FIRE JOE MORGAN

We might as well get to this. Yes, the first entry in Murray Chass' blog, a blog written by a professional sportswriter and and semi-professional blogophobe, needs a little editing ("Whatever impact honmefield [sic] advantage has").

The most glaring error in logic-slash-sanity, though, occurs two-thirds of the way through:

One way would be to reward [with home field advantage] the team with the better won-lost record. But that idea wouldn’t work logistically. Baseball can’t wait until days or even a week before the World Series is scheduled to start to determine where Series game will be played. Airlines and hotels don’t work that way.

Unless all of professional baseball is actually one long kabuki play, I'm pretty sure that at no point in history has anyone known where the World Series will be played until the winners of the two leagues have been determined (in modern times, that means waiting until the League Championship Series are finished). As reader Rob points out, last year "the host of World Series game one wasn't known until 11:33 PM on October 21st when the Red Sox finished off the Indians. Game one of the World Series was played on October 24th."

And yet those diabolical airlines and hotels, true gatekeepers of baseball's ultimate prize, acquiesced and let the Rockies fly to and stay in the city of Boston. Weird how modern society works, isn't it?

Someone may have even used a computer to book those flights and hotels.

*** UPDATE ***

Reader Chris contributes the following:

While I loathe having to defend Murray Chass, even a little, as someone who works in baseball, I can tell you that his point about booking hotels and flights is actually sort of right.

What reporters and others do is reserve hotels and flights for the four (or two, if they wait until the LCS starts) possible cities in each league for the dates that are already set based on the All-Star outcome. That's a lot better than having to do it for eight (or, uh, four, if you wait) for a whole host of possible combinations.

Thanks, Chris. I'm also hearing that the reason the NBA and NHL can use home-court/ice advantage in their playoffs is that they simply don't use as many hotel rooms overall compared to the World Series, so it's a little easier logistically.

*** UPDATE TO THE UPDATE ***

This is riveting stuff for some of you guys, so I'll print this rebuttal to Chris, which comes from Timothy.

MLB wouldn't have to book for 4 or 8 cities if they give it to the team with the best record. This is because, obviously, you can eliminate the team with the worst record from having home field. So, if they wait until the LCS, they would have to book in 3 cities instead of 2. If they do it before the LDS, they would book in 7 cities as opposed to 4. I doubt they do it before the LCS though, for two reasons:

1. The LCS typically runs almost 2 weeks, so doing it before this is probably enough time

2. If you book before the LDS, you would have to book several different cities for the LCS, then also several cities for the World Series to account for all possible combinations. Even in their current system, I doubt they do this.

So, presuming they wait until the outcome of the LDS to be final, booking 3 cities instead of 2 is a small inconvenience to have a better system in place for the team with the best record to get 4 games at home.

*** THE "WILL THIS BE THE LAST UPDATE?" UPDATE ***

From reader Matty:

As the director of reservations in an MLB city, and former director at a hotel that was the contractual home of MLB visiting teams in Chicago, I have SOME insight here (also, I was here both when the White Sox won the World Series, and the Cubs went to the playoffs on the last 2 occasions, so I’ve worked the situation). Every MLB city has a contracted “home” hotel for visiting teams. The contracts contain language that force the hotel to accommodate teams during the playoffs. Reservations are not a concern for them.

The media, does, indeed, make “speculative” reservations – but only a few days in advance. For instance, when the Cubs took a 3-1 lead on the Marlins, we had a huge spike in press reservations. After the Bartman game, roughly half of these cancelled. BUT, we didn’t get the big spike until the Cubs went up 3-1.

Labels: murray chass

A: It's still a blog. Its author is just in denial.

I felt a lot better about giving the Flooky and the Beans guy a boost in traffic, but I feel like it's our duty to report the following news: Murray Chass has started a blog. It's about shodo, the ancient Japanese art of calligraphy. Well, not really. Primarily, so far it seems to be a blog about hating blogs. At least that's what the very first words of its mission statement proclaim:

This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs.

Let me translate that into confusing ChassOrwellian-speak:

This is a blog for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the blog is not a fan of blogs.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This blog is not a blog. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charlie Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.”

[shaking fist] You hear that, James Fallows, Malcolm Gladwell, and Murray Chass? I hate what you do. I hate it because of what it's called. It sounds funny. I hate it because there are some bad blogs. Meanwhile, there has never been a bad newspaper column, book, magazine, painting, mobile, or stele. Those forms of expression are fine.

Keep watching the space at http://www.murraychass.com/about.php to receive updates as to which types of media are acceptable. (Conundrum: http://www.murraychass.com/about.php has recently ruled that websites are now, in fact, unacceptable. So should you visit again? It's up to you.)

He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.

He was alone, watching in his living room, but he remained convinced that the television machine had an applause input microphone (A.I.M.) that would allow Mr. Bissinger to hear his ovation. No amount of research on the nonexistence of the A.I.M. would convince him otherwise.

Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?

I, for one, am sick of wrongheaded writers telling me I love to hate them when in fact I hate to hate them. A note to Baylessian contrarians: you should take no joy in being so wrong about something that throngs of people rise up as one to denounce you. This should not be what it means to be a writer. When thousands of people write you angry emails about something you said or wrote that was wrong, you should not shrug your shoulders and say, "I must be doing something right if I got so many people interested!" No, sir. Sir, no. You were wrong. That is the end of the story. You were so wrong you made people angry. There is no glory in your profound wrongitude. Please stop doing this.

Otherwise, this site will most likely appeal primarily to older fans whose interest in good old baseball is largely ignored in this day of young bloggers who know it all,

Ignored? I would argue that no matter what kind of baseball fan you are, there is more baseball writing, research, opinion, and debate than there ever has been in the sport's history. Verducci is still writing some excellent, longer pieces for Sports Illustrated. Gammons writes a thing or three every week. Your man Buzz is still kicking around. Reilly, if you like his sort of thing, just signed an 18-year, $400-million deal, mainly (we hope) for writing. Every time I write a post, a Roger Angell column does not disappear from this plane of reality.

and new- fangled statistics (VORP, for one excuse-me example),

May I remind people that in this fateful piece for the New York Times, Murray Chass wrote "To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense" and "For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out." and "Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know."

