The Somethingiest Something of the Aughts: The Hitters

Funny thing about writing a daily blog with no remuneration and no one to hold you accountable: sometimes life gets in the way and you don't really feel like writing anything. Sorry about my absence on Tuesday, but real-life Monday sucked like you wouldn't believe. Things now are...not okay, but they're not getting any worse, so here's your new thing.

As he often does, Rob Neyer made me think of something today. He pointed out (via some link to somebody else) that there's something of a race for the batting champion of the decade, with Ichiro! and Pujols running pretty much neck-and-neck. Which left me wondering who led in all the various other categories, and by how much. And as long as I was wondering, I thought I might as well write about it. Verducci, the "somebody else" in Neyer's post, did much the same thing, but I don't care about that, and I'm going to look at some different categories and in a different way. So away we go, stats through Monday night:

Home Runs: Alex Rodriguez, 430
No surprise here. A-Rod led his league in homers five times this decade, and this is the first year he's likely to finish out of the top eight (and he's only four out of the top ten, with at least two of the dudes in front of him out for the rest of the season). What's a little surprising is by how much A-Rod leads: he's up by 62 over Jim Thome's 368, meaning he's hit about 17% more homers than anybody else this decade. The 1990s' leader was Mark McGwire, with 405. The 1980s? Mike Schmidt, with 313. Eight players have hit more than 313 homers from 2000 through 2009, and I suppose Andruw Jones or Lance Berkman could make it nine or ten with a couple hot weeks.

Runs Batted In: Rodriguez, 1227
That's right, the unclutchiest choker ever leads the decade in the lazy man's ultimate clutchy stat, by a comfy 125 over Pujols (approximately one season's worth, which is appropriate since Pujols didn't start playing until 2001). Your 1990s leader was Albert Belle (really?) with 1099, and 1980s was Eddie Murray with 996. Murray's total would place 10th in the 2000s, right between Big Papi and Bobby Abreu.

Runs Scored: Rodriguez, 1181
That A-Rod guy? He's a good player. And one who stayed pretty healthy for an entire numerological decade, which has at least as much to do with it. This is a closer contest than the ones above, with Johnny Damon close behind at 1110. Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu mean that four of the top five have spent at least some of the decade as Yankees. 1990s: Barry Bonds, 1091. 1980s: Rickey Henderson, 1122. Hey, score one for the eighties, almost!

On-Base Percentage (min. 3000 PA): Barry Bonds, .517
What what what? Bonds OBP'ed over .500 for the whole decade? Somehow that shocks me. But I guess OBPing .559 in 2001-2004, four of his five full years in the decade, will do that. Todd Helton is a distant second with a Coors-aided .439, with only three other players within 100 points of Bonds. Frank Thomas led the nineties at .440 (Bonds just behind at a merely fantastic .434); 1980s, Wade Boggs at an equal but more dominant .440.

Slugging Percentage: Bonds, .724
Naturally, and well ahead of Pujols at .630 (though Pujols will end up with nearly 2000 more plate appearances in the decade). 1990s: McGwire, .615 (Bonds right behind again at .602); in the 1980s, Schmidt at .540. In the aughts, you'd have to go to #19 before you drop below .540; Schmidt slots between Teixeira at .542 and Bagwell at .534.

OPS+: Bonds, 221
Well, duh. Pujols second at 173, then Manny at 160. Theoretically, this should be pretty constant across the decades, and it almost works that way, but doesn't. Bonds paces the nineties again at 179, Schmidt the 80's at 153.

Stolen Bases: Juan Pierre, 455
That surprised me a little, but Pierre has played since 2000 and was a regular from 2001 until late 2008, while Carl Crawford (#2 but way behind at 359) didn't play full time until 2003 and missed about a third of 2008. 1990s: Otis Nixon, 478; 1980s: Rickey Henderson, 838. Rickey led that decade by a whopping 255 (over Tim Raines) and missed leading the 1990s by 15, coming in second place. He was #105 in the 2000s.

Hit By Pitch: Jason Kendall, 155.
Up by 17 on Jason Giambi. I never thought of A-Rod or Jeter as guys who get plunked a lot, but they're both in the top ten; lots of plate appearances -> lots of stray inside fastballs, I guess. Chase Utley has been hit 104 times despite not becoming a regular until 2005. Craig Biggio was hit 147 times in the 90s (and was fourth in the 2000s at 132). Don Baylor crushed everyone else in the eighties with 160, 52 more than Chet Lemon and more than three times as many as #8 Lloyd Moseby.

Sacrifice Flies: Mike Lowell, 76.
Now that's a surprise. One leadoff triple by Denard Span could mean that Lowell gets tied by the even more surprising Orlando Cabrera, now at 75, and don't count out the less surprising Carlos Lee (74). After that, you hit Abreu at 66, and I don't think he's getting ten sac flies in three weeks. Frank Thomas had 82 in the nineties, Andre Dawson 74 in the eighties.

Double Play Groundouts: Miguel Tejada, 222.
Again, the identity of the leader is surprising, but even more surprising is the margin; Miggy is crushing Paul Konerko and his 193. Belle led the 1990s at 172, and Jim Rice predictably dominated the 1980s with 224. Rice's 224 trumps Tejada's 222 by more than it looks like, considering that (a) Julio Franco was second in the eighties at 166, which would've been seventh in the aughts, and (b) Tejada took over a thousand more plate appearances than Rice did to arrive at his total.

Plate Appearances: Bobby Abreu, 6864
This one could very easily change hands before the end of the decade, as Derek Jeter is only six behind Abreu and is batting leadoff for the best offense in the majors. Next is Tejada, a hundred behind Jeter. Biggio had 6794 in the nineties and Dale Murphy had 6540 in the eighties.

Hits: Ichiro!, 2005
He's 85 ahead of Jeter or anyone else for the decade, which is especially impressive when you consider that he was in Japan for the year 2000. Going down the rest of the list, Pujols is the next one you'll see that did not play at least a little big-league ball in both 2000 and 2009 (he's ninth at 1697), and to find the next such player, you'd have to go all the way down to #33 and Jeff Kent, who retired after last season and may end up 600 hits behind Ichiro for the decade.

Jeter Is Just Alright with Me

So Derek Jeter has been in the news quite a bit lately. He is, after all, the most recent proud owner of a Viagra Milestone Moment. Yesterday, Craig was excoriated by legions of barely literate Yankee fans* in the comments to the NBC blog for suggesting that maybe seven separate stories by one newspaper surrounding the tying (not even setting, tying) of a single franchise record by a single player was overkill.

* I'm not making a generalization about Yankee fans at all, just talking about those particular Yankee fans, and I'm not exaggerating. Go read those comments and discover for yourself.

Also yesterday, Jason at IIATMS put up what I think is a really nice piece on what Jeter means to him as a fan. And I think that's great. Jason expresses exactly what one should feel about a great player that's played for your own team for 14 years.

