FJM is a closed forum, but we welcome reader feedback. We're especially interested in corrections of our work, and research (usually number-crunching) that we may not be able to do ourselves. Please check the comments section as well, where we often post readers' opinions, and, less frequently, announce that we were wrong about something.
You can e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach individually.
Title is a half-assed play on words on a Richard Dawkins book title. Deal with it. Yesterday we saw a dude call Alfonso Soriano selfish because he had six bad games. (Has anyone noticed that noted egomaniac David Ortiz is 3-36? Diva!) Today's selfish oaf: Carlos Lee (HR totals the past five years: 32, 37, 32, 31, 31). I'm sensing a trend about selfish players -- they're freaking awesome.
There're some more gems in here, so let's get started, shall we, Joe Cowley? Williams emulates a Twinning formula Sox GM realizes talent alone doesn't guarantee anything
Talent, as we all know from years of sports journalism dogma, is anathema to winning. Teams win in spite of talent. Talent creates egos, egos create selfishness, selfishness results in too many damn home runs.
Keep your talent. Give me guys who volunteer at soup kitchens. Then I'll have a baseball team.
He spent years watching, studying and even copying it, to the point where it won him a World Series in 2005.
The truth is finally out there: Ken Williams is copying the formula of the 1989 Trumbull, Connecticut World Champion Little League team. Expect a call, Chris Drury.
Now White Sox general manager Ken Williams hopes he has moved a step closer to perfecting the model.
Thanks, Minnesota Twins.
So Ken, you're going to emulate the Twins' uncanny scouting and player development machine and work on bilking Brian Sabean out of Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano and Boof Bonser for one year of A.J. Pierzynski?
No, of course not. You're going to spout off some nonsense about reducing the amount of talent you want on your team.
''This job is one in which you never stop learning,'' Williams said Monday, hours before the Sox rallied to beat the Twins 7-4 in the home opener. ''Early on, I thought throwing talent at the wall would bring a championship, and, for three or four years, on paper we had the best team in the division.
''There were at least two of those years where Minnesota won the division and then came out and even said, 'That team there [the Sox] has more talent than us.' That really made me rethink some of the things we were doing, the approach we were taking.''
DON'T SAY GRINDER DON'T SAY GRINDER DON'T SAY GRINDER
It also forged the word ''grinder'' into his head.
ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH
White Sox fans: your general manager is officially building a baseball team based on a nebulous buzzword that's a synonym for submarine sandwich. Fear him. Fear him greatly.
He saw players such as A.J. Pierzynski, the Twins' cocky catcher who needled opponents with his antics to no end, all in the pursuit of winning. Torii Hunter, Jacque Jones, Denny Hocking, Doug Mientkiewicz -- the Twins' roster seemed perfectly put together to play the game the right way, frustrating bigger-budget teams along the way.
How about the fact that Hunter regularly hit 25 bombs a year, or that Pierzynski was an above-average hitter at the catcher spot, or that Mientkiewicz was one of the very best defensive first basemen in the game? No? Not important? You're right, it was probably Pierzynski's off-color jokes about what he did to Joe Crede's sisters that won the Twins the division. That's playing the game the right way!
Not only has Williams admitted to copying that model,
WHAT MODEL?
All you've said so far is that they're "grinders" and the roster "seemed perfectly put together" to "play the game the right way." Oh, and that you shouldn't "have the best team on paper." How are these not just read straight off page 1 of General Manager Press Conference Clichés, The Handbook?
but he also has had more money to budget his replica. Add a few tweaks of his own, such as adding players from outside the organization, rather than inside as the cheaply run Twins do, and ... ta-da!
That's another thing. The Chicago White Sox have the fifth-highest payroll in baseball, just behind the Red Sox. They're one Gagne away from equaling Theo's budget. Consider that when you think about what kind of job Kenny Williams is doing. Baseball Prospectus has the South Siders finishing with a sweet 77 wins. Prove them wrong, Kenny. Prove them wrong.
Williams signed Pierzynski, traded away selfish, all-or-nothing hitters such as Carlos Lee and built a stellar starting rotation before the '05 season.
Carlos Lee, EqAs since the trade: .274, .301, .300. The guy they traded Carlos Lee for, EqAs since the trade: .264, .249, .244.
And last year Scotty Pods earned that .244 EqA in just 235 at bats because he was so banged-up and shitty the Sox never wanted to play him. Then, of course, at the end of the year, they just straight-up released him. The whole time, he was extremely grindy, though. He starred in that movie Grindhouse. I think he was the lady with the machine gun for a leg.
El Caballo, meanwhile, just keeps putting up 90-30-100 year after year after year. Get that shit off my team.
Credit where credit's due -- it was a wonderful pitching staff the White Sox had in 2005. But let's be honest, a lot of dudes were having career years. Garland, Contreras, even Buehrle -- all of them posted the highest full-season ERA+s of their careers in 2005, and none of them have really been the same since. This is to say nothing of the freakish, otherworldly performances of Messrs. Hermanson, Cotts, and Politte, who, as we love to point out here on FJM, all had ERA+s of 220 or higher. That's 1989 Dennis Eckersley shit. Fun fact: none of these three guys are even on major league rosters this year. The Podsednik-Pierzynski effect? Or (ahem) just a little bit of good fortune?
Bullpens are unpredictable and fickle; it seems like every year the eventual World Series champ gets out-of-nowhere contributions from their 'pen. Just last year, the Red Sox had Okajima and Delcarmen pitching out of their minds. But seriously, to get 185 innings of sub-2.00 ERA ball from the ne plus ultra of journeyman reliever triumvirates -- Hermanson, Cotts, and Politte -- is remarkably remark-worthy. And for the last time, it has nothing to do with grinding or scrapping from hardworking, undersized, fiery white hitters. But the underlying trait Williams searches for is what he calls a ''Chicago toughness.''
Thank you to the 1,420 people who sent us this link.
Sigh.
Sox may have (computer) chip on their shoulder
Rick Morrissey
If computers ran the world, Steven Seagal probably would have won a few Oscars by now, assuming they judged him on the $2 billion his movies have earned.
That's unfair to computers. Not even computers could find value in Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, or any of the other Adjective Preposition Violent-Thing movies he's made. (I realize Hard to Kill is actually Adjective Violent-Infinitive, but you get the idea.)
If computers had a way of measuring acting ability, he'd be running a martial-arts school in a strip mall.
Which is probably roughly what he is doing, now, in the world of humans.
But they don't run the world, yet, which means we can still type in our credit card numbers online without worrying that all our money is being sucked into a fund earmarked for global dominance by a dastardly computer.
I actually do worry about that, but it's because humans control the computers...for now!!!!!
Computers have no use for heart, or least they can't quantify it. They can't analyze what's inside an athlete, for example. They can't tell you who has the heart of a lion or the backbone of an earthworm.
Actually, the new MacBook Air has a program called iGrit, where you can enter a player's physical attributes, family history, propensity for diving, and which college he punted for, and it will give you a % by which his stats should increase next year. Macs can do anything.
Computers can't tell you that White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko is upset with how he played last season.All they can tell you is that he hit .259 in 2007, that he just turned 32 and, therefore, he must be on the downside of his career because that's what the model says is supposed to happen to him.
