Mickey Mouse Baseball

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It’s Subway Series time, and if you can detect the lack of enthusiasm here, well, that’s because the series finds the Yankees — 12th on this week’s Hit List — reeling as they head out to Shea Stadium, 18-21 and having lost their last two series. Here’s what I had to say about them:

It Gets Late Early Out There: five losses in seven games drive the Yankees back under .500 and a whopping 9.5 games out of first place in the AL East, and with series against the Hit List’s top two teams on deck, things aren’t about to get easier. The offense hits like the Ghost of Joe Girardi for the week (.232/.286/.365), surrendering the scoring lead after cobbling together just 22 runs (luckily, they still lead the league in vaunting). While Jorge Posada (.375) and Derek Jeter (.368) are 1-2 in the AL batting race, Bobby Abreu (.236/.306/.304 — he’s finally hitting like Kevin Stocker), Robinson Cano (.234/.276/.324) and Alex Rodriguez (.237/.348/.303 with one homer since his initial binge) are all mired in slumps, and 900 runs no longer look like Smooth Jay Jaffe’s Lock of the Year (though it is a pretty big lock).

I had more to add, but with the entry already the longest on the list, I skipped noting Kyle Farnsworth’s edict that nobody, not even Roger Clemens, should be allowed to avoid watching him pour gasoline on the Yankee fires. Yes, yes, Farnsworth’s been riding a relatively solid streak lately; BP’s stats still have him as their fourth-most effective reliever behind other six million dollar arms like Brian Bruney and Sean Henn, and with data like that, is it any wonder why the Yanks outrank only the Royals among AL bullpens in Reliever Expected Wins Added?

The Mets, of course, are the #2 team on the Hit List, while the Red Sox, whom the Yanks play next Monday through Wednesday, top the list for the second week in a row. Mott the Hoople, Kevin Stocker, Waffle House, the 2003 Winter Meetings and lots of Simpsons references this week, along with a reminder of one of the first ballgames I remember attending, which bears some explanation.

As regular readers know, I grew up in Salt Lake City, which at the time my dad started taking me to games housed the Gulls, the Triple-A franchise of the California Angels. One night during the 1978 season, my dad, my brother and I found ourselves sitting one row of metal grandstand benches above a father and son who lived across the street from us; I think their names were Gordon and Keith, respectively, and that the latter, a shy, sandy blond-haired kid, was in my brother’s class.

At some point, with a man on first base, one Gull pummeled the ball into deep right-center, and he was barreling out of the box thinking double all the way. The runner on first base, however, assumed the ball would be caught, so went only partway between first and second. When the ball dropped, the speeding batter passed the momentarily paralyzed runner and was called out, at which point the heretofore seemingly mild-mannered Gordon was moved to yell, “Oh come on! You guys are playing Mickey Mouse baseball out there!”

From then on, any time I thought of the combination of Disney’s most famous character and baseball, I associated it with a particularly horseshit level of play (though the 2002 Angels, as annoying as they were, forced me to reconsider this). Thus I was excited that either the Devil Rays or the Rangers dropped an entire three-game series to the other when playing at the Rays’ temporary second home at the Disney Wide World of Sports stadium, which holds only 7,500 seats, in Orlando, because I got to use the phrase “Mickey Mouse baseball” for Texas’ performance there. Hey, if you can’t entertain yourself, why write at all?

Inspired by the greatness of Cardboard Gods, I’ll have more to come on the Gulls soon…

Brewer Buzz

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Given my recent disappointment with the tense Yankee Stadium scene and its heavy-handed security, Friday evening at Shea Stadium felt like a breath of fresh air — the first time in the history of the English language that sentence has been written, I’m sure — with the Brewers and the Mets squaring off for the first of a three-game series. My brother-in-law Adam had surprised me by scoring tickets through his friend Matt and driving up from Wilmington, Delaware with girlfriend Nicole. With the league’s best record at 24-10, holding a seven-game lead in the NL Central, the talented young Brewers are suddenly worth crossing state lines to see.

From our seats way down the leftfield line, we craned our necks — our seats faced centerfield because Shea was apparently designed by inbeciles who had never seen a baseball game — to watch as the first three innings passed without a hit. Both the Brewers’ Jeff Suppan and the Mets’ Jorge Sosa befuddled the opposing bats, but Milwaukee made a couple ugly mistakes along the way. Rickie Weeks, who walked to open the ballgame, was skewered at the back end of a strikeout-throwout double play to end the first frame, while centerfielder Bill Hall embarrassingly dropped a fly ball in the second. Oops.

The Brewers’ J.J. Hardy, whose 19-game hitting streak (.418/.459/.835 with eight homers) had ended on Wednesday, registered the game’s first hit in the top of the fourth, a clean single up the middle that nonetheless went for naught. In the bottom half, the Mets responded by bombarding Suppan, who baffled them last fall as a Cardinal in the League Championship Series. David Wright led off with a home to left-center, just his third shot of the year. Carlos Delgado followed a Carlos Beltran infield single with a two-run blast to leftfield. Moises Alou doubled noisily off the right-center wall (Willie’s Wallbangers?), and one out later, scored on a Paul Lo Duca single. Damion Easley singled Lo Duca to third, but Sosa’s sacrifice wasn’t effective enough to plate the run. The six hits the Mets collected off Suppan in the inning would be the only ones he surrendered on the night.

As childhood friends Adam and Matt reminisced about ancient Brewers with the help of a handheld connection to Baseball-Reference.com (Rob Deer! Glenn Braggs! Ron “The Creature” Robinson! The legendary Chuckie Carr, who drew his release soon after swinging through a take sign and popping out on a 2-0 count, then explaining to manager Phil Garner, “That ain’t Chuckie’s game. Chuckie hacks on 2-0.”…), the modern-day Brew Crew chipped away at the lead with solo homers by Geoff Jenkins in the fifth and Prince Fielder in the sixth. The latter was so emphatic that the Mets outfielders didn’t even turn around; it was Little Big Daddy’s 10th dinger in 20 games and his league-leading 11th of the year.

The Brewers threatened against a tiring Sosa in the seventh, alternating outs and walks until pinch-hitter Gabe Gross and reliever Pedro Feliciano ushered the starters offstage. Brewers manager Ned Yost countered by burning Gross in favor of Corey Hart — generally a deplorable strategy in this age of short benches and ever-expanding bullpens, but the lefty Gross is just 4-for-50 against southpaws in his career, and sidearming southpaw Feliciano probably would have eaten his lunch and the sack too. Hart, apparently not wearing his sunglasses at night (admittedly, it was tough to see from our vantage), struck out to end the threat.

