The other day I emailed Salon sports columnist King Kaufman regarding his article on Roger Clemens and then wrote a whole blog entry around that email. Kaufman was not only kind enough to send me a reply, he also excerpted some of what I had to say while surveying the range of responses in his column today. Additionally, he included a link to “the excellent Futility Infielder site.” Very cool. A special welcome to those of you who’ve come here via that link.

Here’s the portion of today’s column which refers to me, not all of which was included in what I published the other day:

Jay Jaffe: While I don’t consider myself much of a Roger Clemens fan — I’ve screamed myself hoarse at him on more than one occasion — I do feel compelled to defend him against your charges of him coming up short in big games.

First of all, Bud’s Game 7 gambit to the contrary, Tuesday’s exhibition does not count as a big game despite the eyeballs and the fact that ex-presidents and heavyweight champions were on hand. I don’t take it seriously, you don’t take it seriously, and most importantly, the players don’t take it seriously. It’s a great opportunity to market the game, a moneymaker for the network and its sponsors, and an exhibit for fans, nothing more. Throw it out the window as far as the Rocket was concerned.

Second, while Clemens had a reputation for big-game disaster in Boston, he did a considerable job of shedding that tag in New York: 7-4 with a 3.21 ERA in his pinstriped postseasons, including 3-0, 1.50 ERA in five World Series starts. Yes, there are a few meltdowns in there, but there are also some stellar performances.

Note: Jaffe is the author of the excellent Futility Infielder site.

King replies: The All-Star Game is an exhibition not to be taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean Clemens didn’t consider it a big game, in the sense of wanting very badly to do well. It was his night, his coronation. Anyone would want very badly to do well on a night when he’s the center of attention. It’s a challenge similar to any other big game, even though it doesn’t count in the standings. It was an occasion to be risen to, and Clemens didn’t rise.

And while I stand by my assessment of Clemens as underperforming in the postseason and in big games generally given his greatness overall, you’re right that he has, indeed, had some great performances in the postseason.

I’m still not sure I agree with Kaufman’s on the first part, but in retrospect I think that we both make the mistake of trying to get inside the Rocket’s head, total conjecture rather than sound analysis from either of us. Keeping in mind the second part, here’s the meat of what he sent me via email this weekend:

Certainly it’s selective memory for me to talk about his meltdowns and punkouts without talking about his successes, but the reverse is selective too. Put it all together and you have 26 starts. That’s damn near a season’s worth. Fair enough we can’t expect Clemens to put up Gibson’s numbers, mostly because he had so many more opportunities. But Clemens is arguably the greatest pitcher of all time. How about Koufax numbers? Seaver? Hubbell? These are the people around him in the NBJHA [New Bill James Historical Abstract, an awkward acronym but one worth remembering] rankings, and James wrote that Clemens maybe should be higher.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Clemens has been less than Clemens-like in the postseason, beyond just the stiffer competition. And there’s enough data there that it’s not an unfair way to assess him, as it is with most people, including Willie Mays, who played 25 postseason games, or Barry Bonds, who had played 27 before he started playing well.

Good points on both counts, though I’ll Clemens’ overall postseason record (8-6, 3.47 ERA) is nothing to be ashamed of, particularly when one considers what he did with the Yanks (7-4 with a 3.21 ERA) and his overall World Series line (3-0, 1.90 ERA in 47.1 innings), not to mention that all of this took place in a much higher scoring era than, say, Gibson.

I did a bit of figgerin’ regarding that World Series record as compared to Gibson’s (7-2, 1.89 ERA in 81 innings). It may not be a strictly kosher comparison, but I figured the two pitchers’ ERA+ numbers (the ratio of their ERA to the park-adjusted league ERA, expressed on a scale with 100 as average and over 100 as better than average; a 120 ERA+ translates as 20 percent better than average) for the World Series as if they were done in the regular season. That is, Gibson’s 1968 World Series ERA is compared to the park-adjusted league average for the regular season, in this case 2.90. Gibby’s World Series ERA for that season was 1.67, so his ERA+ was (2.90/1.67) * 100 = 174.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations put Gibson’s overall World Series ERA+ at 176, considerably better than his regular season ERA+ of 127, which wasn’t too shabby to begin with. But Clemens, who had posted a 140 regular season ERA+, comes in at a whopping 237 for his Series starts. His overall postseason ERA+ is “only” 129, so if you want to argue that he wasn’t quite as good, you’ve got that number on your side.

Here’s how Clemens fits in among the pitchers with the most postseason innings (a category in which Clemens ranks fifth, with Gibson further down than the rankings at Baseball-Reference.com go). While many of these pitchers are boosted by the two- and three-tiered playoff systems in terms of their total number of innings, just about all of them have been hailed as clutch postseason performers at one time or another.

Pitcher         PSIP   PSERA  PSERA+  RSERA+

Orel Hershiser  132.0   2.59   158     112

John Smoltz     194.7   2.77   149     124

Jim Palmer      124.3   2.61   139     125

Whitey Ford     146.0   2.71   136     132

Dave Stewart    133.0   2.84   135     100

Greg Maddux     190.0   3.22   132     143

Roger Clemens   155.7   3.47   129     140

Tom Glavine     194.0   3.71   121     121

Andy Pettitte   186.7   4.05   115     117

Catfish Hunter  132.3   3.26   103     104

Seventh out of ten, not a stellar showing, and a tie with Maddux for the biggest shortfall (postseason ERA+ minus regular season ERA+) among these pitchers. Still, his performance isn’t all that different from that of Whitey Ford, who’s in fourth place. But with this data on the table, it’s tough to refute Kaufman’s assessment (“…less than Clemens-like in the postseason, beyond just the stiffer competition. And there’s enough data there that it’s not an unfair way to assess him…”). I still hold that Yankee fans have nothing to bitch about regarding Clemens’ postseason performance, but insofar as the overall argument goes, it looks as though I must bow to the King on this one.

Stick a pair of chopsticks in me, because I’m done. We’re just past mid-July, and I may as well concede this year’s sushi bet to my pal Nick. Every so often, the two of us take up an impulsive sports-related wager, the prize being a sushi dinner at the East Village standby, Sandobe (or its sister restaurant, Jeoladdo). One year it was whether Bobby Valentine or Ray Miller would get fired first (I had Valentine and lost, but gained a new respect for the Mets’ manager), once it was whether the New York Jets could come back in the AFC Championship (I enjoyed spearing that tuna), and last year it was the Minnesota Twins versus the rest of the AL Central (yum).

This year, in my preseason column, I predicted that the Detroit Tigers, who lost a near-record 119 games last season, would “bear some resemblance to a major-league club by losing only 100-110 games instead of pushing the 120 envelope.” Nick shot back an email saying, “I’ll bet you sushi dinner they don’t lose 95,” to which I responded, “You’re taking the under at 95? Roll over, Lou Whitaker, and tell Alan Trammell to pass me the wasabe.”

Nick emailed the next day to note that the Tigers had run their record to 4-0, but at the time I was still confident. But a half-season later, having gotten a good look at the team as they’ve battled the Yankees, I’m as cooked as a piece of eel atop of a tiny bed of rice. On Friday night, the Tigers matched last year’s win total of 43 at the Yankees’ expense, with Mike Maroth, who lost 21 of those 119 games, twirling a one-hitter. On Sunday they surpassed that total with a 4-2 win over the Bombers and a 4-3 season series win. In doing so, they bested the 1962 Philadelphia Phillies record of 106 games to reach their previous season’s win total by a whopping 16 games. Through Sunday, the Tigers stand at 44-46.

The biggest reason for Detroit’s resurgence is catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who signed with the team as a free-agent after leading the Florida Marlins to the World Championship. In addition to hitting .367/.409/.559 and leading the league in batting average, Rodriguez has obviously connected with Detroit’s young pitchers and helped some of them improve dramatically:

               ----PRE-2004----   -----2004-----

               W-L    ERA   K/9   W-L  ERA   K/9

J. Bonderman    6-19  5.56  6.0   6-7  5.97  7.9

Jason Johnson  36-58  4.91  5.8   7-7  4.24  5.9 

Mike Maroth    15-31  5.23  4.1   6-7  4.65  4.5

Nate Robertson  1-3   6.45  6.1   8-4  4.11  8.1

As a whole, the Tigers have a 4.89 ERA with 6.4 K/9, compared to last year’s 5.30 ERA and 4.8 K/9. But pitching is only part of the improvement; here’s how the scoring on both sides of the ball has changed:

   2003  RS/G  2004  RA/G   NET

RS  591  3.65   478  5.31  +1.66  

RA  928  5.73   464  5.16  +0.57

As positive as the boost on the mound has been, on a per-game basis, the offense’s improvement is nearly three times that margin, a 2.2 run per game swing. It’s enough to put the Tigers within hailing distance of .500, a remarkable achievement. In addition to Rodriguez’s addition, trade acquisitions Carlos Guillen (.322/.386/.553) and Rondell White (.275/.345/.459) have been big steps up, and the Tigers have gotten a real boost from a pair of players’ — call them the I-sores — whose contributions were below replacement level last year. Catcher Brandon Inge was three runs below replacement level (RARP) with a .216 EQA (a nasty .206/.265/.339 line), while second baseman Omar Infante was six runs below with an even more anemic .199 EQA (.222/.278/.258). This year, Inge — who has moved out of the catcher’s slot and become a utilityman of sorts, playing third base and all three outfield spots — is hitting for a .297 EQA (.297/.365/.480) and is 12.8 runs above replacement, not to mention eight miles higher than even his most optimistic PECOTA projection (90th percentile: .240/.353/.388 for a .277 EQA). Infante is at a .284 EQA (.274/.342/.465) and 14.2 RARP and a few steps above his 90th percentile PECOTA (.240/.353/.388 for a .273 EQA). Throw in the upgrade at shortstop from Ramon Santiago (.225/.292/.294 for a sickly .217 EQA and -5 RARP) to Guillen (.322 EQA and 40.4 RARP) and that’s a swing of about 80 runs — around eight games — with the bat right there, in only half a season!

