Baseball Archives

Josh Heit, trying to find a silver lining in Aaron Heilman's disastrous debut season, looks at David Pinto's new defensive metrics and suggests of Heilman:

The conventional wisdom is that he sucks and needs to go back to AAA. However, he did lose 8.6 outs (137 expected) to his defense (I’d probably blame, in order: Roger Cedeno, Robbie Alomar, and Joe McEwing. The Mets do keep showing up near the bottom of David’s studies, if you look at some of the other data sets). He may have just suffered a string of bad defense.

I'd like to believe that's the core of the problem too, but . . . well, I don't doubt that Josh is right that Heilman suffered from bad defense (although it's a bit unfair to blame Alomar, given that he was traded on July 1 and Heilman threw most of his innings after that). But Heilman's problems ran a good deal deeper than defense. The real problem is that Heilman allowed 41 walks and 13 home runs in 65.1 innings of work, an unsustainable rate (5.65 walks and 1.8 HR/9 innings, if you're keeping score at home).

On the other hand, Heilman struck out just over 7 men per 9 innings, so he must have been fooling someone. I thought I'd take a look, via Aaron Haspel's search engine, to see how many other pitchers have had a season like Heilman's and see if (1) any of them managed to pitch effectively despite the walks and dingers or (2) any of them ever developed into good pitchers. I ran the search for pitchers who issued 40 or more walks and allowed 10 or more homers in a season of less than 70 innings.

Unsurprisingly, the results were ugly. Only 5 of the 17 pitchers had ERAs below 5.60, and only one (Bill Scherrer at 4.36 in 1985) had an ERA below 4.70. Let's review the list, from best ERA to worst:

1. Bill Scherrer, age 27. 1-3 with a 5.98 ERA the rest of his career, all in relief.

2. Brian Oelkers, age 25. Never pitched in the majors again.

3. Dave Campbell, age 26. Never pitched in the majors again; went into broadcasting.

4. Bob Gibson, age 27. No, not that Bob Gibson. 6-7 with 11 saves and a 3.90 ERA the following year in 92.1 innings, but basically washed out of the majors after that.

5. Jose Mesa, age 33. Mesa got worse the following year (5.36 ERA) before recovering to save 97 games with an ERA of 2.76 his first two years in Philadelphia. Has to be considered a modest success.

6. Mike Mohler, age 24. Had a little success in the majors, with a decent year and a half as a middle reliever at ages 26-27 after being returned to the minors. Career high in wins: 6. Career record: 14-27, 4.99 ERA.

7. Steve Barr, age 24. Never pitched in the majors again.

8. Matt Karchner, age 29. Notched 15 saves and a 2.91 ERA the following year, then regressed and appears to have left the game after three seasons of struggles.

9. Doug Bochtler, age 27. Pitched just 21 more innings in the majors.

10. George Susce, age 24. Susce pitched in Fenway in the late 50s, a tough place to pitch. Had a 3.67 ERA his first year away from the Fens, but wound up with a short, unsuccessful career.

11. Dave Boswell, age 25. A 20-game winner the previous year, Boswell threw just 29 more major league innings. I believe he had injuries.

12. Jon Garland, age 20. The youngest of the bunch and still a work in progress; Garland managed a 3.69 ERA in 117 innings the following year and has been just below a league-average starter since then.

13. Heath Murray, age 28. Has pitched just 12 major league innings since.

14. Clint Hartung, age 27. Never pitched again and was converted to an outfielder.

15. Bob Welch, age 37. Retired immediately thereafter.

16. Dick Starr, age 30. Never pitched in the majors again.

17. Roy Halladay, age 23. Had a 10.64 ERA in 2000, arguably the worst season a pitcher ever had in that many innings. Was returned to the low minors but returned a completely reworked pitcher the following year (2001), with a much higher strikeout rate. Won 19 games in 2002 and AL Cy Young in 2003.

This is a fairly grim list, although not completely hopeless. Heilman's 24 and had no prior major league success, so the best comps include some of the most successful ones, like Garland and Halladay, but still includes plenty of disasters. Of course, Halladay's stuff was electric before his blowout in 2000, and Garland also has physical gifts that Heilman lacks. Heilman also struck out more batters than any of these guys but Gibson, although the higher-K members of the group aren't a hopeful bunch.

Heilman was just plain bad in 2003, defense or no defense, and history suggests only an outside chance that he'll ever be an effective major league pitcher.

Jeff Cirillo has turned down a trade to the Mets. Though still stuck with Roger Cedeno, Met fans can’t exactly be crushed.

I'm sure you saw this linked in many places, but if you didn't: this is just beyond the pale.

So, according to Bob Raissman, Brian Cashman's office is set up so people have to walk through it on the way to the men's room?

Real morale-builder, that Steinbrenner. Of course, Page Two reminds us that there are many worse jobs than Cashman's; this job description was particularly unappealing:

In the track-and-field world, there are certain young men who are summoned to perform a peculiar task. Prior to a sprint, the starting blocks must be held in place. The job consists of sitting on the ground, placing a foot behind each block, and gently applying pressure. The hazards may be few, but they are specific. Should one allow the blocks to slip, wobble or (gasp) make a distracting noise, it could lead to a false start, or even disqualification.

Bear in mind, this is the world of the sprinter – perhaps the most tightly wound, highly insecure of all competitive athletes. Should something go wrong, and that athlete is disqualified, you think part of his ire won't rain down on the poor youngster crouching in paralyzed fear behind the starting line?

The other hazard is one of proximity. A sprint is nothing more than an extended explosion. When hamstring muscles flex, quadriceps tighten and glutes tense, a certain unplanned action may take place. And when there's an explosion — of the flatulent variety — there are surely better places to be. Such are the hazards of a job where one man's ass is only inches from another man's face.

Kevin Drum linked last Friday to a page on the White House site about India, the Bushes' cat. I, too, had been unaware that the Bush family had a cat, but more amusing is this tidbit:

Named for former Texas Ranger baseball player, Ruben Sierra, who was called "El Indio"

Just cracked me up that the President of the United States has a cat named after Ruben Sierra.

Brian Gunn at Redbird Nation points us to this statement by Harvard Law prof Paul Weiler - a labor law expert who teaches a seminar on sports law at HLS and had written a textbook on the subject - on the A-Rod mess:

It's a basic feature of collective bargaining that's to stop the bosses from insisting that one of the workers take less money in order to keep a job, . . . The difference is, he's not a nurse making $22,000 a year, he's making 22 million bucks a year. But it is that basic principle that they want to adhere to.

Professor Weiler either misses several key points or at least is quoted in a way that obscures them; the difference here is a lot more significant than the money:

1. Unlike your typical employee working under a collective bargaining agreement, A-Rod has a guaranteed contract. Thus, the Rangers may threaten his ability to keep his job, but they can't take away his $25 million salary.

2. A-Rod didn't agree to less money to keep his job; he agreed to it to take a better job, with a winning team in a big market.

If accepting less money to play for a winner was good enough for Michael Jordan, why can't Rodriguez be allowed to do the same thing? Frankly, the idea that this will lead teams to screw their players out of contracts isn't persuasive; few teams can afford to just punitively bench a guy who is a good player making millions a year, and if they cut him, he can sign elsewhere and keep the money. The parade of horribles presented by the union just bears no relationship to the real world of Major League Baseball.

The owners have been in the wrong on many occasions in baseball, but this isn't one of them.

So, the Player's Union has (for now) killed the Red Sox' deal for A-Rod because they refuse to let a player renegotiate his contract for less money than he signed for. There's apparently a rule in the Collective Bargaining Agreement on this (David Pinto has more; start here and scroll down).

Leaving aside the language of the rule, I think the Players' Union's position is stupid and bad for the players. First, if the goal of the union is to get big contracts for the players, this is an incredibly stupid way to go about it. Look at this from the perspective of the Rangers: one of the biggest fears owners have in signing big contracts is that the team's needs will change and they won't ever be able to get rid of the guy. By telling the Rangers they can't trade A-Rod if the deal is contingent on a restructuring he himself accepts, you are forcing them to keep stewing in their own juices with a player they'd rather trade, and all because Tom Hicks signed A-Rod to a big contract. Think: what effect will this have on Hicks' willingness, or the willingness of other owners, to sign such megabucks deals in the future?

If I'm the union, I want to do everything I can to make teams think of top-of-the-market free agent contracts as the thing to have. Every team wishes they'd signed Barry Bonds or Greg Maddux in 1993, or Reggie in 1977.

A-Rod is -- other than the aging Bonds -- the best player in baseball today. He just won an MVP Award; the year before, he set the all-time single-season home run record for a shortstop. He's stayed healthy, busted his butt for the Rangers and done everything you could ask him to. And yet, as things stand today, most teams are thanking their lucky stars they didn't sign A-Rod; the owners think of his contract as a disaster for the Rangers. The Boston deal could change that, and help show that a player with the game's biggest price tag can be part of a positive story; keeping Rodriguez bolted in place will just underline the folly of the contract, and deepen the resolve of individual owners - even without collusion - never to give anybody that kind of money again. Why on earth would the union want to do that?

Joe Sheehan argues that critics of the union's position are using a double standard:

There's a reason why Tom Hicks and John Henry have the net worths that they do, and I'd imagine that both would laugh you out of the room if you ever suggested that there were touchy-feely reasons for leaving forty million bucks on the table. Why they get to be businessmen, while Alex Rodriguez gets held to a different standard, passes understanding.

Gene Orza from the Players Union makes a similar point in an email to David Pinto:

Why should A-Rod be held to a different standard then the owners with whom he's negotiating? He's being asked to forfeit something like 50 million dollars; you think Tom Hicks and John Henry got to where they are today by walking away from that kind of money? A-Rod shouldn't be allowed to tear up his contract in the same way that Tom Hicks shouldn't be allowed to.

These guys are the ones with a double standard. Isn't Hicks allowed to tear up the contract if A-Rod holds out for more money? Is Orza really saying that if a player wants to renegotiate -- or just wants to sign a long-term deal before his current contract is up -- the owners have to say, "I'm sorry, I can't tear up the contract and give you more money, come back when you've played out the end of the deal"? If that's the rule, it's news to me. In fact, owners do this every day. A-Rod just wants the same rights that Tom Hicks has: the right to put more of his own money on the table if that's what it takes to win. Shame on the union for telling him otherwise.

In 1995, Expos reliever Greg Harris pitched with both hands, becoming the first pitcher in the major leagues to “switch-pitch” in over one hundred years. According to the Baseball Library web site, only four pitchers in baseball history have ever pitched ambidextrously and the first man to have ever done it is also the only man to have done it more than once, Anthony “Tony” Mullane. Nicknamed “The Apollo of the Box” as well as “The Count”, Tony Mullane played between 1881 and 1894 and had a fascinating life and career.

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Aaron Gleeman has the rundown on why Mike Cameron should hit a little better at Shea than he did at Safeco, where he had just horrendous home/road splits. I have mixed feelings about the Cameron move, since I generally believe in the notion that a rebuilding team should focus its energies on rebuilding, and signing a 31-year-old outfielder whose primary asset is his legs seems a little too Vince Coleman-ish to me. Then again, like Matsui (at least by reputation), Cameron is a spectacular defensive player and not terribly overpriced; this is more like the acquisition of Cliff Floyd than like the catastrophic acquisitions of Mo Vaughn and Tom Glavine. He'll definitely help in the short run, and in particular the Cameron/Matsui/Reyes combination up the middle should do wonders for the Mets' pitching staff. On the downside, Cameron's low batting average and high strikeouts will make him a prime target for the boo birds when the team inevitably slides well below .500.

Also of note: Cameron's steals dropped off to 17 last year from 34 and 31 the prior two years, and steals are something that usually doesn't come back. Despite their speed, neither Cameron nor Matsui should be expected to run much. But the team will look far different on the basepaths than in the era of Olerud, Ventura, Zeile, and Vaughn.

Further on the downside is this: Cameron's comps at baseball-reference.com are as follows:

Similar Batters through Age 30 Ruppert Jones (946) Dave Henderson (939) Tom Tresh (938) Tommie Agee (936) Cory Snyder (934) Dwayne Murphy (930) Johnny Briggs (929) Darrell Evans (928) Larry Hisle (926) Ray Lankford (921)

This list is worrisomely similar to the one I noted at the time for Matt Lawton when he arrived in NY; everyone on the list but Evans (who's not really a similar player) and Lankford was washed up or close to it by age 31.

I'm much more opposed to the Mets' rumored interest in Brian Jordan, who's exactly the type of player that got them where they are today, and who would seal off the outfield; I'd much rather start the season with an opening to audition young players alongside Cameron and Floyd than with a set-in-stone veteran lineup.

Or, of course, Vladimir Guerrero; the great ones, when still young, are always worth it. If the Mets signed Guerrero, it would overnight begin to make sense to gear up to win now.

Hey, Phillies phans: if you liked Jose Mesa and Ricky Bottalico, you'll love Roberto Hernandez! This about says it all:

Hernandez, 39, will serve as a middle innings reliever with the Phillies. With Atlanta last season, Hernandez went 5-3 with a 4.35 ERA in 66 games. He allowed 104 base runners in 60 innings, while striking out 45.

(On the upside, at least they're only giving him a 1-year, $750,000 deal, so maybe Ed Wade has learned a little something).

I mean . . . Carl Everett?

Then again, since Major League Baseball owns the Expos, I guess they figure they can recapture most of his salary in fines . . .

So, Guerrero is gone, to where yet we don't know. Vazquez is gone. Even Michael Barrett is gone, to Oakland . . . the Expos still have a few young guys who can play some ball (Nick Johnson, Jose Vidro), but overall, this team is a disgrace. At least a contraction draft would have assured a fair distribution of the Expos' players.

Last month, MLB.com asked the rhetorical question, "How much does Frank Robinson love managing?" I guess we're going to find out.

This Baseball Prospectus analysis from two years ago is still the only thing I've seen trying to give a systematic review of significant Japanese hitters and how their numbers would translate in the U.S. Clay Davenport estimates Kazuo Matsui's 1997-2001 numbers as averaging out to .283/.543/.374 with 41 homers, 79 walks, and 119 strikeouts (interestingly, KazMat doesn't steal bases despite a reputation for blinding speed).

Davenport's translations seem to overproject Ichiro and Hideki Matsui, specifically their home run power (Tsuyoshi Shinjo comes in closer to his Japanese numbers). I'd expect the same from the new Matsui - maybe a .280 hitter with 20 homers instead of 40, especially at Shea.

Since I noted this for Andy Pettitte, let's check in on the record Kevin Brown left behind in LA: not so shabby, for all the griping about his contract. Yes, Brown lost 2002 and half of 2001 to injuries, a risk everyone knew the Dodgers were taking when they signed a 34-year-old pitcher to a 7-year contract. But consider his place on the club's all-time list: Brown leaves LA with a 2.83 ERA, just shy of the top 10 in Dodger history; his .644 winning percentage ranks him 9th in club history. In fewest baserunners/inning, even pitching in a more hitter-friendly Dodger Stadium than in years past and in as great a hitter's era as the National League has seen since the Depression, Brown ranks first at 9.90 (a 1.1 WHIP, for you rotoheads), ahead of Koufax and Drysdale and Sutton and Dazzy Vance and Rube Marquard. Then, go down to ERA+ (ERA adjusted for league and park context), and Brown's first again, by a long shot, at 149 (49% better than the league) to 132 for Ron Perranoski and 131 for Koufax, with Andy Messersmith and Vance close behind.

Yes, it's tough to compare 872.2 innings of Brown to 2324.1 of Koufax, 2757.2 of Vance, 3432 of Drysdale or 3816.1 of Sutton. But that's not the point. The point is, when you even have to explain why a guy wasn't the best pitcher you ever had on a franchise over a century old, it's hard to say he didn't live up to his end of the bargain.

On a lighter note, Roger Clemens is apparently considering joining Andy Pettitte in Houston. I’ll believe that when I see it, but this is pretty funny:

Clemens was concerned that his Yankees' farewell gift -- a Hummer -- would be taken away if he decided to resume his career.

That's where the radio station comes in. KKRW's "Dean and Rog" came up with a plan: They made a plea on the air Friday morning for a Hummer they could offer to Clemens. Moments later, Hummer dealer and regular Dean and Rog listener Lee DeMontrond called in live with an offer.

An hour later the three hit the road in the Hummer, driving straight to the front door of Clemens' house, where they were greeted by Roger and his wife, Debbie.

When presented with the keys, a surprised Clemens said, "This is getting very interesting. ... I didn't know making a comment like that, you guys would show up in my front driveway with a burnt-orange H2."

Err, can’t Roger afford to buy his own Hummer if he really wants one?

The Dodgers better hurry up and finalize the sale of the team. Sure, you can argue some sense for letting Quantrill walk, or cutting loose Kevin Brown, and it undoubtedly made sense to get rid of Brian Jordan and Andy Ashby. But the overall impression is a team desperate to dump salary, afraid to take it on (I still thought they should have jumped at Manny Ramirez, and they may miss a chance to bid on Nomar as well), and generally frozen in place, probably until some time in January or later. Not good news, if you expect this team to contend in what should still be a competitive division next year.

Unlike Dr. Manhattan and Michele, I'm not a Yankee fan and (for the most part) have no problem discussing Andy Pettitte's departure rationally. Then again, I've been pretty well swamped at work lately, so I don't have the luxury of time to go in depth here . . .

1. This is the first time I can ever really remember the Yankees going through what every other team's fans have suffered through repeatedly, a significant player walking away despite the team's ardent efforts to keep him (they didn't really bust a gut trying to keep Wetteland). Granted, the "going home" aspect makes this more like John Olerud's departure from Queens . . . which I still maintain was the beginning of the end for the Mets.

2. Although baseball-reference.com identifies the most-similar pitcher through age 31 as Mike Mussina, I think the best comps for Pettitte are Chuck Finley and Tom Glavine, both of whom pitched effectively well into their thirties. I suspect that Pettitte might have arm trouble, but that's an irrational superstition on my part that has trouble thinking the Yankees really, truly wanted to keep him. In fact, Pettitte cut his walks dramatically (and apparently permanently) when they expanded the height of the strike zone in 2001, and he set a career high in Ks in 2003, so his numbers show no sign of slowing down.

3. On the other hand, I won't exactly be signing him up for an NL rotisserie team now that he's in Minute Maid Field.

4. Bringing in Kevin Brown, as rumored, is a mixed bag. Brown was actually a good deal better than Pettitte this season -- he even pitched more innings and struck out more batters, besides having a 2.39 ERA -- and has a decent chance to be better next year. But he's a bigger durability question, expensive as sin and not a good investment for that seventh year of his contract in 2005. You get Brown this year, you'll need to be going out for more pitching help next year as well. (On the other hand, I'd rather be the guy who replaces Pettitte with Brown than the guy who replaces Brown with Jeff Weaver).

Greg Maddux is still useful if he's cheap, but he won't be cheap and he's unlikely to get any better than he was this season. If I'm the Yanks, I'd rather try to see if Randy Johnson's available (More on the goings on in Arizona when I've got time to blog again).

5. Pettitte's 149 wins rank him 9th on the Yankees' all-time list, but his .656 winning percentage doesn't make the top 10.

6. This season's outstanding performances in the playoffs give Pettitte a solid career record in the postseason with the Yankees, albeit not an outstanding one:

Career	W-L	IP	ERA	H/9	BB/9	K/9
ALDS/ALCS	10-4	126.2	4.12	9.17	2.42	5.40
World Series	3-4	60	3.90	9.90	2.70	6.30
Postseason	13-8	186.2	4.05	9.40	2.51	5.69

After mulling it over, I’m tentatively excited about the Mets’ signing of Kazuo Matsui. Moving Jose Reyes is disappointing, but he is 20 years old and this should not be too radical a defensive transition (unlike when, recalling horrific memories, they put Howard Johnson, Juan Samuel or Todd Hundley in the outfield). Reyes has his whole career to get used to playing 2B and can always move back some day. Meanwhile, Matsui does sound like a solid acquisition due to his reputed defense, speed and power. His reported impatience at the plate sounds troubling, but every player has a weakness. The main thing is Matsui is 28, did not cost the earth in terms of money or picks and will still be only 31 when this deal ends.

