The Artful Martone

This is going to sound weird coming from a Yanks fan, but most readers of this space know I’m not exactly a typical Yanks fan (Mattingly sucks! There, THAT got your attention…). But I’m glad to see that the best Red Sox beat writer is apparently back on the job. Art Martone of the Providence Journal-Bulletin isn’t a name that rings as many bells as some of the more infamous Boston press personalities whom I’m fond of slandering (speaking of which, I saw Bob Ryan at a Salt Lake City bar during the Olympics. Insert punchline here). But he’s the one I read when I want a smart take on what’s happening with the Sox.

First off, Martone tends to be less of a sensationalist than some of his New England peers. He doesn’t sound like a homer or a crony of the Sox front office (then again, Dan Duquette did alienate just about every Boston writer). Most readers of this column know I enjoy a little Sox-related schadenfreude now and then, but I do like to keep my facts straight, too. And Martone doesn’t seem to have lost his objectivity yet.

Second, Martone is one of the few daily newspaper guys who understands sabermetrics and uses it in his writing, and as such I feel compelled to support him even though he’s covering “the enemy”. It would be nice, once in awhile, to read a New York Times or Daily News beat reporter who cited Baseball Prospectus or understood the concept of OPS or Offensive Winning Percentage when talking about Tino Martinez’s season, instead of approaching everything as a graduate of the Proven Veterans Know How To Win School of Journalism.

Martone stopped keeping his Notebook shortly after the Sox ship hit the iceberg last summer, and in my own mind, I wondered if Dan Duquette had him “disappeared,” or if poor Art had checked himself into an institution. As it turns out, Martone went from vacation to 9/11 aftermath to an employee buyout which left the ProJo short-staffed, and he had bigger fish to fry than the dismal Sox. Joe Kerrigan’s dismissal has brought Martone back out of the woodwork (not to mention full circle), hopefully to stay. In his second piece since his return, he adds up the Sox projections in the STATS 2002 Major League Handbook, runs them through the Pythagorean Method, notes that those STATS numbers project the Sox for a 103-win season, and then dissects what that could mean. Yes, I scoff at that 103-win notion, but that’s not Art making the prediction.

Anyway, here’s wishing Martone an interesting season in covering the Sox.