Just a reminder that my first Baseball Prospectus chat is slated for Thursday, November 3 at 1:00 PM Eastern. I’ve had a chance to preview the questions submitted by BP and FI readers and there are plenty of good ones, but I certainly would welcome more, so follow the link above if you have one burning a hole in your head (well, seek help if it’s actually burning, or at least pour a glass of water on it). The recent postseason, the Hot Stove league, awards, deposed GMs, Yanks, Dodgers, the Hit List, JAWS, DIPS, Mind Game, Stottlemyre, The Claussen Pickle or any of my other pet projects — I’ll take my best swing at anything you’ve got. And if you’re on your lunch break, trying to look busy while at work, or simply unemployed and fed up with trying to get a break in today’s difficult job market, drop on by!

It’s a horrible time to be a young, progressive GM or a statheaded fan of one. In a three-day span we’ve seen both the Dodgers’ Paul DePodesta and the Red Sox Theo Epstein leave their posts, the former fired by a thin-skinned, impatient owner, the latter unwilling to work with his poisonous viper of a mentor, walking away from a contract extension that had been reported as done. With both the Dodgers and the Red Sox failing to live up to the lofty accomplishments of their 2004 seasons, the departures will doubtless be spun by the mainstream mediocrity, er, media as repudiations of the Moneyball ethos that links the two bright young execs. Time to invest in a new pair of hip waders, kids, because the bullshit will be especially deep.

Obviously, there are some similarities between the two cases. The 2005 editions of both the Dodgers and the Red Sox were done in by injuries, a stupefying, record-setting avalanche of them in the case of the former, a smaller handful centering around a pair of gritty pitchers who left more than a little piece of themselves on the field during their championship run in the case of the latter. Both GMs were in the process of turning over aged, expensive rosters assembled by their predecessors, looking to shed large salaries while building from within, but they never got a chance to implement their visions fully.

The tenures of both GMs were curtailed by the duplicitous conduct of those above them — senior VP Tommy Lasorda planting the bug in owner Frank McCourt’s ear that it was time to get back to the Dodger Way, Sox CEO Leaky Larry Lucchino chafing at the credit his protegé received and, as is his modus operandi, using the media to retaliate. The media played a role in DePo’s demise as well, with the Bill Plaschkes and T.J. Simerses of the world bashing him endlessly in the pages of the L.A. Times and elsewhere since the day he was hired, preying on the undercapitalized and inexperienced McCourt’s sensitivity to criticism while doggedly defending the old guard.

I could write 5000 words on this if I had the time, and indeed I will, only you won’t get to read them unless you buy Baseball Prospectus 2006 (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). With a heap of player comments and other work awaiting me, I’m going to conserve my bullets, though I’ll offer a few here:

• Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts points out the rough edges of the so-called Dodger Way, such as the unseemly departures of True Blue heroes like Jackie Robinson, the Longest-Running Infield, Dusty Baker and Kirk Gibson, and the fact that for all of the team’s historical success, they have never made the postseason for more than two years in a row. Shocking, isn’t it? Here’s more:

It was legendary Dodger executive Branch Rickey, a statistician, who said it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late. That is the foundation of the Dodger tradition.

Meanwhile, Tommy Lasorda’s 1988 World Series title was preceded by three losing seasons out of four from 1984-87. The only place that the Dodgers have valued stability over performance in the past 50 years, where one could fail or grow old without repercussions, has been the front office.

The idea that somehow, Paul DePodesta violated the Dodger ethos by trading Paul Lo Duca or Dave Roberts, or letting Adrian Beltre go, or watching a division winner have a losing season the following year, is patently absurd, and anyone who says otherwise has simply forgotten or chosen to forget the team’s history.

…The Dodgers traditionally win when they rely on their farm system and the farm system produces. To be sure, the farm system doesn’t always produce. But in their entire history in Los Angeles, the team has made only one playoff appearance with fewer than five home-grown players in the starting lineup. That team was the hallowed 2004 team at whose breakup everyone is so aghast.

DePodesta bet his future on the Dodger Way, transforming the team into one that was going to rely on the farm system, supported by a few outside acquisitions. He had not finished the job – a 71-91 record indicates that – but he was doing exactly what people have been asking for since 1988. He was doing exactly what the Dodgers have been doing almost forever.

Slam dunk. Weisman, who was quoted in an L.A. Times article on the Dodger shakeup, has several essential links to other good articles, both in the blogs and the mainstream media.

• Rich Lederer of Basball Analysts has no fewer than 32 questions for McCourt. “If experience is so important, why do the McCourts think they know how to run a baseball team?” asks one. “If McCourt ‘wants Dodgers here,’ then how does [crusty old GM candidate Pat] Gillick fit into that goal?” asks another. “Is baseball the only business in the world in which a degree from Harvard is a negative?” Inquiring minds want to know.

• At The Juice Blog, Will Carroll steps out of his roles as injury analyst and rumor hound to link the DePodesta firing to the White Sox winning the World Series:

People will mark the day that the White Sox won the World Series as the beginning of the backlash, though it began at the tipping point the other way. The sabermetric revolution reached the masses — and the ears of many owners for the first time – with Moneyball… Sabermetrics was a long, meaningless word with difficult spelling and to date, I’m not sure it’s ever been uttered on ESPN without being attached to Moneyball.

As Beane’s philosophy spread apostle-like (or more accurately, restarting a tradition of coaches such as Bear Bryant, Bill Walsh, and Vince Lombardi, as well as Paul Richards) to Toronto, Boston, and Los Angeles, as well as other outposts like Cleveland, Colorado, and Texas, the great story of Moneyball fast became legend. Legend, as we all know, trumps fact every time. The legend threatened a tobacco-stained oligarchy because they felt threatened, not that they were. No organization got rid of scouts and when they did fire them, it was never because they were replaced by a laptop. Scouts get fired, regularly, by organizations of all stripes. Almost everyone in baseball understands the “hired to be fired” mentality of the game.

…There have been books and columns and insane, fact-ignoring rants in the years since Moneyball came out and became the descriptive term for using business-based methodology in baseball. Most have some basis in friendship – writers protect their friends and more importantly their sources – and in fact. The book short-shrifted scouts in order to make a good story. By writing that good story and shifting it to a Faulknerian good vs bad scenario, Moneyball did as much damage as it did good. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a phenomenal book. It’s a bad legend.

So it’s really the book, or the idea of the book, and not the Kenny Williams-Ozzie Guillen Series win that started the backlash… The upcoming backlash is a quick snack, the snap judgement of those looking for a reason. The White Sox are a broken bottle, the weapon of opportunity, not of choice. They’ll just as soon bludgeon the Yankees and Red Sox with their own checkbooks. They’ll ignore the blended approach of Tim Purpura, Kevin Towers, and Walt Jocketty for the more expeditious free-swinging high risk, high reward Angels and White Sox. The backlash will be led by people that would be better served by trying to find a new generation to mold, to find the middle ground that so many refuse to acknowledge exists.

A must-read.

• ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick notes the odd timing of the DePodesta move after DePo fired manager Jim Tracy:

Think about it: Is there a more dysfunctional scenario than ownership cutting loose the manager and general manager three weeks apart? Short of walking around wearing sandwich signs with “We’re Clueless” on the front, the McCourts couldn’t have provided a greater gift to media critics who view them as an easy target.

…There’s no disputing that DePodesta’s personal style was detrimental to his job security. He was harder to find than Sandy Koufax during spring training in Vero Beach. And in crisis time — for instance, when the Dodgers took a pounding for backing out of the Javier Vazquez trade last winter — he was slow to return phone calls and articulate his position to the press. Maybe he just felt that he shouldn’t have to, that he was smarter than everybody else.

But this much is clear: DePodesta deserved more than 21 months to execute his vision and prove himself, just as his predecessor, Dan Evans, didn’t deserve to be canned after two years on the job. There has to be a happy medium between Chuck LaMar’s decade-long tenure with Tampa Bay and management-by-turnstile in LA.

• Turning to Epstein, most Sox fans are sympathetic to his plight and his reasons for leaving. Here’s Sully from The House That Dewey Built:

Thank you for everything, and know that you will always have legions of admirers, particularly amongst my demographic (College Grads in their 20’s). Graduating college and entering the real world can be tough because there’s no real manual on demeanor, professionalism, humility and really just how to carry yourself as an ambitious young adult. But the reason why this one will hurt for a long time for us is that I think we all got the sense that Theo had it all down pat – extremely hard working, smart, humble and ultimately, principled. I have no doubt that he will enjoy considerable success throughout the remainder of his working life.

