Baseball Ex Machina

Sad Tidings

2009-03-24T21:18:00.002-04:00

It was a sad day for this baseball fan. First came the passing of George Kell, a Hall of Fame third baseman for the Tigers, Sox, and other teams, and later a long-time broadcaster for the Tigers. He was 86. Kell's playing days ended just before I started paying attention, so I never saw him play, but he was one of the players in my All-Star Baseball set, and a good one.

Later came the news that John Brattain had died, apparently of complications from heart surgery. Brattain was probably my favorite writer over at the Hardball Times. His pieces were funny and intelligent, and I will miss them. He was much too young at 44, and leaves his wife and two teenage daughters.

The odd thing for me is how much Brattain's death stunned me. It's not so much that a writer I admire is gone. I lurk at the Baseball Think Factory board where he was an active participant. I've never felt much of an urge to participate there myself, mostly because the tone is generally much snarkier, and often far meaner, than I am comfortable with. But one of the things about lurking is that you often become as familiar with the active participants as if you were participating yourself. Brattain was a witty voice of reason amongst the lesser snark. Such a shame.

Wows!

2008-03-31T10:45:00.001-04:00

Wow! Andre Ethier gets the start in left field tomorrow when the Dodgers open against the Jints. Juan Pierre, aka Slappy McPopup, goes to the bench. As recently as a week and a half ago, I didn't think Torre, who said going in that said going in that PVL (proven veteran leadership) would have the inside track, would pick Ethier over Pierre, despite the fact that Ethier is clearly the better all around player. But Ethier had by far the best spring on the team, and Pierre had by far the worst. So, Pierre will make $9M each of the next four years to sit on the bench. At some point there will have to be a trade, because there is too much baggage there.

Still waiting to see if Blake DeWitt makes the team. He's really, really young (21) and has played very few games even at AA, but he's the only guy left standing at third. The organization would probably really like to get him some more seasoning, but unless Ned makes a trade there's really no one else.

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Wow! That was quite the entertaining game in the LA Colosseum last night. I especially liked the Dodgers' choice to not even bother with a left fielder (since the fence was so close to the shortstop), but to instead play Andruw Jones just behind second base. That decision lead to the extremely rare scoring notation, "CS 2-8," (caught stealing catcher to center fielder) when Jacoby Ellsbury was nailed trying to steal second.

More pictures here.

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Wow! Hiroki Kiroda and Clayton Kershaw looked terrific as they took the Sox to school today, taking a combined no-hitter into the eighth. Pierre celebrated his demotion by having his best game of the spring, although he did manage to get picked off first.

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Wow! Two ex-Dodger pitchers I couldn't wait to be rid of are the opening day pitchers for their respective teams. This says much more about the teams than the pitchers. Odalis Perez opened the season for the Nats tonight in their new park, and amazingly enough was pretty good. But the stunner is that Mark Hendrickson will start for the Marlins tomorrow against the Mets. And if that wasn't unbelievable enough, Luis Gonzales will be patrolling right field for the Marlins, as well. Gonzo doesn't have the arm to play left anymore, much less right. The management of the Marlins should be ashamed. They're not, of course. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

Daddy, I've Got Cider in My Ear...

2008-03-28T13:59:00.000-04:00

Hideki Matsui got married yesterday.

This was apparently about a week after he made bets with both Derek "Sky Masterson" Jeter and Bobby "Nathan Detroit" Abreu that he would marry before either of them.

But it seems to me that in focusing on Jeter's and Abreu's sticky earlobes, the media have missed the real story here — Matsui's new bride is apparently a cartoon character.

Breakfast with Vin

2008-03-09T11:34:00.002-04:00

There is nothing better than having coffee and Dutch apple pie for breakfast while watching the video feed of yesterday's Dodger game with Vin Scully at the mike. It was Scully's first game of the year, and the Dodgers responded by absolutely pounding the Cardinals, 20-6. This was much better than Friday's game.

The Dodgers went into camp with only a couple of questions about who is going to play where. One of them is who's going to play third. The candidates are Nomar Garciaparra and Andy LaRoche. Nomar is the often injured fading star coming off a terrible season (only 7 HR and an SLG of.371). LaRoche is the often injured number one prospect in the organization, who put up terrific numbers in the minors, but who also didn't especially impress in his brief trial with the big club last season. Most of Dodger fandom, at least in the places I hang out, want LaRoche to get the job because of his youthful potential. Meanwhile, the people whose opinions count the most, Joe Torre and Ned Colletti, seem to have decided in favor of Nomar because of his proven veteran leadership (PVL). On the field, both players were having good springs.

Then for about five minutes on Friday it appeared as if fate had decided to intervene. Nomar was hit on the wrist by a pitch and left the game in obvious pain. LaRoche fans rejoiced as Andy pinch ran for Nomar, figuring that here was his shot to take the job. It was not to be. In the very next inning, the Dodger catcher (Danny Ardoin, who has no shot to make the team) threw wildly to third in an attempt to pick a runner off the base. The ball ricocheted off the runner's helmet and struck LaRoche on the base of his right thumb, tearing his ulnar collateral ligament. Bozhe moi!

LaRoche will have surgery, and will be out for at least two months, probably more. Nomar, fortunately, was only bruised and will be out for only a few days. Supposedly. You never know with Nomar. The Dodgers will now look at Tony Abreu (also oft injured), Ramon Martinez (Noooo!!!), and Delwyn Young at third.

The switch-hitting Young is an interesting possibility. He's a heck of a hitter. He started out as a second baseman, but wasn't much of a fielder, so the organization moved him to the outfield. He came up last September and hit .380. He already figured to stay with the team as the fifth outfielder. This spring they put him back at second, and suddenly he started making all the plays. I don't expect him to emerge as a third baseman just as suddenly, but if he can spell Nomar occasionally until LaRoche gets back, that'd be great. Certainly it's better than the reports that Colletti has been shopping around for Brandon Inge.

The Dodgers play the Sox today at Vero, the last Sunday game ever at the old camp.

Hall of Fame Time

2008-01-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

The Hall of Fame balloting results will be announced tomorrow. The voters (members of the Baseball Writers Assn. of a certain seniority) can vote for up to ten players. There are 25 names on the ballot. A player needs to be picked on 75% of the ballots for election, and if he's not on 5% of the ballots, or if he's used up his 15 years of eligibility, he's taken off. Here's the list, and who I'd vote for (in bold) if they gave me a ballot.

First year eligibles:

One of these guys is not like the others.

Brady Anderson - When I went to Florida to watch spring training games in 1989, I carried with me a few baseballs for autographs. For the first couple of days I had absolutely no luck getting any of them signed. Part of it was that there were too many fences between the fans and the ballplayers, and the other was that I thought it too undignified to hang over a railing at a ballpark and beg. I finally got my first at a game in Winter Haven between the Red Sox and the Twins. (The game featured a match up of the previous two AL Cy Young winners, Roger Clemens and Frank Viola, as the starters.) Just before the game started, Mike Boddicker, one of the Sox pitchers, came over to the chain link fence at the end of the stands, where I was standing, so I asked if he'd sign a ball. He did, along with those of a whole pack of kids that suddenly swarmed around me. The only reason Boddicker was there was because the year before the Sox had traded Brady Anderson (and Curt Schilling) to the Orioles for him.

So on that tenuous connection, I'll mention that Brady Anderson (who I also saw play in the minors at Pawtucket) is the owner of one of the all time freak seasons in baseball history. In 1996, he hit fifty (50!) home runs for Baltimore. In no other season in his career did he ever hit as many as twenty-five, and he only broke twenty twice. He had a number of good years, but only one great one. A lot of people will point at '96 and say steroids. For his part, Anderson says it was creatine (which was legal at the time) and one heck of a groove in his swing.

Rod Beck - He died this year, so they put him on the ballot early. Similar, but not quite as good as Robb Nen (see below).

Shawon Dunston - Had a cannon for an arm and was a very good fielder, but never hit much better than average, and usually worse.

Chuck Finley - I ran into a problem here. Finley's overall numbers are somewhat better than those of Jack Morris, a guy I've thought deserved to get into the Hall. I don't think Finley belongs, even though he was better than Morris. There's a perception problem here. Finley was a very good pitcher on a lot of mediocre to bad teams. Morris was a very good pitcher on a lot of very good to mediocre teams. He also pitched a ten-inning shutout to win the 1991 World Series. Finley was very good for a long time, but he wasn't great, so I wouldn't vote for him. Does that World Series victory make Jack Morris great?

Travis Fryman - Sort of poor man's David Wright. He had some very good years before he turned twenty-six, then seemingly ran out of gas. Short career, too.

David Justice - The second best player among the newbies. The Braves won a lot of pennants in the '90s, but they only won one World Series. One of the axioms of baseball is that the team with the best pitching in a short series usually wins, and the Braves almost always had the best pitching. Problem was that their lineups usually had one or two great hitters like Justice, with the rest being guys like Mark Lemke or Jeff Blauser. Doesn't matter how good your pitching is if you can't score runs. Up until a month ago, I figured Justice would probably wind up like Parker or Murphy, getting enough votes to stay on the ballot a long time, but never quite making it to the Hall. He's got some very good numbers, but his career was on the short side. Since then, though, his name turned up in the Mitchell Report, so he may not get many votes. He was once married to Halle Berry.

Chuck Knoblauch - A pretty good second baseman and lead-off hitter early in his career, and then he lost the ability to throw the ball where he wanted it to go. He had a short career, and only a couple of exceptional seasons. Throw in his appearance in the Mitchell Report, and he's not going to get many votes.

Robb Nen - I never thought much of, or even about Nen, so I was kind of surprised by some of his numbers. As a closer he piled up a lot of saves, sure, but that's pretty easy these days. It was his ERAs that struck me. In odd-number years he was okay, a bit better than average, but in even-numbered years he was absolutely brilliant. Not quite Mariano Rivera brilliant, but pretty damn close. Both the pattern and the level at which he pitched in the even years shocked the heck out of me. Of course, it made no significant difference in the number of saves he got each year, which says a lot about that stat. He still not going to the Hall. His career was only ten years long, so he had five brilliant seasons and five average ones, and they weren't even bunched. Very strange.

Tim Raines - The best player on the ballot, and possibly the second best lead-off guy in history, which is one of his problems. His career parallels that of the best lead-off guy in history, Rickey Henderson. Another problem is that he played in ~~obscurity~~ Montreal, and unlike a lot of other Expo stars, he got stuck in Olympic Park for a very long while. When he did finally get out, he wound up with the White Sox, where he tried to convince everyone to call him "Rock." In his later years he was cast as a role player, even though he continued to put up excellent numbers in his limited playing time. And he was one of the players caught up in baseball's cocaine scandal in the early eighties, although he seemed to put that behind him almost as quickly as it came upon him. Despite all the potential negative perceptions, his overall numbers are just too hard to ignore. He deserves a spot. (Rich Lederer makes his case for Raines here.)

Jose Rijo - Terrific pitcher for the Reds in the early nineties, but he got injured in '95, and didn't pitch in the majors again until 2001. His career was just too short.

Todd Stottlemyre - Wasn't even as good a pitcher as his dad, and Mel wasn't good enough for the Hall, either.

There are no real stinkers in the group, and you could put together a decent team starting with these guys, but only Raines really makes the cut. Of the others, I can see Justice and Finley staying on the ballot next year, but probably none of the others.

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Nominees remaining from previous years:

Click here for last year's discussion about these guys.

Starters:

Bert Blyleven - Of the three guys here, Blyleven deserves it most, and gets my vote. He was a terrific pitcher for a very long time.

Tommy John - Borderline candidate. Thinking about it some more, he was a better pitcher than Jack Morris, too, although maybe not as good as Finley. I need to think on this further.

Jack Morris - As noted in the comment about Chuck Finley, I keep waffling on this. I've come around to thinking like those who see Morris as the least of the three pitchers here. On the other hand, if you're talking about a Hall of Fame, he probably has the most singular moments of the three. Of course, he doesn't have a surgical procedure named after him like Tommy John does.

Relievers:

Rich Gossage - It's still a travesty that Gossage still isn't in the Hall. He was great for ten years, and very good for a long time after.

Lee Smith - Smith's main claim was that he had the all-time saves record. Now Trevor Hoffman has that. Still, if Gossage gets in, I would be inclined to consider Smith. He did have some terrific years, and he was good for a long time.

Infielders:

Mark McGwire - He still belongs based on the numbers, and I doubt the writers will keep him out forever.

Alan Trammell - Another guy I waffle on. The problem I have is that while he had a number of brilliant seasons in a long career, he also had a lot of not so brilliant ones. I'd like to see him in the Hall, but I'm not sure I could vote for him.

Dave Concepcion - I have similar feelings as with Trammell. I read an article on how much Concepcion's fielding helped the Reds over the years. Turns out it was a lot. He didn't hit all that much, though. This is his last year of eligibility.

Don Mattingly - I'll have a personal fantasy fulfilled this spring when Donnie Baseball finally puts on a Dodger uniform. Sadly, it's twenty years too late. It's a shame Mattingly will never make the Hall as a player. For about five years there he was the very best in the land.

Outfielders:

Andre Dawson,Jim Rice, Dave Parker, Harold Baines, and Dale Murphy - A case can be made for all five of these guys. Dawson gets beat on some for his very low OBP, but some recent work showing how good some of his fielding stats are, especially when he was still with the Expos, may counteract some of that. I'm surprised at how much of a beating Rice is taking in sabermetric circles. Joe Posnanski, who I usually agree with, has just been pounding Rice lately. I dunno, maybe it's because it was back in the days when the only game on TV around here was the Sox, and I saw Rice day in and out. I mean, I don't even like the Sox, amd I disliked Rice, but I still see him as as the best American League hitter of the late seventies.

I've gone into the others in the past. Parker gets knocked for wasting his prodigious talent, Baines for being a DH, and Murphy for having too short a prime. All three were very good and occasionally great players. They may still get in.

Say It Ain't So...

2007-12-14T16:42:00.000-05:00

Paulie Lo Duca, Mr. Heart and Soul himself, is front and center among those named in the Mitchell Report. Sigh.

Read the entire report, all 409 double spaced pages. It is both depressing and unsatisfying. Depressing on how widespread the corruption was/is, and unsatisfying on how little of it Mitchell actually documents. The corruption includes both the malefaction of players and trainers and the apparently deliberate incompetence by the teams and MLB in response to it. It appears that Mitchell has only documented the tip of the iceberg here. Current players, with the exception of Jason Giambi, uniformly refused to speak to Mitchell. Most of the information comes from the three anthills that federal investigators have kicked over so far, BALCO, Signature Compounding Pharmacy, and Kirk Radomski. Thus you see some of the trees, but not necessarily the entire forest.

The reports starts with a summary of the health effects of steroids and related compounds, as well as human growth hormone. One of the interesting things here is that players appear to be turning to HGH since there is currently no valid test for it, but that it doesn't actually work very well in terms of building muscle mass. It does appear to promote tissue repair when recovering from injury, although that is not currently a legal reason for its prescription.

The next section documents baseball's development of its drug policy, going back to 1970. Much of that development involved clashes with the Players Association over exactly what disciplinary actions the Commissioner could impose on players caught using drugs. It is noted that the MLBPA opposed drug testing for many years. On the other hand, it also notes that MLB didn't push particularly hard for drug testing, either.

There is a long summary of the development of awareness of the problem by the league, starting with allegations about Jose Canseco and Lenny Dykstra around 1991. This section is notable for how incredibly dense MLB management appears in the face of mounting evidence of steroid use. (I can remember discussing it with a bodybuilder friend of mine around '91, and he was of the opinion that it was obvious that some players were juicing.) Upper management appear to have been in total denial for years in the face of mounting evidence. It was only when a reporter noticed the bottle of androstenedione in Mark McGwire's locker during his chase of Roger Maris's home run record that MLB seemed to start looking seriously at steroids. The irony here is that at the time andro was completely legal, both to purchase without a prescription and for use by baseball players. Even so, when a prominent physician tried to warn baseball of the dangers of the supplement, he clains to have been threatened with legal action by MLB's medical director. Canseco is the focus for a lot of this, and it's interesting to see Tony LaRussa keep changing his story on what he knew about Canseco's use of steroids, and when he knew it.

Then it's on to the meat of the matter. First the report details a number of specific incidents over the years where individual players were discovered to be either in the possession of steroids, or failed drug tests. A number of these went apparently went unreported to MLB as not being a big deal. Several teams are mentioned, including the Indians, Rangers, and Red Sox, and there is one cluster involving several Baltimore Orioles, most notably Rafael Palmeiro and Miguel Tejada.

The BALCO investigation comes next, and since it has already had books written about it, that cluster of names mostly from the Bay Area teams were already well known (Barry Bonds, the Giambi brothers, Gary Sheffield, and some lesser lights). The thing that surprised me here is how deep into a dark place the upper levels of management of the Giants stuck their heads to avoid angering their golden goose (Bonds). The buck about what to do about Bonds and his personal trainer kept getting passed from head trainer to GM to owner and back again, but no one ever seemed to have the gumption to stop it.

The largest section details the results of the Kirk Radomski investigation. Radomski worked in the Mets clubhouse, and sold steroids and HGH to an impressive list of players. The meat here is that Radomski kept copies of checks, notes, and shipment receipts for many of the players, resulting some very good circumstantial evidence. There are several clusters of players here, the result of the way players move around. It starts with the Mets, but there are few Met players named. I saw one online speculation that perhaps there were so few Mets on the list because of their proximity to Radomski. Drugs and cash were both hand-delivered, so there was no paper trail to back up any accusations Radomski may have have. The most prominent ex-Met named is catcher Todd Hundley. Hundley was labeled a can't miss prospect by the Mets, but his first few seasons were very disappointing. Then around 1995 he suddenly blossomed into one heck of a hitter, hitting 41 homers in 1996, setting the single season record for record for catchers. It turns out this was when he started buying steroids from Radomski. Two years later, injured and not getting along with manager Bobby Valentine, he was shipped to the Dodgers. As someone over at Dodger Thoughts remarked, there he became patient zero for a cluster of Dodger players, most notably Paul Lo Duca and Eric Gagné. (The Dodgers got Hundley because a moronic suit from Fox decided to trade Mike Piazza not long before. Don't get me started.)

The Dodger story is very strange. Hundley apparently hooked Lo Duca up with Radomski. There is testimony in the report from the man who was the strength and conditioning coach at the Dodgers' AAA team at the time (May 1999) stating that he provided steroids to Lo Duca and several other Dodger prospects, all of whom were hoping to improve their chances of being called up to the big team. (I remember watching Lo Duca play in spring training games in '99, and not being very impressed. I was very surprised when he became a star a couple of years later.) Lo Duca did become a star, one of the two main faces of the franchise, the so-called heart and soul of the team. Thus his trade to the Marlins in the middle of the 2004 season was met with a great deal of consternation among a lot of Dodger fans. The main reason given for the was to shore up the starting pitching (which it ultimately did), but it was also curious because the trade left the Dodgers with no reliable catcher right in the middle of a pennant race. The report may shed some light on that. One of the documents obtained by Mitchell is a set of notes from a Dodger organizational meeting in October 2003 where the future of a number of players was discussed, including Lo Duca:

Steroids aren’t being used anymore on him. Big part of this. Might have some value to trade . . . Florida might have interest. . . . Got off the steroids . . . Took away a lot of hard line drives. . . . Can get comparable value back would consider trading. . . . If you do trade him, will get back on the stuff and try to show you he can have a good year. That’s year of contract, playing for '05.

It turned out to be prophetic. Paulie sent another check to Radomski not long after the trade.

Lo Duca is a guy who a lot of fans really like because he plays with fire and spirit. The media like him because he's always available to chat with, even in tough circumstances. But he is also not the brightest bulb on the tree. He played for the Mets the past couple of years, and he got himself in trouble a couple of times for refusing to back down in arguments with umpires, leading to suspensions. He also got caught by the tabloids cheating on his wife with a nineteen year-old. The most interesting pieces of paper in the Radomski paper trail are from Lo Duca. In addition to checks, and the thank you note shown in the picture, there's a hand written note to Radomski:

Kirk,
Sorry! But for some reason they sent the check back to me. I haven’t been able to call you back because my phone is TOAST! I have a new # it is [Lo Duca’s phone number is listed here]. Please leave your # again because I lost all of my phonebook with the other phone.

