Along with Alex Belth, Larry Mahnken, Cliff Corcoran, Doug Pappas, and a few other names you might recognize, I’m featured in a newspaper article in The Journal News, a suburban New York newspaper covering Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties. Peter Abraham interviewed 27 New York-area bloggers via an email questionnaire, followed a few up by phone, and wrote a lengthy piece on the impact of baseball bloggers: “A Growing Sports Voice.”

Abraham paints a picture of a booming underground that still hasn’t peaked, with blogs springing up and then disappearing with regularity. I don’t know about the latter part, but I will say that an astounding increase seems to have taken place over the past winter. The writer goes on to cite a media studies expert who compares the boom to desktop publishing. That observation carries personal resonance; it’s an area where my computer savvy allowed me to overcome a lack of training and move onto bigger and better things, as I became a graphic designer without benefit of an art-school background. Viva Apple!

The article starts with Belth and his fine blog, mentioning his interviews with famous personalities such as Buck O’Neill, Roger Angell, and Ken Burns, and it then turns to yours truly:

Belth and many other bloggers were first inspired by Aaron Gleeman, Jay Jaffe and David Pinto, the Willie, Mickey and the Duke of this fledgling genre. They were among the first and are now three of the best-read bloggers.

Jaffe, 34, started “Futility Infielder” three years ago. Once primarily a Yankees blog, he has branched out to cover all baseball.

“I developed a penchant for lengthy lunchtime e-mails involving stat-based baseball arguments. My friends invited me to leave them alone and start a blog,” he said via e-mail. “The rest is history. I don’t watch very much TV, besides ballgames, or see many movies since I started doing this. I’ve always got a couple of ideas I’m working on, even if only in my head, to the point where it’s become like the music of my mind.”

Jaffe and many other bloggers rely heavily on the study of baseball statistics — known as sabermetrics — to make their impassioned points. It’s a natural mix of their love of baseball and technology.

The Mick of the genre? Wow, that’s flattering, although I’m quite sure I don’t get nearly as much traffic as Gleeman or Pinto (not that it keeps me awake at nights) or imbibe as much as Mantle. I’ll mildly dispute the second paragraph, too, as I’ve always striven to straddle the line of covering the Yanks but not being limited to them. I can even quibble with Abraham’s description of sabermetrics, preferring to rely on Bill James’ classic definiton: “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” But hey, it’s great to be mentioned, and any publicity is good publicity so long as you spell my name right. So thanks to Pete Abraham for including me in this piece, and welcome to any of you who are visiting this page for the first time because of it.

Any of you coming to this page via your Sunday paper who would be willing to send the page on which the article resides, please drop me an email.

A few weeks back when I participated in the Yankees roundtable on Baseball Prospectus Radio, I commented that despite their upgrades this winter, the Yanks are now so heavily invested in ballplayers who are 30 to 35 or even older that any one or two injuries could cause them trouble given their lack of depth. Joe Sheehan made his prescient comment about the Yanks’ ability to assume contracts — and man, was he right when it came to the A-Rod trade — but the rest of the panel shared my view.

As did the host, Will Carroll, who doubles as BP’s injury expert. Just as he did last year, Carroll is previewing every ballclub in a Team Health Report which shows the level of injury risk for their starting nine, rotation, and closer. Players are assigned the colors of traffic lights which represent an underlying quantification of injury risk. As to what that quantification is based on, Will had this to say:

Like PECOTA, it’s a black box in the sense that I don’t let it out. FAR less math involved. It’s a weighted system of twelve factors starting with position, age, and injury history, but also things like body mass, PECOTA attrition/drop rate, playing time, team’s overall health rating, speed of recovery, and a few others, including a couple that are very subjective.

Just to put it in plain English, the “PECOTA attrition/drop rate” to which Will refers is BP’s forecast of the chance that the player will either decrease his productivity by 20 percent or more (collapse), or decrease his plate appearances by 50 percent or more due either to injury or poor performance (attrition).

Not all of the Health Reports are in the Premium category, and it so happens that the Yanks THR is a freebie. Will starts this one off by quoting a friend of his who says that everything in the world can be summed up in three words, and while he uses “Good. Expensive. Fragile.” to describe the 2004 Yanks, the first three which came to my mind upon viewing the forecast were, “Too many colors.” I tossed a few colorful words of my own in there, as you can imagine.

