The Scooter

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As a Johnny-Come-Lately to New York City and the Yankees, I never really got what dyed-in-the-pinstriped-wool fans found so special about Phil Rizzuto, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89. While he certainly held a link to the Yankees’ glory years as part of seven world champion teams, objectively he wasn’t as great or popular a player as Yankee legends like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, or even Yogi Berra. He wasn’t an imposing hitter; his lifetime numbers don’t even compare to crosstown contemporary Pee Wee Reese. Beyond his playing career, the descriptions of his lapses and malapropisms as an announcer suggest something less than one of history’s great baseball minds. A relic, more sacred cow than “Holy Cow,” was my conclusion.

Fortunately, Cliff Corcoran sets me straight with a touching tribute to the Scooter at SI.com:

Perhaps it’s inappropriate to lead off this tribute to the memory of Rizzuto with such an insult, but Rizzuto lived his life in defiance of such insults, and lived a life that any of us would be fortunate to relive. Rizzuto was famously insulted by Casey Stengel when he tried out for Stengel’s Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-’30s (“go get a shoeshine box,” said Casey). A decade and a half later Rizzuto would be the starting shortstop on Stengel’s five consecutive World Series-winning Yankee teams, earning the 1950 AL MVP award along the way.

Rizzuto was famously insulted by the Yankees organization in 1956 when George Weiss forced him into retirement by making Rizzuto select himself as the player to be removed from the roster to make room for Enos Slaughter. Weiss was slaughtered in the press for the move and the team’s broadcast sponsor insisted that Rizzuto be hired to broadcast the team’s games the following season. Rizzuto was still in the same job 39 years later when the team forced him to call a game rather than attend Mickey Mantle’s funeral. Rizzuto, enraged and embarrassed, quit mid-game, but public outcry brought him back for a 40th and final season.

My voice was one of those calling Rizzuto back. The Scooter may have had more to do with my becoming a baseball fan than anyone else. Though my family is filled with Yankees fans dating back to the days of Babe Ruth, I had no older sibling to turn me on to baseball and neither of my parents was particularly interested in professional sports when I was growing up. Instead it was Rizzuto, with his enthusiasm, good humor and wildly entertaining and unpredictable asides (which were a good match for the often tragicomic play of the mid-’80s Yankees), who sold me on the joys of the game and its history despite the poor quality of the team I was watching.

Can’t argue with that at all, nor with the various tales of how the 5-foot-6 scrapper clawed his way into the major leagues and the hearts of fans. Thanks to Cliff, the Bronx Banter community, Steven Goldman (and his not-so-evil twin), Joe Sheehan, Mark Lamster, Buster Olney and others for sharing their memories and their points of view. RIP, Scooter.

The New New VC

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In today’s Prospectus Hit and Run, I turn my attention to the re-revamping of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee. Changes to the New VC, which has gone a self-congratulatory 0-for-3 since it was last restructured — were announced a couple weeks back, but amid the Bonds home run chase, the trading deadline, and the Hall’s annual induction ceremonies, the news flew beneath the radar. Here’s the skinny:

According to the Hall’s press release, the New New VC will split the player, manager/umpire, and executive voting into three separate ballots that will be screened and voted upon by three separate processes. Furthermore, players whose careers started before 1943 will be treated on a separate track from later ones. The details:
  • Post-1943 Players: a BBWAA-appointed committee will narrow the list of eligible candidates (players with 10 years in the majors, not on the ineligible list, and not under consideration on the BBWAA ballot) to 20. Concurrently, a screening committee of six Hall members that gets appointed by the Board of Directors will identify five players total. The slate of 20-25 candidates (depending on overlap) will be screened by the living Hall of Fame members, narrowed to 10 finalists, and then voted upon, with candidates needing at least 75 percent for election. The next set of players will be voted upon in 2009.

  • Pre-1943 players: a Board-appointed committee of 12 Hall of Famers, historians and writers will review eligible candidates every five years starting in 2009.
  • Managers and umpires: a BBWAA-appointed committee will narrow the list of eligible candidates to 10 candidates. A Board-appointed committee of 16 electors, consisting of Hall members, executives, writers, and historians, will vote on a semiannual basis starting in 2008.
  • Executives: a Board-appointed committee of Hall members, executives, and writers (but apparently no historians?) will review of ballot of executives. The timing of this has yet to be determined, and no further details were announced in the release.

I think the new changes bode particularly well for non-players, who are likely to get better traction from a better-informed electorate than the unwashed former players. I also think that putting the pre-1943 players — of which there were seven on the 2007 ballot, none save for Wes Ferrell a very good candidate — on a separate track will clear away some of the deadwood. However, I worry that while the electorate is more likely to recognize Ron Santo as a Hall of Famer, the other players at the top of its latest vote — Jim Kaat (63.4%), Gil Hodges (61.0%), and Tony Oliva (57.3%), for starters — are more than a little shy in the qualifications department according to JAWS. The thing that needs to happen to show that the New New VC is moving forward is a consideration of Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Dwight Evans, and Darrell Evans, all of whom fell off the BBWAA ballot after their first try and none of whom have reached the VC ballot since, despite stronger JAWS cases than warhorses like Roger Maris and Thurman Munson who, great as they were, don’t really have Hall of Fame chops or momentum behind their candidacies.

Elsewhere in the piece, I begin working through a considerable backlog of JAWS cases, starting with Craig Biggio, who comes up a hair shy of the average HOF second baseman — a very high bar, if you’ll recall. It’s a moot point given the fact that he’s got 3,000 hits and that it’s defense dragging him down; with few exceptions (Ozzie Smith, Bill Mazeroski, Brooks Robinson), BBWAA voters don’t place too much emphasis on defense, let alone value it properly.

However, there’s one other point about Biggio that bears making, and I intend to do so in an Unfiltered entry: he’s not a pure second baseman, having played 427 games at catcher and another 366 in the outfield, roughly 2/3 of which were in centerfield. On an Adjusted Games (i.e., innings) basis, he spent about 28 percent of his career at positions even more demanding than second base. As such, it’s appropriate to consider him not only in the context of second basemen but also in the context of the cross-positional groupings I include with the JAWS standards: 

POS        #  BRAR  BRAA  FRAA   WARP   PEAK   JAWS
C         13   425   215   70    95.7   59.0   77.3
1B        18   744   489   -9   106.1   62.8   84.5
2B        17   579   304   92   122.8   71.5   97.1
3B        11   668   385   69   117.4   67.3   92.4
SS        20   453   153  120   112.3   67.1   89.7
LF        18   752   477    7   111.1   62.6   86.8
CF        17   720   466   15   109.1   63.7   86.4
RF        22   795   519   36   119.6   65.4   92.5

CI        29   716   450   20   110.3   64.5   87.4
MI        37   510   222  107   117.1   69.1   93.1
IF        66   600   321   69   114.1   67.1   90.6
OF        57   759   490   21   113.8   64.0   88.9

Middle    67   547   283   77   111.0   65.8   88.4
Corners   69   751   479   22   113.5   64.3   88.9

Hitters  136   651   383   49   112.3   65.0   88.6

Given his rather unique resume, it’s not inappropriate to consider Biggio in the light of a “Middle” hitter, that is one who spent his career mostly at catcher, second base, shortstop and centerfield. At 123.7/69.5/96.6 he’s just shy of the second base standard but well over that of the Middle players as well as hitters at large. Biggio’s on his way to a pretty inglorious end, but I’ll have no beef when he’s elected in 2013 or so.

