The Best One-Link Links Post Ever

I don't have time today, but luckily, junior from the brilliant but now long-departed FJM blog put up one of the greatest things I've ever read in my whole sadly long history of reading stuff on the internet:

Jesus Is The Derek Jeter Of Christianity

In which the author basically goes all FJM on the ass of Allen Barra, normally a pretty solid dude as baseball writers go, who (about two weeks ago now on WSJ.com) made a truly pitiful attempt to make a case for Derek Jeter to win the MVP award. I mean, no serious case can be made, for Jeter or for anyone other than Mauer, but Barra did a noteworthily execrable job of trying to make one. And junior points out exactly how and why that is like no one else (except those other FJM guys) can.

Junior is hilarious, and it's great when he gets really great material (that is, really awful writing) to work with. If you haven't happened to read this yet, go do it. And if you saw it but didn't make it all the way to the last paragraph, you missed the best part...

Three Comparisons

One: Half-Season MVP Division

Through their first 42 games with their new, National League teams:
Manny Ramirez, 2008: .395/.478/.743 (1.222 OPS), 29 R, 14 HR, 43 RBI
Matt Holliday, 2009: .379/.437/.702 (1.139 OPS), 33 R, 12 HR, 41 RBI
(thanks to the StL P-D for that one.)

Two: I Told You So Division

Orlando Cabrera, since August 1: .256/.283/.353 (.636 OPS), -6.2 UZR (yes, -6.2 runs in 34 games. I mean, what?)
Nick Punto, season: .220/.320/.275 (.595 OPS), +1.4 UZR

Three: Obviously, They're Just Being Cheap Again Division

Since June 3:
Nate McLouth: .264/.353/.439 (.792 OPS), -5.2 UZR
Andrew McCutchen: .278/.355/.470 (.826 OPS), +2.4 UZR

Frivolous Friday

Bit of a cop-out today. Again. But a fun one this time, I think.

First things first, though: it's 2009, and ya gots ta do what ya gots ta do.

Ergo, you can now become a fan of the blog on Facebook or follow the blog (-slash-me) on Twitter. I hope you'll do both. Not much going on in either place yet, but stuff will happen eventually.

Also, this blog now has an e-mail: BillDailySomething (at) gmail dot com. So if you've got something to say that you don't want to share with (a tiny, tiny portion of) the world, send it there. Sometime soon I'll have a box where you can access all that stuff. In the meantime, join the FB page and follow me on Twitter anyway.

Second: so I've been a fan of The Onion for something like thirteen years now. Just brilliant, funny stuff. And they were all over the baseball today.

First: I actually think their written stuff has declined a bit in the last few years, but this little number is pretty perfect. That's baseball.

And where they've fallen behind in the written content, they've made up for with their marvelous fake-tv stuff. At least as amusing as the bit itself is how perfectly they've mimicked the ludicrous excess of Sportscenter:


Baseball Superstar Accused of Performance-Enhancing Genie Use

My Favorite Thing Today: two great Joes collide

Staying very much on the map for this one, because two of my very favorite things in the world came together in a beautiful way yesterday: Joes Posnanski and Mauer.

If you're like me (and let's face it, most of you are), you've probably at least skimmed past that post in your feed already (as much as I love Poz, I find that I just don't have the stamina to always read the 10k or so words he writes every other day or so, much as I try), but it's definitely worth a serious look. You'll read a lot on here for the next three or four months about how great Mauer is, how Mauer is clearly deserving of the MVP award, and then how Mauer got completely screwed out of that same MVP award. But Joe, of course, puts it a lot better than I ever will.

Sigh. Gonna be another frustrating award-announcing season, I think.

My Favorite Thing Today: Baseball In-Depth

Dave Pinto at Baseball Musings linked to this blog the other day, and so far I'm digging it. It's a regularly updated, heavily stats-focused baseball blog run by one guy who has a law degree...hmm. Can't quite put my finger on it, but something about that just kind of clicks with me...

Anyway, I don't know that there's one post I'd recommend above the others. I'd suggest going over there, checking the whole thing out, leaving a few comments and so forth.

Hoping to find time to actually say something tomorrow or Monday. 'Til then!

My Favorite Thing Today: pants

So things are going to be light here for a few days. Real light. And it might be more like ten days. I'm sure I'm overreacting to some degree, but I feel like I could work 48 hours a day for the next week and still not get done everything I need to get done.

