expressed any allegiance at all prior to, let's say, August 2008.
-or-
B. Live in the Tampa/St. Pete area... eh, let's be generous and say the whole state of Florida (sorry, Marlins).
But when it comes to sports allegiance consumption, diehard fans are (indirectly, but still ironically) the reason the Cubs have generally stunk. The more direct cause of course was the Tribune Company treating all those paying fans like the suckers they were.
In any case, this is still funny.
The first time someone mentioned this guy, I realized that simply avoiding the Dodgers-Red Sox matchup was not enough: the only way to short-circuit an incredibly run-into-the-ground story line would be a World Series that had neither of the teams he played for this year.
That said, it turns out I have an inconsistency between my "teams in the World Series" preference and my "teams winning the World Series" preference. Ranking strictly the four semifinalists:
TO REACH
1. Phillies
2. Rays
3. Red Sox
3. Dodgers
TO WIN
1. Phillies
2. Red Sox
3. Dodgers
4. Rays
I like seeing expansion teams do well, just not so well that they win the whole thing. (The second part is a Marlin effect, I think.)
Top of the seventh inning, B.J. Upton at second, having just hit a two-run double to put Tampa Bay ahead 7-0. Red Sox radio guys are commenting on how despite Upton's speed and Jonathan Papelbon's high leg kick, Upton hasn't exhibited any inclination to steal third.
"Joe Maddon perhaps calling off the dogs."
"He doesn't want anyone to get drilled."
Of course they're just speculating -- we'll never know for sure if Maddon decided to let up. I'm not sure whether Jon Miller or Joe Morgan talked about this (was busy with the baby at the time), though I do remember Morgan quoting Sparky Anderson about when you're losing in the mid to late innings of an elimination game, the right frame of mind is: "We have N outs left, lets make the best use of them."
(If you don't: It's a graph of each team's estimated probability of winning baseball game given the sequence of plays that had happened to that point. Most graphs trend smoothly and steadily from middle left to either upper left or upper right.)
By what criteria have the 2008 MLB playoff teams been ranked in the lists below (and what would the relevant raw numbers be)? [This becomes easier still when you look at the subtle differences between the lists.]
1. Rays
2. Brewers
3. Dodgers
4. Phillies
5. Cubs
6t. Angels
6t. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1. Rays
2. Cubs
3. Brewers
4. Dodgers
5. Phillies
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1t. Brewers
1t. Rays
3. Cubs
4. Phillies
5. Dodgers
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
Jay Jaffe won't miss Yankee Stadium.
When the time comes, I'll miss exactly one thing about [A's baseball at the] Oakland Coliseum: its proximity to where we live.
Then again, in the 1990s I was aghast at the condition of Fenway Park, mainly how unhygienic it all was. I had no desire to see taxpayers buy a new stadium, but I just didn't see how the "Save Fenway Park" movement could succeed. Apparently the new [as of earlier this decade] ownership did a tremendous job, though.
While plausibly in their earshot, I've yelled worse things to at least two three four pitchers in my baseball watching lifetime, one of them specifically weight-related:
1. The year Jose Mesa (then with Cleveland) was acquitted of rape charges, he made his first appearance at Fenway Park the same evening Harvard and/or BU held a Take Back the Night Rally. I've conveniently forgotten my actual choice of words here.
2. (the only home player heckle among the four) Late 1990s, Fenway Park: When Jim Corsi was a Red Sock (and on the large side), I accused him of being on the Rich Garces diet plan.
3. 2002, Oakland Coliseum: five rows behind the visiting bullpen, I was one of many fans simultaneously mocking Kaz Sasaki's alcoholism.
4. Also 2002 (this game), same location, I loudly accused Roberto Herrnandez of singlehandedly crippling the Royals' franchise with his ridiculous contract. A ridiculous assertion in hindsight, since
a) it's not his fault he took the money that anyone else would've taken
b) it's not as if the lack of that contract would have magically made Kansas City non-dysfunctional
Will Carroll (best known for gathering info about sports injuries) devotes a Baseball Prospectus blog post to the recent Wall Street meltdown: "Saul Hansell takes a solid look at what some are calling a failure of the quantitative analysts on Wall Street and already, some are wondering if the same kind of backlash will happen in baseball." (hyperlink in original)
(The gist of the Saul Hansell piece is that financial analysts gave their computer models bad initial assumptions, for example (this part is my jumped-to conclusion, certainly not Hansell's per se) underestimating just how many American homebuyers would turn out to be deadbeats.)
Anyhow, shortly after reading that blurb I saw Todd Zywicki, a Volokh Conspirator, ask readers which analogy was more apt between "liquidity problem" or "misvalued assets." There's a lot of both, of course.
Full circle between the financial world and the baseball world, I can finally reconstruct the question I asked Sandy Alderson at a 1999 symposium about players vs. owners, big market vs. small market, etc. (This was at baseball's winter meetings, sponsored by Baseball America; as I recall the panelists were Scott Boras, Gene Orza, and Jerry Glanville; and Sandy Alderson, Randy Smith, and Jerry Colangelo.)
The prevailing meme at the time had been that teams like the Pirates or Royals couldn't afford to sign the best/most expensive free agents. So my question was something like this (nine years after the fact, this is a paraphrase at best):
Did they really mean to imply that it would be unprofitable, even in the long run for a small-market team to sign a big star? Since the very best athletes tend to bring a team marginal revenue well beyond their salaries, wasn't what-can-the-Royals-afford-to-pay-their-players just a liquidity problem that could be easily solved with judicious lending/borrowing? But if the real issue was that signing big stars wasn't worth the opportunity cost (versus sucking but consistently profiting, like the Pirates do), why couldn't they just admit that instead of crying poor?
Boras visibly enjoyed the question; Alderson pretended not to understand it.
The biggest flaw with my premise is of course that a big star will make a much bigger financial difference in a market with more viewers or ticket buyers at stake. If a player would be "worth" $100M to the Yankees or $50M to the Royals, the Yankees could offer $50.1M and reap a big gain. Then again, the flaw with the flaw is that arguably, aside from needing to borrow the money, the small-market teams could have been the top bidders on some particular stars (obviously not others - here's where baseball common sense comes in, e.g. don't overpay mid-30s veterans about to hit a career cliff) and still come out positive (just not necessarily ahead of their otherwise-most-profitable option)
P.S. Speaking of Boras, he certainly knows how to start with an ostensible fight against an arguably unjust situation and extract maximum rent for his client in exchange for letting the broader injustice slide.
As reported by John Perrotto on Baseball Prospectus:
The [Houston] Astros are making a fashion statement in the final days of the season as a sign of protest. They're wearing red T-shirts under their jerseys with a caricature of Commissioner Bud Selig on the front and the inscription "Bud killed us." On the back are the words "We survived Hurricane Ike."
The Astros are still clearly peeved that Selig rescheduled two of their three games against the Cubs that that could not be played in Houston last weekend because of Hurricane Ike to Milwaukee's Miller Park, just a 90-minute drive from Chicago. [...]
"It's just not right what happened," said pitcher Brandon Backe, the Astros' player representative to the Major League Baseball Players Association, and also a native of Galveston, Texas, which was devastated by the hurricane. [...] "To make us have to leave our homes so soon after a major disaster struck showed no compassion whatsoever. All of my family and friends were affected by the storm. Some of the people closest to me are homeless because their houses are gone. It was really a flip of the coin whether I was going to get on that plane and go to Chicago. I knew it was the right thing to do to go with the team but it was hard to leave, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I don't think anybody's heart was in those games in Milwaukee. Heck, we got one hit in two games. What does that tell you?"
I know exactly what it tells me, though that's not necessarily the same thing it tells him. If this isn't sore losing personified, I don't know what is.
(For what it's worth: thanks to WGN I grew up a Cub fan, especially the 1989 team. At some point the Tribune Company's blatant lack of commitment to winning (why should they have cared? win or lose the team was a cash cow) left me indifferent to the Cubs, though obviously living in Boston and then near Oakland also had a lot to do with it.)
With 11 days to go, these players have gotten me 300 or more points in the Kimera Bartee Open this year (league where the object is to have players who play badly):
Carlos Gómez 954
Michael Bourn 856
José Castillo 768
Tony Peña Jr. 660
Bobby Crosby 584
Kurt Suzuki 524
Brad Wilkerson 442
Chase Headley 412
Akinori Iwamura 334
Asdrubal Cabrera 330
Brian Schneider 306
IP
Kyle Kendrick 125.00 940
Brian Bannister 92.67 751
Luis Mendoza 38.00 635
Brian Burres 46.33 456
Greg Reynolds 34.33 384
Kevin Correia 54.33 352
Jason Jennings 22.33 336
Scott Feldman 41.00 331
(Then again, what isn't a disaster-prone area? If it isn't hurricanes it's earthquakes, blizzards, Mississippi River flooding... but the point still holds.)
If you don't want your championship chances dented by a questionably neutral site for your rescheduled games, why not be a bit more proactive and work out a deal with a friendly city closer to home?
For example, no baseball could have taken place in Houston yesterday; but there's no obvious reason why Arlington (the Texas Rangers' home park) couldn't have hosted a game, with the Rangers at Oakland this past weekend. I assume the main reason it didn't work out was that the event staff there couldn't muster a workforce on such short notice (and/or that the evacuation and disaster relief had a ripple effect just that far in-land). But if the Astros and Rangers had made some contingency deal, who knows?
Side note to a spoiled athlete or two: Your own fans got washed out; many of them lost their homes. OMFG, you have to play "83 road games" instead of 81? - the tragedy doesn't quite compare.
Now that the original scorer's decision has been upheld, will this be a more famous or less famous pitching performance than if he'd been charged an error in the first place (and thus ended up with a no-hitter)?
I claim that this game will have been more famous, and as evidence I ask you:
Can you name the last two pitchers to throw MLB no-hitters? You probably can't, unless you're a fan of the team they both play[ed] for.
How many of the last five can you name? (Randy Johnson's perfect game was only the sixth-most-recent.)
Before you look it up, how many of the 12 no-hitters this decade can you describe reasonably well? (Or if you prefer, 15 in the past ten years -- the David Wells perfect game would miss that cutoff by about 3.5 months.)
This article has been up for at least a week now, but I just now realized that it's the best example I've ever seen of what Whitlock was kvetching about.
(Yes, I know it was [some guy whose name I've already forgotten], not Stephen A. Smith, who set Whitlock off, but Whitlock's complaint was really about a style rather than a person.)
Suddenly, the Chicago Sun-Times has a much better sports section.
"Mariotti resigned, and then headed to the Sun-Times office to tape his Around the Horn segment, only to find that his security pass had been deactivated while the paper was deciding whether or not to accept the resignation. They finally accepted it."
"I think that it overshot the mark by far just because, what, in a Yankee game someone didn’t get a homer? Please. It’s happened thousands of times. That’s part of the game. It’s the beauty of the game. Mistakes are made."
--Detroit Tiger pitcher Kenny Rogers, who opposes instant replay
If mistakes were "the beauty of the game," then how would we know if we had the optimal level of them? Should we tweak the rules a bit to subtly introduce even more mistakes?
Fill in the blank. (Don't look it up until you've tried getting it without looking it up.)
1. Joe Mauer
2. Mark Prior
3. [blank]
4. Gavin Floyd
5. Mark Teixeira
Bonus points if you have any idea where he is now (I don't). It's not John VanBenschoten (who's #8 on the list in question behind two names I don't even recognize).
Actually gettable bonus points (that in turn might give away the answer): This guy is to Opening Day 2005 as which two players (actually traded for each other) are to Opening Day 2004 and Opening Day 2006?
Additional (gettable) bonus points: This guy was traded in December 2005, straight up, for whom? (And as a matter of opinion, which of the two players in that deal is a bigger bust?)
Prior to 2008 I don't think I'd made seven fantasy baseball (or fantasy anything) trades in a 12-month span, much less a two-week span. So that was fun.
Nobody cares [etc.] -- though one of these trades did involve both my new third-favorite Oakland Athletic (behind Jack Cust and Frank Thomas) while other trades involve two my new favorite underrated-in-fantasy-baseball pitchers (neither of whom is the aforementioned A.)
From least recent to most recent...
Masters of Puppets: Acquired Andy Marte (3B-CLE), giving up Jeff Mathis (C-ANA). My AL Scoresheet team (baseball simulation), with a comically inconsequential deal (challenge trade?) involving ex-prospects who spectacularly failed to live up to their hype. I sent my third-string catcher to the team that lost Jorge Posada, picking up a 3B in plenty of time for Scott Rolen's saw-it-coming-a-mile-away breakdown (which was a few week's after Eric Chavez's own equally expected breakdown).
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Chris Davis (1B-TEX) and Yovani Gallardo (P-MIL), giving up Jake Peavy (P-SD). 5x5 "sabermetric" (OBP and total bases instead of batting average and HR) roto keeper league; let the dumping begin! Peavy was my first-round pick this year thus can't be kept; Davis will cost me a 13th round pick (somewhere in the 170-180 range)* next year. The injured ace Gallardo would cost me a 9th rounder if he turned out to be one of my six best keep options.
*- it's possible some of these keeper draft pick #s are inaccurate as I'm too lazy to look up confirmation
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Matt Garza (P-TB) and Roy Oswalt (P-HOU), giving up Jonathan Broxton (P-LAD) and Troy Percival (P-TB). In hindsight I hate this deal, because while it ostensibly helps me for 2009 (Garza will cost me a R15, Oswalt would cost me a R3 if he somehow magically rediscovered his peak self over the next few weeks), it actually gives up a shocking amount of 2009 value depending on whether Percival retires and whether Takashi Saito reclaims his old bullpen role. Tremendous future upside for the other owner AND an obvious save boost in 2008.
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Hiroki Kuroda (P-LAD) and Chris Volstad (P-FLA) for Hunter Pence (OF-HOU). My NL Scoresheet team had a grand strategy fall into its lap. I got an e-mail asking who I might be interested in trading among {four or five Carlos Beltran-caliber players, plus Hunter Pence}. Wrote back that I'd deal Pence but that the others were well nigh untouchable. Got this offer, took it ASAP despite its creation of even further havoc in an outfield that's missing concussed Ryan Church, fragile(?) Justin Upton, and the degree of playing time that the Phillies unjustly withhold from Jayson Werth. (And Matt Diaz for whatever he's worth.) This deal also meant that, at the cost of a lot of defense, I finally realized I could play Jim Thome and James Loney at the same time by making the latter stand in left field. (That feels so unrealistic and degenerate, no? And yet in real life the Diamondbacks did pretty much the same thing with Conor Jackson.) Even after doing that I got a brief heavy dose of Alfredo Amezaga, hideously underqualifed corner outfielder.
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Zack Greinke (P-KC) and Brad Ziegler (P-OAK), giving up C.C. Sabathia (P-MIL). This ended a long sweepstakes. Greinke will cost me a R16, Ziegler would be a R14 if he's still the A's closer into 2009, Sabathia is unkeepable. This deal went down right after Ziegler's two-inning save in Detroit.
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Mike Cameron (OF-MIL) and a 2009 round 35, giving up Brett Myers (P-PHI). Obvious counterbalance to the Pence/Kuroda deal. And, not that this was any factor in the trade, but finally the Harvesters are rid of that wife-beating oaf!
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Jeff Baker (2B/OF-COL) and Chris Coste (C-PHI), giving up Jeff Francis (P-COL) and a 2009 R31. The premise for the respective rival owners is that Myers and Francis will each be among their team's 13 best keepers going into 2009. For me they'd be in line (among pitchers) behind Dan Haren, Matt Cain, Clayton Kershaw, Kuroda, Volstad, possibly Todd Wellemeyer, and maybe even Jamie Moyer! (The '08 post-trade Harvesters rotation shapes up as Haren-Cain-Kuroda-Moyer-Wellemeyer.) Baker basically becomes what Chris Burke was supposed to be (lefty-masher who platoons with Kelly Johnson and pinch-hits a lot), Chris Coste is (playing time permitting) quite an upgrade over the 2008 models of Josh Bard and/or Matt Treanor.
One thing about Scoresheet playoffs is that player performance is a combination of season-long performance with September performance (playoff lineup cards are due at the end of August), so even though the Harvesters are six-games out, there's reason to believe they previously underachieved (mainly that 40% of the April-May rotation was Myers/Francis at their worst, and that Miguel Cabrera finally remembered who he is as opposed to his first half), and it's good to stock up on good 2008 performance and jettison players whose '08 numbers are like Myers or Pence.
Suppose Jeff Karstens (RHP-PIT) had walked Chris B. Young in the 8th inning today but retired the next four batters. He would have joined select company: He would have had a very specific thing in common with exactly one other pitcher.
Describe that "thing in common" exactly, and name that other pitcher.
"If it's so overrated then how come you don't see more closers like Hoffman and Rivera?"
--ESPN.com "Featured Comment" in response to an article about baseball's "closer" being the most overrated position in sports.
My first reaction was like the duck in the insurance ads.
My second was to decide whether to bother to work out a concise explanation for why that comment is just so misguided.
We don't see "more closers like Hoffman and Rivera" PRECISELY BECAUSE so many people overrate the work output of that position, and so overrate a particular counting stat (saves) they it takes people too long to realize that Armando Benitez, Jorge Julio, Todd Jones, etc., etc., just aren't any good.
The commenter's question would be valid if we were perfect judges of player ability but terrible judges of which positions matter most -- that is, if we didn't understand comparative advantage, like for example if some baseball manager inexplicably thought the most important defensive position were first base and so always put his best defenders at first.
Despite the phrase, do people actually make bar bets? Now that everything can be Googled, I wonder.
Anyway, without looking it up (some context: I'd been reading a "Jeter vs. Reyes" baseball column) THINK QUICK and name the 2006 American League MVP.
My subjective impression had been that I was having an off year in fantasy/simulation baseball leagues, yet through Sunday, August 3:
$ 1st of 14
* 1st of 6
2nd of 12
2nd of 10
!# 5th of 10
!# 6th of 12
! 10th of 14
$- entry fee and cash prizes
! - entry fee but no cash prizes
*- "suck league" (the object is for your players to play badly)
# - Scoresheet baseball
So I'm fine except in the "sunk cost" leagues. My previous assertion that it was a down year is sort of irrational given that I should care about the league with a prize fund a good deal more than the leagues where despite having spent money to be there I have no money riding.
Then again maybe it's not that irrational - if I were apathetic to how I did in those leagues then what would be the point of the money outlay?
[Both of the Scoresheet leagues happen to be three-way ties (at 55 wins, 57 losses) but that doesn't affect the analysis much.]
Do you consider Nippon Professional Baseball to be on par with Major League Baseball; that is, would you consider them both to consist of (lower case) major leagues?
A lot of questions that people treat as complicated, or controversial, could be answered quite easily if there were clear answer to that question. I happen to think the Central League and Pacific League are not on par with the National League and American League -- but your mileage may vary.
A common conception is that the Japanese Leagues are comparable to Triple-A baseball in the U.S., though Clay Davenport concluded otherwise in 2002).
Anecdotally, I can think of more players who came here from Japan and didn't live up to the hype than players who came here from Japan and exceeded the hype. On the other hand, this may be because high-profile players made the leap before rank-and-file did; for example, nobody in the U.S. expected great things from Hideki Okajima.
On the third hand this gets to why I (chauvinistically?) put U.S. Major League Baseball alone on the top tier: Many of Japan's biggest stars wish to play for U.S. teams; the converse seems not to be true to any extent. Free agents generally go from the U.S. to Japan for lack of U.S. major league opportunities, rather than as a result of getting bids both places and finding a Japanese bid to be superior.
Anyhow, practical implications for how you answer the main question:
Should 30-year-olds who played several seasons in Japan be considered for the MLB rookie of the year award? I strongly believe they should (in large part because in fact they are clearly eligible).
Is it noteworthy that Ichiro now has a combined 3,000 hits between the Orix Blue Wave and the Seattle Mariners? Sort of -- but only sort of. I don't know off-hand how many home runs Henry Aaron hit at any given level of the minors; it says here that Barry Bonds had seven home runs at high "A" and 13 more at Triple-A. There's a good chance that in 2010 Jack Cust will hit his 300th professional home run.
Is it wrong that I feel the exact opposite of sympathy for Dmitri Young?
Fun fact: Dmitri Young was an All-Star in 2007. Then again Cristian Guzman was an All-Star in 2008. What a franchise!
A good time to go to a game is the Monday or Tuesday after the All-Star Break. (Why is an exercise for the reader.)
(Does not necessarily apply to any game involving the A's.)
And by "that," I don't mean either getting hit on the head by a fly ball, or injuring yourself on the mound as a position player.
But what I do mean could have been as many as 20 years ago, or as few as 10. Time flies.
Meanwhile am I really to believe that the hottest riff in top 40 music right now is all quarter notes, perfect[ly white-people] emphasis on all the downbeats?
"Many of you are probably aware that the Chinese are going to great lengths to organize fan cheering for the upcoming Olympics. The Peoples Republic of China can do flip card stunts with the best of them, but this is something different: a massed, coordinated infusion of pre-programmed good vibes.
[...]
This got me wondering what sort of cheers we would hear at baseball games if this procedure somehow made it to these shores and into the stadiums of our national game. How would cheers sound if they were coordinated and attitudinally adjusted to fit the Chinese model?"
--Jim Baker
Chad pointed out to me that one of them is astonishingly good advice:
To the pitcher trying to work his way out of a bases-loaded situation: "Your enemies are everywhere, but focus on the only one who can hurt you."
My perception of Chad's uncanny ability to be right about things is almost like an umpire's perception of Barry Bonds's or Frank Thomas's batting eye: His track record of correct judgment makes me unusually likely to trust his judgment, in particular to change my mind about some logistical decision based on his insight, so we have a virtuous(?) cycle where the fact that he's "shown me the light" in the past leaves me unusually open to his suggestion.
It works on so many levels:
Asked to explain his Red-hot start, Bruce said simply "Sample size."
--Sports Illustrated
(And indeed Jay Bruce's hot start didn't last long, but by the end of the year his total numbers will be fine.)
"What obligations does a city have to a team that is so often considered vital to the community? What obligations does a team have to a city from which it expects undying loyalty and frequent taxpayer support?"
--Caple, referring mainly to the Supersonics' (NBA) attempt to get out of Seattle.
The answer to the first question is almost blindingly simple (unless the city already has contractual obligations); the answer to the second depends on where goodwill fits into one's business model.
That's what they do in Atlanta these days.
Cows are funny.
(Animals in general are funny, if you didn't already know this from the deserved appeal of Get Fuzzy or Pearls Before Swine or Sherman's Lagoon (or the undeserved appeal of Garfield.)
...is that garbage-time blowouts distort them.
Dayn Perry touches on a caveat to the Oakland A's 2008 season, distinguishing between the Oakland and Anaheim records in 1-run and 2-run games, but the real reason A's have an inflated run differential:
13-2
11-2
14-2
15-1
(admittedly there's also a 0-12 floating in there)
I wonder whether projections would be more accurate if blowouts were capped to something like a seven-run margin.
See also Matt Welch's rebuttal to a similar piece predicting doom for the Angels.
"According to the PECOTA-Adjusted Playoff Odds Report, Oakland has a robust 63.4 percent chance of making the postseason. By comparison the Angels have just a 36.5 percent chance of making it. That's a function of Oakland's significantly better run differential. As for the divide between run margin and record, the usual explanations seem not to apply. Usually such discrepancies are traceable back to each team's record in one-run games, but the A's are 10-10 in one-run affairs, and the Angels are 13-9. That's a difference, but not a big one. Two-run games? In those, the A's are 6-10, but the Angels are a whopping 17-4. Is such a disparity in two-run records mostly a function of luck, as we've come to believe about one-run records? Or is it indicative of a skill? The logic of scale suggests that it's more of a skill than one-run outcomes, but measurably less than records in five-run games. Color me flummoxed."
I used to be much more interested in preserving baseball tradition than I am now. Most of the change results in the degree to which traditions have become outdated if not absurd, or (more charitably to those traditions) the degree to which baseball is already ignoring too much, where there's a choice between half-heartedly keeping a tradition stupidly, or making a clean break and doing something that makes sense.
Joe Sheehan ranted about interleague play earlier this week, yet his proposed solution really doesn't do anything to address the actual problem.
(Other than the second-order problem that MLB vastly overstates the excitement of interleague play by failing to adjust for time of year and time of week; as Joe points out, summer weekend series will always draw better than school-in-session weeknight series.)
Anyway, my wife finds it strange that particular teams will play each other only once every three years or so. The schedule as it stands now is confusing and (as Joe illustrates) unfair. If you temporarily ignore how we got here, a better way would be for all 30 teams to play each other at least once series a year, no?
So I have in mind three 10-team divisions. You get one three-game series a year against each team outside your division (whoever you host in even years you visit in odd years). With the 162-game schedule that leaves 102 games within the division, which averages to 11.3.
So in a given year you'll have 12 games each against three particular division opponents and 11 games each against the other six. As the current schedule features 52 series in 26 weeks (although there's the All-Star Break, there's also exactly one occasion where teams get three series, 2-2-3, in one Monday-Sunday cycle), there'd be 20 series outside the division and 32 series within. Three of your division opponents you'd do 3-3/3-3; two of them you'd do 3-3/3-2; four of them you'd do 4-3/4. It's the least problematic way to implement this.
Who's in what division?
Call them West, Central, and East, and you're 90% there. Move the Houston Astros to "West" (buy off Astros owner Drayton McLane for the trouble of the few more West Coast trips that the Texas Rangers already fail to object to).
Do we continue to make sure that same-metro teams aren't both {at home, on the road} at the same time? If so, how?
Sure, why not. The most straightforward way to do this is split each division into five teams that tend to do the opposite of their five counterparts. So you'd have something like:
OAK-LAD-SD-COL-SEA[-OAK-LAD...]
SF-LAA-ARI-HOU-TEX
CHW-MIL-MIN-KC-STL
CHC-CIN-CLE-PIT-DET
FLA-TB-ATL-WAS-NYY
PHI-BOS-TOR-BAL-NYM
(Each pair of same-metro teams could be flipped here. In general I think non-division teams would want to host at least one team per pair of the {Yankees-Red Sox}, {Cubs-Cardinals}, and/or {Dodgers-Giants} any given year.)
I haven't fully put this down to paper (spreadsheet?) but as a general rule road trips would be a sequence of 2-3 teams from one of the cycles above (so e.g. Seattle then Oakland, or Tampa Bay then Atlanta, or Cubs then Cincinnati).
What does the schedule basically look like?
Keeping things as simple as possible unless/until we butt into mathematical impossibilities, I have it in my mind as:
Nine series, everyone in their division (round robin). 15 series, two divisions face each other and the third stays within itself. (5-5-5 for each of those combinations.) Nine series, everyone in their division. 10 series, everyone outside their division. Nine series, everyone in their division.
Your season series with any given division rival would start no later than the first May series and end no sooner than the last August series.
What about playoffs?
This implementation mostly doesn't care about that. The ideal would be three division winners plus a wild card, but if the masses insist on eight playoff teams then the smoothest scenario is three 1st place teams, three 2nd place teams, two wild cards.
What about the DH?
Another question on whose answer this implementation doesn't necessarily depend. But I will say, coming full circle to my belief in baseball tradition (or lack thereof), that my personal preference order is:
1. Everyone uses the DH
2. Nobody uses the DH
[large utility gap]
3. Whether you use the DH depends on who the visiting team is
4. Whether you use the DH depends on who the home team is
...yes, of the four obvious ways to do it, MLB picked the one that (in my opinion) is worst. (Why is "depends on the home team" worse than "depends on the road team"? Because it's ridiculous that pitchers on "DH teams" bat so rarely that they bat only on the road. If an A's pitcher is going to bat maybe once or twice a year, it should happen in front of the home crowd!)
Oh, while we're here, my wife has suggested that from the 10th inning onward, the home team bat first each inning (but the next team to score wins!). I've come to like that idea...
I can't immediately tell what day this column went live, but it refers to an incident Deadspin already told us about two weeks ago.
Maybe the author needed two weeks to collect his thoughts and express insight that would leave us two weeks more enlightened?
For this story is anything more enlightening than "don't do that" even possible, much less necessary?
Wow: The guy outside my window with the mike and the booming voice wasn't just making this up. Despite playing Little League, and growing up in a very red state, I'd never heard of this pledge before.
No kidding the atheists don't like it.
I'm quite confused that on June 14, a baseball season is ending (awards ceremony) rather than beginning. Maybe Stage 2 begins in a week or two?
Should I explain why this particular replay implementation would be shatbit crazy, or will commenters save me the effort by pointing out the most glaring flaws?
(I strongly support instant replay in baseball, and any sport where there's a common sense context to deploy it. I even think it's a good idea to use all available video feeds. It's just the gratuitous layers of bureaucracy and protocol that telegraph themselves as single points of failure.)
Despite knowing of its existence for months (years?) I'd never actually read Curt Schilling's weblog until King Kaufman pointed out how astute an observation he'd made about the NBA.
Tie game, going into the bottom of the 12th. You've just used your 2nd and 3rd best relievers. Now do you bring in:
A. This guy?
B. This guy?
If you said B, you are a true major league manager, with the loss to prove it. (Given my allegiance, obviously I was happy with this particular bullpen usage.)
Meanwhile, satellite oops...
I tend to give major league ballplayers benefit of the doubt, even if they're rumored to be jerks, especially if they're surrounded by uncorroborated innuendo... but if the rumors are corroborated, that's another story.
Anyway, Texas Rangers kick Sidney Ponson to the curb.
You may remember the native Aruban from the time he assaulted a judge.
Or this dugout chat.
...it's Arlington.
(Especially if it's a day game. Humid, 90s, gusts of wind...)
Discussed (indirectly) in this thread re this promotion.
This post seconds what I had already suggested.
Repeating the same trivia question I put there: "For a quick 10 points, without looking it up can you name the player who had nine RBI in a different game that day (May 17, 2002)?"
(Further hint, which would give it away if you looked it up (but obviously you won't look it up until you've given up): The nine RBI player was an Arizona Diamondback at the time.)
Go to MLB.com, Scoreboard, Wednesday's (May 14) games, Boston at Baltimore.
Click on the "MLBTV" logo: It's free but login/password required (if you don't have one already, go through whatever rigmarole it takes).
You'll want "Ramirez's amazing catch." Once you've seen it, the question I have: Did he end up getting help from the fan to reverse his momentum?
Obligatory link to the best Manny Ramirez article The Onion has ever published.
1. Has anyone ever used PitchFix data (or the data Bill James charges you money for on his web site) to compare what "closers" throw in save situations versus non-save situations?
We hear all the time the meme that such players struggle when the game isn't in the line, and I wonder if it's just that they're taking the opportunity to tinker and test. I certainly would in their shoes.
2. We know that basketball teams tend to lose on the road. What statistical elements show the greatest disparity between road and home? If the biggest gaps included (for example) free throw attempts then a major explanation might be (for example) skewed officiating. So how do road teams compare to home teams for, among other things:
Shooting %?
Turnovers?
Offensive rebounds?
Defensive rebounds?
Free throw attempts?
Free throw %?
3-point attempts?
3-point %?
Shot clock violations?
(What would be the quickest, easiest way to test for home-cooked timekeeping?)
Can the home-road disparity be broken down further into how players perform by quarter?
Unlike a lot of baseball fans, especially in Ohio, I've always thought highly of you. So many times I'd just missed getting you in a fantasy baseball league.
Of course this is the year I finally landed you (on two teams!) and this is how you repay me? Feh.
They've entered a golden age of lead writing: Everywhere you look on the site there are one-sentence introductions in amazing "action prose." The sentences are short and simple -- they not only completely avoid wasting words but also get a tremendous amount of meaning from 25 words or less.
I think Ken Korach used not only the same words, but even the same cadence, for both Mark Ellis's 10th inning walk-off home run today and Marco Scutaro's walk-off home run off Mariano Rivera a year ago.
Not necessarily the best, just the ones that I suspect are most widely known among people who are at least casual fans. Sometimes what they really remember (or know of, if before their birth) is the moment (rather than knowing the year or even the teams) but I still count that.
UPDATED May 7, reordered a bit.
1. Game 4, 2004 ALCS (really what people know about is Games 4-7)
2. Game 7, 2001 World Series (I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this first, but if it didn't even cross my mind then who else's mind isn't it crossing? - Yankee fans of course will fondly remember the back-to-back heroics in Games 4-5)
3. Game 6, 2003 NLCS (Bartman's foul ball)
4. Game 6, 1986 World Series (you could argue for this higher depending on the average age of these hypothetical casual fans - a lot here hinges on how old you think these fans are and how Northeastern they are)
5. Game 1, 1988 World Series (Kirk Gibson's home run vs. Dennis Eckersley)
6. 1951 NL tie-breaker ("the shot heard round the world")
7. Game 5, 1956 World Series (Don Larson's perfect game)
8. Game 6, 1975 World Series
9. April 1974: Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth's record
10t. Game 7, 1992 NLCS (usually framed as an attack on Barry Bonds for not throwing Bream out)
10t. 1978 AL tie-braker (the Bucky Dent game)
Removed from the list above: Texas 30, Baltimore 3 (formerly #7 hence Paul's comment), Ruth's called shot, Pujols HR vs. Lidge, Game 7, 1960 World Series (Bill Mazeroski's home run)
Would you consider Game 2, 2000 World Series? ("Clemens throws bat head at Piazza," but I don't think people associate this with a specific game.) It probably wouldn't make the top 10 anyway, would it?
And I don't think people especially remember the games in which career records were broken (McGwire #62, Bonds #71, Bonds #756, Rickey's stolen base -- for a quick 10 points each name the opponents in any of those games) so much as that they were broken.
Another honorable mention: Game 1, 1996 ALCS (Jeffrey Maier)
Meanwhile, the game that inspired this post was Game 5, 1999 NLCS (Mets over Braves in 15), yet I don't think even that game makes the top ten. (Trying to pretend to be a casual fan, I'd slot it ahead of Jeffrey Maier but behind Sid Bream. Game 7, 1992 NLCS should probably replace Ruth's called shot in the 10 proper, since it's not like people can readily place the year or opponent on that, just the idea that Ruth did it once.)
Last honorable mention before I finally let this post lie: Game 5, 1995 ALDS. If ever there was a game that I thought would resonate through the ages, and that arguably ought to... and yet I claim that hardly anyone ever even thinks of this game.
"A 129-minute hockey game is the equivalent of a 19-inning baseball game, the likes of which cause oohing and ahing for decades if it happens in the postseason. That is, it would cause oohing ahing. The longest postseason game in baseball history went 18 innings."
--King Kaufman
Think quick and tell me everything you know about that 18-inning game. I immediately recognized it, though I didn't watch it (I suspect few people did). Without looking up the details, as I recall this game involved two teams that played each other in several post-season series over a 10-year span. It had two particular heroes, of whom one is now a national disgrace and the other a utility infielder in Arizona.
So would you say the longest game in post-season baseball history achieved anything close to "oohing and ahing for decades," as opposed to being a mostly forgotten curiosity three years later?
"Today in Oakland A's History" has been featuring radio calls from these fantastic A's victories all year, but today it was a loss, specifically this 17-16 game.
...a game I remember well because I was at this 1-0 game.
(Ah, Retrosheet, correcting one's faulty memories: I could've sworn that 5-0 game was a 1-0 game, which it was until the 8th.)
"Baseball Primer needs to buy a franchise and make it open-source. "
--comment #29 on this thread
So would that mean the team would send a guy down to Triple-A because random user submitted a mod to that effect?
Do I read the April 30 entry on this blog correctly?
It compares Max Sapp (23rd overall pick in the 2006 draft) to eight other players, seven of whom were picked 21st or earlier. (But how dare a team fail to snag Joba Chamberlain from the rough!)
