April 10th, 2007 → 10:27 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Actually, we don’t. (Obviously, I’m not talking about today’s game. That was decided by the end of the first inning.) The interminable FTM 2007 pre-season contest, which already seems to have gone on forever, is threatening to intermin some more: after a three-way tie and a three-way goose egg, we now have a two-way tie, with sonomasox and maranara each pulling in 1 (one) point, out of a total of 15, with sonoma getting Coco’s three put-outs correct and maranara correctly tagging Beckett with a sole earned run. It’s time to put an end to the madness. You both get a book. I hope you’re happy — I’m paying for these things* (and the shipping costs) myself. So email me your real names, mailing addresses, and your inscription of choice and I’ll get these out in the mail already…
* They’re only $17.16 on Amazon. (Cheap!) Free bookplates still available. (Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Contests
April 10th, 2007 → 9:48 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yesterday, the Globe ran an article in which David Ortiz stood up for Sammy Sosa, his fellow Dominican slugger. Buried in the piece was this quote:
“It doesn’t matter what people say. People say [Roger] Clemens used steroids, people say Mark McGwire used steroids. People say a whole bunch of players used steroids, but nobody can prove that, you know what I’m saying?”
What’s notable (to me, anyway), is how few people actually asking whether Clemens’s remarkable endurance (some would say resurgence) is due to some kind of PED. After all, it’s not like there’s any shortage of red flags. Clemens is arguably one of two players — the second being Barry Bonds* — whose Hall of Fame career was (is) capped (being capped) by his most dominant years coming after the age of 35. Clemens has had four seasons in which his ERA+ has been more than 195…and two of those came in 2005 and 2006, when he was 42 and 43 years old. And the only other time in which Clemens put up three years in a row with ERA+ of more than 145 — as he’s done in the last three years — were from 1990 to 1992, when he was still in his twenties.
Over the last year, more people have started to question Clemens’s remarkable run, but even after the mini-imbroglio involving Clemens and the Grimsley affidavit, the vast majority of folks — fans, sportswriters, and team executives, and MLB officials — prefer to stick with their see-no-evil approach and hope the Rocket keeps on bringing fans to the ballpark. Look, I hope he’s not using as much as the next guy. But I wish more people found it fit to find out the truth.
* And for all those fun side-by-side photo comparisons of Barry from his days with the Pirates and now, doesn’t Roger’s body (and head) look a lot different from the days when he was pitching for the Sox?
Post Categories: Roger Clemens & Steroids
April 10th, 2007 → 9:19 am @ Seth Mnookin
“Weeks ago, when his parents booked their trip to Texas this past weekend, they made plans to leave on Sunday. They figured their son would be making his first big-league start (emphasis added) in either the fourth or fifth game of the season. So they weren’t in the stands Sunday night, when Papelbon came out of the bullpen and was so overpowering in squashing a Rangers rally that starter Curt Schilling was moved to say: ‘You can’t understand how unbelievable that is. Until you’re on the mound, you can’t understand that there are very few guys in the history of the game who can do that, much less right now.'”
— “Welcome News: Many, Including Papelbon, Happy He’s Back Closing”
The Boston Globe
April 10, 2007
Granted, there was a lot going on that day, but I’m willing to bet that the Papelbon’s parents actually remember that his first big-league start came on July 31, 2005, against the Minnesota Twins. You remember that game: it was the trade deadline. Manny didn’t start. Then, in the eighth, he came in to pinch hit — his presence in the batters box heralded with the theme to “Superman” — with the score tied at three and hit an RBI single up the middle. It was the beginning of the Manny being Manny era. After the game, Paps told the Fenway press corps he had gotten goosebumps when Manny rose off the bunch: “I think, to be honest with you, I bet you everybody on the bench did.” Kinda like how everyone must have felt on Sunday…when Papelbon came out of the bullpen. No Superman music this time, although it wouldn’t have been inappropriate.
Post Categories: Boston Globe & Jonathan Papelbon & Manny Ramirez
April 9th, 2007 → 9:24 am @ Seth Mnookin
Last fall, I was asked to review New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey‘s “Baseball,” a ponderous overview of America’s pastime. For various reasons — reasons, I was assured, that had to do with nothing so much as timing and space and certainly not with the diamond-like quality of the piece — said review never ran. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t see the light of day, and the beginning of the season seems as good a time to trot it out as any. I know this isn’t going to win me any more fans in the Times‘s sports department (or in the sportswriting fraternity more generally), but I’ve rarely been able to resist torpedoing my career when given the option. So without further ado…
“Baseball”
By George Vecsey
252 Pages. The Modern Library. $21.95.
In 1888, Walt Whitman, the archetypal American poet, christened baseball the archetypal American game. “[It’s] America’s game, has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere,” Whitman said. “[It] belongs as much to our institutions…as our constitutions, laws, is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”
Whitman was the progenitor of what became a grand literary tradition, one that celebrated the ineffable majesty of a sport that’s frequently labeled, along with jazz and Ken Burns documentaries, one of country’s rare indigenous art forms. For more than a century, writers—from Ernest Hemingway to Don DeLillo—have waxed rhapsodic about the old ballgame, using the sport’s romanticized history as a vehicle for evoking everything from lost innocence to our society’s democratic ideals.
