It wasn’t quite a clean bill of health, but it counted as good news. My orthopedic surgeon, who repaired my right labrum in November 2003, reviewed my recent MRIs on Thursday and declared, “You’ve got a slight tear of the rotator cuff, and some fraying of the biceps tendon. But that might have been there before. The bottom line is that kind of wear and tear is normal in someone your age. You don’t need surgery.” Deep sigh of relief, even if that means I’m probably not fit to toss 200 innings. All I need is some physical therapy with the guy who helped me rehab my shoulder before. Whew!

Anyway, onto a few other notes…

• On Wednesday I had to pinch-hit for my pal Nick, the “commissioner” of our Yankees ticket group, which has been buying the 26-game pick-a-plan since 1998. This year the Yanks demolished that 26-game package, which came with the right to seats to a guaranteed playoff game for each round, in favor of a 20-game plan with no playoff guarantee except for grandfathered licensees (we transferred ours within the group and are currently hoping to qualify). But, oh joy, now we get to buy them online, picking each game and seats.

What happens when you get thousands of Yankee ticketholders trying to bum rush TicketRapist at the same time? Clusterfuck. Technical difficulty after technical difficulty. Nick, who was trying to TCB, had to hand the reins — credit card number and all — over to me because he had to meet with a client. Two hours and several hundred words that would shame even a Tourette’s-addled sailor later, I finally succeeded and came out pretty well, with most of our tickets in sections 601 (lower part of the upper deck, Tier Box MVP, behind home plate) and 625 (between third and home).

I was one of the lucky ones. Reading Cecilia Tan’s similar tale, I think I beat her friend by a good 45 minutes, but other than that, her blow-by-blow account of the saga is virtually the same as ours:

Well, at 10 AM, everyone began trying to buy the Flex plan and get the good seats before they were gone. But no one could get through because the server could not handle the volume. Neither could the Yankees’ ticket office which was fielding complaints. By 10:45 in the morning, fans who did reach the ticket office were told to “just keep trying. It’s slow, but it is working.” That turned out to be blatantly wrong. Fans who finally did get past the login screen were greeted with a checklist of games to choose that showed neither the dates of the games nor the opponents. Just a list of 81 check boxes and every one labeled “Wed. //” except for the very LAST one, which bore the date of the SECOND game of the year, April 12th. With no way to guess which box stood for which game, many fans who were sneaking around at their day jobs to try to accomplish this fruitless task were forced to give up.

At 11:30 AM, callers to the ticket office who managed to get past the “all circuits are busy” messages heard a new story. “It’s simply not working,” a representative said. “So don’t worry, nobody is buying tickets ahead of anybody. No one can use the system.” When it was suggested that perhaps the sale should be rescheduled for another day, the representative said it was a Ticketmaster problem and would be fixed soon. “Maybe five minutes, maybe ten, maybe an hour. Just keep hitting refresh until the ‘technical difficulties’ message goes away. Then try to log in again.”

The earliest successful ticket buyer we were able to find got through the gauntlet of a user interface at 2:40 in the afternoon, after trying all day. Among the additional failures of the Yankees on this day, the promised “flex”-ibility of the plan was scuttled; buyers had to choose a set number of seats that would be identical for all games. (All the ticket office would say about this was “Yeah, that’s gone. Forget it.”) Upon choosing the 20 games for purchase, the buyer then had to use 20 separate drop-down menus to choose what section to sit in for each game separately. Wouldn’t it have made much more sense to let people choose their section and apply it to all games if they wanted? Others had problems with the drop-down menus and had to choose “best available” (the default option) and so spent more than they would have. Was this the real reason for the change?

The bottom line is that Yankee ticket buyers were treated like shit, which isn’t really anything new. But it’s crystal clear now, with a new ballpark on the horizon, that the middle-class ticketholder who pays out of his own pocket is a dying breed who’s in the process of being screwed out of existence by the Yanks. Prices for our Tier Box MVP seats, even with the plan’s discount off of the face value, have skyrocketed. Digging into my old Quicken files, here’s what I get since 2000:

Year   Price $  Pct increase
2000     25          --
2001     29         16.0
2002     29          0.0
2003     30          3.4
2004     35         16.7
2005     42         20.0
2006     47         11.9

The Yanks did an admirable job of holding the line for awhile, even in the face of ever-increasing attendance; from 2000 to 2003 our tickets only went up a total of 20 percent. Since then they’ve risen 57 percent, and they’ve essentially doubled over the course of the past six years. Suffice it to say that both the money and the emotional capital I’ll be forking over to the Yanks in the future is a finite amount, one that George Steinbrenner and company have decided is best spent sooner rather than later. When it’s gone, I’m gone.

• Surprised about Theo? You shouldn’t be. Epstein’s eventual return to the Red Sox has been the worst-kept secret in baseball since the day he snuck out of Fenway in a gorilla suit. He’s been in the front-office loop all along, according to numerous sources, though few of my Red Sox-devoted pals (yes, I do have them) were willing to believe it. For awhile even the mainstream Boston sports media seemed to be downplaying that possibility.