Noting that Epstein is “no Brian Cashamn,” David Pinto of Baseball Musings writes, “Good for Theo. He stuck to his guns and when it wasn’t going to work out, he left. It’s the Red Sox loss. Theo can go home knowing his the only living person to put together a championship in Boston.”

I found Pinto’s Cashman comparison a bit puzzling at first, commenting

Cashman had the clout to extract a commitment from his boss that the Yankee front office would be more functional and orderly (not that it means things will work out that way, but admitting you have a problem is the first step).

Epstein clearly did not have that clout, and now the Sox lose a promising GM who, as you say, is the only who can claim to have brought them a championship. Epstein loses a high-proflie job where he had huge resources to draw upon, not to mention the eternal goodwill of the fanbase for his role in ending the 86-year drought. I’m not sure I see a win for either side there, except in the Pyrrhic sense.

To that comment, Pinto replied, “The Brian Cashman line was to reflect how people think Steinbrenner is impossible to work with, but Cashman does it. It turns out that it’s Lucchino that’s the tough one to deal with. At least with the Boss you always know where you stand.”

Mmmm, delicious irony covered with a special, creamy schadenfreude sauce. The man who called the Yankees the Evil Empire (and who drove Alex Rodriguez into their waiting arms) has proven to be a more odious boss than George Steinbrenner himself, odious enough to drive away the best and brightest from his dream job.

I should say, mind you, that my sense of schadenfreude is towards Lucchino, not towards Sox fans reading this. You guys (and gals) have been jobbed out of the man who brought equality to one of sport’s great rivalries, the man who’s made the past three years of Yankee-Red Sox matchups into Ali-Frazier heavyweight title bouts, exhilarating and exhausting. Which isn’t to say that the rivalry won’t continue on the equal footing it’s been on the past three years, but you folks want to see Lucchino’s lifeless feet swinging from a lamppost even more than I do.

• My BP colleague Christina Kahrl hits a home run on the two GM departures in her latest Transaction Analysis:

In case you’ve missed the events of the last 72 hours, counterrevolution is the fashion, and as our own Will Carroll has put it, the weapon of choice is the White Sox. Skip however smug and frequently fact-free interpretations of why the White Sox won are–maybe it’s just me, but “pitching, defense and the three-run home run” was Earl Weaver’s formula, not Gene Mauch’s. However much Ozzieball is a put-up job, it’s manna from heaven for the industry’s old guard, a generation of men grown jealous in recent years over the credit heaped upon the game’s up-and-coming wave of general managers.

However unnecessary the “rivalry” between old-school baseball and the next generation of management techniques could and should have been, that struggle has taken on a life of its own. In this sort of contest, the scorecard is not one that counts whether DePo and Theo were both General Managers of teams in the postseason in 2004, or one that records that Epstein’s Red Sox did something that Gorman’s or Duquette’s did not. Success is apparently not the measure of success, it is instead what the now-unfashionable smart kids were damned well supposed to deliver, and the moment that they didn’t, they were there to be scapegoated.

These are not the same stories, this particular tale of two cities, but I would suggest that both team’s decisions to make changes at the top reflect a battle over fundamentals, not just over the way the game is operated, but how it is supposed to be remembered, and more basically, who is supposed to be remembered. In Beantown, the capacity for jealousy is what poisoned what was supposed to be a model for success in contemporary front office management. Sadly, a team president seems unusually insecure over his place in history. But when America was treated to the bizarre spectacle of Tom Werner, the man who Huizenganated San Diego baseball, suddenly sharing in the credit for Boston’s victory in 2004, we were reminded of the truth in the adage that victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.

After exploring the specifics of the two situations, Karhl sounds a topical note when turning her attention to the media’s role in all of this:

The poisonous synergy between baseball’s old guard and media figures only too ready to rely upon them for the peculiarly dopey “inside dope” is a significant component of this backlash. Both are motivated by careerism, and both stand to lose a lot to what will inevitably be characterized as the “Moneyball” generation of GMs. Again, baseball reflects the times in which we live, an age where the historical actors and the fourth estate interact in such a way that each simultaneously perverts and supports the purposes of the other. Journalists consider their jobs to be no more than the regurgitation of the information they’re handed, either from every baseball club’s increasingly polished media relations department, or courtesy of some unnamed inside source. It doesn’t matter that such sourcing is transparent, whether it’s Bob Nightengale’s reliance on tales told by two owners named Jerry, or Dan Shaughnessy playing Howdy Doody to fulfill the desire of a Larry To Be Named Later to play “who’s your daddy.” The ’90s showed us that careers involving hopping up and dancing on laps were lucrative; little did we know it was journalism that was the real growth industry on that score. Face it, whether you’re a columnist or you’re on the beat, once you’ve settled in, it’s not only easy to settle for repeating what you’re told, it spares you a lot of the lame daily exercise that goes with chasing down stale pre- and postgame quotes. Nobody thinks of affording themselves the opportunity to pursue actual storylines, like the events of a game (you know, the news event), or assessing a team’s performance using facts. Such things simply are not done.

But however bad that content, or however transparent its craven quality, however standard-issue the bilge may be, that bilge possesses an addictive quality all its own to the subjects of such attention. Insulated within their profession, baseball management, on the field or off, is notoriously tin-eared. It’s this that links these two decisions, whether it is Lucchino’s jealousy of the credit given to his one-time protege, or McCourt’s fear of being singled out for not being a good “baseball guy” for hiring one of those damned kids. In both cases, the elder man has betrayed his responsibilities to the future to hoard the worthless kudos of fickle friends. In each case, I would suggest they have made life easier for their division rivals in the long term. In the short term, whoever inherits the Dodgers has a great chance to look good for a year before being forced to rely on his own judgement. As for the immediate future for whoever goes to Boston, I think it’s much less rosy: whoever goes in is going to have to have plenty of Blistex on hand to keep the Bossling happy, while having very little actual control over the franchise.

Fantastic stuff, at least if you’re a BP subscriber.

There are plenty of nuances to both of these stories, and I wish I could take all day to explore them. Suffice it to say that the men chosen to fill these gaps will add a great deal of further context to these two departures, which seemed so improbable just a few weeks ago. While neither DePodesta nor Epstein may find themselves at the helm of another team this winter, we haven’t heard the last of either man or the chaos left in their wake.

The curtain came down on the 2005 season rather abruptly, with the White Sox sweeping the Astros 4-0 in the World Series and claiming their first World Championship since 1917. Despite the sweep, it was a riveting if not particularly well-played series, with the four games decided by a total of six runs, and three of the four with the winning run scored in the eighth inning or later. The depth and dominance of Chicago’s pitching staff, coupled with some key gaffes by Houston manager Phil Garner, turned out to be the difference in the series.

With only 34 runs (20-14 Chicago) scored total (4.25 per team per game), this was a relatively low-scoring series, as predicted. The six run differential ties a record set by the 1950 Yankees and Phillies, according to All-Baseball.com’s Christian Ruzich, and based on the percentage of half-innings where the score was close, this year’s series can claim the title of the closest sweep. Converting Ruz’s data into a table:

    --2005--   --1950--
RD  Inn  Pct   Inn  Pct
0    38   47    27   37
1    27   33    30   41
2    13   16    10   14
3+    3    4     6    8

RD is run differential, Inn is the number of half-innings ending with a given differential, and Pct is, of course, the percentages of same. Despite the closeness and the presence of teams from the third- and fourth-largest cities in the country in this series, it was in fact the lowest-rated World Series ever, down 30 percent from last year. Pundits may say that’s because neither team had a nationwide following the way the Yankees or Red Sox do, but I prefer to look at it as a referendum on Fox’s bombastic presentation, particularly in regards to the Tim McCarver-Joe Buck tandem of announcers, who could choke to death on their own tongues without being mourned by anyone beyond their mothers. There’s already a website devoted to shutting up McCarver, and I’ll note that the domain ShutTheBuckUp.com is still up for grabs.

I made it through the four games and avoided most of McC&B’s inane patter with the help of my trusty Editor-in-Chief, Mr. TiVo Remote. If I missed a few battles over the strike zone and gave away the outcomes of too many payoff pitches, I also saved myself an average of 90 minutes a night, about half of which was commercials. As I’ve said before, “TiVo: any TV without it is broken.”