32 isn't like crazy over-the-hill for a 1Bman. He could bounce back nicely and match 2006, or 2005, even. But yes, it is most likely that he moseys a little further down the long lonely road known as statistical deterioration. Unless...no. Forget it. I was going to say: unless maybe, just maybe...he has heart!!!!!!
If you saw the piece about Baseball Prospectus' 2008 predictions in Sunday's Tribune, then you know the publication's computer has the Sox going 77-85 and finishing third in the AL Central, and the Cubs going 91-71 and winning the NL Central.
I know as much about computers as I do about astronomy, but I believe the computer term for Baseball Prospectus' Sox prediction is "fatal error."
Nothing better than the profession of complete ignorance, followed immediately by a pronouncement of certitude. "I have never heard a piece of orchestral or chamber music in my life, but I can say conclusively that Dvorák's Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81, is a piece of shit."
I have the Sox winning 85 games and giving Cleveland a run for its money for second place in the division. I know, I know: The Indians are loaded with talent, and if it weren't for Detroit spending gobs of money, they'd be the favorites in the AL Central.
But, again, what about heart?
What about "heart?" What about Miguel fucking Cabrera? What about Grady Sizemore and C.C. Sabathia and Justin Verlander and Fausto Carmona and Magglio Ordoñez? Heart? How about starting pitching? How about the fact that Jose Contreras is 62 years old?
I think Quentin and Swisher make this team a lot better than it was last year, but in that division they just don't have a chance, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong.
Hal (or Smitty or Shecky or whatever the computer's name is)
My name is PECOTA. I will destroy you.
and I pretty much agree about the Cubs, which, given my track record on predictions, should make Hal/Smitty/Shecky do a lot of soul-searching, which is impossible because it doesn't have a soul, just an evil chip that makes it want to mate with Marie Osmond and produce robots that sing show tunes. I am a computer and even I know that Marie Osmond is a hacky reference. Also: what are you even talking about?
The Cubs will win 92 games. They will win the NL Central. They will win the NL pennant. They will get trounced by whichever American League team has the inclination to do a little trouncing, the way a bear commences to eat after it gets done playing with its food.
First of all, thank you for the food metaphor. (Update: it's actually a food simile, so I'm adding a new tag.) Second, you seem awfully sure of yourself for a guy who has been talking about how nothing in life is certain thanks to indefinable qualities that cannot be evaluated or measured. Third: thanks again for the food metaphor. (Update: simile.)
The cold, hard facts might back up Baseball Prospectus' opinion that the Mets will beat the Cubs in the NL Championship Series. New York acquired Johan Santana from the Twins, shifting the balance of power eastward in the weak-by-comparison National League.
But ...
...Johan Santana has a heart condition? The Mets are earthworms? Your knees ache, portending humidity? The entrails of the goat you just slaughtered say that the Gods are upset and we should move our armies West through the mountain pass? Poseidon may take vengeance upon the Greek fleet because Athena zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Do feelings count? Or hunches?
Not really, no. I mean, they're fun. They're fun to toss around and stuff. But they don't "count" when you are trying to scientifically project a team's performance. That is kind of the point of scientifically projecting a team's performance.
Where is there room in computers for the inexplicable? Does the fact that it's the Cubs' 100th season since their last World Series title mean anything in the computations?
Oh my God does it not mean anything.
Does it mean anything that the Cubs could be driven by the challenge of a century of dryness or, conversely, that they could cave in under the pressure of it and finish 10 games below .500?
Look, man, I know that psychological factors sometimes play a part in a team's season. I'm a Red Sox fan, for cripe's sake. But if the Cubs finish 10 games below .500, it won't be because a bunch of grown men suddenly felt the weight of their temporary employer's century-long drought. It will be because they got injured and/or underperformed. I'm sorry, I just don't think that professional ballplayers, who change teams constantly and are hugely rich, are going to deeply internalize their city's historical misfortunes, no matter how many stupid articles to the contrary get written. I personally guarantee that Alfonso Soriano cares way more about the history of the DR little league team than he does about that stupid goat. And need I point to how little history mattered to recent Sox-based teams in the face of good starting pitching, power hitting, and (yes) luck?
I believe the Sox are embarrassed by what happened last season and, not to belabor the point, there is nothing in a computer's innards that can measure the effects of that. But it is one of the great motivators in the human makeup.
True. They might pull it together and have a nice season. But that would be an aberration. The point of computer modeling isn't really to try to take possible nebulous aberrations into account. It is to try to predict what is most likely given the evidence at hand.
That is the least amusing paragraph you have ever written.
Shut up. Go Google something.
Baseball Prospectus was dead on last season, when it predicted the Sox, whom it saw as aging quickly, would win only 72 games. That's exactly what happened.
And yet, here we are, reading this article. Kind of makes you wonder: why are we here, reading this article?
That the Sox dropped from 90 victories in 2006 to 72 games last season was one of the shocks of the baseball season. But not to Baseball Prospectus, and the people who run it deserve their props. They chalk up a lot of what happened on the South Side last season to the inevitability of time catching up with older athletes. I chalk it up to a number of players having down years at the same time.
...Those are kind of the same things.
Isn't there room for a number of Sox to have good years at the same time? Say, in 2008?
Sure!
If Jim Thome --
-- Turns 37 years old this year, hasn't played a full season since 2003 --
stays healthy, he could have an excellent season. It's a big "if," of course, but not like wondering if, say, the rain can hold off in Seattle for a month or two.
There might actually be a better chance of a dry spring in Seattle than of Jim Thome playing in 140 games.
The Cubs don't have a good enough rotation to do the impossible and win the World Series, but perhaps Carlos Zambrano's feistiness becomes contagious and the staff starts pitching like the '69 Mets did. Can a computer comprehend feistiness? I don't think so.
Well, this is kind of disingenuous. I mean, creating a computer than can comprehend feistiness is like the holy grail of artificial intelligence research. It's going to take years and years, and billions of dollars -- from both the public and private sectors -- before we can program a computer to understand and (hopefully) generate feistiness. But when we do, the world communities will come together as one, and marvel at the accomplishment, and they will stand up and say, en masse: "What a colossal fucking waste of time."
This is the time of year for predictions, so it's not surprising there would be a few bad tidings, especially for the Sox.
The problem with computers is that you can argue with them until you're blue in the face, and they don't even blink in response.
That is because I do not have eyelids.
There's no satisfaction in it. You can, however, achieve a higher level of contentment by hitting them with a baseball bat. I'd like to see you try, Morrissey. I'll take you down, son.
The Worst News for Chicagoans Since Mariotti Was Hired by "Around the Horn"
Here we find news that the ChiSox have inexplicably re-upped The Hawk through 2011. The CDC recommends that humans only be exposed to 3-4 PPM of The Hawk, so a major health advisory has been issued for the entire Illinois area, and for everyone with XM Radio.
We also find this nugget of wisdom about the man with the worst HR call in baseball:
When Harrelson signed his previous contract in 2003, he predicted the Sox were in line to win a World Series. His vision was confirmed in 2005.
I'm going to Buster Olney it up and just link a few stories that I don't have the energy to lay into. Setting a bad precedent? Absolutely. But: easier.
Here's a little ditty entitled "Attitude Can't Just Be a Platitude for Sox," by legendary comic actor Dave van Dyck (The Dave van Dyck Show, Diagnosis: Murder.) The thesis is that what the 2007 Chicago White Sox lacked was not "hitting" or "pitching" or any of those other pesky "tangibles," but rather: a certain je ne sais quoi.