Why all this? My pet theory, one that I’ve shared with a few readers, is that after letting Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez go last year — the former in a midseason trade and the latter as a free agent following their World Series win — Epstein didn’t want to be in the firing line for the departures of Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez (though the latter, of course, remains a Red Sock). The emotional toll of dealing with the media and the fan base over such deals was too much to face in the aftermath of an exhausting season. Shedding a superstar is much easier when done from behind the curtain, with somebody else answering the same. damn. questions. over. and. over. Rest assured that Epstein was on board with those decisions — even the abortive Manny one — and has probably had a say in everything else the team has done this winter, including the trades for Josh Beckett and Andy Marte.

The bottom line is that while the front-office power struggle between Epstein and Leaky Larry Lucchino isn’t over, somebody, likely principal owner John Henry, has found a way to bridge the gap. Epstein’s official title hasn’t been announced, but bet on something weighty like President of Baseball Operations, Grand Emperor of Beantown, Colossus of the Citgo Sign or the Archduke of Landsdowne Street. What will be most interesting to see is whether the good cop/bad cop roles for Epstein and Lucchino continue or whether Epstein’s return is based on reining in Lucchino’s blabbermouth tendencies, which appear to prevent the team from operating with the stealth that the Yankees have mustered in the cases of Damon and Alex Rodriguez.

And speaking of A-Rod, any Sox fans piping up about his ridiculous deliberations over the World Baseball Classic can remind themselves that they’ve got their own Hamlet saga to live down, one which has killed far more trees and pushed more pixels.

• Like my pal Alex Belth, I have to mourn the passing of the wicked Wilson Pickett, one of the finest soul/R& B singers ever. Even his most widely exposed tracks such as “Mustang Sally,” “Land of 1000 Dances” and “In the Midnight Hour” retain their freshness some 40 years and millions of spins later. Pickett didn’t have the depth of catalog of Otis Redding, but at his peak he was every bit as good and gritty. If you’ve never heard his screams on his cover of “Hey Jude,” then you’ve never listened to soul music. Educate yourself, kids, and then raise a glass when the midnight hour strikes.

Not a lot going on above the surface here, but I’ve got a couple of things cooking in the lab, in between trips to the doctor to determine the extent to which my once-repaired right shoulder is in need of further attention following a skiing mishap. Thursday’s the big day for the reading of the MRI; just because my father is a radiologist doesn’t mean I can read the films myself, even if this is the second time around.

Anyway, the main project in the lab is DIPS 2005. Given that the DIPS 2.0 formula is now on its fifth go-round (fourth at this site), I’ve wavered on whether to proceed with publishing the numbers, a deliberation that conveniently coincided with the chaos of Book Season. But now that daylight has returned, I’ve concluded that there’s a considerable value of maintaining a DIPS hub here — my Tufts U. pals, among others, seem to appreciate it — to round up the latest work in the field.

This year’s review will include a look at David Gassko’s DIPS 3.0 which was introduced at Hardball Times in August and is reportedly revisted in their annual book, which I have on order at the moment. DIPS 3.0 uses batted ball types (ground ball, fly ball, line drive) to project ERA, and it appears to do a very nice job of doing so with current season performance. However, my preliminary investigations as to its year-to-year predictive powers appear to indicate that it’s no better than DIPS 2.0 at that task. Gassko admittedly had focused on the system’s current-season utility rather than its utility as a projection tool. I’ll be interested to see what he has to say in the annual, which gets an exhaustive comb-thru by my unrelated namesake, Chris Jaffe, at that steel-cage battleground, Baseball Think Factory. Jaffe length, indeed.

Also brewing in the lab, yet somewhat derailed by the demands of the stat crew putting together Baseball Prospectus 2006, is a PECOTA-based look at the two pitchers (Edwin Jackson and Chuck Tiffany) whom the Dodgers traded to Tampa Bay over the weekend for relievers Danys Baez and Lance Carter. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the trade — aside from speculation about the health of closer Eric Gagne — is that Dodger GM Ned Colletti finally broke the seal on the bevy of prospects the team has in its system. In overhauling the team via a flurry of moves last month, Colletti had, surprisingly, resisted trading prospects for veterans. It was bound to end sooner or later, and while I’m not particularly impressed by the returns — there’s enough meh in Baez to make me surprised he didn’t wind up on the Mets, and don’t even get me started about the craptacularity of Carter — I don’t think this is a backbreaking deal for the Dodgers either. They’re dealing from strength, looking for the extra couple of wins that might win them the weak NL West, and there are millions of reasons why that’s a good idea.

Jackson, you’ll recall, outdueled Randy Johnson in his big-league debut, which also happened to be his 20th birthday. But in the two-plus years since, he’s been unable to harness that potential he gave us a glimpse of; his big-league ERA stands at 5.50 through 75.3 innings. He’s bombed so badly in the Dodgers’ Triple-A outpost of hell known as Las Vegas, with ERAs straight off of a Boeing assembly line, that the Dodgers sent him back to Double-A last year. His velocity is down, his mechanics are messed up, his confidence is shot. He needs a fresh start, and while as a Dodger fan it pains me to see him go, I wish the kid the best. Seriously.

