I try not to burden my friends, so I’ve only hinted at it a couple of times in this space, but yours truly has been playing hurt since mid-June. In a horseplay-related swimming pool accident — exactly the kind your mother warned you about — I injured my right shoulder. Hanging out at my pal Nick’s parents’ place in Northampton, MA, I agreed, in my infinite wisdom, to some competitive tomfoolery which involved me diving onto a flotation mat. Genius. My hands instinctively went out to cushion my landing, but my right hand slipped and slid sideways across the mat, pinning my elbow in the vicinity of my sternum and sending a sickening jolt of pain through my shoulder.

The short version is that I tore my labrum, and after three months of physical therapy that haven’t solved the problem, I’m slated to undergo arthroscopic surgery on Wednesday, November 19 to repair the damage. I’ve spent the last two weeks shuttling back and forth between doctors and labs, getting all of my ducks in a row in preparation for this. I’ve been stuck with needles so many times feel like a human pincushion, but I guess that’s good practice for what will happen next week.

The labrum is a ring of fibrous cartilege that surrounds the end of the scapula (the shoulder blade) and holds the head of the humerus (the upper arm bone) as a ball-and-socket joint. My magnetic resonance scans (MRI), which weren’t done until about a month after the injury, showed that I sustained a common type of tear called a SLAP tear. In addition to being something I’m tempted to do to myself every time I explain my injury, SLAP stands for Superior Labral Anterior Posterior. Basically, the lining of my shoulder joint was torn front to back.

Following the diagnosis by my orthopedic surgeon, I went through three months of physical therapy, which did help some in alleviating the impingement syndrome from which I suffered. But even now, my shoulder is still unstable, I’ve been unable to return to anything approaching my normal regimen of lifting weights, and many of my daily activities, such as opening windows and doors or holding onto a railing on the subway, cause me pain. I wake up several times each night to reposition my arm. I haven’t thrown a baseball since a couple of hours after sustaining the injury, which I attempted for diagnostic purposes, finding that even flipping the ball twenty feet was a chore. Basically, my shoulder’s felt as though it had the wind knocked out of it, and though I can’t point to a single specific area that’s sore, getting through a day pain-free is like trying to cover for an unfilled cavity — sooner or later I do something to remind myself just how much I hurt.

My doctors and every other reliable source of information I’ve consulted have been pretty unanimous that at this stage the shoulder isn’t going to get any better by itself, and that the surgery, which is 85-95% successful, is about as minimal as it gets. Basically, I’ll be put out via general anesthesia and given a nerve block via a shot to my neck (mmmmm). Three incisions about a centimeter in diameter will be made in my shoulder, one in the back and two in the front. Using an arthroscope, a narrow fiber optic instrument with a camera, they’ll peek into the joint through the incisions. They’ll check my rotator cuff, which by most indications is probably normal, and reattach my labrum to the scapula via suture anchors. This kind of surgery is an outpatient procedure, so I’ll be going home the same day, and after a few days of convalescing, I should be able to work the following week.

It’s the rehab which is a bitch. To give my shoulder time to heal, I can’t do much of anything for the first four weeks beyond the simple things — feeding myself, typing, and some light range-of-motion stuff. So long, ski season. After that I’m looking at about 4.5 to 6 months before I can resume full activity, including breaking out my mitt to toss the ol’ horsehide around. That feels like an eternity right now, but it’s a better outlook than chronic pain and a throwing motion my girlfriend wouldn’t sign for (she can zing it).

It’s a good thing my baseball career is limited to the occasional game of catch or a rare turn in the batting cage, because a torn labrum is something no ballplayer wants to mess with. To find out why, I turned to medhead extraordinaire Will Carroll, who writes the Under the Knife column for Baseball Prospectus. Will and his father, orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Carroll, wrote a big piece on injuries, “The Medhead Manifesto,” in the Baseball Prospectus 2003 book, including half a page on SLAP lesions, which are one of the “big five” injuries that cause nearly fifty percent of all lost playing time. Here’s what the Carrolls have to say:

The SLAP Lesion (Superior Labrum Anterior Posterior) is an overuse syndrome injury commonly associated with overhead activities, such as the throwing motion in baseball. Technically, the anatomical structure that makes the SLAP lesion possible is the origin of the tendon of the long head of the biceps muscle and the way it hooks over the head of the humerus (the bone of the upper arm that makes up part of the shoulder joint). If the arm is forcibly bent inward at the shoulder as it is in the throwing motion, the humerus acts as a lever and tears the biceps tendon and the labrum. The lining of the shoulder joint from the glenoid cavity is torn in a front-to-back fashion, hence the name SLAP — the superior aspect of the labrum is torn from anterior to posterior.

Usually the signs and symptoms involve the athlete either complaining of pain or instability in the shoulder while throwing. This condition worsens when the athlete puts his arm into the “cocked position” ready to throw. Some athletes with this condition may experience pain while doing overhead weight lifting and some have reported actually hearing a clicking sound in the shoulder when attempting to throw.

Unfortunately this condition is seldom discovered until the damage to the labrum is already done. Athletic trainers and physicians utilize a clinical test called the shoulder impingement test to clinically identify this condition. The test is performed by stabilizing the rear of the athlete’s shoulder, extending his elbow and passively forward flexing the arm. If the test is positive for a SLAP lesion, the athlete will experience pain near the end of the range of motion. If this test is positive, usually an MRI will be done to confirm the diagnosis.

If the damage to the labrum is not significant, withholding the athlete from activity and prescribing anti-inflammatory medications may treat the condition. Stretching and stabilization exercises can be utilized under supervision when the pain lessens. It is extremely important that the athlete not return to sports-specific activity (such as throwing) until the pain has entirely disappeared.