In the final analysis, we’ll have to actually see Matsui to really know for sure. So, among Mets fans, I’m a little closer to this opinion (scroll down), than I am to this one. Meanwhile, Jon Heyman in Newsday has exactly the wrong reaction to this move:

[T]he Mets have done themselves proud. Now they have to do more. They've signaled with this move they are trying to win now. So rather than just dip into the player pool, they might as well dive in.

He goes on to suggest that the Mets try to go sign or trade for Vladimir Guerrero, Preston Wilson, Brian Jordan/Reggie Sanders and Eddie Guardado/Tim Worrell. Slow down there, killer. It’s not time to jettison the rebuilding plan to assemble another high-priced rotisserie team.

This was a bold move, but the Mets need to keep focused on a long-term plan.

For Yankee fans wondering what you're getting in your new starting pitcher, consider this comparison for the years 2001-2003:

Pitcher	IP/Year	ERA	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	K/9	ERA+
Mike Mussina	219.2	3.52	8.22	0.93	1.78	8.07	127
Javier Vazquez	228.1	3.52	8.39	1.05	1.97	8.26	131

Answer: if you're not getting Mike Mussina, you're getting as close a facsimile as you could possibly ask for without violating Mussina's copyright, except 8 years younger and -- for now at least -- a whole lot cheaper. In fact, the ERA+ and Innings Pitched figures suggest he may actually have been more valuable the past three years. Like Moose, his main problem is the gopher ball. Will he win in New York? Well . . .

ERA of NL starting pitchers in 2003: 4.41
ERA of AL starting pitchers in 2003: 4.66
Difference: 5.67%

Vazquez 2003 ERA + 5.67% = 3.42

Clemens/Pettitte/Wells/Mussina 2003 ERA: 3.84
Clemens/Pettitte/Wells/Mussina 2003 W-L: 70-32

Yeah, I think he can win a few games with the support the Yankees can give him. Vazquez' health is a bit of a question mark -- as with any pitcher, really -- but unless Nick Johnson can put together a full, healthy season some day, he's a steal.

Lots of interesting baseball goings-on of late, with Pudge Rodriguez possibly leaving Florida, Alex Rodriguez rumored to be going to Boston and Javier Vazquez and Gary Sheffield heading to the Yankees. I’m sure the Crank will analyze some of these moves and potential moves in more detail.

Lately I’ve been focused on the Mets' efforts to reel in Kazuo Matsui from Japan (see here, here and here). It looks now like a deal may be close.

UPDATE: It's official.

Luis Castillo has re-signed with the Marlins. Thus, the Mets are now focusing even more on Kazuo Matsui. This sounds like a very good option if Matsui will agree to play 2B, much less so if it leads to moving Jose Reyes. Also of interest in the Newsday article is the rumor of Met interest in Johnny Damon and Trot Nixon.

According to Peter Gammons, Gary Sheffield is coming to the Yankees. This move should help the Yankees, but not as much as it will hurt the Braves, which should be a small consolation to Mets fans.

Speaking of which, last week Bob Klapisch analyzed Jim Duquette’s plan for this off-season and beyond.

[T]he Mets are sticking to a get-real wish list, which starts with [Luis] Castillo. Or if the free agent remains with the Marlins -- which some Met officials believe he will -- perhaps Kaz Matsui. The Mets are also considering Mike Cameron in their outfield, envision Sidney Ponson or Miguel Batista in the starting rotation, and haven't ruled out the possibility of talking to Yankees free agent Jeff Nelson - to serve as closer.

In a perfect world, Duquette would've already scooped up Bill Koch in a trade with the White Sox, agreeing to take on $3 million of the troubled reliever's 2004 salary. But the Mets can't spend like the Yankees; sobered by an internal estimate that the Wilpon family may have lost $25 million last year, the Mets have no appetite for such an expensive gamble.

Similarly, the Mets have all but resigned themselves to losing another potential closer, Keith Foulke, to the Red Sox, who are apparently ready to outbid the market. Duquette was hoping Foulke could be lured to New York because his former Oakland pitching coach, Rick Peterson, now works for the Mets. But the Mets don't intend to get in a bidding war with Boston -- not when Duquette considers a closer the final component of his rebuilding equation, not the first.

As Duquette put it, "if I felt I really needed a closer, I would've (traded for) Billy Wagner."

I think Castillo (whose loss would hurt the Marlins) and Matsui both sound like decent options at 2B, although I’d prefer a cheaper, shorter-term option like Fernando Vina. Cameron would certainly shore up the woeful outfield defense, although I’m lukewarm about his offensive abilities. Finally, I’m not sure about Ponson or Batista, but I agree with Duquette’s conclusion that a closer should be a relatively low priority for the Mets. First, you need to get to the point where you have games that can be closed.

The Crusader, the Holy Cross campus newspaper, notes that Marlins manager Jack McKeon attended HC for a year in 1952 before moving on to Seton Hall and later Elon College in North Carolina, where he got his degree.

(Link requires registration)

You know, this is just top-of-my-head speculation here, but shipping Curt Schilling to Boston is a pretty clear indication that the Diamondbacks have finally switched gears from "win now at any cost" to getting rid of at least one aging, high-priced vet who would have helped the team in the short run . . . one sign of a good organization is the ability to recognize when the window of opportunity to win has shut, and the ability to drop the pretense and squeeze maximum future value out of the remaining aging talent on the roster. In Arizona's case, of course, there are some big ones: Randy Johnson is 40, Luis Gonzalez is 36, Steve Finley is 39, and all three still have value. (This is on top of recent departures like Tony Womack, 34, and Mark Grace, 40).

The Arizona Republic has more, although it doesn't sound as if a youth movement is in the offing. The paranoid side of me wonders if pursuing Johnson would be Steinbrenner's next move to counter the Schilling signing; it might actually make some sense, if you think that Johnson could fill Clemens' slot, but I'm not sure the Yanks would want to part with the young talent needed to make the deal if they're still shopping for outfield help.

CNN reports: Naked, bleeding man seeks help at Cal Ripken's house on Thanksgiving.

David Pinto takes on the Elias Sports Bureau's statistics supporting Buster Olney's argument on ESPN.com that teams that make productive use of outs (generally through the deployment of one-run strategies -- bunts -- and other methods of emphasizing moving baserunners at the expense of hitting away) tend to gain a significant advantage in the postseason. Leaving aside Pinto's account of the institutional politics at play here, let's look at Olney's core statistical argument, in which he leads off by arguing that the Marlins

dominated the Yanks, 9-5, in productive outs -- in keeping with a longstanding post-season trend.

This is the Productive Out, as defined and developed by ESPN The Magazine and the Elias Sports Bureau: when a fly ball, grounder or bunt advances a runner with nobody out; when a pitcher bunts to advance a runner with one out (maximizing the effectiveness of the pitcher's at-bat), or when a grounder or fly ball scores a run with one out.

There have been 142 post-season series since 1969. In 130, one team or another has had an advantage in Productive Outs -- and in 62.3 percent of those 130 series, the team with the advantage in Productive Outs has prevailed. Factor in the 12 series in which opposing teams have tied in Productive Outs, and it can be said that teams with a deficit in POs have won 34.5 percent of post-season series.

* * *

[By contrast, t]he Athletics have failed to advance beyond the Division Series in the last four years, and it's probably not a coincidence that they have never won the battle of Productive Outs. In 19 games over those four series, their opponents have produced 23 PO's, Oakland 15.

Base on balls are a fundamental piece of the Athletics' offensive philosophy, but statistically, they have shown to have slightly less significance than Productive Outs in the post-season. Teams that have had the advantage in walks have won 60 percent of the time. (Teams with an advantage in singles have won 63.8 percent of the series, and teams with an advantage in home runs have won 70.4 percent - which makes sense, as Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau noted, because it is the one offensive result in which a run is assured).

David raises two initial objections to Elias' definition of the Productive Out, which he suspects is "rigged" to generate a favorable result:

[I]f you move a runner into scoring position with two outs, doesn't that count for something? And besides, didn't Pete Palmer show 20 years ago that trading an out for a base always decreases run potential?

Well, yes, and yes, although on the second point I'm at least open to persuasion that the dynamics of regular season baseball are in some way materially altered by the characteristics of postseason play, in which a higher quality of pitching figures disproportionately (such as, as I've noted before, Mariano Rivera averaging over 150 innings pitched in relief per 162 games). But the problems with the definition run quite a bit deeper than David has addressed in his initial post on this issue. If your thesis is that teams should try to make productive outs, shouldn't you be measuring the number of times they try to do this, rather than the number of times they succeed? Otherwise, it's like measuring steals but not caught stealings. (Of course, I realize that such a study might be impossible, but recognizing that you've loaded the question by only looking at successful baserunner movement is the first step to recognizing the flaws in this measurement).

Or worse: you're mistaking a strategy for what could just as easily be a by-product of having a lot of baserunners. I wonder what that 62.3 percent figure drops to when instead of raw totals you compare each team's ratio of productivity, by dividing Productive Outs (or even Productive Outs +Stolen Bases) by the number of times that each team has a runner or runners in position to qualify for making such an out. I strongly suspect that teams that get more runners on base with none or one out are more likely to win anyway, regardless of what they do to move them along. Notice that the 62.3 percent figure is just above the number for walks and just below the number for singles; if you simply looked at times on base, I'd bet the number would be over 65%.

To illustrate more graphically: I'd be willing to bet that, overall, the team that leaves more runners on base is more likely than not to win a postseason series, because of the fact that teams that get a lot of baserunners are usually the teams that lead the league in men left on base. I actually ran a quick check on this, although it was difficult because the only source I could find was an old STATS Sourcebook that listed LOB by each game, so I just picked a random sample of 25 modern World Serieses (1969-1993) running somewhat parallel with the Elias study. It's hard to say the results were a resounding success in making my point here -- or that the sampling was large enough to be representative -- but the team that left more runners on base in the series won 13 times and lost 12 (interestingly, 3 of the teams to win the series with fewer men left on base were the 1972, 1973 & 1974 A's; make of that what you will).

Now, leaving runners stranded on base is unquestionably a bad thing, and more to the point, it runs precisely counter to the whole point of making Productive Outs. But the fact that, at least in a small sampling, the team leaving more runners on base was actually successful more often than not at least suggests that both moving and failing to move baserunners, as an indicator of success, is simply a symptom of having more baserunners in the first place.

If Olney wants to show that the study he relied on wasn't skewed but was really a meaningful measurement, he can always come back with a comparison to the success rate for the team that gets more men on base -- a number that is conspicuous by its absence from his article. Like I said, I really am open to persuasion that moving baserunners takes on added importance in the postseason; absent statistical evidence, my gut tells me it does. But the proof, as of now, just isn't there.

Too busy to blog this morning -- I was late at the office last night and never got around to wrapping up my analysis of the Aleto opinion, which will have to wait until after Thanksgiving -- but I couldn't let the day pass without saying a word or two about Warren Spahn, who died yesterday at age 82. You probably know the details, but the key facts about Spahn:

*You can draw the line for "modern" baseball in a number of places, but for pitching records the clearest dividing line is the arrival of the lively ball in 1920, which required pitchers to bear down against every hitter or risk allowing a home run. Since 1920, Steve Carlton is second all time in wins with 329; Spahn is first, 34 wins ahead of him at 363. And unlike the stars of the 1960s-70s, only one season of Spahn's prime (1963) overlapped with a pitcher-dominated era.

*Winningest lefthander in baseball history.

*Served his country with honor and distinction in World War II:

In 1943, Spahn went into the Army. He served in Europe, where he was wounded, decorated for bravery with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and was awarded a battlefield commission. He fought at the Battle of the Bulge and in the battle for the bridge at Remagen, Germany, where many men in his company were lost.

*Spahn's military service had the added result that he didn't win a game until age 25. Perhaps that helped him -- his arm didn't get worked hard until he was old enough to handle it -- but it's just as possible that he would have won 380-390 games if he hadn't served (much like Grover Alexander, who would have won 400 if he hadn't taken a year away at the pinnacle of his career to go to the front in World War I).

*Won 20 games a staggering 13 times.

*Loved the game so much he went back to the minor leagues for a few years after being cut by the Mets and Giants at age 44.

Now, to be fair, Spahn had a few advantages in his major league career; he pitched in pitcher's parks most of his career, and almost always had outstanding offenses behind him, led by Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews. Baseball-reference.com doesn't list his context-adjusted career ERA in the top hundred. But then, between 1946 and 1963, his "ERA+" rates as better than the league by 10% or more 16 times in 18 years, and in all but two of those years he threw at least 257 innings (and the offseasons were one of 245 and the 1946 season, when he wasn't yet an established starter). He faced 1000 batters in a season 17 years in a row. That kind of consistency in a starting pitcher is one of baseball's rarest gifts in any era.

Rob Neyer has more.

The legendary Warren Spahn, who won more games than any lefthander in history, has died.

Spahn was a decorated World War II veteran and loved the game of baseball so much he would pitch until 1967, retiring after stints in Mexico and the minors when he was 46 years old. One of the all-time great Braves, Spahn won 20 or more games 13 times in his career. Never a dominant hard-thrower Spahn was the quintessential pitcher and his durability and consistency, after a late start, were the most notable qualities of his outstanding career.

The Crank will probably have more on this later, but Spahn was one of the great pitchers of the 20th century and his passing is worthy of remembrance.

Well, so much for the slow news week . . . one of the problems of writing for a long-running television show, or a series of books or films -- this problem is particularly acute for soap operas -- is what you might call "drama fatigue": the difficulty of getting the audience to emotionally invest itself once again in some crisis of the characters, after the viewers/readers have been through the wringer so many times with the same characters and/or similar plotlines. The TV show ER has had to work incredibly hard to sustain this kind of tension; JK Rowling has excelled at recreating it anew in each of the Harry Potter books, at each stage escalating both Harry's social humiliations and his peril.

After a while, you start to run out of room to stretch out the tension. Madonna, for example, has reached a similar point with regard to being shocking; she's running out of new tricks. Every saga that depends on new and more stunning revelations eventually comes to and end.

Except the Red Sox. Just when Sox fans thought they couldn't come any closer to victory, couldn't taste any bitterer defeat, wouldn't again fall into the trap of hoping and believing, along comes a 3-run lead against the Yankees in a 7-game series, with Pedro in command . . .

And after that, the cries went up anew: we will never believe again. We won't have our hearts broken again. How, you might ask, does one tug at those heartstrings again? How do you shock, again?

Trade for Curt Schilling. There's nothing but good in this move. It's raising the ante, calling Steinbrenner's bluff, and attacking the Sox' perennial weak spot, depth in the starting rotation. (And the early ESPN report on this deal, assuming it pans out, also explains why Peter Gammons gets the big bucks).

And somewhere in this favored land, the Mudville fans are dreaming once again . . .

Baseball America lists the top ten Mets’ prospects (some of this requires a subscription). Unsurprisingly, pitcher Scott Kazmir is listed at the top:

Kazmir is the Mets' most promising pitching prospect since Dwight Gooden, though he's much less likely to go straight from Class A to the majors like Gooden did. While Kazmir finished the season in St. Lucie, it wouldn't be a surprise if the Mets started him off back in high Class A in 2004 to avoid the April chills in the Double-A Eastern League. Wherever he starts the season, expect him to spend most of the year in Binghamton. He could see Shea Stadium at some point in 2005.

The overall conclusion is also somewhat heartening:

The Mets don’t have as many farmhands who will be ready to contribute in 2004, but their system has more depth than it has had recently. New York has done a nice job with its first-round picks, including righthander Bob Keppel and third baseman David Wright (both 2000), Heilman (2001)…Kazmir (2002) and outfielder Lastings Milledge (2003).

Kazmir, Matt Peterson and Keppel project to front New York’s rotation of the future. Milledge, Reyes and Wright could form the top of the lineup. Phillips isn’t the only candidate to succeed Piazza behind the plate, as Justin Huber and Mike Jacobs, who emerged with a breakout year at Double-A Binghamton, give the Mets two more offensive-minded catchers. The system’s biggest weakness is in the outfield, though Milledge has exciting upside and that may be the ultimate destination for hard-hitting Craig Brazell.

Mets fans will have to be patient as their club goes through an overhaul. But they do have some young talent to bank on, and just as important, the team has a long-term plan in place rather than playing for only the immediate future.

Let’s hope.

I try to read Will Carroll's columns at Baseball Prospectus when I can; Carroll does a great job reporting on and analyzing injuries, and there's really nobody else out there who compares to his work in this area. Carroll alone is probably worth the subscription price. Anyway, Carroll's fairly optimistic about Mark Kotsay's ability to recover from the back trouble that ruined his 2003 season. The addition of Kotsay, the poor man's Trot Nixon, suggests to me that the A's are continuing their recent trend of moving towards valuing defense and away from their earlier emphasis on high-OPS players as the likely candidates for bargain shopping. But throwing Ramon Hernandez into the deal does suggest to me that the A's are up to something else and looking to clear roster space.

I'm less enthused about them dealing Ted Lillly for Bobby Kielty, but more on that later.

Tom at Shallow Center took issue with my analysis of the Billy Wagner trade, in which I argued that "Wagner has to help [the Phillies'] bullpen, but the victory will be Pyhrric if they can't re-sign Millwood." His point:

Millwood was exactly the stud we hoped he'd be in the season's first half, even mixing in a no-no to boot, but fell apart in the latter half of the year. Scott Boras, his agent, will shop him hard, and probably will land him somewhere, at a huge cost -- that's what Boras does, after all. Millwood's new team then will cross their fingers and pray that he's a legit No. 1. Millwood never was that kind of guy with the Braves, and he wasn't one with the Phils. He's a good pitcher, but until he shows me a Maddux/Schilling/Clemens level of domination, I don't think he should be paid as such.

That's a fair argument, and I agree completely with Tom's drumbeat in favor of bringing back Curt Schilling instead of Millwood. I still think Millwood's a solid pitcher, assuming he's healthy, and thus a good investment in the abstract, but I can understand the frustration of Phillies fans for his reversal of his usual pattern in falling apart in the second half this season, and the fact that Millwood is useful doesn't mean you bring him back if he's asking for an unreasonable pay raise. My point is a more basic one: if you don't re-sign Millwood and don't replace him with a comparable starter or one who's an upgrade, such as Schilling, then spending the money to shore up the bullpen instead by the addition of the highly-paid Wagner is no substitute, and in fact is a bad idea if it means you passed on keeping that money available to spend on starting pitching.

Ken Brett, George's older brother who was known as a good hitting pitcher (George called him “the best athlete in the family,”), has died; Brett was only 55 and had suffered from a lengthy battle with a brain tumor. Brett is only the latest member of the Royals teams from the George Brett era to pass on at a relatively young age: Dick Howser and Dan Quisenberry also died of brain tumors, Darrell Porter died suddenly last summer, Al Cowens died last April, Tony Solaita was shot to death in 1990, and Vada Pinson died in 1995. (Aurelio Lopez, who pitched briefly for the Royals in 1974, was also killed in a car accident in 1992).

Honestly, I don't have a strong opinion on the NL MVP race, and given my intense dislike for Barry Bonds, it's probably not wise to get in an argument about the issue. My sense is that if you just look at the numbers without context, Pujols should have had the award, because the difference in playing time makes up for Bonds' advantage in productivity (i.e., his astronomical OBP). But Bonds' missed time included a bunch of time following his father's death, and he could afford to take those days off in part because he had contributed so heavily to the Giants having a big lead. I can't really fault the voters for giving Bonds a break on that score.

It should come as no surprise to long-time readers that I'm very happy to see Alex Rodriguez finally win the AL MVP award, for which he's been a serious contender nearly every year since he became an everyday player in 1996, and which he has basically been robbed of on more than one occasion.

