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...

Happy Birthday...

Mark Belanger!

Just proving he knows how to hold the thing

Belanger has one of the greatest and most widely known nicknames not to appear on his BBREF page: "The Blade." Standing 6'1" and weighing approximately nothing, that plus the alliteration made it just about a perfect nickname (if a little on the nose).

Belanger won eight Gold Gloves, and to hear the people who watched him or played with him talk about his play at shortstop, you'd think he was the reason the award was invented. My own subjective evaluation of the collective subjective opinions of the greatest defensive shortstops of the part of baseball history most living people still remember would go like this: (1) Ozzie Smith; (2) Omar Vizquel; (3) Mark Belanger. And with Mark, like with Ozzie (and unlike with Omar), the reputation appears justified. BBREF and BP both report that he saved about 235 runs over the average shortstop for his career; consider that "the average shortstop" is likely to be the best defensive baseball player on the diamond on any given night, and that's pretty freaking impressive. (Ozzie had 380. Ozzie is so far above every other fielder who has ever played that they should probably rename the position after him.)

On the other hand, Belanger was an almost unbelievably terrible hitter, with a career line of .228/.300/.280 and 20 homers in 6602 PA. The amazing thing is that he had three years in which he was a considerably better-than-average-hitting shortstop, 1969, 1971 and 1976 (95, 97, and 100 OPS+, respectively), but that just underscores how horrible he was in his other 13-ish seasons, putting up full-season lines like .218/.303/.259 and .206/.287/.274. BP has him as being worth 40.4 wins above replacement for his career, which is fantastic for a guy who couldn't hit at all. When he could hit a little, he played like a superstar; he gets 8.4 wins above replacement for his 97 OPS+ year in 1971 (which BP says was also his best defensive year, at an incredible 40 fielding runs above average).

So, here's something a sabermetrician never would have admitted 10 years ago (someday I'm going to go back and try to find all those Rob Neyer posts about how baseball is 60% offense and 35% pitching and 5% defense, so we can laugh at ourselves): historically great defender at the most important defensive position + historically awful hitter = pretty damn good player. Belanger is one of those rare little "gamer"-type guys who deserved all the accolades he got (or most of them, anyway).

Some fun facts about The Blade:

• He batted second in the Orioles' batting order 54 times in 1968 (.208/.272/.248); 53 times in 1970 (.218/.303/.259); and 29 times in 1977 (.206/.287/.274), just as a sample. Worse, he hit first or second 43 times in 1979 at age 35, a year in which he hit .167 in 242 PA and wasn't even playing good D anymore. He did usually bat 8th or 9th, but would occasionally also fill in at leadoff. He's exactly the type of guy you probably don't want hitting in front of the likes of Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, Bobby Grich, Reggie Jackson and Eddie Murray. Why not just stick Jim Palmer in there?
  
  
• He was intentionally walked three times from 1973 on (actually four, but the fourth was as a Dodger hitting in front of Fernando Valenzuela, and I'm sure most or all of his 18 pre-1973 IBBs were in front of the pitcher as well). In 1973, with a runner on third and one out in the bottom of the 11th, Texas manager Whitey Herzog made the...interesting decision to walk both Elrod Hendricks and Belanger, hitters 8 and 9, intentionally to get to the top of the order with the bases loaded. To be fair, leadoff hitter Merv Rettenmund had been just as bad as Belanger, and was actually pinch-hit for here, and the Rangers got out of it when Bill Gogelewski struck out the next two batters (the first on a foul two-strike bunt). This game would have been a lot more frustrating to me had I been around to follow it 35 years ago.
  
  
• Post-DH Intentional Walk #2 is one of the strangest things I've ever seen. In 1977, Cleveland manager Frank Robinson has his old teammate The Blade, the O's #9 hitter, walked to bring up leadoff hitter Al Bumbry. The pitcher (Don Wood) was a shut-down lefty and Bumbry was a LH hitter. But: (a) Bumbry was a good hitter, particularly so in '77, and was a better hitter even against lefties than Belanger was against anybody; (b) Cleveland was already down 4-0; and (c) there were two outs and a runner on third! So rather than take the near-automatic out and end the inning, F-Rob puts him on base to face the much better hitter, who predictably lines an RBI single, and the O's go on to win 7-2. I wish that all IBBs (that don't come right in front of the pitcher) would end this way.
  
  
• IBB #3 was another head-scratcher, Red Sox manager Don Zimmer walking Belanger in front of Larry Harlow (a very unlikely candidate to have already made two appearances on this blog), who had already homered in the game. Harlow singled, but no runs scored. O's won 5-3 anyway.
  
