What an amazing day of watching baseball. Saturday night, as the Padres worked the tying run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, somebody on BP’s mailing list said that they smelled three Game Fours on Sunday. The Padres didn’t convert, ending their season with a sweep by the Cardinals as befitting the Worst Division Winning Team Ever. But we got 27 innings of baseball on Sunday, including a record-setting 18 from the Astros as they eliminated the Braves, 7-6 in a game that lasted nearly six hours.

Thankfully, I’ve got a TiVo. And if you don’t, I pity you, because there was likely no way to make it through that ballgame sane. The lack of scoring in extra innings prevented it from being a classic on the order of the 16-inning Mets-Astros Game Six from 1986. But like that one, they’ll still be talking about it 20 years from now, especially in Houston.

I tuned into the game when it was scoreless in the top of the third, spooling the recorder as I made myself a rather elaborate chorizo and black bean burrito from scratch. Mmmmm, burrito. It turned out I’d started recording just in time to see the Braves load the bases for an Adam LaRoche grand slam off of Astros starter Brad Backe. When rookie Brian McCann homered to make the score 6-1 in the eighth, I was counting on a Game Five.

But the Braves’ bullpen, the bane of their existence since John Smoltz returned to the rotation, struck again. In the three previous games of this series, the pen had allowed eight runs in 6.1 innings, with Chris Reitsma surrendering six of them. Kyle Farnsworth, the closer Braves GM John Schuerholz acquired from Detroit at the trading deadline, came in after Tim Hudson yielded a walk and an infield single, got an out on a fielders choice only to load the bases by walking Luke Scott, a light-hitting (.188/.270/.288) backup outfielder. Lance Berkman then made playoff history by smacking the game’s second grand slam, cutting the score to 6-5. Go figure.

It looked like the Braves might survive despite the grand slam when Farnsworth got the first two batters to start the ninth. But Brad Ausmus, with all of 71 homers and a slugging percentage of .353 to show for his 13-year career, hit a game-tying shot just inches above the yellow line in in left-center as the Juice Box crowd went wild. Hello, extra innings.

I stuck around through the bottom of the tenth, when pinch-hitter Jeff Bagwell came to the plate with two out and two on. The Hall of Fame-bound Bagwell has missed most of the season with some severe shoulder problems, but after surgery, he’s recovered to the point of being able to pinch-hit. He’d already delivered an RBI pinch-single that helped to break Game One open for the Astros, but with retirement perhaps on his horizon, this was an emotional moment for the Houston crowd. Alas, he flew out to end the threat, and I left the house to go run some errands. It was 4:30 Eastern time. Reflexively, I set the TiVo to continue recording the remaining 2.5 hours of “To Be Announced,” figuring I’d have time to catch up with the game-ending hit before I flipped over to the Yankees game.

Walking back home around 6:15, I passed my gym, where you can see the TVs above the treadmills from the street. I didn’t look too hard, but one of the monitors had a guy wearing a red shirt and a silhouette that I knew all too well could only be Roger Clemens. I shook it off; must be a highlight previewing Game Five or the start of the next series. Whatever. I got home 15 minutes later and began playing the TiVo, watching the extra frames by fast-forwarding to get to the payoff pitch. for each batter. It wasn’t purity, but it did nicely for someone tuning in late.

By the 14th inning or so, when Clemens was actually down in the Astro pen all by his lonesome, it dawned on me that what I had seen was no highlight, so I sped through to see the Rocket enter the game as a pinch-hitter for Dan Wheeler in the bottom of the 15th, delivering a textbook sacrifice bunt that put the winning run in scoring position with one out.

No luck with that, and so Clemens was left to throw not one but three innings in his first relief appearance since 1984, and on two days’ rest, no less. But the Rocket had enough adrenaline to blow the ball by tired Braves hitters, yielding only a pinch-double to Brian Jordan (another wounded warrior likely headed for retirement). Meanwhile the two managers went through their entire rosters of position players, with only Braves catcher Johnny Estrada failing to see action. Astros manager Phil Garner moved Ausmus to first base for a few innings, one of four players to see time there. Eric Bruntlet, who entered the game in the eighth, shuttled between shortstop and centerfield three times.

In the 17th, Braves manager Bobby Cox called upon rookie Joey Devine, he of the grand slams in his first two major league appearances and nearly another one in Game One. Devine had also failed to retire a batter in Game Three, allowing two hits and a walk. It didn’t take too much imagination to envision the Braves’ season ending with him on the mound. He burned through one inning, striking out two, and came back for more, mainly because the Braves had no one left, except for a couple of fellow rookies, both lefty specialists.

The TiVo recording was running out in the bottom of the 18th, and I was cursing my luck that the last batter would apparently be Clemens striking out. But I made it through to see Chris Burke, a rookie with just five homers and a .368 slugging percentage on the year, hammering a 2-0 pitch over the wall in leftfield. My recording ran out just as he was rounding first base. Incredible.

Chalk up another bitter playoff defeat for Bobby Cox and a hefty addition to the Clemens legend. With the Rocket having allowed five runs in Game Two, he needed a bit of redemption, and he got it. Texas-sized, no less.

Back later with some notes on the Yankees game.

David Laurila of the Red Sox Nation website recently interviewed me on the topic of — what else? — Mind Game as part of a five-part series (part one, with Steve Goldman, is already up). Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez, and relief aces were some of the topics I addressed. Here’s a sample:

RSN: If the Red Sox were smart enough to acquire David Ortiz, why weren’t other teams — specifically the Yankees with their inviting porch in right field?

JJ: The Yanks had just made a huge commitment (7 yrs/$120 million) to Jason Giambi, and he’d hit a pretty sweet .314/.435/.598 with 41 homers in the first year of the contract. They also were developing Nick Johnson, an OBP machine with some power and a decent glove, better at least than Giambi’s, and considered the jewel of an otherwise nearly barren farm system. At that point they were well covered at the position, and they didn’t really have a need for another slow, burly DH type.

Let’s not forget that prior to 2003, Ortiz had shown some potential but not accomplished very much prior to coming to Boston. His best season was worth only about 3.5 WARP because of injuries, usage issues, and clashes with the Twins brass. Many teams were turned off by what appeared to be a pretty limited collection of talents, and big, slow first base types who don’t field well are a dime a dozen. The credit goes to the Sox management for spotting a diamond in the rough and to hitting coach Ron Jackson for helping Ortiz figure out how to take advantage of his strength and of Fenway.

One of the questions I was asked dealt with a finding credited to fellow BP author James Click, namely, that a pitcher’s ERA improves the more he faces the team. Based solely on what I saw in Mind Game, which is to say a very brief summary of some deeper research, I have a hard time accepting that premise. Oddly enough, today’s New York Times, in the “Keeping Score” column by David Leonhardt where BP authors have made several appearances, takes a look at Click’s work. Here, the assertion appears to be the opposite:

Pitchers are at their most effective in their first appearance of the season against an opponent. In that situation last season, starters had an E.R.A. about 0.23 lower than their season-long average, according to research by James Click of Baseball Prospectus, an online magazine.

The advantage disappears in the next matchup, and the playing field is essentially level. Facing a team for the second or third time, pitchers roughly matched their average performance, Click found.

Then the edge goes to the hitters. A pitcher’s E.R.A. rises about 0.22 above his average during appearances four, five and beyond.