If the labrum is significantly torn, the only viable treatment for someone who wants to continue to be active in the sport is a surgery in which the surgeon arthroscopically reattaches the torn labrum. After the surgery it is very important that the athlete undergoes supervised rehabilitation designed to both strengthen the shoulder muscles and gain flexibility in the joint. Unlike the generally more positive outcomes that result from Tommy John surgery, only a small percentage of players of those that suffer significant labral tears are able to successfully return to anywhere near their previous level of performance. Most often, players that are able to come back lose significant velocity, are forced to alter their mechanics, creating further injury risk, and often retear the labrum. Recent cases such as Mike Sirotka and Mariners prospect Ryan Anderson come to mind as typical.

Yeeech. That’s two players who haven’t thrown competitively since the 2000 season — not exactly good company.

Will was kind enough to grant me some time to talk further about torn labrums. Basically the injury is a more drastic one for a ballplayer than a rotator cuff tear or an ulnar collateral rupture (which requires Tommy John surgery) because it’s harder to detect and because there’s no good rehabilitation protocol. Sports medicine has made many advances in treating other injuries thanks to the advent of the MRI, but in Will’s opinion, it will probably be another 10 years before labrum rehab becomes routine in baseball. He points to Dodger rightfielder Shawn Green’s surgery as a worst-case scenario — Green’s labrum was torn too severely to repair, so the damaged cartilege was removed, and he’s got some bone-on-bone in the shoulder. Somehow, after talking about that, a best-case scenario didn’t come up, but Will did reassure me that my surgery will likely be “as minimal as it goes.”

So for once I’m sitting here thinking that I’m glad I don’t have to hit big league pitching or keep my fastball in the mid-90s to put food on the table. This isn’t going to be a joyride, but with my doctors I feel as though I’m in good hands. I’ll be up and around in a few days after surgery, probably milking the experience for another column or two here. In a few weeks I’ll be hoisting beers with Will and Alex Belth during baseball’s Winter Meetings in New Orleans. Don’t worry, I’ll be hoisting with my left hand.

• • •

Christian Ruzich is back online, and one of the things he’s done is set up a live Pitchers and Catchers countdown. At last notice, there were 95 days, 21 hours, 41 minutes and 36 seconds until the big event.

Will Carroll keyed me in to some interesting work being done by a guy named Avkash Patel at his blog, the raindrops. Inspired by a line from Billy Beane in Moneyball (“Baseball is a game of attrition, and what’s being attrited are pitchers’ arms.”), Patel took a look at a stat he’s calling Attrition Rate (AtR) which involves pitches per plate apperances and on-base percentage.

The theory behind this is that a long at-bat which works the count has value, even if it results in an out, because it tires the pitcher. And even more valulable at tiring a pitcher is a batter’s success in avoiding outs — on-base percentage. So what Patel came up with is a way to combine these two skills and express them in a meaningful number. Patel figured pitches per out made (#Pitches / [(AB – H) + CS + SF + SH + GDP]) and then multiplied by 18, giving us a figure that tells us how many pitches it would take a pitcher to get through six innings (18 outs); in other words, to make a Quality Start. The median of Patel’s four-year sample was 98.63 — just about 100 pitches, a handy context any stat-minded fan can understand. Here ‘s the top ten for 2003:

147.65 B. Bonds, SF

126.58 N. Johnson, NYY

126.17 J. Giambi, NYY

126.09 T. Helton, Col

124.56 E. Martinez, Sea

124.46 B. Abreu, Phi

122.75 M. Mora, Bal

122.49 F. Thomas, CWS

122.04 C. Delgado, Tor

121.60 B. Wilkerson, Mon

Those are some damn good hitters, even though a couple of the names (Mora, Wilkerson) are unlikely. What this says is that it would take a pitcher nearly 150 pitches to get through 6 innings of facing Barry Bonds (of course, he’d have allowed 10 runs by then, based on his Runs Created per 27 Outs). The next two hittes on the list are no slouches either; they form the DH/1B combo for the AL champions. Statheads now have yet another reason to drool over Nick Johnson, and the rest of the world should be remnded that even in a down season, Jason Giambi is still a terrific hitter. For what it’s worth, Giambi’s RC27 of 7.92 was still 12th in the majors, and he was in the top 10 in Equivalent Average and Runs Above Replacement Level.

Here are the bottom 10, the most hacktastic players in the majors this past year:

82.12 K. Harvey, KC

81.46 R. Sanchez, Sea/NYM

81.08 A. Sanchez, Det/Mil

80.38 V. Castilla, Atl

79.81 B. Molina, Ana

79.73 R. Santiago, Det

79.67 R. Simon, ChC/Pit

77.75 B. Phillips, Cle

77.63 C. Izturis, LA

74.61 D. Cruz, Bal

Yargggh. Anybody who’s played Hacking Mass will recognize a lot of those names; I had three of them (Castilla, Itzuris and Rey Sanchez) on my HM team, and the latter two were HM All-Stars. Suffice it to say that none of those guys are ever going to make much money for their stickwork. But what’s surprising is that Nomar Garciaparra is 14th from the bottom at 83.07. Nomar’s OBP in 203 was only .345 (25 points off of his career .370 mark), and he doesn’t see many pitches. Which isn’t to say that he’s not valuable, just that this is a dimension of his game in which he falls short.