Thanks
Paul

The reports also includes a quote made by Lo Duca in a 2002 Sports Illustrated article on steroids:

"If you’re battling for a job, and the guy you’re battling with is using steroids, then maybe you say, ‘Hey, to compete, I need to use steroids because he’s using them . . . Don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone it. But it’s a very tough situation. It’s really all about survival for some guys."

The notes from the 10/2003 meeting seem to indicate that the Dodgers were trying to avoid players with steroid histories, with one notable exception—Eric Gagné. Gagné, of course, was the other main face of the franchise, the man called "Game Over." He apparently got involved with Radomski through Lo Duca. He is mentioned in the 10/2003 notes as a possible user, but he was also in the midst of his 84 straight save streak at the time, so it was unlikely in the extreme that the team would do anything about it. Don't ask, don't tell. The most curious thing about Gagné in the report one of the Red Sox scouts sent to Theo Epstein last winter in response to Theo's questioning whether Gagné was on steroids.

Some digging on Gagne and steroids IS the issue. Has had a checkered medical past throughout career including minor leagues. Lacks the poise and commitment to stay healthy, maintain body and re invent self. What made him a tenacious closer was the max effort plus stuff . . . Mentality without the plus weapons and without steroid help probably creates a large risk in bounce back durability and ability to throw average while allowing the changeup to play as it once did . . . Personally, durability (or lack of) will follow Gagne . . .

I can't argue with a single thing in that statement. Gagné is a big dumb lug who has repeatedly either hidden injuries or tried to come back from them too soon, doing even more damage to himself in the process. The amazing thing is that the Sox eventually went ahead and traded for him anyway.

The Radomski cluster of players getting most of the attention are the Yankees, Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, et al. Clemens now makes a nice bookend with Bonds, two thoroughly dislikeable, though superlatively talented individuals who deserve every bad thing. The funniest thing in all this is that Clemens is apparently not fond of needles, which means he had to get someone to inject the stuff for him. There are a few other clusters, too, and it's interesting to follow the connections between them—Mets to Dodgers, Athletics and Rangers to Baltimore, and so on.

There's a little bit on the Signature Pharmacy case, where a number of players were found to be purchasing HGH from a pharmacy in Florida. All had prescriptions, but unfortunately for the players, many of the prescriptions were written by a Florida dentist. This is what got Carlos Guillen and Jay Gibbons 15 game suspensions for next season.

The rest of the report talks about testing for steroids, and concludes that the current program is inadequate. Mitchell cites seven points required for an adequate system:

1. independence of the program administrator;
2. transparency and accountability;
3. effective, year-round, unannounced testing;
4. adherence to best practices as they develop;
5. due process for athletes;
6. adequate funding; and
7. a robust education program;

none of which appear to be met at this time. The biggest problems appear to be items 2 and 3. There is neither transparency nor accountability. From the report:

In August 2006, I requested summaries of aggregate, de-identified data relating to the administration of Major League Baseball’s joint program. For the years 2003 through 2005, the majority of the records necessary to compile this data already had been destroyed. Even for the then-ongoing 2006 season, we were advised that the records necessary to respond to certain requests had not been retained.

That's just unacceptable if you want the public to have any confidence in the system. As far as "unannounced testing" goes, it is too easily manipulated under the current system. The report cites instances of players receiving notice they are to be tested 24-72 hours prior to the event. There is also an especially egregious example of the Players Association gaming the system in 2004. It involved an unlikely to be repeated set of circumstances, but it still looks really bad.

I was surprised. I didn't expect it to be as interesting as it was. There is quite a lot of stuff I didn't know, even among the stuff previously available. For the most part, I think Mitchell did a good job, particularly regarding his recommendations for testing. I would've liked to see a little more candor on the part of the players themselves, but I supposed that's too much to ask. Again and again one sees the line, "In order to provide [player name] with information about these allegations and to give him an opportunity to respond, I asked him to meet with me; he declined." The few ex-players that did speak with Mitchell added much to the report. Chris Donnells, another ex-Met and Dodger, in particular provided a detailed recounting of his involvement with both steroids and HGH. That was perhaps the best look at what it's like for the player involved, both from the standpoint of what he was doing, and also why.

I did say the report was unsatisfying, and that's because one knows that there have got to be other clusters and networks of players out there that have yet to be uncovered. The way players move around makes it unlikely that this is all there is.

Winter Meetings...

2007-12-03T17:10:00.000-05:00

I haven't talked any baseball in awhile, but the Winter meetings are this week, so it seems like a good time to bring up a few things. It hasn't been terribly busy off-season so far, but a few deals have been made. The most fun place to keep up with the latest player deals has been over at The Griddle, where Bob Timmermann has been summarizing each deal in rebus form. They aren't especially easy rebuses, either.

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The Dodgers haven't done much apart from hiring a new manager, some guy named Torre. I was stunned at how fast Grady Little fell out of favor with the organization, especially since it appears that Torre was hired before Little resigned. Awkward, much? Not to mention the fact that they'd also talked to Joe Girardi before Girardi took the Yankees job. It does appear that the separation was mostly mutual, but it's still a shame. I was pretty happy with Little up until the team fell apart in September. From various reports I've read, it seems like he just lost interest once things went south. The Dodgers had exactly two managers for the first thirty-six years I followed them, and six in the following ten.

I think Torre will help. He won't let the clubhouse get away from him, the way Little seemed to. It'll be interesting to see how he handles roster very different from what he's had for the last few years.

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The hiring of Joe Torre, along with several of his coaches from the Yankees, at long last fulfills an old fantasy of mine. Come the spring, Don Mattingly will be a Dodger. It's a shame it's twenty years too late.

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There's an interesting article over at the Hardball Times today on offensive consistency for whole teams in 2007. It comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who watched them that the Dodgers get a special note for being the weirdest offensive team in 2007.

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Baseball Analysts has an article on the upcoming Rule 5 draft. The Rule 5 draft allows teams to draft players from other teams' minor league systems. The players available are those with a certain number of years of service in the minors who are not currently on a team's 40-man roster. Players drafted have to be placed on the drafting team's major league roster (25-man roster) for the entire season, or else returned to the original team.

The only reason I bring it up is because one of the players available is Jamie D'Antona, who was one of the three Cape Cod League players profiled a few years ago in The Last Best League. At the time he seemed like a can't miss prospect, but while he's had some success in the minors, he hasn't exactly set the world on fire, either. It'll be interesting to see if he goes to another team.

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I'm trying to decide whether to spend a week watching spring training games in March. This will be the Dodgers final spring in Vero Beach. They're moving next year to facility they'll share with the White Sox in Arizona. (Don't get me started.) I can't really schedule anything until the spring schedule comes out. It's complicated because MLB is sending them to frelling China for a couple of exhibitions in February. (Don't get me started.) I'll likely drive down. Gas will be expensive, but still probably be cheaper than the combined cost of a plane ticket and a rental car. Plus I can throw my bike in the back of the truck.

I haven't been to Dodgertown since 1999. Part of the thing holding me back is that I worry that things have changed since I was last down there, and I'll be terribly disappointed. When I visited in 1989, it was by far the most fan friendly of the complexes I saw. The players and coaches were just so damn accessible. Most newer facilities put chain link fences between the team and the fans. Vero was designed for a more innocent time. In 1989, to get from the clubhouse to Holman Stadium, the players had to walk through and with the fans. There were also lots of ex-Dodgers in camp as instructors who had lots of free time to chat with fans. I got to talk with Reggie Smith, and Burt Hooton, and John Roseboro. Even got to meet Sandy Koufax, the guy in the icon up there. When I was there in '99, things were more restricted. A new clubhouse had been built next to the ballpark, so the players were less available. There seemed to be fewer of the ex-players, too. Maybe it was because by then Fox owned the team, instead of the O'Malleys. Maybe it's just the times. Whatever. The worry is that things will be even more closed, and I'll only be able to watch the workouts with a pair of binoculars. Sigh.

---
Speaking of the O'Malleys, Walter O'Malley, the most hated man in Brooklyn, was elected to the executives wing of the Hall of Fame today. Dick Williams finally made it in as a manager, and deservedly so.

Wait Till Next Year...

2007-09-30T22:36:00.000-04:00

Watched the final game of a very disappointing season. Vin Scully, always seeking the silver lining, mentioned something at the top of the game that surprised me. In the fifty years since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, they've had 38 winning seasons. The only team with more in that time is the Yankees with 40. Not particularly comforting after a season that held such promise not all that long ago, and in a final game when they played like they couldn't wait to get on the bus. The Dodgers were absolutely shellacked today, but still finished a game over .500. Juan Pierre? Still sucks, and looked particularly hapless out in the field today. Next year!

---
That choking sound you may have heard was the Mets' season ending. The Mets had a seven game lead in the division with fourteen games to go, and didn't make the playoffs. I've followed the Mets since their first season, but this season I'm really enjoying the schadenfreude. I've spent most of the season listening to the noontime hosts on WFAN basically dismiss the rest of the National League, and the NL West in particular, as not being at the same level as the Amazin's. Yeah. Right. Have fun on the golf course, guys.

---
Jimmy Rollins took a lot of heat for his spring training comments that he thought the Phillies were going to win the division. The New York fans and media took his comments as a personal affront, and roasted him for it. Rollins backed it up, though, hitting .296/.344/.531 on the year. Meanwhile, the man the NY media proclaimed as the best shortstop in the division, if not the league, turned into the East Coast version of Slappy McPopup down the stretch, hitting a pathetic .205/.279/.333 in September.

---
Dear Bud Black,

What in god's name were you thinking about? The Padres need to win one game to win the NL wild card, and you have Jake Peavy, the best pitcher in the league, available to pitch it. Instead, you decided to trot out Bret Tomko. Bret Tomko? Is it any wonder that the Brewers cleaned your clock today? Of course you will have Peavy on the mound tomorrow for your play-in game with the Rox, but you could've avoided the whole thing. Weird things can happen in a single game. Ever hear of Bucky Dent?

Best regards...

---
Meanwhile, Colorado went ahead in the bottom of the eighth today, and held on to force the play-in. The game will be at Coors, and Josh Fogg will oppose Peavy. It's an odd choice, and it surprised the heck out of Vin Scully, who put it as delicately as he could, "Josh Fogg, who is, uh, an ordinary pitcher..., but he's going to pitch the big game."

A Day at the Ballpark...

2007-09-28T09:07:00.000-04:00

Just Play Ball — by Joe Garagiola

Marcie: Babe Ruth had a cap. Willie Mays had a cap. Ted Williams had a cap. Maury Wills had a cap. Willie McCovey had a cap. Mickey Mantle had cap.
Peppermint Patty: Marcie will you shut up!
Marcie: Even Joe Garagiola had a cap.

When I was in grad school, we once held a department golf tournament and called it the Lite Beer West Kingston Klassic, in honor of a recently graduated friend's inexplicable love for crappy beer. First prize was a six-pack of Lite beer. Second prize was two six-packs. In a similar vein, I won this book in a contest over at the Griddle. The winner could choose between this book or tickets to a Dodger game at Dodger Stadium. Second place would get the other prize. I came in third, yet the book was still available. It's even autographed. Poor Joe.

Garagiola generally deprecates his own skills, but the truth is that he wasn't all that bad a ballplayer. His OPS was about average for catchers in his era. He didn't hit for much power, but he had excellent plate discipline. His career on base percentage is a hundred points higher than his career batting average. That's terrific. He didn't strike out much, either. His career was short, just nine seasons. I'm kind of surprised it wasn't longer. He was only 28 during his final season, when he hit .280/.397/.415 as a backup catcher for the Cubs and the eventual world champion Giants.

He likens the book to a conversation at the ball park, just a fan in the stands telling stories to anyone who'll listen, and he's right. It's a collection of anecdotes, occasionally interspersed with some commentary about the state of the game, roughly grouped together by subject into chapters. Some of the stories are his own, and some are retellings of stories he's heard over the years. They're a mixed bag. A few are hilarious (to me anyway), such as the one about a call former umpire Bill Haller once made on a close play at second base. The second baseman argued, then asked Haller, "Would he have been out if I'd tagged him?" To which Haller replied "I really think you would've had a better chance."

Some brought back memories. At one point Garagiola mentions that ballplayers used to be able to sort of roll up their fielding gloves and stick them in the back pockets of their uniforms, and it brought back a memory of me doing the exact same thing when I got my first little league uniform. Those back pockets were pretty roomy. Of course, all that weight made your pants droop. Quite the fashion look.

One problem the book had for me is that if you've listened to Garagiola broadcast as many games as I have, a lot of the stories sound vaguely familiar. Maybe you don't recognize the details, but you can almost hear him telling the story to Kubek or Scully. Plus, a lot of the stories from his playing days feature players I'd never heard of, partly because his career ended when before I turned two years old, and also because he played on some really bad teams along side a lot of never-weres. It sort of like listening to stories about somebody else's friends and relatives whom you've never met. It's hard to keep your interest piqued.

That said, the book is worthwhile for the stories Garagiola tells about the two men who appear to have been his biggest baseball heroes. The first is Branch Rickey, or Mr. Rickey, as Joe (and a lot of other people who knew him) always calls him. He devotes a good number of pages to things that Rickey said, all of which Garagiola wrote down for later use. The quotes give the impression that Mr. Rickey was a bit like Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, calmly rational but a tad long-winded. Rickey's reputation as a forward thinker is well known. He integrated baseball, and created the farm system for developing players. Mr. Rickey was also almost fifty years ahead of his time on evaluating hitters, as this quote from 1954 indicates:

"If the baseball world is to accept this new system of analyzing the game—and eventually it will—it must first give up preconceived ideas. Two measureable factors—on-base percentage and power— gauge the overall offensive worth of an individual."

That, in a very wordy nutshell, is the definition of OPS. Joe also mentions Rickey's definition of an "anesthetic player," a player who gives you some good games, but not enough to help you win a pennant. "He's killing you, but you don't feel it." I have half a mind to send a copy of the chapter to Ned Colletti.

The other hero Garagiola spends some time on is the kid who grew up directly across the street from him, Yogi Berra. There's a remarkable photograph in the book. It's a picture of Joe's father at a construction job site, having lunch with Yogi's dad. I mean what are the odds that the kids of two random guys with their lunch pails sitting next to a pile of bricks would both end up in the Hall of Fame. It's a great story, as are most of his other reminiscences about the kid they used to call "Lawdy."

Overall I enjoyed it. It may drag in spots, but there's enough good stuff here to make up for it. I can think of a lot of worse ways to spend time than listening to Joe Garagiola talk about baseball. And if nothing else, I learned an important life lesson, not that I'm ever likely to need it—never shake hands with Moises Alou.

The Loneliest Team in Town...

2007-09-13T21:42:00.000-04:00

I haven't been writing much about baseball lately. It's not for lack of stuff to write about, but rather that I just keep putting off writing about it, and then it's too late. It's not for lack of interest. Despite the fact that they are unlikely to make the playoffs, the Dodgers have been exciting because of all the young talent they've brought up. And for whatever reason, MLB is still giving me the archived game video for free, so I get to watch all the weekend games in full. Can't beat it.

But I couldn't pass up a chance to post a link to this picture of the, er, crowd at yesterday's Nats-Marlins game in Florida. I mean, even the Expos drew more than that. For that matter, I think I've even played before bigger crowds at softball games. (Thanks to the Griddle for the original link.)

Weekend Routine...

2007-08-04T21:51:00.000-04:00

My brain, perversely recognizing that it's the weekend, woke me up at 5 this morning. Making the best of things, I did my usual Saturday morning routine. Made coffee and watched last night's Dodger game over the internet. I'm not sure why, but for the last couple of months MLB has been letting me watch (not just listen to) all of its archived games. Weird, because I've only paid for Gameday Audio. For live games, the site restricts me to what I paid for, but once a game is archived, the system doesn't even require me to log in like it used to. That's perfect for an east coast boy who can't stay awake for the 10:40 EDT start time for the live feed anyway. As long as I don't spoil myself, it might as well be live. And I get Vin Scully for the whole game instead of just the first three innings. Can't beat that.

Meme — Random Softball Remembrances

2007-07-03T23:15:00.000-04:00

Snagged from Snurri, a meme with a theme as I wait for the Braves-Dodgers game to start...

When I hit the ball, I always used to carry the bat with me a step or two up the line as I headed for first. Most batters seem to just drop the bat behind them at the end of the swing, leaving the bat somewhere in the vicinity of the batters box. My bats were always somewhere up the first base line. It was a totally unconscious action, and I never figured out where it came from. It certainly wasn't something I set out to do deliberately, since holding onto the bat while running tends to slow you down. Worse, I wasn't just bringing my left hand (with the bat in it) back around in front of me and releasing the bat, but I would actually transfer the bat to my right hand and then toss it sideways.

---
The best hitting day I ever had was the time I went 10-10 in a doubleheader, with 2 homers, a triple, and 2 doubles, nearly a double cycle.

---
One of the best fielding plays I ever made was also one of the dumbest. It was a tight game, there was a runner on third, and I was pitching. Things were desperate. I was usually the shortstop on that team. We were up a run in the last inning, and there was one out. I don't know what possessed me, but when I made the next pitch I charged the plate like a soccer goalie trying to cut down the angle. And it worked! Instead of hitting me in the face with a line drive, the batter hit a one hopper right at me. I looked the runner back to third, and threw the batter out. The next batter popped up and we won. And ever since I've wondered what the hell I was thinking about.

---
I did learn one thing about pitching. Based upon my empirical observations, a slow-pitch knuckleball will travel farther than any other pitch one might throw. Might just as well give the batter a tee.

---
When I started playing first base, I had a devil of a time with scooping throws in the dirt. Given the quality of my teammates' throwing arms, there were a lot of them, so it was a real problem. I was spending a lot of time with my back to the field, chasing the ball down behind first base. The only saving grace was that at least I didn't have to try to catch my own numerous errant throws. This went on for most of a season. Then one night our shortstop threw one in the dirt, and I picked it. A couple of plays he did it again, and I picked it again. By the end of the game I'd managed to pick every single bad throw. The shortshop demanded to know what the hell happened, i.e., how the hell I'd gotten good, and I couldn't explain it. It happens too fast to really be a conscious action. It was as if the muscles and reflexes just finally got in sync and learned how the ball would react when it hit the ground. Also, once the body learned how to do it, I rarely missed one ever again. Very weird and neat at the same time.

It's a Long Season...

2007-06-14T20:07:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs New York (NL)

6/11: Dodgers 5, Mets 3
6/12: Dodgers 4, Mets 1
6/13: Dodgers 9, Mets 1

After everything seemed to go wrong in the last two series, the Dodgers seemed to be humming along on all cylinders for this one. The pitching was terrific, the fielding crisp, and the hitting timely and powerful. It's also true that the Mets are better than demonstrated, but it's very satisfying to beat the tar out of them after all the denigration of the NL West I heard on WFAN leading up to the series.

With Abreu, Kemp, and Loney up with the team, there's a lot to get excited about. Now if the Dodgers can just avoid being swept by the Angels again, everything will be jake.

---
Betemit, Kemp, and Kuo went back to back to back, hitting homers on three consecutive pitches in game 2. Kuo even flipped his bay after his shot, which was no cheapie. It was also the first time a Taiwanese player has hit a home run in the major leagues.

---
Betemit finally seems to have gotten untracked, with two dingers in the series. That's good to see. Home runs are good! Loney hit his first of the season last night, as well.

