Angell’s in the Outfield

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Taking a break from the 28 years we’ll have to digest the Alex Rodriguez steroid saga — his contract runs through 2017, which if he retired then would mean his Hall of Fame eligibility would run from 2023 through 2037 — I meant to post something I read last week. It’s from “The Fadeaway,” by Roger Angell, about his 33 years of editing the recently deceased John Updike in his day job as an editor for The New Yorker. From the February 9-16 issue of the magazine:

Updike’s sentences are fresh-painted. In all his writing, critical or fictional or reportorial, he is a fabulous noticer and expander; he’s invented HD. So armed, he felt free from the start to take up and engage with all that lay within the range of his attention and put it down on paper. He had never to my knowledge written about sports when, on a morning in late September, 1960, he was stood up by a woman in Boston with whom he had an assignation and instead went to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox, in the final home game of Ted Williams’s career. Ted hit a home run in his last at-bat, and Updike came home and wrote “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” and sent it off to the magazine: the most celebrated baseball piece ever. The text grew not just out of the event but from Updike’s youthful attachment to the Splendid Splinter; when he decided to leave New York and The New Yorker, in 1957, and move his young family to the suburbs, he chose Boston, as he later explained, in part to be closer to Ted Williams. My own baseball writing was still two years away when I first read “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” and though it took me a while to become aware of it, John had already supplied my tone, while also seeming to invite me to try for a good sentence now and then, down the line, like the one he slips in when Williams fails to doff his cap after circling the bases in the wake of that homer: “Gods do not answer letters.”

How about that? Not only was Updike’s piece worthy of such a superlative (testifying to the esteem in which it’s held, I own it as part of three separate anthologies), but it essentially served as a prototype for one of the great baseball writers of all time. You learn something new every day.

Angell was a latecomer to the world of baseball writing, taking up the challenge when he was in his early forties. His first pieces ran in 1962, not coincidentally the first year of the Mets’ existence. This page has a couple of his pieces from around that time. One is about taking up the Mets’ cause in their inaugural year, during a stretch where the two former New York teams, the Dodgers and Giants, returned to play the Mets at the Polo Grounds, Angell’s favorite haunt:

“I tell you, there isn’t one of ‘em — not one — that could make the Yankee club,” one of them said. “I never saw such a collection of dogs.”

“Well, what about Frank Thomas?” said the other. “What about him?What’s he batting now? .315? .320? He’s got thirteen homers, don’t he?”

“Yeah, and who’s he going to push out of the Yankee outfield? Mantle? Maris? Blanchard? You can’t call these characters ballplayers. They all belong back in the minors — the low minors.”

I recognized the tone. It was knowing, cold, full of the contempt that the calculator feels for those who don’t play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant twenty times in the past thirty years; they have been world champions sixteen times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the smugness and arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints: “They ought to damn well do better than this, considering what they’re being paid!”

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river.This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Right out of the box, that last line is almost good enough to hang with Updike’s most famous phrase. Here’s a shorter piece that leads off The Summer Game, Angell’s first collection of essays. Devoted to the arrival of pitchers and catchers, it’s a nice little tonic to chase away what is turning out to be one of the ugliest weeks for baseball in a long time:

Today the Times reported the arrival of the first pitchers and catchers at the spring training camps, and the morning was abruptly brightened,as if by the delivery of a seed catalogue. The view from my city window still yields only frozen tundras of trash, but now spring is guaranteed and one of my favorite urban flowers, the baseball box score, will burgeon and flourish through the warm, languid, information-packed weeks and months just ahead. I can remember a spring, not too many years ago,when a prolonged New York newspaper strike threatened to extend itself into the baseball season, and my obsessively fannish mind tried to contemplate the desert prospect of a summer without daily box scores. The thought was impossible; it was like trying to think about infinity. Had I been deprived of those tiny lists of sporting personae and accompanying columns of runs batted in, strikeouts, double plays, assists, earned runs, and the like, all served up in neat three-inch packages from Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Baltimore,Houston, and points east and west, only the most aggressive kind of blind faith would have convinced me that the season had begun at all or that its distant, invisible events had any more reality than the silent collision of molecules. This year, thank heaven, no such crisis of belief impends; summer will be admitted to our breakfast table as usual, and in the space of half a cup of coffee I will be able to discover, say, that Ferguson Jenkins went eight innings in Montreal and won his fourth game of the season while giving up five hits, that Al Kaline was horse-collared by Fritz Peterson at the Stadium,that Tony Oliva hit a double and a single off Mickey Lolich in Detroit, that Juan Marichal was bombed by ye Reds in the top of the sixth at Candlestick Park, and that similar disasters and triumphs befell a couple of dozen-odd of the other ballplayers — favorites and knaves — whose fortunes I follow from April to October.

The box score, being modestly arcane, is a matter of intense indifference,if not irritation, to the non-fan. To the baseball-bitten, it is not only informative, pictorial, and gossipy but lovely in aesthetic structure. It represents happenstance and physical flight exactly translated into figures and history. Its totals — batters’ credit vs. pitchers’ debit — balance as exactly as those in an accountant’s ledger. And a box score is more than a capsule archive. It is a precisely etched miniature of the sport itself, for baseball, in spite of its grassy spaciousness and apparent unpredictability, is the most intensely and satisfyingly mathematical of all our outdoor sports. Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment — ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay — and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory,to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.