To my mind, there were only three serious candidates: Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Carlos Delgado. Nobody else was in their league offensively. Look at the AL rankings, starting with Win Shares (which includes defense) and some of the Baseball Prospectus offensive rankings and VORP, BP's overall (defense-included) ranking, as well as Runs Created and per 27 outs and some of the key counting stats:

Player	WS	EqA	EqR	RARP	VORP	RC	RC/27	AVG	SLG	OBP	OPS	HR	R	RBI	TB
A-Rod	1	3	3	1	1	2	4	20	1	8	3	1	1	2	2
Delgado	2	2	1	3	3	1	1	15	2	2	1	2	4	1	7
Manny	7	1	2	2	4	3	2	2	4	1	2	7	4	14	8

Bear in mind that the Win Shares and BP stats are park-adjusted, while RC and RC/27 aren't. When you take account of the fact that the numbers race was so close even on the offensive end between A-Rod, a mediocre defensive first baseman on a non-contending team and a poor-fielding left fielder who was benched in the middle of the pennant race, it becomes clear that Rodriguez properly got the benefit of the doubt even before you consider his near-misses in the past.

Rumors and counter-rumours are swirling about Mike Piazza possibly requesting a trade and/or announcing himself willing to accept a trade (not exactly the same thing but with the same likely outcome). Will it happen? Who knows?

Emotionally, I'd be sad to see him go; Piazza's a gutty guy, he's bonded with the fans, he can still hit and he's still fun to watch. Unlike some proponents of dealing Piazza, I don't see the need to run the guy down just to sell some newspapers promote a trade. But dealing Piazza to an AL team where he could split between catching and DHing instead of playing first base would be the right move for everyone. He may be more valuable remaining available to catch 80-90 games a year than as just another slugging first baseman; who knows, even his throwing arm may bounce back a bit if he cuts back on the time behind the plate. Dealing Piazza would free up salary, get yet another aging vet out of town, and possibly bring back some talent in exchange for a guy who's still a very dangerous hitter.

Of course, trading Piazza makes all sorts of sense in the abstract, and it's fun to theorize that you could deal him to make salary space for Alex Rodriguez, who seems born to play for the Mets. Personally, I'm not adverse to parting with Jose Reyes to get A-Rod; Reyes may be young and on the way up, but if you're looking at contending in 2005-2007, what's the likelihood that Reyes will be better at that point than A-Rod? A rebuilding team generally doesn't trade hot prospects for stars in their primes -- but superstars are another story. Remember, A-Rod still won't be 29 until late July, and he's slugged .600 or better four years in a row. I have high hopes for Reyes, but given his injury history, my bet is that Rodriguez at 35 will still be better than Reyes at 27.

All that said, the only team that seems to have much interest is the Baltimore Imbeciles, who operate under the perpetual delusion that they are a contending team despite the following facts:

*Even in the rebuilding year of 2003, they gave more than 1400 at bats to players 33 or older.

*Of the six players with 12 or more Win Shares on the 2003 O's, two (Jeff Conine and Sidney Ponson) are no longer with the team, and Melvin Mora's 31 and batted .233 the only time he ever got 500 at bats. That leaves Luis Matos, Brian Roberts, and Jay Gibbons -- solid role players all, but hardly the core of the 1993 Indians.

*The Red Sox won 95 games this season and finished second in Baltimore's division. This ain't the AL Central here.

If Lee Mazzilli is worth even a cent of the money he's being paid by his new employers, he'll tell them to let somebody within spitting distance of contention take a flier on Piazza.

But so far, I haven't seen any sign that any such team will. So I'm not getting too exercised yet over the rumors.

As I explained last month, my usual suspicion of giving the Cy Young Award to a reliever is ameliorated by the relatively high workload of Eric Gagne (77 games, 82.1 IP -- Gagne appeared in nearly half the Dodgers' games, including 65 of their 85 victories) and by the low workloads of the leading NL starters, Mark Prior (30 starts, 211.1 IP), Jason Schmidt (29 starts, 207.2 IP), and Kevin Brown (32 starts, 211 IP). (Livan Hernandez pitched more but wasn't as effective). And once you put Gagne on the table at all, his performance level was just so dominating in so many high-leverage situations that you have to give him the award. Consider: with the Dodgers locked in a tight wild card race, Gagne allowed a home run to Vladimir Guerrero on August 20 and this was the only run he allowed after the All-Star Break: 37 IP, 14 hits, 9 walks, 61 strikeouts and an 0.24 ERA. If you can't give a man an award for that, when can you?

Manipulative Dateline NBC reports are generally not my thing, but this one sucked me in – an account of Joe Torre’s harrowing childhood, growing up in an abusive home environment.

Torre is a good guy and a class act. His Safe at Home Foundation is an admirable one, worthy of support.

I've been mostly out of blog here the past week due to an exceptionally busy stretch at work; I'll be busy again this week, but it's not clear yet if things will ease up enough for at least a little blogging. It hasn't been a particularly newsworthy baseball week other than the Billy Wagner deal. While it's always sad to see a guy like Wagner leaving a team he's been through so much with, he has (like most non-Rivera closers) also had enough bad experiences (in Wagner's case, in the Divisional Series) over the years to wear out his welcome with at least some Astros fans.

It's really impossible to evaluate the deal until we see what both teams do the rest of the offseason. If the Astros use the money to shore up their starting rotation (they're rumored in some sources to be hot and heavy after Andy Pettitte, although Peter Gammons says otherwise), it may be a good deal; Dotel and Brad Lidge can clearly take the slack in the bullpen. As for the Phils, Wagner has to help their bullpen, but the victory will be Pyhrric if they can't re-sign Millwood.

The story of the death of Dernell Stenson is also very sad. The fact that one of the alleged assailants has been arrested is small consolation.

ESPN’s off-season preview of the NL East alluded to possible Mets interest in Japanese shortstop Kazuo Matsui. This follows reports in last week’s Newark Star-Ledger to that effect. While I’m categorically opposed to the idea of moving Jose Reyes, this does sound like an intriguing rumor:

The Japanese shortstop, whom scouts refer to as the switch-hitting Nomar Garciaparra of Japan, is relatively affordable, will generate extra revenue from a marketing standpoint similar to the way Hideki Matsui has for the Yankees, and perhaps best off all, won't cost the Mets a draft pick.

Former general manager Steve Phillips frustrated and annoyed the Mets by giving away numerous draft picks as compensation for free agents he signed. Several Mets executives have pointed to that as a reason their farm system was so depleted at the beginning of last season, and why Phillips was fired.

By signing Matsui, the Mets won't have to surrender any draft picks as compensation to the Seibu Lions.

Also, the price tag for Kaz Matsui would be similar to Hideki Matsui's three-year, $21 million deal, a reasonable contract compared to the outrageous fortunes players such as Miguel Tejada and Vladimir Guerrero are expected to receive. Some think those two could get as much as $12 million per season. Kaz Matsui might be an overall better player than Hideki Matsui because of his speed and defense, traits the Mets are looking to acquire, but his offensive numbers are not as good. And it is offensive numbers teams usually pay for.

One question – why are they referring to this Matsui as a “switch-hitting Nomar Garciaparra of Japan” if his speed is one of his primary assets and his offense is questionable?

Don Mattingly has become the Yankees new hitting coach and Willie Randolph has moved to take over Don Zimmer’s role as bench coach, thus making him, according to Newsday, the managerial heir apparent to Joe Torre. It seems like the Yankees are using their coaching staff to reconstitute their mid-1980’s infield - can Mike Pagliarulo be far behind?

Following up on the Crank’s earlier post, don’t expect Manny Ramirez to end up at Shea, according to Newsday.

After 72 years of living, 56 years in baseball, a host of World Series rings, multiple knee and hip operations, a metal plate in his head and highly publicized rumbles with Pedro Martinez and George Steinbrenner, Don Zimmer is apparently still not ready to retire.

I'm fascinated by the Red Sox decision to put Manny Ramirez on waivers, thus allowing any major league team to claim him, provided they pony up the 5-year $100 million price tag remaining on his contract. The move has been widely interpreted as a dare to the Yankees to take on Ramirez, and the Boston Herald reports that that's where Manny would like to land.

There are three obvious points:

1. Manny is the best hitter in the American League, as one can see from a variety of available evidence; he was second the AL in OPS in 2003 and in 2002, and led the AL in Equivalent Average (EqA, the Baseball Prospectus offensive metric) in 2003 and in 2002. As a general rule, you don't give up players like that lightly when you are a contending team, as the Red Sox indisputably are.

2. Manny's a bit of a dog and a bit of a hot dog, and alienated a lot of people this season. There are some people who would like to get rid of him for that alone, plus he's not a real good fielder or baserunner, and tends to be injury prone.

3. As a general rule, very few players are worth $20 million a year for five years, given the cost of available alternatives, and still fewer who are turning 32 next season. Assuming that the Red Sox have a reasonably fixed budget, that's money that could be spread around to pay for a lot of players.

The trick, though, is not to make any one of these points a knee-jerk reaction ("Manny's great, you can't let him go!" "He's a bum anyways!").

So, do you let Manny walk? I figure the Yanks won't get him, actually; teams with lesser records get first call, and among other teams, he fits too well with the hitting-desperate Dodgers, who just yesterday cut Brian Jordan and Andy Ashby to clear some major salary space. Manny would slide right into the role vacated by Gary Sheffield in LA.

Personally, while I can see the overall logic, my take is that if you're trying to win now, you need to put the extra money into improving other parts of the team right away; the problem us that because there's really no weak spots in the lineup to add offense back to make up for losing Ramirez (unless you expect the Sox to bag Vladimir Guerrero, who's the only remotely available player who'd be an upgrade), the move only makes sense if (1) you're going to turn around and use the cash to shore up the starting rotation or (2) you're actually trying to save money instead of trying to win.

Shoring up the rotation, though, isn't as easy as it sounds; pitching is hard to come by even when you have the money to spend. There are only seven free agents who might give the Sox some real bang in the rotation:

Bartolo Colon
Andy Pettitte
Roger Clemens
Keith Foulke
Greg Maddux
Kevin Millwood
Esteban Loaiza

Of those, Clemens remains most likely to retire; the Yankees will not allow themselves to be outspent by Boston on Pettitte; Maddux is old and not all that durable; Foulke, while an outstanding closer who probably has the stuff to be a starter, is nonetheless an unproven commodity as a starter; and Loaiza has a long record of mediocrity behind his one year of big success (in which he threw about a fifth of his innings against the Tigers). That would leave the Sox with just two genuine places to spend the money -- Colon and Millwood. This is problematic as well: first, those guys would know they can drive a hard bargain; the Phillies in particular will likely make a big push to re-sign Millwood; and Colon's conditioning doesn't exactly suggest he'd be a better long-term investment than Manny. (The possibility of a swap of Ramirez for former Red Sox pitching prospect Curt Schilling is more intriguing).

Besides, there may be cheaper ways to help the rotation. I still think you can get part of the way by investing some patience in Kim and Fossum, although it may be that Kim needs another change of scenery (I'll be very happy with Jim Duquette if he starts next season with both Kim and Foulke at Shea Stadium, but that's another story). Yes, $100 million's a BIG CONTRACT -- but I don't see where the Sox wind up coming out ahead on replacing Ramirez.

Mike's Baseball Rants has at long last abandoned the good ship Blogspot; check him out at his new address, http://www.all-baseball.com/mikesbballrants/index.html. Rest assured that the Joe Morgan bashing will not be affected by the move.

John at Iberian Notes has an amusing look at failed attempts by British writers to feign knowledge of baseball.

(John gets a few facts off as well, but the commenters set him straight).

I see that Reese Witherspoon had a baby boy, and named him "Deacon." Now, given that her husband is actor Ryan Phillippe, this would make the boy Deacon Phillippe. Well, since Deacon isn't exactly a common first name these days, that set me a-thinkin': is he named after the six-time twenty-game winner (born Charles Louis Phillippi) who pitched for Honus Wagner's Pirates in the early part of the century, won 3 games in the inaugural World Series, never had a losing season and finished his career with an admirable 189-109 record and a 2.59 ERA despite not arriving in the major leagues until age 27? Is Ryan Phillippe a relative (the original Deacon died in 1952), or perhaps a baseball fanatic? Or was there some other origin to the original Deacon's nickname (a literary reference I'm missing here?) that the new baby shares in common?

The Duquette era has officially begun for the Mets. This is an encouraging quote from yesterday:

"Our road map for next year and beyond," Duquette said, "is to focus on our pitching and our defense, especially our defense up the middle. If you go back and look at our teams in 1999 and 2000 when we were successful, we were well above average in those areas and we had discipline at the plate. Those are the things we're going to stress. That's the plan."

Thirty-five years after becoming the last major-league pitcher to win 30 games in a season and six-and-a-half years after being convicted on federal fraud-related charges, Denny McLain is once again a free man. The litany of his troubles over the years has been a sad story. Here’s hoping he can finally get his life straightened out.

Aaron Gleeman on Derek Jeter's vaunted reputation as "Mr. Clutch" in the postseason:

The situations one would want to look at in trying to determine the Clutchness of a player would seem to me to be the following:

- Runners in scoring position
- Runners in scoring position with two outs
- Close and late

The first two are self-explanatory. "Close and late" is defined as "results in the 7th inning or later with the batting team either ahead by one run, tied or with the potential tying run at least on deck."

In other words, how does someone do when the game is on the line? When the going gets tough and the tough get going. When the s--- hits the fan. When the men are separated from the boys. When (insert your own cliche here).

Here are Derek Jeter's post-season numbers [batting/OBP/slugging] in those situations from 2000-2003, combined...

Runners in scoring position: .214/.421/.357

Runners in scoring position with two outs: .188/.381/.375

Close and late: .176/.263/.323

(emphasis added).

As The Mad Hibernian notes below, Dan Okrent is taking over as ombusdman at the New York Times; ScrappleFace had a great comment on this.

Besides rotisserie baseball, Okrent should be revered by baseball fans everywhere for an even more important discovery: he's the man who discovered Bill James and introduced him to a mass audience, over some resistance from traditional journalists and "fact-checkers" who just assumed that James' opinions and analyses could not be correct because they conflicted with conventional wisdom. Dr. Manhattan saw the significance for the Times of James' challenge to conventional wisdom back in July: "This story has additional resonance in light of the Jayson Blair scandals."

Yes, it does. Okrent will need that same iconoclastic streak if he wants to make a dent in the way the NYT peddles conventional wisdom today.

The New York Times has its first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent. The following part of his bio is of interest:

Mr. Okrent — who is also known as a founder of Rotisserie baseball, the forerunner of numerous fantasy sports games — has written several books on baseball.

More specifically, I remember Okrent primarily as being the author of “Nine Innings” and wish him well in his new job. Judging by the Times’ recent problems, mentioned in passing at the end of the above article, it should keep him busy.

One of the more tiresome arguments we often hear trotted out by Yankee partisans whenever they face the Red Sox is that the rivalry is one-sided; to Yankee fans, the Sox are just another foe to roll over, and the only wins that matter are championships.

The reaction of many Yankee fans to the team's World Series defeat this year gives the lie to this; as the New York Daily News reports, many Yankee fans are looking back at the defeat of the BoSox in the ALCS as a moral victory:

Like many of the five dozen or so fans who gathered outside Yankee Stadium to give thanks and perhaps snag an autograph from a favorite player, Boaz found a silver lining in the season - at least they beat Boston.

"They could never have lived that one down," said Boaz, an unemployed market researcher from the Bronx.

"To knock our archenemies out of the World Series and keep the curse alive meant more to me than beating the Marlins," crowed Tony Apuzzi, 37, a New Rochelle schoolteacher.

And, of course, some Yankee fans reacted with a tried and true strategy:

The crowd was at one point taunted by a small group of neighborhood kids who had discovered a novel way of dealing with defeat - switching sides. They proved their newfound allegiance by chanting "Let's Go Marlins" at the Yankee fans.

"The Yankees, man, forget them," said a disgusted Ricky Nigagliono, 13. "How can they let another team win on their home field?"

"The Marlins, they're nice," said Roger Reyes, 12. "The Yankees, they got old people, that's why they're wiped out."

Ouch.

One thing I laughed at last night was Harold Reynolds saying that the Marlins' success disproved the idea that you shouldn't draft high school pitchers (gee, who do you think he was talking about?), given that Josh Beckett, Brad Penny and Dontrelle Willis were all drafted out of high school. Of course, this might be a more salient critique if the Marlins had actually drafted all three of these guys, but instead they got Willis in the Matt Clement trade and Penny in the Matt Mantei deal. Nobody ever said picking up prospects who had already had some minor league success was unusually risky just because they had been drafted out of high school.

No, for once I think Phil Rogers is right: you can't really draw any broad lessons from the Marlins. A few small lessons, perhaps -- I may take a look at some of those -- but the bottom line is that this was a pretty good team that got hot and got lucky at just the right time.

Well, this time the cavalry didn't come. Flamethrowing ace on the mound, a 2-run lead, 5 outs away from the championship -- you were thinking, as I was, "here we go again." The comeback begins. But this time, that's how it ended. In fact, Josh Beckett threw just 11 more pitches after getting to the talismanic "5 outs" mark, getting a GIDP from Nick Johnson, flies to what's left of Death Valley in left from Bernie Williams and Hideki Matsui, and a weak grounder from Jorge Posada.

Beckett also, in the process, saved the idea of the complete game. After watching Mark Prior and Pedro Martinez -- arguably the best pitcher in each league this season -- wilt in the heat of defending a 3-run lead in the 8th inning, managers everywhere had to be revising even further downward their willingness to let their hoss finish what he started. Tonight, pitching on 3 days' rest, Beckett finished the job. Not bad for a guy whose career record stood at 9-11 with a 3.69 ERA entering the All-Star Break this season. My hat is off to Jack McKeon; he was right on the call for Beckett on 3 days' rest, and I was wrong.

Did the Yankees choke, in losing such a hard-fought series to an opponent over whom they were favored? I explored this question at length two years ago:

It really all depends how you look at the postseason. There are those, like me, who believe that baseball games are basically determined by four things: (1) talent, including not just physical talent and skill but the collection of abilities ranging from concentration to judgment of the strike zone and on the basepaths that separate good players from bad ones; (2) strategy; (3) matchups, i.e. the fact that the righthanded-swinging 1953 Dodgers would fare much better against Randy Johnson than would the 1927 Yankees; and (4) timing or luck, which may or may not be the same thing. The first is paramount over the long regular season, provided that the strategy isn't so totally awful that a team squanders its ability to put the best talent on the field. In the postseason, though, the other three factors loom much larger because the games are closer, they're head-to-head rather than against a cross-section of the league, and with fewer games a single blunder can turn the tide.

* * *

But there are also those, most prominently among pro-Yankees sportswriters, who view the postseason as a sort of mythical proving ground where true champs are separated from "phony" stars who don't really "have what it takes" . . . Thus, winning in the postseason becomes proof of a form of moral superiority, or is seen as somehow revealing who is truly the better team. The media loved, for example, revelling in how the Mariners' 116 wins "don't mean anything now" once they lost to the Yankees -- as if the entire regular season was an illusion and in 6 games the shadows had now been cast off to reveal, with Platonic insight, the actual form of the best team in the American League. We heard variations on this line for three years, but the problem with the argument is that it provides no room for the best team to lose - if you lose, by definition, you are no longer "a champion."

Did they choke? Sometimes you put your best pitcher on the mound, and he gets beat. Happens to everybody. Except the Yankees, we were told. We were told wrong.

(On a personal note, my predictions for the postseason wound up 4-3, but one thing I called before the NLCS: "Great matchup of young arms, with Josh Beckett and Kerry Wood making The Leap and Prior already there.")

Two questions about the Yankees' Game 5 fiasco:

*If David Wells knew before the game that his back felt bad, why didn't he tell Torre to have somebody up in the bullpen just in case? Why did Contreras apparently come in without being properly warmed up?

*Isn't it possible that Wells' back tightening up had something to do with the fact that his last start was on one day of rest, awfully short rest for an aging pitcher who's already not the picture of fitness?

