April 15th, 2007 → 10:21 am @ Seth Mnookin
A number of people have been writing in asking about the possibility of an approved “white list” — perhaps not the best term when we’re celebrating Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, but there you go — whereby previously approved readers can post comments without waiting for them to be cleared by me. So let’s try something along those lines. As of right now, commenters must have signed on with a screen name, as has always been the case; they’ll also need to have a previously approved comment. Beyond that, they won’t be held for moderation. New users will have their comments posted as well; they’ll just need to wait for me to clear them for takeoff.With this comes a new, stricter disciplinary measures: posters will no longer be warned the first time they test positive — from here on out, if you post something that gets dinged because it’s hateful, or racist, or sexist, or gratuitously offensive, or whatever, that’s it: you’re gone. For good. Or: Imus wouldn’t have had a week to flail around like a beached whale before getting canned if his only job had been posting on my blog. (Of course, nobody would have cared if he’d only been posting on my blog.)
Got it? Good. Any questions, etc., can be posted in the comments section below…
Post Categories: Comments
April 14th, 2007 → 6:27 pm @ Seth Mnookin
It’s the 10th game of the season, which means the Sox have played approximately 6 percent of the 2007 games…and Wily Modesta Pena (or, as Joe Castiglione once called him, Wilfredo Modesto Pena) has started exactly zero games and racked up a grand total of four plate appearances. This puts him on pace for about 65 plate appearances over the course of the entire season, which is approximately how many Julio Lugo will have by the end of this week’s Toronto series.*
What gives? Pena was so highly considered by the Sox that they acquired him by trading Bronson Arroyo, a dependable workhorse who had just signed a three-year deal for considerably below market value. In an injury-shortened 2006 season, he showed flashes of the raw talent and awesome power that made him so desirable in the first place: in the first two weeks of August, he had five home runs and 10 RBIs. (It was at that time that I argued that Pena’s potential was as good an argument as any for jettisoning Trot Nixon; at the time, I didn’t realizing the Sox had $14 million a year to play around with.)
I’ve always been a fan of WMP’s, if only because when he’s at bat, there’s always a chance that someone in the Monster seats is gonna get his head ripped off by a line drive. (As Bill James once said to me, sometimes the fact that a player is fun to watch is enough of a reason to want him on your team.) But even if I didn’t like him, I’d be confused by what’s going on. There have been several obvious places where he could — and should — have gotten a start; today’s afternoon start, coming after yesterday’s night game, is one of them. (It’s not as if the team’s outfielders are tearing it up: Manny and Coco have a combined .156 batting average to go along with their six RBIs. Make that seven: Manny just drove in Eric Hinske, another one of the team’s MIA players. And J.D. Drew, the best offensive player on the team thus far, could always use a day off to keep him healthy.) If, for whatever reason, the Sox have lost faith and/or interest in WMP, they’re not helping his stock on the trade market by keeping him on the bench. And if they still think he could develop into a valuable player, they’re not helping his confidence (or his mood) by not letting him play.
Role players almost always play a crucial role on good teams. Wily Mo isn’t a selfish prick in the Jay Payton mold, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who’d be happy seeing so little action. If he isn’t in the starting lineup in the next week — which features both Monday’s 10 am start and the Wednesday-Thursday night-day combo — I’m going to need to assume he was caught doing something very bad with some very important person’s wife.
* As it turns out, Francona told the press before today’s game that Wily Mo would likely get a start in the next couple of days…which would put him on pace for a whopping total of 14 starts all year.
Post Categories: Wily Mo Pena
April 12th, 2007 → 4:30 pm @ Seth Mnookin
No, I haven’t fallen into a stupor after last night’s King Felix-Dice K match up; I spent the day on the Acela, heading back home (yes, to New York). Also, the brilliant Will Leitch, the man behind Deadspin, asked me to do a write up for him. And anyone who’s ever seen Will knows he’s a hard man to turn down.
So without further ado, here it is. Read all about the flash-bulby brilliance of April 11th, why Manny’s pathetic “on slugging percentage” means he should be jettisoned, and why Felix Hernandez will end the season with an ERA+ of infinity.
Post Categories: Daisuke Matsuzaka & Deadspin & Felix Hernandez
April 11th, 2007 → 11:07 am @ Seth Mnookin
Those of you steeped in the minutiae of baseball should appreciate the extent to which an obsessive can drill down when dissecting his subject of choice. For folks who’s bete noire (or object of affection) is the media and the New York Times, there’s no amount of detail that could ever seem trivial. (Trust me: I know.) That’s why a columnist in Los Angeles is writing about the bad review the Times gave to a play written by one of its former staffers.
The reason I’m writing about a column about a bad review of an Off-Broadway play is because, well, the media habit can be a hard one to break. (I want credit for avoiding all “Brokeback Mountain” puns.) So without further ado, I’ll unpack this whole thing…and then point out who patently absurd it all is.
* Bernie Weinraub, the former staff in question, was, for years, married to a movie executive at the same time that he was covering Hollywood.
* As he acknowledged in a grimace-inducing story he wrote upon his retirement, Weinraub not only saw nothing wrong with this, he thought it small minded of those who would dare raise questions about the propriety of a reporter living with one of the top people in an industry he’s reporting on.
* When Weinraub’s play came out, the Times farmed the review out to a freelancer to avoid any conflict of interest.
* The freelancer didn’t like the play.