The small magic of the box score is cognominal as well as mathematical.Down the years, the rosters of the big-league teams have echoed and twangled with evocative, hilarious, ominous, impossible, and exactly appropriate names. The daily, breathing reality of the ballplayers’ names in box scores accounts in part, it seems to me, for the rarity of convincing baseball fiction.No novelist has yet been able to concoct a baseball hero with as tonic a name as Willie Mays or Duke Snider or Vida Blue. No contemporary novelist would dare a supporting cast of characters with Dickensian names like those that have stuck with me ever since I deciphered my first box scores and began peopling the lively landscape of baseball in my mind — Ossee Schreckengost, Smead Jolley, Slim Sallee, Elon Hogsett, Urban Shocker, Burleigh Grimes,Hazen Shirley Cuyler, Heinie Manush, Cletus Elwood Poffenberger, Virgil Trucks, Enos Slaughter, Luscious Easter, and Eli Grba. And not even a latter-day O. Henry would risk a tale like the true, electrifying history of a pitcher named Pete Jablonowski, who disappeared from the Yankees in 1933 after several seasons of inept relief work with various clubs. Presumably disheartened by seeing the losing pitcher listed as “J’bl’n’s’i” in the box scores of his day, he changed his name to Pete Appleton in the semi-privacy of the minors, and came back to win fourteen games for the Senators in 1936 and to continue in the majors for another decade.

Hang in there, folks. It’s just a couple more days…

The Dumbest Article in the History of Stupid, and other A-Roid Tales

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The Alex Rodriguez story took a new turn on Monday evening, as A-Rod submitted to an exclusive interview by ESPN’s Peter Gammons in which he admitted to using steroids from 2001 to 2003 while a member of the Texas Rangers. While the interview was relatively softball — the hand-picked Gammons is about as threatening as Barbara Walters — Rodriguez admitted to wrongdoing, repeatedly using words like stupid, selfish, arrogant and naive to describe his actions, which he claimed were a reaction to the pressure of living up to the 10-year, $252 million contract which brought him to Texas.

It was a reasonably solid performance, though Rodriguez’s obvious lack of facility in the glare of the spotlight has left no shortage of wags taking issue with his lack of uncontrollable sobbing and occasionally vague descriptions of his usage, parsing his every word and feigning outrage that he didn’t give them the beeper number of his dealer or the name of each substance and its page number in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Even the delay between the story’s break and Rodriguz’s interview pissed some pundits off, as if they expected an athlete with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and endorsement at stake to do something besides consult a lawyer under the circumstances. If it wasn’t baseball’s finest hour, it was hardly sports journalism’s finest hour either. NBC Sports’ Mike Celizic was the rare exception (hat tip to Cory Schwartz for the link):

To A-Rod’s credit, his response to ESPN after being caught sounded pretty honest. He said he was young and naïve and he wanted to prove he was worth the biggest contract in baseball history. ‘Roids were part of the culture of the game then, so he took whatever the other guys were taking that helped them play better.

It might sound shallow, but the guy’s a jock. What do you expect?

I know Rodriguez lied a couple of years back when Katie Couric asked him if he had ever used the juice, but I’m not going to hold that against him. That was the same as asking him if he had ever cheated on his wife. Or asking elected officials if they’re atheists. People don’t answer those questions honestly unless they are under oath or confronted with the evidence against them. Even then, they try to wriggle out of it because if you admit it, you’re dead.

No matter how sincere, one single apology isn’t going to win over Rodriguez’s toughest critics, but the fact is that he has already done more than Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire put together in response to the allegations. Instead of blanket denials and legal threats, he took responsibility, showed accountability, brought water to the raging bonfire instead of gasoline. It’s not the end of the story, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Making the rounds on the radio this morning, I was struck by the lack of outrage my Fox News Radio hosts showed relative to our previous discussions about Bonds, Clemens and the topic in general. Perhaps there’s a selection bias at work; I’ve made the rounds on this circuit often enough and shown enough resistance to pandering to turn off extremists like the particular female host in a New England state who clearly had a pitchfork stuck in her derrière over Clemens. All of which reminds me that it was Jose Canseco’s allegations regarding Rodriguez which essentially bumped me off of my tabloid TV debut for Inside Edition back in December 2007. The producer kept pressing me for a two-second soundbite like “A-Rod is the last hope,” but I knew I could never face myself or my colleagues if I fed the beast on their terms. I said words to the effect that the game is more than resilient enough to withstand the wrongdoings of its biggest stars, and that it’s a mistake to invest too much hope in any single player but that Rodriguez, if clean, certainly had the chops to pass Bonds. That deliberately wordy answer left me on the cutting room floor, but I never regretted the outcome.

Only a small handful of what I’ve read on the subject over the past couple days is worth sharing, but before passing on a few links, I’d like to point out the article that inspired this title. With the absolutism of a four-year-old, the New York Daily News‘ Bill Madden called upon the Yankees to eat the $270 million remaining on Rodriguez’s contract. You read that right. They’re supposed cut off their noses to spite their faces by taking the financial hit on behalf of the entire industry over something which (if Rodriguez is to be believed) took place on another team’s watch. Seriously, the guy’s brainpan has to be dripping to pen an article that insults the intelligence of its readers so blatantly that it’s not out of line to suggest that the Daily News should eat HIS contract. You may not be dumber after reading Madden’s piece, but you’ll certainly be angrier.

Among the responses to the whole imbroglio worth mentioning, Newsday‘s Ken Davidoff was quick to point out the trampling of the Fourth Amendment that’s brought this whole scandal to light:

No matter how much you despise him, A-Rod is as much victim as wrongdoer in this ugly saga, unveiled yesterday by SI.com’s Selena Roberts and David Epstein. Whatever level of embarrassment A-Rod feels today, the United States government should be 20 times more ashamed…

For A-Rod’s name to get out is a journalistic triumph for Roberts, an established, terrific reporter, and Epstein. And it’s a disgrace for our government, which couldn’t protect this very sensitive information.

While it’s too late for A-Rod, it’s not too late for our government to be reprimanded some more. We saw it this past week, as Judge Susan Illston indicated that she would not permit some of the crucial evidence that the feds had compiled in their perjury case against Bonds.

