Bavasi and the Bookshelf

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Fresh off last week’s bloggy take on Buzzie Bavasi’s death, I’ve delved into a two-part look at his lengthy career over at Baseball Prospectus, the first of which is up today. Bavasi helped make history before ascending to the GM chair and enjoyed a great run with the Dodgers, but he also experienced some of the lowest lows in his later years with the Padres and Angels, and given the BP-flavored interest in team-building, I thought his successes and failures deserved closer scrutiny. Here’s what I had to say about the middle period of his Dodger tenure (1957-1962), a stretch in which the team managed just one pennant while in the throes of a rebuilding effort:

By this time, the core of the team that Branch Rickey had assembled was aging. [Jackie] Robinson retired rather than report to the Giants after a 1956 trade. The 1957 season was soured by the team’s inevitable departure for Los Angeles (a topic recently revisited here by Gary Gillete), while the Boys of Summer crept closer to their ruin. [Roy] Campanella was paralyzed in a January 1958 auto accident, [Don] Newcombe was traded to Cincinnati after an 0-6 start, and Pee Wee Reese became a part-timer. The Dodgers finished seventh out of eight teams at 71-83 in their inaugural season in LA, their first sub-.500 campaign since 1944. Yet Bavasi was already working to rebuild his aging ballclub by remaining true to a pair of Rickey principles: a commitment to the Dodgers’ player development system, and complete faith in the virtues of power pitching. He assembled an unlikely World Champion in 1959 out of that mess, one that — prior to the dawn of the Wild Card era — Bill James called the weakest of all time.

Bavasi was able to rely on the nearly overripe fruits of the system to overhaul the team. [Johnny] Roseboro and [Charlie] Neal, both of whom had spent the better part of the decade in the minors, stepped into the lineup as solid regulars in 1958; Neal enjoyed a breakout year in 1959, when he was the league’s top-hitting second baseman via a .287/.334/.464 performance with 19 homers and 17 steals. The speedy [Maury] Wills, who had toiled for nine years in the minors, was recalled midway through 1959, replacing a slumping Don Zimmer at shortstop, and hit a sizzling .345/.382/405 in September. Bavasi also made one key trade that year, acquiring left fielder Wally Moon from the Cardinals for Gino Cimoli. The lefty-swinging Moon rebounded from an off year with St. Louis by taking advantage of his odd new environment, the Los Angeles Coliseum. Built in 1923 for University of Southern California football games, the Coliseum was a 93,000-seat football stadium ill-suited for baseball. It was 300 feet down the right field line, 440 to right center (reduced to 375 in 1959), 420 to dead center, and just 251 feet down the left field line (which was topped by a 40-foot screen). Moon quickly learned to focus on hitting to the opposite field; 14 of his 19 home runs were at home, nine of them “Moon Shots” which went over the screen.

The Dodgers used another of their new home’s quirks — dim lighting and a major league-record 63 night games — to give their pitching staff an added advantage. The team had already led the league in strikeouts every year since 1948, but in 1959 they became the first staff to top 1,000 in a season, blowing away 1,077 hitters. Don Drysdale led the league with 242, while Sandy Koufax placed third with 173 despite tossing just 153 1/3 innings. Johnny Podres, the hero of the 1955 World Series, was seventh with 145 and third in strikeout rate. Koufax and Drysdale had been signed by the Dodgers in 1954; the former, a bonus baby, had joined the big club in 1955 but had struggled with the strike zone ever since, while the latter joined the staff the following year and became a rotation mainstay in 1957. The duo would anchor the team’s fate for the better part of the next decade.

Further aided by another pair of pitchers Bavasi promoted in midseason — veteran Roger Craig and rookie Larry Sherry — the Dodgers won a three-way race in 1959, outlasting the Giants (now relocated to San Francisco) and the Milwaukee Braves, whom they beat in a best-of-three playoff at the end of the season (for more on that race, see my chapter in It Ain’t Over: the Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book, now out in paperback). They then beat the Go-Go Chicago White Sox in the World Series

They reverted to fourth place the following year, and finished second in 1961 despite holding the lead as late as August 15. They finally moved into state-of-the-art Dodger Stadium in 1962, a ballpark that dramatically favored pitchers, and won 102 games, the second-highest total of the Bavasi era. Sparked by the speedy Wills, who stole an NL record 104 bases, a new stable of homegrown youngsters, including first baseman Ron Fairly and outfielders Willie Davis, Tommy Davis (no relation), and Frank Howard, helped them finish second in the league in runs scored despite the park’s suppression of offense. Drysdale and Koufax both topped 200 strikeouts, with the former leading the league for the third time in four years and winning the Cy Young on the strength of a 25-9 record, and the latter topping the circuit in ERA despite a two-month absence.

Unfortunately for the Dodgers, the Giants won 103 games, including the rubber match of a three-game playoff. That game almost cost Bavasi and Alston their jobs. Alston, forever working on one-year contracts, had been forced to swallow the irascible Leo Durocher as part of his coaching staff — “on the grounds that we don’t want bridge partners or cronies for assistants,” explained O’Malley — and the Lip continually undermined the manager in front of the team and second-guessed him in the press, particularly over Alston’s staying with Stan Williams instead of summoning Drysdale amid a four-run ninth-inning meltdown in the deciding game of the playoff. Soon after the defeat, Durocher carped that the team would have won if he’d been in charge. Bavasi hit the roof when he found out, threatening to fire Durocher, but was overruled by O’Malley, who wanted to fire Alston in favor of Durocher. Bavasi told O’Malley, “If you fire Alston, I’m gone too. He didn’t make those errors, he didn’t give up those base hits. How in the hell can you say it was Alston’s fault?” O’Malley backed down, and all three men kept their jobs.

Part Two will run next week.

• • •

In my thirst for insight into Bavasi’s days with the Dodgers, I’ve been plowing through my latest find from Manhattan’s awesome Strand bookstore (which boasts 18 miles of books on its shelves the way McDonalds boasts of billions served), Harold Parrott’s The Lords of Baseball from 1976. A former writer for the Brooklyn Eagle, Parrott became the Dodgers’ traveling secretary during the Branch Rickey era, and was still around when the team moved to L.A.; he later worked for the Angels and the Padres in various capacities as well. I’d always assumed Lords was a stuffy book, but it’s an absolutely irreverent peek into the corridors of power, with the author gleefully reveling in the folly of owners and operators from Larry MacPhail to Walter O’Malley to Charley Finley while watching the Reserve Clause disintegrate before his very eyes. Imagine John Helyar’s epic The Lords of the Realm as told to Ed Linn by a Bill Veeck-type raconteur and you’re about there.

On that note, one of the occupational hazards of palling around with other baseball writers is that your reading list is always growing. My head is currently reeling from suggestions gathered this past Monday, when I met up with Kevin Baker, Alex Belth, Steven Goldman, Derek Jacques, Joe Sheehan and Emma Span to quaff a few beers and attend a reading for The Anatomy of Baseball which featured Baker, Jeff Greenfield, Michael Shapiro, and John Thorn, as well as Allan Barra taking his usual amusing potshots from the peanut gallery. Alex had just published a survey of essential baseball books for which he solicited 10 apiece from over 50 writers, including our entire cast. The top 10 most frequently named books, garnering from 13 to 35 mentions, aren’t especially revealing to me, as I named six of them in my own entry (the numbers don’t really matter):

1. Ball Four by Jim Bouton — the groundbreaking look behind the curtain at the ups and downs of a baseball player

2. Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn — a meditation on mortality and a brilliant, poignant study of the flawed beauty of the human organism, masquerading as a baseball book

3. The Summer Game by Roger Angell — a lyrical account of baseball in the Sixties as seen through the eyes of one erudite fan

4. Seasons in Hell by Mike Shropshire — for my money, this gonzo account of the 1973-1975 Texas Rangers is funniest baseball book of all time

5. Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher and Ed Linn — an agonizing choice between this and Veeck as in Wreck, ultimately decided by Leo the Lip’s role in the New York-centric golden age in the Forties and Fifties

6. Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel — a concise summary of nine trends that changed baseball, by one of the game’s unsung scholars

7. Lords of the Realm by John Helyar — an often hilarious account of a century’s worth of labor versus management battles

8. The Glory of their Times by Lawrence Ritter — the classic oral history of early 20th century baseball

9. The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris — two fans explore their love affair with those cardboard slabs and the memories they represent

10. The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz — a wonderful exploration of the history baseball statistics, from the development of the box score to the onslaught of real-time Internet updates to the entry of performance analysis into front offices

Even personally speaking, I’d be hard pressed to call this list my definitive one; at the time I was just ticked off enough at Bill James to avoid fretting over whether or not to include Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?, The Bill James Guide to Managers, the Historical Abstract, or This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones. Given a second batch of ten to right that wrong, I’d also add Weaver on Strategy, my Baseball Prospectus colleagues’ Baseball Between the Numbers, Moneyball, Nine Innings, Red Smith on Baseball, and the aforementioned Veeck as in Wreck, and that would still leave me bummed that I couldn’t include another batch of Roger Angell, a shout for the idiosyncratic, Bouton-edited anthology “I Managed Good But Boy Did They Play Bad”, a nod for Pat Jordan’s A False Spring, a giggle for The Bronx Zoo, and a self-interested plug for It Ain’t Over.