The moment of truth for the Astros came in the ninth inning of Game Three. After Orlando Hernandez walked Chris Burke with one out, the young speedster worked his way around the bases via a throwing error by El Duque and a straight steal of third. Houston’s next two batters were Craig Biggio and Willy Taveras, both of whom, as we heard a million times this fall, are excellent bunters and also co-starring in Prison Break, the new Fox sitcom (wait…). But for all of the emphasis on bunting and fundamental baseball and the glory of the bleeding sacrifice (not this kind), the two Astros never tried to lay one down. El Duque walked Biggio on four pitches, then Taveras, who slugged all of .341 on the year, took two wildassed swings as though he were trying to qualify for next year’s Home Run Derby. He struck out, predictably enough, and after Lance Berkman, the team’s best hitter, was intentionally walked to load the bases, Morgan Ensberg, who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat during the series, whiffed to end the threat. That failure to bunt, coupled with the Astros failure to hit at all with men on base after Jason Lane’s game-tying double in the previous inning, was the death knell. The ‘Stros went 0-for-30 with runners on base following Lane’s hit, and had 14 straight doughnuts on the scoreboard to show for it. Feh.

Throughout the series, Garner got the pants managed off of him by Ozzie Guillen, from letting the unfit Jeff Bagwell eat up outs as the DH in the first two games to tapping the wrong reliever in Game Two and watching Paul Konerko collect a grand slam because of it, to watching Roy Oswalt cough up a four-run lead via a 46-pitch fifth inning in Game Three (Torquemada would have been proud), to failing to play for one run when the season was riding on that run. That doesn’t even include the manner in which he showed up his own team in the aftermath of Tuesday’s 14-inning epic. As Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci wrote:

And what does their manager, Phil Garner, do in the first moments after the White Sox punched them in the gut by beating them in the 14th inning of Game 3, 7-5?

He rips his team.

…”It’s embarrassing to play like this in front of our hometown.”

“I’m really ticked off.”

Way to bail on your team, Mr. Manager.

Not once did he credit the Chicago pitchers, especially the relievers, for holding his hitters to a 1-for-33 showing after Jason Lane hit his home run that wasn’t in the fourth inning. (The umpires blew another call. Please label it as evidence No. 463 that the commissioner of baseball needs to conduct a full review of postseason umpire assignments as soon as this World Series is over.)

Not once did the manager accept any blame or responsibility himself. But remember, this is a guy who showed up Brad Ausmus in the 10th inning by throwing a public fit when Ausmus flied out on a pitch when Orlando Palmeiro had second base stolen. And it’s the same guy who showed up his entire team by flinging a chair against the dugout wall when Geoff Blum hit his game-breaking home run in the 14th.

Way to show you’re in control, skipper.

Ouch. One BPer observed that Garner was about 0-for-25 in getting his own players to talk to him on the bench during Game Four. As the baseball fan Leo Tolstoy once told me as we downded shots of of off-brand vodka during a seventh-inning stretch, all unhappy teams are unhappy in their own way.

Which brings us to the happy team on the other end of the equation, the White Sox. No, they’re not a great team, the 99 regular-season wins notwithstanding. But the 16-1 streak they pulled off dating back to the final week of the season was a truly great run, and Guillen and his staff kept their squad fresh and loose through some long October layoffs. Guillen stayed out of the way of his lineup, leaving it essentially unchanged throughout the postseason with the exception of those extra frames in Game Three, and he pulled all the right levers in his bullpen without turning into Tony LaRussa. He’s now the manager of a World Champion team, and my hat’s off to him.

But for all of the talk about the Sox’ small-ball tendencies, it’s the home runs that were decisive. As Joe Sheehan points out, 32 of their 69 October runs were scored via homers, an even higher percentage than in the regular season, when they ranked fourth in the majors. Looking back to Guillen’s stated desire for a faster, more fundamentally-based speed-and-defense team at the outset of the season, Guillen apparently understood — either objectively or, more likely, intuitively — that U.S. Cellular Field’s underplayed reputation as the majors’ most homer-conducive ballpark meant that the longballs would take care of themselves. Having a broader skill set to draw upon would strengthen the team, making it able to win many different ways. I’m not sure how much stock I can put in that idea, but with a World Series trophy under Guillen’s arm as I speak, that’s what I’m selling. Congrats to the White Sox, the 2005 World Champions.

• • •

Back here in Yankeeland, the biggest piece of the offseason puzzle has fallen into place. General Manager Brian Cashman has decided to stay, agreeing to a three-year, $5.5 million deal that comes with verbal assurances (perhaps worth the paper they’re written on) that he’s at the top of the food chain when it comes to baseball decisions, with the exiled Gene Michael hopefully back in the picture and George Steinbrenner’s Tampa goons taking a back seat. As a symbolic gesture, the team’s first organizational meeting of the winter will be held in New York, Cashman’s turf, not Tampa, Steinbrenner’s. As the New York Times reported:

[W]hat it symbolizes means everything to Cashman. Though it is not spelled out in his contract, Cashman said that he received an understanding that he, and only he, would sit atop the chain of command in the Yankees’ fractured baseball operations department.

“I’m the general manager, and everybody within the baseball operations department reports to me,” he said. “That’s not how it has operated recently.”

Cashman said that Steinbrenner and the rest of the Yankees’ upper management – including the general partner Steve Swindal, the president Randy Levine and the chief operating officer Lonn Trost – supported him.

The in-fighting below him made last season miserable, Cashman said.

“There’s been some splintering off that’s caused a lot of animosity and taken our focus away from our opponents and created opponents among ourselves,” he said. “That, obviously, was not a good thing.”

Cashman was referring to Steinbrenner’s lieutenants in Tampa, whose suggestions often led to roster moves that undermined Cashman’s authority. Privately, Cashman longed for the chance to have as much autonomy as his peers, which is why he nearly left the only organization he has known.

…Cashman could have sought another job and probably gotten one. But he said the Yankees now seemed committed to working cohesively. That was the message he heard in negotiations with Swindal, who is Steinbrenner’s son-in-law and has been named as his successor.

Whether the Steinbrenner/Swindal message gets carried through remains to be seen, but hallelujah for the recognition that the current dysfunctional state of the front office was to the detriment of the team. Admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it.

Hats off to Cashman for a well-played hand. Despite the fact that he’s been with the organization for 19 years, the threat to leave and take a job with the Phillies, the Nationals, the Dodgers (who appear poised to fire Paul DePodesta, a sermon for another day), or another team was palpable. Instead Cashman used his leverage to extract a rare commitment from the Yankee brass, acquiring more clout — and with it more accountability — to go with his bags of money. “The buck should stop here,” he appears to be saying, and while we all know where the buck really stops in the Yankee org, at least we know it won’t be with Bill Elmslie and Billy Connors. It won’t be an easy offseason for the Yanks, but with less potential for mistakes of Womackian proportions, it’s likely to be a more productive one.

• • •

The list of eligible free agents includes 13 Yankees, not counting Hideki Matsui, whose three-year contract is up but who with less than six years of major-league service, isn’t free to negotiate with other clubs: Kevin Brown, rhp; Alan Embree, lhp; John Flaherty, c; Tom Gordon, rhp; Matt Lawton, of; Al Leiter, lhp; Tino Martinez, 1b (pending club option); Ramiro Mendoza, rhp; Felix Rodriguez, rhp; Rey Sanchez, ss; Ruben Sierra, dh; Tanyon Sturtze, rhp (pending club option); Bernie Williams, of.

The only one Yankee fans should give a rip about going forward is Gordon, who may be more interested in resuming his job as a closer and if so, should be patted on the butt and sent on his merry way as well. Williams will likely wind up awkwardly wearing the garish colors of some other franchise as he daydreams his way into retirement. Given Joe Torre’s unshakeable loyalty to Williams in the face of all evidence of decline (.258/.350/.406 with below-average defense over the last three years), not to mention mental lapses such as the busted hit-and-run in Game Five of the Division Series against the Angels, that’s for the best. Otherwise, even if he displaced Sierra as the go-to guy off the Yankee bench, Williams would continue to suck up at-bats better meant for more able hitters. RIP, #51.

• • •

My first Baseball Prospectus chat, originally slated for October 19, has been rescheduled for Thursday, November 03 at 1:00 PM Eastern. I’d love it for my readers to submit questions ahead of time if they can’t make the chat — Yankee, Dodger, JAWS, DIPS, Mind Game, whatever. Bring ‘em on and I’ll take my best shot at answering your queries.