It has been called "swagger" and "a chip on your shoulder," a sort of no-respect, us-against-the-world motivational mentality.
Of course, [Paul] Konerko was around when the White Sox had that intangible benefit of swagger. And he was there when it vanished, perhaps through complacency caused by lack of competition, which led to losing and a lack of confidence.
For those of you keeping your own Intangible Scorecard at home, that was:
Lack of competition ----> Complacency ----> Vanishing of Intangible Benefit of Swagger ----> Losing ----> Lack of Confidence.
Here's another flow chart: Team ERA of 3.61 in 2005 ----> Team ERA of 4.61 in 2006 ----> Team ERA of 4.77 in 2007 ----> Worse Team in 2007 Than in 2005
"The younger guys are hungry, and that adds energy," [Buehrle] said. "And it takes some of the older guys who have been around here to refocus and get that little edge back, knowing that it's more than going out and putting up numbers, that you have to have a purpose on how you're doing it. We have to try to get back to that."
It might be more than going out and putting up numbers. But I would highly recommend: going out and putting up numbers, as like a starting point.
The question is whether swagger comes naturally or takes some team meetings for everyone to believe they should have it.
That's the question? Not: "How do we improve our AL-low .318 team OBP?"
Next up, we have this useless article about how Tom Brady really isn't that good at football, and how Johnny Unitas was better. Take it away, Plaschke.
The first thing you notice about Tom Brady is, well, nothing.
Really? I notice that he is the world's most handsome man. I might also notice his league MVP award, his 3 Super Bowl rings, his 2 Super Bowl MVPs, or the fact that his smoldering eyes and dimpled chin have forced me to take a long hard look at my own sexuality and conclude in like 5 seconds that although I love Mrs. Tremendous with all my heart, I would trade her and our unborn child and everything I own to kiss Tom Brady on the mouth for fifteen seconds, because then I would know what it feels like to melt into perfection.
He doesn't have a nick on his face because today's referees won't allow it.
Also, his offensive line is quite good.
He doesn't have a growl to his voice because today's huddles don't require it.
I just looked at the HTML coding for this sentence, and it reads like this:
{PlaschkeStyle ="nonsense-level: total; meaning: none; point? no; faux-poetry: yes; garbage garbage garbage"}He doesn't have a growl to his voice because today's huddles don't require it.{/Plaschke}
He doesn't have fire in his eyes because today's teams don't need it.
What claptrap. Ugh. You've killed the mood. I don't even want to kiss Brady on the mouth anymore. You ruined it.
Tom Brady is fantastic, but he's formula. He's a champion, but he's a creation. And to anoint him as the best quarterback ever would be to forget that his position was invented, inspired and made famous by those who were neither.
He's a creation who had 50 TD passes this year. He completed 26 of 28 passes in a playoff game. He has led game-winning scoring drives late in the 4th quarter of like 9 Super Bowls. He is 14-2 in the postseason. So, yes, he is a creation...of Football Jesus.
If Brady leads the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl win over the New York Giants next Sunday, everyone will celebrate his four world championships.
They will forget that Otto Graham won seven league championships.
Graham was an incredible athlete and a great winner. But when he played, there were like 12 teams and the average LB was 4'8", 120 and played his college ball at Yale. It's a different game. There are now 32 teams, and the average placekicker can curl 900 lbs. Players sprinkle steroids into their protein shakes, which they pour over bowls of steroids. Free agency, scouting, PhD.-level offensive and defensive coordination schemes, illegal videotaping of other teams' signals...it's a very different game. A harder-to-succeed-in game.
Everyone will marvel at Brady's 15-2 postseason record.
They will forget that Bart Starr was 9-1 in the postseason with a record 104.8 passer rating.
I like that he italicizes 9-1, as if (a) Brady didn't start his postseason career 10-0, and (b) 9-1 is so much more impressive than a theoretical 15-2.
Everyone will wax about how, in two Super Bowls, Brady led his team on late fourth-quarter game-winning field-goal drives.
They will forget that, in one of his four Super Bowl championships, Joe Montana drove his San Francisco team 92 yards for a last-second, game-winning touchdown.
No one will forget that. It's like the most famous thing that has ever happened in football history. Also, Montana needed a TD. Brady did not. Apples and oranges. Or, apples and different-but-equally-delicious apples.
Everyone will applaud Brady for his tough defender's mentality.
They will forget that Slingin' Sammy Baugh actually played defense, picking off 31 passes in his career, which is more than he threw in his last three seasons combined.
Different game, man. You really can't penalize Brady for not playing both ways, a thing that has not happened in decades. And speaking of Brady playing both ways, I would like to kiss him on the mouth.
Yeah, everyone will forget Johnny Unitas.
No, we won't. Swear.
[Unitas] was football's Babe Ruth, and Bart Starr was its Lou Gehrig, and Sammy Baugh was its Ty Cobb, and Joe Montana was its Joe DiMaggio.
Dan Fouts was its George Sisler. Rich Gannon was its Paul Molitor. Rob Johnson was its George Kendrick. Jim Zorn was its Mark Loretta. Al Toon was its Wil Cordero. Marc Edwards was its La Marr Hoyt. Joe DeLamielleure was its Rick Rhoden. And, most obviously of all, Billy Joe DuPree was its Kevin Tapani. That's just a no-brainer.
Tom Brady is football's, well, um, Alex Rodriguez.
...right. He's the best player in the game. Except that Alex Rodriguez, as boneheads like you are fond of pointing out, has never won a championship. So defend this statement, please.
"I hear all these people talking about Tom Brady and I just sort of smirk," said John Unitas Jr., the late quarterback's son. "It's an entirely different game. I'm biased, but what my father did, you can't compare it to anything today."
Tell that to Plaschke. He's devoting an entire column to doing just that.
While Brady is famous for his "decision making," many of those decisions have actually been made for him by his offensive coordinators.
The Patriots' game plan is more homework than instinct, more science than scrabble.
Late in the season finale against the Giants, Brady threw deep to Moss on second down, underthrew him, and Moss dropped the ball. On the next play, 3rd and long, with the Pats losing, their perfect regular season in jeopardy, they ran a play designed to check down to Welker to try to get the first. But Brady, in the 0.8 seconds a QB has to make a decision, saw that the Giants had not rotated safety help over to Moss (perhaps expecting the check-down?), meaning Moss would be single-covered by a CB. So Brady said, calmly, handsomely, to himself: "Fuck this noise," and uncorked a 60-yard pass that dropped into Moss's hands like a day-old helium balloon. Two records fell, the Pats went ahead for good, and all was right with the world.
Please don't say that Tom Brady -- or any modern QB -- doesn't employ "instinct." That's all they have out there, really. Watch how the man preternaturally senses and avoids blind-side pass rushes, and then write Whitman-style poetry about his instinct. Because that's the only logical response to how good his instincts are.
Here's my favorite part:
Brady is playing in an era when the following scenario would never happen:
Playing in overtime for the league championship, having driven his team to his opponent's eight-yard line, a quarterback decides to pass.
That was Unitas, 50 years ago. His Colts were in position to kick a field goal to beat the Giants for the title. Yet he saw a hole in the defense and threw a seven-yard pass to Jim Mutscheller to set up Alan Ameche's one-yard touchdown run.