It Ain’t Over, But It Is Out

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Very briefly, amid what’s already shaping up to be a crazy and somewhat stressful week full of deadlines and mortgage agita (the closing process on my apartment has finally begun, at precisely the wrong time):

• A quick trip to Barnes and Noble’s Astor Place branch in New York City revealed a pleasant surprise: It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: the Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book is actually on the shelves, consistent with the previously announced August 13 publication date. In the company of BP colleagues Steven Goldman (who edited the project), Clay Davenport (who devised the methodology by which we selected the best races), John Erhardt, Kevin Goldstein, Rany Jazayerli, Christina Kahrl, and Nate Silver, as well as special guests Kevin Baker, Allen Barra, Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran, I’m proud to say that I have six chapters totaling somewhere around 60 pages in the book, including the two top-ranked races:

* “1967 American League: To Fight the Unbeatable Foe” – in which the Red Sox shook off decades of indifferent management and institutional racism, joined the 20th Century, and beat out the Tigers, White Sox, and Twins

* “The Summer of Loving Carl Yastrzemski” – the impact of Triple Crown winner Yaz and superstars in general on their teams’ pennant chances

* “1959 National League: Alston’s L.A. Confidential” – in which the impressively flexible Walter Alston helped the Dodgers score their first triumph on the West Coast by beat out the Giants and Braves, the latter in a best-of-three playoff

* “The Braves Dynasty that Wasn’t” – how a team with future Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Warren Spahn won just two pennants and one World Series during an eight-year span in which they won more games than any other NL team

* “The Replacement-Level Killers” – a recurrent theme of great pennant races is one team blindly sticking with an unproductive player when better options exist, thereby dragging its performance down and sometimes making the difference between winning and losing

* “The Say-Hey Savior: Rookies and Pennant Races” – timely contributions from the new kids on the block

That represents my biggest contribution to any book thus far. I’m damn proud of this one, and hope you’ll take the time to check it out.

• Last week’s Hit List is here. Once again, the 2nd-ranked Yankees are closing the gap on the Red Sox, but there’s a reason:

Hot Knife, Meet Butter: the Yanks finish the easy portion of their post-break schedule having played themselves into the Wild Card hunt by going 19-8 and scoring 7.8 runs per game off .328/.401/.556 hitting, with Jorge Posada (.395/.511/.711) and Robinson Cano (.416/.479/.693) leading the way. The road ahead gets tougher; just two of those 27 games were against teams above .500, but 17 of their next 20 are against contenders. Alex Rodriguez becomes the youngest player to reach 500 homers, Jason Giambi returns, and 2006 supplemental first-rounder Joba Chamberlain arrives to aid a bullpen that’s only eighth in the league in WXRL.

Many other outlets have claimed that all of those 27 games were against sub-.500 teams, though your eagle-eyed correspondent here took note of the Blue Jays poking their heads above .500 a couple times in that span.

The Yanks do look a great deal better than they did six weeks ago, when I shoveled dirt on their graves by noting they would need to play at a .690 clip the rest of the way in order to reach the 95-win plateau that the last two AL Wild Card winners attained. They were 37-41 then and have gone 29-10 (a sizzling .744) since, including the completion of that suspended game against Baltimore which is retroactively considered to have been completed on the date started. Even without that game, they’ve been far and away the best team in the AL since that point. From Baseball-Reference.com: 

AL      W   L    GB      WP      RS      RA
NYY    28  10     -    .737     285     168
BOS    21  16   6.5    .568     210     159
TOR    20  15   6.5    .571     160     128
SEA    20  17   7.5    .541     178     175
BAL    19  16   7.5    .543     171     168
LAA    18  16   8.0    .529     178     164
KCR    17  17   9.0    .500     171     159
CHW    19  20   9.5    .487     200     242
DET    18  19   9.5    .486     196     212
TEX    17  19  10.0    .472     150     172
MIN    16  21  11.5    .432     138     167
CLE    16  21  11.5    .432     159     173
OAK    14  23  13.5    .378     163     199
TBD    12  25  15.5    .324     166     239

Thanks to slumps from Cleveland and Detroit, they’ve gained 11.5 and 9.5 games, respectively, on their two most likely Wild Card competitors at the time, not to mention 6.5 games on Boston. Furthermore, they’ve gained 10.5 on Boston since May 29, with a record of 45-22, as compared to 34-32 from the Red Sox.

While the Yanks still need to play at a searing .644 clip to get to the 95-win level, the Wild Card-leading Mariners (who are just percentage points ahead of the Yanks, owing to a pair of snowed-out games in hand) are only on a 91.5-win pace. And with six games left against Boston, the division now appears back in play. The Baseball Prospectus Postseason Odds report gives them just a 12.5 percent chance on that front but a 57.5 percent chance at the Wild Card, for a cumulative 70 percent shot at October — about double what their chances were 10 days ago and quadruple what they were less than four weeks ago. Things are definitely looking up for the Bronx Bombers.

Fear and Loathing Atop the All-Time Home Run List, or Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?

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Our long national nightmare is finally over. On Tuesday night, Barry Bonds finally hit his 756th home run, topping Hank Aaron’s record, a record that stood for over 33 years as perhaps the most hallowed statistical accomplishment in the annals of sport.

Surprisingly, the world didn’t end.

I missed the home run. Or rather, to borrow the take-home phrase from Office Space, I wouldn’t say I missed it. I just didn’t care enough to watch. Such was my disinterest that after viewing one replay of it on ESPN — where its coverage pre-empted the Bronx Is Burning episode I’d TiVoed — that I didn’t even bother to find out who surrendered it until lunchtime today. The sight of the orgy of celebration in San Francisco was enough to drive me away.

I’d missed #755 too, though at the time I did hear my computer alert me via one of those annoying ESPN update chimes on a page I’d left open, and several minutes later, when my wife paused the movie we were watching, I flipped around to find a replay of that one. I even watched it twice before flipping away.

Were either of those home runs against the Dodgers, I might have sat still and enjoyed Vin Scully wrestling with the contrast between the accomplishment and its reception even as I gave Bonds the double-barreled middle finger from my private box seat. That the San Francisco fans uncritically embraced Bonds was no surprise. That the San Diego fans chose to stay classy felt weak; particularly given the two teams’ rivalry and Bonds’ stated loathing for PetCo Park, I thought they’d have more cojones than to smile brainlessly when prompted for their close-up, but I thought wrong.

