Shea Goodbye, Steve

Here is the starting lineup of a baseball team:

   AGE   AVG   OPS  HR  RBI  
C   29  .328  .960  32  111
1B  30  .337  .993  40  115
2B  30  .282  .765  14   56
SS  30  .285  .686   2   30
3B  32  .251  .785  20   67
LF  25  .282  .818  22   90
CF  23  .242  .644   2   17
RF  29  .263  .838  38  125

   AGE   W-L    ERA
SP  32  20-6   2.47
SP  32  17-6   2.47
SP  35  20-7   3.55
SP  27  15-8   4.46
SP  28  13-14  6.23 

If you were the GM who assembled this lineup, you'd be sitting pretty. A starting eight which accounts for 170 homers and has four players with over 90 RBI would make a potent offense, even if a couple of youngsters at the glove positions were easy outs. That rotation looks sharp as well, with a pair of 20-game winners and an 85-41 record, even if the fifth starter needs asbestos pants.

This team actually exists... sort of. They're the 2003 New York Mets. But those statistics aren't current; they're five years old and the players, as you might expect, have aged just as much. Therein lies the problem with these Mets. It's as if GM Steve Phillips is saying, "Sure, it's not 1998 now, but who knows what year it will be in August?"

[Those numbers above, in order, belong to Mike Piazza, Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar, Rey Sanchez, Jay Bell, Cliff Floyd, Roger Cedeno, Jeromy Burnitz, Tom Glavine, Al Leiter, David Cone, Steve Trachsel, and Pedro Astacio. Bell's not really the starting 3B, but Ty Wigginton was in Class A Pittsfield that season. Astacio spent '98 in Coors, hence the inflated ERA.]

The vultures are already circling around Shea Stadium. The team is 11-17, last in the NL East, batting a collective .230 with a .664 OPS, scoring only 3.8 runs per game while allowing 5.3. Vaughn and his $15 million salary are being outplayed by non-roster invitee Tony Clark, who leads the team with 4 homers despite only 32 at bats. Vaughn's been anemic at the plate (.197 AVG, 3 HR, 15 RBI and a .668 OPS), even worse in the field (5 errors and the range of a sedated hippopotamus), and now he's hinting that he'd rather retire than wallow around for the $29 million he's due over the next two seasons (yeah, surrre). Piazza's been slowed by a four-game suspension and now a bum knee. Burnitz got off to a hot start, then broke his hand. Cliff Floyd needs surgery on his Achilles tendon. Cedeno has been a travesty in centerfield, and Timo Perez and Tsuyoshi Shinjo aren't helping much. Roberto Alomar has officially joined the undead. Astacio and Cone are on the DL and have been pretty lousy when they've pitched, save for Cone's triumphant first start. Trachsel's been equally lousy. And the closer... talk about needing asbestos pants.

Phillips could use some asbestos pants himself, because he's the one on the hot seat for assembling this cast of expensive zombies. He painted himself into this corner, one expensive contract at a time, after the 2001 season, beaten like a rented mule by the game's other GMs. His charges performed so poorly that he couldn't unload their large contracts this past winter. Sooner or later, owner Fred Wilpon has to give him the bullet, it's just a matter of time.

The Mets may save a bit of face and level their stats off once they fall completely out of contention (see Mo Vaughn's split statistics last year). But you can kiss Phillips goodbye. Just don't let him slip you any tongue.

• • •

I'm headed to Shea next Tuesday to see the Mets take on the Dodgers. My friend Lillie mailed me my tickets, which arrived today. In order to conceal them from those greedy little postal workers, and also to give me a laugh, she wrapped them in a coupon for BlownSave.com, which sells T-shirts that say "Trade Benitez," "Blame Benitez," and now "Cedeño Cücks". If you want to start pointing the finger early, you can even get $2 off your order with the code APRILSHEA.

• • •

Despite all of my recent hyperbole, I don't really advocate throwing things at players on the field (though I'll cop to "not discouaging it" and would probably shell out for a Fans Gone Wild videotape if a low-budget infomercial pops up in the next fifteen minutes). With Carl Everett and Sean Burroughs hit by errant cell phones in the space of a recent week, Village Voice writer Paul Lukas brings us a brief history of players wearing their batting helmets for protection in the field. Not surprisingly, Branch Rickey's got his hand in there -- at one point his intent was for all fielders to wear them, but then John Olerud got into a time machine and told the '53 Pittsburgh Pirates they were biting his style.

