November 28th, 2006 → 10:17 am @ Seth Mnookin
Unless Manny is traded before the winter meetings, we can expect several more days of feverish speculation on whether or not the best right-handed hitter of his generation will be playing in Boston next year. Right now, both the local and national media are saying Manny won’t be patrolling left field at Fenway come April; the Globe‘s Gordon Edes reports that while talks with AL teams have cooled off, the Sox are deep in discussion with the Padres, Giants, and Dodgers, while the Herald‘s Michael Silverman says the Angels and the Rangers are still the frontrunners in the Manny sweepstakes.
Regardless of where he ends up, if Manny isn’t batting behind Papi next year, there’s sure to be outcry among the natives. And without knowing anything more than your average schmuck on the street (or at least your average schmuck on the street who spent a year living with the team), color me confused. Back in June, I explained why I thought this year’s anemic free agent market meant it was more likely that Manny would stay in Boston, a sentiment which was later echoed to me by Red Sox execs. And even if Manny is threatening, as he has many times over the past five years, to shut it down, history would seem to indicate the likelihood of that happening being close to nil. Whatever happened last year could make this offseason different, but until I hear otherwise, it’s hard for me to see why you’d jettison a player who now seems like a relative bargain…especially if the offensive replacement has a healthy history of not being healthy. (If some variation of these deals do go down, it’ll be a gutsy move by the Sox: if Manny came back to Boston in ’07 and performed below expectations, the outcry wouldn’t be nearly as severe as if Manny left and smacked the shit out of the ball…especially if nominal replacement J.D. Drew had a tough acclimation period in Boston.)
Post Categories: 2006 Hot Stove Season & J.D. Drew & Manny Ramirez
November 28th, 2006 → 9:46 am @ Seth Mnookin
For all the sturm und drang surrounding this year’s voting, the Hall of Fame has always had its share of ridiculous members. Two players — Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker–were inducted for no other reason than the fact that their names were included in a popular ditty. (Hell, even Murray Chass has been honored by the Hall.)
Still, this year’s voting will be especially interesting. Mark McGwire, who was a lock for a first balloter as recently as two years ago, now looks like he won’t make it in. (I’d bet he gets even less votes than Jim Rice.) This, of course, is because pretty much the entire world assumes McGwire’s transformation from Dave Kingman to Babe Ruth was chemically enhanced.
I certainly understand that school of thought. I also understand other sides to the issue. Put aside the fact that steroids are illegal — reason enough to consider steroids differently from other performance enhancing medical options, but stick with me for the sake of argument. How are steroids different from, say, Lasik eye surgery? Or Tommy John surgery? Don’t you think there are plenty of guys from any previous era that could have had their careers prolonged by a decade or more if they’d had these options available to them? And wouldn’t at least some of these guys have made it into the Hall?
What’s more, if McGwire — who has never tested positive — doesn’t get your hypothetical vote, how do you evaluate other players of what’s already known as the steroid era? Does this affect how you think about guys like Roger Clemens, who’ve been the subject of persistent rumors? Or, for that matter, Barry Bonds?
I’ve thought about this for a while, and have settled on a doctrine articulated to me by the Kansas City Star‘s Joe Posnanski (for my money, perhaps the best baseball columnist in the country). If I had a vote — and there’s absolutely no danger of that ever happening — I’d vote for guys like Clemens, and even Bonds, because they seem like Hall of Fame-caliber players regardless of whether or not they used steroids. (If it were ever established definitively that a player used, said player would not get my vote, because ‘roid use in the absence of medical necessity, unlike Lasik and Tommy John surgery, is illegal.) And I wouldn’t vote for guys like McGwire, who is the very model of a player who would never have even sniffed the Hall were it not for a remarkable mid-career surge that seems, on top of all of the other anecdotal evidence, to be the result of a healthy regimen of PEDs.
It’s an imprecise formula, to be sure. But I’m not sure if I can think of another one that makes any more sense.