I have to agree with David Pinto, who crunches some hypothetical numbers on the topic, that starting Josh Beckett on 3 days' rest in Game Six would be a necessary evil if thge Marlins' backs were against the wall (although recall that the Red Sox didn't do that with Pedro in the ALCS even when it meant starting John "Line Drive" Burkett), but starting him with a 3-2 series lead is just not a good idea and reeks of Bobby Cox-style foot-shooting. In fact, I'd say that while it looks like he's going for the jugular, Jack McKeon is really managing scared, afraid to keep his ace in the hole for Game Seven. I'm not even 100% sure that I buy McKeon's core assumption here -- that Carl Pavano is so much better than Mark Redman that it's worth throwing both Pavano and Beckett on short rest, although Redman wasn't the same pitcher in August and September as he'd been at the beginning of the season.

Bill Simmons has some choice words from the oppressed and traumatized denizens of Red Sox Nation, who are pining for regime change (hint: Bobby Valentine's available):

While watching the NFL, my wife once asked me, "Which guy is the quarterback?" She literally knows nothing about sports. Yet last night after the Bernie Williams hit in the eighth, she kept asking, "How come that guy is still pitching?"

* * *

The Ethiopian guy who collects the money looks awful. Like he hasn't slept in days. I ask him if he's doing OK. He says, "I have never felt so awful. Not even when my own father died ... my own father. I have only been in this city for a few years, so I'm new to this. I don't know how you people do this. In my neighborhood are lots of college kids from New York, and they were cheering after the game ended. I am a peaceful man ... a PEACEFUL man I tell you ... but I swear to you I went outside looking to fight some Yankee fans ... just awful."

I really, after rooting my guts out against both of these teams, didn't think there was any way I'd get emotionally involved in this World Series, and although I've been in a Yankee-hating rut I managed to skim by Games 1-3 without doing so. But tonight (like Aaron after Game 1) it was all there again: Clemens, a big comeback, an extra-inning marathon, the specter of Mariano, a walk-off homer. Man, I'm exhausted.

I've been skeptical of the Marlins' ability to stay with the Yankees, and they needed this game to make this a series; now we've got one, and it will head back to the Bronx to end it all.

A handful of thoughts during the game:

I liked Derrek Lee's attempt to fake the pickoff throw getting away in the first inning -- he did this spin move where he looked like the ball had been overthrown -- but Soriano wouldn't bite. . . Bottom 1, they're getting sappy about Clemens already. But this might not be his last appearance; presumably he'll be ready to relieve in Game 7 (on 3 days rest) if it goes that far, and maybe Game 6 as well. . . . the Thundersticks are back! . . . that kid who caught Cabrera's homer looked pretty psyched . . . Clemens looked early like he had nothing; I was ecstatic when I saw Weaver get up in the first . . . they showed the list of guys who had 4 or more World Series wins and were undefeated, and except for Jack Coombs they were all Yankees . . . Bernie slapped the first pitch of the second for a single so effortlessly you'd think he was hitting off a tee . . . they keep comparing Clemens going out while still effective to Koufax or Jim Brown, but that's ridiculous; those guys were young and still the best in the game. They mentioned Elway, who's a better comp . . . I have to say, Clemens really isn't a bad hitter for a guy who rarely swings a bat . . . Carl Pavano showed tonight what the Expos saw when they traded Pedro for him and Tony Armas . . . yup, Urbina's still got the Red Sox thing going . . . top of 10, Buck & McCarver talked about Jeter swinging for the fences with two outs, but it looks like Chad Fox had the same thought since he went way up and in on the first pitch . . . they mentioned Giambi having just 5 RBI in the postseason, but he deserves plenty of the credit for winning Game 7 against the Sox for those two homers; they've been a bit overshadowed . . . it's still wierd to see people dripping sweat and fans in tank tops for October baseball . . . I thought for sure Cabrera would end the game in the bottom of the tenth . . . I agreed with McCarver that it was crazy to walk the bases loaded and then bring in Looper cold with no margin for error, but he sure made McKeon look good . . . not to cast aspersions on the guy, but Weaver looks stoned; it's just the overall look, with the narrow eyes, the pasty complexion, the scruffy hair and the cap pulled down too far . . . now, both Alex Gonzalezes are heroes in Florida.

Eugene Volokh complains that he got the following non-response from ESPN.com to his email about Gregg Easterbrook's firing:

From: ESPN Support
To: volokh@mail.law.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Other

Hi Eugene,

Thank you for contacting us.

We appreciate your interest, but that is currently not a feature on ESPN.com.

Regards,

Patty
ESPN.com
http://espn.go.com/

He then notes that other readers got the response I got:

Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 08:54:13 -0700
To:
Subject: Re: NFL
From: ESPN Support

Hi,

Thank you for contacting us.

We appreciate your comments and are considering your opinion. We will
forward your comments along to the appropriate department for review.

Regards,

Jesse
ESPN.com
http://espn.go.com/

It appears that Volokh's problem was that he selected"Other" rather than "NFL" in the drop-down subject menu on ESPN's contact page.

Meanwhile, Ralph Wiley throws out the ceremonial first race card in ESPN.com's post-Limbaugh/post-Easterbrook era:

Dub's theory on baseball curses is that everybody sort of avoids what he calls the truth about them; teams that were -- or are -- historically dismissive and smugly cruel about its black folks -- those are the teams that stay cursed. . . . Maybe one day the Cubs and the Red Sox will get out of historical denial, ante up and kick in, pay off whatever their psychic debt is, and move on.

Um, a little history? Since the breaking of the color barrier, six all-white teams have won the World Series:

1947 Yankees
1949 Yankees
1950 Yankees
1951 Yankees
1952 Yankees
1953 Yankees

The Yanks waited nine years to integrate -- longer than the Cubs but not as long as the Cardinals (three World Championships since 1947), and when they finally brought in Elston Howard, Casey Stengel reportedly watched him in spring training and remarked, "they had to go and get me the only n_____r in the world who can't run." But that history's lost on Wiley and his race-is-everything meme. (Wiley also throws in a shot about the Marlins playing "non-sabermatrician style," but I'll leave that for another day).

I caught this flipping channels tonight - has anyone else noticed the uncanny resemblance between Mike Mussina and Mark-Paul Gosselaar of "NYPD Blue" (and formerly of “Saved By The Bell”)?

I can’t be the first person to have commented on this.

A man went over Niagara Falls without the proverbial barrel, or any other kind of protection, and has lived to tell the tale. He is believed to be the first person to survive such an unprotected plunge over the American side of the Falls.

This reminds me of the story of Baseball Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty who drunkenly fell to his death over the Falls in 1903. The actual details of the incident have historically been in dispute, but the Niagara Falls Reporter has a plausible account here. One of the all-time great Phillies, Delahanty’s death has remained one of baseball’s most mysterious and tragic stories.

Now, I've got a number of reasons to hate the Yankees and to lose a good deal of the fun of watching baseball when it's a series between the Yanks and an overmatched opponent, as it appears we're seeing now. Those reasons go back to my grammar school days as a lone Mets fan in the late 70s and early 80s, getting backed over by more than a few Yankee bandwagons.

One of the most common reasons for disliking the Yanks got some concrete affirmance yesterday with the release of Major League Baseball's final salary figures, showing that the Yankees spent $164 million on their major league payroll this season, compared to $119 million for the next-highest team (the woeful Mets), $106 million for the next-highest playoff team (the Red Sox), and $54 million for the Marlins. Even relatively wealthy clubs like the Braves ($95 million) and Cubs ($83 million) were left in the dust.

Let's put that in percentage terms:

Outspent the #2 team by 37.8%
Outspent the Red Sox by 54.7%
Outspent the Braves by 72.6%
Outspent the Cubs by 97.5%
Outspent the Twins by 287.7%
Outspent the Marlins by 303.7%
Outspent the A's by 328%

Plus, the Yankee payroll was even higher (projected at $180 million) in mid-July, before they traded Armando Benitez for Jeff Nelson.

That's just orders of magnitude beyond anybody else in the game, outspending even the #2 team by more than a third. Try starting a rotisserie league some time with an extra $100 on your budget and see how hard it is to win. And the stated payroll ignores a bunch of other factors: certain payments to ex-players; payments to bonus-baby minor leaguers; $5 million for Joe Torre; more money for player scouting, advance scouting (you hear so much in the postseason about the Yankees' vaunted advance scouts), etc. The real gap is considerably larger.

As Doug Pappas of the Baseball Prospectus (subscription required) estimated (even using the lower figure of $149 million from the Yankees' season-opening payroll), the Yankees were by no means the smartest or most efficient team in the game in spending their money to produce winning baseball, in terms of marginal dollars (above the minimum payroll) per marginal win (above the record you'd expect from a replacement level team); they just had a whole lot more to throw around.

Here's the problem: like most fans, I tend to like to look at the game through the eyes of a general manager or manager, and ask myself, if I were running the show, what would I do? Who would I trade, who would I keep? That's the stuff of Hot Stove League intrigue and second-guessing (and first-guessing) that makes the game fun and worth the investment of time in crunching stats and the like to really understand why teams win and lose.

But when you look at the winning teams and ask yourself what they are doing right, you come to a cold realization: no matter what he does, the general manager of your favorite team can't emulate the Yankees or duplicate their success. Nobody else has Brian Cashman's budget. Could other GMs do what Cahsman does; could other managers do what Torre does? We can't find out, because they won't get the chance unless they get hired by the Yankees, and then they won't have competition from an equal.

There are usually two related counter-arguments to this. One is to say that Mets and Red Sox fans can't talk, since our teams are among the best-funded and in any event, look how poorly the Mets spent the money they did have this year. Fair enough, but (1) as you can see, even the Mets still aren't in the Yankees' neighborhood, (2) as Pappas points out, even with the Yankees having made some good decisions with their farm system and the like, they have also spent plenty of money unwisely, but can afford mistakes others can't, and (3) the issue isn't how good a particular rival is, but whether they could ever compete on an equal footing with the Yankees.

In fact, the Yankees almost certainly could and would spend even more money if pushed to do so. When the Yankees go after a free agent, do they get him? Nearly always; I can hardly remember one they really wanted and didn't get. When a Yankee's contract is up, do they run the risk of losing him, as happens to every other team? Other than Tino Martinez, who they let go to pursue Giambi, the last major free agent loss before this season was John Wetteland, and even then the Yanks didn't expend a lot of energy to keep him, given that Rivera was ready to move up (in fairness, the Yanks did let Mike Stanton and Ramiro Mendoza go this year, but replaced them with other expensive middle relievers).

The second objection is the Baseball Prospectus line, which is to argue that Steinbrenner is making a return on his investment and other teams could afford to spend more as well. First of all, it's obviously not true that everyone else can afford to spend money like the Yankees, or it would be likely that at least someone else would try to do so. Second, since when is the fun in the game asking yourself, "if I were a billionaire owner, how much money would I spend on the team, given market size and the eslasticity of demand for tickets and premium cable TV"? That's a long way from why most of us fell in love with the game as kids.

OK, my Yankees-in-four prediction didn't hold, but the Marlins leave New York having scored just 4 runs and used four of their five starting pitchers. I still don't see a long series.

Things you maybe didn't know about Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria: in 1968 he wrote a book drawing life lessons from the Peanuts comic strip. You can see the book jacket here. I actually own the book second-hand and have read it, although I can't seem to locate my copy at the moment. It's typical of the genre, philosophical but not deeply so, and painfully earnest in its approach; you would probably only enjoy reading it if you're a serious Peanuts afficionado, as I was at one time (as a kid I read nearly all the strips going back to 1952 as well as a biography of Charles Schultz). Of course, I also found it a bit amusing for the time-capsule nature of a book commenting on life in 1968.

Yes, I'm going out on a limb here, and yes, I may be reacting emotionally. But where the postseason is concerned, gut-level predictions are often as effective as more rational ones. My predictions for who would win the postseason serieses are 3 for 5 so far, missing only the two Cubs serieses.

The template here is 1999: the Yankees defeated the Red Sox and went on to face the mighty Braves, who had triumphed in an epic and exhausting six-game series with the Mets. Great things were expected of that series, but it was a massive anticlimax, with the Braves rolling over and playing dead for the Yanks. The only reservation I have here about a similar prediction is the fact that the Yankees have to start Wells on very short rest in Game One. But I fully expect the Marlins, after all the hype and exceitement, to be flat against the Hated Yankees.

Dave Barry has the scoop on Marlins fans:

I'm a huge Marlins fan. I've been following this plucky team ever since they beat the San Francisco Giants, which was, what, nearly a week ago. I live and die by this team! When they win, I drink champagne and dance all night. This is also what I do when they lose, because there is no point in wasting champagne. But I dance in a more subdued manner.

(Hat tip to Baseball News Blog).

Of course, this is unfair; Marlins fans are very devoted to players like Dan Marino and (what's that you say? Oh.) . . . seriously, ownership has treated Marlins fans with poorly disguised contempt, yet twice in seven seasons, they've been treated to a World Series. It hardly seems fair either way, and it's no poor reflection on Miami fans if they've been bandwagon-jumpers, and tentative ones at that. But really, there were other fans who deserved this more.

Turns out the NY Post wasn't the only one, according to a posting on Romanesko:

10/17/2003 12:23:32 PM
Posted By: Jim Romenesko

From NORM CLARKE: The Chicago Sun-Times had a first-edition blooper too. Sports columnist Jay Mariotti had to file before the game ended, he had the Red Sox beating the Yankees and he ripped the Tribune Co. for not spending money on the Cubs. Look at the Red Sox, he said, spending $125 million on a team going to the World Series. Oops.

This CNN article discusses how rival TV networks rearranged their schedules around FOX's highly-rated LCS series and how they anticipate doing just the opposite in the next round:

Interestingly, NBC is betting that the World Series will not be as popular as the playoffs, now that the Cubs are eliminated. NBC had been planning to air several reruns next week so as not to compete with the World Series, and now will replace them with originals.

Fox executives made no secret that they were openly rooting for the Cubs. The Cubs have more fans than the Marlins, and their long championship drought was a more compelling story for casual fans.

Researchers at Initiative Media estimated that a Cubs-Red Sox World Series would generate a 16.7 average TV rating, while a Marlins-Yankees World Series would only get a 12.4. That's a difference of more than four million households tuning in or turning off, a significant impact on Fox's business.

The Marlins have little following outside of Florida. Although the Yankees are in the nation's largest media market, many viewers outside of New York are tired of the team because of its recent run of success, an Initiative analysis said.

You don't say? I would also insert the phrase “as well as many viewers from New York” into that last sentence.

Well, I feel a little better this morning (but plenty tired; it's a two-coffee morning for sure). If you haven't figured out from the post below or some of the others on this site, I'm not entirely rational where the Hated Yankees are concerned (the Mets, yes, as much as I've suffered with them over the years, but not the Yankees) . . .

You've probably seen sci-fi or horror movies where there's one character who's hyper-rational (usually a scientist) and keeps insisting that there's no such thing as (insert the film's particular horror here) until something happens (usually a face-to-face encounter) that makes it sand-poundingly obvious that this is precisely what's at work. This year's LCS had to have that effect on people who argued that curses, hexes, jinxes and just plain bad mojo surrounding the Red Sox and Cubs were just a myth of some sort (if you could buy stock in Dan Shaughenssy, he'd be up 50% at the opening bell this morning). Adding insult to injury was the Sox losing twice with San Pedro de Fenway and the Cubs losing back to back with Prior and Wood.

I'm not even sure I have the heart to soak up much of the commentary; I haven't seen Lupica's inevitable "Yankees have more class than loser Red Sox, their pathetic fans and their little dog too" victory lap column, although I guess I'll make time to read Bill Simmons' next attempt to place this in the Levels of Losing (pretty high, I'd guess, what with the involvement of Clemens).

UPDATE: Simmons weighs in:

Twenty minutes after the Yankees eliminated the Sox, I called my father to make sure he was still alive.

And that's not even a joke. I wanted to make sure Dad wasn't dead. That's what it feels like to be a Red Sox fan. You make phone calls thinking to yourself, "Hopefully, my Dad picks up, because there's at least a 5-percent chance that the Red Sox just killed him."

Bill also explains why he had that "now I believe in the Curse" moment. Read the whole thing.

Also: The New York Post prematurely buries the Yankees (maybe they were counting on this); David Adesnik goes straight to Lamentations; and Art Martone's wrapup includes the quote of the day:

"(Jeter) told me, 'The ghosts will show up eventually,' " a breathless Boone said after the game.

Finally, for those ripping Grady Little for leaving Pedro out there a few batters too long, it could be worse: in 1925, Bucky Harris left a 37-year-old Walter Johnson in to lose Game 7 of the World Series 9-7 after leading 6-4 entering the bottom of the seventh inning; Johnson went the distance in the game (in a torrential downpour, no less), allowing 9 runs on 15 hits, including 8 doubles and two triples (the 25 total bases surrendered by Johnson in one day is a World Series record unlikely to be broken), including the game-winner, a 2-run ground rule double by Kiki Cuyler into the darkness in right field with two outs in the bottom of the eighth.

Dreams do come true in life. David does beat Goliath. Hollywood endings do happen.

But not in the Bronx. The New York Yankees were put on this earth for one reason -- to remind us that Goliath usually wins, and that Hollywood endings are the stuff of dreams precisely because life so rarely works out that way. Cubs fans believed; Red Sox fans believed. Yankee fans just expect, and they are yet again rewarded. Yankee Stadium remains the place where dreams go to die.

Let's back up a bit, skipping around as I made notes . . .

Inning 1: You could tell this was a big one when Clemens got a standing O on the first pitch of the game.

Bravest guy in the house? Right behind the dugout on the 1B line, there's a guy in a Mets jersey. At a Yankee-Red Sox game. Only in New York.

Why is Soriano hitting leadoff, and Giambi hitting seventh? This is nuts. The lineup should be Johnson and Jeter 1 and 2 (either order has its advantages), then Giambi, Posada, Soriano, Bernie.

Pedro left his fastball at home. I've said in the past that at his peak, I'd rather have San Pedro de Fenway on the mound to pitch the big game than anyone else, ever. His peak looks gone, but I'd still take him over anyone today but Randy Johnson.

Inning 2: Enrique Wilson throws the ball away . . . bad sign for the Yanks. Defense can kill you in games like this.

Inning 3: Lots of full counts on both sides, it seems.

Doesn't Karim Garcia look like one of the Sheens? And David Ortiz definitely has the Mo Vaughn glare going.

Inning 4: Nixon does it again! I almost missed that one, it happened so fast.

I almost feel bad for Clemens at this point. Mussina comes in to relieve.

It occurs to me that if the Sox win, the two wild cards match up in the Series. But at least on the AL side, there's not much doubt that we're watching the two best teams in the league right now, is there?

Jeter rushes to the bag to turn the 6-3 double play; for the first time since I've watched Jeter, he looks desperate, less than 100% certain the Yankees will win.

Inning 5: Giambi has the solo homer. Solo homers in a game like this, you don't mind so much; let the Yanks keep hitting fly balls.

The announcers are talking about instability -- the Yanks have sure gone through some players this year.

Top 7: Nomar swings at Nelson's first pitch of the night. Jeff Nelson. Why?

Bottom 7: Pedro's thrown just 79 pitches through 6; maybe I was wrong about the deep counts. 9 outs to go. I'm thinking: maybe the Sox need to win this game -- what better way to get even the most jaded Sox fans' hopes up (only to dash them cruelly, at the hands of a fly-by-night franchise) than to vanquish the Yankees in the ALCS? It'd be like the US hockey team losing the gold medal match after beating the Russkies in 1980.

The announcers are officially in "Red Sox victory lap" mode, which proves George Santayana's point.

8 outs. Posada flies out deep to Damon. 7 outs.

Matsui is grimacing something fierce; for all of his face-of-stone look, Matsui can really wear his heart on his sleeve sometimes.

Pedro to Giambi, throwing 92, 93. His velocity's increasing. Giambi homers; Damon just misses catching it. 4-2 Sox. Sox still may need one more run to put this away.

