Joe Girardi's Mismanagement of the Yankees Bullpen

Just when I thought I knew what was wrong with Chien-Ming Wang, suddenly it no longer matters. Whether the problem before was is slider failing to slide or his sinker failing to sink, the real problem now is his anything doing anything, or rather the lack thereof.

Wang was put on the DL this past weekend after leaving a start early with tightness in his shoulder, which turned out to be a shoulder strain and bursitis, keeping him out for at least two weeks, maybe longer. The really bad news here, for those of you who may not know, is that Wang is no stranger to shoulder problems. According to Baseball Prospectus, he had, "...shoulder surgery in 2001, and recurring shoulder problems in 2003 and 2005." Here's hoping that this is not a recurrence of the same, but I'm fearing the worst.



Of course, even before Wang was hurt, he was lousy. Granted, his ERA had dropped by over 60% since coming off the DL (with a hip injury) in May, but when you can allow four runs in 5.1 innings of work and your ERA drops by almost half a run, well, I'd say you've been pretty awful.

But in spite of that, there was reason to be hopeful, as Wang had thrown more pitches and more innings, was getting "stretched out" and looking like he might be back to his normal self some time soon. And then the other cleat dropped.

So now the Yankees are left with a conundrum: Who starts Thursday?

The answer, it turns out, is a strange one: Alfredo Aceves.

Aceves has been a crucial part of the Yankees' bullpen this season, vulturing five wins and posting a 2.02 ERA in 40 innings of work, with impressive K/W rates. Most recently he pitched four innings of near-perfect ball against the Blue Jays, who would probably be a first place team id they played anywhere but here.



That outing, however, was only 43 pitches, which is about as many as he's thrown in any outing in the last two months, though he's capable of more. In AAA in April he threw 80+ pitches four times, topping out at 91. But he's thrown more than 50 pitches only once since getting called up in early May, and that was in his first game. Accordingly, the Yankees have set a 65-pitch count limit for him today, which, if we're lucky, will get us into the 4th inning.

This, of course, severely taxes the bullpen, which will inevitably be called upon to pitch at least four or five innings tonight, maybe more if Aceves gets knocked around. It makes you wonder why, when they put Wang on the DL last week, they called up Jonathan Albaladejo, a reliever (and one of the Spelling Bee All-Stars!) instead of another starter.

It's not as though they don't have any other starters at AAA. Take a look at the three-year record of this guy, for example:

 W   L   ERA   IP   H   HR  BB   SO
26  13  3.56  316  299  39  83  255

A solid winning record, decent hit, strikeout and walk rates, allows a homer only once per eight innings...not bad right? And consistency, too. His ERAs over the last three seasons: 3.69, 3.45, 3.65, all at AAA. So why isn't he getting the shot today? Is he hurt? Is he old? Has he been lousy of late?

Nope. It's worse than that: He's Kei Igawa.

Yep, he of the $26 million posting fee and $20 million contract, the Yankees' answer to Daisuke Matsuzaka, with a 2-4 record in MLB and a 6.66 ERA.



Igawa probably could be a decent #4 starter in the majors if they'd give him a chance, but his signing and subsequent career have been a public relations disaster. So much so, that the Yankees seem to feel it's better to leave him in the International League during what will probably turn out to be his best years, effectively paying nine million dollars a year for a player in AAA, than to bring him up. Why chance another meltdown, another 4-inning, 6-run outing, another chorus of boos and round of newspaper stories about what an awful idea it was to sign him? I don't agree with that, but the facts seem to speak for themselves.

Ian Kennedy is hurt. So is George Kontos. Josh Towers is 32 and his fastball wouldn't impress Jamie Moyer. Sergio Mitre has done well as a starter in Scranton and has some major league experience, but his major league record (10-23, 5.36) is fairly unimpressive. Jason Johnson is 35 and continues to be, well, Jason Johnson. Nobody else particularly stands out.

Except...

What about Phil Hughes? Shouldn't Hughes be the obvious choice to replace Wang in the rotation? He's supposed to be the Yankees' best prospect, their blue-chip young pitcher, the reason they didn't trade for Johan Santana two winters ago, right? So why is he still in the bullpen while a free agent they picked up from the Mexican League starts tonight?



Because Joe Girardi screwed up. That's why.

Hughes had started the year in AAA and did well enough to get called up at the end of April, when Wang went on the DL the first time. His results at the major league level were mixed, only lasting more than five innings twice in seven starts and compiling a 5.45 ERA. So, even though he'd been better of late, he was the logical choice to return to the bullpen when Wang returned from the DL.

At the time, most of us assumed that Hughes would pitch long relief, keeping himself ready for a potential return to the rotation in case Wang or another starter faltered. It's not like the Yankees' rotation is a bastion of health and consistency.

Joba Chamberlain was on the DL last August. A.J. Burnett has never pitched two consecutive, healthy seasons in his entire career. Andy Pettitte, despite being the very picture of health for the last four years, is 37 years old and it wouldn't be such a surprise if he broke down. Wang was just on the DL a month ago and looked like he may have needed to be replaced at any minute.

Prudence and preparedness dictated that the Yankees needed to keep someone waiting in the wings like this in case of just such a scenario. You know the old saying: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of not having to explain why an obscure nobody is starting instead of your best prospect." Or something like that.

It's not many teams that can afford to keep six or seven starting pitchers on its major league roster, but if you've got them, you've got to use them, and Girardi didn't.

• Hughes' first outing wasn't for over a week after his last start, and when he was used, he came in to pitch the seventh inning of a game that Andy Pettitte was winning 4-3, got three outs on 11 pitches, and was gone. Phil Coke pitched the 8th and Mariano Rivera got the Save in the 9th. Hughes presumably could have been left in for at least one more inning, and Mo still could have gotten his Save.
• Two days later he tossed 3.2 innings against the Red Sox after Wang was chased in the third. he threw 63 pitches and allowed 2 runs in a game the Yankees lost, but it was a good, long outing, keeping his stamina up.
  
• His next outing, four days later, was only one inning, 21 pitches, mop-up duty in the 9th inning of a 15-0 game against the Mets. He could have been brought in to pitch the 8th, instead of David Robertson, and finish the game if Girardi had been thinking ahead more. Another missed opportunity.
  
• Three days after that, Wang started and was taken out after five innings, having allowed three runs and throwing 91 pitches, so Hughes started the sixth and allowed only one hit and no runs in two innings of work, using only 24 pitches. Phil Coke and Aceves got the last six outs, but again, Hughes could have gone longer.
  
• Three days later, another single inning of work, with just 11 pitches this time, finishing the 8th inning in a 2-1 loss to the Marlins in Florida. If the Yankees had scored another run or two, Hughes might have gotten to pitch longer, but then if there was a game to save, Mariano would likely have been called upon anyway.
  
• Another three days pass. Another losing effort. Another mediocre start by Wang, who allowed three runs in five innings but was lifted for a pinch hitter having thrown only 62 pitches. Hughes started the 6th and pitched two perfect innings, throwing 27 pitches, but was relieved by Robertson (not a pinch hitter) in the 8th. Another missed opportunity.
  
• Five days later Hughes pitched again, this time for only 1.1 innings, but it was in a clse game against the Mets at Citi Field, and he was brought in during a double swith and taken out of the game for a pinch hitter, so it's hard to argue with his usage there. Still, he threw only 16 pitches, further reducing his stamina.
  
• Two days after that, perhaps the best example of Hughes' misuse occurred at home against Seattle. Joba Chamberlain left after 5.1 innings with the score tied at 3 and Phil Coke got the last two outs in the 6th. Hughes then retired the three batters he faced in the 7th on nine pitches and stood to pick up the Win when Alex Rodriguez hit a 2-run jack in the bottom of the inning. For his effort, Hughes was rewarded with a trip to the showers, whereupon Brian Bruney was brought in, promptly blew the lead but held on long enough to get the win when the Yankees came back in the bottom of the 8th.
• Three days later it was another short outing, two outs, 15 pitches in the 8th, and then getting out of the way for Mariano Rivera.
  
• And the day after that, when Wang got hurt and left in the 6th, instead of bringing in Hughges in long relief, Girardi first used Robertson, then Bruney, then Hughes for only one inning (eight pitches?!) and then Mariano Rivera, this time in a tied game in the 9th inning.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for using your closer wherever it seems most prudent instead of at some predetermined time just to pick up a Save. But Hughes had been as good a relief pitcher as anybody in baseball for the past month, including Mariano Rivera, his light workload notwithstanding, and the Yankees could have easily justified leaving him in there for the 9th.

As it happened, that game went to the 12th inning and the Yankees eventually won it, but they needed to rely on Phil Coke for two innings (only the third time in 39 appearances he was asked to get six outs) and Brett Tomko and his 5.19 ERA to do it, as Girardi had already burned through the rest of the bullpen. The better choice might have been to let Hughes pitch two or three innings, knowing that Wang was hurt and that they might need someone to take his spot in the rotation very soon.

Instead, due to regular work of only an inning or two at a time instead of periodic work of three or four innings, Hughes is now unprepared for the role of starting, the role he's been groomed for, the role he's expected to eventually fill. Girardi's justification for leaving him in the bullpen sounds remarkably like the justification once used for keeping Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen instead of the rotation, that he's

A) "not stretched out"

and

2) too important a part of the bullpen to put him back in the rotation.

The first of those, as we've already seen, is nobody's fault but Girardi's, and the second...well, the second just doesn't make any sense. Unless you don't think that Hughes can't be an effective starter, and Girardi certainly has never said that, why would you sacrifice the possibility of him giving you six or seven innings every 5th day so that he can give you one inning every two or three days?

In short, the Yankees are in a pickle here, and it's Girardi's fault. I realize that Girardi has more to think about than how best to keep Phil Hughes "stretched out", that he's got to try to win games, too, but it seems to me that the two goals don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Girardi could have used Hughes more liberally, letting him pitch two or three innings or more several times, allowing him to throw 40 or 50 pitches and then have three days off. This, in turn, would have freed up the rest of the bullpen, Coke and Bruney and Robertson and Aceves and others, making them more available for times when Joba or Wang or another starter failed to give them six or seven innings.

Hughes might not have been able to go eight innings, but he could have made the jump from 50 to 80 pitches without much trouble, and would have been poised to fill that role indefinitely, should the need arrive. As it is, now the Yankees' best starting pitching prospect is still going to be throwing 10-15 pitches at a time out of the bullpen instead of building up his stamina as a starter.



And Girardi has nobody to blame but himself for it.

Marc Rzepczynski and the Spelling Bee All-Star Team

What's "Rzepczynski" spelled backwards, if it isn't already?

The Blue Jays are starting a young lefty named Marc Rzepczynski today against the Tampa Bay Rays, one of many starters in the Jays' patchwork rotation this year. He's 23 and his career minor league stats to date (21-11, 2.76 ERA, 277 K's in 254 innings) suggest that he can become a solid major leaguer.

But that's not why I'm writing.

I'm writing about him because , boy, that name is a doozy, isn't it? I mean, I for one am glad that we no longer live in a world where Aloys Szymanski feels compelled to change his name to "Al Simmons", or Joannes Pajkos feels that he won't be accepted without changing his name to Jack Quinn. But it sure makes for some messy lineup cards.

So, in honor of other guys who've succeeded in spite of the fact that their elementary school teachers probably couldn't spell their names correctly, I came up with the

Spelling Bee All-Star Team

Lineup

C. Jarrod Saltalamacchia - Not a good hitter to begin with, ("Salt-a-MATCH-ee-a", I think) is having an even worse year than normal at the plate, but makes the list on the merits of his 14-letter last name. Besides, Casper Asbjornson has been dead for almost 40 years.

1B: Teixeira, Mark - I was tempted to go with Doug Mientczwkyzch Mint-KAY-vich, but Teixiera can actually hit and play defense, and isn't all but unemployed at the moment. While his name's not that long, there's no apparent reason why it should be pronounced "Te-SHARE-a", so he gets the nod.

2B: Mark Grudzielanek would be the easy choice here if he weren't retired, but then who am I gonna pick, Omar Quintanilla? He's a pinch hitter with a 565 OPS. Grudz (about whom that sentence above was originally uttered, by Harry Caray) is the obvious choice. he can come out of retirement to play the All-Star game. Heck, Magic Johnson did it once, right?

3B: Edwin Encarnacion - Granted, he's been both lousy and injured this year, but there really isn't any other thirdbaseman in the majors right now whose name is all that tough to either spell or pronounce. "en-car-NASS-ee-on" never struck me as a particularly tough name to pronounce, but people insist on saying "en-car-nation" or something like that, so Edwin gets a shot.

SS: Troy Tulowitzki - Not a terribly challenging name, but remembering not to put a "t" in front of the "l" in his last name might be a challenge for some. Nomar Garciaparra, whose first name actually IS spelled backwards, would have been an obvious pick ten years ago, but he hasn't been a shortstop in a long time.

LF: Wladimir Balentien - Can't hit his way out of a paper bag, but with that "l" crammed into the beginning of his first name and an "ie" (or is it "ei"?) in his last, we've unquestionably got our left fielder.

CF: Kosuke Fukudome - Japanese names tend not to be all that difficult to pronounce, since any consonant is always followed by a vowel, but this guy's actually playing and hitting a bit, his name is a bit of a mouthful, and if you pronounce it wrong in mixed company you're probably going to get slapped. So he makes the team.

RF: Bronson Sardinha - What? Why do we have a player who hasn't played in MLB in almost two years on our team? A player who's not playing professionally anywhere this year? A player with a total of 10 MLB at-bats? For that matter, a player whose first and last names are not particularly difficult to spell or say? Why?

Because his middle name is almost 20 letters long: Kiheimahanaomauikeo

And that's all I have to say about that.


Starting Pitchers

LHP: Marc Rzepczynski - pronounced...who knows? Has lots of potential, which is to say he hasn't done anything yet. (Honorable mention: Mark Buehrle.)

RHP: Zach Greinke - Not a long or tough to pronounce name, but he disobeys the "i before e except after C" rule, so that's something. It should be noted, however, that he obeys the "If you're the best pitcher in baseball, spell your name however you damn well please" rule, which was admittedly just instituted this year.

Honorable Mention:
Justin Duchscherer - pronounced "DUKE-shur", not "do-SHARE-er" or "Dutch-sher-er" was actually having a pretty good year, with a 2.54 ERA in 2008 before getting injured, and he hasn't pitched since.

Relief Pitchers

Jonathan Albaladejo - pronounced "All-ball-a-DAY-ho" threw a too many balls, all day-o, and got sent back to the minors for it but was recently recalled when Wang's shoulder landed him on the DL.

Chris Jakubauskas - This 30-year old rookie was horrible as a starter (2-5, 6.64), but solid in 22 relief innings, Chris "JAK-u-boss-kus" is probably our closer.

Buster's Questionable "Olnalysis" of Rockies' Huston Street

ESPN's Buster Olney writes, at the beginning of a 2,800-word "blog post", that Rockies closer Huston Street has experienced dramatic improvement due to the smallest of changes:

...Bob Apodaca, the Colorado pitching coach, approached him and told him he wanted to make a rather major alteration. "We'd like you to move to a different part of the [pitching] rubber," Apodaca said.

Street didn't buy it. Not then, anyway. But after a mediocre spring training, and after he allowed four runs in his first four relief appearances in the regular season, Street had an open mind. He shifted from the left side to the right side of the rubber, and after he had done it for a short time and saw what the change did for him, he couldn't even imagine moving back to the left. "I don't know why things work out the way that they do," Street mused Sunday, "but they do."

Since those first four outings, Street has excelled, posting a 2.33* ERA, converting saves in 15 of 16 chances. He is 8-for-8 this month as the Rockies have made their push back from deep in the NL West standings to over .500, capped by Street's picking up the save Sunday, closing out the Pirates.

*Editor's note: Actually it was 2.22. I'm just sayin'.



Articles like this one always make me laugh, about how changing from one side of the pitching rubber to the other made someone a better pitcher, or how an offseason training regimen or starting to jog everyday or eat more granola or something made some former star a better player again. Usually it's just normal statistical fluctuation, but of course sportwriters can't write about that because

A) it's boring and

2) ZZZZZzzzzzzz......

So they talk to the pitcher, who probably has never taken a statistics class, or a physiology class or a physics class, for that matter, and he explains to them that this and that is the reason for his sudden success. This is much more interesting, or at least less sleep-inducing, than Chi-square distributions and bell curves and standard deviations and all that rot, and anyway, by next week nobody will remember what he said or what Buster wrote because they'll have moved on.

Olney's explanation for the improvement is as follows:

When throwing on the left side of the rubber, Street could throw strikes against left-handed batters by running a fastball over the outside corner, no matter how flat it was -- and the ball would have to travel a longer distance from his hand to the corner. But once Street was on the right-hand part of the rubber, it forced him to be more disciplined in his mechanics. He'd have to get on top of the ball properly to throw it for strikes to the outside corner to lefties, and inside to right-handers. If he didn't throw the ball correctly, it would drift off the plate.

"I've got more of the sinking action than the running action," Street said.

In case you're wondering, the difference in the distance to one side of the plate from one side of the pitching rubber or the other is, at most, about 0.4".

Four-tenths of one inch.

Or, as they say in France, "almost nothing".

It's a simple geometry problem, with a right triangle, 60.5 feet on one side and two feet (the width of the pitching rubber) on the other. The hypotenuse of that triangle is therefore 60.53 feet, or 60 feet, 6.4 inches. That 0.4" difference represents an increase of 0.7% compared to throwing from the other side of the rubber. No wonder Street's been so fatigued!

Street really was quite terrible in those first four games of the season, or at least in three of them. In mid-April, having pitched only four times in the team's first eight games, Street had an 0-1 record with one Save and a 13.50 ERA. Then he supposedly made this change, and over the next four games he was...

...still pretty lousy.

No Wins or Losses, but no Saves either and only one Hold, to go with a 5.79 ERA in those games, though he struck out six and walked none in 4.2 innings. The real improvement followed that. From April 26th to June 21st, he had 15 Saves, two wins and no losses, 27 K's and eight walks in 23.2 innings, to go with a sparkling 1.52 ERA.

The real improvement was not in the walks, as Olney's "analysis" (or shall we say, "Olnalysis"?) suggests it would be. In the first eight games of the season, Street issued only one walk in 7.1 innings. After that, Street's walk rate more than doubled, from 1.23 per nine innings to 3.08 per nine.

The real problem was that he allowed three homers and three doubles in those first seven innings and change, while in the 23.2 innings after that he allowed three extra base hits total (two homers and a double).

Technically, if he's getting more sink on the ball, this would be one result, and so maybe it is helping. But if so, it's because he's being more consistent with his mechanics, not because of which side of the rubber he stands on before he winds up to throw. He could have done this from either side of the rubber if he'd just been diligent about his mechanics.

Looking at this from the other perspective, if Street now has to force himself to "get on top of the ball" more because he can't throw a strike to the outside corner otherwise, shouldn't he now be susceptible to having the ball run back over the middle of the plate when he's trying to throw inside to lefties? If he gets lazy or fatigued and doesn't get the proper sink on the ball, now he's susceptible to allowing doubles and homers, rather than walks. And yet, just the opposite has happened, he's allowed fewer extra base hits, but more walks.

It still comes down to making sure his mechanics are maintained properly, which he can (theoretically) do from either side of the rubber. The real reason for his marked improvement, I think, is that the Rockies' level of competition has changed drastically from that first three weeks of the season. Street faced the Dodgers and Phillies, ranked #1 and #2 in the National League in Run scoring, in six of his first nine games, and his ERA took a beating for it.

Of the 24 games since, 12 have come against teams in the bottom half of the majors in run scoring, and among those, San Diego, Houston, and Seattle are three of the five worst teams in baseball at scoring runs. To me that makes a lot more sense than four tenths of an inch difference causing Huston Street to finally get his mechanics straightened out, and this after having been pretty darned successful in the first 247 games of his major league career.

Olney closes that portion of the blog post this way:

Street cited something that Troy Tulowitzki said recently -- that the Rockies are beginning to expect good things to happen. "You don't know whether success creates that mentality, or whether that mentality creates success," Street said. "I think it's a little bit of both."

Look, pal, that's just plain lazy.

When I was in college, I spent a lot of time studying the Bible with friends from my InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group, using something they called the "inductive method" of study, which essentially seeks to determine what the original author meant to convey to his or her original audience. In a group of 10 or 15 students or more, we would discuss one small section at a time, say, 10-15 verses of the Gospel of Mark, and inevitably, at least once per session, we would come to some kind of impasse.

One student would suggest that Mark was trying to say this, and another would suggest he was trying to say that, the interpretations being mutually exclusive, of course. And after a while, someone would suggest that, "Maybe it's a little bit of both!" This happened so often and so consistently that we coined a term for it: "The Relativistic Third Option." Sometimes, it might have been the best way to interpret something, as certain passages can be interpreted in several ways, none of which is inherently inconsistent with the rest of scripture.

But usually we were just being lazy. It's often hard work to figure out which of two mutually exclusive options is the correct one, and in this world of post-modern ideas and tolerance and relativism, people are too often satisfied with wuss-out explanations like, "It's a little bit of both."

Either your "winning mentality" put you in a position to help make good things happen, or you got lucky, started to win and then tried to think about what else you could do to help the team win more. There is no such thing as "a little bit of both" in this case.

Why doesn't anybody ever just say, "I don't have any idea"?

What's Wrong With Wang?

On the heels of yet another loss to the hated Red Sox, and entering a crucial series with the hated Mets, the New York Yankees have some 'splainin to do. Namely, they have a pretty tall order explaining the continued presence of one Chien Ming Wang in their starting rotation, given that he seems, statistically, at least, to be no closer to returning to the form that twice amassed 19 wins for them.

Those storied* times, the salad days of 2006 and 2007, seemed much farther than two years away as I watched Wang unravel yet again on Wednesday night against the Red Sox, allowing four runs, including six hits and three walks in less than three innings of work. Believe it or not, that start actually constituted an improvement for him, lowering his ERA ever so slightly from 14.46 to 14.34. Oh goody.

*Not steroid.

Much of the talk about Wang has centered around his heavy sinking fastball, and the idea that he somehow needs to either get his velocity back or his mechanics straightened out so this pitch can again be the grounder-inducing menace that so frustrated the American League in 2006 and 2007. The trouble with this, however, is that he's got all his velocity back, averaging 91-92 mph and often hitting 95 mph on the radar gun with his 4-seam fastball.

The problem isn't his fastball. It's the lack of anything else.



According to FanGraphs.com, between 2005 and 2008, Wang threw his fastballs (including the 4-seam and the sinker) 76.5% of the time, with a velocity averaging between 91.8 and 93.1 mph. This year, while his velocity is just as good (91.7 mph average), he's throwing one or the other of his fastballs 84.7% of the time, a significant difference from his usual modus operandi.

Moreover, most of the extra fastballs are coming at the expense of his slider. Previously he threw the slider about 15% of the time on average, ranging from 12.9% in 2005 to 17.1% last season. This year he's used it only 11% of the time, meaning that there are about half a dozen pitches or more per start that used to be sliders but are now fastballs. And of course, Wang has been getting tattooed all year, so we have to wonder if this is somehow related, right?

This in itself may not be significant, but it got me to wondering why Wang (or his catchers) would be so reluctant to use the slider this season, when he seemed to use it more often and with greater success in the past. Looking at the MLB Gameday data for his last two starts and comparing them to a good start from last year gave me a possible answer:

The slider isn't, well, sliding.

Last year, Wang pitched a complete game, 1-run 2-hitter against the Red Sox in April, no small accomplishment given that those Red Sox finished second in the AL in Runs Scored in 2008 and eventually won the Wild Card. During that game he threw 93 pitches, and according to MLB Gameday, 20 of them were sliders. In addition to the speed of each pitch at release, Gameday provides two measures of the pitch movement, "Break" and "Pitch F/X".

According to MLB.com, Break is

"a measurement of the greatest distance between the trajectory of the pitch at any point between the release point and the front of home plate, and the straight line path from the release point and the front of home plate."

That is, I think, the Break is a measure of the difference between where the ball actually ends up and where the batter might think it would end up if gravity and/or spin were not factors.

By contrast, Pitch F/X "is the measurement of the distance between the location of the actual pitch thrown over the plate, and the calculated location of a ball thrown by the pitcher in the same way, with no spin..."

That leaves the method of that calculation as an open question, of course, but assuming that these guys have some idea what they're doing, this seems the more relevant number for our purposes. The batter will assume that the pitch is going to "break" down, if only due to gravity. Even Daniel Bard's fastball, clocked between 98 and 100 mph on Tuesday night, showed a "Break" of three to five inches.

For the record, Wang's fastball/sinker seems largely unchanged, showing a Break of 5-8" and a Pitch F/X of 10-14 " in that complete game against the Red Sox last April. This year, in his most recent start, the fastball was just as fast, showed a typical Break of 5-8" and a typical PFX of 10-13 inches.

But Wang's slider? Last year its PFX averaged 4.05" (with a range of 2-7), but in his two most recent starts, it's averaged just 2.3 inches, almost half of what it once was, and often only zero or one inch. No wonder Posada doesn't want to call for the slider. It isn't fooling anyone because it doesn't do anything, having almost the same trajectory as a pitch thrown without any spin at all, according to MLB Gameday and Pitch F/X. For batters, this is a win-win situation. Either they swing at the occasional slider, which has hardly any spin on it, or they wait on the fastball, which is Wang's only other quality pitch.

The slider is a subtle pitch, so much so that Pitch F/X often has trouble distinguishing it from a cut-fastball and/or even a changeup. It's thrown with a sideways spin that causes it to drift laterally, across the strikzone, in the opposite direction of the pitcher's throwing arm. Because it gets no assist from gravity, the slider doesn't break as much as a curveball does, but it does ehough that it ends up several inches from where you'd expect, either out on the end of the bat or in on your hands, depending on what kind of hitter you are.

The best sliders in baseball (Carlos Marmol, Jonathan Papelbon, Francisco Rodriguez, Chad Billingsley) usually break only 5 to 8 inches or so, but there are plenty of pitchers whose sliders sit in the 4-inch range. But two inches (and often one or none) simply isn't enough to fool major league hitters, who are so well trained that they make mid-swing adjustments in hundredths of a second, and so strong that they can hit a ball out of the park while breaking the bat.

Whether this is a physical problem for Wang or not, I don't know, but I doubt it. Perhaps his foot still hurts, and he's somehow favoring it, throwing the slider less often because it bothers him physically. This is unlikely, as any difference in his delivery due to throwing the slider would be tantamount to "tipping" his pitches, and batters would have picked up on it long ago.

Perhaps he's still rusty, having missed some time due to the foot injury, and doesn't yet have the "feel" for the slider. This seems very likely to me, as pitchers often talk about how difficult it is to get a feel for their sinker, slider or cutter, and how much practice this takes. Having missed more than half of last year, and having thrown only about 21 innings so far this year in the majors (plus 13 scoreless innings in AAA) Wang's a little behind on his usual regimen.

Maybe this means that with a bit more practice, he'll get that feel for the slider - and with it, his confidence in the pitch - very soon, enabling him to keep hitters a bit more honest and not so frequently serve them the heater they already expect. I just wish the "practice" didn't have to come in Yankee Stadium, and against the damn Mets.