It’s a stretch to think the Tigers, who entered Sunday only 5.5 games out of first place in the AL Central, can take the division, as they’ll have to outdo not only the Middling, er, Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox but also the Cleveland Indians. Still, nobody, not even Tigers manager Trammell nor GM Dave Dombrowski, could have foreseen how short the road to respectability would be. Whether that road can be sustained over the rest of the season and beyond is the next question they’ll need to answer, with fellow Centralmates the Kansas City Royals (83-79 last year after eight straight losing seasons, but currently 22 games below .500) as the cautionary tale. But they’ve given the Yankees all they could handle in their matchups this month, and they deserve a hell of a lot of credit for that.

The Tigers aren’t the only team who has turned it around in 2004, of course. The Milwaukee Brewers, winners of only 190 games over the past three seasons, currently stand at 46-43, and they’re looking up at the Cincinnati Reds (48-43), who won only 69 games last year. The Indians (44-46) are coming off a 68-win year. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays (43-47) are showing serious signs of breaking out of the 90+ loss ghetto for the first time in franchise history. The Texas Rangers (51-37) find themselves atop the AL West after averaging 72 wins over the past four years, and the San Diego Padres (49-41) are in contention in the NL West after five straight losing seasons, including recent 66-96 and 64-98 campaigns. Add it all up and you’ll see a lot of writers throwing around terms like parity and competitive balance as if Bad Rug Bud had planted a bug in their ears. Selig himself is proclaiming victory for the results of the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement.

For a good long time, folks at Baseball Prospectus such as Joe Sheehan and the late Doug Pappas have been battling to show that baseball’s competitive balance problem has more to do with the media buying what Selig was selling, lock, stock and barrel, than with what’s actually been going on down on the field. Using this past July 9 as the control, Sheehan measured how many teams were “competitive,” which is to say within six games of a playoff spot on that date. Here’s what he found:

Year     Teams     Competitive Teams

2004        30          20

2003        30          19

2002        30          13

2001        30          13

2000        30          19

1999        30          17

1998        30          11

1997        28          17

1996        28          15

1995*       28          19

1994        28          11



*not representative, as the season started three weeks late

That’s a 54% “competitive rate” over the past 11 years, with 2003-04 representing the data’s two-year peak. Sheehan notes that the low points tend to be either years when one team (such as the ’98 Yankees or the 2001 Mariners) runs away from the pack or years when the CBA is up for negotiation (1994, 2002) and the poorer clubs may have some disincentive to use their own resources to improve. Going back to the 1980s, he notes that while the extremes in the number of “competitive teams” are greater, from 8 to 17 (out of 26),

…the shape of the data is basically the same, with a slightly lower average. In other words, baseball seasons aren’t much less competitive today than they were in the 1980s… Baseball’s competitive balance is the same today as it was before the latest rules changes went into effect. The effect of the confiscatory revenue sharing and payroll taxes isn’t to cause change on the field, but to shift money from players and the industry’s highest-revenue teams to those in the third quartile of revenue. The line being drawn from the current CBA to the baseball we see today is a shaky one.

Shaky or not, Selig will doubtless continue to take credit for solving baseball’s problems while imposing upon us for awhile longer. But as the Royals remind us, one season does not a turnaround make, and while the hosannas start to pour in, we should continue to be mindful of the crimes which Selig has wrought. In his “Open Letter to Commissioner Selig”, BP’s Dayn Perry notes some of them, including perjury before Congress, scamming the public with regards to new ballparks, threatening contraction of two ballclubs as quid pro quos to his friends, and questioning the integrity of anybody who dares counter his spurious claims with hard data. There may be something to Selig’s changes — I’d prefer to look at a sample size larger than two seasons before deciding — but that one facet is no reason to let him off the hook.

But don’t get me wrong. While I greatly enjoy watching the Yankees win, I’m equally excited that the long-suffering people in Detroit, Milwaukee, San Diego and other cities can get just as excited about their ballclubs. One way or another, that’s always good for the game, even if it means some else eating the occasional Tiger Roll at my expense.

So as I was saying before, I trekked out to East Brunswick, New Jersey to watch the All-Star Game at Steve Goldman’s pad, joining Will Carroll and Cliff Corcoran as well as Steve’s lovely wife Stephanie and adorable four-year-old daughter Sarah (apologies on the spellings of those fine ladies’ names, o pinstriped host). We had barely marshalled together an order for Chinese food, endured an American Idol National Anthem (it’s a one-minute song, fer crissakes, not an opera), and watched Muhammad Ali juke with Derek Jeter when the American League decided to skip the ballgame and hold batting practice at Roger Clemens’ expense.

Ichiro (no longer Ichiro! as we’re pretty damn bored by him now) led off with a double into the rightfield corner that just missed going out. Then Ivan Rodriguez (who never should have been called Pudge so long as Carlton Fisk is still breathing) tripled to nearly the same spot, missing a homer by a mere couple of inches. After a Vlad Guerrero groundout came a long homer to Manny Ramirez, last seen threatening to charge the mound when Clemens threw him an eye-high fastball over the plate in Game Three of the ALCS. Clemens struck out Alex Rodriguez and looked to be out of the inning when Jason Giambi grounded to second baseman Jeff Kent. Mr. Porno Moustache couldn’t backhand the ball cleanly, and Wormy G was safe. Derek Jeter singled to right, with Giambi legging it from first to third, something he probably won’t do five times this year. Alfonso Soriano followed with a monster two-run homer to left field to make the score 6-0.

Having not seen Clemens pitch in an Astro uniform, I must say it was quite disorienting. I half-expected Mel Stottlemyre and eventually Joe Torre to head to the mound to calm the Rocket, even though Clemens was pitching against them. At some point, I swear I saw Torre pass from from glare to relief, as if to say, “Wait, this is somebody else’s problem now.” Still, it was weird to watch Jeter, Giambi, and especially Soriano do damage to their former teammate.

We wizened baseball experts sat around pondering the Rocket’s launchpad explosion, the Yankee fans among us conveniently avoiding any mention of Game Four of last year’s World Series. Clemens, still wiping his brow from a narrow, wee-hours escape from a dubious end, was again pitching for what the world though would be the final time. He allowed three first-inning runs and nearly had to depart in another walk of shame, but gritted his way through six more innings while holding the Marlins at bay. That noble salvage job would have made for a fitting epitaph if Clemens had made good on his promise to retire; we should all be so lucky to have our final actions read “7 8 3 3 0 5 ND” in a World Series game.

With that six-run inning, the All-Star Game quickly turned into a moot point, and we were treated to the amusing antics of young Sarah, who regaled us with the theme from Spiderman (the kid knows all the words) and her mastery of the somersault while generously sharing her various toys and books with us. Oh, sure, we were distracted enough by the game to take in the views from those embedded cameras — “Check out that hip rotation!” marvelled our expert pitching mechanic. But we spent just as much time rummaging through baseball encyclopedias trying to determine whether Spud Chandler or Snuffy Stirnweiss was the 1943 MVP, recounting the follow-through of Goose Gossage, learning about Dr. Mike Marshall‘s rather obnoxious mastery of the Krebs cycle, lamenting constantly injured pitchers (“Dennis Leonard ought to be coming off of the DL any day now…”) and nitpicking the failures of Walter Alston in the eyes of Leo Durocher. Fun stuff to talk bout during a suspense-free exhibition.

On the subject of Clemens, Salon’s King Kaufman had a piece on Wednesday noting the Rocket’s big-game shortcomings:

And listen, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Roger Clemens is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, maybe the greatest, but he’s also a first-class punk. He has a way of coming up spectacularly small at the biggest moments, dating all the way back to his stupidly getting himself thrown out of a playoff game in 1990. (He shouldn’t have been thrown out, but he also shouldn’t have put himself in position to be thrown out.)