This young century has not yet produced one of those bittersweet masterpieces destined to take up space on the bookshelf next to Roger Kahn’s “Boys of Summer” or Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game.” George Vecsey’s “Baseball”—the latest addition to the Modern Library’s Chronicles series, in which “the world’s great historians” hold forth, usually in 150 pages or less, on “the world’s great subjects”—is packaged to suggest it belongs on said bookshelf. The front flap describes Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times, as “one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game”; the cover is a sepia-tinged, heavily-shadowed shot of Yankee Stadium taken during the 1961 World Series.
“Baseball” is more of a frustrating jumble than a masterful history. For such a slight book, Vecsey makes a remarkable number of mistakes. The American League and National League did not “coalesce into a stable enterprise of eight teams apiece” in 1903; that occurred in 1901. When the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $125,000, it didn’t seem “like a pittance even at the time”; it was the most money ever paid for a baseball player. Vecsey even flubs episodes from his own past. Describing his role in the birth of the specious Curse of the Bambino, Vecsey writes, “When the Red Sox took a lead in the 1986 World Series, I…wrote a column in the New York Times (‘The Curse of Babe Ruth’) anticipating the horrors that might befall the Sox in the sixth game.” In fact, the first column Vecsey wrote invoking Ruth occurred after the Red Sox lost Game Six, and that piece was titled “Why the Mets Are Still Alive.”
Even absent these errors (and there are many more), “Baseball” is an odd hodgepodge of a book, filled with awkward non-sequiturs (Jessica Lynch makes a cameo in a discussion of Abner Doubleday) and bizarre claims. Shortly after writing that “[n]o American has ever carried the weight of racial progress, plus his own career, as publicly as Jackie Robinson did,” Vecsey posits that “[t]he only possible way to explain” a three-and-a-half decade stretch of N.L. dominance in the All-Star Game is that “the National League was Jackie Robinson’s league.” Say what? Even Robinson’s most fervent partisans wouldn’t claim the relative talent level of the All-Stars in baseball’s two leagues was still affected by Robinson more than a decade after his death.
Just as disappointing for readers looking for an actual overview of the sport is the fact that Vecsey seems to have stopped enjoying baseball sometime between the end of World War II and the beginning of Vietnam. Stan Musial, who retired in 1963, and Enos Slaughter, who played his last game in 1959, are invoked repeatedly. More recent superstars, from Johnny Bench and Mike Schmidt to Greg Maddux and Manny Ramirez, don’t even garner a single mention. Of the ten most recent Hall of Fame inductees, only two get any recognition: Paul Molitor is used as an illustration of how the designated hitter rule kept “older, slower stars” in the game and Dave Winfield serves as an example of George Steinbrenner’s free-spending ways. When Vecsey does make reference to more recent events, he sounds a bit like Montgomery Burns, the aged misanthrope from “The Simpsons.” Today’s broadcasters are labeled “Silly Boys” (twice, in fact), and “commercial-laden ‘message boards'” rarely “bother to give [out-of-town] scores.” Baseball even had “better nicknames back” in the days of “Babe” Ruth (whose actual nickname was the Sultan of Swat). Call me a philistine, but I think Donnie Baseball, the Rocket, and the Big Hurt all sound pretty cool.
The best baseball books use the game’s romanticized, storied past as a lens through which to understand its present and look ahead to its future. “Baseball” uses that past as a vehicle for alternately ignoring and griping about the present. That’s both annoying and perplexing: last year*, a record 75 million tickets were sold for major league games, and the per-game average attendance of just over 31,000 set a new record as well. Presumably it’s just these folks—fans willing to spend upwards of $200 for the privilege of watching athletes with bad nicknames play in front of commercial-laden message boards—who make up the book’s natural audience. They’d have more fun spending that $20 on a couple of overpriced ballpark hotdogs.
* The “last year” being referred to here is the 2005 season. So don’t go sending me letters about how those attendance figures are wrong.