Millar falls down, can't get to the bag, I write down, "uh oh . . . it's a game again . . . this is bad." Play has that kind of look to it.

Pedro starts out up and in on Soriano. Warning? I've got your warning right here. Is this the last inning for Pedro?

Rivera's up in the pen -- down 2, but Torre smells blood.

1-2 to Soriano, Pedro hits 94 on the gun. Jeter doesn't look worried anymore; none of the Yankees do. 2-2, Pedro goes outside, 95 mph.

Pedro throws one belt high, right in Soriano's happy zone -- but just outside. Whiff.

Top 8: Nelson's back. 2-0 pitch goes way inside to Manny . . .

Wells comes in; this is like the All-Star Game, one top starter after another. Ding dong; Ortiz goes deep off Wells, looks like Wells is buying the keg for the next game. So much for the tight game. 8 homers now, they say, in 26 games vs. Yankees; that works out to 50 on a full season.

Bottom 8: Pedro still has trouble throwing strikes to Nick Johnson (this may not be coincidental to Johnson's strike zone judgment).

5 outs.

Jeter doubles. Bernie drives him in. Grady sticks with Pedro to face Matsui, and Matsui doubles. Second and third, one out. Now, McCarver says they should have brought in Embree to face Matsui.

Posada up; gotta get Posada, Giambi's on deck and we'll see Embree to face Giambi.

My notes here: "tie game Damon can't throw . . . Sox doomed . . . Rivera will come in - can't win"

Embree saws off Giambi, Wilson comes up and is hit for. McCarver's still harping on Little leaving in Pedro to face Matsui and Posada, like Red Sox Nation won't do that tomorrow. McCarver: "Sometimes the manager has to overrule the superstar." I pointed out two years ago why this is BS coming from McCarver, who loves to recount the story of Bob Gibson demanding to keep the ball to finish Game 7 in 1964.

Timlin vs. Garcia, now; 2 on 2 out, 3-0 count. Timlin walks him. Will Soriano repeat Game 7 heroics from 2001? Walker wow! What a play to rob Soriano. On the replay it's like watching two separate games - Yankees whirling around the bases, fans starting to rise -- and there's Walker, snagging the ball.

Top 9: Need a base hit from Walker here to take the lead. 1-1. 1-2. Rivera has the hammer . . . a flair to Soriano . . . out.

Bottom 9: Jeter whunts - whiffs on the bunt, but it's not strike 3 yet; now it is. Timlin's still in; for some reason I'd thought they'd changed pitchers. He's been so good in this postseason and Bernie so bad, it's a question of whether something will give or momentum will hold. Walker wow! again, this time a leaping grab. So much for the iron glove reputation. So much for something giving.

Top 10: Ortiz chugs into second with a double, and this time they run for him. Ortiz just is Mike Easler, in a lot of ways - big, scary-looking guy, scary hitter, a bit of a late bloomer. Millar's too eager here, jumping at Rivera's first offering. Popup.

Bottom 10: Wakefield's in, not Williamson. Why? Bring in the closer; screw getting a lead, if somebody else gives up a run, the game's over. Plus, Wakefield brings Mirabelli with him, so Varitek (due up next inning) goes out, and Ortiz is already out.

Top 11: Nothing good can happen as long as Rivera's still out there. Contreras is probably next. Mirabelli looks . . . well, like a bad hitter up there.

Bottom 11: Torre won't warm up anyone else; he doesn't want the Sox to think they've got hope of outlasting Mariano.

Boone . . . TV turned off. Headed downstairs to blog. Not happy about how this season turned out. You suffer all year with a dreadful team, you get a little involved in the postseason, and at the end of the day it's the Fish and the Damn Yankees. That's just the way life is sometimes.

Amid all the focus about the Cubs, their alleged curse, their long-suffering fans and their Game Six meltdown, its easy to forget a few things. First, this was a great and unpredictable seven game series, with Games One and Six being especially memorable classics. As a general baseball fan, it was highly entertaining. Second, the Marlins are a very solid team. They outplayed the Cubs, who I too was pulling for, last night and deserved to win. There’s a lot of young talent on the Marlins, from Josh Beckett to Dontrelle Willis to the talented Miguel Cabrera, and Pudge Rodriguez has provided a refresher course on why he is a star. Jack McKeon has done a great job with this team, although in keeping with Marlins’ tradition, it appears there is already talk that he may not be back next year.

I feel for the Cubbies and their fans (“The Silence of the Goat” would’ve been a great name for their championship video, which will have to wait), but the Marlins deserved their victory. Hopefully, they will have some gas left in their tank for the World Series, especially if they end up playing the hated Yankees.

Dan Drezner has a post on the connections between sports and political affiliations. I don't really buy it, but it's interesting reading. Maureen Dowd uses a Cubs lede to a typically incoherent column. And Jonah Goldberg rips on something I'd meant to get to: the ridiculous New York Times editorial (No longer web-accessible) effectively rooting for the Red Sox, which is practically a parody of the old line about a liberal being a man too fair-minded to take his own side in an argument. Leaving aside the Times' bias (i.e., the fact that the paper part owns the Red Sox), the sentiment is wholly one of, shall we say, guilt at siding with the winners.

It's not that I object to New Yorkers rooting for the Sox; like most Mets fans I know, I'm pulling for them mostly out of hatred for the Yankees. And I wouldn't object to the same sentiment from an out-of-town paper; I was pulling for the Cubs, after all. It's that the Times is supposed to be one of the Yankees' home town papers, and has certainly never been exclusively a paper of Mets partisans. But the Times won't take the side of its own readers.

Calpundit points us to a new website that pays tribute to one of the game's most controversial figures, Walter O'Malley. The site is run by his son, former Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley.

Don Malcolm had some good historical background on the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry back in January. (Link via Redbird Nation) And here's the game-by-game breakdown of the rivalry from 1920 to 2002.

Watching these playoff games, I’m struck by just how annoying Thom Brennaman and Steve Lyons are as announcers. I realize the Crank linked earlier today to the Cub Reporter who had similar, if even less diplomatic, views on the subject last night. It seems even when I agree in principle with Brennaman, as in the case of Manny Ramirez’s showboating against Oakland or about the unfair singling out of the unfortunate Cubs fan, he beats dead horses and comes off as sanctimonious. Lyons, best known for once taking off his pants at first base during his playing days, is also something of a blowhard. Maybe I’m biased, as a Mets fan, but I think Al Leiter is the best thing about the NL broadcasting team.

(This is a contrast from the AL team, where, the active player representative, Bret Boone is utterly superfluous and has nothing to say, especially in a booth with Buck and McCarver, who are generally entertaining).

I figured this out the other day . . . you would think, what with the Yankees' mystique and their storied history, that the franchise's record in Game Sevens would be the stuff of legend. You would be wrong. The Yankees have not won a Game Seven in 41 years, since Bobby Richardson caught McCovey's liner to end the 1962 World Series. Their overall record in deciding* Game Sevens? 5-6:

1926 World Series: Loss. Babe Ruth caught stealing to end the game.
1947 World Series: Win.
1952 World Series: Win.
1955 World Series: Loss. Johnny Podres, the Sandy Amoros catch.
1956 World Series: Win.
1957 World Series: Loss. Shutout by Lew Burdette.
1958 World Series: Win.
1960 World Series: Loss. Bill Mazeroski's home run. Casey Stengel fired.
1962 World Series: Win.
1964 World Series: Loss. Bob Gibson stifles a Yankee rally in the 9th, dynasty ends.
2001 World Series: Loss. Rivera finally blows one.

Curse? Did someone say Curse?

* - Not including their loss to the Giants in Game Seven of the best-of-nine 1921 World Series.

Well, Burkett was Burkett, failing to last four innings or hold the Yankees to one run per inning pitched, which would have been a modest victory by Burkett standards. The only good news: Pettitte has thrown 92 pitches through five innings, so he may not make it all the way to Rivera.

UPDATE: The Red Sox get to Contreras. Will we see Rivera in the 7th, a la Goose Gossage in the Bucky Dent game?

UPDATE: Ortiz ties the game. Do you run for him here, 0 out and representing the tying run at 1st?

UPDATE: Jon Miller on Mueller's single: "Jeter made a dive to his left and can't get to it!" How often we hear that.

UPDATE: Torre has Varitek walked to load the bases for Damon. Why do that with two outs?

UPDATE: Platoon player no more: Grady lets Todd Walker hit with the bases loaded and two outs against the lefty.

UPDATE: Red Sox leave the bases loaded. They're gonna need those runs they left on the table.

UPDATE: Gabe White comes in to tie up Trot Nixon with a man on second in the ninth. I assume after that we'll see Rivera. Keeping the lead at 1 is huge here, so Torre can ill afford to save Rivera for tomorrow.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't work. Nixon goes very deep off of White. It will now require a first-class piece of Red Sox history to blow this one, not that that's all that improbable.

UPDATE: First pitch strike to Giambi. Good sign.

LAST UPDATE: Well, I was right at the outset: the key to this game was running up Pettitte's pitch count so the Sox got to see the Yankee middle relievers. On to Game Seven.

There are tough losses. Then there are really tough losses. Then there is what happened to the Cubs last night.

Inevitably, a little too much is being made of the fan interference on the foul ball in the 8th. First off, all these still photos and super slo-mo replays make it look like some kind of well-thought-out plan by the fans down the line to interfere with Alou, their own team’s left fielder. These things happen quickly and when you’re not a professional athlete paid to make split-second decisions, it’s easy to make a poor one. Admirably, Alou admitted as much after the game:

"They don't go to school," Alou said, "to be taught what balls not to touch."

So that was quite unfortunate, but while its easy to blame some guy in the stands, it should be even easier, and more appropriate, to blame the guys on the field. There was one on and one out, with the Cubs cruising with a 3-0 lead, when the Alou play happened. Luis Castillo, who probably would’ve been out, ended up walking. But the Cubs still had one out and a three-run lead. To pin all the blame on that play seems unfair. To my mind, watching the game, the really key play was, after Pudge Rodriguez’s RBI single, the brutal error by Alex Gonzalez, which looked like a turning point even at the time, on a routine grounder/potential double-play ball. That allowed for Derrek Lee’s huge hit which tied the game and really opened the flood gates.

Above all though, the Cubs have to pick themselves up and dust themselves off. They will be playing at home in Game 7 with Kerry Wood on the mound. If they win, they will be in the World Series just the same. While easier said than done, that game and that opportunity is what they, and their distraught fans, should be focusing on, not the one that got away.

UPDATE (from the Crank): Via Clutch Hits: The Chicago Sun-Times has some choice quotes on the fan, and Yahoo News has some pictures, although they don't really capture what happened. The guy's 26 years old and had front row tickets; he should've known better. Oh, and if you want to go wallow in some hard-earned bitterness, the Cub Reporter is your man (some, er, adult language is involved).

As if there hasn't been enough advancement in bat design to favor hitters, I keep getting unsolicited emails from a company hawking bamboo bats. I have no idea if they're any good, but those things are scary looking.

On October 12, 1929 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, the Chicago Cubs entered the bottom of the seventh inning of Game Four of the World Series with an 8-0 lead; starter Charlie Root was cruising. A safer lead, you will rarely see in postseason competition. And it all unraveled horribly in a long rally highlighted by a fly ball lost in the sun by Hack Wilson; when the inning ended, the Cubs had let in 10 runs and trailed 10-8.

Like the 1986 Red Sox, those Cubs rallied to lead in the next game (they trailed 3-1 in the Series after Game 4), but blew that one as well, surrendering 3 runs in the bottom of the ninth to lose 3-2. As Bill James observed, with the stock market crash following shortly thereafter, Cubs fans must have thought the world was coming to an end.

Tonight will undoubtedly bring back memories of that horror.

UPDATE: Game over, Cubs go quietly into that good night. Man, the Cubs and Red Sox both facing elimination or advancement at the same time -- you can't buy that kind of bad karma.

UPDATE: Rob Neyer also compares the game to 1929.

Just heard on ESPN Radio: John Burkett's regular season career record against the Yankees: 0-6, 8.59 ERA. You can't sum up the last 85 years of Red Sox history better than this: the Sox are facing elimination tomorrow night at Yankee Stadium, and they're starting a 38-year-old pitcher who had a 5.15 ERA this season. They'd be better off with Denny Galehouse.

Frankly, if he was healthy (concerns about his shoulder have been cited as a reason for leaving him off the ALCS roster), I'd far rather see Byung Hyun Kim starting this game, bad experiences at Yankee Stadium or no. Kim posted a 2.78 ERA and a 49/15 K/BB ratio in 55 innings dating back to June 10 this season, and didn't allow an earned run in 12 September outings, allowing just 7 baserunners in 13 innings. At least Kim would've had a hope of giving you some scoreless innings.

"They shouldn't throw at me. I'm the father of five or six kids."

--Tito Fuentes

Both drama and the likelihood of a dramatic letdown were in the air at Fenway last night, as the teams and Major League Baseball tried everything from extra security to giving the night off to the non-players involved in Saturday's kicking spree in the bullpen to a tearful apology from Don Zimmer, who promised not to get in any more brawls until he's 80. I'm sure the presence of Tom Ridge in the stands was purely coincidental (or maybe not), although the umpires did helpfully force Jeff Nelson to unbuckle his belt and turn his glove inside out to make Ridge feel at home . . .

This was actually the first of the ALCS games I'd gotten to see on live TV rather than radio + highlights. One verdict: Bret Boone has a lot fewer interesting things to say than Al Leiter does. Couldn't they have found a player who wasn't related to anybody on the Yankees?

Unfair stat: a FOX graphic pointed out that Doug Mirabelli led the majors in passed balls this year. The broadcasters pointed out that Doug Mirabelli caught all but two innings of Tim Wakefield this year. Coincidence?

Boone did have a point, albeit a predictable one, that if the AL wins the World Series, Hank Blalock will be owed a playoff share for the All-Star Game home run that gives the AL team home field advantage in the World Series.

Notes on replays: you can really see, in slow motion, the way the knuckleball doesn't spin when it's thrown correctly. In a sense, the knuckler's gimmick isn't its movement, as is often said, so much as its absence of the movement that batters expect on other pitches. It's also the case that the mega-slow-mo replay - which immediately looks like aged footage (I keep expecting the swings broken down to be Graig Nettles and Fred Lynn) - makes guys who swing and miss look utterly foolish. At least when you watch in normal time, you get a better sense of how hard it is to hit a baseball. And watching Johnny Damon throw reminds me: there are few things in baseball that must be more embarrassing than having a pitifully weak outfield throwing arm that just lofts throws in to the infield. It's emasculating.

Fly ball pitchers have had their moments in postseason play; consider Catfish Hunter, or Jack Morris. But Mike Mussina needs to cut down on the home runs if he's going to get back to winning games in October. As for Todd Walker, the name "Adam Kennedy" starts to come to mind.

Key difference in the game: Jorge Posada lining out to Manny Ramirez in the fifth with two outs and the bases loaded; Jason Varitek, after jogging in from the bullpen in his catching gear to pinch hit, improbably beating out a potential DP grounder to drive in what would turn out to be the key insurance run in the seventh. The call at first was the right one - Varitek was safe - and the attention to the call reminded me that someone more important to security than Tom Ridge was in the house: longtime National League umpire Cowboy Joe West. You may remember the burly, combative West for, among other things, body-slamming Dennis Cook in a brawl some years ago. Don't mess with Cowboy Joe.

The rundown that ended the seventh was just ugly, with Varitek getting caught off first and Nixon ultimately tagged out at third. Not exactly Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez evading all tags in the 1986 World Series.

Man, you could see that Hideki Matsui was pissed at himself when he dove for Timlin's high outside pitch to strike out to end the 8th. He was grimacing by the time he finished his swing.

It didn't turn out so badly, but I was convinced at the time that bringing in Jeff Nelson was a disaster waiting to happen. I know managers hate to let the crowd dictate their decisions, but here it was clear that (1) Nelson was overexcited and (2) the crowd's "Nelson, Nelson" chants were getting to him. I wonder if Grady Little actually helped Nelson settle down after he threw his first pitch way, way inside, by charging out (in what was obviously a pre-determined stunt) to have his belt and glove checked. Nelson looked in plenty of trouble out on the mound before that; better to save the stunt for later in the series against somebody who was pitching well. Nelson settled down considerably after that.

I knew the Yanks would have trouble with Scott Williamson when he got the high strike on his first pitch in the ninth . . .

Next up: David Wells vs. Derek Lowe. Career numbers at Fenway:

Pitcher	W-L	ERA	IP	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	K/9
Wells	10-10	5.06	153	10.29	1.41	2.64	5.69
Lowe	34-19	2.83	433	7.98	0.46	2.33	5.99

With John Burkett reportedly up in Game Six, the Sox need this one.

I must confess to having been, as is frequent for me, utterly confused throughout the playoffs as to what all those “Cowboy Up” signs in Boston were either for or referring to. This article helpfully clarifies the issue (apparently, my ignorance of rodeo lingo was at fault) while focusing on the indirect beneficiaries of this year's newest, over-used catchphrase.

Another absolute classic last night; I brought work home but had so much trouble tearing away from the game to get much done, I wound up being up until 3am. . . . I didn't get to see quite as much of today's mayhem, unfortunately - I caught chunks of each game - but I'm sure it's just a coincidence that "Roger Clemens" and "bench-clearing brawl" were yet again to be found in such close proximity . . . they're reporting that Jeff Nelson and Karim Garcia may face criminal assault charges for kicking a Red Sox grounds crew worker in the bullpen at the end of the game. Ugh.

The odds that we'll be watching the Yankees mercilessly destroy the Cubs in a week and a half are definitely on the rise.

I assume the Frank McCourt who just bought the Dodgers - described as a "Boston real estate developer" is no relation to the former high school English teacher who wrote Angela's Ashes.

Another too-busy-to-blog day, but before we get rolling with Game Two, I'll leave you with your depressing Hated Yankees postseason stat of the day:

Since 1995, the Yankees have played in 19 postseason serieses (not counting this one), and won 15 of them. They have won the first game of a series 12 times and lost 7 times. How does that break down?

Record when winning the first game: 9-3.
Record when losing the first game: 6-1.
Record when losing the first two games: 2-1.

It's not how you start against the Yankees. It's how you finish.

Is Miguel Tejada headed to the Mets this offseason? I’m not sure that would be a very good idea, since it would presumably require a defensive merry-go-round in the infield with Tejada moving out of position to 3B and Ty Wiggington presumably moving back over to 2B. The Mets need an outfield, not to spend most of their available money on a player who plays the one position, SS, where they should be set for the next ten years.

Of course, you take Mets news anywhere you can find it this time of year.

UPDATE: The Mets are also apparently planning to interview former front-office assistant and current Astros GM Gerry Hunsicker for their GM post.

Barely halfway into Game 2 of the NLCS and Game 1 of the ALCS, we've already had 15 home runs in the LCS. I guess we've got our storyline (and so much for the Marlins' stinginess with homers).

If you're wondering, no baseball blogging this morning because I was tied up with work and other stuff and didn't get to see much of the Cubs-Marlins game last night, which had the look of an instant classic (with Mike Lowell channeling Kirk Gibson). Al Leiter seemed a bit nervous and soft-spoken but insightful in the little I caught of his commentary; more on that later in the NLCS.

I did pretty well with my Divisional Series predictions - 3 out of 4, missing only the Braves-Cubs series. So, just to get on record before the first pitch . . .

Yankees-Red Sox: Given the history, you'd be bonkers to pick the BoSox, as much as I'd love to see them topple the Hated Yankees. The fact that Pedro won't be available to start until Games 3 and 7 is also not encouraging, given Boston's typically thin rotation, plus the top of the Sox bullpen doesn't exactly stack up to Rivera. The Red Sox can win this series if Pedro has two big games and they batter their way into the Yankees' suspect middle relief (even if the Yankees win the series, I suspect the Sox will get one game where they get to Weaver and score 11 or 12 runs), but the odds are not good. Yankees in six.