Admittedly, I have not looked over all the available data. Wang has thrown hundreds of pitches this year and thousands in his career, and I simply don't have the time to examine every one, but this hopefully gives us an idea of where to look for answers the next time Wang takes the mound.

UPDATE: My apologies for the false information, but it turns out that Wnag's next start is scheduled for Wednesday, against the Nationals, not Sunday. That was Burnett's regular spot, and he pitched well for once. Wang should have been scheduled for Today, Monday, which is an off day and (it would seem) a perfect opportunity to skip Wang in the rotation.

Instead, for some reason Joe Girardi has chosen to start him on six days' rest and push the rest of the rotation (other than Sabathia) back a day against the Washington Nationals. Maybe Joe agrees with my assessment that Wng just needs more work, and figures that if there's any team he can beat, it's the Nats (16-45).

Yankees Need to Step It Up Against Red Sox

Well, it's been a whole month, so I guess we were due to resume the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. As you'll no doubt recall, when last we met our heroes - or, at least the last time the Red Sox met them - they were a sad sack of a team, hovering about the .500 mark. Xavier Nady, Brian Bruney and Alex Rodriguez were all on the Disabled List, and the ineffective Chien Ming Wang would soon join them, as would Jorge Posada.

To make things worse, none of their big name free agent acquisitions seemed to be panning out. Mark Teixiera was hovering around the Mendoza Line, while CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett both had ERAs around 5.00. Additionally, the patchwork bullpen, put together mostly on the cheap from the Yankee farm system, had failed them miserably, allowing a composite ERA of almost 8.00 in their first five games against Boston, though they'd done mostly respectable work against the rest of the league.

That team lost all five of its early season contests against the Red Sox, with the starting pitching largely to blame, as they got only one Quality Start in those five games. That performance - Andy Pettitte's 6-inning, 4-run (3 earned) outing on April 26th - met those requirements in name only, and anyway the Yankees could do nothing with Justin masterson that day.

The third inning of that game, when the Yankees had a 1-0 lead, marked the last time the Yankees have led the Red Sox in their season series, including last night's 7-0 loss. The Sawx scored a run in the bottom of that inning and then three more in the 5th (including Jacoby Ellsbury's infamous steal of home plate) and have had no reason to look back since. Indeed, the Yankees have given them no reason to glance over their shoulder.

So, with the season series resuming Tuesday night, the Yankees had good reason to be in high spirits. They had Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada back, and Chien Ming Wang slated to start the second game of the series. Mark Teixiera had found his stroke since A-Rod came off the DL, and several Yankees (Damon, Jeter, Cano, Cabrera) were hitting around .300, many of them with power. They sat atop the AL East, with the best record in the league coming into the game....

...and then they lost miserably.

A.J. Burnett, the big name pitcher who came up so very small against the the Yankees' biggest rival in April, managed to lower the bar for himself even more last night, allowing five runs (three earned) without escaping the third inning. Granted, he's faced the toughest slate of hitters in MLB this year to date, but still, more is expected of a man who's earning more money than the gross domestic products of some small island nations.

Burnett's fastball was plenty fast, usually in the 95-96 mph range, but he seemed to have little idea (or interest) in where it would end up. Working quickly, as if to get it over with rather than to get batters out, Burnett threw 84 pitches - less than half of them for strikes - with his curve proving to be especially erratic. He threw only five of 16 curveballs for strikes, and one of those was a single by Kevin Youkilis anyway.

With the curve clearly not working, the Red Sox could just sit on the fastball and wait for him to throw a rare strike. And when he did throw strikes, they were belt high, out over the plate, which is why the struggling David Ortiz was able to hit one of them 420 feet into the stands in center field, only his third homer of the season.

What's more, it seems from looking at the pitches on MLB Gameday that Burnett all but refused to pitch anyone inside, perhaps out of fear of another suspension for not actually hitting someone. JD Drew's 2-run double in the second inning, on an 0-2 pitch, was hit off a 96 mph fastball that was supposed to be inside (based on where Posada had set up behind the plate) but ended up on the outside corner. Nobody's fastball is good enough to leave it out there and expect to get batters out.

The relief, such as it was, did better but was hardly impressive. Neither Brett Tomko nor Jose Veras threw even half of their pitches for strikes, and though David Robertson was OK, and the group as a whole allowed only two more runs in over five innings of work, the Yankees' hitters couldn't touch Boston's pitching, getting only two hits off them all night.

Tonight Wang takes the hill against Tim Wakefield, who's 7-3 this year but is only 10-17 with a 5.03 ERA against the Yankees in his career, so those who do baseball handicapping would presumably say that the game is up for grabs. Wang, for his part, has been dreadful as a starter this year, 0-3 with a 23.62 ERA, but perhaps he's on the mend and can give the Yankees six solid innings for a change. If not Phil Hughes will be available out of the bullpen, but by then it may be too late.

Even the Los Angeles Dodgers' Pitchers Can Improve

Rob Neyer commented yesterday on the Dodgers' pitching staff and their general manager's efforts to improve on the (apparently) un-improvable:

The Dodgers could cruise to 90 wins and the division title without making a single move the rest of the season. They're that good and the rest of the division is that bad. But right now they've got one ace (Billingsley), two guys who are pretty good (Kershaw and Wolf) and a bunch of guys you wouldn't want within six miles of a postseason start. Not the way they're pitching lately, anyway. (I still have high hopes for McDonald, and Kuroda was solid last year.)

This was in response to an L.A. Times piece about Ned Colletti looking for pitching. Neyer's probably right about the Dodgers' quality relative to the rest of their sad division, though I'm as sure as Rob, and fortunately I have my own Sports Blog from which to pontificate.

For one thing, I'm not convinced that either the Padres or Diamondbacks' hitters can't get their act together and make this an interesting race. Both teams have several guys who are woefully underperforming for no obvious reason, and some of them are bound to find their stroke and bounce back.

Neither am I convinced that Casey Blake, Juan Pierre and Orlando Hudson will continue to hit anything like what they've done so far. Granted, Rafael Furcal and, to a lesser degree, Russel martin have been disappointing with the bats this year, but otherwise, the Dodgers are mostly flush with over-achievers. Yet again, the odds are not in their favor for that to continue.

But the most tenuous threads holding the Dodger fabric together weave through the pitching staff, especially the starters. In particular, counting on Randy Wolf to continue to be healthy and/or good for the rest of the year is a fairly dubious enterprise. He hasn't pitched 200 innings in a season since 2003, and from 2004-07 he averaged just 94 innings and 17 starts, with a combined record of 24-18, 4.62 ERA.

He managed to toss 190 innings in 2008, though his ERA in Houston and San Diego (4.30 combined) was a lot closer to his career mark (4.20) than this year's performance to date. The 2.84 ERA he's posted so far would be not only a run and a half below his career average (at age 32) but also almost half a run below his career best of 3.20, posted in 2002. Somehow that seems unlikely.

The reason for Wolf's unprecedented success is obvious. His BABIP this season is a ridiculously low .247, fully 50 points below the league average, and something over which Wolf has little if any control. So he's bound to regress some, and probably soon. That will leave the Dodgers with ONE pretty good option (Billingsley) and a lot of question marks:

• Two talented but erratic youngsters (Clayton Kershaw and John McDonald),
  
• a decent but injured veteran (Hiroki Kuroda),
  
• three 30-something re-treads (Eric Milton, Jeff Weaver and Wolf, when he falters),
  
• and an organizational soldier pressed into everyday service (Eric Stults).

I don't blame Colletti for trying to improve his pitching staff. Smart general managers can look at a team that's winning and see how it could be even better or might need improvement down the line. Guys like the White Sox' Ken Williams don't recognize good fortune when they see it, leave the roster alone, and end up in third place instead of first.

Projecting the Next 300 Game Winner(s)

In light of the Big Unit's chase for his 300th win, Joe Posnaski had a recent co-column for Sports Illustrated with Bill James and has just blogged his own piece on the nature (and unpredictability of) 300-game winners. Both are great stuff, full of well-written insights and clever commentary that most of us only dream of being able to produce. His point, in both cases, can be summed up in the one word that Joaquin Andujar gave us: Youneverknow.

More specifically, Joe says the one thing you can't know is whether a guy will win 300 games based on what he does in his 20's, and I have to agree with him there. We've seen too many guys who were just awesome in their 20's (Bert Blyleven, Jim Palmer, Robin Roberts) who didn't quite made it to 300, and others (Doc Gooden, Sandy Koufax, Dizzy Dean, Don Drysdale) who never got close.



Joe says you can tell better by what they do in their 30's, especially their late 30's, and illustrates the point with the careers of several pitchers who were great after their mid 30's:

So, it’s really impossible to predict. Randy Johnson only had 99 victories at age 31. Phil Niekro only had 97 victories at age 33. Gaylord Perry, Warren Spahn, Nolan Ryan, Early Wynn … these guys did not look like great bets for 300 when they reached their mid-30s. But they won a lot of games late in their careers. Niekro, as a knuckleballer, just kept going and going and going. Perry had a late career renaissance — he won 21 games as a 39-year-old and 47 more after that. Warren Spahn won 20-games or more seven times after he turned 35. Randy Johnson was probably at his very best from age 35 to 40. And so on.

He's got a point, but I disagree that Ryan and Perry and Spahn and Wynn weren't good bets to make it to 300 by their mid 30's though. Each of them had about 200 wins by the end of their age 35 seasons, and all were above average workhorses, if not spectacular. That turns out to be a pretty good bet, actually.



If you look at the 17 pitchers (including Randy) who've won 300+ games since 1900, 14 of them (82%) had about 200 wins (Perry had 198) and an ERA+ of 110 or better by the end of their age 35 seasons. The other three are Johnson and Niekro, two guys who had to take half a career to learn how to pitch, and the ironically named Early Wynn, who got his 300th and final Win in July of his age 43 season.

Johnson had so much potential, so he was always going to get his chances. Lefties who throw 100 mph don't grow on trees, you know. But he also had so many control problems that he didn't have his first decent season until 1990, when he was already 26.

Niekro, a knuckleballer, did not make it to the majors until he was 25, and did not have a productive season until he was 28, again because of control problems, although obviously for different reasons.

Wynn was basically a better than average innings eater who lucked into playing for the Indians in the 50's and later the White Sox, both during their peaks. Good teams will get a lot of wins for a pitcher who provides a lot of innings.

These three are the exceptions, though, not the rules. You can certainly look at Wynn and Randy and Niekro and say "Youneverknow", and that's true, but it doesn't give us any kind of hint at what we might know, down the line. For that, you have to look at correlations. What do the guys who win 300 games have in common, earlier in their careers, and how likely are they to go on to win 300 games?



As I mentioned, excluding the guys who thrived in the late 1800's, there are 17 pitchers who have won or will win 300+ games. As of their mid 30's, i.e. after their age 35 season, 14 of these had at least 195 Wins and an adjusted ERA at least 10% better than the league. Eighty-two percent is a pretty high correlation, though it should be noted that 41 pitchers meet those requirements, and only 14 of those have made the 300 mark. Still, 14 out of 41 is 34%, better than one in three odds.

At the moment, Andy Pettitte is the only pitcher in baseball who meets these criteria, and giving him one in three odds to win 300 games sounds just about right to me. That may be a little too generous, given that he probably can't survive long if he loses any more off his fastball.



Andy had 201 Wins and a 118 ERA+ after that age-35 season, i.e. 2007, and currently has 219 Wins and an ERA+ of 116, though the trend is of course not in his favor there. But it's not out of the question for him to keep posting approximately 200-inning seasons with a roughly league average ERA, winning about 15 games per year, since the Yankees will always have good hitters.

The next step down would be Roys Halladay and Oswalt, plus Mark Buehrle, each of whom had or has at least 125 Wins and an ERA+ of 120 or better through (or in) their age 31 seasons. The Chicago White Sox Schedule is filled with themlikes of the Royals and Tigers, so Buehrle especially should get his shot at racking up the necessary wins. Tim Hudson also met those criteria, but his injury will hamper his chances severely. Johan Santana, only 30 and with 114 Wins already, will likely join them by the end of 2009, as will C.C. Sabathia, who needs only 4 wins to reach 125 and is only 28.

Eight of the 17 pitchers to win 300 games since 1900 met those criteria at one point, though so did 29 other pitchers who never got to 300. Eight in 40 is 5-to-1 odds, so there's a decent chance that one of the six (C.C., Buehrle, Hudson, Santana and the two Roys) will eventually make the 300 mark. None of them has better than a 20% chance, but as a group there's a good chance that one of them is the next 300-game winner. We just don't know which one, yet.

Why the Yankees Dominate the Minnesota Twins

The Yankees completed a four game home sweep of the Minnesota Twins last night, stretching their current winning streak to six games, four of which were won by only one run. This improves the Yankees' overall record to 21-17, bringing the team within 4.5 games of the Blue Jays for first place in the American League East division.

A brief look back at the four games:

Friday - Yankees 5, Twins 4: In a game started by two youngsters of whom much is expected, Phil Hughes and Felipe Liriano were both gone by the end of the sixth inning, leaving the game to be decided by the bullpens. Justin Morneau hit two homers and Derek Jeter and Joe Mauer each hit one, as did the scrappy Brett Gardner, his second in two days. This one was an inside-the-park job, though, more his game than the one he hit in Toronto the night before.

Down 4-1 in the 6th, the Yankees scored a run in the 7th and then three more in the bottom of the ninth, the last two on a walk-off, bases-loaded, two-out single by Melky Cabrera, who's gone a long way toward redeeming himself from both his horrid 2008 season and my skepticism of his value to the team. Twins closer Joe Nathan took the loss, while the Yankees' best reliever never left the bullpen, which came in handy for...

Saturday - Yankees 6, Twins 4 (11 innings): Nick Blackburn and Joba Chamberlain started, and each pitched reasonably well, but again the bullpens would decide matters in the end. Morneau and Mauer each homered off Joba, and Mark Teixeira hit a three-run jack in the third, his 8th of the year and drove in his 4th run of the game with a game-tying single in the bottom of the 8th to make it 4-4.

Bucking standard closer procedure, manager Joe Girardi brought in a well rested Mariano Rivera in the tied 9th inning, and he threw two scoreless innings to keep the game going. Without their own closer (who had thrown 27 pitches the night before, his fourth consecutive day of work) the Twins were forced to turn the ball over to journeyman lefty Craig Breslow, who walked Teixeira and then allowed a walk-off homer to Alex Rodriguez, his first hit in the new Yankee Stadium.

Sunday - Yankees 3, Twins 2: On the anniversary of David Wells' perfect game against the Twins in 1998, this game was appropriately a pitching duel that remained scoreless until the 7th inning. Twins' starter Kevin Slowey provided the best pitching line of the day, going 7.2 innings with eight strikeouts, no walks, and only two runs allowed. Yankees' starter A.J. Burnett walked six and needed 123 pitches to get through 6.2 innings, again leaving the game in the bullpen's capable hands.

Alex Rodriguez hit another homer, a solo shot off Slowey in the 7th. A double and two sacrifices tied the game at 2-2. Jonathan Albaladejo pitched out of trouble in the 7th and then back into it in the 8th, whereupon journeyman batting practice pitcher Brett Tomko rose up from the ashes to get two outs with the bases loaded and preserve the tie.

Girardi brought in Rivera in the tied 9th inning again, and was not disappointed as he pitched a scoreless inning. Alfredo Aceves kept the Twins at bay in the top of the 10th, which allowed Johnny Damon's one-out solo homer in the bottom half of the inning, for the Yankees' third straight walk-off win.

Monday - Yankees 7, Twins 6: Andy Pettitte pitched 6.2 innings allowing 12 hits, one walk and four earned runs in the only game of the series in which either starting pitcher got a decision. Twins starter Glen Perkins got only two outs and allowed six earned runs in the worst start of his career, and has not had a Quality Start since April 19th. On the plus side, R.A. Dickey provided 4.1 innings of scoreless relief as he continues his comeback as a knuckleballer.

Mark Teixiera homered from both sides of the plate and A-Rod smacked his third bomb in three games, back-to-back with Teixiera in the first. Michael Cuddyer and Denard Span each homered for the Twins, the latter coming in the 8th off Edwar Ramirez. He and Phil Coke made the game interesting in the late innings, allowing the Twins to come within a run before finally capping the game and the sweep with a grounder to second base.


Overall, the Yankees were not exactly dominant in the series, winning the four games by a total of five runs, three of them in their last at bat. But their starters were mostly solid, the offense scored just enough and the bullpen posted a 3.07 ERA in almost 15 innings of work.

Winning close games in your last at-bat is not a recipe for long-term success, however, as anyone who knows anything about sports odds will tell you. The Yankees have actually been outscored over the season despite their winning record. Most of that is die to the 22-4 drubbing they received at the hands of the Tribe last month, but even removing that game puts them only slightly in the black.

Amazingly, the Yankees have dominated the Twins in this millennium, winning 40 out of 58 contests in the regular season, plus six of eight in the postseason, for an overall record of 46-20 since 2001. This is the second best winning percentage they have against any team in the AL in that span, behind only the dismal Kansas City Royals.

They do have higher winning percentages against some NL teams in Interleague play, though these are only in a handful of games. Oddly enough the Yankees' worst winning percentage is against the Reds, to whom they have dropped four of six contests. Fortunately they only occasionaly play a series in the Cincinnati Reds schedule.

Regardless, the Yankees' continued success against the Twins is quite remarkable. You'd expect that the team with the best overall record in this century would do well against the lowly Royals, who have been the worst team of the 2000's, who have had only one winning record (83-79) in the last decade and a half. No surprise there.

But the Twins? They've got the 7th best record in all of baseball in that time, a .543 winning percentage in spite of their small payroll. They've had four playoff appearances in the last eight years, two Cy Young awards, an MVP award, a catcher who wins batting titles, a continuing influx of young pitching talent...so how are they so terrible against the Yankees?

At Yankee Stadium (either of them) it's even worse. At the Metrodome the Twins are actually somewhat respectable, with only a 13-16 record agains tthe Yankees, but in New York? The Yankees are 24-5 at home against the Twins since their last World Series victory, including a current stretch of eight in a row going back to July 2007. The Twins have not won a series against the Yankees in New York since 2001, and in one stretch went two whole seasons (2002-2003) without winning any games at all against the Yankees, losing 13 straight.

And there really isn't any explanation for it. The Yankees have generally been a better team than the Twins in the last eight seasons and change, but that much better? No, of course not. The Yankees tend to play better at home, just like most teams, but again, not that much better. Maybe it's just a combination of being slightly overmatched and slightly intimidated by the big crowds in New York.

Maybe it's the Yankees' propensity for hitting homers combined with the Twins' inability to prevent them. In the last eight years, the Yankees have never finished worse than 4th in the AL in home runs hit, while the Twins have only once finished better than 8th in the AL in homers allowed. Interestingly, they usually do much better than that in ERA, finishing no worse than 7th each of the last eight seasons, with an average of less than 5th.

But it seems they have kept the team ERA down mostly by avoiding walks, and therefore extra baserunners when they allow all those home runs. The Twins have finished in the first or second in fewest walks allowed each of the last eight years, with the exception of 2002, when they were 3rd. The Yankees, however, generally have fairly patient hitters, having been in the top three in drawing walks seven of the last nine seasons, including 2009. That puts a damper on the Twins' strategy perhaps, and lets the Yankees in the door. And so when the inevitable homers are allowed, the Yankees get more bang for their buck than most other teams do, since they tend to have more runners on base.

But it's really the homers that are killing the Twins. Indeed, the Twins have allowed 90 home runs to the Yankees in the 58 games they've played since 2001, a rate of 1.55 HR/game, slightly above the Yankees' overall rate of 1.34/game in the past eight years and change. Twins pitchers, accustomed to allowing about 1.1 homers per game, must find the Yankees quite a shock. Too bad for the Yankees they only get to play them a few times a year.

More Yankees Ticket Shenanigans

In these harsh economic times, I have to wonder why the Yankees think this view is worth $85 per ticket.

They call it the "Batter's Eye View" because the seats are in the Bleachers Cafe, above the batter's eye, i.e. the background against which the hitter at the plate sees the incoming pitches. In the old Yankee Stadium, this was a large area of old bleachers that were painted flat black, but these days, there is a cafe there with tinted glass windows, and the Yankees decided to charge people for the privilege of sitting in that cafe.

These are perhaps not unlike the rooftop seats across Waveland Avenue in Chicago, behind Wrigley Field. Except in that case, the Cubs found a way to make a profit off their neighbor's real estate, and so it's no longer possible to watch every game in the Chicago Cubs schedule for free anymore. The Yankees did them one better, and just incorporated the restaurant (and the lousy view) into the ballpark.

The Yankees, like most of the rest of MLB, have been having some trouble selling tickets, with attendance down over 100,000 from last year's pace to date. They lowered prices on some of the most expensive tickets in the house, but those were so preposterously overpriced to begin with that even some of the new prices are pretty ridiculous. Wow, two seats near the dugout for only $2,500? Yeah, I guess I don't need that used car after all.

But this may be the shadiest and most ridiculous ploy yet. An email I received from the Yankees today offered a special promotion on these seats in the cafe above and behind center field, which nominally cost $125 each. The seats in the sports bar just below this are $90 each. No free food. No free drinks. Just seats. And these about as far from the action as you can get without actually leaving the Stadium.

By contrast, bleacher seats cost just $14 each, and have about the same view (unless you're stuck here).

That's right folks, for almost ten times the price of a bleacher seat, you get...shade. And air conditioning. But wait! Not ten times, not nine times, not even eight or seven times...but for a limited time only, thanks to MasterCard, you can get these seats, with their horrible view of almost everything except the center fielder's back, for just over SIX times the cost of a bleacher ticket (plus TicketMaster fees)! Yay!

The email promo offers you a $40 "discount" on the seats in the cafe for this week's games, i.e. Monday through Thursday nights, which brings them down to just over $90 per seat, with fees. All of these games start at 7:05 PM, so the shade probably isn't necessary. And, since it's supposed to be nice all week, the air conditioning probably isn't needed either.

The normal price for these seats is $125! Where else but Yankee Stadium would you be expected to shell out more than a hundred bucks for such a terrible view?

You know how department stores sometimes offer you "free" stuff to promote things, and to get you to spend money there? They'll offer, say, a watch or a pouch full of cosmetics "with a $50 value" if you spend $100. Except the watch or the cosmetics can't actually be bought in their store or anyone else's. It's produced and packaged expressly for this promotion, so they can say it's got a value of damn near anything they want, because you have no way to prove otherwise.

So you spend your $100.37 to get your watch "with a $50 value", but when you look at it more closely you realize that the watch is made in some sweatshop, has a cheap plastic strap, a cheap digital timepiece, and a cheap plastic fastener. And you're pretty sure you got one nicer than this from a bubble gum machine once. Or the dollar store, you forget which.

Anyway, that's what this promo is like. If you go to the Yankees website and look at their seating and pricing page, they don't list a price for these seats. You have to check the special page for these tickets, because they're being discounted so much that their nominal value has little real meaning.

While you can buy these tickets at full price, I suspect that most of them get sold at a discount, sponsored by a different company each week, probably. They call the view "one of the most unique in the stadium" which of course is true of any seat in the stadium, strictly speaking. Then they jack up the price to unreasonable levels and give you a "discount" so you feel like you're getting a bargain.

On the other hand, the Cubs and the Rays offer similar seats in their parks, so maybe I'm just missing something here. Whatever it is, at those prices, I think I'll keep on missing it, thanks.

Book Review: The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

As the field manager of the New York Yankees from 1996 to 2007, Joe Torre epitomized class and dignity on the baseball field, so it's fitting that even his book's title and cover are classy. A simple title, with no ridiculous subtitle that's four times as long as the title itself. The authors should really be listed as Tom Verducci with Joe Torre, as it's clear that Verducci does the writing in this relationship, and that Torre is mostly there to narrate and provide quotes.

The front cover is graced by a simple, dim picture of Torre in the corridor at Yankee Stadium, en route to the locker room, his well known number six on his back, shoulders slumped a bit with age and all the years of turmoil in Yankeeland, but still proud and determined.

The back cover shows him being carried off the the field by his players, presumably after the 1998 World Series, waving to the crowd, recent tears still wetting his deep set eyes. The photo, a little out of focus, hints at the fleeting nature of this one-of-a-kind run in Yankee history, this one-of-a-kind manager's tenure there, and suggests that perhaps there was more to Torre and those great Yankee teams than we knew.

And there certainly was.

Not that this is a tell-all book. For one thing, Torre has too much class to dish out juicy details of other people's personal lives, or compromise people's standing in the game, or otherwise make a quick buck at the expense of others. There's no shortage of interesting anecdotes or good quotes, both from Torre and others, but this is not a ground-breaking tome like Ball Four was 40 years ago.

Verducci starts the book with the story of how Joe became the Yankees manager, the idea that he was the Yankees' fourth choice, and that even after he was hired, there were rumors that George Steinbrenner was still trying to convince Buck Showalter to return. What a way to start a new job, right?

From there he moves on to how Torre helped inspire a work ethic, a "desperation to win" in those players in the late 1990's, how he got them to play ball the right way and to work at winning, every day. His young shortstop, Derek Jeter, was a big part of that, leading by example right from the start, teaching everyone around him how to play baseball the Yankee Way, how to carry yourself, how to act, and how not to. Torre and Jeter naturally became very good friends, and Jeter earned the respect due a team captain even before he bore the official title.

The following paragraph, about the famous "Flip Play" in the 2000 playoffs against the Oakland A's, demonstrates both Jeter's amazing baseball instincts and Verducci's writing prowess:

"Jeter made a play that only could have been made by a player with supreme
alertness, the mental computing power to quickly crunch the advanced baseball
calculus needed to process the trajectory and speed of Spencer's throw and the
speed and location of a runner behind his back, and the athletic and
improvisational skills to actually find a way to get the ball home on time and
on target while running in a direction opposite to the plate."

OK, so it's kind of a run-on sentence, and he lays it on a little thick, but it's still solid, informative, colorful writing that paints the picture he wants. Besides this, the run-on nature of the sentence conveys the urgency of the play much better than more traditional punctuation choices would have.

For Torre's part, of course, teaching a bunch of guys how to win consistently is a lot easier when you've got so much talent with which to work. Teams that include Jeter, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez, Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, David Cone, David Wells, Roger Clemens, Mariano Rivera and others ought to win all the time. Right?

But even at that, they never seemed to consider themselves entitled, never rubbed it in their opponents' faces, never took winning for granted. As Billy Beane said,

"And one thing about getting beat by the Yankees: They did it with class. It was
as if they beat you in rented tuxedos." (p. 51)

Torre also addresses some of the controversies of that era, specifically the steroid issue and how it affected the Yankees' clubhouse. Because Tom Verducci is really the one writing this, he can paint a picture of the era with broader strokes than Torre could have by himself. He discusses the happenings in baseball as a whole, how records were falling both left (homers) and right (attendance), how everyone was making money, and how nobody took the issue of performance enhancing drugs too seriously.