The fun part is that such lists offer expert recommendations and the occasional gentle nudge. Alex came over to watch the Yankees game last Friday night, and he quizzed me on two books with which he wasn’t familiar, Eliot Asinof’s Man on Spikes and Boyd and Harris’ The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. The former, a novel by the man who wrote Eight Men Out (seen the movie several times, never read the book) is one that’s been sitting on my shelf unread for a couple of years save for its first half-dozen pages (just enough to get me to take it home), while the latter has probably provided me with as much inspiration and as many laughs as Ball Four or Bill James. As such, I was surprised that Alex was unfamiliar with the authors’ blend of irreverence and nostalgia, for it’s one that really has found a home in the blogosphere and beyond, particularly via Alex’s own Baseball Toaster colleague, Josh Wilker, the books’s most worthy literary heir who writes that it “not only celebrates the magic of baseball cards but gives voice to everyone who ever collected them.”

For myself, the list has shamed me into swearing that Man on Spikes, Dollar Sign on the Muscle and a few others already on my shelf will get their day. But not before I finish reading The Lords of Baseball, that’s for damn sure.

Farewell to a Much Better Buzz

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“Who else played golf with Babe Ruth, had dinner with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale and worked for people of the stature of Larry MacPhail, Walter O’Malley, Gene Autry and Ray Kroc?”
–Buzzie Bavasi (1914-2008)

While Buzz Bissinger continues to be raked over the coals, the baseball world lost one of its titans on Thursday, as longtime executive Buzzie Bavasi died at age 92. The old-school Bavasi is best remembered as the architect of four World Champion Dodgers teams and eight pennant winners (1952, ’53, ’55, ’56, ’59, ’63, ’65, ’66, champions in bold), serving as the team’s general manager from late 1950 (when he took over from Branch Rickey) to mid-1968, a period encompassing the franchise’s transcontinental shift from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, their longest run of success and their days as the National League’s predominant powerhouse.

Bavasi’s accomplishments weren’t limited to that span, however. He joined the Dodger organization in 1938, and worked in their farm system until 1943, stepping aside to serve in the Army during World War II. When he returned he played a key role in the game’s integration: in 1946, as Jackie Robinson was smashing through organized baseball’s color barrier in Montreal, Bavasi took the fight to American soil, running the Dodgers’ Class B Nashua affiliate, which featured Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe and was skippered by Walter Alston. As the Los Angeles Times‘ obituary recounts:

“I’ll never forget one night in Lynn, Mass.,” Campanella said in 1983. “Newcombe had pitched, and I hit a home run, and we won the game. We were all dressed and sitting in the bus. Buzzie said he was going inside to pick up the check. All of a sudden, we heard Buzzie and their manager fighting. We went in and broke it up. We found out later that their manager” had used a racial slur when he told Bavasi, ” ‘Without those two [black players], you wouldn’t have won.’ Buzzie went after him.”

In 1947, he was summoned to work for the Dodgers, and one of his duties was to scout the Vero Beach Army base that became Dodgertown and hammer out an agreement with the city. Bavasi then spent three years as the Montreal Royals’ GM before being named to the Dodger post in late 1950. As the club’s GM, he was well known for both his tight purse strings and his paternal attitude towards players:

I always had a warm feeling of gratitude toward Buzzie because he took a chance on bringing me up from the minors after eight years. He stuck by me,” former Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills said Thursday. “He had a way of getting me to play hard without paying me a lot of money.”

One of Bavasi’s favorite ploys was to draw up a phony contract in the name of a player coming off an excellent season and type in an artificially low salary. When another player who wasn’t as good came into his office to negotiate, Bavasi would leave the phony contract on his desk, then excuse himself from the room. The player inevitably would take a peek at the contract, read the low-ball salary and back down in his own negotiations when Bavasi would return to the room.

Bavasi took pride in his ability to operate on a budget, but as the Dodgers’ success took its toll on their payroll, he met something of a personal Waterloo when he presided over the dual holdout of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the spring of 1966, a year which wound up being the final season of Koufax’s career and the Dodgers’ last pennant until 1974. As Bavasi recounted in Sports Illustrated in 1967:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t too successful in the famous Koufax-Drysdale double holdout in 1966. I mean, when the smoke had cleared they stood together on the battlefield with $235,000 between them, and I stood there With a blood-stained cashbox. Well, they had a gimmick and it worked; I’m not denying it. They said that one wouldn’t sign unless the other signed. Since one of the two was the greatest pitcher I’ve ever seen (and possibly the greatest anybody has ever seen), the gimmick worked. But be sure to stick around for the fun the next time somebody tries that gimmick. I don’t care if the whole infield comes in as a package; the next year the whole infield will be wondering what it is doing playing for the Nankai Hawks.

…The double holdout started on February 26, 1966, when spring training opened and Sandy and Donald didn’t show. It looked in the papers as though they had made a big salary demand on the club and the club had turned them down. But it wasn’t that simple. Being three good friends, as I hope we still are, Donald and Sandy and I had met and talked things over. In the first meeting, right after the 1965 season, we got no place. We sat down in my office at Dodger stadium and they said they had an agent—Sandy’s lawyer, Bill Hayes—and that they wanted a three-year no-cut contract totaling $1 million and that neither one would sign unless both were satisfied. I told them I would negotiate only with them, that any discussions they had with their agent were their own business but please keep him away from me, that the amount of money they were asking was ridiculous, and that nobody on the ball club, including me and Walter Alston, was ever going to get more than a one-year contract. As I recall, I said something like, “You’re both athletes, and what you’re selling is your physical ability, and how can you guarantee your physical ability three years in advance? If you guarantee me that you will both be healthy and strong and still winning 20 games each in 1968, I’ll give you a three-year contract.” Since not even Cassius Clay could make a guarantee like that, the meeting broke up. But there was plenty of time; this was only October, the World Series was barely over and I was in no rush to get them signed, especially at their asking price of $166,000 per year apiece. From the beginning I was willing to give them raises on their 1965 salary, which were $80,000 for Don and $85,000 for Sandy. I had it penciled into my budget: $100,000, more or less, for Sandy, and $90,000, more or less, for Donald.

…The double holdout was over, but I can’t say that I felt good about it. We wound up giving the boys much more money than we had intended, and if you had to pick a winner in the whole argument, you’d have to say it was Drysdale and Koufax. Donald got a $30,000 raise and Sandy got a $40,000 raise, and neither would have commanded that much money negotiating alone. After all, they got the biggest raises in baseball history. To that extent, the double holdout worked, although they gave in on the three-year contract for $1 million, which I don’t think they ever meant, anyway. But, as I said before, the plan only worked because the greatest pitcher in baseball was in on it, and also they caught us by surprise. Believe me, Walter O’Malley and I have talked the problem over many times, and no double holdout will ever work again on the Los Angeles Dodgers. We’re firm on that. The next time two of them come walking in together, they’ll go walking out together. Koufax and Drysdale took advantage of a good thing, that’s one way to look at it, and another way to look at it is, why shouldn’t they? All’s fair in negotiating, as I have also said before. This was a unique situation, and it will never happen again.

Anyway, the double holdout didn’t cost the ball club quite as much as the figures would seem to indicate. In the first place, I had anticipated the possibility of having to come up with high figures for Don and Sandy, especially after the season they had had, and therefore I had not been quite as generous with some of the other players as I might have been. I don’t mean I cut anybody just to get money to pay the two pitchers. It worked more like this: let’s say a kid comes into my office and I’ve got him penciled in for $27,000, and he sits down and says that he wants $23,000. This happens all the time, believe me, and my natural inclination is to say, “I’ve got you down for $27,000, and that’s what you are going to get.” But not this time. This time if the kid said he’d sign for $23,000 I’d let it go at that, or maybe I’d sign him for a thousand more. The net result was that our 1966 budget for ballplayers went up exactly the $100,000 I had planned on, with Koufax and Drysdale getting $70,000 of the increase and the other 24 guys getting the rest. I’d have liked to give the other players more, but a budget is a budget and I stuck to it.