And maybe even dating beyond that, depending on whose story you believe about why he came out after seven innings of Game 6 in the 1986 World Series. John McNamara, then the Red Sox manager, has always claimed that Clemens asked out because of a blister. Clemens, who is more believable in this argument, has maintained he was yanked for a pinch hitter.

…In 26 postseason starts, Clemens is 8-6 with an earned-run average of 3.47. In the regular season, he’s averaged a 13-7 record and a 3.18 ERA per 26 starts, which is about three-fourths of a season’s worth. And that includes his lousy late Boston period in the mid-’90s. Of course it’s tougher to pitch in the postseason, where all opponents are good teams, but we’re talking about arguably the greatest pitcher of all time. For someone who could have been expected to put up Bob Gibson numbers in October, 8-6 with a 3.47 doesn’t cut it.

It seems everybody in the latte set is taking their potshots at Clemens lately. The other day came this Slate piece from a snivelling Sox fan named Seth Stevenson, whose open letter to Clemens begins:

Dear Roger Clemens,

Let me offer my hearty congratulations on starting the All-Star Game. Wow, that is really terrific. I’d like to note, however, that I hate you.

Also: You are fat. They say you’ve got this hard-core training regimen, with calisthenics and whatnot. I’m not seeing it. You’re wicked fat.

Oh, perhaps that was uncalled for. You know what else was uncalled for? Sucking, every time it mattered. You ruined my childhood, fatty. Because the trauma you put me through as a young, impressionable Red Sox fan has stunted my emotional growth, I revert to a juvenile mind-set whenever I see you. Like repeatedly calling you fat.

That one may as well have come from a Saturday Night Live skit starring resident Sox whiner Seth Myers, whose shtik just cracks me up.

The Clemens big-game flop trope is a well-worn one from a Sox fans’ standpoint, and if you’re a Yankee fan whose memory only goes back to the last two starts of the 2003 postseason, you might even share that view. You’d be right, but only in a half-assed way. The truth is that Clemens, like, Andy Pettitte, has pitched enough October innings to provide us with a glimpse of his full range of outcomes, from Clutch Jesus in Pinstripes to Uncle Crispy in the Burn Unit. Lest we forget that Pettitte, still smarting from the memory of that 0-2 ,10.00 ERA World Series performance in 2001 — in which he was reputedly tipping his pitches — spent last October pissing icewater (3-1, 2.10 ERA in 5 starts), then coolly took off his pinstripes for the last time, setting in motion the chain of events which took Clemens to the All-Star Game in the first place. Give a great pitcher enough starts and he’ll do just about everything, and our tendency to confuse clutch performance with character traits makes that a bit messy. As Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan put it:

It’s much more enjoyable to extrapolate a certain moral superiority from on-field success, to attribute that game-winning double to your heart and desire, rather than to your fast-twitch muscles and hitting the fastball at just the right angle to push it past the diving center fielder. It’s this need to turn physics and physicality into a statement about the character of people–to stick labels on them based on their day at work and the bounce of a ball–that is the most damning thing about the myth of clutch.

Yankee fans should have no beef with Clemens’ performance in the postseason, and neither should Kaufman. I sent him an email which I’ll excerpt here while adding a few hyperlinks:

While I don’t consider myself much of a Roger Clemens fan — I’ve screamed myself hoarse at him on more than one occasion — I do feel compelled to defend him against your charges of him coming up short in big games… while Clemens had a reputation for big-game disaster in Boston, he did a considerable job of shedding that tag in New York: 7-4 with a 3.21 ERA in his pinstriped postseasons, including 3-0, 1.50 ERA in five World Series starts. Yes, there are a few meltdowns in there, but there are also some stellar performances:

* Given the chance to earn his first World Series ring in ’99, he rebounded from a humiliation in Boston — the team’s only loss of the postseason — and went 7.2 innings with 1 run allowed in Game Four to ensure a sweep over Atlanta.

* After getting shelled in the 2000 ALDS, he emphatically rammed the bat up the Mariners’ collective asses (hey, there’s no way to put it politely; just ask Alex Rodriguez, who went sprawling) with a 1-hit, 15-K performance in the ALCS and in the Series blew the Mets away as well with an 8-inning, 2-hit, 9-K game that’s remembered for less flattering reasons.

* In 2001, with the Yanks down 2-0 in the Series — a must-win — he beat the Snakes by combining on a 3-hitter, then pitched 6.1 innings of 1-run, 10-K ball in Game Seven, leaving with the score tied.

* As all hell broke loose in that ALCS Game Three brouhaha last year, Clemens kept his cool like a little Fonzie, pitching 6 strong innings of 2-run ball, letting the Sox wear themselves out with emotional outbursts such as Pedro’s whinefest and Manny’s charging the mound. The Yanks won the tense 4-3 game.

* He even gutted out that ugly 3-run first inning in last year’s Game Four to last seven frames without giving up another run; the Yanks did tie the score only to lose in 12. At the time that looked as though it might be the last game of Clemens’ storied career; it would have been a much more honorable ending than the great majority of players’ — even great ones’ — careers.

You compare Clemens’ postseason record to Bob Gibson’s and it appears to come up a bit short. That’s like saying Willie Mays couldn’t hold a candle to Babe Ruth, as Gibson is only the single best postseason pitcher ever in many peoples’ eyes. Clemens managed a 1.90 ERA in his seven Series starts, not too shabby next to Gibson’s 1.89 ERA in his nine Series starts. When one considers how much higher scoring Clemens’ era is than Gibson’s, that’s a bit more impressive, as is the fact that he was doing this at the time he was pushing 40, while Gibson was still in his early 30s prime. No, he didn’t last as many innings as Gibby, but then Gibby didn’t have Mariano Rivera to hand the ball to, either.

You seem to look at Clemens and remember only the failures, and yes, there are many, as there will be when you scan a player’s 21-year career. I look at Clemens and while I feel no personal affinity for him, I recognize that while the man occasionally let his emotions get the better of him in key moments, he took his punches and got off the mat, ready to come back even stronger the next time. That doesn’t make him the best pitcher ever. It doesn’t even make him immortal. It makes him human, and we should be so lucky as to see that in all of our superstars.

I look forward to seeing if Kaufman responds. Much as I often thought of Clemens as a punk myself during his tenure in pinstripes, I’m prejudiced by the fact that I was at that ’99 clincher. Good fortune found me in the ballpark with a team given the chance to clinch a championship, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Clemens didn’t let me down. It may be twisting the knife in Sox fans’ backs, but I’ll say that nothing will ever take the memory of the ovation Clemens received when he departed. Yankee Stadium shook, and it didn’t stop shaking for the hour and a half. You don’t forget a thing like that, and you tip your cap to the men who made it possible, the Rocket included.

Just back from a Midtown lunch with Will Carroll (in town for an appearance this morning on ESPN’s Cold Pizza) and my NY crew — Alex Belth, Alex Ciepley, Cliff Corcoran and Steven Goldman, a heady ninety minutes of baseball chatter that I wish I could do every day. The biggest topic of conversation was a potential Randy Johnson trade, now that the Big Unit has said he’d consider waiving his no-trade clause. Will, who gets better inside dope than anybody I know, puts the odds at about 50/50, but says he’s not likely to come east, ruling out either Boston or New York, not that the two teams have anything to offer except that perennially disappointing prospect, Jack Shit. Besides trades, the other big topic of conversation was announcers, with Alex C. and Will going on about various Cubs personalities including Ron Santo and the late Harry Caray, and Will impressing us by producing the phone number of the Phillies’ gravel-voiced god of the mic, Harry Kalas.

As I’ve been immersed in my own obsessive projects, I haven’t left myself much time to write much about the All-Star teams. Here are the selections I would make for the two leagues, with the starters in bold and some piddling commentary after each position that would have been more detailed if I had the time. I’ve filled the 32-man rosters, I’ve represented each team, and for the most part I’ve blown off injured players in favor of the able-bodied. I tend towards the “reward the flukes” end of the spectrum rather than the “established stars in a slump” end, which will make for a few double-takes, but whether it’s injury, age-related decline or sheer crapitude, there’s no way in hell some of the voted starters deserve to be within 100 miles of tonight’s festivities.

American League

C: Ivan Rodriguez, DET, Jorge Posada, NYY, Victor Martinez, CLE. Helluva season so far from Pudge, not only individually but as part of a much-improved Tigers team. Impressive sophomore campaign from Martinez. Posada hasn’t been quite the same since breaking his nose but his OPS is still 64 points better than Baltimore’s Javy Lopez despite having an average that’s 46 points lower. It’s the walks, stupid.

1B: Paul Konerko, CHW, Mark Teixera, TEX, Ken Harvey, KC. A real crapfest in the league thanks to injuries to Jason Giambi and Carlos Delgado and the passage into the undead of both John Olerud and Rafael Palmeiro. When Ken Harvey and Tino Martinez start floating to the top, it’s time to change the water in the tank. Harvey’s the KC charity case representative, post-Beltran.