Back in 2004, when IRS agent Jeff Novitzky first acquired the testing records, Illston questioned Novitzky’s tactics and honesty, as reported by Jonathan Littman of Yahoo!

“I think the government has displayed . . . a callous disregard for constitutional rights,” Illston said in open court, according to Littman. “I think it’s a seizure beyond what was authorized by the search warrant; therefore, it violates the Fourth Amendment.”

BP colleague Derek Jacques, a lawyer by trade, succinctly explained the story arc of the samples relative to the subpoenas and search warrants:

The authorities’ seizure of the non-BALCO 2003 tests was a little more than “serendipitous.” A search warrant is supposed to be very specific, limiting the authorities to only searching for and/or seizing specific items they have probable cause to believe may be evidence of a crime. The IRS search warrant related to baseball players connected to BALCO, and since BALCO was allegedly dealing in PEDs, they had probable cause to think that MLB’s survey testing of the players in question would turn up evidence that the players in question were using steroids, possibly sold to them by BALCO. The Feds should have only grabbed the results of those ten players, but they instead wound up seizing the test results for all the more than 1,000 players tested. This was convenient, since they’d requested all the results in a subpoena that the two laboratories were fighting at the time the IRS raided their offices. It’s a long story that’s still pending appeal.

Rodriguez’s former teammate Doug Glanville, who writes the occasional Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, was able to looked beyond A-Rod’s transgressions, echoing Davidoff’s unease with the violation of rights:

I’m not surprised by baseball’s extensive drug culture. It’s part of the game’s history and has as much to do with insecurity as greed. Players have to capitalize on opportunity, and at the hypercompetitive major-league level that’s like threading a needle — no wonder they will do just about anything to get ahead. Not that this justifies taking performance-enhancing drugs.

But before we get self-righteous, we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether exposing A-Rod, or any player for that matter, is worth stepping all over rights, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity.

There is a lot of outrage out there about Alex. Not surprising. But what really surprises me is the lack of outrage about how a confidential and anonymous test could be made public. We seem to gloss over the fact that these players voted to re-open a collectively bargained agreement in a preliminary effort to address the drug problem. When privileged information is shared it effectively hurts anyone who has expected privacy in any circumstance, just as when someone made Brittany Spears’s medical records public.

The 2003 test was only supposed to assess whether the number of players using performance-enhancing drugs exceeded a certain threshold. If it did, as part of the agreement, a full drug policy would be instituted in the following testing year. One that was more comprehensive with penalties. This was at least a step in the right direction.

So: if Alex tested positive then, but he hasn’t since (and Monday he stated that he’s played clean since joining the Yankees), maybe that program served its purpose as a deterrent. If we take the higher ground and talk about the greater good of the game, then why create trust issues between owners and players by allowing an agreement to be breached this way? It undermines any sense of cooperation.

The Daily News‘ John Harper suggested that the heads of the Major League Baseball Players Association, executive director Donald Fehr and chief operating officer Gene Orza, should roll

So now it’s likely to get messy again, and scary for players whose names are on that list with, allegedly, A-Rod. You’d think that this might stir up the union’s rank-and-file, but players have long been intimidated by the clout Fehr and Orza have held as leaders of the most powerful union in sports, clout earned over decades of tough negotiating that made their membership incredibly wealthy.

As such, players have rarely challenged Fehr and Orza in public, or even in meetings behind closed doors. And one former player last night said that even after all the embarrassment brought on by the various steroids incidents, he can’t imagine current players overthrowing the union leadership.

It would take an organized movement,” the former player said. “And players aren’t going to want to get involved with something like that. Players won’t do anything that might mess with their careers or their money, and there has always been a feeling that you don’t want those guys (Fehr and Orza) mad at you.”

In fact, the former player said he preferred not to use his name because even in retirement, he feared the possibility of ramifications for speaking out against Fehr and Orza.

Orza stood accused of tipping off Rodriguez to a 2004 test, according to Selena Roberts and David Epstein’s report, a similar allegation to one voiced in the Mitchell Report that was later attributed to David Segui. In a press release, the union denied any wrongdoing (surprise) and laid out a timeline regarding the federal governemnt’s conveniently-timed subpoenas which prevented the relevant samples from being destroyed. Plausible, perhaps, but the union hasn’t exactly basked in glory by failing to clarify this until now. And if there’s more than a sliver of truth to Harper’s description of a union in thrall to a thuggish, unresponsive leadership, now would be a good opportunity for a change of direction.

Also rising to the occasion was colleague Joe Sheehan, who pointed a finger at the most hysterical of the chattering classes:

Knowing Alex Rodriguez used PEDs, in the context of those names, isn’t information that changes anything. A great baseball player did bad things with the implicit approval — hell, arguably explicit approval—of his peers and his employers. It’s cheating, yes, which would be a problem if we hadn’t been celebrating cheating in baseball since the days when guys would go first to third over the pitcher’s mound. You can argue that it’s different in degree, though the widely accepted use of PEDs by peers and superiors, and the use of amphetamines before them, is a strong point against that case. What is clear is that it’s not different enough, in degree, to warrant the kind of histrionics we’re reading and hearing over this. It’s not different enough to turn Alex Rodriguez into a piñata.

Of course, the screaming is about the screamers. The loudest voices on the evils of steroids in baseball are in the media, and there’s probably a dissertation in that notion, because for all that we have to hear about how greedy, evil players have ruined baseball by taking these substances (and then playing well, according to this selective interpretation; no one’s ripping Chris Donnels these days), the reason we’re talking about this in 2009 is that so many “reporters” — scare quotes earned — went ostrich in 1999. We hear every year around awards time that the people closest to the game know the game better than anyone, because they’re in the clubhouse every day, and they talk to everyone, and they have a perspective that outsiders can’t possibly understand. For those same people to do a collective Captain Renault, which they’ve been doing since beating up players for this transgression became acceptable, is shameful. Take your pick: they missed the story, or they were too chicken-shit to report it. In either case, the piling-on now is disgusting.

