August 15th, 2006 → 10:33 am @ Seth Mnookin
I know — or I hope I know, anyway — that the Josh Beckett we’ve seen over the last few weeks isn’t the Josh Beckett we’re going to see for the next few years. As I said about a week ago, it looks to me like Beckett needs to work on his maturity (and his need to prove he’s more of a man than the hitters he’s facing) more than anything else. This is a guy with too much talent to implode. And we’d do well to remember how young he is, almost exactly the same age as rookie Jonathan Papelbon. (As a quick aside, please, please don’t start posting comments about how Papelbon would be as good a starter as he is a closer. History is littered with failed starters who became dominant closers. Papelbon might become a very effective starter; his performance this year doesn’t guarantee it.) But as Gordon Edes wrote in today’s Globe, Beckett’s thrown up some really awful numbers: a 5.74 ERA post All-Star break, a 12.00 ERA in his seven losses. That looks like the numbers of someone who isn’t good at getting out of jams.
Some other quick notes from last night: Demarlo Hale made a mistake when he sent Manny home in the eighth. But it wasn’t a flat-out stupid move: the Sox were four runs behind in the eighth, facing a pitcher regularly breaking 100 mph (Wily Mo said the pitch he struck out on was the fastest fastball he’s ever seen), and Tigers center fielder was throwing to third when Hale waved Manny home. It was only an Alex Gonzalez-like play by shortstop Carlos Guillen that got the out. Was it disappointing? Sure. Was it a move worthy of complaints about Hale’s ability or articles dissecting all the criticism? Nope. Hale’s done a great job. He took a risk and it didn’t work out. Let’s move on.
Finally — and I know this is risking a flurry of hate mail — let’s look at what happened last night to the Mets ace. After starting the year with an inflamed big toe and spending two weeks on the DL with an inflamed right hip, Pedro Martinez left last night’s game after a disastrous first inning with a strained right calf. Once again, I’ll remind people that the Red Sox had offered Pedro a three-year contract worth $40 million. Once again, I’ll remind people that the reason the Sox didn’t offer Pedro four years (besides the fact that Pedro never gave the team the chance to match the 11th hour offer by the Mets) was concerns about his durability. And once again, I’ll remind people that Pedro’s track record against NL teams has been markedly different from his performance versus the AL East. I’ve gotten tons of hate mail — more repulsive, hair-tingling, inane vitriol — about the fact that the Sox didn’t keep Pedro and I’ve dared point out why that might have made sense. I’ve gotten more nasty letters directed at Larry Lucchino, Theo Epstein, and the team’s baseball operations crew about this issue than any other. Those letters are confusing emotion with reality. We all miss Pedro. On some level, all baseball fans have a deeply romantic streak; on some level, we all wish our heroes would always stay young and would always retire with the team. And in reality, especially during this era of exploding free-agent salaries, it doesn’t always make sense to do this.
Post Categories: Josh Beckett & Pedro Martinez
August 14th, 2006 → 12:43 am @ Seth Mnookin
In 1993, Lou Gorman chose Christopher Trotman Nixon, an 18-year-old left handed hitter, with the Red Sox’s first round pick (and seventh overall). Nixon signed with the team that same summer; this August marks his 13th year with the organization. For the last eight years, he’s been the team’s regular right fielder. When Trot went down with a strained right bicep on July 30, most of Red Sox Nation groaned: the last thing the team needed was an injury to one of its catalysts. Instead of Wily Mo Pena backing up Nixon, now the team would have Gabe Kapler backing up Wily Mo…and how could that be a good thing?
It’s true that, in an abstract world, having Gabe Kapler third on the depth chart instead of second would be nice. The problem is that we don’t live in an abstract world. And as Wily Mo has shown over the past week, there are a lot of good reasons he should be the regular right fielder even when Nixon comes back. This month, Pena has 5 home runs and 10 RBIs. (Manny has 3 homers and 9 RBIS, Papi has 4 and 5.) Even after a horrendous start to August — before Saturday’s game, Pena’s batting average for the month was .205 — his August OPS (.894) was higher than Trot’s for the season (.822). Look at the season as a whole and it’s not even close: WMP’s slugging percentage is more than 100 points higher than Nixon’s (.549 to .426), his OPS not much less than that (.917 to .822).
As I wrote in Feeding the Monster, last year Kevin Millar demonstrated the extent to which players can hold a team hostage. Even while vying for the position as the worst everyday player in the American League, Millar made it clear that he’d piss and moan if Francona sat him. Towards the end of the year, when he was finally platooning at first, Millar anonymously badmouthed Curt Schilling in the press. Later, he made up inane t-shirts that read “Fuck Everyone”; somehow, that slogan didn’t catch on the way “Cowboy Up” did. (The back of the shirts read, “2005 Sox: All We Have Is Each Other,” which only made sense if by “have” Millar meant “have knives in each other’s backs.”)