Cherrypicking the Yankees from the list and adding one of their notable postseason players who didn’t have enough PA to make Patel’s list:

126.58 N. Johnson

126.17 J. Giambi

113.74 J. Posada

105.29 D. Jeter

104.01 R. Ventura (NYY/LA)

102.72 B. Williams

 98.42 H. Matsui

 96.62 R. Mondesi (NYY/Ari)

 93.41 A. Soriano

 91.89 A. Boone (NYY/Cin -- 87.17 with Yanks)

 84.78 K. Garcia (NYY/Cle -- 94.02 with Yanks)

Well, there’s one more indictment of two players (Sori and Boone) who caused Yankee fans to tear their hair out in October. Even the pinstriped version of Karim Garcia had more success in tiring pitchers out than Sori. More on this topic another time.

What’s most exciting about Patel’s work (which builds on work done by B-Pro’s Keith Woolner and MLB.com’s Cory Schwartz) is that it successfully quantifies one of the relatively intangible qualities we try to grasp. To use an example from my own recent baseball-watching past, consider Chuck Knoblauch during his first two seasons at the top of the order for the Yanks. Knoblauch was such a pest that I used to call him the Lil’ Bastard, and I termed his skill at working the count to get on base the Lil’ Bastard Instant Rally Kit. He was a huge factor in setting the tone for that Yankee lineup, seeing lots of pitches and wearing out starters so the Yanks could feast on the creamy nougat of the opposition’s middle relief. Knoblauch’s OBP in 1998 was .361, solid but not nearly as spectacular as the .424 and .448 he’d put up in 1995 and ’96, or even his .390 in ’97. He rebounded in 1999, with a .393, though it was downhill after that. Here’s a simple chart for those years with his Attrition Rates (ATR) and his OBPs:

       OBP   ATR

1995  .424  112.78

1996  .448  129.64

1997  .390  113.82

1998  .361  108.87

1999  .393  111.11

The numbers show that with the exception of 1996 (when he posted an awesome .965 OPS) Knoblauch was pretty much the same pesky hitter all along, though his results varied a lot more than his approach. Damn, I miss the Lil’ Bastard.

Anyway, I think Patel’s done some fantastic work here just by bringing this simple, intuitive and elegant new tool to light. It will be interesting to see whether others pick up on it and how it gets used — if I were a manager or a GM, I could see it informing my lineup choices, especially at the top of the order. Joe Torre, are you listening?

Rich Lederer of Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat has started a series in which he’s interviewing “the game’s best analysts and bloggers.” His first interview is with Lee Sinins, creator of the Sabermetric Encyclopedia and the invaluable Around the Majors mailing list, which he uses to promote the Encyclopedia (which alas has no Mac version, so I can’t use it).

I find Lee to be a bit of a curmudgeon — his view on no-hitters is about as joyless and insufferable as it gets, and he termed the Wild Card Florida Marlins winning the pennant “a national disgrace.” Nonetheless, I respect the fact that his opinions often run against the grain — his take on “league average” versus “replacement level” is an enlightening one, for example. And I consider the work that he does on a daily basis — sifting through the headlines for baseball news and rumors, which he fortifies with his own commentary and statistical perspective — as essential as my morning cup of coffee. Countless times a single line in one of Lee’s emails has turned into a full-blown piece here. Suffice it to say that Lee’s a heavy hitter in the world of online baseball blogging, and he deserves a lot of respect for his labors.

In the interview, Rich asks Lee lots of questions about the specifics of his work and draws out the fan we readers rarely get to see; two years into receiving his mailings, I was surprised to find out Lee’s actualy a Yankees fan. Sinins also gets to voice his opinons on several players past and present, such as the one he’d chose to start the seventh game of a World Series (Pedro). Good stuff, and I’m pleased to announce that Rich has tapped me to be one of the interviewees in this series sometime in the next month or two.

After finishing Jane Leavy’s bio on Sandy Koufax within seven days of the baseball season’s end, I’m now tearing through Pat Jordan’s A Nice Tuesday. Twice this week, I’ve had my nose so deep into that book that I’ve gotten on subway trains traveling the wrong direction. I can recall doing that only twice in my nearly nine years in Manhattan, and now 150 pages of Jordan have doubled that total (though a new work venue is partially responsible). It’s a fantastic book thus far; Jordan’s devotion to and comparison of the processes of pitching and writing resonates with me. I’ve got a similar theory up my sleeve which relates graphic design and pitching, and I was lucky enough to present my theory to Jim Bouton when I met him three years ago. That’s a story for another day, one I’m itching to get to.

Alex Belth appears to be spending his offseason much as I am, rummaging thorugh some dusty old classics in his library of baseball books. Today he put up a couple of excerpts from Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith in Jerome Holtzman’s No Cheering in the Press Box. The quotes reminded me of perhaps my favorite quote about writing of all time, also by Smith, “The Shakespeare of the Press Box”:

“Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”

The beauty of that quote is that it contains a duality with which any writer can identify. Sometimes writing comes so easily, so naturally it’s like a heartbeat, something you don’t have to think about — it just happens. Words flow from your brain to your fingertips to the page as if driven directly by your pulse. And sometimes writing is much harder — messy, even, requiring a brazen courage to inflict pain on yourself before you can connect with the deeper and more elemental truth of what you’re communicating.

Rereading the piece on Don Mattingly that I wrote yesterday, I’m frustrated by my own efforts. Not because I want to take back anything that I’ve written but because the story itself, my evolution from Yankee-hating Dodger fan to Yankee-rooting Dodger fan, is so much bigger than a blog entry. For all of the writing I’ve done here over the past two years, it’s a story I’ve never gotten down to my satisfaction. But it’s one I’ve been yearning to expand upon, especially since spending the better part of a week in the woods while reading Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer.