Lukas, author of the hilarious zine Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption (the best of which was collected in a book called Inconspicuous Consumption), writes a regular column for the Voice called "Uni Watch" focusing on fashion trends in sports uniforms. The aforementioined article has links to several of his pieces, including a good one on Stargell Stars and helmet merit stickers.

• • •

Oh, and my regular email address, jay@futilityinfielder.com seems to be working again. I got this one Wednesday night from somebody calling himself Bubba:

So Jay Jaffe is intolerant of intolerance. That in a word, is golden.

Though I think he meant that as a slur, Bubba summed up my position quite succinclty. Few things provoke my ire more than intolerance, and while I don't seek to make this column an outlet for my politics (been there, done that), I do feel compelled to stand up for what I think is right and speak out against what I feel is wrong. And I should point out that despite my aforementioned hyperbole, nowhere did I say anything about how Todd Jones should be fined, punished, or told what he could or couldn't say. His views -- however repugnant I might find them -- enjoy the same protection as any other American's. And the rest of us are free to show our displeasure at what he said. That right IS golden.

I did make one factual error in my Jones piece which I should correct: Marietta, Georgia is in fact a suburb of Atlanta, not a small town, as I implied.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 12:46 AM Link

Winner of the John Rocker Award for Tolerance

"You're only as smart as your ERA," Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four over 30 years ago. While Bouton was talking about how nobody within baseball wants to hear what a marginal player has to say, Colorado Rockies reliever Todd Jones has illustrated Bouton's adage in the most literal terms. Interviewed by Denver Post theater critic John Moore on the subject of the Broadway play "Take Me Out," about a baseball star who comes out of the closet, Jones came off like a man whose 6.35 ERA was higher than his IQ:

Colorado Rockies pitcher Todd Jones, a 6-foot, 3-inch pitcher from Marietta, Ga., said an openly gay player would create a hostile locker-room environment, and that opposing pitchers would likely throw intentionally at his head.

"I wouldn't want a gay guy being around me," Jones said. "It's got nothing to do with me being scared. That's the problem: All these people say he's got all these rights. Yeah, he's got rights or whatever, but he shouldn't walk around proud. It's like he's rubbing it in our face. 'See me, hear me roar.' We're not trying to be close-minded, but then again, why be confrontational when you don't really have to be?"

Ugh. Jones, who writes a column for The Sporting News, had to have known his remarks would stir up controversy. What he's apparently saying is that an openly gay player should fear for his safety and his life because cretins like Jones would make it their business to rub THEIR intolerance (and their fists, or their fastballs) in his face.

Fortunately, not every player shares Jones' attitude or ignorance. Moore spoke to Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace:

Grace... said most ballplayers are less threatened by the idea of a gay teammate. "I've played for 16 years, and I'm sure I've had homosexual teammates that I didn't know about," he said. "If one out of six or seven men are homosexual - do the math."

Any problem, Grace said, would manifest itself not so much in the field but in the locker room and in the showers - where, coincidentally, the majority of "Take Me Out" takes place.

"I think the perception in the clubhouse would be one of, for lack of a better word - fear," Grace said. "Fear that they'd be stared at or (that a gay player might fall) in love with them. But I think if you're intelligent at all, you'd understand that homosexuals are just like us. They don't think everybody's attractive. Just because this guy's homosexual doesn't mean he's attracted to me."

Gracefully put. I live in New York City, a city with considerably more diversity and tolerance than your average Georgia backwater. Having spent most of my past six years at a design studio with an openly gay boss signing my paychecks and several gay colleagues working alongside, AND that same period of time as a member of a gym with a high concentration of gay members, I can tell you that I've spent more time worrying about which socks I'm going to wear tomorrow than fending off advances from other men. If I've been ogled by a gay man in either environment, I couldn't tell you by whom, and I've never been hit upon, not once. It's a non-issue.

For their part, the Rockies moved swiftly to distance themselves from Jones' remarks in a press release:

The unfortunate comments made by pitcher Todd Jones and published in today's Denver Post in no way reflect the views, opinions, or attitudes of the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club.

"As an organization and as a part of this community, we are committed to providing an environment for our employees and fans that is free of discrimination and prejudice regardless of race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national orientation, age, disability, or status as a veteran" said Keli McGregor, Rockies team president.

Jones himself issued a half-assed apology to save his (red)neck, but he didn't back off: "I think my only mistake was that I made my views public," he said, reportedly teary-eyed during his press conference.

Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Forget Carl Everett. Anybody who clocks Todd Jones with an object thrown from the stands -- be it cell phone, beer bottle, surrendered home run ball, bowling ball, tire iron, ACME anvil -- wins a free Futility Infielder T-shirt and the replacement cost of the thrown object (valid only with a receipt). Here's wishing Jones every bit of the success his predecessor in the bigotry department has enjoyed. And here's where you can open your own can of Whoop Ass on this John Rocker wannabe: tjones@sportingnews.com.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 6:19 PM Link

Those Eggheads Have Screwed Me Again

Apparently all of the email over the past 48 hours sent via my jay@futilityinfielder.com address has been bouncing due to overzealous spam filtering on the part of my service provider, Time Warner. While I appreciate their efforts to weed out those offers to increase my manhood, romance barnyard animals, and earn several mil via the son of a Nigerian ambassador, clearly it ain't working yet.

Hopefully the problem will be rectified over the next 24 hours, but until further notice please email me via jayjaffe@nyc.rr.com, and if you've sent me anything since early Monday, please re-send via that address as well. Thanks for your patience while I try to keep mine...

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 8:47 AM Link

Counting the Cubs

Whether your a fan, analyst, player, manager, or GM, few topics within baseball are as hotly contested as pitch counts. Crusty codgers may sneer about how today's young whippersnappers are babied with their five-man rotations and specialized bullpens, bemoaning the death of the complete game and the 300-game winner. But the history books are littered with tales of promising pitchers whose careers were cut short by excessive workloads and medieval management techniques. It's not hard to envision an unsympathetic skipper telling his starter, "We'll stretch you on the rack until you can throw 160 pitches on a rainy night in early April, then we'll bleed your arm with leeches." That's because -- less the Dark Age imagery -- the story isn't so farfetched; Yankee manager Dallas Green (my least favorite baseball personality ever) did exactly that to a young Al Leiter back in 1989, a story recounted in "Wings of Fire," a recently-collected Roger Angell piece. The pitcher needed rotator cuff surgery later that season, setting his big-league career back about four years.

Organizations differ greatly in their approaches to pitcher handling. Some keep their pitchers on a strict pitch count system, especially in the minor leagues, where they may even so far as to pair starters in tandem. Others run their pitchers' arms ragged in the name of some macho code, then litter the disabled list with the discarded carcasses of those who aren't tough enough.

In the analytical community, the past few years have seen an attempt to quantify the impact of pitcher use and abuse. Baseball Prospectus' Rany Jazayerli introduced a metric called Pitcher Abuse Points in 1998 which focuses on high pitch-count outings and their correlation with both short-term ineffectiveness (following a high-count outing) and long-term predisposition to injury. The metric, which has been refined over the years, has as its basis an exponential relationship between the number of pitches above 100 and an increased injury risk; the current version is called PAP^3 because the relationship is more or less cubic. While there's plenty that PAP doesn't measure (such as the type of pitcher, the soundness of his mechanics, and the number of days rested between starts), and plenty of flared tempers over just what exactly PAP does measure, the metric remains the most comprehensive attempt to grasp the subject.

Christian Ruzich, the Cub Reporter, has done an excellent job summarizing PAP and its evolution. With new Cub manager Dusty Baker's reputation as an old-school hardass when it comes to pitcher management, Ruzich is keeping a close eye on the Cubbies' precious young arms such as Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. He's created a small chart in the upper right-hand corner of his blog showing each Cub starter, the number of pitches thrown in their last outing, the average number of pitches per start, and their current PAP^3 ranking. Ominously, Wood and his surgically reconstruced elbow rank 3rd in baseball, with two out of his five starts falling in Category IV (122-132 pitches) where the risk of short-term decline is "significant." Prior, who's throwing just 1.2 fewer pitches per outing, is down at 20th place, with no Category IV starts to date. Last year Prior ranked 9th while Wood was down at 44th.

As Ruzich points out, the Prospectus folks have been onto Baker for a few years. Last season saw the Giants with three pitchers in the PAP top 20 (Livan Hernandez 3rd, Russ Ortiz 4th, and Jason Schmidt 18th). And according to Ruzich, the early returns from the Windy City are not good:

So far this year, the Cubs have had four pitchers hovering around the top twenty. While age is no longer an explicit part of PAP^3, lots of earlier research (most notably in Craig Wright's book A Diamond Appraised, which was the jumping-off point for Rany's original study) considers age to be a very important part of the equation. Since three/fifths of the Cubs rotation is age 25 or under, I think it's especially important to pay attention to the workload shouldered by the Cubs' youngsters.

In a more recent post, Ruzich has some additional input on the topic, including an exchange with BP's Will Carroll, a quote from Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci, who appears to yearn for a return to the Dark Ages, and some serious science from Thomas Kuhn. Definitely worth checking out.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 2:16 PM Link