I've been a pretty harsh Jeter-basher over the years (only mentioned him once on this blog, but it wasn't friendly), but none of that has anything to do with how Yankee fans feel about him. And really, none of it has anything to do with Jeter himself; while I feel he's showboated and behaved overtly selfishly more than the greatest leader in baseball history should, guys who play hard are fun, and he seems like a pretty solid character overall.

Rather, my problem has been with how the national media has taken all that love and all that character and rolled it together into this larger-than-life, iconic hero for the whole baseball nation. It obscures his weaknesses--which have been real and numerous--and takes a lot of attention away from other players who (if only momentarily) have been better. Kirby Puckett and Tony Gwynn were heroes to their own fans, and that's a wonderful thing. And they were great players. But they weren't the kind of players who should have dominated all coverage of the sport. I believe that essentially, Jeter is basically what would've happened if Puckett or Gwynn or Cal Ripken, Jr. had played his entire career with the Yankees instead. And that can get awfully annoying to the rest of us.

But let me change gears completely: I think it's time for us -- and by "us" I mean sabermetric types who are fans of teams other than the Yankees -- to back the hell off and give Jeter his due. No, to this point, he arguably hasn't been markedly greater than Barry Larkin or Alan Trammell, both of whom will have a hard time getting into the Hall, while Jeter will waltz in on the first ballot if he retires tomorrow. But those guys should be in the Hall, and the unfortunate fact that they haven't gotten the attention they deserve isn't a great reason to deprive Jeter of the credit he has earned.

Furthermore, you can't really look at Jeter and compare him to those other guys and say "and he hasn't even had his decline phase yet!" anymore. Yes, the decline phase is coming eventually, but Jeter is 35 years old. At 35, Trammell was no longer a full-time player, and immediately became a very bad half-time player for his final three seasons starting with age 36. Larkin had already declined significantly and was in his last year as a useful player. Jeter, meanwhile, is having one of the best seasons of his career.

And then there's that defense. I remain thoroughly convinced that Jeter has never been even an average shortstop, and I think Bill James was probably more or less right when he wrote that he was one of the worst regular shortstops we've ever seen who was allowed to stay at the position for more than a year or so. Moreover, it still kind of pisses me off that they moved A-Rod to third for him, when A-Rod was obviously the superior shortstop. But. UZR and plus/minus aren't available before 2002, and I don't trust any other defensive stats. Even the new measures are subject to wild fluctuations from year to year that can't just be explained away by players having good years or bad years. But by UZR, Jeter has had two awful years, one bad year, and four more or less average years since 2002, and now this year he's been above zero, and actually very good (+5.1). I'm not prepared to believe that a guy who can look that good at age 35, and average so many other times, is as awful as we once thought.

Another common stathead criticism of Jeter is that (in a given year) he's not even the best player on his own team, and I guess I get that when you're trying to combat all the Jeter love, but it also strikes me as a little silly--the fact that Bernie Williams is having a great year or A-Rod is A-Rod shouldn't take away from Jeter's greatness any more than Nick Punto and Delmon Young being bad at baseball should take away from Mauer's MVP candidacy. And at any rate, now -- at an age when most middle infielders, even the best of them, are in serious decline or retired -- Jeter unquestionably is the best player on his team, and that team is the best team in the game right now. So that doesn't work anymore either.

Finally, there's his consistency. Jeter has been one of the two or three best shortstops in the American League every single year for at least the last twelve and possibly more, and that's really something when you're playing at the same time as A-Rod and Nomah and Miggy. That's more than one can say for Trammell or Larkin, both of whom fluctuated quite a bit over their careers (and Larkin was always hurt). Jeter could justifiably have won two MVPs, and would be in line for a third deserving MVP this season if not for Mauer.

No, Jeter is not one of the three or four best Yankees of all time. It's profoundly silly to compare him favorably to Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig or DiMaggio. But he's a great, great player, certainly among the greatest of our current time, and it's time to stop begrudging Yankee fans their right to enjoy that. And maybe to start enjoying it just a little bit ourselves? I can't believe I just said that.

Totally cool to keep ripping on ESPN and Tim McCarver, though. I mean, everybody has a breaking point.

Should Hitters be Platooned More Often?

Ryan Howard is a good hitter. A very, very good hitter. He has a .921 2009 OPS and a .961 career OPS (142 OPS+). Howard's splits look like this:

vs. RHP, career: .307/.409/.561 (1.071)
vs. LHP, career: .224/.308/.446 (.754)

Against righties, Howard is every bit the monster he's reputed to be. Against lefties, he's a well below-average first baseman. But wait, there's more:

vs. LHP, 2008-09: .212/.290/.406 (.696)
vs. LHP, 2009: .198/.284/.348 (.632)

Every club's AAA squad has a right-handed hitter who could probably play a passable first base and put up a .700 OPS against left-handed pitching.

Of course, you can't platoon Howard. You should, but you can't. His overall numbers and his resultant reputation are just too good. He's not going to lead the NL in homers and RBIs every year by platooning. Also, in his (almost deserved) MVP year of 2006, he did put up a .923 OPS against lefties (which is pretty much the whole difference between MVP-quality Howard and the last couple years' pretty-decent-first-baseman Howard).

But consider another case. Tonight, the Twins were facing White Sox southpaw John Danks. They started Jason Kubel at DH and in his customary #5 slot in the order, and they started Delmon Young in left field and in the #8 slot. Forget for a moment that it's crazy to play either of these guys in the field, and just consider this (vs.LHP/vs.RHP):

Kubel's splits, career: .667/.844, 2009: .622/1.010
Young's splits, career: .805/.697, 2009: .861/.578.

Kubel, looking at his total line, has always been a good hitter, and has been one of the 15 or so best hitters in the league in 2009, with a 140 OPS+ and .387 wOBA. Young, on the other hand, has been as disastrous as ever, with a 78 OPS+ and .288 wOBA. Yet: Kubel is just as helpless against lefties now as he's always been, or even more so--the only difference is that he's crushing righties rather than just holding his own against them. No matter how lovely his overall numbers are (and add a .300 average, 22 homers and 77 RBI to that OPS), Kubel has no business ever serving as the designated hitter against a left-handed pitcher. Ever. Delmon Young is Kubel's perfect platoon partner, and DH vs. LHP may be the only role for which Young is actually suited.

There's another great reason to platoon, too. Say you're playing a team with a southpaw starter but a shortage of lefties in the 'pen, or a right-handed closer that you know they're going to use in the ninth. How awesome is it to have the luxury of using Ryan Howard or Jason Kubel (or your righty thumper if the situation is reversed) at exactly the right time, rather than just hoping his turn in the order comes up when you need it to?

So here's my idea, for some future really, really ballsy manager and/or GM:

We need to stop thinking of "hitting" as a skill. Rather, there's hitting vs. LHP and there's hitting vs. RHP, and they're totally separate skills, and your ability to do one doesn't make it a whole lot more or less likely that you can do the other.