Cubs-Marlins: This is a tougher call. The Marlins just have everything going right now, but then a lot of what worked against the Giants was the kind of magic that can vanish overnight. The Cubs, meanwhile, got past the Braves without getting Sammy Sosa out of his late-season deep freeze. Great matchup of young arms, with Josh Beckett and Kerry Wood making The Leap and Prior already there. Key players in this series: Joe Borowski and Kyle Farnsworth, who will be asked to do away with the Marlins' late-inning magic and give Dusty enough confidence to not ride his starters into the ground. And Sosa, of course; the Giants didn't hit a single home run against Florida's pitching. The Cubs don't get on base enough to win without the longball, but with four games at Wrigley, that seems unlikely.

This time, I think Florida's luck runs out. Cubs in seven, and a rematch of the 1932 and 1938 Serieses to follow.

I was very glad to see Boston win last night, rather than let the hated Yankees play a wounded Oakland team potentially without Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder and with a fairly punchless-looking offense.

At the same time, while there’s no crying in baseball, I don’t blame the A’s for being upset with Derek Lowe’s histrionics on the mound last night. I didn’t see the particular gesture referred to in this report, but he did seem to be generally showing up the A’s with his antics. Both he and Manny Ramirez would do well to focus more of their energy on just playing baseball in the next series. They don’t need to give the Yankees any added motivation.

Except this time, the sinkerballing reliever-turned-starter-turned-reliever got the last strike. It would have been too much to see this Red Sox team go down for the want of a closer -- have you ever seen a team with so many closers, but none who could close a game (well, maybe the 1997 Mariners)? Williamson, Kim, Lowe, Timlin, Wakefield and toss in the guys who auditioned this season (Howry, Person, Todd Jones). But tonight, Lowe got the job done.

Before that . . . Man, Barry Zito's curveball is a thing of beauty; there are some pitches you cheer for and some that leave you breathless, but the only appropriate response to Zito's curve is a wolf whistle . . .

On the other hand, when I'm watching the game with my six-year-old son, I could do with a few less ads for 'Skin'. (To say nothing of last night's unsubtle single-entendre ads for Enzyte, the "natural male enhancement").

OK, Manny shouldn't have been doing his Jeff Leonard imitation in the sixth inning after his game-breaking home run, but Tom Brenneman and to a lesser extent Steve Lyons were treating him like he'd spit at a fan or something. Get off the high horses, guys; like we didn't know Manny was a bit of a hot dog at times? The guy's had a rough postseason.

The Damon-Damian Jackson head-to-temple collision was the scariest thing I've ever seen on a baseball field (live, that is; the death of John McSherry was worse). It gave me that football injury, I-hope-he-walks-again feeling as soon as I saw Damon wasn't moving. Now, the fans who gave the Red Sox a hard time while Damon was prone on the field -- they are a fit target for some fresh-off-the-shelf Canned Sportscaster Outrage.

[Lileks moment here - I interrupt this blog post when I hear my daughter fall out of bed. Heard the sound upstairs, knew right away what it was, had her up by the time she was awake enough to start crying. Hey, I got to do something to make up for spending the whole evening in front of the ballgame]

Anyway, the collision reminded me of one that looked almost as hairy at first but that both guys walked away from, the 1988 face-to-face collision between Mookie Wilson and Lenny Dykstra that ended with Mookie's teeth marks across Lenny's nose.

The transition from Chad Bradford to Ricardo Rincon (or vice versa, as in Game 4) has to be a jarring one; Bradford's got that wacky submarine delivery and the long, snapping arms to complete the picture, while Rincon has to have the shortest arms I've ever seen on a major league pitcher.

On to the ninth . . . Steve Lyons was awfully jocular talking about Bill Buckner in the ninth inning, for a guy who was a member of the 1986 Red Sox himself; maybe he's still bitter that they traded him away. (Hey 'Psycho': never be insulted to be traded for Tom Seaver).

I could just tell there was going to be trouble almost immediately after Scott Williamson came into the game; he wasn't pitching, he was aiming. You could see it in the way he was winding up and sort of pointing his arm rather than a natural motion. Grady Little just had no choice but to get him out of there after he walked Guillen.

But Lowe got the job done. Next stop: the Bronx.

Apparently, Tim Hudson's injury may have been initially suffered in a barroom brawl Friday night:

Three sources suggested Sunday that Hudson's injury might have stemmed from an alleged altercation on Friday night at Q, a Boston nightspot.

According to a security guard and a member of the bar staff, Hudson got into a skirmish with a Red Sox fan and threw several punches, including one that clipped a bartender.

"It was a big melee. He was throwing haymakers,'' said the security guard, who spoke on the condition his name not be used.

"Honest to God, he's 160 pounds and it took eight big guys to hold him back,'' the staff member said of Hudson. "It was five minutes of mayhem.''

Hudson was unavailable for comment about the alleged incident on Sunday night, and the manager of Q, Noel Gentelles, strongly denied that any clash had taken place.

"Tim and Barry (Zito) were both here, and they couldn't have been nicer,'' Gentelles said. "Barry even played with the band. There was no altercation.''

Now, going out for a beer or three in the middle of a playoff series is no crime, but this is just stupid, stupid, stupid. If the A's can't get past the Red Sox because of this, Hudson deserves all the grief he'll get.

(Link via Sons of Sam Horn)

Maybe it's just me, but the Cubs' postgame celebration didn't look like a team celebrating the death of a semi-artifical 95-year-old monkey on their backs; they seemed rather subdued (albeit not like the Yankees, who looked like they were looking for the clock to go punch out their time cards). FOX's focus on the 95 years since the Cubs won a postseason series was a neat storyline, but the players seem uninterested in it -- which is as it should be. It's Dusty's job to keep them focused on the real goal, which is ending that other 95-year drought since the Cubbies were Champions of the World.

In the meantime, if you're looking to brush up on your Cubs history, my column here profiles the 1918 Cubs (among other teams), while this post notes that the team the Cubs beat in the 1908 pennant race on the notorious Fred Merkle "boner" play -- the 1908 Giants --was actually the greatest on-base machine, relative to their league, of the past 110 years.

(For a laugh, go here and read me actually taking seriously the possibility of the Red Sox trading Trot Nixon for Sammy Sosa).

ESPN’s Page Two lists the 100 Greatest Home Runs in Baseball History. Personally, I would have put Bobby Thomson’s ahead of Bill Mazeroski’s, but that’s a completely reasonable and defensible choice. Aside from a few too many modern selections, a recurring problem on ESPN lists, the rankings are pretty good.

I couldn’t, however, help but laugh at #100 which is listed as:

100. Carlos Martinez homers off Jose Canseco's head, 1993 (Indians)

For my money, this was just about as funny a highlight as you’ll ever see on a baseball field…at least, among those not involving anyone wearing sausage costumes.

Trot Nixon has his Carlton Fisk moment tonight, keeping the Red Sox alive to torture their fans another day. It had to be a better feeling than seeing Don Zimmer on Thursday night's Yankees-Twins telecast, sitting there in his Yankee uniform and smiling as he wrapped up an interview about the 25th anniversary of the Bucky Bleeping Dent game. What an absolute classic tonight's game was, with great pitching performances by Ted Lilly, Derek Lowe, Mike Timlin, Scott Williamson, Chad Bradford and Jim Mecir. Memories of 1999 abounded, with Manny in a 1-for-series slump and Pedro warming up down in the Fenway bullpen.

It may surprise you to learn that I'm not a baseball rulebook afficionado, but those who are will have a field day with this one between Nomar's re-play on Chad Bradford's quick pitch, the play where Tejada was called out while arguing that he should have scored on an obstruction play, and Eric Byrnes overrunning home plate and getting tagged out at the backstop. The Tejada play brought back memories of David Cone and Chuck Knoblauch holding the ball to argue calls, but in this case it's more excusable if Tejada didn't understand that it was a live play -- but what's the Oakland third base coach for if not to get Tejada safely to a base while this is going on?

Bobby Valentine on the A's mental state for Game 4: "If they're angry they're cool; if they're feeling sorry for themselves, they're in trouble." That's Valentine in a nutshell. He's right, of course. Ted Lilly had this look on his face all night like, "tell me again why I'm not winning this game?" Maybe he always looks like that.

Marty Marion was nicknamed "the Octopus" for his leaping grabs, but Mike Timlin looked like he was auditioning for the moniker with some of his spears tonight. Scott Hatteberg had some jumping to do as well, due to a few too many high throws from the left side of the Oakland infield.

On another note, nothing looked scarier today than Robert Fick's very intentional-looking collision at first base with Eric Karros; if you didn't see the play, Fick was running up the first base line and held his hand out to basically knock the glove off Karros' hand after he's already caught the throw from Kyle Farnsworth for the force-out. It definitely brought back visions of Todd Hundley barreling into Cliff Floyd back in 1995, to horrific effects on Floyd's career for several years. Jason Steffens has the postgame reaction to the combative Fick's latest antics (you may remember his suspension for his part in a massive brawl and his use of obscene gestures when he was with the Tigers), and David Pinto has some harsh words for Fick as well.

I can't be the first one to notice that Matt LeCroy is a dead ringer for the guy who used to play Tim Allen's sidekick on Home Improvement . . . and Ken Macha kinda reminds me of a cross between Larry David and Dick Cheney.

Back to the Sawx game.

Well, Bonds got some relief from his teammates today, but it didn't matter much because the pitching didn't hold up. Let's re-run the chart for the full series; it looks a bit less lopsided now:

BONDS	Total Runs	Scoring Innings	Non-Scoring Innings
Gets On	10	7	4
Makes Out	4	1	6
Doesn't Bat	2	2	17

(Note that this includes a 4-run inning in which Bonds had a sac fly.)

How important has Barry Bonds been to the Giants in this series? The Giants have yet to score in an inning when Bonds doesn't get on base. Let's break this down through three games:

BONDS	Total Runs	Scoring Innings	Non-Scoring Innings
Gets On	10	7	3
Makes Out	0	0	4
Doesn't Bat	0	0	14

That's a man who needs some support.

As late as the end of last season, you could fairly ask whether Mark Prior had advanced to the same class as pitchers like Greg Maddux. By tonight, you felt bad for Maddux trying to keep up with Prior. In fact, either Prior or Jason Schmidt is probably the leading starting pitcher in the NL Cy Young race, although their slim workloads (30 starts, 211.1 IP for Prior, 29 starts, 207.2 IP for Schmidt, 32 starts, 211 IP for Kevin Brown) probably means the award will rightly pass to Eric Gagne (77 games, 82.1 IP).

You could tell how "on" Prior was by how many hitters in the fearsome Atlanta lineup were swinging at pitches that were way, way out of the strike zone - pitches at their eyes, pitches a foot outside. The fact that Prior's control was off in the early going made him that much more unpredictable, and the hitters that much more defensive, by the end of the game. You know the saying, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"? Well, with good pitchers it's almost the opposite -- see hitters hack at a few bad pitches it's probably the result of impatience. But see a whole lineup of guys do it all night, and that's almost always because the pitcher's got something special going.

That said, my initial reaction was that leaving Prior out there to throw 133 pitches once the Cubs had an insurance run seemed foolhardy. The biggest risk isn't hurting his arm -- although with a once-a-decade ace like Prior, that's a constant worry. And it's not Prior blowing the game -- he was going too good to think that bringing in Joe Borowski was a surer bet. The biggest risk is wearing him down for the postseason, which isn't a sprint anymore so much as a quarter-mile run.

There is a counterargument, though: it's Game 3, and Game 5 is in two days. Prior won't pitch again until the NLCS, so he may get an extra day's rest. And though our knowledge of pitching injuries and fatigue is still largely anecdotal, there's a lot of people who would agree that it's not the muscle-tearing long outing that does you in so much as the trying to bounce back before the arm had healed up from it. As statheads have been conceding all season, maybe Dusty knows more than he sometimes lets on.

There was a surprising ending and a big win for the A’s over Pedro Martinez and the Red Sox in last night’s classic playoff game. I thought Boston would hold on after Todd Walker’s homer in the 7th, but another shaky postseason outing by Byung-Hyun Kim would eventually prove to be their undoing.

On the downside for Oakland, Tim Hudson’s health has to be a concern.

If you want yet another reason to be amazed at Leo Mazzone, you can look at Jaret Wright's line with the Braves (counting last night's outing) compared to his line from the rest of 2002-03:

Team	G	GS	IP	W-L	ERA	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	K/9
Braves	12	0	10	1-0	1.80	6.3	0.0	4.5	10.8
Cle/SD	47	6	65.2	3-8	10.42	14.9	1.6	6.4	7.3

Yes, small sample size, and yes, it's a little unfair to include Wright's work as a starter in Cleveland. But the point is, the Braves can take a guy who's about as ineffective as you can get, and there he is a few weeks later pitching in the 7th inning of a close playoff game, pushing his ERA with the team below 2.00.

Late night at the office last night, so no time for real blogging this morning. Just some time to finish up my thoughts to get on record before the first round starts:

Yankees-Twins: You have to assume the Hated Yankees juggernaut will crush the Twinkies, who haven't even won a game against the Yanks since May of 2001. Key to the series will be Johan Santana, the type of nasty young lefty flamethrower who can just dominate a series against the odds. Think the Astros and Marlins regret letting Santana go in the 1999 Rule V draft? Also key to any play for an upset will be Shannon Stewart, who's thus far made the highly questionable Bobby Kielty deal pay off; Stewart's the one guy on the Twins who can really put the ball in play against the porous Yankee defense. Totally pointless stat: Twins starting pitchers batted .286 this season. More important stat: I saw in the paper the other day that Santana, Brad Radke and Kyle Lohse had won 25 of their last 30 decisions.

Red Sox-A's: I like both these teams and wish they both had cracks at the Yankees. Oakland roared down the stretch as usual, but without Mark Mulder they don't look as scary in the postseason against a healthy Sox team with - strangely enough - a healthy San Pedro de Fenway.

Marlins-Giants: Echoes of 1997, although this is a stronger Giants team against a weaker Florida team. Jason Schmidt and Sidney Ponson are key here; the Giants' starting pitching has wobbled pretty badly down the stretch. I smell a Florida upset.

Braves-Cubs: I'll be pulling for the Cubbies, and certainly the Braves' pitching makes them vulnerable. But there's too much offense here to favor the Cubs. Could go either way -- of course, so could any short series -- but I'm sensing a Braves return to the NLCS.

In a weird way, as a Mets fan, I was glad to see the Tigers win yesterday to avoid tying the 1962 Mets record for 120 losses in a season. The ’62 Mets are the classic icon of comedic ineptitude and I’m glad to see their legacy remain intact.

The Tigers win yesterday was good for them and good for baseball history.

Another of the stories that needs to be remembered in analyzing a lost opportunity is Mike Sweeney's injury. Sweeney remains the Royals' best player, and he was batting around his usual numbers -- .321/.540/.440 -- when he went down in June. He's more than that, though; for the season, Sweeney batted .363/.579/.459 with men on base, .398/.648/.493 with men in scoring position, .339/.431/.429 in the late innings of a close game. But after returning from the DL, Sweeney (while relegated to DHing) batted just .260/.379/.325 the rest of the way. In a race that was airtight until the last 2-3 weeks, that's a significant blow.

Now, long-time readers know that I'm a big fan of San Pedro de Fenway here, but even though he was baseball's most effective starting pitcher this season, and at the risk of contradicting what I just said below about Maddux, I just can't see giving Pedro another Cy Young Award this season:

1. He only won 14 games.
2. He only threw 186.2 innings.
3. These two facts are not coincidental.

Not only did Pedro not pitch for nearly a month, but in Pedro's 11 no decisions, he threw less than 7 innings five times. He also left after 7 five others. Now, 7 innings should get you a decision in today's baseball, so including those in the case against Pedro may not be fair; let's take a look at those five starts:

March 31 (Opening Day) in Tampa: Martinez leaves with a 4-1 lead after throwing 91 pitches, having allowed a run in the seventh. Hard to fault him here; it was Opening Day, he had a comfortable lead against a rotten team, and Alan Embree and Chad Fox imploded in the ninth inning to lose the game 6-4.

April 27 at Anaheim: Again, Martinez is lifted after allowing a run in the seventh; he leaves with a 4-2 lead after throwing 101 pitches. A lot of pitchers might have been pulled at that point, so it's unfair to give him all the blame for the fact that Brandon Lyon and Chad Fox each allowed runs (in the 8th and 9th) and the Sox had to go 14 innings to reclaim victory.

June 21 at Philadelphia: Martinez throws 92 pitches, leaves with a 2-1 lead. This one really looks like a game where you'd want your ace pitcher to go 8 with a shaky bullpen. Mike Timlin lets Jim Thome go deep in the 8th to tie it; in the absence of a lefthander, you'd rather have seen Pedro pitch to Thome than a famously gopher-prone righthander. Jason Shiell lets Thome go deep in the 12th, and he and Rudy Seanez blow the game in the 13th.

July 7 at Yankee Stadium: The most notorious of the bunch; the Hated Yankees tie the game 1-1 in the sixth, and Martinez leaves after 7 having thrown 115 pitches. Byun-Hyung Kim blows it in the 9th. Verdict: pitching the 8th might not have made a difference, and Martinez had thrown plenty of pitches here.

July 12 at Detroit: Martinez throws 105 pitches, Red Sox take a 2-1 lead in the top of the 8th, the 24-66 Tigers tie it up in the bottom of the 8th off Embree and the game goes 11. This one's really not Martinez' fault so much as the bullpen's.

Interesting that each of these games was on the road, and all were before the All-Star Break. Even if you exonerate Martinez in each of these five games, the team's overall 4-7 record in his no-decisions, combined with his starting only 29 games in the first place, really has to lead you to conclude that Martinez just wasn't a big enough factor to win the award. That leaves the field to Roy Halladay, Tim Hudson and Esteban Loaiza. (Note that the A's were 10-1 in Hudson's no decisions). I think I'd give the award to Hudson, myself; he carried a heavier innings load (240) than Loaiza (219), but had a considerably better ERA (2.70) than the other two (2.96 for Loaiza and 3.25 for Halladay).

Here's an eye-popping novelty stat: 13 major league pitchers struck out at least 178 batters this season. Only one, major league whiff leader Kerry Wood, walked as many as 60 batters. (After that, you get to Nomo). Doesn't that, together with the growing dominance of the game's best closers, say something? Perhaps that the gap between the best and the rest is growing? Or that the best pitchers are now working harder on throwing strikes because they realize the importance of both K and BB to pitching?

Then again, it could just be a fluke. The 2002 list looks quite different.

Lost in the controversy over Greg Maddux's durability and conditioning (addressed by Baseball Musings here, here and here) is the fact that Maddux led the National League in starts, with 35 (Roy Halladay led the majors with 36). Granted, that's just 1 extra start over guys like Millwood and Vazquez and teammate Russ Ortiz, but at Maddux's age there's something to be said for just showing up every fifth day and knowing what it takes to get you there.

That said, the criticism that Maddux might be able to go deeper in games if he was in better shape seems a fair one. Maddux threw 100 pitches in a game just four times this season (the last time on July 22), and averaged just under 82 pitches per start.

Tom of Phillies blog Shallow Center defends the meanness and negativity for which Philadelphia fans are famous:

We should be applauded, not denigrated, for demanding better of our teams. The Red Sox and the Cubs may be lovable losers, but they're still losers. Boston and Chicago deserve better, but they're too wussy to realize it. We in Philadelphia know we deserve better. That's why we boo when Pat Burrell fans, again, on a pitch about six feet outside, or when the Eagles, in their new, publicly financed stadium, look as adept as a peewee football team tripping through its first scrimmage.

Mike's Baseball Rants seems to be buying into a theory of Joe Morgan similar to the one I aired here.

Tom Glavine leaves tonight's game without a chance for a decision, which should cap off his season's record at 9-14. Here's what I predicted on December 5, 2002 following the Glavine signing:

Glavine likely has one horrible train wreck of a year coming, with a revival to a battered veteran squeezing out one last good in in 2004 or 2005. At best, he's Kevin Appier all over again . . . This contract will probably do in Glavine's bid for 300 wins: you heard it here first, he's going 7-15 in 2003.