Post Categories: Mark McGwire & Steroids
November 27th, 2006 → 11:31 am @ Seth Mnookin
It’s common practice for newspapers to re-report scoops uncovered by their rivals in order to avoid giving credit; this is a bit underhanded but not unexpected. Acknowleding another publication’s work is even rarer when it comes to “trend” articles — can one outlet truly be said to have “uncovered” this or that health fad or religious fad?
That said, it’s worth pointing out that a full six months before the Times became obsessed with the issue, Details put together a not-insignificant package on the whole rich versus superrich thing. Of course, no one in the Times ever reads Details…right?
Post Categories: New York Times
November 27th, 2006 → 11:05 am @ Seth Mnookin
Nope, it wasn’t a one-week phenomenon: after last week’s pair of articles about the plight of the rich as compared to the superrich, the Times is at it again: today’s front page features a story by Louis Uchitelle titled “Very Rich are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind.” Cue the violins:
“The opportunity to become abundantly rich is a recent phenomenon not only in medicine, but in a growing number of other professions and occupations. In each case, the great majority still earn fairly uniform six-figure incomes, usually less than $400,000 a year, government data show. But starting in the 1990s, a significant number began to earn much more, creating a two-tier income stratum within such occupations.
The divide has emerged as people like Dr. Glassman, who is 45, latched onto opportunities within their fields that offered significantly higher incomes. Some lawyers and bankers, for example, collect much larger fees than others in their fields for their work on business deals and cases.”
At least the Times has now acknowledged this is a story they’ll be focused on for some time to come: today’s article has the obligatory box (“Gilded Paychecks: New Paths to a Windfall”) signifying an ongoing series. Any guesses as to what might be next?
Post Categories: New York Times
November 22nd, 2006 → 11:01 am @ Seth Mnookin
There are a handful of the country’s sportswriters who repeatedly demonstrate they are aren’t worth the paper their ballots for baseball’s year-end awards are printed on. (The repulsive and repulsively dishonest George King* of the New York Post is perhaps the best example of rampaging stupidity: in 1999, he left Pedro** off his ballot completely, handing the MVP to Pudge Rodriguez. King lied through his teeth and claimed he didn’t believe pitchers deserved the award despite putting Rick Helling and David Wells on his ballot the year before.)
The 2006 AL MVP Awards, as Keith Law points out in yet another one of his excellent columns (ESPN Insider only), is another example of the travesties that regularly result when a bunch of folks with very little understanding of the game have the power to decide its most prestigious honors. Law points out — correctly — that Morneau wasn’t even the most valuable Twin; Joe Mauer was. (Another reason to like Mauer: he looks enough like me that more than one person joked that I’d somehow snaked my way onto the cover of SI.) I’ll let Law handle the honors: “The reality of baseball is that a great offensive player at an up-the-middle position is substantially more valuable than a slightly better hitter at a corner position. And when that up-the-middle player is one of the best fielders at his position in baseball, there’s absolutely no comparison. Joe Mauer was more valuable than Justin Morneau this past season. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the first thing about baseball.”
Indeed. Derek Jeter*** would likewise have been a better choice. Oh well.
* Late-morning addition: Irony of repulsive ironies: King actually has a column in today’s Post discussing the writers who didn’t put Jeter atop their ballots.
** Take another look at that season. That’s good enough to inspire an entire region’s worth of man crushes.
*** Historical footnote: the only other time Jeter received even a single first-place vote was on King’s 1999 ballot. What a fucking moron.
Post Categories: 2006 MVP Awards & Keith Law & Pedro Martinez & Rampaging morons & Sports Reporters
November 22nd, 2006 → 10:37 am @ Seth Mnookin
Last night, I used a pair of free tickets to the musical version of “High Fidelity.” I feared this would probably be a mistake; it’s rare enough when the movie version of a good book is well done. Two decent spinoffs was a major longshot.