The irony is that I’ve been trying to nail the topic since even before I started this site. The genesis of this unholy mess is a continuing education class in “Personal Journalism” I took at The New School in the fall of 1998. One of the pieces I wrote for that class, “Confessions of a Yankee Fan,” was not only my first attempt to grapple with the internal and external conflicts that this evolution produced but also the first formal piece I’d ever written about baseball. Several times, I’ve entertained and discarded the idea of putting that article up on this site; it’s awkward in spots, dated, and a bit embarrasing — like pictures from a high-school yearbook. Who wants that on display?

But reading that five-year-old piece tonight for the first time in a couple of years, I’ve softened my view of its flaws, enough so to carve out a space for it here. The topic is still one I want to revisit in a longer form, but this tells the basic story well enough to keep me from having to reinvent the wheel. With my writing skills much rawer than they are now, I know that I bled all over the pages of that piece, sweating every word choice, polishing every sentence until I felt confident enough to present the piece to my teacher, my class, and the same handful of friends who’ve been been my partners in Yankee-rooting crime along the way. There are a few hanging curveballs in there, phrases I’d like to have back before they get hammered 400 feet. But this is a part of my story, and I’m proud to include it here.

• • •

This afternoon I received a nice phone call from Christian Ruzich. We’d never actually spoken before, but he called to thank me for the column I wrote earlier this week and to assure me that he’s doing about as well as could be expected under the circumstances; mostly he’s thankful that he, his wife, and his pets are safe. Ruz told me that he’s truly been touched by the outpouring of support he’s received from people in this online community, people who for the most part he’d never met before. But like Alex put it, that support is just a reflection of what a good guy he is, and what his work and his presence in this here blogosphere means to us.

Ruz told me he’d sold off about 3/4 of his library of baseball books before moving to his now-destroyed home, and joked about losing a CD collection that took him 15 years to build. Thinking of that sends chills down my spine as I stare at my two carousels of CDs so large that my girlfriend refers to them as the twin towers. But I guess that’s the point — no pun intended, it hits home pretty quickly what Ruz must be going through.

My friend Issa sent this site along. You can type in anything and it’s instantly generated on a church sign. The first non-obscene possibility that popped into my head was a joke about the Alou brothers.

The Yankees introduced their new hitting coach on Tuesday, a man who needed no introduction as far as most of the team’s fans were concerned: former first baseman Don Mattingly. The Yankee front office had been nudging him to join Joe Torre’s staff for a few years, but Mattingly, who retired to his Indiana farm after the 1995 season, wanted to spend time with his three growing sons. With hitting coach Rick Down the designated scapegoat for the Yanks’ failure to win the World Series, and Mattingly’s family urging him to return to pinstripes, all the cards fell into place to unretire No. 23. Voilà — the prodigal son has returned.

Pardon me for not getting giddy. Mattingly is The Man as far as nearly every Yank fan of my generation is concerned, revered as “Donnie Baseball” and touted as being worthy of the Hall of Fame, but I just don’t feel the same way about him. Part of it is that cheesy porn-star moustache (now gone, thankfully), and part of it’s the way his boosters insist his meager credentials are worthy of Cooperstown. But the real reason for that differerence is what separates me from most of your garden-variety Yankee fans: from the time I began following baseball (1977) through Mattingly’s final season, I hated the Pinstripes with a passion.

I’m a third-generation Dodger fan, scion of a legacy that began when my grandfather saw Babe Herman get hit on the head with a fly ball. My understanding of big-league baseball evolved around the Dodger-Yankee rivalry of the ’77 and ’78 Fall Classics, and while I could admire the pizzaz of Reggie Jackson, the acrobatics of Graig Nettles, or the grit of Thurman Munson, I was expressly forbidden to cheer for the Yanks under my father’s roof. The Yankees were evil, while the Dodgers, the team that broke organized baseball’s color barrier, the team that once had a Jewish ace, were the good guys. Those World Series teams were easy for a neophyte to latch onto: the Longest-Running Infield (Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey), Dusty Baker and own Reggie (Smith) and a voluble manager who elevated team loyalty to the level of religion, or at least physiological abnormality (“I bleed Dodger blue”).

For a kid growing up rooting for the Dodgers, the years that followed those first two World Series were a mix of extreme highs, agonizing near misses, and ho-hum mediocrity. Fernando Valenzuela brought a World Championship and a measure of revenge in beating the Yanks in 1981, Kirk Gibson and the Stunt Men brought an even more unlikely one in 1988. The team was eliminated on the last day of the season in 1980 (losing a one-game playoff to the Houston Astros) and 1982 (curse you, Joe Morgan!), but won division titles in 1983 and 1985 before losing in the LCS.

The Yanks should have been so lucky. Instead, triggered by owner George Steinbrenner’s free-spending ways and a tendency to trade their best prospects for over-the-hill veterans, they entered a New Dark Age, going 13 years without making the postseason and even falling into the AL East cellar. Those were good times for a Yankee hater.

That New Dark Age coincided almost exactly with the career of Mattingly. He got a brief cup of coffee on a sub-.500 1982 team, was a part-timer on a decent ’83 squad, and then ran off four monster years for teams that could finish no higher than second. He garnered an MVP award in 1985, when he hit .324/.371/.567 with 35 homers and 145 RBI, and had two more top-five finishes in the balloting during that span. But his performance started to slide, and his next two seasons (’88 and ’89) were merely very good as opposed to great. After that, back troubles got the better of him; from 1990 until the end of his career, Mattingly was a mediocre hitter. His teams were just as bad, falling as far as 95 losses in 1990.