With Suppan gone, reliever Carlos Villanueva’s second pitch was launched for another home run by Easley to start the bottom of the seventh, running the score to 5-2. But again the Brewers came back, likely buoyed by the sight of an ardent fan standing proudly in his ancient Pepsi Brewers Fan Club tank top in our vicinity (you know, just like Glenn Close in The Natural). Weeks reached on an infield single off Aaron Heilman, and Hardy followed by smacking the game’s sixth homer, again to left — our angled seats were good for a great view of something — to trim the lead to 5-4. That was all she wrote, however. Heilman set down the next three Brewers in order, while Billy Wagner came on for a 1-2-3 ninth, leaving our foursome in the very small minority disappointed that the Mets came out on top. Still, it was fun to catch a bit of the Brewer buzz with folks for whom this is no annual occurrence.

• • •

Thanks to the efforts of Dan Fox and William Burke, this week’s Prospectus Hit List yielded enough interesting data for two Unfiltered entries along the way. The first begins thusly:

While burrowing through various stat pages in the service of assembling this week’s Hit List, I noticed that Kansas City’s David DeJesus was second in the AL with 27 runs scored, certainly surprising for a player on a team averaging just 3.76 per game. Turning to the Royals‘ team stats, I quickly calculated that the DeJesus has scored 21.1 percent of his team’s runs, a level which set off a vague memory I had about an old Bill James Baseball Abstract player comment for Tim Raines that included a list topped by future streetclothes-wearing Dodger manager (my sole frame of reference for him up to that point) Burt Shotton. Both were in the vicinity of 20 percent.

As I queried our stat gurus to find out whether this level had been approached since, not only did I get the data but a note from our own Jim Baker, who served as James’ assistant back in the day: “By coincidence, it was I who put that list in the ‘84 Abstract inspired by the work of Tim Raines. I wonder if he’s been topped since then?”

The short answer is no, and in fact while many have come close to 20 percent, nobody has topped that mark. Check the top 30 over at BP.

Meanwhile, Baker also figures in the second entry, which is based on his “disaster start” stat, one in which a pitcher allows as many or more runs than innings pitched in an outing. In the Hit List I noted that Jeff Weaver had gone 6-for-6 in this department, but it took some persistent digging by Burke to find out whether this is indeed a record. Based on data going back to 1960, it turns out that Detroit’s Willie Blair went seven consecutive starts in 1999, but those were interrupted by a stint in the bullpen. Seven pitchers have had six straight disaster starts interrupted by at least one relief outing, while five pitchers, including Weaver, accomplished a pure streak of six straight starts. These Masters of Disaster include the likes of Mike Morgan, Roy Halladay, and Kyle Lohse, and they’ll survive in the spotlight at least until Weaver comes off the DL — he was conveniently placed there on Friday — to take another crack at infamy.

Bobbing and Wevoing

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I’m pleased to report that my most recent trip to Yankee Stadium, for Tuesday night’s 8-1 win over the Rangers, went considerably better than the previous outing. The Yankee offense raked Mike Wood over the coals, Alex Rodriguez went deep for the first time in 15 days (since some genius started doing Too Much Math), and Andy Pettitte bobbed and weaved (bobbed and wove?) his way through seven innings of one-run ball, and everyone went home happy.

The only casualty may have been my wallet. Back when we were promoting Baseball Prospectus 2007 in New Haven, Steven Goldman and I bet a sushi dinner over how long Doug Mientkiewicz would be allowed to hold down the first base fort (which appeared to be constructed out of couch). I said Memorial Day, Steve had the All-Star break. Stinky Minky, who came into the game hitting just .211/.282/.380, started two rallies — slapping a leadoff single in the third to ignite a three-run outburst, then stroking a two-out single in the fourth that was followed by two more hits and a run — and made two sterling defensive plays in the field in the fifth. That’s the kind of stuff Joe Torre eats with a spork, so I suspect Minky, who’s actually 11-for-28 this month with an OPS north of 1.000, is locked into a job for awhile.

Meanwhile, the rotation is coming around. As I noted in this week’s Hit List, in April the starters managed just 4.7 innings per start while compiling a 5.94 ERA, 1.64 WHIP, and five quality starts out of 23. Starting with Philip Hughes’ Mayday no-hit bid, they’ve risen to 6.2 IP/GS, a 3.42 ERA (it was 2.57 before Chien-Ming Wang was waxed yesterday), 1.07 WHIP, and five quality starts out of nine. Mike Mussina has looked like the pitcher in the catalog since coming off the DL, Darrell Rasner gave Roger Clemens some thunder to steal, but perhaps the most surprising was Matt DeSalvo’s seven-inning, three-hit shutout debut on Monday. My BP colleague Kevin Goldstein has a lengthy look at DeSalvo’s career to this point. I had no idea he was such a Division III standout in college nor was I aware of his Steve Blass-like control problems last year. Here’s what Goldstein has to say about DeSalvo these days:

With little fanfare, DeSalvo took the mound at Yankee Stadium on Monday night to face the Mariners in what was the American League’s only night game on the slate. It’s easy to assume that in his entire career, he never faced a hitter of Ichiro Suzuki’s caliber, and it sure looked like it when Ichiro led off the game with a double to right. Three batters later, Raul Ibanez would single him home for a 1-0 Seattle lead, and things looked a bit grim.

Over the next six innings, DeSalvo would give up just one more hit, finishing the night with seven innings and just the one run. DeSalvo would walk three, including the first two batters of the third inning when his command troubles briefly appeared, and not strike out a single Mariner. It was one of the most dominating-yet-not-dominating performances you’ll see, and awfully fun to watch. In the postgame press conference, DeSalvo mentioned how a pre-game meeting with catcher Jorge Posada limited his arsenal to just three pitches -– fastball, slider, changeup — in order to keep things simple. But that was a simplification in itself, as DeSalvo mixed in six pitches once you break down all the variants. He threw both a two- and four-seam fastball, with the latter sitting at 88-91, and the former featuring better movement. He also occasionally mixed in what looked like a cutter, which featured late horizontal break. His slider is more of a slurvy, show-me offering, but the changeups were special. DeSalvo’s natural mechanics have both a body turn and a hiccup, both which add to the deception of his pitches, especially on his off-speed offerings. His arm action is fantastic on his straight change, and then he also throws what scouts often refer to as a “changeup off a changeup”, as the pitch is another 3-6 mph less than normal change, while featuring more fade. Posada called a wonderful game, stirring up DeSalvo’s arsenal, and DeSalvo himself — a player with a long record of praise for his makeup and mound demeanor — looked like a 15-year-veteran on the mound, working quickly, showing no signs of emotion either good or bad, and showing no fear by challenging hitters at every opportunity.