Well, looks like I was a little pessimistic, but not by much. And we've got three more years of Glavine to look forward to.

Well, the Marlins' big victory last night probably seals the NL wild card race; a 3-game lead with 4 to play is a bit much.

With one more game in San Diego and three in San Francisco, the Dodgers bullpen will be pushed to the limit on a pair of milestones. Eric Gagne notched save no. 55 last night; he needs two to tie Bobby Thigpen's single-season record and three to break it, although he's also still (hold your breath) not blown a save this season in a regulation game (as you'll recall, he did blow the All-Star Game). And Paul Quantrill, who made his 86th appearance last night and who's also wrapping up a tremendous year, needs to pitch in all four remaining games to be the first pitcher since Kent Tekulve in 1987 to pitch in 90 games in a season; it's only been done seven times, six of them between Mike Marshall (3) and Tekulve (3) and the other by Wayne Granger.

Counting this season, five pitchers in baseball history have had 30 saves and 100 strikeouts in the same season more than once; two have done it in back-to-back years. The five? Bruce Sutter, Rich Gossage, Trevor Hoffman, and now Billy Wagner and Eric Gagne. Only Hoffman and Gagne have done it in consecutive seasons; only Wagner and Gagne (assuming no disaster outings this week) have had sub-2.00 ERAs both times as well (Sutter did it once, as did John Wetteland, John Hiller, Robb Nen, Bryan Harvey, and Willie Hernandez); only Gagne among the five has had fewer than 20 walks in either season (Harvey's the only other one to match that), let alone both, and besides Gagne - with his two 50-save seasons - only Hoffman and Wagner have cleared 40 saves in one of the seasons (also matched by Harvey, Nen, Wetteland, Armando Benitez and Ugueth Urbina). Gagne also now holds the record for most whiffs in a 30-save season, with 135 through last night; Sutter had 129 in 1977.

Verdict: he's got a ways to go to prove himself the best or even the most dominant, but Gagne has already staked a real good claim to be the most overpowering closer in the four decades since closers started becoming something of a steady job.

(Hat tip to Aaron Haspel's search engine for the 30/100 club data).

David Pinto has an incisive new look at team defense; now, if he can combine this with his metric that counts extra base hits into team defense, he'll really have something special.

The Command Post reports that John Kerry has accused Howard Dean of being - gasp! - a fan of the Hated Yankees. Dean, of course, is a transplanted New Yorker, and that wouldn't go over well in New Hampshire. Dean is denying this scurrilous charge.

I've been baseball-deprived lately, since the radio in my office died; because I'm usually in the office too late to see games on TV, the radio is my lifeline. Gotta get that fixed, pronto.

As the White Sox fade to grey there's delicious irony for Mets fans in noting that one of the key decisions that did in the Sox was the decision to dump D'Angelo Jimenez and replace him at second base with Roberto Alomar. (Long-time readers of this blog will note that I've been fascinated for some time with Jimenez, the on-again, off-again former Yankees infield prospect, who has shown a recurring tendency to confound his supporters and critics alike.) Check out their numbers since Alomar arrived in Chicago and Jimenez in Cincinnati:

PLAYER	G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB+	SB	AVG	SLG	OBP	OPS	XO	RC
Alomar	64	242	63	11	1	3	41	17	30	6	.260	.351	.337	688	11	29.4
Jimenez	66	266	80	12	2	7	32	30	31	7	.301	.440	.371	811	7	46.3

BB+ = BB+HBP
XO=(GIDP+CS)
RC=Runs Created

You'll recall that I noted at the time that Jimenez was in a terrible but not very long-term slump when the Sox dumped him; maybe that was a wake-up call, but maybe the Sox just panicked after 59 bad at bats and cost themselves a valuable performer. Oops.

On the other hand, I'll admit that I was more optimistic about Alomar than this here, although I was less so here; the biggest problem is that the Sox forgot to platoon Alomar, as he wound up hitting .191 against lefties.

If you've been following the Pythagorean projections all year, it's no surprise that the Astros have surged in the NL Central of late -- although their continuing underachievement is rather odd for a team with such a great bullpen.

Proving once again that media groupthink and the thrall of cliched conventional wisdom is not limited to news coverage of politics, Bill Simmons blasts HBO for running a Red Sox documentary that wound up wallowing in "the Curse."

USA Today has named Prince Fielder, son of Cecil, its Minor League Player of the Year. Fielder is apparently a pure hitter and sounds somewhat reminiscent of Mo Vaughn as a young player…on more than one front:

Like his father, who is 6-3 and played at 260 pounds, Fielder has a large frame and was listed as 5-11, 300 pounds a few months before the draft. He hired a trainer and got down to 260.

I remember watching games back when his dad was playing and they would show young Prince in the dugout and he looked like he was about 225 pounds when he was around 8 years old. I couldn’t get over how big he looked. Kudos to him on his conditioning efforts and hopefully we’ll all be seeing him in Milwaukee soon.

In case you missed it - I caught some of the game on ESPN – late season acquisition Jeff Conine had a whale of a game in last night’s key Marlins’ win over the Phillies at the Vet.

Much as I would prefer to see a certain other NL East member in the race, it’s great to see these two teams playing each other in critical games in a playoff atmosphere in September.

Given the positive reaction to my study of the great slugging teams, I thought I'd take a look at the teams with the greatest on base percentages in a single season, relative to the league. This time, I'll just run the "modern" teams rather than the too-old-time-to-be-quite-legitimate teams, drawing the line at 1893, the point at which the pitching conditions (mound distance, number of balls for a walk) and length of the season started more nearly resembling the modern game. Here are the 19 post-1893 teams that finished at least 9% above the league:

Year/Team	OBP	Lg OBP	% Above Lg
1. 1908 New York Giants	.333	.293	13.7
2. 1898 Baltimore Orioles	.365	.325	12.3
3. 1976 Cincinnati Reds	.357	.320	11.6
4. 1931 New York Yankees	.380	.341	11.4
5. 1915 Detroit Tigers	.353	.319	10.7
6. 1897 Baltimore Orioles	.381	.346	10.1
7. 1905 New York Giants	.340	.309	10.0
8. 1988 Boston Red Sox	.355	.323	9.9
9. 1906 New York Giants	.334	.304	9.9
10. 1902 Pittsburgh Pirates	.336	.306	9.8
11. 1930 New York Yankees	.382	.348	9.8
12. 1927 New York Yankees	.381	.348	9.5
13. 2001 Seattle Mariners	.360	.329	9.4
14. 1894 Philadelphia Phillies	.408	.373	9.4
15. 1971 Baltimore Orioles	.344	.315	9.2
16. 1894 Baltimore Orioles	.407	.373	9.1
17. 1965 Cincinnati Reds	.336	.308	9.1
18. 1913 Philadelphia Athletics	.349	.320	9.1
19. 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers	.362	.332	9.0

A few things jumped off the page here. First, the teams that dominate the OBP category have done so by a far narrower margin than the great slugging teams; we've got just seven teams here, and just three since 1910, that finished more than 10% better than the league, whereas the top slugging teams were in the 15-22% range. Second, as Rob Neyer and others love to point out, slugging and OBP go together like chocolate and peanut butter: 7 of the top 10 modern slugging teams reappear here (including a reprise by the unheralded 1965 Reds). Another of those teams, the 1950 Red Sox, just missed the cut (beating the league OBP by 8.2%), but is tied for the highest team OBP of the 20th century (.382, tied with the 1930 Yankees and 1921 Tigers; you can run the decimal places and tell me who comes out ahead if you like; the 1894 Phillies, with four .400 hitting outfielders, and 1894 Orioles remain the only teams ever to crack the .400 barrier). Third, the name "John McGraw" comes to mind: McGraw played for three of these teams and managed three others (credit should be shared with Hugh Jennings, who got drilled by 40-50 pitches a year for those Orioles teams, and with Roger Bresnahan, the on-base star of the Mathewson-era Giants). Other teams on the list make you think instantly of Babe Ruth, Earl Weaver (Weaver's 1971 O's are known for four 20-game winners, but a .422 OBP from Merv Rettenmund and a .365 OBP from Mark Belanger had more than a little to do with that), Ty Cobb (the 1915 Tigers didn't have the top 3 in the league in RBI for nothing), and Wade Boggs. There are also remarkably few recent teams, which makes the 1976 Reds' dominance that much more impressive. And, of course, there's an awful lot of pennant-winning teams here, as you'd have guessed.

Although one suspects that the repeat presence of McGraw teams suggests that -- as analysts today would argue -- a focus on OBP can be a choice, the fact that the leagues have often been quite compressed (the 1980 National League is one extreme example, with the Cardinals' .329 league-leading figure compared to a league average of .321) would suggest that even without thinking about OBP, managers have mostly stayed within a narrow band in assembling their teams. On the other hand, even a 5-7% advantage in OBP can mean a lot of runs. And it does seem that the spreads are widening in recent seasons, with the 2001 Mariners beating the AL average by 9.4%, the 2002 Yankees by 8.3%, and the 2003 Red Sox by 8.4% through Tuesday, and the 2001 Rockies leading the NL by 8.3% (the biggest margin of the 1990s was actually the 1994 Yankees at 8.4%).

For what it's worth, the top old-time teams were the 1876 Chicago White Stockings, 27.4% above the league at .353 compared to a league average of .277, and the 1875 Boston Red Stockings of the National Association, 24.9% above the league; the top legitimate (non-Union Association) 1880s team was the 1886 Chicago White Stockings, 16% above the league. One reason I included the 1890s teams in the list above rather than lumping them back here was that I had a hard time convincing myself that the game played by the 1897-98 Orioles was really that different from the game played by the 1902 Pirates or the 1905 Giants.

I noted last year that in 2002, Alex Rodriguez became just the fifth player to both drive in and score 110 runs in five consecutive seasons. The others:

13 Lou Gehrig
8 Ted Williams (giving credit for 1939-42 and 1946-49 as a single streak)
7 Babe Ruth
7 Jimmie Foxx

With his 44th home run in the first inning Tuesday night, A-Rod made it six in a row.

I was listening to the Mets radio broadcast the other night and Bob Murphy said that the Mets "certainly have no hope of any postseason action this year." Now, I've been realistic about this fact since April, but there's knowing you have no hope, and then there's hearing Bob Murphy say that there's no hope.

If there's been one unflagging constant with Murphy over his 42 seasons as a Mets broadcaster, leading up to his retirement after this season, it's that there was always hope. In 1962, the Mets started with a three-man broadcasting team of professional broadcasters Murphy and Lindsey Nelson and former player Ralph Kiner. Under the arrangement at the time, two of the announcers would do the TV broadcast and one would do the radio broadcast, and they would rotate every few innings. The choices could hardly have been better: the broadcasting team stayed unchanged for 16 seasons (Nelson retired in 1977), and Murphy and Kiner are still here. Murphy and Nelson were inducted in the broadcasters' wing of the Hall of Fame, and Kiner was inducted as a player in 1975. After the late 1970s, Murphy moved to radio full-time, while Kiner became part of the TV team; the past decade or so he has mostly worked either with Gary Thorne or, more recently, Gary Cohen.

Through it all -- including years on end of lousy baseball -- Murphy remained at all times the eternal optimist, the soul of a franchise whose stock in trade is the improbable comeback and the miracle team: "If Bruce Boisclair can get on here, Ron Hodges will come to the plate with the potential tying run on deck . . . " And he rarely had a harsh word for anyone, even the surly and despised Dave Kingman, who Murphy always referred to, most formally, as "David Arthur Kingman." Murphy always played it straight, as well: he's always left the analysis to the color man, preferring to just give you the game and the occasional anecdote to keep things moving. Just the same, you could always tell from the sound of his voice if the Mets were winning or losing, if a deep drive headed out of the ballpark was good news or bad. And if the Mets won, he would always announce the postgame show with, "and now, it's time for the happy recap." Probably Murphy's only regret as a Mets broadcaster, and one he has mentioned often on the air, is that the Mets never did get a no-hitter, despite some very close calls (especially by Tom Seaver).

Murphy is retiring after this season; although he can still call an entertaining game, you can hear him slipping on the air, and I'm sure he's tired of the travel. I'll miss him; he's been the voice of the Mets all my life, and for a variety of reasons I've listened to an awful lot of baseball on the radio over the years. Thanks for giving Mets fans everywhere hope. We'll need it.

. . . to Redbird Nation, which has had some great posts this past week, including a look at great baseball names and a proposed system for measuring the drama of particular games.

With Jose Reyes out for the season, finishing at a more than respectable (for a 20-year-old shortstop) .307/.434/.334 with 13 steals in 16 attempts and 47 runs scored in 69 games, a pace for 30 steals and 110 runs. Reyes was totally overmatched early on, batting just .209 through July 11, but once he caught on, he hit an impressive .355/.486/.395 the rest of the way.

Reyes' propensity for hamstring injuries, combined with his season-ending ankle injury, are causes for concern. Still, given the history of Mets shortstops, you'd have to believe that he won't have to keep this up for very long at all to be the best the Mets have had at a position that has long been a sore spot for the franchise.

Well, to look at that question objectively, I took a look through Bill James' Win Shares book, as well as at online calculations for the 2002 and 2003 seasons. Through September 7, Reyes ranked fourth on the Mets with 12 Win Shares, which projects out to 28 if he could keep this up for a full season's worth of games. How does that stack up against Mets shortstops of the past? I looked at the shorstop with the most Win Shares for the Mets for each season of their history:

Year	SS	WS		Year	SS	WS
1962	Elio Chacon	5		1983	Bob Bailor	6
1963	Al Moran	3		1984	Rafael Santana	5
1964	Roy McMillan	3		1985	Rafael Santana	11
1965	Roy McMillan	8		1986	Rafael Santana	8
1966	Eddie Bressoud	11		1987	Rafael Santana	11
1967	Bud Harrelson	13		1988	Kevin Elster	12
1968	Bud Harrelson	6		1989	Kevin Elster	18
1969	Bud Harrelson	14		1990	Kevin Elster	10
1970	Bud Harrelson	17		1991	Kevin Elster	10
1971	Bud Harrelson	19		1992	Dick Schofield	13
1972	Bud Harrelson	13		1993	Tim Bogar	6
1973	Bud Harrelson	13		1994	Jose Vizcaino	7
1974	Bud Harrelson	14		1995	Jose Vizcaino	16
1975	Mike Phillips	8		1996	Rey Ordonez	7
1976	Bud Harrelson	13		1997	Rey Ordonez	6
1977	Bud Harrelson	4		1998	Rey Ordonez	9
1978	Tim Foli	7		1999	Rey Ordonez	13
1979	Frank Tavares	12		2000	Melvin Mora	6
1980	Frank Tavares	10		2001	Rey Ordonez	12
1981	Frank Tavares	3		2002	Rey Ordonez	9
1982	Bob Bailor	6		2003	Jose Reyes	12

Bear in mind, here, that a Win Share is a third of a win, so an everyday player who's worth 10 Win Shares (just over 3 wins) isn't contributing all that much. Some observations:

*Average Win Shares, Mets starting shortstops: 9.83

*Total Win Shares, Mets starting shortstops over 42 seasons: 413. Total Win Shares, Robin Yount: 423.

*The Mets have twice won the National League pennant (1986, 2000) without a shortstop who contributed 3 wins to their bottom line.

*The single-season high is 19 by Bud Harrelson in 1971; Harrelson was a good player in his prime, with a good glove and decent plate discipline in a run-starved environment; you could fairly argue that he's the only good shortstop the Mets have ever had, and certainly over any sustained period of time. Reyes has a ways to go to match Harrelson's whole Mets career. But one more full season anything like this year, though, could well make him the best single-season shortstop in club history in short order.

*Vizcaino, in 1995, is the only shorstop to lead the Mets in Win Shares. Of course, when Jose Vizcaino is your best player, you aren't going anywhere.

*We won't mention Alex Rodriguez here.

What's most impressive about Al Leiter's second-half surge isn't his ERA (1.60 compared to 5.57 in the first half) of even his W-L record (although it's pretty impressive to go 6-2 in 10 starts for this aimless Mets team), but the revival of his K/BB and HR numbers, from a dreadful 71/63 (with 11 HR in 97 IP) to 56/26 -- nearly a strikeout per inning -- and just 1 HR allowed in 62 innings. I can't tell from watching him what he's doing differently, but he really hasn't been the same pitcher.

This weekend's series between the Yankees and the Red Sox was a classic of the genre in one sense -- high tension, important games, surprising results -- and a dud in others, given that two of the games were entirely lopsided routs by the Sox.

Yankee Stadium has seen high drama before, and 75 years ago today was one of the most dramatic scenes ever set in the Bronx. Let's set the stage:

1. The Yankees

The Yankees, of course, had been a doormat of a franchise before the 1920 arrivals of Babe Ruth, Bob Meusel and the lively ball era, with an ignominious defeat by Boston in 1904 as the Yanks' only pennant race exposure. After a wild three-way race in 1920 (involving Ruth breaking his own single-season home run record in June, a deadly beaning by Yankee hurler Carl Mays in August and the September suspension of half the White Sox' lineup for fixing the World Series), the Yanks rose to win consecutive pennants in 1921-22 (losing in the Fall Classic to the rival Giants), and christened their new stadium with a World Championship in 1923. After setbacks in 1924-25, the Yanks won the pennant in 1926 (losing a 7-game series to the Cardinals), and then put on a legendary show of dominance in 1927: 110 wins, first place from Opening Day to the clincher on Labor Day, out-homering their opponents 158-42, a .307 team batting average and a 3.20 team ERA, scoring 6.33 runs/game and allowing 3.89 runs/game. As I've noted previously, the 1927 Yankees were the greatest slugging team in modern (post-1888) baseball history, with the Ruth/Gehrig/Meusel/Lazzeri/Combs "Murderer's Row" blasting opponents into submission. They cemented their place in the firmament with a sweep of the Pirates in the World Series.

1928 . . . the Yankees roared out of the gate at a 39-8 clip, and through a July 1 doubleheader sweep of the A's, they looked every bit as devastating as they'd been in 1927: 52-16, a .765 winning percentage (a pace to finish 8 games ahead of their 110 wins in 1927), and a 13.5 game lead in the American League. The Yanks were scoring 6.49 runs/game while allowing 4.24. George Pipgras, the weak link in the Yankees' pitching staff in 1927 (10-3, 4.11 ERA), had won 14 games already (Pipgras was 8-1 at the end of May), a 32-win pace; Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock had won 10 apiece, rookie Al Shealy had won 7, 22-year-old rookie Hank Johnson 5, and newly acquired veteran Stan Coveleski 5.

The new acquisitions were important because the Yanks couldn't rely on three mainstays of the 1927 staff. 33-year-old Dutch Ruether, a hard-drinking veteran, had been let go before the season, to be replaced by Coveleski. Sidearming swingman Wilcy Moore, who'd won 19 games and saved 13 with a 2.28 ERA as a 30-year-old rookie in 1927, came down with a sore arm (50 games and 213 innings split between starting and releiving will do that); Moore threw just 60.1 innings in 1928 with a 4.18 ERA (the league ERA was 4.04, down slightly from 1927). Worst of all was Urban Shocker, one of the AL's best pitchers in the 1920s (his average record from 1920-27 was 20-12) and 18-6 with a 2.84 ERA in 1927; Shocker, suffering chest pains so severe he couldn't sleep lying down, had to be released by the Yankees July 6 having made just one appearance, so he could move to the thin air of Denver in hopes of regaining his health.