I would have walked out after the first ten minutes — it was truly that bad — but for some reason I got kind of stuck on Justin Brill, who played one of the show’s peripheral characters. It wasn’t until the first act’s last song that it hit me: Brill, with straight hair and a scruffy beard, was a dead ringer for one of my favorite characters from the ’04 Sox: never-nervous Curtis. I love that guy. And in this time of thanks, I’m sure as hell thankful for Leskanic’s 1.1 innings of 1-hit ball to close out Game 4 of the ALCS. Curtis, you deserve that W.
Anyway. I still made it in time to catch most of The Wedding Crashers on HBO.
November 21st, 2006 → 4:48 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Earlier this afternoon, CNN’s Kyra Phillips spoke with comedian Paul Mooney and Chicago Defender editor Roland Martin about Michael “Kramer” Richards’s insane, racist rant and subsequent apology on last night’s Letterman show.
This was one of the very few times I didn’t have a pen and notebook on me — I was at the gym, which is the only reason I was watching CNN in the middle of the afternoon — so I don’t have the exact phrasing here (there should be a transcript posted on CNN’s site soon), but Roland Martin did nothing so much as demonstrate that people can make incredibly stupid comments even when they’re not having a nervous breakdown on stage (or getting pulled over for drunk driving). Apparently riffing off of Richards’s on-stage explosion, which began, “50 years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork in your ass,” Martin said, “50 years ago he would have been in an oven in Germany.”
Impressive — Martin managed to be both as ridiculously offensive and as poorly informed as Richards: the Germans surrendered in May 1945, which is actually more than 60 years ago; what’s more, Richards, according to Paul Mooney (and the Interweb) is not Jewish (or a gay Gypsy). (* – see correction below.) (To be fair to Martin, the hook nose and frizzy hair would confuse anyone.)
This kind of inanity doesn’t appear to be totally new ground for Martin. In February, the paper he edits ran a piece headlined “Farrakhan: Neocons, Zionists making America weak.” According to the story, at a recent public appearance Farrakhan “read from a verse from the Bible that refers to false Jews” as a way of “challenging those who refer to him as anti-Semitic.” The story did not have any opposing viewpoints — no quotes from Jewish leaders, no one pointing out that perhaps it’s not the “neoconservatives and Zionists” who have manipulated Bush “into actions that are bringing about the fall of America.” A few days before that piece ran, Farrakhan was included in the Defender‘s list of African Americans [who] have contributed mightily to American history. Needless to say, none of Farrakhan’s more colorful quotes — say, “The Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust. They thought they could trust in Hitler, and they helped him get the Third Reich on the road” — were included in the blurb highlighting Farrakhan’s achievements.
The rest of the segment wasn’t quite as offensive, but it did bring to mind Jon Stewart’s “stop stop stop hurting America” speech on CNN’s Crossfire. After the guests agreed that Letterman was not the proper forum for Richards to have made his apology, Phillips played the whole segment as if it was set to a laugh track. (Mooney, who didn’t get through a single question without cracking a one-liner, didn’t help matters.) And at the end of the segment, she playfully pointed out that Martin referred to her as “white chocolate”…which prompted Mooney to respond, “Oh, you’re that white black woman?” (Your guess is as good as mine as to what, exactly, that’s supposed to mean.) Richards’s appearance on Letterman was squirmingly uncomfortable — both Letterman and scheduled guest Jerry Seinfeld more or less just let Richards talk, and the audience’s laughing reaction was a pitch-perfect illustration of the discomfort so much of the country feels when discussing race — and Phillips et al did nothing so much as demonstrate why, if Richards had wanted a much gentler forum, he would have been well-served by showing up on Phillips’s show.
* A Defender article on the Richards contretemps reports that Richards’ spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, said that Richards is, indeed, Jewish.
Post Categories: CNN & David Letterman & Kyra Phillips & Louis Farrakhan & Michael Richards & Racism and anti-Semitism & TV News