So this would appear to say that the advantage goes to the hitter as the gets more acquainted, something which makes much more intuitive sense. Particularly when it comes to relievers with limited repertoires, the hitter’s familiarity with his stuff would appear to be an advantage.

I asked Click a handful of questions about the piece — specifically, where the data is coming from — and he pointed me to this piece from back in April. Data for 2002, 2003, and 2004 all shows a similar trend of pitchers improving slightly the more times they face a team, but once the selection bias of having only the better pitchers come back for repeat engagements, the tables turn:

As opposed to the apparent improvement in performance as appearances increase, pitchers actually perform worse as their appearances mount. Pitchers performed about a quarter of a run better in their initial appearance against batters than we would expect from their complete season performance, but performed steadily worse as appearances mounted. The discrepancy between the expected and actual ERA in the initial performance against a team is especially conclusive given the massive sample size of innings involved in the initial appearance. Teams may be pretty good about selecting the correct pitchers for the majority of the playing time, but diminishing returns increase as those pitchers face the same teams more and more during a season.

So the scales tip in favor of the hitters as time goes on, contrary to what was asserted in the interview and when the topic was briefly addressed in Mind Game. In an email, Click told me that the issue is something he’s been meaning to revisit on a larger scale, so I don’t think we’ve heard the last on the topic. Stay tuned.

More bullets, because time isn’t on my side today:

• The weather last night at Yankee Stadium looked awful, conditions hardly befitting the swing game of a playoff series. Play was never delayed, but the field looked to be fairly waterlogged. Players were slipping, players had a very difficult time holding onto the ball, the mound required in-game attention from the grounds crew, and it all made for some ugly baseball. When Francisco Rodriguez, to use a notable example, slipped on the mound in the ninth, it could have changed the series and, God forbid, his career with only slightly worse luck.

Both starting pitchers suffered, but the 42-year-old with the bad back and the degenerative knee didn’t look comfortable. I actually missed the top of the first, when Garret Anderson smacked a three-run homer, because I was frantically trying to finish the TiVo’d Red Sox-White Sox game on ESPN2, but BP’s injury expert, Will Carroll, noted on-list that Randy Johnson was having trouble trying to loosen his back. His pitches were up in the zone, though that appeared to be as much game plan as physically-induced result. Either way, he got slapped around by the Angels, giving up nine hits and five runs over three innings.

I had to cringe when the Yankee Stadium crowd booed Johnson upon his being taken out. No, he hasn’t had a stellar year, but given his performance down the stretch, particularly the two big wins over the Red Sox in September, the Yanks wouldn’t even be playing in October. It was a horseshit reaction from what’s normally a classy group of fans, and even siting at home warm and dry, I was embarrassed to be a Yankee fan. Horseshit.

It didn’t help Johnson’s cause that the Yanks had 104 years of age wading around in that wet outfield; Hideki Matsui, Bernie Williams and Gary Sheffield aren’t the most nimble of cats in the best of circumstances, and the team is paying the price for lousy design under the worst conditions. The Angels lashed out 19 hits last night, their batting average on balls in play was .472 (17 out of 36). Part of that was hittable pitching, but the defense did them no favors.

• Aaron Small did a great job in his first two innings relieving Johnson, beginning with a Houdini-like escape from a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the fourth with a rare strikeout and then a double-play; Joe Torre later compared it to Mike Mussina’s rare relief effort in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. The Yanks appeared to draw some energy off of that escape, putting four runs on the board in the bottom of the inning to cut the lead to 5-4 and then another two in the next inning.

But the chariot Small rode to his 10-0 record turned into a pumpkin in the sixth. Small gave up a run on a Juan Rivera double and a Darin Erstad single. He was one pitch away from escaping with the score tied 6-6 when Adam Kennedy’s blooper fell between Williams and Robinson Cano. It was a lucky break for the Angels that probably couldn’t have been defended by any team under the best of conditions, but the wet field certainly didn’t help, and at the very least it cost the Yanks an extra base when Ertad took third.

With runners on first and third, next came Chone Figgins, 0-for-11 on the series. Naturally, he blooped a ball into right-center, and Williams and Sheffield converged like a pair of rest-home occupants paddling canoes as they cut the ball off to prevent the speedster from turning it into a double. That gave the Angels the lead, 7-6, and ended what had been an uplifiting performance from Small on a sour note.

Despite his 10-0, 3.20 ERA record on the year, Small’s peripherals don’t say he’s that good, of course. Internally, one of BP’s fertile minds introduced a new ERA estimator the other day, one that uses K, BB, and groundball-flyball ratios. Small comes up at 5.01 there; his low HR rate (0.47 per nine innings) is what allowed him to beat that considerably.

• The Yankee relief corps(e) just got worse after Small. Tanyon Sturtze needed just one pitch to escape the sixth, but Tom Gordon was lost, yielding a Vlad Guerrero single, plunking Bengie Molina (who had hit his third homer in as many games in the third) on the elbow, and then another single to Anderson, who broke out with four hits on the night, including the homer and a triple off of Johnson.

The point of no return happened on Gordon’s watch, another bad break for the Yanks. Sheffield’s throw home on Anderson’s single had allowed Jose Molina, who pinch-ran for his brother, to take third when it hit Guerrero as he slid home and bounce away from Jorge Posada. Juan Rivera then hit a grounder to Alex Rodriguez at third base. A-Rod’s body was in line to throw to first, but when Cano darted over to cover second, he threw there to try for the force.

The slight delay on A-Rod’s proved damaging. Replays were in doubt as to whether Cano’s foot was touching the bag when he received the throw, but this was a classic “neighborhood play” of the type that generally protect second basemen from having to endure takeout slides and surgery to repair torn ACLs. Universally despised ump Cowboy Joe West, a belligerent sack of shit on even his most friendly days (and also the man who made the ruling on A-Rod’s sissy slap last ALCS), called him safe. Joe Torre came out of the dugout to argue to no avail, and the bases were loaded with no outs.

As if that weren’t a scary enough proposition, Torre then called Al Leiter’s number. To his credit, Leiter tackled the situation about as well as possible, striking out Erstad to begin things. But with the lefty still on the mound to face Steve Finley, the Angels recognized a mismatch. Angels skipper Mike Scioscia put on a squeeze play, with the slothlike Molina advancing down the third base line like a wandering buffalo. Leiter’s back was to the runner, and he delivered the pitch home, where Finley dropped down a bunt, and another run was chalked to make the score 9-6. “You can do it all the time with a lefthanded pitcher on the mound. A lefthanded pitcher can never see the guy break from third base,” noted Joe Morgan in one of his more insightful comments of the night.

After the Yanks went meekly in the seventh (Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez lasted a combined seven pitches, flailing at at hitters’ counts), Torre left Leiter in to start the eighth, and he began things by yielding a triple to Figgins that was aided by some butchery by Hideki Matusi, who failed to recognize that the ball would bounce off of the left-center wall and then pegged the speedster as he slid into third. Orlando Caberra flied to center, and once again, the Angels didn’t test Bernie Williams’ weak arm, but one intentional walk and a Scott Proctor (ugh) appearance later, it became academic with a pair of singles on Proctor’s first three pitches that ran the score to 11-6. Overcoming one five-run deficit is within the Yankee offense’s capabilities, particularly given lousy starting pitching and soft middle relief but overcoming a second one against a dominant Angels bullpen wasn’t going to happen.