Here I have to tweak Mr. Goldman for the fact that DeSalvo’s not in BP07, while Sean Henn, Chase Wright, and Wil Nieves, all of whom have figured in the early-season Yankee plot, are in the one-sentence “Lineouts” of the Yankee chapter. Obviously, the injury problems have forced the Yanks to dig deeper than they otherwise would, but I suspect BP’s readers might wish they could see full PECOTAs of some of those players in the book (DeSalvo’s isn’t even online yet).

While it was worth a wince or two that the Yanks squandered DeSalvo’s effots when Mariano Rivera yielded a tiebreaking homer in the top of the ninth, I’m still willing to chalk up Mo’s problems to rust; he hadn’t pitched in four days. My back-envelope calculations show that in 2005-2006, Rivera put up a 3.05 ERA on three or more days’ rests, 1.32 on less than three. Include 2007 (through Monday) and the figures jump to 4.06 and 1.55.

Anyway, back to the Hit List, as with Goldstein’s article, it’s behind the subscription wall these days, so if you’re not a BP subscriber you’ll have to take my word for it that the Yanks are a relatively low 10th (one notch ahead of the Dodgers) while the Red Sox have taken over the top spot on the list. Meanwhile, I got a call this morning that my brother-in-law Adam is making a surprise visit to the city tonight, having scored tickets — including one for me — to a matchup between the #2 Mets and #3 Brewers. My wife’s family, of course, is from Milwaukee, and I’ve enjoyed sharing in their enthusiasm over the exciting young Brew Crew. I spent a good deal of time talking about them on my two radio gigs last week. On the latter, Norm Wamer had said the week before, “Am I crazy to be picking the Brewers in the NL Central?” No, I said, you’re just reading your BP subscription because we’ve been touting them pretty heavily. With J.J. Hardy and Rickie Weeks finally healthy at the same time, Prince Fielder developing into a crusher, and a deep pitching staff, this team can do some damage, and I’m looking forward to catching them tonight.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a special sight-gag-aided entry which includes the former scourge of the Bronx. My friend Nick (who did a fine job with the graphics here) and I would have played this card back in 2002-2003 if Wevo had ever pitched worth a warm bucket of spit during his days in pinstripes:

Six-Piece, Extra Crispy: Jeff Weaver’s string of disaster starts–allowing as many or more runs as innings pitched, per our own Jim Baker–reaches six in a row with another pair this week. As scientists sift through the rubble of baseball history to determine if that in fact is a record, the good news is that Weaver’s ERA dropped from 18.26 to 14.32 in that span. Given that the Mariner offense has scored just 13 runs in those six starts, one wonders if they’ve been in on the let’s-all-mail-it-in plan all along. On the off chance that it’s the Mariner uniform which is the source of the trouble–after all, Weaver has yet to pitch a non-disaster start in one–our fashion consultant suggests more appropriate attire for his next outing.

Rocket Ride (Slight Return)

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Roger Clemens was on my mind last week. Thanks to a John Perroto piece at Baseball Prospectus, incorporating him into the week’s Hit List was an inevitability, but I managed to have some fun with it:

Despite the arrival of Hunter Pence, the Astros are decidedly earthbound after nine losses in 10 games, and at this rate, the only Rocket ride they can look forward to is on Kiss Alive II. Owner Drayton McLane, GM Tim Purpura, president of baseball operations Tal Smith, and manager Phil Garner confer, deciding that Garner’s mustache is trimmed to the optimal length to inspire Craig Biggio in his deathless march to 3,000.

And that’s without even considering the state of the Yankee rotation, which we’ll get to momentarily. Late in my Friday afternoon chat at BP, I made reference to a bit of sarcasm passing me by like a Clemens fastball, and then shortly afterwards, fielded a question about the Rocket:

The Animal (Boston): Speaking of Clemens… got a prediction?

Jay Jaffe: Yes. With the Red Sox lacking a defined need and the Astros going nowhere fast, I think this is the Yanks’ play if Clemens comes back, and my guess is that he heists them for something like a prorated salary of $30 million.

Sunday afternoon, during the seventh-inning stretch of the Yanks’ 5-0 win over the Mariners, the cameras cut to Clemens as he made a surprise announcement from owner George Steinbrenner’s private box: “Well, they came and got me out of Texas and I can tell you it’s a privilege to be back. I’ll be talking to y’all soon.” Terms were not immediately announced, but ESPN’s Buster Olney reports that Clemens’ salary will be a pro-rated $28 million — not a bad guess on my part, I must say — or about $4.5 million per month. Not a bad living for possibly the greatest pitcher of all time.

Clemens, amid his rather tiresome annual retirement ritual, had insisted over the past several months that he wouldn’t be making a decision between the aforementioned three teams until the end of May. But the combination of the Yankees’ decimated rotation, the other two teams’ delayed timeframe, Clemens’ accelerated workout schedule, and cold, hard cash made for an inevitable resolution. As Olney reports:

Clemens and [agent Randy] Hendricks made it clear to everyone, even into late April, that he wouldn’t make his decision until late May. But as Mike Mussina got hurt and then Carl Pavano, the Yankees felt they could and should become more aggressive. After landing in Texas, Cashman wanted to set up a meeting with Hendricks — only to learn, to his horror, that the agent was meeting with the Red Sox, which the agent confirmed to Cashman with a text message on May 1. Hours later, Phil Hughes hurt his hamstring. The Yankees’ need for pitching was acute.

Cashman and Hendricks e-mailed back and forth on Tuesday and Wednesday, kicking around the idea of meeting during the day Thursday in Houston, but there was a terrible storm in Arlington that forced the postponement of the game. The Yankees and Rangers were scheduled for a doubleheader Thursday, and Cashman felt that if he was away from the team during the game, then the media might get an inkling of how he was trying to make an aggressive move on Clemens. He had used the same approach in signing Johnny Damon: Make a very aggressive offer quickly and force a decision.