The cheerful celebrations in San Diego and San Francisco belied a chase that was no fun at all for most of us, a group that likely includes Bonds. His pursuit brought out the worst in people, from Bud Selig to elected officials to the peers of Bonds and Aaron, from the media to the fans in 29 other ballparks. I’m not happy to concede that at times it’s brought out the worst in me, but I’m not too ashamed to admit that watching the joy drain from the chase filled me with some small degree of satisfaction. As a nation of baseball fans, we deserved what we got, a cynical and likely chemically aided summit of a peak that was thought to be unconquerable.

I’m done gnashing my teeth. The record is what it is, something to be taken in context. Even absent a positive test, the mountain of evidence that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs is enough to convince me that his accomplishment is tainted. We’ll never know the extent to which Bonds was aided, but the fact that his historically unprecedented late-career surge matches up with the well-documented timeline of his alleged usage is enough for me. However, Bonds certainly wasn’t the only player using during this sordid era, and the extent to which the drugs helped him achieve his record will forever remain uncertain. Furthermore, Major League Baseball’s failure to address in any meaningful way the pervasiveness of the steroid problem made them complicit in Bonds’ use. There’s also a growing body of evidence that MLB’s decision to introduce a livelier baseball following the 1994 strike played a part in the astronomical home run totals that followed, but that’s a story for another day.

This much we know: the three players who topped Roger Maris’ long-standing season record of 61 homers have varying degrees of evidence suggesting they had help in the matter, and it’s not unreasonable to eye their latter-day accomplishments with some degree of suspicion so long as that evidence remains. I’m not advocating an asterisk in the record books or the expungement of any stats; if the fabric of baseball history can withstand the variable impacts of the spitballers, scuffers, bat-corkers, sign-stealers, and greenie-poppers — to say nothing of the Black Sox and Pete Rose, rats of an entirely different color — it can withstand this. That doesn’t mean we have to worship the record or the man with the prickly persona who achieved it, nor does it diminish the accomplishments of the men who preceded him in holding that record.

I don’t see eye-to-eye with my BP colleague Joe Sheehan on very much in the Bonds sphere, but a few weeks back, he wrote something that stuck with me, something I resolved to file away for this occasion:

Should Bonds get to 756 home runs, it will mean only that he hit more home runs than anyone else in the game’s history. Doing so doesn’t make him a better person than Hank Aaron—it is irrelevant to that question entirely—nor does his superiority in one statistic necessarily make him a better baseball player. Hank Aaron’s legacy as a player is not diminished one whit by the fact that his name is no longer atop a list of names and numbers. His greatness isn’t defined by a number, and his accomplishments remain just as impressive—overcoming racism in the South in he 1950s, being a player who could do everything on a baseball field, his amazing consistency stretching across two decades of play, and his grace under pressure, surrounded by hatred, as he set the all-time home run record.

Statistics are a record of what happened in baseball games. We make lists, but those lists don’t rank men, they rank their doings. All statistics, however, need to be put into context. That applies when comparing two pitchers who work in disparate run environments, two prospects who play three levels apart, or two Hall of Fame outfielders who find themselves next to each other on a list. Beyond statistical context, however, there’s historical context. The narratives of Ruth and Maris, of Aaron and Bonds, will be written and rewritten, and their places in the history of baseball will be determined not by any statistic, but by the body of their work and their impact on the game.

I’ve yet to read anything in the coverage of the entire home run chase that I agree with the way I agree with that, and so I’ll quit while I’m behind, hopeful that the all-time home run list finds a new man atop it — Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Jason Tyner — by the time I need to explain this record to my children.

If we can agree on one thing, let us agree that the next time around should be more fun.

• • •

My latest Prospectus Hit and Run went up at BP yesterday. With milestone home runs the obvious leading topic, I began with a look back at some old research I did:

I come neither to bury Bonds nor to praise him, but given that the all-time home run list has seen enough shakeups since I wrote about it over three years ago, updating that older work will surely keep me down with OBC (Obligatory Barry Content). Along with Bonds tying Hank Aaron at 755, Sammy Sosa has become the fifth player to top 600, Ken Griffey Jr. and Rafael Palmeiro have cracked the top 10, and Frank Thomas and A-Rod have joined the 500 club.

…Among the top 27 home run hitters of all time — the 22 men in the 500 Club, plus the three active players likely to reach that plateau within the next year, and the two men who came up just shy — Bonds’ ratio of home to road homers is the ninth-lowest. That’s pretty ho-hum stuff. What’s much more interesting is how the chart’s latest interlopers have profited from their home parks. While nobody will ever catch Mel Ott when it comes to home field advantage, Thomas, [Jim] Thome, and Palmeiro have all hit at least 20 percent more homers at home than on the road, with Sosa and Griffey enjoying about a 10 percent advantage, while A-Rod checks in at five percent.

From there, I went on to rerun one of that old piece’s most popular items:

The “Home Doubled” list shows what the leaderboard might have looked like if each of these sluggers had enjoyed the perks of home in every park; we’ve simply doubled the home HR totals (2xHHR). The “Road Doubled” list (or 2xRHRR) puts things on more neutral ground. It ain’t rocket science, but it’s revealing nonetheless: 
Player     2xHHR   Player     2xRHR
Aaron       770    Bonds       760
Bonds       750    Aaron       740
Ruth        694    Ruth        734
Mays        670    Mays        650
Ott         646    McGwire     596
Robinson    642    Sosa        574
Sosa        634    Jackson     566
Palmeiro    622    Schmidt     566
Griffey     616    Killebrew   564
Foxx        598    Griffey     562
Thomas      596    Mathews     550
Killebrew   582    Williams    546
Banks       580    Mantle      540
McGwire     570    Robinson    530
Jackson     560    Palmeiro    516
Thome       546    McCovey     514
Mantle      532    Murray      512
Schmidt     530    McGriff     504
McCovey     528    Rodriguez   488
Rodriguez   512    Gehrig      484
Gehrig      502    Ramirez     478
Ramirez     500    Sheffield   472
Williams    496    Foxx        470
Murray      496    Banks       444
Sheffield   484    Thome       436
McGriff     482    Thomas      414
Mathews     474    Ott         376

What stands out most about the Home Doubled list is how much bigger the 600 level might have been if all these sluggers had feasted on home cooking all of the time; a couple more Skydome shots by Thomas and we’d have 10, with Double X Jimmie Foxx just outside the ranks. The second thing to note is that at every rank but one, the Home Doubled total is higher than the Road Doubled one, by an average of 38 homers. The Road Doubled list shows Bonds as having left Aaron in the rearview mirror already, while maintaining a much more exclusive 600-homer level. It’s just further confirmation that the reputations of these sluggers were considerably helped along by favorable conditions at home.

Elsewhere in the piece, I took a look at the best bullpens according to BP’s suite of statistics, and the best and worst pitching staffs as a unit according to our win-expectancy based measures. That kind of stuff isn’t as timely or as controversial as talking about the longball, but I relish the fact that we can now turn our attention to such matters with fewer distractions.

Swap Meet Spectacular

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The post-trade deadline Hit List is up at Baseball Prospectus, with a look at which teams improved themselves, which ones dropped the ball, and which ones merely treaded water. The Yankees, thanks to their recent offensive onslaught, climb all the way to #2 behind the Red Sox, with the Mets third.