Though I don't remember ever having heard of this at the time, apparently former Texas Rangers pitcher Rick Helling was one of the first to blow the whistle on the steroid issue, at a players' union meeting in 1998. He challenged his fellow players to crack down on PEDs, to help make sure the game was played the right way, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He repeatedly stated that, at least in his opinion, the increasing prevalence of steroids in baseball was forcing some otherwise clean players to consider using PEDs themselves, just to remain competitive.

Which of course was exactly what was happening. Unfortunately, Verducci includes three nearly identical quotes from Helling on the same page to make this point, despite the fact that they read like a skipping record. And Major League Baseball and the MLBPA ignored Helling and others who were sounding the PED alarm at the time, and we all know how that turned out.

For his part, Verducci states, Torre was innocent of the whole thing. "You had two guys from New York doing all the talking in the Mitchell Report. That's why you have more information on New York players."

"Steroids?" Verducci asks, innocently, "He [Torre] knew nothing about them. He never saw them." Torre indicates that he didn't want to go probing, uninvited, into the players' lives, and so he never asked those questions, presumably content that whatever they were doing was working, and decided to leave "well enough" alone.

You can believe that if you want to, and it's Torre's privilege to present himself how he wants to in his own book, but he and Verducci must take the baseball watching public for fools if they think many of us are buying that explanation. Even if it is true, it makes Torre out to be a little too naive, a little too "hands-off" to truly be an effective manager. The players would never respect and follow someone they thought could be so easily duped.

The book contains a great many anecdotes about the normally private and confidential rituals of the clubhouse, including this gem about Roger Clemens' pre-game preparation:

Clemens lost himself in his usual pregame preparation. which typically began with cranking the whirlpool to its hottest possible temperature. "He'd come out looking like a lobster," trainer Steve Donahue said. Then Donahue would rub the hottest possible liniment on his testicles. "He'd start snorting like a bull," the trainer said. "That's when he was ready to pitch." (p. 132)

Listen, I'm as open minded as the next guy, but if I never have to read another story about one man rubbing liniment on another man's balls as long as I live, it will be too soon. Some things just shouldn't be shared, OK? Like balls.

In addition to all the material from Torre, Verducci mines a wealth of information from bullpen catcher Mike Borzello, pitcher Mike Mussina, and several other players to whom Torre was close. He discusses the ways in which George Steinbrenner would try to micromanage and manipulate people, how different people on Steinbrnner's staff, such as Randy Levine or George's sons, behaved toward Torre, how Brian Cashman, in the end, chose to cover his own ass rather than go to bat for Torre.

He also relates not a small number of stories on Torre's dealings with different players. He talks about how Gary Sheffield's efforts on the field varied with his mood, how David Wells was constantly causing trouble of one kind or another, and how the Yankees were warned about Carl Pavano:

"Tim Raines told me, 'Pavano? He's never going to pitch for you. Forget it.' Borzello said. I said, "What?" He said, 'The guy didn't want to pitch in Montreal. There was always something wrong with him. In Florida, same thing. He didn't want to pitch except for the one year he was pitching for a contract. I'm telling you, he's not going to pitch for you." (p. 319)

The Yankee Years, while not entirely chocked full of these kinds of tidbits, certainly has no shortage of them either, plenty to make the chapters interesting. There's not much earth-shattering stuff here, not any really, but there's plenty of inside gossip and other information that we all wish we could have known at the time.

We all know the baseball side of things. What happened is in the record books for all to see. But a book like this offers us some rare insight into the reasons for why things happened or didn't happen, at least in one manager's opinion. The Yankee Years is a worthwhile read for this reason and more, for Yankees fans and Torre fans and anyone who rooted against them all those years.

Phil Hughes Vying for Joba's Job-a?

The Good News: Phil Hughes pitched well last night against the Tigers. He used 99 pitches to shut them out for six innings, allowing only two hits and two walks while fanning six.



The Bad News: People are starting to talk about putting Joba Chamberlain back in the bullpen.

The New York Daily News' John Harper makes some good points, but may be reaching a bit here:

For now, at least, they seem firmly committed to keeping Chamberlain in the rotation. But part of the equation here is that he shows no signs of being a dominating starter.

Well, he was pretty dominant against the Royals two weeks ago, but admittedly he had a tough time with Cleveland and Boston, two of the better offensive teams in baseball. It seems to me that three starts are not much of a barometer for whether he's going to be dominant.

For example, Mike Pelfrey and Scott Baker are both young pitchers, struggling more than Joba in their three 2009 starts. But they both pitched well in 2008, and nobody is talking about replacing Pelfrey's starts in the Twins' or the New York Mets schedule. Admittedly, neither of their teams has the potential glut of capable starting pitching the Yankees seem to have, but still, the analogy is worth considering.

One of the reasons Harper suggests changing Joba's role is that he would be able to throw harder and emote more freely in short stints out of the bullpen, rather than having to pace himself as a starter does, and therefore be more effective.

Since spring training the fastball velocity has been an issue, as he throws mostly around 92-93 mph now as opposed to 96-97 when he was relieving.

And while his celebrations as a reliever may have been a bit over the top, he seemed fueled by the emotion and let-it-go fire he could pour into a one-inning stint, as opposed to pacing himself as a starter.

The combination of lower velocity and a mostly placid demeanor have baseball people wondering what's wrong with Joba.

"There shouldn't be that kind of difference in velocity between starting and relieving," one AL scout said Monday. "When (Josh) Beckett is right, he's topping out at 96-97 from start to finish.

Well, not quite that high, and not all the time, but sure, let's say he's right about Beckett. So what?

Beckett has made exactly three regular season relief appearances in his major league career, and those were six and seven years ago. We have no way to compare whether the 4-5 mph drop from starting to relieving is appropriate or normal, at least not from Beckett. Maybe Beckett would be able to throw 102 mph if he only had to pitch one inning a night. Maybe 96 mph IS "pacing himself" in Beckett's case, a scary thought indeed.

One of the few examples we can use of a starting pitcher being used for short stints is at the All Star game. Though they usually work at more modest velocities, pitchers who know they'll only be throwing one inning tend to dial it up a bit more when they get called in to pitch. Brad Penny, who typically works in the 90-91 mph range, threw 95-96 mph when he started the 2006 All Star game, knowing that he wouldn't go more than two innings.

The fact of the matter is that anybody with any sense who discussed this issue last year knew that Joba would likely not throw as hard as a starter, would not dominate the way he did out of the pen in 2007-08. Nobody compiles a 1.53 ERA and strikes out almost 12 batters per game as a starter, at least not for very long, not in this era. If you were expecting that, you were mistaken.



But Joba can still be a good or even great starter, given the chance, without registering a "99" on the stadium gun every time he releases the pill. And perhaps if Pettitte and Sabathia and Burnett and Hughes and Wang are all pitching well, and taking up every start in the New York Yankees schedule, Joba would be the logical choice to relieve. But at this point Wang is a question mark at best, and Hughes has made exactly one good start.

One.

Why would it be so bad to put Joba back in the bullpen?

Rob Neyer answers that question:

I've always come down squarely on the side of Chamberlain starting, for the simple reason that a good starting pitcher is more valuable than a great relief pitcher. Or rather, that a great starting pitcher is more valuable than a great reliever, and there were (and still are, presumably) some observers who believe that Chamberlain can become a great starter.

Chamberlain doesn't even need to become a great starter, though obviously that is still the hope. Neyer said it right the first time: A good starter is more valuable than a great reliever.

Last year, Jamie Moyer and Gil Meche and Kyle Lohse and Paul Maholm were all good, but not great starters. Each pitched around 200 innings with an ERA just under 4.00. Each had a VORP of about 40 (i.e. they were worth about 40 runs more than a replacement level starting pitcher over the same number of innings.)

By comparison, the best relievers (Scott Downs, the Mexicutioner, Brad Ziegler, Joe Nathan) were all around 30. Mariano Rivera was almost 35, but he's the exception to several rules, the one about the value of relief pitchers notwithstanding. So if Joba is healthy enough to pitch close to 200 innings, and good enough to compile an ERA under 4.00, he'll be worth about ten runs more than he would if he were to pitch only 70 innings with an ERA around 2.00. Got it?

Ten runs isn't an enormous amount, but it's probably about one win, and in what is shaping up to be a tightly contested AL East, one win might make all the difference. But, as Billy Mays says, wait, there's more.

You see, 70 innings with a 2.00-ish ERA is about the maximum that we can hope for from Joba as a reliever. Sure, he could post a 1.50 ERA. He could pitch 80 or 90 innings. But the Yankees would either have to use him more often or for longer stints, and given their history of handling the kid with, well, kid gloves, that's not likely.

As a starter, however, Joba could still thrive. It will be enough if he gives us 180 innings with a 3.75 ERA, but he could still find a groove and rack up 210 innings with a 2.99 ERA (his career mark as a starter) which would make him,

A) Worth about 60 VORP, i.e. twice as valuable as a very good reliever, and

2) One of the best starters in MLB.

Putting him back in the bullpen effectively eliminates this possibility.

Are we really ready to throw Joba's career under the bus after three starts in April? Give the man a chance to build up some stamina. Give him a chance to prove himself against some other teams. Give him a chance to throw more than 93 pitches.

He doesn't have to be great to be worthwhile as a starter. He just has to be good.

But he still might be great. Don't take that away from us.

Giants Free Passes Just Around the Corner

MLB.com's Chris Haft writes that the San Francisco Giants are issuing fewer walks this year, and their pitchers are therefore having more success at preventing runs.

Besides yielding five runs while finishing 4-1 with three shutout victories
on their recently completed homestand, the Giants issued just 10 walks. This
went a long way toward limiting their season total through 14 games to 53.

That ranked only 10th in the National League entering Thursday, but it's a considerable improvement over last year, when San Francisco's 652 walks were third-most in the league. If pitching and defense were the chapter headings to the Giants' outline of success as the season began, reducing walks was a critical subcategory. Too many free passes would devalue the talent of their pitching staff.

"The more it's talked about, it actually makes it all worse," pitching coach Dave Righetti said. "But you know what? You have to face it. It's not going away."

The subject of walks may linger, but the walks themselves have been dwindling. In the past four games, Giants pitchers have walked one batter in three games and two batters in the other. Opponents worked for the few runs they mustered.

Is this really such a big deal?

The Giants did walk 652 batters last year, which was second most in the NL, not third, and their rate per nine innings of 4.067 just slightly edged out the Pirates at 4.06 per nine innings for worst in the NL. In the majors, only Baltimore walked more batters per game than the Giants in 2008.

This year, as Haft says, the walks are down.

To three-point-nine.

Right now they're 7th instead of 16th in the NL in walk rate, but the rate itself is not much better than it was last year, and frankly, it's still pretty early in the season. Matt Cain (career walk rate of 3.8/9IP) and Jonathan Sanchez (4.6) and Barry Zito (4.4 walks/9IP since joining the Giants) and Tim Lincecum (3.6) are still on the team, and are not likely to suddenly stop walking batters.

The one bright spot is that this year Randy Johnson takes the starts that last year were given to Kevin Correia and Brad Hennesey and Matt Palmer, who all walked quite a few batters last season. Johnson, though not the dominant ace he once was, only walked 44 in 184 innings last year, and can probably teach yougsters like Lincecum, Sanchez and Cain a thing or two about throwing strikes.

More likely, though, everyone will continue to pitch largely as they have always done, with perhaps a few slight improvements due to age and experience. Other personnel changes that may help, according to Haft:

The Giants don't want an excess of walks from their relievers, either. That's largely why they signed free agents Jeremy Affeldt and Bob Howry, who maintained excellent control in 2008, and gave chances to non-roster right-handers Brandon
Medders and Justin Miller. Medders issued five unintentional walks in 15 exhibition innings; Miller was even more precise, walking one in 12 1/3 spring innings.

Those four relievers have combined to walk 3.9 batters per nine innings, same as the team average, and as I mentioned, only marginally better than last year's staff.

And as for saving runs? Well, certainly they did OK in the last few games, though it should be noted that these were against the Diamondbacks, who finished 10th in the NL in Runs Scored last season, and the Padres, who finished dead last. Most likely the Giants' pitchers experienced a brief respite from their usual complacency about free passes when faced with a couple of teams that both struggle to score runs anyway.

Just like all the hype about the homer binge at Yankee Stadium last week, it's still pretty early in the season, and any assessment about the nature of either a team or a building is generally pretty premature.

Articles like this get written all the time, especially early in the season. Six years go I wrote something calling Peter Gammons out when he wrote about how the 2003 Baltimore Orioles hitters were suddenly walking a lot more often than their 2002 selves had, describing a change in philosophy that supposedly the whole team had bought into. The 2002 O's had walked only 452 times, second worst in the AL that year, and their team OBP of .309 was also second worst.
Well, in the end the 2003 Orioles actually walked less, only 431 times, and while they did improve two spote in the OBP ranking, it was because they got more hits, raising the team batting average from a dismal .246 up to a semi-respectable .268. But in the meantime, it looked like a good story to Gammons.

Baseball writers are always looking for a reason for a change or improvement, and are quick to lend credence to changes in approach and philosophy for any perceived improvement, especially if they happen to be the beat writer for a particular team. But more often than not, these things are just flukes, and they are frequently magnified by the fact that so few games have been played, so the numbers can be more easily skewed.

And just like that, they can be skewed back. Over the next month, the Giants will be playing the DOdgers six times, the Mets three, the Rockies five times, and the Cubs twice, in addition to the Nationals and the Diamondbacks. Let's see if the walk rate improves any fiurther.

Analyzing the New Homer Happy Ballpark

There is a new ballpark from which balls are flying out at a record pace. Home runs are jumping off the bats of both the home team and its opponents, much more so than in the team's road games, begging the question of whether this new park is going to play like Coors Field. Or at least, like Coors Field used to play.

I'm talking, of course, about Chase Field in Arizona.

Granted, it's not that new. But the Diamondbacks and their opponents have hit 23 homers in their nine home games, but only one homer in their three road games, to date. This gives Chase Field a Home Run Park Factor of 7.667 right now, meaning that it is more than six and a half times easier to hit a home run in Phoenix than it is in a neutral MLB park.



That number is asinine, and is obviously a result of the fact that the Diamondbacks have played only a handful of games. Chase Field has always been a hitter's park, as we know, but nothing has appreciably changed about it from the last several years. Since 2001, the home run park factor in Arizona has averaged about 1.07, meaning that it's about seven percent easier to homer there than at a neutral park. Seven percent, not seven hundred percent, mind you.

This year, the D-Backs have hosted the Rockies, the Dodgers and the Cardinals, three teams that can hit pretty well. The Dodgers were a little below average last year in run scoring, but they've largely revamped their lineup. At bats that last year were mostly handled by an aging Jeff Kent and the three punchless musketeers of Angel Berroa, Blake Dewitt and Juan Pierre are now largely taken by Orlando Hudson, Rafael Furcal, Casey Blake and Manny Ramirez.

The Rockies and Cards were both in the top half of the NL in run scoring last year, and in similar, though somewhat muted fashion, some of their offseason moves represent "addition by subtraction" as well. Willy Taveras, Cesar Izturis, and Adam Kennedy, are gone, and their replacements have helped to shore up the offenses of each team. Admittedly, there are some holes in this theory, as some of their hitters haven't really hit their stride and others are overperforming at the moment, but generally I think this makes sense.

Nevertheless, we can see why the Diamondbacks' pitchers have had a hard time at home. And similarly, we can see why the Arizonas have themselves hit so many homers at Chase Field, facing the likes of Aaron Cook, Glendon Rusch, Joel Piniero and some inexperienced relievers. their three road games, against a rebuilding Giants team in the pitcher-friendly AT&T Park, have helped to skew the sample.

No doubt, as the season plays out and the D-backs both face and provide better pitching, the homers will slow their torrid pace and we'll return to our regularly scheduled season of only moderately crazy home run rates, instead of the ridiculous ones we have now.


In a related story: The New Yankee Stadium.

There are probably a few sillier notions going around than the one that says the Yankees' new digs are a homer haven, but offhand, I can't think of any right now.

After this weekend's opening series against the Cleveland Indians, as you've no doubt heard by now, the New Yankee Stadium is being hailed as "Coors Field East". The Yankees have hit nine homers in their four home games, to go with the 11 hit by the tribe. That's 20 bombs in just four games, and if you want to be thorough about it, you can add in the seven homers hit in the two exhibition games against the Cubs earlier this month.


At the pace suggested by these first four regular season games, you'd expect 405(!) homers to be hit over the course of the year, a ridiculous number. For comparison's sake, the most homers ever hit in a ballpark in one season is (I believe) 303, set by the Colorado Rockies in 1999, who hit 144 homers in their 81 home games, but also allowed 159.

At this rate, then, the Yankees' sea-level ballpark, with dimensions almost exactly the same as their previous home, located literally right across the street from this one and facing in generally the same direction, would have to allow about 1/3 more homers than the homer-happiest ballpark in history at the peak of the steroid era. Which, as I said, is ridiculous.

There have been suggestions that while the official dimensions are the same, the walls themselves are a little bit closer in some areas, especially the right field short porch, though these differences make up less than 10 feet in any one location, and usually more like four or five feet. Similarly, the outfield walls are shorter in a few places, though not very much shorter, and anyway, if you watched Chien-Ming Wang and rookie Anthony Clagett (ahem...) pitch on Saturday, you'd know that few of these homers are just barely clearing the fences. Most are no-doubters, and so we're left to wonder what other forces are at play here.

The elevation and direction are the same. The dimensions are the same, mostly. One suggestion deals with the new, big scoreboards in centerfield, perhaps blocking the wind that used to keep some fly balls in the park, but this too is an insufficient explanation. The old park had a big scoreboard and billboards all the way across the outfield, more than 100 feet high probably, and so while the big, new video board might be bigger than the old one was, it should not make this much of a difference.

The problem in both cases (that is, Chase Field and new Yankee Stadium) is that so little of the season has been played. The Yankees have played just 5% of their 2009 home schedule. Drawing any conclusions from these four games, with no apparent reason for the high incidence of homers to be blamed on the ballpark, is foolishness at best, yellow journalism at worst.

Isn't it just possible that, say, the baseballs themselves are juicier or that the Yankees' pitching staff still has some kinks to work out? or that, you know, it's a statistical fluke? It would be like assuming that all of the 2,900 miles of Interstate 80 are straight and flat and largely devoid of traffic after having driven only the portion that goes through the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.



I think I'll drive a bit further before making my decision, thanks.


UPDATE: In light of the fact that Accu-Weather has weighed in on this issue, and thinks it may be new wind patterns due to the slightly different profiles of the former and current stadia's grandstands, I decided to posit my own theory on how the wind and weather may be affecting the baseballs hit at the new Yankee Stadium.

Possible Old Yankee Stadium Wind:
















Possible New Yankees Stadium Wind:















Hey, my approach is about as scientific as theirs is.

Carl Pavano Makes History Again, Sort of

Carl Pavano made his (not) much anticipated return to a major league mound this afternoon, toeing the rubber for the Clevelands against the Texas Rangers in Arlington.

Pavano gave up nine runs, all earned, in only one inning of official work, striking out one and walking three. He allowed two homers, a double and three singles, and faced three batters in the second inning before being sent to the showers. He left two runners on base, both of whom scored eventually, one on a sacrifice fly, the other on a fielder's choice.

This should be no real surprise, as Pavano has been neither healthy nor effective for half a decade, and his spring training stats (5.70 ERA in 23 IP) did not exactly inspire confidence. But still, an ERA of 81.00?

It's not often you see a pitcher give up at least nine runs without getting more than three outs. Since 1993, this has only happened 15 times, which is more than I would have guessed. The last occurred in August 2008, when Brian Bannister let the Yankees have a 10-spot en route to a 15-6 drubbing. An interesting point of note: Kansas City has doled out four of those 15 games, while nobody else has more than two (Arizona).

Bronson Arroyo also did it last year, in June, giving up 10 of the Blue Jays' 14 runs in an embarrassing loss. Such a game occurred only once in 2007, but it was perhaps the worst start in history: 11 earned runs, two outs by Houston's Jason Jennings against the Padres. Someone should have told him he wasn't pitching in Colorado anymore.

The most this has happened in a single year was the four times it occurred in 2006, twice due to the Royals' horrendous pitching. One of those, Mark Redman's 9-earned run, one out start against the Tigers in late September, might be even worse than Jennings', if we use ERA as the barometer. Redman's ERA for that game was (I kid you not...) 243.00!

Then it only happened about once per year, going back to 1993. Interestingly, some of the pitchers who did this weren't really all that bad. Arroyo last year was already mentioned, but Orlando Hernandez did it in Y2K, Tom Gordon in 1995, and Ben Rivera in 1993, each of whom won 12 games in the year this happened, though Rivera had an ERA over 5.00 for the year, and only won the games he did because he was pitching for the eventual NL champion Phillies.

Rookie Jason Simontacchi did it in 2002, when he won 11 games for the Cardinals. Ryan Madson did it in 2006, when he won 11 for the Phillies, though admittedly, he was much better in relief than starting that year, and hasn't started since that year. Redman also had 11 wins in the year he did it, albeit with an ERA of almost 6.00.

But before that? Wow, this almost never happened. Going back to 1954, which is as far as Baseball-reference.com's searchable gme database goes, there are only three more games ivolving at least nine earned runs and three outs or fewer, less than one per decade.

Before 1993, you have to go back to 1987, when Houston's Bob Knepper surrendered nine earned runs to the Cubs in just one official inning, during a season in which he led the NL with 17 losses. Houston stuck with him, though, and he went 14-5 the next year, but then he went 7-12 for two teams the following year and was done. (Interestingly, Rick Sutcliffe gave up seven runs and six walks in five innings in that game, but got the Win!)

The last one before that was in 1976, when journeyman Joe Decker of the Minnesota Twins gave up 10 runs to the Royals (remember when the Royals used to be able to score 10 runs?) in one of the last starts of his career. He lasted about another month, and then disappeared from the majors for three years, before attempting a brief comeback with the recently formed Mariners in 1979.

And finally, lest you think that such things only happen to lousy pitchers, the first such start belonged to none other than Bob Gibson. Excuse me: Hall of Famer Bob Gibson, in 1967. This was a down year for him, only 13-7, 2.98 ERA in 175 IP, but still, nine runs in one inning? Actually, two thirds of an inning? The Cardinals would eventually win the World Series that year, with Gibson finishing 22nd in the MVP voting, but that day the Giants had their way with him. I guess the wind was blowing out at Candlestick Park.

This really doesn't mean much, except that Pavano is likely on his way out, which we all knew anyway. Unfortunately for Cleveland, they're counting on him as their #3 starter.

In case you had any doubts about how the game has changed in the last decade and a half, think about how these out of control pitching performance used to happen about once every 10 or 12 years, and now they happen about once a year.

Good thing we got this year's out of the way quickly!

Using Draft Signing Bonuses to Predict MLB Performance?

From an interview with Baseball Prospectus' Nate Silver in the Baltimore Sun's blogging branch:

TD: I did want to ask you about [Orioles catching prospect Matt] Wieters, because PECOTA seems to have an almost unprecedented crush on him. I was wondering what you made of that?

Nate Silver: [...] The Double-A team Wieters was playing for, when you look at park effects and league difficulty, it was a really tough year for hitters in Double-A. And so that gets ratcheted up quite a bit. The Eastern League was very competitive. He did about as well as any player can do down at that level. He's a big guy. That translates pretty well. And we look at the size of a guy's signing bonus because that has some predictive value. The fact that he has a very big pedigree in college and that more often than not, guys who are drafted that high tend to pan out. That combination of things led to a really aggressive forecast where, if he played for a whole year at that level, he could be an MVP contender.

The bold emphasis is mine.

For the record, Wieters is projected to hit .311/.395/.546 with 31 homers and 100 RBI this year, despite the facts that he has only one year of pro experience and it's all been at Single and Double-A. For reference, that's about as well as Kevin Youkilis or Mark Teixeira did last year, and is easily the most optimistic projection for a rookie player that Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA system has ever made.

I saw this over at Rob Neyer's newly-formatted blog on ESPN.com, and I thought that rather than waste all my thoughts commenting over there, where someone might actually see them, I would lay something out here. This way nobody will ever read it, and it can't fall into the wrong hands, er... eyes. Whatever.

Anyway, I understood some of why PECOTA would suggest that a young player with so little pro experience would play at such a high level in his rookie year. After all, such a feat is not unprecedented. Mike Piazza hit the cover off the ball at AA and AAA in 1992, and then easily won the NL Rookie of the Year in 1993 at age 24, hitting .318/35/112 for the Dodgers.

He was, it should be noted, a year older, and put up his gaudy minor league minor league numbers at a higher level than Wieters did last year, but the analogy is there. Also, as Neyer pointed out, Johnny Bench won an MVP award at age 22, though he did so after having already played a few seasons in the majors, not as a rookie. Joe Torre, Yogi Berra, Carlton Fisk, Ted Simmons, Gary Carter and other catchers have hit very well at age 23 or so, but most of those had some seasoning in MLB before that.

And of course those were all before PECOTA. Back in the day, we used to have to rely on scouts and guesswork to figure out how well someone would perform, but today there is an array of different methods, all scientific in some form or another, to do this job. Bill James, ZiPS, PECOTA, and a half dozen others all have some proprietary methods for guessing at how well players will do in the future, with varying degrees of success.

Once in a while you get to peek inside a little, as when Baseball Prospectus introduced and explained PECOTA a decade ago. For the most part, though, these systems remain hidden, and the specific formulae are always closely guarded secrets. But Silver let the cat out of the bag in this interview, and I can't beloeve nobody has yet picked up on it:

Signing bonuses??!?

I can understand using players with comparable stats, comparable positions, comparable body types, ages, and etc to try to figure out what someone might do, but signing bonuses? That essentially means that PECOTA is putting some semblance of trust in what the drafting teams think of their draftees' worth, right?

I'm not saying the teams don't know what they're doing, but there is an inherent danger in this approach. Talent and potential aren't the only thing to go into this process. Teams who have more money to spend can afford to give bigger signing bonuses.

The Yankees, for example, routinely give their picks more than "slot money" because, well, they're the Yankees. Or because they're trying to convince a player to sign with them instead of going to college, or playing another sport. Similarly, Scott Boras clients get more than anybody else because he's the best agent in the business.

Theoretically then, a Yankees' draftee, who wanted to go to college, affiliated with Scott Boras could easily get a bigger bonus than someone drafted 10-15 spots ahead of him. This, despite the fact that he's presumably not as talented, and yet, somehow, PECOTA would increase his projection because of it.

How far down the draft order does this consideration go? Just the first round? the first two, or five? The whole draft? Probably not. And for how long is this a factor? Just with rookies, or after a year or two of minor league expereience?

In any case, most of the time, this is probably irrelevant, as I doubt that PECOTA makes a distinction between a bonus of $220,000 and $250,000, or between $19,000 and $30,000, or whatever. But when you start getting into the millions, well, I have to wonder.