So in lieu of my own posts, unless and until I have something I just really need to say, I'm going to link to one thing somewhere in the tangled series of tubes that I really like. And I'm going to go off the map a little bit -- I assume that everyone who reads this blog is also reading Lar, Jason, Mark, Josh, etc. every day (and my other blogger friends whenever they get around to posting) like good little boys and girls.

My favorite thing today isn't even about baseball; I promise I won't make a habit of that. But as it turns out, a guy I was playing a lot of softball with in law school not so very long ago is now freelancing for ESPN's Page 2, and yesterday he posted a story that I thought was really clever and pretty funny: walking a mile in John Daly's pants. It's on the front page of Page 2 as I type this, so it's not "off the map" to most of the sports-loving world, but I kind of doubt I get a lot of overlap with the Page 2 crowd. So, if you haven't checked it out yet, you should.

So that's it! Incidentally, don't ever search for John Daly images at work. I didn't, thankfully, but, well, just don't...

can't tell you more 'cause I told you already

Taking a badly needed break from baseball after last night's disaster, I walked a handful of blocks down the road to Wrigley Field tonight to see this. Our seats were terribly far away (would've been awfully nice seats for a Cubs game, though, way up but right behind the plate), but it was a lot of fun. Even if it was essentially the same show we saw eight and a half years ago, well, it's a damn good show.

So I've not paid any attention to baseball today (aside from all the chatter in the comments earlier), and I'm not gonna 'til tomorrow. What did I miss?

Pictured: the best team to call Wrigley home in 2009

Oh, Pedro

The week from hell continues (I have about one of those a month). I'm working on a more interesting post, but it's not happening today.

So how about this?

What is it with great players at the end of their careers having to jump from one unmemorable stint with a wrong-seeming team to another rather than just leaving well enough alone?

Now, when I first heard this, I figured the Phillies must've looked at him really closely and determined that he was 100% healed from whatever was ailing him last year, when he was, um, horrible. So then what's the next thing that happens? They put him on the DL.

Incidentally, does that ever happen? I've never heard of anyone going from free agency straight to the DL before.

Anyway. It's not a big deal in the end; they're paying him $1 million (up to $2.5 with incentives). He might not even make an appearance with the big-league club. But here's the thing: you have to figure that however many appearances he does make with the Phillies, he'll hurt the team approximately that many times. He hasn't been a good pitcher since 2005, and he was awful when healthy last year.

Consider this: he gave up 19 HR (tied for the fourth-highest total in his career) in just 110 innings in 2008. Shea was a bad home run park; Citizens Bank is a good one. In 10 innings in the Phillies' home park last year, Pedro surrendered 4 home runs. Terribly small sample size and all that, but Pedro is 38, hasn't pitched competitively in nearly ten months, and obviously isn't healthy. Say he goes down to AAA for a couple starts and uses guile and the awe of facing Pedro freaking Martinez to go 12 innings and give up 3 runs and strike out 10. If you're a Phillies fan, do you really want him up and facing the Mets at CBP in August? Or do you kind of have to secretly hope he never makes it out of the minors? I know they're feeling pretty desperate, but it would almost be hard to find somebody that wouldn't figure to be better than Pedro right now.

Running wild?

I had big hopes for today (something about Mo Rivera and closers, most likely), but work has dashed them. I don't even really have time to be writing this.

But here's your ten-cent thought for the day: in 2008, the average MLB team stole 93 bases. In 2009, the Rays have already stolen 121 (just 31 shy of their 2008 MLB-leading total), and the average team is on pace to steal 105. That's about an 11% increase, and they're doing it more successfully (75% in 2009, 73% in 2008).

So it's definitely a difference, but not a huge, game-changing sort of difference just yet. Last year's MLB individual leader in steals (Willy Taveras) had 36 through June 29; this year, Carl Crawford has 40. Three stole 50 and four more 40 last year; this year, we're on pace to see five steal fifty, but only two or three more look like good bets to get to 40. And so on.

So it's true what they say, speed is coming back into the game and all that. But it's coming back in slowly, if you will. At a snail's pace.

It's not the kind of difference you really observe from a single day at the ballpark. I just feel like I've heard it talked about to a degree that goes well beyond what an 11% difference justifies.