• For all of the praise heaped on Cano’s clutch hitting in the series — he drove in the tying run in the fifth — his fatal flaw was revealed in the bottom of the sixth. With the bases loaded and two outs, he swung Scot Shields’ first pitch, lofting a harmless fly ball right to Anderson to end the inning.

Of the 342 players who totaled at least 200 major league plate appearances on the season, Cano saw the fewest pitches of any of them, just 3.05 per PA; the next closest was Pablo Ozuna at 3.16. For all of the good things a .297 batting average and a .458 slugging percentage portend for a 22-year old, the lack of any patience whatsoever (just 15 unintenional walks in 551 PAs) will severely limit his value as he develops.

• Now down 2-1, the Yanks are in trouble. With all due praise to Shawn Chacon for the job he did since coming over from Colorado , he’s another put-in-play pitcher, with just 40 strikeouts in 79 innings pitched for the Yanks. Playing on what’s likely going to be another waterlogged field — even given the word of Saturday’s postponement just as I was finishing this, he needs better defensive support than the Yanks got last night. That he generates a lot of popups (a 0.90 G/F ratio on the year) will help his cause, but the Yanks would do well to put Bubba Crosby out in centerfield, play Giambi at first base, and DH Williams, who’s 4-for-10 on the series. With lefty Jarrod Washburn going for the Angels, that may be academic, especially given Williams’ lifetime 5-for-16 with four doubles against him, but it’s a point worth making nonetheless.

In any event, it’s an uphill climb for the Yanks, who now need to win a game in New York, fly 3000 miles and win another one in Anaheim, only to fly to Chicago to begin the LCS in a very jet-lagged state against a team that will be well-rested thanks to yesterday’s clinching.

I’d put the Yanks’ chances of pulling it off at about one in three at best. In their favor, Game Five starter Mussina — never the best traveler, if you’ll recall from the Japan debacle that began last year — has remained on the West Coast and would be well-rested.

• Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead! I expended a lot of energy rooting against the Red Sox yesterday afternoon, so much so that I was rather blasé watching the Yanks lose. El Duque’s three innings of stellar relief — including an escape from a bases-loaded, no out situation in the sixth with Boston trailing by one, only lengthened his legend as an October hero. Particularly impressive was his striking out David Ortiz in the seventh; at that point the fork looked to be in the Red Sox.

The powerful Boston lineup hit just three homers on the series, all of them yesterday, all of them solo shots off of their two biggest bats, Manny Ramirez and Ortiz. Limiting the damage those two caused was one real reason the White Sox pulled through.

Another was the fine sacrifice bunt the team pulled off in the top of the ninth. Now, as a stathead, of course I normally disdain the sac bunt, and I dislike the extent to which the White Sox, a team that hit 199 homers on the year, has been characterized as a small ball squad. But the difference between a 4-3 lead and a 5-3 one at that point was huge (according to BP data whiz James Click, the extra run cut the Red Sox chances by about 40 percent, from a 10 percent chance of winning to less than six percent). After A.J. Pierzynski’s leadoff double, the Sox used two successive bunts to bring him home, the latter on a bold squeeze play. Mike Timlin’s Hail Mary pitch glanced off of Jason Varitek’s glove, and to the fork already sticking out of the Red Sox collective ass was added a very sharp knife, turned 90 degrees by Ozzie Guillen.

For all of the pleasure I took in watching the Red Sox elimination, I sincerely take my hat off to the team, and not just to throw it into the air with glee. World Championships are very difficult things to come by, as Red Sox Nation has been reminded all too recently after last year’s triumph. The Sox-Yanks battles over the past three years in particular — encompassing the John Henry/Theo Epstein regime — have been heavyweight bouts of incredible intensity, a storied chapter in baseball history (one that even gave me the opportunity to write a couple of chapters of my own to add to the narrative). But it’s been perhaps a bit too much for all of us to remain sane through. The bombast needs a break, the fans and media on both sides need a welcome dose of perspective. As good as the storyline might have been for another ALCS rematch, I look forward to seeing what comes of a new storyline, and that’s whether or not — or make that weather or not — it includes the Yankees.

• If I disappear from writing in this space sometime in the next few days, it’s because I’m preparing the ALCS preview for Baseball Prospectus. That’s a plum assignment I look forward to tackling, but the turnaround may preclude me from writing about the Yanks here in a timely manner..

• Baseball fans in NYC of both Yanks and Sox colors, come on out to Coliseum Books (11 West 42nd St. at 6 PM) to hear Steve Goldman, Cliff Corcoran, Ben Murphy and myself discussing Mind Game. You won’t be missing any action on the TV, that’s for sure.

My travel to Philadelphia precluded me both from commenting on Game Two of the Yankees’ series, which they lost 5-3, and from seeing any of Thursday’s playoff action, a bit of a shock to the system given the two baseball-saturated days I had enjoyed before that. Some random bullet points about the postseason thus far:

• My The critical point I would make about the Yanks is that with Wang on the mound, the defense (Robbie Cano, I’m looking in your direction) needs to be on its best behavior. The Angels beat the Yanks in the Division Series three years ago by putting the ball in play against a shaky defense to the point of madness, and while the Yanks are better with the leather now, they can ill afford to give anybody an extra out here and there.

Time was that Molina was a terrible hitter; back in 2002 he hit .245/.274 /.322 for the World Champions. He’s shown a great deal of improvement since then, and hit .295/.336/.446 on the year, with a .196 Positional Marginal Lineup Value rate, which means he contibuted .196 runs per game more than an average catcher would to an otherwise league-average lineup, fourth-best in the AL. Jorge Posada came in fifth at .180 PLMVr in what for him was an off year with the bat.

• The forecast here in New York City calls for rain over the next five days, which could make playing both Games Three and Four of the series tricky. The biggest hazard is for a Randy Johnson start to get washed away, something that would seriously dent their chances in the series. It’s going to be nervewracking to see what the umpires end up doing; I’d rather they hold off on starting the game if possible so as not to interrupt it once it begins, as any mid-game delay is what’s likely to cause the most trouble. for the 42-year-old.

• Elsewhere in the playoffs, the Red Sox find themselves playing an elimination game Friday afternoon. Matt Clement got destroyed in Game One, giving up five runs in the first inning and eight through just 3.1 innings, including three homers. The White Sox hit five in all that day, two by A.J. Pierzynski including a three-run shot in the first. Scott Podsednik, who didn’t hit a single homer during 568 regular-season plate appearances and slugged just .349, also added a three-run shot as Chicago won a 14-2 laugher.

The supposedly small-ball White Sox, who actually hit 199 homers on the year, fifth in the majors, liked the three-run plan so much that they used another one to win Wednesday’s Game Two. David Wells was sporting a 4-0 lead in the fifth inning when all hell broke loose. Two singles and a double cut the lead to 4-2 with one out, then Boston second baseman Tony Graffanino let Juan Uribe’s double-play ground ball through the five-hole, drawing inevitable though somewhat misplaced Bill Buckner comparisons. After Podsednik fouled out, Tadahito Iguchi, the White Sox 30-year-old rookie second baseman from Japan, jacked a three-run shot to give Chicago the lead. Mark Buehrle lasted seven innings, while 270-pound manchild Bobby Jenks closed out the last two innings to send Boston to the brink of elimination.