Full of more than a little bravado, the four-part series offers a revealing window into the tactics of a Reserve Clause-era executive so smug about holding the best cards in the negotiation game that he could afford to lay them on the table for the world to see. These fascinating articles — first brought to my attention by Alex Belth, who dug them out of the SI clip library for me a couple years back — are now fully available online via the recently debuted SI Vault :

• May 15, 1967: The Great Holdout

• May 22, 1967: Money Makes the Player Go

• May 29, 1967: They May Have Been A Headache But They Never Were A Bore

• June 5, 1967: The Real Secret Of Trading

After 1968, Bavasi left the Dodgers for the expansion San Diego Padres, where he served as team president and part-owner, but he couldn’t replicate his success, as the team finished in the NL West cellar for its first six years. The Padres’ fate improved in 1975, as they escaped the basement for the first time, but Bavasi clashed with new owner Ray Kroc and left following the 1977 season.

Angels owner Gene Autry soon hired him to be his team’s executive vice president, and Bavasi oversaw their first division championship in 1979, an accomplishment that was dimmed by the acrimonious departure of Nolan Ryan following the season. The Angels won the AL West again on Bavasi’s watch in 1982, but although he signed big-name free agents such as Don Baylor, Rod Carew, Bobby Grich, Reggie Jackson and Fred Lynn, he struggled to adjust to the GM’s loss of leverage in the post-Reserve Clause era, traded far too much of the Angels’ young talent (Willie Mays Aikens, Tom Brunansky, Brian Harper, Carney Lansford, Rance Mulliniks, Dickie Thon…) and retired in 1984. Two of his sons, Peter and Bill, became GMs at the major league level, though neither has come close to filling their father’s shoes; the latter is currently the Seattle Mariners’ GM.

Bavasi remained lucid and communicative well into his later years; both Biz of Baseball domo Maury Brown and New York Times columnist Dave Anderson recount their correspondences with him in recent articles. The Times also carries the inevitable obit, and there’s another worthwhile one over at MLB.com.

Update: The San Diego Union-Tribune obit is worth a read as well, particularly for the sidebar of short, colorful stories: “Don Zimmer said ‘Play me or trade me.’ We played him, and now we can’t trade him.”

Clearing the Bases — Late Friday Dead Horse Flog Edition

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• God, what a wretched week for the Yankees. As summarized in this week’s Hit List.

Big Hurts: the Yankees lose Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, Brian Bruney and Philip Hughes to injuries in the same week. Both Posada and A-Rod are gone after wavering between the bench and the lineup, likely prolonging their absence, and while some question the validity of Hughes’ injury — particularly in light of dubiously timed reports of his night vision woes — the latest word is that a stress fracture of his ninth rib may sideline him until July. Adding insult to this spate of injuries, the team is swept by the Tigers in their return to the Bronx following a record 18 road games in April — 18 in a 20-game span, no less.

I’m not sure if it was Peter Abraham who technically broke the story on Hughes, but in the wake of Will Carroll’s “Ferris Buehler comparisons in yesterday’s “Under the Knife,” he was the first I saw, and he’s consistently the fastest gun on the Yankee beat when it comes to this type of news. If you’re a Yankee fan and not stopping by his blog on a daily basis, go get a late pass.

• Via Pete, here’s a good piece by the New York Daily News‘ media critic Bob Raissman on Joe Girardi’s media management skills. Like predecessor Joe Torre, Girardi has experience in the broadcasting booth as well as the dugout, so he understands what it’s like to be dishing out the questions. In light of this, many thought he’d be similarly deft at handling the media, but in his short time as Yankee skipper, he’s proven himself to be a different beast. Where Torre gave the impression of complete openness, Girardi hoards information on things like reliever availability — which is acceptable, tactically — and often feeds reporters disinformation when it comes to injuries, disinformation that quickly winds up looking stupid when the front office reports that one of his players has been placed on the DL. Here’s Raismann about the Hughes affair:

The honeymoon is officially over.

It ended before Wednesday night’s Yankees-Tigers game. While meeting with boss scribes that afternoon, a reporter asked Girardi about the status of Phil Hughes. Girardi answered by saying Hughes’ situation was the subject of “internal discussions.”

“That’s all I will say,” Girardi explained.

The same reporter then asked if Hughes was still in the rotation. Girardi said, “Yes.”

Another scribe asked if that meant Hughes would make his next start. Girardi answered by saying, “I just said” Hughes was in the rotation. The same scribe then said, “That’s not what I asked you, I asked if he’s going to make his next start.”

Girardi repeated his “internal discussions line” and said: “That’s just the way it is….I don’t mean to get irritated, but I’ve been asked the same question five times.”

The reporter said he wasn’t “asking that” and – again – wanted to know if Hughes was going to make his next start. At that point a Yankees PR executive scolded the reporter and cut the session off, prompting the scribe – in full lecture mode – to remind the suit it wasn’t his job to tell him how to “ask my questions.”

“The ending (of Girardi’s interview) may have seemed somewhat comical, but the whole session was tense,” one participant said.

Torre would never have let things get that far out of hand. He would have admitted there was a problem with Hughes that the brass hasn’t yet figured out how to deal with. Either that, or Torre would have said Hughes felt a “twinge” the other day, which may have something do to with his poor pitching performance. He then would have said either way, we’re going to put Hughes on the DL, but go talk to “Cash” for the details.

Yeesh. I’ll be surprised if he makes it through two seasons here.

• Bob Costas is on the damage control trail in the wake of Tuesday’s debacle. Via Joe Posnanski (hilarious in his own take on dodging the bullet of appearing on that “Costas Now” segment), here’s an interview with Costas by Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart, who had already written a very good take (emphasis in original):

TV Barn: So, do you agree with Will Leitch that MSM-blogger relations were irreparably harmed by that exchange on your show?

Bob Costas: No. No. Buzz realizes that he did a disservice to his own points. On the other hand, if fairness prevails — which on the web it often doesn’t because people are coming after whoever the villain-of-the-day is with torches and pitchforks — but if fairness prevails, you keep in mind who he is and that more than outweighs a subpar performance on his part.

The heat he brought to it obscured whatever points he made. And then some people made the leap that because I am critical of some — precisely SOME aspects of the web — that my sentiments are the same as Buzz’s. And they’re not.

It’s convenient, and in this case Buzz handed it to them on a silver platter, it’s convenient and self-flattering for some members of the blogosphere to think any and all objections to them come because mainstream media people are threatened by them.

While there is unquestionably a new media revolution going on, and much of it is good, the part — speaking for myself, the only part, the ONLY part — of which I am critical, is that there is an ethos on a significant portion of the web, an ethos not of criticism or skepticism or a contrarian viewpoint. There is an ethos of abuse, where not only is cogent thought not required, it’s almost resented. Where a reasonable argument has no place and where ad hominem attacks reign. That is not all or even most of the web, but no fair-minded person would say that isn’t a significant portion of it. That’s my criticism.

Gotta call bullshit here. If you go to the barber every day, then you’ll eventually get a haircut, and if all you read is Deadspin — a site where the comments often go way overboard — you’re going to wind up thinking that blogs are basically abusive by nature. But there are a number of sites that do a great job of filtering out the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant, sites like Baseball Think Factory and Ballbug and dozens of good blogs that will point you to other good blogs as well as good mainstream articles as well. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure that out or to gain a knack for filtering it your own damn self via the RSS news readers at Yahoo, Google, or a million other places.

To read Costas’ reply, particularly the bolded part of the statement which echoes Buzz Bissinger’s opening salvo, only reinforces the notion that Tuesday’s confrontation was a setup, with Costas clearly reaching for controversy instead of conversation. He had a chance to make a clear distinction between quality blogging and crap, and instead he created a situation where folding metal chairs across somebody’s skull wouldn’t have been out of place. We all had a right to expect better from him.