Dark day...almost

Sometime soon, I'm going to go to one post per weekend rather than two. But not this weekend (which means that, since this little notice is most definitely something, there will have been at least 67 straight days with a post before I go one without).

I was hoping to have a special guest blogger today, but that's not going to happen yet, so that will be tomorrow. Then on Monday, I'll try to be a little clearer about my position on all this Strasburg stuff, by way of a response to Ron Rollins' comment to yesterday's little bit of nonsense (and presumably to tHeMARksMiTh's Sunday post on the same topic).

In the meantime, consider this: since May 23 (the date of his return from the illness and passing of his mother), Delmon Young is "hitting" .217/.226/.233 with 27 strikeouts in 16 games. That's a .459 OPS, from a left fielder who contributes absolutely nothing in the field. There are 53 times since 2007 where a pitcher has had at least 25 PA in a season and managed to top a .459 OPS.

Glavine, don't be grievin'

Yeesh. The other day, I came down kind of tentatively on the Braves' side in the whole Glavine fiasco, though I certainly understood Glavine's frustration and felt for the guy. I also mentioned that I think he's an exceptionally intelligent ballplayer.

If this happens, I take all that back. I didn't know the CBA had a bar on releasing players for economic reasons, and I'm pretty sure that I would think that was idiotic if there were any way to actually enforce it. But such a provision is pure window dressing to placate the players. If a GM can't come up with some vaguely plausible non-financial reason for releasing a player, that GM is in the wrong line of work (and should probably try the food service industry or something next). There is just no way that a grievance filed against a team for releasing a player "for financial reasons" can, or should, ever be successful.

And the case here is particularly terrible. As I pointed out the other day, there were several good reasons to dump Glavine that didn't have anything to do with money, the biggest being that with four good MLB starters and Tommy Hanson, they didn't have a place for him. If Glavine files this grievance, whoever adjudicates these things should actually, physically laugh in his (and his agent's) face. And he's not nearly the reasonable sort of guy I thought he was.

Um...

I have nothing at all to say today. It happens sometimes.

So Zack Greinke is human, huh? Weird.

He gave up a home run in the second inning last night, the first he had allowed in 112 1/3 innings. Then he gave up another one three innings later.

The interesting thing is that even before last night, hitters were putting the ball in the air off of Greinke at almost exactly the same percentage as they did last year (38.3% to 36.9%), and last year Greinke gave up 21 HR. Greinke isn't an extreme ground-ball pitcher, and he'll keep giving up HR. But his strikeouts are up and walks are down from 2008, and the important thing (that is, the difference between becoming a very good pitcher and a righty Johan) will be to keep those trends going. If you're striking out 10 and walking 1 per nine, you can deal with the ball leaving the yard now and then.

Loose Ends

Just a few comments following up on some recent posts:

• Remember last week when I wrote the piece about Andy Sonnanstine being forced to hit for himself and I wondered why it was okay for Longoria to be brought in to play 3B later in the game despite having been on the lineup card when the game started? Well, turns out it wasn't. Umpiring fail.
  
  
• This blog may be cursed. I profiled the four surprisingly hot teams after the first couple weeks of the season, and they almost all immediately (if predictably) went into the tank. I wrote about how all of them but the Mariners had been struggling since then, and one of them, the Padres, immediately got crazy hot again, while the M's tanked. I wrote about the upstart Jays in the same post, and then they tanked. And now, since my post about Joe Mauer's incredible first 100 PA on Tuesday morning, he's gone 1-for-10, the 1 being just a single, with two walks and three strikeouts. Not a whole lot to go on, I know, but I'm hoping that my mentioning it again just nips that one in the bud straight away, since it seems to work both ways.
  
  
• Just in case the curse is real: boy, that Steve Phillips seems to be doing well for himself these days, doesn't he?
  
  
• If you don't make a habit of looking at the comments: commenter abywaters explained the Bill James/Jeff Bagwell "Pass." mystery, at least to my satisfaction, in the comments to the Bagwell/Thomas post. Several other interesting comments down there, too.
  