Wieters got $6 million from the Orioles, almost as much as 2005 31 pick Justin Upton got from the Diamondbacks. These are Upton's PECOTA projections for 2007 and 2008 as well as the perfromances on which those were based and the actual performances in the following years, for comparison:

2006 Performance: .263/.343/.413 in 501 PA in Class A, at age 18
2007 PECOTA: .255/.318/.413 (12HR, 10 SB, 62 Runs and 53 RBI in 529 PA in MLB)
2007 Actual: .221/.283/.364 in 152 PA in MLB, after hitting .319/.410/.551 in 100+ games at High A and AA

Looks like PECOTA missed high and wide with this one. Upton was only 19 in 2007, but BP thought he would be just a hair below the average NL hitter that year (which was .266/.334/.423, according to Baseball-reference.com). Instead, he hit more like the average NL pinch hitter (.228/.311/.358) which is to say, like a guy who does not deserve to play regularly.


2007 Performance: .319/.410/.551 in 456 PA in A and AA, at age 19
2008 PECOTA: .271/.349/.471 (20 HR, 92 Runs, 78 RBIs, 18 SB in 642 PA in MLB)
2008 Actual: .250/.353/.463 (15 HR, 42 RBIs, 52 Runs, 1 SB in 417 PA in MLB, after 15 decent games in AAA)

PECOTA got pretty clost to the mark here, though. Despite the 21-point gap in batting average and the lack of steals, Upton's actual OPS was within 0.004 of his projection, albeit in a lot less playing time, which is difficult to project. So perhaps the signing bonus thing doesn't factor in once they've got a couple of years' experience to use for evaluation purposes.

Other 2007 draftees who got several million in signing bonuses either don't have a PECOTA projection for this year (Andrew Brackman) or have projections that seem pretty reasonable (Mike Moustakas, David Price, Josh Vitters) given what we have seen of them in the minors.

I also checked Jeff Samardzija, the Cubs' pick in 2005 who got a record $7.25 million so that he would pitch instead of playing football. His projection for last year indicated that he would stink very much bad in the majors, which he surprisingly did not, though their projection for him in 2008 says much the same (6.60 ERA).

I can't check everyone, of course, but my suspicion is that the signing bonus thing doesn't play a very big role. I'm just not sure I get why it should play any role at all. Silver's explanation for using the signing bonus is that "it has some predictive value" but of course, generally, the guys who get more money in the draft are the ones the teams think will be good major leaguers anyway, so there ought to be some correlation there.

This winds up as a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the the players who are expected to be good are given a lot of money, and then the players given a lot of money are expected to be good. Seems to me there must be a better way.

Fisking Fitzpatrick: Comparing the Phillies OF to the 1930 Athletics

Well, I tried to go "old school" with my Canterbury Tales style Phillies Preview, but Philadelphia Inquirer writer Frank Fitzpatrick went old school in a different way in his Sunday column. Fitzpatrick compares the current Phillies outfield of Jason Werth, Raul Ibanez and Shane Victorino to the outfield of the 1930 Athletics, consisting of Mule Haas, Bing Miller and Al Simmons.

He concluded that the Phillies can't match the A's for nicknames, though he admits that neither "Mule" nor "Bing" is as interesting as "The Flyin' Hawiian".



No, seriously, in terms of their abilities, he gives the "...1930 trio a big edge over the Phillies' outfield".

But before we reduce his arguments to rubble, let's ask the obvious question:

Why?

Why are we comparing a team that played 79 years ago, a different franchise, in a different league, in a different park in a different era, with the defending World Champs? Why not compare them to the 1967 Kansas City Athletics, or the 1955 Pirates or the 1884 St. Paul Apostles, for that matter?



It's because those A's were the last repeat World Series champions from Philadelphia, and of course the entire stock of Philly beat writers hopes that these Phillies can repeat as well.

Granted, it's a silly exercise. For one thing, why just compare the outfield? Why not the infield? Why not the starting pitchers or the bullpen or the benches? Besides differences in the leagues and the style of ball, the types of these clubs are completely different as well.

The 2009 Phillies are stocked with several good, but not great players, some of whom had career years in 2008. At best, 20 years from now, we might be able to look back and call, say, Chase Utley or Cole Hamels a Hall of Famer, but that's a long stretch at this point. In reality, there probably isn't a single eventual Cooperstowner on either the 2008 or 2009 Phillies rosters.

By contrast, those 1930 A's had four of them: Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx, not to mention a brief appearance by Eddie Collins. The first three were in their prime, in their mid to late 20's.

Jimmie Foxx was only 21 in 1929, but had been in the majors since age 17, and had an MVP-caliber campaign in his first full season of work. (The AL curiously did not dole out an MVP award in 1929, and neither league awarded any in 1930, though Simmons and Foxx would have certainly been in the running.)



Fitzpatrick starts out reasonably well:

As a result, anyone interested in comparing Simmons, Haas and Miller with their counterparts on the 2009 Phillies can do so only through the harsh prism of statistics.

But numbers don't reveal everything. They don't consider 1930's lively ball or 2009's menacing bullpens. They don't account for the rigors of train travel, the daunting glare of the 24/7 spotlight or the spitball and slider.

He then proceeds to base most of the rest of the article on anecdotal evidence and hearsay, all but ignoring any intelligent statistical analysis.

Quoting Dave Jordan, the head of the Philadelphia Historical Society:

"...the old A's outfield looks far, far better. Simmons does that all by himself, and Miller and Haas were very solid performers. Victorino may, in coming years, approach Miller. I don't think Werth can even be placed in a fair comparison with any of them."

Fitzpatrick and his sources are correct in saying that Raul Ibanez, the most accomplished of the three Phillies' outfielders, is no match for the best of the A's outfield, Hall of Famer Al Simmons. The Inquirer article cites Simmons' career batting average of .334, his hits and homer totals, but forgets to mention how significantly these were inflated by the era and the ballpark in which he played.



If you "neutralize" his stats, his career batting average drops to .312, still very good, but not quite so impressive on the face of it. Similarly, he loses about 15 homers and almost 200 RBI over the course of his career. If you neutralize both of their career stats lines, they actually come out quite a bit closer than you would think:

Simmons: .312/.356/.498, with 22 HR, 113 RBI & 93 Runs per 162 Games
Ibanez: .280/.340/.463, with 21 HR, 90 RBI & 78 Runs per 162 Games

That's still a big disparity, but not as big as you might think.

For comparing the other two, he then quotes someone named Bill Kashatus, who wrote a book about the 1929 Athletics:

"What I see in those numbers is that while the power stats are comparable for center and rightfielders, Haas and Miller had higher batting averages and were much more disciplined at the plate than Victorino and Werth, as evidenced by the difference in strikeouts."

Wait, so he's saying that these players from Shibe Park in the 1930's hit for higher batting averages and struck out less often? Well, then they must be better players, right?

Except that they're not.

For one thing, comparing strikeouts is just ridiculous. In 1929, the American League averaged 2.92 strikeouts per game, and then in 1930, it jumped up to an average of 3.32/game.

Last year, the National League averaged almost seven strikeouts per game. Baseball is played differently now. Everybody swings harder, pitchers throw harder, and the strike zone is half the size of what it was three quarters of a century ago.

For example, Jimmie Foxx led the American League in whiffs every year from 1929-31, and his total for three years (220) was only 10 percent more than Ryan Howard did all by himself last year (199), which didn't even lead the league. There is no good way to say that Werth or Victorino has less impressive bat control than two players from 1930.



Another big difference, of course, is the relative number of runs scored. In 1929, in a league that averaged 5.01 Runs/Game, Bing Miller created 103 runs, or as many as would normally be scored in 20.6 games. Mule Haas created 99 Runs, enough for 19.8 games.

In 1930, the American League averaged 5.41 Runs/Game. Miller, despite hitting .303 with 100 RBI, created only 88 Runs, enough for 16.2 games. Haas created only 74 runs, good for 13.7 games' worth. Simmons created 148 and 166 runs in those two seasons, good for 29.5 and 30.6 games in 1929 and 1930, respectively.

For comparison's sake, last year's outfield played in a league that averaged just 4.54 runs/game, and Ibanez played in the American League, which averaged 4.78 Runs per game. The 2008 Phillies outfield was not better than the 1930 Athletics' outfield but it's closer than you'd think:

       Simmons   Miller  Haas          Total 
1929     29.5    20.6    19.8           69.9 
1930     30.6    16.2    13.7           60.5 

       Burrell  Shane   Werth  (Ibanez)   Total (Tot w/ Ibanez)
2008    23.3     20.3    18.5   (22.6)    62.1 (61.4)

So, even though Simmons has a big edge on Burrell (or Ibanez), the edges for the other two outfielders are very slim, comparing 1929 to 2008, the first Championship year for each team.



And then both Miller (age 35 in 1930) and Haas (age 26) drop off notably the next year. Werth and Victorino are both in their late 20's, and should not see any significant drop off due to age, though Werth may have peaked last year, and in any case, his track record suggests that he's never more than a checked swing away from his next DL stint.

Ibanez, on the other hand, will be 37 this year, and will probably start to decline at any moment, but if the other two pick up his slack, there's no reason that these three can't provide about 60 games worth of runs for the 2009 Phillies, just as Haas, Simmons and Miller did for the 1930 Athletics.

Another comparison made in the article pertained to speed, with Kashatus saying,

"What always amazed me was that Haas in 12 full seasons in the majors totaled 12 stolen bases. With his speed, he could have stolen much more. Then again, the . . . A's weren't built to run. They were a power-hitting team."

This last part is true, though I find it amusing that a guy whose nickname was "Mule" was actually considered fast.



Technically, it's not clear whether he actually was very fast or whether he just had incredible instincts when it came to chasing fly balls in the outfield. Most of the literature talks about him being a great fly chaser, but little of it actually talks specifically about his speed. Similarly, Joe DiMaggio was widely regarded as one of the best in centerfield, but never stole more than six bases in a season.

The 1930 A's were second in the American League in homers, slugging and runs scored (all to the Yankees, of course), but only 7th in steals among eight teams. If you can score 951 runs without risking skinned knees and broken fingers, why bother, right?

These Phillies are different, though. In addition to all the homers (they led the Senior circuit with 214 of them last year) they also had the 3rd most steals (136) in the NL, and were 4th from last in getting caught.

Victorino stole 36 bases himself last year, 6th in the NL, and should probably be compared to Miller, not Haas, as Bing stole 24 bags in 1929, 3rd in the AL, and is the only one of the three with any propensity for swiping bases. He dropped off significantly in 1930, stealing only 13, but also getting caught 13 times.

Another quote from Kashatus:

"Both Werth and Miller are disciplined hitters, though. They both work counts well and can hit in the clutch. But Miller was more of a contact hitter who considered it a disgrace to take a called third strike."

Werth is, indeed, a very patient hitter, seeing 4.51 pitches per plate appearance last season, which would have ranked second in the majors (behind Nick Swisher) if he'd had 19 more plate appearances. Even though he struck out twice as often as he walked, and about 40% more than the average NL player, he waited for his pitch to strike out. Dammit.



Miller was, though not abnormally averse to the strikeout, at least relatively adept at avoiding them. The average American Leaguer in 1930 struck out 56 times in 585 at-bats, while Bing would swing and miss only 25 times that year.

So Kashatus was right about this one, though I would have liked to see some evidence, rather than just taking his word for it. I guess newspapers aren't the place for tables of numbers and complex statistics, unless they refer to the stock market.

Now if we can just get Charlie Manuel to wear a high, false collar and a bowler.

Brett Gardner: Put me in Coach! I'm Ready to Make Outs!

The Yankees are reportedly planning on letting Brett Gardner be the regular center fielder this year, at least until he demonstrates that he can't handle the load. In my mind, his four seasons of fairly lackluster performances in the minor leagues have already demonstrated that.



Nevertheless, Yankees manager Joe Girardi has tabbed Gardner, not Johnny Damon or Nick Swisher, to be the everyday centerfielder. And if Girardi decides to stick with Gardy despite all evidence that he knows how to do little other than run fast and make outs, I am hereby patenting the term for this tendency as a "Gard-On", as in:

"I just don't get why Girardi has such a Gard-on for this guy. You'd think they were having an affair or something."

Gardner has evidently won the job on the strength of his strong performance this spring, in which he's hit .367 with three homers, six RBI, nine Runs and five steals in six attempts in 21 games. In case you were wondering about the level of competition, these homers were hit against:

• Brett Cecil, a 21-year old who had a 4.11 ERA in 30 IP in AAA last year,
• Aaron Harang, who went 6-17, 4.78 for the Reds in 2008, and whose 4.56 spring ERA suggests that he hasn't appreciably improved over the winter, and
• Brad Mills, a 23-year old Blue Jays prospect who has not yet pitched above AA
  

In addition to the unimpressive competition and the fact that he has not hit one out since March 9th, those three homers equal the total he hit in 341 at-bats in AAA last season, or one third of his entire professional career home run total, in 381 games. So, while it's possible that Brett suddenly somehow acquired the power he has always lacked, it's more likely that this is a fluke, and Gardner won't hit more than one or two homers all year, if he plays daily.

In somewhat related news, the Yankees announced last week that Derek Jeter will be moving back into the leadoff spot, a role in which he has performed admirably at various times in his career. Indeed, Jeter's career line in the #1 hole (.315/.389/.471) is almost exactly the same as his overall career line (316/.387/.458). Despite his weaknesses, one of Jeter's greatest strengths as a player is his ability to adapt, and to do what needs to be done, regardless of changes in circumstance. If there's anyone who can be shuffled around the lineup to help the team function better as a whole, it's Jeter.



So, they don't need their centerfielder to also serve as the leadoff man, as Damon did for the last few years. That should help Gardner a bit, dropping him back down to the bottom of the order, where the lower pressure may allow him to thrive. Or, more likely, where the lack of protection in the order will enable opposing pitchers to challenge him, and his weak bat will be exposed all the more.

Jason Rosenberg from IIATMS commented over at ShysterBall:

... Here’s what Gardner isn’t: a power hitter. Here’s what the Yanks don’t need: A power hitter. What DO the Yanks need: A CF with speed and a hitter who can get on and help manufacture a run.

[...]

Tell me I am crazy, but if Gardner’s on first, they are going to hit and run like mad as Jeter is so adept at slapping the ball towards rightfield. As the 2B goes to cover the base (Jeter being righty and all), that creates a massive hole for Jeter to try to shoot the ball thru. Gardy’s going first to third alot this year.

Melky ain’t.

With all due respect, Jason, power hitter, schmower hitter. And that "if" Gardner's on first should by no means be taken lightly.

Gardner's just barely a "hitter" at all. His career minor league line is .291/.389/.385, with nine homers in almost 1700 plate appearances. Baseball Prospectus' 75th percentile projection for him is only .266/.353/.375, which last year would have given him an OPS that ranked 125th out of 147 major league batters.

In other words: He'll have to defy three-to-one odds just to be awful.

Gardner's 90th percentile projection from Baseball Prospectus (meaning that roughly 1 out of ten players with a similar profile do this well) is .288/.376/.412. That's statistical speak for "moderately useful" or about as well as BJ Upton did last year.



But Upton is younger, more experienced, and still has potential, as everyone expects him to hit with more power, in addition to the speed and the newly found patience he exhibited in 2008. Gardner would be maxed out at that level, with nowhere to go but down. Unless Gardner is saving dozens of runs with his glove and those speedy legs, there's no way he should be a viable option for a team trying to win a championship, not for more than a couple of weeks as a stopgap.
More likely he'll compile numbers closer to BP's weighted average, which is .252/.339/.350 (689 OPS), and which would make Gardner one of the dozen or so worst regular hitters in the major leagues this year.

For comparison, Chone Figgins of the LAnahfornia Angeles had a 685 OPS, which ranked 11th from the bottom. That's IF Gardner meets his weighted projection. In all probability though, given his statistical profile, he'll end up performing more like Michael Bourn of the Astros, who was dead last out of 147 qualified MLB hitters last year in OPS. (He only played as much as he did, both in Philly and Houston, because GM Ed Wade has a gard-on for the guy. See how that works?)

Take a look:

Name    AVG   OBP   SLG  OPS   AB    R   2B  3B  HR  RBI   SB  CS   BB   SO
Bourn  .285  .379  .393  772  1552  280  48  36  16  142  163  28  227  339
Gardy  .290  .389  .385  774  1448  297  55  28   9  124  151  31  233  287

Those are the minor league stats for the two players (complements of the Baseball Cube) and they are eerily similar.

Other similarities include that they're both an inch or two under six feet tall, with listed weights of 180 lbs. Both bat lefty and play center, and Gardner, like Bourn before him, will get his first shot at extended playing time in the majors at age 25.



If there is any difference to speak of, it's that Gardner struck out 10% less often in the minors than Bourn did, which may suggest slightly better bat control, but not much else. It should also be noted that more than half of Bourn's numbers were compiled at AA, while Gardner's were spaced pretty evenly between Single A (both high and low), Double-A and AAA.

If you look at their college numbers, at first glance it appears than Gardner (.382/.456/.508) was a vastly better player than Bourn (.320/.431/.371) but this is largely a result of context. Gardner went to the College of Charleston, in the Southern Conference, with such luminous institutions as Wofford, the Citadel, Appalacian State, and Elon College (long live the Fighting Christians!!!).

During the three years that Gardner attended college, there were 33 different players drafted from that conference, and four of these have made it to the majors, at least briefly. Among these, the best (so far) is probably Tom Mastny, a nondescript relief pitcher in the Cleveland organization.

By contrast, Bourn attended the University of Houston, in Conference USA, with much larger schools like Tulane, UNC-Charlotte, and Texas Christian. In his three years, there were 66 different players drafted, and 12 of these have been in the majors for some span of time. The best of these are Chad Tracy, Jesse Crain, Dan Uggla and Kevin Youkilis. Clearly, Bourn was up against much stiffer competition. So it looks like the differences in those college numbers are a wash, too.

This, of course, is largely irrelevant now, since we have close to 400 minor league games to examine for each player, a much better indicator of future major league performance than college numbers are. And those numbers suggest that Gardner will be one of the fastest and most prolific outmakers in the major leagues this year.

On another team, he'd be a great bet to rack up 50 steals and 500 outs, but I think the Yankees will grow tired of his act by the end of May, and either Damon or Swisher will be out patrolling center field. The Yankees can afford to take a hit on defense if it means they'll get reasonable production from their hitters.

Either that, or they'll end up trading for someone they think can play regularly, eating a lot of salary in the process. Someone like Aaron Rowand or (God help us...) Juan Pierre.

Ick.

2009 Phillies Preview...in Iambic Pentameter (sort of)

The Phillies won themselves a World Series,
Beat the Tampa Bay Rays with rel'tive ease!
A championship! And long-awaited!
City of Brotherly Love, elated!
But now they face a new season: Oh-Nine,
Their foes take aim, they'll have no easy time
Repeating as Darlings of October...
Will their season end before it's over?

Starting Pitching:

The team's hopes start with Hamels, their big ace
The Series MVP, the Phranchise Phace,
Two hundred innings plus, this year he'll give
And each time out, he'll keep the hope alive.
A nasty change-up from his arm, sinister
Will make opponents hear, "Sit down, Mister!"
At only twenty-five and not abused,
His arm for 20 wins could well be used.



Brett Myers gets the nod as starter, second,
For thirty starts again, he should be beckoned.
He's better than his middling ERAs
But needs to prove it, get back to the days
In '05, '06, under four he stayed
And he still can, he's only twenty eight.
A breakout season they need, not a LAIM
Fifteen-plus wins, he's no one left to blame.
If he can't do it now, he never will
A few more years, and he's over the hill.

Blanton's number three, an innings-eater
His slider, curve and low 90's heater
Provide six innings, quite reliable.
Mechanics make him inviolable.
Perhaps not much to watch, not exciting
Won't miss bats, without a slider, biting,
But more than earns his modest salary
(Though he should maybe watch the calories!)

Fourth is Jamie Moyer, ancient of days
Who helped the Phils to beat the Tampa Rays.
Sixteen games he won through the long season
Though some thought him done, and with good reason.
For two years more the Phillies, they signed him
And though his best seasons are behind him
He might give just enough to be useful
Though I doubt it, if I must be truthful.




The Number five spot, quite likely revolving:
(Kendrick's not much good, and not evolving.)
Chan Ho Park could start sometimes, but it seems
His ERA, helped by Chavez Ravine
Will likely blow up this year in The Vault.
The minors seem bare, though not Ruben's fault,
Won't help much, unless someone surprises.
The same poor pitching, in many guises.

Bullpen:

Closers can't remain perfect, as Brad Lidge
Was in '08. He'll drop off, just a smidge,
But should remain a thoroughbred stopper
Helping the Phillies remain on top, or
Barring that, at least he'll fan his share of
Batters, for Phillies Phans to cheer thereof.
But if Philly's season hopes, they Phalter
It won't be his fault, he's like Gibraltar.




After Brad Lidge, rounding out the bullpen:
Madson, Condrey, Chan Ho, Eyre and Durbin,
Some quality arms, some who are re-treads.
"Condrey and Durbin," say some cooler heads,
"Should regress some from last year's performance.
Low ERAs, with little conformance
To anything they had done before this!"
By not pointing this out, I'd be remiss.

But Madson is a solid reliever,
With two good seasons, he's made believers
In Philly and beyond. Hitters hate him
And his slow change-up, "Bland ultimatum!"
They'd rather be challenged with smoking heat
But it's off-speed stuff he uses to beat
Them, and more of the same you'll see this year
He's both young and quite good, so have no fear!

Scott Eyre is the Phillies' only southpaw
Due to Romero's run-in with the law
From tainted powder, 6-Oxo Extreme
(Of pitching 'fore June, he can only dream),
But once he returns the Phils are stronger,
Though in contention, perhaps no longer
They'll be if the starters cannot maintain
Their '08 levels and be more than LAIM.

And those who don't start should pitch some innings,
Out of the bullpen, vulture some winnings,
Though Park and Kendrick and Happ aren't much,
To coax outs from them will take a soft touch.

If there's more relief help, it's hard to see.
Majewski, Zagurski, Dave Borowski?
All washed-up and lousy they were last year
Such dreck in the majors? No! Please not here!


Offensive Starters:

1)
As for the offense, begins the order:
Number 11, a man much shorter
Than many of his peers, though they can't boast
Of an MVP, to him, they must toast.

But from that height, he seems to have fallen,
Though still a great shortstop, Jimmy Rollins.
His glove is no slouch, he's earned two Gold ones,
And backs up his words (he utters bold ones!)

His bat, more than adequate, it should yield
A hundred-plus runs, if he stays on-field,
Hit a few homers, could walk more often
But don't expect vintage Kenny Lofton.



2)
The two-hole, also manned by a shorty,
With O-B-P's well over .340:
Shane Victorino, "Flyin' Hawaiian"
His small stature, his talent belyin'.

Decent BA, a handful of homers,
Good defense (among center field roamers),
Excellent speed (he'll steal 30 bases),
Still in his prime, just 28, he is.

3)
Second baseman, Utley, the third batter,
Should this year 40-plus doubles, scatter,
And hit 30 taters. Runs he'll drive in,
And score some himself, plus make some divin'

Stops up the middle. Perhaps a Gold Glove?
Alas, last year's voters showed him no love
Though vastly better he was than Brandon,
(The voting gets increasingly random.)

Regardless, Chase is the best keystoner
In MLB. At that, he's a loner,
An MVP threat, without any peer,
But Philly will need more than him this year.

4)
Cleanup man? First baseman, Ryan Howard
Last year with much undue praise was showered
For driving in runs and hitting some jacks.
Such people ignored the cost of those hacks:

Almost 200 whiffs, low O-B-P...
His VORP, on his own team, ranked #3!
Still he had value, not a bad player,
But much like Casey, per Ernest Thayer.

Likely to improve on .251,
But not the best fielder under the sun,
Defense atrocious and legs immobile,
But more power than erstwhile Chernobyl!





5)
Raul Ibanez bats fifth, plays left field,
(Philly to Burrell's demands would not yield.)
Out goes The Bat they thought not a keeper,
And in comes Raul: Older, not cheaper.

Still can't play defense, walks much less often,
Hits more singles, (the blow, this should soften)
But little difference in their net effects
Should there be this year, unless one gets wrecked

With injuries, or else early, ages.
Smart cash is on Raul, say the sages,
To start his decline phase, slow attrition.
By June, for Pat, Phils' Phans could be wishin'!

6)
Next we have Werth, him, finally healthy,
Had a career year, made himself wealthy,
But can he build on last year's good numbers?
Or will his bat instead choose to slumber?

The more common problem for him has been
That his wrist ailment, to heal wasn't keen,
But with a full year in '08, he proved
That he's OK now, beyond this he's moved.

A great hitter, like Manny, 'gainst lefties
But batting left, his numbers aren't hefty,
Now he must try to hit righty pitching
Or maybe just when he hits, not switching.

7)
The next, um... "hitter" is Pedro Feliz
Who seems to make outs with relative ease.
Suppos'd to stabilize the Corner, Hot,
But hitting .250 is all he's got.

Despite his weak bat, swings for the fences,
No need to walk, he makes no pretenses,
Still plays good defense, but won't steal a base,
OPS so low, how's he show his face?

Better thirdbasemen? Twenty, easily,
Or more, but Philly's minors got measly
Production from theirs, so help's not coming.
City of Brotherly Love? Soon bumming.

8)
Last in the lineup is the day's catcher,
Often Ruiz, whose bat is no match for
Chris Coste, not that his lumber's so awesome,
But at least his bat isn't still playing possum.
Ruiz, now 30, has slim potential
To help the Phillies' run differential.
Nor does Lou Marson, or Ron Paulino.
Eight's a black hole for the Phils, as we know.




The Bench:

The Phillies back-ups, they should do just fine,
Long as they're usually riding the pine.
Not a bad bunch here, some players, decent
But none whose star was bright very recent.

Jenkins, fifth outfielder and pinch hitter,
May be tempted to feel rather bitter,
Signed with the Phillies to be a starter
But found hitting righties last year harder
His one skill gone and injuries nagging
Geoff found his at-bat count sort of lagging.
A different approach he seems to have found,
And hopes for a 2009 rebound.

Stairs has experience, hitting, eating
Now 41, his career's depleting.
A timely bomb made him Philly's hero,
But this year he'll post too many zeroes.
Still hits a homer or walks on occasion
But where can he fit in their equation?
Just a DH in the League, National
They'd cut him loose if they were rational.




The mid-infield back-ups, Bruntlett and Giles
Like pre-owned cars, with no shortage of miles.
Both about 30, with little upside,
Bruntlett, all over, can field the horsehide,
And run just a bit, in case they have need.
Giles once had some pop, and a bit of speed,
And could bounce back, getting out of this rut...
(Monkeys could also fly out of my butt!)

More likely someone like Cairo, Miguel
Or Pablo Ozuna will get to tell
His wife he won the job in Spring Training.
Giles seems to have no more miles remaining.

Main corner back-up, Greg Dobbs they will ring
To spell Feliz from all his out-making.
Not much for defense, Dobbs won't be used long,
But his bat makes up for all his glove's wrongs.

Summary:
Finally, putting these things together
You will all likely want to know whether
The Phillies will win. What are their chances
Of returning to October Dances?

The Phillies will have trouble reprising.
New York Mets, no slouch, and the Fish, rising,
Make stiff competition, as do the Braves
Though none of these teams will draw critics' raves.

Injuries could, the Phillies, sabotage.
Last year they had few, they're due a barrage,
And with some key players, like Cole and Chase
High injury risks, the Phils could, the race
Concede by August, dig too great a hole
To climb out from, as these hurts take their toll.