---
Eddie Murray was fired as hitting coach today, with Bill Mueller taking over the job for the time being. I don't know what to think about that. When Murray got fired by Cleveland prior to coming to the Dodgers, one reason put forward was that Murray isn't very proactive about helping players, preferring to let them come to him for advice. That may work with veterans, but not so much with kids, as Cleveland had and the Dodgers have now. The Dodgers approach hasn't been great this year, with too many batters not working counts. Not necessarily Murray's fault, since he was also batting coach last year when the Dodgers walked a lot, but troubling just the same, especially if Murray wasn't advising guys like Ethier to be a little more patient. (Although, I don't think Pierre or Nomar would listen even if he did.)

Skidding Along...

2007-06-11T14:39:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Toronto

6/8: Dodgers 4, Blue Jays 3 (10 innings)
6/9: Blue Jays 1, Dodgers 0
6/10: Blue Jays 11, Dodgers 5

Another ugly series, but there were bright spots, even if they are the kinds of things that pay off long term rather than immediately.

Bad: Jason Schmidt pitching batting practice to the Jays yesterday. All the hope off of his first start coming back from the DL has evaporated. How bad was it? Roy Halladay, who'd had exactly one hit in his entire career prior to the game, went 2-4.

Good: James Loney was recalled from Vegas yesterday, and started in place of Nomar. Drove in a run in his first at bat, too.

Bad: Still not hitting well as a team. Derek Lowe threw a complete game four-hitter Saturday, giving up a single run to the Jays, and lost because none of the Dodgers hit. Friday was a near thing, too, with Saito blowing his first save of the year.

Good: Lowe has been an absolute rock for this team of late, despite getting no run support. Three complete games, already more than LA had in either 2005 or 2006. Penny's been great, too.

Bad: Brady Clark, we hardly knew ye. I'm kind of surprised it was Clark, and not Anderson, who was let go to make way for Loney. OTOH, it leaves Kemp as the only right-handed hitter in the outfield, more or less indicating that he's here to stay.

Good: Grady has apparently had it with Pierre, dropping him to eighth in the lineup. He pinch hit for him with Ethier late in Saturday's game, and double switched him out in the fifth with Kemp yesterday. Still, what do you do with him? His contract makes him tough to trade and tough to sit.

Bother, Swept Again...

2007-06-08T20:27:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at San Diego

6/5: Padres 1, Dodgers 0
6/6: Padres 5, Dodgers 2
6/7: Padres 6, Dodgers 5

Kent and Nomar are taking most of the blame for last night's meltdown in the ninth, but Broxton has looked terrible in three of his last six outings. Grady held out Pierre last night, but he's back in the lineup tonight. The best news to come out of this is that Matt Kemp has been recalled. (All of a sudden Ramon Martinez's back hurts, so he's on the DL.) The bad thing is that Kemp is going to take time from Ethier, not from Pierre.

---
The Dodgers, with the 20th pick, had a shot to draft a player out of my old high school yesterday, Rick Porcello, a kid projected to be the second best pitcher in the draft, but passed. Porcello is a Boras client, and may opt to go to UNC, so there are big signability issues. The Tigers wound up picking him at 27.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly...

2007-06-05T10:03:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Pittsburgh

6/1: Dodgers 5, Pirates 4

6/2: Pirates 3, Dodgers 1

6/3: Dodgers 5, Pirates 4

6/4: Dodgers 6, Pirates 5

The Good - Three out of four to pull a half game away from the Pads and Snakes.
DeLo taking a no-hitter into the seventh. Russell Martin hitting not one, but two game-winning homers. Jason Schmidt coming off the DL tonight.

The Bad - I listened to Sunday's game on delay, and as things got dicey late, I opened up Gameday just to see how things turned out, and was stunned to see that Beimel had gotten the save in relief of Saito. OMGWTFBEIMEL?!? Pulled up the ninth inning recap, and saw that Beimel had relieved Saito due to injury. OMGWTFSAMMY'SHURT?!? There wasn't any detail about what happened, so I just kept plugging along with Monday and Reuss on the radio archive. When it happened, there was actually some relief. It wasn't his arm. Saito was trying to walk it off, and it seemed as though he was removed as a precaution. The later news also wasn't horrible. Strained hamstring, day to day.

The Other Bad - Kuo's luck. Lowe losing it so quickly once the no-hitter was gone. Penny giving up his first and second homers of the season.

The Ugly - The Pirates' baserunning, especially in the 6th inning of Game 2. After Nady put the Bucs up by two with a solo shot to lead off the inning. LaRoche then doubled. Paulino also doubled, but LaRoche only got as far as third. Wilson hit a grounder to short. LaRoche got caught in a run down between third and home. Snell was up next, and Tracy put on a squeeze play, but Snell missed the bunt, and Paulino was dead. Snell then struck out to end the inning.

The Rumble at Wrigley...

2007-06-02T16:20:00.000-04:00

The Cubs' Michael Barrett and Carlos Zambrano got into a shoving match in the dugout yesterday when catcher Barrett apparently pointed out to his pitcher that he was getting shelled. Zambrano took exception. The, er, discussion was broken up, and Pinella sent Zambrano to the showers. Barrett followed, and the next thing ya know Barrett had to go to the hospital for stitches in his lip. Pinella, who has been seething this year at the play of his team, let all his players have it in the post game interview. Remember, this is a man who was present when Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin got into it in the Yankees dugout in '78, and was a long term member of the Bronx Zoo. But that was a much better team than what Lou has in Chicago.

Zambrano, who was terrific last year, is in his walk year and stinking it up. Barrett, who punched out A.J. Pierzynski last year (fulfilling the dreams of practically everyone in North America, including Pierzynski's mother), has also been awful. He made about three mental mistakes in one inning against the Dodgers the other night. The whole team, which was expected to do well, has stunk. I'm not sure what they can do, either. It certainly looks like Barrett will be gone sooner rather than later, and if they can get a reasonable deal for Zambrano, he may go, too.

Regression to the Mean...

2007-06-01T15:44:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Washington

5/29: Dodgers 10, Nationals 0
5/30: Dodgers 5, Nationals 0
5/31: Nationals 11, Dodgers 4

Penny and Lowe both pitched terrific games yet again, but then Hendrickson failed to deliver yet again. Juan Pierre had a triple followed by two doubles in the opener. The only thing that held him back was that Penny kept winding up on the base immediately ahead of him. The bullpen has taken a couple of hits. Brazoban got hurt in the finale, and was placed on the DL. Eric Hull (who) was brought up from Vegas to replace him. Meanwhile Broxton got clobbered again. He's given up 9 earned runs this season, 6 in two of the last three games. Here's hoping it's just a bad week

---
Hendy, Hendy, Hendy... Here I'd started to believe in you, if only a little. Your numbers in your first six appearances were so good...

year	ip	era	whip	fip	gb%	k/9	bb/9	hr/9	slga
2004	183.1	4.81	1.40	4.48	45.6	4.27	2.26	1.03	0.443
2005	178.1	5.90	1.55	4.63	46.2	4.49	2.47	1.21	0.503
2006	164.2	4.21	1.43	4.74	48.3	5.41	3.39	0.93	0.373
2007	27.2	1.30	0.69	2.32	58.7	7.80	1.62	0.32	0.193

But now...

2007

53.3

4.17

1.26

4.35

47.8

6.59

2.53

1.35

0.420

Five games later and you're right back to your less than mediocre career levels. I am so disappointed. It wouldn't be quite so bad, but 7 home runs in the last five games. Have you stopped seeing that psychologist? If so, you might want to dig out his number. Back to the pen. Fortunately, it looks like Schmidt will be ready to come off the DL sooner rather than later.

The Trials of Sweet Lou...

2007-05-29T18:21:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Chicago (NL)

5/25: Dodgers 9, Cubs 8
5/26: Cubs 4, Dodgers 2
5/27: Dodgers 2, Cubs 1 (11 innings)

All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not a Cubs fan. This must've been torture watching these games. In the first game, DeLo pitched great, left with four run lead, and then watched Beimel, Brazoban, and Broxton absolutely implode, giving up seven in in the seventh. But then the Cubs much less vaunted bullpen decided to follow suit in the eighth, and the Dodgers scored four, with no runner ever advancing more than one base. Station to station all the way. It was like the conga line in the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. Meanwhile Seanez steadied the ship, and Saito finished out for the save.

Hendrickson gave up two quick homers in his start, and a couple more runs later, while Carlos Zambrano demonstrated why he's a number one starter. The Dodgers did get a couple of runs towards the end, but too little, too late. I need to look at Hendrickson's numbers again. He was looking so good there for awhile, that while it was hard to expect it to last, it's equally hard to believe it might have all been luck. He's still not as bad as he was last year

The rubber game saw Wolf and Rich Hill dueling for six scoreless innings apiece (game scores of 69 and 67, respectively), then turning it over to the pen (Ruh, roh, Lou). The Cubs took a lead in the eighth on three consecutive singles off Seanez. Ethier got a PH homer off of Eyre in the bottom. There's a nice deconstruction of the inning focusing on Little's moves versus Pinella's here. The game went into the 11th, when the Dodgers won the game without an official at bat. Ramon Martinez, down 0-2, worked a walk. Betemit walked, too. Sweet Lou made a pitching change. Then Lucille basically got picked off second, but while Michael Barrett was throwing to second, Martinez lit out for third instead, and made it. The Cubs then walked Furcal intentionally to get to Juan Pierre, hoping for the weak groundball to the infield. It was all for naught, though, because Carlos Marmol then hit Pierre on the knee with a pitch. Martinez scores, ballgame over. Rob McMillin had this terrific commentary on the game over at 6-4-2.

Baseball in Connecticut

2007-05-26T08:15:00.000-04:00

Trenton Thunder 1, Connecticut Defenders 0 (11 innings)

First of all, what moron thought Connecticut Defenders would be a better name than Norwich Navigators, which is what the franchise used to be called? I suppose it could be worse, that they could've called them the Foxwoods Firebirds or Mohegan Lasts or something. Their logo is a frelling submarine. I was very much surprised that they sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" instead of "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch.

---
I've been meaning to take in a game at Dodd Stadium for years, going back to the days when the Navigators were a Yankees farm club. God only knows how the current club wound up in the Giants system. Anyway, I finally remembered this notion whist at work yesterday, so I went up on their website to see about buying a ticket. They have a very good system, one I like better than either the PawSox or the Mets. It not only lets you select a general location in the ballpark, but also shows you all the available seats at that price level, so you can decide between being in the fifth row of Section 3 versus the first row of Section 2. Much better than letting some machine decide what it thinks is the "best available seat." Anyway, I took an aisle seat, second row, section 2, just behind first base. Good seats, eh buddy?

---
Theoretically, Dodd is a little under an hour's drive from my house, so when I left my house at 5:40, I figured I'd be okay. What I didn't expect was getting stuck in a traffic backup at the park that compared favorably with a Shea Stadium playoff game. The problem is that Dodd is located in the most remote part of an enormous, wooded industrial park. There's only one way in, a winding single-lane road that effectively dead ends at the stadium, and the traffic just backs up for a couple of miles. There were only a few thousand people there (the box states 4815, but I don't believe that many actually showed), but the way in is just torturous. If I go again, I'm going to go way early.

---
The stadium is still fairly new, and is a pleasant place to watch a game. The front row is at ground level, unlike McCoy Stadium, so fans are very close to the action. It's also designed to encourage wandering about the park to view the game from different angles, none of which are far from the action. It really is a nice place to watch a game. The jam made me miss the first inning, so I didn't bother keeping up a score sheet. I grabbed a beer and a couple of hot dogs, and headed for my seat. It was then I discovered the one problem with selecting a seat. No system will take into account who you'll be sitting next to. In my case, I discovered I'd picked a seat smack in the middle of a Pawcatuck Middle Schools' student outing. Oy!

---
It turned out to be a pretty boring game. I suppose it was actually a pretty good pitchers duel, although I wonder if the pitchers were that good or the hitters that bad. But I had absolutely no rooting interest, the free scorecard only listed Defenders players, and even then not very accurately, so I had very little information about who was playing, and little investment in the game. CT only pitched relievers, so the "starter" was pulled in the fourth despite the fact that he was throwing a no-hitter at the time. Trenton's starter was almost equally effective, but only went five. I left after seven, mostly because I was worried about the potential traffic jam after the game. The game eventually ended with Trenton winning 1-0 in the eleventh.

---
There were a few items of interest. Trenton's CF got picked off at first, resulting in a rhubarb and his ejection. Trenton's second pitcher, Paul Thorp, has the biggest beer belly I've ever seen on a minor leaguer. Connecticut's Justin Hedrick, the eventual losing pitcher, looks scarily like Matthew Fox, even down to the five o'clock shadow. Red Sox legend Bob Stanley is Connecticut's pitching coach. CT's hitting coach is Gary Daveport, who according to the program resides in Nettuno, Italy. Trenton's logo has Marvel's version of the mighty Thor wielding thunderbolts.

Ghame Over...

2007-05-24T21:39:00.001-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Milwaukee

5/21: Brewers 9, Dodgers 5
5/22: Dodgers 3, Brewers 2
5/23: Dodgers 5, Brewers 1

I gotta admit I was worried, especially when the team dropped the first game, but two very well pitched games by Wolf and Penny ended the skid. I didn't listen to any of tha action after the first couple of innings of the first game. It seems like whenever I happen to listen in real time their chances of losing go up exponentially.

---
Kuo was sent back to AAA Tuesday after appearing once in relief. To pretty much everybody's surprise, Colletti called up Tony Abreu to replace him. Now Abreu has a chance to be a good player, and he impressed both in the spring, and at Vegas, but does the team really need another infielder? Especially when the team could really use Matt Kemp's bat in the line up.

I just don't get Ned's fascination with middle infielders. There have been a couple of scenarios mentioned, but neither seem compelling to me. First, Abreu is a natural second baseman, so he can rest Kent, or have Kent play first to rest Nomar (who seems to need some). The other thing is that while Betemit has been tearing it up as a pinch hitter, he still isn't hitting a lick when he starts, so Abreu can (and already did) share some time with LaRoche at third. As I said, there are probably better ways to accomplish this.

It's just so awkward. And it does nothing to address the real elephant in the room, Juan Pierre. He's the guy who really needs to be sat down, even if only occasionally, but he's got the big contract, and he's got his consecutive games streak. Sorry, Juan, you are no Cal Ripken.

---
Ned made another move Wednesday, putting Tsao on the DL (shoulder strain) and calling up Yhency Brazoban. Appropriately enough, Yhency finished up the game that night. Good to see him back.

Wow, Did That Ever Suck...

2007-05-21T20:03:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Anaheim

5/18: Angels 9, Dodgers 1
5/19: Angels 6, Dodgers 2
5/20: Angels 4, Dodgers 1

Not much to say. Nobody could hit, nobody could field, and only Lowe could pitch. Next question...

Fall of the Cards

2007-05-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs St. Louis

5/14: Cardinals 8, Dodgers 4
5/15: Dodgers 9, Cardinals 7
5/16: Dodgers 5, Cardinals 4

A wild and wooly series, but I only managed to listen to a couple of innings. Tomko got shelled, while Lowe and Wolf were mediocre. But hey, the Cards had won ten in a row against the Dodgers prior to Tuesday's win, and LA took the series. That's good.

---
Wilson Valdez's run of good luck finally ran out. He hadn't really done much offensively since that wild trip around the bases versus the Pirates three weeks ago. Regression to the mean is a cruel mistress. Valdez was DFA'd, and his spot was taken by Hong-Chih Kuo, who was shelled in his first appearance out of the pen.

Stone Soup...

2007-05-13T22:11:00.000-04:00

The Globe had the following piece in their Baseball Notes column today:

The Dodgers have had a good start, but if they could, they'd probably trade for a third baseman. Dodger scouts were watching the Red Sox and Blue Jays last week. There doesn't appear to be any chance the Sox would move Mike Lowell after the hot start he's had, but the Blue Jays, given their demise, might consider parting with Troy Glaus. If the Jays fade fast, there could be a fire sale in Toronto. Glaus, who hurt his heel in Friday's game and didn't play yesterday, would appear to be a candidate for trade.

This sparked all sorts of discussion amongst the fans, but if you read the piece carefully, you'll notice that the person who wrote it never actually talked to anyone. He just noticed Dodger scouts at a Sox-Jays game, and like all the Boston media who think the Sox are the very center of the baseball universe, he figured that the scouts must be there to watch the old town team. Now the only reason for doing that would be for a possible trade, and since he had two inches to fill, he made up a ridiculous rumor. I doubt it ever occurred to him that the scouts might not be there to watch the Sox at all, but rather were there to scout the Blue Jays, since the Dodgers have to play them next month. But that would mean the Sox weren't that important to the scouts, and that's just not possible.

Nibbled to Death by Ducks...

2007-05-13T21:14:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Cincinnati

5/11: Dodgers 2, Reds 0
5/12: Dodgers 7, Reds 3
5/13: Dodgers 10, Reds 5

I once coached a women's softball team that was the worst team in its league. We came by this result honestly. We couldn't hit, and we were slow. Even when one of the players did get a hit, it was almost invariably a single, and runners never took an extra base. We scored very few runs because each run required at least four hits or walks in the inning.

I remembered that season was I watched the Dodgers, er, pound out eighteen hits today, almost all of them singles. It was much the same yesterday, and the day before that. thirty-six hits in the series, only six for extra bases. There were also fifteen walks. Fortunately, the pitching held up. Wolf was outstanding (11 Ks), and Penny regrouped after a bad inning to put together an effective start. Hendrickson, though, had his second rough outing in a row. All the things he'd been doing well seem to have vanished. He's not striking people out, and he's throwing a lot of fly balls, some of which are leaving the park. Maybe he needs to have another chat with the psychologist.

Still, a sweep is a sweep, no matter how unimpressive. The Dodgers are three games up on the rest of the division.

Double Rats!

2007-05-11T20:23:00.002-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Florida

5/7: Dodgers 6, Marlins 1
5/8: Marlins 6, Dodgers 5
5/9: Dodgers 5, Marlins 3
5/11: Marlins 3, Dodgers 0

There was some terrific pitching in these games, but very little timely hitting. Penny had his best outing of the year, and so would've Lowe if he hadn't left one pitch out over the middle of the plate. Tomko had a good outing, too, and while Hendrickson had a tough time of it, but he wasn't 2006 awful, either. The Dodgers had lots of baserunners, except for that last game, but they couldn't get them across. The Lowe game was a killer. Sergio Mitre held them to three hits over eight innings. That's right, Sergio Mitre. THE Sergio Mitre. Bozhe moi!

Still, 3-4 on a road trip versus the Braves and the highest scoring team in the National League isn't awful. Andy LaRoche continues to do well, so that's good. And the rest of the division was getting boxed around, too, so no real change in the standings. What annoys, though, is that the Dodgers could've just as easily swept the series.

Well, Rats...

2007-05-07T11:40:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Atlanta

5/4: Braves 4, Dodgers 0
5/5: Dodgers 6, Braves 3
5/6: Braves 6, Dodgers 4

This was the series that got away. Well, that was disappointing, although at least the team seems to have started to hit again. They did manage to beat Tim Hudson, no mean feat, with Lowe throwing his best game of the season against him. But then Chin-hui Tsao stopped being perfect, blowing the final game with a five-run inning, the first hits, runs, and walks he's given up all season. Bother.

Betemit was benched Saturday, and celebrated the fact by hitting pinch hit homers on consecutive days. Andy LaRoche was brought Sunday up to replace him in the lineup, and looked good in his MLB debut. Marlon Anderson was placed on the DL.

A Tale of Three Pitchers...

2007-05-05T18:01:00.000-04:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The Dodgers are currently in first place, but their offense has been positively anemic lately. Their success is largely due to their pitching, something that I had some doubts about about going in. I thought the bullpen would be very good, which they have, and I was confident in Jason Schmidt and (god help me) Derek Lowe at the top of the rotation. My doubts were about Brad Penny, Brett Tomko, and when Schmidt went on the DL, Mark Hendrickson. Going into last night's game, those three, especially Penny and Hendrickson, had pitched far better than I expected. All have mentioned reasons for their improvement, one mechanical, one psychological, and one a little of both, so I decided to take a look at some numbers to see if back up those claims. A small sample size disclaimer does apply, of course.

