July 23rd, 2007 → 11:44 am @ Seth Mnookin
The next time you hear someone do a 20-20 hindsight look back on a trade/non-trade, etc., make sure you’re actually figuring in all the relevant details. An example: in ’03, Lester was heading to Texas along with Manny in the aborted A-Rod deal. I’ve brought this up before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again: it’s one of my favorite examples of the need to consider everything that’s actually going on. (This is a corollary to my dislike of people making pronouncements about a long-term deal/trade/non-deal etc. before said term is completed. It’s kind of like making pronouncements about a season before it’s halfway over.) (Er, see below…)
Welcome back, Jon. Don’t let KG steal all your thunder. (Too bad Lester’s last name doesn’t begin with a B…)
Post Categories: David Pinto & trade deadline
July 23rd, 2007 → 11:39 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yup: that’s a lame headline. And it’s not accurate. That’s fine; it’s Monday, and, as you can tell from the absence of recent posts, I’ve been a bit fried. But given my perennial love of the underdog, I need to give shout outs to Julio and CC. Lugo, bless his speedy little heart, has gone from a hitting something approximating .00004 in June to coming in damn near .500 in July. (Seriously, how many of you just knew he was gonna smack that grand salami off Contreras? And how awesome was his man-love hug with Manny when he got back to the dugout?) Coco’s also been lighting it up at the plate; more importantly, he’s still playing some truly awe inspiring defense. (I can’t remember which game it was, but sometime in the early going of a game against the Chi Sox he ran down a long fly that looked like a sure run-scoring double…and as I’ve said before, saving a run is as good as scoring one.)
Post Categories: Street Legal Lyrics
July 23rd, 2007 → 11:33 am @ Seth Mnookin
So: there are 64 games left in the season, the Sox are within a whisker of having the best record in baseball (.602 winning percentage vs the Tigers’ .604), they’re 7.5 games up on the Yankees, they’re fourth in the AL in runs scored, 3rd in OPS, and 2nd in OBP. Their pitching staff has the second best ERA, the second most K’s, and the second best batting average against.
All of that’s good news, and (and yes, this has already become a very tired refrain) if anyone told any of you during spring training this is what the baseball universe would look like with a little more than a week left in July, you’d be ecstatic. If I was a betting man (note: I am a betting man), I’d put good money down on Boston to win the AL East.But since bloggers and sportswriters alike need something with which to occupy their time (and space, whether that be virtual or actual), let’s break down some numbers. Since the beginning of June, the Sox have been a .500 team (on the dot, actually, with a 23-23 record); during that same period, the Yankees have been a .640 team. That’s a good stretch of time; if those numbers were to hold for the remainder of the year, the Yankees, with 93 wins, would win the division by 2 games.
But wait! If you go back and count off 64 games (the number of games actually remaining in the season) and replicated those patterns, you’d end up with the Sox winning the East by…7.5 games, since both teams have put up 36-28 record in that time. And certainly you’d be more likely to expect the Sox to play at something closer to a .600 clip than a .500 clip, right? Because, really, how many good baseball teams play .500 ball for months on end?
How about the ’04 Boston Red Sox? (You had to have seen that coming.) Before running away with the, er, Wild Card in August, the Sox had a three month stretch — May through July — in which they played .500 ball (.506, actually; they were 41-40).
All of this still leaves me without any discernible point. Fear not; I actually have several.
1. It’s patently ridiculous for sportswriters to declare in May (or June, or July) that a race is “over” unless it’s actually, mathematically over. Nevertheless, that’s what lots of people were doing, from the folks over at “Baseball Tonight” to almost every newspaper in the greater New England area. (That tendency is excusable; it takes someone with a true dedication to stupidity to posit the opposite.)
2. The Yankees were never, ever as bad as they looked. They have a scary offense — as shown by the fact that they’re leading the AL in plenty of offensive categories. And their pitching staff is good enough to carry them along: Clemens-Mussina-Pettitte circa 2007 is a far cry from Clemens-Mussina-Pettitte circa 2003, but it’s not awful; throw in Wang and the potentially terrifying Phil Hughes and you’ve got yourself a rotation.
3. Inre #2: It is time once again to praise Joe Torre’s bullpen management. If — and this is an enormous if, obviously — the Bombers do make it to the playoffs, the combo of aging starting pitchers and a bullpen full of dead-arm relievers is going to be a big problem.
All of this, I suspect, will make for a fun couple of months. If I was being forced to guess (note: I do not need to be forced to guess), I say Boston’s division lead will be as low as 4 games and that they’ll ultimately end up winning the East by somewhere between 6 and 8. Oh, and I’d also guess that New York won’t be in the playoffs, A-Rod won’t be in the Bronx come next spring, and Joe Torre will wish he’d retired a year earlier.