  
• Speaking of, I opened the same BagPipes v. Big Hurt discussion on a message board at Imagine Sports' Diamond Mind Online game (a fantastically addictive and highly recommended game if you're a hopeless baseball history nerd like me), and there were a lot of interesting insights, but the one thing that came out of it that I really wished I had noticed before I posted the other day was this:
  
  Thomas on the road, career: .297/.414/.511, .925 OPS
  Bagwell on the road, career: .291/.398/.521, .919 OPS
  
  Wow. I mean, Thomas is still the better hitter, since I'd rather have the 16 points of OBP than the 10 (or even 16) points of SLG, and you never know about the difference in competition or whatever, but wow! Incidentally, despite playing most of his home games in the cavernous Astrodome, Bagwell was much better than that at home...just not nearly as much better as Thomas was at his home.
  A couple of the guys at IS made some interesting points in Thomas' favor, but all in all, since the post went up on Wednesday morning, I've become more and more comfortable with my conclusion that Bagwell was the better player.
  
  
• The Common Man had a much more thorough Memorial Day post than the one I could muster, and, I thought, a great one. But I just want to stress again that everybody needs to be familiar with the story of Lou Brissie.
  
  
• More confirmation that (a) David Eckstein has made a deal with the Devil and/or (b) Kevin Towers has lost his freaking mind: "As great a year as Adrian and Heath have had, I think Eckstein might be our MVP." Sigh.
  
  
• Finally, not actually related to a prior post on here, but friend of the blog Jason from IIATMS has started a new blog, Vote for Manny, at which he encourages people to, um, vote for Manny. Sounds crazy, but read his explanation at the site (posted on Wednesday). Intriguing stuff, at the very least. And now just like that, he's all famous and stuff. I honestly don't know how I feel about the idea, and for different reasons than most people would probably expect -- I did vote for Manny once already, though, just for being undecided -- but Jason's initiative is pretty impressive.
  

"Maybe it's a tumor." "IT'S NAHT A TOOOMAH!!!"

So.

Wednesday afternoon, and it's the weirdest thing: the entire T-D-S editorial staff comes down with an illness that is either (a) a really bad, late-season flu or (b) Intermittent Dysmorphic Attachment Dysfunction with Smelly Feet (IDADWSF). It's bad, whatever it is.

So the planned epic response to the very thoughtful post from tHeMARksMiTh that I mentioned yesterday (the draft in my head is tentatively titled "IN DEFENSE OF COMPASSIONATE (ButStaunchAndUnwavering) SABERMETRICISM") will be on hold for at least one more day. Instead, I'll just say this:





Craig Breslow, we hardly knew ye.

I know, he was horrible for 14 or so innings this season. But he was great for 40 or so innings last season. And he went to Yale. (No, I don't know what that has to do with it.) And he figures to be better, right now, than 25 year-old AA pitcher and marginal prospect Anthony Swarzak. Whatever the solution to the Twins' bullpen woes was, dropping one of the few relievers who was likely to improve (unlike, say, Luis Ayala) wasn't part of that solution.

For more, refer to ubelmann.

*COUGH* *WHEEZE*
/ staggers off to bed

Links of the Week or So and Notes

Work dictates a quick one today, a few notes (some of them very old, but interesting...at least to me):

• tHeMARksMiTh wrote what I think is a very eloquent and well-reasoned plea for civility between the sabermetric and "traditional" crowds. More on this tomorrow or the next day, time permitting.
  
  
• Dave Cameron on the vastly improved defense that he thinks is creating the illusion of vastly improved pitching in Texas.
  
  
• Something is seriously wrong with Scott Baker. I mean, his numbers aren't good, but he's not just a little tweak away. He's not even close. You notice these things when you're stuck watching the White Sox feed of the game, but can't stand to listen to The Hawk, so you put the Twins' radio broadcast on, which is just a second or two ahead of your TV. When on just about every other pitch you watch Redmond set up high and away at the exact same time as you're hearing Dazzle Dan say "...and that's down and in," it really drives home how far off Baker is right now.
  
  
• A while back I wrote about the Yankees putting Chien-Ming Wang on the DL with what looked to me like a pretty obviously made-up injury. Craig pointed out about a week ago now that Dontrelle Willis basically admitted his was made up, and Craig has a lot of the same questions I did. Some unintentionally comedic comments below, too.
  
  
• Speaking of Wang, he says he's ready and is expected to rejoin the rotation soon. He's looked pretty good in AAA, too. Of course, given his 34.50 ERA to start the year, he could go on a Zack Greinke-like 38-inning scoreless streak and his ERA would still sit at 4.70, almost exactly league average. I have a feeling he's going to struggle again, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. And he could hardly help but be better than he was.
  