* Now Weinraub is complaining and Nicki Finke, who says right off the bat that she’s “one of Weinraub’s closest friends,” is giving those complaints some legitimacy. Weinraub seems to think the Times is unhappy because his play criticizes the the paper’s Holocaust coverage. (There are plenty of lifers at the paper…but there’s nobody there who was patrolling the newsroom in the forties.)
My reaction? Man, Bernie Weinraub is a whiner. (Given his history, there’s some irony that he’s the one calling the Times “unprofessional.”) There’s no way in hell the Times could have given the play to one of their own writers. And once they decided to assign it elsewhere — to David Ng, the Village Voice‘s theater critic — they couldn’t very well have demanded the outside reviewer soft-pedal his opinion; that would have been a clear sign of meddling.
As befits this whole mess, Finke’s column doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. “I am not suggesting any sort of conspiracy theory,” she writes, “[e]ven though I happen to know that Weinraub and [Times theater editor] Lyman, who took over the Hollywood correspondent beat from Bernie, never got along and didn’t like each other.” She goes on: “I am also not maligning the choice of Village Voice theater reviewer David Ng for the assignment nor impugning his integrity as a reviewer,” although she does feel obliged to point out that “this does appear to have been not just his first theater review for The Paper Of Record but his first piece on anything for the NYT since I could not find his byline there either in Nexis or the NYT‘s own online archives.” So what’s Finke’s beef? Unclear: “What I am doing is simply drawing attention to what I consider to be a gross unfairness.”
I’ve drawn the shit end of this particular stick in the past: in 2004, when the Times reviewed Hard News, my book about the paper’s full-scale meltdown, Slate‘s Timothy Noah has tapped to do the honors. He wasn’t impressed. It was virtually the only bad review I got: the Washington Post named Hard News one of the best books of the year; the Los Angeles Times compared it to a Greek tragedy, and EW gave it an A-. Unfortunately, the Post, LA Times, and EW don’t carry as much weight as the Sunday Book Review does. If anyone had cause to suspect the Times was deliberately sabotaging his work, it would have been me — Arthur Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher and CEO, told me to my face he wished the book hadn’t been written. But there wasn’t a conspiracy going on; there was just a writer who didn’t care for my book. That’s life. And it’s a lesson Weinraub could certainly stand to learn.
Post Categories: Bernie Weinraub & Hard News & New York Times & Nicki Finke
April 11th, 2007 → 9:54 am @ Seth Mnookin
I was as impressed with Josh Beckett’s performance yesterday as anyway was. In fact, I was probably more impressed than people who were watching the game from the heated comfort of their own homes, because every eight-pitch, up-and-down inning he turned in seemed like a particular blessing to someone freezing his ass off in a wooden seat built for a guy who tops out at 140 lbs. But let’s wait a bit before we christen the Sox’s rotation as one likely to harken back to the glory days of the Orioles (for those of you younger fans out there, yes, the Orioles did have glory days) and post multiple 20-game winners. Beckett’s two starts this year have been against the Royals and a Mariners staff that’s been building snowmen for the past week. And he’s turned in precious few starts like this since moving north last year; indeed, as Jackie MacMullan inadvertently points out in her column today, Beckett’s moments of brilliance have come against less than prodigious lineups: there was last July’s four-hitter against the Royals, last September’s the-year’s-already-over six-hitter against the Twins, and yesterday’s game. I’m pretty certain Manny isn’t going to end the year with no home runs and a .280 slugging percentage. I’m also unconvinced that we’ve seen Beckett turn the page. Let’s see how he pitches when he gets in trouble, when he needs to rely on his off-speed stuff instead of having being able to play around with whatever he wants due to the freedom that comes with a 46-run lead.
Post Categories: 2007 Home Opener & Josh Beckett
April 11th, 2007 → 9:38 am @ Seth Mnookin
As far as pomp and circumstance go…well, it was no 2005, when somehow I found myself on the field during the Red Sox ring ceremony. (At one point, Larry Lucchino glanced over at me and gave me a “what the hell are you doing out here?” look. I had no good answer.) In fact, I’m sympathetic to those fans who seemed to feel that the ’67 squad got short shrift during the pre-game, on-field ceremony. (And yeah, I thought Yaz, the Hawk, et al., could have gotten individual shout-outs as they ambled onto the field.) But really, how can anyone complain when Robert Goulet — I’m sorry, Lawrence’s own Robert Goulet — is on the field, warbling “The Impossible Dream”? (A quick aside: as inspiring as 1967 was, and I’m fully in the camp that believes that that squad is more responsible for the region’s enduring Red Sox mania than anything else, has any team had a lamer anthem then the a hit song from the Broadway smash “Man of La Mancha”? “Welcome to the Jungle” it’s not.) Goulet’s a professionally trained voice man, and I’d much rather see him out there than a dubious ruffian without the chops…because when a professional gets his mitts on a song, that’s when it really takes off.
The one thing I regretted was that we didn’t get to hear Goulet croon, “I like it when you call me Big Papi — throw your hands in the air when you think you’re a player…Papi.” For that, you’ll need to pick up your copy of “The Coconut Banger’s Ball.” It’s well worth it.
Post Categories: Baseball & Boston & Literature & Media & Music & the Red Sox
April 11th, 2007 → 9:21 am @ Seth Mnookin
“I’d never do anything like that. There are fucking kids in the stands.”
— Brendan Donnelly, when asked if he’d made an obscene gesture at Jose Guillen after striking him out in the eighth.
Post Categories: 2007 Home Opener & Brendan Donnelly