So it is possible -- no, probable -- no, certain -- that Murray Chass still does not know what VORP means, and yet hates it with every fiber of his wizened being. This is the equivalent of a person who's lived in Muncie, Indiana his whole life hating a specific dish in a restaurant in Doha, Qatar.

which are drowning the game in numbers and making people forget that human beings, not numbers, play the games.

February 27, 2007, New York Times: "People play baseball. Numbers don’t."

Maybe Murray Chass just doesn't have that much more to say. That's okay. He's had a long, storied career. He's won awards. He was inducted, as he tells us in his biography, "into the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh." But there's no need, Murray, to spit such vitriol at new ways of enjoying sports simply because you aren't interested in them.

E-mail comments are also invited, but visitors to the site are asked to omit the obscenities.

Remember, this is a man who several paragraphs earlier informed us that he "heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show." Bissinger began his applause-worthy, highly informed, well-reasoned, level-headed argument by telling the gentleman next to him "I really think you're full of shit."

“I have spent my professional life in the print world, where obscenities don’t see the light of day,” Chass said. “They will remain in the dark here as well. It will be a good test for bloggers and Red Sox fans to see if they can control themselves.”

"The time for obscenities is on national pay cable television, where a grown man and father of three can ambush an unsuspecting young writer with a torrent of spittle-accompanied expletives, thoughtlessly and carelessly excoriating an entire medium without retribution or moderation from the host. That is where obscenities belong, and that is where I applaud them. Shouted at other people, on television."

Mr. Chass: you're angry at nomenclature. Really. Ideas are ideas. Writing is writing. By starting this blog, you're acknowledging as much. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Labels: murray chass

Did we contribute, in some minuscule, 0.000000001% way to Murray Chass allegedly being bought out by the New York Times? The Big Lead is reporting Chass' impending departure. The news, of course, will take a few days to reach Murray, as he depends solely on the Pony Express for communication (the Postal Service, he maintains, is a passing fad that he won't abide).

I'm really torn. Should I feel bad about this? Or terrific?

To be honest, I'm already mourning the loss of hundreds of future statphobic-fish-in-a-barrel posts. If this news is true, FJM has lost a goldmine. (The VORPies flag flies at half mast today.)

Labels: murray chass

... and I use it to bludgeon him to death.

Look, the column is no good. Boring, stale, rehashed -- and the big revelation is an allegation by an anonymous source that gasp! the Red Sox wanted to keep Daisuke Matsuzaka away from the Yankees.

Well, no shit.

My issue is with this paragraph, which appears in an odd little below-the-dot addendum at the end of the piece:

Varitek was speaking before the Red Sox abandoned their plan to make Jonathan Papelbon a starter and restored him to the closer role he filled so capably for most of last season. But his exit from the starting rotation presumably weakens it. It now has two 40-year-olds, one of whom, Tim Wakefield, had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs.

Read that last sentence again. According to Murray Chass, Tim Wakefield was (okay, "might have" been) the reason the Red Sox didn't make the playoffs last year. This is sort of like blaming Azerbaijan for fucking up the war in Iraq, except a million times more egregious and important and serious.

Mr. Chass, let me explain to you how you go about not writing a sentence like that. I know you don't cotton to VORP or WARP or people who believe, as I do, that the game of baseball is played by animatronic numbers swinging bats and fielding balls. Unfortunately, this method involves a computer, which you may have to purchase, and the Internet, which you may have to look up in a dictionary and then dismiss as a fad.

Alternatively, you could probably find this information at the library with your knowledge of card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal Classification System. It would only take several more hours and ten times the work.

First, find last year's baseball standings. You will discover that the Red Sox finished eleven games behind the AL East champion Yankees and nine games behind the Wild Card Tigers. So we'll go with nine games as the ground the Sox needed to make up to reach the playoffs.

Now look up Tim Wakefield. Yahoo (don't worry about what that is) provides a record of all of the games he pitched in last year. Huh. Look at that. In 23 games started by Wakefield, the Red Sox went 11-12.

Your claim, remember, is that "Tim Wakefield had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs."

11-12. Nine games out. So Tim Wakefield would've had to have willed his team to go 20-3 in his games he started in order for them to even pull into a tie with the Tigers.

I think it's pretty fair to blame him for that.

---

I'm jumping all over Chass for a minor mistake in a minor piece written before the season has even started. But I think it's a minor mistake that reflects either carelessness (if you're willing to be charitable) or a fundamental misunderstanding of very basic statistics and player value. It's like Chass saw on a piece of paper that Wakefield went 7-11 and decided he had a terrible year because hey, that's losing and losing is bad. The year before he went 16-12. That's winning! There you have it: Tim Wakefield, 2006 goat.

Here's the thing: Wakefield may have finished 16-12, but in games Wakefield started in 2005, the Red Sox went 17-16. That's basically .500. Which is basically what they did in his starts in 2006. Because that's what Tim Wakefield gives you -- league-average ERA and hopefully, lots of innings. (His last three ERA+ years have looked like this: 100, 106, 100.)

Wakefield did miss starts last year, and that hurt the Red Sox, but keep in mind that that's not what Chass is saying. No: he is saying that 7-11 (losing!) somehow damned the Red Sox to that ignominious third place finish.

See, being afraid of numbers and resistant to change and unwilling to learn new things doesn't just make you look like a sad, anachronistic old kook. It can actually hurt your writing in concrete, demonstrable ways. It can make you assert things that with an ounce of research can be shown to be patently ridiculous.

I am beginning to think that Murray Chass could improve as a sportswriter.

Labels: murray chass, red sox, tim wakefield

I would guess that something like ninety percent of people still consume all of their sportswriting in the form of newspapers. (I mean, factor in old people and casual fans, right?) They wake up in the morning, pour themselves some orange juice, sit down and read drivel like this willfully uninformed screed from cantakerous, crotchety Murray Chass.