In the same way that the reporters who vote for the Hall of Fame are going to take their embarrassment out on Mark McGwire, and probably Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro behind him, and god knows who to follow, they should punish themselves as well. I propose that for as long as a clearly qualified Hall of Famer remains on the ballot solely because of steroid allegations—or for that matter, proven use—there should be no J.G. Taylor Spink Award given out to writers. If we’re going to allow failures during the “Steroid Era” to affect eligibility for honors, let’s make sure we catch everyone who acted shamefully.

Colleague Steven Goldman, writing over at YES, offered not one but 11 reactions to the news:

3. Most of the players caught taking steroids have been of the most fringe-y types. These fellows did not turn into Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez. It’s hard to see that they received any benefit at all. When we turn to a Bonds or an A-Rod and say that they received a great benefit from using, not only are we automatically in the realm of conjecture about the basic effects, we’re also positing that they received a benefit beyond what other users received. While it is known that certain medications will affect various individuals differently (the impact of side effects varies, for example), it is something of a stretch to say that one guy gets nothing and the next guy gets 50 home runs, or even 10 extra home runs. If you’ve had radiation administered to your eyes, as I have, you will find out that some people have their vision reduced, and some go completely blind (as I have). One guy in a hundred does not turn into Cyclops of the X-Men and go about shooting bad guys with his optic force beams. That kind of result just isn’t on the menu of possibilities.

…5. Rodriguez had the best offensive season of his career in 2007. His 2008 offensive output wasn’t too different, when adjusted for context, than his now-tainted 2003 performance. How do we reconcile these things, assuming Rodriguez was clean after 2003 or 2004? Wouldn’t it be naïve of us to believe that 2003 was the only time A-Rod was using?

6. Clearly, using PEDs does not help you come up with the big hit in a postseason game.

Goldman hits on a great point, one that I made several times in the course of my radio rounds. For every A-Rod or Bonds whose numbers fit into our stereotype of what performance-enhancing drugs do to the statistics of the game, there are dozens of obscure players from the ranks of the BALCO files or the Mitchell Report who saw no discernible improvement. Trying to weed such players out of PECOTA, as some Baseball Prospectus readers have suggested, is a pointless exercise, not only because we have no basis to accurately determine what was used and when, but because the bottom line is that in the grand scheme it makes little difference to our ability to measure performance in retrospect or to forecast it going forward. And trying to wish the numbers away by expunging the record books — a common theme on the talk radio circuit — isn’t going to happen. If the stats from the 1919 World Series are still on the books, the ones compiled by A-Rod, Clemens, Bonds et al ain’t going anywhere.

Anyway, that’s some of the good stuff, which beats the hell out of reading tripe like this. I still think it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, but for one day, at least, Alex Rodriguez made progress towards putting this story behind us.

Roid Rage Radio

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As usual, big news in baseball’s steroid story means me waking up at oh-dark-thirty to field a handful of interviews for the Fox News Radio network, talking sense to the occasionally inflamed radio hosts, though with the Alex Rodriguez story shifting a bit int he wake of yesterday evening’s interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, tempers may have cooled somewhat.

Here’s today’s docket, many of which can be heard over these stations’ web sites. All times Eastern:

WTVN Columbus, OH
7:42 AM ET

WTAG Worcester, MA
8:06 AM ET

WOAI San Antonio, TX
8:40 AM ET

WSYR Syracuse, NY
8:50 AM ET

KTRH Houston, TX
9:20 AM ET

KFAB Omaha, NE
9:35 AM ET

KFBK Sacramento, CA
10:18AM ET

The Summer of Hate Begins

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It’s a dark day for baseball, the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was among the 104 players who failed a drug test in 2003. Never mind the fact that the test was supposedly anonymous and carried no punitive consequences but was being conducted as a survey to establish whether Major League Baseball should implement more stringent testing for performance-enhancing drugs. The soapboxes have already been mounted, and it’s clear that this news will bypass the thaw promised by the impending arrival of pitchers and catchers. For those looking to further vilify the game’s highest-paid, least media-savvy superstar, the Summer of Hate has begun.

A-Roid Scandal… Yankees Stuck with A-Fraud… Alex a Total Bust… Tarnished Forever… Roid-riguez in Hall of Shame… that’s just a small selection of one day’s headlines. Those of us who live in the Big Apple get to read stuff like this for the next nine years, if Rodriguez plays through the end of his contract. Oh, joy.

Like a foot-long shit sandwich, this story stinks seven ways to Sunday. It stinks for those of us who’ve stood by the Hammerin’ Hamlet with the frosted tips as we’ve witnessed him performing some of the most remarkable feats on the diamond that we’ve ever seen (three home runs in one game, two homers in one inning) as well as the most bone-headed (the glove slap) — and that’s before touching his infamous opt-out. It stinks for those who supported him when he was thrown under the bus by Joe Torre not once or twice but thrice, most recently over the manager’s own laundry-airing “autobiography” in conjunction with Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci. It stinks for those who wanted to believe that Jose Canseco was off base when he pointed the finger at A-Rod. It stinks for those who bore hope that Rodriguez might eventually restore some dignity to the all-time home run record after it had been sullied by Barry Bonds’ joyless quest.

The stench is hardly alleviated once we move beyond whatever faith was misguidedly placed in Rodriguez; by now we should have known better. This stinks for fans of due process, the right to privacy, and collective bargaining. That the confidentiality of the 2003 testing, the product of a collectively bargained agreement, was not safeguarded is a black eye for both the players’ union and Major League Baseball, who have federal investigators up in their business because they didn’t destroy the samples as they had agreed to do. Said samples and the key to match them up to the identities of individual players were then seized in a raid that was part of the BALCO investigation, with the union failing to negotiate to limit the subpoena to the records of 10 BALCO-related players, as Howard Bryant notes.