This is incredibly dumb. Kick the field goal. It's overtime. (Unless NFL rules were different back then and it wasn't sudden-death. Anyone weigh in on this?)
I said I was just going to sample some articles to save time and energy, and now here we are, like two hours later. Oh well. Here's one more, about a man you might have heard of, Eric Walker, who thinks steroids don't really help people that much.
“If power were up, we’d see it in the statistics,” Walker said. “But the boost just isn’t there.” [...]
Apparently, he hasn't noted the extreme end-of-the-bell-curve-probability rise in 50- and 60-HR seasons since the "Steroid Era" began. Smaller parks, maybe. Expansion, maybe. Steroids probably helped, too, though, considering McGwire, Sosa, and a bunch of other Congressionally-invited dudes are on that 50+ list.
Regarding Bonds, for example, they note that, yes, his peak home run rates came at 36 through 39 years old, when most players are in decline. Then again, another slugger three decades before enjoyed almost the same late-30s surge: a fellow named Hank Aaron.
That doesn't seem like a huge "surge." (Though he did play in fewer games at 37-40 than in the previous years, so his HR/AB rate was higher.)
“I’m tired of people saying, ‘This is what happened because I see more home runs,’ ” Walker said. “If you disagree with me, deconstruct the argument; tell me where it’s wrong. If you can, more power to you.”
The argument has already been "deconstructed" [sic], at least w/r/t Bonds. It's here, and it's telling. Basically, it sets the odds of a 37 year-old hitting 73 HR at one in 53 million. That season was so many standard deviations from the mean, the author had to like go searching for a chart that would even calculate it.
And before any of you make fun of me for wanting to make out with Tom Brady...I got nothing. Go ahead. I want to make out with Tom Brady. Do your worst.
I'm pretty sure it was the first game in NFL history that required sudden-death (regular season games just ended in a tie with no OT, I believe).
As far as throwing the ball from the 8 in sudden death, that does seem like pretty horrible strategy, especially when you consider that was before the goal posts were moved to the back of the end zone. I suppose one could argue that place kicking was so brutal back then (pre-soccer style of course) that a field goal from any distance was a risk. (Come to think of it, maybe the 8 was even too close to kick because of the goal post thing.) Also, their kicker Steve Myhra was just 4 of 10 in FGs that year according to Pro Football Reference.
Thanks, Vinnie. Although, I'm pretty sure I could hit a 15-yard FG more than 40% of the time.
before Pete Gogolak popularized soccer-style field goal kicking in the 1960s (that is to say, well after Unitas' and the Colts' victory over the Giants in the 1958 NFL Championship Game, known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), field goal kicking was much more of a crapshoot than it is today, to the extent that successfully executing a field goal try from the 8 yard line (or even from the 1 yard line) wasn't really the given that it would be today. (As an illustration, per Wikipedia, Lou Groza, NFL Hall of Famer and namesake of the NCAA's annual award for the best DI-A kicker, made just 58% of his kicks, well below what even an average kicker accomplishes today.)
Additionally, while I can't find any specific information on point, we're talking about a game that was played on natural grass in New York in the winter. Heck, even today field goals at Giants Stadium on FieldTurf can be an adventure. One article I've read says the game featured numerous turnovers and missed field goals. I'm guessing weather probably would've added to the difficulty of a game-winning field goal attempt.
Those things being the case, I'd imagine that continuing to drive for a touchdown was netiher as "incredibly dumb" as you might have thought, nor as heroic as Plaschke portrays it as being.
I will officially back off from the position that going for it was dumb because they should've kicked, though I still think a 15-yarder was makable. However, as Joshua notes, Unitas maybe shouldn't be given a ton of credit for passing, since they kind of had to try to score a TD, and who knows what defensive alignment he was facing (10 in the box?).
Either way, I am definitely sure that I could have been the league's best FG kicker in the 1950s. Maybe even a good RB.
Ever get the feeling that Kenny Williams and Ozzie Guillen kinda sorta got really, really lucky that year they won the World Series? How about this Kenny comment from the Chicago Tribune blog:
NASHVILLE - Despite earlier comments by manager Ozzie Guillen, general manager Kenny Williams said the White Sox have no interest in free agent center fielder Andruw Jones.
"Andruw Jones is not on our list," said Williams, adding that he liked Jones but wanted players who can help lower the team's strikeout total, raise their on-base percentage and work deep counts.
So Ozzie says they like him, Kenny says his OBP and ability to work deep counts aren't up to proud White Sox standards. (I'll grant him that Andruw strikes out a ton.)
The reader who sent this to us submits:
Jones has 152 walks in the last two years. I may have missed a player or two, but I have him ranking 26th in the majors over those two years. Number of White Sox ahead of him: One.
I submit: Jones' P/PA last year was 3.96. Number of White Sox regulars who ranked higher: Two (Thome and Dye).
More to the point, though, what the hell is Kenny Williams worrying about OBP for? His manager is a guy who thinks the problem with the offense is not enough bunts and hits and runs and free outs and raw, unvarnished anger. You might want to talk to that guy if you're worried about getting on base, K-Dubs.
As I always say, the problem with these two men is their consistency. If they would remain consistent, everything else would fall into place. A consistent consistency is the most difficult part of being consistent. Keeping your consistency consistent is something I've dubbed consistinency.
Yesterday the White Sox dropped two games in dismal fashion to the Red Sox. Ozzie Guillen, post-game:
"A tough day for everyone. Pitching, hitting, defense. You just name it. I think that's one of the reasons they're in first place and we're in last place."
Pitching, hitting, defense. One of the reasons the Red Sox are in first place and the White Sox are in last.
Reader Chris writes in with some updates on our favorite MLB announcers:
In the bottom of the sixth, Hawk and DJ have eclipsed all past displays of ignorance. In regards to the abysmal season the White Sox have been having (and, as a Sox fan, it's been excruciating for me), the two dropped these gems:
DJ: ...Not in the minds of the coaching staff or the front office. Hawk: Well, nobody could see it coming. It's just that simple.
Then:
DJ: Nobody knew or could have foreseen the Sox playing the way they have this year. If anybody could have explained it to them earlier in the year [Ozzie] probably would have slapped him in the head and walked away.
later...
DJ:...It's been uncanny, nobody could truly explain it. Nobody foresaw this kind of turnaround.
I will refer Messrs. Hawk and DJ to this post from March, referencing an article that discusses how a computer predicted the ChiSox would go 72-90.
And I would also invite Ozzie Guillen to "slap [the computer] in the head and walk away." Because I would like to see what that looks like.
Darin Erstad was a punter at the University of Nebraska! And besides that, he plays baseball really hard!
Did you know that? No? I guess that means you never read this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or any other of the 2.7 million articles that have been written about how Darin Erstad used to be a punter and plays baseball "hard."
On the off-chance that you have never in your life read any articles that talk about how Darin Erstad used to be a punter at the University of Nebraska and now plays baseball really hard, which would mean that you have never read anything in your life -- because the fact that Darin Erstad used to be a punter and currently plays baseball "hard" can be found in every single piece of literature ever printed, including The Bible, John Grisham's The Rainmaker, J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, The Secret, and the novelization of Down Periscope -- here is one more article about how Darin Erstad used to be a punter and also plays baseball really hard, courtesy of the must-be-a-joke-named Carol Slezak.