Isn't that sort of like blaming the 1984 Washington Bullets (or any of 19 other teams) for drafting players other than Michael Jordan, Hakeem, or Charles Barkley?
How did it take until comment #4 on this thread to point that out?
My team in the Kimera Bartee Open (fantasy baseball league that rewards players for playing badly) has a collective hitting line that represents about 1.5 seasons worth of a real full-time player's at-bats. So, multiplying everything by 2/3, we get:
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB K GIDP E
616 86 153 34 4 6 56 18 4 60 116 13 12
Our hypothetical bad player is hitting .248/.315/.346 (for OBP, assume no HBP or sac flies) - in today's offensive environment that's unacceptable, but you could squint and imagine a below-average shortstop. 34 doubles? 18 steals? Just 12 errors?
That's a lot better than Tony F. Pena would do (and yes, Pena is one of the players represented by this composite- had a big decision between Pena and Adam Everett with the #2 overall pick, and I'm still shocked that Pena was still around at #13).
Our composite hypothetical pitcher is 8-12 over 168 1/3 innings, with 186 hits allowed, 114 runs, 20 HR, 76 BB, 97 K. RA = 6.09, WHIP = 1.56
So far Deadspin has run at least three editions of "The Dark Side of the Locker Room." One of them was actually quite good: Jeff Passan writing about a Fresno State basketball player whose girlfriend had taken out a restraining order. The other two that I've seen were unbelievably lame, including Jeff Pearlman getting sand in an unmentionable place because how dare Will Clark be mean to him, and then this one.
A few rules of thumb that I would have thought were common sense:
1. Act as though you belong, and other people will act as though you do (the converse is also true)
2. If you're in a locker room, don't stare.
3. Athletes like to yell. (Blame the testosterone, or the greenies.) If they're blatantly just trying to yank your chain, give your chain some slack.
4. Not a rule so much as an observation: I don't for the life of me understand what was wrong with what Piniella did in this anecdote.
Now obviously a feature like this should only get the most extreme stories -- which is all the more reason why I've been transcendently disappointed so far. People will care even less about the run-of-the-mill interactions.
But I'd be willing to be that my favorite Standard-Times writer has at least ten fantastic stories, nine of which he absolutely can't share. And even I have a thoroughly mediocre story from the only professional sporting event I ever "covered" (a basketball game at Boston College almost counts as professional, but not quite).
On January 1, 2000, the Boston Bruins and New Jersey Devils skated to a 2-2 tie. Whoever usually covered Bruins games for SportsTicker was probably off celebrating the holiday.
I got post-game quotes from the visiting locker room by standing near the edge of the throng, but I didn't have any questions that nobody else already asked.
On my way from the press ring to the locker rooms I got lost and accidentally wound up completely outside the stadium. Despite my credential the security people almost didn't let me in, but finally did.
(If they hadn't, the wire service story might have had one or two fewer Martin Brodeur quotes, though life would have continued.)
Sal Fasano would be a 0, Michael Irvin would be 100, and even Michael Jack Schmidt would probably still be at least in the 30s given how long Philadelphia's fans still booed him.
What about Scott Rolen and J.D. Drew, both of whom I just acquired in the same fantasy baseball deal? (Something about them both stimulated the same part of my brain, and I was trying to remember what else they had in common besides both being made of glass.)
"The Padres' Greg Maddux will make his second attempt at joining the elite 350-victory club against the Giants."
--photo caption on Yahoo! Sports' MLB front page
I hear if the season goes especially well for him, later this summer he might get to take a crack at joining the elite 360-victory club.
Quoting Joe Sheehan:
"I discovered yesterday that the Yankees don’t play on Labor Day, which seems silly. Looking deeper, it appears that MLB is continuing to kill the tradition of holiday baseball. There are 11 games on Memorial Day, just five of them in the daytime, one of those in Toronto. Labor Day features 10 games, eight of them during the day.
Everybody plays on July 4, but that’s only because it’s a Friday. Six of those games are scheduled for the daytime, although a handful of others have late-afternoon or early-evening starts, presumably to allow for fireworks.
I’m sure there are reasons for this trend, but you would think that an industry that so desperately tries to connect itself to its past in some ways would embrace the idea of an American pastime on American holidays, baseball in the sunshine on a Monday afternoon as a means of kicking off the summer or ending it."
I realize Monday and Thursday are both frequent travel days for teams, but having that many teams miss a major holiday is outrageous.
(Fun Labor Day schedule quirk: When the A's had their 20-game winning streak in 2002, they began a series against the Royals on Labor Day, but took the Tuesday off.)
I'd forgotten about this until now, but during Friday's Cardinals-Giants game, Dave Flemming cited as evidence of Troy Glaus's struggles the fact that he was recently replaced in a double-switch for the first time in his major league career.
I remember hoping someone reminded Flem that there's a better explanation for why that particular double-switch was Glaus's first. On further review I suppose it at least shows that Glaus was highly thought-of in 2005.
"Only an idiot" would publicly call out the people he's hired to make his company succeed. If they're not doing what you want them to do, fire them; either way, nobody cares what you think.
"By embracing baseball analytics, Brian Bannister has transformed himself into a must-own fantasy pitcher. "
--headline text at fantasysports.yahoo.com
You know, I think it's utterly fantastic that Brian Bannister is a baseball stat geek (as well as an actual pitcher). But his stat-geekdom isn't what makes him succeed on the mound! If that were all you needed, hey, sign me up. But I know better than to think a 55-mph fastball will work at this level.
Even among people with the raw talent to be pro athletes, understanding stat geek principles is a far cry from applying them. I heard somewhere that Dante Bichette (of all people), for example, had a deep innate understanding that OBP is life. This didn't change the fact that hacking at the first hittable pitch he saw was too ingrained in him to do it any other way.
(Ironically, whatever Bannister preaches, what he practices is well worth staying away from if you do fantasy baseball: In the long run his strikeout rate is unlikely to be sustainable.)
This entire King Kaufman column (both halves: the kid going to the NBA, and the Red Sox jersey) is so obviously right that I'm depressed that any of it actually needed to be written.
You got a problem with that?
I... actually don't. I agree with the Yankees 100% here. I'd like to claim that I'd still feel that way even if I were Catholic, though of course it's impossible to know for sure.
It's small sample size but the Orioles are undefeated since switching from "Orioles Magic" as their take-the-field song to Saliva's "Click Click Boom."
The A's take-the-field music seems to be up to the starting pitcher: Joe Blanton, for example, gets the cheesiest country songs imaginable. (Mark Mulder always warmed up to "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." That was Mulder's song, and only Mulder's, until he was traded and Barry Zito took it over; since Zito's departure the Daft Punk has lain fallow.)
Every few months I change my mind about what song I'd most want to warm up to as the home team starting pitcher. For awhile I was in a "Shaft" (extended instrumental intro) frame of mind, but now I just wonder if any team would actually be willing to do "YYZ." Oops, I actually mean "The Camera Eye." Getting my Moving Pictures tracks confused in my middle age.
I have no opinion yet about the suspicious dark smudges on Jake Peavy's hand, but I love to tears that both this thread and this thread became so obscene so quickly.
These players are not only on one of my "real" fantasy teams but also on my team in the Kimera Bartee Open (which rewards playing badly):
Kurt Suzuki (Scoresheet)
Asdrubal Cabrera (both a Scoresheet and a roto)
Adam Everett (Scoresheet)
Alfredo Amezaga (Scoresheet)
Dontrelle Willis (Scoresheet)
Ian Kennedy (roto)
I realized at today's game that the ideal visiting team for any game we attend has these properties:
1. Multiple "tell your kids you saw him play" greats, but with top-to-bottom depth of fun talent.
2. Better offense than pitching staff (if Julia is along)
3. Loyal fan base of regional transplants, yet not a huge bandwagon following.
(Games with 10K fans are depression, but on the other hand crowded concourses and a mad throng onto the BART bridge are problems unto themselves, and one or two teams just have jerky fans.)
My completely subjective ranking of potential visiting teams to Oakland (only 16 of whom actually do visit the A's this year) by how excited I'd be to see them play, all other things being equal (day of week, month of year, weather, A's starting pitcher, etc.). Assume the visiting starting pitcher is equally likely to be any of their top five. (Teams shown in italics don't actually visit Oakland in 2008.)
1.Milwaukee. For scarcity reasons (yeah sure, we could see a team play at the Giants, but... brr!) this list might overrate NL teams. (An unwittingly pro-interleague play data point? Incidentally Julia strongly favors a balanced schedule across all 30 teams, tradition be damned.) And alas, the Brewers don't visit Oakland this year (and haven't since they were an AL team). But man: Ryan Braun? Prince Fielder? Rickie Weeks? Beloved former A's backstop Jason Kendall? Baseball-cheeseheads who haven't had a team to be this excited about in many years? Suspect pitching staff?
2. Cleveland. As they announced the visiting lineup Julia and I cheered for both Grady Sizemore (tremendous player) and Asdrubal Cabrera (his name is Asdrubal). The past n times I've seen the Indians, Oakland has started a LHP; this time finally Travis Hafner was still in the lineup. And the hypnotically undulating paunch made Dana Eveland look svelte. (Ah, I have a weakness for overweight southpaws. I too am lefthanded.)
3. Philadelphia. Reigning NL MVP Jimmy Rollins went to Julia's high school. The marquee value is top-heavy (as marquee value tends to be) but Rollins, Utley, and Howard more than hold their own. And I've greatly enjoyed the transplanted visiting fans at every Phillies-Giants game I've ever been to. We'll see the Phillies in person at least twice in June.
4. Cincinnati. Once Jay Bruce (Jay Bruce! no relation that we know of) gets his call-up, Ken Griffey will only be the third-biggest draw (for me) in the Reds' outfield!
5. Detroit. Tough call between the Tigers and Red Sox until I remembered Miguel Cabrera (don't fret about the slow start: I say cold weather + sample size fluke), and more importantly some points against BOS@OAK games.
6. Boston. The defending champions need no introduction. Quite a lineup surrounding Ortiz and Manny. But... the most annoying road fans I've ever seen in the Coliseum have been Red Sox fans. Also, the place gets mega-crowded.
7. NY Mets. Another very top-heavy roster but oh, those stars. And a 40% chance (health permitting) to see Johann or Pedro? Even after discounting for injury I like those odds.
8. Chicago White Sox. I assume this is the biggest surprise so far. In no particular order it's Ozzie, beloved former A's slugger Nick Swisher, the 20% chance to watch Mark Buehrle pitch, and a great fan base.
9. Arizona Young rising stars, plus 40% chance to see Dan Haren's homecoming or watch Brandon Webb pitch. (But Webb vs. A's might just be too depressing.)
10. Atlanta Maybe I overrate Brian McCann and Kelly Johnson for fantasy baseball reasons. But Chipper Jones is still surprisingly good and there's beloved former A's center fielder Mark Kotsay to welcome back.
11. LA Dodgers This is tricky, since it's not as if Jackie Robinson or Sandy Koufax were on the 2008 edition. And I wouldn't go anywhere near a Dodgers-Giants game given all the hubbub. But since the next LAD@OAK series won't actually conflict with our wedding, I imagine Julia will really want to go.
12. NY Yankees. Franchise cache (thinking about Julia's likely preferences led me to drop the next two teams two spots apiece at the last minute). And they're still very good.
13. Colorado. Tulo, Helton, Holliday, and if nothing else they're the defending NL champs.
14. LA Angels. This was a fine rivalry when the A's were good. But if both teams aren't at each other's throats, the Angels are... still generally fun to watch, and they have Vlad. Oh, and Torii Hunter now. Still not quite top 10 material (if you count both leagues) given that the rivalry will be a little one-sided for a bit. There's also anti-scarcity at play: Can't come to this series? Catch them again in six weeks.
15. Chicago Cubs. This could be their year but I really suspect this wouldn't be worth the annoyance factor (crowds, some of the visiting fans).
16. Seattle. The Mariners are Oakland's archetypal opponent, sort of the traveling partner, also the "not the good one but not the bad one" division rival. The star power is basically just Ichiro.
17. San Diego. This is almost entirely for the 40% shot at Peavy or Maddux, neither of whom I've seen in person before.
18. Tampa Bay. About ten spaces higher than they would've been a year or two ago. Obviously no road fan base to speak of, but interesting lineup + leaky pitching staff.
19. Kansas City. Also quite a bit higher than I'd have predicted. Essentially Butler, Gordon, 20% shot at Greinke, and of course the Kubicek connection.
20. Toronto. Beloved former A's DH Frank Thomas is the closest thing to a face on this surprisingly good yet unspectacular team.
21. St. Louis. Pujols!
22. Minnesota. Joestin Mauerneau can only sell you so many tickets.
23. Pittsburgh. Are you shocked they're this high? I can commiserate with the Pirate fans I know, and really, the next six teams are all bland at best.
24. Washington. Lastings Milledge and Ryan Zimmerman can only sell you so many tickets.
25. Texas. The "bad" division rival.
26. Houston. We've welcomed back beloved former A's shortstop Miguel Tejada many times as it is. After him and Berkman, blah.
27. Florida. Why?
28. Baltimore. Below the Marlins only because they come at least once a year. (And I guess Hanley Ramirez beats... Nick Markakis?)
29. San Francisco. Sure there's a 40% chance of Matt Cain or Tim Lincecum. But it's still the worst of both worlds: Depressingly bad opposing team, yet aggravating crowd situation.
No idea whether Baseball Tonight still employs Forrest Gump, but if you want to see/hear something priceless go to the MLB.com Media Center for Wednesday, April 2, click on the Daily Rewind link for ARI @ CIN, and wait for (or skip to) the 1:15 mark.
You were saying, Jeff?
(In a perfect world, "This guy is not a clutch hitter" would become a SportsCenter cliche. Well, in an almost-perfect world that nonetheless has SportsCenter cliches at all.)
"Channel 4 San Diego will carry 150 Padres games this season, all of which will be in high definition. Matt Vasgersian, who is in his seventh season, and Mark Grant, entering his 12th season, are the main play-by-play team, with Tony Gwynn and Steve Quis coming off the bench. The pregame show for 7:05 p.m. home games starts at 6 p.m. The postgame show with John Weisbarth and Bob Scanlan follows all home games and most away games."
--this column (emphases added)
Along those lines, Denny Hocking can be heard on Fox Sports Radio on the weekends now. Your mission is to find still more obscure/mediocre players (but just distinguished enough that we'd actually remember them) who now have obscure/mediocre media gigs.
Six teams, 169 roster spots filled as of March 31, 2008 (Opening Day for most of the league).
Obviously doesn't account for future add/drops; also doesn't include the "suck league" team that drafts later this week.
Team representation:
Arizona Diamondbacks: 11
Atlanta Braves: 11
Cleveland Indians: 10
Kansas City Royals: 10
Tampa Bay Devil Rays: 9
[...]
Seattle Mariners: 0 (purely unintentional)
4-time offender:
Conor Jackson (1B-ARI)
3-time offenders:
Adam Jones (OF-BAL)
Josh Bard (C-SD)
Kelly Johnson (2B-ATL)
Lastings Milledge (OF-WAS)
2-time offenders:
Adam Dunn (OF-CIN)
Andrew Miller (SP-FLA)
Asdrubal Cabrera (2B-CLE)
Billy Butler (1B-KC)
Brian McCann (C-ATL)
C.J. Wilson (RP-TEX)
Carlos Pena (1B-TB)
Chris B. Young (OF-ARI)
Daniel Cabrera (SP-BAL)
David Wright (3B-NYM)
Derrek Lee (1B-CHC)
Hiroki Kuroda (SP-LAD)
Huston Street (RP-OAK)
Jacoby Ellsbury (OF-BOS)
Jamie Moyer (SP-PHI)
Joakim Soria (RP-KC)
Jonathan Broxton (RP-LAD)
Justin Duchscherer (SP-OAK)
Justin Verlander (SP-DET)
Kosuke Fukudome (OF-CHC)
Matt Diaz (OF-ATL)
Peter Moylan (RP-ATL)
Rickie Weeks (2B-MIL)
Troy Percival (RP-TB)
Zack Greinke (SP-KC)
Two more below the fold. (One took place via web server from Thursday nine days ago to earlier this week; the other took place on ESPN this morning.)
Alameda Islanders
12-team head-to-head keeper league
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, IF, LF, CF, RF, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, HR, RBI, SB, FPCT, AVG, OBP, SLG, W, SV, K, HLD, ERA, WHIP
Players in bold were kept; there's no meaningful distinction between "round 1" and "round 8" but we could keep "rookies" at the end. (I got very lucky with our league's playing time cutoffs on mine.)
Round Pick Player Position
1. (9) Brian McCann C
2. (16) Todd Helton 1B
3. (33) Derrek Lee 1B
4. (40) Justin Morneau 1B
5. (57) David Wright 3B
6. (64) Derek Jeter SS
7. (81) Carl Crawford LF
8. (88) Carlos Zambrano SP
9. (105) Kosuke Fukudome RF
10. (112) Pat Burrell LF
11. (129) Rickie Weeks 2B
12. (136) Kelly Johnson 2B
13. (153) Josh Willingham LF
14. (160) Lastings Milledge LF,CF,RF
15. (177) Conor Jackson 1B
16. (184) Joakim Soria RP
17. (201) Jay Bruce CF
18. (208) Jonathan Broxton RP
19. (225) Bronson Arroyo SP
20. (232) Hiroki Kuroda SP
21. (249) Zack Greinke SP,RP
22. (256) Dave Bush SP
23. (273) C.J. Wilson RP
24. (280) Andrew Miller SP
25. (297) Aaron Heilman RP
26. (304) Al Reyes RP
27. (321) Justin Duchscherer RP
28. (328) Jacoby Ellsbury LF,CF
-----
California Ceiling Cats
10-team roto redraft league
C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, MI, CI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, Util
P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN
Overall picks #2, 19, 22, 39, etc.
1. Hanley Ramirez
2. David Ortiz
3. Grady Sizemore
4. Adam Dunn
5. Derek Lee
6. Chris Young (Ari)
7. Corey Hart
8. Huston Street
9. Matt Capps
10. Rafael Soriano
11. Joakim Soria
12. Francisco Liriano
13. Rickie Weeks
14. Edwin Encarnacion
15. Ben Sheets
16. Lastings Milledge
17. Jeremy Bonderman
18. Conor Jackson
19. Derek Lowe
20. Orlando Hudson
21. George Sherrill
22. Eric Gagne
23. Troy Percival
24. Jonathan Broxton
25. Josh Bard
Red Sox players did exactly the right thing.
I'm shocked that so many people disagree with that seemingly simple proposition, and that the disagreement is so illogical.
"Mister High Standards" has the most blatantly false user handle ever.
Chad caught a funny error in this BIll James piece on Slate. (He meant "more than 1/10 the number of seconds," not "more than ten times the number of seconds.")
Bill James is arguably the most misunderstood figure in baseball analysis. He doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but then doesn't pretend that anyone else does either. (Think about how he went against the grain on the question of Pete Rose's guilt. It just dawned on me today how perfectly consistent that is with the rest of his analytic approach.) That level of humility is the perfect starting point for scientific inquiry.
On the other hand, his actual forays into number crunching are frighteningly ad hoc and sometimes more complicated than they needed to be, a conspicuous result of a human being (albeit an insightful one) doing a lot of trial and error until he trips over something that works (but then of course tests it further to see how robust it is).
Never trust any Bill James formula until you've sanity-checked the explanation behind it (unlike some of his peers, he uses plain English very well and his work is reasonably transparent). On the other hand, that's exactly the advice he'd probably give himself. He'd probably chide a few other stat geeks for pretending to be a lot more certain of the future than is plausible.
His sense of humor is also marvelous, but perhaps the most misunderstood element of his public identity. Given his very subtle humility, I'm sure his equally subtle dry wit is often grievously mistaken for crankiness, and his self-deprecation mistaken for everyone-deprecation.
14 teams, 24 rounds, keeper system of escalating draft pick compensation. I picked 7th, 22nd, etc.
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, RP, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, RBI, SB, TB, OBP, W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP
Keepers in bold.
Jake Peavy
Nick Swisher
C.C. Sabathia
Huston Street
Lastings Milledge
Kyosuke Fukudome
Alex Gordon
Adam Jones
Conor Jackson
Billy Butler
Troy Percival
Carlos Pena
Brian McCann
Justin Verlander
Asdrubal Cabrera
Andrew Miller
Ian Kennedy
Kelly Johnson
Yunel Escobar
Daniel Cabrera
Dan Wheeler
Peter Moylan
James Shields
Matt LaPorta
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 75 4 0 7 3 8 0.200 0.238 0.213 0.451
May 59 7 2 8 8 7 0.254 0.338 0.424 0.762
June 94 14 1 9 10 10 0.298 0.364 0.447 0.811
July 106 18 3 17 7 15 0.368 0.410 0.528 0.939
August 111 15 2 17 7 8 0.306 0.350 0.468 0.818
September 100 8 0 15 8 20 0.180 0.236 0.220 0.456
But I also have to admit that they're not nearly as damning as I thought they might have been.
Can I get odds on whether Seth Macfarlane's best Chris Berman impression makes it to network TV one way or another this year?
(If you weren't already familiar with these, the best (and first one made public) is the bottom one on the linked post.)
(Fourth league, but the other three are teams for which I've kept the same name over the years.)
Jungle Patrol: I plan to rotate the tag-line between the various quotes featured on that link.
Part 1 of N; forgive the ugly formatting.
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 86 24 5 15 24 16 0.326 0.473 0.593 1.066
May 108 16 2 14 10 23 0.259 0.322 0.426 0.748
June 86 9 1 10 13 21 0.256 0.356 0.360 0.717
July 73 16 4 16 8 17 0.356 0.427 0.658 1.084
August 93 16 3 8 16 21 0.269 0.382 0.452 0.833
September 75 10 1 5 8 19 0.200 0.282 0.267 0.549
"Hispanic baseball pioneer Roberto Clemente’s uniform number 21 will be retired from use by all 30 teams in Major League Baseball if the New York City Council has its way.
--NY Sun via Baseball Primer (emphasis added)
In the grand scheme of things they matter far less than their proponents think -- or at least, they ought to matter a lot less. (Power to the people: we have significantly better access to the players and games of our time than ever before -- and even to a very large body of classic games; more important, we have much better access to enough analytic tools that we don't need a HoF either to be the gatekeeper or to prevent the deserving from being forgotten.)
That said, I have a few brief points to make. Feel free to argue with me, as long as you understand that I'm right, that it's not even close, and that I feel no need to discuss any of these further:
Bert Blyleven = yes
Tim Raines = yes
Jim Rice = no
Don Mattingly = no
Barry Bonds (when the time comes) = yes [with as many disclaimers as you see fit: disclaim him until the cows come home, but to omit him completely would be antithetical to any conceivable purpose of a HoF]
Anyone else is either uncontroversial enough to catch my eye, or borderline enough that apathy wins out for me. (This includes McGwire and Sosa: My blink-of-an-eye reaction would be yes to both, but I'm not so married to either of them that I'd find excluding them unjust, even if I found the reasons to exclude them laughably contrived.)
P.S. Here's a frightening collection of actual arguments made by actual voters.
Sandy Koufax did not juice, despite an ambiguity of the English language.
The reason I bother posting this is that it reminds me I got through maybe five pages of Squeeze Play (Leavy's attempt at a farcical novel). I guess you'd like it if you were the sort of person who liked Primary Colors. I had assumed that it would be vaguely similar to Ball Four (but fictional rather than real); I was utterly wrong.
"We're now using draft slot as a criteri[on] for identifying comparables for prospects (this turns out to make a HUGE difference)."
--Nate Silver
Credit where it's due: Unless I'm mistaken, that idea first came up as a chat question to Silver a few months ago, as asked by joonpahk (Cambridge, MA)
The front page of today's Baseball Prospectus reminds me that my all-time favorite NFL/MLB/NBA logo is the old Denver Bronco D with the horse head. But if anything, the Bulls uniform (seen in the photo of Evan Longoria) does it even better.
That is, if instead of "assistant to the regional manager," Schrute weren't 'assistant to' anyone in particular.
(Something about the latest King Kaufman column brought this to mind.)
I have three comments about the Mitchell Report:
1. I find it fascinating that the only thing most people seem to care about is the naming of names.
2. In the part before the naming of names, Mitchell recommends a few solutions. Some of them are either obvious ("more education"), too vague to be useful, or both. One of the specific recognitions is to set up a permanent Department of Investigations (its actual name! - see page 37 of the PDF file), like the baseball counterpart to the office of a special prosecutor. It's hard for me to comment further given that I'd like to avoid confirming Godwin's Law.
3. Most importantly, I'm appalled by how many people want to scapegoat the MLB Players' Association for warning players about the potential adverse consequences of talking to Mitchell. The letter is here. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the key points of that letter -- that Mitchell had no legal authority to grant anyone immunity (thus anything they told him could lead to criminal charges), and that the commissioner's office pointedly reserved the right to punish people for what they told Mitchell -- were not only quite true but also deeply consequential.
(And why I decline to think too hard about issues of who's in/out.)
Bowie Kuhn somehow made it in; Marvin Miller still hasn't. That's outrageous, yet is it even surprising?
"A few weeks ago, Bud Selig proudly announced that MLB’s revenues exceeded $6 billion in 2007. This is a watershed moment, a sign that the game, no matter its problems on a micro level, is as healthy and successful as it has ever been. (My extensive disagreements with his decisions and his approach aside, Selig’s reign has to be considered successful for this reason.)"
--Joe Sheehan (parentheses in original)
How much of an understatement is "has to be considered successful"?
Just think, though: all MLB had to do to get there was cozy up to some supremely corrupt politicians (for the new stadiums) and sign over the TV rights to a network that makes the game unwatchable.
By the way, have I mentioned my ambivalence about how, just when my wife had become a passionate A's fan, we've all but clinched that there will never again be a championship caliber baseball team whose home park is in Oakland?
Dmitri Young, Lastings Milledge, and Elijah Dukes are now teammates.
Nothing in The Dugout yet, but you know it's coming.
"Part of the problem was that [Dave] Winfield’s [10-year] contract [signed with the Yankees after the 1980 season] contained a cost of living adjustment, which meant that he received an automatic raise every year. He became much more expensive than the Yankees had initially planned (they apparently didn’t fully comprehend the impact of that clause at signing), and this was nettlesome to the owner."
--Stephen Goldman
I wonder whether the COLA percent was fixed. Given the year the deal was signed, I could imagine somebody vastly overestimating what inflation would be like through the 1980s (compared to the late '70s).
It's come to my attention that a big-city sports writer recently began a sentence:
"The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth [...]"
There's no need to even finish a sentence like that, as the first part already marks the speaker as a deranged attention-whore.
It gets even better when the writer in question refers to Colonial pamphleteers in a pejorative sense. (Damn that Thomas Paine...)
(OK fine, here's a second-hand link, via Baseball Think Factory)
We have two month-by-month picture calendars in this apartment. One was created for our honeymoon and shows a glacier for November 2007. The November 2007 picture on the other one is of a man who died this morning, way before his time.
Earlier this week I'd looked at the calendar and thought it somewhat ironic that he'd been released by three different teams since we got the calendar as a giveaway.
There is also an eerie connection involving back-of-the-rotation A's pitchers who had previously been with Tampa Bay. Well, maybe two is one short of a "eerie connection," but if I were pitching in the Rays system right now I wouldn't want to take my chances on being the third.
Full article here but I learned everything I needed to know from the block quote here:
"This is a major step in the right direction. Bonds was a cancer."
Feinstein leaves (intentionally?) vague just what the "this" modifies (it's the first word of a new paragraph) but surely he doesn't mean the indictment itself. I hear Vince Carter is hard to get along with sometimes; why not indict him as well?
"In the court of public opinion you can be guilty at any time, especially when the evidence of your guilt is overwhelming."
The Baseball Primer posters mentioned Feinstein apparently has some ugly history involving the Duke lacrosse case. Someone less lazy than me can look it up and comment as needed.
"Being a hero is not a right granted by the constitution; it is a privilege. "
So rumor has it that people who play sports for a living are capable of being something other than a hero or a villain. I think this intermediate state is known as humanity.
"Joe Nuxhall, Modern Baseball’s Youngest Player, Is Dead at 79"
--most poorly conceived NY Times headline ever?
"Check my license. Mohammed Jafar.
[Bonds], when you're done with this fare, get your indicted ass down to the convention center!"
So what's going on in the world of baseball today?
(I do have to give MLB.com credit for acknowledging the Bonds indictment, and in fact making that the top story. On the other hand, I take issue with "Player A might have reached a deal with Team B" supposedly being a bigger story than the hardware.)
My prediction that the Angels would sign both Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez is starting to look terrible. Given that the A's probably have to blow it up and start over either way, I can't decide whether the lack of an Anaheim juggernaut makes that more or less sad.
Oaklandathletics.com wants me to vote for Bill King for the Ford C. Frick award. I can't really see what difference it makes to King in the afterlife whether he wins it or not. Either way, I assume he's in a happy place these days.
From the first six posts to this thread:
"Why would the Astros do this? Wasn't someone willing to give them something better for Lidge?"
"This is interesting. I thought Bourn was worth a lot more than that."
Finally. (If they're even smart enough to go through with it.)
Chuck Tanner will try to help restore Pirates discipline.
I'm sure it's possible that lack of discipline cost them a game or two last year, maybe a handful this decade. Meanwhile lack of talent cost them 15-20 games this year and well over 100 this decade.
If I put my wife in the batters box and asked her to hit home runs, I'm sure her failure to do so would reflect some sort of character flaw.
Incidentally, I agree completely with most of the commenters about what a travesty it is that people still sing "God Bless America" in the middle of a ballgame.
Oh, while we're simultaneously having a fit of libertarian pique and thinking about things Dwight thinks about, rarely are their more truthful words written than:
"You can feel the collapse of [the Johnstown] economy coming. If the primary impetus for what stabilizes the district is one man's patronage, the aftershocks will devastate."
See also military base closures, and the poor deluded people who argued against them for pure local-economy reasons that had nothing to do with national defense.
The last several times I've read "the D-word" (the feminine hygiene one, not the fate of your eternal soul one) have all related to Bostonians, their sports teams, and/or those teams' fans.
I think this breaks that streak. In fact, I think the quasi-curse word I've used to frame this post conveys almost the exact degree to which this is grating: Enough to merit a word like that but harmless in the grand scheme of things.
(And I even like Joe Girardi!)
This Onion article captures exactly why I was seething in rage at Fox Sunday (this is what I get for inexplicably backtracking from my standard practice of muting the TV for Fox baseball).
Meanwhile, the obvious punchline to this post was dutifully made in the very first comment.
(On the other hand, the funniest thing Josh Fruhlinger ever wrote about a comic strip wasn't on his own blog, but in a comment to this post (warning: link contains foul language and may be seen as heresy to some Peanuts fans).)
Not nearly enough is made out of the fact that when the Texas Rangers traded Alex Rodriguez to the New York Yankees, the Rangers agreed to pay a large chunk of the salary owed to Rodriguez under his contract -- that is, the contract out of which he just opted.
Any contract extension agreed to before the opt-out would have supplemented the original contract: The Rangers obviously wouldn't have been on the hook for whatever else Rodriguez (actually Scott Boras on Rodriguez's behalf) and the Yankees agreed to, but they would still have owed the Yankees money until the original contract ended. ($21 million in all.)
Once Rodriguez opted out, of course, any new contract he signed would replace the one he terminated. In other words, Tom Hicks no longer owes George Steinbrenner $21 million.
When Brian Cashman claims that the Yankees won't negotiate with Rodriguez after an opt-out, even though the posturing is of some sort of hallowed principle, it really just means that he thinks the $21 million difference makes the window where both sides would be content a whole lot smaller (probably non-existent).
The Yankees had a chance to get Rodriguez for $21 million less (from them) than he'd cost now (all other things being equal). They failed to take advantage of this -- or, more likely, were unwilling to let Rodriguez/Boras keep some insanely high portion of that $21 million.
I imagine it was a lot like an ultimatum game, where Boras's demand simplified to (something like) $19 million of the $21 million, the Yankees called his bluff, and he followed through on his non-bluff.
Today Baseball Prospectus decided to repost its article last spring (one of a series of 30) on how the Boston Red Sox could win the World Series.
Given that the Sox weren't exactly underdogs, I think how the Colorado Rockies could win the World Series is much more interesting for your hindsight reading.
I meant to call my favorite Sox fans but it was well past midnight EDT when I remembered intending to do so.
This is why I still read the work of Bill Simmons despite the level of self-caricature he sometimes achieves. Simmons on how McCarver would analyze things from within a particular car commercial:
"John, here's the thing about our country -- it might be a country that belongs to folks like you and me, but the key to this country is that we fought two major World Wars in the 20th century, and each time, we defeated foes who could have potentially conquered democracy inside our borders. Had we NOT won those wars, this might not be our country right now. (Dramatic pause.) But we DID win those wars. And when you win wars, usually, with very few exceptions, you get to keep your country. That's why ... This is ouuuuuuur country."
It's funny because it's true, and it's sad because it's funny.
McCarver was my favorite broadcaster when I was ten years old. But I was an unusually pedantic, tendentious, and all-around annoying ten year old. At that age I probably could have done his schtick yet not realized why it was so grating.
Nate Silver rocks my world (find it for yourself).
Am I to understand that some of you are four wins away from getting money back from Jordan's Furniture?
I'm floored. How was it even possible, given the quality of today's TMQ and today's Sports Guy, for this Tim Keown column to have the worst lead-in of the three (by a wide margin!)?
What part of "I [Paul Byrd] have a pituitary tumor, and disclosed my medical treatment to my team and to MLB the entire time I took it" did Keown (willfully) fail to understand? This column, and more than half the columns that led with the same topic, are almost exactly like the old middle school joke "Hey, I just took an aspirin. That means I just took DRUGS (omg lolz)!" -- except that they're all apparently dead serious.
It gets better when Keown decides to make fun of any Christian who wants to spread the word about why Christianity might be a good thing. I understand that many proselytizers are annoying and pushy, and that athletes who credit God for their success are especially annoying (paraphrasing from TMQ, Tony Dungy is dead right that God doesn't care about the outcome of sporting events). But we've reached the point in America where if you dare to even call yourself Christian, a large segment will deride you as a Jesus freak.
(DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT treating that last paragraph as some piece of martyrdom, or breaking out the world's smallest violin. This isn't about having a pity party; it's about how absurdly spiteful and hateful some people off when they vastly overstate their reasons for mocking any given person's religion.)
Getting back to Keown's medical slander (rather than his religious slander):
"There's been an eerie [...] pattern to the leakage of names, especially when it comes to HGH. [...] It's probably best not to speculate -- the lawyers hate that -- but there's a good chance a few World Series participants are promising to be good for a long, long time if they can just make it through the next 10 days without needing a news conference."
And here when I read the word "eerie" I thought he might actually start to question the timing of some of these suspiciously timed leaks. But no, instead he decides to lob innuendo at 50 players at once. After all, it's not as though any of them have reputations to uphold (though doing this after he's already made fun of people who dare defend their own honor is a nice rhetorical touch).
Keown, not that you'd have any reason to read this blog, but you're chicken-shit.
Therefore, I should have known better than to savor the delicious irony of J.D. Drew's Game 6 grand slam and its effect on one particular sports writer.
The entire second half of this column makes me want to bang my head repeatedly against a brick wall. (This after the man joked about naming a kid after Josh Beckett but was too much of a yuppie frou-frou to make the commonsense decision that "Josh" is a first name and "Beckett" in fact is not.)
I don't know which would be worse: That he were the effect of the Conventional Wisdom, or that he were the cause.
While we're here riffing on ESPN columns, has Easterbrook finally lost it? Chad & I traded plenty of e-mail about this column, wherein he confirmed that yes, RCA Dome can be called "antiquated" despite its being built in 1983; and yes, even though Easterbook egregiously compared apples to oranges, a punt return TD is more likely than a successful Hail Mary pass if the distance to the goal line exceeds the quarterback's arm range.