Further allegations that the Players Association’s chief operating officer, Gene Orza, tipped Rodriguez off regarding an impending test in 2004 and that he was charged with finding enough false positives among the 104 players to drive the percentage below the threshold needed to trigger testing discredit the union even more, call into question its sincerity on the matter once it agreed to crack open the 2002 Collective Bargaining Agreement in the first place. From here the allegations surrounding Orza look like grounds to haul everybody in front of Congress again for another dog and pony show.

That the federal investigators in turn leaked information to the press regarding the identities of the players — and if you believe Rodriguez was the only one whose name leaked, I’ve got a bridge to sell you — is just as disturbing. That’s been business as usual ever since the BALCO investigation began, and it’s not surprising that this information is coming to light at a time when the prosecution is fighting an uphill battle to admit all of its evidence against Bonds into his perjury trial. Despite the conviction of BALCO leaker Troy Ellerman, it’s clear that there are others willing to do an end run around due process to out people no matter the stakes. It’s also clear that most of the chattering classes don’t care at all how this information made its way to daylight. They just want to manufacture outrage and admit the ill-procured evidence into the court of public opinion. A high-profile ballplayer doing steroids six years ago, before MLB began enforcing any type of ban? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!

At the risk of playing Kill the Messenger, it’s only appropriate to point out that Roberts, who shared the byline on this break, has a book on Rodriguez coming out this summer. Funny how she broke this news just as the “A-Fraud” buzz from Torre’s book was dying down, isn’t it? While some regard her as a solid reporter, her days at the New York Times were marked by one of the most grating styles ever to, uh, grace its sports page. Rife with agendas, laden with innuendo, she was living proof that the world of hackneyed sportswriting wasn’t restricted to those with a Y chromosome (or two). Check the sheer ineptitude of her late-to-the-party dissing of Billy Beane and Moneyball. Check her premature burial of Bonds. Check her smear of Rodriguez regarding the rental properties he owns in Miami and his alleged lack of generosity with regards to charities. Clearly, she’s well equipped for whatever literary takedown she’s preparing on the slugger.

None of which is to exonerate Rodriguez for any of this, of course; he screwed up. And while that should only make him yet another screw-up in an era full of them — Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, the BALCO boys (and girls), the players in the Mitchell Report, et al — being the highest-paid and perhaps most talented one, he becomes the newest poster boy for the era. Barring a remarkable turnaround in his ability to deal with the harsh glare of the spotlight, he’ll be carrying this baggage with him for a long time.

Which makes me miss the departed Jason Giambi all the more. As much as he was pilloried for his lack of specificity when he came forward and apologized for his PED usage, his candor — to the extent he could be candid while avoiding saying anything explicit enough to void his contract — and contrition stand in marked contrast to the players who have taken the lady-doth-protest-too-much route like Clemens and Palmeiro. Here was a player ensnared by the BALCO investigation, one whose career nearly crashed onto the rocks in its aftermath, one who drew skepticism even in his home ballpark once he began hitting again. Yet Giambi never complained publicly about the bind he’d gotten himself into, never put the blame upon anyone but himself. He simply kept his head down and played ball, outlasting the abuse he took by discovering a way to reconnect with fans via his own sense of humor, as signified by a cheesy mustache.

Giambi pulled off a pretty neat trick, and for the sake of whatever rooting interest I maintain in the Yankees, I wish he was around to beat some of that advice into A-Rod’s thick skull. That’s not going to happen; it’s unclear what tack Rodriguez will take once he opens his mouth, but the bet here is that he’ll find a way to make the problem worse.

A Toast

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“…we write for each other, for baseball is not a paragraph, and losing, I think, is no parenthesis” — Humbug.com’s “Random Diamond Notes Generator,” after e.e. cummings

Waaaaay back in the day, as a regular poster on Baseball Primer, I was a fan of the mysterious Score Bard, the poet laureate of the baseball blogosphere. Shortly after celebrating his first foray into creating a site to house his verse, and soon after leaving the design job I’d held for nearly six years, I received a touching email from the still-pseudonymous Bard. In it, he talked of his own departure from a dot-com job and subsequent voyage of self-discovery, as well as the connection he shared with his late father over The World Almanac, whose 2002 and 2003 covers I had designed. Obviously, I still have that email.

I’m not sure how much later it was, but one day I was reading his site and stumbled onto a page which linked to some of the Bard’s other ventures, unmasking him as Ken Arneson in the process. I kept this bit of information regarding his identity under my hat for months, finally passing it on to Will Carroll and Alex Belth at the Winter Meetings in 2003 in exchange for some other bit of juicy gossip It was probably the only privileged piece of baseball information I had at my disposal; I had no other chips with which to go “all in.”

Fast-forward a year later, to the 2004 Winter Meetings in Anaheim. I met Arneson for the first time. He was there to hook up with a few of our mutual blogging pals, including Carroll, Dodger Thoughts’ Jon Weisman and the Cub Reporter’s Alex Ciepley; they were all working together at All-Baseball.com and in the process of forming what would become Baseball Toaster, an aggregation of a handful of great baseball blogs, some of which had migrated from the A-B hub, Bronx Banter among them. Arneson, a tech wiz, custom built the site’s blogging software.

Despite my connections to this great gang of folks — and my role in pointing them in the general direction of each other — I never explored the possibility of joining the Toaster group, in part because this site, or at least my vision for it, was more expansive, and in part because I was already headed down the road to becoming a full-fledged member of Baseball Prospectus.