---
Brad Penny - Pitching smarter instead of throwing harder?

year	ip	era	whip	fip	gb%	k/9	bb/9	hr/9	slga
2004	143.0	3.15	1.22	3.37	42.7	6.99	2.83	0.76	0.382
2005	175.1	3.90	1.29	3.57	46.6	6.26	2.10	0.87	0.417
2006	189.0	4.33	1.38	3.89	43.5	7.05	2.57	0.90	0.430
2007	38.1	1.64	1.30	3.59	58.0	3.52	3.99	0.00	0.307

In 2006, if you looked up "loss of composure" in a dictionary, you might have seen Brad Penny's picture next to the definition. He was the angry man of the Dodgers staff last year, appearing to let every perceived slight bother him to the point of distraction. He railed at umpires, his manager, and his teammates. That he had a Jeckyl and Hyde season seems appropriate given the temperament he often displayed. He was very good in the first half, awful in the second. He has since said he had an injury in the second half that prevented him from throwing his splitter properly.

He looked pretty bad this spring, too, and although he said the usual things about spring training stats not meaning anything, I had serious doubts about him. All he's done since is pitch brilliantly (1.64 ERA). Looking at his numbers is a study in contrasts. His WHIP and FIP are about the same as they've ever been. His K/9 innings has plummeted to about half of what it's been in the past, while his BB/9 has gone way up, which are both usually signs that there's a bad moon arisin'. So how is he doing it?

Apparently he's replaced his misfiring splitter with a sinker. Look at the difference in his ground ball percentage this year. He's gone from somewhat of a fly ball pitcher to very much getting his outs on the ground. This has helped in two ways. First, it's very hard to hit a ground ball into the seats. Penny has yet to give up a home run. Second, with all the walks, he does get into trouble occasionally, but it seems like every time he does, he gets a double play to get out of it. Actually, there's a third way it's helped. Keeping the ball on the ground makes it less likely that the other team can take advantage of Pierre's and Gonzo's defensive deficiencies.

His demeanor on the mound has changed, as well. He seems cool, calm, and collected out there, very much in control of himself. Nary a loss of composure to been seen so far. So instead of losing it when things go bad, and trying to get out of bad situations by overthrowing, he's been buckling down and making good pitches. The low ERA is probably due to good luck, but if he keeps to what appears to be his plan, it may not get all that much higher.

---
Brett Tomko - Same as he ever was?

year	ip	era	whip	fip	gb%	k/9	bb/9	hr/9	slga
2004	194.0	4.04	1.34	4.05	42.0	5.01	2.97	0.88	0.414
2005	190.2	4.48	1.37	3.98	39.8	5.38	2.69	0.94	0.444
2006	112.1	4.73	1.35	4.66	37.5	6.09	2.32	1.36	0.471
2007	28.2	4.40	1.67	3.74	40.0	6.90	5.33	0.31	0.387

Tomko is here because he had a good spring and a couple of good early outings that gave a little bit of hope that perhaps the change in mechanics he's mentioned might improve his consistency. Since then he's had a couple of outings that weren't so good, so same ol' Tomko. There are a couple of things of note, though. First, he's striking more people out. He has balanced this by also walking more people. The other good thing is that he has only allowed one home run so far.

---
Mark Hendrickson - Is it real, or is it Hendrickson?

year	ip	era	whip	fip	gb%	k/9	bb/9	hr/9	slga
2004	183.1	4.81	1.40	4.48	45.6	4.27	2.26	1.03	0.443
2005	178.1	5.90	1.55	4.63	46.2	4.49	2.47	1.21	0.503
2006	164.2	4.21	1.43	4.74	48.3	5.41	3.39	0.93	0.373
2007	27.2	1.30	0.69	2.32	58.7	7.80	1.62	0.32	0.193

Last year, Hendrickson had some decent outings with Tampa Bay, although his peripherals weren't that great. Then he came to the Dodgers, and the wheels came off. The signature moment came late in July when he fell off the mound after a pitch. He wound up in the bullpen, where he had a pretty good September and October. He started this season in the pen, too, but then Jason Schmidt went down.

Hendrickson has been seeing a sports psychologist, and boy, does it seem to have worked. Look at his numbers this season. His ERA is way down, which by itself could be a fluke, but so are his WHIP, FIP, and slugging average against. Like Penny, he's gone from a fly ball pitcher to a strong ground ball pitcher, but unlike Penny, he's also striking a lot of guys out, while giving up neither homers nor walks. Every indicator shows marked improvement. This could very well be real. He needs to continue a little while longer before I'll believe it, but still. Meanwhile, let's have this psychologist have a quiet chat with Wilson Betemit.

Phoning It In...

2007-05-05T07:26:00.001-04:00

Courtesy of the Onion:

Manny Ramirez Asks Red Sox if He Can Work from Home.

Improbability Drives...

2007-05-03T11:01:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Arizona

4/30: Diamondbacks 9, Dodgers 1
5/1: Dodgers 2, Diamondbacks 1
5/2: Dodgers 2, Diamondbacks 1

The Dodgers score only five runs in the series, and still take two out of three. That's some good pitchin' there, boys. I didn't follow either of the first two games, but the third was a terrific pitchers' duel between Doug Davis and Hendrickson. More on Hendy in a later post, I think.

The Dodgers spend the rest of the month playing teams from outside the division, which should make for a nice change.

By the Skin of Their Teeth...

2007-04-29T22:23:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at San Diego

4/27: Dodgers 6, Padres 5

Down two in the top of the ninth, Nomar and Martin ruined Trevor Hoffman's day, literally, as the Bums scored off of him.. It was Trevor Hoffman Day at Petco, the Pads honoring Hoffman before the game for passing Lee Smith as the all-time saves leader. There were even commemorative clocks given to the fans in attendance. So it goes.

Hendrickson pitched well again, but Billingsley had a rough inning. Seanez picked up the win, his first in a Dodger uniform in twelve years.

4/28: Padres 3, Dodgers 2

Tomko got the first eleven batters he faced out, then gave of three runs on four straight hits, then got the next eight hitters out before finally running out of gas in the seventh. Those three runs were all that the Pads got, but Greg Maddux was his usual efficient self, so it was all they needed.

4/29: Dodgers 5, Padres 4 (17 innings)

Grady outmanaged Bud Black in the marathon, helped by a bullpen that only gave up one hit over 10 2/3 innings. As the game got late, Black used up both his bench and his bullpen, so that by the 13th he had to call on rookie Justin Hampson to go as long as possible, and on Pete LaForrest to play first. Sampson pitched well, all things considered. Meanwhile, Grady still had a rested Billingsley available, with Valdez still on the bench for a double switch. It paid off as Billingsley remembered how to pitch (and probably could've gone longer), and Valdez scored the go-ahead run after LaForrest's error put Valdez aboard.

---
The boys didn't hit much, but then nobody hits much in Petco. It was good to get out with another series win. Now the Dodgers play the Dbacks, who are coming off a sweep of the Jints.

Swept Away...

2007-04-27T11:44:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs San Francisco

4/24: Giants 5, Dodgers 3
4/25: Giants 6, Dodgers 4
4/26: Giants 5, Dodgers 4

Not a lot to say because I only got to watch or listen to the first few innings of each game. The good was that the games were close, and the Dodgers had opportunities to win all of them. The better is that they were able to rally back when Wolf gave up four runs before even recording an out in the second game. The bad was some lackluster pitching by both the starters and the pen, plus the continuing antics of Juan Pierre, who is so bad he'll get his own post soon if I can stomach it.

Gather Round, Lads and Lasses, Gather Round...

2007-04-24T15:08:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Pittsburgh

4/20: Dodgers 10, Pirates 2

I took advantage of MLB's 5 day free trial to actually watch some Dodger games, something that's very hard to do here in Red Sox nation. As much as I love listening to Vin Scully describe the game on the radio, there is no substitute for seeing what's happening. That Vin did the telecasts is a bonus. Alas, it's only for five days.

After a bit of a wobbly first inning, Randy Wolf cruised (10 strikeouts in 6 innings), and hit two doubles besides as the Dodgers crushed the Bucs 10-2. A six-run third put the game out of reach, and after that it was fun just to listen to Vin talking about stuff like the proper pronunciation of "Xavier". Another thing he mentioned was Freddy Sanchez's change of position fron third to second after Sanchez couldn't make a play on a Juan Pierre grounder in the first:

When we were giving you the lineups, we talked about Sanchez playing second base. Well you know they statiscalize everybody in this day and age, and as far as the Pirates are concerned they're making a big risk moving Sanchez from third base to second. They figured out last year at third he saved 21 more runs per year than the average third baseman, but 13 runs worse when he moves over to second base. Wellp, a hard ball just got by him, and the Dodgers now first and third, nobody out, and the batter is Nomar Garciaparra.

"Statiscalize" is my current most favorite word ever. He also went on to talk about how a player waiting "in the hole" to hit is a corruption of "in the hold," which is where someone waits to follow the man "on deck." I never knew that.

That last wasn't the biggest surprise I got during the game. The biggest surprise was the discovery that John Wasdin is still on a major league roster.

4/20: Dodgers 7, Pirates 3 (10 innings)

Sloppy game by both teams. Brad Penny pitched okay, except for the third, which hearkened back to last year's second half. The key difference, though, was that he displayed remarkable composure, even when Joe West called a ball on a pitch to Adam LaRoach that looked an awful lot like a strike. Grady got himself tossed questioning the pitch call, in one of calmest manager-umpire conversations resulting in an ejection that I've ever seen. Neither Joe nor Grady appeared particularly exercised as they chatted, nor even particularly angry. Nothing personal; just business.

As I said, sloppy. The Bucs got their first run when Chris Duffy singled, went to third on Penny's wild pitch which Martin then chucked into center field, and then scored on a ground out. It was Martin's second brain spasm this week. Not good. The Dodgers had plenty of opportunities to score, but had only cashed in two runs by the bottom of the ninth. Then the Pirstes returned the favor the Dodgers had given them in the first. Ethier opened the inning with a walk, but Valdez laid down a terrible bunt, forcing Ethier at second. With Olmedo Saenz at the plate, Torres threw a wild pitch that Ronnie Paulino then chucked into center a la Martin, Valdez to third. Two pitches later Torres handcuffed Paulino, the ball got by him, and Valdez scored on the passed ball, tying the game. Russell Martin atoned for his mistake by hitting a walkoff grand slam in the bottom of the tenth to win the game.

4/20: Pirates 7, Dodgers 5

Another sloppy game. Tomko pitched well enough, but there were three errors behind him. The top of the first was almost a duplicate of the night before, with Martin chucking yet another ball into the outfield when Duffy attempted to steal second. Pierre continues to be a nightmare in center, dropping one easy fly ball, and allowing Bautista's sharp grounder in the second (which barely got by Furcal) roll all the way to the wall for a double. Bautista got another ball past Pierre later for another double. I'm not sure I can take five years of this. The Dodgers did get the tying runs on in the bottom of the ninth, thanks to a Pirate error, but couldn't plate them this time. Bother. The defensive highlight for LA was Joe Beimel faking a pickoff on Jason Bay at second, only to discover that Bay had lit out for third. An easy throw to Valdez sent Bay back to the dugout.

Up in the Thin Air...

2007-04-19T20:05:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Colorado

4/18: Rockies 7, Dodgers 2

Wow, DeLo sure has problems with the guys in the middle of the Rockies order. I mean, they're good hitters anyway, but it was like Lieberthal was telling 'em what was coming. Grady had pretty much decided to concede this one by sitting Gonzo, Kent, and Martin anyway.

4/19: Dodgers 8, Rockies 1

Given that the Dodgers had already lost the first game of the mini-series, a well-pitched game by the much maligned Hendrickson was an especially nice surprise. I know that Vin keeps reminding us that Hendrickson has pitched well out of the pen, but I keep reminding myself of all the bad starts last year. I think Grady remembers, too, because he yanked Hendrickson at the very first sign of trouble. I was kind of surprised he went to the pen so soon.

---
Pierre seems to have put his hitting slump firmly behind him, but now he seems to be in a base stealing slump, having gotten caught twice in three attempts in the series. Meanwhile, Betemit is showing signs that he may be about to bust out, going 3/10 with 3 walks on the trip.

Short and Sweet...

2007-04-18T10:50:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Arizona

4/16: Dodgers 5, Diamondbacks 1

The third consecutive good start for Brad Penny. He hasn't been overpowering, but boy, has he been effective. The Bums move into first place with the best record in the majors.

4/17: Dodgers 6, Diamondbacks 4

Tomko regressed to the mean, but didn't completely blow up, so the Dodgers have that going for them. Juan Pierre appears to have finally started hitting during the series. He had two weakly hit singles in the first game, but last night he scorched a double and a triple. If nothing else he sure does run fast.

---
Jason Schmidt had an MRI, and wound up on the DL with shoulder bursitis. It was mentioned over at DT that he's had this before, and it didn't cause him to miss many starts. Tsao was recalled from Vegas to take his place. Hendrickson will probably get Schmidt's next start.

---
Speaking of the DL, Colletti has some decisions coming up. Kemp is rehabbing in Vegas, Yhency Brazoban is rehabbing in A ball, and Kuo is throwing bullpen sessions in preparation for a bullpen session.

Jackie Robinson Weekend

2007-04-16T11:04:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs San Diego

4/13: Dodgers 9, Padres 1
4/14: Padres 7, Dodgers 2
4/15: Dodgers 9, Padres 3

The Dodgers took two out of three similar blowouts. In all of them the losing pitcher didn't make it out of the third inning, whilst the winning pitcher cruised along. The good news is that LA did well against a team that manhandled them last year. The better news is that the Dodgers bullpen outperformed the Padres vaunted bullpen despite the fact that it was Hendrickson and Seanez who got most of the work.

---
Jason Schmidt was awful in the loss, pretty much throwing batting practice to the Padres. He was better in his first two starts, but nowhere near what was expected, even off of last year's performance. Is he hurt? Is it mechanical? Curt Schilling had a similar outing Opening Day, but bounced back strong in his recent starts. Schmidt's next turn comes on Thursday against the Rockies.

---
Some of the bats looked good. Martin and Gonzo continue to pound the ball, Nomar has started to come around, and Ethier finally seems to have busted out last night, including a two-run homer off Scott Linebrink. OTOH, Pierre and Betemit continue to slump. Betemit at least walks once in awhile, but as someone over at DT noted, Randy Wolf had more walks in yesterday's game than Pierre has had all season.

It's tough to know what to do about Pierre. Clearly Colletti spent too much to get him ($44M for 5 yrs.), but he's certainly can't be as bad as he's shown so far, both at the plate and in the field (another error last night). He's got the second longest consecutive game streak going in the majors, a streak he wants to keep alive, even though a rest might do him some good. There are already signs that Grady is thinking about it. He didn't start him Saturday, although he brought him in later, so the streak remains intact. If it were me filling in the lineup, Pierre would be batting eighth until he demonstrates that he can do something other than hit weak ground balls to the infield. If Ethier is getting out of his slump, then maybe Brady Clark can get a couple more starts in center.

---
Wilson Valdez had another good game last night, and I have to wonder how he's suddenly blossomed at age 29. Is he just an anomaly? Is he using something? Did he lie about his age when he was originally signed, and is actually 27? It's not just that he's hitting like he never did before, but he's hitting with power. Very strange.

---
Next up: Arizona

Life, the Universe, and Everything...

2007-04-15T15:21:00.000-04:00

I don't know if Douglas Adams was a baseball fan, but I suspect it's highly improbable that he was. Still, I think he'd smile if he knew how many baseball players will be wearing number 42 upon their backs today. They'll wear it to honor Jackie Robinson, who first wore it before Adams was even born. It's funny how a particular number can become associated with a person. Sixty years ago today, when Robinson first walked out to first base at Ebbetts Field, I doubt many in attendance gave his uniform number much thought. As Bob Timmermann noted the other day over at the Griddle, it's likely that 42 was just the next uniform available when Jackie made the team. If, however, everything Adams said was true, then it was a clear sign from the cosmos that an event of great significance was taking place. So it goes.

I've never been especially happy that MLB decided to retire 42 across the entire league. Part of that is Dodger fannish possessiveness, feeling that since Jackie was a Dodger, it should be the Dodgers that honor him in that way. There's also this nagging feeling that it was all just a marketing stunt on MLB's part, cynically calculated to cash in while patting itself on the back for something that most of the Lords of Baseball were opposed to when it happened.

On the other hand, I do like the fact that many players, and some entire teams, will wear number 42 today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Jackie's first game. I think Ken Griffey's original idea to do it was a terrific one, and I salute the individual players who decided to follow suit. The cynic in me does wonder about the entire teams that decided to wear the number, whether it was the players who decided to do it, or just that the marketing departments that saw a golden opportunity, but I'll just let it pass and assume the best. If nothing else, it means I get to see the Dodgers on TV for the first time this season, and that's always a good thing.

---
Meanwhile, the Onion has their own take the subject.

Jeff Kent To Wear No. 42 To Honor Mariano Rivera

The Last Best Player

2007-04-12T20:49:00.000-04:00

When Vin Scully mentioned the other night that Chris Ianetta, the Rockies' catcher, was from Providence, something clicked in the back of my memory, and it dawned on me that he was on the Chatham A's team that was chronicled in The Last Best League. He is now, AFAIK, the third member of that team to make it to the bigs, after Tim Stauffer and Chad Orvella (now both back in the minors).

On the List...

2007-04-12T20:06:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers vs Colorado

4/6: Rockies 6, Dodgers 3

The home opener wasn't very homey as the Bums lost both Matt Kemp and Jason Schmidt to injuries. Schmidt says it was just a leg cramp, and he'll be ready to go next start. Kemp has a grade 1 shoulder separation, ligaments stretched but not torn, and was placed of the DL. Chin-hui Tsao, a right-handed reliever, was called up from Vegas to replace Kemp. Rafael Furcal is due to come off the DL tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see who Colletti keeps on the roster. The original thought was that Wilson Valdez would be the one to go, but he is out of options, so sending him down would require him to clear waivers first. The same would apply to Ramon Martinez. Now, Ned could send Tsao back down, or else he could send down Rudy Seanez, whose ERA in three appearances this year is 13.50.

4/6: Dodgers 2, Rockies 1

The best game pitched by a Dodger so far this season. Brett Tomko, of all people, was brilliant. 6 IP, 0 runs, 1 hit, 3 walks, and 9 strikeouts (game score of 76). There wasn't much offense, and really, apart from the rout Sunday in SF there hasn't been much all season, but there didn't need to be.

4/6: Dodgers 3, Rockies 0

Remember how I said I was skeptical of Brad Penny? During the first inning last night when Penny ahad walked three consecutive batters to load the bases, I thought "OMG, here we go." But he managed to wiggle out of it with no harm done, then settled down, allowing only two hits and no runs in 6 1/3. The bullpen was aces, too, and the offense scored enough to win.

Considering how bad things looked Monday, winning two of three looks pretty good. The lack of offense is worrisome, but Furcal should be back tomorrow, and that's got to help.

I'll Take Original Recipe, Please...

2007-04-10T16:08:00.000-04:00

During the Dodgers 2004 stretch run, I became addicted to Gameday, mlb.com's play-by-play web app. I hadn't yet sprung for the MLB Audio package, so it was the only way a cheap- skate like me could hang on every pitch thrown in my out-of-market team's games. Other sites have similar apps, all differing slightly in presentation and data provided, but I got used to Gameday. I started subscribing to the audio package in 2005, but I would usually have a Gameday window open, as well, for quick access to stats and game status. For one thing, Gameday tends to be a pitch ahead of the audio call, so it's a bit like peering into the future. Anyway, it may not have been perfect, but it worked.