(Here's why I call it: Haily mary situations only come up every few games, whereas any given game should feature a good half-dozen punt return opportunities. So "once a week versus once a decade" is quite the non sequitur. Heck, I've been to twice as many Raider games as weddings.)
As for TMQ's Harry Potter reference Chad reminded me that the character in question died before passing through the arch, and that if such dark magic existed it would probably be hard to destroy (therefore some locked room in the Ministry of Magic, close to people who could study it but away from the general public, is the PERFECT place for it).
Coming full circle to the subject line (both Red Sox and CW): About two weeks ago I heard someone in an office break room express the hope for a Yankee-Red Sox ALCS on the grounds that no other match-up would be nearly as interesting. I nearly threw up in my mouth. More recently I heard a different person claim that Boston hadn't been to the World Series in 80 years -- from context they meant "prior to 2004," and more importantly they really meant "won" rather than "been to," though it's unclear whether they knew the second part. (1986 wasn't that long ago, certainly more recent than 1954...)
Fans, in any given moment, do not induce their teams to play well or play poorly, at least not nearly to the extent that your latest column implies.
(Come to think of it: If they did, then you and your brethren would have a lot of 'splaining to do, for jinxing your own franchise all those decades with that negative attitude. For shame!)
EXCEPTION: Strategically, Cub fans can be blamed for their team's own drought, in that their unwavering support means the Tribune Company can turn a healthy profit without needing to waste dollars on the margin attempting to assemble championship-caliber rosters.
(And not affiliated with ESPN.com)
"With Rick joining Bill Simmons, our readers will now enjoy the two best sports columnists anywhere."
To what extent can thinking people debunk that claim? (THE two best?!)
As mentioned here, I'll start with King Kaufman for the low-hanging fruit.
After reading this story yesterday I meant to mention that no sympathy or empathy was ever generated from a sentence that simplifies to "My dad made you what you are." It's not terribly removed from a sentiment like "My dad could beat up your dad."
I eschewed that post partly for time, partly because I honestly didn't know anything about Joe Torre's dad, especially whether he were still alive. But then today I skimmed Goldman on Torre:
It’s also likely that Torre defined himself in opposition to his father, “a volatile New York City police detective who slapped the Torre kids around every chance he got,” in the words of Maury Allen. Torre was anything but volatile, and it’s probable that whatever George Steinbrenner tried to do to bully Torre, he had already seen worse. If there was a negative side to this, it’s that Torre was sometimes patient to the point of passivity.
(Honorable mention to the urban legend that he was breast-fed until age four -- but only if that were true, and we have no way to confirm or deny.)
Manny Ramirez: He can hit, he can play defense in his home park, he’s smarter than any of us give him credit for—lost in the hullaballoo over his off-day comments was that he was absolutely, without a doubt, correct—and he seems to love playing baseball. He’s almost a bright-line test for humankind; if you just divided the world into “people who like Manny Ramirez” and “everyone else,” which group would you rather hang out with?
--Joe Sheehan
(On ESPN)
All ten pass the smell test. #5 (1978 Yankees) and #4 (1951 Giants) both seem overrated compared to the rest. I think Nate Silver has assigned probabilities in the past to most of these. I was about to scoff at #1 until I remembered (though Neyer didn't mention) that Game 4 went to the bottom of the ninth with the best post-season reliever in baseball history protecting a one-run lead.
...but this new Microsoft commercial sent its coffin about 30 feet further into the ground. (You all did recognize Poison's finest anthem, right?)
Jake Westbrook was drafted by the Colorado Rockies (as I type this he's not doing a great job of seeing to it that this would be cited as useless trivia a week from now), then traded to Montreal in a package with two other minor leaguers for Mike Lansing.
The Loria-run Expos sent him and players to be named later to the Yankees for Hideki Irabu, after it was already clear he was a flop. One of the PTBNL was Ted Lilly.
(And then he was part of a package the Yankees sent the Indians for David Justice.)
Q. "DID YOU TAKE DRUGS?!?!?"
A. Um, yeah. I have a prescription, for my pituitary condition. My team knows about it, the league knows about it, there's even a chapter about it in my upcoming book.
Q. "CHEATER! CHEATER! CHEATER! And here your team is about to play Game 7..."
Various updates:
1. No idea why my left navigation is acting up.
2. I love that some columns about this are describing Byrd's "alleged" HGH use. He's confirmed that he took it and explained why he did.
3. There's some cognitive dissonance here between how I feel about baseball players and how I feel about some of the people who get special treatment for standardized tests. For example, I do tend to think that if you're given extra time (or took a drug that was prescribed to you but wouldn't be to your peers), that information should be disclosed along with the score itself. Call it an "asterisk," call it what you will.
(On the other hand, the very public consensus that Barry Bonds took steroids actually is the "asterisk" in his case. Further annotation is redundant, unless you honestly think that by 50 years from now the Hall of Fame will have survived but the Internet won't have.)
That is to say, certain Red Sox fans (who know who they are) believed in him all along. (cough)
Hey, did you know that if you combine syllables from words, you can make hybrid words that sometimes roll amusingly off the tongue? Hey, did you know that works especially well with place names?
Six(?) years ago the Oakland A's set up a platoon of Scott Hatteberg with Olmedo Saenz. Chris[tina] Kahrl referred to them collectively as "Scolmedo Hattebaenz," repeated the meme a few times with other platoon situation and ran it into the ground.
...then an ad agency took the ball and ran with it and now we're all in Oklachuhamas*.
*- not actually in any of the ads that I know of
"Rocktober" made sense to me (as a catch-word) as far back as the NL wild card tiebreak game. But for awhile nobody picked up on it, and then suddenly everybody did.
Similarly, a few days ago Julia came home when I had the Fox ALCS telecast on mute, ESPN on the radio, and a gamecast window open. In the latter there was the Red Sox "B" logo and... Chief Wahoo. She did a double-take.
There's a faint hum of people objecting to the Indians' logo again. It will become a flashpoint should Cleveland win either game in Boston this weekend, yet probably be forgotten by November. Same thing that happened for the Indians' previous two World Series appearances.
(Pro forma I really do object to Chief Wahoo. The nickname itself is fine given the backstory but the logo needs an update. In the grand scheme of things, though, there are a few thousand things in the world I'd want to see changed first.)
"I’ll simply ask this question: which is worse, that Manny Ramirez cost his team a base through poor judgment, or that six umpires cost the Red Sox a run through their incompetence? The relative cost of the two mistakes made is clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of baseball, but to the two men in the booth, it was as if one of the errors didn’t happen, while the other was a devastating lapse." --Joe Sheehan
Having been at work when this happened I have to take everyone's word that it was a home run (hence a blown call). But it seems to be unanimous.
I was in the car (listening to Jon Miller & Joe Morgan) for this sequence:
- B. Kielty singled to right
- J. Varitek singled to left, B. Kielty to second
- C. Crisp struck out swinging
- J. Lugo grounded into double play shortstop to first, J. Varitek out at second
Morgan harped on Crisps's inability to get a bunt down as the reason the inning fizzled. But 1st & 2nd, one out is still a run expectancy of about 0.9, distinctly more than the difference in expected runs between getting the bunt down and not getting it down. (Crisp's strikeout reduced the run expectancy from about 1.5 to 0.9)
Manny Ramirez's outfield defense.
This Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered post quotes this fielding metric with the conclusion that Manny made 19.1% fewer plays per game than the average left fielder.
What % fewer plays would the average left fielder make with a wall 310 feet away from the plate?
"You would think that a leadoff walk would lead to more big innings than a leadoff home run. But we've done the research and it turns out that more big innings have come from leadoff home runs than leadoff walks."
--Tim McCarver, quoted here
"Joe Morgan said during last night's radio broadcast that home runs are usually rally killers because they clear the bases and end the momentum the team was building. He said this right after Peralta went deep to make it 6-0 instead of 3-0."
--commenter from the same thread, recounting the same quote I distinctly remember myself (but a bit unfairly: the way I remember it, he said a home run "can be" a rally killer, which is less emphatic than "are usually"
In other words, lay off McCarver: What he said might seem obvious at first glance, but remember that a lot of people think the way Morgan does on this point. And it was theoretically possible (though very unlikely) that the empirical evidence would somehow show a greater likelihood of a "big innings" (2+ runs scored) after a walk than after a home run (say, if pitchers did very badly from the stretch but nobody had clued in on this yet).
Actually, it's even closer than the mockers seem to think: In both cases you're basically asking about the probability that, with zero out, at least one of the next few batters will come around to score before the third out. (I say "at least one" because even if the guy who's already batted (and not made an out) is only on first, if someone behind him scores than chances are he's scored.) I would presume that the difference in likelihood hews closely to the probability that a runner on first is caught stealing, thrown out trying to take an extra base, or erased in a double-play. (The real-life data wouldn't show that EXACT difference, because of variance, but you get the idea.)
The day I'll give a rat's behind either way about various Yankee managers and/or coaches is the day Don Mattingly passes a note conveying his inability to be "M of the NYY."
I actually think it's plausible that J.D. Drew would idly wander away from second base, squandering the potential winning run because he falsely believed he was already out.
But I know J.D. would never ever swing at a 3-0 pitch while representing the tying run, much less swing at it and pop it up.
In other words, it had to be hard to find his way out from his older brother's suck-shadow, but Stephen Drew found a way.
Various other caveats about that meme:
1. I would NEVER actually give a child an offbeat name. It pains me that not everyone realizes the running joke was in fact a joke.
2. Yes, "was": At some point you have to draw a line
3. Our short-term affinity for Cleveland is partly from two "success stories" of that meme: Fausto (great name for a pet, no?) and Asdrubal (no person or creature should be stuck with a name that unfortunate).
4. Am I wrong about Mewelde being a seriously underrated name for a cat? It has a ring to it, it even has the "Mew," and if there was any NFL player after whom you'd name a cat: Wouldn't it be a sleek, undersized 3rd down back anyway?
Disjointed thoughts about this article and my describing college football as "a form of clan loyalty" one post below:
Yes that's a small 'c.' I forget where I read this (a year or two ago) but in the early to mid 20th century college football was big in the Northeast, a relative nonentity in the South. Meanwhile Northern women swore a lot more than Southern women, according to whoever this was. (Somebody had the thesis that Southern culture is just Northeastern culture from 50 years earlier.)
Tribal affiliation is another way to think of it, and I'd scoff even more except that my own undergraduate alma mater is especially notorious for good-old-boy networking even if it didn't relate to gridiron success.
When Tim Murphy came to coach Harvard's football team, he very implausibly described Harvard as a football school. The funniest part of this was that, if anything, it's a hockey school (recent abject lack of Beanpot success aside).
Shifting sports (but keeping that quasi-sociology focus), we've already discussed the terrible PA announcer at Arizona Diamondbacks games, and the handful of classless fans at Game 1. That said, I find it insulting and patronizing how so many commentators can blithely dismiss Arizonans as baseball newbies. It's an absurd conceit on so many levels:
1. Arizona has had spring training baseball for decades
2. Arizona had (at least) two Pacific Coast League teams for decades: The Tucson Toros since 1969, the Phoenix Firebirds since 1966. (When the Diamondbacks came along, their AAA team became the Tucson Sidewinders; a new AAA team sprung up in Fresno, CA.)
3. Many Arizonans are relatively recent transplants from elsewhere.
4. Baseball is not rocket science.
Some of the patronizing comments might just be substitute for "This team hasn't existed very long, and so it lacks tradition, and I hate change anyway." As if the parts of the country that had baseball in the 1950s had a god-given right to monopolize baseball pageantry.
On ESPN's radio broadcast, Dave Campbell mentioned that there weren't grandfathers who'd taken fathers to Diamondbacks games a generation ago. I immediately thought of the "grandfather clause," and wondered -- this part is completely independent of sports -- how often people who casually use that phrase stop and ponder the evil/unjust things perpetrated through the original Grandfather Clause(s).
"Before the Rockies, the last team to put together a 19-1 run was the 1977 Kansas City Royals"
--AP, via Yahoo! Sports
The Royals may have been the last team to win exactly 19 of 20 games, but aAnyone who's read this blog for awhile should know the last tea to win at least 19 of 20 (and therefore also exactly 19 of 20, as Paul points out).
"I want to make one point about the NLCS: it’s just not very good. Although the Rockies are a terrific story, the quality of baseball being played in the NL postseason is sorely lacking. Friday night’s game in Phoenix featured nibbling pitchers, hitters who refused to make them throw strikes, so-so defense, awful baserunning, questionable tactics and, in the end, Jose Valverde being hung out to dry, well in violation of his warranty."
--Joe Sheehan
Unfortunately I can't disagree here. These teams will both be better 2-3 years from now than they are now. Game 1 was blah; Game 2 was entertaining, but really the Arizona runners who keep overshooting second base are the defining element.
Game 3 doesn't look much better: The pitching match-up is Livan Hernandez vs. Josh Fogg. I had both of those pitchers in an NL Scoresheet league this year, on a team that made the championship series (i.e. finished 2nd of 12), but going into the playoffs they were my 5th starter and my "7th starter" -- this even after real-life events eliminated some better candidates. (To be fair, those same events were why I traded for Livan, parting with Rickie Weeks at what turned out to be his point of least value.)
[Not that you care, but the top four starting pitchers on Harvesters of Sorrow are/were: Dan Haren*, Tom Gorzelanny, Matt Cain, and Jeff Francis. Injuries aside I would have ranked Randy Johnson or Jason Jennings ahead of Livan. Meanwhile Brett Myers got closer-converted after his rough April, Zach Duke imploded, and Homer Bailey never stuck, hence my need to use supplemental draft picks on Kyle Kendrick and Fogg even before the Livan trade.]
*- league allows two "crossover" players per team, obviously players who used to be in the NL (i.e. can't draft Manny Ramirez and call him one of your crossovers)
I guess this isn't as prescient as it would've been with a BOS-NYY ALCS, but it's still darned close:
"Not least, the [Boston Red Sox] regularly kick the shit out of the loathsome New York Yankees. We play Colorado a lot."
--The Phoenix New Times, screen shot on this page of Cooch's archives
"From sports icon to commercial spokesperson and philanthropist, Bonds is one of the most recognizable and discussed sports figures in the country."
--promo for this October 24 personal appearance
American League stadiums via Google Earth & MLB 07
National League stadiums via Google Earth & MLB 07
In the seventh inning of last night's game, a 20-year-old rookie who'd just been hit by a pitch got called for a borderline, tick-tacky interference call when he came in hard to break up a double play.
Does anyone else think with a few more years of service time, or even with his getting on base some manner other than the HBP, that would've been a non-call.
None of that excuses some classless fan behavior. ESPN recently republished the Bill Simmons diary of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, in which he ran into the ground a meme about uneducated Arizona fans. The whole idea seemed randomly out of place to me: Arizona had spring training long before it had a franchise, and most of the baseball fans there are transplants anyway. But then I listened (later watched) the game last night and caught two signs of a minor league ambiance:
1. The ham-it-up PA guy, with a style that only belongs at Double-A or within a basketball arena
2. The fan overreaction to the marginal (not "bad" as such, just marginal) call, which only belongs at a minor league hockey game or a Wrigley Field night game.
Because Arizona is still letting its TV guys do the three middle innings of its playoff games, I still get to hear Mark Grace. He's 43 years old now, and has smoked enough that his voice always sounds like someone were sitting on his chest (it has a subtextual "oof").
Meanwhile, I don't think I'd ever seen TV camera close-ups of Jeff Francis before. That's what Zach Braff would look like if Zach Braff weren't actually sort of ugly.
Going back to the first paragraph, this would be a much better photo (of a man who hasn't aged half-badly) if it weren't for that lump inside his left cheek.
I'm stunned: There really are people (other than George Steinbrenner, who's pretty far gone into dementia) who think that Game 2 of this year's Yankees-Indians series should have been halted until the bugs went away. (For example, some commenters on this NY Times blog thread.)
Admittedly, "the bugs affected both teams equally" is overstated and inaccurate. Random atmospheric factors do "affect" some people more than others, and life isn't fair. Asking for a stoppage of play amounts to summoning the whaambulance.
Maybe I'm not the best source of advice given that I'm listening to an archive of you purely for Schadenfreude (I could play "IT IS HIGH, IT IS FAR, IT IS... a foul ball" (05:57:58 on your Gameday Audio) over and over again). That said, with exactly one change you'd be an excellent broadcaster for even non-Yankee fans to listen to.
That one change: PLEASE stop giving undue emphasis to the word "the." Thank you.
Alphabetically by last name, my top five choices for American League MVP all fall between Ordoñez and Rodriguez (inclusive).
Bronchitis. (Also known as being about to turn 97 years old.)
The distinctive feature of this Jim Hall fellow seems to be a deep voice that could cut through wood.
In any case, I successfully identified a PA announcer as "not Bob Sheppard." That's more discerning than "not Renel Brooks-Moon" but less discerning than "not the late Sherm Feller" (while Sherm was still around).
"Year 99 ended like all the ones before it, with a loss, [...]"
--this Yahoo! Sports column about the Cubs
Um, actually: since every year other than 2007, 2003, 1998, 1989, 1984, 1969, 1945, and [various years before 1945 that I'd have to look up (yes, the others are from memory)] the Cubs didn't make the playoffs at all, I presume at least some of them ended with a win in the regular-season finale.
(Good catch, ZD. The Mets' 1969 season certainly did not end in a loss.)
It's not exactly Dark Side of the Wizard of Oz, but my two favorite things to listen to at work are:
1. Gameday Audio via MLB.com (mouse over "Audio & Video" and select "Media Guide")
2. Organ Live on Live365.com
Combining them lends a soap opera element to the play-by-play.
The actual headline: "Pirates set to fire Tracy"
If the NLCS on TBS turns out to be Rockies-Diamondbacks then does that mean the "other NLCS" on TNT will be Jazz-Spurs?
(If it's on TBS/TNT and it involves teams from the Mountain states, doesn't just feel like the NBA playoffs?)
The good news for the Indians is on-going as I type this (9-3 lead, mid 6th).
The bad news: All seven of the Yankees' previous Division Series (2000-2006) were won by the team that LOST Game 1. In fact, the teams that won Game 1 went a combined 3-21 over the rest of those series.
(While, for no apparent reason, listening yesterday to the Padres' radio coverage of Monday night's tiebreaking game.)
(This wouldn't have been worth posting but then I saw Cooch's poor review of Sox broadcaster Orsillo in the TBS booth.)
1. At some point in the 1990s Tony Gwynn was in a batting title race with Andres Galarraga and, as Leitner recalls it, any time Galarraga put the ball in play at home they'd score it a hit rather than an error.
2. If the stadiums that display inflated radar readings for the home pitcher are doing so to try to intimidate the opposing hitters, believe Leitner it doesn't work.
3. The Padres reached the World Series in 1984 and 1998. (I swear I've relearned this every time I've ever heard Leitner call a game.)
4. Twice in the 13th inning Leitner referred to the Padres in first-person possessive ("my Padres").
Just thought you should know. It's not that I intensely dislike his broadcasting -- that's oversimplified and not quite true. He has an incredible gift of speaking so quickly and clearly, and mastering the art of cadence like no other broadcaster I've heard -- but squanders that gift (plus his hard work) by being a pompous blowhard.
With the Chicago Cubs back in the playoffs I feel compelled to point out that the old Mike Royko meme technically was not "Cub factor" so much as "ex-Cub factor." 29 times out of 30 this would make no difference, but for the Cubs themselves my interpretation is that being a current Cub does NOT qualify one as an "ex-Cub." With that in mind...
The 2007 Cubs have Steve Trachsel. (but wisely left him off the playoff roster)
The Diamondbacks have Augie Ojeda.
The Rockies have LaTroy Hawkins.
The Phillies have Antonio Alfonseca and Jamie Moyer.
The Red Sox have... nobody?
The Angels... nobody?
The Yankees: Kyle Farnsworth (what is it with all these terrible relief pitchers?!)
The Indians: Kenny Lofton and Joe Borowski(!)
Johnson is a special guest in the booth. For innings 4-6 we have Darin Sutton with Mark Grace (innings 1-3 were, and I presume 7-9 will be, Greg Schulte plus Tom Candiotti).
It's been interesting, though I did notice that he did use third-person to describe the Diamondbacks and past tense for the Arizona portion of his playing career.
Back in the first inning, Stephen Drew took a called third strike (but he hit a home run in the middle of this sentence, so what do I know?) and I thought about... two acorns falling not far from each other. (Had to change a metaphor a bit since I have no idea how Papa Drew would have batted.)
Go to http://www.tbs.com/ and mouse over the word "sports" in the top nav bar.
They distinguish "major league baseball" from "braves baseball."
What good could it possibly do to set up a computer algorithm, of all things, to identify classic baseball games? HAVE YOU NO SOUL?!? Real fans know what the best games were because they lived through them, they remember the emotion [etc.]. Besides, classic moments from games are famous for reasons that transcend written play-by-play.
Well, obviously we didn't live through them all. I was seven months old in October 1975. My parents were quite young in October 1960. Their parents were quite young (if alive) as of Babe Ruth's called shot, etc.
I think most of what most people know about classic baseball games comes from received knowledge, and the lore that the most read, watched, and listened-to authorities happen to pass along.
I was surprised to read in this Volokh Conspiracy post that Ilya Somin ranks 2003 ALCS Game 7 as greater heartbreak (for Red Sox fans) than 1986 World Series Game 6. My impression is that the conventional wisdom goes the other way, and yet... on further review this seems right.
When we're doing our best to be authoritative do we underrate the things we lived through most recently and have had the least time to put in context? (Alternately, does the sudden explosion in quantity of baseball playoff games -- and also of immediate access to coverage of all sorts of games -- cause us to raise our standards of what's "great" among the moderns?)
This season-ending game was utterly meaningless, yet it was so crisply played, so dramatically ended (the eighth and ninth both), and in such perfect weather that as we walked out of the Coliseum, for several seconds I honestly wondered whether that was the best game I'd ever been to in person. Now that really IS crazy talk, but can you understand in the moment why it was at least plausible?
(The actual "best game I've ever been to" was either Game 18 (Tejada HR) or Game 20 (Hatteberg HR after blown 11-run lead) of the A's 2002 winning streak.)
"What about 1991 World Series, Game 7? Give me a 1-0 thriller over a 9-8 thriller any day."
--Brian W.
I have a hard time seeing any Wildcard tiebreaker being "legendary" unless it ends on an unassisted triple play or something else weird like that.
Game 7 of an LCS or WS, sure. Wildcard tiebreaker, not so sure."
--comment #39 to this thread
I'm ambivalent about Brian's comment, strongly disagree with the second.
If you were trying to teach a computer to determine (by algorithm) the greatest baseball-games of all-time, what criteria might be relevant?
I think most playoff games are far more likely to be dramatic than most regular-season games because more is at stake. If you lose on Opening Day, you have 161 more to go. Even if you lose the first game of a post-season series you can make up for it in Game 2. Games where the loser goes home -- or even where the winner would have gone home had it lost -- start out with the greatest implied drama.
(The commenter whom I quote with disapproval elaborated later in the thread: "I mean, does anyone describe an NCAA Basketball Play-In game as "legendary" under any circumstances? I don't even know where to begin with that statement:
1. Has there ever, in fact, been a dramatic NCAA Basketball Play-In game?
2. If there has been, yet people forgot, might it be because that team was so likely to be crushed in its next game? Stark contrast to baseball playoffs with teams on even footing.
3. There definitely have been many memorable ("legendary"?) FIRST-ROUND NCAA basketball games (Valpo says hi...); if this is a "technically in the {playoffs, tournament}"/"technically not" distinction then it just seems cock-eyed to me.
4. Basketball and baseball are really apples and oranges anyway.
)
Anyway, situational importance is a huge difference in initial rank. What else would a computer program (say a perl script with access to Retrosheet) look for? Lead changes might be big, except that this criterion underrates pitchers' duels. (One counterweight that arguably overrates pitchers' duels would be the average batter-by-batter score margin.)
Extra innings, of course, with some additional weight for scoring opportunities missed. Huge bump for teams that fall behind in the top of the final inning but come back to win.
What else would we need to avoid false negatives (false positives seem sort of unlikely)?
I can picture an algorithm that would spit out the top games as something like:
1. 2001 World Series Game 7
2. 1991 World Series Game 7
3. 2003 ALCS Game 7
4. 1992 NLCS Game 7
5. 1960 World Series Game 7
Where you slot in last night, or 1995 ALDS Game 5, depends on the weights the business rules give to each playoff round. The missing World Series Game 6's (1975, 1986, and yes 1991) are an interesting question of how you algorithmically account for the "We will see you... TOMORROW!" factor.
(Speaking of which, Len Dykstra presents an interesting case of the "We will NOT see you [Mr. Mike Scott]... TOMORROW!" factor.)
UPDATE: An interesting wrinkle is how to handle any one game from the end of the 2004 ALCS. I would have (naively) attempted to teach this computer how to evaluate each game on its own, but in hindsight Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS is a lot more legendary given that the comeback really did succeed all the way.
(Then again, how much did Cincinnati's win in 1976 Game 7 affect the "classic" status of Game 6?)
The Rockies' radio voices are too flat. That is, they don't change their intonation to reflect how surprising or game-changing a given play is. It's almost like having a poker face in a situation that doesn't call for one.
(I suppose never shouting is better than always shouting.)
Expanding on that point a bit, take the 13th inning Holliday triple. We hear about Brian Giles going back, to the wall, we hear deafening crowd noise... "off the top of the wall" shouldn't be sotto voce. That's the difference between game over and game-almost-over.
UPDATE: The one thing I always remember about Ted Leitner is that he has knee-jerk opinions. The thing I should remember, by contrast to the Rockie guys, is that he speaks a mile a minute yet accents every fourth or fifth syllable (the correct ones to accent) to make what he's saying crystal clear. It's entirely the wrong cadence for a lazy afternoon of baseball, yet it works well for this game, and probably even better for basketball, hockey, or quiz-bowl reading.
UPDATE2: Another problem with Leitner's style is that he gets names wrong from trying to communicate so fast. He corrects them immediately but still.
I still have yet to succeed at finding (free) video of either of tonight's two most controversial plays.
Would it be crazy of me to call this the most dramatic game in MLB history?
Other contenders that happen to come to mind, in no particular order:
1975 World Series (Reds-Red Sox) Game 6
1986 World Series (Red Sox-Mets) Game 6
1995 ALDS (Yankees-Mariners) Game 5
2006 NLDS (Braves-Astros) Game 4
(several other games from the 1986 playoffs)
(multiple games from the 2001 World Series)
It's obviously the most dramatic regular season(!) game in MLB history. I wonder what game qualifies as a distant second? It might be this one, I don't know.
Why?
What part of any of that suggested he wouldn't stink?
Granting that it's not up to Hoffman how managers use him, if he's the Padres best reliever (in fact he isn't, but since by reputation he is let's say he is for the sake of argument), WHY ARE THEY USING SOME MEDIOCRE GUY INSTEAD OF HIM IN THE BOTTOM OF THE TENTH INNING?
Holding him back for that almighty save is absurd.
(Bonus: Broadcast teams by series. Baseball Think Factory is excellent.)
What I like: it's neat to know all the possibilities now instead of having the weekend games be a total TBD until Friday. I also like the {late-afternoon/prime time/West Coast} triptych a lot better than the {day, day, prime time}. TBS is being relatively merciful to West Coast fans.
What I hate: would it kill them to have the same teams play in the same time slot on consecutive days? (Yes, both NLDS do that for Games 1-2 but what I really mean is that there's no fixed concept of a game "slot." It used to be you could count on games at 1p, 4p, 7p, or 10p. Now you have to double- and triple-check the exact hour.)
Cleveland goes from 6:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.; Boston goes from 6:30 p.m. to (two days later) 8:30 p.m. 8:30! That's going to make Lansdowne Street pretty interesting. (Compare to a High Noon local start time for one of the games at Anaheim.)
And that whole "oops, the game is {two hours later / 90 minutes sooner} than it would have been" is guaranteed to trip someone up.
But by and large it's a good schedule.
(all times Eastern/Pacific)
WEDNESDAY
1500/1200: (Rockies or Padres) at Philadelphia
1830/1530: Angels at Boston
2200/1900: Cubs at Arizona
THURSDAY
1500/1200: (Rockies or Padres) at Philadelphia
1830/1530: Yankees at Cleveland
2200/1900: Cubs at Arizona
FRIDAY
1700/1400: Yankees at Cleveland
2030/1730: Angels at Boston
SATURDAY
1800/1500: Diamondbacks at Chicago
2130/1830: Phillies at (Colorado or San Diego)
SUNDAY
1300/1000: Diamondbacks at Chicago (if necessary)
1500/1200: Red Sox at Anaheim
1830/1530: Indians at New York
2200/1900: Phillies at (Colorado or San Diego) (if necessary)
MONDAY
1800/1500: Indians at New York (if necessary)
2130/1830: Red Sox at Anaheim (if necessary)
(if only one game then it would take place at 1930/1630)
TUESDAY
1830/1530: (Rockies or Padres) at Philadelphia (if necessary)
2200/1900: Cubs at Arizona (if necessary)
(if only one game then it would take place at 2030/1730)
WEDNESDAY
1700/1400: Yankees at Cleveland (if necessary)
2030/1730: Angels at Boston (if necessary)
(if only one game then it would take place at 2030/1730)
If for some odd reason you care, check back intermittently on this post.
Alameda Islanders: 12-team H2H, 4th place in 2006 (despite the top "regular season" record), 4th place in 2007 (consistent with being the playoff 4-seed) after a 7-7 "loss" and an 8-6 loss.
Keepers in green.
Round Pick Player Position
1. (3) Brian McCann C
2. (22) Paul Konerko 1B
3. (27) Derrek Lee 1B
4. (46) Justin Morneau 1B
5. (51) David Wright 3B
6. (70) Derek Jeter SS
7. (75) Carl Crawford LF
8. (94) Carlos Zambrano SP
9. (99) Barry Bonds LF
10. (118) Chris Young CF
11. (123) Todd Helton 1B
12. (142) Ray Durham 2B
13. (147) J.D. Drew RF
14. (166) Brian Giles RF
15. (171) Josh Willingham LF
16. (190) Anthony Reyes SP
17. (195) Kelvim Escobar SP
18. (214) Jhonny Peralta SS
19. (219) Ian Snell SP
20. (238) John Patterson SP
21. (243) Kelly Johnson 2B,OF
22. (262) Armando Benítez RP
23. (267) Kiko Calero RP
24. (286) Justin Duchscherer RP
25. (291) Chad Qualls RP
26. (310) Zack Greinke SP,RP
27. (315) Scott Eyre RP
28. (334) David DeJesús LF,CF
McCann finished 113th among position players in VORP; sixth among catchers (just behind Jason Varitek). Lee, Morneau, and Konerko were 28th, 80th, and 100th. Wright was 5th, Jeter 23rd, Crawford 50th. Carlos Zambrano was 29th among pitchers. No particular regrets there: Konerko was the iffiest keeper.
Bonds and Helton worked out great, Chris B. Young and Durham not so much, Willingham a whole lot better than Drew or Giles.
Escobar and Snell were highway robbery but Reyes didn't work out. Jhonny Peralta had kind of a schizophrenic season.
John Patterson was a terrible mistake, Kelly Johnson a nice find, then some bullpen dreck. I guess David DeJesus was okay for what he was.
Team Julia Forever!: 14-team roto, second place in 2007.
Keepers in green.
1. (3) David Ortiz 1B
2. (26) Miguel Tejada SS
3. (31) Joe Nathan RP
4. (54) Brandon Webb SP
5. (59) Alex Gordon 1B,3B
6. (82) C.C. Sabathia SP
7. (87) Orlando Hudson 2B
8. (110) Ryan Freel 2B,3B,OF
9. (115) Brian Giles OF
10. (138) Félix Hernández SP
11. (143) Corey Hart OF
12. (166) Kevin Youkilis 1B,3B,OF
13. (171) Adrián Béltre 3B
14. (194) Jonathan Broxton RP
15. (199) Pat Neshek RP
16. (222) Brian McCann C
17. (227) Justin Verlander SP
18. (250) Curtis Granderson OF
19. (255) Kelly Johnson 2B,OF
20. (278) Brandon McCarthy SP,RP
21. (283) Ryan Shealy 1B
22. (306) Kevin Gregg SP,RP
23. (311) Scott Olsen SP
24. (334) James Shields SP
Ortiz was fine, Tejada let me down a bit, Nathan did what he was supposed to, Webb and Sabathia were awesome of course, Gordon didn't work out, Hudson did, Freel really didn't, nor Giles.
In hindsight the other guy came out like a bandit when I dealt King Felix and Granderson in mid-April for Alfonso Soriano and Mariano Rivera.
I also picked a very unfortunate time to waive Corey Hart.
Youk was fine, Beltre I cut (prematurely?) after a slow start, Broxton and Neshek did what I drafted them to do, McCann was a fine keeper, Verlander a GREAT keeper, KJ a nifty future keeper.
McCarthy and Shealy didn't work out. Gregg would've been nifty if I hadn't immediately cut him once Florida traded for Jorge Julio.
Scott Olsen... *sigh*
...and even though I should've taken Hunter Pence over James Shields, either was a great option at that spot.
Deadspin wins. However, "Bob Sheppards Flock" mangles the Ferris Bueller quote: The score was nothing-nothing (Cubs-Expos) when Rooney asked who was winning.
(Warning: Will lower your IQ 10-15 points.)
Somebody is all-caps mad that ESPN fantasy baseball won't somehow find a way to count today's baseball game in their head-to-head leagues (but will in rotisserie leagues).
It's unclear what exactly the original posted wants to happen, since obviously the match-ups from last week (Monday the 24th to Sunday the 30th) wouldn't carry over if the announced interval ended at September 30.
Think of this as "Week 27" and if you're in a head-to-head league, count one games' worth of stats against your "opponent": Good old "Bye." So everyone in an ESPN H2H league gets a perfect "score" this "week." Whee!
Yahoo! chose not to count this game in ANY fantasy baseball leagues. That strikes me as exactly right if they already announced that all FLB ended September 30 (I think they posted a calendar with such dates, but can't remember for sure), technically wrong otherwise.
If a half-dozen Rockies and Padres combine for something like an .800 on-base percentage in 25-30 plate appearances then I'll pull a for-money championship out of the fire, otherwise I'll stay in second place.
P.S. I just saw the typo in the subject line right below this. I like it and will choose to keep it.
"It's certainly one of, if not the most important one, I've had, obviously. It's hard to say it's any more important than a playoff game that I pitched last year."
--Tom Glavine, NY Daily News
Glavine started Game 2 of the 2006 Division Series with the Mets already up 1-0. He started NLCS Game 1 (series tied 0-0, obviously) and Game 5 (series tied 2-2). None of those were elimination games, whereas today was effectively an elimination game for the Mets.
If you're giving an honest answer, "hard to say" might still be about right. But it's certainly not what his fans wanted to hear at the time.
As for what you tell yourself to psyche yourself up: He'd know better than anyone what works best for him ("most important game I've ever thrown" versus "treat it like any other game") but if you're 40-odd years old then surely you've had plenty of time to realize that at the highest level of a league like MLB, athletes are largely entertainers.
The cardinal sin isn't to stop caring -- pride alone or money alone would be enough that I find "they stopped caring" to be a patently absurd explanation, and anyone who's made it to the big leagues at all can be assumed to have the mental fortitude to avoid a statistically significant "choke": If there were a way to measure it, I suspect that "propensity to choke" among big leaguers would be analogous to pitchers' Batting Average on Balls In Play: They're all so good at avoiding screaming line drives (and, I claim, avoiding mental tailspins) that it comes out about even.