2B: Ronnie Belliard, CLE, Juan Uribe, CHW. Another position suffering from poor first halves of its brightest lights — Alfonso Soriano and Bret Boone. Sori’s .796 OPS is unacceptable in that hitter’s park. Mark Bellhorn could just as easily be in the mix here.

SS: Carlos Guillen, DET, Michael Young, TEX, Miguel Tejada, BAL. No trinity this year — Derek and Nomar get to lick their various wounds. Guillen is making Seattle look very, very stupid for trading him, Young’s done an admirable job filling A-Rod’s shoes in Texas, and Tejada’s signing is one of the few things that’s gone right in Baltimore.

3B: Alex Rodriguez, NYY, Melvin Mora, BAL, Chone Figgins, ANA. A deep position thanks to some shifts. A-Rod’s been a bit light in the clutch (.220/.310/.451 with RISP), but his overall productivity is nothing to complain about. Mora picked up right where he left off during his injury-riddled ’03 before getting hurt yet again, and Figgins, with his 13 triples and 20 steals, has flat-out been one of the most exciting players in the league. Hank Blalock would make a worthy choice somewhere as well, but I need Melvin to fufull the Oriole quotient.

LF: Manny Ramirez, BOS, Hideki Matsui, NYY, Lew Ford, MIN. Manny’s the best hitter in the AL. Matsui is starting to look like the guy in the catalog. Ford is one of the few examples where the Twins haven’t squandered their immense logjam of corner infield and outfield talent.

CF: Johnny Damon, BOS, Vernon Wells, TOR. Beltran would merit the starting slot if he were still in KC, but caveman Damon’s having a great season so far (.321/.401/.488).

RF: Vlad Guerrero, ANA, Gary Sheffield, NYY, Jose Cruz, TAM. No Ichiro here. Vlad and Sheff have been all that and a bag of chips for the teams who signed them as free agents. Cruz’s low BA disguises his merits, and we need somebody from Tampa, their march to respectability notwithstanding.

P: Mark Mulder, OAK, Curt Schilling, BOS, C.C. Sabathia, CLE, Javier Vazquez, NYY, Johann Santana, MIN, Brad Radke, MIN, Fredddie Garcia, CHW, Mariano Rivera, NYY, Francisco Cordero, TEX, Joe Nathan, MIN, Eddie Guardado, SEA. I’d have given the starting nod to injured teammate Tim Hudson, but Mulder’s had a fine first half as well.

National League

C: Johnny Estrada, ATL, Paul Lo Duca, LA, Michael Barrett, CHC. Guess that Kevin Millwood trade wasn’t too bad after all.

1B: Jim Thome, PHI, Albert Pujols, STL, Todd Helton, COL. Unlike the AL, a very deep position, with Sean Casey and Lyle Overbay also justifiable choices.

2B: Mark Loretta, SD, Jeff Kent, HOU. How about ex-Brewers starting at second for both teams? Mr. Porno Moustache gets the nod over Todd Walker and Jose Vidro.

SS: Jack Wilson, Pit, Rafael Furcal, ATL. In which a Pirate with a .622 OPS in his first three years gets the nod despite drawing only 11 walks; his .855 OPS is still 50 points higher than any shortstop outside of Colorado. Furcal gets to represent the old guard because Edgar Renteria’s had an off year.

3B: Scott Rolen, STL, Mike Lowell, FLA, Adrian Beltre, LA. Beltre’s emergence makes this a deep position, with Aramis Ramirez playing well and David Bell, Ty Wigginton and even Vinny Castilla shoing signs of life.

LF: Barry Bonds, SF, Lance Berkman, HOU, Adam Dunn, CIN. I’ve always liked Berkman, and it’s nice to see Dunn turn it around. Still, the asshole gets the starting nod.

CF: Jim Edmonds, STL, Steve Finley, ARI, Carlos Beltran, HOU. The silver lining to Griffey’s injury — and no, I don’t wish the man any ill will — is that Beltran’s asterisk-riddled selection is now a moot point.

RF: Bobby Abreu, PHI, J.D. Drew, ATL, Miguel Cabrera, FLA. Abreu is criminally underrated. Drew is surprisingly healthy. Miguel Cabrera is going to be a very good player for a long time. Craig Wilson just missed a spot here.

P: Roger Clemens, HOU, Ben Sheets, MIL, Jason Schmidt, SF, Randy Johnson, ARI, Tom Glavine, NYM, Carlos Zambrano, CHC, Livan Hernandez, MON, Eric Gagne, LA, Danny Kolb, MIL, Armando Benitez, FLA. It’s tough not to give Rocket the nod to start. Though I hate the Giants, it’s great to see Schmidt recover, and I’m very happy to see Sheets become the ace he was slated to be, helping MIlwaukee to be the surprise team of the first half.

I’m out the door to catch a bus to East friggin’ Brunswick to watch the game chez Goldman with Will and Cliff. There aren’t many people I’d go to Jersey for, but if you get enough of them in the same room, I’m there.

In Sunday’s New York Times, William Rhoden notes the rumors swirling along the Northeast Corridor regarding the possibility of two sure-thing Hall of Fame aces, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson, being injected into baseball’s hottest rivarly. While the Yankees and the Red Sox represent two of the AL’s strongest teams, neither has a bulletproof rotation, and both are looking for reinforcements to add to their hefty payrolls and battered pitching staffs.

The other day I noted the Value Over Replacement Player for the Yankee rotation; here’s the Sox, for comparison:

Pitcher         VORP

Curt Schilling  40.4

Pedro Martinez  30.1

Tim Wakefield   13.7

Derek Lowe     -14.5

Bronson Arroyo  -3.0

TOTAL           66.7

The Yankee quintet raised their VORP to 57.9 over the past couple of days, thanks mostly to Jon Lieber, but that’s still about a game worse than Boston’s starters.

Still, the idea that either Johnson or Clemens — two of the four members of the 4,000 strikeout club, owning ELEVEN Cy Young awards between them — would be traded to either of the two teams is a longshot, thanks to the presence of no-trade clauses in the pitchers’ contracts, their professed desires to finish their careers in the uniforms they’re currently wearing, and the dearth of blue-chip prospects in the two teams’ systems. Nevertheless, one can mix and match the two aces and the two teams and salivate at the story lines. Operas have been written about less.

Clemens to New York

After “retiring” following an emotional extended farewell which not only ran through the most recent postseason but barely missed coming to an end in the most ignominious way — at the hands of his former team in an elimination game — the Rocket shocked the baseball world by resuming his career in Houston. Joining fellow Yankee exile Andy Pettitte, Clemens entered the senior circuit for the first time in his 21-year major league career and immediately made an impact, wining his first seven starts to the tune of a 1.99 ERA, running his record to 9-0, and carrying a 10-3, 2.62 ERA line with 121 strikeouts in 116.2 innings into the All-Star break. He’ll start for the NL on Tuesday night, and he’s earned it.

Coming into the season, the Astros were co-favorites in the NL Central based on Clemens’ and Pettite’s arrivals, and they held first place until a swoon late in May sent them reeling. They’ve gone 20-28 and despite trading for Carlos Beltran on June 24, entering Sunday a mere game over .500, 10.5 in back of the division-leading St. Louis Cardinals. Speculation abounds that the ‘Stros not only will flip Beltran but might also consider moving Clemens, notions that both ESPN’s Jayson Stark and Rob Neyer dismiss. The reason? Houston’s still within reach of the NL Wild Card, only 3.5 games behind the San Francisco Giants as of Sunday. Of course, seven other teams are between the Astros and the Giants, so they shouldn’t exactly start printing tickets yet.

While the Yankee organization has greeted the Rocket’s resurfacing in Houston with mixed emotions, right now he’s as dominant as he ever was in pinstripes. He’s clearly got something left in the tank, he’s outperforming every single Yankee starter, and he may finally have figured out the need to balance the rigorous workout regime he puts his 41-year-old body through with the physical demands of starting every fifth day. The man won two rings and helped the team to four World Series, going 3-0 with a 1.50 ERA in five starts. As awkward as a reunion would be, it’s a safe bet the Yanks would welcome him back with open arms if the opportunity presented itself.

Clemens to Boston

If a pinstriped reunion would be awkward for Clemens, a return to Boston would be downright surreal in a cats-mating-with-dogs way. Clemens built his legend pitching thirteen seasons for the Red Sox, going 192-111 with a 2.97 ERA, 2,590 strikeouts and 38 shutouts. He won 20 or more games three times in Boston, garnered the first three of his Cy Youngs along with an MVP award, led the league in ERA four times, and left Game Six of the 1986 World Series with the Sox six outs away from their first championship in 68 years. But Boston’s failure to win that Series, along with the Rocket’s injury-aided descent into a perceived mediocrity (a 40-39 record despite a 131 ERA+ over his last four years), came to define Clemens’ tenure with the Sox. General Manager Dan Duquette allowed Clemens to leave after the ’96 season, declaring the pitcher to be in “the twilight of his career”.