The Yankee fortunes began improving during manager Buck Showalter’s second season in 1993. They had the best record in baseball when a strike ended the 1994 season, and they finally returned to the postseason in in 1995, dragging the shell of Mattingly’s former self all the way. At the tender age of 34, Donnie Baseball hit only .288/.341/.413 with 7 homers and 49 RBI as the team’s regular first baseman that season. But in that thrilling AL Division Series against the Seattle Mariners, Mattingly crushed a lot: .417/.440/.708. He never won a World Series or even played on a team that won a postseason series, but that brief taste of October baseball provided some solace for the Yankee fans who’d watched his sad decline.

I moved to New York City in February 1995, still a Yankee hater who spent most of my energy rooting for the Dodgers. I spent that 1995 ALDS pulling for the Mariners, jeering Mattingly in front of my TV set. To this day the hair on the back of my neck rises when I recall the cameras panning to the Seattle bullpen as one of the announcers excitedly exclaimed, “The Big Unit is getting loose!” It wasn’t until the following summer when the Yanks caught my attention in a different light. As I wrote awhile back:

In 1996, my second baseball season in New York City, I read the sports pages daily, waiting for George Steinbrenner, his new manager Joe Torre, or one of the players to spark a controversy worthy of the Bronx Zoo’s legacy, whereupon the team would implode. Remarkably, it never happened. I had no great affection for [David] Cone at this point in his career, but his seven innings of no-hit ball in his post-aneurysm comeback on September 2 — and his willingness to call it a day at that point — exemplified these new Yankees: they had perspective. My Dodgers were still a factor in the National League at that point, but in my disgust with their meek showing down the stretch (a choke in the season’s final week relegating them to the Wild Card, then a quick cha-cha-cha out of the postseason entirely), it seemed automatic to turn my attentions to the Bronx side. The rest, as they say, is history.

My allegiance to the Dodgers had eroded gradually via the retirement of Tommy Lasorda, the aforementioned foldup in ’96, an even worse one which cost them a trip to the postseason in 1997, and a headlong plunge into the clueless oblivion of the Fox era. In 1998, I started participating in a partial season ticket plan for Yankee games, was treated to the best team I’ve ever seen, and damn near forgot about that gal Sally Ann I left behind on the farm. I still root for the Dodgers, and if the two teams should ever meet in a World Series there’s no doubt which hat I’d wear, but it’s tough to follow a team three time zones away when there’s so much fun to be had close at hand.

But there’s Mattingly, parked on the wrong side of a line which separates “my” Yankees from the ones I grew up hating. It’s not his fault for getting old before his time and missing out on the championship run that followed his retirement, but it’s something more than a coincidence that when the Yankees replaced him with a first baseman that could produce numbers appropriate to the position, they rose to the top of the heap.

I’ve largely embraced that cast of Bronx Zoo characters which beat my Dodgers, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gone back to revise my allegiances across the board. I still get Bummed when I read about the Yanks triumphing over Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s, still gloat a little at the smugness of the Yankee brass as the empire fell following the 1964 World Series, still flinch when I see Bucky Dent’s home run off of Mike Torrez (yes Virginia, I was pulling for the Red Sox in that one, but the virus didn’t take), and still throw objects at the TV when I watch Nettles smother another line drive with men on base in Game Three of the ’78 Series.

Not that any of this was a military secret — it’s been quite well documented in these pages — but I’ve fully copped to being an interloper in the House That Ruth Built, a bandwagoneer on the Joe Torre Championship Express. I don’t deny my past while I plumb its depths on a regular basis, and that means I can’t get too excited about Don Mattingly, Hitting Coach. I know he’s a legend around here, and I do think he’s got a shot at a good second career with this team. But when the next goat that needs ‘scaping is Donnie Baseball, you’ll have to forgive me if a little smirk crosses my lips.

If you want a different take on the Mattingly news, Alex Belth has some analysis and the perspective of a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee fan.

Christian Ruzich, who’s been a good pal to a bunch of us in the world of baseball blogs, took a real hard one in the loss column this week. And I don’t mean a ballgame, so I’ll dispense with further metaphors along those lines and any mention of the his favorite team’s dramatic postseason misfortunes. Ruzich, who runs The Cub Reporter and hosts several other sites, is a resident of Cuyamaca, California, a tiny town 40 miles southwest of San Diego. A week ago, that town was evacuated because of the wildfires raging in California, and the blaze — the Cedar Fire, largest in California history in terms of acreage — ended up destroying about 90% of the town, and all but 25 out of Cuyamaca’s 145 homes.

Christian was several thousand miles away as this all happened, vacationing in Paris. On Friday his father, who was with him in Paris and who also lives in Cuyamaca, returned to the town and confirmed their worst fears: both of their houses were destroyed. The “good news” in this realm is Christian’s truck and car were unharmed. Most importantly, Christian, his wife, and his dogs were unharmed.

Imagine losing all of your worldly possessions except for whatever you may have haphazardly thrown in a suitcase two weeks ago. For your mind not to reel at that concept constitutes proof that you’ve already joined a monastery and renounced all trappings of the material world, in which case what the hell are you doing here?

Me, I’m a fairly stuff-heavy guy. Books, music, computer gear, artwork, memorabilia, photos, clothing — I’ve crammed my tiny Manhattan apartment with enough of that stuff to fill a place four times the size, and somehow I convinced my girlfriend to shoehorn herself and her belongings alongside of me. Our (ok, my) unholy but rather well-organized (cough) collection of objects is testament to thousands of individual decisions that I can’t, under my present circumstances, imagine living without some of this crap. Sure, it’s not 1987 now, but who knows when somebody will refer to a Bill James article in the ’87 Abstract?

