August 25th, 2006 → 12:44 am @ Seth Mnookin
Thump thump: Ortiz isn’t gonna be the only one at Mass General when the entire region starts holding its breath.
Post Categories: David Ortiz
August 24th, 2006 → 11:41 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I prefer erring on the side of allowing more opinions to be heard as opposed to fewer, but I’m increasingly going to need to edit — and by edit I mean delete — some of the comments. Personal attacks directed at me are fine (until they become redundant); personal attacks directed at others — players, managers, members of the front office, reporters, columnists, old babysitters — are not. I welcome any constructive criticism, but I’m going to need to keep a cap on unmitigated insults. So, for example, “I find myself increasingly frustrated by Mike Timlin’s proclivity to allowing inherited runners to score and I think the Red Sox should consider using someone else as a set-up man” is a-okay; “Mike Timlin is a puss-sucking prick and the mere sight of his face makes me want to puke” is not.
If you post a comment and it doesn’t show up, don’t take it personally; there’s lot of stuff of my own that I end up deleting. If there’s something I find particularly upsetting, I’ll let you know; if you have a question about why a particular comment got edited, let me know. Some guaranteed ways to hear from me: race baiting (or racism), homophobia, sexism, making fun of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. For any of these things, I’ll warn you once; after that, you’re off the board. Except for making fun of Genesis: there won’t be any warnings for that.
Post Categories: Comments & Counting Out Time & Oblique References to Eminem Lyrics
August 24th, 2006 → 4:03 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Buster Olney, in his daily blog on what’s going on around baseball: “Dan Shaughnessy is embracing the Red Sox plan of ‘Don’t Win Now,’ he writes.”
Huh. That’s not what I got out of this column, headlined “Some advice: Don’t look now.” To wit: “If you can’t see what’s happening here, it is your own fault. The Red Sox, like the Patriots, are simply smarter than every other organization. They have vision while the rest of the baseball world wears bifocals. And they rely on a flock of fans who are willing to pay $12 just to walk into an empty ballpark and look at the ancient poles. Let’s face it: 2004 bought a lot of patience and solidified Epstein as a hardball genius. These are days of Camelot at olde Fenway and there’s nothing that Edgar Renteria, Matt Clement, Coco Crisp, Rudy Seanez, Julian Tavarez, or Josh Beckett can do to change that.”
But maybe I’m just a cynic.
(EDIT: I’m deleting all comments that are personal attacks; see above.)
Post Categories: Buster Olney & Dan Shaughnessy
August 24th, 2006 → 3:24 pm @ Seth Mnookin
With about 78 percent of the season’s games done and gone, Big Papi is leading the majors with 45 home runs and 119 RBIs. That puts him on pace for a not shabby 58/153.
But will he end up there? What if Manny’s not in the lineup protecting him? What if his ED acts up? What if he strains a groin muscle legging out a triple? For all your intrepid future predictors out there, here’s your chance to guess where Papi’ll be on the morning of October 2. And just like on “The Price Is Right” (except for the dishwashers and Bob Barker), the person who’s closest without going over will get a signed, personalized copy of Feeding the Monster, shipping and handling included. (Or, if you’d rather read about the Times, a personalized, autographed copy of Hard News.) For simplicity’s sake, home runs and RBIs will count equally, so someone who’s off by 2 home runs and 3 RBIs will be counted the same as someone who’s off by 5 RBIs. Post your predictions in the comments section of this post by Sunday at noon, EST. One entry per person, etc etc etc. And no more arguing about Sean McAdam.
(If you post your guess and it doesn’t get posted right away, that’s only because I’m not sitting at my computer all the time. Appearances to the contrary. Don’t worry — it’ll go up.)
12:30 pm Sunday update: Well, that’s it for entries — we’ve got 52, and I’ll set the crack FTM Blog number crunching team (read: me) to work on this as soon as the season’s over. In the meantime, I hope all of you have the book already. It’ll only make the winning copy that much more rewarding. Or something.
Post Categories: Contests & David Ortiz
August 24th, 2006 → 10:53 am @ Seth Mnookin
My post yesterday was divided into three main parts. Here’s a Cliff Notes summary.
