April 23rd, 2007 → 12:18 am @ Seth Mnookin
On SportsCenter, Chris Berman just said that outside of Pearl Harbor, more people knew about Hawai’i because of Don Ho than any other single thing.* Then Berman teared up, looked to the sky, and said, “Don, you’re with the me, leather.”
* This part is actually true.
Post Categories: Chris Berman & Don Ho & Leather & You're With Me
April 23rd, 2007 → 12:12 am @ Seth Mnookin
I don’t believe in superstitions…although I do hit my dashboard when I go through yellow lights. And I don’t let myself to be separated by an inanimate object (street sign, tree, etc.) from someone I’m walking with. (Don’t ask — it’s apparently an old Mnookin family tradition that I don’t pretend to understand.) Oh, and during the ’04 playoffs I didn’t take off the t-shirt I was wearing during Game 4, which only became really problematic when I went to the gym.*
So…when I didn’t post after Friday’s game, well, that was it until the series was over (or until the Sox lost). (Also, I’m supposed to be moving — or at least completing the purchase of some New York City real estate — which is fairly hectic.) (Another aside in an already parenthesis-happy post: how is it people decide what they’re going to be superstitious about? I had no problem changing my underwear in ’04. And even though I saw Volver on Friday, I didn’t feel compelled to watch an Almodovar movie every day.)
Anyway. It felt like a damn good weekend.** Friday night was spectacular. Watching Manny punish a ball was a welcome sight. As was Drew, Lowell, and Varitek’s following rockets. As was the fact that the Yankees rotation is in shambles and that Torre’s being forced to abuse his bullpen even earlier than usual.*** As was Coco’s hot bat. As was Tek’s hot bat. As was Pedroia’s snag tonight in the eighth. As was Beckett’s performance, and his first four games (which are fundamentally different from his first starts last year; if you want to get all geeky about it, check this out). As does the emerging brilliance of Hideki “Darkman” Okijima (nickname courtesy of Peter Naboicheck via Gordo. As was…well, you get the idea.
Now everyone get some sleep. We’re going to do it all again next weekend.
* I wasn’t the only person who had some weird superstitions that October: John Henry and Larry Lucchino watched Game 6 in the living room of Lucchino’s Brookline house, and after they took a lead, no one was allowed to move.
** Still, let’s point out one tiny silver lining: the Sox had their three best pitchers and a fully rested bullpen. The Yankees had Andy Pettitte and a couple of Double-A schlubs. (And that’s only a slight exaggeration.) The series was at Fenway. And over three games, Boston outscored New York by a total of…four runs. Not much margin for error there.
*** I attribute the ‘o4 ALCS to four things: David Ortiz, Keith Foulke, Curt Schilling, and Torre’s Dusty Baker-esque abuse of Tom Gordon during the regular season.
Post Categories: Red Sox & Superstitions & Yankees
April 20th, 2007 → 12:11 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I’m not sure if this explains the Michael Lewis “Jock Exchange” piece or means it’s even more frustrating that there’s still so much A’s material in there…but there are rumors (via Gawker via Dealbreaker) that Lewis is making $12 a word(!) for his Portfolio stories. By that count, this post would net me a bit less than $1,500, and I’d have made somewhere north of a million bucks off of this blog. Instead, I’m paying for the server space.* If that figure is anywhere near accurate, one thing’s for sure: he’s a lot smarter than I am about monetizing his labor.
Update: According to any number of people who’re in a position to know, that figure isn’t anywhere remotely close to being accurate. Which makes me feel better. Or at least like less of a chump.**
* After two months, I took down the Google AdSense ads from the sidebar; they netted me a total of $15.79.
** I should know better than to think that anonymously posted comments put up in a blog have even the slightest relationship to reality. Actually, I do know better. Oh well.
Post Categories: Michael Lewis & Portfolio
April 19th, 2007 → 9:44 am @ Seth Mnookin
In the inaugural issue of the mildly confusing Portfolio, Conde Nast’s new business magazine, Michael Lewis has a story about a “Jock Exchange” that would function like much like the stock exchange. As is almost always the case when Lewis references baseball, the piece is heavy with references to the Oakland A’s. And as is increasingly the case, many of these references are out of date and are used to illustrate points that might have been true four or five years ago, but aren’t any longer.