So Hendricks and Cashman spoke on Thursday night, and the financial parameters were laid out: Clemens would cost a prorated salary of $28 million. Hendricks got off the phone and called Clemens, and told him that the time was nearing for the pitcher to make a decision, and that if he was going to go to the Yankees, now was the time. “Let’s do it,” Clemens responded.

The past week-and-change has intensified the need for stability in the Yanks’ rotation. Last Saturday, Jeff Karstens was drilled by a line drive that fractured his fibula. On Tuesday, Philip Hughes broke hearts just as he was winning them over, popping his hamstring while chasing a no-hitter. On Friday, Kei Igawa, who had come out of the bullpen to fire six innings of shutout ball in relief of Karstens, pitched like the guy who got sent to the pen in the first place. And as the week wore on, doubts about Crippled Pitcher’s Carl Pavano’s return this season reached a deafening crescendo. Despite good work from Andy Pettitte and Darrell Rasner, a sizzling start from just-activated Mike Mussina and Chien-Ming Wang chasing perfection, the Yanks’ rotation doesn’t appear to have the necessary depth to hold up its end of this $200 million deal, which is why a team with the highest-scoring offense in the majors is still clawing its way back to .500 while losing ground to their rivals. Here’s a thumbnail comparison of the Yankee and Red Sox rotations thus far: 

       W-L  IP/GS  QS%  ERA   K/9  SNLVAR
BOS   17-9   6.25  60%  3.79  7.2   4.1
NYY    8-8   4.97  28%  5.25  5.3   1.2

The Yanks aren’t even averaging five innings per start, they’re getting a Quality Start less than half as often, allowing about 1.50 runs per game more; the three wins above replacement level difference (according to BP’s numbers) seems to be an underestimation given the superiority of the Yankee offense thus far, but the difference in bullpen performances has been even steeper, and there’s no question the latter fact is a product of the former. As the Yanks have spent the past decade reminding us, the soft underbelly of long relief can make for quite a feast.

There’s no question Clemens can still pitch. Granted, the NL has played as an inferior league during Clemens’ three years years in Houston, and that’s before considering the DH/non-DH factor, but a pitcher who put up these numbers from ages 41-43 can still get it done: 

Year   W-L   IP    K/9   ERA  ERA+ 
2004  18-4  214.1  9.1  2.98  145  Cy Young #7
2005  13-8  211.1  7.9  1.87  221  Led NL in ERA
2006   7-6  113.1  8.1  2.30  197

Despite the drama of the announcement and the Yankees’ obvious need, as a fan I’ve got mixed emotions about Clemens’ return. I was no fan of Clemens when he came to New York — I screamed myself hoarse at some of his early starts — but I came around. I was in the House That Ruth Built watching him nail down the 1999 World Series clincher, an indelible moment in my time as a fan. I was also at his stellar Game Three performance in the 2001 Seres, where he held off the Diamondbacks in a tense game played under tense circumstances. For all of his checkered history in big games — a history I’ve explored several times — his best big-game performances have come as a Yankee: “In 17 pinstriped [postseason] starts, he had a 3.24 ERA and won two World Series rings; with the other two teams, his ERA is 4.19 with no championships,” I wrote in 2005. And I’ve held that when he retired for the first time, he owed the Yanks and their fans nothing except perhaps the return of that Humvee, which is just more Steinbrenner money anyway.

Having said that, I’ve watched Clemens reveal himself as even more of a mercenary since then; like Krusty the Klown, selling out is in his blood. Clemens is perhaps the ultimate mercenary in baseball history, one who’s not only able to call the shots on where he plays, but exactly when he gets to show up to work. Taking him at his word on any matter involving his retirement or his return is a foolish act, and his burly-redneck-football-adrenaline-junky-drama-queen persona is a bit tough to digest. And that’s before his pitching even comes into play. He’s still a going-on-45, six-inning pitcher coming to a tough division — not to mention the loftiest, championship-or-bust expectations to be found in team sports — and counting on him to dominate as he did even for stretches during this millennium is probably a pipe dream given the contrast to his cushy Houston environs.

Still, when the alternative is watching a parade of Your Name Heres limp from mound to DL to bullpen or Scranton and back again trying to fill out the Yankee rotation, Clemens is the preferable alternative. In for a penny, in for a pound, as my Anglophilic friends would say. His pricey presence allows the Yanks to continue with their attempt to have cake and eat it too, winning while rebuilding, buying time for a young arm like Hughes to develop. If nothing else, this Rocket ride is certain to be an interesting one.

• • •

A reminder to those of you who are XM subscribers: I’ll be doing my usual 2 PM Eastern slot with Chris Liss today on XM 144’s “Baseball Beat,” and I’m sure you-know-who will be at least one topic of conversation between two Yankee fans.

Also on the radio, on Wednesday at 4:10 PM Eastern I’ll be appearing on Toledo, Ohio’s 1470 AM (WLQR), doing a show called “Front Row” with host Norm Wamer. Wamer had me on last week, and I’m delighted to return. Catch it if you’re in the area.

Grumpy 7

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Yankees-Red Sox games in the Bronx are always tense affairs, but Saturday’s contest ratcheted the tension through the roof. For starters, the Yanks came in riding a seven-game losing streak, their longest since the end of the 2000 season (their 0-fer on the Hit List stuck out like a sore thumb). They’d lost four straight to the Sox, including Friday night’s 11-4 debacle, a game which stopper Andy Pettitte (13-5 against the Sox in his career, and 64-27 after a Yankee loss) failed to get the job done. Worse, Mariano Rivera, who’d blown his only two save opportunities of the year in spectacular fashion, was torched for four runs in 1/3 of an inning of mop-up duty and had to be unceremoniously removed mid-inning. The tabloid paper tiger, George Steinbrenner was supposedly threatening to roar (if you believe Howard Rubenstein), canning Joe Torre for the egregious sin of not being ten deep in healthy major league starting pitchers. Not that anyone should put any stock in this; it’s most likely the black throat of the anti-Cashman forces — Mark Newman, raise your hand — stirring up trouble.