Part 1:
* Manny Ramirez was freakishly good in the Yankees series
* He’s among most unsung superstars in the game
* Last weekend, Manny really was like Superman
Part 2:
* According to a Sean McAdam article, Manny had to be convinced to play Saturday’s game because he didn’t get credit for a single
* For years, Manny’s hamstrings have been what’s been cited whenever he’s needed personal days
Part 3:
* Sportswriting is unique in that it’s the only place where writers fill the roles of columnists, investigative reporters, and critics
* Omniscient sourcing is used in the sports section far more than it is in other sections of the paper
* McAdam’s column may very well have been the result of this type of situation
* Because of the fact that he reported — accurately, I assume — what happened, he gets boatloads of hatred directed at him
Here are some of the reactions I got to said post:
* I was taking cheap shots at Manny
* Nobody cares when Manny takes a day off
* I am a dork
* I am carrying water for Dan Shaughnessy
* This is a non-story because Manny is on pace to play 150 games this year
* Manny really is hurt and I’m a dick for saying that he’s not
* Sportswriters are patronizing
* Fans don’t want to know this kind of crap
* I’m a misogynist, my imaginary wife hates sex, and I don’t want to hear about Cynthia’s twins
* This is making a mountain out of a molehill
* I am attacking Manny’s approach at the plate
* I am a pissant.
***
Before people get all upset again, take a deep breath look at what’s actually going on (and what I actually wrote). Sean McAdam did not write a column ripping Manny for making up hamstring injuries. His column, titled “Sox lose game, and perspective,” described “the way the team seems to be unraveling from the inside.” His main example was the situation with Manny and the phantom single. Another example was David Wells throwing up his hands in disgust when Javy Lopez pulled a Rich Gedman, circa Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. And a third example was when, in the middle of a game, one player loudly questioned why a teammate hadn’t been given an error. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a clubhouse in need of a group hug.
Finally, McAdam wrote, “It’s not much of a leap to think that Ramirez’s early exit from yesterday’s game — he pulled himself out of the lineup after the fourth inning, telling trainers he was suffering cramps in the right hamstring — was connected to the events of the previous two days.
“One player yesterday noted that while Ramirez had played hard for much of the season, the events of the last few days seemed to hint at an upcoming ‘episode’ involving Ramirez, in which the slugger takes a decidedly indifferent approach to his play — if he appears in the lineup at all.”
That’s a player, not McAdam. If, in the middle of an epic swoon, there’s a player calling out Manny, I want to know about it.
(A quick note: McAdam is not one of the Red Sox beat writers I was friends, or even particularly friendly, with. He was always perfectly polite, but I don’t think the two of us have ever had a non-professional (or even a non-recorded) conversation. There are plenty of beat writers I am friendly with, and plenty I’m still in touch with. McAdam isn’t one of them.)
***
I’m not sure how many times, or in how many ways, I can say that I think Manny Ramirez is a great player. I don’t know how I can be more emphatic about the fact that Manny was one of the rare bright spots in a depressingly feeble weekend.
I also don’t know how anyone finds it hard to believe that when, after the double-header loss on Friday, there were those teammates, coaches, and front office employees who found it frustrating that time had to spent on Saturday coaxing Manny into uniform because of a non-single the night before. This is frustrating — not for me, but for the team — regardless of whether Manny had gone 8-for-8 with 6 home runs and 2 triples the night before. This is frustrating regardless of whether Coco Crisp stranded 58 runners in scoring position and whether or not Javy Lopez can catch balls that don’t land directly in his mitt. Again, this isn’t frustrating to me: I was enjoying watching Manny put on another hitting clinic. This is frustrating to teammates.
One of the comments on my post reads, in part, “[McAdam’s] duty to the public is to report the facts of what happened: the team (ASIDE from Manny) collapsed.” Does that mean it’s reporters’ duty to the public to report the facts of what happened so long as what happened doesn’t include anything bad about anyone the public really, really likes? (I’m not talking about Dan Shaughnessy’s column, which I haven’t read, and I’m not talking about conjecture concerning what is or isn’t going on with Manny’s hammies. I’m talking about what actually did happen on Saturday, and I’m talking about actual reactions from actual teammates.) Because that’s not reporting; that’s propaganda. And it’s hypocritical: when Jeter and A-Rod are squabbling because of some on-field (or clubhouse tiff), or when Sheffield starts pissing about how the Yankees haven’t picked up his option year, Red Sox fans (and I’m generalizing here) want to read and hear about that. Dare I say, if the New York media didn’t report that, they’d be pilloried for papering over the reality of the situation.
Manny Ramirez was upset that he didn’t get credit for a single. People on the team were upset he was upset. Sean McAdam told us that. And now he’s the one who’s a jerk. If I was a psychologist, I might wonder if this was a case of displaced anxiety. With so much time and emotion and energy invested in the Red Sox, it’s too painful to direct our anger and frustration at the team itself. But this guy? (Or these guys?) Not so hard. In a way, that’s exactly what Bob Ryan was saying: “Blame must be affixed. Heads must be severed. Once upon a time, losing brought a brief period of sorrow. Now it brings rage. The rest of the season, I fear, will not be much fun.” The Red Sox got swept in a five game series? Well goddamn, that reminds me how much I hate Sean McAdam — who didn’t come with 100 miles of blaming Manny for the losses — and the rest of those snivelling sports columnists.