Nixon is much too classy (and talented) a guy to pull that kind of crap. And he deserves a lot of respect. He’s a loyal player, he works hard, and he’s put up some impressive numbers in his career. From 2001 to 2003, he averaged 26 home runs a year; in 2003, he pushed his average above .300 and had an OPS of .975, good for fourth in the league. (He trailed only Manny, A-Rod, and Carlos Delgado.) As good as that is, there’s a decent chance Wily Mo could top it. He’s only 24-years old. His power is awe-inspiring; as Alex Speier pointed out in last week’s Union Leader, Pena can launch balls even when he gets his bat sawed off. In the past two weeks, he’s hit four home runs of more than 430 feet, and one more that nearly decapitated a fan sitting on the Green Monster. (Thanks to gator92 for the hit-chart link.) Unlike Manny, who gets his incredible power from his nearly perfect balance, Wily Mo’s power is oftentimes in spite of his balance. If he ever developed a stroke like Manny’s, he’d be able to hit balls into the Citgo sign.
Still, the most likely scenario upon Trot’s return is that he’ll be back as the Sox’s regular right fielder, with Wily Mo getting the lion’s share of starts when there’s a lefty on the mound. Trot’s a veteran and he’s in the walk year of his contract. He’s also the original Dirt Dog: the pine tar on the helmet, getting thrown out of games while on the disabled list, etc.
That would be a shame, and not just because WMP has a .705 slugging percentage against righties. The future is now, and his name is Wilfredo Modesto Pena.*#
***
One more note to the WMP saga. The baseball season is a long one. Playoff spots are won over months, not weeks, and trades (and signings) should be evaluated over years, not months. When Bronson Arroyo began the season on a tear — both on the mound and at the plate — and the Red Sox’s pitching imploded, there was plenty of moaning about what a mistake the Red Sox’s front office had made. (One half-season even convinced some writers who had been in favor of the trade when it was made to come down against it. And yes, I’m looking at you, Shaughnessy.) Let’s examine this again when the season’s over. And then again when next season’s over. And then again when the 2008 season is over, because it’s only at that point that Pena will be eligible for free agency.
* Before I get a bunch of emails and comments about small sample sizes and how a couple of good weeks can make someone like Todd Walker look like Babe Ruth, let’s remember that Pena has been heralded for his power for as long as he’s been in baseball. The knock on him has been that he has bad plate discipline, and he does still strike out a lot. But he’s clearly been learning, and the fact that David Ortiz has taken him under his wing can only be a good thing.
# Pena’s full name actually appears to be Wily Modesto Pena, but Joe Castiglione called him Wilfredo Modesto on Saturday, and that’s too good not to use.
Post Categories: Trot Nixon & Wily Mo Pena
August 12th, 2006 → 12:55 pm @ Seth Mnookin
One of the things I was most surprised by last year was the hatred directed towards David Wells. Fans didn’t like him. Reporters weren’t overly fond of him. Casual acquaintances asked me why the Sox had bothered to sign him up at all.
I’ve always kind of liked Wells. I’m naturally predisposed towards people who speak their minds, and Wells’s apparent inability to keep his mouth shut was refreshing in a world in which most everyone is trained not to offend. Watching ESPN in the clubhouse before a game one day, he blurted out, apropos of nothing, “Can you imagine what my record would be like if all these guys weren’t on steroids? That’s one good thing about being so fat: no one’ll ever suspect me.” When Manny had his mid-season melt-down, most of his teammates tossed off platitudes about what a good teammate he was and how his trade demands were never a distraction. Wells wasn’t quite so politic. “The guy’s messing with my cake,” Wells said last July 30. “I don’t care what’s going on. This team needs him. … It’s selfish for him not to step up. Listen, we’ve got a couple of guys hurt.” On the last night of last year’s August visit to Kansas City, I asked Wells about the intensity of the fans in Boston. He didn’t give a rote speech about how nice it was to play in front of passionate fans; instead, he said publicly what a lot of the players had grumbled about privately. “[The fans] don’t care [about privacy]. That’s why I don’t go out. You can’t enjoy a drink with a friend or a meal with your family because they’re such huge fans. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when the game’s over, you’ve got to let us breathe. I mean, look at Manny. He’s got a hard time. And David Ortiz, Johnny Damon, guys very seldon go out because they know what they’re up against and they don’t want the hassle. There’s really nowhere to hide.”
I’ve also liked Wells because he’s a true physical marvel. Roger Clemens works his ass off to stay in shape; Julio Franco eats 20 egg whites as the first of his five or six meals a day. Wells? He eats like crap, drinks a lot, throws a beautifully nasty curve, has remarkable control…and may or may not have thrown a perfect game while half-drunk. He’s a physical marvel like Hunter Thompson was a physical marvel.