Husker & Hustler
Going all out | Ex-Nebraska football player Erstad plays with intensity, abandon
If outfield walls could talk, they'd have harsh words for Darin Erstad, who has crashed into dozens during his career.
If baseball analysts could talk, they would gently remind Ms. Sleestack that Darin Erstad isn't that good at baseball. Because, the baseball analyst might correctly surmise, any article that begins this way is bound to turn into a massive fawning cockstroke of a guy who has a career .270 EqA and hasn't had a WARP3 above 5.3 since 2002.
If grass and artificial turf had a voice, they would ask Erstad to stop crushing them while diving for balls. If infield dirt had feelings, it would beg Erstad for mercy. And in response, he would shrug, as if to say, ''Hey, I'm just playing baseball.''
A lot of people dive for balls. A lot of people slide hard, and run hard, and play hard. In fact, like 90% of all professional baseball players play hard. And many of them are better at the actual skills of baseball than Darin Erstad. Where are these articles for Grady Sizemore and Johnny Damon and Carl Crawford and Ivan Rodriguez and Torii Hunter?
Unfortunately for the things that get in his way, Erstad knows only one way to play baseball. Fortunately for the White Sox, after 10 years in Anaheim, he has come to Chicago this season.
How is this fortunate for the White Sox? He has a .258 EqA this year. He's hitting .275/.326/.359 with 2HR. As for fielding, he's 10th out of 12 AL CF in Range Factor, though he is fourth in Zone Rating. Who knows, with fielding stats, really. But anecdotally, he seems to take weird routes to balls and has let a few line-drives sail over his head.
Although, to be clear, Erstad doesn't really get why people make a fuss about his style of play.
Finally, someone who is baffled by all these articles about Darin Erstad: Darin Erstad.
Imagine an entire roster of Erstads.
Okay. Such a squad would score 4.27 runs per game. For comparison, a roster of Carlos Beltrans would score 7.53 runs per game. Nine Torii Hunters would score 6.79 runs per game. Nine Curtis Grandersons would score 7.09 runs per game. The good news: the Flyin' Erstads would defeat the Fleet-of-Foot Juan Pierres, 4.27 to 3.36. So they've got that going for them.
Guys who sacrifice their bodies to make a catch. Guys who run out every ground ball, even a soft tap back to the pitcher, as if they were legging out a triple. Guys who always slide hard to break up double plays. Guys who prepare for each game as if it were Game 7 of the World Series.
This describes a lot of players. Who are better at baseball. Than Darin Erstad.
"I wouldn't want to have a bunch of me's,'' Erstad said with a laugh.
You and every thinking GM in baseball.
''That would be pretty annoying. You can't have 25 guys beating their heads against the wall and playing the way I do. It takes all kinds to make a team work. You have to have different personalities, different styles of play, to make things work."
You also need guys who can hit. That is another thing that you need.
If Erstad, who turns 33 next month, seems to play baseball with the mentality of a football or hockey player,
Yes, he does seem to do so. Do you have any idea why? Because I have never read anything in my entire life and cannot fathom why this might be.
it's likely because both sports have played big roles in his life. Although he went to Nebraska to play baseball, he also played football in 1994, joining the team as a kicker and punter (and also kicking field goals from outside 40 yards).
Da-whaaaaa?! You are joking with me when you say this! This cannot be a true fact. I simply cannot for one tiny second believe that Darin Erstad once played football for Nebraska. My brain is aflood with confusion because I have learned this interesting fact about Darin Erstad re: Nebraska/punting. Please continue informing me of information.
Legendary Cornhuskers coach Tom Osborne had found himself in need of a kicker that season and knew that Erstad had kicked in high school. After watching video of Erstad, Osborne asked him to join the team. Talk about great timing -- Nebraska won the national championship that year.
Because Darin Erstad punted a touchdown with two seconds left? Because he baseball-tackled an opposing player inches from the goal line? Because he inspired his team at halftime with a display of punting that rallied their spirits? No, friends. They won the national championship...just befuckingcause he was on the team!!!!
For a kid who wore his dad's softball shoes, jock strap, gloves and jersey ''since Day 1, even before I can remember,'' Erstad's decision to pursue baseball would seem obvious. But for Erstad, who played forward on his high school hockey team, the choice wasn't so clear.
Here's Sleestack: "Hey Ken Tremendous -- Darin Erstad was a punter at Nebraska." Here's me: "You're kidding. That is without question the single most interesting and relevant and important fact that has ever been discovered." Here's Sleestack: "Yes. But check it: he was a hockey player, too." Here's me: "My brain is exploded."
''I was a good hockey player, but to get to the NHL in hockey you have to be a different breed. They are special players.''
You have to be good at baseball to play baseball, I'm pretty sure.
''I've been an admirer of Darin's style of play for a long time,'' said general manager Ken Williams..."I readily admit that last year's club missed a little bit of that edge. That recklessness and all-out style. So I sought to correct that this offseason and bring a little bit of that back to us. I think overall it will serve us well. It already has and will continue to as the season goes on because it's infectious. He's not shy about his desire to win. And that fits into what we're about.''
The White Sox are 14th out of 14 teams in the AL in runs scored. Whatever you're doing, there, Kenny, it ain't working. (And yes, I know Thome has been hurt. Relax. They have a .312 team OBP. Thome can't change that all by himself.)
So, there you have it, for the millionth time: Darin Erstad was a punter, and a hockey player, and is currently a mediocre baseball player. Rejoice!
Toni Ginnetti of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a little piece on Pablo Ozuna's injury. The headline of this article is:
Ozzie on Ozuna: He's Irreplaceable.
Irreplaceable.
Now, I know that utility guys are often key pieces of their teams' success, given their flexibility and "gutsy spirit" and all that. But what strikes me as semantically amusing about Ozzie Guillen's declaration is that Pablo Ozuna's WARP, or Wins Above Replacement Player, is -0.1. His WARP2 is 0.0, and his WARP3, adjusted for all-time, is 0.1.
Thus: Pablo Ozuna, this year, is virtually the very definition of "replaceable."
That's the subject heading of reader Karl's e-mail to me about this piece, and I see no reason to change it on this blog.
Erstad, playing regularly and without pain for the first time since 2005, has been exactly what Williams had hoped he would be. He is not one of the White Sox's offensive problems, batting .375 since April 20, and doing all the smart and gritty things that make him valuable. "Love him," Williams said. "Every day, the epitome of the grinder comes out to win a ballgame."
Erstad in 93 AB so far: .258/.307/.366. EqA of .256, or slightly below league average. So, as Karl pointed out, yes, that is probably exactly what Williams had hoped Erstad would be. (Ersty's EqA is above his 90th percentile PECOTA projection, so don't worry, it will probably go down.
Also, if you're from the NE, like me, this is the epitome of the grinder:
So you can go ahead and attack them. It's fine. They don't care. You might want to think twice before you accuse them of not giving a team enough "respect," though. 'Cause that sort of sounds like a feeling, you know, and like I just said, computers don't have feelings.
Computer crashes White Sox Statistical program predicts aging team will win only 72 games
It's funny, the legitimate-sounding rationale for the prediction is already in the subhead. (It's aging.)
TUCSON, Ariz. -- After winning a World Series and more games the last two seasons than any team in baseball except the New York Yankees, the White Sox should have earned a little respect.
Right?
