September 27th, 2008 → 2:32 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Seriously: try to watch this without spitting up your Cheerios. And I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you’re on. (Be warned: I haven’t lost thus far.)
Post Categories: Election '08 & Sarah Silverman & The Great Schlepp
September 27th, 2008 → 2:30 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The Joker takes on the bailout.
Post Categories: Batman & George W. Bush & The economy & The Joker
September 25th, 2008 → 6:10 pm @ Seth Mnookin
A fascinating new study on steroid use found that…
…even years after steroid withdrawal—and with little or no current strength training—muscle fiber density and increased number of cell nuclei were comparable to drug-free athletes currently doing high-intensity strength-training. The additional cell nuclei could give a big advantage to former dopers—more nuclei means more protein synthesis, which means more muscle. So steroid use can still offer a competitive advantage years later. Which means that a clean ballplayer can still hit a dirty home run.
The implications of this are profound. There’s already very little incentive for an on-the-cusp player not to use: either he goes natural and doesn’t have an MLB career, juices and gets caught and doesn’t have a MLB career, or juices and doesn’t get caught and gets some time in the bigs. Now it looks like a worst case scenario for someone who decides to ‘roid up is getting caught, serving a suspension…and still benefiting for years to come.
Post Categories: Steroids
September 24th, 2008 → 12:58 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Well, folks, it’s official – for the first time since 1994, the Yankees won’t be playing October baseball. Whatever you think about New York, it was an impressive run.
The Sox, meanwhile, will be going to the playoffs for the fifth time in seven years since the Henry-Werner-Lucchino gang took over, a stretch that includes the most exciting baseball playoff series in history and two world championships. (Read all about it in Feeding the Monster, the only all-access to the team’s current management and the ’04-’05 seasons. It’s available at Amazon for only $10.20 – cheap! And, as always, personalized, inscribed copies are still available.)
Plenty will be written about all of the above, of course. What I want to do is take a quick look at accumulated boo boos of the 2008 campaign. Everyone from Hank Steinbrenner to the sad-sack fans I work with have been whining about all the injuries those fragile souls in the Bronx have had to endure, and, to be sure, there’s a long list. But has it been all that much worse than what the Sox have faced?
Let’s go to the numbers.
The Yankees DL list includes, most prominently, Posada, Wang, and Joba, with Posada and Wang missing most of the season. They’ve also had A-Rod, Matsui, Damon, Pettitte, Phil Hughes, and Ian Kennedy on the 15-day list and Brian Bruney out for 60 days. And, of course, there’s Carl Pavano. (Hughes’ and Kennedy’s problems weren’t due to injuries as much as to ineffectiveness.)
The Sox, meanwhile, have had five of their six pre-season projected starters on the DL: Schilling was lost for the year before the season started, Colon was on the 60-day, Daisuke and Buccholz both did 15-day stints, and Beckett has been out of commission twice. (As far as pitching goes, Timlin also did two turns on the DL, but that might have helped the team more than anything else.) Offensively, Lowell has been sidelined twice, Lugo was lost for the season, and Ortiz and Drew both did their time. (Casey – twice – and Cora also got banged up enough to move off the active roster for stretches.) Oh yeah: they also had Manny mope his way out of town.
Is that worse than the Yankees? You could make a case either way; what’s certain is that the Yankees’ haven’t been snake-bitten to an unprecedented, or even all that unusual, degree. Ortiz has been considerably more hindered than A-Rod, and the Lowell-Drew injuries have been more lingering than anything the rest of New York’s offense had to deal with. Wang and Posada are obviously enormous losses, but the Sox’s rotation has had to deal with more injury-related interruptions than the Yankees. And Tek…well, yeah.
So why were the Sox wearing their champagne goggles last night while Girardi had the distinction of being the first Joe not to lead the Yanks to the playoffs in well over a decade? In a word (or three), home grown talent. But that’s a subject for another day.
Post Categories: 2008 Playoffs & 2008 Season & Hank Steinbrenner & Injuries & Red Sox & Yankees
September 16th, 2008 → 11:28 am @ Seth Mnookin
In case you haven’t noticed, the Sox’s most enthusiastic dancer has hit a rough patch the last week or so. (Papelbon himself has noticed–and he’s noticed that Eck and TC have noticed over on NESN as well.) In fact, according to Nick Cafardo’s piece in today’s Globe, hitters have a .414 BAA for Paps since Aug 28, and he’s seen his ERA jump from 1.71 to 2.11.
What else has happened in that time? Papelbon has been used a lot, and used on consecutive days a lot – on Sept. 7, 8, and 9, and then again on the 13th and 14th.
This reminded me of an essay on closer fatigue in The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 that looks at Mariano and his use over the years. There are lots of variables, and Bill, being much smarter than I am, figures out all sorts of ways to parse thousands of games worth of data, but the take-away is essentially this: for the Yankees, the difference between a rested and a tired Mariano has been the difference between a 103 win season and a 93 win season.
Intuitively, this makes sense, and I assumed that if I went back and looked at Pap’s game logs for this year, I’d find data that mirrored what we’ve seen in the past week or so. I was wrong. From April through August, Papelbon pitched on consecutive days 13 times – and didn’t give up an earned run on the second day once. (Interestingly, on the first day of those pairs, he’s given up 4 ERs and 7 runs total, which translates into roughly 41 percent of his total runs and 36 percent of his earned runs in 22 percent of his games. (Keep in mind: This is pre-September stats only.))