Only four Yankees out of the 15 Will graded get the green light: Alex Rodriguez, Hideki Matsui, Enrique Wilson (who may not even be the regular second baseman) and Mike Mussina. Eight receive a yellow light, and three — Jason Giambi, Bernie Williams, and Kevin Brown — turn up in the red-light district. No sooner was I reading the THR (a day late) than Alex Belth floated an email saying Williams was undergoing an appendectomy and would miss Opening Day. Ugh.

Carroll offered to field my questions on the Yanks’ report, and so I jotted down a handful and fired them off to him. What follows is our exchange.

FI: How much of the fact that Jason Giambi was red and Kenny Lofton was yellow is based on the two of them playing the field?

WC: It was a factor, but taking them out wouldn’t have changed either significantly. Giambi would be in on age and the lack of comparable successes (at least in the long term) for his knee injury. Lofton was in the middle of the yellow range — speed players tend to age poorly unless they refer to themselves in the third person.

FI: The news pre-op seemed more likely that Williams would be in center and Giambi would be DHing; does that change anything?

WC: Williams was actually on the cusp of yellow/red and I certainly can’t predict appendectomies. Williams is both older, figures to play some in the field — by design or by default when if Lofton gets injured, and has such a multitude of injuries in his file that it’s almost impossible that one of these wouldn’t jump up and bite him. Arthritic shoulders, bad knees, reduced speed, and DH doesn’t necessarily help. Edgar Martinez has to go through a pretty elaborate stretching regimen before every at bat; Bernie might not make that adjustment.

FI: Good points when you think about those 35-year-old hammies. What color lights would Travis Lee, who they recently signed, and Tony Clark receive?

WC: Lee and Clark are both green. Neither have major recent histories and neither figures to get enough playing time to hurt themselves. 1B is the safest position on the field.

FI: How wide a variation in the eight yellows is there, and if you were able to give some of them plus (closer to green) or minus (closer to red), who would get what?

WC: Internally, there’s quite a variation. Lofton is higher, Jeter is medium (thought I’m not terribly worried about him. I’ll worry more if I start seeing him dive more knowing that his SS job is under scrutiny) and Sheff is pretty low. Sheffield was one of the more interesting players to research so far. No one believes his hand wasn’t broken in the Cubs series. [Sheffield was just 2-for-14 with 1 RBI in the Braves’ first-round loss to Chicago.]

FI: What’s Kevin Brown’s bigger risk, arm or back?

WC: Back, but you have to look at the entire kinetic chain. If he favors his back, he’ll put more stress on his arm. I just can’t see Brown going 200 innings, but he did it last year. The one thing I can’t factor in is someone’s pain tolerance.

FI: You didn’t really elaborate on Jose Contreras’ yellow — what can you say about him? Is it based on the uncertainty of his age?

WC: No, I use the same data as PECOTA on age. Contreras only has one year in his injury history and that’s the part that’s uncertain. The biggest negative for him was the expected jump in innings. That’s a challenge for anyone.

FI: Steve Karsay’s shoulder problems last year were blamed on tendinitis, but now we’re hearing that he had rotator cuff surgery. Did the Yankees conceal that? How serious was his tear?

WC: Conceal? No, but they had no reason to tell anyone. If Tom Gordon’s agent knew about that, would his price have gone up? Tendinitis and cuff problems are often related. It would take a whole section of a book to explain that — but luckily that book, Saving The Pitcher, is coming out in April!

FI: Let the record show that I added the shameless linking to Will’s innocent plug of his book. Anyway, what about the rest of the Yanks’ pen — Gordon, Quantrill, Heredia, and White? Any glaring risks there?

WC: Gordon’s always a risk, but used properly, he’ll be fine. The rest don’t figure to be major risks for anything “preventable.” That word — preventable — is a tough one. Bernie gives us a perfect example for just how unpredictable injuries are. Any pitcher can get overused or take a ball off their head and pow — in an instant the whole rotation or pen has changed. Where the Yankees — and you touched on this in the intro — are harder to figure is in how they’ll deal with an injury. There’s not much in Columbus, but Cashman’s just as likely to go get someone from another team as he is to get someone from Triple-A.

FI: Tell that to Aaron Boone.