  
• A few more things I left off yesterday's post on the 2005 prospect lists that I found interesting, all about the Baseball America Top 100 this time: Ian Kinsler was #98 on BA's list, 77 places below BP's. Russell Martin was #89. Only four second basemen made the list (Kinsler and Aaron Hill were shortstops back then): the ill-fated Rickie Weeks (8), the even iller-fated Josh Barfield (45), the "meh" Chris Burke (60), and the then 30 year old Tadahito Iguchi (96) all had considerably brighter futures than ROY-MVP Dustin Pedroia.
  

Joe Mauer Day

I got nothin' today. Or rather, no energy left to come up with somethin'. As I type this, Randy Johnson has been perfect through 3 1/3, having struck out the first five batters he faced (and none of the next four). He's too old for that sort of thing.


Mauer certainly didn't disappoint tonight. In his first time up, he took two balls before smacking a home run to the opposite field. Next time up, he took two strikes before lacing a double down the left-field line, later scoring. Next time up, he took three balls and a strike, then a fourth ball, scoring on Morneau's home run. So, having seen 11 pitches and swung the bat only twice, he'd already been on base and scored three times. Two swings, three runs. Next time up he fouled oen off and grounded into a double play, but still. If you're a Twins fan, today was like Opening Day #2.

Back tomorrow with something for real.

Links of the Week or so

I didn't have much more time than I expected today, so here are some links to things I've found interesting over the last several days.

• My old friend The Common Man takes me to task for my faint praise of Michael Cuddyer on Tuesday. If things go well here, I'm looking forward to much more of my mindless blather being hyper-analyzed by people more intelligent than I.
  
  
• Much newer friend Lar takes us back to Orel Hershiser and his glorious 59 in 1988. I remember that streak, and Canseco's 40/40 the same year, as the first baseball things I noticed that weren't the Twins or the World Series...though the accuracy of that remembrance is extraordinarily questionable.
  
  
• Dave Cameron is one of my favorite baseball writers, and I think I've already linked to his stuff twice. This week, he drew some...interesting conclusions about the first 35 PA of Andruw Jones' season, and then responded to some criticism over that with some very broad statements about the usefulness of small samples. You can see what I think about all that in the comments to both articles, if you're interested; otherwise, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
  
  
• In Cameron's very interesting piece about Chris Young's complete inability to hold runners, he concludes, "Quite simply, Young is worse at holding runners than anyone else in baseball is at any other skill." Probably right. I was thinking about possible competition for that title, and all I could come up with was pitcher Daniel Cabrera's hitting.
  
  
• Jonah Keri wrote a very good column for SI that, inter alia, defends David Wright from jumpy Mets fans, and yesterday responded to an email from just such a fan on his excellent blog. Keri has noticed something I have too, which is that fans go to insane lengths to find fault with their team's best player, especially when he's the soft-spoken sort. I'll write a thing about that someday.
  
  
• Shyster does a number on that ridiculous forthcoming A-Rod book and the ridiculous person who wrote it.
  
  
• Zack at MLB Notebook interviews Jason from IIATMS, Mark from Way Back and Gone, and many similarly excellent folk in chronicling The Life and Times of a Baseball Blogger. There is a nonzero chance that, had that post cropped up three short weeks earlier, you wouldn't be reading this right now...
  
  
  
• Non-baseball Division: For as long as there have been juries, there have been people who have tried to get out of jury duty (or so I assume). If you're looking to get out of jury duty, don't take your cues from this guy.
  
  
• From the Archives Division: I firmly believe that Joe Posnanski is the best currently active sportswriter on the planet, and I recommend everything he writes. But I also believe that the Snuggie is the most fascinating and bewildering thing in our modern world, and I can't recommend anything Joe has written more than his blow-by-blow dissection of its amazing commercial.
  
  
• Topical Comedy Division: The only thing funnier to me than Snuggies is everyone's severe overreaction to swine flu, and the only thing funnier than that is Colbert's riff on everyone's severe overreaction to swine flu:
  

  The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
  Enemy Swine: A Pigcalypse Now
  colbertnation.com
  Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor First 100 Days

• Happy Joe Mauer Day!!!