Too many key players with sudden peaks
Last year aren't likely to keep up those streaks,
Or stave off aging, they're due to endure
Declines in their 40's, they will, for sure,
Show signs of slipping, and with that, the team
Will need much luck to stay up in the stream.
The odds will catch up with the Phils this year
Eighty five wins is the safe bet, I fear.

Curt Schilling Not Cooperstown-Bound

Curt Schilling announced his retirement yesterday, which immediately begs the question of whether he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

No.

There, now that the suspense is gone, let me explain.

There are really only two arguments for Curt Schilling going to the Hall of Fame. These are, in the order of their importance:

• He helped end an 86-year World Series drought in Boston, and helped win two other championships as well, amassing an overall postseason record of 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 133 innings. Without this, we wouldn't even need to address this question.

• When he was healthy, he was one of the best pitchers in the game, winning 20+ games three times and fanning 290+ batters four times.

Taking the second part first, Schilling has been quite good in the postseason. His 133 innings, 11 wins, 120 strikeouts, and .846 winning percentage are all among the top 10 all time for career postseason performance. Ten of the 12 postseason series in which he was involved were won by his team, including three of four World Series.

In my mind, however, this should only be a tie breaker, not an argument unto itself. Dave Stewart and Orlando Hernandez were also great in the playoffs, but the rest of their careers don't measure up. Greg Maddux was so great in the regular season that nobody will care about his 11-14 record in the playoffs when it comes time to vote for him. Schilling will get a few extra votes for helping his teams to win three World Series, but I'm not sure that will do it for him.

And that's it, really, because nothing else holds up for very long. The more closely you look at his career accomplishments, the less impressive they seem.

His 216 career wins rank just 80th all-time, far fewer than most of the pitchers in the Hall already. In terms of his competition, that total is also way lower than not just future locks for Cooperstown like Randy Johnson (295), Greg Maddux (355), and Tom Glavine (305), but also borderline cases like Mike Mussina (270) and definitive 'no's like Jamie Moyer (246) and David Wells (239). And these are his contemporaries. Older guys like Jim Kaat (283), Tommy John (288) and Bert Blyleven (287) have been shut-out with much more significant career totals, and in some ways, better cases for the Hall.

Or, if you'd prefer to compare him to current Hall of Famers, it's no great chore to find some to whom Schilling compares favorably. Herb Pennock, for example, went 240-162 with only a 106 adjusted ERA and two 20-win seasons. Hal Newhouser won only 207 games and averaged 100+ walks a year for a decade, whereas Schilling, eventually, had impeccable control. Rube Marquard won only 201 games and rarely led his league in anything. Jesse Haines has a very similar record (210-158) but only a 108 adjusted ERA. There are others, but you see where this argument could go: "Because Player X is in the Hall of Fame, Schilling should be, too."

The trouble with this is twofold:

1) Some of those pitchers are so-called special cases, who lost time due to WWII, or pitched in an extreme era, or otherwise were somehow worth more than the apparent sum of their ERA and Win totals.

B) This approach waters down the talent level, turning the Hall of Fame into the Hall of Pretty Darn Good.

Just because Haines and Pennock (and Jim Bunning, and Ted Lyons and Eppa Rixey and...) are in Cooperstown doesn't mean that they belong there. Writers make mistakes, and it doesn't help things to compound those mistakes by adding more players of this caliber to what was supposed to be a shrine to the best of the best.

So if we can't justify his enshrinement based on him being better than several existing Cooperstown residents, we're left looking at Schilling's own accomplishments, and how they compare to his competition in his own career. Was he one of the best pitchers in his own era?

Yes, sometimes.

For example, his career winning percentage of .597 is quite good, but not even as good as contemporaries like Andy Pettitte, Mark Mulder and Roy Oswalt. Or even Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia, for that matter. Granted, Schilling pitched for a lot of bad teams early in his career, which skews that number a bit, but he hasn't pitched for a losing team since the Phillies in Y2K, so that certainly helps.

Not a fan of Wins and Losses? Think they're archaic and a poor measure of a pitcher's worth? Well, generally I agree with you, so let's see what else we can come up with...

Earned run average is much better, as it doesn't rely on the hitters, like Wins. Schilling's career ERA is 3.46, which is pretty good, especially in this day and age. That ranks 11th among current major leaguers, behind Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, Johnson and Maddux, but also behind (believe it or not...) Roberto Hernandez and nearly tied with Tim Hudson and Carlos Zambrano.

His adjusted ERA of 127 (i.e. 27% better than the leagues in which he pitched) also ranks 11th among current major leaguers, though just 46th all-time. If you remove the players who were predominantly relievers (Mariano Rivera, Hoyt Wilhelm, Doug Jones?!?) and the pitchers who thrived in the Dead Ball Era (Smoky Joe Wood, Addie Joss, Rube Waddell, etc.) Schilling ranks around 20th to 22nd all-time, depending on whether you want to include the likes of Walter Johnson and Pete Alexander, players whose careers straddled the lines of the Dead Ball Era.

That's still pretty good, but only about as good as Kevin Brown and Sal Maglie (both 127), and not nearly as good as Harry Brecheen (133) or Spud Chandler (132), who admittedly had shorter careers. Contemporaries like Randy Johnson (137), Pedro Martinez (154) and Greg Maddux (132) blow Schilling away in this regard. Younger pitchers like Oswalt, Johan Santana, Brandon Webb and Roy Halladay are all better than Schilling at relative run prevention, though these have a while to pitch yet and will inevitably drop off over time.

Schilling's career strikeout total, 3,116, is also a point in his favor, as only 16 men in history have struck out more than 3,000 batters, and he is 15th among them. John Smoltz is likely to pass him in 2009 if he can pitch even half the season, but then nobody is likely to bump him down for several years, at best.

Of the 14 men ahead of him, 12 are either in Cooperstown already or are likely to be. The other two are Bert Blyleven, who could still pick up another 12% of the voters in the next three years, and Roger Clemens, who was considered a lock for the Hall before his name got rightfully tied to the steroid scandal. Personally, I'd vote for him anyway, but the BBWAA probably won't.

Though that's just one thing, it's a big one. Even if you believe that strikeouts are boring and fascist, you have to admit that they're effective. When the baseball writers see him on their ballots, they'll certainly see that Schilling took care of his own business more often than all but about 15 guys in history. That is pretty impressive.

But is it enough? Sure, Schilling eventually developed impeccable control as well, leading his league in WHIP and in Walks per nine innings twice each. He also led in K/W ratio five times, and his career rate is the best of anyone since the 1800's (Tommy Bond), at which time it took between six and nine balls to walk a batter, depending on the year. That is, Schilling has the best ratio of strikeouts to walks of any pitcher who's tossed at least 1000 innings since they invented the 6-pitches-or-fewer walk.

On the other hand, Schilling never led his league in ERA (real or adjusted) or shutouts, or strikeout rate, some of the signs of dominance you see frequently from Hall of Fame pitchers. He was often a workhorse, during the infrequent healthy stretches, leading the league in starts three times, in Wins and Innings pitched twice each, and in complete games four times. But herein lies the trouble. Schilling amassed 3,261 innings in his major league career, good for 95th place all time, but fewer than Kenny Rogers, or John Smoltz.

It's also way fewer than Mike Mussina, Randy Johnson, Maddux, Glavine or Clemens, his primary competition for enshrinement in Cooperstown. As it happens, it's also far fewer innings than those pitched by Dennis Martinez, Charlie Hough, Jack Morris, and Frank Tanana, none of whom is likely to ever be in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown unless they buy a family pass.

Despite pitching for 21 years, he averaged just 155 innings per season, if you include 2008, when he had an $8 million contract from the Boston Red Sox but did not throw a pitch. For comparison's sake, Smoltz averaged 162 innings per year, and that includes the missed Y2K season and four years where he intentionally pitched only in relief (and was excellent at it). David Wells averaged 164 innings per year. Jamie Moyer? 170 IP/year. The Big Unit? 192. Mike Mussina averaged almost 198 innings. Maddux and Glavine and Clemens are all over 200.

You get the point, I think: Schilling was great on certain occasions when he was healthy enough to pitch every 5th day, but such times were infrequent. He had five or six seasons (1997, 1998, 2001, 2002 and 2004, probably 1992) when he was among the five to ten best pitchers in baseball, though you'd be hard pressed to say he was ever the best, even in those years. He had five other years in which he pitched fairly regularly, and with decent success.

And then he had ten years lost all or partly to his either lack of focus (as was the case early in his career) or, more often, to injuries. Edgar Martinez will suffer from the same problem: great peak value, but not enough time when he was fully healthy.

Not that the injuries are necessarily his fault, but neither should we simply ignore them and give him credit for what he might have done if healthy. Don Mattingly and Orel Hershiser and Albert Belle don't get credit for lost time, and neither should Schilling. If I had to give betting odds, you wouldn't win as much off of me as you would off the sportsbook guys, since I think he probably will eventually get in. I just don't think he should.

Curt Schilling Retirement Retrospective

Curt Schilling has unofficially announced his retirement from Major League Baseball, following a 20-year career in which he went 216-146 with a 3.46 ERA that was about 27% better than the average of the leagues in which he pitched. He was named to six All-Star teams, and pitched in three of them, starting the 1999 and 2002 contests. He was the MVP of the 1993 NLCS and the co-MVP of the 2001 World Series.

He won several of the minor awards that MLB started handing out recently, like the Babe Ruth Award and the Hutch Award, but never won a Cy Young award or a regular season MVP. He finished 2nd in the CYA voting three times and 4th once, which gives him the highest award shares total of anyone who's never actually won it, for whatever that's worth.

Schilling was probably at least as famous for his outspoken nature as he was for his pitching prowess, making himself a regular fixture of talk radio call-in shows wherever he pitched and eventually blogging as well. Whether you liked him, whether you agreed with him or not, you had to give him credit for having a personality in a game that seems largely devoid of interesting characters these days.

He started out as a 2nd round draft pick of the Red Sox in 1986, when he was 19, but Boston would give up on him before he was 21. They saw his strikeouts dropping and his walks rising, took a look at the personality associated with those disturbing trends, and figured they could spare him. During the stretch drive in 1988 they traded him to Baltimore with Brady Anderson for Mike Boddicker, who helped the Sawx win two division titles in three years.

Though Schilling did well, winning 13 games for Baltimore's then-affiliate AAA Rochester as a 22 year old, Schilling was not yet ready for prime time, having pitched only a handful of mostly forgettable games in the majors when Baltimore sent him to Houston with Steve Finley and Pete Harnisch for Glenn Davis. He was 24, and already with his third different franchise.

It was allegedly in Houston that Schilling's career got the kick in the pants it needed, from none other than Roger Clemens. While Schilling was goofing off in the weight room at the Astrodome, the Rocket lectured the arrogant kid with the earrings and blue hair about how to approach the game better, and to his credit, Schilling took it to heart.

Though there was no obvious or immediate improvement while bouncing back and forth from AAA to the majors in 1991, Schilling re-focused himself. When the Phillies traded Jason Grimsley for him the following April, he finally put it all together, winning 14 games and pitching 226 innings with a 2.35 ERA that trailed only three others in the Senior Circuit.

The following year he won 16 more games and pitched 235 innings for the worst-to-first Phillies, who lost the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays. Not that you can blame him for that, as he threw 147 pitches in a complete game shutout in Game 5, which may be why...

...he developed a bone spur in his elbow and a knee injury that limited him to just 82 MLB innings (plus 14 in the minors, during rehab) in 1994. The following year he had his season truncated in August when he needed shoulder surgery to repair a torn labrum, which also cost him the first several weeks of the 1996 season.

Like many pitchers who undergo such procedures, Schilling returned throwing harder than he had when he was young, as he had to be more disciplined to perform the rigorous work of rehabilitation. Though he went only 9-10, he struck out 183 batters, 10th in the NL, with a strikeout rate that was 5th among qualified pitchers.

In 1997 he led the NL with 319 strikeouts and was among the league leaders in several other categories, including ERA (8th), Wins (5th), WHIP (4th), Complete Games and Innings Pitched (3rd), K/W, shutouts and strikeout rate (2nd). On a personal note, I saw him fan 16 Yankees at Veterans Stadium on Labor Day that year, including the second, and so-far, last, Golden Sombrero of young Derek Jeter's career. When they asked him after the game what he thought of Schilling's fastball, he responded, "You're asking the wrong guy. I didn't even see it."

Schilling was just as good, if not better in 1998, but the Phillies stunk even more than usual, so he went 15-14 in a season that might have won more acclaim for him if it had been with a team that didn't lose 87 games. He went 15-6 for the 1999 Phillies, but again had a season (ahem...) cut short when he needed arthoscopic surgery on his pitching shoulder in August, and was not his usual dominant self upon his return in September.

Frustrated and unconvinced of the Phillies' long-term plans, Schilling sought a trade and got one to Arizona in the middle of Y2K. The following year the Diamondbacks became the fastest franchise in history to win a World Series, in just the 4th year of their existence, as they beat the Yankees in an emotional, exciting seven-game series.

The next year the Diamondbacks again won their division but were swept out of the playoffs by the Cardinals, despite Schilling's seven strong innings in his lone postseason start. He pitched fairly well again in 2003, but not often enough as an assortment of injuries limited him to just 168 innings, this after racking up over 250 in each of the previous two seasons.

That winter, Arizona, wanting to rebuild, actively shopped Schilling. Though he had expressed a desire to pitch either for the Yankees or the Phillies, it was Boston who eventually nabbed him, playing to his ego and talking him into joining the team, to take a run at history. They even somehow managed to work a million dollar bonus into the contract if he helped to deliver a World Series championship and end the Curse of the Bambino in 2004, despite the fact that such bonuses are not allowed per the MLB collective bargaining agreement.

Theo Epstein flew to Arizona and stayed the Thanksgiving holiday with the Schillings, playing to Schilling's well-known penchant for using the tools of the Information Age to inform his pitching approach, his desire to be a aprt of history, and even going so far as to describe what his and his wife's charity work might look like in Boston.

Meanwhile, Epstein had already worked out a deal with Arizona's owners, who , after asking the moon and stars of the Yankees, inexplicably let Schilling go for the frankly ridiculous sum total of pitchers Casey Fossum, Brandon Lyon, and Jorge de la Rosa, and minor league outfielder Michael Goss.

• Fossum has been with three different teams since, and is 26-41 with a 5.90 ERA in 552 innings in the intervening years.
  
• Lyon missed all of 2004 and half of 2005 with injuries, and is 11-15 with 42 Saves in 58 chances and a 4.04 ERA, since returning. He's expected to be the Tigers' closer this year, despite the 4.70 ERA he posted in 2008, which lost him the closer's job in Arizona.
  
• De La Rosa never pitched for the Diamondbacks, and didn't do much for Milwaukee, Kansas City or Colorado either, amassing a 25-31 record and a 5.55 ERA in 404 innings over five seasons.
  
• Michael Goss never got but a handful of at-bats above Single-A, and has been trying to stay afloat in the independent leagues since 2005.

It was, in short, a horrendous trade for the Diamondbacks, though a great one for Schilling and Boston. Schilling won 21 games and finished 2nd in the Cy Young Voting to Johan Santana, and helped lead Boston to their first World Series title in 86 years. Perhaps best of all, they came back from an 0-3 deficit to the Yankees in the ALCS to win the series, with Schilling famously pitching through an ankle injury that required him to change his bloody sock every few innings.

The following year, injuries again limited his contribution to the team, as he pitched only 93 innings and won eight games. His lack of availability in the playoffs helped lead to the Red Sox firt round exit at the hands of the eventual World Champion White Sox, who had not won it all since 1917. So, in a way, Schilling helped to end two such streaks. Maybe the Pale Hose owe him a million bucks, too?

Healthy again in 2006, Schilling won 15 games and led the team with a 3.97 ERA, but Josh Beckett had trouble adjusting to the American League, and their teammates faltered, dropping to 6th in the AL in Runs and 11th in ERA. The Red Sox did not even finish 2nd in their division for the first time since 1997.

But the 2007 team came back with a vengeance, leading the AL in wins and ERA, finishing 3rd in runs scored, winning their first division title since 1995, and winning a second World Series in four years. Schilling missed more time due to injuries, pitching only 151 innings in the regular season and winning nine games, but he was healthy enough to go 3-0 with a 3.00 ERA in four postseason starts en route to his third World Series ring.

He re-signed with Boston for 2008, but his shoulder flared up again in spring training that year, and he would not throw another major league pitch. Now 42, he has decided to hang up his spikes, though probably not his laptop or cell phone. Schilling likes the limelight too much to simply fade into obscurity.

Commentary on Baseball America's Top 20 Prospects

Baseball America has its annual list of the top 100 prospects out, and though you have to pony up a few bucks to read the in-depth analysis of each player, you can get a taste for free. Just like with drug dealers and the folks who make baby formula. BA has the relevant basic info and some "key number"for all 100 of them on the list, and some of these are somewhat amusing.

For example, one of the few prospects the Yankees have on the list is 23-year old pitcher Andrew Brackman, ranked #92. His key number?

0: Number of official professional innings he has pitched since signing with the Yankees in 2007.

The 6'11" righty underwent Tommy John surgery last year and missed all of the normal 2008 seasons, though BA doesn't mention that he played Hawaiian Winter ball. Not that he was any good there, posting a 5.56 ERA in 34 innings, but still, it's "pro" ball, right? His work in high school was impressive enough for the Yankees to give him over $4.5 million, but we'll see what he can do as he comes back.

In any case, I don't want to go through the entire 100, but I thought a few comments about the top 20 might be in order, since some of these guys will be in the majors pretty soon.


#1 Matt Wieters Catcher, Baltimore Orioles
1.054: His on-base plus slugging percentage in 2008 between two minor league levels.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

Wieters looks every bit like the real deal, a player with so much talent that even the inept Baltimore organization cannot screw him up. He hit .355 with power and patience at two levels last year, with more walks than strikeouts. He'll start the year in AAA, which is a big jump from high A and AA, where he spent 2008, but there's every reason to believe he'll be in the majors by June or July. His big frame (6'4", 225) makes it an open question whether his knees will allow him to remain a catcher over the long term, but for now, he's as good as they come.

The Orioles' likely catching corps includes some combination of Greg Zaun and Chad Moeller, aged 37 and 34, respectively, who both hit in the .230's last season, and aren't likely to improve on that much. They've also got a bunch of younger guys - some only slightly younger - who can't hit either, so it's just a matter of time before Wieters gets a shot.


#2 David Price LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
109: Strikeouts, in 110 minor league innings, between three levels last season.
Opening Day Age: 23
ETA: 2009

Price has also struck out 20 batters in 19.2 innings at the major league level, including eight whiffs in 5.2 innings in the playoffs. He's a 6'6" lefty who throws a sharp slider, a cutter and a fastball that hovers between 92 and 96 mph. He's expected to replace Edwin Jackson in the rotation, and though there will be some growing pains as he learns to pitch to major league hitters, he should be very, very good.




#3 Colby Rasmus OF, St. Louis Cardinals
2005: Year he led Russell County High to Alabama and national championships, when he also was a first-round pick.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

Wow, a high school national champion three years ago? That sure told us a lot, huh? Rasmus is a toolsy outfield prospect who has shown tremendous power potential (29 homers as a 20-year old in AA in 2007, for example) but who struggled a bit last year upon a promotion to AAA. He still walked at the same rate, which is encouraging, but his homers and doubles dropped to about half their previous rate, despite the fact that power comes cheap in the Pacific Coast League. Keith Law says he was injured, and Law usually knows what he's talking about, so I can't be too tough on RAsmus' sub-par season.

In any case, as one of the youngest players in a league of seasoned veterans trying to get back to the Show, he didn't embarrass himself. The Cards will want him to prove himself in AAA before giving him a call-up to the majors, I presume, but with Tony LaRussa's penchant for utility players and his leeriness of youngsters, Colby's best bet will be to either learn to play multiple positions or to invest in a fake mustache.




#4 Tommy Hanson RHP, Atlanta Braves
49: Strikeouts in just 29 innings in the Arizona Fall League, when he became the first pitcher to win the league MVP award.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

The AFL is a pretty small sample size and the level of competition is only around that of Double A, but hits are very cheap in the thin, desert air. Forty-one players hit .290 or better for the season, in a league of just six teams. Four of them hit over .400, so Hanson's 49 K's and 0.63 ERA are very impressive.

He hasn't pitched above AA yet, so the Braves should give him a little seasoning at Richmond before calling him up. Only 22, and in the system of a team that's not expected to compete this year, he's got some time to make sure he's ready.


#5 Jason Heyward OF, Atlanta Braves
14: Overall pick in the 2007 draft where the Braves nabbed Heyward, who wasn't expected to fall that far.
Opening Day Age: 19
ETA: 2010

14: Another meaningless number for a Braves farmhand. Who cares where he was drafted?

Heyward was very impressive in his first extended chance in pro ball, hitting .323/.388/.483 in 120 games at low-A Rome last year before a brief and forgettable call-up to High-A Myrtle Beach. He won't turn 20 until August, so he's got time, and the Braves will likely start him at High-A and then bump him up to Mississippi if he stays the course.

His plate discipline is already pretty good, with 49 walks in 120 games last year, but he'll have to guard against the temptation to try to hit everything out of the park, as high school standouts who jump right to the minors often do. My one concern with him is that the scouting videos on MLB.com show a kind of long swing, one that can be exploited by pitchers with a good slider, especially lefties, and there are lots of those in the majors and high minors.


#6 Travis Snider OF, Toronto Blue Jays
50: Minor league homers in 305 career games.
Opening Day Age: 21
ETA: 2009

A short, stocky guy with a quick, power stroke, Snider is expected to play right field for Toronto this year after he held his own in a September call-up (.301/.338/.466 in 24 games). He probably won't hit for much average, as guys who strike out more than once a game in the minors rarely do in the majors, but he should hit some homers.

Baseball Prospectus compared him to Brian Giles in their comments last year, but Giles struck out about 1/3 less often than Snider by this point in his career, and walked more. he had the bat control thing down first, and developed the power later on (when, coincidentally, everyone was developing power, if you know what I mean). Snider to me looks more like Pete Incaviglia, who had power but struck out a ton and never walked all that much.

Anybody want to guess how many guys in history who were under six feet tall but over 240 lbs have hit 20 homers in a major league season? None. For that matter, nobody listed as 5'11" and over 215 has ever done that. Snider could be the first, but don't expect him to have a long career.


#7 Brett Anderson LHP, Oakland Athletics
10.11: Strikeouts per nine innings he compiled in 2008 between two levels.
Opening Day Age: 21
ETA: 2009

The big southpaw (6'4", 215) isn't a classic power lefty, but he has impressive control for such a young kid, keeping walks and homers in check while fanning more than a batter an inning throughout his two year minor league career. Unfortunately, the only video of him on MLB.com is of a pick off, so I don't know what his delivery looks like, but his stats suggest real talent. His lack of a Grade A fastball will probably limit his ceiling to the role of a #3 or #4 starter, but that's still a pretty valuable commodity.


#8 Cameron Maybin OF, Florida Marlins
8/18/07: Date when he hit his first big league homer—off Roger Clemens.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

I remember watching that game, the second of Maybin's career, and it scared the crap out of me, a kid that good. In the mean time, he's mostly been in the minors, where's he's hit for average (.298 in his career), modest power (36 homers in 300 games) and stolen bases successfully and often (73 for 93 in his career). He takes a few walks, with 161 of them in 300 games, but also strikes out a lot, the result of his lanky frame and his youth, I suppose.

He projects as a superstar, 5-tool centerfielder, but I'm not sure that will start this year. He's got the tools, but not the skills to keep from flailing away at big league sliders and curveballs. The Marlins plan to start him in centerfield this year, and there's an argument to be made for that. He's had some success in Double A, and other Marlins have successfully made the jump from AA to the majors (Dan Uggla, Hanley Ramirez, Jeremy Hermida).

Plus, it's not like there's a lot of pressure to succeed in Florida. Though they had a winning record in 2008, the team's perennially rebuilding, it seems, and they have the lowest average attendance in the majors by a large margin. Nobody will mind if he strikes out 175 times, because nobody will see him.


#9 Madison Bumgarner LHP, San Francisco Giants
1.46: His minor league-best ERA last season at low Class A Augusta.
Opening Day Age: 19
ETA: 2010

Against their better judgment, the Giants seem to have acquired themselves a prospect!

Other than having a girl's first name, Bumgarner has a lot going for him. He went 15-3 in the Sally League as an 18 year old, and it was no smoke-and-mirrors job. He fanned 164 batters in 142 innings while allowing only 21 walks and three homers. Granted, Augusta is a pitcher's park in a pitcher-friendly league, but it's not that friendly.

The book on Bumgarner is that he only started throwing offspeed stuff recently, so he's mostly been surviving (thriving, really) on his excellent fastball, which touches the mid to low 90's, with late movement, and has the potential to get into the high 90's as his frame fills out. Even if it never does, improving the quality of his slurve and changeup should be plenty to keep hitters off balance.

My one concern with him, other than his extreme youth - and it's more of a longevity concern than one of pitching quality - is that his mechanics look a little, well, untidy. His pitching arm lags way behind him, pointing straight out to left field (see below), with a big, looping motion as he swings it up into position to deliver the ball.


Besides the possibility that this might lead to him tipping his pitches, it also places a lot of pressure on the shoulder, especially the rotator cuff, to have to whip the whole arm forward like that. He also has a rather short stride for such a tall pitcher, and probably strains his elbow and shoulder more than is really necessary because his legs don't generate as much power as they should.

Bumgarner is still very young, and a long way from the majors (I would give him at least another year on Baseball America's ETA, given that he's never pitched above low-A ball) but I would hate to see all that talent wasted by a carelessness about his mechanics. Pitchers with that kind of poise and control, coming out of high school, no less, are a very rare commodity, and the Giants need to make sure they're careful with this one.


#10 Neftali Feliz RHP, Texas Rangers
3: Home runs allowed last season in 127 innings.
Opening Day Age: 20
ETA: 2009

There is an appalling lack of players with good, obscure, Biblical names in the major leagues. Sure, you get lots of Marks and Peters and Johns, an occasional Jonah, or Jacob or Benjamin, but how often do you get a good Zebulun or Neftali (Naphtali)?

Feliz is still only 20, but he dominated both the Midwest League (Single A) and the Texas League (AA) last year, with a 2.69 ERA and 153 strikeouts in 127 innings. The Baseball Cube and MLB.com both list him as 6'3", 180 lbs, so he's a little on the skinny side, but then so are lots of pitchers, especially ones that are not yet allowed to drink legally.

His Achilles heel is the number of walks he gives up, which tends to be rather a lot. He's averaged four walks per nine innings throughout his minor league career, the kind of number that keeps some prospects from ever getting an extended look in the majors. He seemed to be getting that under control at Clinton this year, where he allowed only 28 walks in 82 innings, but then he reverted to his old form when he skipped High A ball and went to Double A, walking 23 in only 45 innings.

This isn't an insurmountable problem by any stretch. Young pitchers with blazing fastballs often are more prone to allowing walks, knowing that they can probably strike the next guy out. With a full season at AAA expected, or maybe even some more time at AA first, he should have plenty of opportunities to work on his control.