From July 2 through September 8, though, the Bronx Bombers just weren't the same team, going just 36-31 as they frittered away their lead. As the season wore on, the pitching depth evaporated: Shealy and Coveleski won just 1 more game all season between them. Pipgras also slowed down, highlighted by a 24-6 loss in Cleveland on July 29 and -- amazingly -- a 4-2 loss when Pipgras returned to start against the Indians again the next day. But the real problems were on the offensive side; the pitching was actually better in this period (allowing 4.00 runs/game), but the offense fell off badly, to 4.25 runs/game. I don't have dates for the injury, but Tony Lazzeri, who batted .332 and slugged .535 with a .397 OBP, separated his shoulder and wound up missing 37 games, in which the Yankees went with rookie Leo Durocher at second; Leo's bat couldn't keep up with his glove or his mouth, and he managed to slug just .338 with a .327 OBP, both figures below the league average. Bob Meusel fell off from .337 in 1927 to .297 and missed some games, and Earle Combs and the catchers were off as well. On the other hand, the Babe cracked 24 home runs between May 29 and August 1, and Gehrig batted .374, so neither of them seems to have faded much in the summer sun. Growing worried, the Yankees started to turn over the roster in late summer, bringing in rookie catcher Bill Dickey on August 15 and veteran Senators starter Tom Zachry (who'd surrendered Ruth's 60th homer the year before) on August 23.

2. The A's

If the Yankees had risen to dominance in the 1920s, the A's were still recovering from falling on hard times. One of the dominant franchises from the AL's 1901 founding until Connie Mack's 1914 fire sale, the A's crawled up from 7 straight last place finishes to become a perennial also-ran in the pennant races from 1925-27. 1928 looked the same, as the A's rolled out to a workmanlike 39-30 start, good for a respectable second place to the mighty Yankees. This was one of the strangest teams ever assembled. The young talent was astonishing and already in its prime: Jimmie Foxx was just 20, but Al Simmons was 26, Mickey Cochrane 25, Max Bishop 28, Mule Haas 24, Lefty Grove and George Earnshaw 28. But then there were the super-veterans: Ty Cobb, acquired the previous season (when he'd played regularly and batted .357), was 41; new acquisition Tris Speaker was 40; Eddie Collins, in his second season back in Philly, was 41; ageless pitcher Jack Quinn was 44 (Quinn would pitch until he was 49).

Mack intended to open the season with Simmons in center field and Cobb and Speaker at the corners, but spring training made clear that this would be a defensive disaster; Bill James, in the Historical Abstract, quoted a writer at the time who remarked that Cobb couldn't come in, and Speaker (once the greatest of defensive players) couldn't go back. Simmons was hospitalized with tonsilitis and swollen ankles to start the season, an inauspicious beginning.

Speaker left the lineup for good after a May 21 collision in the outfield with Bing Miller, and Cobb -- hitting .332 at the time and still playing daring baseball on the basepaths -- followed suit after being hit by a pitch on July 27. Meanwhile, Simmons had taken Speaker's place, and Mack worked Foxx into the lineup more as the season progressed, first as essentially a utility player at first, third and even (on 19 occasions) catcher, and ultimately as the everyday third baseman while Jimmy Dykes platooned at first with former minor league slugging legend Joe Hauser.

After the doubleheader sweep on July 1, the A's caught fire in a very big way, going 50-17 heading into their September showdown with the Yankees. While the offense surged from 5.26 to 5.81 runs/game, it was the A's' pitching that really made magic, cutting the team's runs allowed per game from 4.62 to 3.37. Through July 1, the A's were basically leaning on 3 pitchers: Quinn had 9 wins, Grove and Rube Walberg 8 each, with 5 wins for Howard Ehmke, 4 for Ossie Orwoll (who doubled as a part of the first base mix when Hauser and Dykes were injured in late August), and 3 for knuckleballer Eddie Rommel. When the A's got hot, though, Grove was ascendent, winning 14 in a row, including all 13 starts in this stretch. Here's the breakdown of the A's record in each of the pitchers' starts (including Grove's and Rommel's wins in relief):

Pitcher	Wins	A's Record	A's RA/G
Grove	14	13-0	1.6
Earnshaw	6	9-5	4.2
Walberg	7	6-6	3.4
Quinn	6	9-1	3.3
Ehmke	4	6-4	4.6
Rommel	9	4-1	3.2

(I'm leaving out a few spot starts). As you can see, Grove's hot streak wasn't a coincidence; he was the one who really carried the team, along with Quinn and Rommel -- the team was a combined 26-2 and allowed 2.5 runs/game in their starts during the run, while Grove and Rommel won 6 games in relief in this period. The emergence of Earnshaw, who was purchased from the minor league Baltimore Orioles May 28 and didn't win a game before July 1, was also a factor, replacing the ineffective Orwoll in the rotation (Orwoll started just once, in a doubleheader on September 8).

By the morning of Sunday, September 9, the Yankees' lead was gone, and the A's stood at 89-47, a half game ahead of the Yankees at 88-47. The new upstarts had taken the champs by storm, setting the stage for an epic doubleheader at Yankee Stadium to kick off a four-game series.

3. The Scene

As reported in various sources, 85,265 people crammed into Yankee Stadium that afternoon to watch these two titanic teams, loaded to the gills with baseball immortals, grapple for the pennant. Although I'm not sure if the news had reached New York, the drama was underscored by the fact that Shocker died that day in Denver, from what was later revealed to be a severely enlarged heart (he was 38).

The first game, matching Quinn and Pipgras, was something of an anticlimax, as Pipgras tossed a shutout to win 5-0. The second featured a less exciting pitching matchup of Walberg and Fred Heimach, but the two teams took no chances, with Rommel relieving on just one day's rest (he started September 7) for the A's, and Waite Hoyt doing the same for the Yankees. The Yankees took advantage, with Meusel -- on a hot streak by then -- cracking a grand slam in the 8th off Rommel for a stirring 7-3 victory. After a day off on Monday, the teams matched up again on Tuesday, September 11, Grove against Hank Johnson, but the Yankees beat Grove 5-3 on Babe Ruth's 49th home run, a 2-run shot in the 8th (for the season, the Yankees were 6-1 against Grove, who was 24-8 overall, which helps explain why he didn't draw a single MVP vote). The A's beat Hoyt the next day, but the damage was done, the tide turned back, and the Yankees cruised the rest of the way (and went on to sweep the Cardinals in a massively lopsided World Series) while the A's stumbled through the rest of their season-ending 24-game road trip.

The A's would have the last laugh, winning the next 3 pennants and two World Championships while the Yankees' pitching unraveled over the next 3 seasons. But on September 9, 1928, it was the Bronx Bombers who held the day in one of baseball's great pennant race showdowns.

SOURCES: Some of the material here was taken from Retrosheet, baseball-almanac.com, baseball-reference.com, baseball-library.com, the Historical Baseball Abstract, Baseball Dynasties, and Charles Alexander's bio of Ty Cobb.

Ever notice how, when they cut to the pitcher making a pickoff throw, you can see it in his face if he's got the guy dead to rights? It was clear as day on Al Leiter's face tonight when he nailed Marlon Byrd.

Carlos Baerga is batting .339 for the Diamondbacks.

Rey Sanchez is batting .352 for the Mariners.

Rey Ordonez was hitting .316 for the Devil Rays before he got hurt.

Armando Benitez has a 1.77 ERA and hasn't allowed a home run since going over to the AL.

And Mike Stanton, he of all that Yankee glory, is now 2-6 with a 4.91 ERA.

Of course, the baseball pennant race is still in full-swing. The Phillies, tied for the NL wild-card lead with the Marlins will face off at home against the Mets in a four-game series this weekend. This is a good chance for the young and somewhat resurgent Mets to play spoiler after having just completed a rare sweep of the Braves. Meanwhile, Jayson Stark asks whether Larry Bowa is starting to lose it.

If defense in general and team defensive efficiency in particular is an under-reported phenomenon in baseball (at least, under-accurately reported), then in-season changes in team defensive efficiency is really invisible. Let's see if we can remedy that a little.

On July 7 (about a week before the All-Star break, roughly 86-88 games into the season), I decided to take a look at the Baseball Prospectus numbers for team defensive efficiency (i.e., number of balls in play becoming outs), which update daily. Here's where they stood at that point, leaguewide and by team:

Defensive Efficiency Report -- Updated 07-JUL-03

LG	BFP	H	HR	BB	HBP	SO	DEF_EFF
A	47050	11224	1346	3849	462	7302	.7102
N	54608	12633	1502	4913	513	9198	.7107

TEAM/LG	BFP	H	HR	BB	HBP	SO	DEF_EFF
SEA A	3232	696	93	257	24	523	.7418
OAK A	3277	720	88	259	29	519	.7347
ANA A	3261	755	102	246	33	512	.7242
CHA A	3258	735	91	277	27	545	.7222
DET A	3330	795	94	287	22	405	.7220
TBA A	3402	791	106	348	52	446	.7204
CLE A	3384	806	88	274	39	472	.7141
MIN A	3386	816	100	233	29	547	.7109
KCA A	3420	841	97	309	35	472	.7032
NYA A	3348	813	81	197	27	626	.6971
BOS A	3475	837	90	288	35	612	.6951
TOR A	3472	884	109	268	32	546	.6921
BAL A	3324	847	96	261	43	520	.6876
TEX A	3481	888	111	345	35	557	.6806

TEAM/LG	BFP	H	HR	BB	HBP	SO	DEF_EFF
PHI N	3255	699	77	267	39	577	.7290
LAN N	3211	645	63	270	22	714	.7283
ATL N	3371	750	78	322	17	555	.7199
SLN N	3482	832	119	283	31	514	.7187
SFN N	3376	758	77	323	23	534	.7185
MON N	3387	797	113	265	37	551	.7175
ARI N	3394	749	84	285	42	645	.7156
PIT N	3342	802	95	271	32	466	.7147
CHN N	3393	704	80	345	41	762	.7118
SDN N	3527	816	110	358	40	601	.7080
MIL N	3485	853	129	306	30	567	.7049
CIN N	3516	876	121	343	28	474	.7039
HOU N	3427	776	79	328	45	621	.7039
NYN N	3382	832	102	327	21	468	.7037
FLO N	3473	828	69	299	19	624	.6917
COL N	3587	916	106	321	46	525	.6871

All stats courtesy of Baseball Prospectus; you can check out the current reports here. Without reprinting those in their entirety, I can see a few major trends:

*The AL as a whole is down from .7102 to .7088 (.7062 for the second half), a rather dramatic falloff in this context.

*Large drops (comparing 1st half to current percentage):

Angels, .7242 to .7147
Tigers .7220 to .7109 (like they need another negative trend)
Phillies .7290 to .7205
Dodgers .7282 to .7239 (note that the Dodgers are still leading the NL, but their defense has regressed towards the mean)
Cardinals .7187 to .7126
Expos .7175 to .7117

*Large gains:

Orioles .6876 to .6970
Reds .7039 to .7091
Astros .7039 to .7122 (the most dramatic improvement)
Marlins .6917 to .6986
Rockies .6871 to .6961 (those last two and the Orioles also being regressions towards the mean).

I'll admit that I couldn't spot a clear pattern that would tie the shifts to personnel changes in the second half, although obviously some of these teams have changed some starters. It is true that some of the teams showing improvement are out of the pennant race. But the trendlines for a number of teams have shifted, and with them can go their fortunes.

P.S., Hopefully the Prospectus guys will include in-season breakdowns as their premium site brings in more revenue to support the kind of stat sorting that is routine on the bigger sites.

I honestly don't know enough about Oliver Perez -- beyond the fact that he's a young pitcher with high strikeout rates but little or no success thus far at the major league level -- to really evaluate the Pirates' deal of Brian Giles to San Diego, with Perez as the chief consideration in return. But to be fair to the Pirates, remember this:

*The Pirates aren't any good and won't be any good for a few more years;

*Giles will be 33 next season, and will never be more marketable.

For all that, I'm suspicious of trading a superstar-level hitter principally for an unproven young pitcher. And you have to conclude this: the deal is a dramatic no-confidence vote in Pittsburgh's young starting rotation. A team that thought Josh Fogg and Kip Wells and Kris Benson were going to be the anchors of a good rotation would not make this deal. (In Benson's case, pessimism is clearly warranted by his season-ending shoulder injury).

No, never mind, I'm not ready to talk about that.

Just whenever you are ready to think that plate patience and strike zone judgment (the two are not the same thing) can't be taught, a player with a couple years' experience becomes a teammate of a guy like Barry Bonds or Rickey Henderson or Edgar Martinez, and a light goes on (or back on). Witness Jose Cruz (still depicted by ESPN in a Blue Jays hat), who after drawing a decent number of walks in 1999-2000 drew just 45 and 51 as an everyday player in 2001 & 2002, respectively. This season: 445 at bats, 83 walks, which helped make Cruz a big part of the Giants' early success.

Lately, while he's kept walking, Cruz has stopped hitting, batting .216 and slugging .289 since the All-Star break. In fact, since May 11, he's batting .243 and slugging just .399. But his season OBP remains a respectable .364.

Entering last night's action, Jeff Bagwell's lifetime batting average stood at as precisely .300 as it gets: 2100 career hits in 7000 at bats. (Bagwell went 2 for 3, so he's still above the line).

As I've mentioned, I'm currently reading Ball Four. If you've read the book or are otherwise interested in the short, unhappy life of the Seattle Pilots, you can check out this link for audio of in-season radio interviews with the Pilots' incisive, forward-thinking manager, Joe Schultz.

Has Alfonso Soriano righted the ship? Soriano started this season even hotter than last, and even I -- a long-time skeptic of Soriano -- was starting to think he was really that good. 28 games into the season, he was batting .378, and even drawing a decent number of walks. But I should have remembered that this is precisely what often happens to guys who have big breakout seasons: a month or so in, they look even better before it all unravels. After May 1, Soriano just coasted on that early hot streak, to the point where Joe Torre benched Soriano for consecutive games in Texas August 6-7 (and for a hitter, what harsher punishment is there than being benched against the Rangers?). Here's the breakdown:

Dates	G/TG	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	AVG	SLG	OBP
3/31-5/1	28/28	127	48	6	1	10	27	26	11	21	6-1	.378	.677	.428
5/2-8/7	75/80	351	86	14	3	14	54	34	15	72	21-4	.245	.422	.276
8/8-8/23	15/15	67	17	8	1	3	10	8	6	12	2-2	.254	.537	.315

Well, it's better, anyway. But viewing Soriano as a .300-hitting, top-of-the-order, MVP-candidate type of player may have always been a one-year wonder.

Read More »

Dr. Manhattan notes something I'd thought about myself: that Tom Tippett's analysis of balls in play against pitchers (which I noted here) -- which concluded that at least some pitchers do have an effect on balls in play, in a revision to Voros McCracken's groundbreaking theory -- is significant because many of the recent advances in fielding statistics have been premised upon the idea that the fielders alone control a team's overall rate of hits on balls in play.

Of course, still absent (I think) from a lot of the analyses of defensive stats is the other wild card: park effects. Until we make sense of the components of park effects, we can't really unravel the balance between pitchers and fielders on balls in play.

Reports of Rich Harden's easy dominance of the American League have been premature; Harden got shelled last night by the Red Sox even after extra rest for a tired arm. With Ted Lilly getting clocked in his last start, Tim Hudson getting drilled with a line drive and now Mark Mulder on the 15-day DL, the A's starting pitching is more vulnerable than it's been in some time.

The Sacramento Bee has fired a reporter who did a story that appeared to be, but wasn't, filed from the ballpark, with quotes from other sources. Of course, those quotes are mostly useless and writing stories from the telecast isn't that far from the days when regional reporters would broadcast from ticker reports -- but the point is, the guy was giving a false impression that the paper couldn't tolerate.

At least somebody's checking these things now.

One of my pet peeves is the status of major baseball websites (the news sites, not the commentary/analysis sites). Maybe I just go to the wrong sites -- I tend to frequent ESPN's MLB page, CBSSportsline, and sometimes CNNSI's baseball page or USAToday's. A couple of common complaints:

1. Popup ads.

I'm not someone who will boycott sites with popups, but a battery of popups makes it much less likely that I'll make a site a daily read, or drop by there to pick up a quick piece of information. Even for active players, I much prefer to get stats (other than current-year stats) from Baseball-Reference.com, which loads quickly, searches easily and lacks popups.

2. No Standings on the Front Page

Standings are the lifeblood of Major League Baseball, even moreso than box scores. There's no reason you shouldn't see a sidebar on the front page with the divisional and Wild Card standings. (The latter is particularly important, yet also neglected by many newspapers, even though (1) it impacts many more teams' playoff chances and (2) the wild card race is often both close and complicated, so the average fan may not have the standings straight in his head). CBSSPortsline even makes room for its "power rankings" on the front page, but no standings.

3. Difficulty Searching for Stats

Again, both baseball-reference.com and some of the rotisserie-themed sites beat the major operators here; on ESPN.com, you have to click through several pages to get to where you can pull up an individual player's stats, whereas BR.com lets you run a name search from the front page. Advantage: Sean Forman.

* * *

Both ESPN and CNNSI have moved in the direction of making the front page look more like a magazine cover, with a big headline and picture. But a webpage should open with the table of contents, not the cover, with lots of links to the information you want. I could go on -- maybe some other day I'll critique the actual stat pages, which each have their pluses and minuses -- but the main point here is that baseball websites simply don't seem to be designed with the people who use them in mind. That's a shame.

Needless to say, this was good to see last night.

Esteban Yan got a hit in his only at bat this season -- lowering his career slugging average by 1500 points. Yan, who had never batted in the minor leagues either, hit a home run in his first major league at bat in 2000. His batting line now reads 1.000/2.500/1.000.

I was at last night’s Met game and witnessed the admirable, yet utterly futile, efforts to pitch to Bonds that the Crank described. Nonetheless, the game was a well-played and satisfying Met win.

A couple of highlights:

- I’ve become convinced that Jose Reyes is the real deal. He’s been playing great of late and has proven to be a quick learner. His hitting, defense and even batting eye have all noticeably improved in a short period in the major leagues. His hustling RBI double provided a much-needed insurance run in the seventh inning which proved to be the difference in the game. If Reyes is really 20 years old, with his talent, he can be a truly great player if he wants to be. And it seems like he does.

- This was not an auspicious performance by Sidney Ponson. The Giants may be a tad nervous about having given so much up to get him.

- Finally, I hadn’t realized until I got home that Shea was graced with the presence of none other than Bill Clinton last night. Apparently, he stopped by both clubhouses before the game and spoke with a number of players, including one possible future politician:

The president went to the players' dining room and chatted with a few Mets, including left-hander Al Leiter, and took pictures with them.

“He is fascinated by politics,'' Clinton said of Leiter. "He asked me a lot of questions. He's certainly competitive and inquisitive. I respect guys that like to ask questions.''

Leiter said he enjoyed the visit from Clinton.

"It was fun,'' Leiter said. "I might not necessarily agree with all of his political views, but that's OK.''

Overheard on tonight's Mets broadcast:

Gary Cohen, 7:55 p.m.: "With a 3-run lead, one out and nobody on base, it looks like Aaron Heilman will pitch to Barry Bonds. It might be the only time we see him pitched to all night."

Bob Murphy, less than ten seconds later: "There it goes!"

I'm still loading the old columns up; for the historically minded, here's my analysis from three years ago yesterday of the Hall of Fame's selection of Bid McPhee (Hall of Fame columns rarely get dated). For more, you can always browse the "Baseball Columns" category, and I'm overdue to add some of the more lasting ones to the sidebar.

Dan Lewis is hawking some amusing T-Shirts and stuff over at his site, including what appears to be Mr. Met with the slogan, "I'd go to the ballpark . . . but it's easier to cry at home".

Brian Gunn over at Redbird Nation is reliving the ups (and downs) of the St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Club over the past 25 years or so; you can catch part one here and part two here. It's a great read.

I'm not ready yet to talk rationally about 1987.

I guess the All-Star Game doesn't count against Eric Gagne's save streak.

I completely agree with the view that the Armando Benitez-Jeff Nelson trade was a boon for the Yankees. In Benitez, the Yankees had picked up a live grenade, but were smart enough to toss it to someone else before it goes off.

However, after listening to one too many Yankee fan gloat about how the trade guaranteed their team a return trip to the World Series, I was quite happy to see Nelson blow today’s game against Seattle.