***
Two more quick points. For those who think the Boston sports media is relentlessly negative, open your eyes. If A-Rod (or Jeter, or Mussina, or Randy Johnson) had asked out of Saturday’s game, it would have been back page news on the tabs for days on end.
And: a lot of the comments were along the lines of “no one cares about this crap.” But in the 22 hours after a post went up praising Bob Ryan’s column for its clear-eyed perspective, 11 comments were posted; in the 14 hours after yesterday’s post went up, 24 comments were posted. And more than 550 more readers read “Manny and his hammies” than read my post on Ryan’s column.
Finally, speaking of comments, another reminder: when you’ve made your point, there’s no need to repeat yourself. Let’s keep the level of invective to a minimum; it brings down the Socratic level of discourse. OK? Great. I’ll see you all soon.
Post Categories: Bob Ryan & Losing streaks & Oblique references to Ice-T lyrics & Sean McAdam
August 23rd, 2006 → 11:50 am @ Seth Mnookin
Imagine you’re married to a smoking hot chick. (I say chick only because, judging from the comments and names of people who’ve registered on the site, it seems as if most of the blog’s readers are men. But for the ladies in the house, imagine you’re married to a smoking hot hunk, and substitute in as you wish.) She’s a hellcat in the sack. I mean mind-bendingly, jaw-droppingly good, the kind of sex that leaves you weak-kneed for a day or two afterwards. She also likes football, baseball, and the Three Stooges. She’s funny. She’s smart. She’s interesting. She’s exciting. In the history of wifedom, it’s hard to imagine more than a handful of women who’d ever be able to compete. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her drawbacks: she refuses — flat out refuses — to visit your parents. She hates your friends. And she stubbornly chews with her mouth open. But you can deal with all of this. You happily deal with all of this.
The one thing that’s harder to deal with is those times, once or twice a year, when she up and disappears. Literally just checks out. Oftentimes, these moments come when you need her most: your boss just tore you a new one, or your dog just died, or you’re going in to get that weird lump checked out…and suddenly, she’s gone. Usually she’s back in a couple of days, but sometimes it’s a week. Or longer. The weird thing is, these moments often come immediately after she’s once again blown you away with how amazing she is. She’ll insist on staying at the game in the middle of a thunderstorm, or will surprise you with a pre-paid trip to Vegas…and then, bam, she’s gone. No matter how amazing things were a couple of days (or hours) earlier, that hurts. It hurts bad. And it’s almost impossible to understand.
Ladies and gentlemen, you’re the Boston Red Sox. And that smoking hot wife is Manny Ramirez.
***
Buried amidst all the carnage of the Boston Massacre, 2006 edition, is how freakishly good Manny has been as of late. During the five games against the Yankees, Manny had 20 plate appearances. He reached base 19 times. Think about that: in five games over four days, Manny made exactly one out. (It’s likely true that, as ESPN’s David Schoenfield argued last week, Manny is among the most unsung superstars in the game, although that’s due more to his silence than anything else.) He had two four-baggers. He had seven RBIs. The pitching might have come up short. The bullpen might have leaked runs like a flimsy piñata. David Ortiz might have had a frustratingly human series. But Manny? Manny really was (as the Fenway PA system reminded us on July 31, 2005) like Superman.
Except all was not right in Manny-world. Friday night, a couple of hours after the first gut punch of a loss and a couple of hours before the second one, Manny hit a sharp ball into the hole. It glanced off Derek Jeter’s glove, and he was given an error. Manny certainly didn’t need the single to improve his average (.329, 4th in the AL), his OBP (.445, 1st in the AL), his SLG (.625, 2nd in the AL), or his OPS (1.080, second (by .008) in the AL). Lord knows he wasn’t looking for that elusive base hit that’d help him snap out of a slump.
But to repeat what’s already become a hackneyed phrase, Manny, being Manny, threw a hissy fit. According to teammates (or according to people in the clubhouse who attributed this to teammates) and club officials, Manny had to be talked into suiting up on Saturday. On Sunday, according to several people privy to the situation, Manny tried to convince an MLB official to give him a hit on the play. And on Monday, according to everyone who was watching the game, Manny, because of his suddenly tightening hamstrings, didn’t play after the fourth inning. He also didn’t start last night’s game (although he did pinch-hit for Dustin Pedroia to lead off the top of ninth with the Sox down a run).