As for the rest of the offseason, my next task is to turn my attention towards my contributions to Baseball Prospectus 2006. I’m going to make an effort to keep up some of the winter staples at FI.com, such as my DIPS-infused free-agent pitcher roundup, but the paid work has to come first. I’m going to try to keep with more frequent and shorter entries here to compensate for the business elsewhere, but that’s a pledge I’ve made before with little success. Here’s hoping I can do better this time around.

If you’re a frequent reader of this space, you know that the buzzards had been circling Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre long before he made his departure official last week. Stottlemyre’s sacred-cowness within the Yankee organization was a drum I’ve been banging since last fall, and I certainly wasn’t the only one.

The Yankees’ slow start in April amplified that drumbeat. No less an authority than Allen Barra even asked me to provide some data and perspective for an article he wrote for the New York Sun addressing the topic. I called Barra’s attention to the fact that the Yankees not only had a lousy recent track record when it came to the performances of their imported high-profile pitching talent (Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright joining the ranks of Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez, and others), but that the organization had virtually no success at developing pitchers from within since the likes of Andy Petttite, Mariano Rivera, and Ramiro Mendoza. As Barra’s piece was being published, I wrote up the latest of my findings in a piece called “Mystery Stottlemyre Theater” which to my surprise became one of the most widely circulated in the history of this site, being cited on just about any Yankees-themed site when the topic came up for discussion.

Not everyone agreed with my take, however. My good friend and Baseball Prospectus colleague Steven Goldman defended Stottlemyre, calling my response “frothing” (ouch), took me to task for my admittedly selective list of Bronx bombing pitchers and promised a debate between the two of us over at his Pinstriped Blog, one which never materialized due to scheduling issues.

But in debating Stottlemyre’s effectiveness with him and others, I had resolved to attempt to study the matter more objectively. Now, there’s no easy way to do this, but I figured that rather than continuing to harp on Mel’s Greatest Misses, I should examine the records of as many pitchers as possible during Stottlemyre’s Yankee tenure, which began in 1996 alongside Joe Torre. With the help of my trusty research assistant, Peter Quadrino, I gathered the year-by-year stats of all pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in a season on Mel’s watch and compared their Yankee stats with what came before and after.

By the time I completed this task, it was August, and it was quite apparent that with so many new faces in the revolving-door rotation, it would be worthwhile to include the current crop of Yanks in the study, so I tabled publishing my findings until the end of the season. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ego, Kilgore Trout, NOW IT CAN BE TOLD. I’ve written up my findings for a premium piece at Baseball Prospectus, “Pell Mell: Evaluating the Departed Yankee Pitching Coach.”

For starters, the Yankee starters this year underperformed drastically. Besides Randy Johnson, the other four projected members of the rotation, Brown, Pavano, Wright, ad Mike Mussina (incidentally, the highest paid pitcher in the game last year at $19 million, and the fifth-highest paid player overall — but where’s the A-Rodesque outrage at him?) combined for just a 2.7 VORP on the year, virtually replacement level. They did that at a cost of $46.7 million, more than the entire payroll of the postseason near-miss Cleveland Indians, as well as four other teams. A market value formula devised by BP’s Nate Silver showed that the entire starting five underperformed at a level $44.6 million short of what could be expected, another staggering number. Here’s a chart showing some of BP’s metrics along with salaries (in milllions), market valuations, and the difference between the two:

         GS   IP     ERA   VORP  SNLVAR WARP   Sal    Val     Dif
Johnson  34  225.2  3.79   44.1    5.7   6.8  16.00  12.56  -3.44
Mussina  30  179.2  4.41   23.3    3.4   4.7  19.00   6.58 -12.42
Pavano   17  100.0  4.77   -1.3    1.0   1.0   9.00   0.61  -8.39
Brown    13   73.3  6.50   -9.5   -0.5   0.4  15.00   0.19 -14.81
Wright   13   63.2  6.08   -9.8    0.1   0.2   5.67   0.09  -5.58

Wang     17  116.1  4.02   17.3    2.1   3.6   0.32   4.20   3.89
Chacon   12   79.0  2.85   25.1    3.1   3.9   0.94*  4.80   3.86
Small     9   76.0  3.20   22.1    1.7   3.6   0.32   4.20   3.89
Leiter   10   62.1  5.49   -1.7    0.7   0.8   0.15*  0.46   0.31

*pro-rated shares for players acquired via trade

In other words, Mussina’s performance was worth about 6.58 million on the open market according to Silver’s formula, some $12.4 milllion less than he was being paid.

After reviewing the starters’ season and the decisions and strategies which brought the Yankees to this juncture, I dug into the meat of my study, those before-during-after numbers. The pool consisted of 39 pitchers who had thrown nearly 59,000 big league innings and won 3,912 games — yes, you read those numbers correctly. This is a venerable bunch of hurlers.

Now, I don’t want to spill too many beans (y’all should be subscribing to BP), but basically the data shows that while the Yankee pitchers as a whole performed at a level below what they had done before coming to the Bronx (using ERA+, the park-adjusted indexing of a pitcher’s ERA to the league average), they were still considerably better than league average. Furthermore, they performed even less well upon departing, suggesting that the Yanks at least did a reasonable job of harvesting the value from these pitchers.

But some interesting things happened when I sliced and diced the data further. The veterans, skewed by two very notable ones (whose identities I’ll leave to your imagination), underperformed during their time in the Bronx relative to both before and after. But the previously inexperienced pitchers (including the international free agents) performed much better during their Bronx tenures than beyond, though the sample sizes were considerably small enough to send off some warning bells.

On the whole, my findings suggest that while the group of pitchers failed to live up to their collective expectations in the Bronx, they still performed at a level well above league average. It seems apparent that while the Yankee front office imported a lot of high-priced veterans, they failed to provide Stottlemyre with pitchers who played to his strength, younger and more malleable hurlers that he could influence.

At the same time, there was no doubt the recent Yankee staffs had underperformed:

At the base of the complaint was an undeniable decline in the quality of the pitching staff’s performance, one that appeared to have something to do with Stottlemyre’s directive for the team’s pitchers to rely less on their ability to strike hitters out in favor of putting the ball in play and subjecting it to the whims of a subpar Yankee defense.

      ERA (rk)  K/9 (rk)   PIP (rk)   DE  (rk)
1996  4.65 (5)  7.12 (2)  .677 (11)  .683 (11)
1997  3.84 (1)  7.15 (3)  .688 (10)  .685  (8)
1998  3.82 (1)  6.67 (5)  .697  (9)  .713  (1)
1999  4.13 (2)  6.95 (3)  .680 (12)  .699  (3)
2000  4.76 (6)  6.57 (3)  .690 (10)  .693  (4)
2001  4.02 (3)  7.85 (1)  .672 (12)  .684 (10)
2002  3.87 (4)  7.04 (2)  .706  (6)  .690  (9)
2003  4.02 (3)  6.89 (2)  .714  (6)  .682 (13)
2004  4.69 (6)  6.60 (6)  .707  (2)  .688  (7)
2005  4.52 (9)  6.20 (6)  .714  (7)  .689 (10)

…[T]he broader trends show that the Yankee pitching staff had been moving backwards for the past couple of years relative to the league, and if Stottlemyre was in fact advocating a more contact-centric approach, he was doing so on a team ill-suited to withstand more balls in play. It may be unfair for him to have endured so much criticism given his track record, but it’s also apparent that the time for change had arrived.

DE is Defensive Efficiency, the percentage of balls in play the defense converts into outs, while PIP is balls in play (both hits and outs, but not sacrifices) as a percentage of all plate appearances. The number in parentheses are ranks within the AL. Note the staff’s recent decline in ERA went hand in hand with the decline in strikeout rate and more or less with the rise of more balls in play, something the Yankee defense has done a lousy job of for quite some time.

As someone who spent a good deal of time hammering Stottlemyre and egging others on in the service of same, I must admit that I’m somewhat surprised at some of the results in this study. But I think they’re important, and they show a lot more nuance than the original arguments I and others had made. I’m very proud of this study and hope that those of you interested enough will find a way to read it, if only so that we can elevate the debate the next time a pitching coach comes under fire.

And now for a Futility Infielder first: it’s time to get biblical. Like most observant Jews, I spent a good portion of last Thursday at services for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I didn’t go there with the intention of thinking about baseball, or at least no moreso than I usually do while listening to Hebrew chanting about 2,000-year-old rituals. Still, it wasn’t too long before the subject crept into my consciousness.