  
• A candidate for his best offensive game would be August 18, 1969. The O's spanked the Seattle Pilots, 12-3, and Mark went 4-for-5 with three doubles and 5 RBI.
  
  
• Another is May 11, 1974: 5-for-5 with a double, stolen base and three runs scored. Managed not to drive in any of the twelve runs the O's scored against Cleveland.
  
  
• He seemed to like playing against Cleveland. On at least one occasion, he made Earl look like a genius for batting him leadoff, going 4-for-4 with 3 R, 3 RBI, a stolen base and a triple in a 7-0 win. I'd like to find a big offensive game where he carried the team to a win, but they're all blowouts. Apparently, if Mark could hit your pitching, so could the rest of the team.
  
  
• I'm guessing this might be the weirdest game he ever played: August 25, 1968. In 18 innings, the O's beat the Red Sox 3-2. The Blade (batting second) comes up nine times. Three of those times he gets a hit, and he scores one of those precious three runs. One other time, he has a sac bunt. Each of the other five times, Belanger strikes out.
  
  
• So over the course of a long career, even the worst hitter will have a handful of amazing games where it seems he can do no wrong, the kind you remember forever. By the same token, of course, even the best fielder can make an absolute ass of himself. Just like his teammate Brooks Robinson more famously did, Belanger (who retired with the highest fielding percentage of any SS in AL history) once committed three errors in one inning. The errors led to three unearned runs and gave the Twins a one-run lead. Luckily for Belanger, his teammates bailed him out and the O's won the game.

Belanger would have turned 65 today. Sadly, he passed in 1998 at just 54, succumbing to cancer (or as his BBREF sponsor kind of irreverently says: "Unfortunately, he smoked cigarettes, and he died too young"). But happy birthday wherever you are, Mark.

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.

Ramblin' about Randy

I'll remember him as a Mariner, but I suppose that Randy Johnson will be remembered by most people as a Diamondback. That's where he won four of his five Cy Youngs, and the World Series MVP, and all that. Just for fun:

Team	W	L	ERA	Inn
Expos	3	4	4.69	55.2
Mariners	130	74	3.48	1838.1
Astros	10	1	1.28	84.1
D-Backs	118	62	2.83	1630.1
Yankees	34	19	4.37	450.2
Giants	5	4	5.12	58.0

Wow, those couple months in Houston jump out at you, don't they? I tend to forget how many teams Randy has pitched for. I imagine he'd rather forget his time with the Yankees...as I already had.

And his time with the Giants, outside of yesterday afternoon, seems destined to become pretty forgettable, too. It seems, from the few times I've watched him and from looking at the stats, that Randy can still throw it plenty hard...but he has to try a lot harder than he used to in order to make that happen, so he ends up losing his control somewhere along the line. Or he has games like yesterday, where he doesn't walk many but also doesn't strike out anybody either (who had Randy's 300th win pegged as a two-strikeout game?), which seems to indicate that he pulled it back a bit. Anyway, it's pretty clear that Randy isn't Randy anymore. You have to assume (or maybe just hope) that he hangs it up after this.

So, with all due respect to Giants fans, it seems kind of sad to me that today had to happen with the Giants (and sadder still, with all due respect to the Nationals' fan, that it happened in Washington).

But then again, pitchers who stay in the game long enough to win 300 tend to move about a bit. How many 300th wins do you suppose actually came with a club you tend to associate the pitcher with? Well, sticking with the last 50 years or so:

Greg Maddux -- Cubs
Roger Clemens -- Yankees
Steve Carlton -- Phillies
Nolan Ryan -- Rangers
Don Sutton -- Angels
Phil Niekro -- Yankees
Gaylord Perry -- Mariners
Tom Seaver -- White Sox
Tom Glavine -- Mets
Randy Johnson -- Giants

Actually, I think the answer to my question is "more than I would've guessed." Maddux is a Brave first, but he'll be remembered as a Cub too. Clemens is essentially equal parts Yankee and Red Sock, I think, though most of his best years were in Boston (or Toronto). Carlton played for seventy-seven teams after getting his 300th win, but stayed with the Phillies long enough to hit the mark. I don't know if people will remember twenty or thirty years from now that Tom Glavine pitched for the Mets...but he did spend five seasons with them, and made two All-Star teams.

Frankly, there's only one trivia question here that definitely would've stumped me: Phil Niekro. I have to admit that I had no idea he ever pitched for the Yankees. But I imagine a lot of people would be surprised to see that Sutton did it for the other L.A.-area team, or Seaver with the White Sox, or Perry with the Mariners (though he pitched for essentially every team in the Majors).