Against this backdrop, I headed to Yankee Stadium for my second game of the year, and the fun started early, when the Police Academy reject at the entrance hassled me over the little leather attache in which I keep my scorebook, sunglasses, and subway-ready reading material — a modest upgrade over the previous faux-leather item I’d recently replaced. Since 9/11, security at the Stadium has gotten increasingly unpleasant and irrational. I could have a Tek-9 in my pants and grenades wired to my body, but so long as my cell phone turns on and there are no assault rifles hidden under my cap, the Rent-A-Cops will wave me through. Try to bring in a leather attache, and it’s curtains. Stick the stupid thing in a clear plastic bag at the request of the Rent-A-Cop’s supervisor, and everything is back to hunky dory, “just this once.”

Our seats were in the infield, but they were also in the back row of the Tier Box section, directly in front of the Section 10/12 tunnel. Thus, we were vulnerable every half-wit drunk sloshing multiple beers onto us, while a steady breeze of peanut shells wafting up from the rows below dusted our entire section. All of this excitement cost me only $56. Several rows down, a man in a red #7 football jersey with “Grumpy” on the back, stood out among the Jeter, Cabrera, Rodriguez and Mantle t-shirts and jerseys dotting the crowd. It was a Snow White reference, but the non sequitur summed up the vibe in the park: the Yanks’ seven losses in a row had all of us in a less-than-chipper mood, hardly they type of vibe than a beautiful Saturday afternoon with a ballgame ought to bring.

Against that wonderful tableau, the game got off to a miserable start for the Yanks. On the first pitch, Sox shortstop Julio Lugo lined a pitch back to the box, and it drilled pitcher Jeff Karstens on the leg. Karstens went down as though he’d been shot, and was writhing in agony as Torre, trainer Gene Monahan and the infielders encircled him. After a few minutes of catching his breath, standing up, and squatting on his haunches — making us believe he’d actually taken the shot in the groin — Karstens threw a warm-up pitch and drew applause and the green light from the trainer. But after giving up another single, he departed; it turns out the liner had cracked his fibula, further depleting an already decimated rotation.

With the staff already in disarray, Torre summoned his lone option, Kei Igawa. Carrying a 7.84 ERA through four starts, the Japanese lefty has been nothing short of erratic thus far; with Karstens’ return from some spring elbow tenderness, the Yanks had banished Igawa to the bullpen until he got his shit together. Nick and I put the over/under for runs allowed by the Yanks at 12 and slunk into our seats. I summoned my Clancy Wiggum voice: “This is gonna get worse before it gets better.”

Miraculously, Igawa began by inducing a room-service 4-6-3 double-play off the bat of David Ortiz. As the big slugger lumbered back to the dugout, the man in the seat directly in front of me shouted, “Get off the field, fat ass! And that’s coming from a 50-year-old, 295-pound man!” The fellow fat ass soon revealed himself to be Tom from Texas, and he kept us entertained throughout the afternoon with a lively stream of patter, though I could have done without the combination of peanut detritus and dandruff flaking from his midnight blue shirt into my soda cup. Suddenly, I wasn’t so thirsty.

Though Manny Ramirez came into the game batting just .193, he still posed a threat, particularly with Lugo at third. After falling behind 0-2, he battled Igawa through 10 pitches, finally working a walk. But Igawa came back to strike out J.D. Drew, earning a healthy ovation from the portion of the 55,026 fans who weren’t carpetbagging around in Red Sox paraphernalia.

The Yanks mounted a threat in the bottom of the first against Tim Wakefield. With one out, Derek Jeter reached on an error by third baseman Mike Lowell, his seventh of the year after making just six all of last year. Jeter stole second a few pitches before slumping Bobby Abreu — in the midst of what would become an 0-for-19 slump, one that would see him attempting to bunt in his next at-bat — worked a walk, bringing up Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod had cooled off a bit from his scorching pace of 14 homers and 34 RBI in 18 games. A-Rod worked the count full, but struck out, while Jeter lit for third base and was gunned down for an inning-ending double play. Blech.

The Yanks threatened again in the second. Hideki Matsui stroked a one-out single, and stole second one pitch before Jorge Posada walked. Both runners moved up when a Wakefield pitch knuckled off Doug Mirabelli’s big glove. Since Mirabelli’s sole reason for breathing rests on his ability to catch Wakefield’s knuckler — a problem that San Diego GM Kevin Towers exploited beautifully when the Sox needed to hurriedly reacquire Mirabelli last summer — I shouted something colorfully unprintable, even by this blog’s lax standards. Yeah, love to hate that Mirabelli, I do. Thus my curse words were adequately warmed up when Melky Cabrera lined out to rightfield to end the inning.

The Yanks finally broke through in the fourth, when after a one-out walk by Matsui, Posada went upper deck with a Wakefield knuckler, spilling some poor fan’s beer or soda all over the facade of the rightfield tier, 2-0 Yanks. Still, the crowd was tense, unwilling to believe Igawa’s stifling performance. Working exclusively from the stretch, “Ugly Uh-gawa” (who’s no matinee idol, if you’ve seen pics) kept the Sox offense at bay by getting ahead of hitters. Through five innings, he’d gotten a first-pitch strike on 11 out of 16 and surrendered just one hit, a two-out double by Lowell in the fourth. He even got Ortiz to ground into yet another double play, though this time, his sundial-timed loaf back to the dugout brought no comment from Tom from Texas.

Ugly Igawa gave Ortiz fits all day. With one out in the sixth, he got the slugger to pop up into foul territory on the first base side. Jason Giambi, playing first because Joe Torre had finally benched Doug Mientkiewicz and his .140 batting average, surprised everyone by leaning over the railing to snare the popup. When Igawa walked Ramirez on four pitches immediately afterwards, it looked as though the jig was up, but Drew slapped an easy grounder right to Giambi to end the threat.

The Yanks extended their lead to 3-0 in the bottom of the inning. Posada worked a walk off Wakefield, and advanced to second on a grounder. Cabrera, who’d hit the ball hard all day to no avail, dunked a blooper down the leftfield line, and the ball obliged by bouncing into the stands for a ground-rule double and an RBI. That was it for the knuckleballer, who’d thrown 118 pitches for the day. In came Brendan Donnelly, who loaded the bases by yielding an infield single to Jeter — who would go 3-for-5 with two infield singles and two reach-on-errors, as Lowell had booted another one in the fifth — and walking Abreu before getting A-Rod to pop up to short.