Chew on this for a moment: in the 71 years they’ve been playing the All-Star game, a total of five Yankee catchers have made the team 46 times, or 65 percent of the time. Jorge Posada, with four All-Star appearances, is just the latest in the line of those who’ve donned the tools of intelligence in the House That Ruth Built.

In part because I’d stumped for him here as the AL MVP, Alex Belth invited me to contribute a piece on Posada for his week-long Yankee preview, which has included guests Steven Goldman, Rich Lederer, Ben Jacobs, and Cliff Corcoran. In my profile, I recount his history, take a look at how he fits into the Yankees, both currently and historically, where he places among his contemporaries, and whether he will one day rank among the all-time greats. For my rankings, I drew on the same methodology as I did for my Hall of Fame ballot pieces on Baseball Prospectus last month; recall that no catchers were on the 2004 ballot, so unless you’ve done the work yourself, most of this data will be new to you.

Anyway, it was an honor to contribute to the series, and I hope you all enjoy the piece.

Lunchtime brought a surprise in my mailbox on Thursday: the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, with a seven-page Moneyball follow-up from author Michael Lewis that’s worth the cover price on the newstand (y’know, off-line). Those expecting an epilogue tracking the progress of Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford, Jeremy Brown or Nick Swisher will be disappointed; nary a mention do they receive here. Instead Lewis focuses on the reaction the book provoked from the baseball establishment and its guardian, the mainstream sports press. His tone is blistering when describing both, and he pulls no punches, countering some of the more egregious and idiotic attacks on the book from the likes of Joe Morgan, Tracy Ringolsby, Richard Griffin, and Pat Gillick.

Lewis ‘s view of baseball front offices is the Peter Principle in action:

The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you’re very good at it you don’t survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated.

There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball is structured less as a business than as a social club. The Club includes not only the people in the front office who operate the team but also, in a kind of women’s auxiliary, many of the writers and broadcasters who follow the game and purport to explain it. The Club is exclusive, but the criteria for admission and retention are nebulous. There are many ways to embarrass the Club, but being bad at your job isn’t one of them.

…Club insiders have a remarkable talent for hanging around — scouting, opining on the game — until some other high-level job opens up. There are no real standards, because no one wants to put too fine a point on the question: What qualifies these people for these jobs? Taking into account any quality other than Clubability would make everyone’s membership a little less secure.

Gloves off, baby! Lewis goes on to retrace the background of his story, how he came to write about the Oakland A’s front office, GM Billy Beane, and the rethinking of baseball in general, pointing out that the A’s and Beane really didn’t pay him too much mind at the time:

As far as they knew, I wasn’t even writing a book about the Oakland A’s. I was writing a book about the collision of reason and conventional baseball wisdom. (They weren’t the only ones whose eyes glazed over when I tired to explain what I was up to.)

The irony is that once the book was out, Beane, not Lewis, became the lightning rod for criticism. The author points out that twice in ESPN.com chats, Morgan attacked the book, both times laboring under the mistaken notion that Beane himself had penned the book. From his second chat: “I wouldn’t be Billy Beane first of all. I wouldn’t write the book Moneyball!” Writes Lewis, “It was in a perverse way, an author’s dream: The people most upset about my book were the ones unable to divine that I had written it… the people most certain they had nothing to learn from the book were in the front offices of other major-league teams.” Meanwhile, the literate world sat up and took notice; the book was a hit, and its memes took hold as teams from other sports, Fortune 500 companies, and amateur baseball programs adapted its lessons, reappraising the terrain on which their assumptions rested.

Lewis goes on to examine the progress of the Toronto Blue Jays, who hired former Beane sideman J.P. Ricciardi as their GM in late 2001, cut the payroll 40 percent, and turned the team’s fortunes around — but in doing so drew the ire of Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber at the Toronto Star. In a classic ignorance of the concept of sample size, Geoff Baker attacked Ricciardi’s moves as racially motivated. The public took Baker to task for what the National Post called “a smear job,” and Jays’ players such as Carlos Delgado came to the organization’s defense. Hey, you’d be glad to get rid of Raul Mondesi, too.