#11 Trevor Cahill RHP, Oakland Athletics
2.25: ERA for Team USA in two Olympic starts last season en route to a bronze medal
Opening Day Age: 21
ETA: 2009

I'm not sure why his performance against a bunch of green amateurs and washed up pros, in two lousy starts, should matter. If you want to quote an impressive number, point to CAhill's 2.19 ERA in 37 innings in Double A this year, or his 22-9 career record in the minors overall, or the 264 K's in 239 career innings. Granted, his strikeouts dropped and his walks rose when he went from High A to AA in 2008, but the kid was only 20, and Midland is a hitter's park in a hitter's league, so that's forgivable.

John Sickels commented on him last year:

However, the lack of a big-time massive plus velocity heater causes some to project him as more of a Jeff Suppan control, inning-eating type than a true future ace. Others point out that not every great pitcher has great velocity, and Cahill's intelligence and guile are huge assets. The sabermetric case points to the combination of strikeouts and ground balls as a big positive.

Hey, you could do a lot worse than to grow up to be Jeff Suppan, you know? He's made over $32 million in his lackluster career, which also happens to include a World Series ring, thankyouverymuch. I know he's the prototypical LAIM, about as boring a pitcher as you can imagine, but the fact of the matter is that the man has been in the majors for 14 years, has flawless mechanics, and the lack of injuries to prove it. He's averaged 33 starts, 12 wins and a 4.49 ERA for the past decade. Most prospects don't grow up to be as good as Jeff Suppan, so don't knock him.

The analogy with Suppan isn't perfect. For one thing, Cahill is a little behind Suppan's pace - by this age, Suppan was already getting his feet wet in AAA - and he walks a few more batters, but he also allows fewer hits, fewer homers, and gets more strikeouts, which are all indicators of long-term success.

The fact that his nasty (if not super-fast) sinking fastball generates so many groundballs also bodes well for him, but he needs to work on his control and his secondary and tertiary pitches to keep major league hitters honest. He'll probably be 23 or 24 before he has a regular job in the majors.


#12 Pedro Alvarez 3B, Pittsburgh Pirates
9/24: Date he signed with the Pirates—more than a month after the Aug. 15 deadline—after the union's grievance on his behalf.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

Alvarez, you may recall, was embroiled in a controversy over his signing with the Pirates last summer and fall, but there's no controversy over his talent. He hit .349/.455/.658 in two and a half seasons at Vanderbilt, helping to lead them to an SEC championship. A broken hamate bone delayed the start of his third season in 2008, but he healed well enough to post great numbers again and the Bucs took him with the #2 overall pick last year.

He'll probably start 2009 around A or high-A ball, as he missed any chance at a pro debut with the holdout squabble last year, but he could move up through the ranks quickly with his complete hitter's package of patience, power and hitting for average. Baseball America's ETA of 2009 seems a little overly optimistic to me, given that he's never played pro ball at any level just yet. Heck, Mark Teixeira had even better numbers coming out of Georgia Tech in 2001, and he didn't make his MLB debut until 2003.


#13 Mike Moustakas 3B, Kansas City Royals
1992: The last time a teenager led the Midwest League in homers, before he did it with 22 in 2008.
Opening Day Age: 20
ETA: 2010

Wow, 1992, eh? Anyone want to hazard a guess who that was? What future superstar led the 1992 Midwest league in home runs? What wunderkind posted such numbers, a harbinger of eventual major league greatness? Was it Jim Thome? Manny Ramirez? Chipper Jones? Nope, not even close! It was the one, the only, the Immortal...

Steve Gibralter.

Yes, that's right, the same Steve Gibralter who got exactly five at-bats at the major leagues, and almost got a hit in more than one of them. Almost. Gibralter did lead the Midwest League with 19 homers at age 19, but then hit .237 at AA. He improved at AA the next year and hit well enough at AAA in 1995 that he was eventually ranked as the Reds' #2 prospect (behind Pokey Reese, if you can believe that) in 1996.



But over the long haul, his inability to hit for anything other than power - and modest power, at that - kept him mired in the minors and led him inextricably to a life as a real estate agent. He was out of baseball by age 28.

Since 1992, Midwest League Home Run title has gone to such non-legendary players as:

Joe Biasucci, Matt Raleigh, Jesse Ibarra, Larry Barnes, Joe Frietas, Bucky Jacobsen, Aaron McNeal, Austin Kearns, Samone Peters, Jason Stokes, Jason Drobiak, Brian Dopirak, Ryan Harvey, Jordan Renz, Juan Francisco, and Moustakas.

Among them, only Kearns has had a MLB career of any length, and even that career is generally seen as a disappointment compared to his potential. To find a Midwest League HR champ who had a good MLB career, you have to go back more than 20 years, to 1987: Greg Vaughn at age 20. But Vaughn hit .305/.425/.593 with 33 homers and 102 walks, not .272 with 22 bombs and 43 walks.

Talk to me when Moustakas posts a .500 slugging percentage. Or .470, even. His reputation rests mostly on his impressive work in high school, where he set a California prep school record with 24 homers, while hitting .577 his senior year. The operative phrase in that sentence was "high school". His pro performance doesn't come close to that. That doesn't make him a non-prospect, just not one I would rate the 13th best in the country.


#14 Buster Posey C, San Francisco Giants
.879: Division I-best slugging percentage for Florida State last spring, when he won BA's College Player of the Year award.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2010

Posey always hit for average in college (Florida State), but suddenly last season he started hitting for power, too, with a .463/.566/.879 line that looks more like stats compiled in a video game than in the competitive ACC. He's only been a catcher for two years, so you can fogive him if he's not the most polished receiver, but even if he proves unable to make it to the majors as a backstop, a bat like that should carry him at almost any position.

He has only a handful of pro at-bats, hitting for average and with patience in Rookie Ball, Class A Short Season and then in the Hawaiian Winter League. His power has so far not been seen, as he has only one homer, nine doubles and a triple in 111 at-bats among those three, low levels, but that may come back. He did lead his HWB team with a .338 batting average, but the power deficit may be due to adjusting to wooden bats, an issue with many college players. Whether the power ever comes back or not, he's still a great prospect, though not one you should expect to see with a regular MLB job for another couple of years.

#15 Dexter Fowler OF, Colorado Rockies
14: Round in which he was drafted; he signed for $925,000, turning down a Miami scholarship.
Opening Day Age: 23

ETA: 2009

Fowler's lanky frame (6'5", 189 lbs) doesn't generate much power yet, but he hit .335 in the Texas league last year, and his career OBP in the minors is almost 100 points higher than his .299 batting average, a sign of good patience. He's got some speed, as he's stolen 100 bases in 334 minor league games, but his instincts may not be that great, as he's also been caught 48 times.

He'll likely start the season at AAA Colorado Springs, where his numbers will get some help from the thin mountain air (even more than they got from the Texas League) and he may even hit some homers. If Carlos Gonzalez continues to disappoint and Scott Podsednik continues to be, well, Scott Podsednik, Fowler could be playing regularly in Denver by June. Whether he deserves it or not.

#16 Mike Stanton OF, Florida Marlins
.988: OPS away from Greensboro's cozy NewBridge Bank Park; it was .996 at home.
Opening Day Age: 19
ETA: 2010

Unlike his long-lived but largely un-exciting namesake pitcher, the hitter Mike Stanton is extreme in almost every respect. He's extremely young, having just turned 19 in November. He's extremely tall, 6'5" to be precise, with 210 lbs of muscle on his frame. He swings extremely hard, it seems, as evidenced by his 153 whiffs in 125 games, and also his having led the Sally League in homers (39), slugging (.611) and total bases (286). He also got hit by 11 pitches, not far off the league lead of 17, which suggests that he positions himself extremely close to the plate.

But lest you think he's just a hacker, he also walked 58 times in 468 at-bats for a respectable .389 OBP, very impressive for an 18-year old in his first long look in pro ball. His defense seems a little sketchy at first glance (five errors and only six assists in 107 games last season at Greensboro), but he'll probably be fine in left or right field.

The Marlins may skip High A ball and move him all the way up to AA to start the 2009 season, though it may be worth it to send him to the pitcher-friendly Florida State League (High A ball) first, to see how he does. The main thing will be trying to keep the strikeouts in check. Right now his stats look an awful lot like those of Russell Branyan at this age, so if he can't tone down the extreme nature of his game just a bit, he'll never last in the big leagues.


#17 Lars Anderson 1B, Boston Red Sox

.404: Career OBP in 252 career minor league games. Opening Day Age: 22 ETA: 2009

Does anybody else think of Metallica every time they hear the name "Lars"? Maybe that's just me...

As though the Red Sox needed another one of these, Anderson is a DH waiting to happen. He's already a firstbaseman, at the bottom of the defensive spectrum, and he isn't much to look at there, but with a bat like his, that might not matter.

An extremely patient hitter, Lars has walked more than once every six at-bats throughout his two years and three different teams. He doesn't show any real power yet, as most of the handful of homers he has hit are due to the hitter's parks he frequented in Lancaster (CA) and Portland (Maine). Kevin Youkilis got the same criticisms at this stage in his career, and he turned out OK.

The Sawx could bump Anderson up to AAA - he's certainly ready - but they had a lot of 1B/DH types there last year, and the majors are obviously blocked by Big Papi and Youk, so they may give him a little more time in AA just to keep him playing every day. In any case, whether it's with Boston or not, you should see him in the majors by the end of the year, with a regular job perhaps by 2011.


#18 Logan Morrison 1B, Florida Marlins 29: RBIs in 25 games he played in the AFL while hitting .404. Opening Day Age: 21 ETA: 2010

Amazingly, that .404 mark was only 3rd best in the AFL, behind Eric Young Jr (.430) and Jason Donald (.407). Hits are cheap in the AFL, as I mentioned in the Tommy Hanson comments, but he also hit .332 in the Florida State League, which tends to favor pitchers. Morrison never hit for much average before 2008, so I'll be interested to see whether he can keep it up (literally) with a promotion to Double-A. his decent walk rate and declining strikeout rate suggest that he can.

In the Southern League, Morrison will be a boy among men, most of whom are 24 or 25, many older than that. Many organizations' top prospects are at this level, as are a lot of major league pitchers on rehab assignments. This is a big jump for a 21 year old to make, and will be a good test of his status as a top prospect.


#19 Alcides Escobar SS, Milwaukee Brewers
5.44: His range factor last season—best among shortstops in BA's Prospect Handbook, and another way to say he's an elite defender.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

The only prospect in the top 20 based predominantly on his defense, Escobar's place on this list may not last long. He led the Southern League in At-Bats and Hits, and missed the batting title by 0.001 to Huntsville teammate 3B Mat Gamel.

He's shown improvement upon a second tour at a level twice in the last two years now, hitting .257 in High A ball in 2006, then .325 in part of 2007. His promotion to AA Huntsville in 2007 saw him hit only a modest .283, but his 2008 encore brought a .328 average. That may mean it will take two seasons for him to master AAA, and then two more for the majors, or it may mean nothing. He hit only .224 in the Venezeulan Winter Leagues, so his ability to keep hitting for a decent average is hardly a foregone conclusion.

Escobar has some speed, having stolen 20-30 bases several times, with decent-but-not-spectacular success rates. He swiped 34-of-42 this year at AA, which is quite good. On the other hand, you can't steal first base, and Escobar only walks about once every five games, so unless he hits well over .300, he's basically an out machine. He has absolutely no power either, with only 15 homers in over 2,100 minor league at-bats, and his rail thin frame (6'1", 155 lbs) isn't likely to develop it any time soon.

In short, Escobar could grow up to be a Gold Glove caliber shortstop who hits .300ish and steals bases with aplomb - Omar Vizquel without the walks, if you will. More likely he'll hit just enough to keep himself in the #7 or #8 hole in the lineup, or end up as a late inning pinch-runner/defensive sub. In any case, I have a hard time believing that there are only 18 prospects in the game better than him.


#20 Gordon Beckham SS, Chicago White Sox
28: Home runs he hit for Georgia last season, tied for the NCAA Division I lead.
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2009

A young shortstop prospect with three years of college experience in which he showed improvements each year, Beckham was the 8th overall pick in last year's draft. The ChiSox put him at Single A Kannapolis, and he adjusted well enough to wooden bats, hitting .310/.365/.500 in about three weeks' worth of games. If the power spike and the patience (54 walks, 30 strikeouts) he showed in his last year at the University of Georgia are real, he could be a very good player, especially if he can stay at short.

The Sox don't have another shortstop prospect around that level, so they could either put him back in A ball or bump him to High A to start the 2009 season, but how the gurus at Baseball America imagine he'll make it to the Show by the end of 2009 is beyond me. For one thing, Alexei Ramirez is eminently capable of holding the short-fort in Chicago for the time being.

For another, Beckham has exaxtly 14 games of professional experience, all in single A, so there are three levels between him and the majors. Mastering High-A, AA and AAA in a single season is all but unheard of, so you South Side fans shouldn't get you hopes up until at least June of next year.

25 Random Baseball Things

Last week, Shyster Ball started a trend and a bunch of other bloggers has followed suit, so I figured I wouldn't be the worst copycat if I did my own 25 Random Baseball Things. Generally, when I get tagged in a note on FaceBook, I just ignore it because really, who cares? You may feel that way, too, and if so, well, you're entitled. You may stop reading whenever you like.

1. My mom is the reason I'm a baseball fan. My father left before I was three years old and wasn't much for sports anyway, as I understand it, unless they involved horses. Baseball being woefully equine devoid, I don't think he would have instilled the same love of the game, or at least of the Yankees, in me that my mom did.

2. She's no athlete, but my mom did her best to help me become one, or at least to prove that I was not, though that was never her design. When there were no kids around with whom to play catch, she would stand on the porch and toss baseballs to me, and would even throw a pop-up when I asked. Once I let a high pop get past my mitt and it hit me in the throat, giving me some trouble breathing for a few minutes. I kept better track of the ball after that.

3. I did not get to play in Little League. My family was pretty poor when I was a kid, my mom raising three kids by herself, on welfare for several years before my kid brother was in school full time and she could get a job. Sponsors may buy you uniforms, but cleats and gloves are (I think) your own dime, and we didn't have many of those to spare. I wasn't Omar Vizquel, using a milk carton to snatch grounders off a rocky field, but I did try using a welder's glove to catch once. Not sure where I found a welder's glove.

4. I did play a form of baseball in the apartment complex where I grew up. I lived in these rickety, old garden apartments in Lodi, NJ, commonly referred to as "Wrights Village" or simply "The Village", which had courtyards, some of which were useful for playing wifleball, stickball, and etc. The sidewalks in the courtyards formed quasi-diamonds, though they were hardly square. According to Google maps, it was about 30 feet from home to first, but more than 50 feet from first to second. A lot of us got tagged out trying for second.

5. We rarely had enough people to play a real game, and rarely had a hardball with which to play, so usually it was three or four on one, as we took turns at bat, using tennis balls and a wifle bat with newspaper stuffed down the end to give it weight. There was no need for a left or center fielder, as the buildings were only 40 feet away over there, and anyway, if you hit a fly ball to left, you had a pretty good chance of breaking a window, so we tried to avoid that. Anything over the roof was a homer, just like in the big leagues.

6. One way we made up for the lack of players was to use shopping carts as catchers. There was a supermarket around the corner from my house, and a lot of poor people without cars in the neighborhood, so there were always shopping carts laying around. We'd prop one up about 5 feet behind the home plate corner. The cart itself and the crossbar underneath served as a strike zone.

The long, shallow carts were a pitcher's best friend: For an 8 or 10 year old batter, the strike zone was two and a half feet wide and might have gone from his waist to six inches above his head...but it was official. If you got the ball in that box, it was a strike. Period. If not, you had to go back to the parking lot and find it under a car or (God forbid) in the sewer drain, so there was a lot of incentive to throw strikes. Nobody ever walked.







7. There were not many boys my age in that neighborhood, so I usually played against my brother and his friends, three years my junior. One of them, a hefty little bugger named Chris, played Little League and was considered a pretty good hitter. Though I was nothing special as a pitcher, with three years on him and at 25 feet away, even my modest "stuff" was hard to hit. I was padding my ego as I zipped "fast"balls by him into the cart one day, but he was clearly getting mad as he kept missing, so I took a little off the next one...and he hit it into the street, 200 feet away. Twenty years later, that still pisses me off.

8. I was interviewed once for a local TV station's 6 o'clock news, where they were filming "man on the street" types of clips for the sports portion, getting people's thoughts on the Yankees, who were constantly revamping their roster. For whatever reason, they thought that a 10-year old boy in front of the K-Mart in Lodi would make for a good clip, so they filmed me talking about how the Yankees seemed to be getting rid of all their good players for a bunch of "has-beens and never-will-be's", which I thought was clever. We watched that obscure cable TV station's news broadcast for days trying to see if I would be on TV, but to no avail. I don't think they ever used the clip.

9. I remember very little from my first big league game. I went with a group from the Lodi Boys and Girls Club to a Yankee game against the Blue Jays, probably around July of 1985 or 1986, and the Yankees lost. We sat in the bleachers and I got sunburned.

When I got home, I told my mom how I'd gotten to shake Ron Guidry's hand, since the bleachers are above the bullpen. I had an inexplicable propensity for making stuff up at the time, and this lie was one of the biggest. I guess I liked the attention. My mom believed me, too, I think. (By contrast, when I told my 3rd grade class that I had shot a bear at the age of 3, while living in Kentucky - a story lifted directly from the Davy Crockett legend - nobody bought it.)

10. I met Lou Pienella in the Nordstrom in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, NJ when I was in high school. My mom recognized him and sent me over to get his autograph, and he was cool about it and shook my hand, too. (My mom was there to witness it, this time.) I told him that she and I were big Yankees fans. At the time, he was managing the Reds.

11. In high school, we played softball in gym class sometimes. I was skinny (6'5", 165 lbs in 11th and 12th grades) and so I didn't have much to offer offensively, but I knew my limits, and tried to slap hits over the second baseman's head to get on base. It rarely worked. Apparently you need some muscle for that, too.

Defensively, they put me in left field, where non-athletes always go, but here, my smarts paid dividends where my feeble frame could not. There was a guy named Pete in our class, nearly as tall as me but with 50 additional pounds of muscle. (And, now that I think of it, a lot of acne...maybe Alex Rodriguez's cousin injected him too?) Anyway, whenever Pete came to the plate, the cosmic elements of the slow pitches, his huge frame, his righty swing and his big ego would inextricably converge and he would smash the ball in to deep, deep, left field.

And I would be waiting under it, and catch it, every time. He got mad, and even remarked to me how frustrated he was about that, but strangely he never tried a different approach.

12. There was an old guy who used to hang out near a corner store a few blocks form my high school. A friend and I walked past him all the time, and tried to avoid talking to him because he would often monopolize us for several minutes and delay our plans to go do nothing for the rest of the afternoon. Anyway, the guy professed to be a catcher who had once played against Babe Ruth. He'd say, in his New Jersey accent, "You see deez fingaz?" and he'd show us his gnarly hands and make us guess which position he played, which was much easier after we got it right he first time.

As a cynical high school student, I didn't believe him of course, but knowing what I now know about barnstorming, I realize that this man was probably suffering from a gnome, or small dwarf living in his stomach. And that he was probably telling the truth, after a fashion.

13. I didn't get to another major league game until the summer of 1994. In July, a college mentor of mine took me to a Yankees-Mariners game. We got to sit right behind home plate, one section up, and Jimmy Key and his 12-1 record were starting for the best team in the AL against Dave Fleming and a 34-44 Seattle team, so I figured we had this one in the bag.

As it happened, Key gave up six runs in four innings and we lost, 12-6, though Bernie Williams hit a homer. The blow out wound up being a good thing, sort of, as a lot of people left and we got to sit right up against the backstop for the last few innings. Though I didn't realize it at the time, Goose Gossage pitched the last inning of that game for Seattle, one of the last of his now Hall of Fame career. Ken Griffey got five hits that day. I hated Ken Griffey.

14. I didn't get to another game for just over a year, as The Strike hit about a month later. July 12th, 1995, the day after the All-Star Game, saw the Yankees playing a bizarre one-game "series" against the Royals, presumably an artifact of the oddly truncated Strike Season.

The struggling Yankees started a rookie named Andy Pettitte against Chris Haney. This was a Wednesday night, back when 1/2 price Student Nights could get you half price to any seat in the house, not just the nose-bleeds, and we took full advantage. Two friends and I spent $12.50 apiece for Main Box seats behind first base, where Don Mattingly, my childhood hero and still my favorite player, was bound to be. It was Sock Night, both for us and the Yankees. We got free pairs of socks with the Yankees logo, and the Yankees socked nine runs on 11 hits and seven walks.

The first Yankee win I'd ever seen in person was the last game of the year for Chris Haney, who was terrible (and presumably injured) and did not pitch again that year. His relief, (oddly enough, Dave Fleming again) did no better in one of the last games of his career. Pettitte pitched the best game of his young career, allowing one run in 8.1 innings, and instantly became my favorite pitcher. Mop-up man Scott Bankhead got the last two outs uneventfully, pitched three more games in his career and then was gone from MLB.

15. The next game I attended was August 13th 1995, the day Mickey Mantle died, though I didn't know it until we got to the ballpark. Three friends and I drove in and listened to a music tape instead of the radio, so we didn't hear the news, but when we got there, the park was eerily quiet, despite the fact that it was packed. About 20,000 extra fans showed up that day, almost 46,000 total, compared to a normal Sunday home attendance of about 27,000.

There was no music on the loudspeaker, but the JumboTron said "#7...With Us Forever" and it was obvious. They had a video tribute to him and a moment of silence at the beginning of the game, and then the Yankees paid Mickey the greatest tribute of all: They went out and beat the best team in the AL.

Those Indians had Kenny Lofton, Carlos Baerga, Albert Belle, and Eddie Murray. Jim Thome hit 6th and and Manny Ramirez hit 7th, they were so good. David Cone, who had been with the team for just two weeks, knew the gravity of the situation, and he shut them down. Cone threw 129 pitches, earned a complete game, and surrendered only one run on a solo homer to Belle in the 6th. (Sadly, he was terrible for about three weeks after that, but winning a big game like that buys you a lot of slack.)

16. The next summer, I actually went to a baseball game about 7,000 miles from my home before I went to one 10 miles away in New York. A friend from college allowed me to join him for a week and a half in Japan with his parents, who were living there at the time, and they were gracious enough to get tickets to a baseball game. I didn't care who was playing, just that I got to see a game in Japan. We saw the Nippon Ham Fighters play the Chiba Lotte Marines at the Tokyo Dome, aka, the Big Egg, where the Yankees and Tampa would someday play the first official Major League game outside North America.

Both the game and the park were pretty nondescript, but it was fun watching the two teams' fans take turns rooting for them, whenever they were batting. (In Japan, opponents' fans are generally quiet while the other team is batting.) I don't remember who won, only that an American ex-Met named Eric Hillman started the game, and that my friend's mom "caught" a foul ball when it wedged between her back and her seat. Oddly, a stadium attendant collected the ball and gave her a voucher in return, which was good for a Nippon Ham Fighters' mascot key chain. She was nice enough to give me the key chain as a souvenir, which I gave to my mom. Not sure if she ever used it, and I can't say as I blame her, given how strange the mascot for that team is:



17. I didn't own a decent baseball glove until college. I had one as a kid, but it got lost, and I didn't have one I could wear as an adult until I bought a cheap, "pleather" glove in the summer of 1995. I was working as a security guard in a discount department store in South Hackensack, NJ, the kind of place where any self-respecting shoplifter wouldn't be caught dead, and one of the department managers got a sample glove from a vendor, which he sold to me for $5 or $10, I think.

It was so cheap that later that year, playing catch with my roommate in the quad at college, the baseball literally ripped right through the web of the glove. I can barely throw 65 mph. I asked for a real glove for Christmas and my grandparents sprung for a nice first baseman's mitt, which I still use.

18. The first baseman's mitt, along with several other gloves, a dozen baseballs and softballs, two bats, a catcher's mitt and mask, and size 15 cleats are in a bag in the trunk of my car, just in case a baseball game breaks out somewhere. I need to be prepared.

19. One of the gloves in that bag was acquired at my bachelor party. My best man arranged a softball game, and after the game, there was an extra mitt in my bag. There were about 20 of us playing that day, but nobody ever claimed it. Most of the baseballs are official Patriot League balls, which I get during the winters at the ballfield on Lehigh's campus. They have practices in the late winter/early spring, but sometimes it snows and they can't always find all the batting practice balls in the snowdrifts. But my dog can.


20. The best game I ever attended was a Yankees-Red Sox game in September of 1996. The Yankees trailed 6-1, 8-4 and 11-7 at different points in the game and left 20 men on base before finally winning 12-11 on a bases-loaded, 2-out, bottom of the 10th single by His Clutchness, which literally sent the Stadium rocking. My friends and I were in Row Y of the Tier Reserved section. There is no Row Z. We could actually feel the Tier bouncing as they played Gary Glitter and everyone jumped up and down to it. In 2007, I took my mom to a divisional playoff game, and they won, but even that was not as exciting a game.

21. The only time I've been to a Yankee game in my life without a glove was 11 September 1999. Nomar Garciaparra hit two home runs, and the second of them came right to me. I sprained a finger trying to catch it, to no avail. The Yankees lunch cooler freebies they gave out might have served as a makeshift glove if I could have thought that fast, but alas, 'twas not to be. When I got home, I taped SportsCenter so I could see myself on TV. That, too, was disappointing. But I always bring my glove, now.

22. I got to see the walk-off grand slam by Alex Rodriguez against the Orioles in April a couple of years ago. The rest of the game, in truth, was kind of a drag. My wife actually fell asleep for a couple innings, but woke up in time to enjoy the drama. You can read about that experience here.

23. I got to see a walk-off homer by Barry Bonds at AT&T park in 2004, one of three places I've seen him (Citizens Bank Park and Dodger Stadium are the other two). You can read more about that here.


24. I have a collection of MLB team ceramic coffee mugs, which must be purchased in the city where the team plays. I still need the two Florida teams, San Diego, Oakland and Baltimore. I had Oakland and Baltimore mugs at one point, but the glued-on, die-cast metal logos tend to come off in the dishwasher.

I also have mugs from minor/independent league teams in Trenton, Newark, Camden, Rochester, and Huntsville, all places where I've gotten to see a game. I saw a game in Boise a few years ago, but they had no mugs, so I got a shotglass. The minor league mugs have to be from teams I've visited and watched in person, while the MLB mugs can come from a friend passing through the airport (as my Cardinals mug did, for example).


25. I have seen a minor league game in seven different cities, but an MLB game in only nine ballparks: Yankee Stadium, Shea, Camden Yards, Veterans Stadium, Citizens Bank Park, PNC, AT&T, Dodger Stadium, Jacobs Field, and Chase Field. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've been to three of the five NL West parks, and to professional games in Idaho, Alabama, Japan and South Korea, but never to Fenway.

A-Roid, the Fallout From the Alex Rodriguez Apology

I had been away from blogging for a few weeks as my wife and I were finalizing the adoption of our son, but there's nothing like the biggest name in baseball on the biggest team being implicated in yet another scandal to bring one back to the fore.