Both Rich Lederer and Bryan Smith have done a nice job of covering this at Baseball Analysts, as has Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts, so I’ll save my bullets for another day. The points I’d stick by for the moment are that among Dodger pitching prospects, Jackson and Tiffany would rate well behind Chad Billingsley, Jon Broxton, and Scott Elbert, and that the LA organization’s player development system continues to be hampered by the fact that Vegas is brutal for pitchers. It’s not too far off from sending a guy to Coors Field to learn how to pitch. Tiffany — an Extreme (capital E, as in 0.58 groundball/flyball ratio according to Baseball America) flyball pitcher — is the kind of player whose value after going through the Vegas meatgrinder (likely in 2007, given that he spent ’05 at Vero Beach) could be severely lessened.

Anyway, here’s hoping my data ship comes in soon, so that I can add something a bit more substantial to the discussion. For those of you with a subscription, at least…

A few quick hits:

• Buster Olney on the wink-and-nod Hall of Fame votes for the unqualified:

We see it every year, these odd little vote totals, with some writers exercising their constitutional right to fill out their ballot with guys who — with all due respect — should only enter the Hall of Fame after purchasing a ticket.

We try to make sense of it.

…Walt Weiss, one vote . What you know is that the former shortstop had a lifetime average of .258, including two seasons of more than 130 hits. What you don’t know is that one writer did, indeed, lose a 4 a.m. bet at a bar seven years ago, and finally paid up.

Gregg Jefferies, two votes. What you know is that the ex-Sports Illustrated cover guy never scored 100 nor drove in 100 runs in any season in the majors. What you don’t know is that he is the greatest player ever to practice his swing underwater, and for two voters, that put him over the top.

…I’m sure that some of these votes are given with a wink and a nod, a personal tribute to someone who was enjoyable to cover, to someone who always stood at his locker and answered questions when other players hid in a trainer’s room. The problem, however, is that placing a vote for Hal Morris or Walt Weiss for the Baseball Hall of Fame is like picking Terrell Owens for president — it’s silly, and adds thick reinforcement to the notion that the writers don’t have any idea what they are doing.

Believe me, we can accomplish that without those two Hall of Fame votes for Gregg Jefferies.

Amen to that, Buster.

• Joe Sheehan on the election of Bruce Sutter:

It’s not fun writing that a guy shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. It’s much easier to write that someone does deserve an honor, which is just one reason why most players see gradual rises in their vote counts over time. It’s more enjoyable to talk about what a player’s accomplishments were, what positive memories he created, rather than objectively compare him to his peers and to established standards. Because of this, much of the coverage of Sutter’s election ignored his short career and his clear inferiority to another reliever on the ballot, and continued exaggerating his role in the use of the split-fingered fastball and the development of the closer position.

It remains true, however, that Sutter didn’t have nearly the value that Rich Gossage did, and his edges over Gossage stem largely from usage patterns that were developed to protect Sutter from injury. In other words, to cover up a flaw, an area in which he was inferior to Goose. Save totals are the primary manifestation of this, but you can also see it in ERAs, where Sutter’s lighter usage helped his numbers as compared to Gossage.

…What’s galling is that Sutter is getting his Cooperstown pass in much the same way that he got that Cy Young Award: through a crack in a voting process. This is the most frustrating aspect of his election, and the one that calls the electorate into greatest question. What was acknowledged openly in the coverage of yesterday’s voting results was the idea that Sutter benefited from the lack of qualified first-ballot candidates. With no new players to vote for (Orel Hershiser led the way with 58 votes, and only two new candidates, he and Albert Belle, will make it back for another year), the voters changed the question from, “Is this player a Hall of Famer?” to “Who is the best player in this group?” That’s simply the wrong question to ask; this isn’t the MVP award, where you’re trying to determine a winner from among a field of candidates. This is the Hall of Fame, where the standards are set and it is entirely possible to have a year in which no one meets them.

If you look at the voting, though, you can see the shifted standard. Fourteen of the 15 returning candidates saw their vote totals rise in this election (Willie McGee being the understandable exception). The absence of new, highly-qualified candidates caused voters to lower their standards and drop votes on players who they normally would have ignored. That factor, and not some sudden collective reconsideration of Bruce Sutter’s career, is what pushed him over the top.

I think this is a huge hole in the process. Being a Hall of Famer should be about being one of the greatest players of all time, and even if the various Veterans Committees have screwed that standard up permanently, we should at least look to uphold the standard in the initial balloting. By electing Bruce Sutter just because he was the returning guy with the highest vote total, and there was no one new to vote for, the BBWAA has sullied the process and the honor.

…As I wrote the other day, in immortality, as in life, timing is everything.

Amen to that, Joe.