So Ryan Howard has been awesome, and has put up some awesome stats, but he hasn't somehow earned the right to keep sucking against LHP by virtue of being awesome against RHP, any more than Tim Lincecum has earned the right to start in center field by virtue of being an awesome pitcher.

This kind of thinking would lead to a lot more platoons in more extreme situations (and there are a lot of them), and teams would properly value right-handed hitters whose numbers look bad because they hit against RHP 70% of the time, but who are highly valuable as the less-used half of a lefty/righty platoon. But even more commonly, it would change the way managers set batting orders and rest players. Almost every player (as we all know, but which I don't think people pay enough attention to) has a significant split in favor of opposite-handed pitchers. For instance, Mauer is a Hall of Fame .951 career vs. LHP and a merely pretty-good-for-a-catcher .762 vs. LHP, and while he deserves to start most games against both, he's probably not a #3 hitter against lefties, and he should never get a day of rest when a righty is on the mound unless the team has faced six righties in a row. Even Roberto Alomar, a switch-hitter and future Hall of Famer, probably batted high in the order far too often against LHP, against whom he had an OBP 50 points lower than he had against RHP (.337/.386).

It's not a big deal on a case-by-case basis (except in extreme cases like Howard and Kubel), but a manager who really looked at these things, roster spot by roster spot, and utilized significant platoon advantages whenever possible -- in setting the lineup and order and actually using platoons where appropriate, not merely pinch-hitting at the end of the game -- might pick up an extra win or two over the course of the season. And DHing Kubel against lefties just has to stop.

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

A Few Observations on Andruw

When will this guy stop talking about the Rangers? It's all Rangers all the time at this blog allasudden!

I don't have a ton to say today, but I've been thinking about Andruw Jones.

First, the Dave Cameron article
Away back on May 1, I linked to an article that Cameron, one of my favorite baseball writers, wrote on April 28 called Welcome Back, Andruw (and then responded to criticism over that, Cameron did, with this piece on the usefulness of small sample sizes). My feelings on it were only insinuated in this space, but you could pretty much tell (or tell for sure if you read my comments below the initial article) that I was really skeptical about basing anything on 35 plate appearances by anybody, no matter how great those 35 were.

Since April 28? Jones has gone on being a part-time player, batting .204/.312/.463 in 253 PA to drive his season batting average from .370 to .222, his OBP from .514 to .337. He's still got tons of HR power (a rate of 39 per 162 starts). but not a lot else.

I doubt Dave will say it--after all, Jones is better than he was in 2008 (it would be hard to be worse), and, for the year as a whole, better than 2007--but he got one wrong for once. Not just with Andruw--a guy with a .300ish OBP (as he's been since the 28th) who is mostly a DH and LF just isn't a particularly useful player--but with his ruminations on small sample sizes. Line drive rates and contact rates and all that fun FanGraphs stuff are approximately as susceptible to sample size fluctuations as batting average and homers. As I pointed out in the comments to Dave's initial article, Andruw Jones had almost the exact same stretch in 2007 as he did to start 2009--but in July, not April, so nobody even noticed. Small samples are interesting, not useful. A great month should adjust our expectations for what we expect a guy's final line to look like (as I tried to do a few times very early on), but we should wait a bit more than 35 PA before we start adjusting our expectations for the rest of the season.

Second, on defense
This is just a passing thought, because I've watched Andruw just twice this year and have no idea what I'm talking about. But: he's just 32 years old. I know he's gained some weight, but has he really fallen so far in two years that he's gone from a (deserving) Gold Glover in 2007 to a DH in 2009?

I just can't believe that. First, even in 2008 when he looked completely lost and useless with the Dodgers, UZR had him as approximately an average center fielder. Second, in his limited time this year (5 games in RF and 12 in LF), his UZR has been great (doesn't mean much, but it doesn't mean nothing, either). Third, he's tried five steals in what was, let's face it, not very many times on first base, and he's only been caught once. I have to believe that he'd at least hold his own if given a chance in left, and, I mean, he's Andruw Jones. How do you not even try him in center, even once?

Now, the Rangers' D has been great (and is probably the biggest part of their success). Consider: UZR thinks Michael Young is as bad at 3B as he used to be at SS, but no one else on the team has been more than 1 run below average at any position. With Nelson Cruz and Elvis Andrus, they've got two of the best at their positions in the game, and even Josh Hamilton (who looked horrible last year) has put up a good number. But anyway, Hamilton has been hurt, and guys need rest now and then. How has Andruw gotten a total of 17 innings in the OF? Has he really lost that much at 32?

Third, a weird observation about his splits
Putting those crazy first 35 PA back into play, so for the whole season: .224/.302/.552 vs.R, .220/.380/.420 vs.L. 13 of his 17 HR have come against righties, but 20 of his 30 walks have come against lefties.

That's two totally different players. You might think a lot of guys are two different players based on their splits, but all that usually means is that one is a good player and one is a bad player. Andruw is two totally different players--of roughly equal value, but just about as different as they can be. Against righties, he's Dave Kingman; against lefties, Max Bishop.

I'm sure that's not that unusual, especially with less than a full season's worth of PA. But I thought it was kind of funny.

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...

Drastically changing the mound height was a terrible idea. Let's do it again!

Yesterday, Bill Conlin came up with quite the conlin.

In a nutshell (and I really don't think I'm being unfair to his work at all, but you be the judge): with the pitcher's mound higher than it is now, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams and Lefty Grove did good things. Therefore, baseball should raise the mound back to where it was in 1968. They lowered the mound after 1968. This was ostensibly to restore the balance between pitching and hitting, but really it was to restore the balance between the AL and NL. Because, see, the NL was more racially diverse, and was better. Rose led the league in batting average at .335 in the NL, while Yastrzemski led the AL at .301. There were a bunch of Hall of Famers in the NL, and only a couple in the AL. Bob Gibson is in the Hall of Fame, while the pitchers who put up great numbers in the AL in 1968 are not. Therefore, the NL was a whole lot better than the AL, and baseball saw this as a problem, so they lowered the mound just to make the AL as good as the NL again, and now they should raise it again. Ruben Amaro, Jr. doesn't think they should do that. Ruben Amaro, Jr. is an idiot.

Have you already figured out how crazy this is? 'Cause, frankly, this is a busy day for me, so I don't have a lot of time to explain it to you. But here, look at this:
1968 AL: .637 OPS, 2.98 ERA, 3.4 R/G
1968 NL: .641 OPS, 2.99 ERA, 3.4 R/G

If Ichiro! were playing in the 1968 AL, Ichiro! would probably hit .350, even while Yaz finished second at .301. And that wouldn't do a thing to change the balance or imbalance between the leagues. Randomly listing facts about the league leaders in certain statistics is just about the worst way you could possibly look at balance between the leagues as a whole. And in fact, Conlin doesn't just list facts, he lies about them: in extolling the NL, he cites the fact that McCovey led the NL with 36 homers as though it shows you how much better the NL was, but doesn't mention that over in the AL, Frank Howard hit 44 and Willie Horton hit 36.