• As for Bissinger, not so much. Salon’s King Kaufman runs down his sordid history:

Interrupting as usual — because as the defender of literature and higher learning whatever he had to say was, like, way more important than what anybody else had to say — [Bissinger] told Leitch, “You say you don’t want to be in the press box because the facts get in the way,” which isn’t even close to what Leitch had said. What Leitch had said was that he declined to apply for press access because “the minute I start doing that, I start writing for the other people in the press box … I get a lot of benefit from having that distance.”

But let’s not let facts get in the way, right, Buzz?

“It seems to me,” Bissinger continued, “what you’re saying is, ‘I don’t want facts to inhibit me. Facts get in my way, so I’m going to sit in my little room and I’m going to give this nebulous fan’s voice.'”

Pretty rich coming from a guy who sometimes — for instance, in this very comment — takes only a nodding interest in facts. Here, courtesy of FireJoeMorgan.com, are links to a bunch of smart people finding fundamental errors in a piece Bissinger wrote for the New York Times magazine Play last year about Kerry Wood.

He’d have found them himself if he’d bothered to do a little research instead of just transcribing the thoughts of Tony La Russa and other baseball men, as he’d done for his book “Three Nights in August” two years earlier.

…Bissinger is big on boneheaded generalizations about people who are younger than he is, which is 53. In “Three Nights in August,” he wrote that the sabermetric movement had populated baseball front offices with “thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees.”

“It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn’t care about baseball,” he wrote. “But it’s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don’t have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk.”

If by “it’s not wrong,” he meant “it’s absolutely 100 percent gold-plated wrong,” then I’d agree.

Funny, while Costas tried to apologize on Bissinger’s behalf, Buzz himself has been strangely silent. Hallelujah to that.

Update: Dodger Thoughts’ Jon Weisman alerts me to this summary of a post-melee Bissinger appearance on Dan Le Batard’s radio show. Bissinger comes off as embarrassed by his own conduct and lack of professionalism but hardly conciliatory towards the medium he dismissed outright:

There were some things I should not have said. I shouldn’t have used profanity, I shouldn’t have been as hostile in my approach to Will Leitch, ’cause it makes me look bad, its unprofessional and its unfair to him … I don’t care if it’s Will Leitch or anyone, no one should be treated the way I treated them. Just wasn’t right.

…I don’t take back a word of what I said. I have a tremendous amount of problems with blogs. It doesn’t mean all blogs are bad. It doesn’t mean I’m against free speech, because I’m not.

…The reason for it was is that I really care about this passionately, because, you know, I think blogs are a threat, not a threat to old school, it’s not a threat to M-M-S’es, as they call it, the mainstream media, it’s a threat to writing and reporting, which is what I’ve done for 40 years and what many people have done better than me.

It’s not all just about what flies into your head, and let’s, you know, put it down, and let’s be nasty and mean-spirited and hope we get as many posts and comments as we can so traffic increases and then, bingo-bango, we make some money. That’s not what it’s about.

As somebody who’s blogged for nearly seven years without making more than a few bucks to keep this endeavor self-sustaining — something I share with a great majority of blogs out there — I can agree with this clueless, self-important schmuck on one thing: that’s not what it’s about. Unfortunately, until Buzz Bissinger does figure out what it is about, he’s welcome to the ignominy guaranteed by the eternal preservation of his shameful performance. Every time that “Costas Now” clip repeats or those spiteful words are read, the joke will be on him.

So he’s got that going for him.

Hit and Run

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“I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty.”
– Honest Buzz Bissinger, best-selling author on “Costas Now”

That blanket statement was the opening salvo fired on behalf of Tired Old Media on Tuesday night’s “Costas Now” segment devoted to The Way Those Big Mean Bloggers Are Destroying Journalism. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Bissinger began by telling Deadspin’s Will Leitch, “I really think you’re full of shit,” a not-unreasonable allegation that nonetheless instantly lowered the terms of the debate in a way that made one pine for the civility and reverence of the recent Democratic Presidential candidate tête-à-tête.

It’s tough to claim the moral high ground for tone when you’re flecked with spittle and spewing obscenities on cable TV, telling us how blogging “really pisses the shit out of” you, as Bissinger did. Dishonesty? How about the intellectual dishonesty of picking one post from one blog and using it to dismiss an entire medium, a responsibility that’s borne in part by Bob Costas for narrowing the focus on the medium down to a single, controversial site. As Fire Joe Morgan inimitably put it, that’s akin to “picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, ‘This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy — your medium is worthless!'”

Having recently said my piece about these battle lines, I don’t have much else to add to the fray except a pointer to the always-thoughtful Jon Weisman’s column on this melee, another pair of pointers to Bissinger’s own dishonesty, and my own dedicated bit of cruelty in recommending that ol’ Buzz have a scalding cup of my favorite beverage poured into his lap. Good grief, what a raging, unprofessional assclown.

• • •

From today’s Prospectus Hit and Run:

During last Friday’s chat, I was treated to a heaping helping of Hall of Fame-related questions, including a few that I didn’t have time or space to answer. In light of a few recent milestones and some hot- and cold-running starts, I though it might be a good time to devote a column to the JAWS cases of these players, who form the core of the most frequently inquired about among my readers.

In the piece, I took a look at four “Cooperstown Cases” covering eight active players: a trio of pitchers (John Smoltz, Mike Mussina, and Curt Schilling), two relif aces (Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman), a pair of sluggers (Frank Thomas and Jim Thome) and, in a class by himself, Chipper Jones. Here’s the part about Smoltz and Mussina, with a look at the rankings of the active pitchers (with you-know-who still considered active):

Pitcher         Career   Peak    JAWS
Roger Clemens    199.6   83.9   141.8
Greg Maddux      180.3   86.0   133.2
Randy Johnson    147.0   77.3   112.2
Tom Glavine      137.4   63.7   100.6
Pedro Martinez   118.0   68.8    93.4
Mike Mussina     117.8   64.3    91.1
John Smoltz      122.8   58.5    90.7
Curt Schilling   110.3   65.9    88.1
Avg HoF SP       106.0   67.2    86.6

Among this group, Maddux and Glavine are locks for the Hall thanks to their 300+ wins and their assorted hardware. One question that I get asked often, both by fellow analysts and by readers, is whether their longtime rotation-mate Smoltz will be joining them. Last week, Smoltz whiffed his 3,000th hitter, becoming just the 16th pitcher to do so–an impressive feat even given the high-strikeout environment of this era, and one that places him in the company of every other pitcher listed above except for Glavine and Mussina. While he won’t reach 300 wins (he’s got 210), it’s important to remember that Smoltz spent four years working primarily as a closer, saving 154 games but notching just six wins from 2001-2004. He’s got a very solid case with respect to his other traditional merits, one that includes a Cy Young award, eight All-Star selections, a crucial role on a team that’s won 13 division titles, five pennants, and a World Championship, and a stellar post-season record — 15-4 with four saves, a 2.65 ERA, and 194 strikeouts in 207 innings. Hell, that’s a season’s worth of work these days, one that would set a career best for ERA while as a starter.

Turning to his JAWS, from a peak standpoint, Smoltz falls a bit short of the average Hall of Fame starter, but he more than makes up for it with his longevity. Lest there be any suggestion that he’s simply padding his stats, it’s worth noting that his 336 Pitching Runs Above Average and 1263 Pitching Runs Above Replacement blow past the Hall of Fame averages of 279 and 1099; this isn’t Tommy John we’re talking about. Smoltz ought to be considered a surefire Hall of Famer at this juncture.

Not that he needs them to cement his Hall of Fame case — five Cys and the third spot on the all-time strikeout list ought to suffice — but unless the Big Unit can eke out another 15 wins, it will be a while before another pitcher joins the 300 Win Club. Mussina (253 wins) is the next closest pitcher, and one of only three (along with Pedro Martinez at 209 and Andy Pettitte at 204) who have over 200 wins and are still under 40 years old.

At 39 and now reduced to employing a fastball that wouldn’t get ticketed in a school zone, it’s a safe bet that the Moose isn’t going to become a member of the club. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have Hall-worthy numbers, at least from a JAWS standpoint. As with Smoltz but to a lesser extent on both scales, Mussina’s ahead on career and short on peak numbers, with PRAR and PRAA numbers (284 and 1221, respectively) that also surpass the benchmarks. What Mussina doesn’t have going for him, particularly relative to Smoltz, is the hardware which will augment his much more traditional case: no World Series ring, no Cy Young, no 20-win season (he’s had 18 or 19 five times) and “only” five All-Star appearances. His post-season record is “just” 7-8, albeit with a 3.42 ERA and 145 strikeouts in 139 2/3 innings; the fact that his teams have scored just 3.2 runs per game for him is a big reason, and certainly hasn’t helped his quest for a ring.