Does this mean fatigue doesn’t have anything to do with Pap’s 6.0 September ERA, or his 1.83 WHIP? Well, no, not necessarily. If you dig a little deeper, you find that Papelbon entered September with 58 innings pitched, well over the 47.1 he’d amassed through August 31, 2007. In fact, Papelbon’s total innings last year, playoffs included, was only 69 innings, which is just five innings under where he is now. (In 2006, Pap pitched a total of 68 innings…and was shut down for the season after he gave up 2 hits and a run in a third of an inning on Sept. 1.)
I’ll be curious to see how Papelbon is used for the rest of the year. I, for one, was mildly surprised that he was brought in with 1 out and a man on in a 7-1 game back on Sept. 7, (although it’s true that he hadn’t pitched in six games at that point, and the 2 hits he gave up could have been as indicative of some rust as anything). And I’m obviously in favor of pretty much anything that keeps Mike Timlin out of all games in which the Sox are neither winning nor losing by a minimum of ten runs.
Post Categories: 2008 Season & Bill James & Closer fatigue & Jonathan Papelbon
August 1st, 2008 → 10:40 am @ Seth Mnookin
Some quick thoughts on the biggest trade since…well, since as far back as I can remember. (This dwarfs the Nomar deal of four years ago. Dwarfs, I say!)
* After three straight years of 150+ games a season, Manny topped out at 130 and 133 in ’06 and ’07. In that time, he hit 1 HR per 17.3 ABs and had an RBI every 1.4 games; over 150 games, that comes out to 32 HRs and 107 RBIs. That’s an impressive season. It’s also significantly off what he was doing previous to that in Boston, when he averaged 1 HR per 15.3 ABs and an RBI every 1.15 games, which comes out to 36/130.
* His OPS last year was 120, the lowest since he played 91 games in Cleveland as a 22-year-old rookie. His slugging dipped to below .500 for the first time ever. This year, even at .529, it’s lower than any other season save for last year and his rookie campaign.
* Much of the commentary thus far has been along the lines of, “the Red Sox are a worse team today than they were yesterday. That’s true if you assume Manny’s in the game. As Peter Gammons pointed out recently, he’s shown a tendency to ask for some time off when the Sox are facing particularly tough pitchers: this year he’s sat against Verlander, Duchscherer, King Felix (twice), and Joba (twice). Against those four pitchers he’s 3/20 with 7 Ks and no extra-base hits. (Amazingly, he appears — at least according to ESPN — never to have faced Joba.)
* In 2006, Manny logged 28 DNPs over the last 36 games. At the beginning of that stretch, the Sox were 5.5 out. They finished the year 11 back and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2002. That was the year, incidentally, that Papi broke the Sox’s all-time HR record, finishing the year with 54 round-trippers and 137 RBIs. There are those on the team that feel that Manny’s absence not only cost the Sox a shot at the playoffs but cost Ortiz the MVP award as well. I’m not one of them; I’m just throwing it out there.
Finally, despite the Sox’s valiant efforts to keep clubhouse disputers in the clubhouse, there are two incidents that couldn’t be hidden:
* On June 26, Manny shoved Red Sox traveling secretary Jack McCormick to the ground when McCormick told him he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get him 16 tickets to an Astros game, shouting, “Just do your job.” Let me re-phrase: the 36-year-old Manny Ramirez, a professional athlete who is paid $20 million a year to lift weights and stay in shape, shoved the 64-year-old Jack McCormick, a traveling secretary who is paid to make sure the players make it on the team plane, to the ground.
* On June 5, Manny took a swipe at Youkilis in the team’s dugout…apparently because he didn’t like how seriously Youk took every at-bat.
On the flip side of things:
* If the Sox had been able to keep Manny on the field, they’d have gotten a draft-pick when Manny signed with another team in the offseason, and the Sox have a good track record of taking advantage of those compensation picks. (See: Buccholz, Clay and Martinez, Pedro.)
* Things will not be pretty at Fenway if Jason Bay ends up being an Edgar Renteria.
* Picking up the rest of Manny’s salary, giving up Hansen and Moss, and getting only Bay in return…well, it does seem like a lot. Even if Bay is signed for under $8 for next year.
There you have it. My somewhat random thoughts. Oh, one more:
* It’s going to be an interesting couple of months.
Post Categories: Jason Bay & Manny Ramirez & Trade Deadlines
August 1st, 2008 → 9:38 am @ Seth Mnookin
Have you heard? Yeah – the Red Sox traded Manny. This may appear, at first blush, to be a near total refutation of my previous post, in which I accused Portfolio magazine of being full of crap for saying Manny wouldn’t be suiting up for the Crimson Hose next year.
In fact, it’s not…although I made the mistake of throwing in some opinions in a post that criticized another reporter as passing off an “experts” musings as if they were a reflection of what was going on inside the front office. (The difference here: I made the difference clear.) My beef, as I said, is that “neither I, nor Andrew Zimbalist [heretofore mentioned expert], nor Franz Lidz [author of said article], nor anyone else who isn’t actually in the room has any idea what’s actually going on in the Sox’s front office. To pretend any differently is, well, a load of crap.” It’s something we see again and again in sports reporting — one stray voice in the wilderness being quoted as if it represents a team’s view. We saw that being illustrated again and again (and again) over the last few days: just go back and look at how many reports cited a “senior level executive” or “a source close to the team” as saying a deal would not get done…or a deal with Florida was just awaiting Selig’s sign-off…or that the Sox would holding out for a package with a host of good young players.
Post Categories: Manny Ramirez & Sports Reporters & trade deadline