• Silly fun with Photoshop in the service of an interesting concept at Baseball Prospectus. Not my idea, but I’m guilty of performing the execution.

• Baseball Between the Numbers, the forthcoming non-annual book from BP in which I did a minor bit of glossary pinch-hiting, is now available for Amazon pre-order. It ships in the first week of March. Jonah Keri has the details here. Screw the haters, I think this will be a great book.

Meanwhile, the annual book ships in the last week of February, for those asking. I’m told that Fantasy Baseball Index will be available via Amazon as well, as it’s been in the past.

• My Angels chapter for BP06 comes into focus much more clearly witth the news that Darin Erstad and his anemic bat are moving back to centerfield. Well, the bat probably won’t be out there in center, that would be weird, dangerous, and probably illegal. But it’s easier to stash a good fielder who’s hit .274/.326/.374 over the past five years out there than at first.

The move gives Casey Kotchman his long-awaited entry into the lineup. It raises the question of where Chone Figgins plays; will he beat out Dallas McPherson — an injury-riddled bust last year but a guy who can probably hit 30-40 homers in the near future — at 3B? Will he move back to his natural position at 2B, thereby making Adam Kennedy expendable and keeping the seat warm for Howie Kendrick, a guy with a career minor-league batting average of .359? Will he push Erstad to the bench? I’m very intrigued to see how this plays out.

• Will Carroll, all 5’10,” 230 lbs of him, is putting his money where his mouth is:

So I’ve decided to do what I should have been doing all along and combining it with my quest to bring out the truth – the real truth – about steroids and supplements. I would spend a year using the most advanced legal technology to bring my weight down, my strength up, my cardio to a solid level, and most importantly, prove that steroids aren’t needed to make the type of gains that we’ve all secretly wondered about.

I’ll take the next year of my life as a quest to do what I should have been doing all along – staying in shape – and also conducting a bit of an experiment. I’ll use what I’ve learned in researching steroids and supplements for good, not evil. I’ll have goals, talk to professionals, chemists, trainers, doctors, gurus, wackos, and whoever else could help this process along.

And I’ll write about it.

I’ll have goals for fat loss, weight, strength, power, cardiac endurance, and muscle building. I’ll guarantee that I won’t be a major league caliber ball player at the end of this, but I do think we’ll have a much better idea on what a world-class athlete with resources far beyond mine could do. I’ll be calling in favors, looking for suggestions, and in the end, I’ll succeed.

Best of luck with that, Will; it should make for a fascinating project.

The BBWAA voting results for the Hall fo Fame were announced on Tuesday, and contrary to many a pundit’s expectations, one man gained entry. Bruce Sutter garnered 76.9 percent of the vote to become just the fourth reliever elected to the Hall. Goose Gossage, whom I’ve argued has a much better case, received 64.6 percent of the vote up from 55.2 last year and low-40s support for four years prior.

Jim Rice finished with 64.8 percent, Andre Dawson with 61. Bert Blyleven, another pitcher I’ve been stumping for, got 53.3 percent, up from 40.8 last year and 35 two years ago.

As disappointed as I am that the writers tabbed the wrong guy, I’m heartened by the surge in support Gossage and Blyleven have received. Besides Gil Hodges and those mentioned above, everybody who’s gotten 50 percent of the writer’s vote has gained election eventually. Next year is stacked with Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken Jr., and Mark McGwire making their first appearances on the ballot, but 2008 offers “only” Tim Raines — a personal favorite, but one who will need a Blyleven-type grassroots campaign to gain the vote. It’s not too difficult to foresee Gossage slipping in on that timetable, unless he keeps shooting off his mouth about the results.

I hosted a chat on BP to chew on the results on Tuesday evening. The Hall was the prime topic, but it wasn’t the only one. A few sample exchanges:

Nick Stone (NYC): To what degree does the selection of Bruce Sutter water-down HOF standards? Is his selection on par with some of the more egregious errors of the veterans committee? It would seem like this could open the doors to a flood of relievers. Or is this a time thing, the result of a weak ballot?

Jay Jaffe: It’s tough to say that Sutter waters down the Hall standards for relievers, because with only three (or 2.5, if you account for the fact that Eckersley gets a big boost from the bulk stats of his career as a starter), there aren’t really any standards yet. Sutter (49.9 JAWS) doesn’t measure up to Fingers (61.4), to say nothing of Eckersley (87.1) or Wilhelm (70.3), that we know.

But there are a half-dozen pitchers with lower JAWS scores — not a lot lower, but lower — all elected by the VC, none of them relievers (Joss, Bender, Chesbro, Welch, Haines, Marquard). There are also eight hitters, all VC, with lower JAWS. S is this a travesty of that order? No.

I think Sutter’s election is the result of a weak ballot, yes, and I do think it will open the gates to a trickle of relievers, not a flood. Gossage (64.6, up from 55.2 last year) will be in within a couple of years, I think. I don’t see Lee Smith getting the same courtesy, nor John Franco. We may still be waiting for Mariano Rivera.