In Mussina’s favor is a long stretch in which he could lay claim to being one of the league’s best pitchers; he finished in the top five of the Cy voting six times from 1992 to 2001, with two sixth-place finishes as well, and has eight top five finishes in ERA, and eight top 10 finishes in strikeouts. While not the equal of Clemens, Johnson, or Martinez, he was one of the league’s top-shelf hurlers for a good long time. He’s probably facing a tooth-and-nail fight, but it ought to turn out in his favor.

As with most things JAWS, it’s a pretty long piece — I do tend to jaw on such matters.

This Wasn’t the Cold One I Had in Mind

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Sat through another chilly night at Yankee Stadium last night, watching the Yankees fall to the Tigers 6-4 in a game they should have won. Even with Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada on the sidelines, they had more than their share of opportunities against a team that has thus far fallen every bit as short of expectations as the Yankees have. Not that the Tigers haven’t been playing decent ball recently; since starting the season 2-10, their offense had put up 6.9 runs per game as they won nine of 14. But their pitching remains a problem; of their five starters, three have more walks than strikeouts, with ace Justin Verlander not far off that unhealthy balance as well. Kenny Rogers came into the game sporting a 7.66 ERA and the burden of having not earned a regular-season win against the pinstripes since 1993.

Yankee starter Philip Hughes — who wasn’t even born when Rogers was drafted — offered no sure thing either, and unfortunately for the makeshift lineup, provided little support. Hughes put the Yankees in a 2-0 hole right off the bat, walking Curtis Granderson on seven pitches, yielding a single to Placido Polanco, advancing both runners on a wild pitch, and surrendering a two-run single to Magglio Ordonez. That last hit was a frustrating one; Johnny Damon was playing center field, and lacking the speed and throwing arm of Melky Cabrera could neither get to the ball in time nor make a credible cutoff throw to limit the damage.

The Yanks tied up the game in the bottom of the second on a two-run homer by Robinson Cano, just one pitch after I noted that the kid hadn’t gone yard while in the lineup, only as a pinch-hitter. Hughes couldn’t keep the account square; he surrendered a solo homer to Granderson to lead off the inning and a two-run shot to Gary Sheffield following a Polanco double and another wild pitch. Catcher Chris Stewart, the fourth backstop to whom Hughes has thrown this year, was brutal behind the plate, and no Chad Moeller with the stick either; if the Yanks are going to be without Posada for awhile, they at least need defensively sound work back there. Half a dozen guys at the bus station could have done a better job than he did in his Yankee debut. Today’s New York Times writeup notes that he and Hughes weren’t on the same page:

If Hughes ever doubted that, he does not now. Hughes explained how he had no command of his fastball, so he resorted to throwing breaking balls. He also said that he and catcher Chris Stewart, who made his debut as a Yankee, had communication problems. Hughes called that “inexcusable,” a word that could define his entire outing.

When they make you pine for the halcyon days of the Moleman…

Granderson figured in the coup de grâce for Hughes the next inning, lashing a two-out double to deep left center field — a ball Damon might have flagged down but Hideki Matsui could not — and then scored on a Polanco single. That chased Hughes, whose ugly line for the night tallied 3.1 innings, 8 hits, 6 runs, 3 walks, 2 K’s, his third disaster start out of four. Suddenly, he’s in jeopardy of losing his rotation spot, and rightly so; he looks as through he needs a stint in Scranton to iron things out. Anyway, he departed to a smattering of boos — yes, the wormy Yankee crowd has already turned on him — in favor of another rookie, Ross Ohlendorf. We had little optimism upon seeing the Dorf, who had yielded eight runs n his last four appearances, but he held the Tigers to one hit and one walk while striking out five over 3.1 innings.

Not that the Yanks could do much about it. Though Rogers struggled with the strike zone, walking the bases loaded with two outs in the third, the Yankees just couldn’t come up with the big hit when they need to. Reliever Denny Bautista walked the bases loaded as well in the eighth, then plunked Derek Jeter to force in a run, but sidearmer Clay Rapada needed only two pitches to get Bobby Abreu to bounce into an inning-ending force play.

The Yankees had their chances in the ninth as well. Facing Todd Jones, whose best days are behind him, they netted a quick run on a Matsui walk, a wild pitch, and a Jason Giambi single, bringing the tying run to the plate with no outs as the sparse remainder of the crowd came alive. Alas, perhaps determined to round off the night’s Left On Base total at an unlucky 13, the Yanks went gently into that not-so-good night, making the final three outs in a five-pitch span. Shelley Duncan, who’d doubled and drawn three walks in what was otherwise a good demonstration of his lefty-mashing skillz, hit into a fielder’s choice on Jones’ first pitch, and Morgan Ensberg, who figures to be the regular at third base while A-Rod is on the DL, grounded out on the first pitch as well. Cano went down 1-2-3 like he had a plane to catch, and that was that. Yuck.

Update: Could it be that Hughes can’t stand the glare of the spotlight? According to a New York Post article, Hughes has difficulty seeing at night:

Joe Girardi revealed after the Tigers’ 6-4 victory over the Yankees that Hughes has some difficulty seeing at night, especially at Yankee Stadium. Hughes and GM Brian Cashman both confirmed the problem, but no one was quick with a remedy.

“At night things get blurry,” Hughes said.

…”His night vision isn’t great,” Girardi said. “It is something we will have to talk about.”

Hughes said he has been checked several times and that he has “perfect vision.” He said his troubles come from the glare of particularly strong lights at night, which he finds problematic at Yankee Stadium. He said there has been some talk in the past of outfitting him with neon glasses to counteract the glare.

I’m not buying this rather poorly-timed excuse. Hughes’ ERA at night for his limited big-league career is 4.94 in 71 innings, whereas in the day it’s 7.23 in 23.2 innings. Night vision problems didn’t seem to bother him when he made that no-hit bid against Texas last year, nor in his first outing of the year against the Blue Jays, his best start of this young season. Hell, it was still daylight when he got the tar wailed out of him by Granderrson and Sheffield.

I hate to sound like a hardass, but for this to suddenly be the explanation for Hughes’ problems doesn’t ring true, and even if it is true, it reflects poorly on the pitcher and the team for going even this long without taking the appropriate steps without this becoming a spectacle. Lame, lame, lame.

Update 2: the Moleman Returneth! Laments Peter Abraham, “A team with a $209 million payroll praying that nobody claims Chad Moeller. Amazing.”

Chatterbox

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In Friday’s XM Radio appearance on the Rotowire Fantasy Sports Hour, host Chris Liss and I discussed my “Big Lugs and Small Sample Sizes” piece from earlier in the week. Chris threw me for a loop with the entry of Carlos Delgado into the discussion; as noted in this week’s Hit List, I’m pretty down on him:

The Skinny: Though he’s snapped a 1-for-28 skid, Carlos Delgado has fallen below the Mendoza Line; he’s hitting just .198/.290/.272 with the lowest VORP on the team and the fourth lowest of any first baseman with at least 60 PA. Sadly, this isn’t a new problem for Delgado. He was in the bottom third among NL first basemen last year, and it’s increasingly likely that his days as a middle-of-the-lineup threat may be at an end.

Chris and I more or less disagreed over whether Delgado was able to salvage his 2007 season. His splits show that he hit a lousy .242/.305/.435 in the first half, albeit with 14 homers and 49 RBI, whereas in the second half, when not missing three weeks due to injuries, he hit .285/.375/.469 with 10 homers and 38 RBI — more respectable, but lacking his usual thump (.279/.385/.545 career).

Anyway, you can hear our discussion at Rotowire’s Podcast archive or download directly here.

• • •

A few excerpts from yesterday’s BP chat:

Tommy (OPS,FL): Back when the Rays were shopping Delmon Young there appeared to be some talk of Young for Cliff Lee, but nothing came of it. Knowing what the Rays got in return and Lee’s hot start which deal would have been better for the Rays?

JJ: Long-term, I’d still take Matt Garza over Cliff Lee, and it wouldn’t cost me a moment of sleep.

Rany Jazayerli has a great Unfiltered post about Lee’s hot start, a post that includes a note form Joe Sheehan regarding the quality of competition Lee has faced: “A’s twice, Twins, Royals. Ninth, 13th and 14th in the AL in EqA.” Right now Lee is living off a .151 BABIP, and that’s not going to last forever by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, sooner or later he’s going to have to face some competent lineups, and when he does, you can expect his ERA to get fluffed up. The bottom line is that I don’t expect him to be a significantly better pitcher than the mid-rotation inning eater who surprised us with his bellyflop last year.