At the heart of the Torah reading for Yom Kippur (please turn in your prayer books to Leviticus 16) is a passage detailing the ritual of the scapegoat which was central to the holiday in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem. In this ritual, two goats are chosen and presented to the High Priest. One is sacrificed to God in the proscribed fashion, the other is symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and then banished to the desert. Of course, with the local newspapers still buzzing with the Yankees’ recent elimination at the hands of the Angels (not that there’s anything biblical about them) and particularly, the failures of Alex Rodriguez, you can see why the topic rang a bell.

Rodriguez’s punchless 2-for-15, 0 RBI performance in the five-game series was no small factor in the team’s defeat. Right up to the final inning, when he represented the game-tying run and grounded into a double play to put the Yanks one out from elimination, A-Rod failed to deliver. His lapses at the plate were coupled with more in the field, where he made a key error in Game Two and hesitated on several other grounders, resulting in missed opportunities for outs along the way. Reportedly, the September 30 death of the uncle who raised him played a part in his poor performance, but really, it isn’t necessary to explain it away. He’s far from the first MVP-caliber player to come up short in a small sample size; even pinstriped gods like Ruth, DiMaggio and Mantle had their share of postseason flops.

And Rodriguez was far from the only offender in the Division Series. As a whole, the team hit just four homers and slugged just .392 (as compared to .451 in the regular season). The rotation averaged less than five innings per start. Prior to the final game, the Yankee bullpen had allowed eight earned runs in 13 innings, a 5.53 ERA (though they did freeze out all six of the baserunners inherited from the starters over the course of the series). Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui combined for just two extra-base hits and three RBI between them, former clutch god Bernie Williams had just one along with a critical missed hit-and-run that cost the Yanks a baserunner early in Game Five, and even the sainted Derek Jeter’s two home runs were both solo shots with the Yanks facing significant deficits (five runs in Game Three, three runs in Game Five). One could point to a couple of bad calls made by umpire Joe West along the way, but the Yanks simply didn’t play well enough to beat the Angels, and they got what had been coming to them since last winter’s brutal hackjob of a retooling: an early exit from relevance.

As the season dawned, I decribed the Yanks as “a roster built with all the grace of a congressional spending bill fraught with dozens of tacked-on pork-barrel amendments… or the car Homer Simpson designed for his half-brother Herb.” Smarter people such as Steven Goldman has opined that the Yanks’ 2004-2005 offseason will go down in history as one of the worst in team history. The two big-money free-agent pitchers the team signed, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, both pitched below replacement level while being limited to a combined 163.2 innings between them, about 40 percent of what was expected from a pair whose track records were already spotty to begin with. The big-money ace they traded for, Randy Johnson, delivered a very un-Randy Johnson-like season, with an ERA more than half a run above his career average.

The team then used that profligate spending as an excuse NOT to sign centerfielder Carlos Beltran, even though Williams could no longer carry the position either offensively or defensively. They signed low-budget, low-OBP geezers like Tino Martinez, Ruben Sierra, and Tony Womack to be the supporting cast for a cracking good lineup. They patched over their bullpen’s lack of an effective lefty reliever — made glaringly apparent by David Ortiz in the now-infamous 2004 ALCS — in favor of retread Mike Stanton.

Still, the team was projected by Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecasting system to win 95 games, and that’s exactly what they did. After spending a half-season looking like they would indeed live up to my vision of a $200 million tightrope walker splattering — they started by losing 19 games out of their first 30, and stood at 39-39 on July 1 — the Yanks returned to their winning ways while sporting some ungainly patchjobs, going 56-28 the rest of the way. Despite the renewed optimism from Yankeeland, the truth of the team’s quality lay somewhere in between those two poles, the .500 team and the .667 one. Good enough to make the playoffs with a bit of luck, but not immune to the possibility that they could be bounced just as quickly as they had arrived.

Baseball is a game of streaks, and it wasn’t all that surprising that the team which roared to the finish of the regular season at 26-11, claiming the AL East crown on a head-to-head tiebreaker, should back that up with a most inconvenient cold one in the first round of the playoffs. Bad weather in New York played a part — creaky Randy Johnson was ill-suited for the sodden Game Three conditions, and the next day’s postponement gave the Angels bullpen a bit of extra gas in the tank. Bad luck — the Bubba Crosby/Gary Sheffield collision in centerfield during the second inning of Game Five, leading to two runs — did as well.

But really, I look at Game Five as Joe Torre’s failure just as much as anybody else’s. Torre’s refusal to remove Mike Mussina — in favor of Johnson, Chien-Ming Wang, Shawn Chacon, Whitey Ford, or anyone else — after that two-run inning proved fatal. Moose, who had paired a good and an awful start after returning from elbow inflammation and had apparently gotten the good game out of his system in the series opener, yielded a pair of quick singles to Orlando Cabrera and Vlad Guerrero to start the third frame. To that point, he’d allowed just two hard-hit balls, a Garret Anderson homer which began the inning and then Adam Kennedy’s collision-aided triple.

The important point was that Mussina wasn’t missing bats. Only two Angels, Chone Figgins and Darin Erstad, had swung at and missed even one pitch. Three more strikes came on foul balls, two of them to Guerrero just before his hit. The rest were called strikes, eleven of them. Mussina was getting his share of calls from the home plate ump, but between that and the shaky defense, that’s a razor-thin margin to be walking, especially once he’d already surrendered the short-lived lead. Unable to finish off the Angel hitters without letting them put the ball in play, he gave up two more runs on another single and two productive outs before the Big Unit came out of the bullpen. For Torre to have left Mussina out there to absorb five runs in an elimination game is to see the Yankee manager’s wishcasting — this is the Moose of old, he’s healthy, and he’s going to come up big, because he’s a veteran and a Yankee — laid bare.

The rest is history. Johnson pitched admirably out of the bullpen, holding the Angels scoreless until Tom Gordon took over in the eighth, but the Yanks could do no more damage. Robinson Cano, the rookie who had seemed to wind up in the center of every big play in the series, and not always on the right side, was the victim of Bernie’s missed hit-and-run in the second inning, and then wound up being called out running outside the basepaths as he sped to first on a dropped third strike to end the fourth; had he run where he was supposed to have — essentially through Erstad, who didn’t have the ball (just because he was a punter doesn’t mean he’s tough) — the Yanks would have loaded the bases for Williams. Instead, they let Angels rookie Ervin Santana, who came out of the bullpen in relief of the injured Bartolo Colon, off the hook at critical times.

In the end, the $203 million kludgemobile failed, a victim of both bad design and bad performance. Just how many of the parts will be stripped of this ill-suited machine remain to be seen. Williams is likely done as a Yankee, and after his critical lapse in Game Five, it’s not a moment too soon, despite all of the warm sentiments his passing from pinstripes should evoke (that’s what those Game Four ovations were for). Kevin Brown, injured for more than half the season, is finally done in this town as well. Between those two, that’s $23.5 million off the books once Bernie’s buyout is counted. Hideki Matsui, Tom Gordon, Martinez, Sierra, John Flaherty, and all of the bullpen dross are free agents, with only Matsui likely to return. But the core of the team will remain in place, one year older and no necessarily the wiser, and damned expensive. Here are the major 2006 salary commitments for some of the incumbent Yankees, not including prorated bonuses or pending options:

Alex Rodriguez  $25*
Derek Jeter      18
Jason Giambi     18
Mike Mussina     17
Randy Johnson    16
Gary Sheffield   13
Mariano Rivera   10.5
Jorge Posada      9
Carl Pavano       8
Jaret Wright      7
Tony Womack       2

That’s $143.5 million dollars committed to just 11 players, not even half of the roster. Not even half an outfield, for that matter. But the biggest question coming from the Bronx is who will be around to fill out that roster. GM Brian Cashman’s contract expires at the end of October, and he may well decide he’s got better things to do than endure another season of marginalization in an increasingly dysfunctional front office. At this point, two scenarios appear to be possible:

1) Cashman stays because George Steinbrenner (who wants him to stay, to the extent of not granting him permission to discuss other openings before his contract expires) not only meets his price but significantly eases him from the yoke of the goons-without-portfolio who comprise the Yanks’ Tampa office and Steinbrenner’s inner circle, often undermining the team’s day-to-day operations.

2) Cashman leaves, finally free to seek a more sane employer, and the Yanks promote VP of Scouting Damon Oppenheimer, whose moon is quite apparently in the House of Steinbrenner these days. The 43-year-old Oppenheimer took over the team’s postseason scouting duties from Gene Michael (who’s been thoroughly marginalized himself since re-upping in June 2003) this year. His promotion might do something to unify the team’s dual decision-making nodes, at least until someone else emerges to second-guess him to Steinbrenner. The Boss does like his scapegoats, after all.