As Season Approaches, Some Topics Should Be Off Limits

Things I don’t want to read or hear about anymore:

Let's cut to the juicy part.

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.

"New age" is touchy-feely. New age is spiritual. New age is intangible. VORP, Mr. Chass, is not new age. It may be relatively new, but it is not new age. It is the opposite of new age. It is an attempt to quantify, to measure, to analyze. You know, a more scientific approach to knowledge. Science -- that thing that humans do to find out more about the world around them. Not new age -- a fake thing that involves pan flutes and rubbing crystals on your body.

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

You can feel the sneer curling on his face as he writes "electronic publication" with a quill pen in Olde English, then rolls up the parchment and sends it on its three-day horseback journey to his publisher, Lord Sulzberger, Jr.

He's kidding about the e-mail of course. He doesn't have an "e-mail address." E-mail is for new age wack jobs.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense.

Sir. Sir. You're still using "new age" incorrectly. Excuse me, sir?

(Murray Chass ignores me and continues brushing his teeth with a small rubber fish.)

For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out.

That's cool. You're just a baseball writer for the fucking New York fucking Times. Thanks for caring about your fucking job so much you won't type "define:vorp" into Google, hit return, and then read the literally two sentences that result. I just did it ten times in the last three seconds. You're right, though: I guess those are "great lengths" for a 479-year-old member of the tribe of living undead.

I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Those colleagues:

Tim McCarver
Branch Rickey
Abner Doubleday
Alexander Joy Cartwright
Scoop Jackson
Herodotus
John Kruk

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

If you read this paragraph again, you'll find that it doesn't really contain an argument in any sense of the word. Since when are baseball statistics supposed to be "thrilling"? How thrilling is ERA, a thing you presmuably think is fine? And you still don't know what VORP means, even after writing about it in a professional column in a professional newspaper, professionally?

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative.

In their parents' basements, not getting a date for prom, wearing nerd glasses and playing the violin. Even at age 9,354, Murray gets a thrill out of nailing these dorks. Good luck getting laid, dorks! Gotcha!

But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

Murray Chass: New age new age new age new age the end. My column's done!

Nurse: Very good, Murray! We're going out into the garden now for some fresh air. The garden. Won't that be fun?

Saying that VORP undermines "enjoyment" and the "human factor" is like creationists saying that evolution takes away the "wonder" and "mystery" of the universe. It doesn't. It makes it awesomer.

People play baseball. Numbers don’t.

I actually believe that goofy, anthropomorphic numbers with arms and legs and silly oversize white gloves play all of the games we know of in what we call professional baseball. Call me crazy, but that is what I believe.

Murray Chass: proof that there is still a reason we behave like true dickheads on this site.

Labels: mother's basement, murray chass, new age, vorp

Let the knee-jerk overreaction to a four-game series (Really, we're talking about two bad losses. Two.) continue. Murray Chass knows why the Yankees haven't won a championship in six years: Mike Mussina.

Nothing against Mike Mussina, but he is the symbol of the Yankees’ failure to win the World Series the last six years. If George Steinbrenner is seeking a scapegoat, make it Mussina.

First off, the article begins "Nothing against Mike Mussina," but the very next sentence basically says, "Hey, fuck you, Mike Mussina." And pretty much the whole thing is one big Mussina-bash. But nothing against you, Mike.

Let's get to the numbers. Reader Pandrew has done some of the legwork for us.

This is what Mike Mussina has done since 2001:

W/L - 92-53
ERA - 3.80 (#1 among Yankees' starters since 2001, minimum 400 IP)
WHIP - 1.179 (#1)
K/BB - 4.11 (#1)
IP/GS - 6.42
K/9 - 7.77 (#3 behind Clemens (8.80) and Johnson ( 8.01))

Thanks, Pandrew. In Murray Chass' world, these concrete, objective results don't matter at all.

I think Murray Chass lives in a Jules Verne-style whimsically constructed aboveground submarine.

Mussina joined the Yankees as a free agent six years ago. The only other players who have been with the team that long have a bunch of World Series rings: Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada.

This is a true fact. Those other four players were around a little longer, so they got those rings. What's your point?

Mussina is the ringleader of the anti-World Series champions: Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, Kyle Farnsworth.

From everything I've seen and read about the Yankees, Mussina is not a ringleader in any discernible way. He's just a guy who shows up every so often and pitches and gives you an above-average ERA. Also, Gary Sheffield, Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson and Johnny Damon have World Series rings.

And you suddenly think Hideki Matsui is some sort of cancerous loser? Harsh, dude. He seems to be trying to me.

Mussina, like some players on that list, is a pitcher, and the lack of strong pitching has undermined the Yankees’ chances of winning the World Series.

In spite of Mike Mussina's general positive contributions, yes.

Mussina pitched his division series game against the Tigers just well enough to lose.

I hate -- hate hate hate -- that meaningless cliche. We've gone over this before. This is a dumb, equally meaningless thought experiment, but bear with me. Mussina allowed four runs through seven innings. Not great, but let's assume for one second that Mussina decided, hey, I don't really care about pitching excellence today. I'm going to mail it in and just hope my team scores enough to win. I, Mike Mussina, am going to pitch just well enough to win. Mike pulls up the Yahoo! MLB team stats page and clicks to sort the teams by runs scored. Well, what do you know? My boys the Yankees are first! Bully for them. They scored 930 runs this year. Mike goes to Google and enters 930/162 into the search field, and he finds out that the Yankees averaged 5.74074074 runs per game this year. So Mike figures, I go seven innings, give up four runs, let Farnsy cough up another one in the eighth, and we still win by 0.74074074 runs! I'm a hero!

What he does not do: give up six runs, which would, on an average Yankee day, be just good enough to lose. (Hypothetical Mike Mussina doesn't care who the opposing pitcher is. Hypothetical Mike Mussina isn't much of a sabermetrician.)