Meanwhile, the Star‘s Richard Griffin, a frequent target on Baseball Primer, showed his misunderstanding of baseball history: “… Ricciardi along with Billy Beane and other new-wavers believe in building offense through patience at the plate and taking no chances on the bases. That’s pre-WWII style of play. Under those criteria, Jackie Robinson could not have played in the majors.” Ugh. Never mind that Robinson’s high on-base percentage, plate discipline, power and undervaluing in the eyes of the pre-integration Club would have made him a prime target for Beane and his disciples. As Lewis writes, “One way of looking at the revolution in baseball management is as a search for the new Jackie Robinsons: players who, for one irrational reason or another, often because of their appearance, have been maligned and underestimated by the market.”

The lesson Lewis takes from the Moneyball aftermath is that “if you look long enough for an argument against reason, you will find it.” It’s a bittersweet coda, and while the article is satisfying from a folding-metal-chair-swinging standpoint (the Ringolsby stuff is a great below-the-belt-buckle swing), one can’t help but wish Lewis had followed up some of the more positive angles of the book, such as the increased popularity of the stathead approach among fans and writers, or the progress of the seven first-rounders the A’s drafted in 2002. In the interest of doing just that, I pulled some quick stats together:

Hitter-'03 age     Team-Level     PA   AVG  OBP  SLG  HR

Jeremy Brown-23    Midland-AA     378 .275 .388 .391   5

Nick Swisher-22    Modesto-A+     237 .296 .418 .550  10

                   Midland-AA     336 .230 .324 .380   5

Mark Teahen-22     Modesto-A+     530 .283 .377 .380   3

John Mccurdy-22    Kane County-A  571 .274 .331 .365   4



Pitcher-'03 age    Team-Level      IP   ERA  K/9  K/W

Ben Fritz-22       Modesto-A+      77  4.91  9.0  2.3

Steve Obenchain-22 Modesto-A+      44  5.15  3.9  1.0

                   Kane County-A   49  2.57  5.5  2.3

Joe Blanton-22     Midland-AA      36  1.26  7.6  4.3

                   Kane County-A  133  2.57  9.7  7.6

Without delving too deeply, that doesn’t look too bad for seven guys with two years’ experience in pro ball. All of them have progressed past the rookie and low-A levels, four of them spent time in high-A, and three of them reached AA. Swisher struggled at Midland and Obenchain at Modesto, but only McCurdy’s performance in Kane County looks like a disappointment at this stage. All of the other hitters have shown the appropriate plate discipline and strike zone judgment, though Swisher seems to be the only one whose power is developing. Time and Billy Beane are still on their side.

But that’s not to say the establishment can’t look at that tall glass as half-empty. Discussing the Dodgers’ hiring of Paul DePodesta, Baseball America writer Jim Callis takes the A’s draft to task by comparing it to the Dodgers’ recent track record:

DePodesta comes from Oakland, where he was the top assistant to Billy Beane, who presides over the draft with a heavier hand than most GMs. In the last two years, the Athletics have had 28 picks in the first 10 rounds and spent all of them on college players. They haven’t selected a high schooler before the 19th round.

[Dodger scouting director Logan] White, an Orioles crosschecker before coming to Los Angeles in December 2001, was allowed a free rein with the draft by former Dodgers GM Dan Evans. In his first two drafts for the club, he has had 22 choices in the first 10 rounds and used 16 of them on high school players. White hasn’t tabbed a four-year college player before the seventh round.

…Based on the initial returns from their clubs’ 2002 and 2003 drafts, DePodesta could learn a lot from White. No one wrote a fawning best-seller about how the Dodgers built their team and revolutionized the draft, but they have outdrafted the A’s the last two years.

Before anyone points out the first half of the word “Moneyball,” consider that Oakland spent roughly $14 million on those two drafts, compared to $11 million for Los Angeles.

Never mind the fact that two years is an awfully short time frame to exalt or dismiss a draft class, or that the Dodger had considerably more money to spend on scouting these players, or that the A’s seven first-rounders (due to compensation picks for lost free agents) were able to command signing money that was, if not overwhelming, then at least better than most lower-round players. The old guard’s ways must be defended! Did anyone bother to ask how much money the Dodgers spent on scouting those players? My guess is that the difference is more than made up for in the bottom line. But this is still an apples-to-oranges comparison. The A’s strategy is a reaction to their limited resources, and the Dodgers’ strategy reflects the breadth of theirs; they can afford risks the A’s are unwilling to take.