The Dodgers come in at #7:

With rotation injuries sprouting up like mushrooms–Randy Wolf may be done for the year, while Brad Penny and Derek Lowe narrowly escape DL stints–the Dodgers trade away their most productive third baseman for an overworked reliever and spend the rest of their deadline arguing internally over which prospects to keep and which to deal without pulling the trigger. That this one’s so obvious even Bill Plaschke gets it right is a sign that whatever the current regime’s faults, they know how to deal in PR. Bad news: Jeff Kent strains a hammy after a .447/.500/.737 July.

Yes, that’s a Bill Plaschke link in the Hit List, and for once, my nemesis actually written something about the Dodgers that I agree with:

For the first time in a decade, they are no longer the kind of team that needs to do calisthenics every July to be strong for many Octobers.

They have a nucleus. They have a surplus. They have a clue.

What they may not eventually have this season is a spot in the playoffs, but — and I can’t believe I’m writing this — maybe that can wait.

Maybe they have to sacrifice a September for James Loney, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier to learn how to play in the heat.

Maybe they have to lose a division for Jonathon Broxton to learn how to pitch under the glare.

Maybe Dodgers fans, just this once, will agree to pay for two months of soaring, skidding fun with an October of silence.

Having finally collected enough good players to contend for several years, the Dodgers smartly refused to break them up for the sake of this one.

Maybe, by taking no big steps, they have actually taken a giant one.

Sorry about that spacing; like high-powered magnets, Plaschke’s thoughts continue to be too weighty to put side-by-side. Anyway, while none of the prospects Dodger GM Ned Colletti has traded have come back to bite the Dodgers thus far, every deadline gives Dodger fans the feeling that he’s playing Russian roulette, willing to sacrifice a prospect or two in spectacularly shocking fashion. The GM puts up a unified front in the Plaschke piece, but the buzz leading up to the deadline had Colletti clashing with the team’s player development arm over which prospects were tradable, particularly 19-year-old southpaw Clayton Kershaw, who stands a good chance of being one of the top three pitching prospects on next year’s lists. Even with the Dodgers on the edge of a playoff spot, I can’t fault them for keeping the kids together; 2007 won’t be their last playoff chase by any means.

Anyway, elsewhere in the Hit List, you’ll find Willy Wonka, Nightmare on Elm Street, “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” Lays potato chips, Thomas Hardy, and Coach Krupt. I challenge you to find a more eclectic assortment in any set of power rankings for the big four sports (baseball, chess, curling, and yak rodeo).

As for the Dodgers, I watched most of their three-game series against the Giants, with Barry Bonds perched on the precipice of history at 754 home runs. As negative as I am about the whole record chase, the the idea of Vin Scully calling the shot, as he did Aaron’s 715th, certainly held some appeal, as did the idea of Bonds at least tying the record in the ultimate enemy territory as a chorus of boos rained down. The possibility of that contrast wasn’t lost on Scully:

“This to me is different,” Scully said. “Aaron was received with great love, affection, adoration. I’m not sure how this one will be received. The story won’t be what I say. The story will be what the crowd will say. So I will shut up and let them take it.”

Scully is famous for going silent at the right times. When Aaron hit his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth, Scully let 26 seconds pass, allowing the crowd in Atlanta to roar. Only then did he reflect on the setting, the meaning and the times:

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”

Speaking of that call, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Furman Bisher recently did a completely irresponsible hatchet job by taking Scully’s call out of context, as though race were the first thing he mentioned.

Anyway, though they neutralized Bonds, the Dodgers dropped two out of the three games. They did win the middle one in dramatic fashion, outlasting rookie phenom Tim Lincecum with a four-run eighth-inning rally capped by a two-run homer by Nomar Garciaparra. Ironically, that was the one game called by the delightfully bent Giants’ announcing team of Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper (futility personified, with one home run in 3,379 career at bats); they’re about the only Giants-related thing I can stand. Overall, Bonds went 1-for-7 with five walks during the series, thereby halting a 19 at-bat hitless streak against the Dodgers. He only faced Dodger lefty specialist Joe Beimel once, resulting in a reach-on-error; Beimel, as the New York Times notes in a recent article, came into the series having held Bonds to 1-for-15 with a homer and two walks over the last two years.

The middle game also featured Scott Proctor’s Dodger debut; he threw one pitch that resulted in an inning-ending caught stealing, and that was his night. When he reappeared the next night with somewhat less success (1.1 innings, one run on two walks and a hit), the sickening realization came over me that I am stuck with the guy like he’s some felonious in-law trying to goad me into joining his next shady venture at every family event. There’s no relief from Scott Proctor.

Meanwhile, Proctor’s opposite number made a splash with the Yankees yesterday, belting a three-run homer in his first official at-bat as part of an eight-run comeback that eventually went for naught. I was at the stadium on Wednesday night and actually saw his Yankee debut as a defensive replacement for Alex Rodriguez. The more I think about the deal, the more I like it from the Yanks’ perspective. Betemit’s in his Age 25 season (he’s listed as 27 on ESPN, but they’re still using the false date that got the Braves in trouble several years back when it was revealed they signed him at 15), he’s got a .264/.339/.445 career line that if you remove the first 50 at bats in 2001 and 2004 becomes .270/.344/.463, and he’s arbitration-eligible for the first time this coming winter, meaning he’ll be under the Yanks’ control for the next three years. If he never wins a starting spot he’s still the best hitter on the Yankee bench in ages.

A few links to note:

• Via Rob Neyer, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee is being revamped again, with managers, umpires and executives screened and voted upon separately from the players; there will now be a VC election every year, with two sets alternating (managers/umps in ’08, players in ’09, execs TBD), a final ballot of 10 players, and a new five-year-cycle for players whose careers began before 1943. I’ll have more on these changes at Baseball Prospectus soon.

• George Steinbrenner is in rough shape according to former Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, who pays him a visit in this lengthy Conde Nast Portfolio piece.

• Speaking of Steinbrenner, I could watch Oliver Platt play the Boss to John Turturro’s Billy Martin, as in the ESPN Bronx is Burning miniseries, on a weekly basis for the next five years without getting bored. The series has its share of problems, but the performances of those two, not to mention the comic relief provided by the Mickey Rivers character, are reasons to keep watching. Bruce Markusen has an entertaining profile of Mick the Quick at Bronx Banter.

Deadline City

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The trading deadline is a great time to be part of Baseball Prospectus. Not only is it fun to watch guys and gals like prospect guru Kevin Goldstein, transaction maven Christina Kahrl and yenta hotliner Will Carroll do the voodoo that they do so well, but kicking the deals around on our internal mailing list is always informative, and simply being privy to the flood of competing rumors and connecting the various dots is a blast.