Of course, it would be premature to bury the Red Sox at this juncture, given how fresh their 3-0 comeback in last year’s ALCS should be in everybody’s memory. The Bosox are putting a brave face on this, and while it’s win-or-else time for them, I won’t believe they’re done until Jason Varitek’s severed head is being paraded around on Ozzie Guillen’s fungo bat, with Curt Schilling hogtied and roasting on a spit (I have weird visions this time of year, it’s true). I’ve been instructed to root for the Red Sox to extend the series in the interest of Mind Game sales, but I can’t really bring myself to do so. If I’m rooting for stories, it’s for a new plot, something besides Yanks-Red Sox III, that appeals to me for the ALCS.

• Several BP writers had climbed on a Padres bandwagon thanks to the Cardinals’ slow finish after clinching, Chris Carpenter’s struggles, and the off days after the first two games which would allow San Diego, which is shorthanded in the rotation, to bring back ace Jake Peavy on normal rest for Game Four.

The bandwagon crashed somewhere around the fifth inning of Tuesday’s game when Peavy, already trailing 4-0, have up a grand slam to Reggie Sanders. After the game it was revealed that Peavy had bruised a rib during the Padres’ clinching celebration last week, and that the rib likely cracked when he caught a spike on the rubber in the third inning. The Pads came back to bring the tying run to the plate with two outs in the ninth inning, but fell 8-5, but close doesn’t count, and after yesterday’s 6-2 loss, they’re staring at the place where an 82-80 division winner should rightly go in short order: home.

• I watched most of the first Astros-Braves game and was dumbfounded when Bobby Cox elected to intentionally walk Lance Berkman to set up a force play with two outs in the seventh and the Astros ahead 4-3. On deck was Morgan Ensberg, who hit .283/.388/.557 with 36 homers on the year as the centerpiece of an otherwise lousy offense. Ensberg had already driven in two runs with a single that broke a 1-1 tie in the third.

Ensberg promptly singled to left to drive in the run and expand the lead to 5-3. Cox then made another dubious decision, bringing in rookie Joey Devine to relieve starter Tim Hudson. Devine was the team’s first round pick in the 2005 draft, and he set an ignominious record by allowing grand slams in his first two big-league appearances back in August. In all, Devine threw just five innings for the Braves, but he made the playoff roster due to injury to fellow rookie Blaine Boyer and the suckitude of Danny Kolb, who started the season as the team’s closer but lost the job and finished with a 5.93 ERA.

Devine grazed Jason Lane with his second pitch; it was a cheap HBP, but it loaded the bases nonetheless. He battled Orlando Palmeiro to a 2-2 count before Palmeiro lofted a high fly ball deep to rightfield that was… caught by Jeff Francoeur at the warning track. In the end, that maneuver didn’t cost Cox, but it was still a dumb call, and his walk certainly did hurt the team. Just another example of how a manager who’s piloted his team to 14 straight playoff appearances has only one World Series ring to show for it, I guess.

• I missed all of the much-hyped John Smoltz-Roger Clemens matchup for Game Two. But nonetheless, I couldn’t help but think back to the last time the two squared off: Game Four of the 1999 World Series, a game I attended. In that one the Yanks, who came in leading the series 3-0, rallied for three runs off of Smoltz in the third inning, with Tino Martinez driving in two with a bases-loaded single. Clemens blanked the Braves for seven frames before putting a couple of men on with two outs in the eighth. He left to a thunderous ovation that literally shook the Stadium. Though one of the runs scored, the Yanks got it back in the bottom of the eighth, when Jim Leyritz pinch-hit a solo homer off of Terry Mulholland, who relieved Smoltz to start the inning. The Stadium kept shaking, and very soon 56,000 pfans were singing “New York, New York” in unison as the Yanks celebrated their second consecutive World Championship. Good times…

Just a brief note to announce that I’ll be joining Steven Goldman and perhaps other Baseball Prospectus authors for a pair of bookstore appearances this week, one on Thursday evening in Philadelphia, the other Saturday here in New York City. details are as follows (it’s worth noting that neither of these appearances conflicts with any of the Red Sox playoff games):

• Thursday, October 6, 7:30 PM, Barnes & Noble, Rittenhouse Square, 1805 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

• Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM, Coliseum Books, 11 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

Also, while I’m engaging in some self-promotion (wait, when is Screamin’ Jay Jaffe not engaging in self-promotion?), I’m pleased to announce my first BP Chat on Wednesday October 19 at 1:00 PM ET. I doubt there will be any hot, available babes taking part, but I’ll gladly answer as many of the submitted questions as I can on the the playoffs, the Yankees, Dodgers, Mind Game, the Hit List, JAWS, DIPS, WARP, VORP, and Mike Timlin’s penchant for cross-dressing.

Huge win for the Yankees last night as they beat the Angels 4-2 out in Anaheim to take a 1-0 lead in the Division Series. Mike Mussina–the good, if diminished version–gave the Yanks 5.2 scoreless innings, more than they had any right to expect, the team put together two two-out rallies, and suddenly the Yanks have swiped back the home field advantage they’ve spent too much time whining about Buck Showalter having taken from them.

Despite his 21-8, 3.48 ERA season, Bartolo Colon hasn’t had a lot of success against the Yanks, particularly as an Angel. Most memorably, he yielded three home runs to Alex Rodriguez on April 26, a game I had the pleasure to attend. In two years with Anaheim, he’s put up an 8.64 ERA against them in three starts, yielding a whopping nine homers in 16.2 innings.

When Colon struck out Rodriguez on a low two-seam fastball for the second out of the first inning, it looked like it might be a long night for the Yankees. Even when they managed three two-out singles in a row, he was pouring the ball into the zone for first-pitch strikes. But Robnson Cano’s two-strike, bases-clearing double–over the head of the glacially slow Garrett Anderson–changed the complexion of the game very early, allowing Mussina to take the mound with a generous lead.

Moose threw ball one to the first three hitters, but only Orlando Cabrera, who singled, could capitalize. The Angels hitters’ game plans seemed to be to get a good look at Mussina the first time through by taking pitches, but he was getting enough of the plate with his breaking stuff that the Angels ended up looking at looked at six strikes in the inning; even Vlad Guerrero, who hardly takes any pitch, watched two go by before grounding back to Moose.

The Yanks mounted another two out rally after Bernie Williams and Bubba Crosby both struck out; a Derek Jeter single, a painful-looking plunk in the back ribs of A-Rod and then a Jason Giambi double pushed the score to 4-0. The Angels had a chance to push back with a two-out rally of their own, but when Steve Finley’s shot into the rightfield corner bounced over the wall for a ground-rule double, former Yankee Juan Rivera, who had singled just before Finley, was forced to stop at third. Huge. Adam Kennedy flied out to end the threat.

That Finley was even in the lineup against Mussina was surprising; in fact, Mike Scioscia’s lineup was questionable on many fronts. Finley had a thorougly miserable season, hitting just .222/.271/.374 and it took a lot of late-season work just to get those numbers that shiny. The lefty centerfielder hasn’t shown much of a platoon split in recent years (.252/.312/.452 vs. southpaws from 2002-2004, as compared to .268/.334/.468 against righties), but he was hopeless against them in 2005, hitting just .201/.252/.347 compared to .271/.317/.441 vs. lefties. Better for Scioscia to sit Finley in favor of playing the versatile Chone Figgins in centerfield and the rookie Maicer Izturis (.264/.316/.368) at third.