Within a year, the Boston exec had egg on his face, as Clemens won a Cy Young in Toronto, and then another. A trade to the Yankees allowed him to hitch his star to a contender, and the Rocket won the title that had long eluded him, notching the clinching victory in the ’99 World Series and sending Red Sox Nation into paroxysms of jealousy and rage.

Four World Series and five years in pinstripes, not to mention his stated desire to go into the Hall as a Yankee pretty much guarantee that the rift between Clemens and the Sox will never heal. But the cognitive dissonance induced by a Clemens return via trade would be worth the price of admission for Yankee fans who bask in their foes’ misery. Hey Sox fans, how badly do you want to win? Badly enough to take back the man you’ve called a traitor and worse for the past several years while jeering yourselves hoarse? Mwah-ha-ha…

Johnson to Boston

Nobody beats the Yankees like Randy Johnson beats the Yankees. While the Big Unit is only 6-8 with 4.23 ERA against them over the course of his regular-season career, he’s 5-0 with a 1.64 ERA and 35 strikeouts in 27.1 innings facing them in two postseason series. But as dominant as those statistics are, they only hint at the drama behind them.

In 1995, the Mariners ended the regular season tied with the California Angels atop the AL West. In the tiebreaker, Johnson tossed a three-hitter, but his start meant he couldn’t pitch against the Yankees in the AL Divisonal Series until Game Three. He won that one, but the thrilling series came down to the fifth game. In the bottom of the eighth inning, the M’s pushed two runs over on an exhausted David Cone, tying the score, and the Big Unit came out of the bullpen on one day’s rest to hold the Yanks. Pitching on fumes, Johnson went three innings and struck out six, but allowed the go-ahead run in the top of the eleventh. He was rescued when Edgar Martinez smacked a two-run double off of Jack McDowell, sending the Yankees down in defeat.

Six years later, Johnson, pitching for the Diamondbacks, returned to haunt the Yanks in the 2001 World Series. He posted a three-hit shutout in Game Two, then beat them again in a 15-2 Game Six rout. The next night, two outs after Curt Schilling allowed a go-ahead solo homer to Alfonso Soriano in the eighth inning of Game Seven, Johnson came on in relief to limit the damage. The Yankees got to within two outs of their fourth straight World Championship before the Snakes rallied to score a pair in the bottom of the ninth off of indomitable closer Mariano Rivera, giving Johnson another improbable victory in relief over the Bombers.

Two heroic performances to help slay the big bad Yankees are more than enough reason for the Red Sox to go chasing the 40-year-old lefty. A reunion with Schilling in Boston — the 2001 World Series co-MVPs — might seem to be icing on the cake. But the duo’s relationship isn’t quite so cozy, at least according to a New York Times Magazine article by Pat Jordan from a few years back. It’s no longer available for free online, but here’s an excerpt:

“When he pitches I believe there’s a lot of unhealthy anger there, but it’s what makes him what he is,” Schilling says. “We’re friends. We’ll remain friends forever. We golf together, go out together, our wives and kids get together.”

Schilling’s “friendship” with Johnson is something of an obsession. He needs it for some reason. Possibly, he is just trying to give Johnson a blessing, the friendship of a gregarious and charitable man (the public’s perception) toward a misanthrope (also the public’s perception). Schilling sees it as his duty to bring Johnson out of himself, to bring him up on the stage under the spotlight that Schilling himself loves, whether or not Johnson loves it.

Johnson plays down their friendship. He doesn’t like being photographed with Schilling, especially those fabricated shots that show two men laughing and tussling in a jocky manner on the golf course. It offends his sense of propriety. (“Their friendship is just for the media,” says Jerry Colangelo, managing general partner of the Diamondbacks.) When Johnson talks about Schilling, you can detect a hint of disdain.

“I appreciated what Schilling is doing this year,” Johnson says, “because I wanted him to do it again, not just one year. The level of excellence is measured over time. It’s nice to see him continue to get better. I appreciate it because it’s what I strived to do the last eight years.”

A few days earlier, a local writer, Pedro Gomez, went on TV to declare that the Schilling-Johnson friendship was merely cosmetic. This incensed Schilling. “Gomez is the worst in his profession,” Schilling says. His anger at Gomez goes back to last year’s World Series, when Gomez called Schilling “a con man” in a column.

Friends or not, the duo of Johnson and Schilling, while boosting the team’s chances this year, would also give the Sox some insurance against a potential departure by Pedro Martinez, who’s a free agent at the end of the year and a fragile, risky, expensive one at that. That Boston and Arizona connected on the Schilling deal may work in their favor; that Casey Fossum — the only one of the four players the Snakes received who is in the majors — is 2-7 with a 5.55 ERA may cause the Snakes to think again about letting Theo Epstein burn them.

Johnson to New York

If Yankee owner George Steinbrenner knows anything, it’s that if you can’t beat somebody, you should trade for him. He’s been openly pursuing Johnson for the past few weeks, so vocally that the commissioner’s office is reviewing his remarks to decide whether a fine for tampering should be levied.

It may not matter. Johnson, who signed a 2-year, $33 million extension before the season, has a no-trade clause, the bad fashion sense to desire finishing his career in that godawful purple and teal combo, and a justifiable impatience with any writer who wastes his time speculating about whether he’d waive his no-trade clause to come to New York. Additionally, there’s enough bad blood between the Yanks and Diamondbacks that a deal might be hampered. First came David Wells reneging over a verbal contract agreement with Arizona to sign with the Yanks. Then over this past winter, when the Yankees pursued Curt Schilling, Arizona demanded a package including Alfonso Soriano and Nick Johnson. Neither player is still in pinstripes, and the Yanks have nobody nearly so young and desirable to offer for a pitcher who’s even better than Schilling. About the only think working in the Yanks’ favor towards this deal is that they could take second baseman Roberto Alomar off of Arizona’s hands as well.

In the end, the rumors of Johnson/Clemens to Boston/New York have more to do with East Coast media blather and wishful thinking from fans who feel a sense of entitlement to this great rivarly than they do substantial possibilities for the midsummer swap meet. But it sure is fun to think about the various scenarios. The rest of the baseball world may cringe, but why shouldn’t we have all the fun? Mwa-ha-ha…

From a study I’m doing involving Yankee prospects who were traded:

Pitcher         VORP

Jake Westbrook  27.1

Ted Lilly       20.9

Zach Day        17.6

Eric Milton     11.3

Tony Armas, Jr.  3.9

TOTAL           80.8



Pitcher         VORP

Javier Vazquez  27.8

Kevin Brown     15.5

Jon Lieber       6.3

Mike Mussina     4.9

Jose Contreras  -0.7

TOTAL           53.8

VORP is Value Over Replacement Level, in runs. You don’t even want to see how bad this looks if I included Roger Clemens…

This entry is about a player with the following line:

 G   AB  H  2B 3B HR  R  RBI  BB  SO  SB CS  AVG  OBP  SLG

162 603 199 35  1 27 128  91  84 116  13  8 .330 .424 .526

A pretty special player, eh? Let’s put him in there with a few 2003 stat lines of some randomly-chosen stars:

         AB  H  2B 3B HR  R  RBI  BB  SO  SB CS  AVG  OBP  SLG

Mr. X   603 199 35  1 27 128  91  84 116  13  8 .330 .424 .526 

Ordonez 606 192 46  3 29  95  99  57  73   9  5 .317 .380 .546

Pujols  591 212 51  1 43 137 124  79  65   5  1 .359 .439 .667 

A-Rod   607 181 30  6 47 124 118  87 126  17  3 .298 .396 .600

Rolen   559 160 49  1 28  98 104  82 104  13  3 .286 .382 .528

Soriano 682 198 36  5 38 114  91  38 130  35  8 .290 .338 .525

Okay, based on that one season, he’s not the best hitter in that group, but he’s certainly not the worst, either. Those stats can sit next to the big boys at the dinner table; he’s got power, he’s got a good batting eye, and he’s even got a bit of speed if not necessarily the best judgement on the basepaths. His line looks especially good next to Scott Rolen, who’s having an MVP-caliber season in the NL this year. Yet this player languishes in the relative obscurity of a last-place ballclub. His team spent top dollar for some free-agent hitters in the offseason, but he’s outhitting them, and the club has actually fallen one spot in the standings.

There’s a catch to that player’s line. Those are true stats, but they’ve actually been assembled over two seasons due to injuries. That line consists of the last 162 games played by Melvin Mora of the Baltimore Orioles, who went on the disabled list on Monday with a hamstring injury and a sprained ligament in his left foot. He’s played 66 games this year, hitting .347/.433/.556 with 12 homers, 60 runs scored, and 43 RBI. A litany of injuries, including being hit in the face by a pitch and tearing a knee ligament, limited him to 96 games last year, during which he hit .317/.418/.503 with 15 homers, made the AL All-Star team, and topped the league in batting for a good spell. He won the Futility Infielder of the Year award, too. When I wrote up that profile, I wondered what his stats would look like if he’d played a full season, and while I’d been tracking him, I was quite shocked to find how, um, timely, his injury was.