Our voyages of self-discovery would continue in parallel, occasionally intersecting, as I retained a deep connection with the Toaster crew. Dodger Thoughts and Bronx Banter were my chosen houses of worship for my two teams, and I collaborated with DT’s Weisman and BB’s Belth on a few occasions between All-Baseball and the Toaster. I regularly read Arneson/Bard’s Humbug blog, his A’s-themed Catfish Stew, Mike’s Baseball Rants, Carroll and Scott Long’s Juice Blog, and others. Cardboard Gods, which didn’t join up until years later, became one of my favorites as well, with Josh Wilker’s note-perfect style of incorporating baseball cards and the existential revelations they held into the narrative of his own journey through life — a model that via The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book had initially inspired this site, but one that I’ve invoked with decreasing frequency as my own work here and beyond has grown more analytical. The Toaster sites were among my favorite reads in the baseball blogosphere, and they fostered a great sense of community among its reader-fans.

Alas, there’s something about toasters that suggests a built-in obsolescence. After Dark’s Flying Toaster screensavers. Cylon Centurions. The fetishization of vintage kitchen appliances. Hell, the slang usage of the word “toast”: finished, defunct, done.

And so it is with Baseball Toaster. Earlier this week, Arneson announced that he had decided to unplug the Toaster as multiple bloggers go their separate ways. The departure isn’t for lack of interest from readers. Rather, the graduation of Bronx Banter to SNY late last year and Dodger Thoughts to the Los Angeles Times earlier this week — thus removing the two highest-traffic blogs from the site — as well as Ken’s understandably shifting priorities regarding work and family led to a reconsideration of the enterprise. The impending departures seem to have led a few of the other blogs to give up the ghost as well, though I’m particularly glad to see Cardboard Gods land on its feet.

Wilker’s final post on BT concerns Reggie Jackson and the sway he held on those of us fans of a certain age; obviously, I can relate. So can Arneson, who invokes Jackson, among others in the Toaster’s final post, a remarkable epic whose role call also includes Moby Dick, Huck Finn, Billy Martin, Ingmar Bergman, Borg-McEnroe, Sinatra, Dylan, Rickey Henderson, Bono, Battlestar Galactica, the Bash Brothers, Yeats, Billy Beane, Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall, original poetry that doesn’t suck (this is the Score Bard, after all), the birth of Netscape, the dot-com boom and bust, the futility of banner ads, Kos, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator movies, the inefficiency of Nigerian diplomats, Elvis Costello, Kraftwerk, Monty Python, Armed Forces Radio, Radio Moscow, Dennis Eckersley, Kirk Gibson and Jack Buck.

Written in honor of Arneson’s 43rd birthday as a farewell to the Toaster and to blogging in general, it connects the scraps of personal information which I first gleaned via my initial connection with the Score Bard to classic literature, film and music in perhaps the most ambitious piece of web-based writing I’ve ever read. It is Ted Williams’ final at-bat and John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” rolled into one along with so much more. “Well, the internet is over, this post won. Thanks for playing, everybody,” wrote Wilker in the comments section, invoking a previous comment to another epic Arneson post that I somehow missed.

Reading that piece and watching the Toaster go toast leads me to voice the inevitable questions regarding my own blogging. For a few years now, this site has become something of a personal back burner as my Baseball Prospectus work occupies more of my time and carries me into new frontiers (see here, here, here, and here as well if you’ve got a subscription, and know that there’s more of this to come). My audience continues to grow via those venues, but it contracts here as my posts grow more scarce and pieces of the site fall into disrepair. On some occasions I vow to begin posting shorter and more frequent entries, reaping the dividend of my occasionally short attention span and my expansive voyages across the Internet in the service of rebuilding this site’s traffic. On others, I’ll wonder if the blog is a burden to be shed, a childish thing to be put away as my work grows more professional.

In the end, as this site approaches its eighth birthday, I find that I’m still willing to soldier on with Futility Infielder, keeping the pilot light lit if only to illuminate my progress and the occasional bursts of inspiration which wouldn’t otherwise find a home. Maybe I will get that shorter-post thing down at some point. Maybe I’ll move this thing to a self-contained platform where I don’t have to worry about third-party add-ons going kaput. Maybe I’ll let this blog evolve into something that’s less strictly baseball-oriented. One way or another, you ain’t getting rid of me that easily.

In the meantime, I can only offer the fondest farewell and best wishes to my pals at the Toaster as they scatter to the four winds. They’ve brought me community and plenty of inspiration while taking me a few steps closer towards my own personal enlightenment, and for that I raise my glass and offer my humble thanks. Fare thee well, friends.

Updike Fan Bids Author Adieu

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike passed away today at age 76. While he didn’t write often about baseball, and while I’m no expert on the rest of his oeuvre, his career line includes one memorable home run of a piece: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”, his account of Ted Williams’ final game, written in 1960 for The New Yorker and anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Salon’s King Kaufman sets the scene. Here’s a taste of the piece itself:

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. According to Yesgamers, they were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’s last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. “WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

…In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as “the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O’Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams’ .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth’s season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway’s, one of the most distant in the league, and if — the least excusable “if” — we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Regarding his final at-bat:

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on — always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us — stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

“Gods do not answer letters” ranks among the most memorable lines ever written in the service of sport. Classic stuff well worth reading and savoring in its entirety.

Kent’s Cooperstown Case

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In today’s Hit and Run column at Baseball Prospectus, I take up “The Curious Case of Jeff Kent”, who retired last week:

There’s no crying in baseball, which may or may not explain why Jeff Kent’s stoic facade crumbled during the press conference in which he announced his retirement last week. A notoriously gruff and prickly personality, Kent had spent the better part of two decades distancing himself from his teammates and the media as much as possible. Thus the sight of him fighting back the tears was surprising, even shocking given his apparent lack of emotional range. As the legendary sportswriter Frank Graham once wrote of Yankee outfielder Bob Meusel, “He’s learning to say hello when it’s time to say goodbye.”