Bu the biggest mistake I saw in Scioscia was not including rookie Casey Kotchman in the lineup. Kotchman crushed righties to the tune of .286/.355/.551. Playing him at first base would have provided more power than Darin Erstad (.291/.337/.396 vs. righties) though admittedly not as much Special Veteran Sauce. Playing him at DH would have allowed Juan Rivera to play leftfield while Anderson (.261/.290/.429 vs. righties, and no great shakes healthwise) sat. Erstad and Anderson were big parts of Scioscia’s 2002 World Championship season, and he appears to be beholden to them at the expense of fielding the best lineup.

Anyway, after Finley’s double, Mussina allowed just one Angels hitter out of the next 12 to reach base. With two outs in the fifth, he gave up a single to Vlad Guerrero on an 0-2 pitch, and Joe Torre took the ball from him.

I began hyperventilating as Torre summoned Al Leiter to face Darin Erstad; bringing in a lefty to face Erstad (.244/.298/.316 against southpaws) was the right move except that the Yanks lack any decent ones out of the bullpen, as I’m sure you’ve heard Screamin’ Jay Jaffe rant about before (Jay is going to talk about himself in the third person for awhile, just to see what it feels like).

Leiter, of course, threw ball one. But he came back to get two strikes ina row on Erstad, the second of which he chased low and away. It apparently was a busted hit-and-run; Jorge Posada threw down to second, and though it appeared Derek Jeter actually missed the tag, he prevented the ump from getting a clear view, and sold the call adequately. Inning over, Leiter off the hook. Huge.

Leiter stuck around to finish off Erstad the next inning, then Tanyon Sturtze came on, apparently for the sole purpose of allowing Bengie Molina to take him over the wall. Sturtze is cooked; his velocity is off, his durability is shot, and frankly, I thought Torre had the right idea when he was warming up Aaron Small in the sixth. Bumped from the rotation by experience rather than any performance shortcoming, Small is a fresher arm at this stage of the season, and I’d rather see him than Sturtze or Felix Rodriguez in the sixth or seventh. In any event, Torre brining in a rested Tom Gordon was even better; Gordon got the next four outs to hand the baton to Mariano Rivera.

Mo didn’t have an easy inning; Robinson Cano made two plays which nearly negated his offensive contributions. After Anderson flied out and Guerrero took a rare walk, Vlad stole second. Erstad chopped one which bounced high in front of the plate and then just in front of Cano, who tried to backhand the ball rather than getting in front of it to keep it in the infield. Guerrero raced around to score, bringing the tying run to the plate in Molina. Now, Molina has a three-run homer off of Rivera under his belt from a game last May (I was at that game but left during the second rain delay and watched the end from home), but he runs like a burly catcher; Joe Sheehan calls him the slowest player in baseball and he may be right.

When Molina grounded to Jeter at short, it looked as though the game might end on a double play. Jeter went into the hole and made a fine play throwing across his body to Cano, but the second baseman hesitated on the pivot, and Molina was safe, keeping the game alive. Kotchman pinch-hit for Rivera, a move Sheehan assailed:

Then Scioscia compounded his error by sending up Kotchman for Juan Rivera. This made no sense whatsoever; if Juan Rivera is the player you want starting the game at DH against Mussina, he’s the player you want batting against Mariano Rivera in the ninth. Scioscia has been managing in the AL for five years; he has to be aware that Rivera chews up left-handed batters but is a bit more susceptible to righties, especially righties with some pop. If you’re determined to get Kotchman an at-bat, have him hit for DP Concentrate a batter earlier. Using him for Juan Rivera probably decreased the Angels’ chances of winning the game, chances that dropped to zero when Kotchman popped weakly to Alex Rodriguez.

We’re 163 games into the season, and if you haven’t yet figured out who your best players are, you’re not likely to get religion now. The Angels desperately need Kotchman’s bat in the lineup, even if it means upsetting guys with higher salaries and more service time. Scioscia, a good manager in many respects, has to work through his loyalty issues and put his best lineup on the field.

What he said. Thus the Yankees stole the first game of the series, and having done so, I like their chances more than I did a day ago. The Angels may have depth and versatility, but if it’s not deployed correctly, it doesn’t do much good.

It’s a 10 PM game tonight here on the East Coast, which means I’ll probably be watching from a bar with Nick instead of puttering around with my TiVo, my wireless headphones, and my laptop. Chien-Ming Wang faces John Lackey, who had a very good season, striking out 199 batters with a 2.8 K/BB ratio and a 3.44 ERA. At 26, Lackey’s already a seasoned veteran, having started Game Seven of the 2002 World Series as a rookie. he’s been on a roll since the All-Star break, with a 2.57 ERA and an 8-1 record. He’s had a bit of success against the Yanks this year (2.53 ERA in 11.2 innings), but they’ve beaten him pretty soundly in the past (6.34 in 38.1 innings); I think you have to throw the latter data out the window because he’s definitely coming into his own this year. BP’s Support Neutral stats show Lackey as the 10th-best pitcher in the AL this year, 5.5 wins above replacement level. Colon was second at 6.7, while the top Yankee starter, Randy Johnson, finished sandwiched between Lackey and tentative Game Four starter Jarrod Washburn.

Facing another righty in Wang, the key for the Angels is whether Scioscia makes some adjustments, particularly getting Kotchman’s bat in the lineup. If he doesn’t, you have to like the Yanks’ chances all the more.

The critical point I would make about the Yanks is that with Wang on the mound, the defense (Robbie Cano, I’m looking in your direction) needs to be on its best behavior. The Angels beat the Yanks in the Division Series three years ago by putting the ball in play against a shaky defense to the point of madness, and while the Yanks are better with the leather now, they can ill afford to give anybody an extra out here and there.

In the words of my man Jim Anchower, “Hola amigos, it’s been awhile since I rapped at ya.” When I last checked in, Saturday’s Yankee-Red Sox game was just moments away. Today the first round of the playoffs is underway. In between we’ve heroes and heartbreak on the way to a climactic end of a great regular season. I spent much of the past 48 hours tying it all up in an epic-length valedictory edition of the Prospectus Hit List. More on that in a moment.

First, to Saturday’s game. My pal Nick and I got to whoop up in the first inning, thanks in part to a two-run Gary Sheffield jack over the Green Monster off of Tim Wakefield. The old knuckleballer tried to cross him up with a fastball, and if there’s one thing Gary Sheffield can do, it’s cream a mediocre fastball. It was a cathartic shot, and the two of us were shouting such obscene things at the Red Sox that I swear a small bird died outside my window, and even Andra had to try hard to endure our boys-being-boys rowdiness. By the time the smoke had cleared, the Yanks led 3-0.

But the Sox came back quickly. Randy Johnson was shaky, pouting and glaring at the ump for squeezing the strike zone on him and yielding a loooong two-run homer to Manny Ramirez. The Yanks added two more runs in the second, and Johnson nearly gave them right back, loading the bases before striking out Edgar Renteria. Side note: Renteria’s four-year, $40 million contract looks quite absurd given his .276/.335/.385 line on the year. Baseball Prospectus‘ numbers also put him an astounding 22 runs below average in the field and worth just 2.6 Wins Above Replacement on the year. Blech.