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Red Sox & Sports Reporters & Yankees
July 14th, 2007 → 2:09 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Ah, yes, the wonders of 20-20 hindsight. Back in 2000, when A-Rod signed a 10-year, $250 million deal, Rangers owner Tom Hicks was widely derided as a total buffoon for offering that kind of money. He most certainly way; Hicks’ offer was about $100 million more than the next highest one. But with three years remaining on the deal, it looks like $25 million/year is going to be, in the through-the-looking glass world of MLB, a relative bargain. So much of a bargain, in fact, that A-Rod said yesterday that he was refusing the offer to negotiate a contract extension during the season, preferring to take an out-clause in his deal and become a free agent when this season ends.
Those with extra good memories — and close readers of Feeding the Monster, the NYT and Boston Globe bestseller (available now in paperback for only ten bucks — cheap!) will remember that it was exactly this type of out clause that Union Prez Gene Orza ridiculed as being worthless…and it was Orza’s stance (combined with Larry Lucchino’s volatility) that squashed the A-Rod to Boston deal.
I wrote about this same thing back before the season began; that post contained an excerpt from FTM that quoted from “The A-Rod Chronicles,” the book’s relevant chapter. I’ll reprint a paragragh of that here:
“The Red Sox and Rodriguez ended up working out a deal in which Rodriguez would cut approximately $4 million a year off the last seven years of his deal in return for some licensing rights and the ability to declare free agency at different points during the remaining years of his contract. When the two sides presented the deal to Orza, he was dumbfounded. No one had signed a contract for as much as $20 million in years, Orza said. The made the offer of free agency essentially worthless — there was no way Rodriguez would ever sign a more lucrative contract again. (emphasis added) Orza made a counter-proposal he said the union would be able to accept, in which the Red Sox would save a total of about $12 million instead of $28 million. The Red Sox initially rejected Orza’s figure…”
I’m on the record as calling the Players Association “full of crap,” “moronic,” and “power-hungry,” so I don’t think my feelings about Gene Orza and crew are all that opaque. But here is another instance where Orza et al were egregiously wrong; unfortunately, many of the players are so convinced everyone else is out to screw them it’s unlikely anything will ever change…at least for another couple of decades, when retired players start growing tumors out of their eyeballs and guys on the field wonder if the fight against effective drug testing was really worth it.
It’s also interesting that note that had Orza been a bit more prescient about the vagaries of the marketplace, the Sox would, in all likelihood, currently have A-Rod at short and Magglio Ordonez in left. Or, to put it another way, we’d have a guy with 14 HRs, 54 RBIs, and a .992 OPS batting third, a guy with 31 HRs, 87 RBIs, and a 1.083 OPS batting cleanup, and a guy with 13 HRs, 72 RBIs, and a 1.028 OPS hitting fifth. This is, of course, based on a whole mess of assumptions, including the re-signing of Magglio; lots else would have been different as well (Jon Lester, for example, wouldn’t be a member of the Red Sox organization; he was heading to Texas with Manny). But as much as I despise A-Rod — and I do despise A-Rod — that is an absolutely terrifying trio. (Suffice to say that, at least thus far this year, Papi would be the weak link.)
***
I haven’t been posted as much as usual…which means I haven’t been reminded everyone out there about my offer of free signed and personalized bookplates. They’re really nice, and will be the icing on the cake for all of those copies of FTM you buy as gifts for the loved ones and beachgoers in your life. Don’t delay! Act today!
Post Categories: A-Rod & Feeding the Monster Outtakes & Manny Ramirez & Players association & Yankees
July 12th, 2007 → 10:29 am @ Seth Mnookin
Some of you may have noticed that my postings have been a bit, well, nonexistent as of late. I won’t bore you with the vagaries of how I spend my days; suffice to say that I apologize. I’ll try to be better.
One thing I’ve especially wanted to do is provide some sort of midseason report card; if you regularly read the papers’ Sox coverage, it’s the type of thing you’ve been getting a lot of already. This is going to be a bit different; for one thing, I’m not going to evaluate each and every player (along with the manager, coaches, and members of the front office) — instead, I’ll just anoint the first half’s valedictorian. Another difference: it’s not going to be Okajima, or Beckett, or Lowell, or Youkilis, or even everyone’s favorite muppet, Pedroia.
Nope: it’s Coco Crisp, the man Tony Massarotti gave a D+ in his report card. Now, sure, a .322 OBP is not what anyone would want from someone who’s supposed to be a potent offensive weapon, to say nothing a .709 OPS. In fact, none of his offensive stats are anything to write home about (if, that is, we lived in a world in which people still wrote letters). There are signs, however, that he’s turning that around: he’s been on an absolute tear since the middle of June, and since that 3-HR series in Atlanta, he’s been arguably the Sox’s most potent offensive force.
But what’s made Crisp the first half’s MVP is what he’s doing on defense. This is something I’ve been paying attention to since May, when Bill James wrote that the Sox’s surge happened at precisely the same time that Coco became the best center fielder since Micky Mantle. As Bill wrote, “It seems to me that the BIGGEST factor in our team’s performance over the last week or so has been that Coco has been just unbelievable in center field…he’s just catching EVERYTHING that looks like it might be trouble. There’s been no gap in right center, no gap in left center, nothing getting over his head and nothing has been landing in front of him.”