I’m babbling about myself, but that’s because I don’t really know what to say about Christian. I can only begin to fathom his loss, hope that no one he loves was injured or worse in the fire, and wish him the best of luck in putting the pieces back together. I would hope and suspect that he’s got homeowner’s insurance, which will cover the bulk of this financially, but with a deductible that’s some percentage of a mortgage, that’s still a big financial hit. Who can replace the memories that one’s possessions hold? To say nothing of the possibility that he may have lost a good chunk of everything he’s ever written if he had a computer there (from now on, I’m storing some backup disks offsite).

Over the past two years, Ruz’s site has meant a lot to me — that little Pitchers and Catchers countdown he had going in the upper left corner last winter did more to keep me sane than all the Peter Gammons columns in the world, and the rest of the site is pretty kick-ass as well. Furthermore, Christian’s support has meant a lot to this site; he’s plugged my column plenty of times, and his technical facility in the vagaries of RSS helped me to expand my audience considerably. Along with countless other bloggers out there, I owe him some thanks, and my heart goes out to him and his family during this difficult time.

Ruz already has a means of accepting donations to support his weblog via PayPal. If you’re reading this, I ask you to consider digging a little something out of your wallet. It’s not going to bring his home or his possessions back, but it will remind him that he’s got a lot of people pulling for him, and taken altogether, the money might be enough to replace an item that really meant something to him.

Three days after letting manager Grady Little walk, the Boston Red Sox are in the headlines for trying to usher another key member of their 2003 Wild Card team to the outskirts of town. The Sox placed slugging leftfielder Manny Ramirez on irrevocable waivers on Wednesday, meaning that any team can claim him without costing themsleves another player or worrying that the Sox will pull him back.

The catch, of course, is money; claim him and you owe bigtime. Ramirez will earn $101.5 million over the next five years — $20.5 mil next year, second only to Alex Rodriguez — and the Sox have clearly decided that’s money better spent on staples such as pitching, defense, and one-year contracts to the likes of David Ortiz, who produced 31 homers, 101 RBI and a .961 OPS for the low price of $1.25 million. Or perhaps the Sox plan to spend their no-Manny mad money on Pedro Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra, both of whom are free agents after next season, and both of who figure to cause plenty of grief until Theo Epstein and company show them proper “respect” in the form of contract extensions.

Ramirez hit .325 with 37 homers, 104 RBI and a 1.014 OPS, terrific numbers right in line with his career production. But the 8-year, $160 million contract to which he was signed by the Dan Duquette regime is a relic. That deal came at a time when baseball salaries looked to be escalating ever higher, and via some combination of collusion, common sense and the Collective Bargaining Agreement, that has not been the case. As good as he is, he’s not worth that kind of coin, a defensive liability now on the dark side of 30 (he’ll be 32 next May).

Speaking of the dark side, at times Manny exists on his own planet, acting at best like an airhead and at worst like a selfish little brat. As an ESPN report recounts:

He was benched by Little late this season after he missed a crucial series against the Yankees with a sore throat and fever, yet managed to pull himself out of bed to reminisce with New York infielder Enrique Wilson about their days in Cleveland.

Then Ramirez didn’t show up for an appointment with the team doctor, and when he joined the club the next day he sat on the bench but said he was “too weak” to pinch-hit.

And in a game at Yankee Stadium in September, the absent-minded Ramirez tossed the ball into the stands after making a nice catch, thinking there were three outs when there were only two.

According to a report in the Providence Journal, those actions by Ramirez set off internal discussions by the club to deal him this off-season, even though the Red Sox would likely have to pay much of the remaining money owed Ramirez.

That doesn’t even touch on Ramirez’s cowardice in Game Three of the ALCS, when a high fastball over the plate from Roger Clemens induced the hotairhead to charge the mound, emptying both benches. Put a ten-cent head atop a twenty million dollar hitter and you have Manny Ramirez.

Now, there simply aren’t too many teams out there willing to take on a $20 million salary; the Yankees might be the only team with the financial wherewithal to do so. ESPN’s Rob Neyer speculates that the timing of this maneuver is crucial because George Steinbrenner “is never going to be more frustrated and more aggressive than he is right now.” But according to ESPN’s Buster Olney, the Boss ain’t bitin':

The New York Yankees have no interest in placing a waiver claim on Boston Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez, according to a baseball executive who has had contact with a high-ranking member of the team’s front office Thursday…

The Yankees are aware, according to the executive, that if they claimed Ramirez, the Yankees could essentially create circumstances that would lead to the departure of pitcher Andy Pettitte, who is eligible for free agency this offseason. If the Yankees relieved Boston of Ramirez and the accompanying financial burden, the Red Sox could then turn around and make a deal with the Houston Astros — perhaps for expensive reliever Billy Wagner — and free up payroll for the Astros to sign Pettitte, whose preference may be to return to his home in Texas…

Adding Ramirez also would throw another designated hitter candidate onto the roster loaded with aging sluggers. There is some question about how much longer [Bernie] Williams and [Jason] Giambi could play in the field, because of their deteriorating physical conditions.

The Yanks have obligations — big contracts to Williams, Giambi, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and Mike Mussina, some of which are already biting them in the ass. They don’t need another. But back to Boston for a moment. As my pal Nick notes, one reason the Sox may be attempting to rid themselves of Manny is their managerial vacancy. Theo and company seem set on a manager who will see things their sabermetrically inclined way, and may tap a relatively inexperienced skipper willing to do their bidding. Pre-emptively ridding themselves of one of the new manager’s potential headaches may make the job a little easier, though most skips, if asked, would probably put up with those kind of numbers.

Before anyone weeps for Manny (Bueller? Anyone?), Peter Gammons reports that the feeling between Ramirez and the Sox is mutual:

Ramirez talked to the club at the end of the season and expressed that while he likes the Red Sox and Boston, he wouldn’t mind seeing what there was in a trade, with his home (New York) an enticing option…

When Ramirez talked to Red Sox officials, they offered to let him out of his contract so he could become a free agent. Obviously he declined, as agent Jeff Moorad knows that the current market might bring four years, $50-60 million, in contrast to the five years, $100 million on his existing deal.