With the three-run lead restored, Johnson settled down, while the Yankee offense pulled away slowly. Still, despite a lead that was as wide as five runs, the game carried plenty of tension. With that Red Sox lineup in that ballpark, no lead is safe, as the Sox have proven time and time again. The afternoon sun made things even more precarious, particularly for the not-so-nimble Yankee outfield. Sheffield made two crucial diving catches, one in the rightfield corner and one in right-center that in all likelihood should have been Bernie Williams’ ball.

The key point in the game came with the score 8-3 in the bottom of the eighth. With David Ortiz set to lead off the inning, Joe Torre stayed with Johnson, who’d thrown something like 119 pitches, rather than open the Pandora’s box that holds the Yankees’ lefty specialists (Leiter Fluid, Smolderin’ Embree, and Wayne the Bane). Johnson had handled Ortiz reasonably well in three prior at bats, striking him out swinging, allowing a leadoff double that went uncapitalized, and then getting him to ground out. Johnson quickly put Ortiz in a hole with two called strikes before Big Papi grounded meekly to Tino Martinez. Yesssss.

That was crucial because Tom Gordon came in and immediately yielded a solo homer to Ramirez, his second shot of the game. No one who saw last year’s ALCS will forget the two homers Ortiz launched off of Gordon, least of all Flash, who pitched that series like a man in fear. It’s not tough to imagine him issuing a leadoff walk or worse to Ortiz under those circumstances, opening up a bigger inning. Clearing Manny with the score 8-4 instead of 8-5 made a big difference, and the Sox never got any closer. Mariano Rivera retired the side in the ninth, giving the Yanks their 10th victory of the 19-game series against the Sox, meaning that they held the tiebreaker in the event the two teams ended up with the same record. With the slumping Indians having lost 4-3 to the White Sox, the final out meant that the Yanks had officially clinched the AL East. Torre was all but blubbering as he hugged his players; division titles don’t come much more difficult than that.

With the Yankees having clinched, Torre altered his Sunday plans, sending Jaret Wright to the hill instead of Mike Mussina. The Sox still had to win to assure themselves of the Wild Card; a loss and an Indians win meant a one-game playoff. As dramatic as that might have been, it never came close to happening. The Yanks missed a couple of early opportunities to put some runs on the board against Curt Schilling, and though Wright kep the game close through three innings, the Sox broke through for five runs in the fourth, and the game turned into a parade of crappy Yankee relievers auditioning for their October roster spots while the lead widened to 10-1.

That made Cleveland’s result a moot point; they lost for the sixth time in seven games, including three to the White Sox B-squad, sending their bandwagon to a crashing halt. Awkwardly enough, the Indians still finished the season ranked #1 on the Hit List, with the Cardinals second and the Yanks third. I’m sure I’ll hear plenty about that from my readers. It’s the run differential, people. The Indians outscored opponents by 148 runs, 33 more than any AL team. But they went 22-36 in one-run games, losing five of them in the final week. It’s a sad way to go — the greedy fan in me wanted both the Indians and the Yanks in the playoffs at Boston’s expense — but that doesn’t diminish the great leap forward they took this year. They’ll be back.

Anyway, this edition of the Hit List marks the 23rd I’ve written on the season (four of them were handled by understudies while I traveled or concentrated on other deadlines). I’m amazed I made it through the year, quite frankly; better BP writers have tried a similar weekly rundown and failed to carry it through; it’s an immensely time-consuming task. The upside is that I feel thoroughly conversant on every team; each capsule this week practically contains the starting point for a BP 2006 essay. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Joe Sheehan for suggesting that I create the Hit List and then letting me figure out exactly how I wanted to handle it, John Erhardt for catching every Simpsons reference, Ben Murphy for creating a script that automated some of the formatting and for keeping the column warm while I got married and went on my honeymoon, Dave Metz for pinch-hitting late in the season when I needed it the most, Clay Davenport for being responsive to my nitpicking of the Adjusted Standings which form the List’s basis, James Click for handling the bulk of the data queries, and everyone else at BP for pitching in to answer my questions and back the piece with the organization’s support. Thanks, guys.

I’d also like to thank David Pinto at Baseball Musings for creating the Day By Day Database, a fantastic tool that allows the user to calculate all kinds of splits and intervals; that thing literally saved me hours of counting on my fingers and crunching numbers with my pocket calculator. Of course, it could be argued that the database actually cost me hours by opening up such a world of possibilities for the Hit List, but since it’s all in the service of a better product, I can live with that.

The Hit List will be back in some to-be-determined format after the playoffs end, but after this one, I need a break. On to my playoff predictions, which I’ll run virtually without comment except to say “it’s the pitching”:

• AL Division Series: Angels over Yankees in 5 — it pains me to say it, but I simply don’t see the Yanks as having the pitching depth to get through this round. If either Mike Mussina, who didn’t get out of the second inning in his last start, or Shawn Chacon turn into a pumpkin, the Yanks don’t have the bullpen to get through the way the pitching-rich Angels do.

• AL Division Series: White Sox over Red Sox in 4
• NL Division Series: Cardinals over Padres in 4
• NL Division Series: Astros over Braves in 5

• AL Championship Series: White Sox over Angels in 6
• NL Championship Series: Cardinals over Astros in 6

• World Series: Cardinals over White Sox in 5

Not much time to grumble about last night’s Yankee loss to the Red Sox except to say that David Wells pitched like the big game hunter that he was advertised as, that Jason Giambi throws like a little girl, and that Jorge Posada’s unclutch performance continues.

When the game was over I tried to flip to the Cleveland-Chicago matchup but got sidetracked watching the final half-inning of the Brewers’ successful attempt to clinch their first .500 record since 1992. I needed a smile after the Fenway debacle, and that was good enough; Andra (who’s from Milwaukee, where her parents and one brother still life) and I shared a high-five and a hug after Derrick Turnbow nailed down a 6-5 comeback win. That town deserves a good baseball team now that the Brewers has gotten out from under Bad Rug Bud’s thumb; as it happens, the new owner Mark Attanasio and I are alums of the same school, so all the more reason for me to root for them.

Anyway, Cleveland lost in 13 innings, setting them a game back in the Wild Card. They need to win both games to assure themselves of life beyond Sunday, and despite the potential for that adversely affecting the Yankees, I find myself pulling for them. Rooting for stories… Hey, if the Yankees can’t win a single game in Fenway this weekend, they simply don’t deserve to play in October.

If you’re going crazy trying to digest the various scenarios in which the Yankees, Red Sox, and Indians can become entagnled, Hank Waddles of Only Baseball Matters has a handy clip-and-save table outlining what happens.

One more worthy link to pass on is Bronx Banter’s Cliff Corcoran looking back at the other three weekends in baseball history in which the Yanks and Sox went down to the final weekend with first place on the line. 1904 is here, 1949 is here, and 1978 will bring the karma tomorrow.