A genuinely top-notch pitcher finds a way to win. Mussina finds a way to lose.

Really? Is that why he's 239-134 in his career with a 3.63 ERA?

The outcome of the game last week left him with a 7-8 postseason record, indicating he is not the pitcher to come up big when something big is needed.

I forgot. The playoffs are the only true Measure of a Man. Real Men come up big. They Find a Way to Win. I hate when people Capitalize Things to Emphasize Them.

(In the 21 postseason games before this year, Mike Mussina posted a 3.30 ERA, a third of a run better than his regular season mark.)

Chien-Ming Wang, playing his first full season in the major leagues, was the Yankees’ only reliable starter this season, and he came through again in the playoff opener.

Define "reliable." In the Murray-Chass Oxford-Webster Collegiate dictionary, reliable is defined as Asian.

(Mike Mussina had a better ERA, WHIP, K/BB, K/9, and Whiteness Ratio than Chien-Ming Wang this year. He spoke marginally better English.)

That left Wright as the pitcher to put his finger in the dike.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Finger in the dike.

Labels: mike mussina, murray chass, yankees

This isn't even criticism. I just thought it was funny. This guy Murray Chass wrote another article for some newspaper, and I'm not totally sure about this, but I think he might be old. Like really old. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying.

This the title of his column:

Heavens to Murgatroyd: Mets Are Hurting

Already don't know what he's talking about? I don't really blame you. "Heavens to Murgatroyd" is one of Snagglepuss's catch phrases. That's right. Snagglepuss, the animated anthropomorphic pink mountain lion created in 1959. Some may argue that Snagglepuss is an evergreen character (Bugs Bunny is like twenty years older), but honestly, when was the last time you and your buddies threw around a "Heavens to Murgatroyd" while watching the game?

Better still, I'm 90% sure Chass is actually referring to the original use of "Heavens to Murgatroyd" -- you know what I'm about to say ... Bert Lahr, Meet the People, 1944. A movie you'd have to be over 70 to have seen in the theaters.

So that's the title. Maybe he gets fresher in the actual article? I bet he'll break out a T.I. lyric or something.

“What a revoltin’ development,” Jimmy Durante used to say.

First line. Jimmy Durante. Birthdate: February 10, 1893. 1893.

“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Stanley,” Oliver Hardy used to say to his partner, Stan Laurel.

Very next line. Laurel and Hardy. Birthdates: June 16, 1890 and January 18, 1892.

Phenomenal. Murray's perfectly within his rights to write about 1920's pop culture. And of course, I know who Snagglepuss, Jimmy Durante, and Laurel and Hardy are. But taken all together, one right after the other ... it's simply magical. It's just never been clearer that he's a billion years old.

And then there's this:

Correction: Sept. 30, 2006

The On Baseball column yesterday about the Mets’ postseason chances without pitcher Pedro Martínez misattributed the quotation, “What a revoltin’ development.” It was Chester A. Riley’s catchphrase in “The Life of Riley,” a sitcom in the 1950’s, not Jimmy Durante’s.

Murray Chass is so old he can't keep his 50-year-old references straight. And re-read that paragraph again. What the hell is a reference to Chester A. Riley in "The Life of Riley" doing in an article about Pedro Martinez and the Mets in 2006?!

Labels: heavens to murgatroyd, mets, murray chass

How old do you think Murray Chass is? It turns out if you look at his Wikipedia page, you can figure out that he's around 68, which is way off from my guess of 5.348 x 10^7. Although you can never rule out the possibility that Murray himself edited his page to say that he graduated from Pitt in 1960 instead of 5.348 x 10^7 B.C.

Anyway, Chass has fired up his bellows-powered typewriter to throw some more not-so-subtle jabs at his least favorite assemblage of baseball players, the Boston Red Sox. The result is not so much a Celizic-style disaster as an overwrought, underthought, giant sneer of a piece. Basically, par for the Chass course.

Ahem.

The Boston Red Sox are a poor excuse for a good baseball team.

Zing!

A less biased sentence would read: The Boston Red Sox are a good baseball team, tied for third in the AL and fourth in all of baseball. They trail the Yankees, a team with -- and no, we can't harp on this enough -- a payroll more than $74 million greater than theirs, by two games.

Digression: I know, I know. What right do Red Sox fans have to complain about payroll? John Henry is as rich as Croesus. (Sorry, Murray Chass snuck onto my laptop and wrote that last sentence.) But let me insert here a snippet of an email I wrote in reply to a reader who asked me that very same question:

Both the Yankees and the Red Sox spend more money than other teams. However, the difference between the pre-Abreu Yankees' payroll and the Red Sox' payroll is about $74 million. Check it out here.

Basically, the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox is greater than the difference between the Red Sox and the Royals or the Pirates.

Weird, huh?

End of digression.

Wait, wait. Not the end. As dak points out often, we should embrace the Yankees' ability to pay whatever they want to their players. We're not against that. They should do whatever they can to put the best team on the field. We're fine with that. In fact, let me formally retract that sentence where I justify the Red Sox trailing the Yankees because of payroll differences. Not a valid excuse. Okay, now I'm done.

For the second year in a row, they have squandered an advantage they had over the Yankees, this year even more grievously than last.

Can you believe that? For the second year in a row, the Red Sox didn't lead the AL East wire-to-wire! What a bunch of losing losers!

Like last year, they will very likely pay for their profligacy.

Just like last year, when they finished with an identical record to the Yankees, advanced to the playoffs like the Yankees, and were eliminated in the first round like the Yankees. Oh, they'll pay.

But by now, the Red Sox should have had a commanding lead over the Yankees. But they don’t have that lead, even though the Yankees have played much of the season without a third of their starting lineup.

This is only true if you think the Red Sox and Yankees were equally good at the beginning of the year. Did you think that, Murray Chass? I bet you thought the Yankees were better. Come on, admit it.

Some may say Alex Rodriguez has been missing, too.