Lowell reached on an A-Rod error to start the seventh, and Coco Crisp singled, ending Igawa’s day. Six-plus shutout innings, two hits, four walks, six strikeouts, against the Red Sox no less — it all added up to a well-earned standing ovation as he departed in favor of Brian Bruney. The chunky, heat-throwing reliever struck out Mirabelli and extricated the Yanks from the jam having thrown just nine pitches.

It would have been nice if he’d come back for an encore, particularly because he hadn’t worked the night before, but Torre quixotically summoned Kyle “Marmaduke” Farnsworth — christened as such by Alex Belth in a conversation earlier in the week (congrats to Alex and Emily on their beautiful nuptials down in the Bahamas, by the way). With the skill of a suicidal arsonist, Farnsworth doused himself in gasoline by surrendering a single to Kevin Youkilis and walking Ortiz, reaching for the matches by bringing up Ramirez with two on and no outs. But Manny looked at two quick strikes, and after a ball, was punched out watching strike three, as disbelieving as the other 55 thousand of us. He got Drew on a fielder’s choice, but surrendered an RBI single to Lowell, 3-1 Yanks. Up came Crisp, who looked at two quick strikes just as Ramirez had. He worked the count to 2-2, but looked at strike three, and was so angry at home plate ump Bruce Froemming’s call that he slammed his bat and helmet down and was tossed.

As all of this was going down, the tension, the alcohol, and a very bipartisan capacity crowd induced the usual slew of fights up in Tier Reserved. Tom from Texas proved himself a fantastic spotter, directing our eyes to the latest fray — none of which got very violent, from what I saw — long before the cops arrived. Best was the ejected Sox fan who turned around in the tunnel entranceway so as to give the finger to the Bronx denizens above. For his trouble, he got a well-deserved beer shower. As Chris Rock would say, “I don’t condone it, but I understand it.” Or perhaps my Coup de Torchon mantra is more suitable here: “It’s a dirty job, and I deserve all the dirty pleasure I get out of it.

The Yankees carried their lead into the ninth, which meant a call for Rivera. Still lacking a save for the year, and lugging a 12.15 ERA into the game, he nonetheless arrived to a hearty ovation and the familiar strains of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” He quickly yielded a single to Jason Varitek, pinch-hitting for Mirabelli — uh, oh, here we go — but erased him on a fielder’s choice for the first out. Lugo quickly fell behind 0-2, bringing the buzzing crowd to its feet, then hit a dribbler near the mound which Rodriguez barehanded on the charge, flinging a perfect peg to first, a beautiful play. With trouble looming on deck in the form or Ortiz, Mo calmly got Youkilis to pop up to second for the game-ender, as the crowd erupted and Sinatra’s “New York, New York” rang from the P.A.

I wish I could say it was all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows from there, but exiting the Stadium turned ugly. With the concourses thick with throngs of fans who’d stayed through the final out, Nick and I attempted to make our way all the way to the stairwell at the end of the leftfield side, but some psychotic security guards insisted on closing off the exit. I got irate, as did several other fans, but the Rent-A-Cops would give us no explanation.

I’m no claustrophobe, but the idea of sealing off exits under such combustible circumstances strikes me as the height of brazen stupidity. Yankee Stadium has been gradually edging towards police-state status since 9/11, but this was a new level entirely. It took 40(!) minutes to crawl from the upper deck to the subway platform, erasing what good vibes could be salvaged from the victory, and even writing this 48 hours later, my blood is still boiling.

Guess how far up their asses the Yanks can stick the next dollar they try to pry from my wallet.

All A-Rod, All the Time

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As I cobble together this week’s Hit List, here’s a link to a New York Sun piece I did on Alex Rodriguez’s hot start. Sun articles are now free, but here’s a taste if you need extra encouragement:

Before A-Rod this spring, only three hitters have hit more than 11 homers in April — Pujols, Luis Gonzalez, and Ken Griffey Jr. That number is partially a product of scheduling — Opening Day now arrives about a week earlier than it did prior to 1993, and two weeks earlier than it did in the late 1950s. Given that the Yanks still have six games to play before the calendar flips to May, setting the bar at 24 games provides a better gauge to measure Rodriguez against other hot starters in baseball history. Since 1957 (the earliest year for which game logs are continuously available), just six other players have managed 12 or more homers in the first 24 games:

As a group, this sextet averaged 35.2 homers the rest of the way, but none of them broke any records, and only two, Gonzalez and Griffey, are among the select group who have topped 50 homers in a year. However, the record-setters weren’t too far off this pace — Mark McGwire hit 10 of his record-breaking 70 homers in the first 24 games of the 1998 season, while Barry Bonds hit 11 homers through 24 games in 2001, on his way to the current single-season standard of 73. (Previous recordholder Roger Maris had just three through 24 games in 1961, proving that a hot start isn’t a necessity).

In all, 51 players besides Rodriguez have hit at least 10 homers in the first 24 games, including two others — Willie Mays in 1965 and Brady Anderson in 1996 — who hit at least 50. As a group, this bunch averaged 28.4 homers the rest of the way, with Bonds (62 in 2001) and McGwire (60 in 1998) pacing the field.

I followed that up with an expanded chart and an extensive set of A-Rod-related links in an Unfiltered post. The must-read is Tyler Kepner’s New York Times piece discussing Rodriguez’s work with new hitting coach Kevin Long, who’s encouraged the slugger to swing at the first pitch more often, concentrate on the opposite field, and focus on keeping his head stationary.

Like every Yankee fan, I’m excited to but guardedly optimistic about phenom Philip Hughes’ debut tonight. One of my Baseball Prospectus colleagues was quite critical about the way the Yanks have handled this, charging that the Yankees were reacting rather than acting by noting that Chase Wright was recalled to prevent Hughes from being rushed. Said colleague came around to my way of thinking when I noted that in the time between Wright’s recall and his four-homer drubbing, two things had happened. First, Hughes had put forth his best start in Triple-A (striking out 10 in six innings), washing away the mixed results which had preceded it. Second, the Yanks had been able to add him to the 40-man roster — where Wright already resided, dictating the team’s earlier choice — without exposing another player to waivers. Humberto Sanchez’s Tommy John surgery, lamentable though it is, allowed him to be shifted to the 60-day disabled list, which doesn’t count in terms of roster slots. Got that?