Well, again, it's not really about respect. It's about looking at strikeout rates and walk rates and aging curves and ... there are a lot of variables. It's a computer program that does a better job on average than one person just making a guess. Except you're right, they probably only inputted a 3.9 for the White Sox' Respect Over Replacement Team (RORT) when they should've obviously given at least a 5.4.
Well, maybe from real baseball people, but not in the surreal world of computers.
Got it? Anyone who has ever touched a computer is not a real baseball person. They are imaginary, and they hate baseball. And they (cue reality show confessional cam) don't give us enough respect!
(Warning: people who use computers may in fact be computers themselves.)
Baseball Prospectus, considered the new-age statistical bible, projects the White Sox to finish with a 72-90 record this season.
Van Dyck's been reading Murray Chass. Don't do that, van Dyck.
Re: new age -- please read the following, reprinted from February 27.
"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.
A statistical bible is not new age. What the White Sox will be battling, however, are their own statistics, their ages, historical comparisons and myriad other data fed into the PECOTA system at Baseball Prospectus.
Exactly. See, it isn't so hard to figure out how this stuff works. People are working on this system. They tinker with it to improve it. It is not a random number generator.
How the computer arrives at its final projections is way above the average baseball mind, a sort of "objective" analysis of what the computer predicts is going to happen.
Dave van Dyck has a low opinion of your mind, fellow baseball fan. He is the kind of guy who would put finger quotes around the word objective if he were reading this article out loud.
And the scary part is that the computer can be accurate much of the time. It projected five of the six division winners last spring and predicted the Detroit Tigers would finish with a better record than the defending champion White Sox.
That's good. Good predicting. A computer did that? A surreal-world-living computer?
But 72 victories for a team that has averaged 95 the last two seasons? How could that be?
Well, they won 90 last year. And their Pythagorean was 88 wins. So let's start there.
Last year, four batting men on the White Sox accounted for 28 WARP1. It's true. Those men were Jermaine Dye, Joe Crede, Jim Thome, and Paul Konerko. Now, if you follow baseball at all, you might know that Dye had an insane career year, Crede performed better than he ever has, Thome bounced back from injury and put up big numbers at age 35, and Konerko -- well, Konerko stayed good and stayed healthy. PECOTA, not unreasonably, projects Dye to return to Earth, Crede to come back to his previous levels, 36-year-old Thome to be banged up, and Konerko to decline a bit at age 32.
All told, for these four guys, the 2007 WARP projection is just 15.9. 28 minus 15.9 is 12.1.
88 minus 12 is 76. So we're basically almost there already. Just with these four guys. Dye is the main culprit. At age 32, he posted an 8.5 WARP1. This is what the last six years of his career look like: 4.5, 3.4, -0.5, 2.4, 2.9, 1.9. So you can forgive PECOTA for being skeptical.
Pitching-wise, PECOTA isn't optimistic for a bounceback to 2005 levels. Mark Buehrle, for instance, is predicted to continue being 2006 Mark Buehrle, and again: pretty defensible. The man had a K/9 rate of 4.0 last year.
But, Williams was reminded, the computer says the Sox are a year older.
It's been awhile, but nothing gets the blood going like some Ozzie Guillen and some Darin Erstad -- now in one convenient South Side package!
First up, Ozziesmartball Smallballguillen, the professor of wrong, has commenced 2007 by continuing to be totally misguided about baseball things and is already being praised for it.
Ozzie: The appetite's back
Four words in, and you know the article's going to be a gem.
Sox skipper 'hungry' to make up for '06, starting with bunts
So problematic it's almost a parody of itself. The White Sox manager, a man who will play zero minutes of baseball this year, will singlehandedly "make up" for the last season (which he also managed) solely because he is "hungry" and he will do this by bunting, generally a poor strategy.
Guys, this is so crazy it just might work. I think we can blow this asteroid up with a crackerjack team of the world's best drillers. Come Saturday, Ozzie Guillen returns to his comfort zone.
That means White Sox pitchers and catchers report to ''Camp Ozzie 2007'' prepared to hear four-letter expletives and one-liners from their fiery manager. But jokes won't be the only thing Guillen is cracking this spring.
Throw in a whip this time around.
Throw in an iron maiden. Throw in a medieval torture rack. Draw and quarter Joe Crede in center field. It won't matter. 2006 wasn't about guys not being hungry. It was about pitching.
Your pitching wasn't as flukily good as it was in 2005. Got it?
Fact is, Guillen's offseason, which began as disappointment when the regular season ended and the Sox failed to defend their 2005 World Series title, turned to embarrassment by the holidays.
Because of the pitching. This is not hard to understand.
2005 White Sox ERA: 3.61 (3rd in baseball) 2006 White Sox ERA: 4.61 (21st in baseball)
In 2005 tons of guys had career years and the staff was extraordinarily healthy. You weren't so lucky in 2006. The end.
Now, Guillen says, it's hunger.
Good luck parlaying your metaphorical hunger into another set of Neal Cotts and Cliff Polittes. By the way, how much of Ozzie Guillen's managing genius can be attributed to these two randomly fluctuating middle relievers?
Neal Cotts 2005: ERA 1.94, WHIP 1.11 Neal Cotts 2006: ERA 5.17, WHIP 1.63
Cliff Politte 2005: ERA 2.00, WHIP 0.94 Cliff Politte 2006: ERA 8.70, WHIP 2.07
SO UNHUNGRY IN 2006.
'They got a little taste of the success and winning the World Series, and you want to get it back,'' he said recently of his players. ''They are mad because we didn't win it last year. They are hungry to do it again.''
Good. Great. Neal, Cliff, give me your hungry 2005 stats again. Oh wait. You're not even on the team anymore.
That's also when the phone calls to bench coach and good friend Joey Cora became more frequent. Cora has been Guillen's right-hand man the last three seasons and is in charge of putting together the Sox' spring-training program.
The continued message to Cora was, ''Let's get back to small ball.'' Far too often in 2006, Sox hitters failed to move the runner or get the bunt down in key situations.
Yee-ha! Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. I cannot believe that anyone believes that the problem with the 2006 White Sox was a lack of smallball -- and yet the only person whose opinion matters believes just that. Bunting? The team ERA went up an entire run and we're talking about bunting?
Plus, Jesus, just take one second and look at this:
2005 White Sox Runs Scored: 741 (13th in baseball) 2006 White Sox Runs Scored: 868 (3rd in baseball)
I guess what I'm saying is your offense made a quantum leap forward in 2006. Your offense was the only reason you weren't 15 games out of the playoff race. At the Tucson, Ariz., training facility, Cora has designated a special field that will be used for ''Bunting 101,'' and only a few Sox players have a pass.
The good ones. "Everyone has to go through it besides [Jermaine] Dye, [Paul] Konerko and [Jim] Thome."
Exactly.
''We have a different way. We're going to play games -- give bunt situations, give pointers, the way they used to teach. We're going to make it fun, but they're not going to [expletive] around. I'll be in charge on that field because we have to do stuff better.''
Not saying this stuff is going to hurt the team -- okay, it might -- but seriously, this seems like a misuse of time and resources. The team was third in runs scored last year. Thome and Dye should be worse than last year, so there's that, but the answer to a problem that doesn't exist is not bunting. It's not.
I would also say that in a certain way, practicing bunting over and over again sort of is [expletive] around. Guillen also will play mad scientist this spring, moving the top and bottom of the lineup around regularly in hopes of finding a solid formula.