MLB introduced "Enhanced Gameday" during the playoffs last year, offering 3D pitch graphics, with (allegedly) much more precise pitch locations. The pitch locations on the original version tended to be located more by the umpire's call rather than their actual location in physical space. Either that or Vin Scully (and all the other announcers) was completely lying when he described their locations. There were some other new features, and it was all sorts of snazzy looking, but after an inning or two, I clicked on the option for "Classic Gameday."

This year, MLB was proud to announce that they had not only combined the "enhanced" and "classic" versions together into one nifty new Franken-app, but also completely removed the option to use the old version. The new version is a monstrosity, a triumph of gee-whiz over function. It takes up more of the screen, yet gives far less useful information. It's low to update, and freezes far more often than classic. Worse, rather than just freezing in place when it hits a glitch, it tries to muddle through, usually by combining the results for two players into one, much to the befuddlement of the fans. It provides way more information than one needs to know about the path of each pitch to the plate, including the angle and distance of the break and a variable called "pFX" that no one seems to know the definition of, and yet if you want to know what the batter did last time up, it's not there. Mind, the new version shows you the pitch locations and ball/strike calls for all of the batter's previous at bats right under his picture, but it doesn't say anywhere what the end result of all those pitches was. And don't get me started about the big honkin' ad in the lower right that reduced the space available for the box score and lineups by half.

Needless to say (it being on the internet and all), there was a pile of criticism heaped upon the folks who foisted this on the fans. They listened politely, and then completely missed the point, adding a couple of useless options, but no option to get the original version. One wonders if they erased the code.

It looked grim. I didn't much care for the other gameday type apps I looked at, and it was just easier to click on the Gameday icon on the same site that I was going to for my audio feed. But then Rob McMillin of 6-4-2 stepped up to the plate. creating a gameday app that looks and works (mostly) just like the original. It's just neat. (The picture of classic posted up top is actually Rob's version.)

The only worry I have now is that MLBAM will attempt to squash him like a bug for having the temerity to do this.

---
Bob Timmermann wrote about this over at the Griddle, too, here, here, and here.

Sweep!

2007-04-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at San Francisco

4/6: Dodgers 2, Giants 1

I'm skeptical about Brad Penny. If you had asked me last weekend who would be the first Dodger pitcher to pitch into the eighth inning of a game this season, well, I don't know who I would've picked, but it wouldn't have been Penny. He's looked so bad since last year's All-Star game that going into Friday night's game I was just hoping he'd get through five innings only down a couple three runs. He pitched way better than I expected. He only struck out one, but he only walked one. He gave up ten hits, but he scattered them effectively, inducing some double plays to take care of the resulting runners. He also had lots of help from the Jints, who kept running on Russell Martin and Ramon Martinez and losing. I'm still skeptical, but it was a good first step.

The Dodger offense continued to struggle, but got lucky when Matt Kemp scored on a busted play that the Giants managed to botch.

4/7: Dodgers 4, Giants 1

Derek Lowe pitched like Derek Lowe, and Russ Ortiz pitched like Russ Ortiz. If you can't beat Russ Ortiz, who can you beat?

4/8: Dodgers 10, Giants 4

Randy Wolf survived two shaky innings by the thinnest of threads, then settled in and shut down the Giants. Meanwhile, the Dodgers teed off on the Hundred and Twenty-Six Dollar Man, and Luis Gonzalez confounded all expectations by hitting two homers in the rout.

The Gonzo and Pierre Show

One of them is named for a muppet, the other one looks like a muppet, and they both have been fielding with the manual dexterity of muppets. Every day has pretty much seen the same schtick from two thirds of the outfield—misjudged or dropped balls followed by poor throws. Gonzo, at least, has been hitting well, but Pierre has been a bad caricature of himself so far, exagerrating all of his worst traits as a player. I know he'll regress to the mean eventually, but it's a tough listen right now. The only silver lining so far is that the Giants have similar problems of their own, as evidenced today when Jeff Kent went first to third on a weak single hit to Bonds.

Valdez!

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. In 182 previous at bats with three different major league teams over the last three years, Wilson Valdez hit .209/.250/.291. Now, after going 6 for 10 with a double and a triple in his first two games as a Dodger, some otherwise sensible folk are touting him as a potential savior, as if he somehow just learned how to hit at age 29. Small sample size much? Sorry, but I was fooled two years ago by Oscar Robles. I'll enjoy it while it lasts, but I'm not biting again.

Third Time's the Charm...

2007-04-05T20:48:00.000-04:00

Series Recap—Dodgers at Milwaukee

4/2: Brewers 7, Dodgers 1

Opening Day! It wasn't even as close as the score indicates. Ben Sheets was brilliant, throwing a two-hit complete game (game score = 82), Luis Gonzalez lost a fly ball in Miller Park's Windows, and Milwaukee's rabbits ran and ran on Juan Pierre's arm. The only bright spot was Jeff
Kent's solo shot in the second.

Derek Lowe has now started three straight Opening Days for LA, and is 0-3. In 16 innings pitched over the three starts, he's given up 25 hits, 8 walks, 3 homers, and 15 earned runs.

4/3: Brewers 4, Dodgers 3

The Bums had a lead on Russell Martin's tie-breaking homer in the fifth, but Randy Wolf coughed a two run shot to Kevin Mench in the sixth, and that was that. Once again Gonzo's defense was an issue when he couldn't get to a Johnny Estrada fly ball that got past him for a double.

"I just couldn't get to it," said Gonzalez. "It's no secret, I've been playing 17 years. What you see is what you get. I'm not 21."

Matt Kemp got the start in right field over Andre Ethier. Here's hoping Gonzo gets some days off, too.

4/4: Dodgers 5, Brewers 4

It took three tries, but the Dodgers finally won a game this season. Jason Schmidt made his debut, and pitched well until he ran out of gas in the bottom of the fifth, walking the bases loaded with two outs. Fortunately there was no harm done, and he ended up with the win.

The most notable thing about the game was the Dodger fifth, when Martin, Nomar, and Kent each made out on the very first pitch thrown by Jeff Suppan. Three up, three down, three pitches. I realize they had to catch a plane for San Francisco, but jeez. Worse, it was part of a pattern. Through the first three innings, the Dodgers had made Suppan throw 63 pitches. In the next four innings, Dodger hitters viewed a grand total of 27 pitches:

4th Inning
	Martinez	3 pitches	grounded out
	Schmidt	3 pitches	struck out
	Pierre	1 pitch	grounded out

5th Inning
	Martin	1 pitch	grounded out
	Garciaparra	1 pitch	flied out
	Kent	1 pitch	flied out

6th Inning
	Gonzalez	2 pitches	doubled
	Betemit	1 pitch	flied out
	Ethier	1 pitch	flied out
	Martinez	4 pitches	grounded out

7th Inning
	Kemp (ph)	1 pitch	doubled
	Pierre	2 pitches	sacrifice bunt
	Martin	5 pitches	walked
	Garciaparra	1 pitch	lined out, DP

I mean, I don't have a problem with a guy swinging on the first pitch if he's looking for a particular pitch and gets it. It just that when you have the pitcher on the ropes and the first two guys in the inning are gone on two pitches, you might want to think about trying to work a count.

Opening Day

2007-04-02T15:10:00.000-04:00

Okay, technically Opening Day was yesterday, with the Mets at the Cardinals, but 'most everyone else is starting today (except the Giants and the Padres who will wait until tomorrow). The Mets looked good last night, cuffing around the World Series champs with timely hitting, aggressive base-running, and Tom Glavine's crafty¹ pitching. The Cardinals did not look as good, running into outs with over-aggressive base-running and timely strikeouts. What in the name of the Wide World of Sports is Tony LaRussa (The Smartest Manager in Baseball™) doing batting Yadier Molina (.216 avg/.595 OPS) fifth? If Molina's the best hitter he has for that spot, the Cardinals are in a heap o'trouble.

The Dodgers open in Milwaukee with Derek Lowe making his third straight opening day start versus Ben Sheets. Vin Scully is actually making the trip (he usually only goes on the road for division rivals these days), so Gameday audio will have Vin today for three innings anyway, whoot! Lowe and Jeff Kent will be the only players starting this year's opener who started for last year's.

LA went into the spring with only two main questions to be resolved, who would be the fifth starter, and would James Loney make the team. For the first, Bret Tomko got the job almost by default when Hong-Chih Kuo (the favorite) came up with a sore shoulder, and Chad Billingsley was sent to the bullpen to work on his command.

As for the second question, the answer was one that almost nobody expected. Going into the last weekend of training, it had come down to James Loney versus Larry Bigbie. Loney led all the minor leagues last year by hitting .380, tied a Dodger record by getting nine RBI in a single game once he was called up, and hit .405 for the spring. Bigbie, in camp as a non-roster player, is a guy with talent, but he also has a history of injury which has kept him from becoming the player many had predicted. Loney is by far the better hitter of the two, but he plays first base, a position currently occupied by Nomar Garciaparra. They tried playing Loney in the outfield, but he was very good. Bigby is a decent outfielder, and has an escape clause in his contract that allows him to become a free agent if he doesn't make the team, so it looked like, barring a trade, he would make the team to avoid the chance of losing him.

Then Grady Little surprised everyone Saturday night by announcing that neither player had made the team. Instead the Dodgers kept Matt Kemp, a terrific, albeit somewhat raw, young power-hitting outfielder. The Dodgers don't have a whole lot of power in their lineup, particularly in the outfield, so Kemp should help with that. He is an exciting player. Unfortunately, this means Loney will open the season chasing fly balls in Vegas, which is a shame because he has nothing left to prove in the minors.

---
¹ The adjective "crafty" as it applies to pitchers is almost exclusively used for left-handers, and only those with less than first-rate stuff. Randy Johnson, although a lefty, would never be called crafty. For that matter, Glavine wasn't usually referred to as crafty when he was younger, but at age 41 he relies more on guile and smarts than he had to back when he was winning Cy Young awards in the 90's, much like his old friend Greg Maddux, who has always been the smartest pitcher on the planet. Maddux, however, is right-handed, so would never be called crafty.

This Is Just... Neat

2007-01-08T12:57:00.000-05:00

Score Bard's 2006 Top 25 Baseball Player Names and Vacation Photos

Ken Arneson is a frelling genius. He took photos of his trip to Scandinavia, and titled them with appropriate player names. Great fun. Watch the slide show (and perhaps imagine some Grieg in the background), and you'll understand.

It's That Time of Year Again...

2007-01-08T09:53:00.000-05:00

The Hall of Fame balloting results will be announced tomorrow. The voters (members of the Baseball Writers Assn. of a certain seniority) can vote for up to ten players. There are 32 names on the ballot. A player needs to be picked on 75% of the ballots for election, and if he's not on 5% of the ballots, or if he's used up his 15 years of eligibility, he's taken off. Here's the list, and who I'd vote for (in bold) if they gave me a ballot.

First year eligibles:

Harold Baines - If not for Frank Thomas, Harold Baines would likely be considered the best hitter in Chicago White Sox history. He is probably the most popular player in their history. He may make the Hall eventually, but it'll take awhile. His numbers are very good, and he played for a long time. His biggest problem is the same that Edgar Martinez will face in that he spent most of his career as a DH.

Dante Bichette - A decent player until he became one of the original Colorado Rockies in '93. There, he put up seven terrific seasons and hit a ton of home runs into the thin Denver air. The problem was that once he came down from the mountain, he was just decent again. He'll get some votes, but not a lot.

Bobby Bonilla - For five years in Pittsburgh, Bonilla was an HOF calibre player. Then he signed a monster free agent contract with the Mets, and smacked head on into the New York media. The Mets massively failed to live up to some ridiculous expectations that year, and Bonilla, despite having a pretty good year under the circumstances, did not comport himself well in the situation, getting into a couple of confrontations with reporters. He was labeled a clubhouse cancer (as was Eddie Murray) by the media, and his career never really recovered from that despite having some pretty good seasons after that. His career numbers are okay, but I suspect the only votes he'll get are from Pirates beat writers.

Scott Brosius - A late bloomer who was a key player on the last few Yankee World Series winners, but certainly not a Hall of Famer.

Jay Buhner - One of worst trades the Yankees ever made was sending a very young Jay Buhner to Seattle for a very old Ken Phelps. (Phelps was once a sabremetric darling, but his best days were behind him.) Buhner became a terrific player, a powerful, patient hitter, and an excellent fielder. His main problem was that he was injured a lot. His career totals are good, but not good enough.

Ken Caminiti - He had a cannon for an arm, but it was all a sham. He an okay player until he discovered steroids, after which his power numbers went way up. He was MVP in '96, but he faded quickly after that, the result of too much abuse of steroids and cocaine. He died of these problems two years ago. He has no shot, because he is one of the few players to have actually admitted to taking steroids.

Jose Canseco - Speaking of steroids... Canseco was the victim of his own obsession with celebrity, even when he was one of the best young players in baseball. It wasn't enough for him just to be a great player. He had to be the first 40-40 guy (forty homers and forty steals in the same season, power and speed). He had to prove he could also pitch (blowing out his shoulder in the process). He had to date Madonna. It was always about him, and his career eventually suffered for it. He became a joke. But it was still all about him, so he decided to admit his steroid use, as though it were a good thing. He hit 462 home runs, and he's still not going to get into the Hall

Eric Davis - Yet another guy who suffered under the mantle of being called "the next Willie Mays." Davis was arguably the best all around player in the National League while playing for the Reds in the late eighties, but injuries crushed his career. Most famously, he lacerated his kidney diving for a ball in the '90 World Series. Reds owner Marge Schott accused him of malingering, among other things. In the mid-nineties, he took a year and a half off from baseball just to let his body recover from all the accumulated injuries. He came back, and his career revived, but then he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He continued to play while undergoing chemotherapy, and eventually beat the disease. Sadly, all the time he missed over the years is going to keep him out of the Hall, for no one deserves it more.

Tony Fernandez - For a long time, the stereotypical shortstop was a quick, wiry guy with good hands and a strong arm, who was often from San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. They were typically good field, no hit guys, and if they could hit a little they became all-stars. Fernandez was one of the latter, an all-star for some good Blue Jay teams. He was a terrific fielder, but he's got no shot of even making next year's ballot, because the other new shortstop on this ballot destroyed the stereotype completely.

Tony Gwynn - All you need to know about Tony Gwynn was that he was Ted Williams's favorite. That's a helluva recommendation. All of us weekend athletes loved him, too, because he was chubby and yet both one of the best hitters ever and a gold glove fielder to boot. Roly-poly guys represent! He's a can't miss first ballot electee.

Wally Joyner - Better than average, nice career, but not good enough.

Mark McGwire - Clearly the numbers are there, and I believe he belongs. His performance at the Senate hearings on steroids probably wrecked his chances for a first ballot election, and probably quite a few more. I do think he'll get in eventually.

Paul O'Neill - O'Neill is often referred to as a little intense, which is sort of like saying the surface of the sun is a little warm. Water coolers were never safe when he didn't perform up to his own very high standards. He was a very, very good player for both the Reds and the Yanks, helping both teams win World Series. But even he'll tell you he doesn't measure up to the standards of the Hall.

Cal Ripken, Jr. - The stereotype of shortstops as lean, wiry guys started to change with Alan Trammell, and it was smashed completely by Ripken. When he was in the minors he played third, and everyone assumed that'd be his best spot in the majors, too. He was too big and had too much power for short. He did play some third when he first came up, but then Earl Weaver moved him over and the legend began. If it hadn't been for Cal, ARod would probably have wound up as a third baseman. Oh, wait... Anyway, Cal will surely be on the podium with Gwynn in Cooperstown this summer.

Bret Saberhagen - He pitched too many innings at too young an age. Saberhagen was a dominating pitcher in his early twenties, but arm troubles limited him for the rest of his career.

Devon White - The best fielding centerfielder of his generation, and possibly the best fielding centerfielder ever. Not a good enough hitter to get in, though.

Bobby Witt - Not even better than average. Only on the ballot because he meets the minimum requirements for time served. Probably the worst player on the ballot, although unlike last year (Alex Fernandez, Gary DiSarcina) there are no real stink bombs this year.

---
Nominees remaining from previous years:

What's interesting is that they're fairly easy to pair up to make comparisons, at least until you get to the outfielders. Click here for last year's discussion about these guys.

Starters:

Bert Blyleven and Tommy John - Two men who pitched at a high level for a very long time. John has one more win (288 - 287) but Blyleven was a much better pitcher, throwing perhaps the best curve ball of any pitcher ever, so he gets my vote (again).

Jack Morris and Orel Hershiser - Two men who pitched at a very high level in somewhat shorter careers, both known for steadfast determination and post-season heroics. As much as I love Hershiser, Morris had a much better career by any standard of measurement.

Relievers:

Rich Gossage and Lee Smith - It's a travesty that Gossage still isn't in the Hall. Smith doesn't even warrant consideration until the Goose is enshrined.

Infielders:

Alan Trammell and Dave Concepcion - A less extreme version of the Ripken-Fernandez comparison above. Trammell was the better player, but not as good as Cal. Both were better than Fernandez.

Don Mattingly and Steve Garvey - Donnie Baseball was a better player in every possible way except for ability to stay in the lineup. It's a shame Mattingly will never make the Hall as a player.

Outfielders:

One of my all time favorite photos is this SI cover from the late seventies featuring two of our candidates, Jim Rice and Dave Parker, back when they were the most feared players in baseball. I like it because it was such a shock to see how Parker towered over Rice. Despite that, at the time they would've been very evenly matched (with Parker getting an edge probably for being the better fielder). I'm tempted to pair the two of them up now, but it doesn't really work.

Andre Dawson and Dave Parker - Two guys who maintained very high levels for very long careers, both of whom played for a lot of teams, and both of whom had problems that often kept them for performing at their very best. For Dawson the problem was his fragile knees, worn down from the pounding they took on Olympic Stadium's astroturf. For Parker it was cocaine, but unlike some others (I'm looking at you, Strawberry), he managed to break the habit. Dawson turned out to be the better player over their careers, and is probably the best of the five outfielders overall. Parker has excellent numbers as well, but the cocaine will probably keep him out.

Jim Rice and Dale Murphy - Two guys who at their peaks were probably the most feared hitters in their respective leagues, who also seemed to lose their abilities with startling rapidity. With Rice it was his eyesight, and he retired fairly soon thereafter. I don't think anyone knows what happened to Murphy, but he continued to put up mediocre numbers for several seasons before finally retiring. Rice was the better player for a longer time, and belongs in the Hall. Murphy's chances are hurt by the fact that his skills left him in mid-career, followed by a lot of mediocre seasons.

Albert Belle - A class by himself, he put together ten monster seasons before having to retire due to injury. The numbers are terrific, despite the short career. Belle's problem is that he's a nasty human being. He was nasty and abusive to fans and reporters when he played, and he was recently convicted of concealing a GPS device in his ex-GF's car to use in stalking her. Albert, you're a dick. No Hall of Fame for you!

---
There's already a kerfuffle brewing on this as one voter, a writer in Chicago, has stated that he submitted a blank ballot, and will refuse to vote for any player who played in the steroid era. Which means he won't be voting for anyone ever for the foreseeable future. More over at the Griddle.

Irony...

2006-11-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

Two bizarre items culled from the the Griddle.

First, remember the Lehigh Valley IronPigs? Apparently there's a motorcycle club down in Texas called the Iron Pigs™, who've trademarked their name, and are challenging Lehigh Valley's use of "their" name. I'm not sure what the grounds for challenging will be, since I don't see how the person on the street could mistake a AAA baseball team for a bunch of bullying ex-cops on bikes, but what do I know?

---
Second, when the grim reaper gets a post-it with your name on it, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Bob Cartwright, a friend of flight instructor Tyler Stanger, was telling everyone who would listen that Stanger had invited him along on the fatal flight that took the lives of Stanger and Cory Lidle, but he couldn't make it. It appears that the gravelings finally caught up with Cartwright on Tuesday, when he and two other men were killed in the crash of a light plane in California.

Worst. Team Name. Ever.

2006-11-13T07:50:00.000-05:00

When Ottawa's AAA franchise moves to Allentown in 2008, they will be called the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. (Yes, IronPigs is one word. Sigh.)