While he does go on to show that DePodesta and White share some common ground in their analytical nature and are apparently off to a good start in their relationship, he cites a Baseball America study he did showing “that high school picks yield a higher percentage of above-average big league regulars and stars than college choices.” What he doesn’t mention is that for the time frame of the study (1990-1997), a slightly higher percentage college players reached “regular or better status” overall (8.8 percent to 8.4), and significantly more high school players were complete flops, never even making the majors for a cup of coffee (71.8 percent to 61.1). And if one focuses on the upper rounds, the college edge becomes more clear: 18.1 percent of the 326 college players in rounds 1-3 reached “regular or better” status, while 14.5 percent of the 379 high-schoolers did so (junior college players did badly across the board, but since BA separates them out, I am as well). Overall for the ten rounds studied, the ratio of flops to regular-plusses is 8.5:1 for high-schoolers, 6.9:1 for college players. In that light, the A’s strategy of minimizing their risk and maximizing their yield makes perfect sense.

Back to Lewis, I certainly wouldn’t put it past such a shrewd observer to be taking good notes on all of this. For all that I know, he’s planning a sequel. The Ricciardi and DePodesta regimes, as well as that of Theo Epstein in Boston, should provide ample material once a longer view can be taken. But like those A’s draftees, that will have to wait for another day.

Baseball Musings caught my eye with a brief entry on Expos pitching prospect Chad Bentz, a walking human-interest story in the Jim Abbott traditon: Bentz was born with fingers only on one hand and has had some success in professional baseball. This winter he made the team’s 40-man roster, and he’s in camp fighting for the second lefty spot out of the bullpen, up against former Yankee yo-yo Randy Choate, who was traded with Nick Johnson and Juan Rivera for Javier Vazquez.

The reason I bring this up is that I saw Bentz pitch two and a half years ago for the Vermont Expos against the Brooklyn Cyclones. He was impressive, sliding his glove off onto his non-throwing “hand” after retrieving the ball, then replacing it after delivering the pitch so effortlessly that you barely notice. The Cyclones could barely touch him on the night I watched, though he left the game with a lower back strain. Last year at AA Harrisburg of the Eastern League, Bentz was 1-4 with a 2.55 ERA and 16 saves in 84.2 innings. He’s got some minor control issues, walking 39 men to his 56 strikeouts (6.0 per 9 IP), but he got by somehow, allowing only a .260 average on balls in play. Regarding his impediment, Bentz told the Winnipeg Sun:

“I don’t consider it a handicap,” said Bentz. “If I did, I would get a parking sticker.

“It doesn’t prevent me from doing anything. I call it a birthmark. I think it would be boring to catch normally, without switching the glove, but I’m sure it’s not normal for anyone else.”

In addition to his Abbott-like distinction, Bentz is also trying to become the second Alaska-raised player in the majors. This Juneau Empire piece adds a hometown touch to the Bentz story for those interested.

Though he’s been hampered by a nerve injury in his foot, one that wasn’t properly repaired until the second surgery and shortened his first two pro seasons, Bentz has fared pretty well overall. In his three years of organized ball, he’s got a 3.36 ERA in 150 innings with 128 strikeouts (7.7 per 9 IP) against 64 walks. He’s reportedly got a 93 MPH fastball and a developing curve and changeup. My guess is that he needs a year in AAA but if he can get ahead of the hitters regularly and cut down his walks, he has a decent shot at the bigs eventually. I’ll be pulling for him.

* * *

Those of you wondering about my sparse output lately can look forward to my contributions to a couple of Yankee-related previews over at Alex Belth’s Bronx Banter blog. One is a lengthy profile of Jorge Posada that should run Thursday or Friday; pieces by Steven Goldman (Jason Giambi), Ben Jacobs (Mike Mussina) and Alex and Rich Lederer (Derek Jeter and Bernie Wiliams) have already run and are worth checking out for their quality and variety. Another is a roundtable with various bloggers and writers about the Yankees in general, for which I filled out a long questionnaire. I’ll be elaborating on my own takes on the topics discussed there once the roundtable has run.