To Conlin, the AL was embarrassingly atrocious; the NL produced "below-average but not anomalous offense." Back in reality, though, the difference between the two leagues was essentially a rounding error (and they were both very, very anomalous). You know how I feel about Conlin generally, but this is poor even for him. In almost any other profession, if you put in the effort and showed the level of competence Conlin does in this piece, you'd be investigated and probably fired.

Here's a big reason why I hate the writing of hopeless hacks like Conlin: they have the ability to take things I really believe in and, just by writing in support of those things, make me start looking for reasons to disagree with those things. I do think that lowering the mound was a short-sighted, kneejerk reaction to a very weird season (and a pretty weird five or six seasons). It was silly. They shouldn't have done it.

Additionally, I don't doubt that, in the beginning, the AL as a whole was slower to integrate than was the NL as a whole. The lag in some AL teams' response to integration was deplorable, and I don't doubt that it hurt competition. For a while.

On the other hand, I don't think that the mound height is to blame for the high ERAs or low inning totals of today. Starting pitchers threw a lot more innings in the 1970s, low mound and all, than they did in the 1950s or 1960s. Pitching ruled, low mound and all, in 1988-1991. It's a cyclical game. These things happen. Also, I'm not totally convinced (without research) that the competitive disadvantage from the AL's collective racism lingered all the way to 1968, the year 22 A.J. (Anno Jackie, The Year of Our Jackie 22). The fact that the NL seemed to have all the great players of color doesn't mean that the AL wasn't trying. Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey were a lot better than Willie Horton or Tony Oliva, but they were all about equally non-white.

And on a third hand, or something like that, I totally agree with Amaro. Changing the mound height back to where it was more than 40 years ago would be exactly as drastic and rash a change as the one Conlin is denouncing for being too drastic and rash. There's just no reason to do that, and there's no reason to believe that doing so would do the things Conlin thinks it would.

Anyway, read the article, have a good laugh. The craziness and all-around logiclessness of the whole thing is really pretty amazing.

But then come back and tell me what you think of the mound height thing (or what you think you would've thought if Conlin's article hadn't turned you instinctively against the idea).

Stuff I'm thinking about

• After the standing ovation the Dome fans gave Mark Buehrle after his bid for a second consecutive perfect game was broken up in the 6th inning last night, I've decided it's time to give up my resentment of Buehrle, all based on the litany of incredibly stupid things he said to or about the Twins five or six years ago. He's a hell of a pitcher, and hardly the most offensive thing on the Sox (Hawk, Guillen, Pierzynski, and Kenny Williams, in that order). From now on, he'll be on my list of likeable White Sox players (Thome and Buehrle, in that order).
  
  
• And oh, yeah, Buehrle set a major league record last night by taking that perfect game into the 6th inning. With the 17 in a row he retired last night, the 27 in a row from the perfect game, and the final batter of his outing before that, he retired 45 straight batters, shooting past the old record held by his teammate, Bobby Jenks. So, a hearty congrats to Buehrle...if throwing two no-hitters in his career was unlikely for him, 45 batters in a row is like winning the lottery. (And then the Twins won anyway, so all is well.)
  
  
• Vikings fans: everything's okay again. Hallelujah; the nightmare is (apparently) over.
  
  
• You probably didn't notice this because he's a Nat, but Josh Willingham hit two grand slams on Monday. Ruth, Gehrig, Mays, Aaron, Griffey, Bonds or McGwire? No. Willingham, Mueller, Tatis, Tabor, Hoiles, Nokes, York, and pitcher Tony Cloninger? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes, among a select few other, similarly surprising names (and F-Rob).
  
  
• Here's a contemporary article on Cloninger's two slams, which I have to say were quite a bit more unlikely and interesting than Willingham's. And here's the boxscore. Cloninger's career OPS was a very pitcher-like .486, and outside of 1966, his career highs in parts of seven other seasons were two homers and eight RBI, or exactly the total he came up with in those two swings in one game in '66 (he added a ninth RBI in the game). Even better, Cloninger had had a two-homer, five-RBI game less than three weeks earlier.
  
  
• How is Omar Minaya not history already? This was about the most incompetent display I've ever seen by an executive of anything.
  
  
• I continue to believe that the Rays are the best team in the East, and in the entire American League. But they're six and a half games behind the Yankees for first, four behind the Red Sox for the wildcard, and have Texas and conceivably even the White Sox or Twins to contend with for that as well. They may be better teams than the Yankees and Red Sox, but I don't think it's likely that they're that much better.
  
  
• I dislike the wildcard, but the National League wildcard race is shaping up to be the most (and before too long, could end up being pretty much the only) interesting race in the Majors. Fully half the league (Florida, Atlanta, St. Louis, Houston, Chicago, Colorado and San Francisco) is within three games of the wildcard lead, and since two of the divisions are already virtually wrapped up by Philly and LA, those teams will really be fighting for that one spot. It shouldn't exist, but I'll be interested in seeing who gets it anyway.
  

Instant replay now, please

A week ago today (I think I can finally talk about it now), the Twins blew a ten-run lead to fall behind the A's 14-13. They appeared to tie the game in the top of the ninth, when Cuddyer came around from second on a wild pitch and slid in comfortably ahead of the catcher's throw to the pitcher covering the plate. The umpire called Cuddyer out, however, ending the game.

But Cuddyer was safe. There's absolutely no question about it. You could see it live on TV. You could see it, in fact, from any possible angle except the one at which the umpire had chosen to place himself. He was inexcusably out of position, and thus blew the call in an absolutely critical spot. It was terrible, and the umpire, Mike Muchlinski -- apparently a minor league umpire substituting for a regular crew member -- should never see action in the majors again. Still, though, it was an isolated incident, it was a non-regular umpire, and it was publicized enough that we can expect the rest of the umpires around the league to take a lesson from it. Hard to get too worked up about it, in the big picture.

Until yesterday. With the Cubs up 3-1 in the eighth, the Reds are threatening a comeback, with runners on the corners and only one out. On a fly ball to medium center, Edwin Encarnacion tries for the plate. Fukudome makes a great throw, he's called out, and the inning is over.

Except he wasn't out, not by a long shot. This was an even worse call than Muchlinski's; it's not clear if Cubs catcher Koyie Hill ever tagged Encarnacion, but if he did, that didn't happen until at least two thirds of Encarnacion's body had safely crossed the plate. And there was no trickery or other confusing element of the play; it was a close enough play as plays at the plate generally go, but not that close. There's no excuse for getting that one wrong. So instead of it being 3-2 with a runner on second and two outs in the 8th, it's 3-1 going into the bottom of the inning, in which the Cubs score two and effectively put the game away. So it didn't change the outcome of the game as clearly as Muchlinski's screwup did, but it was an even more obvious screwup, and it certainly may have changed the outcome.