For Wells fans, last night was a good night. In May, the hulking lefty suffered an incredible bout of bad luck when he was nailed in the right knee in his first game back from an injury…to his right knee. Since then, he’s been uncharacteristically quiet: no calls for Bud Selig’s resignation, no disses of his teammates, none of his outbreaks of verbal diarhhea. As a result, he’d almost slipped under the radar (to the extent that any Red Sox player who weights 250 lbs can slip under the radar in Boston). After a so-so outing from Josh Beckett, a shaky one from Jon Lester, a blown save from Jonathan Papelbon, and a late-inning meltdown by Curt Schilling, it was Wells, the balding, ornery, overweight ex-Yankee, who, for one day at least, was the savior. The stopper, even.
Grateful Dead fans used to affectionately refer to Jerry Garcia as the Fat Man. If the Sox are going to make a successful push to October, Wells will be one of the keys, and I hope the Fat Man keeps tearing off those nasty curves, keeps putting up those phenomenal K/BB numbers, and keeps spouting off. It’s just David being David. And it’s exactly what we need.
Post Categories: David Wells & Oblique references to Grateful Dead lyrics
August 10th, 2006 → 11:16 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Tonight, I gave a talk in Coral Gables, Florida. Being down here has reminded me why I wasn’t all that upset to leave Florida when I headed back north in 2000: the oppresive heat, the horrendous traffic, the oppresive heat. Still, the Coral Gables event was lovely: lots of Sox fans, lots of good questions, lots of people wanting to know why the Red Sox had traded Pedro and Johnny.
On my ride back to my hotel, I started to compose an entry in my head, most likely titled “The Stopper.” I’d point out how, in 2004, Curt Schilling was 12-3 after a Red Sox loss, and how this year he was 5-2 thus far…and I was only thus far-ing it because I was totally confident he would pull it out.
A little after 10, I came into my room. Since the game wasn’t on TV (you’d think with all that PPV-porn available you’d think they’d find a way to let us overpay for the privledge of watching a baseball game), I resigneed myself to watching the MLB game cast: the one where you see a message that says “ball in play” for about 15 or 20 seconds before you find out what actually happened. It was the bottom of the eighth. The Red Sox were leading, 4-2. Schilling was under 100 pitches. Wily Mo had smacked a three-run homer. All was right in the world.
And then there was a ball hit into play. And then there was a ball hit into play, except this one was a run scoring play. Then there was another run scoring play. And then another. And then I wanted to cry.
Remember how yesterday I was all, ‘Look on the bright side, think about the future, blah blah blah blah blah.’ Well, forget it. Go back to the ledge. The sky is falling. Life sucks. I want Bobby Abreu. I mean, it’s the goddamn Royals. I would have been happy if the Red Sox had won one game against the goddamn Royals. I would have been happy if the Red Sox had merely gone 2-4 against a pair of last place teams. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Tomorrow? I get to head to the airport at 5 am so I can sit in row 27 for a flight back to New York. Right now that seems like more fun than what I had to watch unfold on my computer screen tonight.
(Note: I reserve the right to go back to being rational and sanctimoniously tell everyone how they should just chill. If you don’t like it, start your own blog.)
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Readings & Losing streaks
August 10th, 2006 → 8:58 am @ Seth Mnookin
The Red Sox have lost four games in a row, two to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and two to the Kansas City Royals. Those teams have a combined record of 87-141; their combined payrolls are $83 million, compared to $120 million for the Red Sox. This is pathetic. Despicable. Unacceptable. Right?
Wrong. Here’s why.
***
Theo Epstein’s resignation last October was — and usually is — portrayed as a result of a personality clash with team president and CEO Larry Lucchino. As I detail in Feeding the Monster, personal animosity had something to do with what happened, but just as important was Epstein’s frustration with the PR approach of the team. Epstein — and Lucchino and John Henry and Tom Werner and everyone associated with the team — is thankful that the Red Sox are successful enough financially to allow them to compete with the Yankees even though Boston’s payroll is only about 63 percent of New York’s. (In percentage terms, this is roughly equal to the Tigers’ payroll in relation to the Yankees’. In pure dollars, the difference between New York’s and Boston’s payrolls is more or less the same as the difference between the Red Sox’s and the Royals’ or the Pirates’.)
I’m sure some folks will say that that’s exactly the point: the Tigers, with an $82 million payroll, have 11 more wins than the Red Sox, as well as the best record in baseball. But 2006 will be the Tigers’ first winning record in well over a decade; twice in the past five years, Detroit has lost more 100 games. If that happened in Boston, there’d be riots in the streets.