• • •

Brent (Raleigh): Do you agree that, from a PR standpoint, the best thing that could ever happen to an ex-player is to be right on the cusp of the HOF, but not quite? I mean, Gary Carter gets elected to the HOF and that basically does it for people reflecting about Gary Carter and his career. On the other hand, Burt Blyleven gets annual 1000-word articles written about him by sportswriters all over the country. Maybe being on the outside looking in isn’t that bad…

Jay Jaffe: I disagree. Carter took six years to get voted in. I LOATHE Gary Carter, but never for a minute did I have a doubt while watching him play that he’d wind up in the Hall, and it sickens me to watch voters make players with his kind of credentials twist in the wind. He may not be foremost in the minds of the public now that he’s in, but he’s cast in bronze in upstate New York, and thousands of people get to read the words on his plaque every month.

I’m sure Blyleven would trade the thousand-word hosannas for votes and induction any day of the week. Not that the publicity isn’t helping; he jumped to 53.3 percent this year from 40.8 last year and 35 two years ago.

• • •

dokomoy (Los Angeles): Has the HOF voters stupidity over the years cost the Hall any credibility? If so beyond making me the Final arbitrator of who gets in, what can be done to fix it?

Jay Jaffe: As I’ve said before, the BBWAA rarely gets it wrong in terms of electing somebody who’s NOT worthy (Sutter’s not their best choice, though). They generally err on the side of keeping reasonably worthy players out, leaving them for the Vet Committee to sweep up. The VC is where the problem has lain for a long, long time — electing the wrong brother (Rick Ferrell, Lloyd Waner) or their cronies. Per JAWS, the 24 worst hitters in the hall and 13 of the worst 14 pitchers were VC selections.

Does that compromise their credibility? You’d think so, but the mainstream public seems to take the Hall at face value. As to what can be done, I think you’re seeing it. You’ve got dozens of eloquent and largely web-based writers advocating for Blyleven and Gossage, and as a result, their vote totals have risen markedly over the last few years. the goal of JAWS is to identify and promote above-average HOF candidates so as to raise the standards of the elected. Is it having any impact? Not by itself, but I think it fits in well with the rest of what’s going on online.

I think there’s a generation of writers to whom any sabermetric evaluation of the Hall is lost. But the guys who are working their way towards that 10-year status which gets them a vote will be more receptive to seeing things in a different light. That won’t undo the mistakes of the past, but may right a few wrongs, and make mistakes less likely.

There’s plenty of non-Hall stuff to be had among my answers as well. Dodgers and Yankees and Angels.. and Red Sox and Brewers and Padres, oh my! Check it out.

One of the early defining moments of The Sopranos came in the series’ second episode, “46 Long.” In the back office of the Bada Bing, Silvio Dante, as played by Steve Van Zandt, does an animated impersonation of Al Pacino in The Godfather, to the amusement of his cohorts:

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

Having just barely started to glimpse daylight on my winter’s worth of big writing projects, I had that line — the rubber-faced Van Zandt’s version of it, at least — running through my mind the other night. Long story short, I accepted a call out of the bullpen to crank out one more team essay for Baseball Prospectus 2006, this on the Angels (having already done the Dodgers and Braves). Fortunately, I’m left with a pretty fresh set of notes from the ALCS Preview I wrote for BP, not to mention a thorough rundown of the team’s hitters for my work at Fantasy Baseball Index. I should be OK, but if things are slow around here for another week, that’s why.

In any event, I just want to remind everybody here that I’ll be hosting another chat at BP on Tuesday, January 10, at 8 PM EST. My last chat set a BP record at three hours, 35 minutes, and while I have no intention of going that long this time around, I should be good for a couple of hours. The Hall of Fame voting results will be announced earlier in the day — the reason I asked to host the chat in the first place, given my recent JAWS series — and I’m sure we’ll have plenty to chew on. Be sure to stop by (it’s free) or submit a question beforehand.

Yes, I’m back. Back in New York City after a week and a half in Salt Lake. Back to the high-bandwidth connection rather than a 56K modem I need to armwrestle my brother to access. Back to worrying about the health of my surgically-repaired right shoulder (more on that after the inevitable MRI). And with my various writing obligations more or less fulfilled — except for a chronic, across-the-board 30 percent surplus of verbage that dogs everything I’ve submitted lately, likely leading certain editors to curse my very name — hopefully back to a more orderly presence here at FI.

As I look back at 2005, I’m amazed at how far this site and its pilot came in a year. I found myself on TV and radio, turned up in an undergrad syllabus at Tufts, where I guest lectured, ran as the Hot Dog in the Miller Park Sausage Race, was published in not one but two books, as well as the New York Sun and Salon, and my name — not always spelled correctly — made its way into newspapers in Denver, Boston, and Pittsburgh. I celebrated ten years in the Big Apple and completed my first full year as a Baseball Prospectus author having created a successful, occasionally controversial, weekly feature in the Prospectus Hit List. I continued beating the DIPS, JAWS, Claussen and Stottlemyre war horses, and found myself with some legitimate paying work at year’s end.