At the time those 2003 numbers looked like a pretty big fluke from a versatile 31-year-old who’d never topped a .750 OPS in a season, but Mora has picked up right where he left off this year. And while both Miguel Tejada (.314/.362/.511) and Javy Lopez (.319/.370/.481) have hit better than their career levels, it’s Mora who leads the team in On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage. Signed to a 3-year, $10.5 million contract in the offseason, he’s also had to deal with converting to third base, a position at which he’d played only seven games in his major-league career. It’s been a rocky transition, 15 errors in 64 games, a .919 Fielding Percentage (lowest of the 24 regular 3B), a .699 Zone Rating (22nd) and a 2.71 Range Factor (10th). Yet he’s third among AL 3B in Win Shares, behind only Alex Rodriguez and Hank Blalock, though injuries to Eric Chavez and Troy Glaus have thinned the ranks a bit. At his salary, he’s a bargain.

But the Orioles are struggling. They’re 36-46, in fifth place behind not only the Yankees and Red Sox but also the Blue Jays and, yes, the Devil Rays, who stand 42-41 in third place at this writing. According to ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick, owner Peter Angelos is losing patience, though most O fans have long ago lost patience with him. Angelos, according to Crasnick, might even fire first-year manager Lee Mazzilli if things don’t improve. Though Lopez and Tejada have performed well, two other free agent signings, Rafael Palmeiro (.242/.353/.405) and Sidney Ponson (3-12, 6.29 ERA) have been big busts, and the starting rotation has put up a combined 5.56 ERA.

One bright spot for the O’s lately has been the play of the man who’s spelling Mora, 30-year-old journeyman David Newhan, who’s hitting .405/457/.662 with 4 HR in 81 plate appearances. Coming into the season, Newhan hadn’t played in the bigs since 2001, and in parts of three seasons, had never drawn 50 PA, hitting a sub-Mendozoid .163/.247/.302 in 97 PA. Now he’s got the pundits invoking Wally Pipp when they discuss the job he’s done in Mora’s absence. No matter. While Mora should return “good as new” according to Baseball Prospectus injury expert Will Carroll, the O’s might be well served to ride those two hot bats and return Melvin to the outfield to replace the woeful and injured rightfielder Jay Gibbons (.223/.290/.345), or the woeful but healthy Larry Bigbie (.263/.327/.393) or Luis Matos (.239/.290/.359).

Anyway, here’s wishing Melvin a speedy recovery so he can get back to terrorizing AL pitching as he has for the last season-and-a-half and showing the rest of the baseball world what a fine player he’s become.

When the Yankees went into the season, the one position their mighty lineup lacked an All-Star-caliber player was second base. Aaron Boone’s basketball misadventures provoked the Soriano-for-Rodriguez trade, shifting the most glaring Yankee offensive weakness to the middle of the diamond. But despite expectations that George Steinbrenner would throw more cash at the problem to round out his set of All-Stars, the Yanks entered the season with two players who could charitably be described as futility infielders sharing the job at second, Enrique Wilson and Miguel Cairo.

Despite some superficial similarities — they’re within a year of each other in age (Cairo is actually younger, thanks to Wilson being caught red-handed in the age-gate scandal a couple winters ago) and an inch in height — Cairo was the far more established player coming in. Wilson entered the season with a .253/.296/.358 in parts of seven major league seasons, accumulating 1250 plate appearances but only once playing anywhere close to regularly. Cairo put up a .269/.317/.361 line in 2225 PA over eight major-league seasons, including three years as the regular second-baseman of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Since departing Tampa after the 2000 season, he’s bounced around the league and the diamond, playing six different defensive positions for three teams including the Yanks.

Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system had Wilson’s weighted mean projection of .238/.287/.351, a mere 1.3 runs above replacement level (VORP), while Cairo’s weighted mean projection of .263/.315/.400 put him at 6.1 VORP — a half-win gap between the two. Wilson’s been his usual craptacular self with the bat thus far, putting up a .210/ .253/.336 line — a .589 OPS — despite a comparatively Ruthian two-week stretch which saw him go 14-for-50 with a double, five homers, and 16 RBI. Take those numbers away and you’ve got a guy who’s hitting .172/.221/.193, numbers that would embarrass even a blind, one-legged, octagenarian lady stepping into the batter’s box with a pair of knitting needles.

Cairo, on the other hand, has been a sparkplug who’s shown a surprising amount of power for a number-nine hitter, racking up a .312/.368/.461 line for an .829 OPS, about 140 points higher than his career rate and 240 points higher than Wilson. He’s 8-for-13 with two doubles and a triple in his last four games for a cool 1.590 OPS and is currently hitting 13.2 runs above replacement level, while Wilson is 4.0 below — a 17.2 run difference, nearly two games. By comparison, Jason Giambi’s VORP is only 13.8 and the DH/1B “platoon” of Ruben Sierra and Tony Clark are a combined 14.6. In other words, Cairo has held his own among Yankee regulars or near-regulars with the stick. Defensively, Wilson and Cairo have combined for 3.0 Fielding Win Shares, trailing only Chicago, Tampa, Oakland in the AL.

Will it be enough for Miggy to keep his job beyond the July 31 trading deadline? It’s tough to say. Spring training found the blogosphere full of such something-for-nothing pipe dreams as Jose Vidro and Ray Durham. Recent rumors have Seattle’s Bret Boone — Aaron’s older brother — as a possible option. With the M’s 16 games below .500 and 14 out of first in the AL West, they’ve all but flushed this season, and Boone has been “leading” the way by “hitting” a woeful .232/.299/.389 with 11 homers, after three monstrous seasons in which he’s averaged over 30 homers and 120 RBI. He’s making $8 million in the final year of his contract, and there’s no way in hell the Mariners or any team is likely to pick up the 35-year-old’s $9 million option. But the Yanks don’t have a great deal to offer in a trade, and with Kevin Brown on the DL and Jose Contreras and Jon Lieber struggling, insurance for the starting rotation may cost the Yanks the closest things they have to blue-chip prospects.

On the starter front, Boss Steinbrenner is currently engaged in a flirtation with the Diamondbacks over ace Randy Johnson, but the Big Unit has all but sworn a blood oath that he’ll never pitch for the Yanks, so that’s quite unlikely. However, if a deal were consummated, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see Roberto Alomar included as a throw-in. Signed by the Snakes for less than $1 million at the start of the season, Alomar put up only a .262/.333/.385 line with one homer before breaking his hand in late April, and he’s since lost his job to rookie Scott Hairston. I’m not advocating him as the answer to the Yanks’ middle-of-the-diamond name-recognition problem, but he does fit the profile.

Speaking of the Hairston family, brother Jerry, another second baseman, is battling for playing time on the Baltimore Orioles while hitting .310/.385/.399 and stealing 11 bases in limited use, and is rumored to be available. He’s also been seeing time at third base, the corner outfield spots and even DH (bad idea there, Lee Mazzilli), making him a handy bench player to have around. But is he better than Cairo? His career line of .259/.331/.369, coupled with his base-stealing ability and his younger age (he’s 28) indicate that he would be an incremental improvement; he projects at 16.8 runs above replacement via PECOTA, about a full game better than Cairo. That’s hardly a shining reason for the Yanks to spend resources for such a minor gain.

Another name that may surface is one that might be familiar to Yankee fans: D’Angelo Jimenez, the now-26-year-old second baseman of the Cincinnati Reds who was traded by the Yanks during the 2001 season. At one point, the former prospect seemed a better bet for big-league success than Alfonso Soriano, hitting .327/.392/.492 in Columbus (AAA) as a 21-year-old in 1999 and being named the International League’s All-Star shortstop. By comparison, that season Soriano hit .305/.363/.501 as a 23-year-old in Norwich (AA) and was overmatched in a month at Columbus (.183/.225/.341). Jimenez looked to have a shot at making the 2000 Yanks but he sustained a broken neck in a car accident in the Dominican Republic that January, setting back his progress considerably. He still looked shaky in 2001 when the Yankees, desperate for relief help, traded him to the Padres for Jay Witasick. Midsummer trades have since become an annual ritual, and after passing through the hands of the Chicago White Sox, he’s now in Cincy with a .260/.364/.388 line on the year, right around his .267/.350/.384 career mark. Jimenez has a bit of a bum rap following him around — “perceived as lazy” says Baseball Prospectus 2004, but after a slow start, he’s come around (.309/.407/.412 in June) and it’s possible the Reds might want to cash him in while his value is ascending. PECOTA puts him at a weighted mean of .271/.349/.404 with 18.0 VORP. That’s not more than a hair ahead of Hairston, but as Aaron Boone, Gabe White, Drew Henson and others might attest, these two teams have been known to swing midsummer deals, so this could happen, especially if the Reds start to fall off of the NL Central pace. Then again, they’re 7 over .500 and 5 out of first, so punting may be a ways away.