Post Categories: Baseball & Book reviews & George Vecsey
April 6th, 2007 → 11:09 am @ Seth Mnookin
SUNDAY NIGHT EDIT: Well, guess what…you all third-place losers lose again. So much for everyone choosing the obvious candidate. So here’s a contest where it’ll be truly difficult to pull off another menage: sonomasox, unforgiven, and maranara, you each need to guess:
* Beckett’s pitching line on Tuesday: IP, H, BB, K, R, ER and total pitches.
* Lugo’s batting line: AB, H, BB, SAC, HBP.
* Coco’s fielding line: put outs, assists, and errors.
That’s fifteen total categories. Each’ll be worth a point. Let’s get this damn thing over already…
The results of the FTM 2007 pre-season contest are in, and the winners are…still up in the air!
Sort of, anyway: sox5452 and richsim tied for first place, with 9 points apiece, but at the moment, we have a three-way tie for third place, with sonomasox, unforgiven, and maranara all clocking in with 8 points. Which means we’re going to a sudden death shootout.
Here are the terms: now I’m looking for the first home run from the heart of the order — Manuel, Papi, and JDD — so the three of you post the following in the comments section for everyone to see:
* Who’ll go yard first,
* What game that’ll be in,
* What inning, and
* How many men on base.
Each guess will be worth one point; obviously, if only one of you gets the player right, s/he’ll win. To keep things exciting (and fair), I won’t post either entry until I have both of them.
Meanwhile, sox5452 and richsim, both of you e-mail me with your names, addresses, and anything special you want me to write in the inscription. Nothing x-rated, though. Or too x-rated, anyway.
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Contests
April 5th, 2007 → 4:58 pm @ Seth Mnookin
When my baseball game-watching career is over, I have no doubt that being present when Pedro returned to Boston in a Mets uniform will be one of the highlights (along with that ’99 one hitter at Yankee Stadium. Oh, and the final 8 games of the 2004 season). But as crazy as Fenway was those nights last June — and as crazy as Opening Day in ’05 was — I have a feeling Dice-K’s first start in Red Sox home whites is going to be full-scale, batshit insane.
Again, let’s remember: today’s game was only against the Royals. And, as we all know from Monday, it’s only one game. But, yeah, 7 IPs, 10Ks, 1BB, and a knee-buckling curve that starts off batters with a called strike…I can live with that. (It’s almost, dare I say it…Pedro-esque.) Shoot, even Mr. Covelli L. Crisp got into the action. Nice RBI, Coco!
Post Categories: Daisuke Matsuzaka & Pedro Martinez
April 5th, 2007 → 11:08 am @ Seth Mnookin
I gots to run, and there’s been several full days of baseball to mull over with nary a peep out of me. There have been some nice developments: last night Beckett didn’t seem afraid to throw his curve, and while KC probably isn’t the best indicator of what the season’s going to be like, on a night when Mike Lowell seemingly wasn’t able to hold onto the ball, it was nice to see the rest of the Hanley Ramirez trade bait step up to the plate, as it were. Tek finally got a hit (although I’m increasingly less confident we’ll see a lot of those this year…to say nothing of ’08). J.D. “Don’t call me Nancy” Drew is stroking the ball. And Youkilis is showing he’s ready to take Manny’s mantle as the premier slugger in the game.
But the real thing to wonder/worry/think about right now is Curt Schilling. Yes, it was only one start — one Schilling himself acknowledges was a sucky one (or, as Gordo puts it, dismal). But it was also exactly the type of start you’d expect Schilling to excel in — Opening Day (lifetime 3-1 record), pitching for a team that just went all-out to acquire the most heralded new pitcher in all of baseball. So what do we have here? A 40-year-old fastball pitcher who’s trying to learn a change-up and has said publicly that he wants to pitch to contact more (which he sure did on Monday).
The best piece I’ve read on this subject is Tony Mazz’s column in Tuesday’s Herald. Tony doesn’t recommend anyone line up, lemming like, at the nearest bridge, but he does make some excellent points. Such as:
* The only reason a potential Hall of Famer who has lived for upwards of 20 years off of his fastball decides to learn a new offspeed pitch is because he’s worried said fastball doesn’t have the zip it once did, and…
* “The truth? This really is not about one game, particularly in a 162-game season that undoubtedly will feature a succession of peaks and valleys. This is about Schilling wanting to pitch another season, about the Red Sox’ reluctance to give him a contract extension, about Schilling now being 2-5 with a 5.34 ERA in his last 10 starts dating back to last season.”
This will be an interesting story to follow. I’d never doubt Schilling — he’s shown time and time again that’s a loser’s bet. But right now, I don’t know how much I’d wager on him either.
Post Categories: Curt Schilling