Epstein and the Sox’s baseball operations crew have focused, over the last several years, on developing the team’s minor league talent. That’s meant not only holding on to prospects but teaching developing players how to deal with success and failure, how to handle the media, and how to develop (and maintain) good working habits. “We’re going to need a lot of patience,” Epstein told a meeting of the team’s senior staff last October, “because there’s going to be a lot of failure. It could get rough.” Epstein warned about telling fans the Red Sox were an “uber-team.” “Sooner or later we might need to take half a step backward in return for a step forward. … What if we win 85 games [in 2006]? We’re bringing up some young players that are going to be better in ’07 than they will be next year. And they’ll probably be even better than that in ’08.”
Right now, the Red Sox have three players — Curt Schilling, Manny Ramirez, and Jason Varitek — whose combined salaries ($41 million) is greater than the payrolls of the Colorado Rockies, the the Devil Rays, and the Florida Marlins. That kind of spending power is both a blessing and a curse. Players that get huge contracts — the Jeters, the Randy Johnsons, the Pudge Rodriguezs and Barry Bonds and Miguel Tejadas — are players who have reached free agency (and therefore have six years of MLB experience), and demand long-term contracts. It’s rare for players to break into the majors before they’re 22; it’s therefore safe to assume that most players who reach free agency are at least 28…which is more or less the age, historically, at which players reach their peak. That means that those same free agents will likely see a decline in their performances at the exact moment they seem an exponential increase in their salaries.
The entire Red Sox organization thinks (and hopes) that by using the money the team does have judiciously to pay for high-priced free agents and also developing its own talent, the Sox should be one of those rare teams that can compete for the playoffs year after year after year, and not just once a decade, like the Tigers. But that won’t always happen. Some years, a team with a lot of older players will also have a lot of injuries. Some years, the young players will have growing pains. Some years, the free agents who pushed the team to success one year (like Keith Foulke in 2004) will be salary drains another year (like Keith Foulke in 2005 and 2006). And some years, fans need to be patient enough (and smart enough) to realize this.
A few weeks back, at a game in Fenway, I sat next to someone who spent most of the game griping about how much the Sox sucked. He was jabbering on to anyone who would listen: Fuck this, screw that, this team is awful, the front office is stupid, I’m a better pitcher than Matt Clement. When Jason Varitek tried to lay down a sacrifice bunt in a late-inning situation, this guy starts telling all his buddies how that move demonstrates how stupid Terry Francona is. “See, if he’s going to have Jason Varitek bunt, he should just send in Willie Harris.” His friend was impressed: “I don’t even know who Willie Harris is.” “He’s our best bunter,” the guy said. “And he’s fast.” He also was playing for Pawtucket that day. He also isn’t a catcher, and the Sox would still need someone to receive pitches. (And no, it wouldn’t have been a good move to put in Doug Mirabelli.) Losing is painful. Part of the reason rooting for the Red Sox can be so wonderful is because our emotional connection to the team is incredibly strong. But let’s not become knee-jerk naysayers.
These last few weeks have been frustrating. Without David Ortiz (or without their 16-2 record in interleague play), it’s frightening to think where the Sox would be right now. While it’s possible the Sox will sack up, come back, and rip off a string of wins reminiscent of their late-August, early-September run in 2004, it doesn’t seem hugely likely: there are a lot of injuries, a lot of older players, and a lot of pitching woes. Red Sox fans have been cited as the most passionate fans in baseball; it’s a good time to show we can be the smartest ones as well.
***
I watched a couple of innings of last night’s game from a sports bar in Delray Beach, Florida. It made for grim viewing: even though the Red Sox were leading, the team looked dispirited, exhausted, and overwhelmed. It’s hard to imagine that Javy Lopez ever knew how to catch a baseball; last night, he seemingly was unable to get to any ball more than a couple of inches out of the strike zone. Even Gabe Kapler, a player Terry Francona loves for his hustle and attitude, looked miserable after he got caught in a rundown.
Last year’s August series with the Royals was pretty brutal, too: Schilling got shelled in his return to the rotation, and the Sox lost 2 out of 3. And plenty of good teams go through miserable stretches: the Yankees, remember, started last year 11-19. Let’s hope that, whatever happens this postseason, the Sox can get back to making games fun to watch. That, at least, is not too much to ask.
Post Categories: Fans & Losing streaks & Preparing for the future
August 10th, 2006 → 7:45 am @ Seth Mnookin
There’s nothing to put baseball into perspective like a trans-Atlantic terrorist plot designed to cause “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”
Post Categories: Fans & Losing streaks & Preparing for the future
August 9th, 2006 → 8:46 am @ Seth Mnookin
That’s right — I’m feeling pretty petulant right now: It’s less fun talking about the Sox all the time when the Sox are sucking. (I will note that in Ortiz’s last two at bats, when the Sox were losing, he went 1-for-1 with a homer and a walk.) So it’s down to Florida for me, because what could better than readings in Palm Beach County and Miami in the middle of August?
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Readings