As you've no doubt heard by now, Alex Rodriguez had a rough week. First he had to deal with the overblown allegations from Joe Torre's book about how his teammates referred to him as "A-Fraud" (though Torre maintains that they did so in jest). Then Madonna dumps him for some Brazilian model/boy-toy. And then someone leaks his name in connection with a failed drug test from 2003.

Regarding the Leak:

We knew that a bunch of guys had failed tests in 2003, back when MLB and the Players' Union were just "surveying" to help decide whether they needed a full-blown drug testing program, mostly to keep congress of their backs. According to the Mitchell Report,

"1,369 tests were conducted in 2003, and 96 of those tests were positive for steroids. Although 13 of the 96 positives were disputed by the Players Association, the disputes were never resolved because the positive rate was above the 5% threshold under either calculation. " (p. 55)

That 96 is not the 104 number we've heard thrown around this week, but it's close enough. As I've said in the past, if the players were aware that they were to be tested, were often tipped off as to when the tests would occur and they still couldn't avoid the 5% threshold, then how many of them were really using? It's a heck of a lot more than 5-7%, I'll tell you that.

The names of those who tested positive in 2003 were never supposed to be made public, as they were supposedly only for survey purposes, and some people think heads should roll for the failure to destroy that information in a timely fashion. Shysterball thinks that someone in the US prosecutor's office leaked the info to somehow put pressure on the judge in the Barry Bonds case, or something, which doesn't totally make sense to me, but then he's a lawyer and I'm not.

In any case, we'll probably never know the identities of the other 100 or so names on that list, nor should we. They were supposed to be anonymous, and nobody gave a damn about them until now. Certainly, justice would be served if A-Rod had some company in that spotlight, as he's clearly only about 1% of the guilty parties from that group. But the Players' Union is not in the habit of surrendering anything they haven't already lost, and for now, they haven't lost those other 100 or so names, so you can't have them. So there.


A-Rod's "Apology":

In some ways, his decision to come out and admit that he used steroids seems kind of refreshing. After all, at this point, these were just rumors, and to date Alex Rodriguez is the only baseball player who has come out and admitted to more than that of which he was accused.

Jason Giambi apologized for, well, nothing in particular. Rafael Palmiero and Barry Bonds and others have denied any wrongdoing in spite of the preponderance to the contrary. Andy Pettitte apologized, but admitted to only using HGH once or twice, and then only to heal faster, not to gain some kind of edge (as though getting back on the playing field sooner is not some kind of edge?). Nobody else of any significance has yet admitted to or apologized for several years of PED usage when the only evidence against them was one failed test.

So it's nice to see someone step up and be a man, for once. But on the other hand, how big a man is he? His confession entails using only from 2001-2003, before there was a testing policy in the major leagues, indeed, before there was any mutually agreed upon prohibition on performance enhancing drugs at all.

This is like admitting that you once hunted and shot a leopard in 1968, before they were on the endangered species list. It may not have been a nice thing to do, but it wasn't illegal, and you obviously did it on purpose and were therefore clearly not sorry for it at the time. But now that everyone knows and it's a bad PR move to have been a leopard hunter once upon a time, well, now you're sorry.

Additionally, it seems that A-Rod's confession is probably scripted and incomplete, at best. Rob Neyer points out some of the faults with it, including where he thinks A-Rod loses the script and where he gives a somewhat less than definitive response as to when he used PEDs. He definitely gives the impression that he's being less than forthright here.

It's a very convenient confession, don't you think? It explains his steroid use as a response to the intense pressure he felt upon signing what was then the largest contract in sports history. That's a lot of pressure, and it makes sense, and we can all imagine ourselves doing the same thing, right? breaking some implied but essentially nonexistent rules to help ourselves get better at what we do, thereby justifying the huge contract and saving off the boos and jeers? I can relate to that.

It also isolates his steroid use to his three seasons as a Texas Ranger, which means he has to piss off only one location to make his apology (albeit one that uses the death penalty somewhat liberally...I'm just sayin'). Specifically, it isolates his drug use to three seasons in which his team won absolutely nothing, finishing in 4th place all three years. The only things tainted by his admission were the awards he personally won during those three years, and of course he has more where they came from. He can deal with that.

But the good people of the greater Northwest can rest easy knowing that Rodriguez really was as talented as he seemed when he played for the mariners from 1994-2000. The good people of New York can have some assurance that the two MVP awards he's won in Yankee Pinstripes are legit. And the whole of the baseball-watching world can take some solace in the "fact" that he's not using anything anymore.

Or is he?

Let me ask you this: If A-Rod was not using steroids in Seattle, but he was in Texas, wouldn't you expect to see some evidence of that? He left Seattle when he was 25 at an age where he should have been entering his natural peak, typically 26-28 or so. But his slugging, batting average, OBP and OPS were almost totally consistent between his last year in Seattle and his three years in Texas. Take a look:

YEAR   AGE    AVG   OBP     SLG     OPS
2000    25   .316   .420   .606   1.026
2001    26   .318   .399   .622   1.021
2002    27   .300   .392   .623   1.015
2003    28   .298   .396   .600    .996
Avg.         .308   .402   .613   1.015
Std Dev      .010   .013   .012    .013

This is a man with admittedly incredible talent,

entering the natural prime of his career,

leaving a severe pitcher's park (Safeco Field)

going to the best hitter's park in the American League (The Ballpark at Arlington)

AND he supposedly starts using steroids

And his batting average increases 0.002? Right.

He loses 21 points of OBP. OK, whatever. He gains it back with 16 points of Slugging, which is basically the difference between Arlington and Safeco for 2001. The next year he holds steady with the slugging but loses a few points of batting average and OBP. In 2003, the year when he turned 28, and also the year in which we already know he was cheating, he again loses a couple of points of batting average and drops 23 points of slugging.

I don't mean to make too much of the individual statistics here. These are all well within the normal range of what you would expect for a great player entering his prime. But that's the problem. You would have expected to see a big jump in his performance, or at least in his stats, when he went to Texas. But instead of skyrocketing, he plateaued. With all those factors working in his favor, there are really only two logical explanations for this:

1) He stopped working so hard, but the ballpark and the 'roids compensated for this.

B) He didn't just start using PEDs when he went to Texas.

You can guess where I'm putting my money. For the record, by all account Alex Rodriguez works as hard or harder than anybody out there, and always has. Nobody has ever accused him of laziness or a lackadaisical attitude. So that ain't it.

I don't know when he started using PED's, but it wasn't in 2001. Maybe it was 1998, when he was coming off a sub-par season and admitted HGH user David Segui joined the Mariners. Others implicated in (or at least smeared by) the Mitchell Report who also played with Rodriguez in Seattle include Josias Manzanillo, Glenallen Hill and David Bell, his double play partner in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Maybe it was 1999, when he missed 30+ games due to knee surgery, and he wanted to get back in shape fast. Maybe it was 2000, when his adjusted OPS jumped from 134 to 162 after an injury plagues 1999 season. In any case, other than it own, apparently well-crafted confession, there's little evidence to suggest his PED usage started when he went to the Rangers.



A-Rod's Legacy:

As big a story as this is right now, frankly, I doubt it will mean much in the long run. You see, the more we learn about the PED Era, the more guilty parties there seem to be, and the more people there were using, the less seriously we can consider the pundits who believe that all the juicers' records should be expunged, or at least ignored.

If juiced-up pitchers were facing juiced up hitters, almost all the time, should we penalize them both? Shouldn't the better players still get credit for their accomplishments? You can argue that Barry Bonds wasn't Better than hank Aaron, if you want, but there's no question that Barry Bonds was better than anybody else who played during his career.

Over time, the list of players who have been caught will only grow, and the amount of innuendo and rumor linking others to the PED Era will call everyone into question. A-Rod, Bonds, Palmiero, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Juan Gonzalez, Miguel Tejada, Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, Ken Caminiti, Ivan Rodriguez, Andy Pettitte, Jose Canseco, Mo Vaughn...the list of connected players is ridiculously long, and there are bound to be others.

Even - and I hate to say it - Albert Pujols may someday find his name sullied by this scandal. It was his trainer, you'll recall, who sold Jason Grimsley his HGH. And of course, there's no shortage of nobodies on the list either. Mike Judd, Adam Piatt, Tim Laker, Ryan Jorgensen, Stephen Randolph, Bart Miadich, and a couple of hundred more.

Literally nobody is safe from the speculation, and that means that virtually everybody could have been using PED's in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Perhaps it's time we started asking not who was using, but who wasn't?

Adopt a Sea Kitten!

This really doesn't relate to either baseball or my Ethiopian Adoption blog, but what the heck...

Some friends last week informed us of a wacky, new ad campaign being run by some organization called PETA (Please Eat the Tasty Animals, I think) to try to convince everyone to refer to fish as "Sea Kittens".

The idea here is that fish have kind of a bad image, and that people would not eat them if they thought of them as being cute and cuddly like kittens, though it must be said that no fish has ever missed the litterbox and left his business on the bathroom floor, thankyouverymuch.

Far and away the best part of this ad campaign is the fact that you can create your own Sea Kitten, and even email it to friends or put it on your MySpace page. There are four different kinds of fish you can start with, and lots of clothes and accessories to put on or near your sea kitten, including a suit jacket, a ball of string and a unicorn horn.

Most of these of course do little more than obscure the obviously scaly, wet, non-cuddly nature of the fish, the cartoon of which has already been made unrealistically cute with things like eyelashes and pouty lips.

Here's my attempt:


Also you can name your Sea Kitten.

This is, as far as I can tell, the most you can possibly get on one Sea Kitten without him sinking to the bottom of the ocean and, well, not drowning. He has cat ears, a mohawk, a leather jacket, an elephant's nose,a fu manchu, Lennon specs, swimmies, and a ball of string, litterbox and water dish.

How the light blue water manages not to seep out into the regular, dark blue water is not clear. Perhaps it's water made with deuterium, i.e. radioactive "heavy water", in which case you should probably not eat this fish anyway. Also I hear the jacket is kind of tough.

In any case, Sunny and I thought that this premise could perhaps be built upon, that we might be able to think of other animals, normally thought of as edible, and give them names that evoked much cuter images. This might make people less prone to kill them, cut them into fillets, dip them in whisked egg and milk, coat them with seasoned breadcrumbs and then saute them in olive oil until golden brown. Mmmmmm...., er, I mean no, bad Travis. Sea Kittens. Sorry.

So we came up with a list of potential alternative names that might make up the next PETA ad campaign:

Old Name     New Name
Chickens     Pecking Bunnies
Cows         Milk Puppies
Shrimp       Tiny Sea Ferrets
Lobster      Giant Sea Cockroach Hamster
Lamb         Lamb

The theory kind of breaks down at the end there. I mean, what the heck can you do to make a lamb cuter than it already is?



They're innocent, fluffy little things that live on farms and drink milk and have big, black eyes and are generally as dumb as a bag full of hammers.



You don't even have to turn them into some kind of caricature to make them cute and adorable. Heck, one of the most famous puppet characters in history is a lamb! And yet even that character is named not after some cutesy aspect of the lamb's personality, not after its big eyes or soft fur, but after a dish you can make from the lamb after it's killed.

People know this. They are already aware of how cute lambs can be before they order them, and yet they do so anyway. And if that kind of cuteness cannot keep the cute, fluffy image above from turning into, well this:

Then fish (and cows and chickens, and especially lobsters) have little hope.

Nevertheless, it can be fun to try to think of other options that might work. Anybody have a suggestion (or an improvement) for the list?

Cooperstown Comes Calling for Rickey, Rice

What in the wide, wide world of sports is a'goin' on around here?

I'm out of the country on business for one week, and I come back to find that instead of being a member of the Atlanta Braves, as he almost always has been, John Smoltz is now a Red Sock. Pat Burrell is a Ray, Trevor Hoffman is a Brewer, and Twins owner Carl Pohlad is an Angel (if you believe his son, anyway). Can't I leave you people alone for one minute?!!?

All of that would normally be news if it weren't for the fact that the Hall of Fame vote was announced yesterday. Rickey Henderson got in on Rickey's first attempt, just as Rickey figured Rickey would. Rickey never doubted that Rickey would get in, only how much of the vote Rickey would get. Rickey's credentials speak for themselves, whether you like the traditional or the sabermetric numbers, though Rickey sometimes does the favor for them.



He's the all-time career leader in Runs and Stolen Bases, leadoff home runs (along with a bunch of other records for leadoff men, I'm sure), second in walks and 4th in times on base and plate appearances. He's 9th in career Runs Created, behind Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig and Pete Rose. Yeah, he was that good.

Alas, Rickey didn't come particularly close to getting 100% of the vote, something nobody's ever done. (Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan each got 98.8% in their first years of eligibility, and nobody's ever gotten closer.) Rickey received 94.8% of the vote, 28 votes shy of perfection.

Jim Rice also got the call, in his 15th and final chance on the BBWAA ballot, with 76.4% of the vote, an increase of 20 votes from last year. This was expected, as no hitter had ever gotten so close as Rice did in the 2008 vote (72.2%) without getting elected soon after. If the BBWAA allowed only 14 years of eligibility, Jim Rice and his alleged "fear-inspiring" attributes might still be on the outside, looking in. Rice became the third player to be elected in his last opportunity, along with Ralph Kiner and Red Ruffing.



By the numbers, Jim Rice is the 7th "Jim" in the Hall but only the 3rd "Rice", along with Sam and Del. He's the 9th hall of fame player to have played primarily with the Red Sox, thoough several others have spent significant time in a Red Sox uniform as well. He's the 20th(!) player listed primarily as a left fielder, including two other Red Sox, Yaz and the Spendid Splinter. Someday, I'm sure, Manny Ramirez will join them, but that's it.

Seriously, BBWAA folks, I think we have enough left fielders, and definitely enough Red Sox left fielders. We have to draw the line somewhere before Troy O'Leary.

Anyway, I'm among the many who don't happen to think that Rice belongs there, but I won't rehash all of that. (I've got some new stuff to hash.) You can read my thoughts on Rice here and here. Mostly I think his impressive numbers at Fenway Park skew the appearance of his value upward, making him look like a much better hitter than he really was. Neutralizing his stats gives him a .290/.343/.489 career line instead of .298/.352/.502, but that doesn't really matter, as the folks who vote for him are going more on gut instinct and anecdotal evidence than they are on, you know, facts.

My problem with Jim Rice's election is not that it opens the door for Andre Dawson and Dale Murphy and Harold Baines. Someday I'll do a study to see how well we can predict Hall of Fame voting trends, but it looks to me right now like Dawson's train is all but unstoppable, and that he'll be in by 2011 or 2012. The other two are clearly going nowhere.

My problem is that Rice's selection opens the door for Andres Galarraga and Larry Walker, two players who also got a lot of help from their home parks. The former has (superficially) very similar career numbers to Rice, as Bill James' Similarity Index rates the Big Cat as Rice's 2nd closest comp, with an 893 score. His closest comp, Orlando Cepeda, is already in Cooperstown, though I never thought he deserved election either. Rice's 282 Win Shares are a few more than the 252 than Galarraga had, and Baseball Prospectus' WARP, tells a similar story, 73 to 66.



Galarraga won a couple of Gold Gloves and also stole 10+ bases six times, while Rice stole 10 only once, and never even got into a discussion about the Gold Gloves unless someone thought he should try his hand at amatuer boxing. Each won two Silver Sliggers. Rice was in the top 10 in MVP voting six times, with one win, while Galarraga was in the top 10 seven times topping out at 6th in 1996 and 1998. The similarities are almost eerie.

I'm not saying that Galarraga will receive or even deserves enshrinement in Cooperstown, but a case can be made for him, in light of Rice's presence there. Indeed, the Hall of Fame's own story about next year's class mentions Roberto Alomar, Edgar Martinez, Barry Larkin and Fred McGriff, but not Galarraga, and rightly so. Galaragga is NOT a Hall of Famer, nor will he be.

But here's the rub: Larry Walker had 308 Win Shares and almost 93 WARP in his career, far outclassing them both. Walker's career line of .313/.400/.565 is vastly better than Rice's, and even after adjusting it for league and park, it comes out to .299/.384/.539, which is a heckuva lot better than Rice's unadjusted line. Rice had about 1,000 more plate appearances for his career than Walker because, despite the abrupt end of Rice's career, Walker could never resist a leg injury he hadn't already tried, but even with that, he had 440 Adjusted Batting Runs, 61st all-time, while Rice doesn't even crack the top 100.

Add to this the fact that Larry Walker was a 7-time Gold Glove right fielder who also stole 230 bases at a high success rate, and I don't see how you leave Larry Walker out, and yet I suspect that he will get little support when he enters the balloting in 2011. During his own 17-year career, Walker had only the 14th most Win Shares, and everybody in front of him on the list amassed several more either before 1989 or after 2005. John Olerud had almost exactly the same number of Win Shares during the same 17 years.



Larry Walker, despite his obvious talents, was rarely considered among the best players of his generation because everyone knew how much help he got from Coors Field. Like Rice, Walker won one MVP Award (albeit one that should have gone to Mike Piazza), but he only finished in the top 10 in the MVP voting two other times, and only once in Colorado (1995, when he was 7th).

Walker's MVP finishes while in Colorado:

Year   MVP    BA/HR/RBI  Other Qualifications
1995   7th  .306/36/101   96 Runs, 16 Stolen Bases, 13 OF assists
1997   1st  .366/49/130  143 Runs, 46 Doubles, Gold Glove, 33 SB
1998  17th  .363/23/ 67  113 Runs, 46 2B, GG, 14 SB
1999  10th  .379/37/115  108 Runs, GG, 11 SB
2001  24th  .350/38/123  107 Runs, 35 2B, GG, 14 SB
2002  20th  .338/26/104   95 Runs, 40 2B, GG

To be fair, he also had a 5th and an 11th place showing in Montreal before going to Colorado, but if a man can hit like that and not even crack the top 15 or 20 in the MVP vote, I don't think the baseball writers take him too seriously.

And yet Walker was demonstrably a much better player than Jim Rice. Oh, excuse me: Hall of Famer Jim Rice. But Rice played for winning teams, in an era when nobody thought about park effects, so the baseball writers eventually convinced themselves that he belonged in Cooperstown, while Walker probably never will.

Some contend that the election of Rice won't lower the standards of the hall, but I think that's exactly what will happen. Perhaps Dave Parker and Albert Belle won't get in, but others might. Electing Dennis Eckersly, primarily for his prowess as a reliever, led to Bruce Sutter, which made it easier for Goose Gossage to get in.

The Veterans' Committee's selection of Bill Mazeroski made them give Joe Gordon a second look, even though he never got more than 30% of the vote from the writers. Same thing happened when Phil Rizzuto was brought into the fold: Suddenly George Davis belonged in there, too. Putting Jim Bunning and Hal Newhauser in meant that Don Sutton and Phil Niekro had to be elected.

The writers' election of Tony Perez and the Veterans' selection of Orlando Cepeda and Larry Doby made it easier for Rice (and soon Dawson) to get in, and they speculate that Henderson's election might help Tim Raines, which would actually be a good thing. This a very slippery slope here, people, and while the writers may not simply choose to elect anyone who ever played a few seasons in Colorado just because Jim Rice is in there, we have to at least wonder how his election will effect the candidacies of other marginally qualified players.


A few other notes about this year's ballot:

* Each of the top five players on the ballot after Rickey and Rice picked up between two and five votes since last year, even though the entry of a sure-fire hall of famer onto the ballot usually signals a drop in votes for the marginal candidates. Tommy John got 32% in his last shot.

* Tim Raines lost 10 votes since last year, though admittedly, some of those might have been due to the four fewer voters this year. Apparently the presence of the Greatest Leadoff Man in History diminished Raines' case a little bit.

* Mark McGwire lost 10 votes as well, after having gotten exactly 128 in his first two years of voting. Apparently people have their minds made up about him, and nothing has much happened to sway them in his favor.

* Dave, Donnie, and Dale have all hit a plateau around 12-15% after losing much of their initial support, which hovered around 25% of the voters. Hitters who came onto the ballot in the mid to late 1990's suddenly didn't look so great during the Steroid Era, and nobody's really changed their minds about them much.

* Harold Baines is hanging on for dear life, with just 5.9% of the vote.

* Mark Grace, who had the most hits in the 1990's (and a dozen more Win Shares than Jim Rice, by the way), got only 4.1% of the vote and will not be on the ballot next year. You hear that, Jack Morris?

* David Cone, who was about as good a pitcher as hall of famers Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, Juan Marichal, and Whitey Ford, got only 3.9% of the votes and won't be back next year.

* The Great LOOGy Hope for the Hall of Fame, Jesse Orosco, got one vote, and that was from his mom, who's probably senile anyway. I guess we have to wait for Mike Myers now.

Let the Yankees Spend Their Own Money

The Yankees have long been the favorite targets of rival fans, rival team owners and media pundits for a very long time. In the early 1970's we were told that free agency would ruin baseball, mostly because it was thought that nobody could afford to pay players what they were actually worth, essentially. Even George Steinbrenner himself said,

"I am dead set against free agency. It can ruin baseball."

As it turned out, though, teams like the Yankees could afford to pay the going price for (presumably) the best available players, while other teams sometimes had to struggle to get by. Free agency was the best thing to happen to the Yankees since Mickey Mantle. King George was smart enough to realize this, so afterwards he kept quiet about the issue, while others lambasted him for spending so much money on free agents like Catfish Hunter, Goose Gossage, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, and Rickey Henderson, among others.

Not that it worked. I mean sure, the Yankees used free agency to supplement a pretty decent team in the late 1970's and they won two World Series for their efforts, but then they went 18 years before they won another one, and went 14 years without even making the playoffs, despite the perennially high payrolls.

Efforts to sign big-name, superstar free agents were often unsuccessful and sometimes disastrous. Ed Whitson, Jack Clark, Terry Mulholland, Kenny Rogers and Danny Tartabull come to mind, among others. Even if they performed, it wasn't up to par with the fans' and writers' expectations, and so they were quickly dispatched to the far reaches of the major leagues, usually for pennies on the dollar.

When they did start winning World Series, they did so with teams predominantly composed of home-grown players (Jeter, Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Ramiro Mendoza) and the products of shrewd trades (John Wetteland, David Cone, Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, Jeff Nelson, Tim Raines, Scott Brosius, Roger Clemens, David Justice). Granted, many of those trades (like the ones for Clemens and Chuck Knoblauch) only happened because the Yankees could most easily afford to meet their salary demands, but still, the Yankees were shrewd to make them.

Not that free agents played no role, but when they did, those players were often complementary (Darryl Strawberry, Orlando Hernandez) rather than stars. For what it's worth, in their four most recent championship seasons, any Yankee MVP or Cy Young votes usually went to either home-grown players or those acquired in trade. Only David Wells, a journeyman southpaw who who had signed as a free agent before the 1998 season, bucked this trend by getting a smattering of votes for each in that year, and the Yankees were as surprised as anyone when he briefly blossomed into a star.

But this new crop of free agents is expected to carry the team.

The recent signings of Mark Teixeira (8 years, $180 million), CC Sabathia (7 years, $161 million) and A.J. Burnett (5 years, $82.5 million) has spurred a lot of bitterness in the baseball writing community, at least amonth those who are not Yankee fans. Phil Sheridan of the Philadelphia Inquirer says that the Yankees' free spending ways, in the midst of poor economy, is

"...the most egregious display of financial irresponsibility in the history of sports."

Which is ridiculous. That title obviously belongs to the $55 million contract the Dodgers gave to Darren Dreifort. Or perhaps the $65 million Chan Ho Park got from the Rangers. No, wait, Russ Ortiz. Or maybe Barry Zito or Mike Hampton. Or whatever we spend to train the Olympic curling team. At least Burnett, Sabathia and Teixeira are actually good players, and stand a decent chance of continuing to be good for a few years.

The San Francisco Examiner's Bob Franz thought the Yankees were ruining baseball, and that was before they signed Teixeira. He too cites the lousy economy, as well as the fact that the Yankees' new ballpark is partially being paid for by taxpayer money. (Well, the infrastructure improvements are, anyway, but let's not be too picky.)

Bill Bradley of the Sacramento Bee thinks these signings show the sport's need for a salary cap, and Brewers' GM Mark Attanasio agrees. This notion comes out every time something like this happens, and there's never been any real progress on the matter. Nor will there be, if the MLB players' union remains as strong as it has been for the last three decades.

Phil Rogers points out that the Yankees have spent about $130 million more on their free agents this winter than the other 29 teams have spent combined, which is interesting. Still, though, it's not as staggering as he would have you believe, since there was nobody anywhere near as good as the Yankees' three signees to whom the other 29 teams might pay that kind of cash. Rogers also correctly notes that if nothing else, these free agent signings make 2009 an all-or-nothing year for the Yankees, and especially field manager Joe Girardi.

Todd Jones of the Sporting News suggests that the Yankees can't buy themselves a championship, and though he mixes metaphors inappropriately and mis-quotes some stats (Burnett won 18 games last year, not 17), his point is taken.

The problem with most of these arguments is that they confuse the lagging economy and government bailouts of big businesses with what the Yankees spend and how they decide to spend it. While baseball may not be "recession proof", the Yankees still find themselves with a lot of advantges going into 2009:

• They're still the most recognizable brand in sports
• They still play in the largest market in the country
• They still have their own cable TV network
• They have a brand new sadium opening this spring
• They won 89 games in 2008, enough to have won two of the six divisions in baseball
• and they had about $70 million coming off the annual payroll.

Add to this the facts that they missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade and a half, and that the talent coming up from the minor leagues is not yet poised for stardom, and the reasons the Yankees should not spend lavishly on free agents become difficult to explain. Why should they wait and hope like other teams when their window is now, and they can take advantage of it with just another piece or two (or three) in the puzzle.

They're not asking Uncle Sam to foot the bill for Sabathia and Teixeira and Burnett and A-Rod and Jeter. They're not laying people off like Ford and GM, and then turning around and asking for more money for themselves. They're not using taxpayer dollars to offset the expenses of golden parachutes offered to their departing executives. They've managed their own business well, and can spend the profits however they please.

The Yankees have their own money. They're not asking for handouts. They're selling a product, and their fans don't show any signs of reluctance to buy it. They've made lots of money in the past and they expect to continue that trend. And if the failing economy starts to hurt them at the gate, they'll be the ones forced to pony up the dough for these big contracts, not us.

And lest you assume that the Yankees will raise ticket and concession prices to recoup their losses, please understand that it doesn't work that way. Basic economics states that the prices are regulated by supply and demand, and in this case the supply is set at 52,325, so it's just demand. If the demand goes down, the price will go down, not up. If attendance starts dropping, they'll be forced to lower ticket prices to make up in volume what the've lost in margin.

One of the few reasonable voices out there, Will Carroll points out that the Yankees really aren't spending money they don't have. They had room in the "budget" with the departures of Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Carl Pavano, Bobby Abreu, and (we assume) Andy Pettitte, and they took advantage of that fact.