At this point, if you're a faithful reader, you'd expect FJM to defend A-Rod, who's been the target of an overwhelming amount of bad sportswriting. But a look at his Baseball Prospectus Player Card shows that his performance has really taken a horrific downturn this year. His EqA is .298, down from last year's .349 and a career average of .318. His WARP3 is a pedestrian 5.5, his lowest in any season ever. (By the way, when he was 20 years old, he posted a WARP3 of 13.7. This is crazy.)

On top of the absences of Matsui, Sheffield and Canó, Rodriguez is having a lackluster season, making three errors in one game and striking out three and four times in others.

I think we can all agree that these are not the right metrics to conclusively demonstrate a lackluster season. Bad Murray.

The youngest player to hit 450 home runs, Rodriguez has hit only one home run in his past 14 games and three in his last 29.

Again, not interested.

Bruised and bloodied, the Yankees have been winning with players named Melky and Bubba.

But as we've been through before, they still have a lineup full of extremely valuable hitters. Repeat after me: it's not that surprising that the Yankees have a good record.

With only a third of the season to go, they have won more than the Red Sox, who until catcher Jason Varitek had knee surgery last week, had not dealt with the extended absence of an everyday player.

Coco Crisp, the Red Sox' starting center fielder, missed 42 of the team's 110 games due to injury. And I know you qualified your statement to only include everyday players, but the Sox did lose two-fifths of their starting rotation in Matt Clement and David Wells, along with their Opening Day closer, Keith Foulke. Also, number three starter Tim Wakefield and starting right fielder Trot Nixon are currently on the DL.

This season’s developments should come as no surprise to the Fenway faithful. They saw it most recently only last season, when the Red Sox were six and a half games ahead of the Yankees barely a month into the season. Less than three weeks later, they had tumbled behind the Yankees.

Yes. There is an overwhelming trend of one year.

Considering that the Yankees played dreadfully in their first 30 games (11-19), it was noted here at that time that “the Red Sox should have taken off and left the Yankees in the dust.”

He's still talking about last season here for some reason. And that is some pompous-ass prose. "It was noted here" indeed.

I repeat the cautionary advice I offered the Red Sox last year: If they want to be assured of a postseason spot, they would be wise to finish ahead of the Yankees in the A.L. East. This year, more than last, the wild card could elude the second-place team.

The New York Times: your home for obvious, obvious, obvious advice to Major League Baseball teams. Our writers look at baseball standings and then give you analysis that only a person with a fourth-grade comprehension of numerical charts could give you.

The Red Sox, though, have to hope that the sight of the Yankees will act as smelling salts and snap them out of their annual stupor.

Annual stupor? Annual stupor?! You said yourself it happened once before. Once!

Murray Chass is the kind of guy who invented Groundhog Day because one time one year a groundhog saw his shadow and it was cold and that one thing happening once means it will always happen. Also, he's old.

Labels: murray chass, red sox, yankees

I wonder if Murray Chass wakes up in the morning and thinks, Murray, old fella, today you're gonna write an article in a real special way: you know the scientific method? That thing where you make observations and marshal data before you draw conclusions and say things are true? Well, the way you're gonna write this real special article is by reversing that -- you're gonna take an idea that's been rattling around in the old upstairs for awhile now (here's the idea: that that darn Moneyball book isn't all it's cracked up to be) and then do your damndest to find evidence -- any wisp of a scintilla of evidence -- to support that idea.

You think that's what he thinks in the morning? I sort of do. Because his latest article is called -- I kid you not -- "When 'Moneyball' No Longer Pays Off." And I know this is shocking -- fasten your seatbelts and place your babies in baby safety chairs and fasten their baby seat belts -- he doesn't really support this title with good, solid evidence.

Look, I realize that this is baseball. It's not particle physics or oncology or the study of a hypothetical technological singularity. But if you're going to take a way of thinking seriously and then criticize it in the New York Times for all to see, I reserve the right to criticize your criticism. Let's begin.

ART HOWE lives in Houston, whose wild-card Astros won the National League pennant last season, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, whose wild-card Steelers won the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Fantastic. Carry on.

"To a large degree," Howe said, discussing the playoff success of wild-card teams, "I think they have less pressure on them when they get into the postseason because no one expects them to go far, and they have a chip on their shoulder so they play harder."

Okay. Sounds good. Wait a minute. No, it doesn't. No one expects the wild card teams to go far? Are you kidding me? The Boston Red Sox were the 2005 AL Wild Card team. You're telling me no one expected them to go farther than, oh, say the mighty 82-win NL West Champion San Diego Padres? We've passed the point where the wild card is a stigma. In general, all of the teams in the playoffs are just teams. They're just there, and they're good, and most reasonable people acknowledge that almost any of them could win it all (except maybe the 2005 Padres). It's not big, bad division champions and weakling wild cards. The AL East proves that year in and year out. Chip on their shoulder? The Braves are going to sit back and play crappily because they eked out another Division title by two games over the Phillies? Jesus, Art, talk some sense.

Oh, maybe he's talking about football. Well, in the sixteen years of the current wild card format, a wild card team has won the Super Bowl a whopping three times. So all those lowered expectations and chips on their shoulders must not be too overwhelming in terms of contributing to actual, tangible football results. Also, bear with me, I haven't even gotten to any Chass opinions yet.

Before the Mets, Howe managed the Astros for five years and the Athletics for seven years. The end of his tenure was described in none-too-flattering terms in the book "Moneyball."

Describing the frustration of General Manager Billy Beane after the Athletics' 2002 playoff loss to "the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins," the book's author, Michael Lewis, wrote that at such times, Beane would make a trade.

I don't have Moneyball in front of me (in fact, believe it or not, I've read it but don't own it), but my guess would be that Lewis used the phrase "the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins" in a passage that describes Beane's thinking, not his own. That is, Lewis was probably saying that in Beane's head, he was frustrated that he was losing to a team he believed to have inferior personnel to his own. Of course, I could be wrong entirely. It just seems like that Lewis wouldn't arbitrarily slam the Twins' roster (while it would make sense that the absurdly confident Beane would believe that about the two respective teams). Can an intrepid FJM reader contextualize this quote for us?