Fred (Houston): Is Sheffield headed for the Hall of Very Good? It doesn’t seem like he’s made many friends in the media over the years.

JJ: Are you kidding? If there’s been one consistent facet of Sheffield’s career, its that he’ll talk to the media and is almost guaranteed to say something that will stir the pot and give the writer some high profile attention. Writers bash Barry Bonds for not cooperating. They don’t bash Gary Sheffield for speaking his mind, however ill-considered his words may sometimes be.

From a JAWS standpoint, Sheffield came into the year at 117.2 WARP career, 63.5 peak, 90.4 JAWS, with the average HOF right fielder at 125.0/68.7/96.8. I think he’ll be a close call, because right now its not at all clear he can stay healthy enough to pass 500 homers (he’s at 481), and there will be some who will hold his involvement in BALCO against him.

tommybones (new york): Is there a point in a borderline HOF career where the player is better off retiring than padding counting stats at the expense of pct. stats and reputation? I’m looking at Mike Mussina right now.

JJ: Sheffield seems to be a better answer to this than the Moose, whose numbers are well over the JAWS threshold (117.8/64.3/91.1 compared to 105.7/67.5/86.6 for the average HOF P) even if the perception lags behind. To me, I think we’ve seen enough great pitchers dragged off the mound kicking and screaming, having milked every last ounce of their ability for anyone’s perceptions to be damaged by those final, futile days.

Which reminds me, for some reason, of one of the classiest thing I ever saw on a diamond. When Orel Hershiser tried to eke one last year out of his career with the Dodgers, he got knocked around pretty consistently, culminating in an eight-run, 1.2-inning bombing. Rather than boo him, the Dodger Stadium crowd picked up on the fact that the end of the line had arrived for Hershiser, and gave him an incredible standing ovation.

I think I have something in my eye…

bam022 (Chicago): Can you think of any analogue to Justin Upton’s performance right now. A-Rod was similarly dominant at age 20, but other than him, does this have any parallel?

JJ: Tony Conigliaro hit 24 homers and .290/.354/.530 for the 1964 Red Sox as a 19 year old, which is pretty much the gold standard for teenage success for a hitter. Mel Ott (.322/.397/.524, 16 HR) also had a great Age 19 season. Those two would be a good start.

Homers aren’t the only way to look at this obviously, but rather than worry about the number of plate appearances, I just did a quick list of the best single season hitter performances ranked by homers at B-Ref [here].

After enduring a half-hour delay at the start due to technical difficulties, I think I answered about 30 questions. I still had a lot of JAWS-related questions left over, enough to build a Hit and Run column around sometime soon. Anyway, it was lot of fun, as always, to spend a couple hours talking baseball with BP’s readers.

Bullets for a Busy Day

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Busy day:

• A Prospectus Hit List to go with Wednesday’s Hit and Run piece on struggling rotations, with special focus on the current Tigers and the historically awful Rangers, with an aside about the Yankees’ failure to get innings from their starting five (5.07 per start).

• a spot on the Rotowire Fantasy Sports Hour with Chris Liss, XM 144 at 2:25 PM Eastern

• a 3 PM Eastern chat at Baseball Prospectus. Drop by and submit a question if you care to.

• Meanwhile, one article to recommend, today’s freebie at BP. In it, Nate Silver aims a bullet at Bill James’ recent, baseless allegations that steroid usage played a part in the development of Gary Gaetti and Kirby Puckett and their subsequent success in helping the Twins to a pair of unlikely world championships. James’ comments come in his latest book The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, and as offhanded as they may have been intended, the fact that someone with his stature would stoop to the realm of the fingerpointers is a dark, dark day for baseball and for those of us who hold his legacy dear. I’d already decided I was in no hurry to buy the Gold Mine — Steven Goldman bought one while we were on our promotional tour and we chewed on some of its rather pedestrian offerings — and that sealed the deal.

• Drawing mention in Silver’s piece is David Ortiz, as a victim of the old eyeball test for steroid stoppage, a statement that’s a reliable litmus test to determine whether the person you’re talking baseball with is a blithering idiot. Big Papi should have been part of my “Big Lugs and Small Sample Sizes” entry, now that I think about it. Ortiz started the season 3-for-43 since then has hit a considerably more robust .298/.377/.532, with 14 hits in his list 11 games. It’s a coincidence that the turnaround almost exactly coincides with the excavation of a an Ortiz jersey buried in the bowels of the new Yankee Stadium. Probably.

Big Lugs and Small Sample Sizes

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Watching Tuesday night’s Yankees-White Sox game in an attempt to keep my mind off the Pennyslvania Democractic primary results, I saw Jason Giambi homer to left field in the second inning. Giambi came into the game hitting .109/.288/.283 in 46 at-bats, and more ominously, just .174/.323/.366 in 213 at-bats going back to last May 1. In the wake of Frank Thomas’ unceremonious release from the Blue Jays, Steven Goldman floated the idea in today’s New York Sun that it may be time for the Yankees to cut ties with the 37-year-old 1B/DH, who’s in the final year of his seven-year, $120 million deal. The Blue Jays cut Thomas while owing him $8 million, but Giambi’s contract is an even bigger pill to swallow; he’s owed $21 million for this year plus a $5 million buyout for next year.

I’m not buying it, at least not just yet. It’s unlikely the Yanks can find a trade partner to take Giambi off their hands even if they pay virtually every red cent of his deal AND convince Giambi to waive his no-trade clause. His results last year were skewed by the plantar fascitis woes which cost him two months and limited his availability; thus far this season there’s no reason to believe he’s in anything but a slump, as opposed to dealing with yet another injury. The Yanks aren’t so desperate for a roster spot that it makes sense to cut him just for the sake of cutting him. Now, if Jorge Posada were to get to the point where he could hit but couldn’t catch, I could understand, because his bat has far more life in it than does Giambi’s. But Posada is back behind the plate tonight, so his arrow is at least momentarily moving in the other direction.

There may be something to the fact that Giambi homered to left; on the YES telecast, Michael Kay and Paul O’Neill spent a bit of time talking about his work with Yankee hitting coach Kevin Long and how he needed to return to going the other way. It’s no secret that since coming to the Yankees, and particularly since 2003, Giambi has gotten away from his ability to hit to the opposite field; that’s what the infield shift and his declining batting averages are all about. According to the data at Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index, the percentage of Giambi’s homers that go to left field or left center is less than half of what it was during his Oakland heyday: 

            LHR   Tot   Pct
Career       46   367   12.5

Oak (95-00)  28   187   15.0
NYY (01-08)  18   180   10.0

2001-2003    13    94   13.9
Since 2004    5    86    5.8

Obviously, the asymmetry of Yankee Stadium and the way it favors lefties (318-399-408-385-314) has something to do with that change; by comparison, the Oakland Coliseum was a more symmetrical 330-362-400-362-330. But as the last breakdown shows, this is something that’s gotten more pronounced during his Yankee tenure, suggesting that it’s more a function of choice or habit to focus on puling the ball to right field, than anything else. If he can’t break out of that cycle — and it’s not just homers; O’Neill was incredulous that Giambi doesn’t just take his pokes to the left side of the infield — his career will continue its downward spiral. For the sake of the 2008 Yankees, here’s hoping tonight’s homer plants the seed for what he needs to do.

Update: good stuff at Replacement Level Yankees Blog on Giambi’s lousy batting average on balls in play.

• • •

Regarding Thomas, Joe Sheehan appropriately savaged the move over at Baseball Prospectus:

So, as you read the coverage of the Jays’ decision to release Thomas yesterday, on the heels of their decision last week to reduce his playing time, remember that the “slow start” being cited as justification isn’t a slow start at all. It’s a slump that lasted all of 10 games, beginning April 9 against the A’s. Thomas was hitting .240/.296/.640 a week into the 2008 season, which is the kind of awkward line you get when you have 27 plate appearances, but it’s nonetheless productive. In the subsequent nine games, Thomas was awful: 4-for-35 with no extra-base hits and 10 walks.