Rather, the cardinal sin is to let your biggest fans think you stopped caring.
So on first order everyone excoriating the Mets is wildly overreacting. On second order, though, they did a horrible PR job at the end.
Both the NLCS and ALCS have an off day before Game 5. In theory a team could use a three-man rotation, where the only "short rest" game was the guy pitching Game 4 on three days rest following Game 1.
(The other three extra days that push World Series Game 1 from Saturday to Wednesday: one before the Division Series, one before the fifth game of each Division Series, one before the WS itself. (The last Championship Series Game 7 used to fall on a Thursday, two days before Saturday; now it falls on Sunday, three days before Wednesday.)
As of 1:30 a.m. (PDT) Monday morning all start times are still to be determined.
Two idiotic Fox broadcasters (one usually does TV games for San Diego and has a wildly inflated opinion of himself; the other was a Dodger first baseman of the 1990s and has trouble forming complete sentences on the air) just claimed that a tie atop the NL East would be settled by head-to-head record.
Maybe they were thinking of what would happen if both teams were assured of playoff spots, but in fact it's far more likely that the tie in question would be settled on the field.
I can't emphasize enough my disdain for this broadcast pair.
(Upon Tony Gwynn Jr.'s game-tying triple with two out in the ninth today.)
"Son of a..."
Crucial error by Ryan Howard just now. I wonder if Phillie fans will remember it way out of proportion to its effect on the game (much less the season). The Phillies radio alternate play-by-play guy (i.e. 3rd, 4th, and 7th innings to Harry Kalas's other six) was certainly nonplussed.
Already eliminated, and on mute on my TV, Milwaukee is going further down the tubes -- good news for San Diego, already irrelevant to the Cubs (that surprised me), bad for four(!) other teams especially Colorado.
It doesn't matter to the real-life playoffs but Rich Hill's stellar outing for the Cubs today hurt me in the NL roto money league. We were tied, but the other guy had three starting pitchers today and thus will probably gain a point (at some other guy's expense) in strikeouts. WHIP was too close to call (me barely behind), but Hill gave him a big lift there. Still time for one of his other two starters to get lit, or Tom Gorzelanny to throw me a perfect game, or my hitters to erase a .0008 difference in On-Base Percentage, or the guy behind my rival to erase a 5-runs-scored difference.
Still no no-hitter in franchise history. Blessing in disguise for Willie Randolph: I think the right decision would have been to pull Maine after eight, yet I don't think he would have made it out of the stadium alive if he did. (If I were otherwise right, is the fact that the Mets have never thrown a no-hitter enough to sway that decision? I can't quite see it.)
WFAN uses the same radio jingle they used in 1996 (and probably 1986, 1976...).
They just played a snippet of the theme for "Chico and the Man" upon reference to Washington Nationals' starting pitcher Matt Chico (who the Mets obviously want to do well against Philly today). Much better musical reference than the Pitbull snippet I always think of. ("Ay Chico!")
This quote about computer models versus real-life observation reminded me that I've been meaning to post about the National League rookie of the year decision and the recent groundswell of support for Troy Tulowitzki.
Defense aside, Ryan Braun would seem to be overwhelmingly likely to win, yet many baseball analysts have pointed out that the runs cost/saved by their relative defense almost outweighs the difference in hitting.
An interesting task for a stat-head would be to present those numbers, and explain the approach behind them, so well that even a math-phobic baseball fan gained intuitive understanding of why any given rough quantification of those players' defense is in the right ballpark (pardon the expression).
(Contrast to the manager who, a few years ago, claimed that some good-but-not-earth-shattering defensive first baseman literally saved his team three runs per game.)
"Forgive me for getting all Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy [...]"
--from Cooch's eloquent attack on the Red Sox Nation hoopla
I bet I can spot the three words that an editor added for clarity.
"I’ve been like a broken record," [Mets' catcher Paul Lo Duca] said. "I don’t know what to say anymore. I don’t even know if I’m getting through to these guys, but I just want them to know that this is real."
--Baseball Think Factory
A true clubhouse leader doesn't go out of his way to posture like one for media consumption, because his message is for teammates and not reporters. I'd cite (of all things) a Bible verse in favor of this rule of thumb, yet I'm not quite sure how it goes nor how best to web search what I want to find. It's in the New Testament in any case.
In any case, I think there's a 95% chance any player who lets himself be quoted saying something that egregiously self-serving is just an asshole (pardon the French).
Speaking of the Jeff Kent Rule's namesake:
"Who said he was a leader?"
--James Loney, responding to a Kent rant
Comment #16 in this thread:
"As usual, people assume that there can be only one jerk and no shared fault in an incident.
There is no reason, especially during a Sep PO race, for a player to be fighting off his manager so hard that he has to be tackled."
(Bold face added to distinguish the guy's own words from the words he was quoting.)
"Isn't it possible that both A and B were at fault?"
"To answer your question: A was at fault!"
It's been awhile since I've seen a better example of non sequitur in the wild.
(12 counting my god-forsaken Salary Cap team. Hmm, 13 counting Barker Cut-Throat.)
Football
All four fantasy teams are 1-1.
Barker Cut-Throat: San Francisco and Seattle Week 1, Denver and St. Louis Week 2.
Salary Cap: Reggie Bush is killing me! (And so help me, despite the hype surrounding him, he came cheap.)
Baseball
El Diablo con Dinero: (8-team NL roto) Lost three points worth of ERA/WHIP Sunday but gained two of them back. Pick your favorite metaphor between "two-run lead in the ninth" and "7-point lead and the ball with four minutes left."
Faux Klingons: (18-team H2H) Won 6-4 last week. In either the finals (of 9) or semis (of 18) depending on how you treat the "Division 2" half of the league.
Harvesters of Sorrow: (12-team NL Scoresheet) Went 1-5 to fall to 81-69, still a division leader (but by two games instead of five games). September slumps are bad news for the playoffs (based on 2007 season stats but with extra weight given to September stats).
Neifi Pharma: (6-team suck league) Drew within 150 points last night. Failing to capitalize on it tonight.
Team Julia Forever: (14-team roto) Comfortably in second place, up to 108 points (perfect = 140 points). Leader has slipped to 120.5.
Alameda Islanders: (12-team H2H) Tied the semifinal 6-6-2 but lost because the Yahoo! tie-breaking criterion is ERA. (Would have also lost on ESPN.com, where the criterion is team seed.)
MAsters of Puppets: (10-team AL Scoresheet) 67-83, playing out the string.
The CMU band's favorite baseball player (context)
Every physics grad student's favorite baseball player
1. What an arbitrary, self-selected group of Internet voters thinks should qualify as "Wonders of the Modern World"
2. What an arbitrary, self-selected group of Internet voters thinks should happen to some particular baseball
My lasting impression at the time was Jack Hannahan's flying leap; from seeing the video on MLB.com, I realize that Swisher's low tackle/leg grab puts him in a bit too much of a Jeff Van Gundy position.
If you wanted an easy reference to who plays whom over the final two weeks (starting Monday-ish), read on.
Incidentally, I think the Rangers have the most ill-conceived schedule. Their final visits to the Angels, A's, and Mariners (i.e. the three West Coast teams in their division) are/were three separate trips. Who decided that three-city trips with the West Coast destination as the middle city were a good idea?!
Red font = single make-up game.
Boston: at Toronto (3), at Tampa Bay (3), OAKLAND (2), MINNESOTA (4)
NY Yankees: BALTIMORE (3), TORONTO (4), at Tampa Bay (3), at Baltimore (3)
Toronto: BOSTON (3), at NY Yankees (4), at Baltimore (3), TAMPA BAY (3)
Baltimore: at NY Yankees (3), at Texas (4), KANSAS CITY, TORONTO (3), NY YANKEES (3)
Tampa Bay: at Angels (3), BOSTON (3), NY YANKEES (3), at Toronto (3)
Cleveland: DETROIT (3), OAKLAND (3), at Seattle (4), at Kansas City (3)
Detroit: at Cleveland (3), KANSAS CITY (3), MINNESOTA (3), at White Sox (3)
Minnesota: TEXAS (3), WHITE SOX (3), at Detroit (3), at Boston (4)
White Sox: at Kansas City (4), at Minnesota (3), KANSAS CITY (3), DETROIT (3)
Kansas City: WHITE SOX (4), at Detroit (3), at Baltimore, at White Sox (3), CLEVELAND (3)
Angels: TAMPA BAY (3), SEATTLE (4), at Texas (3), at Oakland (3)
Seattle: at Oakland (3), at Angels (4), CLEVELAND (4), TEXAS (3)
Oakland: SEATTLE (3), at Cleveland (3), at Boston (2), ANGELS (3)
Texas: at Minnesota (3), BALTIMORE (4), ANGELS (3), at Seattle (3)
NY Mets: at Washington (3), at Florida (4), WASHINGTON (3), ST. LOUIS, FLORIDA (3)
Philadelphia: at St. Louis (3), at Washington (4), ATLANTA (3), WASHINGTON (3)
Atlanta: FLORIDA (3), MILWAUKEE (4), at Philadelphia (3), at Houston (3)
Washington: NY METS (3), PHILADELPHIA (4), at NY Mets (3), at Philadelphia (3)
Florida: at Atlanta (3), NY METS (4), CUBS (3), at NY Mets (3)
Cubs: CINCINNATI (3), PITTSBURGH (3), at Florida (3), at Cincinnati (3)
Milwaukee: at Houston (3), at Atlanta (4), ST. LOUIS (3), SAN DIEGO (4)
St. Louis: PHILADELPHIA (3), HOUSTON (4), at Milwaukee (3), at NY Mets, at Pittsburgh
Cincinnati: at Cubs (3), at San Francisco (4), HOUSTON (3), CUBS (3)
Pittsburgh: at San Diego (4), at Cubs (3), ARIZONA (3), ST. LOUIS (3)
Houston: MILWAUKEE (3), at St. Louis (4), at Cincinnati (3), ATLANTA (3)
Arizona: SAN FRANCISCO (3), DODGERS (3), at Pittsburgh (3), at Colorado (3)
San Diego: PITTSBURGH (4), COLORADO (3), at San Francisco (3), at Milwaukee (4)
Dodgers: at Colorado (3), at Arizona (3), COLORADO (3), SAN FRANCISCO (3)
Colorado: DODGERS (3), at San Diego (3), at Dodgers (3), ARIZONA (3)
San Francisco: at Arizona (3), CINCINNATI (4), SAN DIEGO (3), at Dodgers (3)
Not sure how this came about but now the Marlins' star 3B always makes me think of chain restaurant baby back rib jingles whenever he does well. ("Miggy Cab" instead of "baby back".) There's a too-close-to-call fantasy baseball playoff matchup wherein his grand slam tonight is excellent news for me.
Are Kerry Wood and Ryan Dempster really that much more responsible for the outcome of this game than Ted Lilly and Carlos Marmol?
(Bias alert: You can probably guess which two of the four I have on two fantasy teams each. That said, Marmol's "hold" does help me in one of them.)
MLB.com Gameday Audio
Nationals @ Marlins
Wednesday, September 12
Visiting Audio (WTWP)
Start at about 02:28:30 and keep listening (BH Kim batting, trying to bunt)
Key moment is 02:29:23
I have a realistic shot at five(!) fake baseball championships five fake baseball teams that a have a realistic shot at their respective championships this year, plus a comfortable 2nd place (of 14) in one of the other two.
Colorado Rockies make a surprising amount of difference to those championship hopes; this post is like the sad version of the ode to Troy Tulowitzki that I didn't bother you with yesterday or the day before.
El Diablo con Dinero: 6.5-point lead in an NL-only eight-team roto. My team has been at exactly 65 most of this week as the second-place guy fluctuates in the high 50's.
Alameda Islanders: head-to-head playoffs (semifinals of 12)
Faux Klingons: ditto (top 6 of 18 or top 3 of 9 depending on how you treat the league's D1/D2 structure of putting all the newbie owners in a division together and keeping the division playoffs separate until the final)
Neifi Pharma: 2nd of 6 in a points-based suck league but closing within 500 points of the 1st place team (after trailing by as much as 1500 earlier this month)
Harvesters of Sorrow: in the division lead, second-best record in the league, 12-team NL-only Scoresheet (playoff performance based on September playing time and full-season stats weighted towards September)
Team Julia Forever!: 2nd of 14, roto. (16 points behind but 11 ahead.)
Masters of Puppets: second-worst record, 10-team AL Scoresheet.
This column is probably great soapbox fodder in theory, but in practice it's worse than useless.
"But a more important question for Mitchell is what his report will say about the effects men such as Mota and Palmeiro -- and now, it appears, Glaus and Ankiel -- have had on history. For if the standings don't matter, the game has lost its legitimacy."
How the hell could the Mitchell report possibly fill this purpose? Well, gee, Gus, I think Palmeiro's steroid use gave the Baltimore Orioles 4.7 wins, costing the Red Sox 1.2 wins in the process. But if you use VORP instead of WARP...
This is almost exactly as useful as if the Commissioner's Office tried to use park effects to evaluate the legitimacy of Todd Helton's batting title(s)*. (Title, singular, but I had to look it up.) Indirect statistical analysis contains some margin of error that's completely acceptable for analysis but that is fundamentally incompatible with anything official or canonical.
That's also why "whether it is Mitchell's belief that the record book should contain an asterisk" (also a quote from Bryant's article) is fundamentally irrelevant. It's a stupid question to ask, partly because it puts a discrete yes-no answer in place where the better answer is a matter of degree; partly because Mitchell's opinion is unlikely to carry the weight of royal edict (or to deserve to).
*-UPDATE: A better example, and an interesting question: "What kind of career numbers would Ted Williams have put up without missing time to serve his country?" I trust Bill James to come up with a reasonable estimate, or anyone else whose methods are basically sound. If somebody from the Commissioner's Office had the chutzpah to publish a for-the-record estimate , I wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. If they tried to gave that estimate official weight, that would make orders of magnitude more mockery of the game than any substance any player ever ingested.
(Pardon the French.)
"When you’re treated by the clubhouse like you’re a rookie when you make it back to the major leagues again and you’ve played longer than these guys, that kind of sours you a little bit."
--Bill Pulsipher, on making a brief 2005 comeback in St. Louis, Newsday as reprinted in Baseball Primer
Athletes are not model human beings, perhaps especially not when they're off the field. (You already knew this.) They seem to have a fraternal culture with an entrenched pecking order. (You also already knew this.)
In short, as people they're exactly the sort from whom you probably don't want your children taking "how to behave" lessons. (We're still in the realm of the obvious, right?)
(Since neither the Newsday writer nor Pulsipher elaborates on how he was treated, who knows whether a reasonable person would see it as teammates' boorish behavior, Pulsipher's sour grapes, or both.)
But this amuses me a lot as compared to a couple of steroids stories:
1. Rick Ankiel becomes folk hero because of his own comeback, yet scorned a day later on news that he used HGH at the start of his comeback.
2. Barry Bonds becomes super-villain for his suspected steroid use but really more on the premise that he's a jerk.
The most counter-productive 25 hitters and worst 25 pitchers of 2007 (through yesterday), based on the points system for the suck league Mike Burger set up.
Stat Modifiers :AB (4), R (-6), H (-8), 2B (-6), 3B (-12), HR (-18), RBI (-6), SB (-6), CS (12), BB (-6), K (8), GIDP (8), E (10), IP (-9), W (-16), L (16), CG (-20), SHO (-50), SV (-16), H (6), R (10), HR (9), BB (3), HBP (3), K (-4), WP (2), SVOP (8), HLD (-4)
Points AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB K GDP E
Tony F. Peña 960 456 51 117 21 6 1 41 4 5 9 68 13 21
Miguel Olivo 904 408 39 96 16 4 15 53 2 2 10 105 13 11
Nick Punto 898 420 46 84 15 3 1 22 15 6 52 77 7 10
Juan Uribe 876 439 46 97 12 2 16 55 1 7 29 99 5 15
Felipe López 826 537 60 131 23 5 9 48 22 9 46 99 9 17
Brandon Inge 814 443 59 107 22 2 13 62 8 2 44 138 6 15
Gerald Laird 774 374 42 82 15 2 8 42 6 2 28 94 3 10
Josh Barfield 748 408 52 100 18 3 3 49 14 3 14 86 3 14
Alex Gordon 718 480 56 121 30 4 14 54 14 4 36 120 11 11
Craig Monroe 700 370 49 81 22 0 11 55 0 4 24 99 12 3
Craig Biggio 668 459 63 116 28 3 10 47 4 3 19 98 4 9
Nelson Cruz 652 259 29 55 13 0 7 25 1 3 21 75 5 4
Bobby Crosby 648 349 40 79 16 0 8 31 10 2 23 62 11 14
David Ross 632 283 28 57 8 0 15 34 0 0 23 87 6 4
Jhonny Peralta 622 515 77 139 24 1 18 66 3 3 50 132 11 15
Ryan Langerhans 618 196 24 30 7 1 5 20 2 1 27 74 4 2
Iván Rodríguez 616 444 44 123 27 3 10 54 1 2 8 84 11 6
Jason LaRue 614 152 14 22 8 0 4 12 1 0 16 59 6 4
Delmon Young 612 560 59 164 34 0 11 79 7 3 25 108 17 7
Marcus Giles 610 398 52 91 19 3 4 38 10 3 39 79 8 7
Brad Ausmus 602 329 37 76 15 3 3 24 6 1 36 70 10 4
José Castillo 596 205 15 49 15 1 0 21 0 0 6 45 9 9
Josh Fields 580 312 35 74 13 0 18 56 1 1 24 105 10 9
Stephen Drew 570 473 52 109 25 3 10 47 8 0 53 88 4 14
Abraham Núñez 570 230 22 54 9 1 0 15 1 0 23 44 9 9
Points IP W L CG SO Save H R HR BB HBP K WP SvOp Hold
Mike Maroth (StL - SP) 1139 111.2 5 6 0 0 0 161 96 25 48 5 46 1 0 0
José Contreras (CWS - SP) 910 155 8 16 1 1 0 188 114 17 57 13 97 2 0 0
Scott Olsen (Fla - SP) 897 159.1 9 12 0 0 0 197 112 25 73 1 120 7 0 0
Dontrelle Willis (Fla - SP) 894 179.2 8 14 0 0 0 217 113 25 72 10 125 6 0 0
Kip Wells (StL - SP) 890 145.2 6 16 0 0 0 168 106 17 68 8 106 8 0 0
Adam Eaton (Phi - SP) 837 144.2 9 8 0 0 0 169 104 26 60 9 88 6 0 0
Edwin Jackson (TB - SP,RP) 829 138 4 14 1 1 0 165 102 17 76 4 109 7 0 0
Odalis Pérez (KC - SP,RP) DL 818 137.1 8 11 0 0 0 178 90 14 50 4 64 3 0 0
Kameron Loe (Tex - SP,RP) 785 136 6 11 0 0 0 162 96 13 56 4 78 6 0 0
Ervin Santana (LAA - SP) 781 129 6 12 0 0 0 154 93 23 50 7 100 7 0 0
Liván Hernández (Ari - SP) 781 182.1 10 9 1 0 0 213 101 29 69 4 79 3 0 0
Casey Fossum (SD - SP,RP) NA 780 76 5 8 0 0 0 109 71 15 27 6 53 3 4 2
Vicente Padilla (Tex - SP) 778 109.1 5 9 0 0 0 139 83 15 42 7 63 2 0 0
Zach Duke (Pit - SP) DL 763 93.1 3 7 0 0 0 141 66 10 22 3 33 0 0 0
Robinson Tejeda (Tex - SP) NA 741 95.1 5 9 0 0 0 110 78 17 60 6 69 10 0 0
Woody Williams (Hou - SP) 729 174.2 8 13 0 0 0 194 100 29 48 12 96 0 0 0
Horacio Ramírez (Sea - SP) 724 96.1 8 5 0 0 0 132 77 12 39 2 39 1 0 0
John Danks (CWS - SP) 699 136.1 6 13 0 0 0 157 89 27 50 3 106 2 0 0
David Wells (LAD - SP) 681 128.2 6 8 0 0 0 169 79 17 37 3 68 1 0 0
Jason Jennings (Hou - SP) DL 670 99 2 9 0 0 0 119 73 19 34 2 71 5 0 0
Jeff Suppan (Mil - SP) 665 174.1 9 11 1 0 0 209 99 15 57 10 93 7 0 0
Kyle Davies (KC - SP) 659 117.2 6 12 0 0 0 130 84 18 59 5 90 4 0 0
Matt Belisle (Cin - SP,RP) 656 152.1 7 8 1 0 0 188 97 24 35 6 104 5 0 0
Jorge De La Rosa (KC - SP,RP) DL 653 125.1 8 11 0 0 0 152 80 19 49 3 78 3 0 0
Kevin Millwood (Tex - SP) 644 146 9 11 0 0 0 176 95 17 59 8 110 3 0 0
As I type this, Philadelphia doesn't just lead Atlanta 8-2 in the top of the 7th: Bases loaded, two out, Ryan Howard looking to pad what you'd think is already a commanding lead.
UPDATE: With one out in the 8th, Phillies scrub outfielder Chris Roberson has already made a least three terrible plays in 1.1 innings. (One error fielding a base hit, two bloops (pop flies) it sounds as though he should have caught.) So Tom Gordon leaves the game after three bloops in a row fall in; and now I'm choosing to relive a sequence in which notorious human being Brett Myers makes his best attempt to cost me money. (My opinion of him as a human being is independent of whether he help or hurts any given real team or fantasy team.)
[N.B. It's too soon to say for sure but it's starting to look as though in the league in question Myers will NOT cost me money.]
UPDATE 2: Myers came in completely unable to throw strikes, yet got out of the eighth with an 8-6 lead. Routinely retired the first to batters of the ninth, so two out, none on, two-run lead. Then two infield hits in a row, and Myers loses his ability to throw strikes again.
Say I'd been a young, impressionable Phillie fan living through this game, I could imagine being turned off from the game of baseball.
Both ESPN and Yahoo! refer to "Moves" in their fantasy baseball standings tables: I guess they think it's worth showing how many times a team picked up a player, but can't fit the word "Transactions" into the column header.
For perspective, the 23rd week of the 2007 season is drawing to a close. So aside from the suck league, for each team I've picked someone up a tiny bit more than once a week.
That rings true: Look who's available maybe once a week, don't always make a switch but do sometimes make a bigger change.
Yahoo!
Team Julia Forever! (roto): 2nd of 14 (18 roto points behind), 28 moves. Three teams have made more moves. Most recent move: Chad Qualls added, Sean Marshall dropped, Labor Day: Qualls picked up a save after Lidge entered in the 8th but left w/injury.
Neifi Pharma (suck league): 2nd of 6, 48 moves, easily the busiest team. I knew about the innings pitched limit but didn't know about the 50-transaction ceiling until I'd hit 46. All that pitcher-churning probably could have waited until September when teams were putting call-ups on the mound. Most recent move: Edinson Volquez added, Kyle Lohse dropped, August 30
Alameda Islanders (head-to-head): 4th of 12, about to win a playoff quarterfinal, 38 moves (three teams have made more). Most recent move: Jacoby Ellsbury added, Joel Zumaya dropped, yesterday (Ellsbury had no business still being available)
Head-to-head side note: This team easily had league's best regular season record in both 2005 and 2006. This year, let's see the category breakdown:
BY RECORD: Runs = 13-8-1, HR = 13-6-3, RBI = 14-8-0, SB = 10-10-2 (despite Carl Crawford and David Wright), Fielding = 10-12-0, AVG = 9-12-1, OBP = 13-9-0, SLG = 14-8-0, Wins = 7-9-6, Saves = 5-15-2, Strikeouts = 12-10-0, Holds = 16-4-2, ERA = 12-10-0, WHIP = 12-10-0. Still pretty solid, though you can see the difference between keeping Mariano Rivera and not keeping him.
BY CUMULATIVE STAT: Runs = 3rd, HR = 4th, RBI = 2nd, SB = 7th, Fielding = 2nd, AVG = 1st, OBP = 1st, SLG = 2nd, Wins = 4th, Saves = 11th, Strikeouts = 5th, Holds = 2nd, ERA= 9th, WHIP = 8th
The only things out of whack are moderately good luck converting ERA & WHIP to points, but strikingly bad luck converting AVG and Fielding % to points.
Over on ESPN:
El Diablo con Dinero (NL-only roto): 1st of 8, all $100 of my FAAB spent. Between that, the long-gone trade deadline, and my 3:1 SS-to-2B ratio, Orlando Hudson's thumb injury is exactly the worst-case scenario I'd thought of but decided to chance. Most recent move: Javier Valentin for $1 just after Ryan Doumit went on the DL, Alfredo Amezaga dropped (d'oh).
Faux Klingons* (head-to-head): 3rd of 18 (playoffs start next week), 27 moves. Tied for third-most, and I'd been well aware of the 30-move cap. Most recent move: Casey Janssen added, Luis Vizcaino dropped, August 29. Hey, as a result of this blog entry I just noticed that our commissioner explicitly touts this as Rivalry Week. I should have remembered to tell Joon he was going down, if by "going down" you mean "ahead of me 5-4-1." My 1.76 WHIP is, like, so much better than his 1.78 WHIP.
*- this reference feels so stale now: remind me to stop ripping team names from the headlines
Troll of the day (linked for comment here).
"Fundamental baseball wins championships and fundamentals aren’t found in the statistical formulas used when signing players for the Oakland franchise."
There's not much worth responding to here (I agree with the thrust/punchline of Primer comment #19: "we should stop paying attention to all this gobbledygook like OBP and just teach hitters the fundamental skill of getting on base")
Can you point me to the fundamentals here? (OK, I hadn't remembered he was on the 1991 Twins -- count the ring, baby! -- but I distinctly remember him as part of the problem when the Yankees went through the biggest dry spell of my lifetime.)
Some things you probably didn't know about the 2007 Oakland A's:
3. Relatively few men left on base, because (ironically) so few reach base to begin with.
(So where do the "fundamentals" fit in here? I've watched a lot of A's games this year -- more than Pagliarulo and/or "staff", I daresay -- and it's not as if they make stupid mistakes. Is it that they should bunt more? Boy, that'd fix everything...)
There's a very good chance that the A's 2008 lineup won't have a single position player whose hitting is above average at his position. That's especially likely if Nick Swisher plays first base. (A lot depends on how far Jack Cust regresses to the mean and who belongs in Custs's peer group. I rewrote, with references to "position player," to punt on that question.)
This really makes a difference to you? If so, explain how/why.
On second thought, do I really want to hear it? The ensuing comments in the linked-to post contain a lot of joyless scolds whose platitudes contribute nothing. Before you comment on this post, think long and hard about whether you're wasting your time.
I wonder if David Pinto realizes the extent to which his Baseball Prospectus column today (subscription only) implicitly reduces players to chattel. For example:
"In general, MLB needs to encourage a much more free flow of players between North America and the NPB. Rather than the current posting system, direct trades between the leagues would mean that Japanese teams get compensated without losing talent."
Congratulations! You just got sent to Tokyo, whether you like it or not! Ironically, the root problem (monopolistic rules about who's eligible for free agency) comes up in a different context in his very next two sentences:
"Japanese teams should compete for American free agents, bringing our stars across the Pacific to boost interest in their teams. Imagine the publicity if someone like Alex Rodriguez signed with the Yomiuri Giants."
Wait, I have an even better idea: Imagine the publicity if someone like David Beckham signed with the LA Galaxy...
First place in the eight-team NL money league. $32 separates first prize from second prize. (The standings gap between second and third is pretty comfortable.)
I'd been in first place for a couple weeks, in a tight battle with both the top two teams around 64-65 points. Fell out a week ago today when Brad Penny was getting lit up, only to sneak back in as Noah Lowry also got lit up.
Then one day this weekend I was down 60 to 63.5, only to be up the next day 62 to 58. (I never did check what did the other guy in that day.)
Source: Google Maps driving directions.
Chicago: 10.1 miles from Wrigley to the Cell
New York: 10.2 miles from Yankee to Shea
San Francisco: 16.3 miles from Oakland Coliseum to China Basin*
Los Angeles: 30.9 miles from Dodger Stadium to Anaheim Stadium
*- But only 5.2 miles from the Coliseum to Robert Crown Memorial State Beach, in Alameda, straight across the water from the Giants' stadium lights. When OAK & SF were both inexplicably home a few days ago, we drove back from the former and saw the lights still on for the latter.
Following up on a question Chad asked me six weeks ago: all distances based on Google Maps driving directions based on city name alone.
Seattle: Tacoma (34 miles)
Boston: Pawtucket (45 miles)
Detroit: Toledo (49 miles)
Philadelphia (2008): Allentown (63 miles)
Colorado: Colorado Springs (71 miles)
Oakland: Sacramento (81 miles)
Cincinnati: Louisville (102 miles)
Arizona: Tucson (116 miles)
NY Yankees: Scranton (120 miles)
Houston: Round Rock (165 miles) [Austin is 162 miles]
Kansas City: Omaha (184 miles)
San Francisco: Fresno (189 miles)
Cleveland: Buffalo (193 miles)
Texas: Oklahoma [City] (213 miles)
Baltimore: Norfolk (234 miles)
Toronto: Syracuse (244 miles)
[2007 MEDIAN: 257 miles]
LA Dodgers: Las Vegas (270 miles)
St. Louis: Memphis (284 miles)
Chicago Cub: [Des Moines,] Iowa (333 miles)
Pittsburgh: Indianapolis (359 miles)
Washington: Columbus (419 miles)
Philadelphia (2007): Ottawa (448 miles)
Atlanta: Richmond (532 miles)
Milwaukee: Nashville (563 miles)
Tampa Bay: Durham (679 miles)
Angels: Salt Lake (682 miles)
Chicago White Sox: Charlotte (761 miles)
Minnesota: Rochester, NY (1,009 miles)
San Diego: Portland (1,082 miles)
NY Mets: New Orleans (1,297 miles)
Florida: Albuquerque (2,012 miles)
If the baseball season ended today, all four Division Series match-ups would feature the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets, or Cubs. I have no sense of which series would get the worst billing.
My best guess for scheduling (according to Wikipedia, NLDS will begin on Tuesday; ALDS on Wednesday; I'm not sure whether to infer that one ALDS will actually be a split Tuesday-Thursday deal):
TUESDAY
Arizona at NY Mets, 1 p.m. EDT
Chicago Cubs at San Diego, 1 p.m. PDT (4 p.m. EDT)
NY Yankees at LA Angels, 5 p.m. PDT (8 p.m. EDT)
WEDNESDAY
Arizona at NY Mets, 1 p.m. EDT
Chicago Cubs at San Diego, 1 p.m. PDT (4 p.m. EDT)
Cleveland at Boston, 8 p.m. EDT
THURSDAY
Cleveland at Boston, 4 p.m. EDT
NY Yankees at LA Angels, 5 p.m. PDT (8 p.m. EDT)
FRIDAY
NY Mets at Arizona, 1 p.m. MST (4 p.m. EDT)
San Diego at Chicago Cubs, 7 p.m. CDT (8 p.m. EDT)
SATURDAY
San Diego at Chicago Cubs, Noon CDT (1 p.m. EDT) (if necessary)
Boston at Cleveland, 4 p.m. EDT
NY Mets at Arizona, 1 p.m. MST (4 p.m. EDT) (if necessary)
LA Angels at NY Yankees 8 p.m. EDT
[etc.]
If you have Gameday Audio: Listen to the end of yesterday's game, then the end of today's. They break new ground in MLB cheering-in-the-booth. (You'd think it was a college football broadcast crew.) Not that I mind.
I went with Castiglione and the ESPN soccer guy over Harry Kalas. (Neither New York radio crew really stood a chance, though I really should catch the Mets' broadcast team at some point this year. Maybe in the playoffs.)
A good deal of baseball transpired after I was already here but before it occurred to me to check for Thursday east coast matinées. I hadn't been listening very long when Robinson Cano hit his home run.
Cano and Cabrera (Robinson and Melky*, if you're their close friends) seem to have a lot to do with the Yankee resurgence, especially if you compare their stat lines before and after NYY stopped struggling.
*- great name for a radio team. picture somewhere in mid-America: "...catch Robinson and Melky, right after Rush, only on Hot Talk..."
UPDATE: The ESPN soccer guy just mentioned how the Yankees have made the playoffs each year since 1995. That reminds me: The 1995 playoff appearance was their first since 1981. To be sure, it was harder to make the playoffs when four teams a year did it (rather than eight), but still:
I was six years old in 1981. I was 20 in 1995. My impression of the Yankees should, in theory, be quite different from someone ten years older or ten years younger than me. (On the other hand spending seven years in Boston, three in an apartment a five-minute walk from Fenway Park, probably counteracted that historical anomaly.)
On further review Craig is right about Kige not being right for the Deadspin HoF. Since my post itself made a big deal about the fourth wall, Kige's Deadspin membership should've been a point against, not in favor. (Every time something makes the HoF that is basically "of" Deadspin, the HoF gets a bit too close to circle-jerk status.)
Brian's point in favor of Nick Punto reminds me of something, though: When people rank athletes (or anyone else) by observation, they tend to overemphasize single great plays. Two similar effects are going on here:
1. A particular play/feat looks jaw-dropping by itself, until you realize just how frequently plays of that caliber are made. (By the way, I highly recommend the "Top 10 Plays of the Week" video feature on Yahoo! Sports.)
2. Multiple subtly worse-than-average plays will cumulatively the team more than that one awesome play helped it.
Specifically, in the form of a poor excuse for a human being. (Warning: First link laden with obscenity.)
Even if you didn't hear the original stories and don't feel like following the links, the last sentence of the last link gives you enough context:
Carchidi said he "absolutely did not" say anything previously to Myers about the incident involving his wife.
The Twins' default third baseman has struggled this year, to understate a bit.
Baseball Prospectus lets its subscribers see hitters ranked by Value Over Replacement Player, for the season to date. (Paid subscriber link: If you follow that link you'll probably get a login screen.) If you've never heard of VORP or don't understand what it is, Wikipedia points out that it compares any given player to a fictitious "replacement player": A replacement player performs at "replacement level," which is the level of performance an average team can expect when trying to replace a player at minimal cost, also known as "freely available talent." (Read: one of the best position players on any given Triple-A club.)
Anyhow, "Freely Available Talent" = 0.0 VORP (by definition).
For the 2007 season, through August 26, Punto is the worst hitter in the major leagues, with a VORP at -23.4.
By comparison: The 87th best hitter by that metric has been (think "third-best hitter on a bad team, or fourth-best on a good team") Matt Diaz, a part-time Atlanta outfielder who crushes left-handed pitching and who's put up a .345/.373/.502 line this year, albeit fewer than 300 plate appearances. (VORP functions more like a counting stat than like a rate stat.) Diaz has a 22.7 VORP.
In other words the difference between Diaz and "Free Talent" is less than the difference between "Free Talent" and Nick Punto.
The second-worst VORP belongs to Craig Monroe (including only his stats as a Detroit Tiger), at -15.3. The difference between Moroe's VORP and Punto's is 8.1, which is exactly VORP of Rickie Weeks, highly touted young Brewers' 2B who's been beset by a wrist injury. [Weeks is at #204 by VORP, so in theory if performance were distributed equally among the 30 MLB teams then Weeks would be some team's seventh best position player.]
The difference between Nick Punto and the second-worst position player is exactly the difference between Rickie Weeks and free talent.
We get the idea: a glissando to high C means the Rays scored a run.
(This is less nifty than, and more annoying than, the Big Ben chime that signifies a home team run scored at Yankee Stadium.)
To the benefit of a few fans in Detroit who now have quite a memorable experience!
UPDATE: Several things I did not know when I posted this:
1. How the game would actually end (I posted it in the 10th)
2. That rather than multiple mid-game rain delay(s) there had actually been a four-hour delay before the game even began. Ridiculous! Wouldn't it have been easier to play a split double-header Sunday? (Especially since the series wraps to Monday.)