To wit: the A’s are not “by far the most cost efficient team in baseball,” as Lewis says: since 2001, the Florida Marlins have paid approximately $488,000 per win, while the A’s have paid about $525,000 (and the Twins approximately $542,661). Lewis credits this incredible cost efficiency largely to the work of Paul DePodesta, who left the A’s “first to become the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and then the San Diego Padres’ special assistant for baseball operations.” Left unmentioned is the fact that DePodesta was fired after two years as the GM of the Dodgers…having spent more than twice as much as the Marlins, A’s, or Twins on each L.A. win.
Lewis is a great writer, and Moneyball is inarguably one of the best books ever written about baseball. He’d be doing himself a favor if he let it stand for itself and stopped writing pieces that use increasingly outdated research to do current articles.*
* Note: hopefully I will follow this advice.
Post Categories: Baseball & Boston & Literature & Media & Music & the Red Sox
April 19th, 2007 → 9:11 am @ Seth Mnookin
It’s true: Rob Bradford, who’d been toiling in the purgatory of the Eagle-Tribune, has been hired by the Herald. I’ve long been a fan of Rob’s — he’s one of the best guys on the beat, and goes out and reports out new stories with new angles, an especially difficult task in Boston. (This isn’t a slam on anyone else covering the Sox: I’m a big proponent of newspapers dedicating staffers to reporting on sports as opposed to asking the same guy/gal who’s writing up game summaries and doing a Notes column to also come up with enterprise stories. It’s no accident that the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Balco reporting came from the work of two investigative reporters and not the paper’s Giants beat writers.)
This is the second Herald poach of an Eagle-Tribune staffer in the past year: John Tomase, who preceded Bradford as the E-T‘s Sox writer, was hired by the Herald last year to cover the Pats (and pinch hit when needed on baseball). That’s two good guys coming out of the E-T and two great hires by the Herald. For all the talk over the last several years about the Herald‘s tenuous business situation (and it’s purported $2 million a year in operating losses), they’ve an impressive investment in what’s long been the most profitable beat in Boston. (For the papers, that is…not the reporters.)
In other Red Sox-media news, it’s nice to see that Schilling not only agrees with me about Bradford, he also shares my opinion of my favorite punching bag, the ineffable Murray Chass. From a Q&A Schilling posted on his blog yesterday:
“Boston, like any other city, is what the player makes it, period. Every city has it’s CHB* to some degree. That miserable curmudgeon who will be the ‘anti-opinion’ guy because that’s the only niche he can fill. You come to realize that most times that person, or those people, are just bitter unhappy people and it has nothing to do with you in the end. If you allow people like that to skew your perspective on guys like McCadam (sic), Bradford, Browne, Buckley, Maz, then you can miss the boat. … [When] you read weekly sludge from the Murray Chas’ (sic) of the world it gets easy to let it roll off your back. There are going to be bad people with rotten agendas in any workplace, you just laugh and move on.”
I’ve taken a couple of weeks off from reading Chass; I was, frankly, worried about my blood pressure. I’m sure that’ll end soon…
* CHB=Curly Haired Bastard/Curly Haired Boyfriend=a Carl Everett-coined nickname given to Shaughnessy, although Simmons gets credit for the acronym.
Post Categories: Curt Schilling & Murray Chass & Rob Bradford
April 15th, 2007 → 6:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
No, really: he does. At least a little…but not to any of the Sox beat writers; instead, he decided to share (a very little bit of) the Tao of Manny with The New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath* for an article that comes out tomorrow (and is now online).
It’s quite a good piece. It’s long (it’s hard to imagine another magazine that would devote eight pages to Manny) and strikes a nice balance between introducing his Mannyness to the non-baseball world and offering insight to those of you who…well, to those of you who read my blog everyday. Some choice bits:+
* Ortiz calling Manny “a crazy motherfucker” and then practically insisting McGrath put it in the piece.