"Moneyball" extolled the talents of Beane, portraying him as superior to other teams' general managers. Lewis celebrated Beane for his ability to produce winning teams with small payrolls, but Terry Ryan has done the same thing with the Twins, a fact Lewis didn't acknowledge.

This is a fair point. But here's the thing: a lot of the anti-Moneyball crowd bemoan the fact that Billy Beane gets a book while poor Terry Ryan sits alone, completely media coverage-less and underappreciated. My question is, what's the story when you're talking about Terry Ryan? Is he doing something different and unconventional enough to fill a 200-some-odd-page book intended for the general reading public? If you lined up the two guys' stories (while assuming, as I think is fair, that their baseball results are relatively similar), whose is more compelling? I bet the answer is Beane's. (Admittedly, I know nothing about Terry Ryan. He could be the league's only GM with Asperger's Syndrome for all I know. That would make for a pretty good book.)

If Chass' point is just that Lewis should have put in some token mention that the Minnesota franchise has done pretty well with a small budget, just like Oakland's, then I don't really disagree with that.

As little as Beane might have thought of Howe, the Athletics reached the playoffs three straight seasons under him and have not been there the last two years with Ken Macha as their manager after making it in his first year.

Aaaargh. To me, this paragraph is smug self-satisfaction disguised as understatement. It seems like they teach that style to every Times writer. You think you're so smart, Beane and Lewis? How about this little fact? I'll write about it very drily so its devastating truth can do all the damage by itself.

Oakland isn't going to make the playoffs every year. And although no one likes to talk about it, a baseball manager contributes very little to how many wins a team finishes with. The fact that Howe went to the playoffs three out of seven years, while so far Macha has gone one for three? I mean, it's pretty much meaningless. Doesn't say anything about either guy. Thanks, Murray.

Again, not that I think the men themselves are remotely responsible for these records, but for what it's worth:

Howe Winning Percentage (7 seasons): .529
Macha Winning Percentage (3 seasons): .566

I'm pretty sure that just means Macha had slightly better baseball players on his teams, but you brought it up, Chass, so there you go.

It has been three years since the publication of "Moneyball," and it is worth assessing other matters the book discusses.

Do tell.

Several times, Lewis wrote about the Athletics' infatuation with Kevin Youkilis, a young player who had a high on-base percentage, the gold standard of Beane's player evaluation.

In limited playing time with Boston the past two seasons, Youkilis has compiled a .376 on-base percentage but has yet to show the Red Sox he is ready to help them on a daily basis. They are planning to try Youkilis, a converted third baseman, as a platooned first baseman this year.

Yes, he did compile a .376 on-base percentage. That's pretty good. It's .025 better than the league average for the last two years. Also, he OBP-ed .400 last year in limited action and he should have played more. He also continued to absolutely mash AAA pitching, OPS-ing a ridiculous 1.051 (.459 of it OBP) in Pawtucket. In what way is that not showing the Red Sox that he is ready to help them on a daily basis? Because Tito Francona, a guy who has never shown any interest in adhering to Moneyball principles, stuck with the steady, professional, entrenched-at-third-base Bill Mueller? Because he refused to take out Kevin Millar for whatever crazy, intangible clubhouse chemistry reason?

Kevin Youkilis should be a serviceable MLB player. I don't think Billy Beane ever expected him to become a superstar.

Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher but a high Oakland draft choice in 2002 because of his high on-base percentage, was viewed as a Beane type of pick. But he is still working his way through the minor leagues at 26, having spent the past three seasons at Midland, Tex., in the Class AA Texas League.

Yes, this player appears to have not panned out. Shall we go through a list of players Terry Ryan has drafted who have not panned out? I'm certain it's extremely long. Prospects, as a rule, don't pan out. Check the percentages.

Scott Hatteberg was another on-base guy Beane found attractive. But after four seasons and last year's Oakland-low .334 on-base percentage by Hatteberg, Beane cut him loose as a free agent.

Yes, this other player appears to have not done very well for himself. Now you have named two players who have not done well and one who has done pretty well given a limited opportunity. In other words, you have done nothing to convince me that Moneyball, if you insist on calling it that, no longer pays off. Every team has guys who stop playing well. Every team has draft picks who never amount to anything. To show that something doesn't "pay off," you have to at least begin to show that there is a systematic failure -- that in a long-term, far-reaching sample, things are tending to go poorly using this particular method of scouting and drafting and valuing players. That isn't happening, I don't think. The A's played very well last year with a very young roster. They had the AL Rookie of the Year, and a bunch of their young dudes are good.

Two Beane disciples became general managers with other teams, Paul DePodesta with the Dodgers and J. P. Ricciardi with the Toronto Blue Jays.

"Moneyball" credited DePodesta with great statistical dexterity, but it didn't help him with the Dodgers, who fired him two years into a five-year contract after some highly questionable moves a year ago left them with a weakened team that won 22 fewer games than their division-winning team won the year before.

The Dodgers are idiots. Seriously. DePodesta got run out of town by sportswriters like Bill Plaschke. It also didn't hurt that his team was decimated by injuries and he apparently has piss-poor interpersonal skills. Anyway, Chass' point seems to be that Moneyball isn't working so well because see? The Dodgers fired DePodesta! To me, a guy getting fired doesn't mean anything. You have to look at the decision-making ability of the people doing the firing. In this case, I have some serious questions about Frank McCourt and his judgment.

SPECIAL NYT SIDEBAR!

The caption under the picture of Billy Beane accompanying this article reads, "Billy Beane, the Athletics' general manager, considers on-base percentage the best gauge of a player's value."

This is, I believe, categorically false. I can think of 100 different metrics that are better than on-base percentage at gauging a player's value, and I am willing to bet Billy Beane can too. Like VORP. VORP is a thing. Remember VORP? No, you do not. You are a caption writer for the New York Times Online. And now, back to Chass.