My point, though, is that I have the hunch that Randy will be the real stumper, a couple decades down the road. The thing about it is, he's a better pitcher than any of the guys I just named; you could argue for Seaver, but you'd probably lose. He has the bad fortune of pitching at the same time as Clemens and Maddux and Pedro, but he's got to be in the top 10 (probably very comfortably) of all time. Yet, unless he learns to throw a knuckler and hangs around with them until he's 50 or something, who's going to remember that Randy Johnson got his 300th with (or even ever pitched for) the Giants?

Just seems like kind of a shame, is all...

(up)Comings and Goings

I really wanted to do a big long thing on the Sports Illustrated cover story that Jason@IIATMS pointed out today about 16 year old phenom Bryce Harper, but I don't have nearly the time I would need to devote to it.

Definitely go read the article, though. With the weirdly reverent, awestruck and just off-the-wall weird way Verducci writes the piece, it's almost eerily reminiscent of the famous 1985 SI piece on "Sidd Finch", only it turns out that Harper is real.

The Verducci piece and everything else I read about him lauds his personality, too -- he volunteers for charity, has a good GPA, all that stuff. Only if you read the quotes from him in the piece, he actually comes off as astonishingly overconfident (if understandably so) and kind of petty (in other words, like a 16 year old). Of course, as has been pointed out numerous times, Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry got the he's-such-an-upstanding-and-together-young-man from the media as unknown phenoms, too. You suppose they'll ever learn their lesson about that?

Anyway, I really hope Harper stays healthy and comes along as expected between now and 2011. With the circus that has been Stephen Strasburg this spring, the internets might just explode with a catcher who can hit 500-foot home runs and steal bases out there for the taking (by, I'd have to assume, the Nationals again).

Also, check out Larry Stone's take on the Harper piece...and the uninspiring tale of the only other high school ballplayer to make the SI cover.

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In completely unrelated and astonishing news, the Braves released Tom Glavine today, on the eve of his return from a pretty rough rehab assignment, and he's predictably less than thrilled about it (though, in example #593 of how Tom Glavine is smarter than other baseball players, he expressed it entirely through his agent).

On one hand, I have to say that, as a baseball move, it's hard to argue with this. The Braves have three starting pitchers who would be #1s for most other teams (Vazquez, Lowe and Jurrjens) and another who's been better than he looks (Kawakami), plus two #5 starters and one of the top prospects in baseball in Tommy Hanson knocking on the door. Activating Glavine would mean a $1 million bonus in addition to the $2.5 million he's already owed; not much money to a baseball team, but $1 million that, in a bad economy, they had no reason to part with. Baseball-wise.

On the other hand, you can sort of understand why Glavine is upset. He's won 305 games, 244 of 'em as a Brave (and 12 more in the postseason). He's 43 years old and a guaranteed Hall of Famer, and he's put himself through a two-month minor-league rehab gig to get back to play for this club (and he did pretty well; didn't walk a lot of guys or give up homers, though he didn't strike anybody out either).

On yet a third hand (growing out of the middle of your back, but don't look now), this can't be a good PR move for the Braves, whose fans have mostly very good memories of Glavine. Is it bad enough that they'll lose $1 million in revenue from it? I kind of doubt it. But it doesn't look great.

So did they make the right move? Shyster sure doesn't think so -- calls it "shameful," actually -- but he's probably as impartial about this as I am to the question of whether Kirby really deserved all those Gold Gloves. Anyway, I'm undecided, but leaning toward saying yes, it was a good move for the Braves. Maybe Glavine doesn't show up to any Old Timers' Games for a few years or something, but you've got to get Hanson in the big leagues and you've got to be sure you're using guys who can still pitch. And a million dollars isn't nothing these days.

Glavine says (in the ESPN article linked above) that he still intends to play, but will he have the option? He's 43, coming off an injury, and before that coming off a 5.54 2008 ERA. He was about an average pitcher, ERA-wise, in 2007...but with a 4.86 FIP. And two years is a long time ago to a 43 year old baseball player. I assume he can be had for virtually nothing, but so (presumably) can Jim Edmonds, and Frank Thomas, and Ray Durham, and Mark Grudzielanek. If these guys can't get jobs, should we really expect Glavine to find one at this point?

Which, with sincerest apologies to Tom, would be the bright spot in this for me. I think it would be pretty flipping sweet to see Glavine and Greg Maddux head into the Hall of Fame together. Now if only that other rehab project could go off the rails (in a career-ending but otherwise non-debilitating way) before it hits Boston...