Oh, and somewhere in all of this I found time to marry a wonderful little gal who never fails to make me smile. The rest of the world may be going to hell in a handbasket (though the times, they are a-changin’), but it was a very good year here, and I want to thank everybody — my readers, colleagues, editors, friends and family (y’all know who you are) — who helped make it so special.

As I look to 2006, I’m struck by the fact that this site will celebrate its fifth birthday in April, a milestone that I suppose I’ll mark in some fashion when the time comes. I’m not quite sure what the coming year will bring — more than 71 wins for the Dodgers and a mixed reception for Johnny Damon in both Boston and New York is about all I’m prepared to wager on — but if it’s anywhere near as interesting as the last one, it should be worth a look here, so I hope you’ll join the fun. Best wishes for happiness and health to all of you!

As the holidays and my 36th birthday rapidly approach, I want to take the time to thank everybody who responded to my three-part series on the Hall of Fame at Baseball Prospectus and my little brush with the mainstream media. The response was the biggest in the three years I’ve been evaluating the Hall ballot for BP, and it was overwhelmingly positive. A couple of readers even took the time to write the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s Gene Collier, as I had done. Speaking of which, a version of my letter is featured in today’s sports mailbag.

Collier did take the time to respond, and did so with a disarming sarcasm in which he agreed with my assessment of his intellectual capacity, referring to himself various times as an idiot, a moron, and a neanderthal. He also claimed the omission of the word “here” was inadvertent, something I still don’t buy since his reply continued to paint me as advocating a Hall of Fame dictated entirely by statistics. Since I didn’t ask permission to rerun the letter, I can’t do so. But I did reply to him once more, in a slightly more conciliatory fashion. Here’s the conclusion:

If you enjoy Baseball Prospectus, you’re probably aware that all of us at BP (including the 90% of that bunch who’s smarter and more experienced than me) would probably run over our own grandmothers at home plate for the right to vote for the Hall. Currently, the best we can hope for is that somebody out there with a vote is paying enough attention to reexamine some of their closely-held assumptions about the game in light of our work. I hope that by the next time you get an opportunity to cast a ballot, you will have taken that message to heart.

Ninety percent? I’ll admit that was a wild-assed guess rather than one derived from an advanced metric in my spreadsheet. Anyway, continuing with the postal theme, a couple of my replies to readers are featured in the most recent BP mailbag. And if you’re disappointed you didn’t get to read the articles because they were behind the subscription wall, I’ll pass on a suggestion that you can take advantage of BP’s gift subscription system to get a discount for that special someone (“Aw, honey, you shouldn’t have”). It’s not too late!

Since blogging is likely to be light over the next few days, I’ll close with a pointer to my hoary annual piece on the sixty-odd players, including Rickey Henderson, who share my December 25 birthday. I swear, that thing is getting as long in the tooth as I am, but the chance to update it always sneaks up on me, and this year there was no freakin’ way I could even begin to touch it. I’m not sure Willy Taveras, one of the two Xmas-born players to have debuted since my last update, has earned a spot on the team yet, but he’s getting closer.

If you’re hungry for an updated take on these players, my BP colleague Jim Baker gives you just that. And speaking of anniversaries of a sort, the gifted Alex Belth has a new piece up at SI.com, this one recounting the 30th anniversary of the Messersmith-McNally decision which led to free agency.

I’m off to SLC through the new year, but hopefully I’ll be checking in from time to time. Happy holidays and safe travels to you all.

If you heard me cussing last night as the news about the Johnny Damon signing trickled in, you’d have wondered which side of the aisle I was sitting on. “In the words of Joe Schultz: shitfuck,” I wrote to the Baseball Prospectus internal mailing list, a medium which rarely sees a four-letter word, though now that I think about it, Steve Goldman dropped a few f-bombs when it came to the Ron Villone trade last week.

I’m pissed at the Damon signing, four years and $52 million, because it’s back to business as usual for the Yanks. Damon is a 32-year-old centerfielder, A-list celebrity and Scott Boras client who was seeking a ridiculous seven-year deal that nobody was going to give him. Obviously, the Yanks called his bluff, going far beyond the Red Sox most recent four-year, $40 million offer, one the Sox never got the opportunity to match. So much for loyalty or Damon’s words from last May:

“There’s no way I can go play for the Yankees, but I know they are going to come after me hard. It’s definitely not the most important thing to go out there for the top dollar, which the Yankees are going to offer me. It’s not what I need.”

Uh-huh. So now Damon will be handsomely overpaid to deteriorate right before our very eyes in Yankee Stadium. If you liked watching the decline and fall of Bernie Williams, get ready for more, because he’s already as bad a thrower as Williams about five years ahead of schedule. In fact, per BP’s numbers, he was at -5 runs last year, while the Yankee CFs, including Williams, were at -1. Yeesh.