Somewhere amid our internal roundtable on Monday, in dissecting the initial announcement of the Mark Teixeira-to-Atlanta trade, BP intern/FI research assistant Peter Quadrino summoned forth the study I did of Braves GM John Schuerholz’s track record in dealing prospects (former colleague Dayn Perry recalled it, too). I quickly decided that updating it would make for an appropriate lead for this week’s Prospectus Hit and Run:

While Jason Schmidt and Jermaine Dye remain the cautionary tales, they’re the exceptions rather than the rule when it comes to Schuerholz’s track record. In my study, I found that only six out of the 80 traded prospects (arbitrarily defined as having not accumulated 502 plate appearances or 162 innings in the bigs) had thus far managed 10.0 WARP post-trade, a “career of consequence.”

Revisiting those numbers two years later, Dye and Schmidt have distanced themselves from the pack, even though they’ve fallen on hard times in 2007. Meanwhile, Wes Helms and Jamie Walker have crossed the 10.0 WARP threshold, the latter as a rather wealthy man but nonetheless a situational reliever, bringing our running total to eight careers of consequence.

…[Wilson] Betemit and [Adam] Wainwright look like reasonable bets to make the grade, but even if they do, that would make 10 careers of consequence out of a new total of 87 (the aforementioned plus Max Ramirez and a few others, but not the ones in the Texeira deal). As good a deal as the Teixeira one looks for the Rangers right now, those are steep odds to beat.

As it is, the deal looks a bit better for the Rangers, given that it expanded to five prospects for Tex and lefty reliever Ron Mahay: catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, shortstop Elvis Andrus, and pitchers Matt Harrison, Neftali Feliz, and Beau Jones, the latter two apparently added to mitigate Harrison’s sore shoulder. The Baseball America Prospect Handbook has Salty, Andrus, and Harrison 1-2-3 among the Braves prospects, with Jones 14th and Feliz 18t; Salty was 36th overall, Andrus 65th, and Harrison 90th. At BP, Goldstein’s Top 10 Prospects had Salty, Harrison and Feliz 1-2-3 and Andrus 5th, with Salty 51st, Harrison 79th, and Feliz 98th overall.

I’ve been pretty critical of Rangers GM Jon Daniels in recent weeks, but I dished out a reasonable amount of praise for his deadline work in a piece I did for today’s New York Sun:

Most intriguing is Saltalamacchia, a 6-foot-4-inch switch-hitter who projects as one of the game’s top-hitting catchers. Already boasting an elite backstop in 23-year-old Brian McCann, the Braves found at-bats for “Salty” at first base; after a hot start, a slump dragged his numbers down to .284 AVG/.333 OBA/.411 SLG. That’s light for a first sacker, but solid for a catcher, particularly on a team getting considerably less from incumbent Gerald Laird. Andrus is years away from the majors, but he’s been playing against competition that’s three years his senior, and with Young signed through 2013, time is on his side. Harrison’s a big strike-throwing lefty with solid control and good velocity; his recent shoulder soreness prompted the inclusion of the other two pitchers as insurance.

In shipping Gagne to the Red Sox, Daniels acquired immediate help and future promise. Southpaw Kason Gabbard, 25, has filled in admirably for the injured Curt Schilling, putting up a 3.73 ERA through seven starts. His ability to induce ground balls by the dozen will aid a rotation that’s giving up the league’s highest slugging percentage. Outfielder David Murphy, 25, is a card-carrying member of the Future Fourth Outfielders of America; he’s a good enough defender to handle center field, and while his plate discipline improved markedly over the past year, his power remains middling. The key to the deal is 17-year-old Dominican Engel Beltre, a toolsy outfielder with good speed, a good arm, and power that’s evoked comparisons to Barry Bonds and Darryl Strawberry from scouts. It may take a decade to see who came out ahead here.

Daniels made one other solid move prior to that pair, shipping Lofton back to Cleveland for another catching prospect, Max Ramirez. Thanks to a refined approach, the 22-year-old is hitting .306/.420/.500 in High-A, but his defense is suspect, he’s undersized (5-foot-11, 170 lbs), and he joins a farm system already stocked with the highly-regarded Taylor Teagarden behind the plate. A shift likely looms, though a bat of his caliber won’t go to waste.

These moves won’t turn the Rangers’ 2007 around, but they’ve gone a long way toward restocking a system whose minor league talent ranked among the game’s bottom ten. For doing that, Daniels may just have earned his extension.

The Gagne move was a big one around these parts, even bigger than the Scott Proctor/Wilson Betemit move that had me gnashing my teeth in disgust for both of my teams. In talking to Steven Goldman last night, the bearded one offered an interesting take that he replicates in today’s Sun: the Gagne move actually helps the Yankees because it prevented him from going to the Tigers or Indians, since it’s more likely the Yanks are challenging for the Wild Card instead of the division:

…the Yankees are in the wild card business, the Red Sox are on their victory lap, and the two aren’t in any kind of direct competition except when they’re playing head-to-head, something that happens just six more times this season. The Yankees can worry about what should be a deadly back end of the bullpen for Boston with Gagne, Hideki Okajima, and Jon Papelbon when and if they make the postseason and have to play them.

Until then, Theo Epstein and pals have given the Yankees a huge break. The Yankees are competing with the Indians for the wild card, and the Tigers could be in the mix should the Indians pass them for the AL Central lead. Even if they don’t, the Yankees have eight games remaining with the Tigers and three with the Indians, which is to say that the Yankees will be spending 20% of their remaining time in 2007 playing exactly who they need to be playing. Both of those teams, particularly the Tigers, have had problems in the bullpen. When the Red Sox stepped up to the plate on Gagne, they prevented the Yankees’ real rivals from getting an upgrade they desperately needed.

…For either of these clubs, acquiring Gagne would have been a season-altering event. After 105 games, the two teams are one game apart. In broad terms, they are equals. The reasons for their record may differ, but neither is the superior of the other. Had either team improved their bullpen, the stalemate might have been broken. For the Yankees, who need both teams to be weak, that would have been disastrous.

As for the Proctor deal, the interesting point is the Yanks’ avoidance of the relievers on the market in favor of a plan to promote heat-throwing Double-A prospect Joba Chamberlain and perhaps also Ross Ohlendorf (acquired in the Randy Johnson deal): “There are certain guys in my system right now that I have people telling me could replace Scott Proctor,” GM Brian Cashman told the New York Times. “And if that’s the case, that’s what made me consider the opportunity for Wilson Betemit. We have needs, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s a belief that some of those needs might very well be met from within.”

Betemit, as I pointed out in the Hit and Run, got the screw job from the Dodgers; batting average aside, he’s been a much more productive hitter than Nomar Garciaparra, though the latter’s timely hitting with runners in scoring position has given him the “clutch” tag. While Betemit’s versatility and ability to come off the bench are assets sorely missing on the current Yankee roster, I don’t particularly trust Joe Torre to integrate him into the mix. And for all the sense it makes to have Betemit as a fallback option in case Alex Rodriguez departs, if the Dodgers didn’t see it then the Yankees certainly won’t; they’ll be under far too much pressure to Do Something Big if A-Rod leaves and will have to get a Name Player there, even if said Name Player is actually more expensive and less productive.

Anyway, I’ve got plenty more to say on the topic of the deadline, but I’ve got to bang on the Hit List for a few hours before I head to Yankee Stadium to boo what’s left of the ever-charming Kyle Farnsworth. Five 1-2-3 innings this year in 45 appearances — not to mention working back-to-back days just five times as well — and he’s complaining? Grab drink, dude.