Rich Lederer has kept the hot stove burning this winter at his Weekend Baseball Beat blog by conducting an entertaining series of interviews which has included Baseball Prospectus writers Will Carroll and Joe Sheehan, prominent bloggers Alex Belth, Mike Carminati, Aaron Gleeeman, and David Pinto, and Around the Majors mailing list domo Lee Sinins. To that esteemed group of what should be familiar names, Rich has added another one you’ll recognize: mine. I’m honored to be Rich’s first interview subject at his new all-baseball.com location.

In the interview (conducted via email), Rich let me fill in the blanks for those who want to know more about the Futility Infielder, from the origin of the site’s name to my all-time post-1969 team to just what the hell “The Big Book of Bitter Defeats” means. He gave me enough rope to hang myself several times over when it came to the recent Sons of Sam Horn dust-up, my views on the baseball blogosphere, and the tangled history of my rooting interests. The interview was a blast to do, and I hope it makes for as enjoyable reading for you as the rest of the series has for me.

Tim Marchman was one of the many smart people I met at the Winter Meetings in New Orleans and spent hours with hanging out and talking baseball. For those unfamiliar, Marchman writes about baseball in a weekly column for the New York Sun, which is subscription-based in the online realm. He’s one of the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to discussing off-the-field topics such as game’s labor situation and economics, and can talk your ear off about Marvin Miller. If you don’t mind a few days’ delay, his writing is now available for free at a politics-and-culture site called The New Partisan. Add this man to your roster of frequent reads.

In the wake of the Alex Rodriguez trade, Marchman’s February 17th piece for the Sun calls for another baseball team in the New York market, a common plea from Brooklynites who still feel the nearly half-century-old sting of abandonment. But his motive is based on economics, not nostalgia. Examining the three two-team markets in major-league baseball, he shows how far ahead New York is of Chicago and Los Angeles based on a combination of population, fan interest, and income:

According to the most recent census, the New York metropolitan area is 21,199,865 strong. The figure for Los Angeles is 16,373,645; for Chicago, 9,157,540.

According to a survey performed by Scarborough Research for MLB, 21% of New Yorkers who describe themselves as “very interested” in major-league baseball, as compared with 15% of Los Angelinos and 13% of Chicagoans. According to the most recent figures I was able to find (they’re from 1999), per capita income in the New York metropolitan area is $38,539. The figure is $28,050 for Los Angeles and $33,857 for Chicago.

With these numbers it’s easy to make a very crude estimate of the potential dollars each team has access to: Figure the number of avid fans in each city, and multiply it by per-capita income… [T]he total income of avid baseball fans in Chicago is around $40 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in Los Angeles is around $69 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in New York is around $172 billion. This means, then, that the Yankees and Mets inhabit a fiscal universe where they are, theoretically, drawing from a resource pool of around $85 billion apiece — more than four times that available to the two teams in the massive city of Chicago.

Adding a third team to the New York market would reduce the resource pool to $57 billion per team, still an advantage over the other two big cities and hell-and-gone ahead of the rest of MLB, of course. Obvious remedies such as moving the Expos to Brooklyn — “nothing more than a recognition that there is significantly more demand than supply for baseball in New York, and a correction of that situation,” says Marchman — would be beyond the power of the Yankees and Mets to prevent if the other 28 teams wanted to make that hapen, since the Big Apple teams could only file an anti-trust suit. As we have been constantly reminded every time baseball’s labor situation is addressed, MLB enjoys an archaic anti-trust exemption.

Summing it up, Marchman harshly criticizes the non-Yankee teams for their approach when it comes to the luxury tax: “I think that by expressly jury-rigging the most recent collective bargaining agreement against the Yankees, Major League Baseball and the other 29 clubs have lost all moral right to complain about Yankee spending.” That sentiment was echoed the other day by none other than the Big Boss Man himself when Red Sox owner John Henry put one in his wheelhouse.

A former limited partner of George Steinbrenner’s (which brings to mind one of the all-time great quotes), Henry was allowed to hold his 1% share of the Yankees even as he owned the Florida Marlins, and turned a handsome profit in the millions for finally selling them when he bought the Sox. After the Rodriguez-to-NY deal closed, Henry conveniently saw the light and proclaimed that the Yankees needed to be dealt with. According to the A.P. report, “Henry, whose team failed to obtain Rodriguez from Texas in December, said in an e-mail response to reporters Wednesday that he is changing his mind on whether the sport needs a salary cap ‘to deal with a team that has gone so insanely far beyond the resources of all the other teams.'” Apparently, taking on A-Rod’s contract is all a matter of whose ox is being gored, and if he couldn’t justify the finances of it, nobody else should be able to either.