Ricciardi has fared better from an employment standpoint but hasn't finished first in four years.

Really? Not one time has he finished first? In FOUR WHOLE YEARS? In a division with the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox? This is a travesty. Burn all copies of Moneyball immediately. Burn all libraries that have ever housed a copy of Moneyball and all people who have ever read its dust jacket or accidentally run their fingers over its cover at Costco. Travel back in time and prevent Mr. and Mrs. Lewis from conceiving their son Michael. Kill Mrs. Lewis, just to be safe. J.P. Ricciardi has failed to finish first in four years in the AL East.

That's pretty much the end of the article. Chass concludes by mentioning that the Blue Jays aren't any cheaper than they were when Ricciardi got hired. Now, having read the article and/or my crazy, barely coherent rants about selected passages from said article, doesn't it seem like Mr. Chass started with an ax to grind and found a couple of anecdotal pieces of evidence to help grind it? Yes, again, it's baseball, and yes, it's a short newspaper article, not a research paper, but I just wish he tried a little harder. I wish he would look at information and then write an article with interesting conclusions and reasonable inferences drawn from that information. Murray, I know you're not a Celizic or a Dibble or a Morgan. You can't be, because those men, as far as I can tell, are functional illiterates who have palsied Cambodian children in sweatshops write their articles for them. You're better than that. Please don't disappoint me again, Murray.

Labels: a's, billy beane, murray chass

Experienced writers sure enjoy their conventional wisdom. Take Murray Chass of the New York Times. He wrote an article called Rodriguez Manages to Be Productive Despite Strikeouts.

Because everyone knows strikeouts are bad, right? They're bad! They make you look silly! Everyone knows that! Everyone!

Rodriguez is having a great season, a most valuable player season, one of the best of his 11-year career, but he is striking out more than ever. Not only has he struck out a career-high number of times, but he has struck out more frequently in the last 10 weeks than he had previously. But - and here's the weird part (emphasis mine) - as his strikeout ratio has risen, he has hit better and more productively than before.

The italicized part is where Murray Chass falls down. Chass assumes that strikeouts are so intrinsically damaging that it's inconceivable that a hitter's productivity could increase when his strikeout rate does the same.

But even a cursory examination of the league leaders in strikeouts puts that assumption into serious doubt.

Here are the top ten leaders in strikeouts in the American League:

Richie Sexson
Alex Rodriguez
Brandon Inge
Hank Blalock
Grady Sizemore
Eric Chavez
Jhonny Peralta
Alfonso Soriano
Mark Teixeira
David Ortiz

And as a bonus, here's number eleven:

Travis Hafner

Notice anything about these guys? They're all pretty decent hitters. In fact, ten of the eleven have 22 or more home runs. No one save for Blalock has an OPS lower than .750. And four of them -- Rodriguez, Teixeira, Ortiz, and Hafner -- are MVP-level mashers.

So isn't it possible that strikeouts aren't so bad? That they correlate positively to power and perhaps discipline (loosely defined)? Why can't Murray Chass take five seconds, go to Yahoo! Sports and click on "K" to sort guys by number of strikeouts? Doesn't he like baseball?

No. Instead, he'll go to his scroll of parchment, remove his feather pen from its inkwell, and write in Middle English about how completely insane it is that Alex Rodriguez manages to be productive despite striking out a lot.

Way to promulgate misinformation, Murray Chass. You probably think Andy Rooney has too many newfangled modern ideas.

Labels: alex rodriguez, arod, murray chass, strikeouts

Murray Chass has covered baseball for over 40 years. He was the recipient of the 2003 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, presented annually "for meritorious contributions to baseball writing."

And his latest article for the New York Times is meandering, intermittently mean-spirited, and as far as I can tell, poorly titled. It's called

'04 Postseason: Dissector's Cut on DVD

and yet it includes the paragraph

A boxed set of a dozen DVD's arrived at my door recently: seven games of the American League Championship Series, four games of the World Series and a bonus disc. Which A.L.C.S.? Which World Series? Last year's, of course. Red Sox-Yankees, Red Sox-Cardinals. What's on the bonus disc? Don't ask me. I don't own a DVD player.

>> Now, if this article is supposed to be about the DVD box set, why didn't Murray (or the Times) pony up the thirty bucks for a DVD player? You can buy one here or here.

If it's not about the DVDs at all, then that title is not an especially good fit. And why does it sound like he's boasting when he says he doesn't own a DVD player? Is this an Andy Rooney column?

Oh, I get it. It's a play on the phrase "Director's Cut." And he's dissecting the '04 postseason. Wait. No, he is not.

Instead, Chass then takes a sharp left turn and begins lecturing both the Yankees and the Red Sox about how they shouldn't feel like they're guaranteed the wild card this year. That's a valid point, albeit one I've heard ad nauseum already.

Next, for no apparent reason, Chass takes a shot at Red Sox fans.

A warning was issued in this space earlier in the season that Red Sox fans shouldn't assume that the wild card, if not first place, was theirs. And if they are looking at the races sensibly and not fanatically - as if they are capable of having any other kind of view (emphasis mine) - they know the Red Sox have to play two months of top-tier baseball to return to the playoffs.

>> I don't know where to begin. Is that a playful joke? I think it fails in that respect. Since when is it the reputation of Red Sox fans to arrogantly assume their team will come through? Isn't that the exact opposite of what they're known to do?

Red Sox fans, on the other hand, aren't thinking wild card. Who needs the wild card when you have first place? The Red Sox have been in first place for nearly six weeks, except for one day, since June 24, and their supporters are confident that they will remain imbedded there for the remainder of the season.

>> Thank you for telling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of total strangers what they're thinking.

I'm sure there are many, many Sox fans out there ready and willing to tell Mr. Chass about their myriad concerns -- about the bullpen, about Trot Nixon's oblique muscle, about Curt Schilling's ankle, about Keith Foulke's mysterious decline, about Kevin Millar's season-long slump, about starting second baseman Tony Graffanino ...