Thanks to Bob Timmermann at the Griddle for pointing this out.

Spahn, Sain, and Pray for Rain...

2006-11-09T22:02:00.000-05:00

Spahn & Sain

First we'll use Spahn
then we'll use Sain
Then an off day
followed by rain
Back will come Spahn
followed by Sain
And followed
we hope
by two days of rain.

-- Gerald V. Hern

Back in the day, when my best friend Richie and I used to play All Star Baseball under the maple tree in my backyard, one or the other of us would almost always pick Johnny Sain to pitch for our team. To be honest, I knew nothing about Sain as a pitcher. He'd retired when I was two. What I did know, based on his ASB disk, was that he'd been a heck of a hitter for a pitcher. Each player in ASB was represented by a disk that fitted over a spinner. You spun, and the outcome of the at bat depended on which numbered arc the spinner ended up in. (If it was on a line, we called "foul ball" and spun again.) The size of the arcs were based upon the players' actual stats. Sain didn't have much power (homers were "1"), but he hit a ton of singles ("7" and "13"). Plus, he hardly ever struck out ("10"). You really couldn't ask much more from a pitcher in a game in which pitching had absolutely no effect on the outcome.

When I got older, I read Ball Four, in which Jim Bouton sang Sain's praises as a pitching coach. (We had Bouton in ASB, too, but he hardly ever got in. I mean, look at all those frelling 10's.) Everyone who worked with him seemed to think he was the best pitching coach in the game. Leo Mazzone, probably the best pitching coach in baseball today, was a pupil.

Johnny Sain passed away Tuesday at 89. He was a terrific pitcher, a terrific coach, and a pretty decent hitter, too. Rest in peace.

Tigers in Three...

2006-10-28T09:09:00.000-04:00

Oh. Wait...

The Cardinals won the World Series last night, finishing off one hell of an improbable playoff run. Nobody, and I mean not even die-hard Cardinal fans, thought that the Cards had a chance to win it all when the season ended. After starting the season like a house afire, they limped home due to injuries and abysmal pitching, backing into the playoffs only because the Astros managed to lose their games in the final weekend. Few picked them to get by the frelling Padres for crying out loud. When they got by the Pads, and then the Mets, excuses were made for the teams that lost. The Tigers, a team that hardly distinguished itself down the stretch, blowing a huge lead over the Twins and falling into the wild card slot on the final day of the season, were installed as overwhelming favorites. A number of sportswriters went so far as to jokingly opine that the Series would only last three games, because the Tigers would crush the Cards in the first three games so badly that Bud Selig would be forced to cancel the fourth game for humanitarian reasons. Now folks are decrying the Cards as the worst team to win a World Series ever.

Piffle.

Last year, playing with mostly the same players, the Cards won 100 games. the year before that they won 105. This group of players has been very good for a long time, and their experience showed in the playoffs. They don't make many mistakes. More than that, baseball is a game of streaks. Unlikely players get hot, and entire teams get hot, and that heat carries them through. The Tigers got some of that with Kenny Rogers, but he could only pitch every fourth day. OTOH, the entire Cardinals pitching staff caught fire in the playoffs. Anthony Reyes, arguably the worst pitcher EVER to start the first game of a World Series, threw eight innings of four-hit ball in game 1 for the win. Last night it was old friend Jeff Weaver doing the same the close out the Series. I was glad to see Weaver get the win. He's had a terrible season, even getting released by the Angels to make room for his little brother. Still, he did yeoman's work for the Dodgers in 2004 and 2005, so I'm happy for him.

Meanwhile, the Tigers very much resembled the Cleveland Indians team of has beens and never will-bes assembled in the movie Major League. There was Pudge Rodriguez playing aging catcher and team leader, Jake Taylor, Magglio Ordonez as the enigmatic and streaky Pedro Cerrano, and crusty Jim Leyland as crusty manager Lou Brown. Justin Verlander became fireballing rookie Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn, while Kenny Rogers played the part of crafty old Eddie Harris, who never met a substance he didn't want to apply to a baseball. And like that team, the Tigers didn't win the World Series (which you don't find out until you watch Major League II).

To be honest, I didn't watch much of the playoffs, especially once the Dodgers departed. Fox's coverage is just so awful. At least last night I could watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown instead of watching Kevin Kennedy and Jeannie Zelasko. I mean really, there are good female baseball announcers out there, women who earned their baseball announcing gigs through hard work and experience. Suzyn Waldman comes to mind. Zelasko wouldn't know a baseball if it hit her in the face. Fox has the baseball contract now through 2013. Ratings this year were the lowest ever. Fox has managed to drive away both casual fans (by not starting the games til almost nine o'clock on the East Coast), and hard core fans (with their terrible kiddie show coverage). By 2013, there may be no body left watching.

R.I.P. Cory Lidel

2006-10-11T22:14:00.000-04:00

It's weird. One of my flashbulb memories is the moment I heard about Thurman Munson's death in a plane crash. I was in grad school, and a bunch of us were having beers down at Iggy's, the closest bar to campus, when the local news came on TV. (No cable in those days in RI.) It was a shocking moment, and even the Sox fans in the group drank to his memory.

I doubt that today will remain with me like that. Events unfolded to slowly, and work was busy, so I didn't pay much attention. People were mentioning the crash, but it was a small plane kind of far from anything symbolic, so I assumed it was just a peculiar accident. And so it was.

When I got home, they'd just found out that it was owned by Yankee pitcher Cory Lidel. That was a bit of a stunner. And just weird, too. You never expect to discover something about a high profile incident that makes it even more high profile.

I logged in over at the Toaster, left condolences at Bronx Banter, and then got involved (along with a some others) in a mild kerfuffle at DT with someone jumping to some extreme conclusions. Meanwhile, there was a troll attack on Bronx Banter as the fans there were coming to grips. People suck.

It'll be interesting to see just what happened. It sounds like something malfunctioned, but that's only from reports I heard on the news, which seems to think that rumors and facts are the same thing.

Damn, I miss Iggy's.

Buck O'Neil, 1911-2006

2006-10-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

"There's nothing like getting your body to do everything it has to do on a baseball field. It's as good as sex; it's as good as music. It fills you up. Waste no tears on me. I didn't come along too early. I was right on time." -- Buck O'Neil

Buck O'Neil passed away last night at the age of 94. O'Neil played in the Negro Leagues, was the first black coach in the Major Leagues, was a scout (he signed Ernie Banks and Lou Brock, among others), and spent his later years as an ambassador for the game. The only good thing about Ric Burns's Baseball documentary was that it introduced Buck to the world at large. My favorite moment of the entire series is his rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

Earlier this year he became the oldest man ever to play in a professional baseball game, suiting up for both teams (he was "traded" midway through the game) in the Northern League All-Star Game, and drew a walk for each team in his two at bats. It was a nice thing to do for him after organized baseball snubbed him yet again when they failed to elect him to the Hall of Fame (while electing 17 other Negro League legends) back in February. It's one of the few times Buck seemed perplexed. Not bitter or angry, but as he told Keith Olbermann, "You know, I could play a little." Olbermann, for his part, did get angry, and had this to say about the wretched state of affairs.

Still, it didn't seem to get Buck down, and when all the folks who were elected were inducted, it was O'Neil who went to Cooperstown to do the honor of introducing them. The sad thing is that at the same ceremony, Rachel Robinson said about the inductees, "You always wish things can be done in a timely manner. Clearly, you wished people would be available to enjoy the awards and the accolades." Buck O'Neil won't be around next time.

Alex Belth did a terrific interview with O'Neil some years ago that really seems to give a good sense of the man. The NY Times obituary is here. He was a wonderful man who died too soon. Sad now.

eta: Here's some additional stuff on Buck. First is the full text of an interview did as part of the episode of Baseball on the Negro Leagues. The second is a brief remembrance of fellow DT'er Eric Enders over at the Griddle.

One Ugly Play...

2006-10-06T15:12:00.000-04:00

I was listening to Wednesday's Dodgers-Mets game via MLB audio, and immediately following "the Play," Vin Scully told a great old joke about the Daffy Dodgers of the late twenties. One Brooklynite sees another peering through a hole in the fence at Ebbets Field, and asks him how the game is going. The second man replies, "The Dodgers have three men on." The first man then immediately asks, "Oh yeah, which base?"

October Madness...

2006-10-03T11:16:00.000-04:00

Baseball playoff prediction limericks.

Supposing Mozart, or One of That Crowd...

2006-09-23T07:09:00.000-04:00

...had tried writing a book about baseball?

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball is a collection of short pieces Stephen Jay Gould wrote for various magazines and newspapers, published shortly after his death. It is the most boringest book about baseball I've read in a long time. That surprised me, because when I'd seen Gould on TV he was generally interesting (except for the awful Simpsons ep that he phoned in), and his books on evolution and biology are generally well regarded (although I haven't read any of them). I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this certainly wasn't it.

Part of the problem is that "various magazines and newspapers" bit. Gould has about five baseball-related personal anecdotes that he relates over and over again. Published in separate venues at different times, it probably wasn't all that noticeable. Collect those articles together in the same volume, and the third time in fifty pages that you read about him getting beat up in Brooklyn for being a Yankee fan it starts getting a little tiresome.

The other thing is that he is unrelenting in his quest to show exactly how erudite he is. Granted, his target audience for most of these pieces was the New York Review of Books crowd, but it begins to approach self-parody in some passages. In a piece on the Abner Doubleday myth, in which he discusses why we know far more about the history of cricket than we do about the "base ball" mentioned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, he states:

The upper and educated classes played cricket, and the history of the sport has been copiously documented because the literati write about their own interests, and because the activities of men in power are well recorded...

Apparently, despite all his fancy book learnin', Gould never learned the meaning of irony. It crops up again in a review of George Will's Men at Work:

By the way, Will's thesis, if ever properly grasped, would forthwith and forever end the silly discussion about the supposed anomaly of why so many intellectuals love baseball, and why baseball, alone among major sports, has a distinguished literature [with Will's book as the latest entry]. We who have loved and lived with the game all our lives feel no need to mount a defense against such ignorance.

That "defense against such ignorance" is, of course, exactly what both he and Will are doing in their respective works. The whole smarter than thou schtick gets annoying fast. There really is no legitimate excuse for using the phrase "fin de siècle" when "end of the century" works just as well and doesn't require checking the dictionary to figure out what the frell he's talking about.

There are some bright spots. His biographical sketches, especially those of Jim Thorpe and Dummy Hoy, are well worth reading (although the piece on Barry Bonds seems naïve now, but we have more information than Gould did), and there are a couple of pieces in which he flexes his scientist muscles that are interesting. Mostly, though, it's listless and boring. I have a theory that this may partly result from the almost inconceivable notion that he considered himself a fan of both the Yankees and the Red Sox. The only explanation I can think of for this sad state of affairs is that in the era in which he moved to Boston from New York there was no rivalry from the Yankee perspective. Sox fans hated the Yankees, but Yankee fans didn't give the Sox a second thought. Anyway, it means that all his fannish passion had to be carefully controlled, like matter and anti-matter, lest it explode. Despite the title, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of passion here.

More Baseball Cards

2006-08-14T11:08:00.000-04:00

I mentioned baseball cards not long ago, and I suppose it should come as no surprise that there is at least one baseball card blog. I wouldn't even mention it, except that I happened across the most recent entry about the numbering system used on Topps cards in the sixties, and was very much surprised. Dude! There was a system? I collected those cards, and I never even suspected there was some sort of system to the way they were numbered. Well, maybe I might have noticed that the really big stars all ended in "00," but if I did, I totally forgot about it.

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Meanwhile, another story on how the, er, bubble burst on card speculation, and what Topps plans to do about it.

Dodgers 1, Giants 0, 10 Innings...

2006-08-13T22:57:00.000-04:00

Russell Martin!!!!!

And dayum! Greg Maddux was terrific. As was Jason Schmidt, but I mean, really... Eight innings, only two hits, and 22 batters in a row retired on a measly 68 pitches? 68 pitches doesn't even get Chad Billingsley out of the third inning.

The Dodgers came out of the All-Star break losing 13 of 14, falling into last place. Since then they've won 15 of 16, and are back in first. There is always an ebb and flow to the baseball season, but the Dodger season has ebbed and flowed like the great Typhoon of '44. The losing streak was an awful thing, but it's helping keep the current streak in perspective. Still, I like their chances at this point.

Reloading...

2006-08-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

So, having already shot themselves in the foot once, MLB Advanced Media are already reloading to do the same thing again. They are planning to appeal Tuesday's court decision that they they can't copyright factual data, and therefore can't charge licensing fees for the use of that data in fantasy baseball leagues. MLBAM is now going to try a different tack on appeal.

"We've agreed that the stats and names are in the public domain, but when you start to use teams logos and other images as CBC did, you need a license, it's that simple." -- Jim Gallagher for MLBAM

That approach will probably work, because now the case is dealing with trademarks rather than dubious copyright claims. The thing is that even if they win, it'll be a pyrrhic victory. Fantasy leagues don't really need team logos. The whole idea of a fantasy league is you draft a squad from the total pool of players, not individual teams. Putting a Cardinals logo next to David Ortiz's name on the draft sheet doesn't make him any more valuable in this context. (Video games, as I mentioned yesterday, are a different matter. There, you want to see the logo, and the uniform.) The fantasy leagues can just go ahead and remove the trademarked material, and go about their business.

King Kaufman had a good piece on this over at Salon yesterday in which he questions the economics of the whole idea, and whether it's worth the money MLB gets out of the deal to risk alienating its fans. The money baseball makes off of it is essentially chump change. With the last change in its licensing policy, MLBAM raised their fees somewhat, but they also reduced the number of companies it licenses from 19 to 7. Only the biggest media companies were allowed to stay, thus reducing the options available to the fans, and, you know, competition. It's all about control and power, and the fans take it up the rear once again.

Chin Music...

2006-08-09T14:55:00.000-04:00

Major League Baseball Advanced Media, i.e., MLB.com, the marketing arm of Major League Baseball, took one in the earflap yesterday as a judge ruled that MLB cannot copyright facts. I've mentioned the case before. MLBAM has been charging license fees to the companies that run fantasy baseball leagues for the use of its statistics, taking the position that MLB owns all the data generated from its games. Despite the dubious legitimacy of that claim, the fantasy leagues paid the extortion, as did the video and computer game makers. (This led to the current state of affairs where there is currently no licensed PC-based computer baseball game, because MLB granted an exclusive license to a company that only produces games for video consoles.)

MLBAM denied a license to one fantasy game company, so that company went ahead and used the stats anyway, and also filed a lawsuit against MLBAM to have the statistics recognized as factual information that is not protected by copyright. MLBAM argued that it was not about copyright, but instead about the right to publicity, i.e., the use of someone's likeness for profit. The judge didn't buy any of it, pretty much airing them out like Charlie Brown on the pitchers mound in rejecting all of MLBAM's arguments in finding for the plaintiffs.

Maury Brown has the text of the decision here, and there's a brief discussion at the Griddle as well. One thing that was brought up over there is that video and computer games still aren't completely free and clear of licensing requirements, especially if they want to use things like team logos and uniforms. It should be a boon to text-based games, like Strat-o-Matic and Out of the Park baseball, though.

You Gotta have Heart...

2006-08-08T14:45:00.000-04:00

Distractions of the baseball Sort...

Fausto Carmona of the Indians had a very bad week, becoming only the second pitcher in major league history to lose four games in relief in only seven days. He not only lost them, he lost them spectacularly.

July 30 versus the Mariners, Fausto started the ninth with the score tied, 3-3. Three hits, two walks, and a hit batsman later, the Mariners were up 7-4, and Fausto was heading for the showers.

The next night the Indians were up in Fenway with an 8-6 lead when Fausto was brought in to pitch the bottom of the ninth. A hit, a walk, and a David Ortiz home run later, and the Sox were walking off the field as winners.

Two nights later, Fausto was again brought in to protect a Cleveland lead. This time it was 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth, but again he blew the save. It started out promising, as he struck out the first two batters, but then he hit two guys in a row, followed that with a walk to load the bases, and then Mark Loretta doubles off the monster to bring in the tying and winning runs.

Fausto was then rested for a couple of days, but it didn't help. On August 5th, with the Indians up a run in the bottom of the ninth versus the Tigers, Fausto was called upon once again, and once again he blew it, giving up a single and a Pudge Rodriquez game-winning homer. Yikes!

One has to wonder whether Fausto badly misread the contract he seems to have made with Mr. Applegate.

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Ken Arneson found a bunch of unmarked baseball photographs in a second-hand store, and has been posting them as challenges to see if they can be identified. For the first two he posted folks have not only been able to identify the players and ballparks, but even the game and the particular play in the game from the clues in the images. It's fascinating stuff. Photo #1 was particularly impressive to me, because it hinged on uniform color, and the shape of a corner in the outfield grass.

Photo #1 - Photo #2

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Speaking of Arneson, he hasn't been able to post as often as he'd like over at Catfish Stew, so he's taken on an apprentice, Philip Michaels. Michaels's first post is very funny, taking Nick Swisher to task for forgetting a very old rule. There's even a little piece of Sondheim filk in the comments.

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Finally, there's a clear, concise explanatory piece on baseball's sometimes arcane waiver rules over at McSweeneys.

No-No's and Toe Socks...

2006-08-04T15:44:00.000-04:00

It's a rare thing to see the notation "3-5-1" in a baseball scorebook. Double play, first baseman to third baseman to pitcher. It'd apparently only occurred once in the majors in the last fifty years. Until last night's Dodgers-Reds game, that is. With a runner on first, the Dodgers put on a defensive shift against Ken Griffey, Jr., moving Lugo from second to short right field, and Furcal from short to the right side of second base. This left third baseman Wilson Betemit covering the entire left side of the infield all by himself.

As planned, Junior hit a sharp grounder into the teeth of the defense. Olmedo Saenz, playing first, made a terrific stop of the ball, and threw it to Betemit coming all the way over from midway between second and third to cover second. Betemit, who has a cannon for an arm, then threw on to Maddux covering first, just like it's drawn up in the playbook. 3-5-1.

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Of course, the gimmicky defensive alignment is the main reason the play was even possible. This kind of alignment is being used more and more against powerful left-handed hitters. Ortiz sees variations of it a lot, as does Jason Giambi, and Grady used it against both Griffey and Dunn in the Dodgers-Reds series. When it works, like on the 3-5-1, it's brilliant. I just don't know if it works often enough to be a smart play.

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The 3-5-1 wasn't actually the big story of the game. That was brand new Dodger Greg Maddux throwing a no-hitter for six innings in Cincinnati's bandbox of a ballpark. Then the rain came. When they finally took the tarp off some 45 minutes later, Maddux had stiffened enough that he and Grady thought that it would be better for the team if someone from the bullpen took over. It was a good decision. Beimel, Broxton, and Saito closed the door, and the Dodgers won 3-0.

It's a shame really. For all his accomplishments and 328 wins, Maddux has never thrown a no-hitter, at least, not since he was in Little League. (For that matter, neither has Roger Clemens, which is even stranger.) Jon Weisman did a nice piece on Maddux's decision, and the tradition of not mentioning a no-hitter in progress for fear of jinxing it, over at Dodger Thoughts.

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As a side note, lost in all the pluses and minuses discussed regarding Maddux's acquisition is that he is probably the finest fielding pitcher of his generation. Now, it's true that a pitcher's fielding ability is never considered when evaluating his worth to the team. Still, a good fielding pitcher can help, especially in the National League where pitchers sacrifice bunt a lot. Every little bit helps.

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Another thing Jon mentions in today's DT is an interview Takashi Saito did recently in the OCRegister. Nobody expected much from Saito when he was signed. He was 36, and his last couple of seasons in Japan weren't all that great. He has been a godsend this year, though, stepping in and pitching brilliantly in the closer's spot when it became clear that Baez couldn't cut it.

Anyway, here's Saito on how to avoid the agony of da feet:

Dodgers reliever Takashi Saito revealed the secret to his success - his socks.