* The beautiful anecdote about how the teenaged Manny used to wake up every morning at 5:30 and run up a hill behind his high school with a spare tire attached to a rope that was tied around his waist.
* A semi-plausible explanation of why Manny’s uniform pants are so baggy — while in Cleveland, he “borrowed” the pants of 250-pound bullpen catcher Dan Williams one day before a game.
There were some disappointments as well. The Manny portrayed here is a sort of sweet, almost Zen-like figure. There’s some truth to that, to be sure; almost every time I’m asked about Manny, I tell people I’ve never met anyone who seems to simultaneously work so hard and remain so disengaged. But some of Manny’s true…well, insanity doesn’t come out.#
Another part of Manny’s personality I would have liked to have seen explored (or explained) a little more is his seemingly tenuous connection with a world in which reality is not mutable. Even after his annual “trade me/I love it here” episodes, I’ve never thought Manny was a liar; my impression has always been that Manny believes whatever it is he’s saying whenever he’s saying it.
One more complaint: in the one place where I’m mentioned, Feeding the Monster isn’t acknowledged, and there’s an unspoken rule in journalism that if you’re going to use someone else’s reporting, you do the common courtesy of letting the world know where said reporting originally appeared. (In a section that alludes to my description of how Manny, after he was placed on irrevocable waivers, called the Sox ownership “motherfucking white devils,” McGrath writes, “The next spring, according to the writer Seth Mnookin, Ramirez let the Sox ownership know that he felt angry and insulted.” This anecdote, as it’s related in the piece, also leaves what’s arguably the most crucial detail: that Manny’s reps had signed off on the waiver filing because at the time, Manny was desperate to get out of Boston.)
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out one error that somehow made it past The New Yorker‘s much vaunted fact-checkers: Manny is identified as being six feet tall, which is, indeed, how he’s officially listed. This is definitively false. And yes, I have proof. I’m about 5-11.5…and Manny, as you can see, is shorter than I am.
McGrath doesn’t quite get to the bottom of Ramirez; the Sox employee who pulled me aside and pleaded that I discover what was actually going on in his head is likely to remain as frustrated as ever. That’s not to say this isn’t a wonderful piece, and likely the best one we’ll get about the best right-handed hitter of the last twenty years.^
* Note: Ben^^ is somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance. He’s also the son of Chip McGrath, who reviewed my book for the Times. Us Red Sox fans: we travel in packs.
+ My prediction: the Boston media is going to seize on the following quote: “You know where I want to go? I want to go to China. I want to go and see–it’s a city that I don’t know how to say. It’s the Prohibit City? I saw it on the History Channel. They do a lot of tours over there.” This will serve as one more piece of evidence used to prove that Manny is a moron. That is profoundly unfair, and it goes a long way towards explaining why there are those players who say Boston is an exceptionally tough city in which to play.
# This might be a bit unmerited; after all, I didn’t include these stories — and I’m sure they’re stories Ben heard as well — in my book, and I imagine we both left them out because we couldn’t get anything close to on-the-record confirmation. That said, in his Times review, Ben’s dad criticized FTM for not including nearly enough “porn — intimate, Boutonesque details about the players’ off-diamond lives and antics,” and, you know, the whole sons bear the sins of their fathers thing…`
^ Albert Pujols has a ways to go before he supplants Manny.
^^ Ben’s demonstrated the extent to which us journalists can use our jobs to satisfy our obsessions: this is his third Sox-related piece for the New Yorker, following one on Bill James and one on Tim Wakefield (although purportedly about the knuckleball).
` Chip McGrath also said I larded my book with copious footnotes. Some habits die hard.
Post Categories: Ben McGrath & Ramirez & The New Yorker
April 15th, 2007 → 10:26 am @ Seth Mnookin
Over the last four games, the Sox’s non-Japanese starters have posted a 3-0 record to go along with a .082 ERA. Dice-K? He’s 0-1 with a 3.86. How”d we end up this guy? Geesh.
Post Categories: Baseball & Boston & Literature & Media & Music & the Red Sox