If the Yankees don't maintain their regular-season mastery over the Red Sox, the reason will be clear: the inability of their $64 million rotation to stay healthy and to perform. But if they do - and it says here they will - the Red Sox will face greater embarrassment than in the years before 2004.

>> Embarrassment? Because they finished second to the Yankees, a team with, let it be said again, a payroll of $208,306,817 (as of April 7 of this year)? Yes, the Red Sox have the second-highest payroll, but with the Yankees' money you could field the teams from Boston, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, and many of the gentlemen who play for Pittsburgh. That would be a pretty good team (well, not really, but still ...)

Also, I don't see the point of saying it will be more embarrassing for the Sox to lose the division this year. I seem to recall this being a recurring theme of Chass', and I can't for the life of me figure out where he's coming from, or why that "fact" would matter to anyone.

The Red Sox were wise holding on to Manny Ramirez. He might be a bad human being, but when bad human beings drive in 150 runs they are good players, and good players are what teams need to win.

>> "He might be a bad human being"? What? Why is that statement in the New York Times? You could say that about anyone on Planet Earth. Has anyone close to Manny Ramirez even hinted at his being anything other than a flaky, overgrown man-child? Now he's a "bad human being"?

And what happened to the review of the DVD set?

Without watching it, I'm sure the DVD set shows Ramirez's contributions of last October. As hot as Ramirez was in the World Series, the DVD set has been a hot seller in the few weeks it has been available.

>> Oh. Right. You didn't watch it. Well, what do you think you're going to call this article, Mr. Chass?

Really?

You do realize there's only a tangential mention of the'04 postseason --

Okay.

But like you keep saying around the office, you don't even own a DVD player --

All right.

Fine.

No, I like it. It's great. Great article. See you tomorrow.

Whenever you feel like coming in is okay.

Labels: j.g. taylor spink award, murray chass, red sox

I knew you'd write something stupid, you old fart of a washed-up, retarded NY Times baseball reporter!

And here it is:

The explanation is so obvious, it's difficult to understand why no one has thought of it. The Yankees are enduring their worst start to a season in the 10-year Joe Torre era, and one person who had been with the Yankees for that entire era is missing this year. Instead of helping Torre catapult the Yankees into another dominant lead in the division, Willie Randolph is managing the Mets - and doing a first-rate job at it.

...[Yesterday's] 7-5 victory over Philadelphia improved the Mets record to 15-14, including 12-11 in their division. The Yankees, after losing to Tampa Bay by 6-2 last night, had an 11-18 record, including 9-14 in their division.

Okay. The reason the Yankees are struggling, the reason they're 11-18, is because of the absence of WILLIE RANDOLPH?

The former bench coach?

Not an aging line-up. Not Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez, Ruben Sierra, and Tony Womack being terrible hitters. Not Randy Johnson being injured after a sub-par start. Not Jaret Wright being a $21 million mistake, and also being injured. Not Carl Pavano and Mike Mussina being mediocre. Not Tom Gordon and Paul Quantrill being terrible, or Tanyon Sturtze being terrible and also injured. Not any of these things.

The reason they are struggling is because they didn't retain Willie Randolph.

Their bench coach.

Who, for the record, is a shitty manager. 15-14 is no great shakes. It's about right for that team. A team that added Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez in the off season.

Now read this, from the same article (it's long, but worth reading):

"Consider what Randolph did yesterday. In a move calculated to test his other players and learn something about his team, he took his hottest hitter out of the lineup and won without him. Cliff Floyd, with a 20-game hitting streak, longest in the major leagues this season, had been carrying the Mets, leading the team with a .391 batting average, 8 home runs, 25 runs batted in, a .701 slugging percentage and a .443 on-base percentage.

Take that bat out of the lineup when the Mets are trying to snatch every victory they can get? What kind of a rookie move is that?

Randolph, however, knows that the Mets can't rely on Floyd to produce that kind of offense all season. Even if Floyd were to remain hot for the next five months, which we know he will not, the Mets would need other hitters - Mike Piazza, Mike Cameron, David Wright - to contribute for them to win consistently. So Randolph quietly put the challenge before Floyd's teammates, and they responded.

Piazza, batting .198 when the game began, slugged four hits, including a three-run home run that turned out to be the decisive blow. Wright socked a tie-breaking two-run double. Cameron, who had missed the first 28 games with a wrist injury, began his season by drilling a pair of doubles.

Floyd watched it all from the bench. So did Randolph.

"I'm looking at the long haul," Randolph said afterward. "The guy's in a nice little groove, but I think it's more important to look at the big picture. One guy isn't going to carry us and do everything for us. I came in feeling this way and thinking this way, and I'm not going to change."

He did not want to "try to milk him for every little thing because he's in a streak," Randolph said of Floyd, adding, "It's more important what he's going to do the next few weeks and month."

Randolph didn't say that by resting Floyd he was seeking to learn something about his other players, but that was what he had in mind. It was a bold move for a rookie manager, one that could have backfired if the other hitters had not met the unspoken challenge. But they did, and that was the point.

Oh my God. This is a good managerial move? Sitting your hottest player? Maybe if he just wanted him to get a day of rest, fine, whatever. But Chass states authoritatively that this is not the reason Randolph did it. It was to test the mettle of the other gus on the team? Whaaaat?

And then Randolph says: "The guy's in a nice little groove, but I think it's more important to look at the big picture. One guy isn't going to carry us and do everything for us. I came in feeling this way and thinking this way, and I'm not going to change."

Whhhhaaaaaaaaaaaatttt?

What does that mean? What is the "big picture?" Why not keep him in the line-up to help the other guys feel less pressure? And does anyone really think that Mike Piazza had four hits yesterday because Cliff Floyd wasn't in the line-up? (They were playing the Phillies. A bad team with a bad pitching staff.) What kind of insane sense does that make?

Murray Chass and Willie Randolph. A match made in heaven.

Labels: murray chass