Guillen will play mad scientist with a lineup that scored the third most runs in baseball to the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. My guess? Erstad hits 2nd, 6th, and 8th and OPSes a hungry .590 in 1800 at bats.
While Guillen has a hands-off mentality regarding the pitching staff, he and pitching coach Don Cooper do have a message for the entire staff, as well as the minor-leaguers.
That message is: magically rekindle the improbable run of health and quality you experienced in 2005 that made people think Ozzie Guillen knew what the hell he was doing.
---
And now, Part 2, wherein we once again encounter the notion that the White Sox' offense and its lack of smallness was the reason for their non-championship-winning ways. Plus, Erstad.
TUCSON, Ariz. – Darin Erstad and the White Sox. Now there’s a match made in OzzieBall heaven.
Now there's a giant turd of a lede.
He’d run over your mother to catch a flyball, and he just might run over his own mother if she tried to block home plate.
He just might punt your mother in the tits because when this guy punts he punts to win and he sometimes thinks breasts are footballs.
His body is beaten up, not from his days as a college football player
(punter)
at Nebraska or a high school hockey star in North Dakota
Holy. Shitfuck. Add that to the Darin Erstad resume, quick. Opens up a whole new world of toughness metaphors and similies. "Darin Erstad plays baseball like he plays football. And he plays football like he plays hockey. With a stick that he uses to hit people with."
From now on, The Punter shall be referred to as The Highschoolhockeystar.
When healthy, Erstad is similar to Aaron Rowand, the popular, fence-crashing center fielder who was the classic “grinder” for the ’05 Sox. Except Erstad is faster and stronger.
And he parlays that speed and strength into hitting really, really atrociously. Like scary bad. Pokey Reese shit. I'm exaggerating. But here are Erstad's post-2000 EqA seasons: .252, .256, .241, .274, .259, .219.
“The fans of Chicago,” Guillen said, “will appreciate the way this kid plays.”
I bet they will. Dirty-hat type guy. Still: .252, .256, .241, .274, .259, .219.
Yes, the White Sox lost their way and relied too much on home runs last season, but they hit a lot of homers in 2005, too.
Here we go again. They lost their way to the tune of 127 additional runs. Adding a crazy-good Jim Thome will do that.
The difference? In ’05, they were aggressive on the bases. They bunted. They hit behind runners. They broke up double plays. They risked bodily harm to make sensational catches. They constantly put pressure on opponents.
They scored 127 fewer runs. They rode a scintillating pitching staff to unwarranted acclaim. They subjected us to way too much Ozzie Guillen.
They were 13th in runs scored. They scored fewer runs than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They on-based worse than the Cubs and the Orioles and the same as the Nationals and the Astros and the Pirates.
Offensively, they weren't that good. And now we have to hear about how Ozzie Guillen is revamping his far better 2006 offense to be more like the shittier, less effective, decidedly mediocre 2005 version.
How hard is it to look up team run totals? What does it take? 10 seconds? And yet no one ever seems to do it but us, when discussing the White Sox. Unbelievable.
More like Smell-Ball! Yeah, I said it. I think Small-Ball should be called Smell-Ball. Because it smells smelly, like a bad smell does. And while that's perhaps the stupidest thing a human being has thought, uttered, or written in quite some time, it's no less valid an argument than much of the drivel in Thomas Boswell's Washington Post article For Many Teams, Small-Ball Efforts Are Being Richly Rewarded.
Thomas?
Welcome to the era of baseball on a budget. It's time for brains and judgment to have their day, not just juice and financial muscle.
Cool! So you're going to talk about brains like Billy Beane's and Terry Ryan's? Guys who use their judgment to build good baseball teams on a budget? Tell me you're going to do that, Bozzy old friend.
This period in the game's history is just beginning and none too soon. But you can see it everywhere, from the mid-market teams in last year's World Series to the fundamentally sound, unselfish teams that dominated the World Baseball Classic.
Oh, Boz. Why? You're going to talk about the White Sox, aren't you? And chemistry? We're going to be lectured on chemistry and oh, maybe sparkplugs and table-setters and nobly giving yourself up for the good of The Game.
The Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Angels and a few other mega-market teams won't be joining the rest of the sport in the frugal fun. They know that big money will still have years when it can buy the pot, as it always has. Big is still better. But not nearly as much better as it has been in recent times. For many other franchises, especially the 15 or so teams that are not among the very richest or the very poorest, these are days when dollars well spent can put you in the postseason. Or, as the White Sox and Astros proved last October, get you a date in the World Series.
White Sox. Check. And wait: your premise is that mid- and small-market teams will experience a Renaissance for some reason? I'm sure you have a well thought out explanation for all this bluster.
As if to underline the point, the WBC illustrated every theme from last year's postseason. The small-ball and off-speed pitching masters from Japan and South Korea, as well as the divinely precise, unselfish Cubans prospered while the U.S. team went home early, beaten by Canada, South Korea and Mexico as the rich Americans waited for home runs that didn't arrive often enough.
No! No no no no no. The WBC showed that in a single-elimination baseball tournament, weird, dumb stuff can happen. It was fun, sure, seeing a team of shaggy-haired Korean dudes beat down A-Rod and Jeter, but does anyone think that South Korea actually fielded a better baseball team than the United States? Not even you, Thomas Boswell, an 89-year-old man with Nostalgia Glasses on, could believe such a thing. And let's address once again the argument that Japan won the tournament with small-ball, guts, and math-related sneak attacks. Japan hit 10 home runs in 8 games. The U.S., 9 in 6 games. The U.S. finished second in SLG, Japan third. Japan finished second in OPS to Canada (!). And those scrappy, crafty Japanese contact hitters averaged more strikeouts per plate appearance than the selfish, steroided-up U.S. sluggers (0.144 to 0.132). Probably waiting for those home runs to show up. (An argument that I've never understood. Who waits for anything in baseball? You're telling me Vernon Wells goes up there thinking, "F this, I'm just gonna strike out and then wait for Griffey to hit a home run. I'm a lazy dum-dum.") As for Japanese pitching: yeah, I bet there aren't as many Japanese pitchers who can bring the nasty like American WBCers Roger Clemens and Gary Majewski, but who was the MVP of the whole tournament? Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who throws 96 mph cheese on a good day. And wait a minute, just how "divinely precise" were the Cubans? Last I saw them, Yuliesky Gourriel was chucking a ball into the dugout and they were leading the tournament in errors.
In the first inning of the WBC title game, Japan paved the way to its championship with four runs without a single hard-hit ball. You'd have thought that Scott Podsednik, Tadahito Iguchi, Jermaine Dye, Paul Konerko and A.J. Pierzynski -- the modest top five hitters in the White Sox' order last October -- were playing for Sadaharu Oh's club. Draw a walk, lay down a bunt, steal a base, hit behind the runner, beat out an infield hit, then murder 'em with a five-hop ground ball into center field.
Yeah, about those modest top five hitters ... I don't know if you follow baseball (you seem like more of an architecture guy), but Paul Konerko hit 40 home runs last year. 41 the year before. In fact, he hit a home run every 14.4 at bats, good for 6th in the AL. But you're right, Scott Podsednik is modest.