In any event, as the roster arcana which has surrounded Hughes all year — I’m one of those who advocated him not breaking camp with the club so as to prevent his service clock from starting, potentially giving him an extra winter under club control — recedes into the distance, we’ll get to watch perhaps the best pitching prospect in the minors take it to the grand stage of Yankee Stadium tonight. Here’s hoping it lives up to the hype.

We Lose Another Great One

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Less than two weeks after the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, the world of letters lost another giant on Monday when David Halberstam was killed in a car accident near San Francisco. Halberstam was 73 years old but had shown no sign of slowing down; the crash occurred as he was on his way to interview the great Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship game. Tellingly, the New York Times did not have an obituary at the ready as it did for Mr. Vonnegut or most other accomplished men his age. With a book on the Korean War in the pipeline, and the football one on the front burner, the man was far from writing his final chapter. Damn.

Halberstam made his mark as a war reporter for the Times, sharing a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his unflinching coverage of the Vietnam War, coverage that called his patriotism into question. From the obit:

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

…President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.

Obviously, Halberstam’s story resonates in these times, though it’s clear the forces who question the patriotism of the messenger bearing the bad news now have the upper hand. Such bold reportage as Halberstam’s is all too lacking today, enabling a submoronic president and his utterly corrupt administration to fight a war on false pretenses while blanketing a complicit and deferential press with lies that go largely unchallenged in the mainstream media. As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald put it:

David Halberstam’s death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.

But modern American journalists — as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized — have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation’s most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.

Halberstam generally alternated his books on heavy topics like wars, politics and industry with books on sports. While the latter were anything but puff pieces, Halberstam understood the limits of sport’s power in the current age.

I read his Breaks of the Game, a book about the Bill Walton-era Portland Trailblazers of the ’70s, back when I was in high school; it’s been hailed as basketball’s answer to The Boys of Summer, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I can’t list too many basketball books I’d read again if given the chance. Several years later, I devoured both Summer of ’49 and October 1964, two of Halberstam’s books on baseball. I’ve since learned that both have their share of minor errors, but the latter, which covers the rise of the Gibson-Brock-Flood Cardinals and the fall of the Yankee dynasty, remains a touchstone for its illuminating narrative of the impact of integration on the two teams and their respective leagues. I touched on a bit of the Red Sox shameful history of racism here last week. The Yankees, who finally integrated in 1955 with Elston Howard, were no saints in that department either; their reward for GM George Weiss’ myopic racism and failure to pursue talented black players was a decade of irrelevance. Another of Halberstam’s baseball books, The Teammates remains on my shelf, unread, awaiting its turn at bat.

But the first Halberstam book I pulled off my shelf when I heard the sad news was one he edited, The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Back in 1999, when it came out, I went to the Union Square Barnes and Noble for a signing featuring him and four of writers represented in the book, Ira Berkow, George Plimpton, Dick Schaap, and Gay Talese. Schaap died in 2001, Plimpton in 2003, and now Halberstam — perhaps they’re all somewhere in the afterlife, talking about ballgames past, telling stories as only they could. So it goes.

I’ve Seen It Be-Four

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You call that a four-consecutive-homer onslaught? Puh-lease. While a few of my Baseball Prospectus colleagues were frothing at the mouth that the Red Sox’ back-to-back-to-back-to-back jacks last night was something they’d never seen, I could only remind them that one doesn’t have to go back any further than last September 18 for a precedent.

That’s when the Dodgers rolled up four straight homers at the Padres’ expense, and while the drives themselves weren’t as impressively telegenic — the Monster and the boisterous Fenway crowd make for better theater than a half-empty Dodger Stadium — the context was much more important. The Dodgers hit their homers in the ninth inning of a game that came in the heat of a pennant race. Two came off Jon Adkins, a garden-variety scrub reliever, while the other two came off Trevor Hoffman, the all-time saves leader and a likely Hall of Famer. And the call came from Vin Scully.

The Red Sox, by contrast, banged out their four homers in the third inning of an April game. The homers came in the veritable slaughterhouse of Fenway, a park that on a per at-bat basis produced 24 percent more homers than Dodger Stadium did last year. The blasts were hit off Chase Wright, a shellshocked 23-year-old who came into the night with a grand total of fewer than 20 innings of experience above A-ball. Wright is the Yankees’ #8 starter only because the team didn’t want to take the trouble of adding top prospect Philip Hughes to their 40-man roster. Throw in Tyler Clippard or the rapidly improving Sean Henn and Wright might charitably be called the Yanks’ 10th best rotation option. Yes, four homers in a row is still remarkable, but the two occurrences scarcely deserve comparison.

A win is a win, and so props to the Red Sox for taking advantage of a decimated Yankee club. But if you’re a Yankees fan, it’s hard to get too worked up about the outcome of this past weekend. Yes, the Sox swept the Yanks in Fenway for the first time since August 31-September 2, 1990, but the three wins were by a combined total of four runs. Two of the three games were started by rookies who likely won’t be in the rotation for much longer. Hideki Matsui, who returns this week, missed the entire series, and Jorge Posada was limited to three plate appearances due to a bruised thumb. Josh Phelps caught a couple innings of a major-league game for the first time since his cuppa coffee days in 2001. The Yanks showed an ability to reach Boston’s new X-factor addition to the rivalry, Daisuke Matsuzaka, who surrendered six runs — as many as he had in his first three starts combined — in seven innings.

The most disconcerting aspect of the weekend was the way the Yanks’ top three relievers, Luis Vizcaino, Scott Proctor and Mariano Rivera, were smacked around, charged with seven runs allowed in 3.2 innings. Even then there are mitigating circumstances; Vizcaino, Joe Torre’s new favorite toy, had been torched for four runs against the Indians the day before his contribution to Friday’s meltdown. Proctor had worked the previous two games before last night and had gone seven scoreless appearances between allowing runs. Rivera… well, he’s been off to slow starts before, though blowing two high-profile saves within five days of each other still constitutes a kick in the groin, as it’s taken the Yanks to 8-9 from a potential 10-7.

Still, the Yanks are grooming some additional bullpen options. It was nice to see Colter Bean get a shot last night, his fourth major-league appearance despite numerous appeals from the stathead crowd for him to get more work. He responded with two scoreless innings of long relief, though he did walk three. Henn had two scoreless appearances over the weekend, and has allowed just one earned run in 11.1 frames so far. Chris Britton made his Yankee debut with a pair of scoreless innings against Cleveland, but he was sent down so that Karstens could be activated just before the Boston series. Brian Bruney has allowed just one run in 10.1 innings after an ugly exhibition season. Torre doesn’t need to run the same guys out there every night, but then that’s a story that predates this year’s model.