The Japanese right-hander said balance is "the most important thing" in his delivery. Maintaining that balance starts at the bottom.

"That's why I'm wearing five-finger socks," Saito said through his interpreter, giggling when he lifted his foot for verification. "I use them to grip the ground better."

Saito said many Japanese pitchers wear the socks that have separate tubes for each toe. He laughed when asked if he would try to persuade other Dodgers pitchers to wear them.

Using pantomime, Saito pointed at Jonathan Broxton and Mark Hendrickson and indicated they were large enough for staying grounded not to be a problem.

I think the cool thing is not so much that Saito wears toe socks, but that he can giggle about it.

High Heat...

2006-08-02T14:13:00.000-04:00

Wow! It is really, really, really hot outside. Yikes!

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So, the trade deadline came and went Monday afternoon, and the Dodgers were extremely active both in the days leading up to it, as well as at the deadline itself. Five deals in ten days with fourteen players moving hither and yon.

• First, Sandy Alomar, Jr. was shipped off to finish his career with the White Sox in exchange for minor league pitcher B.J. Lamura.

Alomar was originally brought in to help mature Dioner Navarro and occasionally catch. When Navarro got hurt, it turned out Russell Martin didn't need nearly as much maturing, and Alomar was only used as a catcher when Martin absolutely, positively couldn't go. When Navarro and Seo were traded for Hendrickson and catcher Toby Hall, Alomar's sole function became pinch hitting, a luxury role at best. So he goes off to Chicago where he maintains his residence.

The most interesting thing about Lamura appears to be that his name is almost an anagram of "Alomar," but at least he seems to be about even to Alomar in value. The key thing about this trade was that it cleared a roster space for Jason Repko to be activated. Repko was sorely missed.

• The next to go was Odalis Perez, who was exiled to the Royals along with a couple of minor leaguers to reacquire Elmer Dessens.

Perez seemed to have completely lost whatever pitching talent he once had (6.83 ERA), and he'd become disgruntled with the Dodgers' management. The problem as far as making a deal was the huge contract extension DePo had signed him to last year. In the end, the Royals took him, along with two A level minor leaguers, for Dessens, who is a mostly reliable middle reliever. The Dodgers also had to pay a good chunk of Perez's salary for next year.

There was much hue and cry that Colletti should've gotten more, or paid much less to get rid of Perez, but I don't think there was much he could do. Perez had pitched terribly, had copped an attitude, and had an enormous contract. Addition by subtraction. Dessens, who was with the Dodgers in 2004 and 2005, is nothing special, but he's pitched better than Perez.

• Colletti next tried to correct a mistake he'd made by sending Danys Baez and Willy Aybar to Atlanta for Wilson Betemit.

Baez was originally acquired along with Lance Carter in a much maligned trade with Tampa Bay. He had his good moments, but his bad moments were absolutely horrendous, blowing a couple of five-run leads this season. Aybar is a pretty good young hitter, who shows excellent plate discipline, although without a lot of power. The knock on him is his fielding. I'm not sure the knock is completely justified. His big problem with LA was that when he did make an error, it always seemed to be at the worst possible moment, and this seemed to make Little hesitant to use him in key spots.

Betemit is a bigger, better version of Aybar, and only a year older. Or two... Or three... There was considerable ~~heated argument~~ discussion or at DT regarding how old he actually is because apparently he forged a birth certificate so that he could sign with the Braves when he was still only fifteen. Not helping is the fact that various baseball reference sites are showing differing birth dates. Still, he has more power that Aybar (at least at this point in his career), and is likely a better fielder.

There were mixed feelings over this deal over at DT. Nearly everybody was glad to see the man who'd been nicknamed the "Cuban Missile Crisis" in another uniform. OTOH, very few especially wanted to lose Aybar, a prospect who seemed on his way to be fulfilling his potential. The key is whether Aybar can become as good a player as Betemit appears to be, and there are legitimate arguments both ways. Right now, Betemit is the better player. Meanwhile, Baez's spot in the pen was taken by Brett Tomko, coming off the DL.

Then came the deadline, and it looked at first as if Ned was going to stand pat. By 4 p.m. EDT, there were no announcements involving the Dodgers, and DT collectively breathed a sigh of relief. The prospects were safe. Then at 4:05 came word of not one, but two deals.

• Cesar Izturis was traded to the Cubs for future Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise Cesar, not to bury him. Alas, poor Cesar. He was the victim of a freak occurrence (I mean really, how many shortstops need to have Tommy John surgery?) In his absence, Colletti signed Furcal to play short, and when Izzy came back (way earlier than expected, I might add), he was told he had to play positions other than the one he'd won a gold glove at. He didn't complain, he just went out and played a brilliant third base. Then, when Betemit came over to play third, Izzy went to second, and fielded that position well.

The problem is that he just doesn't hit enough to play any position but short. Although he'd showed unexpected plate discipline in his rehab assignment, he went back to his non-walking habits upon his return to the bigs. He's got no power, and despite his speed, he can't steal a base to save his life. The best possible outcome for him would be a trade to somewhere he could play short.

Which is what happened. In return LA gets one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Unfortunately, he's forty, and on the downside of his phenomenal career. Still, he's probably the smartest pitcher ever, and he's moving from the friendly confines over to a pitcher's park. All he really needs to do is be better than Hendrickson, and folks will be happy. Also, given some of the head cases that inhabit the Dodgers' rotation, it's hoped that Maddux will be able to lead by example. Billingsley is the guy they really want him to take in hand, but maybe he can have a positive effect on Penny and Lowe, too. All in all, this trade should be a good one for the Dodgers.

• Finally, minor leaguers Joel Guzman and Sergio Pedroza were sent to Tampa for Julio Lugo.

The Maddux trade was announced before this one, and people were feeling pretty good. Ned had managed to achieve some good trades without having to give up any of our "untouchable" prospects. Then came the news that the man nicknamed "JtD" (for Joel the Destroyer) was yet another Dodger heading for Tampa, and all hell broke loose at Dodger Thoughts, both for and against.

Last year, Guzman was considered to be the number one prospect in the Dodger organization, a shortstop who put up monster numbers in Jacksonville. Since then, his stock has fallen somewhat. There were some doubts about whether he should really be at shortstop. His size and strength seemed a better fit with one of the corner positions, so this year he was tried at first, third, and the outfield. He was promoted to Las Vegas, but didn't hit right away in one of the best hitter's parks there is. He got a two-week cup of coffee in the bigs in June, but he showed he wasn't ready. Then he bitched when he got sent down. Meanwhile, guys like Kemp and LaRoche passed him on the depth chart, and the most logical positions for him to play were all filled. Many agreed that if we had to give up a top level prospect, Guzman would be the least upsetting.

At least, it was until it actually happened. It's not that Julio Lugo is a poor player. In fact, of all the trades Neddy has made with Tampa, Lugo's probably the only really good player the Dodgers have gotten. I wonder, though, why we need him. Now granted, both Kent and Nomar are on the DL, but their injuries aren't supposed to be serious, and when they come back there'll be a logjam. I'd presumed that was one reason why Izturis was traded. Loney should do fine filling in for Nomar, and Betemit could've played second while Kent was out, so why not bring up Laroche to play third?

Besides the not needing Lugo thing (which Colletti and Little disagree with), there's also the fact that Lugo will be a free agent at the end of the season, so the Dodgers are essentially renting him for two months at a very high price. However, there is a line of reasoning that say this approach could actually be a good thing. There's a good article over at armchairgm.com that lays it out. Essentially, since Lugo is likely to be a type A free agent come the fall, if the Dodgers offer him arbitration, and then don't sign him, they will get two first-round draft picks when he signs with another team. In effect, they will have traded two prospects for whom the luster has worn a bit in JtD and Pedroza for two shiny new prospects.

To me, that makes a bit more sense. It still doesn't explain Neddy's fascination with Tampa Bay. So far, we've gotten Lance Carter (exiled to Las Vegas because he stunk), Danys Baez (shipped to Atlanta because he stunk), Mark Hendrickson (actually fell off the mound while pitching this weekend), Toby Hall (already bitching about playing time, and wants to be traded), and Julio Lugo (whiffed on three pitches in his first Dodger at bat). Okay, the Lugo thing is a cheap shot.

So, all-in-all, it was a lively ten days. Ned didn't give up the farm, which is good, and only brought in one aging veteran, but at least he's going to the Hall of Fame. The one negative thing is that even though the Dodgers did not give up they're top propects, it continues to look like Ned is overpaying on some of these deals. he paid a lot to have Odalis removed, and Willy Aybar seems a pretty expensive throw-in just to get someone to take the Cuban Missile Crisis off our hands. Or is it that the value of those players was so low that it was the best he could do. Fortunately, the Dodgers had the resources to do it.

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Meanwhile, back at the Ravine, Jose Cruz, Jr., was DFA'd to make room for Lugo. I like Cruz. He's a decent fielder, and patient at the plate, but he'd slumped badly against righties this season, and with Ethier playing so well and Repko back he wasn't needed. Hopefully he'll catch on with someone who can use him.

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Speaking of designated for assignment, old friend Hee-Seop Choi was DFA'd by the Sox yesterday, mostly just to get him off the forty-man roster. It a heck of a blow for the sabremetrically correct, and not particularly good news for Choi, either, who was only hitting .207/.347/.361 at Pawtucket before going on the DL.

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And finally, MLB has come down hard on the Milwaukee Brewers. To quote the Griddle:

MLB has told the Milwaukee Brewers that they can't use the "Chorizo" in their nightly sausage races, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Yeah, that's the ticket. MLB is still "investigating" steroid usage by players, but when a franchise puts a guy in an unauthorized giant sausage costume, they're right on it.

Bet it wouldn't have happened if Bud Selig still owned the team...

Ron Cey and the Fat Moose...

2006-07-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

Today's Slate has a piece on baseball cards, and how the bottom has dropped out of what was once one of the few investments that never lost money. Of course, the reason for the former was that too many people figured out the latter at about the same time, with predictable results. The demand for cards, especially the highly sought after "rookie" cards, i.e., the first card upon which a particular player had appeared, went through the roof. Card shops and card shows proliferated, and the manufacturers started producing more card sets to meet the demand, each more special than the rest. When I was a kid, there was just one manufacturer, and one set, Topps, which we bought a pack at a time. Ten cards a stick of rock-hard gum for a nickel. Even into the mid-eighties, there were still only three competing sets, Topps, Fleer, and Donruss.

It was about then that I briefly began collecting again. I'd had a lot of cards when I was a kid, some of which would be worth small fortunes today. I had multiples of Mantle, and Koufax, and Mays, and Aaron. And Ray Sadecki, but I clipped those to my bicycle as noisemakers. Typically for most of us who did collect when we were kids, my mother threw them out when we moved across town. (I remind her of this from time to time. She also reminds me that she also threw out my sisters' vintage Barbies, which she regretted muchly when she began collecting dolls later on. Then my father reminds me that I swiped the baseball he had stashed in the attic, and used it for neighborhood games until it was destroyed. You know, the one that had Babe Ruth's autograph on it. Oops.) Over the years I'd pick up a couple of packs here and there, so I never completely abandoned the hobby. Actually, I wound up with an awful lot of cards from 1979 for some reason. Anyway, my landlord dragged me off to a card show in '87. He was in it for the investment. I went because I liked the cards.

It was fun. Mike was looking to invest. I was looking for mementos. I picked up some cards of favorite Dodgers, a few old cards, and tried to fill in some of the gaps in the '79 set I'd inadvertently started. After that I went to a few more shows, stopped in at a few shops, and kept plugging away on the Dodgers and '79. The most expensive single card I ever bought was Ron Cey's rookie card, at $30 or so. (It wasn't that expensive because Cey was on it. It was expensive because it was also Mike Schmidt's rookie card. Schmidt turned out to be the greatest third baseman ever.) Eventually I even bought a few complete sets to put aside for my retirement, one each of the big three, along with the new kid on the block, Upper Deck.

This was right on the cusp of the proliferation of manufacturers and sets. Upper Deck was a "premium" card, with better production values than their competitors. Soon, Topps, et al., started issuing premium sets, and things escalated. More manufacturers, more sets, and not much difference among any of them. I gave up. Everything became about greed, and it wasn't any fun. I knew it was only a matter of time before the Franklin Mint got involved in cards. The Slate piece mentions that there were ninety different sets in 2004, and forty this year. The hucksters ruined it for everyone.

I still have the sets I bought back then. I really ought to put them up on eBay. The '79 set remains unfinished, and valuable only to me. I still have my Cey rookie card. One of these days I need to figure out the best way to display some of them.

I had one good laugh in the Slate piece. He used to buy cards from Fat Moose. I used to shop in Fat Moose's store, too (though at the time it was more for comics and wargames than cards). I mean, how many Fat Mooses could there be?

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Harold Reynolds was fired yesterday from ESPN's Baseball Tonight, and since no one at ESPN is commenting, speculation was rampant over at the Griddle. There is some very funny stuff over there. As for the actual reason he got fired, there are rumors that it was either for sexual harrassment, or because he had a melt down in a meeting about the network's coverage of A-Rod's recent problems. I'm thinking it would have to be one hell of a meltdown for it to have been the latter, but if it was the former, why would ESPN then give Reynolds's spot on BBTN to Steve Phillips, who was fired as GM of the Mets for sexual harrassment?

[eta] And Reynolds has confirmed that it was for sexual harrassment, although he claims his inappropriate hug was misinterpreted. Could be. When you see things on TV like the President of the United States giving uninvited neck rubs to the Chancellor of Germany, it's entirely possible Reynolds thought his actions were appropriate. Sure it is...

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Speaking of Phillips, he has been vociferously calling for the Yanks to trade A-Rod, and folks are questioning if he might not be all together unbiased on the subject. Truth be told, Phillips was a terrible GM, and any criticism he has for other GMs has to be taken with a colossal grain of salt. Hey, I'd take A-Rod in a New York second, but Brian Cashman isn't that stupid.

Home Run Derby...

2006-07-10T21:46:00.000-04:00

So, I went riding again tonight. I was able to do almost fourteen miles. Was very stiff when I started. After a couple of minutes I loosened up a little, but never got terribly comfortable. My legs were so dead when I finished that I had a hard time getting off the bike. Also, the new saddle isn't quite broken in yet, so my butt hurts. Que sera. Still glad I forced myself to do it, because I do need to get back into a regular routine. Tomorrow is supposed to be thunderstormy, so I can recuperate for Wednesday.

Now I'm having a beer, mocking the Home Run Derby over at the Griddle, and otherwise communing with my inner turnip, serene in the knowledge that at least they don't determine the winner of the World Series with one of these things.

---
Bill Mazeroski threw out the first pitch of the HRD, and still looks good. His home run to win the '60 Series is my earliest memory of baseball. I still wonder sometimes how I wound up a fan of the Dodgers and not the Pirates.

---
David Wright has a potty mouth. He also made a brilliant choice in having Paul Lo Duca (a catcher) pitch to him. Paulie lobbed in pitches like he was throwing it underhanded, and Wright just crushed 'em.

---
All you need to know about international soccer is that the best player in the world managed to get himself ejected from the World Cup championship game for head butting an opponent. His team went on to lose, in part because he wasn't there to take a penalty shot (what a stupid way to run a railroad). Afterwards, he was voted MVP. Imbécile.

Weirdness...

2006-07-04T23:46:00.000-04:00

It's been a weird couple of days in Dodger land. Monday, Nomar was plunked three times in one game, tying a major league record. Interestingly enough, it's the third time this particular record has been tied this year. Toronto's Reed Johnson has already managed to do it two times this year. Johnson's been plunked thrice twice!

And on top of everything else, just when many of us thought the Dodgers' pitching situation couldn't possibly get any worse, who trots into tonight's game but Giovanni Carrara, who I last saw pitching for the Pirates' AAA team against the PawSox back in April. He'd come into a 0-0 tie in the tenth inning, loaded the bases, and then gave up the game winning sacrifice fly. I mean, the Pirates are by far the worst team in the National League, and they decided that he wasn't good enough to pitch for their minor league team, so they released him. I have no idea why Neddy signed him. He's already given up a run in his first inning of work. Fortunately, LA still has an eight run lead. ::Crosses fingers...::

Other Stuff You Can't Make Up...

2006-06-30T15:20:00.000-04:00

Eddie Griffin, who briefly played basketball for my alma mater and now plays for the Minnesota Timberwolves, has been sued over an accident in which the SUV he was driving slammed into a parked SUV, driving it up onto the sidewalk. Apparently, not only was Griffin driving drunk, but he was also driving whilst watching porn on a dashboard mounted DVD player and masturbating. Also, he doesn't have a drivers license. No mention of whether or not he was also talking on his cell, but it seems likely that the masturbation probably wasn't hands-free.

---
Jeff Weaver was designated for assignment by the Angels today, another in a recent string of high-profile, high-salary, underperforming pitchers who have been unceremoniously dumped in the last couple of weeks despite still being owed millions (see also Russ Ortiz and Jason Johnson). What makes Weaver dumping especially ironic is that his replacement in the Angel rotation will be his little brother, Jered. Ouch. That's gotta sting.

If the price is right (i.e., dirt cheap), I wouldn't mind seeing the Dodgers try to get Jeff. He's not great, but he was adequate for us the last couple of years. It will also be interesting to see if the Dodgers decide to add to the string of DFAs by dumping Odalis Perez.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up...

2006-06-28T19:20:00.000-04:00

Headline at milwaukee.brewers.mlb.com:

Wise Hurt by Salad Tongs

I got it from the Griddle, where there is some, er, commentary.

Getting Some Help for the Low Post...

2006-06-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

So, Ned Colletti went shopping yesterday, and got the Dodgers... a power forward?

Jae Seo, Dioner Navarro, and a player to be named later were sent to Tampa Bay for Toby Hall and Mark Hendrickson, who played four years in the NBA before deciding to change careers. Not exactly an earth-shattering deal, although to listen to some of the hue and cry over at DT, you'd think that Neddy had gunned down a line of baby ducks with an AK-47.

It's a simple enough deal. Ned wanted Hendrickson, a lefty starter in the middle of his best year (although that's not really saying much), and Tampa has been lusting after Navarro for a while. Seo, a pitcher who's been maddeningly inconsistent in his brief time with LA, and Hall, a catcher, are the throw-ins to balance things off. The thing that has a number of folks incensed is the inclusion of Navarro in the deal. Navarro is young, moderately talented, and inexpensive. He is also, perhaps, the shining symbol of the DePo era, in that he was acquired by jettisoning fading star Shawn Green, and Green's enormous contract as part of DePo's housecleaning. What. Ever.

Don't get me wrong. I think Navarro is a decent player. He is not the second coming of Mike Piazza. The emergence of Russell Martin made him expendable. Martin is as good or better as a hitter, is better defensively, and apparently calls a better game than Dioner. Navarro wasn't going to be the starter for the Dodgers again unless Martin got hurt. He had value, and we didn't need him. It really doesn't matter whether Navarro was one of our treasured prospects or not. He was a treasured prospect who was projected to be our back-up catcher of the future (and really, I'd prefer a back-up catcher who's a little better defensively).

Do I think Ned got equal value? Nope. The problem Colletti had is that the Dodgers needed a pitcher who can go seven innings (something in really short supply in Dodger Stadium of late) more than they need an expendable catcher, no matter how talented or cheap, and in the current baseball marketplace, mediocre pitchers are more valuable than young, moderately talented catchers. People keep spinning the trade as if it's Navarro straight up for Hall, and viewed that way, it's a terrible deal for LA. But it's not that. It was Navarro for Hendrickson, with Seo and Hall as the throw-ins. Is that a good deal? Maybe, maybe not. It depends upon what other teams were offering for Navarro, if anything. Only Ned knows that. It's also going to depend upon how well Hendrickson pitches. It's certainly not worth the apoplexy some of the DT posters are displaying.

---
From the Griddle comes this link to an article by Coulter wannabe, Lisa Fabrizio, at The American Spectator on the liberal infiltration of baseball.