…While Kent hasn’t been the object of many fond farewells, the widespread consensus in the mainstream media is that he’s bound for the Hall of Fame. From a traditional perspective, it’s not difficult to see why. Although he didn’t debut in the majors until he was 24 and didn’t top 400 plate appearances until the following year, Kent nonetheless racked up 2,461 hits and 377 homers, reached the postseason seven times, made five All-Star teams, and won the 2000 NL MVP award. The 351 home runs he hit as a second baseman are tops for the position, far outdistancing the second-, third-, and fourth-ranked second-sackers—Ryne Sandberg (277), Joe Morgan (266), and Rogers Hornsby (263)—all of whom are enshrined in Cooperstown. He also leads all second basemen in RBI and extra-base hits, while ranking 12th in games played at the position.

…Kent does not fare nearly so well when it comes to JAWS, and I say that as somebody whose first impulse would be to vote for him if the BBWAA granted me a ballot today. I’ve explored his case before, but with his final two seasons of play as well as a major adjustment in the WARP system’s replacement level—one that’s not yet reflected on our player cards, alas—it’s appropriate to take another look…

Kent ranks 12th in career WARP, 20th in peak WARP (best seven seasons) and 14th overall among all second basemen. As odd as it sounds for a player who lasted through his Age 40 season, he’s hampered by a lack of durability. Kent topped 145 games just five times (including in 2002, the season he infamously broke his wrist while “washing his truck”) and averaged only 133 games a year over his last six seasons, the Houston and Los Angeles phases of his career. He’s got just four seasons above 5.5 WARP via the new system, and just three above 7.0. Overall, his JAWS score tops only one of the nine second basemen elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America, that being Jackie Robinson, whose career was shortened by the color barrier but who nonetheless had a peak that was well above average, to say nothing of his monumentally larger role in history.

Kent falls slightly short via JAWS, and his case appears to rest upon how much value one places on holding the home run record for second basemen, a record set under historically favorable conditions.

As you’d expect, the article has plenty of charts to illuminate the case as well as a deeper look at the JAWS system and in particular the odd distribution of second basemen amid the rankings. None of which will have an impact on whether Kent makes the Hall of Fame; he’ll likely find a spot there in due time, and while I doubt I’ll greet that news with more enthusiasm than Kent showed in his Dodger days, it’s not something that will be worth fighting against the way Jim Rice’s candidacy was.

Chat-tastic

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Doubling up with yesterday’s Hit and Run column, I had a chat at BP as well. Alas, it was fraught with technical difficulties that slowed the system considerably, limiting the number of questions I could get to without pulling my hair out:

frampton (Oakland, CA): Thanks for the chat! You alluded in today’s article to the difference between lamenting the inclusion of players like Jim Rice to the Hall on the one hand, and pressing for the inclusion of guys like Blyleven and Raines. Is there a pragmatic reason to focus on the latter rather than the former in the sense that the guys with the votes might be more receptive to arguments for inclusion if we don’t tell them they’re idiots for putting in borderline players? It also sort of seems that the history of the Hall has pretty much rendered moot the argument that only the truly elite should be enshrined . . .

JJ: There are a few things in play here. Arguing against Rice is particularly futile because his admission is a done deal. Not that it didn’t stop me from mentioning some of his candidacy’s shortcomings today, but my intent was more to focus on the process and its underlying patterns than on the player. Oh the other hand, arguing for Blyleven and Raines is still a worthy cause even if the battle appears to be an uphill one. Second, as contrarian as I may seem relative to the BBWAA electorate, I much prefer the positive angle of arguing for a worthy candidate than against an unworthy one.

Furthermore, in this particular case, I’ve had enough of bagging on Rice because as I mention, I genuinely did enjoy watching him play and I do feel like he got a raw deal in some quarters. If his admission promotes a bit of healing, so much the better.

Matt A (Raleigh): I’ve been very interested to hear the thoughts of someone from BP on the Braves’ signing of [Derek] Lowe. Got any?

JJ: Moving away from the Hall questions for the time being, I like this signing, though the price is a lot steeper than it should have been based on the reports of what the Mets were offering. Lowe is an ultra-durable groundballer who’s solidified into a much better pitcher since leaving Boston, even beyond the obvious advantages of his move from Fenway to Dodger Stadium, park- and leaguewise. Over the last four years, he ranked 11th in the majors in SNLVAR, 10th in innings, and 12th in ERA+. While he’s entering his age 36 season, there’s nothing about him that suggests he’s a particular health risk or that he’s at risk of a sudden collapse.

The bigger issue for the Braves, however, is that while Lowe and recently acquired Javier Vazquez are both solid #2-type starters, neither is anywhere near the caliber of Johan Santana or Cole Hamels, the NL East’s big guns.

AlexBelth (Bronx, NY): Jay, do you ever recall an off-season when so many veteran players were unsigned by this point? It’s one thing when you are talking about Junior Griffey who has little value left, and a guy like Manny or to a lesser degree Abreu, who while in decline, can still provide…something.

JJ: My man Alex! I think you’d have to go back to the collusion era (1985-1987 offseasons) to find so many big names out there who remain unsigned. While I’m not suggesting anything so nefarious is afoot, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a decade from now somebody unearths evidence to the contrary there.

Doubling this up with another good question you’ve asked (“Has your analytical work been more difficult this year with all these free agents still out there in limbo?”) I think the offseason climate created by the economy and the slow pace of player movement has provided one of the more daunting challenges I’ve ever faced in this industry. Teams like the Brewers and Dodgers (both of whom I cover in BP09) still haven’t come close to completing their offseason work with regards to replacing big guns like CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez, making any legitimate assessment of their 2009 chances very difficult.

Snakedoctor18 (New York): Who should be the Yankees opening day CF in 2009?

JJ: Has the ship sailed on Zombie Mickey Mantle yet?