There were any number of ways the Blue Jays could have handled this. They could have given Thomas a day or two off, diddled with his spot in the lineup, put him into a platoon with Matt Stairs for a week or two, kept everything quiet and private. No, the Blue Jays had to turn it into a project, telling Thomas that he would be playing less, which invited Thomas to question their motivations. After all, Thomas is a bit more than 300 plate appearances shy of vesting his 2010 option for $10 million, and has already lost one contract to the invocation of a “diminished skills” clause. He would, justifiably, see this as an attempt to take money out of his pocket rather than a baseball decision.

Whether motivated by baseball or money, the Jays released their DH and #5 hitter based on a 10-game slump. Thomas was unquestionably awful over the last two weeks. If only there were evidence of him emerging from similar early-season stretches to be productive over the course of a season. It’s not like he hit .097/.243/.129 in a stretch of 37 PA last April, then went on to hit .285/.382/.500 afterwards. No, wait, that happened. Of course, that’s another small sample size. It’d be something else if, in 72 PA, he hit .154/.236/.323. That would be meaningful. He could never come back from that and hit .289/.403/.575 the rest of the way. What? He did that in 2006? Boy, I don’t know. Keep reading things like this, and you’d think that stretches of ineffectiveness weren’t all that meaningful when put up against Thomas’ career. But that would mean the Blue Jays had made a bad baseball decision, and that doesn’t seem…. No, wait.

It would be one thing if the Blue Jays were so larded with talent that they had to create space for it, and this was the only way to do so. On Saturday, the Blue Jays DH’d Matt Stairs, batted Rod Barajas sixth, and played Joe Inglett in left field. On Sunday, their DH was Barajas, who batted fifth; their left fielder was Marco Scutaro. I give you Jays’ GM J.P. Ricciardi:

I don’t know that we have the luxury of waiting two to three months for somebody to kick in because we can’t let this league or this division get away from us.

Really, now. Well, let me help you along with that, J.P. Rod Barajas is 32 and has a career OBP of .288. I seriously doubt it’s all going to “kick in” for him. Marco Scutaro is 32 and a utility infielder. Not playing him in left field is one good idea if you want to help your club’s offense. Joe Inglett is 30 and might be a serviceable replacement for Scutaro, but is also not suitable for the outfield. These are all the guys who Frank Thomas is too done to play ahead of, based on 10 bad games.

Did I say savaged? There are days I read Joe as a fan rather than a colleague; like editor Christina Kahrl, I eagerly awaited seeing pounce on this petty little decision. Like a lion eating a rabbit (a particularly clueless one so as to better resemble the Toronto GM) — “disembowled” would have been more appropriate. “Eviscerated” maybe. Classic Sheehan stuff.

• • •

Meanwhile, out in Milwaukee, there’s been much made of Prince Fielder’s decision to go vegetarian, not in an effort to slim down his bulky 260+ pound frame but for ethical reasons. Fielder started the season in a slump, and came into last Thursday’s game hitting .224/.350/.286, without a single homer; he bashed 50 last year. By that point, even Brewers fans were begging Prince to go back to carnivory, and the national media was making a fuss. Luckily, Brewers’ beat reporter Anthony Widtrado showed a good grasp of the situation with his piece the day before:

The national media, ESPN in particular, has been all over the topic of Prince Fielder not having any home runs in 45 at-bats. Oof course, people are blaming his vegetarian diet because it’s an easy topic of conversation and makes Prince an easy target after his 50-HR season.

PTI and Around the Horn both had Fielder as subjects, and it amazes me that some people are still thinking that his diet is a way to lose weight and that it is contributing to his lack of home runs. I’m sure the Cardinals don’t feel that way since they completely pitched around the slugger last night.

…Prince is struggling. Period. He isn’t driving the ball because he is not squaring it up on the meat of the bat with any consistency. He’s proven to be a good, patient hitter. His groove will probably come. The guy hit the ball 8 miles last season, so a drop in power won’t mean he can’t hit the ball over the fence. It’ll just mean that instead of hitting balls off the scoreboard, he’ll hit them into the bullpen.

Maybe, if there is a drop in power, and I’m not saying there is because I don’t think that’s the case, it would affect the balls that get to the warning track. But in reality, how many home runs of Prince’s do we remember scraping the back of the wall? Not many.

He plays for a professional baseball franchise, and that franchise has enough money to hire qualified nutritionists to help Prince and all the players with what their bodies need to perform.

Fielder did homer last Thursday, just in time for me to note it in the Hit List, and he’s now up to .250/.386/.368. His diet will continue to draw more scrutiny than merited, and he may not top last year’s monster season, but we should at least wait for a larger sample size before trying to connect the dots between his lack of cheeseburgers and his lack of homers.

The Stadium Within

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With Yankee Stadium II in its final year, the nostalgia is already getting a bit thick, as everybody and their grandmother pens their ode not only to the House that Ruth Built, but to its shabby cousin in Queens, also in its final season. Luckily, some of the stuff is pretty good. The New York Times has a quartet of pieces from its regular columnists that have apparently been up since March 30, but I’ve only just discovered them. Here’s William Rhoden:

Every morning, I look out my bedroom window at two Yankee Stadiums: the old one to my right, the new one to my left. What an awesome sight: looking across the river at the Yankees’ past, present and future. The new stadium is like that freshly purchased baseball glove that requires years of line drives and ground balls to be sufficiently broken in. The old stadium bursts at the seams with collective experiences.

I love that comparison of a glove, perhaps the ballplayer’s most personal item, with a stadium. Both end up showing their wear over time, and become cherished less for what they are, for their ability to still do the job, than for what they’ve represented in the life of a user. Having retired my ancient ball glove last year, one I’ve had since about 1980 in favor of a new one that I’m still getting comfortable in, I can relate. And it’s not only with Yankee Stadium, a ballpark I’ve visited well over 100 times and have come to love, warts and all. Last weekend, showing my brother-in-law around the dump that is Shea Stadium for the first time, I was reminded of the fact that even the lousiest ballparks have a certain soul to them. Seriously, who even among the most ardent Mets fans doesn’t loathe certain facets of that stadium, the sound of La Guardia’s air traffic overhead, the appallingly poorly considered vista of parking lot (now thankfully blocked by the new stadium), the upper-level seats so removed from the field, hell and gone from any shot at snagging a foul ball and askew at angles ridiculous for watching a game? Fan of the Mets or not, if you’ve ever been to Shea, you’re allowed to commiserate with the millions of others who’ve shared that experience.

Ballparks, even da woist of dem, bring people from all walks of life together to create communities, vast civic and regional networks of like-mined fans, with satellites spread all over the country and even the world. Particularly in an age when we’re becoming more and more fragmented, less able to connect on a mass scale, ballparks are the practically the last arenas to help us to form shared memories, and in doing so, even the diviest of dives manage to transcend their own crapulence. Forget the mystique and aura of Yankee Stadium for a moment and think of the miracles that happened at Shea in 1969 and 1986, the unlikelihood of their occurrence and the way they shocked the baseball world, and tell me there won’t be something lost when that park is gone, memories that people pine for in the same manner they pine for the bygone days of Ebbetts Field and the Polo Grounds.

• • •

From the same Times series, here’s George Vescey:

Somehow or other, my other enduring memory is an empty Yankee Stadium on the day of Martin Luther King’s funeral in 1968, not a soul in the house. My friend Jim Bouton felt the need to throw that day, so he pitched off the mound, and I squatted where Berra and Dickey had squatted, using a mitt borrowed from Coach Jim Hegan’s locker. (Hegan used a falsie to protect his hand, but I told Bouton I didn’t need the extra armor.) We dressed in the main clubhouse and used the players’ sauna. The Stadium was stone silent.

After decades of working at the Stadium, the original or the instantly antiquated rebuilt version, I try to see the awe through other people’s eyes — Tony Gwynn taking videos before the 1998 Series, rookies’ eyes widening, fans on a pilgrimage. I think of it as a hard place, with Steinbrenner meanness squashing the humanity in guards, ushers, executives. But I remember “Good friends we had/good friends we lost/Along the way,” as Bob Marley put it — Steve Hamilton, Bill Robinson, Bob Fishel, Michael Burke, some of the finest people I’ve ever known. I think about Mantle’s shot off Barney Schultz in the 1964 Series. And Bob Sheppard’s dignity. In the last generation, an old Brooklyn fan could feel immense respect for Joe Torre’s team.