Simpsonic Weekend

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Fabulous weekend here at Futility Central, with baseball on the back burner after I delivered this week’s Hit List…

• Friday night, we caught the opening of the long-awaited Simpsons Movie, and while it wasn’t a gut-busting revelation, it didn’t need to be. [Semi-spoiler alert; skip to next bullet]. Other than the expanded length, the movie didn’t differ from the show spectacularly on a writing level. The main plot was engaging and amusing, the jokes were very funny, worth repeating even days later, the sappy moments were kept to a minimum, there were a few lines I missed due to the laughter that I’m sure will expand my appreciation upon another view. As the New York Times Anthony Scott wrote in his review, “In other words, I’d be willing to watch it only — excuse me while I crunch some numbers here — 20 or 30 more times.”

The real treat was what a visual feast the movie turned out to be. The wider screen, larger color palette, shadows, and complexity of the large crowd scenes were all enough to remind you that this wasn’t just another episode of the ultimate nuclear (powered) family. The common complaint among my friends was the minimal roles of secondary characters. Comic Book Guy and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel — two of my absolute favorites — had prominent supporting roles, but Montgomery Burns, Smithers, Patty and Selma, Lenny and Carl, and numerous other favorites drew the short end of the script. And one of the key subplots, Homer’s pet pig, went unresolved.

Still, that hardly added up to disappointment, even in the face of all the hype that’s been building towards a movie that’s seemed inevitable for at least the last decade and a half. I’m 37, and I’ve been watching the show since its inception; while I hadn’t seen the Simpsons in their original guise on the Tracey Ullman Show, I was a fan of Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip, and thus primed for the show’s inaugural episode back in 1989. While I certainly saw a few people older than me at the theater, I was a bit surprised how young the audience ran. Kids as young as eight or nine could be heard giggling in the audience, though they probably had a leg up on their peers; one was even witty enough to offer “floor popcorn” to his fellow patrons as we exited the theater. Doubtless he’ll be joining the show’s writing staff in season 33.

• The Hit List had more than its usual share of Simpsons references in honor of the movie, but in retrospect it would have been far cooler if I’d thrown down the gauntlet and injected purple-goo Simpsons flavor into all 30 donuts, I mean entries. There’s a brilliant article from a couple years back where each team was matched up with a Springfield character, so it’s not like my idea would have been a first, but given the extent to which the column’s warped humor has been influenced by the show, it would have been an appropriate homage. D’oh!

Anyway, the trading-deadline flavored Hit List found the Yankees ranked third, thanks to their feasting upon crappy Devil Rays and Royals pitching. What little baseball I saw this weekend reminded me that even as the Yanks work their way through the soft portion of the schedule, this remains an uphill climb. Eight games back in the AL East, a more reasonable four and a half back in the Wild Card, they still need to play .690 ball to get to 95 wins, a fact will temper any temptations to make a blockbuster and instead confine them to attempts to make Kyle Farnsworth an ex-Yankee, if not by burying him in the Meadowlands than by trading him to the Tigers for a bag of Gary Sheffield’s hate mail and a one-legged batboy to be named later.

Trading Farnsworth might be the single biggest move to make the Yankees watchable again, particularly if highly-touted Joba Chamberlain shows up to take his spot. Regarded as the Yanks’ second-best pitching prospect behind the soon-to-return Philip Hughes, Chamberlain was recently shifted to the bullpen at Triple-A Scranton in an attempt to provide the Yanks with an internal option for upgrade. As the New York Times notes:

In Chamberlain, the Yankees have a prospect with a refined repertory and, by all accounts, a solid makeup. The Yankees still view him as a starter for the future, but he has been scratched from his start Monday for Scranton and will work an inning of relief instead.

The plan is for Chamberlain to throw another inning Wednesday, but it is not a stretch to think he could be with the Yankees by then.

Asked when Chamberlain might be promoted, Manager Joe Torre said: “The only thing I know is he’s in Scranton, and that’s certainly something that’s going to be looked at. As far as what date, I don’t know.”

Promoting Chamberlain presents a health risk; it is late in his first professional season, after pitching in the Hawaiian winter league, and the innings in the majors will be intense. Chamberlain had triceps tendinitis at the University of Nebraska, an injury that caused some teams to pass on him in the 2006 draft.

Yet the benefits could be enormous. Chamberlain throws 98 miles an hour and could overpower hitters the way Francisco Rodríguez did for the Angels and Bobby Jenks did for the White Sox in their first seasons, helping their teams win the World Series. The Yankees, who are four games out of a playoff spot, do not have a shutdown bullpen. Their relievers allowed 9 runs and 16 hits over their last eight innings.

I’ve got tix to Wednesday’s game. Perhaps I’ll get to see one of the season’s more anticipated debuts.

• Saturday, we went to go see Sonic Youth reprise their Daydream Nation double album in the delightful setting of Williamsburg’s McCarren Park Pool, an empty 70-year-old, WPA-built public facility that’s the size of three Olympic pools. Reproduced live in its entirety, Daydream Nation‘s soaring, interwoven guitars, chugging drums and alien melodies never sounded better — appropriately huge given the album’s landmark status. The 71-minute opus seemed to passed in about half that time even as I mentally followed along with every lyric, anticipated chord changes and shook in time to shifts in tempo that I’ve heard a hundred times. Meanwhile, the band careened around stage in a way that told the audience that they were enjoying the ride down this familiar road every bit as much as we were.

I’ve been listening to Daydream Nation since my Brown U. freshman roommate foisted it upon me by play the creepy, oddball and out-of-character track “Providence” on repeat about a dozen times in a row one afternoon in the fall of 1988. It took a bit longer for me to gain appreciation for the beauty and intensity of the band’s oeuvre, but they became one of my favorites even as they broke out of the indie rock ghetto to infiltrate the incredibly boring world of early ’90s mainstream rock. The handful of friends I saw at this show — some who have been part of my life since college, others who I hadn’t seen in five years or more — evoked thoughts of even more distant friends who’d have given if not a limb then at least a couple fingers to see this particular show. Not for nothing is the album’s title crucial to its following; we’re all bonded together as part of a very large secret society: the daydream nation, indeed.

• In honor of the above (well, not the Yankees and certainly not Farnsworth), I present one of my favorite MP3 treasures: Sonic Youth playing the Simpsons theme from the “Homerpalooza” episode circa 1996. Enjoy!

Hit & Run

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It’s a big day here at Futility Central. Those of you who are regular readers of the Hit List may have noticed that last week’s edition weighed in a bit lighter than normal, which is to say that for once it was of manageable length. There’s a reason for that. After two and a half seasons of ever-lengthening weekly roundups, the powers that be at BP have encouraged me to tame the unruly beast and channel my energy into a more traditionally organized (and less HTML-intensive) weekly companion piece. Consider it a 2-for-1 stock split, or maybe the variety-show spinoff.