Even worse? This time, it wasn't some triple-A schlub. This umpire was Laz Diaz, a real-life Major League umpire who's been at it for over ten years. Replays showed he got into the exact same position Muschlinski had gotten himself into, completely screening himself off from actually viewing the play that it was his job to interpret. So much for learning from the other guy's mistakes.

So it seems to me that at least one, and very likely both, of these two things are true:
(1) Laz Diaz and Mike Muchlinski are incurably incompetent; or
(2) we need instant replays across the board, now.

If it's (1) and not (2), what we need is a league-wide audit of the umpires, and for the ones who can't handle basic things like getting into the proper position on a play at the plate to be made gone (or at least heavily retrained). But why not just implement (2) regardless?

Really, what's the serious argument against instant replay, and how can those considerations possibly mean more than the importance of getting the calls right and avoiding altering the outcomes of games by virtue of terrible calls? This seems unbelievably simple to me. Yeah, you make the game a little longer, you take some (possibly very little, depending on how you implement it) of the humanity out of the game, and so on. But you get the calls right, and you protect the integrity of the games against incompetence like Muchlinski's and Diaz's.

There's a lot of room to argue about how to go about it and how pervasive to make it, how the replay should be triggered, etc., but I don't see the argument that replay should be kept out of the league altogether, or limited to home run calls as it is now. We have the capability to get calls like these right (and have for decades now), so we should get them right. What am I missing?

Just a Day: May 23, 19091981

So, last week was my wedding anniversary, and I took the opportunity to write about all the stuff that happened on that particular day. It was fun! So I thought that today, I'd look at some other random day in baseball history. I went to this site and had it pull random numbers: between 4 and 10 for the month; between 1 and [30 or 31] for the day; and between 1953 and 2008 for the year. Here's what I got this time:

May 23, 1981.

(Okay, so I originally entered 1901 to 2008, and it came up with 1909. Which would be great...except that as you probably know, Retrosheet and Baseball Reference only have boxes from 1953 on [and from 1920-1930, which I'll have to wade into sometime], and without that it's really hard to come up with enough to say unless you happen to fall on a really momentous day, which isn't the point. So 1981 it is!)

Anyway, on Saturday, May 23, 1981...

• The Dodgers beat the Reds, 9-6. Rookie sensation Fernando Valenzuela (hey, check out the sponsor of that page!) has his second poor-ish start in a row after going 8-0 with 8 CG and an 0.50 ERA in the first 8 starts of his career. He still goes 8 innings, but gives up five runs, four earned, with six walks. Another notable rookie, Dave Stewart, bails him out by striking out two in a perfect ninth, and the Dodgers score four in the top of the tenth to give Stew the win. Ron "The Penguin" Cey belts his ninth home run of the young season, but he's only got four more in him in this injury- and strike-shortened year. The win put the Dodgers at a MLB-best 29-11 (.725), already 6.5 games up on the NL West. Quite similar to 2009, when the Dodgers were 30-14 (.682) on May 23 and 8.5 games up on the (smaller and weaker) West.
  
  The 1981 squad would go on to finish first in the West for the first half, but play 27-26 ball and finish 4th in the second half, giving them a second-best-in-the-West record that would have kept them out of the postseason in any other year in history. The Reds, meanwhile, finished with the best overall record (66-42, .611) but didn't win either half. The Dodgers won the World Series, while the division-best Reds watched the entire playoff run from their couches. Weird, weird year.
  
  
• Gene Green passed away at just 47. He had one very solid year with the bat, in 1961, while with the hundred-loss Senators (though he did lead the league in GIDP). Oddly, I can't find any indication anywhere of how it happened that he died so young.
  
  
• Mike Schmidt hit his 14th home run of the season in the Phillies' 6-4 comeback win over the Pirates. That put him on pace for 58, assuming a 162-game season. He finished the year with 31 in just 107 team games, a 47-HR 162G pace. He ended the short season leading the national league in HR, OBP, SLG, R, RBI, total bases, extra-base hits, walks, times on base, and OPS+ (199). And the career .267 hitter even finished fourth in the league in batting average at .316, the only time in his career he went over .293. Those extra 55 games might have given him a real chance at the majors' only triple crown since 1967. Or (certainly more likely) he might have fallen back toward his career norms. Just too bad we didn't get a chance to find out.
  
  
• This was a big day for multiple-extra-inning games. The Rangers manage just seven hits in 12 innings, but also draw ten walks in beating the Mariners 6-4. Bill Stein pinch-hits in the 9th and ends up the star, going 2-for-3 with 3 RBI. The Rangers had been down 4-0 before scoring four in the ninth to tie, and added two in the twelfth to win.
  
  
• That wasn't even the longest game of the day...and neither was this one, though it came just one out shy. Rickey Henderson's sacrifice fly plates Mitchell Page, and the Athletics beat the Blue Jays 3-2 in 15 innings. Henderson, in his second of four consecutive years leading the league in both stolen bases and caught stealing, goes 3-for-6, but is caught stealing for the 10th time after leading off the first with a single. Interestingly, this game featured a matchup of the very best and the fourth-worst leadoff hitters of all time: Rickey for the A's, Alfredo Griffin for the Jays. Thankfully, the not-insane team won this one. Future A's manager Ken Macha came in on defense in the 9th and went 3-for-3 against his future employer.
  
  
• This was the longest game of the day -- in outs, though almost certainly not in minutes. The Royals beat the Twins in 15 innings, 1-0. Paul Splittorff goes 11 shutout innings (six hits, two walks, two Ks...no pitch counts available, sadly), and Roger Erickson matches him for 9.1 of those innings (seven hits, one walk, seven Ks). It ends when Willie Wilson singles home pinch runner Danny Garcia, who played 12 games in '81 and was never heard from again.
  

What I love about this, based on the inadequate sample of the two I've done so far, is that when I first start looking at the chosen day, it looks kind of boring and uninspiring, but as I dig into it, there's always something. Like the Dodgers-Reds, and the three games that totaled 42 innings. I hope you enjoyed reading it some tiny percentage of as much as I enjoyed researching it...

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.

On June 24, 2001...

Of course, the nature of this blog means that June 24 was yesterday. But I'm writing this on June 24, so that's good enough for me. Anyway, eight years ago yesterday...

- Cristian Guzman, enjoying his one good season, had an unlikely 6 RBI, with a double and a homer, as the Twins trounced the Tigers 14-5. They came close to shocking Cleveland and taking the Division Title that year...but 2002 would be their year. By which time neither Guzman nor Keir Dullea was any help at all.

- Barry Bonds went 0-for-4 with a walk, which left him sitting on 39 HR, and on pace for 84.