3. That because this is the Yankees' only trip to Detroit this regular season, the decision was in the umpires' hands. (I'd been aware that normally, until the game has started, the "play or call" decision is the home team's. Hence, coincidentally, the Yankees' silly decision not to play 2006 ALDS Game 2 in that dinky little drizzle.)
This game shouldn't have been played to begin with, and it ended up hosing a lot of fans. But GIVEN that it was played, great result. (I'm dying to know if they pulled a Fulton County Stadium (July 4-5, 1985) and actually did shoot the fireworks off at 3:35 a.m.)
My goodness, the Tigers do the fireworks thing a lot.
As of Game 1 of yesterday's doubleheader, they seemed to be having trouble selling ad space (lots of PSAs), and yet also seemed to have trouble getting back to action before the pitcher had thrown not one, but two pitches.
1-0 Baltimore so far. I'm trying to trick myself into thinking (as I listen) that I have no idea what's about to happen.
UPDATE: Seven in the books, 14-3 Texas (at this point just a routine blowout, and just two innings to go at that). These PSAs are driving my crazy -- how do actual Rangers radio listeners cope?! (Or is the idea that the sold ads can only go on broadcasts for some reason and not the MLB.com feed?)
Brian Roberts has most excellent batting music ("Hypnotize" by The Notorious B.I.G. if I hear correctly).
El Diablo Con Dinero (my team in an NL-only, roto, auction, weekly transaction, real money league) is in first place but has had a devil of a time getting pitcher wins lately.
Part of it is my own mismanagement: Twice in about a month I've unwisely benched Tom Gorzelanny. The first was right after he'd been hurt, except that he had a double-dip week and pitched great both times (at Arizona, at SF); the second was this week, with his only scheduled start at Coors.
While we're here talking baseball: Who on Earth will win the 2007 AL Rookie of the Year? Josh Fields leads AL rookies in home runs, a factoid from which I indirectly learned that Jack Cust no longer qualifies as a rookie. If it weren't for xenophobic illogical voters, I'd figure Dice-K might have a good chance, but enough people will refuse to consider him that I don't think he can come out on top. So who am I forgetting? Reggie Willits?!
Unless I'm egregiously forgetting people I think my hypothetical ROY ballot would feature Dice-K, Fausto, and then... ?
(See one post below.)
UPDATE: When originally posted these were my (literally) instant reactions. I've gone back and edited to what, upon further review, I think they ought to be.
BAL: Cal Ripken
BOS: Ted Williams
NYY: Joe DiMaggio
TB: Jose CansecoCarl Crawford
TOR: Devon White Carlos Delgado
CHW: Harold Baines Frank Thomas
CLE: Rocky Colavito
DET: Kirk Gibson Ty Cobb
KC: George Brett
MIN: Kent Hrbek Kirby Puckett
ANA: Donnie Moore (sorry!) Rod Carew
OAK: Dave Stewart
SEA: Edgar MartinezKen Griffey, Jr.
TEX: Juan GonzalezIvan Rodriguez
ATL: Chipper JonesTom Glavine
FLA: Miguel Cabrera
NYM: Len Dykstra Tom Seaver
PHI: Mike Schmidt
WAS: Dmitri Young Chad Cordero
[MON: Brad Wilkerson Vlad Guerrero]
CHC: Jody DavisRyne Sandberg
CIN: Pete Rose (sigh)
HOU: Jeff Bagwell Craig Biggio
MIL: Paul Molitor Robin Yount
PIT: Roberto Clemente
STL: Albert PujolsStan Musial
ARI: Randy Johnson
COL: Todd Helton
LAD: Kirk Gibson(!!)Sandy Koufax
SD: Steve GarveyTony Gwynn
SF: Willie Mays
Here the methodology flaws are even more obvious. As you can see I was very scrupolous in sticking with THE VERY FIRST knee-jerk answer. Of all the "better responses that came a split second later," the split-second-est was Ryne Sandberg.
I wish someone other than ESPN had publicized the meme first but ESPN is as good a place as any. Going purely by my own personal instant association, specifically with the 2007 editions:
UPDATE: When originally posted these were my (literally) instant reactions. I've gone back and edited to what, upon further review, I think they ought to be.
BAL: Miguel Tejada
BOS: David Ortiz
NYY: Derek Jeter
TAM: Scott KazmirCarl Crawford
TOR: Frank Thomas
CHW: Bobby JenksPaul Konerko
CLE: Travis Hafner
DET: Justin VerlanderMagglio Ordonez
KC: Joey GathrightDavid DeJesus
MIN: Joe Mauer
ANA: Vlad Guerrero
OAK: Nick Swisher
SEA: Ichiro
TEX: Sammy SosaMichael Young
ATL: Chipper Jones
FLA: Miguel Cabrera
NYM: David Wright
PHI: Chase UtleyRyan Howard
WAS: Dmitri Young
CHC: Alfonso SorianoCarlos Zambrano
CIN: Adam Dunn
HOU: Hunter Pence
MIL: Prince Fielder
PIT: Tom Gorzelanny
STL: Albert Pujols
ARI: Chris B. YoungBrandon Webb
COL: Todd Helton
LAD: James LoneyNomar
SD: Greg MadduxBrian Giles
SF: Tim LincecumBarry Bonds
Can you spot the obvious flaws in the method?
I don't mean the players: Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez, and Josh Willingham in particular are three of the most underrated hitter in baseball.
Rather, there's the year-after-year-after-YEAR stadium kerfuffle, and then today they somehow managed to get saddled with a day game (getaway day) on a Monday that (according to Dave Fleming) is the first day of school in Miami. That's just brilliant.
(It might also just be the MLB commissioner's office inadvertently giving the Marlins a royal hosing by scheduling the series to wrap around to Monday, but still.)
On Friday (Thursday?) they changed the Gameday Audio page so that it redirected to an ad tying Gameday Audio into a Sports Illustrated subscription. The only way to continue (as opposed to clicking elsewhere) was to add something to your shopping cart -- even if you were already a subscriber.
By today they'd "fixed" this -- sort of. I clicked "Current Subscribers Click Here" as I always do/have, and got a page with a message like "Returning subscribers from 2006 if you're seeing this message then we could not process the credit card we have on file." (Not necessarily the exact message.)
This makes sense if they were looking for a credit card related to some username associated with a cookie from a year ago. But this year for elaborate-but-boring reasons related to buying A's tickets, our Gameday Audio is in my wife's username. That's also the username through which I've connected to Gameday Audio only a few dozen times from that computer.
So I went and deleted some cookies and lived happily ever after. But this shouldn't have been necessary.
"Turf troubles: Noting that left fielder Shannon Stewart, who has played through a foot injury for most of the season, will need a day or three off during the A's upcoming seven-game road trip on turf fields, A's manager Bob Geren rested designated hitter Mike Piazza, who could play every game this trip."
--A's beat
No, they don't mean Piazza would play outfield; rather, Piazza would DH while Jack Cust stands out there.
I would pay money to see an All-Star Week exhibition of bad outfield defense. Invite Manny, Cust, [insert other good nominees here?] and keep hitting high pop-ups to them.
Despite being (on the surface) about the Dodgers, this piece -- specifically the devices employed -- made me think of Paul (who hasn't updated his blog in more than two years).
I hate telethons with a fiery passion (is the idea that you donate money to MAKE IT STOP?), yet I voluntarily subjected myself to as much as I could stand of today's Red Sox radio coverage.
I suppose that's a lot less useful to the cause than if I'd just cut a check.
But the team branding on the Gameday Audio page is a nice touch (pair of red socks: every other team I've listened to lately just has the MLB logo there).
The pitchers I acquired in an 8-team NL auction league five months ago, sorted by auction price [note: dollar values are all imaginary, out of fake $260 auction budget (and $100 Free Agent Acquisition Budget below)]:
$12 Anthony Reyes
$11 Brett Myers (to be fair he's been good with the saves)
$11 Scott Olsen
--
$9 Brad Penny
$7 Jose Valverde
$4 Tim Lincecum
$3 Jonathan Broxton
$3 Ted Lilly
$2 Tom Gorzelanny
Half-empty: I paid as much for Anthony Reyes as for Lincecum, Broxton, Lilly, and Gorzo. Half-full: I got Lincecum, Broxton, Lilly, and Gorzo for the combined price of Reyes. (Of the above, all but Reyes are still on my roster.)
I used two of my seven reserve picks on Matt Morris (still around, on my bench) and Ricky Nolasco (long since dropped).
Pitchers acquired by FAAB:
Kevin Gregg (bid $4, got him for $1)
Carlos Marmol (bid $6, got him for $3)
Paul Maholm (bid $1)
Pitcher acquired through trade:
Chris Carpenter (in June, hoping in vain he'd come back)
Inspired by some ghastly-sounding stat lines I overheard on the radio:
Four of the 25 worst hitting pitchers of 2007 (by Value Over Replacement Player) are San Francisco Giants.
Tim Lincecum (.091/.143/.121) is 3-for-33 with a double and two walks to go with 15 strikeouts. His batting VORP (-1.4) isn't as bad as...
Barry Zito (.093/.133/.093), 4-for-43 with two walks and 12 K (-2.3 VORP), who in turn isn't as bad as...
Matt Cain (.050/.073/.125), 2-for-40 with a home run(!), a walk and 24 K (-3.1 VORP). But the worst hitting pitcher on the Giants, and second worst hitting pitcher in the league this year, is...
Noah Lowry (.042/.061/.063), 2-for-48, double, walk, 12 strikeouts (-5.9 VORP).
For a quick 10 points name the worst hitting pitcher in the league. Two hints:
1. He's pitched very, very well this year.
2. At least a couple frequent comments to this blog have regional rooting interest in his team.
The 19-year-old Diamondback has nine hits since his call-up:
2 singles
3 doubles
3 triples
1 home run
With what probability will Matt Morris turn out to be the last pitcher to allow a home run to Barry Bonds? (Of course that's greater than the probability that Bonds's 758th home run will be his last.)
Which pitcher other than Morris is most likely, and with what probability?
Potentially relevant data points:
Tony Armas starts against the Giants tomorrow, followed by Tom Gorzelanny, then a Monday double-header at Pittsburgh (Paul Maholm and Shane Youman).
After Pittsburgh the Giants' next opponents are Atlanta (starting with John Smoltz) and Florida. They face each NL West opponent two more times, plus Washington, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee once each. They finish the season at Los Angeles.
I'll list Derek LoweChad Billingsley (health is important!) as the second-most-likely pitcher to serve up Bonds's final home run. I think Morris is still #1 (the odds of something catastrophic happening to Bonds exceed the odds that any particular pitcher is in the right place at the right time). Thoughts?
UPDATE: With Jake Peavy probably more likely than any other Dodger pitcher even though the last 2007 Padres series precedes the last 2007 Dodgers series.
Hadn't read Is Full of Crap in a few days but his mention of this game reminded me that I listened to the last two innings of it via Gameday Audio.
Within minutes of my tuning in, Skip pronounced Teixeira (t'SHARE-uh) three different ways, repeatedly referred to this man as "Carlos May," and claimed that events of the 12th inning (i.e. one inning earlier) had happened in the ninth.
I hadn't heard Skip since April but it was sobering that he could slip so far in just a few months.
This is an incredibly astute column from a non-baseball source. My favorite passage:
"Bonds's pursuit of this record has been almost universally described as joyless and soulless, often by the same writer or commentator on successive days and many times by a chorus of pundits on the same day. And yet, if you've been watching his games, they've been neither: he's cheered at home and mostly booed on the road with great passion (though the San Diego crowd was decidedly mixed after witnessing number 755). And in the end, isn't that what the games are about? Joyless and soulless would more accurately describe the tens of thousands of words that have been written attacking him."
The article is mainly about how one reason Bonds is so reviled by certain media gatekeepers is that he's such an affront to tradition and orthodoxy. At least, he's an affront to the hypothetical "fathers and sons [who would] come and stare at [Bonds HoF memorabilia] glumly as they bear mute witness to baseball's diminished glory." (Very good Onion article in spite of it all.)
But... why? A Bill James quotereprinted here:
"Records last awhile; then somebody breaks them," James wrote. "Athletes will use any resource available to them to break the records. It's always been that way. There has never been any time when the world of records was pure and simple."
I can buy that the world is a worse place if athletes are tarnished, but the records themselves? Going back to the TNR artice:
"In the baseball canon, numerology is sacred, and no numbers are more sacred than 755 (previously reached by Hank Aaron) and 714 (Babe Ruth's once unapproachable number). "
Even as a serious baseball fan I've never bought the idea that those numbers were mystical in themselves. (If anything 756 is extra-cool because it's 2^2 * 3^3 * 7.) On the contrary it's actually a bit ironic that the people most likely to overrate those numbers are among the people least likely to get caught up in stathead-type analysis. Being fixated on a number like "755" is almost exactly like a caricature of a numbers geek, only the retarded/autistic version of one.
I enjoy watching baseball (live: on TV it's almost unwatchable) because it's an interesting, challenging game, played by incredibly talented athletes in a gorgeous outdoor setting. If anything, their being juiced up enhances my experience to the extent that they play better. (Yes, I'm incredibly callous in that it doesn't really affect me if they ruin their post-playing career lives; I'm so callous that I don't even particularly shed a tear for teenagers stupid enough to mess up their own lives (this connection is deeply overrated anyway).)
I can understand if "enhanced" athletes offend your sense of sport. But if an enhanced 756-home run athlete is really that much more than 756/754 times as offensive to you as an enhanced 754-home run athlete... you're just being silly & wrong.
I'd have gone with Greg Maddux (this isn't hate: quite the opposite, I love how he pitches) but this Onion article is tremendously well-done.
(It's really more about that silly "nobody else will win 300 games" canard than Glavine personally, but still.)
More of the baseball/politics nexus.
"You know, I feel bad for Bud [Selig]. Almost. He's like the Richard Nixon of Baseball Commissioners. He did a crapload of great stuff but there's one thing that is going to forever going to kill his standing in the halls of Sports Commissionerdom. Dick Nixon had Watergate (and being a general paranoid). Bud Selig has Roidgate and Bonds."
--comment #6 on this thread
The follow-up comments impressively rebut both ends of the laughable inaccuracy of that post.
Do you think people realized in 1974 that Vin Scully's (visiting radio) call of Henry Aaron's record-breaking home run would be the one that kept getting replayed?
On MLB.com the call of record was Duane Kuiper (home television), though you can also see Dave O'Brien's (ESPN2) on ESPN's page.
Thanks to MLB Gameday Audio I've now also heard Jon Miller (Giants radio) and Charlie Slowes(?) (visiting radio). There's probably no convenient way to get the visiting TV (Bob Carptenter?) call at my fingertips.
Kuiper [KYE-per] will probably have the historical call, with his "OUTAHERE!" catch-phrase. Just as well, since nobody else particularly nailed the moment (the best way to nail the moment would've been to just shut up and let the crowd noise tell the story: I was singularly disappointed that Jon Miller didn't do this, as he seemed like the guy most likely to figure that part out).
("The formula in this cell differs from the formulas in this area of the spreadsheet")
Consecutive headlines from MLB.com's "Complete Bonds 756 Coverage":
Aaron congratulates Bonds via video
Commissioner's statement on Bonds
Giants congratulate Bonds
Nice work there, Pocket Boy.
Even if you can't be bothered to treat a moment like this with class, at the very least, even if you absolutely must be a prick about it, this is the way to do it. (The Onion should put that back on its front page in honor...)
Guess who played some third base in 1995-96? He probably wasn't as big then.
Al Davis's greed turned this into this. Linger a bit on the Oakland hills in the background of the first image.
Counting a several-week-old Murray Chass bit in the Sunday Times (we fell behind and have been catching up), I've seen two feature columns on Fred Lewis in the past couple days. Both were in the context of Lewis as Barry Bonds's backup, but while one was about how generic a player he is (fans' disappointment to see him instead of Bonds), the other had the conceit that Lewis was somehow a lot like a much younger Bonds.
Um, no. Bonds was a talent unto himself, even when his forte was scorching line drives and big speed. The "he's a generic player" angle is much more accurate, especially since he just got sent back down to the minors.
I'd love to do a meta-human interest story about how Jason Ellison and/or Tod Linden just missed out on being the focus of one of those first-order human interest stories.
I also wonder if there's some guy in the minors named Aaron Durst.
I wonder how long this guy ("I would be particularly interested in any other Saltalamacchia’s out there") has known of this guy?
The former has "roots from my father in the aeolian islands off the north of Sicily." I presume Jarrod is also vaguely Sicilian. More about the Italian connection (which Julia very accurately guessed).
Another thing that still gets my goat about this article is the headline's use of the word "cheated" at face value.
What exactly is Bonds accused of doing, anyway? Unless you've heard accusations that I haven't (e.g. Sammy Sosa-style bat-corking, which was definitely "cheating") this amounts entirely to whether he put particular substances in his body. Until very recently none of those substances were actually against baseball's rules.
"But they were drugs!"
Oh, like cortisone, caffeine, or aspirin? Before baseball changed its rules the only way to distinguish what Bonds allegedly took from any of those is either an appeal to authority (what a "real doctor" prescribes for you) or an inane "I know it when I see it" argument where the word "steroid" serves the same hysteria-inducing (but misleading) purpose as the phrase "assault weapon" in a gun control debate.
If I'm not mistaken that was J.T. Snow telling KNBR radio listeners about how Bonds had taken some extra batting practice by himself yesterday afternoon, and how often that's a good way to get out of a slump. (This was between pitches immediately before the record-tying home run. On the gameday audio, Giants' away audio, start listening around the 1:06:00 mark. I like Fleming's #715 call better than this one, though I realize that the silence surrounding #715 was the result of a technical glitch. Still worked out like genius.)
"We need to do more than just find out who did it, crucify them, sweep them aside, and move forward."
--former Giants catcher Brian Johnson on steroids users
But what you're saying is we do need to "crucify" them (it's just not enough)? Good to know.
The rest of the article is funny because one would infer that a "former teammate" of Bonds would have an informed opinion based on first-hand observation, yet every other quote in the article relates to either Johnson's reactions to published news or vague assertions that mention nobody by name.
At Tuesday night's A's-Tigers game the scoreboard pointed out that Mike Piazza was 10th among active players with 422 career home runs, two behind Carlos Delgado.
With one piece of help from the Tiger fan next to me, it turns out we were able to name the top eight in exactly the right order. If you've paid attention to milestones this year then you'll easily get the top five in order, but I feel pretty smug about getting 6-8 in the right order as well.
See how well you do before looking it up.
This is easily the most wrongheaded thing I've read on the web today:
"Criticizing someone for going after Barry Bonds while leaving small fry like Neifi Perez alone is like criticizing someone for going after George Bush without paying proper attention to the corruption and incompetence of the mayor of ########, PA..."
--comment #28 in this thread
Among the many differences between Neifi Perez and Barry Bonds, the salient one here is that Perez has failed a drug test; Bonds hasn't.
The "small potatoes" argument doesn't even apply to Neifi as much as one might think: Someone further down in the thread alludes to Neifi's hit that beat the Giants on the last day of the 1998 regular season, thus putting the Cubs into the playoffs over them.
Ostensibly the reason people care about Bonds but not some utility infielder (or relief pitcher) is the magnitude of difference he's made. But if that's all there is to it then why the hue and cry over whether Bonds happened to have 756 career home runs instead of 754? It turns out fans have this pathological obsession with accounting for superlatives. Heaven forbid Hank Aaron (or before him Babe Ruth) be "dethroned" by somebody not worthy of sitting on top of a totem pole.
(As you might guess, my position on actual season/career record holders is similar to my position on Halls of Fame, MVP awards, and All-Star Game selections.)
This is asinine. The first job of a sports play-by-play broadcaster is to describe what happened. You could argue that the second job is to make a compelling narrative: Be excited for the team you work for, if that's what you do well; otherwise, be honest and interesting.
If you think there's honestly a chance that you'd say something to embarrass your organization then you shouldn't be in the booth to begin with. But I've listened to enough MLB Gameday Audio to realize that in Leitner's case that's redundant: He shouldn't be in the booth, period.
Padre radio broadcasts are easily the most joyless pieces of narrative in the league. Leitner always has something to complain about, and his complaints always manage to be boring.
I defy you to find a worse radio team in baseball.
(Okay fine, the second I hit "Save" I remembered what it's like to sit through Ron Santo. And I presume Milo Hamilton still has a job in Houston. But Leitner et al are very near the bottom all the same.)
FURTHER UPDATE: This comment thread restored my faith in humanity. #1 is exactly right, #8 all the more insightful, and #9 completes the picture. And wow, imagine for a moment that your choices for watching/listening to your favorite team's homecasts were Ted Leitner vs. Matt Vasgersian.
Google News search for Julio Mateo, then for Brett Myers.
Given how much first-person plural shows up in this article, I can only assume Kevin McHale was one of the finest outfielders forwards ever to wear pinstripes tight green shorts.
Here, have some run support.
For a quick 10 points which of the players in this game did I bench (in a head-to-head league) 15 minutes before the game began?
UPDATE: Houston's long reliever left the game with a bruised shin. I smell "position player pitches the 9th." Odds that it's Biggio?
When Mickey Mantle died about a decade ago, his passing coincided with the San Francisco Giants' "Until There's a Cure" day. I remember being struck by the irony: Mantle destroyed his body (and ultimately his life) through terrible lifestyle decision-making, specifically how much he drank.
I sympathize with AIDS survivors as much as a compassionate person ought to, yet I couldn't help noticing the irony, given how many of them got the disease from terrible lifestyle decision-making: Unprotected sex here, unclean needles there...
Tonight was their nth annual "Until There's a Cure," and they happened to pay tribute to Rod Beck. By all accounts Beck was a wonderful man, but between what we knew of his party lifestyle and how old he was when he died, I think it's safe to say Shooter's demise was sort of like Mantle's only a lot sooner.
So until there's a magical panacea that prevents some of life's grislier consequences, try to be a little more careful out there, K?
So this minister assaulted a man at a golf course. The victim share his first and last name with a Houston Astro.
From the headline (Double-A coach dies after being hit in head by ball) there was a 1-in-30 chance this story would spook me so much and a slightly smaller chance I'd be someone I remembered as a player. (I remember his older brother a bit better.)
Arkansas didn't even used to play Sunday home games (they had Saturday double-headers, I suppose for Sabbath reasons).
[Incidentally this illustrates one of several reasons why the notoriety of supposed All-Star Game "highlight" of Tommy LaSorda falling on his butt annoys me to no end. Since there are so many risks in life whose dangers people vastly overestimate, I get befuddled sometimes about the risks that people underestimate. Like hard 100+ mph projectiles.]
There is a correlation between people who support the DH rule and Democrats.
Does the fact that I disagree with nearly all of the most frequently presented arguments on either side of the DH debate mark me as a libertarian?
Homer Bailey (RHP-CIN) is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball. The Reds called him up about six weeks ago and put him in the rotation.
He was sent down over the All-Star Break, ostensibly to get in extra work (Triple-A does not take its break at the same time as the majors). This was supposed to have lasted one start... except that he got lit up in that start. So the Reds decided to leave him down for one more start... and he got lit up again.
Apparently it was a "you'll come right back unless you have a bad start" send-down, which is sort of like saying "you'll come right back unless you think of a pink elephant." Quick: DON'T THINK OF A PINK ELEPHANT!
What did I just tell you?!?
(WARNING: Fantasy baseball.)
So why did I trade Ryan Zimmerman for Khalil Greene?
Eight-team rotisserie league, weekly transactions, NL-only universe, deep starting lineups (the traditional roto size with 14 starting hitters), $20 entry fee with payouts to the win/place/show. (It's not immediately obvious that the payout ratio matters, though in theory I could treat this like a quasi-poker problem.)
Last week before the All-Star Break, Hero in first place, top three teams within 3 points of each other): At least 7 points in each of the four hitting categories other than steals, numerically closer to gaining points than to losing them. In a dogfight for some of the pitching categories (read: variance ahead), seemingly equally likely to gain or lose 3-4 points. Hero's Free Agent Acquisition Budget at 4 fake dollars (from a 100 fake-dollar starting point).
Relevant players: Chipper Jones at 3B (highly productive but fragile), Bill Hall at SS, Ryan Zimmerman (3B-qualifier, low OBP but decent in other categories) on the bench. No qualifying middle infielders on the bench. (Slightly less relevant: Orlando Hudson at 2B, Troy Tulowitzki (SS) at MI.)
This is where Bill Hall sprained his ankle and was forecast to miss six weeks.
Hero spent $1 on Alfredo Amezaga (qualifies at 2B & SS) and also traded Zimmerman for Khalil Greene (similar profile: OBP killer, pretty good TB/R/RBI producer). That deal didn't go through in time for the post-ASB lineup, which is just as well since Amezaga had some better-than-expected games. With the Padres at home (low-offense ballpark) this week vs. some good pitching staffs, and the Marlins facing some terrible pitching, Hero kept Amezaga in this week's lineup.
Anyhow, now they expect Bill Hall to return a week from now. Should that actually happen, in the medium term it's Hall starting again, Amezaga and Greene both on the bench, enough 1B/OF depth/prowess that it's not worth considering the OF or utility spots... and no backup 3B for Chipper if heaven forbid. (In theory I could slot in Andy LaRoche and just take the zeros while he's in the minors. But that accomplishes exactly as much as leaving the slot empty or leaving a DL player in it.)
With Hall out the options were:
1. Do nothing [other than FAAB'ing a replacement-level middle infielder]
2. Trade Zimmerman for a Greene-caliber middle infielder.
3. Trade one of {James Loney, Mike Cameron, Jeremy Hermida} for a middle infielder. At the time I considered Hermida the third-best of these guys, one of whom would always be on my bench, but there wasn't a market for them as of when I was a highly-motivated trader.
4. Trade some pitching for a middle infielder.
Given the shape of the standings #4 seems like clearly the worst option. #3 either wasn't available or would have required more real-life time and legwork than seemed worthwhile. Maybe #1 was better than the trade I actually made. The basic factors are {Hall's expected return date}, {Amezaga's expected production}, and {Chipper's likelihood of a second injury stint in 2007}.
(For what it's worth, in the realm of Chipper insurance, best available 3B qualifiers include Yunel Escobar (he was ahead of Amezaga in my FAAB queue but I was outbid for him, though the guy who picked him up dropped him) and Craig Counsell.)
Aside from Scoresheet (which actually simulates the games) I'm in two head-to-head fantasy leagues where your score for a given week results from comparing your players' stats in N categories to some other league owner's players' stats.
In one of them I'm sitting on a six-game winning streak (last loss: 6-7-1 in Week 9; none of the losses have had a margin greater than two). 11-3-1 in the overall match-ups, but that's sort of like describing how a team has done series-by-series instead of game-by-game. 119-81-10 (.590) in the numbers that count.
In the other one the winning streak is at seven. 12-2-1 in overall match-ups (losses of 3-6-1 and 4-6), 88-56-6 (.607) in the numbers that count.
For all the bragging, neither team is in first place. (The former is 3rd of 12, the latter 2nd of 18.)
Compare the salary history on this page to the stats generated for the years in question.
(Injuries wiped out his 2003 and 2004 seasons. I hope the Rangers had a good insurance policy.)
Even without the injury thing, this is an interesting case of salaries rewarding past performance (mainly from the pre-arbitration, pre-free agency time when the player was a serf to one team and the lack of leverage kept the salary artificially low) more than expected future results.
(Not that anyone could really expect two entire seasons on the DL. I wonder what one might have expected from Rusty Greer as of just after the 1999 season. His counting stats aren't anything special but hey, nice rate stats.)
Good baseball move; will deeply disappoint my wife (who already opposed in-season trades on general principle: making players move cross-country, etc.).
How many times in your life has your favorite player from your favorite team (at the time) been traded away?
This has happened to me, among other occasions:
December 5, 1988 (at the height of the WGN Cub era; this made room in the lineup for my subsequent favorite Cub)
November 17, 2000 (Harang wasn't properly my favorite Ranger, though he was my favorite Texas prospect: the allegiance shift to the Rangers closely tracks my favorite Tulsa Drillers establishing themselves as major leaguers. Coincidentally, this was just before my first season on the A's season ticket mini-plan, a season of allegiance transition)
July 5, 2002 (yes, it's the same link as the one right above it; you might say the January trade cemented my allegiance)
December 18, 2004 (in exchange for the man who immediately replaced him as my favorite Athletic)
(The other 40% is just amusing.)
"I played for great managers like Sparky Anderson, Cito Gaston, Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, and Don Baylor, and I learned from all of them."
--Darnell Coles, now a minor league manager himself.
The correct assessment of those five managers is an exercise for the reader. Some thoughts after the jump will spoil the "exercise for the reader" part.
I cringed a tiny bit when I noticed that the two "bad" managers among the five were the two black managers.
Dusty Baker had a great tenure in San Francisco, though it's unclear how much his disastrous Cubs tenure undoes the legend surrounding him here. Baseball Prospectus once did a feature showing how so many hitters had done much better under Baker versus under other managers: Well beyond statistical fluke. (And not a park effect artifact either, as IIRC they tested and ruled out that hypothesis.) Mind, for the San Francisco part of this you could say "In a lineup with Barry Bonds" versus "In a lineup without Bonds."
Don Baylor is a great hitting coach. As a manager... the first time he ever managed a playoff game he ran out of hitters and needed a pitcher to bat with two out in the ninth, tying run on third winning run on second.
Frank Robinson seems to have been a solid manager; some of his teams; win-loss records really just reflect abject lack of player talent.
I understand that Willie Randolph gets a lot of criticism for in-game tactics but I don't quite see it. He seems fine.
Ron Washington was supposed to have been a great potential manager. I don't know if it's time yet to draw any conclusions from this year's Texas Rangers debacle. Washington's big strength is communicating well with people. (The stereotype about black managers is that they do a tremendous job at motivating people but fall short in the in-game tactics. Given other racial caricatures this is a predictable stereotype and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a crock, though I have a hard time immediately thinking of counterexamples. Well, Cito himself was supposedly not much of a people person. At least, he didn't take a shine to a very young Shawn Green.)
He's no Rickey, but new Mets hitting coach Howard Johnson had a very good career. This continues the tide of people whom I remember much better as players becoming known to the younger folk as coaches.
Harry Caray always called him (redundantly) "HoJo Johnson", or sometimes "HoHo".
Which player name of 2007 would be best suited to Harry Caray's... unique... talents? Best I can come up with at the spur of them moment is Kiki Bolero.
"Ki-ko Ca-ler-o. If you spell it backwards that's o-rel-ac ok-ik"
I've heard the phrase "begs the question" misused (by people who think it means "makes us think of an obvious question") dozens of times since the last time I saw such a good example of the phrase's traditional meaning ("tries to start a proof of something by assuming that basically the very thing you want to prove is already true").
I really don't mean to start more arguments about PEDs, but I have to take issue with the idea that the current testing program "works." It's fairly clear that Bonds used HGH. And it's certain that HGH isn't being tested for, and who knows when the ability to do so will exist. The program in place essentially allows the game's most famous player to use this substance freely -- I fail to see how that "works." --mbring (Saint Cloud, MN), from this chat
"Teams are following Major League Baseball's recommendations on signing bonuses to the letter, with players getting 90 percent of last year's deals in almost all cases. The discipline is most visible beginning in the sixth round, where no one has signed for more than $125,000."
--Baseball America
"recommendations"
"discipline"
The 2007 American League schedule still looks like a piece of shabbiness to me, with lots of silly elements (nearly every eastbound A's road trip is goofy) and no obvious underlying patterns/beauty. The National League schedule, on the other hand, has a bit of cleverness.
Let's pick things up the week of Monday, June 25. (Sunday, June 24 ended the five-series stretch wherein every AL team and all but two NL teams had inter-league opponents.) Since some teams are off on a Monday, glance the Tuesday (full slate) NL games. Nothing special just yet: You'll notice that pairs of nearby teams are both hosting (or both visiting) other pairs of nearby teams -- the "travel partner" scheme that comes up at all levels of sports -- but that's true for a lot of NL slates.
(Much easier done in a 16-team league than a 14-team league of course!)
Onto the weekend slate, where the natural "travel partners" are all facing each other: Atlanta-Florida, Phillies-Mets, Washington-Pittsburgh, Cincinnati-St. Louis, Cubs-Milwaukee, Houston-Colorado, Dodgers-San Diego, Arizona-SF. (All of these are either obvious on their face or uniquely correct after a process of elimination.)
First week (and weekend of July you'll notice actual trips/stands worth of the travel partner pattern, where some teams are traveling/hosting a bit longer because of the previous weekend:
ATL/FLA @ LAD/SD
NYM/PHI @ COL/HOU
CHC/MIL @ PIT/WAS
ARI/SF @ CIN/STL
Then the All-Star Break, and after that one series of:
PIT/WAS @ ATL/FLA
LAD/SD @ ARI/SF
CIN/STL @ NYM/PHI
COL/HOU @ CHC/MIL
[Here's a transition where some trips/stands continue to three series (but not four!), others stay at one.]
Both series of:
CIN/STL @ ATL/FLA
ARI/SF @ CHC/MIL
NYM/PHI @ LAD/SD
COL/HOU @ PIT/WAS
Both series of:
ATL/FLA @ ARI/SF
CHC/MIL @ CIN/STL
LAD/SD @ COL/HOU
PIT/WAS @ NYM/PHI
Both series of:
COL/HOU @ ATL/FLA
NYM/PHI @ CHC/MIL
ARI/SF @ LAD/SD
CIN/STL @ PIT/WAS
Both series of:
ATL/FLA @ NYM/PHI
CHC/MIL @ COL/HOU
LAD/SD @ CIN/STL
PIT/WAS @ ARI/SF
[Let's pause and take a deep breath.]
That's four weeks in a row of week-on/week-off trips/stands. Eight teams with one pattern (week at home, week on the road, week home, week road), eight with the opposite pattern. Each of the former eight has one series versus each of the latter eight. Several questions come up, though they basically answer each other:
1. Q. When they want the eight teams on the same cycle to start facing each other (so three "pair versus pair" scenarios and the one series of the natural partners versus each other), how can they do the transition without giving teams two full weeks of a trip/stand? A. If you find a way to truncate one of the edge slates then the longest trip/stands will be three series.
2a. Q. The series immediately after the ASB stand on their own rather than in a pair; what gives? (e.g. STL@PHI but not STL@NYM; COL@MIL but not COL@CHC.) A. See previous answer.
2b. Q. Where did the "other half" of that natural trip/stand go? A. To the weekday slate wedged between the interleague play and the "travel partners vs. each other" weekend. (Try a few examples! SF: vs. SD on June 26, vs. LAD after the Break. STL: at NYM on June 26, at PHI after the Break.) This is that part gave me enough mental pleasure to bother with this long of a post.
2c. Q. But doesn't cutting a natural trip/stand in half risk giving someone two cross-country trips instead of one? A. Not if the slate that you split in half doesn't have any teams playing too far from home. (e.g. NL West teams together)
Onward:
Both series of:
ARI/SF @ ATL/FLA
CIN/STL @ CHC/MIL
COL/HOU @ LAD/SD
NYM/PHI @ PIT/WAS
(The reverse of the series from three weeks earlier.)
Both series of:
ATL/FLA @ CIN/STL
CHI/MIL @ ARI/SF
LAD/SD @ NYM/PHI
PIT/WAS @ COL/HOU
(The reverse of the series from five weeks earlier.)
Alas, with five weeks left in the season things get a bit messier: Each team has a division rival for at least eight (generally exactly eight) of its last ten series. For the 5-team divisions this is basically a home-and-home round robin with an odd team out each series. So it no longer makes sense to, for example, put Colorado/Houston or Pittsburgh/Washington in tandem. (And here and there the road trips get messy again.)