He’s a better hitter than Williams circa 2005, of course, and likely 2006, too. He hit a handsome .316/.366/.439 for the Red Sox last year, with a VORP of 49.2, second best in the AL. Yankee centerfielders hit a combined .243/.297/.333 with a -11.5 VORP. That’s a difference of about 60 runs right there, six wins, a six-win swing between two division rivals who were separated by an eyelash so narrow that the Sox still think they shared the AL East title.

But there are a few reasons to be disconcerted about the Damon signing. First, at four years, $52 million, it’s essentially the same deal they gave Hideki Matsui back in November. Matsui is seven months younger, but their baseball ages are the same; both were considered to have their Age 31 season last year. Matsui hit .305/.367/.496 for a .293 Equivalent Average (EqA). Damon’s line is only worth a .280 EqA (.260 is average) thanks to the fact that he was helped more by his home environment, Fenway Park. And that’s the nut of it: Damon is a much lesser hitter away from Fenway. Over the past three years:

         -----HOME------   -----AWAY------
         AVG   OBP   SLG   AVG   OBP   SLG
Damon   .318  .388  .448  .278  .340  .433
Matsui  .298  .362  .505  .296  .377  .463

Clear edge to Matsui on neutral ground. But more to the point, I’m not really crazy about either contract by itself, and taken together, that’s $104 million worth of obligations for two players who are going to grow old side by side. So much for fiscal restraint or the lack of a big splash from George Steinbrenner this winter. So much for Damon’s trademark unfrozen caveman look, too. Think he’ll be hearing about that one from Sox fans?

The Yanks are better today than they were yesterday, and their division rivals are worse. That may be enough for some. But in the long view, Damon costs the Yanks a draft pick, as does reliever Kyle Farnsworth. Given the obvious need for the Yanks to shift over to a model of building from within, the Damon signing moves them further away from that goal, and it doesn’t help that the Sox get their pick. Details have yet to be announced, but I suspect the contract is backloaded a bit too, meaning they’ll be paying more and getting less down the road, another fading veteran the Yanks will have to accommodate. Roll over, Mike Mussina, and tell Randy Johnson the news.

Damon’s a definite upgrade over Bubba Crosby, who Yankee GM Brian Cashman had bluffed about opening the 2006 season with in center. My personal preference would have been for the Yanks to make a low-level move by signing Jeff DaVanon, recently released by the Angels. DaVanon is a 32-year-old switch-hitter with good plate discipline, speed and the ability to play all three positions, so would have represented a sensible (and virtually free) upgrade over Crosby. He hit a weak .231/.347/.311 last year, but his career line of .256/.348/.401 is more respectable, the kind of thing you can stick in the nine-hole without worrying about a run hemorrhage, yet guiltlessly slide into a fourth-outfielder role when the midseason cavalry arrives, and flip for a Single-A live arm whenever you need the roster space. According to his agent, who’s probably exaggerating, 15 teams showed interest in DaVanon, though a reported two-year, $3.5 million deal with the Diamondbacks turned out to be a rumor. Given that he’s the son of a futility infielder, I’ve always had a soft spot for him. Clearly I’m not alone.

I do like the pending signing of reliever Octavio Dotel, who’s reportedly getting a one-year, $2 million deal with incentives that could raise it to $5 million. Dotel is a fireballer who struck out 122 in 85.1 innings in 2004; for his career he’s K’d 10.9 per nine innings. He’s got a 97 MPH fastball, but he tends to get pounded occasionally; he gave up 13 homers in 2004, 1.4 per nine innings, which isn’t what you want to see. He was limited to just 15.1 innings last year before undergoing Tommy John surgery in June, but it wasn’t just any old TJ. His ulnar collateral ligament wasn’t as badly torn as most surgery candidates are, and for that reason, he had been encouraged to continue rehabbing the injury rather than going under the knife. And speaking of “Under the Knife,” here’s what Will Carroll had to say:

Dotel had an overlay TJ. Remember how three surgeons didn’t want to do the surgery? The UCL wasn’t torn through, somewhere around a 60% tear. He could have pitched with some pain and maybe it would snap, maybe it wouldn’t. [Surgeon Dr. James] Andrews put the graft over the existing, damaged ligament so he never lost proprioception. I don’t THINK he’ll be back on Opening Day, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

According to A’s trainer Larry Davis, the pain was unmanageable enough for Dotel to decide on surgery despite the advice of those surgeons: “Everybody’s tolerance level is different. Octavio feels like he’s tried long enough. … He’s been throwing a long time and is tired of recurrent tendinitis.”

I suspect a return from Dotel sometime in June is probably more realistic, with the All-Star break as a worst-case scenario. TJ recoveries are much more predictable than shoulder surgeries — remember Jon Lieber? — and he’ll effectively be a fine in-season addition to the Yankee bullpen at a reasonable price. I’m still not overly keen on the bullpen makeover, which stars Farnsworth, Villone, submariner Mike Myers, and likely Aaron Small joining the fading Tanyon Sturtze in getting the ball to Mariano Rivera. But that’s a story for another day.