How appropriate to mention Burke, the man who got the city to pay for Yankee Stadium II’s refurbishments in exchange for the team not bolting for the Meadowlands à la the football Giants. Every time I see Michael Burke‘s name, I think of Baseball Think Factory’s tireless linkmeister, Darren Viola, a/k/a Repoz, who always seems to work anecdotes about the iconoclastic pre-Steinbrenner Yankees president into his introductions at BTF. And that in turn sends me to Repoz’s blotto account of an early-70s doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, published at The Baseball Analysts a few years back. Repoz’s amalgam of bad booze, obscure musical references and futility infielders is an unforgettable one, to say the least.

• • •

On the subject of futility infielders, you’d be hard-pressed to come up one more futile than Duane Kuiper, a man who hit just one homer in 3754 plate appearances between 1974 and 1985. Kuiper was futile enough to merit mention in this site’s original statement of purpose, but I never in my wildest dreams would have claimed him as a favorite. Joe Posnanski, on the other hand…:

People always seem to think that I love Kuiper ironically, or that I’m somehow being a wise guy about this whole thing, but in the words of that noted philosopher Mike Gundy, that ain’t true. I loved Duane Kuiper when I was 10. And I love him now. He has always represented something important to me, something I did not really understand when I was young. Duane Kuiper was the player who brought the game closer. He was the one who said that you don’t have to be supremely gifted and impossibly strong and touched by God in order to get where you want to go. You can also dive for every ground ball. If there’s one lesson I could pass on to my daughters, it would be that lesson. And also that you should not throw your ice cream cone just because you decided today that you don’t like vanilla.

My first memory of Duane Kuiper is not a memory of him at all; it’s a memory of a Little League game where the coach put me at second base for the first time. I was 9 then, I guess, and up that that point I had always played third base, always. I couldn’t really tell you why I always played third — maybe it was my father’s appreciation of Brooks Robinson — but I had gotten used to the position, and my entire view of the field was a third base view. I WAS a third baseman. I was not prepared to move to second base. It confused me. Then my coach said, “You can be just like Duane Kuiper.” In my memory, this appeased me. Duane Kuiper. I had about 28 of his baseball cards.

…When I got older and found that there was a whole other world outside of Cleveland, I started to appreciate that perhaps Duane wasn’t a good ballplayer. It’s funny … I had never really thought about it. I guess I felt about Duane the way I felt about nearsightedness, male pattern baldness and my Uncle Lonka who played the accordion at weddings and bar mitzvahs — I inherited him. I had never really thought to evaluate him. That almost seemed beside the point. He was the second baseman I wanted to be. He was the player who represented what life could become if you wanted it enough. He was the guy who every game made one diving play to send a little kid home with a memory.

Now, of course, I’m well aware that Duane Kuiper — because he hit only one home run in his career, because he was such an unsuccessful baserunner, because he is a funny, gifted and self-effacing announcer — has become a symbol, sort of a Joe Shlabotnik of the disco era, I appreciate that. But that’s not why I love the guy. Read that quote above one more time. When I was a little kid playing baseball in the backyard with my old friend Michael Fainer, we used to pretend to play World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Cincinnati Reds. We both wanted to the be the Indians, of course, being true Cleveland kids, but someone had to be the other team, someone had to be Pete Rose and Johnny Bench and Tony Perez and Don Gullett and, especially, Joe Morgan.

Now that I can relate to. Great stuff.

I’ve got another note on the futilitymen of yore, but as it involved an archaeological dig through some storage boxes stacked five deep, it’s going to have to wait until later this week…

Interminable

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This week’s Hit List was composed amid a hangover of sorts brought on by Wednesday night’s Yankees-Red Sox match, an interminable 15-9 win for the Yanks that lasted four hours and eight minute. Four-hour affairs aren’t really my bag any more — I routinely avoid Yankees-Orioles games like telemarketers phoning at dinner time — and it’s not like a Yanks-Sox matchup needs anything to ratchet up the tension any further. Normally, one consumes beer at a ballgame to enhance the enjoyment, but this one required drinks just to tolerate.

The Yanks jumped out to an early 3-1 lead, as Bobby Abreu hit a two-run homer to right field and Alex Rodriguez immediately followed with a towering solo shot to left, his 522nd of his career, passing Ted Williams and Willie McCovey to move into 15th place on the all-time list. Both shots came at the expense of Clay Buchholz, a highly-touted rookie who threw a no-hitter last September and who wound up battling Joba Chamberlain for the top pitching spot on prospect lists.

Buchholz didn’t have it on Wednesday, but neither did Chien-Ming Wang, who had two-hit the Sox the previous Friday night. Having already surrendered a first-inning run courtesy of a Manny Ramirez double, Wang couldn’t hold the lead, as the Sox added runs in the second and fourth innings to tie the score at three apiece.

It was then that things got crazy. The Yankees broke the tie in the bottom of the fourth via a double by third-string catcher Chad Moeller, recalled from Dunder Mifflin a couple days prior after backup backstop Jose Molina tweaked his hamstring. A nine-year vet with a career line of .224/.284/.346, Moeller is the kind of generic backup catcher you can pick up at the service station just off the interstate. His hit was hard won, the result of an impressive eight-pitch at-bat against Buchholz, and it opened the floodgates. “The Moleman” — my friend Nick’s instant Simpsons-themed nickname for the new catcher — would go on to collect two more hits and a walk on the night. Meanwhile, the Yankees scored three more runs before the inning was out, two on a Derek Jeter single which chased the rookie hurler and a third on a wild pitch by reliever Julian Tavarez.

Wang could do nothing to hold the lead. He fell behind 3-0 on leadoff hitter Dustin Pedroia before allowing a double, and then surrendered four straight singles which cut the score to 7-6 and spelled his early exit. Ross Ohlendorf, a rookie reliever obtained in the Randy Johnson trade last year, came on in relief and made an instant impression by striking out Jason Varitek, but he yielded an RBI single to Sean Casey, the last of seven runs charged to Wang’s room. Ohlendorf found further trouble by walking Jacoby Ellsbury after another strikeout, then surrendering a two-run single to Pedroia — his second hit of the inning — to run the score to 9-7 Boston.

Undeterred, the Bronx Bombers roared back with four more runs in the bottom of the fifth, the first on a Jorge Posada double, the second on a Robinson Cano single, and the last two on a broken play. With the bases loaded, Melky Cabrera grounded to Pedroia at second. He flipped to Julio Lugo for the force, but Lugo’s throw got away from Casey at first, and two runs scored. The outburst completed a stretch where 14 runs scored in the span of eight outs, as the game blew past the two-hour mark and threatened to reach three before the seventh-inning stretch. According to the wire service summaries, the bottom of the fourth lasted 23 minutes, the top of the fifth another 31. Had the Yankees not taken the lead in the bottom of that fram, I might have chewed a limb off to get out of the ballpark.

The Yankees’ LaTroy Hawkins and the Red Sox’s David Aardsma — the nitwit who displaced Hank Aaron atop the game’s all-time alphabetical register — brought some semblance of order to the game, as the next three half-innings went by without even the threat of a run. Billy Traber, who got Ortiz to pop out on his only pitch of the game, and a much slimmer, shaggier Brian Bruney than I remember, pieced together the top of the eighth inning. The Yanks more or less put the game out of reach in the bottom of the inning, beating up Mike Timlin, now 42 and with his best days blessedly behind him, for four more runs. Three doubles by A-Rod, Posada, and Jason Giambi provided the scaffolding for the rally.

It also served as enough of a cushion to give Mariano Rivera the night off. Bruney made things a bit interesting by allowing two of the first three hitters to reach base, but he dispatched the Sox before Ortiz and Ramirez could get one last lick.

• • •

Starting pitching has been the Yankees’ weakest link thus far; as I noted in the Hit List, the team’s Fair Run Average (their runs allowed per nine innings, adjusted to divide the responsibility for inherited runners between starters and relievers based on the base-out situation) ranked just 11th in the league, and youngsters Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy had combined for an 8.87 ERA. Since then, the two pitchers have both fumbled another start against the O’s (and no, I couldn’t really bear to watch), and the Yankee rotation’s FRA has fallen to 13th out of 14 AL teams. Hughes and Kennedy aren’t even averaging four innings per start combined (27.1 innings in seven starts), and as a team the Yanks have now fallen below 5.0 innings per start (94.1 innings in 19 starts). The bullpen has been one of the game’s best; they rank second in the AL in Reliever Expected Wins Added (WXRL) but their combined 70.1 innings leads the majors. Ohlendorf (14.1 innings) actually has thrown more innings than Kennedy. If that pace continues, it will make Yankee fans pine for the days when Joe Torre tried to pitch Scott Proctor’s arm off.