In any event, the Prospectus Hit & Run debuts today, with a look at some of the trends and tools which help shape the weekly Hit List. In the debut edition, I look at team Support Neutral pitching rankings, the difference between BP’s two flavors of relief stats (Win Expectation above Replacement, Lineup-adjusted and Adjusted Runs Prevented), team records in one- and two-run games and their relationship to the aforementioned reliever stats, hitting streaks, and a piece of reader mail. Here’s a taste:

My customized team WXRL report reveals which bullpens have most of their oars pulling in the right direction. Rather than dissect those rankings in parallel to what we did above, we’ll look at things a bit differently. When Keith Woolner introduced it a few years ago, WXRL pushed another fine stat, Adjusted Runs Prevented, into the shadows. Whereas ARP accounts for the base-out situation in which a reliever inherits runners by treating them equally regardless of inning or relative score, WXRL incorporates leverage and the team’s expected chances of winning into the mix (once again, Derek Jacques has your brush-up). Often the two stats are more or less in agreement, but sometimes they’re not; a team may be doing a decent job of dealing with inherited runners as a whole, but a few high-leverage failures can throw their WXRL out of whack. Here are the teams’ respective rankings (1-30) in both categories: 
Team      WXRL  ARP Difference
D'Backs     4   14  10
Tigers     17   25   8
Indians    11   18   7
Brewers     8   15   7
Braves     15   21   6
Pirates    16   22   6
Cardinals  13   19   6
Angels     12   17   5
Astros     23   26   3
White Sox  27   29   2
Phillies   25   27   2
Nationals   7    9   2
Red Sox     1    2   1
Dodgers     5    6   1
Mets       10   11   1
Mariners    3    4   1
Reds       28   28   0
Devil Rays 30   30   0
Twins       6    5  -1
Padres      2    1  -1
Royals     14   12  -2
Rockies    26   23  -3
Marlins    20   16  -4
Athletics  24   20  -4
Orioles    29   23  -6
Rangers     9    3  -6
Blue Jays  18   10  -8
Cubs       22   13  -9
Yankees    19    7 -12
Giants     21    8 -13

For just about half of the teams (14 out of 30), the difference between the two lists is trivial; they’re no further than three spots apart. What the list is saying for the rest is that relative to their overall bullpen performance, the teams at the top have done a better job of rising to the occasion than the ones at the bottom; they’ve especially taken advantage of their high-leverage situations. Note the lead here is held by the Diamondbacks, who are an NL-best 7.4 wins above their third-order projection, and that nine of the top 10 teams—all but the Braves—are ahead of their own third-order projections. At the other end of the scale, we’ve heard plenty about the bullpen failures of the Cubs and Yankees at various times this year, but the Giants? Between the minute-to-minute updates on Barry Bonds, the zombie lineup around him, and the solid but ill-supported rotation (including the fascinating Tim Lincecum), the bullpen has been pretty low on the list of things to pay attention to out by the bay. Then again, there’s a reason Armando Benitez was banished to Florida, and it ain’t the dominance of his replacement, Brad Hennessey.

You can expect a similar assortment of stats, analysis and Simpsons references when the piece rolls around next Tuesday, and of course, the regular Hit List will continue to run on Fridays.

• • •

Speaking of the Simpsons, not only have I already got my ticket for opening night of the long-awaited movie on Friday, but last Sunday we paid a visit to the 42nd Street 7-11, one of a dozen in the country which has been converted into a Kwik-E-Mart as a promotional tie-in. So I picked up a talking beer mug, a couple cans of Buzz Cola, and a box of KrustyO’s (jagged metal prize not included), sampled a toothache-inducing donut, and cursed the failure to stock the Radioactive Man comic and the Dufffman bobblehead (to say nothing of the failure to produced Duff Beer). I resisted the call of the Blue Squishee, the giant PEZ dispensers, the Simpsons lunch box, and a few other items, but I feel sufficiently souvenired up.

The signage in the store was great. The trash can had a price tag, the hot dogs were touted as “rich in bunly goodness and were offered “3 for the price of 3,” and an oversized visage of Grampa Simpson’s friend Jasper Beardley was painted in the freezer in reference to the episode where he takes up residence there. “7 lb bag, Jasper extra,” read the sign. Fun stuff.

• • •

Also at BP recently is an introduction to the forthcoming It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: the Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book and the first look at its cover:

Certainly better looking than the hideous Mind Game cover, at least. As to the contents, quoth editor Steven Goldman:

On August 13, the Baseball Prospectus family will proudly debut our newest book, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: the Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book. For the first time, we’ve taken our nifty statistical tools and the insights gained from years of studying baseball and applied them to the pennant races of the past. Not only did we get to revisit some of the great players, personalities, and events of the past and look at them from a new vantage point, but in doing so we were able to find new insights about the game of today. As Shakespeare wrote, what’s past is prologue. That’s true even in baseball–you could look it up.

Using a method developed by Clay Davenport that compares the closeness and volatility of each pennant (or divisional) race, we ranked every race in history and wrote about the top 14 on the list, pausing here and there to explore related subjects from the greatest deadline-day trades of all time to what would have happened if Branch Rickey had been the general manager of the Yankees instead of the Dodgers.

Steve goes on to mention a couple of my contributions (Jay Jaffe on the Dodgers race to beat the Braves in 1959 and why a Milwaukee dynasty that had every reason to happen didn’t”) but he leaves out not only my favorite titled chapter of the book (“The Replacement Level Killers,” on teams dragged down because of their failure to adjust their lineups)) but also my chapters on the 1967 race in which the Red Sox beat out the Tigers, White Sox, and Twins (oh my!), and the impact of Triple Crown winner Carl Yastrzemski and other superstars on their teams’ pennant chances. Still, it’s exciting that the book is just a few weeks away from hitting the streets.

Return of the Seamhead on Crystal Math

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I could quibble with the headline (“Stats Geek: Clemente, Waner almost an even match”), but once I learned that it was the title of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill’s regular offering and not another example of a P-G writer pejoratively yanking my chain (I tip my cap to Gene Collier’s phrase “seamheads on crystal math” if not the sentiment behind it, though he and I have long since buried the hatchet), I was happy to find myself getting a nice press hit today.

Back in December, O’Neill consulted me for a JAWS comparison of Pirate rightfielders Roberto Clemente and Paul “Big Poison” Waner, the latter of whom will have his uniform number retired by the club on Saturday. Not to be confused with his brother, teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer Lloyd “Little Poison” Waner — nicknames derived from a Brooklynese lament, “Them Waners. It’s always the little poison on thoid and the big poison on foist!” — Paul Waner was the superior of the two; as legend goes, Lloyd was elected by the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee in a case of mistaken identity. Da Big Poison is also a a very good comp for Clemente:

Baseball historians say Waner and Clemente are near equals. Both could run, hit and field like almost nobody else. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks Clemente eighth and Waner ninth among all right fielders.