• • •

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve got a regularly occuring satellite radio slot as of today. From now on, I’ll be appearing on XM 144’s Baseball Beat with Chris Liss every Monday at 2 PM Eastern. If you’re a subscriber, please tune in if you get the chance.

Glove Story Redux

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It’s a glorious spring weekend in New York City, the first nice one of the year, sunny with temperatures skirting 80 degrees. With the Tompkins Square Park grass emitting a siren call for outdoor fun, my wife inspired me to buy a new mitt, since the Rawlings Greg Luzinski special (RBG80) I’ve been using since childhood can no longer answer the bell. After two trips to Paragon Sporting Goods in New York City, where I probably totaled an hour trying on various mitts, some consultation from a kindly old man determined not to let me overpay helped me get out with a Rawlings RBG17NC, a black 11.75 inch model that just felt right in my hand. Total damage was just shy of $50. If it lasts as long as my previous mitt did, I might using it to play catch with my grandkids just as my grandfather did with me.

After bringing the mitt home, Andra joined me for a late-afternoon game of catch, my first of the year. A former softball player, she’s got an old mitt of her own (a Ron Cey Wilson model) and a heck of an arm to boot (no “throws like a girl” excuses for her). Our catch only lasted for about 20 minutes — long enough to get my shoulder barking — but it was a blast inaugurate the season and the arrival of spring weather nonetheless, to say nothing of how lucky I am that my wife enjoys the activity as much as I do.

With close friends in from out of town the past two nights, I’ve missed the first two Yankees-Red Sox matches, and it’s probably just as well, particularly with Mariano Rivera’s meltdown on Friday night. Can’t win ‘em all, can’t watch ‘em all, and if it’s gonna be a gut-ripping defeat, you might as well put it in that particular overlap of the Venn diagram. Even prior to the two victories, the surging Sox were up to #2 in this week’s Hit List, behind the Mets, with the Yanks third and the Dodgers fourth (bummed that I missed Russell Martin’s walk-off grand slam last night, but oh well on that too).

Even with the Yanks’ two losses, the buzz still surrounds Alex Rodriguez, who though he failed to homer yesterday is still up to an astounding 12 homers and 31 RBI in 16 games. That’s an historic start, to say the least. Here’s the list that ESPN ran the other day, showing the fastest to 10 home runs to start a year: 

G   Player           Year
12  Mike Schmidt     1976
14  Alex Rodriguez   2007
14  Albert Pujols    2006
14  Luis Gonzalez    2001
15  Willie Stargell  1971
15  Willie Mays      1964

Schmidt actually reached 11 in 12 games thanks to a two-homer effort on April 26, 1976. Even that feat was topped by his hitting four home runs on April 17, an exploit I recall reading about in a March 1978 Boys’ Life magazine article that it turns out was written by former major league hurler Jim Brosnan (Brosnan wrote the pre-Ball Four diary The Long Season as well as a bio of Ron Santo that I must have read three times during elementary school).

Anyway, Rodriguez matched Schmidt’s 12-in-15-games feat, and as BP’s John Perroto points out, he’s the first to reach 30 RBI in 20 games since Roy Campanella in 1953. Skeptics like to point out that yes, it’s only April, and until Rodriguez produces in October he’ll struggle to shake off the perception that he’s unclutch. But if and when the boo birds inevitably settle on A-Rod’s shoulder, they should remind themselves that it’s Rodriguez carrying the team through the stretch where three-fifths of the projected rotation plus Hideki Matsui are all on the shelf. A win is a win, and socking a few away in April while the cavalry’s kept at bay never hurt anyone. Yes, the Yankees are only 8-8; they would be much worse without Rodriguez’s efforts.

• • •

Love him or hate him, you’ve got to respect the fact that Manny Ramirez is one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. As I pointed out in his player comment in Baseball Prospectus 2007, Ramirez ranks 10th all-time in Equivalent Average, BP’s all-encompassing hitter rate stat: Babe Ruth (.366), Ted Williams (.364), Barry Bonds (.356), Lou Gehrig (.345), Albert Pujols (.343), Frank Thomas (.342), Mickey Mantle (.341), Rogers Hornsby (.335), Mark McGwire (.335), Ramirez (.334). As Tony Kornheiser would say, “That’s it. That’s the list.”

As great a hitter as he is, Ramirez has his detractors because he remains such an enigma, mired on Planet Manny (population: 1). This week’s New Yorker features a must-read profile of him from Ben McGrath which addresses that very situation:

Ramirez, now entering his seventh season with the Boston Red Sox, is the best baseball player to come out of the New York City public-school system since Sandy Koufax, and by many accounts the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, though attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark. He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”

McGrath chases down the legend of Manny, the over-reported incidents which have dogged his Boston career — taking a leak inside the Fenway scoreboard, drinks with Yankee Enrique Wilson while claiming to be sick, the difficulty of locating him at times, the annual attempts to get rid of him on the part of the Sox, the eBay grill auction, and so on. My favorite bit was this one:

[Boston GM Dan] Duquette had been following Ramirez’s career since high school, but he now concedes that he had no idea “exactly how unique” his new left fielder was. “When Manny first came to the Red Sox, he would stand in the batter’s box, and the umpire would call ball four, and he would get back in the batter’s box,” Duquette, who is now the president of the fledgling Israel Baseball League, told me. “He did this in his first series at Fenway Park and again on his first road trip.” After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’ Then he said, ‘Duke, I’m up there looking for a pitch I can hit. If I don’t get it, I wait for the umpire to tell me to go to first. Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?’

Absolutely classic. Don’t miss it.

Shorted Again [BP Unfiltered]

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This ESPN Deportes poll asking readers to choose the greatest Latino shortstop of all time got me to pull out my JAWS spreadsheet. Not surprisingly, the choices ESPN offered — Luis Aparicio, Dave Concepcion, and Omar Vizquel — while fine players, are a not-quite-representative trio that conformed to the image of the light-hitting glove man for whom English is a second language. Notably, one player in particular was slighted, while several other worthies were left out of the discussion.

Read more about it at Unfiltered.