- John Rocker got his first save with Cleveland after being traded from the Braves; the 26 year old had just four more saves left in him after that. I wonder if he's the only (nearly-)star-quality MLB player whose career was actually derailed by stupidity? Not, like, a debilitating accident caused by his stupidity; just plain ol' stupidity, in and of itself?

- The Mariners won to run their record to a ridiculous 55-19. They were leading the Angels by 18.5 games. It's a travesty that that team didn't even make the series. Probably one of the three best teams ever assembled...and with essentially no star power.

- I noticed none of these things. I was busy getting married to my best friend and a wonderful person who has kept me sane and happy and healthy for eight wonderful years. So forgive me for kind of a nothing post, but we've been celebrating, and I'd just like to appreciate that and marvel at the fact that it was already eight whole years ago. Also, just looking at a random day (random to the baseball world, that is, not to me...) can be fun.

Jamie Moyer could be almost your whole team's dad

I don't think baseball-reference or retrosheet can do this yet (I could be wrong), but I'd really like to know how often one starting pitcher in a game has been twice the (seasonal) age of the opposing starting pitcher. I bet you could find a bunch of them just by looking at the last few years of the likes of Moyer, Ryan and Johnson and the first few of Feller and Newhouser. But anyway...I'd like to know, but not enough to actually go looking.

Regardless, it happened on Tuesday night, and it was bad news for the young guy, with 23 year old David Price and the Rays falling to 46 year old Jamie Moyer and the Phillies by a score of 10-1.

Now, Price didn't pitch that badly (though he pitched plenty badly), and Moyer probably didn't pitch that well (though I'd like to see anyone in his peer group do better). Price suffered from some terrible defense behind him...but did give up 5 "earned" runs (he surrendered all 10 total runs), and his K/BB/HR ratio was an ugly 1.0 (he racked up two of each in just over four innings). Moyer needed 101 pitches to get through six, and walked three, but he did double up on the younger's strikeouts, with 4, and he allowed only the one run to score.

Price throws a 94 MPH fastball and a sharp 86 MPH slider; Moyer hasn't thrown any of his pitches 86 in probably 15 years, and his fastball averages 82.

Now, Moyer's 6 IP, 1 ER lowered his ERA for the season to just barely below 6, so let's not get too carried away. But that 5.97 ERA is good for (approximately) a 74 ERA+, which is 10th all time for a player 46 and older (minimum 70 IP). And of the seasons ahead of his, two are by Hoyt Wilhelm, two by Jack Quinn, and two by Phil Niekro, and one by Brian Dowling in 1901, which should hardly count. So you could argue that Moyer is the 6th-best 46 year old pitcher of all time. Also, only Niekro (and Dowling) was a full-time starter by that age; if Moyer tops 138.2 innings this year (also a Niekro number, at age 48), he'll have thrown the most innings in a season by a dude 46 or older, aside from Phil Niekro, in the last 108 years.

And he doesn't even throw a knuckleball! Now, I'm pretty sick of the Phils, but you gotta love Jamie Moyer.

Guest Blogger: The All-Hotness Team

When I posted my All Unfortunate-Looking Team the other day (and by the way, how did I forget Otis Nixon?), it was suggested in the comments that I should follow it up with an All-Good Looking Team. And, well, I can't. I'd like to be able to; I just don't know whether guys are good-looking or not. I guess there's an ugliness threshhold below which I feel fairly confident in my assessments. Above that, though, I find I have no idea.

Enter my first ever guest writer: my own lovely wife, who has recently (re-)begun writing her own delightful blog under the name "Minerva." Enjoy!

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After reading Bill’s delightful-if-irreverent blog on Thursday providing his readers with the homeliest of players, the question came to mind of whether he would provide the opposite list. He assured me he would not; however, he did offer me the opportunity to do so in his stead. I will do my best. I will restrict myself to players who have played in my lifetime, as he did, for consistency’s sake. Also, then I won’t have to look up quite so many players. I lack the depth of encyclopedic baseball knowledge of my darling husband, although he has made quite the baseball fan out of me. I undertake this challenge with one caveat: judging a person’s attractiveness is very subjective. I am going with my own gut reactions here, so I fully expect there to be some disagreement. I apologize in advance if anyone’s secret heartthrob is inadvertently left off my list. And if it seems like I have too many Twins, it’s probably because I watch them more than any other team, so I can readily recall more of them and what they look like off the top of my head…sorry about that. Maybe that’s why I don’t have many Yankees…Hmm.

Catcher: Joe Mauer. I admire baseball players that are great at fielding a very difficult position and also are excellent hitters. As the first-round draft pick for the Twins who went on to win the batting title in 2006 and 2008, Mauer certainly fits that bill. I also admire a pair of startlingly-blue eyes set off by dark hair (I secretly hope my own son will one day rock this combo). I may not be a huge fan of giant sideburns, but if that’s his biggest flaw, I’m willing to overlook it.

Honorable Mention: Mike Piazza. Growing up in California in the 90s, I clearly remember the days when a young Mike announced in a commercial that he was the lowest-paid player on the Dodgers, and he could still afford that car…what a cute guy. Always charming and well-spoken, and he wore a goatee well. He seems like the type of guy your mom would love, but he'd still be fun on a date. He happens to rock the classic "tall, dark and handsome" combination very well.

1^st Base (tie): Justin Morneau. Another excellent player (MVP, anyone? How about Home Run Derby champ?). His name is fun to chant when followed by a clapping pattern. This action seems to spur him to superhuman home-run streaks against the Chicago White Sox. I am also a sucker for accents and he is Canadian. He has nice eyes, straight, white teeth and wavy but not 'fro-y hair. Plus, his surname rhymes with “porno.” I'm not sure why, but this seems to be in his favor.

Derrek Lee is a tall drink of water who still manages not to look like Frankenstein. He has a warm, genuine smile and once in awhile you can catch him laughing and joking in the dugout, as in this photo. Sexier than a solely-attractive man is a man with a cause: he is also a crusader for further research into the rare retinal disease that afflicts his young daughter. Bonus points if he can speak Japanese, since his father had a career in Japan’s major leagues. Domo arigato, Mr. Lee.

Honorable Mention: Chris Davis. Davis has big, soulful blue eyes. He also finds creative poses for his photo sessions, indicating a certain level of creativity and intelligence beyond raw athletic talent. Hmm, maybe I have a thing for goatees, I never noticed before. Maybe it’s just that so many danged baseball players HAVE them…I sort of have to end up picking some of them then.

2^nd Base: Chase Utley. The unattractive-sounding surname doesn’t suit such a handsome mug. Even the boo-birds in Philly can’t find much to fault in him. I mean, really. He married a woman who is a classic beauty (not the bottle-blonde bimbos a lot of them seem to gravitate towards), and they rescue dogs together? What’s not to like? Let's take a moment to revel in the pure cuteness of it all.

Okay, moment over. Moving on.