It’s much less likely the Yanks would go outside of the organization to hire a GM in the event of Cashman’s departure, and anyway, that’s a topic for another day. Beyond that and despite all speculation about the linking of his fate to Cashman’s, Torre is a virtual lock to stay, with $13 million still on his contract. He’ll need a new set of consiglieres, however. Bench coach Joe Girardi appears fated to wind up the manager of one of the two Florida teams, while pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre has resigned, setting fire to the bridge behind him on the way out of town as he highlighted a perceived slight from Steinbrenner.

The time for change is upon the Yankees, a change that may go all the way to the top and one certain to have some impact on the roster despite a lean free-agent class. Let’s hope the Yanks do a better job of managing change during this early-arriving winter of discontent than they did last year.

Update based on Comment #1 (” It isn’t that bad since 8 mil of A-Rod’s deal is from Texas”): Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. Rodriguez agreed to defer $4 million of his 2006 salary as part of a $45 million deferment arranged in 2001. The breakdown of the remaining $21 million is 15 NY/6 Tex according to what I published back in February 2004:

       TX   NY
2001   21
2002   21
2003   21
2004    3   15
2005    6   15
2006    6   15
2007    7   16
2008    8   16
2009    7   17
2010    6   18
bonus  10
defer  24
-------------------
      140  112

So that may shave as much as $10 million off of the $143.5. It’s still a ton of money that by itself is already more than any other team payroll in 2005, including the Boston Red Sox ($126.8 million according to a recent AP report).

And that doesn’t even take into account the luxury tax hit. As three-time offenders, the Yanks 2005 payroll is taxed at 40 percent for the amount above $128 million; that’s $30 million right there. The 2006 hit will be 40 percent above $136.5 million, so assuming that the Yanks more or less match this year’s $203 mil, their portion might actually decrease all the way down to $27 million or something like that. In other words, every single player they add beyond the eleven they’re already committed to will cost them a 40 percent premium. As it was last winter, even the richest team will feel that bite.

As promised, here’s the ballot I cast in the Internet Baseball Awards. Most of my choices are informed by various metrics at Baseball Prospectus, among them Value Above Replacement Player (VORP), Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP), Support Neutral Lineup Adjusted Value Above Replacement for starting pitchers, Reliever Expected Wins Added, and the recently introduced Win Expectancy Added. But circumstances such as a team’s status as a contender, time missed due to injury, and other factors make all of these what they are, one person’s subjective judgement using objective measures as a guide but not the be-all and end-all. It’s easy enough to fill a ballot out 1-10 ranking players by WARP or VORP, but basing everything on one number — even one well thought out, all-encompassing number — isn’t what this is about.

Also, it’s important to remember that this vote was based entirely on the regular season results, not anything that happened in the brutally small sample size of the opening round of the playoffs or beyond.

AL MVP
1. Alex Rodriguez 2. David Ortiz 3. Jhonny Peralta 4. Mariano Rivera 5. Travis Hafner 6. Vladimir Guerrero 7. Brian Roberts 8. Derek Jeter 9. Paul Konerko 10. Mark Teixeira

Again, forget the postseason for a moment — I’ll be picking that over from the Yankees’ standpoint soon enough — because this is only about the regular season. The Yankee gets the nod over the Red Sock in a race that literally kept me awake at night thinking about. I’m sure I’ll be accused of bias here, but I’m comfortable with my reasoning.

Even with slightly below-average defense (a 95 Rate2, meaning he was five runs below average per 100 games), A-Rod finished with 10.2 WARP (note this is WARP1, used to compare within the same season), Big Papi with 8.0. James Click’s Win Expectancy numbers (updated via email) show the latter with 7.3 WINS — the fractional improvement in his team’s chances of winning before and after each of his at-bats — the most in baseball, with Rodriguez third in the AL and ninth overall at 4.7 (Hafner was second in the AL at 4.8). That closes the gap considerably, and might be grounds for favoring the latter, but then we don’t have any measure of the Win Expectancy produced by Rodriguez’s defense, and that might be worth something as well.

Both players, for whatever it’s worth, were essentially equal against their rival teams (.934 OPS for A-Rod, .939 for Ortiz). But in the end, Rodriguez’s 4-for-5 performance in Fenway on October 1, the game in which the Yankees clinched the AL East, was enough to seal the deal. It didn’t end up meaning much in terms of playoff opponents or home field advantage, but it did force the Sox to use Curt Schilling in Game 162, thereby slotting him for a turn against the White Sox that never came. That’s tangible, and from the standpoint of a Schilling hater, it fills me with warm fuzzies, too. Advantage: Rodriguez.

As for the rest, both Hafner and Peralta deserved recognition for the Indians’ great season. Rivera’s 9.4 WARP put him in the mix for a middle spot on the ballot. Jeter’s 8.8 WARP was tempered by the fact that according to Win Expectancy, he was one of the 20 most UN-clutch players in the majors this year. Brian Roberts was fantastic, particularly in the first half, and then suffered a career-threatening injury against the Yanks in late September.

NL MVP
1. Derrek Lee 2. Albert Pujols 3. Jason Bay 4. Morgan Ensberg 5. Andruw Jones 6. Jim Edmonds 7. Miguel Cabrera 8. Brian Giles 9. Chase Utley 10. David Wright

Two years ago I refused to put A-Rod (who finally one the award after several years as an also-ran) first on my ballot because playing for Texas, he was a fair distance away from relevance, the Lone Ranger. I was prepared to consign Lee to the same fate until noting that he had a 1.6 WARP edge on Pujols and 5.3 WINS (3rd in the NL), while Pujols, with about 3.6 WINS, was among the unclutch. Andruw Jones, at 7.9 WARP, was nowhere near as valuable as his 51 homers would lead one to believe (his defense declined by about a win), but I did boost him a few notches based on his importance to the Braves at a time when everything else seemed to be crumbling around him. Jason Bay very quietly had a spectacular season that — though it took place in Pittsburgh, which at best can boast the beds where the Cardinals slept several times — deserves some recognition.

AL Cy Young
1. Johan Santana 2. Roy Halladay 3. Mariano Rivera 4. Kevin Millwood 5. Francisco Rodriguez

Last year’s winner is in good shape to rack up another Cy. Santana led the AL with 7.6 SNLVAR, well ahead of the number two, Bartolo Colon (6.7), who himself was well ahead of Halladay (6.0), who broke his leg in his final start before the All-Star Game. It’s impossible to ignore what Halladay did in his half-season; he was still leading all AL pitchers in VORP and SNVLAR into September. Colon and his teammate John Lackey might deserve to be in the mix, as do a few White Sox (John Garland 6.0 SNLVAR, Mark Buehrle 5.7). I’ll take Millwood, the rock of the Indians’ staff sandwiched between the AL’s two highest ranking relievers (who I flip-flopped here on the strength of Rivera’s three-win advantage in WARP despite half-win deficit in WXRL).

NL Cy Young
1. Roger Clemens 2. Andy Pettitte 3. Dontrelle Willis 4. Chris Carpenter 5. Pedro Martinez

Much as I’d like to vote for somebody besides the guy with seven Cy Youngs already on his mantle — Dontrelle, perhaps — the gap between Clemens and everybody else here is too much to ignore. Clemens led the NL with a 9.4 SNLVAR (Support Neutral Lineup Adjusted Value Above Replacement), Willis, Carpenter, and Pettitte are virtually tied at 8.6, then Roy Oswalt (another Astro) at 7.7, then Pedro at 7.6. Carpenter’s late-season fade and Pettitte’s fine second half helped sort out the runners-up.

AL Rookie of the Year
1. Joe Blanton 2. Robinson Cano 3. Huston Street

A bumper crop of rookies in the AL, but ultimately it’s the two A’s who put up the most value, and how far down would the A’s have finished without them? Cano gets a a boost for a spectacular September and a clear edge over the not-pictured Tadahito Iguchi, who was even worse defensively but very solid overall for the White Sox. Also receiving strong consideration were Jonny Gomes, Felix Hernandez, Gustavo Chacin, and Chien-Ming Wang.

NL Rookie of the Year
1. Jeff Francoeur 2. Ryan Howard 3. Zach Duke

By contrast, the NL was a much weaker crop. Duke would get the edge on raw value (4.4 WARP in 14 starts, compared to 2.9 in 70 games for Francoeur and 3.2 in 88 games for Howard), but the relevance of the Brave and the Phillie to their respective teams’ playoff chases was impossible to ignore.