So Bud Lite is fine with the gansta [sic] rap behavior exhibited daily by many ballplayers and celebrated gleefully by ESPN.

Gangsta rap? From all them white boys? Or is it all the Latino and Asian players of whom she speaks? One of the dismaying things about the current state of baseball is how few African-Americans are actually playing. The Dodgers have only two on their roster, Lofton and Kemp, as do the Yankees, the Sox, and the Mets. Still, I suppose in Ms. Fabrizio's teeny little mind, two blacks are two too many. There is far more wrong-headedness that I could comment on, but it's just not worth the aggravation. What an ignorant bunt.

Well, there is one thing...

While it's always been true that most baseball men have been known to wrap their tongues around an obscenity or two, it's most likely that these words were used off-the-record as modifiers and not central to a highly public press conference.

Someone needs to play Tommy Lasorda's opinion of Dave Kingman for Ms. Fabrizio.

Sunday in the Ballpark with J...

2006-06-12T16:12:00.000-04:00

Took a ride up to Pawtucket yesterday to watch the PawSox play Richmond with my friend, J. It was the first real nice day we've had in a while, although the breeze made it a little chilly where we were sitting in the shade. It seems like a lot of people were downright eager to get out into the sunlight, because when I got there about an hour early, the main parking lot was already full up. I had to park at the junior high across the street.

J. got caught in traffic and missed most of the first inning, so I was sitting in the midst of a small group of empty seats, scoring the game when the woman sitting a couple of seats down the row asked "Are you a scout?" Now, the color guard had been a group of Boy Scouts and adult leaders, so all I could think of was that she had somehow confused my tan shirt with a scout leader's uniform, so I gave her a puzzled look, and said "no." She then said, "Oh, you're just scoring the game for fun?" and I finally got it. She'd thought I was a major league scout. Oh, the rumors I could've started.

Where's Choi?
I'd hoped to see ex-Dodger Hee-Seop Choi play. He's been stuck down in Pawtucket ever since the Red Sox pulled him out of Ned Colletti's trash can. He's been such a cause celebre over at Dodger Thoughts that I was looking forward to seeing him hit up close and in person. Unfortunately for my hopes, Richmond started a lefty, so the PawSox manager decided to go with right-handed Dustin Mohr instead of left-handed hitting Hee-Seop. The move didn't make much sense to me because Mohr was batting a robust .164. Choi could hardly have done worse than that. Still, the scoreboard reported that Mohr had walked nine times in his last six games, and he responded to the manager's vote of confidence by going 1-4. Hee-Seop finally did put in an appearance when he popped out of the dugout with the rest of the team at the end of the game to celebrate a PawSox victory.

I did get to see a lot of Canadian National Hero Adam Stern, who's only hitting .234, but is "wicked fast," as the lady down the row opined the first time he batted. He does run very well. He beat out a bunt for a hit and stole two bases. Apparently nobody's ever told him that speed is the last thing the Red Sox look for when they bring someone up.

Afterwards, J. went home to plant tomatoes and stick sharp objects in her eye, while I picked up some Popeyes to go for my dinner.

---
I got back home in time to witness a ninth inning rally by the Dodgers to beat Colorado. Rookie sensation Matt Kemp had two homers. Meanwhile, the Mets were beating the Diamondbacks like a rented python, 15-2. The upshot of this is that the Dodgers are finally alone in first place. Whoot!

---
Who's on first... and second... and short...
Lots of speculation after the game on the roster moves coming up this week. There are two rosters that have to be considered. There is the 25-man major league roster, the current list of players on the major league club, and the 40 man-roster, which is the list of players with major league contracts who are eligible for the 25-man roster. Besides the 25 guys on the big club, the 40-man includes players on the 15-day disabled list (DL), and a few select minor leaguers. It does not include the rest of minor leaguers, nor any players on the 60-day DL.

Anyway, Jeff Kent comes off the 15-day DL tomorrow, which means Gagne will probably go back on it. Izturis is due back from the DL as well, but since he's been on the 60-day, it would necessitate not only sending someone down (probably Guzman), but also taking someone off the 40-man roster to open up a slot for him. That likely means Ricky Ledee will wind up moving from the 15-day to the 60-day DL (and off the 40-man). It's also being reported that heralded pitcher Chad Billingsly will likely be called up from Vegas, and he'll also need to be put on the 40-man, probably sending either Repko or Mueller to the 60-day. The only good thing about all the injuries is that if all these guys weren't hurt, the Dodgers would have a helluva a logjam of players to deal with. Meanwhile, the big question is which pitcher gets sent down/traded/released to open up a spot for Bills on the 25-man roster. You can almost hear the paper shuffling from here.

---
The other thing of note from yesterday's major league games were three very bizarre plays.

The Player Vanishes...
The least bizarre had erstwhile Sox, now Royals, first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz catching a foul pop-up just as he ran into a rolled up tarp alongside the field in Kansas City. Normally they keep the tarps pushed right against the fence, but not this time. He fell over the thing, and vanished into an 18" gap between the tarp and the fence. The ump came over to have a look, and all you saw was a hand slowly come into sight gripping the ball to show he'd held on.

Yankee shocker! Damon runs into another player...
Next up was Nick Swisher's inside-the-park home run in Yankee Stadium, the result of a collision in the outfield between Johnny Damon and Melky Cabrera. They slammed into each other hard, with Damon taking Cabrera's mitt full in the face. Meanwhile the ball was rolling around the outfield as Swisher chugged around the bases.

Triple play...
Finally, there was the most bizarre triple play I've ever seen outside of a rec league, for which I'll just repost Bob Timmermann's account:

Lost amidst the excitement that any Tampa Bay-Kansas City game was the experience of watching the Royals turn an 8-1-6-5 triple play in the second inning.

David DeJesus caught a fly ball off the bat of Russell Branyan and threw home to try to get Aubrey Huff. The throw went over catcher Paul Bako and was backed up pitcher Scott Elarton, who threw to second, where shortstop Angel Berroa tagged out Rocco Baldelli trying to advance. Berroa then threw to third baseman Mark Teahen to appeal that Huff left early and umpire Bob Davidson, the man who loves to call people out on appeal plays (see Japan vs. USA in the World Baseball Classic), called out Huff for the triple play.

It was the sixth triple play in Royals franchise history, and the first triple play Tampa Bay has ever hit into.

---
I have to mention here that I once played in a softball game in which my team turned not one, but two triple plays. I was involved in both, which were more conventional in nature (line drives caught with the runners going) than the play yesterday. It was the only time I ever played in a game where there was a triple play. Despite our fielding legerdemain, we lost the game 22-21 in extra innings.

Less Tightly Wound...

2006-06-10T19:51:00.000-04:00

It's the most important piece of equipment in the game. After all if it wasn't, they wouldn't have named the game after it. Anyone who's ever played softball understands this, because there are softballs, and there are soft balls.

Now, when we were kids, we were big fans of rubber-coated baseballs. These were identical in construction to real baseballs, except that the leather cover and stitches were replaced by a tough rubber skin with the stitch pattern molded in. The reason we liked them was that they lasted forever (just ask commercial batting cages), especially when you took into account the little brook that meandered alongside our local baseball field, just a few feet behind the batting cage. We were constantly fishing the ball out of the brook. Real baseballs don't travel as far after they get waterlogged, nor do they last very long. Since none of us had much in the way of discretionary income back then, rubber-coated balls were the best thing ever, because they lasted a long time. Later, when I was in high school and still labored under the vague delusion that I could actually be good enough to make the team someday, those rubber-coated balls were great for pitching against the cinder-block outside wall of our garage, upon which I'd drawn the outline of a strike-zone. The rough surface tore the skin off horsehide balls pretty quickly, but the rubber-coated balls just bounced back to me with barely a scuff mark. Later, when we were in grad school, my buddy Tom and I drew the same mystic symbol on the brick wall behind the recreation center at URI. Our dreams of major league glory were long gone by then, but it was still fun to pretend.

That was the same year I started playing softball in the grad intramural league at URI, and the rec department provided each team with two rubber-coated softballs. These were supposed to last us for the entire season, some twenty-four games. At the time, it seemed like an okay idea to me. Well, no. The rec balls turned out to be the most cheaply made balls ever. They were heavy, and a couple of innings of hitting was all that was needed to change their shapes to something non-spherical, a phenomenon exacerbated by the very stretchable rubber skin. We threw them out, and got real balls as soon as we could.

The thing is, even cheap baseballs are fairly consistent in their hardness. Maybe it's because hardballs are designed to be wound as tightly as possible to produce that characteristic hardness. Softballs are different. They are meant to be less hard than baseballs, but things get tricky on the question of how much less hard.

First off, a softball isn't all that much softer than a hardball. Even the softest will still leave a nasty bruise if a line drive hits you. But there are differences in construction that allow the balls to be marketed for different uses and levels of competition. The predominant brand, Worth, marked their balls with a colored dot to indicate how the ball was constructed. Blue dots meant "restricted flight," a ball that didn't rebound off the bat quite as hard as the "unrestricted" red dots. Most of the town leagues used blue dots to even things out a little for the non-hulking among us, while in less organized leagues (like the URI rec league), the better teams snuck in red dots to use on wide open fields (heh). The women got to use green dots, smaller and more tightly wound than a standard softball. I used to occasionally take a few swings in batting practice with a women's team I coached, just so I could tee off on those. In the nineties, when bat technology developed (and balls started being wound even more tightly) so that 150 lb shortstops could suddenly hit blue dots 300' in the air, "extra restricted" gold dots started being used in some leagues. They reminded me a lot of those old rubber eggs URI gave us.

But baseballs are supposed to be consistent, especially the higher up the ladder of competition you go. Or at least they used to be. The Colorado Rockies play in Coors Field, a stadium that is a mile above sea level. It's a bigger than average park, but the thin air at that altitude has made the place a veritable launching pad. While Colorado's hitters have benefitted greatly from playing there, their pitchers have generally turned into quivering masses of jelly just biding their time until they can declare free agency and get the hell out of ~~Dodge~~ Denver. Good pitchers can be reduced to tears after just a few outings at Coors. Many will attest that one of the greatest pitching feats of all time was the no-hitter Hideo Nomo threw there some years ago as a member of the Dodgers.

Recently, however, the offensive levels of Coors Field have been dialed back to about league average. How? Did they move the fences back? Nope. The Rockies are storing their official National League baseballs in a humidor. Humidifying the balls is a much subtler version of fishing the balls out of the brook. Humidified balls don't rebound off the bat as well as a dry ball. In effect, the Rockies are using restricted flight baseballs. Pitchers across the league are rejoicing, and it's helped get the Rocks off to their best start in yonks because their young pitchers aren't getting lit up all the time, which helps keep the shellshock cases down...

Of course, it helps opposing pitchers, too, as it did last night when Brad Penny threw the best game by a Dodger starter this year to shut the Rocks out, 3-0. This allowed the Dodgers to crawl into a first place tie with the DBacks, the first time they've been there in more than a year. Penny's had some rough, not to mention short, outings of late, but last night he was brilliant, going 8 1/3, the first Dodger starter to make it into the ninth this year.

---
The Rockies made a trade before the game, picking up #2 WFAN anathema Kaz Matsui from the Mets for Eli Marrero. Matsui has been awful for the Mets since coming over from Japan, and I have no idea why the Rockies would want him. Well, unless the management, who are very concerned about player character, got confused about the difference between a player of good character, and a player who IS a character.

Foul Ball

2006-06-06T06:55:00.000-04:00

I finished Bouton's Foul Ball : My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark, and really enjoyed it. It's not really a baseball book, but rather a book about small town politics. There is an ancient ballpark in Pittsfield, MA, called Wahconah Park. It was built in the 1919. In 2001, the tennant, an Astros A team, announced they were moving to a brand new park in another town. The PTB in Pittsfield (i.e., the mayor, the bank, the daily newspaper, and General Electric, the town's biggest employer) put forward a proposal to build a new stadium to attract another team. The new stadium would be built at taxpayers' expense on land then owned by the newspaper, so all the PTB folks stood to gain financially. Meanwhile, the old park would be demolished. The townsfolk mounted a grassroots campaign in opposition, and managed to defeat the proposal when it came up on a referendum.

At this point, Bouton and his partners stepped in with a proposal of their own to renovate Wahconah Park with their own funds, in exchange for a long term lease which they would use to operate an independent league team. (The independent leagues consist of minor league teams that aren't affiliated with any major league team. Since they aren't part of a farm system, the teams tend to have more experienced players, including some ex-major leaguers, thus leading some to argue that the brand of baseball is better than you'd normally get in the low minors.) The proposal falls upon the deaf ears of the PTB, who are still trying to figure out how to ram through the new stadium. The book is the journal Bouton kept of their campaign.

It's a tough go. The main opponents are the mayor, a lame duck who relishes his power, and the newspaper, which because of its massive conflict of interest is almost totally against them, misreporting the story to its own advantage. And behind them both is the shadow of one of the world's largest corporations, GE, which over the years had dumped PCBs on nearly every vacant piece of land in Pittsfield. There are rumors that the newspaper's land is similarly contaminated, and the reason everyone is so hot for the stadium is that it's a structure that can be built without having to dig a very deep foundation, because god knows what they might find. Meanwhile, a couple of independent league teams, smelling new stadium, make their own proposals, bringing league politics into the mix, as well.

Most folks would take the hint and just walk away, but Bouton and his friend, Chip, are outraged. It becomes a crusade against tyranny for them, somewhat to dismay of their wives.

Tonight in the car, on the way to dinner, Paula and I talked about the "crusade."
"Chip and I are those rare individuals who could pull off something like this," I said. "Who else could do such a thing?"
"Single people, mostly," said Paula.

It's a book that resonates with me quite a bit, because of how disfunctional the local government around here has become. In my town, the school committee has started paying for police (at taxpayer expense, natch) to attend their meetings to keep order among the board members. The next town over has similar problems in their town council. There is a meanness and a pettiness that just has to be seen to be believed lately.

I See the Boys of Summer in Their Ruin...

2006-02-17T17:11:00.000-05:00

"The book also says you came to bat 620 times and that was the only home run."
"Yep. You got a secret weapon like that, you don't want to go showing it around."
-- Roger Kahn and Preacher Roe

I finished a long overdue reread of The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn's classic memoir about the men who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early fifties. The Dodgers were the best team in the National League for most of the late forties and early fifties, in large part because they were the first team to integrate, but they also seemed star-crossed. Branch Rickey, who had assembled the team, once said that luck is the residue of design, but that didn't seem to be working out for the Bums. They blew big leads down the stretch in 1950 and 51 to the Whiz Kid Phillies, and Bobby Thomson's Giants, respectively, and in the years they did win the pennant, they always wound up losing to the Yankees in the World Series. It became part of their charm. As Kahn notes, "You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat." The rallying cry of Brooklyn fans became "Wait til next year."

Intellect isn't much in this game. They say Einstein wasn't much of a hitter
-- Fresco Thompson

In the first half of the book, Kahn talks about growing up in Brooklyn, and how he came to be sitting next to Fresco Thompson on a DC-3 to Miami in March of 1952, enroute to taking over the job of Dodgers beat writer for the Herald Tribune. (The book is also a bit of a memoir about the Trib, which had gone out of business not long before Kahn started working on the book.) Kahn covered the team for two seasons, and it was a great team to cover. Both years the Dodgers went to the Series, and lost to the Yanks. There were four future Hall of Famers, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Roy Campanella, and Gil Hodges (and maybe even Dick Williams, as a manager) may yet get in. The team was also a living, breathing social experiment, and Kahn records the tensions that resulted from that. There was a dichotomy in the way the black players were perceived. Jackie and Campy are respected as fellow players and men by the white players, but when Jim Gilliam is brought up in '53, Billy Cox is irate over the possibility that he's going to lose his job to a black.

The second half of the book comes fifteen or sixteen years later, when Kahn goes to visit many of the players he knew. He talks about the fact that athletes suffer two deaths, the first being the end of their careers as athletes, and he wanted to see how his old friends had managed that. He finds them doing all the things that one might expect ex-ball players to be doing in an era before they were paid millions of dollars to play. Cox is a bartender. Carl Furillo is a laborer installing elevators in the then under construction World Trade Center towers. Preacher Roe is a grocer. Joe Black and Robinson are business executives. (One thing that I find interesting is that Black and Robinson, both black, were probably the most well educated men on the team.) Campanella, a quadraplegic since the auto accident that ended his career, owns a liquor store. Only Hodges is still in baseball, as the manager of the Mets. Most seem comfortable with their lives, and only a couple seem to miss baseball much. Campy is upbeat, despite his injuries, while Furillo, the Reading Rifle, is the bitterest man alive, having been unjustly jettisoned by the team. Snider comes off very much as the prototype for today's totally self-absorbed player, which is a shame. He was one of my early heroes. Robinson, of course, is the central figure, but in one of the great ironies of all time, the other man who towered over that clubhouse was named "PeeWee." Reese was the captain, the man from Kentucky who openly accepted Robinson on the team. Their concerns are those of middle aged men, i.e., their jobs and their families. One of the threads that runs through the book is the relationship between fathers and sons, Kahn's with his own father, and some of the ex-Dodgers with their sons. There is also a thread of impending tragedy, especially in the chapters on Hodges and Robinson. Both talk about the heart attacks they'd suffered, and the reader knows that both would be dead within a year of the book being published.

It's an odd thing to be reading this book now that I'm older than Kahn and the players were when this was written. The first time I read this book, I was still in my twenties, and that colored my impressions a lot. Back then I had trouble wrapping my brain around the fact that Preacher Roe only sounded uneducated, or that Charlie Dressen, the gruff and uneducated manager of the team, could show moments of great kindness. Now, knowing the kind of money that players make today, it's kind of quaint to read the stories about the players carpooling in from Bayside to Ebbetts Field.

The Last Best League

2005-10-20T22:37:00.000-04:00

I finished The Last Best League, by Jim Collins, a while back. It's non-fiction about the Cape Cod Baseball League, an amateur summer league where the best college baseball players in the country can strut their stuff for major league scouts, and incidentally, learn how to hit with wooden bats. The writing can be a bit uneven. I'm not sure I needed to know what each and every ball field on the Cape smells like, and there are some odd descriptions, such as this passage about pitcher Tim Stauffer:

An observer could tell at a glance—from the uniform, the big ears, the thick eyebrows—that Stauffer didn't come from some posh suburb in Florida or southern California, the sunny places that seem to spawn most college ballplayers these days.

Sunshine shrinks a person's ears? There are other scenes that also struck me oddly, and some that made me wonder how the omniscient author even knew about them.

Still, there's lots interesting stuff here, particularly when he focuses on his three primary characters, Stauffer, pitcher Thomas Pauly, and third baseman Jamie D'Antona. Stauffer is the pitcher with ice water in his veins, one of the best college pitchers in the country, who really has nothing to prove. His only task is not to screw up. Pauly, on the other hand, has no reputation, and is only on the team as a favor to his coach and because someone else bailed to play professionally. He starts out the season figuring he's got no shot, so why bother trying. Then there's D'Antona, the natural, a star college hitter who is considered a can't miss prospect, a kid who isn't afraid of hard work, even manual labor, with a good attitude. His only weakness is that he often lacks focus. In the end, Stauffer doesn't screw up, D'Antona finds some focus, and Pauly discovers that maybe he is good enough to be an elite player after all.

The book covers the 2002 CCBL season, after which all three of the players were drafted by major league teams. I checked up on them to see how they were all doing. Stauffer has already made it to the majors with the Padres, playing the first half of this season with the big club. I even listened to at least one of his games versus the Dodgers. Unfortunately, his numbers weren't that good, so they shipped him back to AAA for some more seasoning. He'll get another shot come spring training. Pauly was the best pitcher on one of the Reds' A level teams, but still has a long ways to go. D'Antona, the can't miss prospect, had a mediocre year for Arizona's AA team. Unless there's some mitigating factor, he may not even get as far as AAA. He's no longer considered a prime prospect. Too bad, because he seems like a nice kid.