Even with the 2009 salaries and signing bonuses of these three players, plus another $10 million or so in raises to current players like A-Rod, Robinson Cano, Nick Swisher, Chien-Ming Wang, Xavier Nady and the Melk Man (who failed to deliver), the Bronx Bombers still find themselves about $20 million shy of last year's historically large payroll.
You see, the Yankees keep themselves in check. It's only because they overspend on free agents that they are not even more successful. The pressure of playing in New York requires them to overpay for free agents, and that means that when a signing proves to be a bust, it's that much more spectacular and tragic.

That, in turn, makes them a little more wary next time around, or ties up their payroll in costly albatrosses like Carl Pavano, so that when a Carlos Beltran or Johan Santana hits the market, they can't always snatch him up. Granted, often they can, but just as often they end up eating about half the contract when the player ages prematurely or, as in the case of Jason Giambi, stops taking steroids and gets and intestinal parasite.

Some teams may have to wait and hope for victory. Royals fans may remain delusional on the issue. The Oaklands and Tampas can play Moneyball and the Minnesotas can play little-ball and the Brewers can try to catch lightning in a bottle, but the Yankees were already spending a lot of money on their team, even before the $423.5 million they promised to A.J., C.C. and Mark and if they wanted to have anything to show for it next year, the only way was to spend even more.

Baseball Observations from Tickets3D.com

Observations from an insider
by LB Valentino

Boston Red Sox tickets are probably the most popular baseball tickets in demand this season. This Beantown team has had a loyal following since they began playing in the early 20th Century and their millions of fans are always the first in line at the box office and on the Internet.

But fear not, you can always get a great selection of tickets for all sports, concerts and theater events at http://www.tickets3d.com/ They have exclusive 3D venue maps that let you see a view from your seat and buy your tickets at the same time ' all in under a minute. Don't be fooled by imitators. You can also pick your own price and search for tickets by city, artist, team or venue. It's the best place to buy tickets on the web!

New York Yankees tickets are also in high demand from fans across the nation. This legendary team is probably one of the most high-profile, popular teams in the history of the sport. From Babe Ruth to Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees have been thrilling fans since 1901 with their spectacular feats of athletic prowess and their personalities.

As far as East Coast teams go, Chicago Cubs tickets are another hot commodity all year 'round. When they play on their home turf, at Wrigley Field, the stands are jam-packed with fans; and when they're on the road their fans are right behind! They are known as bounce-back kings, having been down-and-out early in their seasons only to come back and show everyone what tenacity really means. With some of the greatest players in the league, they never disappoint.

There's no shortage of excitement on the West Coast either. Los Angeles Angels tickets are always a great way to bond with your buddies or your girls. There's no place better to see baseball live than underneath the California sun ' so close to the Pacific Ocean that you can smell the sea air. Palm trees, sports and fun in the sun ' it doesn't get better than that.

Take a short drive north along the Pacific Coast Highway and you'll find one of the most legendary cities in the world, Los Angeles. From Hollywood and the Sunset Strip to the celebrity residences of Malibu, there's no shortage of LA attractions to pique your interest. World famous restaurants and museums are just the tip of the iceberg. LA has fantastic theme parks that are fun for the whole family, and some of the best shopping on the planet. So make sure to bring your sunglasses for all the glitz and glamour ' and feel free to stay awhile.

On the outskirts of Los Angeles is the place that created the phrase, 'valley girl.' Of course there are plenty of other things to do in the San Fernando Valley besides stand around talking like a teenage girl. You may want to check out their exciting nightlife and club scene, which includes hotspots in Studio City and Burbank ' cities that are also magnets for Hollywood movie types.

If you're in the mood for a drive through the desert, you'll find plenty of things to do in Las Vegas, Nevada. Just a 5-hour drive from the City of Angels, Las Vegas may not exactly be considered the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it has electricity that can be felt all through the Rockies. Spectacular casinos, shows, restaurants, clubs and the pulse of a million heartbeats make this a popular spot any season of the year.

But if you like something a little earthier than bright lights and the big city, there are plenty of things to do in Seattle, Washington. Seattle may be known for its rainy weather, but it's also well-known for its hospitality and as the birthplace of the grunge music scene. It's also the birthplace of perhaps the world's most famous coffeehouses, Starbucks. From music to fishing to coffee and major sports teams and concerts, Seattle offers a wide variety of fun for the whole family.

CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett and Melky's Impending Departure

Wow, that was a busy week.

As predicted, the Yankees wound up signing CC Sabathia, for a contract within about 0.6% of the total amount I estimated a couple of weeks ago, albeit for one less year than I thought. The signing came as little surprise to anyone, excepting perhaps Los Angeles GM Ned Colletti, who apparently had an imaginary encounter in which Sabathia professed to want to play for him. When push came to shove, apparently it was about the money, stupid, as Jason Rosenberg will tell you.

Also as expected, it's the largest total and largest average value for any pitcher's contract in history. The unexpected thing is that there's a player option to get out of the contract after just three years, after which the Yankees will have spent "only" $69 million on him, and after which he will be 32 and perhaps starting to (or about to) decline.

That's where the real issue lies, though. While some people have posited that the opt-out clause is actually a good thing for the Yankees, as CC will undoubtedly decide to take it so he can get more money and move closer to his home in southern California. That's only true however, if he's been both healthy and good for the first three years of this contract.

If either of those eventualities does not occur, especially in the third year, the Yankees will almost certainly be "stuck" with Sabathia for the next four seasons. Can you really imagine a pitcher who just went, say, 5-8 with a 4.93 ERA in 87 innings opting out of a four-year, $92 million contract? I don't think so.

In any case, there is every reason for the Yankees and their fans to be excited about what CC means for 2009: A legitimate, #1 ace pitcher to anchor the rotation.


And speaking of those...

The Yankees also signed A.J. Burnett this week. Burnett, coming off career highs in innings, wins, strikeouts, technically has nowhere to go but down from here, but there is some reason for hope, despite my previous protestations (begging, really) against this signing. The biggest reason to look on the bright side is that Burnett's BABIP was .318 last year, well above the MLB average of .300, but don't make too much of that. We're only talking about eleven hits here, if he reverts to the average.

Burnett gets $82.5 million over five years, which as I pointed out previously, is four more years than he's ever stayed healthy at a stretch. I hope, and fully expect, that the Yankees would not so cavalierly spend money on such a high risk, and must therefore know something I don't about Burnett's prospects for continued health. Of course, I thought that when they signed Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, too, and those hopes turned out to be misguided, at best.

Six years ago, I worried about Burnett's health and how Jeff Torborg's abuse of his arm might have harmed him in the long run, and apparently I was on to something. Burnett had Tommy John surgery the following April and missed most of the 2003 and 2004 seasons, plus parts of the 2006 season due to TJ-related scar tissue problems. His track record is the very definition of "spotty".

But when he's good, he's really good, a workhorse who not only eats innings but misses bats, striking out enough batters to take a substantial part of the load off the Yankees' porous infield defense. He's a number one starter the Yankees will never have to sue as such since Sabathia will (hopefully) always serve that purpose.

I find it interesting that Burnett has received a lot of criticism for his apparent unwillingness to pitch when he's anything less than 100% healthy, this from some of the same people who criticize managers for over working pitchers. It seems a bit disingenuous to me to say that Burnett should be willing to pitch even if he doesn't feel great about it, when they also criticize the culture that discourages pitchers from voicing such concerns, and retroactively villainizes managers who send pitchers out there with known ailments that eventually lead to things like ligament replacement and rotator cuff surgery.

I don't know whether Burnett could pitch through those maladies, and just chooses not to, but I know I'd rather have him at 100% for 28 starts a year than at 75% for every start through JUly and then not at all for the rest of the season.


The other notable Yankee news this week was the rumor that they're planning on trading Melky Cabrera to Milwaukee for Mike Cameron. This would give the Yankees a stable, if aging and expensive, centerfielder in place of Melky Cabrera, who had a terrible year in 2008 and eventually got sent back to AAA.

Though his terrible batting line was largely due to his .271 BABIP, well below the MLB average, the caveat here is that even if he'd hit .300 when he put the ball in play, he'd have only amassed ten more hits. That would have brought him up to a .277 batting average instead of .249, and would have given him only the 5th worst OPS among regular MLB centerfielders, instead of the third worst. Oh, goodie.

If the Yankees had taken my advice in the spring and traded Melky before the season really got underway, they might have gotten more in return for him than a 36 year old centerfielder with a .250 career batting average who might make almost $11 million in 2009, if he meets all his incentives. Cameron's not all bad, as he's got some power and takes enough walks to make up for the low batting avergae.

As it is, though, they're selling low on Melky, but if he's not likely to get any better, they might as well get something for him now. The market for centerfielders who play mediocre defense, don't steal bases and hit .275 with no power isn't likely to be much better when Melky hits his arbitration years.


There are rumors that the Yankees aren't done, either with free agents or trades, as they're still trying to reel in Andy Pettitte with a much more modest contract than he got last time around, something more in the $10 million range for a year or two. That would give them a rotation of Sabathia, Burnett, Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain, with Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy relegated to Scranton until such time as somebody gets hurt again. I'm not sure they need Pettitte, frankly, as I still think Hughes and/or Kennedy can prove useful, but then they never listen to me.

Harold Baines for the Hall of Fame?

It amazes me that I'm even writing this.

It seems to me that if you've got a player whose main job, nay, ONLY job for most of his career was to hit, he ought to have some damn impressive stats if you're going to talk about putting him in the Hall of Fame. Harold Baines won a Silver Slugger and was a six-time All-Star, but Darryl Strawberry made eight All Star teams, Frank McCormick nine, and Steve Garvey ten. Bill Freehan went to 11(!) All Star Games, and when he came up for election, he got two lousy votes and promptly fell off the ballot.

A Designated Hitter ought to amass 200 or more hits at least once. A run producer should pile up 100+ RBIs more than three times in 22 seasons, or score 100 runs, even 90 runs, at least once. A great slugger ought to lead the league in slugging more than once, or hit 30 homers at least once, or at least be among the league leaders occasionally.

Harold Baines did none of these things, and yet there are still folks out there who think he belongs in Cooperstown, along side Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and Carl Yastrzemski and Dave Winfield.



Scott Merkin, a White Sox beat writer for MLB, is one of them. He's got a column on the MLB website calling for the longtime Pale Hose wearer to get some serious consideration for Cooperstown. To make his case for Baines, Merkin interviewed such non-partisan folks as White Sox GM (and former Baines teammate) Kenny Williams, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, White Sox color commentator Ken "Hawk" Harrelson, and Harold Baines himself. Way to keep it neutral there, Scotty.

I have never thought of Baines as a Hall of Famer, and usually just glaze over his candidacy with a few sentences between discussions of more serious candidates. Apparently few of the BBWAA voters have either, only about 28 of them, out of the 540 or so who get to vote. This is important because their opinions, unlike mine, actually matter. Merkin and others like him will need to change the minds of almost 400 of the BBWAA writers, which is unlikely.


A few tidbits from Merkin:

Clutch hitting for Baines [...] led to an amazing 1,628 RBIs despite only topping the 100-RBI plateau in 1982 (105) and 1985 (113) with the White Sox, and with Baltimore and Cleveland in 1999 (103). Baines turned 40 before the 1999 campaign.

It's a model for consistent excellence on Baines' part, accomplished the right way through dedication on and off the field, without any questionable shortcuts.

First of all, being 28th all-time at something does not constitute "amazing" in my book. A-Rod is right on his heels, and will pass him before the end of May next year. Jim Thome and Carlos Delgado are about 140 RBIs back, and could both pass him in the next two years, without necessarily even being much good. Chipper Jones is about 250 back, and could pass him inside of three years easily. Any two of those four will push Baines out of the top 30, and thus his best case for Cooperstown will weaken quite a bit.

Also, it's hard for me to agree with "consistent excellence" as an appropriate term to describe someone who hit, on average, .289 with 22 homers per 162 games. (His actual average per season was about 17.5 homers, because he rarely played more than around 145 games worth of the Chicago White Sox schedule.) More like "typical goodness" which sounds a lot less compelling.

Sure, I'll give him three snaps in Z formation for not using steroids, but then do we even know that for sure? He played almost half his career in the so-called steroids era, and suffered little apparent drop off in skills as he went into his late 30's, when most players slow down.

Baines hit the second most homers of his career at age 40, in 1999, the height of the PED era, and also had the third highest slugging percentage and RBI totals of his career that year, then fell off the table, hitting just .254 with 11 homers in Y2K. If players as mundane as Jason Grimsley and Ricky Bones and Hal Morris and David Justice and dozens of others were all using, is it so hard to believe that Baines could have, too?



Even assuming that he was clean, was he the amazing clutch hitter that Merkin makes him out to be? White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and GM Kenny Williams think so, but then if you asked any owner and/or GM about a longtime fan favorite on the Cooperstown ballot, they'd probably say something nice like this. But is there any (non-anecdotal) evidence?

Baines hit .289/.356/.465 in his career overall, and while he did hit .313/.387/.427 as a pinch hitter (presumably a clutch situation, most of the time), his "Close & Late" numbers (.284/.360/.474) and other clutch stats hover right around his career marks. In short, there's no evidence that he was any more clutch than anybody else.

Baines' hit total of 2866, 40th all-time, is his other main argument. It's as close as any eligible player has gotten to 3,000 hits without getting elected, and two-thirds of the next 30 players on the list are either in the hall or will be someday. That 3,000 mark has always seemed like a lock, and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf blames himself for Baines' inability to get there:

"What really has bothered me for a long time is that if we hadn't traded him, he would have his 3,000 hits and he would be a lock for the Hall of Fame. We traded him twice and into bad situations where he was a platoon player. If he stayed with us, he would have gone over 3,000 hits. If he doesn't get in, it would really bug me. I talk to him about it, and he just shrugs it off."

Should Reinsdorf blame himself for the fact that Harold Baines elicits so little support for election to the baseball Hall of Fame? Besides the fact that 3,000 hits is by no means an automatic ticket to the Coop, given how bland Baines' other numbers look, is it actually possible that Baines would have gotten more playing time and therefore more hits if he'd stayed in Chicago? Let's see:



In 1989, he was traded to Texas on July 29th, and he played in only 50 of the Rangers' remaining 62 games, but not because he was a platoon player. He got five sporadic days off, but then missed seven consecutive games in September, after being pinch hit for in the 6th inning of the last game before the missed week. We have to presume an injury here, and if so, we cannot presume health if he'd stayed in Chicago.

So at best maybe he gets five more games. But does he really? The White Sox had not played him every day either, as he appeared in only 96 of the team's 102 games up to that point, a day off every 17 games. In Texas, not counting the alleged injury, he sat about once every 11 games. So that gives him less than two more games, if he sits once every 17 instead of once every 11. Hitting .321 (his White Sox BA that year) in those two games would give him maybe three more hits. Woo hoo, only 131 to go!

But his performance slipped a bit too when he went to Texas, his batting average dropping from .321 to .285. There's no saying why this was, but let's just pretend that Harold was sad when the ChiSox traded him, and didn't hit as well because of it, and that he would have continued to hit .321 in the remaining 52 games in 1989, instead of .285 in 50 games. How many more hits would that have gotten him? That would give him 58 hits in 188 at-bats instead of 49 hits in 172 at-bats, his actual numbers in Texas. So we've got a total of nine additional hits. Down to 125.

The next year he split between Texas and Oakland, hitting .284 with 118 hits in 415 at-bats. Baseball Reference says that if he'd spent the whole year with Chicago, he'd have had 115 hits in 412 at-bats, three less than his actual total.

But let's also assume that he'd have gotten more than the 135 games they gave him in Texas and Oakland, too. Some of that was due to normal days off, but others may have been injury-related, like when he missed three games in May after playing all of a doubleheader, or when he missed nine games in July, after a game started in which he only got one at-bat, and had only a two-inning appearance in right field in the middle. He played only 103 games of 129 with Texas before the trade to Oakland, where he actually did play every day (and hit only .266).

We can't give him the 12 or so he presumably missed due to some ailment, so we'll give him seven days off (one every 17 games, like in 1989 with Chicago), plus the 12 due to boo-boos, which leaves him with 143 games played instead of only 135. With four plate appearances per game, he gets 32 more plate appearances at most, but he did walk some, so that takes away about four plate appearances. Hitting a 1990-Comiskey adjusted .279 in 440 at-bats instead of the .284 in 415 at-bats he actually compiled gives him 123 hits that year instead of 118. That's five more hits, and we're down to 120.



You see where this is going? I've written over 1,600 words, and we've managed to find 14 hits for him. At this rate, I'll have written a novella about Harold Baines before we get him 3,000 (real and imaginary) hits. But let's keep it up...

I'm not going to make adjustments for the five years in between Baines' first and second stints with the White Sox. He spent two seasons in Oakland and three in Baltimore, never playing more than 141 games in a a season. Let us presume that this was because he was a 30-something DH with bad knees and not because his managers didn't care about getting him into the Hall of Fame.

If that's the case, there's little reason to think that he would have played more often in Chicago than he did in Baltimore and Oakland. Furthermore, adjusting for ballparks (via Baseball Reference) shows that Baines would have had fewer hits, not more, playing half his games in Comiskey, a slight pitcher's park. We'll leave well enough alone there.

Anyway, the second trade Reinsdorf was talking about happened in late July 1997, two days before the famed White Flag Trade. Baines had played 93 of the team's 103 games to that point. When he went to Baltimore, he was in a platoon, mostly with righty Geronimo Berroa, who hit .277/.366/.426 after Baines' arrival. Baines, for his part, hit .291/.356/.418 for Baltimore, playing 44 of the team's remaining 59 games, but his OPS was 120 points lower against lefties than righties that year, so it seems the platoon was justified.

Reinsdorf would have you believe that Baines would not have been platooned in Chicago, but with 1B/DH Frank Thomas hitting .347 that year, I find that hard to believe. Thomas hit .344 against righties that year, and therefore did not need to be platooned, but if they only used Baines as a DH against righties and played Thomas at first those days, Baines still would have gotten less playing time, not more.

Even if we believe Jerry's argument and we give Baines nine more games (6 games off in the remaining 59) and about nine more hits (using the same .300 batting average and the same ratio of at-bats to games played). Now he only needs 111 for the Hall to come calling.

The next year he was platooned again, this time with Joe Carter and Eric Davis, mostly, but he also missed about 32 games from late June to early August due to an injury, so at best he might have played 117 games that year (with the normal game off every ten days) instead of the 104 he actually played. This exercise typically picks us up about one hit per game, so we'll give him 13 more hits, and now he "only" needs 98 more, and they're obviously not going to be found.

By this point in his career, Baines was a part-time player, and deservedly so. He wasn't getting to play as much because most clubs, including the White Sox, had better options at DH than a 38-year old who couldn't hit lefties and didn't have much power. Reinsdorf is just flat-out wrong.

Another quote from Reinsdorf:

"He's going to have a tough time [getting HoF votes] because for a good part of his career he was a designated hitter and a lot of writers won't vote for a DH,"

No, writers will vote for a DH if he's good enough, as they did for Reggie Jackson, and as they will for Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas. It's not because Baines was a DH, it's because he wasn't a great DH.

Merkin also argues for Baines, if you can believe this, based on his defense(!):

Many people will forget Baines' natural ability as an outfielder during the early portion of his career, finishing with 10 assists for three straight seasons from 1981 to 1983 and with 15 assists in 1986. But Baines did not play the field from 1993 through his retirement in 2001.

Assists are not the best measure of an oufielder's defense, but they are a measure. In this case, Baines' 15 assists were not in the top 30 among outfielders between 1980 and 1986, the last year he played the field regularly. The 10 assists he had in other years probably would not be among the top 100 marks in those seven seasons, and he never won a Gold Glove. That's not everything, but it tells you that he was never considered one of the three best defensive outfielders in the league when he played.



Surprisingly, according to Baseball Prospectus he was a pretty decent outfielder, good for between 11 and 17 FRAA (Fielding Runs Above Average) each year from 1983 to '86. That's not fantastic, but it is pretty good. Still, you can't give him credit for what he might have done with good knees without throwing everything else off, so we have to evaluate him based on what he actually did, which was DH.

And as a DH, he just doesn't measure up. It's not Reinsdorf's fault. It's not the voters' fault. Baines just wasn't great enough. Being "pretty good" for 22 years should not be, and will not be, enough for Cooperstown.

Problems in Projecting C.C. Sabathia: The $140 Million Question

Rob Neyer and Anthony McCarron have weighed in on the large-looming presence that is CC Sabathia, and the even larger one that will be his next contract, well north of the $100 million mark. Neyer followed that up with some comments on a Sports Illustrated article discussing Sabathia's size and other attributes as well.

I discussed CC a bit last week, but did not go into too much detail. Hopefully I'll remedy that oversight here.

Ben Reiter of SI thinks that CC's as good a bet as anyone to be a very good pitcher for the next several years, in spite of his size. McCarron things that this is a big risk, but one the Yankees have to take, and I mostly agree with that, though I don't necessarily think that comparing him only to other $100 million pitchers is fair, exactly. For one thing, the $100 million is just a convenient benchmark. If you brought it down to, say, $85 million, still a hell of a lot of money, you'd have the likes of Mike Mussina and Carlos Zambrano, neither of whom can be considered a bust, at least not yet.

And if you look at average annual value, the list gets even bigger. Andy Pettitte and Jake Peavy both made more money per year than Brown or Hampton, but then so did Roger Clemens and Jason Schmidt, and those didn't go so well. Roy Oswalt and Mark Buehrle and Roy Halladay aren't far off that mark, either, and their clubs are all pretty happy with them, but then there's also John Smoltz and Chris Carpenter, so...we just don't know. Spending money is a risk, and the more you spend, the bigger the risk. This is not news.



But among the few things we can say with confidence about CC Sabathia, there is this: He is not Barry Zito. Or Kevin Brown. Or Mike Hampton. Unfortunately, neither is he Johan Santana.

Still, for the sake of argument, it might be helpful to look at the warning signs associated with these other huge contracts, to see if they "should have known better", or something.

Rob Neyer had reasons that three of the previous four megadeals should have been avoided, but I find a few problems with his arguments:

"[Kevin] Brown had been up and down, durability-wise, and was well into his 30s
when the Dodgers signed him (and it should be said that he did pitch brilliantly
for two years)."

Granted, he was 35 when he signed, and should have been considered an injury risk for that reason alone, but "up and down"? He missed a month in 1995 with a dislocated finger, and missed some time in September of 1989 and 1990, but had been a veritable workhorse every year from 1991 to 1998, averaging well over 200 innings per 162 games.


The Dodgers got three very good (if non-consecutive) years and two injury-plagued ones from Brown, and then they traded him for two good years of Jeff Weaver (his last two good ones, it would turn out) plus two other pitchers. That's about as good as they could have hoped, given the fact that they were dumb enough to sign a 35-year old pitcher through his 40th birthday.

Another one of Neyer's retrospective assessments:

"Zito was a disaster waiting to happen, his performance obviously slipping long before the Giants signed him. "

Have to disagree there, too, to some degree. There may have been some advanced metrics to suggest the impending drop in performance, but his slipping performance was hardly "obvious". At the time of the signing, Zito was a 28-year old lefty who had averaged 16 wins, 220 innings and a much better than average ERA for the previous 6 years. Those aren't the only important numbers, naturally, but you can hardly make a case for an obvious drop in skills.

Even if you just looked at the previous 2-3 years, he was still a durable, better than average lefty starter, which is a rare commodity. Of course, $18 million a year is too much to pay for that commodity, but there was little reason to think that Zito would turn out to be as bad as he's been the last two seasons.

"And Hampton was a very good pitcher who was thrown into an extreme environment."

Not sure about this one either. If anything, he was a so-so pitcher who had thrived in one extreme environment, and was therefore highly overrated. Hampton had been helped significantly by the severe pitchers' parks in Houston when he was with the Astros and in New York. His career ERA split after the 2000 season was 2.88/4.09, in over 1,200 innings of total work, meaning that away from those pitchers' havens, he was basically a little better than average.

Not only was he removed from that extreme environment, but he was forced to pitch half his games in an even more extreme environment, one with the exact opposite properties of those that had masked his mediocrity. That revealed his weaknesses, and severely so. Colorado to their credit, unloaded him after two seasons, and got some value in return.

Sabathia is none of these things. Unlike Brown, he's not almost 35. Unlike Hampton, his success does not come from the parks he's called home. Unlike Zito, he doesn't have rising walk rates and dropping strikeout rates and his best season was last year, not five seasons ago.

He doesn't have control problems. He doesn't have obviously problematic mechanics. He doesn't just "get by" with a decent fastball and a whole lot of junk. By all accounts, he's not a self-absorbed jerk, or a hot-head, or a primadonna, or a clubhouse cancer, or anything of that ilk. He doesn't appear to wilt in the heat of a pennant race or the playoffs. In short, there's really nothing wrong with him, except...

His size. Unlike Neyer's assessment, though, this is not the elephant in the room nobody talks about. For one thing, everybody's talking about it, and for another, can't we come up with a less loaded analogy than that for a fat guy? "Sabathia's weight is the gauche, pink drapes in the room everyone's ignoring!" Nah, now we're upsetting a different demographic. Sorry, fat guys.

He's listed at 6'7", 290 lbs, which means he's probably well over 300 lbs these days. There's never been any pitcher his size who's been successful for any length of time. Heck, there's really never been anybody his size in MLB. A mediocre relief pitcher named Jumbo Brown, who pitched before World War II, was listed at 295 lbs, but he was gone after his age 34 season, perhaps to fight the war, and never even pitched more than 90 innings in a year.

A handful of other pitchers are listed as being over 250, but most of them (Jeff Juden, Jeff Nelson, Chris Young, maybe Tim Stoddard) are very tall and a different body type from CC. Others, like Dennys Reyes and Bartolo Colon, are much shorter and fatter, whereas CC is more thick than fat.

And the ones who might be comparable physically, like Bobby Jenks or Chris Britton, don't have the same workload put on them because they pitch only in relief. There's a big difference between throwing 800 pitches a year and 3,500, and we have no idea how Sabathia's knees (and back, and arm...) will hold up under that strain. Either that or they don't have enough of a MLB track record to say anything about them, like Colter Bean or Humberto Sanchez. There just isn't a reasonable comparison for CC anywhere.

And because of this, the others in the exclusive $100M club, Mike Hampton, Kevin Brown, Barry Zito and Johan Santana, are almost nothing like Sabathia, except perhaps that three of the four are lefties. The pitching styles, and perhaps most important, body types, are very different from CC's. This is what makes it so difficult to project Sabathia's performance going forward.

Baseball Prospectus, an organization that makes a living at telling you what baseball players are likely to do, says that CC's "Similarity Index" (incorporating body type and performance) is 5, where anything less than 20 is "historically unusual". That "5" means basically that they don't have any idea at all.

For comparison, coming into 2008, Andy Pettitte was a 41, Roy Halladay a 43, Matt Morris a 56, Cole Hamels a 48. Those guys were reasonably common, and more or less performed as you might have expected them to perform. (Much better than that, in Halladay's case.)

Jamie Moyer and Kenny Rogers were both in single digits, like CC, and while Rogers basically pitched as badly as BP expected, Moyer was much, much better than anticipated, and nobody exactly knows why. Randy Johnson's Similarity Index is a zero, meaning that there's really nobody even remotely like him for comparison's sake, and CC's not much better so take anything you see about what he might do with a grain or two of salt.