Time to gas up the TiVo so as to better tell those assclowns at Fox to go fuck themselves. Seriously, the one thing I am hoping for this October — beyond any specific team besides the Red Sox winning, of course — is for lightning to strike Tim Mccarver and Joe Buck and send a bajillion volts through their bodies so that we’re all spared their insufferable yammering and prommotional whoring.. Have I made myself clear? Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?

You’re reading the words of a happy man, and not just because the Yanks find themselves one game up in the AL East going into the weekend’s showdown in Fenway. No, I’m a happy man because my copy of Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning arrived on Wednesday.

Mind Game, for those of you who haven’t heard this particular song and dance yet, is a book about how the Red Sox took a rational, sabermetrically-derived approach to building a team and in doing so, overcame the better part of a century’s worth of mistakes, including the pervasive, institutional racism that made the Sox the last team to integrate. It follows the narrative arc of their 2004 championship season — which, as you may have heard, was their first since 1918 — but digs back into their sordid past to emphasize the failures of imagination and intelligence that doomed the Sox, focusing on the way the John Henry-Theo Epstein regime solved some of those problems in building a championship team.

Never mind that this was a copy I had to buy online because I couldn’t wait for the publisher to send me my author copies. Never mind that the book is an in-depth exploration of something that at its center caused me a great deal of personal frustration. Never mind that the green and red cover looks like a Christmas morning trainwreck of bad design (nobody consulted this graphic designer) and clashing colors.

No, I’m a happy man because I get to hold in my hands the first baseball book to which I ever contributed (Will Carroll’s The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball’s Drug Problems was published first, but my work on this was done prior). And that feels pretty incredible. Someday, holding my newborn son or daughter or a book of my creation in my arms will bring me more satisfaction. But for right now, this feeling is tough to beat.

I wrote two chapters for Mind Game, which was well underway and yet below the radar when I officially joined the Baseball Prospectus team last November. The first one, now titled “Deconstructing Pedro,” is a look at Pedro Martinez’s mighty struggles against the Yankees, who won 19 of the 30 games in which the diminutive Dominican started. I mined data from Retrosheet and pored over the game logs of all of his starts against the Yankees, looking for patterns, querying the database gods at BP to shuffle the numbers a few different ways.

I had a great time reading through my own writings on the topic — blog entries and game reports that Steve Goldman, who edited the project, had in mind when he offered me the chapter. Without too much difficulty, I was able to cull a “starting nine” of memorable Pedro-versus-Yankees games, many of which brought out the rabidly irrational partisan in me in a way I don’t really miss now that it’s gone. I got to relive the circumstances of memorable quotes such as “Why don’t we just wake up the Bambino, and maybe I’ll drill him in the ass?” “YES Network wants me to die,” and “I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.”

I wrote the chapter as Martinez was locking up his four-year-deal with the Mets, and as I followed the news, I felt a great weight lifting from my own shoulders as a fan. Finally, I could take some appreciation in the accomplishments of the best pitcher of his generation, and enjoy the quirky sense of humor that lay beneath that armor of defiance. I don’t think I can put it any better than I did back in January:

That I drew a chapter in which the Yanks won most of the battles made it a little easier to swallow, as did the breaking news of Martinez’s departure for Flushing Meadows. In that context, I really warmed up to Pedro, viewing the performances and antics of his Sox career in the past tense and reconstructing his season through the point of view of the chapter. Pedro the dominant pitcher of 1999-2000 bored me. Pedro of 2001-2002 just pissed me off. But the fallible Pedro of 2003-2004 is one of the more fascinating baseball characters of our lifetime, and a reminder why there’s little need for fiction in baseball: the real thing provides better drama than we can possibly dream up. Red Smith had a point.

At one point during my stay in Salt Lake City, when the deadline was bearing down on me and the Cabernet from my dad’s wine cellar had been especially good, I drifted off into one of those beautiful half-slumbers that I could recall later. In my dream-state, I was driving a car down a desert highway, and Pedro was riding shotgun, laughing bemusedly through his half-lidded expression as we talked about his battles with the Yankees on the field and in the media. The message, I guess, is that now that he’s no longer a Red Sock, I’m free to appreciate him that much more, and I certainly do. And in a strange way, the dream and the writing brought me a kind of closure with the whole Sox win/Yanks lose angle of the past postseason. I can live with it now; the last tantrum has been thrown, the last hat stomped.

The second chapter I wrote, now called — to my eternal amusement and satisfaction — “You Want Me to Hit Like a Little Bitch?” about the long and winding road David Ortiz took to becoming the Sox’s most feared slugger. The title comes from a quote in which Ortiz described the Minnesota Twins’ attempts to stop him from swinging for the fences, and the main thrust is to show how two very different teams could take such divergent views on the same ballplayer. There’s a commonality to what they saw — a not-too-nimble guy at the left end of the defensive spectrum, where talent is cheap — but the Twins were rolling in those types of players, not that they knew how to use them, while the Red Sox were busy creating international incidents to grab as many of them as possible to fill their first base and DH holes.

For all of the work I put into the book, until receiving my copy I had yet to see any of the 320 or so pages to which I didn’t contribute. It’s a hefty book, 352 pages, crammed full of words and tables and charts that include leaderboards for most of the advanced metrics that the book relies on — all-time and Boston-only single season and career leaders for VORP, EQA, FRAA, SNVAR, WXRL, and a few more noodles from the BP alphabet soup. Twenty BP writers contributed in all, including the late Doug Pappas, with Steven Goldman, who edited the project, batting cleanup and tying the whole thing together (he listed much of the book’s content here).

Goldman, of course, is best known for his tireless work over at the YES Network website, writing The Pinstriped Bible and its companion, The Pinstriped Blog. It’s been asked why a Yankee fan such as him or myself would work on a book about the Red Sox. Aside from the obvious financially-related answers, it’s because we pride ourselves on being able to approach the topic in an objective and critical manner to do justice to a fascinating story about which — despite all of the other books on the market — much had been left to say.

Thinking about the two chapters I wrote, I’m reminded of something Buster Olney said about covering the Yankees: as a writer, you don’t root for teams, you root for stories. I’m lucky enough that I get to wear both hats (to say nothing of the Dodger, Yankee and Brewer caps which dot my apartment) as a fan and a writer, but in writing my chapters I learned what Olney meant. Even covering two players who were instrumental in beating the Yanks, I had no trouble becoming engrossed in the topic. Understanding, appreciating and communicating why something happened — even if that wasn’t something we ourselves may have hoped to happen — and doing it well won’t always make you rich, but it does bring a great deal of satisfaction, and I’m confident that we’ve done it well enough to satisfy both Red Sox fans and fans of the game in general.

Some would argue that BP has missed the boat with the timing of the book coming almost a year after the fact, but really, that’s a feature, not a bug. This way, ours didn’t get lost in the instant Soxploitation books that flooded the market when the team won; it’s not a quick reaction to the marketplace such as the slew of King/Shaughnessy/Montville tomes, not that those don’t hold their virtues for diehard Sox fans. It aims to be a timeless, authoritative tome on how to build a championship team, using the 2004 Sox as its template, and as such, should have an appeal that extends far beyond the Mass Turnpike.

Anyway, this constitutes the end of the sales spiel, other than to say that at a list price of $13.95 (and considerably lower on Amazon and other online merchants), it won’t bleed you dry, and I think it’s a book you’ll pull out often to hone those arguments about the “Holy Gospel of On-Base Percentage” (that’s a chapter title), the importance of controlling the strike zone, and the proper way to run a bullpen. I’m extremely proud to be associated with this product, and I encourage anybody who enjoys reading this blog to check it out.