O, fragile equilibrium of unhappiness, sweet harbinger of a winter of discontent in New England, how I cherish thee at a time like this. Would that such feelings of schadenfreude could warm me until Pitchers and Catchers.

Manny Ramirez isn’t simply one of the best hitters in the game. He’s one of the best hitters in the history of baseball. With his career OPS 1.010, Ramirez is in the all-time top 10 with guys like Ruth, Gehrig, Williams, Foxx, Bonds, Greenberg, Hornsby, and Todd Helton. Now, the latter’s presence on the list should clue you into the fact that adjustments need to be made to account for ballpark and era, so if we turn to the career leaders in OPS+, Manny ranks in the Top 20, third among active players behind Bonds and Frank Thomas. That list (which hasn’t been updated to include 2003 yet) is still biased because sooner or later Manny’s going to decline the way even superstars do. Even so, he’s still one of the best hitters the game has seen. But his combination of price tag and attitude is too much for the Boston Red Sox and it’s too much for the New York Yankees. The rest of the league isn’t banging down the door either.

• • •

As Baseball Prospectus‘ Dayn Perry points out, prescriptions to improve the New York Yankees after a season in which they don’t win are “one of the hoariest media traditions known to humankind.” That said, Perry’s prescription is worth a gander, as are those of Alex Belth, Larry Mahnken and Bryan Smith over at Bryan’s Wait ‘Til Next Year blog (which is long overdue for my attention). I won’t go into the details or merits of any of them — I gots my own plan, which will come in due time, probably between those two popular turkey dinners. I’m going to have lots of time on my hands, or hand… but that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say it looks as though we’re all going to get real acquainted with Mr. Arthroscope. Will Carroll, I’m headed your way…

Mr. Belth has been a busy man lately. He’s got a fantastic interview with writer and former pitcher Pat Jordan at Bronx Banter. Jordan was a Milwaukee Braves farmhand in the late ’50s and early ’60s who, for want of a better term “went Ankiel,” derailing a promising career but providing him with a springboard to a new one. I’ve covered all of this before.

In the interview, which was done late this summer, Jordan offers his opinions on several pitchers, gets off a good Joe Torre tale, and generally sounds like a guy with whom you’d love to knock back a few beers while talkin’ ball. I’ve got his A Nice Tuesday in my on-deck circle after I finish that Koufax bio (which is excellent), and I’m looking forward to it.

I waited until virtually the last minute to fill out my ballots at the Internet Baseball Awards this year, bleary-eyed from staying up to watch and then write about so many exciting ballgames. As a citizen of the online baseball community as well as the sheriff of this humble little outpost, I feel duty-bound to participate in the IBA, even if the rules are slightly different from those the Base Ball Writers Association of America follows for the “official” awards. BBWAA participants have to send their ballots off by the end of the regular season, while we schlubs had an extra two weeks to point and click — two frenzied weeks of letting October baseball saturate our brains with two or three games a day. Now I understand exactly why the BBWAA does things the way they do.

Despite the late date, I tried to prevent any October bias from seeping into my judgement. That wasn’t easy, especially with the Red Sox-Yankees series having boiled over only 48 hours before I cast my vote. But while I wouldn’t piss on Manny Ramirez or Pedro Martinez if they were on fire, I did include them on the relevant ballots.

As I’ve said before in discussing my AL MVP choice, when it comes to voting on the MVP, playing for a team that makes the postseason isn’t a requirement, but playing for a contender is. And while that isn’t necessarily a requirement for the other awards, it did play a part in a couple of cases.

AL MVP: 1. Jorge Posada 2. Carlos Delgado 3. Manny Ramirez 4. Carlos Beltran 5. Bret Boone 6. Alex Rodriguez 7. Alfonso Soriano 8. Jason Giambi 9. Miguel Tejada 10. David Ortiz. This one I discussed already. Posada was a rock for the Yanks, and his emergence as a leader elevated him above his teammates, who had flawed years that still merited recognition. Delgado and Rodriguez were docked for playing on noncontenders, Boone held partially accountable for the Mariners’ fade. Manny’s disappearing act and the team’s response to it spoke volumes. Ortiz gets a token nod because he was a Yankee wrecking machine, looking all-world every time I saw him swing a bat.

AL Cy Young: 1. Roy Halladay 2. Esteban Loaiza 3. Tim Hudson 4. Pedro Martinez 5. Mike Mussina. Halladay won this down the stretch, with a 5-1, 1.46 ERA September, while Loaiza went 3-3 with a 5.30 ERA. Loaiza still posted a lower ERA, 2.90 to 3.25, but Doc had 40 more innings pitched, and that counts for something, as does his 6.4 K/W ratio and the fact that I had Loaiza on my freakin’ HACKING MASS team, destroying my chances there (or at least indicating how shocked I was at his improvement). Hudson, at 240 innings with a 2.70 ERA, was right in the mix as well, with the lower strikeout total costing him a bit. Martinez was impressive — when he pitched. Moose was solid, but clearly behind all of these guys.

AL Manager of the Year: 1. Tony Pena 2. Grady Little 3. Ken Macha. Raise your hand if you thought K.C. was going anywhere but deeper into the AL Central cellar this year. Little did an impressive job with the Boston clubhouse, but we all know it ended in tears. Had I let my October bias creep in, I would have never voted for Macha.