For years, Manny has had tight hamstrings. Manny’s also incredibly limber; the next time you go to a game, watch him warm up. And for years, Manny’s hammies have been the excuse cited by the team whenever Manny’s needed to take a couple of personal days. This is infuriating, regardless of what Manny did in the previous four innings or the previous four days or the previous four days or the previous 12 years. Yesterday, Terry Francona told the media, “He’s just sore. So rather than turn this into a week, try to let him get worked on and get him back as quick as possible.” Was he talking about Manny’s hamstrings? Or his head? Or a bit of both?
***
Sportswriting is a unique beast. It’s the only type of journalism in which someone’s called on to be a critic, an investigative reporter, and a gossip columnist…all at the same time. (Can you imagine if movie critics were also asked to report on the business side of Hollywood? How do you a pan a movie when the next day you need the exec who greenlighted the project to tell you about an upcoming merger?) It’s also the last place reporters and columnists regular elide from one role to the other (you’re not about to see Maureen Dowd writing news stories from Crawford), and just about the last place omniscient sourcing is permitted. If you can’t think of the last time you read a sentence that began, “According to teammates who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of clubhouse interactions,” that’s because you’ve never read a sentence that began that way.
I’ve never covered football, basketball, or hockey, but I have covered politics, business, and crime, and baseball is the only arena I know of in which everyone — from the players to the agents to the coaches to the managers to the front offices — is fully expected to lie. After he signed with the Yankees, Alan Embree never copped to telling the Red Sox he was going to sign with a team on the West Coast before ending up playing for the Yankees, the Red Sox never called him out, and Embree’s agent kept saying how disappointed Embree was about the whole thing. A lot of the time, reporters aren’t privy to these types of prevarications. Sometimes, however, they are, and sometimes people — the front office, players, etc — tells reporters something but tells them they can’t attribute it to anyone, even anonymously. And since there’s the absence of those “requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature” clauses, viola: omniscient sourcing.
This, I assume, was the case with Sean McAdam’s column in yesterday’s Providence Journal. “Think about that,” McAdam wrote. In the middle of the Sox’ three most dispiriting losses of the season, suffered at the hands of the team’s archrival, Ramirez sulked about losing credit for a meaningless single that didn’t even involve an RBI. …
[W]ith his team’s season in the balance, Ramirez intended to sit out to protest a scorer’s call? Would Jeter do that? Would David Ortiz? Would, in fact, any other player in the game?”
For anyone who saw Ortiz making a mad dash for second, sausage-link legs akimbo and arms furiously pumping, in the botttom of the ninth on Sunday knows the answer to that question. (Ortiz’s hit, a sharp shot down the first base line, was flubbed by Jason Giambi. Unlike Jeter’s play with Manny, Giambi wasn’t charged with an error, and Ortiz was given credit for a double.) McAdam, one of the most respected (and one of the best) Red Sox writers, doesn’t cite his sources. That’s not, I’m sure, because he doesn’t have them; I was able to independently confirm the basic facts with a couple of phone calls from my apartment in Manhattan. But sportswriters aren’t supposed to use the pedantic sourcing found on the front page. And because of that, sources expect they won’t be linked to a story…even as a generic “teammate” or “club official.” Still, in many quarters, fans were outraged at McAdam for writing his column instead of at Manny for up and disappearing at another crucial moment.
***
Thirty-eight years ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren told Sports Illustrated the order in which he read the newspaper: “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people’s accomplishments; the front page nothing but man’s failures.” New Englanders, with their near-religious devotion to the Sox, expect the sports section to record people’s accomplishments more than most places. New Yorker’s don’t explode in outrage when players are caught acting like morons (or horny teenagers). Bostonians do…but this outrage is directed at the messengers, not the message. I understand that, and I’m sure McAdam does, too. But it doesn’t change the reality of the situation.
Post Categories: Manny Ramirez & Media reporting & Sean McAdam & Sports Reporters
August 23rd, 2006 → 9:19 am @ Seth Mnookin
“When Robert Rubin left Goldman Sachs 14 years ago and came here to join the Clinton administration, he brought a couple of big ideas with him. …
“The idea was simply that uncertainty was an inevitable part of life and only the foolish imagined they could eliminate it. To make the best possible decisions, bond traders and policy makers alike had to weigh every relevant piece of information, estimate the risks that something unexpected would happen and then make a judgment based on the odds, aware all the while that success could not be guaranteed. They had to understand that a good decision could produce a bad outcome. That is what uncertainty meant, and recognizing it maximized the chances that they would succeed next time.
“‘Unfortunately, Washington — the political process and the media — judges decisions based solely on outcomes, not on the quality of the decision making,’ Mr. Rubin wrote, with his co-author Jacob Weisberg, in his 2003 memoir, In an Uncertain World.”
–“This Fed Chief May Yet Get a Honeymoon,” David Leonhardt, The New York Times, August 23, 2006
Post Categories: Red Sox front office & Robert Rubin