Shortstop: Ryan Theriot. I love an underdog, and The Riot seems to be one of the main poster children of our loveable Cubbies. While his eyebrows are threatening to take on David Wright-esque proportions, he is otherwise a very nice-looking guy. A benign Sylar, or a more-athletic Spock, if you will.

Honorable Mention: Elvis Andrus. Bill had to spell his last name for me, I was not familiar with this rookie, but his smile has the makings of a young Denzel Washington. This one intrigues me. I will be watching you, Mr. Andrus. Please, keep smiling.

3^rd Base: Evan Longoria. Lucky he is this cute, or everyone would tease him WAY more for having a name almost identical to Eva of Desperate Housewives fame. Another really nice smile, and the rest of his face is well in proportion as well, with nice high cheekbones and smiley eyes. Oh, and he can play a little, too.

Outfield: Ichiro! Suzuki. Even scruffy, his quiet intensity at bat and gravity-defying feats in right field make him very easy to look at indeed. His smile is more of the mischievous, little-boy-all-grown-up variety. Very winning.

Outfield: Torii Hunter. While he played for the Twins, he had braces for at least a few years, but despite that potential barrier, his smile was infectious. Now that they are off, it’s even more so. Just try not to smile when you see him smile! Really, I dare you. That’s on top of the 8 consecutive Gold Gloves.

Outfield: Jeff Francoeur. Sure, he he sucks, but look: PUPPY! In all seriousness, he is a good-looking dude. Sweet smile, big, bright eyes, long eyelashes. I guess it's good he has all that going for him since he probably won't have a really long MLB career. Get the Annies while you can, buddy!

Pitcher: Johan Santana. My first article of clothing featuring an MLB player's number was his. I had the pleasure of going to an early autograph signing he had at a Twins pro shop with my husband, and he is definitely easy on the eyes. Warm, open face, sparkling eyes, and a neatly kept goatee that actually flatters him. He was a very polite young man as well, which certainly doesn’t hurt. What could be a better combination than knockout looks and lights-out pitching? We miss you in the Cities, señor.

Honorable Mention: Pat Neshek. Okay, he’s hurt right now. That doesn’t make him less cute. He has an irrepressible energy that radiates from the field clear out to the bleachers. It shines through in his rakish smile and crinkly eyes. He also has an awesome submarine pitching action that actually offends opposing hitters—very entertaining. Plus, he is a big nerd—he collects autographs.

I dig nerdy athletes.

Okay, it’s impossibly late, so I need to put this, then myself, to bed. Thanks for humoring the chick that doesn’t know quite as much about baseball as all of you.

"Dude, we're hot. High five!"

The All-Unfortunate-Looking Team

Inspired by The Common Man's post of about a month ago and a friend's suggestion, here are my votes for the ugliest players at each position in my lifetime. This is a little mean-spirited for my taste, but it's not like this would be the first time any of these guys had heard it, and it's hard to think of a new topic every single day sometimes, so give me a break already:

Catcher: Ron KarkoviceThere's a reason that all the cards (and other pictures for that matter) of the good-field, no-hit catcher other than this one are from a solid 15-20 feet away. He had the wrinkles, and the pure-white hair and whispy little mustache, of a 75 year old man. He was about 23 in this picture. No kidding.

First Base: John Kruk

You know, first basemen as a whole are a good- (or at least inoffensive-)looking group. They're either your strapping athletic types that look like quintessential baseball players (Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Mark Teixeira, Justin Morneau), or they're the lovably pudgy types (either Fielder, Kent Hrbek, Mo Vaughn, Jim Thome). Kruk might have fit into the latter category, but he wasn't quite pudgy enough, and the mullet goes a long way in this competition. And of course now on ESPN (he's still on ESPN, right? I really don't watch anymore), he looks like a bowling ball in a suit with no neck, just a head perched on top. Steve Balboni narrowly missed the cut, by the way, but with him I think it was just the walrus mustache; without that, he'd probably look totally normal. John Kruk couldn't be spared that easily.

Second Base: Mickey Morandini

In this picture, he kind of has a younger Ron Karkovice thing going. In later pictures, no doubt influenced by Krukkie (his teammate both here and with the Phillies), he has a mullet. Either way, it ain't pretty.

Shortstop: Alvaro Espinoza Huge 80s mustache + huge 80s glasses = win.

Third Base: Gary Gaetti

My first favorite player, as I've mentioned before, but man. You don't get a nickname like "The Rat" by...well, by not bein' ugly.

Left Field: Pete Rose Maybe I'm biased, but that mug and those jowls and that greasy bowl haircut...just kind of revolting.

Center Field: Willie McGeeThe MVP of this team, for obvious reasons. Not only was Willie less than blessed aesthetically, but his "picture face" was less of a smile than a look suggesting that something has just happened that is so horrible as to be beyond his comprehension.

Right Field: Ricky Ledee
Kind of an out-there pull on this one. But if that's not unfortunate, I don't know what is. And it's not the picture--all his pictures look just like this. May actually be The Missing Link.

Starting Pitcher: Randy Johnson
I mean, obvi. Apologies to Pete Vuckovich, CC Sabathia and David Wells, but just as with the NL Cy Young race throughout the early 2000s, this contest is no contest.

Relief Pitcher: Rich Garces
There are a lot of higher-profile guys to choose from -- Eckersley, Mesa, Urbina -- but if Ledee can make the team, then so can El Guapo. Kruk would give him a run for his money nowadays, but I think Garces may be the first player who, at his playing weight, was as wide as he was tall.

So who'd I miss?

Adventures in Miscellany

I don't think this year was the best time for MLB to try to go all NFL on us with the draft. I mean, you've got the new best pitching prospect ever (don't dare tell Keith Law that he might not be the next Clemens, by the by) , but nobody seems all that excited about anyone else in the draft. I'll watch pretty much anything having anything to do with professional baseball, and maybe if the amateur draft was held in January, they'd rope me in. But I'm not watching the MLB draft in prime time when there's real baseball to be watched. And if I'm not in their audience for this thing, odds are pretty good that their actual audience will be wildly terribly small compared to the amount of time and money they've spent promoting it.

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Nobody has told baseball that it's a dated and boring game. It keeps coming up with things I've never seen before. Like this:

I wish I could figure out where that came from or who those teams were. But anyway, I thought it was cool.

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Speaking of Strasburg, add Buster Olney to the growing list of crotchety writers who are jealous of his opportunity and "advising" him to take less money than he's worth in what may be the one shot to make real money he gets in his life. Olney quotes "one baseball official" as saying he would just offer Strasburg $11 million (half a million more than Prior's record-breaking deal eight years ago) "and make that my best and first and only offer."

I'll just say this: I hope that "baseball official" is the Padres' director of marketing or the Mets' senior counsel or something. If that official is making baseball decisions, you should hope that he's not doing so for your team. A Boras client very well may (I'd go so far as to say probably will) ignore an offer so obviously below his value as that (and negotiation techniques as bullying and amateurish as that), and go play for the Saints or something.