In short, while upgrade options may exist for the Yanks at second base, they’ve got far bigger concerns in the pitching department, both in the rotation and in the overworked bullpen. Unless they can get something for virtually nothing, they’ve probably got enough to stand pat at second base, at least until they sort out their more pressing needs.

No sooner had I dragged out the Yankees’ and Red Sox’s run differentials and expected (Pythagorean) winning percentages than the Yanks took a stumble back towards reality, being swept by the Mets in their three-game series at Shea Stadium. What little I saw of the series — about half of the second and third games — was a numbing succession of lead changes and lousy pitching that made for less than compelling baseball, unless of course you’re a Mets fan, in which case your team now has a pulse. The Yankee bullpen put up an 8.67 ERA in 9.1 innings, but they were only following the uninspring performance of the starters — Mike Mussina, Jose Contreras, and Javier Vazquez, who put up an ugly 8.40 ERA in 15 innings and couldn’t even make it into the sixth once. The sweep was dismaying, but also a much-needed reminder coming off the high of the Boston series that these Yanks aren’t nearly so invincible as some pundits would have you believe.

Speaking of Pythagroean winning percentages, Alan Schwarz had a neat piece in the New York Times on the stat and its use in front offices. Yes, Virginia, here is an example of one of the most basic sabermetric tenets — that we can predict a team’s record by their run differential — taking hold among old-school baseball men. Writes Schwarz:

For a more accurate forecast of which teams are contenders and which are pretenders, however, a different set of standings is catching the attention of fans and front offices. Known as the Pythagorean standings — more on the name later — they rank teams not by the more traditional measure of victories and losses, but by their building blocks: runs scored and runs allowed, which cumulatively prove to be a better indicator of future team performance than just about anything else.

“I use it every day,” said Brad Kullman, the Cincinnati Reds’ director of baseball operations. “It allows you to be a little more objective about your evaluation of where you’re at. You can ask yourself: ‘Do we have what it takes to stay in the race? Or are we going to have a hard time keeping this up?’ ”

…”Our differential says that things are better than they seem,” Gerry Hunsicker, Houston’s general manager, said, “but that’s not too practical in real life when your owner is asking why you’re struggling.”

Yet more and more clubs are using the Pythagorean standings to evaluate how their clubs might perform for the stretch drive.

“The Pythagorean records do help you formulate strategy for June and July,” said Josh Byrnes, assistant general manager for the Red Sox. “Especially when there’s a lot of clutter, like this year, they can show the hidden quality of a team. Some of it is looking at other clubs who might be overevaluating themselves, and exploiting that in a trade.”

The Reds, the Astros, and the Red Sox — an interesting cross-section of teams that’s not overly reliant on the Moneyball whiz-kid axis of Oakland, Toronto, and L.A, though of course Boston has Theo Epstein and Bill James himself in their ranks. Somehow in its electronic version the article omits the actual formula, which for those of you who are novices is: Expected Winning Percentage = RS^2/(RS^2 + RA^2) where RS is Runs Scored and RA is Runs Allowed. Schwarz explains why James dragged an ancient Greek philosopher and mathematical genius into the equation: “The squares reminded James of the Pythagorean theorem — a2 + b2 = c2 — so he borrowed the moniker, giving mathematicians the willies but readers an enduring mnemonic.”

Further refinements of the Pythagroean formula use a slighly lower exponent (1.83) that produces more accuracy, but that’s a bitch unless you’ve got a scientific calculator or a spreadsheet; this one is generally good enough. Schwarz cites a study showing the formula’s power:

Sure enough, at the midpoint of any season, the Pythagorean records are much more accurate than real-life ones in picking which contenders (teams .500 or above) will keep it up or fade. Since the two leagues split into divisions in 1969, 68 teams have begun July with records more than three victories higher than their run differential warranted; these overachievers saw their second-half winning percentage plummet from .575 to .516. Meanwhile, looking at the underachievers on the other end of the spectrum, their winning percentage stayed about constant, .548 to .540. Both groups regressed, because all teams move toward .500 over time, but the overachievers ultimately succumbed to their foreboding run performance.

Twenty-seven years after Bill James’ debut, it’s not that surprising that the Pythagorean concept has taken hold; sabermetric formulas don’t get much simpler or more useful than this one.

• • •

While we’re on the subject of our good Greek friend Pythagoras, he pops up in a study to be presented at the SABR Convention later this month by a man named Chris Jaffe (no relation, so far as I know). Building on another relatively simple and ancient Jamesian concept — pitcher run support — Chris has come up with a stat that measures how well a given starting pitcher was supported, park-adjusted and relative to his league, called Run Support Index (RSI). Think of it as the ERA+ of offensive support; a 110 RSI means a pitcher received 10 percent better support than the park-adjusted league average, while a 90 means he got 10 percent worse than expected.

“Run Support” is computed simply by adding the number of runs scored by a team in a pitcher’s starts, without worrying when the runs were put up, the thinking being that the total number of runs scored or allowed still has a pretty solid impact on a pitcher’s won-loss record whether or not he’s still in the game. ESPN and a few other sites now compute support on a per nine-inning basis using only those scored while the pitcher’s in the game, but I’ve always found this old Jamesian method (introduced in an early Baseball Abstract) to be more useful). For one thing, it’s much more easily obtainable, because you can simply cull it from a list of games such as the ones from Retrosheet which go back practically to the ancient Romans rather than needing a box score to determine the details of how many innings a pitcher threw and when the runs were scored.

Chris then uses the RSI concept to adjust the Won-Loss records of starting pitchers via — that’s right — the Pythagorean formula by finding the margin between what the pitcher would have done with league-average support and what he did with his actual support, ascribing what in many cases is a larger gap — between actual W/L record and expected W/L — to luck or underachievement. He’s got a blog devoted to his calculations, including a list of nearly 200 pitchers — Hall of Famers, 200-game winners or losers, and the Top 100 pitchers from the NBJHA — whose entire careers he has measured RSI and adjusted W/L. The top five:

Al Spalding 133.60, 216-102

Allie Reynolds 121.96, 165-124

Don Newcombe 120.44, 133-106

Vic Raschi 115.56, 119-79

Juan Marichal 115.34, 220-165

Yankees pop up all over the upper reaches of the list; in addition to Reynolds and Raschi, Carl Mays and Andy Pettitte crack the top ten, Lefty Gomez, Whitey Ford and Catfish Hunter are in the next ten, and Herb Pennock, Dwight Gooden, Red Ruffing, and David Wells are in the next ten. Granted, these pitchers weren’t exclusively Yankees, but they certainly didn’t lack for run support during their time in pinstripes.

From the Dodger perspective, besides Newcombe, who pitched in the bandbox of Ebbetts Field behind a mighty offense, many of the team’s notable hurlers are right around average for their careers: Jerry Reuss, Sandy Koufax, Don Sutton, Bob Welch, Rick Sutcliffe, Tommy John, Orel Hershiser, and Fernando Valenzuela are all in the 102-to-105 range of RSI, and Don Drysdale is at 100.02, as close to average as any pitcher. Some 300-game winners actually received lousy run support; Tom Seaver, Walter Johnson, Gaylord Perry and Nolan Ryan are all around four or five percent below average, as is the eminently Hallworthy Bert Blyleven.

Anyway, be sure to check out Chris’ presentation if you’re going to SABR (it’s on Thursdaty at 3 PM), and drop by his blog for more of this good stuff.

As you might expect, plenty was written by the people who saw much more of Thursday night’s epic Yankee-Red Sox game than I did. Here are a few highlights from the pinstriped angle:

• Derek Jacques, who was at the game:

The hardest part of writing about this game is that it’s hard to identify what “the story” was. Was it the Sox’ last gasp at at keeping the Division race close? Not really — it’s still only July 1, and I don’t think you can stick a fork in a team that’s just two games out of the Wild Card. Was it the young lefthander holding his own against the Boston lineup? That was nice, but by the time the game ended, you could hardly remember that Brad Halsey started.

The story, if you could call it that, was a game that showcased everything that’s good about baseball. Big home runs. Beautiful defensive plays. Extra innings, which beats the living daylights out of “overtime” in any other sport.

Red Sox fans were all over the stadium, like an invading army or a colony of intestinal parasites, depending on your point of view. They’ve been bolder than usual over the past two years — Yankee Stadium security has improved to the point that the Beantowners don’t have to make out a will before wearing their colors in the Bronx. The Sox fans were fairly sedate last night, however, still suffering from the gut punch they suffered on Wednesday, when David Ortiz decided to re-enact the Bill Buckner play.

• Cliff Corcoran, who was also in the House o’ Ruth and reports that it took him a half hour to get out of Yankee Stadium and until 3 AM to get back to his New Jersey domicile:

It’s interesting that a game that will likely be remembered well beyond this season seemed so unimportant going in. The Yankees had a seven-and-a-half-game lead on the Red Sox. They’d taken the first two games of the series, clinching a series win. And they were sending rookie Brad Halsey to the mound in just his third major league start against Pedro Martinez, who had dominated the Yankees in his previous start at the stadium earlier this year. Had the Yankees lost this game in an uneventful fashion, it would have meant no more than the one game in the standings it accounted for. Instead it may have defined this team.