That stretch of defensive excellence didn’t let up, and there’s good reason to hope that Coco’s has discovered something (or made a Robert Johnsonesque deal with the devil) that’s allowed him to go from appearing lost to playing above virtually everyone else in baseball. This has been valuable for any number of reasons: first, and most obviously, because he’s saved a lot of hits. He’s also given the corner outfielders more freedom to cheat out. Finally — and this is crucial — he’s given pitchers the confidence to pitch to contact when need be; they know that if a ball is hit anywhere near to him, he’ll come up with it. My favorite example of this also came in that Atlanta series, when Hudson smoked a sinking line drive to left-center (an inning after Beckett had a shot of his own, incidentally). Coco seemed to materialize out of nowhere to snare the ball. It was a great play, obviously, but what was most telling was the fact that Alex Cora, playing shortstop, held up a congratulatory fist even before Coco had made the catch. That’s a kind of Bird-like confidence (I know the analogy isn’t exact). Afterwards, when Beckett told reporters he constantly had to re-evaluate which of CC’s catches were the most impressive, you got the sense that this is a guy who could be having a Lugo-like season at the plate and he’d still be valuable.
So there you have it. Call me crazy, but I’m handing Coco my 2007 first half MVP award. Congrats, you rascal you.
Post Categories: 2007 Report Cards & 2007 Season & Coco Crisp
June 25th, 2007 → 12:04 am @ Seth Mnookin
This weekend’s games showed why, for the remainder of the season, the Sox should worry about almost anyone before New York. While Francona continued to manage brilliantly down in San Diego — I almost jumped for joy when I saw Beckett go back out for the eighth this afternoon — Joe Torre continued the ritualized abuse he’s been heaping on the Yankee bullpen for years, guaranteeing that, should the Yanks somehow make the playoffs, they’ll have almost no arms to lead them to battle. (I’ve always said that it was Torre, along with Schilling, Ortiz, and Foulke, that played the biggest role in the ’04 ALCS: had he not rode Tom Gordon that year like a cheap whore, Flash might have had an ounce or two of gas left in the tank in the eighth inning of Game 4.) The CW storyline coming out of this weekend will be how, once again, the Yankees’ bullpen failed when the game was on the line. But the CW is wrong. The story here is how Torre’s mismanagement is already crippling New York.
There are so many places to start this discussion, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s Torre’s use of Mariano for five outs on Friday, the second time Genius Joe has pulled that move after swearing up and down in spring training he’d never use Mo for more than one inning. There’s his ass-backwards bullpen management last night, which pretty much guaranteed the Giants would break their eight-game losing streak. And there was tonight’s emergency relief appearance by Clemens (I’m just sure that’s what he signed up for), the first time in 22 years Roger’s come out of the bullpen.
But instead of harping on any of that, let’s just look at some numbers. The first one is IP so far this season; the second what that’s projected to over the full year.
Proctor, 41, 92 (Last year Proctor led all relievers in IP with 102.)
Vizcaino, 37, 81.2 (Pretty much in line with his career averages.)
Farnsworth, 32, 70.2 (Since becomming a reliever in 2000, he’s topped 80 IP only once, in 2001.)
Bruney, 32, 70.2 (His career average is 32.2.)
Myers, 29.2, 65.2 (The last time he topped 50 IPs was in 1998.)
Then there’s the Sox.
Okajima, 36.2, 80.1 (No MLB comps.)
Piniero, 30, 65.2 (He averaged more than 180 IP during his years as a starter.)
Papelbon, 27.1, 59.2 (He was shut down after 68 IP last year.)
I guess Torre figures that now that Dusty Baker’s no longer on the bench, someone needs to wrack up those pitcher abuse points…
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Joe Torre & Yankees
June 24th, 2007 → 11:44 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I know, I know — I’ve been forsaking my duties. And I’m still behind on my work, so I’ll be forsaking some more. But I’ll duck back in for a couple of quick posts, the first of which…is about Murray Chass! Many of you will remember that it was less than two weeks ago when Chass wrote, “At the rate at which the Yankees are slashing into Boston’s lead in the American League East, they will pass the Red Sox in the standings by July 4.” At the time, the Sox led New York by a mere 7.5 games. After today’s Sox win/Yankees loss, the Yankees are back below .500, stuck in third place, and 11.5 games out of first. Oh, and the Sox have the best record in all of baseball. For the Yankees to overtake Boston by Independence Day would truly be miraculous: each team only has 8 games between now and then.
Murray so consistently displays an almost total lack of awareness about the game of baseball — how it’s played, what it means, how to write about it — that it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he remains one of the very few New York Times columnists the paper doesn’t make you pay for reading online. (I will admit that even I was somewhat surprised that the paper didn’t even put him on the front page of its sports homepage.) (Oh, and want a rich combo of delicious irony and total boneheadedness, check out today’s column, in which Chass bitchslaps ESPN for not bringing up steroids during a discussion of whether or not Sammy Sosa would make it to the Hall of Fame. Murray, the man has more than 600 home runs. The only reason they were even having that conversation was because of steroids!)
Post Categories: Murray Chass & Sports Reporters