And if that happens, with fan morale where it is now (that one fan is getting awfully down on himself), the Nationals might as well move back to Canada. Or Senegal.

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Mr. Pinto points out that the Padres get a strange off-day in the City of Angels, maybe indulging in a Rodeo Drive (or maybe just Rodeo Road--man, I wish that video was online) shopping spree between their series with the Dodgers ending on Wednesday and the one with the Angels starting on Friday. There have been a lot of head-scratchers with the schedule this year, mostly (a) all the two-game series and (b) pairs of teams in different divisions seeming to meet each other very frequently over the first two months, and then not again for the rest of the year. But problem #1, now and always, is that ridiculous unbalanced schedule. Yankees and Red Sox fans (and Rays fans) should put away their differences and organize a collective uprising against that ludicrosity.

Then again, you can get from LA to San Diego in two hours or less. I guess I'd probably just buzz back home for the day. Now, if they did that to the Marlins or Orioles, there might be issues.

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Finally, a video that has nothing to do with anything. Here's a sentence I never thought I'd say: I'm currently obsessed with two folk-comedy duos. You've probably heard of the first:


The other is Garfunkel and Oates, who don't have the benefit of an HBO sitcom (yet) but are just as funny. But I've realized that they don't have a video I could embed here that wouldn't be likely to be at least a little offensive to someone.

If it's May 9 rather than June 9...

...and your team's MVP candidate is hitting .228/.343/.447, do you worry?

Because that's Ian Kinsler's line since May 6 (the season started on April 6, so if this were a month earlier that would take us back to about game 1). Fortunately, back in the real world, he hit .321 and slugged .652 for the first five weeks or so. So since May 6 he's lost 47 points of average, 14 points of OBP and 103 points of SLG, but he's still a .905 OPS second baseman, not some .228-hitting disappointment. For now.

Another one: his season numbers are still awe-inspiring, because he hit .400 for the first month or so. But do you think Miguel Cabrera would be getting ESPN.com feature stories right now if the first baseman had put up an .839 OPS with 3 homers through May 9, rather than from May 6 to June 9?

On the other hand, how do you suppose the New York media would react if Mark Teixeira had waltzed into the city and hit .350/.417/.761 with 12 HR in his first month-plus, rather than his second?

Do you think there would be any doubt about his All-Star chances if Ichiro! had hit .400/.439/.538 in April-May rather than May-June? Would the media get off David Wright's back a little bit if he had been hitting .388 with a .500 OBP on May 9?

One thing that drives me crazy is the way that, at least with regard to position players, each passing month is a little less important to us than the last, until you get to September (and that's assuming you're in a pennant race). If a guy hits .400 in April but then hits .200 in May, he's still a good bet to make the All-Star team, while if he hits .200 in April and .400 in May, he's probably still considered a disappointment come June (unless somebody noticed and gave him the Player of the Month Award or something). The April stats count for all the hype, and the October stats count for who's "clutch" and who's not, and all the stuff in the middle just kind of happens.

But if the Mets win by a game or two, Wright's enormous early-May-to-early-June will have been as big a part of it as anything Delgado or Reyes or Beltran could possibly do in August or September. With that decimated lineup, being only three games out at this point is a miracle you can attribute almost exclusively to the wonders that are Wright and Santana. Yet if Wright slips a bit in September (or even if he's his usual stellar self, but is perceived as being "not clutch"), he'll be widely regarded as a failure again. These games (and these stats) count too, people...

just a story

In early May of last year, we took our then-three month old son to his first ballgame, a night game between the Twins and the Sox. And he slept most of the time, of course, either in my arms or in Mom's little carrier.

But when he wasn't sleeping, he was probably screaming. It was a surreal experience; if I'm at a game and I'm not keeping score, I'm still giving it at least 90% of my attention. With the boy there, though, about that much of my attention was taken up with trying to quiet him down, trying to get him to sleep, trying to keep him asleep, trying to keep his little legs and hands covered and out of the cold night air.

And it wasn't much of a game anyway, for a Twins fan. The Sox jumped on Nick Blackburn early. The Twins were hitting the ball pretty hard off of Gavin Floyd, but everything was right at a defender somewhere. They got a run at some point--on a walk and a (questionable) error and a sacrifice fly--and they kept it close until the Sox opened it up to 6-1 in the 7th, but it just never felt like they were really in it (but maybe that was just, you know, the baby). We, and especially the boy, had had enough, and finally decided that if they didn't score in the top of the 8th, we would head out. I never leave games early, but with a kid, you've just got to use your head once in a while. So when they failed to score again in the 8th, we got up and walked out.

We'd been told by a concession lady earlier in the game to visit the fan relations booth before we left, for special "baby's first White Sox game" gifts for our son. So we did. And while he's printing out the little certificate and whatnot, the fan relations guy looks at me and says:

"You're not leavin' now, are ya?"

Little sheepish grin and nod toward the kid. "Well, yeah...we--"

"You know what's happening out there?" He's kind of cocked his head and is squinting at me now, like maybe I'm a foreigner at my first ballgame or something.

So here I am thinking, yeah, I know, big win for the White Sox. Genius, I'm wearing a Twins hat and my son is decked out in Twins gear. Not really into it. And then he kind of gives me a come on figure it out I don't want to say it look, and it slowly dawns on me.

Everything the Twins have hit (except that questionable error call in the 4th) has been right at somebody. Literally, everything.

There are no hits. This is a no-hitter through eight. I've been sitting here watching eight innings of a no-hitter in person (definitely a first for me), completely oblivious.

I don't remember what I said to the guy. I'm sure I tried to laugh it off, but I was actually kind of mortified. I'm not trying to brag (and not at all convinced that this is something to brag about), but it's a safe bet that I follow more baseball and know more about baseball than 99 or so out of every hundred people in the park that night, and yet suddenly I'm the one doofus who tries to walk out on history. As we hurried back in (behind home plate to stand behind the seats and look on for the last inning, ironically an infinitely better view than our own seats in the upper deck and down the line), it's ridiculous, but I wanted some way to tell everyone I saw that I'm not actually like that, I would never do that, but you see I have this boy here and he's cold and fussy, but I know what I'm doing here really I do.

Anyway, Mauer doubles with one out in the ninth, and Floyd leaves so Jenks can get some work in and sew up a 7-1 win. So I wouldn't have missed history after all. But I certainly would've missed something.

Lar at wezen-ball wrote a nice piece the other day about the feeling of being part of a crowd that starts to sense that something special might happen. And it made me think of this. I have no doubt that the same buzz and excitement was all around me that night (though they had hit him pretty hard, and he'd walked three guys and given up a run, but I mean, all you have to do is look at the big '0' on the stupid scoreboard). But I missed it completely, and I'm sure the 15 year old boy inside me smacked me square in the forehead for that. But, you know, parenthood can do amazing things to a person.