• • •

So, Thursday night’s radio gig was a bit of a dud for me, not that it wasn’t an entertaining hour of listening (you can hear it here or, with a bit more fidelity and a copy of iTunes, you can listen here). Cliff Corcoran of Bronx Banter and Ryan Toohil of The House That Dewey Built chatted with host Christopher Lydon at length about the Boston-New York rivalry; Cliff comes in at about 4:50, Ryan comes in at 14:15, and yours truly comes in around 37:00 and gets sandwiched between two studio callers, drawing all of about five minutes of airtime. I felt screwed; the biggest disappointment was that I didn’t get to mention Mind Game to an audience for whom the book was in the wheelhouse. But hey, I’ve gotten to do TV and numerous episodes of Baseball Prospectus Radio, so I’m not too worried that my media dominance (hahaha) wasn’t exactly furthered here. The show is still worth a listen even if the host spent far too long celebrating Bill Simmons.

• • •

Ah yes, there’s a series to discuss, isn’t there? Let’s face it, we all knew — Yankee fans and Red Sox fans and MLB schedule-makers — it would likely come down to this final weekend, didn’t we? The tantalizing part about the matchup is the potential — still at about 65 percent, according to BP’s Postseason Odds page — that the losing team will miss the playoffs. We can all taste the blood.

And yet the matchup is somewhat anticlimactic. There’s less at stake with the Sox having finally broken their 86-year run of futility. These two teams are not the juggernauts that have squared off in the past two ALCSes. They’re both extremely flawed, with weaknesses in the rotation and particularly the bullpen; the Sox pen’s ERA of 5.26 ranks last in the AL, while the Yanks’ is extremely shaky in front of Mariano Rivera, stocked with no-talents like Leiter Fluid, Smolderin’ Embree, Wayne the Bane, the Proctologist, and Fraudriguez. Tanyon Sturtze has been burned beyond recognition by Joe Torre’s usage pattern, while Tom Gordon has been decent but not great. Only Mariano Rivera has had a stellar year, though it’s one marred by a couple of dings at the hands of the Sox.

One of Baseball Prospectus’ fine reliever stats is called Fair Run Average, which divvies up inherited and bequeathed runners according to a Run Expectancy Table (using the base-out state) to more accurately assign responsibility. It also doesn’t let pitchers off the hook for unearned runs, for reasons that are best explained here (suffice it to say that preventing unearned runs is a skill that correlates with ERA). Here are the FRAs of the relevant (i.e., active) relievers for each squad:

Yankees   FRA
Rivera    1.54
Gordon    3.60
Sturtze   3.67
Small     3.69
Franklin  4.87
Proctor   5.43
Rodriguez 6.49
Embree    7.13
Leiter    7.49

Red Sox   FRA
Myers     1.17
Timlin    2.39
Papelbon  4.12
Stanton   4.31
Delcarmen 4.37
Gonzalez  4.58
Bradford  5.61
Hansen    8.44

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if one of those names on the second list seems familiar and yet somewhat out of place, it’s because the Red Sox acquired two-time former Yankee (including 2005) Mike Stanton from the Washington Nationals yesterday for a pair of live arms. It’s one of the latest deals ever made, and while Stanton won’t be eligible for the postseason roster, there’s a very real possibility he’ll see some action against a big lefty bat like Hideki Matsui or Jason Giambi (suddenly this memory became much warmer). Don’t be fooled by the symmetry of him essentially swapping places with Alan Embree; Stanton got his shit together in Washington (where his FRA was 2.83 in about twice as many innings as he had in NY), while Embree has been brutal in both venues (both his and Stanton’s FRAs encompass both stops, as does Leiter’s).

It’s interesting to note that the Sox have three rookies among their bullpen corps. Hansen, their first-round draft pick from this summer, has all of 2.1 innings under his belt, while Delcarmen has 8.2; Papelbon is likely to be the only real factor of the three but since he threw 2.2 frames on Thursday, he probably needs a day of rest. With Keith Foulke out of the picture, the Sox are relying that what’s behind the unknown Door #2 is better than the gimpy Door #1.

Don’t be surprised if the Yanks call the number of last night’s starter, Aaron Small, for an inning of setup on Saturday or Sunday in a spot where Sturtze would normally pitch. Jaret Wright, who’s been the victim of too many identified flying objects lately, is also in the pen; recall that he resurrected his career with 13 innings of stellar stretch-run relief for the Braves in 2003. His ERA since returning from his Tampa rehab is 4.43 and while that’s not particularly impressive, it could come in handy as an altertnative to Felix Rodriguez, who should just stay home. I hope it doesn’t come to pass, but Wright is likely also the long man in the event of a shellacking or a short leash on Mike Mussina. It’s a contingency the Yanks have to plan for; not a happy thought, but as contingencies go, there are worse.

But really, the series will have a lot to do with the starters, and to me the matchup favors the Yanks. Neither David Wells, who throws tonight, nor Curt Schilling, who goes on Sunday, are anywhere near 100%, though both have the outsized egos and big game reputations which have prepared them for this stage. Chien Ming-Wang goes against Wells tonight; he’s never faced the Sox before, but he’s been throwing very well in his last couple of starts since coming off of the DL. Less impressive is Mike Mussina, who starts on Sunday; he was rocked in Baltimore on Tuesday night, failing to get out of the second inning, though the elbow pain which sidelined him for three weeks reportedly wasn’t a factor (yeah, surrrrre).

Ultimately, it’s Saturday’s rematch between Randy Johnson and Tim Wakefield that’s the most tantalizing; recall that Johnson (and company) beat Wakefield 1-0 back on September 11 to begin a 15-3 tear which the Yankees have ridden to the brink of the finish line. This is the start the Yankee brass had in mind, this is the difference maker, all 42 years, gimpy knees, 96 MPH fastball, brutal slider and mean mofo glare. Quite frankly, there’s no pitcher from either team that I’d feel more confident about at this stage, except for Rivera. I’m picking the Yankees to take care of business this weekend; whether the Sox, 10-7 over that same span, survive is the big question, though with the Indians having been cooled down by the same Tampa Bay Devil Rays squad that wrought so much havoc on the playofff picture, their chances have sweetened considerably. It should be a fantastic weekend for baseball.

Keeping up with the audio theme, I’m pleased to announce that I will be one of the guests on Radio Open Source, which runs from 7 PM to 8 PM EST Thursday evening on WGBH in Boston (89.7 FM) and from 4 PM to 5 PM via KUOW in Puget Sound (94.9 FM). The topic, as if you may not have guessed, is the upcoming weekend series between the Yankees and the Red Sox, a series that will decide the AL East and quite possibly send the losing team to a long winter of discontent. With the Yanks holding a one-game lead after Wednesday night, they can do no worse than enter the series tied, meaning a sweep at Fenway — already an unrealistic expectation — won’t be necessary for them to win the division. None of which will help anybody get any relaxation between here and Sunday.

You can listen to a stream of the show via WGBH’s website or KUOW’s website. I’ll have links to the archive, if there is one, for those of you who can’t make that time but don’t want to miss the fun.