AL Manager of the Year
1. Ozzie Guillen 2. Eric Wedge 3. Joe Torre

I loathe Guillen’s predilection for small-ball and find his personality abrasive, but somewhere the bill comes due for a team that exceeded its third-order winning projection by 12 games, and I’ll hand it to the White Sox manager. He did a fantastic job of handling his pitching staff, not the least part of which was nurturing Jose Contreras into being a top-flight starter, and he built a strong bullpen that was able to adapt to the injury of closer Dustin Hermanson. Wedge kept the surprising Indians in contention into the final days of the season; had the Indians pulled it off, the top spot here would be his. Torre took a deeply flawed team to the AL East title, but his handling of the bullpen and the bench made the race closer than it needed to be, and sowed the seeds of the team’s demise in the playoffs.

NL Manager of the Year
1. Bobby Cox 2. Phil Garner 3. Ned Yost

For whatever Cox’s flaws as an in-game tactician — and as another Braves team goes down due to some questionable decisions in the Division Series — he’s a great manager for the 162-game haul, thanks in part to having Leo Mazzone by his side. With injuries galore, as many as 11 rookies on the roster, and a strong division in which every team finished at .500 or better, he had his work cut out for him, and he delivered. Garner took a team that lost Jeff Bagwell, Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltran — not to mention 30 of its first 45 games — back to the playoffs on the strength of a great pitching staff. Yost piloted the Brewers to their first non-losing season since 1992 and showed himself adept at handling a pitching staff in his own right. Frank Robinson might deserve a mention for keeping the Nationals in contention all year, but his refusal to keep sending Cristian Guzman and his penchant for writing out lineups that would shame your son’s Little League team hampered the Nats’ hopes for the Wild Card at too many critical junctures.

I’m interested to hear who my readers voted for in the IBA (or who you would have, if you had). So if you feel like sharing, drop your picks into the comments below.

The Internet Baseball Awards voting ends tonight at 11:00 PST. Make your picks for all the major awards and you might win a free subscription to BP. At the very least you can reacquaint yourself with the great banner I designed for the IBA a couple of years ago. You can’t put a price on that.

I’ll be back with my ballot soon.

For just the second time in the last eight years, the American League Championship Series will proceed without the Yankees, who were eliminated Monday night with a dispiriting 5-3 loss to the Angels. The breaks didn’t go their way, they made some key mistakes (including the manager, who stood idly by as Mike Mussina was bled to death by a thousand cuts), and as a result, they’re as gone as the defending champion Red Sox.

I’ve scarcely had any time to mourn the Bronx Bombers’ demise, however, working well into the night and back at it early this morning to complete my preview of the ALCS for Baseball Prospectus before the second dosage of caffeine wore off. The White Sox and Angels both share similar strengths (pitching, particularly in the bullpen, speed, and defense) and weaknesses (offense, having drunk an extra large-glass of One-Run Kool-Aid). In the first round, both beat teams that were much more patient offensively, setting up a series where we’ll see a lot more balls in play than a Yanks-Red Sox matchup.

The preview is a premium piece, unlike a lot of my other work for BP, but here’s a sampler plate:

Expect to hear a lot of hooey about how the success of the Sox/Angels’ PutItInPlayism(TM) is a repudiation of the the patient WaitItOutNess(TM) of those more sabermetrically sound offenses. Or maybe it’s how the Sox and Angels represent the triumph of man’s natural impulses over the tyranny of spreadsheets and slide rules. Either way, thank your local deity that Joe Morgan won’t be jabbering for seven games about the book that Billy Beane wrote.

…[H]ome runs are the dirty little secret of the Sox “speed and defense” mantra. Ozzie Guillen’s small-ballers walloped 199 in the regular season, fifth in the major leagues, and a number that has a lot to do with the ballpark they play in. Over the past three years, U.S. Cellular Field (née Comiskey II) has yielded homers to lefthanded hitters at a rate that’s 58 percent above average, tops in baseball and 26 percent ahead of the second-place Ameriquest Field (née The Ballpark at Arlington, home of the Texas Rangers). Over that same three-year span, righty hitters have homered at a rate that’s 38 percent above average, just one percent behind pacesetting Houston’s Minute Maid Park. Forget Colorado’s Coors Field; U.S. Cellular is the top home run park in baseball for reasons that don’t seem to have much to do with either altitude (Chicago’s about 600 feet above sea level, which puts it in the top 10 among major-league cities but trailing most other midwestern venues) or dimensions:

    USCEL  ML AV   DIF
LF   330   331.3  -1.3
LCF  377   376.8  +0.2
CF   400   404.1  -4.1
RCF  372   377.4  -5.4
RF   335   329.1  +5.9

By this data, it would appear that everybody benefits from a shorter centerfield, with lefty hitters perhaps gaining a slight advantage with the shorter right-center power alley, one somewhat negated by the longer foul line adjacent. Perhaps weather (they do call it the Windy City) and a disproportionate number of times feasting on the young arms of the Royals and the Tigers might be factors as well.

…With a pair or strong pitching staffs and subpar offenses, this is likely to be a low-scoring, fast-paced series–at least as compared to the Boston-New York battles of the past two years. Both teams have pitching depth and managers who know how to used it. But the Angels have a couple of serious health questions that may have an early impact, while the White Sox are so much more rested that it will likely prove decisive. The Halos need to hope they can steal a game in Chicago as they catch their collective breath from a whirlwind first round, and that whatever gamble they make on a Game Two starter pays off. Still, with the rest, home field advantage, and the fewer question marks, one has to favor the White Sox. Chicago in six.

As much as it pains me to say this, I’m somewhat relieved that the Yankees lost, if only because I’m simply tired of staring that team’s limitations in the face night after night. It’s really no surprise that the $203 million kludgemobile didn’t have a strong enough engine to drive back from Cali; the Yankee organization needs to let the lessons of this team’s shortcomings sink in. I’ll be back to pick at the scabs of the Yanks’ defeat after I get some rest and check out tonight’s opening game of the LCS.

Back with the bullets because my gun is still loaded…

• After speeding through 18 innings of Astros-Braves, I was worried I might be as blasé about the night’s Yankees game, much as I had been after watching the finale of the Sox^2 game on Friday. I was even more worried the Yankee Stadium field would be as sodden mess, though the weather cooperated on Sunday.

Still, I was happy to see Bubba Crosby in centerfield for the Yanks instead of Bernie Williams. With the Angels having hit 17-for-36 on balls in play on Friday night, something had to change, and with few other options at his disposal, Torre made the best move he could.

Though the sample size is limited, Baseball Prospectus’ numbers show Crosby with a career Rate2 of 114 in centerfield, meaning that over 100 games, he comes out 14 runs above average. Of course, he’s got only 53 appearances there, with enough innings that it translates to a mere 23 full games. Meanwhile Williams comes off at an even 100 this year (surprisingly average), but over the bigger picture is at about six runs below average per 100 games over the last four years, a period which included the unmistakable notification that Bernie was no longer the Gold Glover we Yankee fans had been blessed with. As Joe Sheehan recounted after watching Friday night’s debacle:

In the top of the sixth inning last night, with the game tied 6-6, Adam Kennedy blooped a single to center field that pushed Darin Erstad to third base. The ball, skied high in the air, fell between Bernie Williams and Robinson Cano in short center field.

The play was remarkably similar to a ball Erstad hit in Game Four of the 2002 Division Series, one that fell in a similar spot, one that also came in the middle of a game-changing rally. That hit is burned in my memory as the moment I gave up on Williams as a center fielder.

Credit Torre for making a good call there.

• What a pitching matchup. The Angels were forced to scratch slated starter Jarrod Washburn due to a throat infection, and rather than bring back Game One starter Bartolo Colon on four days’ rest, Mike Scioscia tapped Game Two starter John Lackey on three. Scioscia called Lackey the most adaptable of the Angels’ starters; recall that he started Game Seven of the 2002 World Series on three days’ rest and got the win, and he had done so in his final start of this season to align himself for the playoffs.

Colon’s condition played a part. Even before the Washburn scratch was announced, the Los Angles Times reported that Colon was unable to answer the bell:

Upon learning Saturday’s American League division series game against the Yankees was rained out, Manager Mike Scioscia summoned Bartolo Colon to his office and asked the Angel ace if he could start a rescheduled Game 4 tonight, on regular rest, on the day Colon was originally scheduled to start Game 5.

The answer might have surprised Scioscia and pitching coach Bud Black: Colon, his lower back feeling a bit stiff and his arm not quite 100%, said he wasn’t ready to go.