AL Rookie of the Year: 1. Angel Berroa 2. Hideki Matsui 3. Mike Macdougal. Matsui’s RBI totals and situational hitting ability were the most impressive things about his overblown season. Berroa was a real reason for K.C.s sudden improvement. Macdougal was another one, even with the high ERA. I could have flipped a coin between him and Cleveland outfielder Jody Gerut, who was a nice surprise.

NL MVP: 1. Barry Bonds 2. Albert Pujols 3. Javy Lopez 4. Gary Sheffield 5. Jim Thome 6. Todd Helton 7. Edgar Renteria 8. Richie Sexson 9. Marcus Giles 10. Lance Berkman. Even in a heartbreaking season for him personally, when Barry played, he was godlike. Pujols had an incredible year that would have been MVP in just about any season lacking a Ruth or a Bonds. Lopez, Sheffield and Giles made the Braves into an offensive juggernaut. Renteria would get a lot more ink if he played in the AL. Helton, Sexson, Thome — these guys just crush a lot.

NL Cy Young: 1. Mark Prior 2. Jason Schmidt 3. Eric Gagne 4. Kevin Brown 5. Kerry Wood. Gagne’s pristine season was worthy of a spot, but not the top spot here. Prior was the real deal, and Schmidt’s season looks all the more impressive knowing that he was less than 100%. Brown had a nice comeback, Wood lotsa K’s.

NL Rookie of the Year: 1. Dontrelle Willis 2. Brandon Webb 3. Scott Podsednik. Willis gets the nod here not only for helping to turn around the Marlins at a time when they really needed it, but for injecting some Fernandomania-style buzz as well. As rookies go, style points count in my book.

NL Manager of the Year: 1. Jack McKeon 2. Felipe Alou 3. Frank Robinson. McKeon was a no-brainer the moment the Fish made the playoffs, though Alou showed that it wasn’t just Dusty Baker’s magic which took the Giants to the 2002 World Series. Baker did a decent job in Chicago, but I think overusage of his young starters will have long-term consequences, and so I give the nod to Robby for keeping the Expos above water in a season they had to cross lots of it.

So there’s one man’s ballot. Taking a look back at my ill-conceived award predictions from April, none of them match my top choices on their respective ballots, and only the Matsui one (which I don’t even agree with anymore) has a hope of actually being right, unless this really is A-Rod’s year. I had Berkman as NL MVP, Randy Johnson and one of the A’s Big Three as the Cys, and Marlon Byrd as NL rookie. No manager picks, fortunately. Scanning my team performance predictions, I got all of the AL playoff participants correct, underestimated the Royals (duh), overestimated the Angels and the Indians, and that was about it. The NL was a disaster, however; I didn’t get a single postseason team correct (Phils, Astros, D-Backs plus the Dodgers), and had the Marlins in last place. That A’s-Phils World Series never showed up either, due in part because the Phils never did act out their obvious desire to lynch Larry Bowa (which I predicted). Ah, wait ’til next year…

• • •

HACKING MASS, for those of you unacquainted with it, is a contest sponsored by Baseball Prospectus which stands for “Huckabay’s Annual Call to Keep Immobility Next to Godliness: Maximus Aggregatus Stiffisimus Sensire.” Um-kay… the idea is to choose a team of the worst performers by accumulating ESPN (Exuded Stiff Points, Net), which are produced by the formulas (.8-OPS)*PA for hitters and (ERA-4)*IP/3 for pitchers.

My choice of Loaiza was based on his 5.71 ERA in 150+ innings last season — an inefficient inning-eating machine, I thought. But Loaiza’s emergence this year derailed any chance I had, because via the ESPN formula he was tied for the 25th best player in the majors with Aubrey Huff and Bill Mueller at -82 points. I wasn’t the only one sucked in by Esteban’s potential suckitude, however — he was the 18th most popular player chosen. Overall I finished 505th out of 927, a bit below the middle of the pack, though my score of 339 was within a point of the average team. Stalwarts such as Cesar Itzuris (120 ESPN), Rey Sanchez (84) and Einar Diaz (59) were offset by moderate comebacks from Jeromy Burnitz (8), Vinny Castilla (16) and Travis Lee (-4). What can I say, I suck at picking those who suck?

One of the comments in my previous piece discussing Grady Little’s firing led me to do some thinking about the right man for the now-vacant Boston job. Of all the names mentioned, there’s one — as yet unmentioned by the mainstream media — who scares the hell out of me as Red Sox manager.

He’s a guy who fielded competitive team after competitive team while building a reputation as a player’s manager. He was way ahead of the curve, stathead-wise, in part because he learned the game while playing for another proto-stathead. He was reading Baseball Abstract back before the Internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore’s beady eyes.

He might have a hard time taking orders from a 29-year-old GM, but his philosophy wouldn’t be too far out of line, and he’d probably do a better job of selling it to the players than anybody else. He’s one tough bastard who wouldn’t get pushed around by a diva superstar.

He’s a guy that, if I were a Red Sox fan, I’d be sneaking into Fenway Park to spray-paint his name in 30-foot high letters on the Green Monster to send a message to Epstein/Henry/Douchino. Any guesses yet?

Boston fans might have a hard time accepting him because he managed a team that caused them possibly the greatest pain they’ve ever felt (no, not Don Zimmer). And he might not want to get back into managing in the first place. But if you got Bill James to go after him, as an admirer of his work, he’d probably be flattered enough to accept the position.

You should have the name by now, especially if you’re a Boston fan. But if you’re not, I’ll give you one more hint: he’s the last guy to beat a Joe Torre team for the AL East title, and his reward for winning AL Manager of the Year was a pink slip.

I’m tallking about Davey Johnson. The thought of him in a Red Sox uniform might keep me awake at night.