Why, the style reminded you exactly of the best feel-good story of the first five months of the '05 season -- the spunky, one-run wonder, low-payroll Nationals fighting for a playoff spot before they got tired, got hurt and got on each other's nerves.
Is that what happened? They got on each other's nerves? Are you sure it wasn't the fact that they were beating their Pythagorean by a significant amount (probably through blind luck) mid-way through the season, and then that the cruel reality that they were allowing more runs than they scored finally set in, no matter what they currently measured on the Thomas Boswell Spunk Meter?
No, you're right. Nerves.
In this post-steroid era (with the number of positive drug tests finally under 1 percent), it has become clear that pitching and defense, as well as more versatile, diverse offenses, once again have a place at the top of the sport. Especially in tense, lower-scoring venues like the late-season playoff races, the chilly postseason and the WBC.
This is clear because a) the White Sox won the World Series one year and b) Japan won the WBC, a tournament in which they went 5 and 3. (Korea was 6-1; the Dominican Republic, a team of monstrous home-run-hitting sluggers if there ever was one, was 5-2.) Game, set, match, Boswell.
In other words, if you can't afford a $100 million payroll, it's a viable time to be an affluent but not obscenely rich team. For example, clubs like both the Nats and Orioles should, in the future, be able to pay enough to compete on this more level field.
You haven't remotely proven that things are any different now than they were, say, three years ago.
It's no accident that the rise of mid-market teams has coincided with the decrease in performance-enhancing drugs. The artificially inflated sluggers and strikeout pitchers of recent years commanded the most astronomical salaries. Plenty of the richest didn't cheat. But too many did. To reach the top of the heap, some teams had to hold their noses and pay inflated salaries for superstars with muscles-from-a-bottle. Now, that's changing.
A hand-waving argument. Actually, most hand-waving arguments would be ashamed to be in the same room as this argument. According to Game of Shadows, Barry Bonds didn't start juicing until after the 1998 season. We can assume that some guys were doing it before then (McGwire, Sosa, I'm looking at you). But were those guys' teams winning championships? Were the Yankees' dynasty teams loaded up with "artificially inflated sluggers and strikeout pitchers"? It doesn't seem like they were helped all that much more than other teams were by steroids. It seems like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Chicago were the main beneficiaries. Plus, look at who's won championships since 2000: the D-Backs, the Angels, the Marlins, the Red Sox, and the White Sox. Besides the Sox and their offensive juggernaut, where are the 'roided-up mega-rich franchises that you say ruled the world until last year?
Because of this transition from power ball to a more balanced blend of brawn and moxie,
You still haven't proven that. And moxie? Who are you, a guy in a film noir movie?
we're entering a period of semi-frugal baseball. No, the rich teams still aren't like the rest of us. But they're closer. The sport doesn't have parity. (Who wants it? Too boring.) But the Marlins did win the '03 title with an Opening Day payroll of only $48,750,000, less than a third of the Yankees whom they beat in the Series. And the Twins and Athletics, among others, have contended often with modest payrolls.
Right. So you're saying the new "semi-frugal" period started in or before 2003? What?
The teams that spot the next trend most quickly and adapt their rosters to capitalize on it will get the most value for their dollars in coming years. So far, the Nationals and Orioles certainly seem to be early adapters.
And the next trend is fielding a team of Pod-eck-ggins-es, if I'm not mistaken. And signing a guy to play a position he doesn't want to play. A guy who can't get on base to save his life. With a .265 OBP away from Ameriquest Field last year. And who made $7.5 million last year. That's value.
Baltimore has decided to build around its five-man pitching rotation of Daniel Cabrera, Erik Bedard, Rodrigo Lopez, Kris Benson and Bruce Chen, coached by ex-Braves pitching maestro Leo Mazzone. Adding Benson to replace disappointing Sidney Ponson was the team's top offseason priority, rather than getting more power hitters to replace Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro. Look what rotation depth did for the White Sox, whose five starters completely shut down foes last October.
Rotation depth did nothing for the White Sox. Their top five starters combined for 152 starts, so they didn't really need any depth. That's right. 152. Brandon McCarthy started the other 10. Oh, you're talking about having five good starters, not guys who can start outside the top five? Five starters who "completely shut down foes last October"? Well, I know for a fact that the White Sox only used four starters in the playoffs because I looked it up using a computer that talks to other computers through a cable in the wall.
In Washington, the Nationals are totally committed to the thesis that times have changed. Will the Nats move in the fences at cavernous RFK Stadium? "No way," said General Manager Jim Bowden who has spent the last year retooling his personnel to suit his park. "We want line-drive gap hitters with extra-base power who can have a high average, not fly ball [home run] hitters," said Bowden. "There are a lot of hits out there in our [big] outfield. The long fly balls get run down. The line drives don't."
I would have liked it better if the paragraph ended "No way," said General Manager Jim Bowden, who has spent the last year making horrendous, arbitrary trades, optioning promising hitters like Ryan Church, jettisoning OBP machines like Brad Wilkerson, acquiring OBP/clubhouse poison like Alfonso Soriano, and generally making a mess of things and ruining the future of baseball in our nation's capital. "There are a lot of hits out there in our [big] outfield," said Bowden.
It's no accident that Vinny Castilla, Preston Wilson and Wilkerson -- who all fit the mold of big-fly all-or-nothing sluggers who will never hit close to .300 in a big ballpark -- have left the organization. The Nats don't think they suit the dimensions of RFK or the new Nationals Park, which has been designed at the team's request to be "a pitcher's park."
Brad Wilkerson has a career high of 32 home runs, and in the three years before he went to Washington, he OBPed .370, .380, and .374. That guy is a total cancer, an all-or-nothing jerkwad who can't stop swinging for the fences like some preening juiced-up monster who hates team unity and grit and sweat and hustle-heart. He once promised a sick kid in the hospital he would sacrifice bunt a guy over but then swung for the fences and hit a home run like some kind of asshole.
If the Nats play with the team unity and fundamental soundness of the first half of '05, then all these theories may have some meaning.
They'll be about .500 if they do that.
However, if their defense remains as unfocused as it has been in Florida and if their lineup lacks internal chemistry, as it did in '05, then all the Nats' smart talk won't count for much.
Internal chemistry? Internal chemistry??? I think that's the name of the new Bush album. You guys listen to Bush, right? Hello? 1996, are you there?
Why some lineups are combustible and others are inert is still one of the game's mysteries. Who'd have thought obscure Podsednik and Iguchi were the proper table setters for a world champion?
I like that after all that, he chalks up the potency of a baseball team's offense to "hey, guys, it's just one of those mysteries!"
Don't count out the power of a buck in any sport, certainly not baseball. But, as Opening Day arrives, at least 20 teams are firmly convinced that their budgets will not prevent them from making the playoffs. Once you reach October, as teams like the '02 Angels, '03 Marlins and '05 White Sox showed, nobody weighs your wallet before handing you the World Series trophy.
And nobody weighs your brain before you write an article about baseball.
Hold on, I just got an email with the subject "Re: Tom Boswell's brain weight." It's 1375 grams. Huh. That's about average. How about that.
My good friend Mr. M. Stone, Esq., B.A. (Harvard U.), M.A. (Columbia B.S., Class of '08), whose reticence in re: posting for this blog is one of the great mysteries of my life, made an excellent point today, namely: no one has talked about the fact that Japan might have won the WBC in part because their pitchers have kind of crazy deliveries, some of them, and w