So if you're still reading after all this, you may ask yourself ("how did I get here? Where is that large automobile?"):
1a. Where did this slate go?
NYM/PHI @ ATL/FLA (AWOL for now)
COL/HOU @ CHC/MIL (right after the ASB)
CIN/STL @ LAD/SD (AWOL for now)
ARI/SF @ PIT/WAS (AWOL for now)
1b. Where did this slate go?
ATL/FLA @ COL/HOU (AWOL for now)
CHC/MIL @ NYM/PHI (AWOL for now)
LAD/SD @ ARI/SF (right after the ASB)
PIT/WAS @ CIN/STL (AWOL for now)
2. When do the teams on the same pattern "break pattern" and face each other? (For example, ATL against {FLA; CHI/MIL; LAD/SD; PIT/WAS}. Well, one of the ATL-FLA is on "natural partner weekend." And you'll notice that the week right before the ASB has match-ups entirely of teams that end up on the same post-ASB pattern (at least after the first post-ASB series, which has to be in sync with the pre-ASB week so that nobody has a trip or a stand straddle the break).
3. What's the match-up algorithm for prior to inter-league play?
Taking the last one first: There are exactly five series between the May 18-20 interleague kickoff weekend (mostly natural rivals -- NOT the same as "travel partners"!) and the June 8-10 interleague games. Those series turn out to be:
Both series of:
NYM/PHI @ ATL/FLA
PIT/WAS @ CIN/STL
COL/HOU @ ARI/SF
CHC/MIL @ LAD/SD
Both series of:
ATL/FLA @ CHC/MIL
LAD/SD @ PIT/WAS
ARI/SF @ NYM/PHI
CIN/STL @ COL/HOU
And finally a weekday series with the reverse of the "natural travel partner weekend" match-ups.
So if you oversimplify the NL schedule to "double round robin" (plus interleague play, some additional division series, and some other additional series to get to 162 games), we have 22 of 30 round robin slates accounted for. (12 in that nifty July-August six-week stretch, 2 of travel partners vs. each other, 4 from just before/after the ASB, 4 from just after the first inter-league weekend)
Now what about the series right after that first weekend? Well look what we get from May 11 (weekend series) and May 15 (weekday series):
ATL/FLA @ PIT/WAS
CHC/MIL @ NYM/PHI
ARI/SF @ COL/HOU
CIN/STL @ LAD/SD
Rewind to the weekend of May 4:
LAD/SD @ ATL/FLA
COL/HOU @ CIN/STL
PIT/WAS @ CHC/MIL
NYM/PHI @ ARI/SF
OK, 26 for 30 isn't bad. It doesn't go back any further (at least not neatly); instead we have the first 10 series (actually pigeonholed into nine slots, with two two-game series per team April 16-19) as mainly divisional play.
The four "missing" series get interspersed in the April and September stretches-of-10. For example, ATL/FLA still needs to visit COL/HOU and to host CHC/MIL.
Braves host Cubs in April (and also as a June non-interleague series); Braves host Milwaukee in September. Marlins host Cubs in September; Marlins host Milwaukee in April. Marlins visit Colorado in September and Houston in April; Braves do the opposite.
Unlucky teams for West Coast travel: Pirates visit San Diego in September (between Chicago and Houston on a divisional road trip), Dodgers in April (tacked on after STL/MIL); Washington visited San Diego in April (just before CHC/MIL), Los Angeles in September (actually late August, tacked on after HOU/COL).
A cynic might claim that most of these aren't man-crushes so much as "Heartfelt thanks for helping one of my fantasy teams do well." That's probably true, though calling them "man-crushes" just sounds catchier.
C: Brian McCann. I just can't quit you. His thumb is obviously still bothering him, his 2007 production is a pale shadow of his 2006, his all-star selection is dubious at best (not that any other catcher was an obvious snub), there are some who claim he isn't even the Braves' best catcher (now that Salty is on the big-league club). For all that I still deeply appreciate a catcher with a sweet lefty swing -- and Joe Mauer's bandwagon is big enough already. Honorable mention: Ryan Doumit
1B: Justin Morneau. He had a pretty good day Friday, certainly more enjoyable than coughing up blood. Honorable mention: Did Carlos Pena finally put it all together?
2B: Kelly Johnson. Honorable mention: Orlando Hudson
3B: Close call. I'll go with Miguel Cabrera over David Wright because Wright also has a big enough bandwagon already. (This doesn't fit the "crush" theme since I've never felt the personal affinity, but have you noticed yet another outstanding year for Chipper Jones?)
SS: Hanley Ramirez, honorable mention Troy Tulowitzki. (Props to both New York shortstops but it's unclear at this point which one is more overrated.)
LF: Matt Holliday might be the most underrated hitter in baseball even aside from his excellent first name and alma mater. Honorable mention: Matt Stairs
CF: Hunter Pence is the new Lance Berkman (yes, Berkman shifted to first base years ago and is having a down year in 2007). Honorable mention: Curtis Granderson
RF: Jack Cust for list balancing purposes, even though I hate it when the A's start him anywhere other than DH. Honorable mention: Reggie Willits. (I used to be deeply enamored of both Magglio Ordonez and Bobby Abreu, but then Magglio became larger than life -- man-crush emeritus? -- and Abreu became a Yankee. Also, despite how completely irrational this is, I'm less thrilled about Venezuelan players now than I had been before Hugo Chavez)
DH: Travis Hafner. Honorable mention: Prince Fielder (yes, he plays on an NL team, but he'd be a good DH). (David Ortiz has a big enough bandwagon, and is in a down year.)
Rotation: In no particular order, Mark Buehrle, Jarrod Washburn, C.C. Sabathia, Tom Gorzelanny, Jeff Francis
Honorable mention: Noah Lowry is my sixth-favorite southpaw starter. Even before he became lights-out Dan Haren was by far my favorite righty, but I'm trying hard not to jinx him. Matt Cain, Justin Verlander, Brandon Webb, and Fausto Carmona are all in the mix here.
Bullpen: After Heath Bell this is hard to fill. You'd think I'd feel solidarity to situational lefties but if anything the opposite is true. An obvious choice would've been Joel Zumaya but surely he didn't have this coming. Let's go with Jonathan Broxton and call the bullpen full, certainly by weight capacity.
Oakland's 37-year-old temporary closer takes the mound to "Work It Out" (Jurassic 5 Feat. Dave Matthews).
Compare to Huston Street's "Hate Me Now" (Nas), Keith Foulke's "Lunatic Fringe" (Red Rider), Billy Koch's "Fuel" (Metallica), or... I can't put a title/artist to what Jason Isringhausen used in Oakland, except that it's also been used as a wrestling theme (but then what hasn't?).
In the wilderness months between Foulke's departure and Street's ascent, Arthur Rhodes closed to "Back in Black" (AC/DC) and Octavio Dotel to "Come With Me" (Puff Daddy, with Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" as the main riff).
For a quick 10 points (on the honor system because I actually don't know!): What do the Giants play for Brad Hennessey, and what did they used to play for Armando Benitez? SF Giants' closer music is all a blur to me since Robb Nen ("Smoke on the Water" (Deep Purple)). Was it Tim Worrell who used "Iron Man" or was it The Other Guy (who I'd have to look up on Baseball Reference).
Some of my favorite 9th inning musical moments at Pac Bell park involved either Livan Hernandez attempting a complete game ("The Distance" (Cake)) or Felix Rodriguez closing (to salsa music that I didn't recognize) when Nen had pitched a few days in a row and needed the day off.
Arrange these guys in order from most to least disappointing 2007 season:
Bronson Arroyo
Freddy Garcia
Randy Johnson
Barry Zito
(Arroyo actually crossed over in May 2006 but for Scoresheet purposes his crossing over was most relevant in the 2006-07 off-season.)
I didn't realize until now that this was unlimited voting. (Q. Then couldn't someone write a script to rig the election? A. The captcha script is so hardcore that even my own eyes only have about a 70% correct match rate so far.)
Anyhow, vote for Tom Gorzelanny (because he deserve it and because DEK gave him a great nickname) and for Pat Neshek (because he politely asked you to).
Brought to you by ESPN:
"Fantasy owners were looking for a 20/20 season from Mike Cameron. Will he deliver?" -- teaser text before a hyperlink
"Mike Cameron has only eight stolen bases this season." -- caption below an action photo of Cameron ([sic] - he stole his ninth base last night)
The Padres have played exactly 81 games, exactly half their schedule. The difference between Cameron's stolen base output and a 20-steal pace is well within variance.
Meanwhile, among the subject lines of the "Baseball Message Board": Should I drop Hanley? Sure, you might consider dropping Hanley Ramirez if you're in a four-team league or something.
I tend to avoid things All-Star game related, especially the "who got snubbed" kerfuffle. But that's a very conspicuous absence.
Not your league's own board, but rather the general-use message boards on ESPN and the like. You don't even have to read the messages, just the subject lines.
Today, in two separate places:
Why did Dontrelle Willis leave after 4 innings?
(an 89-minute rain delay will have that effect)
Can Dontrelle still get the win?
(No. Starters must pitch at least five innings. Not that this is global common knowledge, but if you happen not to be aware of it then your time is better spent experiencing real baseball than dabbling in the fake kind.)
If you live in Boston then you know Lugo stopped hitting several weeks ago. But did you realize he has 20 stolen bases? I'd failed to notice this and falsely concluded that a rival fantasy baseball team had a hole at second base.
This is freakishly impressive. (It'll be even more so if they've added the June 29 appearance by the time you see this.) I'm glad I don't have him on any fantasy teams (yet).
Bad news for NL Costanza Team 1, who's already lost five games this year despite leading after eight innings.
A pitcher's good strikeout-to-walk ratio not only helps him succeed now but also does a great job predicting future success. Some ratios that have caught my eye:
James Shields in June: 32.1 innings, 31 to 2 (and a 5.57 ERA on the month but just a 1.14 WHIP).
C. C. Sabathia on the season: 122.1 innings 108 to 17.
Andy Sonnanstine (another Devil Ray) on the season: 32.1 innings, 27 to 3.
Your 2007 leaders in K/BB ratio (min: 20 innings pitched):
1. Takashi Saito (14.0)
2. Yoel Hernandez (13.0)
3. Rafael Betancourt (11.0)
4. Paul Byrd (9.6)
5. Andy Sonnanstine (9.0)
6. George Sherrill (8.7)
7. Kenny Rogers (8.0)
8. J.J. Putz (6.7)
9. C.C. Sabathia (6.4)
10. Mariano Rivera (6.0)
Meet Pitcher Z. He's been pretty good for awhile:
2004: 209.9 innings, 2.75 ERA, 1.22 WHIP, 188 K
2005: 223.1 innings, 3.26 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 202 K
2006: 214.0 innings, 3.41 ERA, 1.29 WHIP, 210 K
The key points here are durability, effectiveness, and especially strikeouts.
Pitcher Z got off to a rough start. Two months into the season he put up a 5-13-7-6-2-0 line. That's five innings, 13 hits, 2 walks, no strikeouts. Up to that point he had a 5.62 ERA in 73.2 innings; 83 hits, 34 walks, 51 strikeouts.
At that point he got into a fight with his starting catcher, first in the dugout (where they shoved each other), then in the clubhouse (where he punched his catcher in the mouth). From that point on he's never pitched to that catcher.
In his five starts since then (four with a light-hitting backup catcher, one with a new guy):
37.2 innings, 18 hits, 7 runs (6 earned), 13 walks, 43 strikeouts.
Which brings us to the conspiracy theory: Was Pitcher Z's catcher/nemesis telling the batters what was coming? I have zero evidence of this other than the numbers.
Jim Caple's 101 things all sports fans must experience list contains an odd combination of things I know to be right on, things he intuitively he has to be right about (e.g. both the Super Bowl and the Pro Bowl as "events to avoid"), and odd overemphasis on baseball. I like the game as much as Caple does but there's no way the world at large likes it that much.
Of the ones I've actually been to, or reasonable facsimiles thereof:
4. The World Series. It's a great experience if you're rooting for one team or the other, but above everything else that happens more frequently than every four years?! (Of the top three I suspect the World Cup is more worthwhile than either Olympiad.)
6. Spring training. I'll use Arizona Fall as a proxy here: Based on how relaxing and enjoyable those games were I can vouch for this high a ranking for myself, yet [see disclaimer above].
15. Red Sox-Yankees game. I haven't been to one since Game 3 of the 1999 ALCS (Pedro over Roger in a rout), but none of the regular season games (late 1990s) did anything for except instill a "pox on both your houses" annoyance at various frat boys.
22. Cubs game in the Wrigley bleachers. I'll sort of buy this, if you politely ignore ownership's culpability in valuing tourist dollars over a winning ballclub.
34. MLB Opening Day. Meh.
36. Frozen Four. If anything this should be higher.
42. Baseball all-star game. Maybe the Home Run Derby isn't a fair proxy but there's just no way. Even in the "This Time It Counts" era it's an overhyped exhibition game.
44. Play Pebble Beach. I don't even play golf, but just thought I'd mention at least one reader has done this and apparently found it worthwhile.
63. Camp out for tickets. If getting up at 4 a.m. to join the line counts then I've done this. (I just didn't feel safe doing an all-nighter on Lansdowne Street. Took a chance that 4 a.m. would be good enough, and it was.) This is a better thing to have done than to do (as you might guess it gets boring) -- and in the on-line ticket sale era I don't think it's possible anymore. (For example, Giants' 2002 World Series tickets were sold only on-line. When people tried to camp out the police dispersed them/us.)
72. Beanpot. Should be higher.
83. Bay to Breakers. About right. (I've never run it. I used to live right near the finish line.)
84. A Raiders game. Shouldn't be nearly as high. The hype far exceeds the actual experience. If I was paying attention the the only team-specific NFL experience ranked higher is the Packers at Lambeau, yet I'd be shocked if there weren't at least five other better NFL experiences. (Cleveland's Dog Pound? Soldier Field? Tailgating in East Rutherford? Foxboro?) With this and Bay-to-Breakers back to back I have a sneaky suspicion Caple lives around here.
90. Little League game. About right.
Fill in the blank, as overheard on a radio promo just now:
"On July 4, the A's host ________ and the Toronto Blue Jays."
For any given team this should be their best (or best-known) player, e.g. "Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals." Or "Ichiro and the Seattle Mariners."
Go ahead and guess which "name" player this promo used to represent the Jays.
UPDATE: "The A's host Frank Thomas and the Toronto Blue Jays on July 3rd." That's more conventional. But Thomas was NOT the name mentioned in the previous promo.
Who needs closers?
Chad Qualls got a save last night. I had no idea until today. That was worth half a "game" to me in both of my head-to-head fantasy leagues, because by sheer coincidence in both leagues I faced someone who also got exactly one save.
No closers = one last-minute Chad Qualls save. Actual closers (people like Takashi Saito, Trevor Hoffman, Jason Isringhausen...) = one save.
In fact, in one of those leagues I dropped Qualls last night (league with holds as a category, with Aki Otsuka inexplicably available).
BONUS NOTE: Yesterday I first became aware of Dustin McGowan's no-hit bid when the starting hitters on my "for money" team (with four Rockies) were a combined 0-for-14 midway through the afternoon.
No offense meant to Grady Sizemore but the Cleveland Indians don't seem like a team that will beat anybody Jose Reyes style (i.e. constantly taking extra bases and drawing wild throws the way Reyes, Carlos Gomez, and the rest of the Mets did on Sunday).
Through fantasy baseball (partly by way of league with the "holds" category) I know that the Florida Marlins' current pecking order is:
7th Inning = Matt Lindstrom
8th Inning = Armando Benitez
9th Inning = Kevin Gregg
The A's are familiar with that kind of pecking order, as in:
7th = Kiko Calero
8th = Justin Duchscherer
9th = Huston Street
Unfortunately ALL THREE of the above are now on the Disabled List. Of the other four start-of-the-year bullpen arms, right now Alan Embree closes; Jay Marshall gets situational lefties (and then is left in too long and a righty crushes him); Lenny DiNardo is in the rotation(!); and Jay Witasick was inexplicably released.
Everything else is newbie righties who I either don't know enough about (Santiago Casilla -- he used to be Jairo Garcia (and used be three years younger), right?) or I find frightening (Colby Lewis? Ruddy Lugo?).
Rich Harden is expected to pitch two innings tonight. We'll see.w
Two things about Travis Hafner:
1. He kills the A's.
2. He didn't play in any of the last (at least) three times I've seen the Indians in the Bay Area. Blame some combination of Joe Kennedy, Barry Zito, and DH-less interleague play.
Contrary to your enraged claims on the air yesterday, and despite what you may remember from "Anytime I've ever seen an obstruction play," interference does NOT result in a dead ball.
That's the same mistake Miguel Tejada made in Game 3 of the 2003 ALDS.
In the Extended Entry, bold = Team A has never visited Team B before (or for such series involving Milwaukee, Team A hasn't visited Team B since the Brewers switched leagues). Red = traditional rivalry.
No attempt has yet been made to verify that all these games can fit into six pigeonholes with no team idle or double-booked.
(American League teams' opponents can be derived or CTRL-F'd from the output below)
ATLANTA BRAVES
at Kansas City, at Anaheim, at NL Team
vs. Minnesota, vs. Oakland, vs. Seattle
FLORIDA MARLINS
at Tampa Bay, at Oakland, at Seattle
vs. Tampa Bay, vs. Detroit, vs. NL Team
NEW YORK METS
at NY Yankees, at Minnesota, at NL Team
vs. NY Yankees, vs. Chicago White Sox, vs. Texas
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES
at Detroit, at Minnesota, at Texas
vs. Boston, vs. Cleveland, vs. Anaheim
WASHINGTON NATIONALS
at Baltimore, at Cleveland, at Detroit
vs. Baltimore, vs. Seattle, vs. NL Team
CHICAGO CUBS
at Chicago White Sox, at Boston, at Tampa Bay
vs. Chicago White Sox, vs. Baltimore, vs. Anaheim
CINCINNATI REDS
at Cleveland, at NY Yankees, at Toronto
vs. Cleveland, vs. Boston, vs. NL Team
HOUSTON ASTROS
at Texas, at Tampa Bay, at Toronto
vs. Texas, vs. Boston, vs. NY Yankees
MILWAUKEE BREWERS
at Minnesota, at Boston, at Seattle
vs. Tampa Bay, vs. Oakland, vs. Texas
PITTSBURGH PIRATES
at Baltimore, at Oakland, at Texas
vs. NY Yankees, vs. Toronto, vs. NL Team
ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
at Kansas City, at Baltimore, at Anaheim
vs. Kansas City, vs. Tampa Bay, vs. Toronto
ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
at Boston, at Chicago White Sox, at NL Team
vs. Toronto, vs. Kansas City, vs. Minnesota
COLORADO ROCKIES
at Chicago White Sox, at Detroit, at Kansas City
vs. Baltimore, vs. Minnesota, vs. NL Team
LOS ANGELES DODGERS
at Anaheim, at NY Yankees, at NL Team
vs. Anaheim, vs. Tampa Bay, vs. Cleveland
SAN DIEGO PADRES
at Seattle, at Toronto, at NL Team
vs. Seattle, vs. Detroit, vs. NL Team
SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
at Oakland, at Cleveland, at NL Team
vs. Oakland, vs. Chicago White Sox, vs. Detroit
According to Retrosheet (1997-2006) and CBS Sportsline (2007), and if my perl and spreadsheet skills are up to snuff, then after 11 seasons of interleague play several matchups still haven't taken place.
Every team has played every other team at least one series but not every road-home combination has happened.
The list after the jump treats Montreal/Washington as one franchise.
Series that have yet to take place, ordered by home team:
*- the other way around has happened twice
#- the other way around has happened three times!
Atlanta at Anaheim
*St. Louis at Anaheim
*Minnesota at Atlanta
Seattle at Atlanta
Cincinnati at Baltimore
Pittsburgh at Baltimore
St. Louis at Baltimore
Chicago Cubs at Boston
Milwaukee at Boston
Colorado at Chicago White Sox
Anaheim at Chicago Cubs
Baltimore at Chicago Cubs
Boston at Cincinnati
San Francisco at Cleveland
*Washington at Cleveland
Minnesota at Colorado
*Kansas City at Florida
Boston at Houston
NY Yankees at Houston
Atlanta at Kansas City
#Colorado at Kansas City
Cleveland at Los Angeles Dodgers
*Tampa Bay at Los Angeles Dodgers
Baltimore at Milwaukee
Oakland at Milwaukee
Tampa Bay at Milwaukee
Texas at Milwaukee
Toronto at Milwaukee
Cincinnati at NY Yankees
Los Angeles Dodgers at NY Yankees
Milwaukee at NY Yankees
Chicago White Sox at NY Mets
Texas at NY Mets
Chicago Cubs at Oakland
Florida at Oakland
Anaheim at Philadelphia
*Cleveland at Philadephia
*NY Yankees at Pittsburgh
Toronto at Pittsburgh
Florida at Seattle
Milwaukee at Seattle
Chicago White Sox at San Francisco
Tampa Bay at St. Louis
Texas at St. Louis
Chicago Cubs at Tampa Bay
Houston at Tampa Bay
Philadelphia at Texas
Cincinnati at Toronto
Houston at Toronto
San Diego at Toronto
This article shocked me to the core. So many unanswered questions.
I wanted an injury update on Ryan Freel. Naturally I googled "Ryan Freel" and, in the new universal interface, happened to get two image results. This might surprise you but the image results usually DON'T auto-populate for baseball players.
An image of Freel surrounded by party-goers led me to this gossip blog. I don't know WTF to with this but it's out there for your enjoyment.
Comment of the day: "She even did Sturtze."
9th of 10, 4th of 12, 4th of 14, 3rd of 18, 2nd of 6, 2nd of 8, 1st of 12.
Masters of Puppets (9th of 10 in AL Vandalay)
How many disappointing seasons can you spot in this lineup (aside from one injury replacement this was my Opening Day lineup, though I've shifted it a bit since then)?
1. Robinson Cano
2. Michael Young
3. Travis Hafner
4. Carlos Lee
5. Raul Ibanez
6. Dan Johnson
7. Adrian Beltre
8. Corey Patterson
9. Kenji Johjima
Moreover, 40% of my planned starting rotation was Kevin Millwood and Jake Westbrook, with lots of high-leverage innings expected from Joel Zumaya.
On the bright side, Justin Verlander has had the opposite of a sophomore slump, both Andy Pettitte and Jon Garland have exceeded expectations, and both Fausto Carmona and John Danks have stepped into the rotation quite nicely.
Right now this team has very good starting pitching, 80% of Pronk, Carlos Pena pretending to be a corner outfielder (unless the Scoresheet defense algorithms result in Dan Johnson out of position instead), and a team on-base percentage of .306.
Stars: the aforementioned rotation
Notable Acquisitions: Carlos Pena in the May supplemental draft
Alameda Islanders (4th of 12 in a fourteen-category head-to-head league)
My third season in this league (each team keeps eight players from the year before), and my week-to-week impression has always been that I'll come out on top of the rate stats (this league uses AVG, OBP, and SLG) but break even elsewhere.
So far OBP = 8-3, SLG = 8-3, AVG = 6-5, all other categories 58-55-8. Ever since the Armando Benitez trade I've owned the Holds category but gotten zero saves (for lack of closers).
Stars: David Wright, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, Todd Helton... I love my lineup. On the flip side it's Carlos Zambrano or bust.
Notable Acquisitions: I was shocked to find Ted Lilly on the FA pile. Then again felt the same way about Jarrod Washburn six weeks ago.
Team Julia Forever! (4th of 14 in a roto league)
(Best Comics Curmudgeon post ever! But how can you go wrong with the A3G, (DT)GT, FBoFW, FW quadfecta?)
Apparently I've hemorrhaged runs and Total Bases in the past few days, as there was a point at which none of my category scores were between 3 and 11. Pitching (Wins, Saves, K, ERA, WHIP) = 14, 3, 14, 13, 13 despite owning all of {Joe Nathan, Mariano Rivera, Brad Lidge}.
(Rivera in a trade, Lidge on waivers near the start of the season.)
I'm also at or near dead last in both RBI and steals despite trading for ALfonso Soriano awhile back.
Stars: David Ortiz, Brandon Webb, C.C. Sabathia, James Shields, Justin Verlander (mmm... pitching...)
Notable Acquisitions: Rivera and Soriano in the same deal (for Felix Hernandez and Curtis Granderson, both priced very advantageously for 2008); Aaron Rowand and Carlos Pena as FAs.
Faux Klingons (3rd of 18 in a head-to-head)
Remind me to stop naming teams after wacky current events with a short shelf life! Yet another saves-deficient team. If this were a roto league my scores by category (18 = best, 1 = worst) would be...
Runs = 16
TB = 15
RBI = 8.5
SB = 15
OBP = 17
K = 14
W = 16
SV = 1 (two to be exact; next fewest is seven)
ERA = 11
WHIP = 8
Stars: Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez, Jake Peavy, Dice-K
Notable Acquisitions: Last month I picked up Reggie Willits, Willie Harris, and Carlos Pena in a 24-hour period. All have worked out pretty well.
(Worth mentioning the extent to which Kelly Johnson and Scott Hatteberg have exceeded expectations.)
UBBIA (2nd of 6 in a points-based suck league)
Storm clouds on the horizon: Some of my most reliable hitters are starting to not-suck just to spite me (Miguel Olivo I'm looking your way! and let's not even talk about Cristian Guzman...), plus I'm on pace to slam into the innings pitched limit before the end of August.
Stars: Olivo, Tony F. Pena, Adam Everett, Adam LaRoche, Levale Speigner
Notable Acquisitions: Scott Elarton was just sitting out there
El Diablo con Dinero (2nd of 8 in an NL-only auction/roto league)
The only league where money is at stake. My hitting line (R-TB-RBI-SB-OBP) was 7-8-8-2-6 for several weeks but I've slipped a bit in runs scored. Pitchers lead the league in K's but second-from-the-bottom in wins!
Stars: Prince Fielder, Matt Holliday, Brad Penny, Ted Lilly
Notable Acquisitions: Ryan Doumit via FAAB (working out well), Andruw Jones via trade (not so much).
Just traded Willy Taveras and Stephen Drew for Chris Carpenter and Bill Hall. How that works out will depend mostly on Carp's comeback and Hall's potential second-half breakout.
Harvesters of Sorrow (1st of 12 in NL Costanza Scoresheet league)
I love this team. What more can I say? Dan Haren, Tom Gorzelanny, Matt Cain, Randy Johnson (when healthy), and Jeff Francis make a nifty rotation. And then a lineup full of "OBP is Life" types like Kelly Johnson and Jim Thome. It's bliss.
(This team is on the Detroit Tiger plan a year behind: 46-116 in 2004, then 61-101, and last year 77-85.)
Stars: Haren and Heath Bell are having incredible seasons. Balanced starting lineup centers on Carlos Beltran
Notable Acquisitions: Not really. Used the May draft for relief pitching backfill.
Check out these lefty-mashers (who can't hit RHP to save their lives):
Sammy Sosa
Mike Cameron
Ryan Zimmerman
Travis Buck (OF-OAK)
vs. RHP = .248/.354/.406 in 155 (at-bats + walks)
vs. LHP = .400/.475/.829 in 39
Home = .250/.352/.435 in 125
Road = .333/.429/.600 in 69
Day = .218/.262/.345 in 58
Night = .310/.431/.566 in 136
Yes, this was a sham. But just how many games do you think St. Cal played solely for the purpose of keeping a neat-but-ultimately-not-so-meaningful streak alive?
(Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the emphasis on perfect attendance records in school grades? I think this leads kids to show up for class sick and infect their classmates. Not that a gimpy Ripken would have been contagious or anything, but I do think that the Orioles would have probably done better had he sat about six games a year and been that much more refreshed for the other 156.)
Hoaxes are good. Hoaxes at Jim Romenesko's expense are gold.
Deadspin bonus link: Moooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I'm way overdue for plunging into the massive Baseball Reference database but if/when I do get around to some casual mining, an interesting question suggested by today's Giants-Brewers game:
How many times in baseball history has each team hit a grand slam in the same game?
Another milestone in my lifetime of attending ballgames in person: First time I've seen a position player pitch!
Most of Scott Spiezio's offerings were in the high 70s. Any given pitch had about a 50% chance of being a foot outside and in the dirt. All the same: Bobby Crosby hit a wicked shot up the middle that Spiezio tipped with his glove for the old 1-4-3 play. Dan Johnson worked a deep count into a walk. Mark Ellis hit a foul fly down the left field line. Jack Cust seemed to crush a ball... but he got under it and the right fielder caught it on the track.
I have to admit I've never heard of Andy Cavasos, Kelvim Jimenez, or Erasmo Ramirez. I've heard of Ruddy Lugo but I shudder to think of him as an Athletic.
Two of the top five picks in baseball's 2007 amateur draft are named Josh Vitters and Matt Wieters.
Four of the six best World Series of the last 25 years are represented in the current (weeknight) interleague matchups. For 5 points per answer--name:
A. All four of those matchups that are taking place.
B. The two that aren't.
For no bonus points but quite some discussion fodder, rank all six.
Of the four most improbable major league games of my lifetime (that I know of: feel free to recommend others), two each involve the Pirates and the A's. In chronological order:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1991/B04210PIT1991.htm
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1997/B07120PIT1997.htm
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2000/B05050TEX2000.htm
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2002/B09040OAK2002.htm
(ah, look at those August W's...)
Sometimes it's the plaintiffs themselves.
I can't remember the last time I felt so much scorn for some idiot who went and got himself killed. (Or for the media vultures who somehow turned him into a celebrity martyr.)
The post three below this one has led to a really good e-mail exchange, about which you get to hear nothing (obviously, given the nature of private e-mail exchanges).
But I will say my one major regret is the accusation of false modesty coupled with "basing his career off" a story, when in fact there's strong evidence for the exact opposite conclusion: Somebody who writes that well and who got that much publicity (notoriety?) could have become a lot more famous had he chosen to exploit it.
(Note the "same city" above. Obviously none of this applies to that odd-man out Arizona-Pittsburgh series, which is neither "same city" nor "interleague." I got a kick out of imagining some Phoenix transplant who somehow volunteered to relocate from there to Pittsburgh, yet keep enough old-home spirit to show up at PNC with rivalry on his mind.)
My favorite meta elements of this weekend:
1. Mixed couples, where one spouse had on an A's jersey and the other a Giants jersey. All in good fun.
2. Everything made somebody cheer. In fact at the game's tightest moments there was something like the State of the Union effect only even better, since fans were interspersed instead of being separated by a particular dividing aisle.
That said I still think interleague play is overrated, because of the cherry-picking (prime weekends, over-focus on the specific rivalries that lend themselves well to this) done by people who tout it so much.
UPDATE: Interesting developments in the comments section. I'll see what comes of this and update/retract as necessary. I may have been embarrassingly wrong about Pearlman's first-hand knowledge of the 2007 Yankee clubhouse and/or attempts to interview Joe Torre (I'm willing to believe that anyone who bothers to attempt contact with a random blogger probably does also attempt contact with the Yankees' manager).
After reading this column I mean that in the matter-of-fact sense, not the pejorative sense. When it comes to things I hate about this particular column, where to begin?
(You already know this, but I'm not a Yankee fan. I resented the Yankees at their peak, now I'd like to think that I can soberly assess them as a good team that I don't especially like or dislike.)
First of all, I hate the "I don't say this very often so when I do say it I must be right" approach to (il)logic. He makes a big deal that when he wrote an ill-advised college column, he "never even worked up the guts to call [the soccer coach whose firing the column demanded] and get his take" -- yet this column was very evidently written without any attempt to interview Joe Torre.
Second, through the years the biggest criticism leveled at stathead analysis columns is that those authors supposedly don't know what's really going on in baseball, that they (we) need to lift our head out of the books & numbers and watch a game. The thing is, Pearlman has no idea what really happens in the Yankee clubhouse. He watches the team now and then (I presume) and decides to pull out of his ass the theory that they lack "passion" (along with begging the question that passion leads to some huge number of victories above and beyond talent).
He may be right, he may be wrong (he's probably wrong, at least in that he overrates the things that he wants fixed), but there's no way whatsoever to test his theories with any validity.
The ideas expressed in this column, and the combination of vehemence with utter lack of demonstrably knowing what he's talking about, is exactly why I find sports talk radio unlistenable. Some guy named Jerry in his car on the Bronx expressway could have dictated a better column than this.
(Full disclosure: I'm predisposed to dislike Jeff Pearlman for making a career out of being the guy who tore down both John Rocker and Barry Bonds, then for putting on a false modesty act that he has any shred of regret for being that guy. Even if I weren't so predisposed, every point I make here would stand. The best defense for most of Pearlman's other hit jobs is that he usually actually does put some legwork into them.)
I am so ready for this. Right this moment I'm dead certain Rickey is a better hitter and better defender than Shannon Stewart.
With that in mind, Ray Fosse (on the A's radio broadcast) hopes the Royals stick with Bell as manager.
OK, great, he's patient and a good man. I know a few people like that. Is he any good at what he does? He has a very long track record as manager, with no evidence whatsoever (that I can tell) of success.
There are 30 available positions as [field] manager of a major league baseball team. There are many more than 30 qualified candidates. Being patient and a good man may be necessary but it's far from sufficient.
(But as an A's fan, the more the A's opponents stick with personnel like Bell, the more likely the A's are to succeed against them.)
ESPN Headline: "Report: World Series to start on a Wednesday"
Here's the article, attributed to "ESPN.com News Services" but transparently based on someone seeing a story in USA Today. ("USA Today reported" / "According to USA Today" / "MLB president Bob DuPuy told USA Today")
The even worse part is that the main piece of news here -- that the World Series would start on a weeknight -- has been known for nearly six months now. I don't think "effort to boost sagging ratings" is the best lede for a news story that's actually only about starting Wednesday rather than Tuesday.
But of course if ESPN itself isn't involved in televising a sporting event then it doesn't really matter anyway, right?
Joe Borowski is now 0-2 this season (with about a billion cheap saves). Both of his losses happened as I was listening to live radio of the game (the first one via MLB Gameday Audio, the second one locally).
Both of Borowski's losses have come in games where he had two out and nobody on in the ninth inning with his team up by multiple runs.
There's this one beer commercial popping up on baseball radio broadcasts all over the place. It's hideously annoying but admittedly it does grab one's attention. It would make a nice dramatic monologue for audition settings.
While we're here, do you think The O'Jays mind much that "Love Train" has been so thoroughly co-opted into the advertising world? (I don't think they had weak domestic brew on their mind when they sang it.) Probably depends on how much they were paid.
This is a fascinating Google search. (I'll admit I wasn't positive it was The O'Jays.) I wonder if anyone has bought the Wolfmother track mistakenly thinking it was a cover. That reference on the Amazon page is just sad.
This interview is interesting in hindsight. (As I type this, Cotroneo is calling a very interesting third inning in this game.)
While I am not a "homer," over time fans will be able to tell who I am working for by the sound and inflection of my voice.
No joke. Here "over time" seems to mean a span of about five minutes.
There won't be any attempt to make some kind of "statement," or set myself apart from the broadcast. It's my job to blend in, provide timely information, have a good time and make things as smooth as possible for Ken.
Well put, and he succeeds well at this.
Here's a blogger who really liked him, though it's odd that the blog itself went fallow after December 2005.
On the walk-off grand slam last night, I wonder whether Jorge Julio grooved a pitch to Ryan Zimmerman. He had more motivation than usual:
1. It was 1:42 a.m. local time, with two out in the ninth inning of a tie game that had already been through rain delays totaling 3 hours, 40 minutes. Did anyone (except the Marlins of course) want that game going to extra innings?
2. If you're going to cause the game to end anyway, might as well get three runs (instead of one) charged to the guy you replaced, the guy against whom you'll be competing for the opportunity to get saves,a vastly overrated (but financially lucrative!) individual statistic.