Jay Jaffe has developed a rating system for Baseball Prospectus to discuss the merits for the Hall of Fame, and he ranks both even higher. Jaffe puts right fielders in this order: 1) Babe Ruth 2) Hank Aaron 3) Mel Ott 4) Frank Robinson 5) Al Kaline 6) Clemente 7) Waner 8) Dave Winfield 9) Reggie Jackson 10) Sam Crawford. (That possibly unfamiliar name is the all-time triples leader who played alongside Ty Cobb in Detroit).

“If Clemente had lived,” Jaffe wrote in an e-mail in December, “he’d have probably emerged from the pack for sole possession of fifth.”

I haven’t space to outline Jaffe’s methodology, but he uses peak years and career record to come up with the overall rating. You don’t hear arguments about Clemente and Waner the way you do, say, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, but no players who played the same position for the same team are more closely matched among baseball’s all-time greats, according to Jaffe’s system.

O’Neill had simply asked how the duo compared with other famous franchise mates, with an eye towards the aforementioned Joe D. and the Mick. In running the numbers, I discovered that Clemente and Waner were actually the closest call, JAWS-wise, among Hall of Famers from the same team. Since O’Neill didn’t run down the others, and since this is likely too unwieldy for BP Unfiltered, I’ll show the work here: 

Player          POS  Career   PEAK   JAWS
Babe Ruth         9   234.2  107.0  170.6
Hank Aaron        9   209.9   85.0  147.5
Mel Ott           9   175.8   84.8  130.3
Frank Robinson    9   165.1   76.2  120.7
Al Kaline         9   129.9   64.6   97.3
Roberto Clemente  9   126.3   67.7   97.0
Paul Waner        9   124.7   68.2   96.5
Dave Winfield     9   131.6   61.0   96.3
Reggie Jackson    9   126.3   64.6   95.5
Sam Crawford      9   112.3   57.3   84.8

Clemente put up 6.3 WARP during his final season at age 37. Even two seasons totaling that would have been enough to distinguish him from the other four players with whom he’s clustered here. Going around the horn and then some for other team-specific battles in the rankings among HOFers: 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Johnny Bench     2   122.2   73.7    98.0
Gary Carter      2   117.8   68.9    93.4
Yogi Berra       2   116.2   66.0    91.1
Carlton Fisk     2   118.3   59.5    88.9
Bill Dickey      2   107.0   62.8    84.9

Among the two pinstripers wearing #8, Berra has a solid edge, though the latter is no shame. 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Lou Gehrig       3   147.1   84.7   115.9
Cap Anson        3   159.3   64.0   111.7
Eddie Murray     3   140.3   69.2   104.8
Jimmie Foxx      3   129.9   73.9   101.9
Roger Connor     3   133.0   68.7   100.9
Dan Brouthers    3   116.1   70.1    93.1
Tony Perez       3   109.4   61.2    85.3
Johnny Mize      3   102.9   67.4    85.2
Willie McCovey   3   107.0   62.1    84.6

Connor, Mize, and McCovey all had stints with the Giants, though the latter’s was by far the biggest chunk of his career, whereas O’Connor and Mize would see significant time elsewhere. 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Eddie Collins    4   178.0   84.9   131.5
Rogers Hornsby   4   163.7   96.0   129.9
Joe Morgan       4   168.0   86.1   127.1
Nap Lajoie       4   167.1   83.7   125.4
Ch. Gehringer    4   132.3   77.0   104.7
Rod Carew        4   128.7   70.4    99.6
Frankie Frisch   4   119.8   66.2    93.0
Ryne Sandberg    4   112.8   72.0    92.4
Bobby Doerr      4   112.5   69.3    90.9
Billy Herman     4   106.8   69.6    88.2

Hornsby and Herman both spent significant portions of their careers as Cubs, though not as much as Sandberg. 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Honus Wagner     6   194.4   86.8   140.6
Cal Ripken       6   169.2   89.1   129.2
Arky Vaughan     6   131.4   90.0   110.7

Another one for the Pittsburghers, as two of the top three Hall of Fame shortstops were at their best as Pirates. The underrated Vaughan even bests Wagner in peak score. 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Stan Musial      7   197.3   90.8   144.1
Ted Williams     7   172.0   93.3   132.7
C. Yaztrzemski   7   144.3   67.2   105.8
Ed Delahanty     7   111.9   73.1    92.5
Jim O'Rourke     7   129.0   55.7    92.4
Billy Williams   7   117.2   66.3    91.8
Willie Stargell  7   105.8   60.3    83.1
Al Simmons       7   104.7   60.6    82.7
Joe Medwick      7    98.2   64.1    81.2

A pair of Red Sox at #2 and #3 here make for the highest ranking of “teammates,” though the gap is considerably wider than between Clemente and Waner, or Berra and Dickey. Medwick played significantly in St Louis, though it’s not really close with Musial, who actually played more of his games in leftfield but accumulated more WARP in rightfield). 

Player          POS  Career  PEAK    JAWS
Willie Mays      8   206.1   91.9   149.0
Ty Cobb          8   190.0   81.8   135.9
Tris Speaker     8   173.2   77.8   125.5
Mickey Mantle    8   155.1   85.3   120.2
Joe DiMaggio     8   120.2   77.3    98.8

The most famous intra-team positional battle isn’t really all that close on either peak or career values, even with Joe D. holding about an eight-win edge on defense.

Anyway, it’s always fun to see my name spelled correctly and my system in the paper. Thanks to Brian O’Neill for casting JAWS in a more flattering light than his colleague.

Hoist a Skittlebrau to Vin Scully

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Reason #10,001 why Vin Scully is the greatest announcer ever, from the broadcast of last night’s game: “Yes, the Phillies have lost 10,000, but it’s not been all beer and skittles for the Dodgers either.”

When I heard this, at first I thought the esteemed voice of the Dodgers was referencing a great Simpsons quote from the episode “Bart Star”:

Homer: Got any of that beer that has candy floating in it? You know, Skittlebrau?

Apu: Such a beer does not exist, sir. I think you must have dreamed it.

Homer: Oh. Well, then just give me a six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles.

Scully has never been a guest voice on the Simpsons, though he’s often been imitated to uncanny effect by Harry Shearer. Realizing the likelihood of the 80-year-old voice of the Dodgers making such a reference was slim, I decided to Google the phrase. As it turns out, it predates the Simpsons by several centuries:

Meaning

‘Beer and skittles’ is shorthand for a life of indulgence spent in the pub.

Origin

Skittles, also known as Ninepins, which was the pre-cursor to ten-pin bowling, has been a popular English pub game since the 17th century. The pins are set up in a square pattern and players attempt to knock them down with a ball. It is still played but not so much as previously.

The phrase was referred to in Footman’s History of the Parish Church of Chipping Lambourn (1894), which reprints a piece from 1634:

“William Gyde… for playing at skittolles on Sunday.”

Citations of beer and skittles and variants appear in literature from the 19th century. For example, Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, 1837:

“It’s a reg’lar holiday to them – all porter and skittles.”

Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 1857:

“Life isn’t all beer and skittles.

Several other sites back up this interpretation. So in the end, two of my favorite things have given me even more reason to appreciate their depth. Scully’s added another fine archaism to his arsenal, and the genesis of a great Simpsons joke has been revealed. I’ll drink to that!