I’m certainly not wowed by the Yankees’ in-house options, a pool that nominally includes Melky Cabrera, Brett Gardner, Johnny Damon and Nick Swisher. I don’t think the latter two can carry the position defensively anymore, and I’m less than wowed by the offense offered by either of the former two, unless Cabrera has spent the entire winter being beaten over the head with a fungo bat in an effort to impart the slightest modicum of common sense into his thick skull.

Which means that a better solution must lie outside the organization. I’d be willing to see if Jim Edmonds has anything left given his rebound with the Cubs.

I appreciate those of you out there who dropped by. Fair amount of Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Brewers and Hall of Fame chatter in there for those interested in reading more.

(No) Comments

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As you may or may not have noticed, the comments feature on this blog has been nonfunctional over the past month. As of December 23, the third-party system I used, YACCS (Yet Another Collaborative Comment System), discontinued its service, but it’s only now that I’ve had a chance to clean up my template and enable Blogger’s integrated comments system. The existing YACCS comments have been archived but I’m not sure if there’s a way to import them back into Blogger, or at least an easy way that’s worth my time; only a few recent postings have drawn comments at all.

Currently, the new settings for the comments feature do not require any registration, only word verification. Nor are they moderated, though I’ve obviously reserved the right to delete offensive or irrelevant comments if necessary, and to reach out to smite you in your chair if the offense is grave enough (ok, getting carried away there). I’d prefer not to have to take a stronger hand in managing this feature, but I’ll do so if necessary. Either way, I hope the new system serves this site’s readership well. Please note that there is some delay between posting comments and seeing them on the site, a consequence of going through Blogger’s big, big system.

Also, another one of my third-party add-ons, Blogrolling, is temporarily kaput. This controls the link list you see at left. There’s a lot of housekeeping which could stand to be done — links added, deleted or updated — once it comes back online. Apologies for the inconvenience in the interim.

Pattern Recognition

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After a week and a half of laying low following the delivery of my final Baseball Prospectus annual essays and JAWS pieces, I’ve re-emerged with both an article and a chat. Today’s piece at BP focuses on last week’s Hall of Fame voting results and their underlying patterns. After noting that Jim Rice made history by becoming the first player ever voted in on his 15th and final ballot, I noted how rarely late-eligibility elections occur:

Beyond the fact that Rice made it in his final turn at bat, it’s worth noting how uncommon it actually is for any candidate to win the requisite 75 percent after lasting for more than about five years on the ballot. Since 1966: 
Years    #   Elected
  15    33     1      Rice (2009)
  14    37     0
  13    39     2      Ralph Kiner (1975), Bruce Sutter (2006)
  12    43     1      Bob Lemon (1976)
  11    45     1      Duke Snider (1980)
  10    52     1      Don Drysdale (1984)
   9    62     4      Joe Medwick (1968), Lou Boudreau (1970),
                      Tony Perez (2000), Rich Gossage (2008)
   8    68     1      Hoyt Wilhelm (1985)
   7    72     0
   6    84     3
   5    96     4
   4   107     3
   3   124     5
   2   175     4
   1   629    37

Basically, a candidate who lingers on the ballot for longer than five years has about half the chance of being elected as someone who gains entry in his first five years of eligibility: 

Years     #  Elect   %
 1-5    1131   53   4.7
 6-10    338    9   2.7
11-15    197    5   2.5

Further down, I’ve got my own prescription for reforming the voting process:

Elsewhere on BP, [Joe] Sheehan advocated a one-and-done approach to the BBWAA voting. While I do think that there’s ample room for reform, particularly in light of the data above, subjecting the candidates to a single in/out vote seems to me an awful idea given the obstinacy of a portion of the electorate, to say nothing of the sorry state of the Veterans Committee. Certain voters love to parade their ignorance of any approach beyond Ye Olde Pornography Test (“I know a Hall of Famer when I see one”), and many others could stand to research the candidates much more thoroughly before delivering a potentially fatal blow to the chances of the likes of Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Darrell Evans, and Dan Quisenberry, all of whom fell off the ballot after one vote because they failed to garner five percent.

Instead of making this a one-shot deal, I’d advocate shortening a player’s term on the ballot to three years—three strikes and you’re out, get it?—with no minimum five percent cutoff. The portion of the electorate that feels strongly enough about the distinction between “first ballot” types and the rest of the field would still have that avenue available to them, but the process would be considerably sped up, and the field simplified.

Of course, I’d also like to see the BBWAA voting rules reformed to allow the new wave of internet writers — including my BP colleagues Will Carroll and Christina Kahrl as well as ESPN’s Rob Neyer and Keith Law — their voting privileges before the ten-year waiting period is up. While there’s more than a little self-interest with regards to that statement — I’m extremely hopeful that one day I might join those ranks myself — the bottom line is that those of us who have come around to any kind of sabermetric approach to the Hall want to see a better-educated electorate tackling the ballot so that the game’s highest honor may be more uniformly bestowed upon the most deserving candidates. Is that so wrong?

That Will, Christina, Keith and Rob all were granted entry to the BBWAA [Baseball Writers Association of America] is the long-lost bit of news that I alluded to back in early December when the story broke, but I never got around to discussing here. I’m elated for all parties involved; Neyer and Law were snubbed a year earlier in what became an ugly PR disaster for the BBWAA, as numerous other Internet-based writers, including several of Neyer and Law’s ESPN colleagues, gained entry. The BBWAA had been exclusive to print-based publications prior to that point, but with the realities of the newspaper industry becoming grimmer by the day, the organization finally saw the light on that front. What it all means is that if I continue long enough with BP I too may gain membership, which, assuming I could then hang on long enough, would make me eligible to vote in the Hall of Fame balloting around the time the AARP starts taking an interest in my life — hence the bit of self-interest in picking up the damn pace.

I’ll be back to slice and dice the chat in my next post…