Josh Barfield (.212/.246/.301) is still outhitting Kevin Kouzmanoff (.115/.175/.207).
I remember a few years ago in a fantasy league trading Scott Podsednik for Sammy Sosa just before both Podsednik and Sosa both came crashing to Earth.
The Toronto Blue Jays have yet to win a game in May. They have lost:
4-12
6-7 in 11 innings (game tied 6-6 through six innings)
5-6 (game tied 5-5 through six innings)
1-7
4-11
2-3 (starting pitcher gave up the go-ahead run in the 8th, left after 97 pitches)
2-9
3-9
0-8
Obviously the problem is they don't have B.J. Ryan around to preserve those non-existent 9th inning leads.
(Losing Roy Halladay on the other hand: That's a blow (even though this happens year after year after year). It's as if the Blue Jays heard all the "there's screwed without B.J. Ryan" canards and decided to say, no, THIS is what "screwed" looks like.)
(Washington Nationals' fantasy ties after the jump.)
Harvesters of Sorrow (NL Scoresheet): Rickie Weeks
Masters of Puppets (AL Vandalay): none (unsurprisingly, as it's AL only)
Alameda Islanders (12-team H2H): Jeff Suppan as a FA pickup a couple weeks ago
UBBIA (suck league): none (Aaron Miles doesn't count)
Boxcar Saturn Margo (14-team roto style): Geoff Jenkins & Corey Hart (i.e. one OF slot, no hard decisions, just check whether the opposing pitcher is lefty or righty (and then watch as Hart misses a game to injury and Jenkins hits a 3-run HR against a southpaw))
Faux Klingons (18-team H2H): none (traded Corey Hart for Jason Frasor a couple days after B.J. Ryan went on the 60-day DL: that worked out well)
El Diablo con Dinero (8-team NL only roto): Prince Fielder
Harvesters of Sorrow (NL Scoresheet): Ryan Wagner, Jerome Williams
Masters of Puppets (AL Vandalay): none (unsurprisingly, as it's AL only)
Alameda Islanders (12-team H2H): none
UBBIA (suck league): Nook Logan, Cristian Guzman, John Patterson
Boxcar Saturn Margo (14-team roto style): none
Faux Klingons (18-team H2H): none (Jarrod Washburn doesn't count)
El Diablo con Dinero (8-team NL only roto): Ryan Zimmerman (who's four months younger than Fielder)
Bob Uecker is a fine broadcaster, surprisingly meat-and-bones if you're used to the goofy persona he affected for ad campaigns.
I wish the stadium organist there would learn something other than Hava Nagilah, or at least choose a less whiny organ timbre for it: Every time I hear that I think I'm listening to a game at Le Stade Olympique back when Montreal had a team.
(That will sound incongruous to most of you -- WTF does Hava Nagilah have in common with Montreal? -- but trust me, they played it to death there for no apparent reason.)
Damian Miller is catching for Milwaukee, just as he did last time I listened to a Brewers home game on a weekday (they completed a sweep vs. St. Louis). Uecker mentioned his starting "in place of Johnny Estrada." Oh yeah, Miller's the backup: But you get a lot of backup catchers on the getaway day weekday games, which are exactly the games I hear on weekday mornings (Tuesdays and Fridays aside).
...should devote an entire wing to some combination of the Hendricks brothers and Roger Clemens.
As a free market enthusiast I'm deeply impressed at what they've pulled off year after year.
Fun things you can do with a time machine involve going back to the 1969 Seattle Pilots and telling Jim Bouton (as he was working on Ball Four) that one day a pitcher would leverage his market value so successfully.
The guy in the pink jersey had his horse out in front of the pack, then some other horse started making its move and made its move just as NBC foolishly cut from the overhead cam to the "down the stretch" cam. Looks like horse that made the late move won easily and the earlier front-runner came in second?
Meanwhile Robinson Cano hit a sacrifice fly seconds before the race began and the Yankees made the last out of the seventh inning with the race under way and I went back to concentrating on John Sterling's call of whether Chien-Ming Wang will accomplish something special today.
UPDATE: Well, that's one way to break up a {perfect game, no-hitter, and shutout} all at once.
Lois Griffin still cracks me up as a Yankee radio color analyst. It's not even anything she says, it's entirely her voice. I'd have expected the only female radio broadcaster in MLB to sound more like Renel Brooks-Moon (SF Giants' PA announcer).
"But, Marge, that little guy hasn't done anything yet. Look at him. He's going to do something and you know it's going to be good."
--Homer Simpson, "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"
HITTING CATEGORIES
Hitting for the cycle
Inside-the-park home run
Come-from-behind walkoff home run
Steal of home
PITCHING CATEGORIES
Pitching a no-hitter
Striking out 14 or more batters in a game
Complete-game loss (minimum: 8 innings)
Hold and a loss in the same game
DEFENSE/MISC.
Recording a putout within a triple-play
Being traded
Orlando's BBQ, just behind the Coke bottle in left-center, is by far the best source of food within the SF Giants' phone-park. But in real life Orlando Cepeda was just pulled over for speeding and arrested for the white powder the cop found on him.
(Let me be the thousandth person you hear snark about whether it was the clear or the cream. I haven't read Deadspin since the poker-golf thread but I presume they were on this many hours ago.)
Is 72 hours the record for shortest elapsed time between two in-season trades of the same player?
I'd never previously seen this stat column but it appears to run daily.
[N.B. since I refuse on principle to research this myself -- the point being that their own research is so pointless -- please let me know if I munge a detail on the trivia questions below.]
The first item "Hughes was the first pitcher to take a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in his first or second career start" is pretty good even though "seventh inning" is an arbitrary endpoint. I liked the DePaula and Halladay references.
For a quick ten points what pitcher threw a no-hitter in 1990 (right after being called up from the minors) to lower his career ERA from infinity? If this helps, he was also on the 1997 Marlins' championship team.
"Only one other player has ever driven in at least five runs, accounting for all of his team's scoring at Shea Stadium" (emphasis added)
WTF cares whether it's Shea or some other ballpark? (Now I understand part of why those Bill James essays of the late 1980s were so cranky when it same to Elias.)
For a quick ten points who drove in all nine runs of his team's 9-8 victory, doing so on Labor Day 1996? (I believe that's the record for most runs driven in for a game in which you drove in 100% of your team's runs.)
"[Coco Crisp is] 4-for-34 when batting in potential walk-off situations, having delivered the winning run only once"
Nifty. Is that league-worst? Tenth from worst? Who else sucks?
"Form held as the Raptors avoided elimination by defeating the Nets 98-96 after losing the two previous games by double-digit margins. Teams facing elimination after consecutive losses by 10 or more points have a record of 44-40 in NBA postseason play."
"Form held in a recent all-in situation as a pair of nines were good enough against ace-king..."
"You know, at Valero, not all of our energy comes from a hole in the ground. A lot of it comes from our people..."
--actual ad copy heard on the A's radio broadcast
Did any of the rest of you have a high school classmate kill themselves, then realize you'd known of that person but really hadn't known them, then felt guilty (but only mildly so) that you felt at most a mild sense of grievance? Is this just me being an awful person?
Getting back to the case at hand, it's not like Josh Hancock (honestly, unless you knew the trivial stuff one post below here, had you even heard of him? - I bet not) was Albert Pujols or the like.
TO BE CLEAR: I don't mean that as a "pecking order" judgment, just a distinction between people you know well and people with whom you're vaguely acquainted. And to be sure, I know close to nothing about the camaraderie of a 25-person team unit. Even so, how long had Hancock even been a Cardinal? This is light years different from the Darryl Kile situation.
And finally, not that this in any sense excuses or provokes callousness, but there's always the issue of the many nameless people who died in car accidents this weekend but won't ever get that kind of public recognition for it.
I'd just e-mailed this but decided that it's either "too obscure" or "too soon" to work as actual quiz fodder:
--
I remember when Josh Hancock would have been a nifty early clue in a question about Jeremy Giambi, not vice-versa. Until three days ago I actually did know Hancock expressly as "that guy the Red Sox traded to get Jeremy Giambi cheaply."
The "other" "guy traded for Jeremy Giambi" is probably already obscure to newbie A's fans but for all I know might still be name-checked on Baseball Primer.
You'd have to be a much better pedigree as an A's fan (or Royals fan) to pull out the "other other" "guy traded for Jeremy Giambi" without looking up Giambi's baseball-reference page. At least, I couldn't have done so (though I knew Little G originated in KC).
"You guys are just all lucky there isn't a category for unassisted triple plays. Because then I'd be screwed."
--message board comment from an owner in our 'suck' league
I was actually thinking about this after Mark Buehrle threw his no-hitter while on my roster in that league. If you were going to design a roto-style league with categories for ultra-rare accomplishments (for maximum fun and variance), what categories would you go with? I mean things like no-hitters and triple plays (not necessarily unassisted! - but for maximum variance you could assign a point per putout within the TP).
These would be very rare accomplishments, rare enough that you could score the league by hand but nothing more rare than (say) a no-hitter.
My first draft is something like:
BATTER/FIELDER
1. Inside-the-park home runs
2. Putouts from triple plays
3. Steals of home
4. Games with at least five hits
5. Games with at least seven RBI
(I'm dissatisfied with the last two has having essentially arbitrary cutoffs.)
PITCHER
1. Starts with one or fewer hits allowed (min. 5 IP)
2. Complete-game losses
3. Innings with at least four strikeouts
4. Relief appearances coming in with the bases loaded but holding the opponent without a run
5. Relief appearances of at least four scoreless innings
This is a great topic for an in-depth profile but the reporter made at least two baffling mistakes:
"He understands the heart, and always gives respect," says Yukiatsu Akizawa, the president of AM/PM markets, a sort of Japanese 7-Eleven, and a friend and business associate of Valentine's.
Akizawa is actually president of am/pm Japan Company, Ltd., the Japanese arm of am/pm, which has several American outlets (and is owned by BP). Ironically, 7-Eleven itself is now owned by a Japanese firm (though it was founded in Texas).
On why Kenji Johima, the catcher for Mike Hargrove's Seattle Mariners, is platooning behind the plate: "Because his manager's an idiot."
Um... Johjima played in 144 games last year, with at least 526 plate appearances, both above average for a starting catcher. This year he seems to be playing almost every day. His backup has gotten about a start a week. I guess you could call that "platooning," but why?
If ESPN's sortable stats are to be believed then in 2006 only one player successfully stole a base with Justin Verlander on the mound (versus five caught stealing); meanwhile Kenny Rogers "allowed" one SB and six CS.
I imagine that has more to do with Ivan Rodriguez than either of the two pitchers.
Recently, Piazza has been racking his brain for a theme song to suit Oakland closer Huston Street. With a smorgasbord of goosebump-inducing options available, he is baffled why so many closers take the lazy route and recycle AC/DC's "Hells Bells" and Metallica's "Enter Sandman." --Crasnick
Billy Wagner and Mariano Rivera adopted "Enter Sandman" independently of each other in the mid-1990s (Wagner had it first but Rivera had it in a bigger market, so all these New Yorkers falsely assume Wagner stole it from Rivera).
Trevor Hoffman has had "Hell's Bells" since time immemorial. No other relief pitcher that I know of uses either "Enter Sandman" or "Hell's Bells."
More importantly, though, the entire time Huston Street has been Oakland's top reliever he's entered to "Hate Me Now" (by Nas). Has he really had so few save opportunities this year that Piazza wouldn't notice?
I claim Piazza was just putting Crasnick on.
A moment of silence for his passing (and for the thousands of other people who also died in car accidents over the weekend)...
...now, here's my point of sports marketing pique: At one point yesterday the biggest story in the NFL was the Patriots traded for Randy Moss; the biggest story in the NBA was the upstart Golden State Warriors; the biggest story in baseball was a guy died (not as part of the game: if it were part of the game now that'd be a very different story).
That's how you build interest in a league.
After diverticulitis and pleurisy (diseases of the colon and the lungs) what is there?
Has he already had gout?
When I ate too much Gorzelanny at the Duke & Chacon, they thought I might have some Snell Maholm; fortunately it was just Salomon Torres.
1. O-Cab
2. K-Rod
3. Chris Bootcheck
4. Brandon Wood
5. regedit
(My favorite SF Chronicle feature)
Did the Pentagon deceive Americans about Curt Schilling's bloody sock?
This is by far the shortest major league game I've ever been to.
The Pirates-Astros game barely missed lapping us: Eric Chavez was deep into a ninth inning at-bat as the potential tying run, fouling off pitches, when the hand-op scoreboard posted that final. Chavez hit into a game-ending double play on the next pitch.
How on Earth did this thread get 225 posts (and counting) with no mention of the concept of prosecutor's discretion?
I'm not sure which type of post in this thread is most appalling:
1. People who gave any loophole weight to frivolous wordplay involving the difference between Royals' players and the Royals' club (post #36 rebuts this pretty well)
2. People who act as though it matters whether this was Torii Hunter or some guy just up from Triple-A.
3. People who raised a hue and cry about the absolute necessity to enforce the letter of the law
4. People who went out of their way to brand the law-and-order people as morons
There's some validity to the law-and-order argument and also to the "c'mon, have some sense of perspective" (not an actual quote that I know of) argument. Either you enforce the rule rigidly enough to inflict grave injustice, or you make a mockery of the rule by ignoring it...
...or you do what any prosecutor with a lick of sense would do and just don't bother trying the case (or whatever the MLB commissioner's office fact finders' equivalent of trying the case would be).
If the commissioner's office wanted to be complete pricks then, yes, Hunter could be kicked out for three years and end up hosed much the same fashion that some schoolchildren get hosed by various public school "no tolerance" rules.
But they won't actually do that, and they'll be well within their discretion not to, and that's life.
(But a not-quite accurate of personnel picture.)
Leyland is right that the Tigers shouldn't have had to make a random two-day trip to Anaheim to start a road trip that takes them right back to the Midwest. But Leyland, FYI, the schedule is NOT actually made -- at least not its final approval -- by "a professional schedule-maker making out this schedule, they don't know baseball from football. They might think we play 16 games."
Rather, we already know from the stories about the Seattle-Cleveland snowout that the buck stops with Katy Feeney in the commisioner's office. She appears not to have her own wikipedia entry, though her father does.
I have no idea how she actually gets the schedule made but I think most computer geeks could do a better job than the 2007 abomination.
Have I already mentioned here that both my current direct supervisor and my previous supervisor (from before a recent reorganization) are trying fantasy baseball for the first time this year? I've heard a lot about their teams.
Click through to hear more about mine. You know you want to, standard disclaimer notwithstanding.
Kelly Johnson's two home runs, three runs, four RBI, and nine total bases were on three of my benches today, given that Johnson bats lefty and Tom Glavine throws lefty. Instead of him I played Jhonny Peralta, Ryan Freel, and Orlando Hudson. C'est la vie.
Not counting the two I missed from, I still got five home runs in a particular head-to-head league today (including both J.D. Drew and Derek Jeter in the ESPN game). Went into today trailing 8-5 in the home run category; the other guy got exactly one HR today. If my math is right then in six total games from three weeks worth of two head-to-head leagues, I will have had four wins, zero losses, and two ties. Ties are amusing. The other tie was a week ago in a 10-category league where he got all five of the offense but I got all five of the pitching. The latter is a major upset given that my only save was a fluke save by Joel Zumaya.
Given my lack of other save sources, whether and how soon Joel Zumaya becomes closer might be the biggest factor in whether that particular team wins that particular (18-team!) league.
I already have a few lone wolf closers: Armando Benitez, in a h2h league whether both saves and holds are categories (and Benitez is barely worth the roster spot, frankly); Joe Nathan, in a roto-style league where I'm treading water in saves; Jose Valverde, who singlehandedly put me at or near the saves lead in the 8-team NL only roto (but I got Henry Owens with my FAAB a week ago).
Oh, and Heath Bell is the closer for my NL Scoresheet team. Of the 12 teams in that league, four are using Padre relievers as closers. I felt all special about taking Bell as a sleeper until I saw that some guy was using Cla Meredith. I mean, Scott Linebrink is one thing...
Between Kelly Johnson, Rickie Weeks, and especially Jim Thome (one of my crossovers), this should be a good week for my NL Scoresheet offense. We'll see if I got any pitching at all (from Matt Cain, yes, and also Dan Haren (my other crossover); not so much from Zach Duke or Brett Myers). Last week my team averaged 8 walks a game. Matt Cain gave me an 8-2-0-0-13-5 line. In real life I don't think they'd leave a guy in long enough to walk 13 batters.
Oh, and I get to use Adam Lind on my AL team. Woo! If I hadn't been out of town a weekend ago I'd have already had him in my lineup vs. RHP and I presume he would have out-hit Mike Sweeney. (Dan Johnson's injury put a crimp in my platoon plan there.)
The track list would include, but not be limited to:
Chimes (whenever the home team scores a run)
Opening riff from Aerosmith's "Walk This Way"
Opening riff from "Blitzkrieg Bop"
Opening riff from 2 Unlimited's "Twilight Zone"
Frank Sinatra version of NY, NY
What am I missing? How much more insufferable would this be (the on-going rally as I type this) were I listening to John Sterling rather than to the Indian radio crew?
(N.B. about an hour ago I was making a snarky blog entry about how John Wehner can't wait to see Adam LaRoche "locked in" and how it must be hard to struggle like that. But I cut short that entry once the Pirates actually started to rally. The rally fell short, and Francisco Cordero sounded unhittable, but still.)
A-Rod here, one way or another...
"The Best Trim Available" is the tag-line of some company that sponsors Red Sox radio broadcasts. That same company offers a "caught looking" promotion where somebody gets a prize if a batter is caught looking (strikes out by taking a called strike three instead of swinging) in a given inning.
That is all.
I started him in a fantasy league tonight, but that's not the good news you'd think it might be.
I don't regret starting him in the least. I'd do it again. In fact I'll do it again five days from now (six if off days intervene). Last year I probably would've started Anibal Sanchez the day of his no-hitter.
The last time this "suck" league was up and running I very stubbornly stuck with Melvin Mora for several weeks, until it was clear that he wasn't going to stop randomly being one of the best hitters in the American League that year. That put me in a bit of a hole.
(Mine, not theirs, obviously.)
Time: 2:17.
Attendance: 20,174.
Weather: 51 degrees, partly cloudy.
Wind: 28 mph, out to right.
A routine victory in surprisingly cold, windy weather: Since the Coliseum is inland a bit from the Bay, it doesn't typically get those blustery evenings that SF Giant fans are used to.
Did you know Chad Gaudin ["Go DAN"] is younger than Jered Weaver? Anyhow, they both looked great early on, Weaver in his 2006 debut. Between the pitchers and the weather (wind really does a number on baggy pants) it looked like one run might win the game. Angels left two men on in each of the first two innings, then Oakland got its first big chance in the 4th inning and Bobby Crosby made the most of it.
Gaudin stayed in until the shutout bid was broken up (barely over 100 pitches), then got a big ovation. Embree retired the only man he faced (on a wicked liner to Eric Chavez) and Huston Street threw 11 strikes in 13 pitches for the easy save.
Bottom line, the Angels' lineup isn't nearly so potent when Vlad is missing.
Having now twice listened to Ken Korach's (home radio) call of the ninth inning of yesterday's A's-Yankees game, I've turned to the road radio feed just for completeness' sake.
Thank you Gameday Audio.
Name the first National League player to reach five home runs in 2007.
(Some silly additional clues: He leads off; I don't have him on any fantasy teams this year; my drafting him in fantasy baseball seems to jinx him.)
Preston Wilson has begun the 2007 season 4-for-22, with no walks, 7 strikeouts, two GIDP, a caught stealing, and an error.
It's the little things that make a terrible player really truly terrible. And to think I wouldn't have even noticed this if it weren't for loser-league style fantasy sports.
Tuesday, April 17, vs. Minnesota. But Johann's next start is April 13, and the Twins' likely April 17 hurler is Carlos Silva or Ramon Ortiz.
Sunday, April 22, at Anaheim. Could face Jered Weaver if the stars align. Is that worth the time, gas (airfare?), and marriage equity, considering that it's two teams whom the A's rival? (N.B. They could also choose not to skip their fifth starter, and so push Felix to Monday, April 23, at Texas.)
Friday, April 27, or Saturday, April 28, vs. Kansas City. Probably not Greinke, so not quite on the level of Felix-Daisuke.
If you think Penguins teammates doubt Sidney Crosby really has a girlfriend in Canada (from today's Sports Pickle) sounds a little bit too familiar, you're right.
For the record, El Diablo con Dinero is the best name ever for a fantasy baseball team in an auction league.
Every time I see my team page the slanderous mambo in my head puts a spring in my step. (It didn't have to be an auction league for that to be true but the name doesn't seem quite as appropriate if you're not pretending to spend money.)
Excerpting from their latest update/apology:
Late on Wednesday night the ESPN Fantasy team will:
1) Revert all teams to their opening day rosters (Sunday, April 1).
2) Set the starting lineup of each team's opening day roster as the active roster for all games played to date (April 1 - April 11).
3) Retroactively apply scoring for the entire season to date based on that roster.
4) Void all transactions to date (trades, waiver pickups, roster moves, etc.).
Wow. So who gets screwed the most out of that implementation?
A. The guy who picked up Al Reyes (not me)
B. The guy who has a bunch of Giants and/or Padres (me: Brian Giles & Terrmel Sledge, but at least I'm not the Barry Bonds guy)
C. The guy who began the season with Dice-K on his bench because Dice-K wouldn't actually start until Thursday (hi, me again)
D. The guys who completed a helps-both-teams trade ON Sunday, April 1 (yo!)
E. What else can you hypothesize (or if you're in an ESPN league yourself, do you know to be true)?
Yesterday. This time the goal was to get bad players. 6 teams, 30 rounds, each of my picks came straight from a pre-ranked list.
One thing: we will have gotten retroactive stats from the first week and change. I didn't take this into account at all, thus missing an obvious opportunity that I assume most of the rest of the league did pick up on. That said, I'm very happy with my team, and shocked that my round 6 pick fell that far.
It's also disturbing how many of these players are on one of my (trying to play well) Scoresheet teams: Everyone whom I also own in a "real" league I'll put in bold.
But hey, I have 80% of the Colorado rotation (humidor, what humidor?), 60% of Kansas City's, and both of the non-Biggio sinkholes in the Astro lineup. We're groovy.
Apparently I very much believe bad players cluster. My 30 draftees by team:
COL 5
KC 5
CHW 4
FLA 2
HOU 2
STL 2
TEX 2
WAS 2
ARI
BAL
CIN
LAA
LAD
PHI
Roster Positions: C, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, RP, RP, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL, DL
Stat Categories: AB, R, H, 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, SB, CS, BB, K, GIDP, E, IP, W, L, CG, SHO, SV, H, R, HR, BB, HBP, K, WP, SVOP, HLD
Stat Modifiers: AB (4), R (-6), H (-8), 2B (-6), 3B (-12), HR (-18), RBI (-6), SB (-6), CS (12), BB (-6), K (8), GIDP (8), E (10), IP (-9), W (-16), L (16), CG (-20), SHO (-50), SV (-16), H (6), R (10), HR (9), BB (3), HBP (3), K (-4), WP (2), SVOP (8), HLD (-4)
1. (5) Tony F. Peña SS
2. (8) Darin Erstad 1B,OF
3. (17) Brad Ausmus C
4. (20) Aaron Cook SP
5. (29) Brandon Duckworth SP
6. (32) Adam Everett SS
7. (41) Gil Meche SP
8. (44) Jeff Francis SP
9. (53) Liván Hernández SP
10. (56) Alejandro De Aza OF
11. (65) Miguel Olivo C
12. (68) Josh Fogg SP
13. (77) Jason LaRue C
14. (80) Jon Garland SP
15. (89) Aaron Miles 2B,SS
16. (92) Nook Logan OF
17. (101) Zack Greinke RP
18. (104) Sammy Sosa OF
19. (113) Corey Patterson OF
20. (116) Preston Wilson OF
21. (125) Kyle Lohse SP,RP
22. (128) Casey Kotchman 1B
23. (137) Brandon McCarthy RP
24. (140) Rodrigo López SP,RP
25. (149) Wilson Betemit 2B,3B,SS
26. (152) Cristian Guzmán SS
27. (161) Mark Buehrle SP
28. (164) Jamie Moyer SP
29. (173) Gustavo Molina C
30. (176) Kazuo Matsui 2B
This column describes an interesting trend. Is it a problem? If you're a baseball fan who prefers baseball to other sports then of course it is, on the same level that you might think of the trendiness of the NFL as a relative "problem."
If you're looking at a larger societal level, though, I'm not convinced. For one thing, the overall level of black participation in major U.S. pro sports leagues is up. For another, every discuss I've ever seen of this makes the begging-the-question assertion that the decline of black participation in MLB results from racism or other nefarious factors (which obviously also explain the surge in Hispanic and Asian players).
What do you think?
(Some of the most prominent black MLBers are from rural places, e.g. Torii Hunter's part of Arkansas, where it's a lot easier to find 300 feet by 300 feet of grass and dirt than it would be in, say, The Bronx. C.C. Sabathia is from Vallejo, which is suburban enough. Dontrelle Willis and Jimmy Rollins both went to the same high school as my wife (and as Willie Stargell, after whom their playing field was named), on the island of Alameda, near a military base that closed several years ago. So land isn't so scarce.)
So now the Seattle Mariners and Cleveland Indians have to find a way to fit in not one, not two, not three, but four makeup games in Cleveland, despite Seattle's not actually being scheduled to go to Cleveland again this year.
"I’ve said, half-jokingly, that if 30 teams are unhappy with their schedule, I’ve done my job."
--Feeney (quoted by Alan Schwarz, The New York Times and reprinted by Baseball Prospectus)
So you've 'done your job' if you schedule a team's only visit to a cold-weather city as a four-game series in April? This was not even all that hard to anticipate or prevent.
Of course it wouldn't even be an issue if it weren't for the effects of having BOTH an unbalanced (more games in your division) schedule AND an arbitrary set of interleague play.
I'm appalled, especially because I'm dead certain I could have done a better job (as could Mike B).
Apparently they weren't counting any stats at all (at any point in the season) for players who were on someone's bench at the moment.
I failed to notice this because of the two leagues I'm in on ESPN (same commissioner), one has weekly transactions only; the other has rosters set up in such a way that I wasn't making very many activations/benchings.
This is two weeks old but still stuck in my head:
Jason Z., now officially the 10th best Sudoku player in the world (but he hadn't gone to Prague yet), took Pedro Martinez in the 13th round of a keeper league. Someone else mocked him for paying such a high price "for three months."
A third person pointed out that Z would get to keep Pedro for a 12th rounder in 2008, to which Z responded "those were the three months he was talking about."
Sitting at my computer I cracked up. You might even say I "laughed out loud," since I actually did (even though I despise that phrase).
UNRELATED TRIVIA QUESTION: How many career walk-off grand slams does Alex Rodriguez have now?
I don't quite understand:
Retiring a player's number (that is, a given team will no longer issue a uniform number worn by one of its stars) is an honor.
Retiring a player's number league-wide is an even bigger honor.
And yet choosing a particular day on which that same number is worn, on purpose, all over the league, is a yet bigger honor?
Speaking (indirectly) of ceremonial distinctions that mean less to me than to other people: The Ohio Lottery has co-branded with the Cincinnati Reds (and Cleveland Indians, but the interesting part involves the Reds). I bet that's bitter irony to members of a certain cult of personality (the "Hit King" brigade). Everyone who makes him a martyr does (sort of) have a point, but he's enough of a jerk for me really not to care.
Oh, while we're here, about that travesty in Cleveland last night: From 2008 onward I think MLB should set a policy that once a game begins, if it can't be played any further that day then it just gets suspended. No more "none of this ever actually happened" washouts.
Does anyone else out there remember a suspended game involving the Braves and the Marlins, where the last pre-suspension play resulted in a Florida outfielder (Cliff Floyd?) injuring himself? The player in question went on the DL but was active again by the time the suspension got resumed. Since the play where he got hurt was the point of suspension, there hadn't been any need to remove him from the game.
Anyhow, one of Skip Caray's best lines ever was the suggestion that play resume literally where it left off, with the outfielder on the ground writhing in pain, surrounded by training staff, and suddenly leaping up as if he'd been miraculously healed.
Sometimes Uecker tells you what happened several seconds after it actually happened, more of a past-tense narration than a present-tense. He's efficient with his words and probably makes a fantastic local TV play-by-play guy.
But not so good a radio guy after all if you don't have a picture feed.
The Cincinnati Reds radio booth rotation consists entirely of broadcasters whose last name is like 'Br%'. (Just like mine!) If you saw a mid-winter press release then you know who two of them are. The third is pretty good on radio (would fit in well in the Pirate booth or any of a number of Midwestern teams), certainly better than he ever was on ESPN.
If I were a major league player then on an alphabetized (by last name) list of active major leaguers I'd be after Jonathan Broxton but before Brian Bruney. Despite the phonetic similarity, Ben Broussard is actually two earlier, before Emil Brown (is it surprising that only one active major leaguer has surname Brown?).
Devil Rays just scored three in the bottom of the ninth to win their home opener. On the Rays' radio network they're interviewing Delmon Young -- and the interview is being piped over the Tropicana Field PA system.
I've been hearing this all week but it just now struck me why this is so wrong:
"Back when the world was black and white, Florida was a different kind of place. [...] The Bradenton area still is that kind of place."
So apparently this is a place Western Pennsylvanians can vacation to and not feel threatened?
One major advantage over ESPN over Yahoo! (at least for private leagues: I'm not sure how either site handles public leagues) is that each team's initial roster on ESPN includes a starting lineup with reasonable assumptions made about which player to put in which spot. Each team's roster on Yahoo! begins with all starting spots empty and all players on the bench.
If your league has any busy, lazy, and/or obtuse owners, you can see where this is going.
In this 12-team Yahoo! head-to-head league one owner still hasn't put anyone into his starting lineup, and at least one other owner didn't get around to it until midweek. That led to a silly, six-deep message board thread, whose content I will now summarize in straw man fashion:
Guy who's winning 14-0 by default:
"Even though I myself am the owner benefiting from this 14-0 freebie win, I object on principle to teams whose owners can't be bothered to fill a lineup out. They should be kicked out of the league."
Other Guy, who was being blanked by default until he got his act together:
"Well, excuuuuuuuuuse me for being too busy to get around to looking at my team, even though I'm apparently not too busy to post this very defensive-sounding message."
Guy who's winning 14-0 by default:
"I appreciate that you're busy but nonetheless I grumble grumble grumble."
Other Guy:
"Despite being so busy I'll post something else that most people won't get around to reading."
Some Third Guy:
"Me too."
Original Guy:
"Me too."
The post that I didn't feel like making there (and yet will subject you unrelated to audience here): Head-to-head fantasy baseball (as opposed to rotisserie style) may be a lot of things, but "fair" isn't one of them. Stuff happens, match-ups let you run well or run badly. In a league where half the teams make the playoffs (6 of 12), none of this will result in a deserving team missing out.
Oh, you hate to see this:
GAME NOTICE
ESPN Fantasy Baseball Players - We are aware that there continue to be problems affecting some of your teams and some of the features of the game. We want you to know we have been working feverishly to correct these, and will continue to do so until they are 100% resolved. Your experience is of utmost importance to us, and we offer our sincere apologies for the inconvenience and will continue to communicate with you.
If you have more questions, or specific issues you need addressed, please call our customer service center at 1-888-549-ESPN.
The funny thing is I'm not entirely sure what's gone wrong (at least in the last 48 hours or so). I've noticed on their live-update pages sometimes that the numbers hop skip and jump (always makes me wonder if they have multiple servers running and one of them missed out on some data). I've taken it on faith that they'd get it right in the end.
I wonder if the Yahoo! people feel smug.
Despite what the Arizona Diamondbacks' radio guy just said*, Chad Gaudin's name is pronounced like "Go DAN!"
*- "gaw-DEEN" [sic], which I suppose isn't quite as bad as "GOW-din"
7.0 6 1 1 1 10 is a good line.
As for Green-K, nothing wrong with
7.0 8 2 1 1 7
Meanwhile, David DeJesus and Kelly Johnson are my two "bench" hitters in a 12-team, very-deep-lineup head-to-head league. I started them both today because of other teams' days off. Both hit home runs. That's just how the Alameda Islanders roll, at least in the regular head-to-head season (pre-September).
(Our schmidt didn't work in the 2006 playoffs but did work in the 2005 playoffs.)
Which player would you least like to see "take one for the team" by sticking his elbow into a pitch with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game?
(Yeah, if you take it as a hypothetical I realize it's just a roundabout way to ask for the biggest cocky-S.O.B. jerk in the game.)
UPDATE: It dawns on me there's a second "obvious" choice. Oh, to be a fly on a clubhouse wall the year A.J. Pierznski and Barry Bonds were teammates.
1. His voice timbre is not unlike Bob Uecker's.
More importantly,
2. He's on a respectful last-name basis with both teams' players.
(An odd exception to my bristling at first-name-basis broadcasters: I don't like that Oakland's radio team is on a last-name basis with Ichiro. They'll refer to "Suzuki" and it'll be a beat or two before I realize who they mean.)
We have ourselves a shouter.
Also, anyone listening to the Indians' radio feed apparently has to hope that "Jake" turns things around the way "C.C." did on Monday.
Fantasy baseball implications: That AL Scoresheet team of mine with both Jake Westbrook and Jon Garland at the back of the rotation will have a bit of trouble in this week's fake games.
Maybe I'm not the target audience of a Florida Marlins radio broadcast. Maybe there's a cadre of hardcore Marlin fans who would hear e.g. "Cody" and immediately recognize it as Cody Ross.
The A's radio guys do this too much as well, but in a tiny sample size the Marlins' radio guys have been the worst offenders I've run across in 2007.
UPDATE: That last sentence isn't necessarily limited to calling players by first names or nicknames ("Sanchie"?!?). Just all around this is a painful broadcast team to listen to. Interesting baseball team, but if you were to follow them you'd probably want to cycle through the opponents' radio feeds.
UPDATE 2: Of course any team can look good batting against the 2007 Nats, but so far Miguel Cabrera and Hanley Ramirez are looking very good from the first two rounds of an 18-team league.
UPDATE 3: It's going to be a looooooooooooooooooong year for the Washington Nationals. Not a good major league debut for Matt "Ay" Chico.
I'm going to root for the Pirates this year. Hold me to that.
(No, I don't mean as primary rooting interest: That's still Oakland of course.)
Their front office has made no reasonable effort to put a championship contender together, and there's no logical reason to expect great things from the 2007 team, this thought experiment aside.
But so help me, their fans do deserve better than they've gotten, and the past two games have been fun to listen to. A voice in the back of my head does wonder whether it's even my place to say this, because in theory I could just turn my back on the team if they have a bad week or two and are out of it by May, while the diehard fans actually local to there have been stuck with 15 years of incompetence.
Even so, this is a team I'd like to see do well. (Obligatory fantasy component: Zach Duke. Tom Gorzelanny. I think I have Ian Snell on one team, though in Scoresheet I picked exactly the wrong time last year to trade him for David Eckstein, who promptly fell flat on his face (at least in the regular season). I think the only Pirate hitters who even remotely affect me are Ronny Paulino (second catcher in a 2-catcher roto league) and Ryan Doumit (2nd or 3rd catcher on an NL Scoresheet team), but despite never having "owned" Jason Bay I like him a lot as a player.)
("UI" = "User Interface")
I've been partial to Yahoo! fantasy sports for awhile, ever since they were the first major site to offer teams/leagues for free. My subjective impression has been of Yahoo! as longtime front-runner with other sites playing catch-up. ESPN may have caught or passed Yahoo! for fantasy football (as of 2006), with scoring updates after every NFL game (for free) as a big improvement over the Yahoo! "wait until Monday unless you want to pay for premium."