Predictably, the so-called Evil Emperor struck back as only he could:

We understand that John Henry must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his failure in this transaction,” Steinbrenner said. “Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston. It is understandable, but wrong that he would try to deflect the accountability for his mistakes on to others and to a system for which he voted in favor. It is time to get on with life and forget the sour grapes.”

Bud Selig put the zipper on both owners for further comment before Henry could offer up another sour glass of whine. But for those of us watching the fray, it’s just another round of a good, old-fashioned grudge match scored to the Yankees. Bambino’s Curse blogger Edward Cossette referred to the exchange as an “NYC Smackdown” and called Steinbrenner’s response “one of the best retorts I’ve heard in a long time.” He also pointed to David Pinto’s tart assessment: “Oh boo-hoo. Cowboy up the money, John. Or stop whining and use your sabermetic brilliance to beat this team with a cheaper payroll.” Pinto’s readers see Henry’s response as just part of the payback he owes Budzilla for the Boston bag job. My man Alex Belth calls Henry’s words “Bringing A Knife to a Gun Fight” and runs down the writers’ reactions in two cities. Fun stuff.

Back to Marchman, who’s surely clipped this exchange for his files as he works on a book about Selig. In addition to his own writing, he’s also an editor at Ivan R. Dee Publisher, a name I’ll be dropping here in the future because they’re publishing books by both Will Carroll and Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. I’ve been granted the honor of previewing and commenting on Will’s manuscript for Saving the Pitcher, a task I look forward to undertaking. I’m even in the book — Will liked my piece on my torn labrum so much that he asked permission to use it, and reported that Dr. Jim Andrews, perhaps the top name sports medicine, really enjoyed my contribution. Wow.

Speaking of the shoulder, yesterday was the three-month mark since surgery, and my physical therapist opined that my shoulder mechanics were “at 95%” and now it’s more a matter of slowly building strength. The corner’s been turned, so tell Brian Cashman I may be able to get some innings in Columbus by mid-summer in time for the stretch run.

* * *

Speaking of Nate Silver, whose PECOTA system is the foundation of BP’s performance predictions, I emailed him Wednesday to ask if, in the wake of the news that Alfonso Soriano lied about his age, he’d had a chance to re-run Sori’s numbers. Sori aged from 26 to 28, and since the statistical peak age of a ballplayer is 27, that has a great effect effect on the long-term outlook of this trade; he’ll be 30 when it’s time to sign his big contract instead of 28, so whoever signs him will likely overpay for the downside of his career. But short-term, according to Nate (who hadn’t rerun the prediction yet), it won’t make much difference. The 26-28 years are the flat part of the age curve, and there’s considerably less variation in the prediction than if he jumped from 22 to 24 or from 33 to 35.

Sori’s original weighted mean forecast called for a normalized .295/.349/.533 line, which isn’t too shabby (for purposes of comparison, A-Rod’s forecast is .299/.398/.604), but now the question becomes whether he’s too old to show such improvement in his plate discipline. Optimists point to free swinger Sammy Sosa’s latter-day improvement which has coupled with his amazing power run, but he’s the exception, not the rule.

One more angle on Soriano-for-Rodriguez worth mentioning is that the two players’ stats were dramatically influenced by their home parks. Arlington is a favorable environment for hitters, while Yankee Stadium plays as a pitchers’ park, especially for a righty such as Sori. Here’s their home-and-away splits over the last three years, conveniently the tenure of both Soriano’s stay in the Bronx and Rodriguez’s stint in the Lone Star State:

Soriano

.268/.305/.466 with 40 HR at home

.305/.346/.543 with 55 HR on the road



Rodriguez

.333/.416/.666 with 86 HR at home

.278/.375/.564 with 70 HR on the road

Hold the phone, Mabel. Sori’s three-year road OPS (.889) is really not that far off from A-Rod’s (.939). Rodriguez is still the superior player, of course, but if you can stand next to him and not look ridiculous, that’s saying something. For all of the bluster around this deal, what remains to be seen is whether the ratio of the expensive A-Rod’s marginal value to marginal contract dollars (box office dollars is another story) is significantly better than that of Soriano, who will likely be making less than half the dinero of A-Rod come his next contract. Years from now, that will be a fascinating analysis to undertake.