My wife, who was sick a few days ago, fell asleep early on Friday night, leaving me to putter around our apartment into the wee hours after I couldn’t edit one more player comment. I spent a few minutes watching a TiVo’d HBO Sports documentary on Howard Cosell, a favorite of mine, as the man had a massive impact on the world of sports reporting in the 20th century at a time when I was an impressionable youth (yes, I actually chose to watch this over the Skinemax presentation of Hollywood Harlots or whatever). The doc showed footage of Cosell’s autumn years, when his ego had gotten the better of him. Strutting around the office, smoking a cigar that Reggie Jackson could have walloped a homer with, Cosell complained about being attacked in print by the infamous tabloid scribe, Dick Young. Cut to Frank Gifford and Al Michaels recounting an anecdote about the notoriously thin-skinned Cosell bragging and kvetching in his inimitably nasal cadence, “Did you see… what they said about me… in the Des Moines Register?”

Shortly after that, Rich Lederer of Baseball Analysts sent me an email, calling my attention to being name-checked in an article by Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discussing the Hall of Fame balloting:

The old paradigm was, when I saw the player’s name, if I had to think about it, he didn’t get in. Hall of Famers, went the philosophy, are players whose very names terminate all debates of worthiness: Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, Mays, Clemente, etc., and next year Gwynn, Ripken and, of course, Derek Bell…

The seamheads on crystal math are running Blyleven through the software along the lines of Jay Jaffe, who points out on the Baseball Prospectus site that: “Clay Davenport’s Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) figures make an ideal tool for this endeavor because they normalize all performance records in major-league history to the same scoring environment, adjusting for park effects, quality of competition and length of schedule. All pitchers, hitters and fielders are thus rated above or below one consistent replacement level, making cross-era comparisons a breeze. Though non-statistical considerations — championships, postseason performance — shouldn’t be left by the wayside in weighing a player’s Hall of Fame credentials, they’re not the focus.”

Uh-huh.

Here’s my formula. If I’m managing a decent club that’s going into Pittsburgh for a weekend series in July of 1979 and the Pirates are sending Bert Blyleven, John Candelaria and Bruce Kison to the mound, is there a pitcher among them that I think I might not be able to beat?

Yes, and it’s Candelaria, who is not a Hall of Famer.

I went into my instant Cosell mode: “Did you see what they wrote about me in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettte?”

I especially admire the way Collier has decided that the last thing anybody should do when evaluating a Hall of Fame vote is think.

Heaven forbid, he’s a professional sportswriter; he doesn’t have to think!

Sometimes, like his colleague across the country, Bill Plaschke, he doesn’t even have to put two sentences together to make a paragraph.

Because that might take thinking.

And we can’t have that when we’re guarding the gates of baseball history, can we?

But rather than do anything rash, I slept on it before taking the trouble to pen a reply to Collier this morning. Here it is, in its entirety, with a few relevant hyperlinks thrown in…

• • •

Dear Mr. Collier,

Thank you for taking what I said out of context at Baseball Prospectus in your article about the Hall of Fame voting. Not only did you lop off the key qualifying word “here” at the end of the paragraph you quoted — thus distorting the purpose of my exercise, which was to demonstrate where the Hall candidates measure up statistically via a rather sophisticated system, as opposed to more subjective considerations which, as the key word you omitted had clarified, *were not* the focus of that particular piece — you then made a random assertion (Blyleven vs. Candelaria, July 1979) that’s demonstrably false thanks to our ability to actually go back and check every box score since 1960 at a wonderful site called Retrosheet.org:

Blyleven—4 wins, 1 loss, 2.64 ERA
Candelaria-3 wins, 1 loss, 3.64 ERA

Not good enough for you? Then consider Blyleven vs. Candelaria in a more important and memorable month, one that probably holds a great deal of meaning for your readership, October 1979:

Blyleven—2 wins, 0 loss, 1.42 ERA
Candelaria-1 win, 1 loss, 3.94 ERA

Anyway, it’s always a thrill to find people willing to set themselves out as the exemplars of the type of statistical illiteracy and ignorance of facts which we baseball fans have come to fear among those entrusted with a Hall of Fame vote. Your reactionary, anti-intellectual screed serves to illustrate how out of touch some voters are and to provide true fans of the game with the motivation to work harder in bringing the merits of candidates like Bert Blyleven to the attention of open-minded readers everywhere. Well done.

If you find what I have to say too dense for your tastes — and I’m perfectly willing to concede that the article isn’t for everyone, seeing as how it’s a subscription-based site — I invite you to check out what a couple of your BBWAA colleagues (Bob Klapisch and Jeff Peek) have written about seeing the light on Blyleven’s candidacy at http://www.baseballanalysts.com. You’re apparently unwilling to consider my logic, but I do hope you’ll at least take a moment to consider theirs.

Best wishes,

Jay Jaffe
Author, Baseball Prospectus
Creator, FutilityInfielder.com