(Fox went even further with free instant scoring updates but they began the season with a catastrophic level of bugginess.)
Now, baseball 2007: ESPN has been buggy at times, telling me earlier today that one of my teams was in an "Invalid League." Once that was fixed, I stared at the League page for awhile until it became obvious how to find more detailed Rotisserie standings than just the overall numbers. Oddly enough, they were hyperlinked from the word "Standings", on a black bar, to the right of "League" and "My Team" and "Players." (That's probably just me being dense rather than the UI's fault.)
Now that I do finally see the full standings, they seem to be updated instantly, which (for roto points) is in the process of making my head spin.
Yahoo! rotisserie standings are still the traditional "updated through yesterday," which I find sufficient (will that still be true once ESPN spoils me and once sample sizes are big enough to avoid spinning heads?), but in particular the "Overall Standings - Distance from competition" widget is very nifty.
Also, I like the drag-and-drop Yahoo! roster management, though it wasn't obvious to me the first time that I needed to click the "Submit" button for the changes to take.
Bottom line: for fantasy baseball, ESPN has some potent features but is still a bit buggy. Yahoo! also has some really nifty one-of-a-kind features, with (in my opinion) still slightly better UI and also a seemingly more reliable infrastructure.
The new features from Yahoo! are a good sign because they're in a position where the biggest mistake they could make would be to get complacent as the "gold standard" and let competitors out-feature them. (Coincidentally, the biggest mistake competitors could make is to roll out new features too quickly for the support to be reliable.)
My working theory, which I'm 95% sure is correct: So that they'd have no problem getting Jon Miller flown back from the Sunday night St. Louis play-by-play.
Miller did some pre-game pageantry (related to past Giant all-stars, tying in with the 2007 ASG being in SF), apparently wearing a tux on the field, with his words simultaneously on the PA and over the radio waves.
They also did a very clever thing to guarantee that Barry Bonds would not be booed* in the pre-game ceremony: They paired Bonds with Willie Mays so that the two could be introduced simultaneously (Mays being mentioned by name two seconds ahead of Barry).
*- Barry's reception at the Giants' Thursday exhibition game (their first of the year in SF): 80% cheers, 20% boos. I presume that on the road it's consistently a cavalcade of boos.
(Actually "infinity plus two" people.)
1. Steve Lyons
2. Charley Steiner
3. anyone who isn't Vin Scully
That does result in double-counting Steve Lyons and Charley Steiner, but I'm comfortable counting them twice each. Timing any future Dodger games to hear Scully (and only Scully) may take some strategery.
More MLB TV/radio leftovers: Who or what is the Cubs' primary TV outlet this year? (I imagine it's no longer WGN but what do I know?) I actually do know from web research who the Cubs' lead TV play-by-play guy supposedly is. Believe me, you've never heard of him. Pat Hughes and Ron Santo both still seem to be around for radio. I've heard enough of them in my lifetime.
Surprisingly many MLB TV/radio broadcasters came to their current Major League job from the PawSox.
Broadcasters who I don't know apparently aren't in the habit of mentioning their own full names much. Anything in italics below is straight from an URL like http://mlb.mlb.com/team/broadcasters.jsp?c_id=min (replace "min" with the appropriate abbreviation)
ATL @ PHI: Braves (Skip Caray & Pete Van Wieren) from 4th inning to end of game.
TOR @ DET: Tigers (Dan Dickerson & Jim Price?) for the 10th inning only
BOS @ KC: Red Sox (Joe Castiglione & Dave O'Brien?) from bottom 1st to when it became a laugher (7th inning stretch?)
ARI @ COL: Rockies (Jeff Kingery & Jack Corrigan) from the 6th to the end.
OAK @ SEA: A's (Ken Korach, Vince Cotroneo) from the 4th to the end.
Then for some reason the Pirates audio wouldn't load, but:
BAL @ MIN: Twins (John Gordon & Dan Gladden?) from the top of the 6th to likely the end the pitching change from Reyes to Crain.
PIT @ HOU: Pirates (Lanny Frattare & John Wehner?) from the top of the 10th to (I assume) the bitter end. It would appear that my brief problem trying to load Pirate audio (and also my persistent disdain for Milo Hamilton) caused me to hose myself out of hearing yet another of Brad Lidge's finest moments.
UPDATE: But I did catch Jason Bay's HR! I sure hope this is one of those stations that plays the play-by-play calls of the highlight plays in its broadcast wrap-up.
I also need to check Laurence Simon to see if he's had running commentary, for the Schadenfreude. His man Chad Qualls gave up the go-ahead HR. By extension, "my" (some team or other... two teams even?!) man Chad Qualls got two runs charged to him.
Forget about the Crosby error: Seattle would have found a way to score at some point today. But Felix Hernandez is just on.
Felix is to the deceptively disheartening 2007 A's opener as the juggernaut Yankee offense is to the deceptively disheartening 2006 A's opener. Some games you're just not going to win.
Geez, 11 strikeouts in 97 pitches.
Jeff Kingery (Colorado Rockies' radio color man), when you describe the 51,000 (and change) tickets distributed for today's Opening Day as "a Rockies' record," I think you mean a Coors Field record.
Mile High routinely seated well over 70K for baseball.
UPDATE: On the Rockies' flagship station they just played an ad for Budweiser with the tag line "Anheuser Busch, Ft. Collins, Colorado". (See what they did there?)
Sticking with the Rockies thread, my latest object of fantasy baseball fretting is Willy Taveras. I have a team where Taveras will make a bigger difference than anyone else as to how I do in that league (chiefly because he's going to lead that team in steals by a wide margin).
Okay, so if you had the crappy ballplayer equivalent of an environmental disaster, would you call in the Kaz-Mat team to deal with it?
"Schilling pitches to Shealy" is almost but not quite as hard to listen to as the Phillies team with Rollins and Rowand (thank goodness they don't still have Rolen).
UPDATE: I would not have guessed Deval Patrick's voice sounded like that.
Skip seems pretty sympathetic to Brett Myers on that whole "punched his wife in public" incident, to the point of using inappropriate passive voice to describe the series of events (as something that "happened to him" rather than something "he did").
The Baseball Prospectus 2007 blurb on Myers was a bit too sanctimonious for my taste: Myers isn't necessarily a bad human being, but he did do a rotten thing that nobody should ever do.
As already mentioned here several months ago, someone like Myers is a good test of why you play fantasy baseball (and how it affects players' right of publicity): The incident itself doesn't make me any less happy to "own" Myers['s stats], though it does make me twitch a bit.
(And right as I typed this Myers blew his own victory.)
I work with a first-time fantasy baseball owner and just heard all about his picking Carl Pavano up from free agency, hoping Jeff Kent does well despite his being a Dodger, Barry Bonds, etc.
The question came up "How do you handle it?" (Avoiding obsession, that is.) My wife also asked me how I can possibly run seven teams. In both cases it comes down to just looking at the box scores the next day if that's all you have time to do.
But I'm not one to talk: So far today I've composed (in my head) a Randy Newman-style ditty about Brian McCann, felt smug that Miguel Cabrera also went deep, fretted that Kelly Johnson's dropping a pop fly will end the experiment of playing him at 2B before he's been there long enough to qualify, grimaced that John Patterson got shelled, and something or other about Elijah Dukes (who isn't even on any of my teams and probably won't be any time soon).
(Even though the one I'm making fun of got an RBI double as I typed the subject line.)
Miguel Cabrera
David Wright
Chipper Jones
Ryan Zimmerman
Wes Helms
"There's a lot of room in left center, if he hits one there we can dance in the street."
The next few words of that call are now quasi-legendary but I'd never heard the lead-in until a random commercial for a utility company. Give as much as you can of the next few words of that call.
"Down the middle for a ball. One ball, no strikes, Ed Montague strikes again." --Skip Caray
(N.B. a Brave was batting at the time (albeit John Smoltz), so this wasn't even homerism.)
As Skip ages he sounds a bit like old-time Garrison Keillor to me. Speaking of which, rest in peace Herb Carneal. I first knew of Carneal through a song Keillor performed on A Prairie Home Companion that included a clip of Carneal narrating a base hit by Gary Gaetti (as an example of a generic Twins baseball play).
Harry Caray often railed against the "fake to third, throw to first" pickoff move because it never worked. (At least, almost never.)
Tonight Joe Morgan railed against it because he thinks it's a balk, because it's too deceptive.
The irony here is that if my life depended on either Harry Caray or Joe Morgan taking an IQ test, I'd go with Morgan every time (even stipulating that Caray was still alive and hadn't had his stroke). But just now an idiot baserunner fell for one of the oldest plays in baseball, yet Joe Morgan did the exact opposite of calling him out on it.
I acquired Paul Konerko for C.C. Sabathia.
(18-team head-to-head league, "sabermetric 5x5" categories. On my side I like the marginal gain of Konerko over Scott Hatteberg better than the marginal loss of Sabathia from a pitching staff that also had Jake Peavy, Dice-K, and Pedro on the DL. I know the league has a hard limit of eight SP on your roster (not counting DL). I don't think it has an innings pitched max (if it did this trade would be a steal for me).)
For any trade so soon after the draft, the obvious question: Konerko was a late 3rd-rounder, Sabathia an early 5th. My best guess is someone got skittish about Konerko losing RBIs to the White Sox' bizarre fascination with stiff OBP-less outfielders at the top of the lineup.
UPDATE: If you want to quibble with the subject line, I traded Alex Rios for John Danks at a mid-February keeper deadline (it mattered that the rookie Danks wouldn't count against a 13-player limit but Rios would), and a couple weeks ago I traded a May draft pick for Jerome Williams [in 2006 the analogous draft pick became Wandy Rodriguez, after his hot start but before he remembered he was Wandy Rodriguez; then again, ironically, my 2006 AL Scoresheet team used the analogous pick on Alex Rios].
Mark your calendars. Thursday, April 5, 13:00 CDT, Matsusaka vs. Greinke. Given that teams start their best pitcher on Opening Day, and on down the pecking order, this the first time in a long while that we had a pitching match so good (and so interesting!) in teams' third game of the season.
(True, the subject line doesn't quite capture Zack's surname. More like "Greinke and the Brain" or "Inky, Pinky, Greinke, and Clyde," but even if it's slightly inaccurate "Green-K" has a nice ring to it.)
2007 Opening Day match-ups that are the same as 2006:
Chicago Cubs at Cincinnati
Cleveland at Chicago White Sox
Arizona at Colorado
The only "mirror image" is San Diego at San Francisco (a year after San Francisco at San Diego). I guess I'd have expected fewer "same as last year" and more "exact opposite of last year."
Repeat opening day starters from those matchups:
Carlos Zambrano vs. Aaron Harang; C.C Sabathia for Cleveland (Contreras replaces Buehrle for CHW); Brandon Webb for Arizona (Aaron Cook replaces Jennings for COL); Jake Peavy for San Diego (Barry Zito replaces Jason Schmidt).
Now that I have six fully rostered fantasy baseball teams (and now that the only one still to draft is a "suck" league), here are the players I acquired over and over again (based on rosters as of right now, since I've already made a couple transactions):
4 teams
Kelly Johnson (2B-ATL)
Brian Giles (OF-SD)
3 teams
Anthony Reyes (SP-STL)
Orlando Hudson (2B-ARI)
Josh Willingham (OF-FLA)
2 teams
Zach Duke (SP-PIT)
Tom Gorzelanny (SP-PIT)
Zack Greinke (SP-KC)
Jason Jennings (SP-HOU)
Brett Myers (SP-PHI)
Scott Olsen (SP-FLA)
C.C. Sabathia (SP-CLE)
Justin Verlander (SP-DET)
Jonathan Broxton (RP-LAD)
Chad Qualls (RP-HOU)
Joel Zumaya (RP-DET)
Josh Bard (C-SD)
Brian McCann (C-ATL)
Dan Johnson (1B-OAK)
James Loney (1B-LAD)
Ryan Freel (2B/OF-CIN)
Adrian Beltre (3B-SEA)
Troy Tulowitzki (SS-COL)
Corey Hart (OF-MIL)
Hunter Pence (OF-HOU)
Terrmel Sledge (OF-SD)
Chris B. Young (OF-ARI)
I'm still new at this auction thing. 8-team NL only, $260 budgets, standard rotisserie roster sizes (14 hitters, 9 pitchers, 7 reserve), "sabermetric 5x5" categories.
My roster follows (sorted by salary). I left $8 on the table because I'm silly that way.
El Diablo con Dinero
World Series of Fantasy
Matt Holliday $30
Todd Helton $21
Prince Fielder $20
Chipper Jones $15
Ryan Zimmerman $15
Brian Giles $14
Willy Taveras $13
Stephen Drew $13
Mike Cameron $12
Anthony Reyes $12
Brett Myers $11
Scott Olsen $11
Troy Tulowitzki $10
Orlando Hudson $10
Brad Penny $9
Josh Willingham $8
Jose Valverde $7
Josh Bard $6
Tim Lincecum $4
Ronny Paulino $3
Jonathan Broxton $3
Ted Lilly $3
Tom Gorzelanny $2
--
Khalil Greene $0
Jeremy Hermida $0
Scott Thorman $0
Matt Morris $0
John Rodriguez $0
Ricky Nolasco $0
Hunter Pence $0
http://www.bat-girl.com/archives/001814.php
If you read Deadspin Baseball Think Factory then you already know Ben Hendrickson's dad got banned from a Brewers' fan site for sending obscene private messages to other members.
On the opposite end of the spectrum (for all I know), a couple years ago I had my Baseball Prospectus annual on a plane flight (since Julia wasn't on the same flight this couldn't have been too recent). The guy next to me turned out to have a son in the Twins' organization, named J.D. Durbin. I let him borrow my BP and he read about his son and other Minnesota farmhands.
I decided I'd draft Durbin in the July supplemental rounds of my AL Scoresheet league -- only to be beaten to it by another guy in the league.
(Blog post convergence: That same guy now has a ridiculous amount of pitching depth but no position player depth whatsoever. I know this because he has C.C. Sabathia, while I have both Jeremy Sowers and Fausto Carmona. I was going to swoop in and offer him a trade that he'd be desperate enough to take, until I saw that ridiculous depth.)
Line drives off the wrist are just variance, but maybe a thinner man could have gotten out of the way.
This is Jane Eyre: You may already be familiar with her.
This is how Jane Eyre runs for president, according to a McSweeneys parody.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write the fictionalized autobiography of Scott Eyre, in the style of Jane. Perhaps consider Dusty Baker as Edward Rochester, with Barry Bonds as the hidden maniac? Maybe that's too flight of fancy.
When Black yesterday penciled Heath Bell into his bullpen for Opening Day, Bell shrugged. “I could have told you that 40 days ago,” Bell said. “I was on the team.”
Bell considered it a fait accompli once the Padres acquired him from the Mets last November.
“San Diego wanted me. New York didn't want me,” Bell said. “It's plain and simple – if you want me, I'm pretty much on the team. I could have (messed) it up. But I'm not going to (mess) it up.”
Now that's just tempting fate.
(The quote is from the bottom of this article, the top part of which is even better.)
Just as some fans think Kevin Oden (or J.D. Drew) shows too little emotion, others think Sammy Sosa shows too much.
OK, if seeing exactly the right level of emotional reaction (not too little, not too much) is what you require to be maximally entertained, go with whatever floats your boat. Sports teams do need large quantities of people to buy tickets, buy memorabilia, and so on.
Just don't make any assumptions about whether these things have jack to do with a team's propensity to win or lose.
As mentioned a post below, 18-team, 25-round draft this afternoon: Taylor Tankersley round 15, Kevin Gregg round 22, Henry Owens round 23 by me, and Matt Lindstrom undrafted.
Yesterday in DownWith (14 teams): Taylor Tankersley round 10, Kevin Gregg round 22 by me, Henry Owens round 24, Matt Lindstrom undrafted.
I have no idea off-hand who led the Marlins in saves in 2006. Let me look it up... It says here Joe Borowski, who since moved on to Cleveland. (Sorry, for a FLB fanatic, I'm not much of a sCrappy closer buff. I go more for the Joel Zumaya "his stuff's good enough to close, maybe he'll get to someday, maybe not" type.)
Oh, while we're here, Armando Benitez...
DownWith round 16, ESPN round 14, Enjoy! (12-team league with 15 starting hitters per team) round 22 by me.
Enjoy! is the latest draft-by-server league, where the same people keep going over the 12-hour time limit and everyone else kvetches at them. I'd been so good about my own queue until we reached the point where I was going to have to rank relievers. At some point yesterday evening I had a pick coming up, with Greg Maddux and Kelly Johnson in my queue. Flash forward to 3 p.m. this afternoon: A round-and-a-half later, I'd gotten Johnson, Maddux was gone, and it had been my pick for 14 hours. By rule, if Matt L. had made it to his computer in the "extra time," I'd have been stuck with the highest available player by Yahoo! Rank (who, for all I know, may actually have been Armando Benitez). But regardless of who I picked that round, I've spent the rest of today just embarrassed that it was me who brought the draft to a screeching halt.
Dmitri Young, eh?
(No, I did not draft Dmitri Young.)
My first redraft (i.e. no keepers at all) league this year. 18 teams*, 25 rounds, head-to-head league with the "sabermetric 5x5" categories (OBP, TB, R, RBI, SB; Wins, Saves, ERA, WHIP, K)
*- We actually have two divisions, one with all the "serious" owners and one for the more casual types. Unbalanced schedule but we do face all but two of the other division.
See if you can spot the recurring Guys I Like More Than Anyone Else Does.
Picks below are #6, #31, #42, #67, etc. Lineup is C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF, OF, Util; max of eight pitchers who qualify as a SP. (Which really messes up the Marlins' closer mix#...)
1. Miguel Cabrera
2. Hanley Ramirez
3. Jake Peavy
4. Daisuke Matsuzaka
5. C.C. Sabathia
6. Brian Giles
7. Chris B. Young
8. Frank Thomas
9. Josh Willingham
10. Joel Zumaya
11. Orlando Hudson
12. Corey Hart
13. Kelly Johnson
14. Chris Iannetta
15. Dan Johnson
16. Anthony Reyes
17. Gregg Zaun
18. Scott Hatteberg
19. Jason Jennings
20. Zach Duke
21. Mike Sweeney**
22. Pedro Martinez***
23. Henry Owens#
24. Chad Qualls
25. Jarrod Washburn
**- [Future] Open Roster Spot #1: My only autopick of the draft, the one time the connection went down. What stinks is that, like Thomas, Sweeney qualifies only at DH, so he's distinctly useless to me. I plan to drop him for whoever I get on waivers.
***- Open Roster Spot #2: NOT an autopick. I've already moved him to the DL so technically I'm a player short until waivers get processed Wednesday morning.
#- Taylor Tankersley round 15, Kevin Gregg round 22, Henry Owens round 23 by me, and Matt Lindstrom undrafted.
Nate 51 (possibly 59)
Matt 35
John 34 (possibly 42)
John has Ohio State and Georgetown, Nate has Florida and UCLA, so each has a lock on a championship game spot (and I already credited the six points for each semifinal victory).
Speaking of such things: here's a completed roto draft, two completed Scoresheet drafts, and a mostly-complete head-to-head draft.
Boxcar Saturn Margo
Down With Geniuses
14-team keeper league, sabermetric 5x5, 9 starting hitters, 7 pitcher spots (3 must be SP), daily transactions
(by the way, in light of the recent TLR DUI, this was a prescient choice of league name)
The picks you see below are 3rd, 26th, 31st, 54th, etc., kept players bold, likely starters regular, likely bench players italic.
1. David Ortiz
2. Miguel Tejada
3. Joe Nathan
4. Brandon Webb
5. Alex Gordon
6. C.C. Sabathia
7. Orlando Hudson
8. Ryan Freel
9. Brian Giles
10. Felix Hernandez
11. Corey Hart
12. Kevin Youkilis
13. Adrian Beltre
14. Jonathan Broxton
15. Pat Neshek
16. Brian McCann
17. Justin Verlander
18. Curtis Granderson
19. Kelly Johnson
20. Brandon McCarthy
21. Ryan Shealy
22. Kevin Gregg
23. Scott Olsen
24. James Shields
Biggest potential regrets: Shields over Hunter Pence in r24 (low round = good keeper value) after an agonizing decision (Pence went undrafted, so anyone who picks him up as a FA would have to spent a R13 to keep him in 2008); overdrafting Orlando Hudson, only to see Ray Durham go a billion rounds later; taking Corey Hart two rounds before Chris B. Young went.
I still like my team a lot, especially given the 25% chance Gregg closes.
Harvesters of Sorrow
NL Costanza
12-team NL only Scoresheet (simulation)
Matt Cain
Dan Haren (crossover)
Brett Myers
Jason Jennings
Zach Duke
Tom Gorzelanny
Jeff Francis
Jim Thome (crossover)
Rickie Weeks
Edwin Encarnacion
Troy Tulowitzki
Josh Willingham
Carlos Beltran
14. Randy Johnson
15. Kelly Johnson
16. Josh Bard
17. James Loney
18. Omar Vizquel
19. Aaron Rowand
20. Ryan Doumit
(I'd traded away my R21 pick)
22. Ryan Freel
23. Jeff Baker
24. Kevin Gregg
25. Heath Bell
26. Angel Villalona
27. Royce Ring
28. Ryan Wagner
29. Terrmel Sledge
30. Rob Bowen (don't usually see third-string catchers in fantasy baseball, eh?)
31. Justin Upton
32. Andrew McCutchen
33. Hunter Pence
(I acquired someone else's R33) Jerome Williams
34. Clayton Kershaw
35. Homer Bailey
PROBABLE STARTING LINEUP (slash = platoon)
1. Rickie Weeks 2B
2. (Kelly Johnson or Terrmel Sledge) OF / Josh Willingham "1B"
3. Carlos Beltran CF
4. Josh Willingham OF / Edwin Encarnacion 3B
5. Jim Thome 1B / Aaron Rowand OF
6. Edwin Encarnacion 3B / Jeff Baker OF
7. Josh Bard C / Ryan Doumit C
8. Troy Tulowitzki SS
PH. (Sledge or Johnson) / Ryan Freel
Bench: Vizquel, Pence, Bowen, other sides of platoons
(That's five slashes but only three platoons: note Willingham and Encarnacion moving up against LHP)
SP1-5: Cain, Haren, Myers, Jennings, Duke
Swing/Long: Randy Johnson, Francis, Gorzelanny, Williams
Middle/Short: Gregg, Bell, Ring, Wagner
Taxi Squad: Bailey, Kershaw, Upton, McCutchen, Villalona
Masters of Puppets
AL Vandalay
10-team AL only Scoresheet (simulation)
Justin Verlander
Andy Pettitte
Kevin Millwood
Jake Westbrook
Jeremy Sowers
Francisco Rodriguez
Joel Zumaya
Kenji Johjima
Travis Hafner
Robinson Cano
Adrian Beltre
Michael Young
Carlos Lee (crossover)
14. Jon Garland
15. Raul Ibanez
16. Adam Lind
17. Dan Johnson
18. Corey Patterson
19. Mark Ellis
20. Zack Greinke
21. Fausto Carmona
22. Jason Michaels
23. Melky Cabrera
24. Mike Sweeney
25. Dennys Reyes
26. Carlos Silva
27. Sammy Sosa!
28. Kelly Shoppach
29. Royce Clayton
30. Jeremy Reed
31. Billy Butler
32. Brandon Wood
33. Josh Fields
34. John Danks
35. Tom Diamond
PROBABLE STARTING LINEUP (slash = platoon)
1. Robinson Cano 2B / Jason Michaels CF
2. Michael Young SS
3. Travis Hafner DH / Adrian Beltre 3B
4. Carlos Lee OF
5. Raul Ibanez OF / Travis Hafner DH
6. Dan Johnson 1B / Mike Sweeney 1B
7. Adrian Beltre 3B / Sammy Sosa OF
8. Kenji Johjima C
9. Corey Patterson CF / Mark Ellis 2B
PH. Melky
Bench: Clayton (ugh!), Shoppach, other sides of platoons
(That's six slashes but only four platoons: note Beltre moving way up against LHP and Hafner moving down)
SP1-5: Verlander, Pettitte, Millwood, Westbrook, Garland
Swing/Long: Sowers, Carmona, Greinke, Danks, Silva
Middle/Short: K-Rod, Zumaya, Reyes
Taxi Squad: Diamond, Butler, Wood, Fields, Lind
Alamed Islanders
Enjoy!
12-team head-to-head keeper league with 14 categories (including all three hitter rate stats) and 15 starting offensive positions. 22 active slots, 6 bench slots. Through round 20 all of my active slots are filled except the two dedicated "RP." Many of my last eight picks will be relievers
Brian McCann
Paul Konerko
Derrek Lee
Justin Morneau
David Wright
Derek Jeter
Carl Crawford
Carlos Zambrano
9. Barry Bonds
10. Chris B. Young
11. Todd Helton
12. Ray Durham
13. J.D. Drew
14. Brian Giles
15. Josh Willingham
16. Anthony Reyes
17. Kelvim Escobar
18. Jhonny Peralta
19. Ian Snell
20. John Patterson
When Barry Bonds went in round 8 of a fantasy baseball draft this morning, commish chatted "Wow! I didn't expect that!" Apparently he perceived the guy who drafted Bonds as someone least likely to draft someone with "character issues."
My chat comment of "UBBIA" was ignored, and I just now learned from Googling that the U actually stands for "unsolicited" rather than "unexpected."
Anyhow, if you don't mind mixing Fark cliches with Deadspin, here's some actual UBBIA.
Nate 37
Matt 35
John 20
Tonight:
#1 Florida (Nate) over #5 Butler (John)
#2 Georgetown (John) over #6 Vanderbilt (Matt)
#3 Oregon (Nate) over #7 UNLV (Matt)
#1 North Carolina (Matt) over #5 USC (Matt)
PPF: Matt 65, Nate 57, John 42
Saturday:
#1 Kansas (Matt) vs. #2 UCLA (Nate)
#1 Ohio State (John) vs #2 Memphis (Matt)
Sunday:
#1 North Carolina (Matt) vs. #2 Georgetown (John)
#1 Florida (Nate) vs. #3 Oregon (Nate)
One championship berth is Kansas (Matt) else Nate; the other is guaranteed to be John or Matt.
Matt 32
Nate 31
John 17
PPF: Matt 75, Nate 57, John 55
Tonight:
#1 Kansas (Matt) over #4 Southern Illinois (Nate)
#2 Memphis (Matt) over #3 Texas A&M (Nate)
#1 Ohio State (John) over #5 Tennessee (John)
#2 UCLA (Nate) over #3 Pitt (Nate)
Tomorrow:
#1 Florida (Nate) vs. #5 Butler (John)
#2 Georgetown (John) vs. #6 Vanderbilt (Matt)
#3 Oregon (Nate) vs. #7 UNLV (Matt)
#1 North Carolina (Matt) vs. #5 USC (Matt)
Saturday:
#2 UCLA (Nate) vs. #1 Kansas (Matt)
#2 Memphis (Matt) vs. #1 Ohio State (John)
Sunday:
(Florida or Butler) (Nate or John) vs. (Oregon or UNLV) (Nate or Matt)
(North Carolina or USC) (Matt) vs. (Georgetown or Vanderbilt) (John or Matt)
So, who do I like this year?
It's hard to give that question a useful answer. As this column should remind you, Albert Pujols and Johan Santana will both be pretty good this year. Who knew? And everyone expects Alex Gordon to be the top American-born AL rookie, with Daisuke Matsuzaka as the top actual rookie.
(Should Dice-K be treated as a rookie? Of course he should. But enough people draw the distinction that I'll acknowledge the sentiment.)
The conventional wisdom is pretty well established. When people ask "who do you like?" they tend to mean "who do you like more than other people like?"
Last year after a plethora of fantasy baseball drafts had concluded, I combined my rosters to see which players I'd drafted to multiple teams. Those were, you can assume, the players I liked most relative to my league mates' assessment.
The two players who came out on top were Brian McCann and Justin Verlander. I seem to have been "right" about them both. (That said, rookies in general did so well in 2006 that anyone who overvalues rookies would seem, on the surface, to have picked well in 2006. I probably overvalue rookies, yet I predict I don't end up with either Dice-K or Alex Gordon in any league.)
This year? I've kept Matt Cain, Justin Verlander, and Brian McCann two different places (each). This tells you nothing other than that the price was right in each context. Three drafts will be done by this weekend, though, and the last of the web-based drafts has an ETA of about a week from today. I'll tell you then who I ended up with everywhere.
UPDATE: Holy schmidt the league using Google Spreadsheet is going fast. Each year we try to sneak a few picks in before the actual live date. Usually this involves an e-mail thread and maybe half of the first round. This year (first time using Google Docs) it's already halfway through round 2. Oh, I got Papi in that league. Last time I had Papi in a fantasy league, Tom Kelly was the bane of his existence.
I have two comments about the most recent e-mail sent by sfgiants.com to everyone on their mailing list:
TRIO OF GIANTS TAKE AIM AT LAST OPEN SPOT
Life on the proverbial "bubble," that state of purgatory
between making the Opening Day roster and being released
or waived, combines the certain and uncertain.
Players in this state have no idea what their immediate future
holds. All they know is that they must continue to play hard
-- and well.
Mark Sweeney, Jason Ellison and Lance Niekro are the Giants
currently caught in roster limbo. Only one of them will make
the team as a reserve if the Giants begin the season with a
12-man pitching staff, and assuming that catcher Eliezer
Alfonzo, utilityman Kevin Frandsen, first baseman-outfielder
Ryan Klesko and outfielder Todd Linden already have secured
spots on the bench.
1. When did 12 pitchers become the default assumption for a Major League roster? As of the late 1980s and early '90s I distinctly remember most teams carried 10. A significant minority did go to 11, but 12 was unheard-of at the time. Now it's the norm? This is not your usual old fogey complaint about the decline of the complete game: I have no problem with judicious use of a scarce resource (pitcher health), but I do think that pitching changes have gotten out of hand. I'm also dead certain that carrying two of the three men mentioned would help the Giants more than carrying one of them plus their 12th best pitcher.
2. If you were one of the three guys mentioned, would it feel weird to you that your own job insecurity was part of your employer's marketing campaign? Can you think of any other... never mind, the key concept is "entertainment industry" and blah blah Survivor.
Full fantasy baseball disclosure: I have seven(!) fantasy teams, counting the resurrection of the "suck" league. Three haven't drafted yet, one is just getting the draft under way (aside from each team's keepers), one is AL only, and one is about 2/3 of the way through drafting. Thus far I have Matt Cain in two leagues (as a keeper both places); Barry Bonds and Ray Durham in another. None of the Giants fighting for roster spots factor into my strategy.
If I have my scandal time lines straight, nobody thinks Barry Bonds had any association with steroids until 1999 or so. (The theory is he saw the McGwire-Sosa home run chase and got jealous.)
But a temporary glitch on the Baseball Prospectus web site gave me a chance to reread this article about media treatment of Bonds -- published in October 1997.
(If you're not a subscriber you might not see the whole thing in the link, but I'm dead certain BP didn't go to a subscriber model until several years after this was first published.)
October 23, 1997
The Sun Glinted Off His Jewelry as He Homered to Win the Game...
Sportswriters and Barry Bonds just don't mix
by Gregg Pearlman
Gregg Pearlman returns with a look at the frustrating relationship some sportswriters seem to have with San Francisco Giants all-world OF Barry Bonds. You can read more of Gregg's work at the Official San Francisco Giant Fan House Of Pain: EEEEEE!.
Sportswriters hate Barry Bonds. They point to his surliness, unfriendliness, and arrogance, and, not knowing Bonds ourselves, we take their word for it. These things are convenient excuses, though, and make Bonds an easy target, but I think the real reason for the hatred is simply his staggeringly huge paychecks.
For instance, in an August 28 column about Bonds' tendency toward self-criticism, Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, "'It's just frustrating, that's all,' said Bonds as he idly fingered a couple of $100 bills." There's no other reference to money or Bonds' salary -- Jenkins may as well have said that Bonds "idly fingered a couple of squirrels" -- but that sentence typifies the general nastiness.
Three prizewinners exemplify more specific hatred. One is a May 23 column by Bob Smizik of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that looks like it was written by someone who's angry about Bonds leaving the Pirates and knows he can use his column to retaliate. Smizik says, "Barry Bonds unquestionably is a very good player, but he's far from the best player in the game." ("Far from," "Damn near": it's a fine line.) He asserts that Bonds is "only in left field for reasons of ego. He should be in center field, where he began his career." ("Larry Walker should use that wonderful arm on the mound, where it's needed.") He declares that Bonds is "a speed and power guy, but he trots to first base." ("Brilliant surgeon, but ugly socks.") And here's the cherry on top: "Consequently, he doesn't get as many triples as he should be getting, which dictates to me that he's not much of a team player and doesn't get the most out of his ability." (Ah. Team players hit triples. I see.)
Smizik maintains that Bonds is "aloof... and he openly criticizes his teammates." But on almost the same day, Tim Keown of the Chronicle actually produced quotes -- in other words, he chose to be accountable -- in a column calling Bonds selfless, well-liked by his teammates ("for the first time"), and "just one of the guys."
Smizik insists that giving interviews cordially is "part of [Bonds'] job." (Presumed job description: "Position -- Left fielder. Salary -- $11 million. Duties -- hit baseballs; catch baseballs; throw baseballs; be nice to the media.") Smizik's job depends partly on Bonds' cooperation, but that cooperation isn't implicit; we know this because teams sometimes boot the writers out of the clubhouse.
Smizik also demands that superstars be "credible with the media" (Certain words come to mind: pot... kettle....) and "accessible to the fans." He says that Bonds "should be a hero in Pittsburgh for what he did, but the fans haven't forgiven him for all the things he did."
Like leaving. Smizik specifies no other offenses.
Lowell Cohn of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat gores Bonds in a post-elimination column: "What you remember is Barry Bonds standing there in the bottom of the sixth, his bat on his shoulder as the plate umpire rings him up. Strike three. You're out of here." So if Bonds weren't a congenital choker, the Giants would've hammered Florida, right? (Ask the Braves.)
"Bonds just stands there," Cohn says. "You think of a deer caught in the headlights. You think of all the money they pay him for big moments like this. You think of all his swagger. At least take a swing. Foul the ball off. Miss it, if it comes to that. But, for goodness sake, try.
"He does nothing. It is the quintessential moment of failure...." Quintessential. Clearly writing this article gave Cohn unparalleled pleasure.
No one did much for the Giants in the Division Series. Roberto Hernandez surrendered the winning hit in Games One and Two, but he elicits sympathy for his "misfortune" of being on the mound when that happened. Is he a choker? Nah -- these things happen. But Bonds is.
Cohn eventually outdoes himself: "And then the game is over and the Giants are eliminated, and Bonds is sitting at his locker. The picture of grief.... And he's crying. Such sadness. Such mourning."
So Barry's just a big fat sissy. Or is it a put-on? It can't be genuine; Bonds can't just be upset that he and his team didn't succeed.
Columnist R.E. Graswich of the Sacramento Bee offered this theory on September 5: "There is one big reason why the Giants will finish second behind the Los Angeles Dodgers this baseball season. His name is Barry Bonds, and he just can't help himself, or anyone else.
"Bonds embodies much of what's wrong with professional sports. He found an owner willing to pay lots of money, and that's great. But Bonds sees no reason to go out and actually earn the dough."
So why was Bonds so critical of his performance earlier in the year? ("I suck!")
Graswich says, "With the pennant race heading to the wire between the Giants and Dodgers, Bonds has already begun to fold his tent and evaporate." "The Houdini act is slick and sophisticated, practiced to perfection."
Yeah. Bonds practices failing.
Bonds just won a Silver Slugger award. His 1997 OPS w