If you want to see a fine example of a top-notch blogger taking an old-school newspaper hack to the woodshed, check out Aaron Gleeman’s dismantling of L.A. Times hack Bill Plaschke’s anti-DePodesta screed*. Plaschke attacks the new Dodger GM for his youthful appearance instead of his advanced ideas (for which he subsitutes derisive terms which reference ten-year old computers — floppy disk?), drags out age jokes which are older and no more witty than the hot dogs he mentions, and misses the boat entirely when he brings Branch Rickey into the equation. He fails to recognize that long before Billy Beane was a twinkle in his mother’s eye, Rickey was the proto-sabermetric GM; the Life Magazine article “Goodbye to Some Old Baseball Ideas” is a touchstone which I’ve discussed before, and it should be required reading to anybody who thinks that Moneyball or even Bill James materialized out of thin air. Gleeman picks up on this, discusses the Rickey article at length, and then tears Plaschke’s lazy, ignorant diatribe apart.

As for Plaschke, it doesn’t help his case any that he writes in what I call “autohack mode,” the tendency of a certain segment of the sports punditocracy to rely almost solely on single-sentence paragraphs as a method for proclaiming that one’s thoughts are so weighty and complex that they require extra space to be absorbed.

It’s the mark of a lazy, condescending writer.

Annoying, innit?

I know Plaschke’s editors, and sports-page editors in general are at least partly to blame for the proliferation of that style, but really, I don’t want to hear the Lupicas of the world railing about how entire college basketball teams can’t read and write when from the looks of their Sunday columns, neither can they. Somebody please shoot me if I ever make that a habit.

*the pinch hinter reminds you that bselig/bselig will work there.

Those of you wishing to get a vicarious glimpse into the lives of the unsavory characters who populate my tales of sitting on barstools and arguing about baseball and politics can get a dose of the latter at Moving the Goalposts, a brand-new, political-themed blog (with a hideous color scheme that will be fixed soon). MtG is an evolution of a de facto mailing list of political and humorous stuff we kick around daily. And just as my friends encouraged me three years ago leave them the hell alone and start a blog, so did I when it came to this venture. We bat from the left side of the plate, some even further left than others. Caveat emptor.

It won’t take a detective to figure out the valued member of my organization to whom I’ve delegated the authority to post occasional opinions and take the Movable Type system for a test-drive. But suffice it to say that the separation between what goes on at that blog and what goes on here shall be as rigid as the division of church and state (unless it’s a Republican-controlled state, that is…). Unless there’s a damn good reason otherwise, what’s on there stays there, period. I got into writing about baseball to get out of writing about politics — you’ve seen how ugly I get when I write angry — and unless it’s particularly relevant to our discussion, I have no wish to broach that subject here, the preceding potshot aside. So check it out if you dare, avoid it like the plague it if its going to raise your blood pressure, and remember, it’s much more fun to argue about baseball.

Nine years ago today, with the help of two friends, I loaded all of my belongings into a U-Haul and left Providence, Rhode Island. I had lived there for six years, including college and developed quite a fondness for the city, but having outgrown my job while watching my peers leave town, I could feel in my bones that it was time to move.

Driving by myself, some four hours later I reached the Triboro Bridge and screwed up a lane change so that I ended up having to re-cross the bridge and pay the toll a second time. The rube was out six bucks before he even hit town. Finally taking the correct exit, I got off on 125th Street, found Second Avenue, and carefully drove 111 blocks south, stoplight by stoplight, my thumbs pounding on the U-Haul’s steering wheel to the music on the boombox as I rode the brake all the way down Second.

I treated the friends who helped me unpack the truck to dinner that night at El Sombrero, a Ludlow Street restaurant with the greasiest hot-plate Mexican food you could possibly hope to find. I lost count of how many pitchers of frozen margaritas I paid for, went home and carved out a space to lay my futon, and fell into a deep, tequila-aided slumber.

Somewhat bewildered, I awoke the next morning to see the boxes and furniture strewn randomly around my room. Seven stories up, from where I lay I could see the Empire State Building and the Chrysler standing tall against the blue Manhattan sky. I’ve never forgotten that view or the excitement I felt that morning, and I’ve never looked back.