The Angels sent Colon back to Anaheim ahead of the team (perhaps a curious decision to put a guy with an ailing back on a cross-country flight, but let’s assume he was flying first class and had ample room to stretch out his ample frame), with Scioscia saying later:

“Bart was still in town when we found out, going back to the hotel… He had plans to fly back to the West Coast last night, which he did. Bart needs the time. He’ll be fresher and ready for Game 5 if we need to go that route. He’s much better off in the slot we have him right now. Even though it’s normal rest, the extra day could be important to Bart.”

The dirty little secret lost in all of this is that Lackey is the team’s best starter now. Since the All-Star break, he’s put up a 2.57 ERA and struk out 8.36 per nine innings, while Colon’s ERA was almost exactly a run worse at 3.55, with only 6.18 K//9. Lackey was filthy on Sunday night, holding the Yankees hitless until a loud Jorge Posada double with two outs in the bottom of the fifth.

But Shawn Chacon had matched Lackey zero for zero up to that point, showing no signs of the lack of command one might have expected from a finesse pitcher on 10 days’ layoff. He wasn’t afraid to rely on his breaking ball, even at the expense of Ball One, and he struck out four, including Vlad Guerrero, in his first time through the order. Through five frames, he’d allowed just a lucky infield single by Vlad and looked every bit the cool customer he’s been since arriving from Colorado.

• The fourth inning might be looked at as the demise of the Angels if they lose this series. Jorge Posada, not exactly known for his defensive skills, threw out two overly aggressive Angel runners in the inning. First, he nailed speedster Chone Figgins, who led the majors with 62 steals, after Figgins reached on an error by Hideki Matsui, who appeared to lose his fly ball in the lights. The throw was good, but it looked as though Robinson Cano was a bit late with the tag. The rookie managed to sell the call, and the Yanks caught a break.

Then Guerrero reached on a play in which Cano nearly made into highlight reel fodder, fielding the ball in short right, spinning and throwing to first just a fraction of a second too late to catch Vlad. Chacon’s first pitch to Garret Anderson bounced in the dirt and under Posada, hitting home plate umpire Alfonso Marquez in the foot. Miraculously, Posada managed to find the ball, whirl and throw a perfect peg down to second to impale the Impaler. It was a once in a lifetime play for Posada, and it ended the inning. For all of the talk about the Angels’ aggressiveness, here it cost them dearly. On the series, Posada has now thrown out four out of five runners attempting to steal., effectively neutralizing the running game.

• In the end, the pitchers’ duel turned into a war of attrition, with the more patient team winning out. The Angels drew just one walk, a four-pitch one by Juan Rivera to lead off the sixth. Rivera came around to score the game’s first run on a Figgins double, and Figgins scored one pitch later on an Orlando Cabrera double.

But the Yanks answered back when Alex Rodriguez, otherwise rather ineffective in this series, worked a one-out walk, one of eight by the Yankees on the night. That was the beginning of the end for Lackey. Rodriguez advanced to second as Lackey turned Jason Giambi’s bat into toothpicks (for what, the third time this series?), then Gary Sheffield, also very quiet thus far, promptly singled the run home on the first pitch to cut the lead in half, ending Lackey’s night at a mere 78 pitches.

The magic of patience paid off against reliever Scot Shields as well. Shields extricated the Angels from the sixth with the lead and the Yankees required the miracle of Al Leiter getting a double-play in relief of Chacon to end the seventh with the score still 2-1. Cano reached on an infield single and after Bernie Williams flied out — with the crowd chanting his name, knowing it might be his final game in pinstripes — Posada drew a walk, his second of three on the night.

With two on and Bubba Crosby’s spot up, Joe Torre tapped Ruben Sierra, not the most patient of hitters, to pinch-hit. Sierra, to his eternal credit, waited out Shield’s first two offerings for balls, fouled one off, and then ripped a game-tying RBI single that showed why Torre would willingly carry his love child to term. Posada alertly took third on the throw home, while Cano came in standing up on a play that was too close to do so; memories of Jeremy Giambi failing to slide in Game Three of the 2001 LDS — you know, “The Flip” — came up like indigestion.

Posada taking third was HUGE. Derek Jeter followed by grounding to Figgins at third base and Figgins, handcuffed by the ball, took a fraction of a second too long to throw home. Posada slid in just under a tag made by Bengie Molina’s mitt, which unfortunately for the Angels, didn’t have the ball; Molina picked up the throw barehanded and didn’t touch Posada’s left leg until his right foot had already touched home. Though Molina and Scioscia argued, replays showed Marquez made the right call, and suddenly the Yanks had the lead.

Credit the Yanks for grinding out three runs on just four hits, and putting a two-run rally together with little more than chewing gum and bailing wire. It wasn’t pretty, but it was pretty big.

• With that play, the Chone Figgins Magic Carpet Ride may have crashed. Figgins had made pivotal defensive plays at both third and centerfield in the two Angels’ wins, but on this night, he could do no right. On Sheffield’s RBI single, he failed to cut off Garret Anderson’s throw, and the ball tailed up the first base line, making Molina’s attempt to nail the vertical Cano in vain. On Jeter’s grounder his throw was again just a moment too late and too far up the first base line for Molina to make the play. Angel defense: another myth crumbles.

• The sudden lead change only amplified Torre’s decision to turn to Mariano Rivera to start the eighth; with the season on the line and the rest of the Yankee bullpen blowing chunks, he had no choice even if the Yanks had failed to regain the lead. With the lead, it was the best of all possible worlds to have the greatest closer in postseason history with the season on the line. Even in the face of perhaps needing Rivera for Game Five, Torre wisely followed the famous Leo Durocher line: “Never save a pitcher for tomorrow — tomorrow it may rain.”

Rivera looked a little shaky to start the eighth, falling behind 2-0 to Juan Rivera before drawing a groundout. He fell behind Steve Finley, but struck him out looking; Finley simply dropped the bat on a strike three that hit the outside corner as if to say, “No chance. No chance at all.” He finished by getting Kennedy to ground out as well.

The Yanks didn’t score in the eighth, but what they did do may well prove key for Game Five. Facing Kelvim Escobar, Cano, of all people, drew a one-out walk on a seven-pitch at-bat, then advanced to second on a wild pitch. Posada worked another walk on a six-pitch at-bat, and both runners moved up on another wild pitch. By the time Tino Martinez popped out, Escobar had thrown 35 pitches to get five outs. The Yanks patiently waited through his sliders, knowing that he relies on geting hitters to chase balls outside the strike zone. Not on this night.

Since returning from surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow and joining the Angels’ pen, Escobar has not pitched on back-to-back days, and the times he’s crossed 30 pitches, he’s had at least three days’ rest before returning. In all likelihood, the abortive Yankee rally may have taken him out of the equation for tonight. Much will be made of the fact that the Yanks have left too many men on base and wasted opportunities, but it’s important to create those opportunities in the first place. The Yanks have outwalked the Angels 20-3 on the series, and if the vaunted Angel bullpen comes up short in this sereies, that will be a big part of the story.

So it came down to Rivera facing the top of the Angels’ lineup. He got Figgins looking to end a seven-pitch at-bat, then drew a weak comebacker from Cabrera. This brought up Guerrero, capable of tying the game with one swing of the bat. But Rivera quicky got ahead 0-2, then battled four more pitches (two balls, two fouls) until the fearsome slugger grounded sharpy to Cano at second, and suddenly it was time to cue L.L. Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali.” It was his 36th pitch on the night, but you can guarantee that won’t stop him from coming back in the same situation tonight.

• So now the two teams will play ball again some 13 hours after landing 3,000 miles away. Game One starter Mike Mussina, who remained on the West Coast while the rest of the team traveled back to New York, will presumably be the most rested player on either team, which should help the Yanks. Randy Johnson and Chien-Ming Wang will both be available to augment the shaky bullpen in front of Rivera. In an elimination game, it’s all hands on deck, and as Johnson himself — not to mention Roger Clemens yesterday afternoon — has shown a couple of times, baseball theater absolutely does not get any better than when the ace starter comes out of the pen with the season on the line. Pass the popcorn. It’s on, baby.

• Win or lose for the Yankees — and I think the matchup favors NYY tonight, because their patience will help their cause — my next responsibility is to crank out the ALCS preview for BP in time for Tuesday night’s game (a Daily News report that Game One might slide back to Wednesday was later refuted by the same paper). If I don’t offer up more than a cursory post to comment on tonight’s result, rest assured that I’ll be back soon enough.