• YES Network’s Steven Goldman, who found eight great plotlines within a single game:

The label “historic” does not fit neatly on most regular season ballgames, if only because there are a few games each year that qualify. There have been only 14 regular-season perfect games since the dawn of the 20th century, but highly dramatic, seesaw contests with pennant race implications happen, at least for the Yankees, roughly once a year. That means there have been 50 such contests since the mid-1950s alone.

Let us, then, not rush to call the Thursday, July 1 contest between the Yankees and the Red Sox “historic,” which turns out to be a less than unique designation, and call it something better instead: perfect. This game showcased baseball at its best. It possessed clutch pitching, dramatic hitting, long home runs, baserunning, defensive gems, heroic sacrifice, and more interweaving plotlines than two soap operas laid on top of one another.

• Hardball Times’ Larry Mahnken, who referenced the greatest sportswriter of them all, Red Smith, with his article’s title (“Fiction is Dead”):

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it — and I’m still not sure I do. This was the type of game that makes you believe in miracles and curses, mystique and aura, and destiny. It had heroes and it had goats, unlikely comebacks and lost opportunities, highlight-reel plays and errors. It was the kind of game that makes you a baseball fan until the day you die.

…If it wasn’t Yankees/Red Sox, if it wasn’t such a crucial game for the Red Sox, it still would have been the best game of the year. That it was these two teams, that so much did ride on it for Boston, makes it one of the great games in Yankees history. It wasn’t Bucky Dent, it wasn’t Aaron Boone, but it was almost as exhilirating, almost as heartbreaking, and every bit as memorable.

There are people in this world who do not like baseball, there are people who find it boring. But last night’s game showed, once again, why baseball is the greatest game ever invented; it will always find a new way to surprise you. Even a poorly played game like last night’s contest can be a classic. If that’s boring, then nothing in this world is interesting.

• Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan marveled at the game’s great plays and examined his own preseason take:

All of the attention after the game was focused on Derek Jeter, who tore up his face diving into the third-base box seats after making a running catch to end the top of the 12th. Without taking anything away from Jeter, though, the play of the game was Alex Rodriguez’s double-play turn in the 11th. On a ball that took a strange bounce just to stay fair, Rodriguez made a stab, a tag of the base, and a perfect, only-line-he-had throw to the plate to prevent the tying run from scoring.

Nothing against Jeter, whose catch — of a ball that I think was going to land fair and score two runs — required a great jump and excellent raw speed, but Rodriguez had to do about four things correctly in less than two seconds to get the optimum result, and he did. Jeter’s play was simpler, although the requirements of making it — a sprint into short left field — led him to injure himself after completing the catch.

We’re dealing in gradations of excellence here, which is really what last night was all about. Keith Foulke wiggles out of a jam? OK, here’s Mariano Rivera escaping a tougher one. Pokey Reese makes a highlight-reel catch? Here comes Rodriguez, and then Jeter, pushing him to the cutting-room floor. Manny Ramirez comes up with another huge hit with his team up against the wall? Nice, but the Yankees get down to their last strike, more stars on the bench than in the lineup, and get back-to-back hits from the waiver-bait segment of the roster.

On ESPN the other night, Peter Gammons mentioned that the Yankees have never blown a 6.5-game lead. That lead is now 8.5 games, nine in the loss column, and although I’ve insisted all along that the Red Sox would overtake the Bombers once they got healthy, I’m now convinced I was wrong.

There’s a theme that’s starting to gain ground. Sox fans are backing away from this team, as if they knew all along that it wasn’t really that good. Given that this is virtually the same team that Massachusetts wanted to marry a year ago, but with Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke added, I don’t buy it. They didn’t bunt or run all that much last year either, and the lack of double plays now being cited as a key to their demise has more to do with the fact that they don’t 1) put runners on first base or 2) get ground balls than any fatal flaw.

• Alex Belth, who mustered genuine sympathy for Red Sox Nation:

In the late ’90s when we wondered how the future would treat the Big Three [shortstops], who would have thought it would come to this? Each player figured dramatically in last night’s game. Jeter was valiant, Rodriguez, brilliant, and Garciaparra was impotent. This morning, BDD [Boston Dirt Dogs] posted a rumor that would have Nomar packing his bags for Los Angeles. A three-team deal including Toronto would bring Odalis Perez and Carlos Delgado to Beantown. While nothing has happend yet, it’s likely that Theo Epstein will make a bold move soon (he was at work acquiring two pitchers in two different deals this afternoon). There is still a lot of season to play and the Sox aren’t done yet. But Garciaparra certainly looked like a short-timer last night.

All of which leaves me feeling incredibly sad. Sad that Garciaparra is so unhappy, sad that a franchise player like Nomar is likely to leave Boston disgruntled and bruised like Lynn and Fisk and Clemens and Vaughn. I’m especially sad for Red Sox fans.

As you might imagine, there’s plenty of noise being made in RSN, with much of the frustration centered around Nomar. From ESPN’s Bill Simmons:

On the other side, we have Nomar Garciaparra, who sulked in the Red Sox dugout for the entirety of last night’s game. Either he’s getting traded, or he’s determined to turn the city against him. Boston is a weird place. If everyone is standing at the top step of the dugout, and you’re sitting awkwardly on the bench with a “I wish this game would end, I could go for some pizza” face, you may as well just start strangling kittens on live TV at that point. I’m not a betting man — okay, that’s a complete lie — but unless Nomar gets traded in the next 48 hours, I would bet that last night’s game became one of his defining moments in Boston. And not in a good way.

Looking at the big picture, yesterday was the final chapter of “The Tale of Three Great Shortstops,” the three guys who were supposed to battle for supremacy through the end of the decade. So much for that angle. There was Jeter recklessly crashing into the stands, the ultimate competitor, a franchise player in the truest sense of the word. There was A-Rod greeting Cairo at home plate at the end of the game, a multi-kajillionaire just happy be involved in baseball’s version of the Cold War … even if it meant giving up on his dream of becoming the greatest shortstop ever.

And there was Nomar, the fading superstar who helped the team blow two games in Yankee Stadium, then showed little interest in even watching the third one. He’s been declining steadily for three seasons now — his body breaking down, his defense slipping, his lack of plate discipline a bigger problem than ever. He always seemed to enjoy himself on the field, almost like a little kid, but even that’s a distant memory. Maybe his spirit was shattered by the rumored deal to Chicago last winter. Only he knows the answer to that one. For his sake, I hope he’s getting traded this week. After last night’s display, there’s no going back.

Bring on the Pokey Era. Please.

Maybe it’s because I missed the previous week of baseball, including the first 27 innings of the Yanks-Sox series, but I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around all of this. Despite the echoes of last fall’s Game Seven and other similarly tilted results, Thursday night’s game decided nothing, no matter how great the win was for the Yanks, or how devastating the loss was for the Sox. Die hard fans, whether they’re Bomber backers making World Series plans or Red Sox Nationalists looking for a drainpipe over which to throw the noose rope — not to mention professional pundits — would do well to remember that the Sox took six of seven from the Yanks in April, when the shoe was on the other foot. They still hold an edge in the season series, 6-4. Curse, shmurse, this was two teams meeting at a time extremely opportune for one and lousy for the other. It’s not too different from the situation several weeks ago, despite the reversed fortunes of the two teams.

As ESPN’s Eric Neel points out, the two teams are extremely close in run differential; in fact, the Sox have a higher expected (Pythagorean) winning percentage, .564 to .558 through Friday. The Yanks are a lofty seven games above their EWP owing to their ability to come from behind, while the Sox are two games below thiers. But these things have a strong tendency to even themselves out over the course of a year.

As a Yankee fan, there is one thing I take from their recent history against the Sox: the Pedro mystique, at least insofar as Martinez being some kind of Yankee killer, is as dead as the Bambino. The whiny-assed, Jheri-Curled, diva bitch goddess of an ace is 11-9 with a 2.90 ERA in 29 career starts against the Yankees, including the postseason and one start as an Expo. But his teams are only 11-18 in those starts:

1997  1-0

1998  0-3

1999  2-0 including 1-0 in ALCS

2000  2-3

2001  1-5

2002  3-1

2003  1-5 including 0-2 in ALCS

2004  1-1

TOT  11-18

For all of his bluster (“Why don’t we just wake up the Bambino, and maybe I’ll drill him in the ass?”) and machismo (his eruption in Game Three of last year’s ALCS, his plunking of Gary Sheffield on Thursday night), his decreased stamina — he hasn’t pitched more than 7.1 innings in any start against the Yanks since 2001 — means the Bombers can merely wait him out and feast on the Sox bullpen. He’s still a great pitcher… when he’s pitching. But these epic Yanks-Sox battles have a way of waiting until the wee hours to be decided, when that Jheri Curl is dripping onto his warmup jacket while he sits on the bench, watching his team fritter away his hard work. Poor, poor, Pedro.