Megan is offended that NY City and State is putting up $220 million towards the Yankees' new stadium. So much so that she declares:

I'm feeling more affection for the Nationals by the minute.

I understand Megan's aversion to spending public money on sports stadiums (especially as most studies find that municipalities don't get much economic bang for the public buck), but this is almost as short-sighted and impractical as....voting for Ron Paul or something. First, the Nationals are themselves one of the worst offenders in recent years when it comes to extorting public money for their stadium - a city council revolt led DC to cap their outlays at "only" $611 million for the Nationals' new stadium. And it's not as if DC is that much more flush, or has fewer social problems, than NYC.

For better or worse, most new stadiums built over the past 20 years or so have been built whollly or mostly with public money (though the trend has been decreasing in recent years). By (very, very low) relative standards, New York has gotten off relatively easily with the new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets - neither project would crack any top-10 list of municipal stadium boondoggles.

And while the Nationals are on the way up, I still expect that New York will earn a better return on its investment than DC - at least on the field.

A soon-to-be-cousin-in-law asks me what I think of the recent brawls between the Rays and the Yankees.

Here's what I think about it:

-zsdjghsg-

Sorry, I fell asleep and my head hit the keyboard.

More seriously, Peter Abraham says it all, far better than I could:

The idea that this somehow represents the "new" Yankees under Joe Girardi is laughable. Let's review for a second:

A Class A catcher with a .261 career batting average and six home runs in 247 games got run over and broke his wrist. Most of the regular players were home when this happened. I would venture that most of them couldn't pick Francisco Cervelli out of a lineup.

A non-roster left-hander who practically none of the regular players have ever spoken to grazed one of Tampa Bay's players with a pitch.

Then Shelley Duncan, who has played in 34 big league games, decided to go all Rambo with his slide into second base.

...The Yankees are a class team with class guys like Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and Rivera leading the way. Girardi was part of that group as a player and will be that way as a manager. You don't motivate a $205 million roster by vowing revenge on the Tampa Bay Rays. This is baseball, not minor-league hockey. You think Girardi wants to sit in the dugout and make up silly excuses for what Shelley Duncan did? That's not why he wanted the Yankees job.

The Yankees don't care if people pose for home runs or nonsense like that. They care about beating you to death with their relentless lineup then watching you flail weakly at Mo's cutter in the ninth inning. They worry about winning, not sideshows.

The idea that they "sent a message to all of baseball" is ridiculous. Having All-Star caliber players at nearly every position and the best young pitching in the game is sending a message. Shelley Duncan sliding spikes high into second base is not what the Yankees are about.

That sums it up.

As far as whether this pugnacity augurs well for Tampa this year, I will try to elaborate on this in my baseball previews (which I hope to start posting in the next week or two), but I am indeed terrified of the Rays. But fights between them and the Yankees in spring training have nothing to do with it - rather, what worries me is the number of burgeoning stars they have all over the place, and the possibility that the pieces will fit together in very short order.

Red Sox fans likely remember some crazy brawls over the years between the Sox and the Rays (this game being the most famous example). You might have noticed that they didn't lead to much success on Tampa's part. Combativeness isn't new in Tampa - good players are.

(With the trade of Elijah Dukes over the winter, the Rays have even lost the excuse of having one of the very few players who could legitimately cause everyone else in the ballpark to fear for their safety, especially after the game. One more strike against this theory.)

Like Tyler Kepner, I would never have expected Mariano Rivera to name this guy as a mentor:

...I asked him if anyone had helped him out when he was a young Yankee. Rivera surprised me with the first name he mentioned: Steve Howe.

I always thought it was amazing how well Howe pitched when he initially joined the Yankees after being out of the game for so long. One trivia note: the GM who released Howe for the final time in 1996 was Bob Watson, who Howe induced to fly out for the final out of the 1981 World Series.

No time to do justice to this topic, but David Pinto has a link to a fascinating and controversial piece on steroids in baseball:

Quinn is a second-generation disinformation artist. He takes his cue from a much younger Armen Keteyian who was largely responsible for beginning the late-20th hysteria about steroids some 20 years ago in his article written as a sordid eulogy for ex-NFLer Lyle Alzado. And almost 20 years after his screed he sat in front of Dr. Fost and apologized for being an accidental progenitor of the same type of disinformation Quinn - and those who do the same as him - spreads today. Almost 20 years later Keteyian sat in front of virulent anti-steroids buff, Gary Wadler, formerly of the world Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and found that Wadler had no scientific evidence to back his claims that steroids were the evil he claimed they were; found that Wadler had no idea that Fost’s work existed. Sadly, Wadler was reduced to pathetic phrases like, you’re playing Russian roulette with your health, and why would you take a chance using them even if they aren’t harmful?

Here we are, with scientific evidence before us in the way of a peer-reviewed study that clearly shows that steroids taken under a physician’s care have no deleterious effects on healthy males over the age of 25 and that every male, because of a natural reduction in the amount of testosterone produced by the body, should take monthly injections of steroids to lead a healthier life - and the study is shunned like an “amulet” - that was actually nothing more than a pendant - might have been during the Salem witch trials.

Also, see this post from the same blogger. It is too long and good to excerpt, but anyone interested in the historical context of drug policy needs to read this.

I am currently reading Ian Ayres' Super Crunchers, and it's quite good. But in the introduction, he makes some mistakes regarding one of his examples of the analysis of large databases (the "Super Crunching" of the title). Specifically, he cites the now-famous example from Moneyball about how Billy Beane instituted a new draft philosophy for the 2002 draft, allegedly de-emphasizing the opinions of scouts in favor of a more statistically-driven approach. Ayres specifically cites the example of Jeremy Brown, the infamous "fat catcher" whom scouts hated but was drafted anyway on Beane's orders due to his great hitting stats in college. (This blog may have discussed Moneyball once or twice.

First, while Michael Lewis' account of the A's approach to the 2002 draft - especially regarding Brown - was an all-time classic of journalism, the philosophy of that draft has not held up well. Specifically, Ayres wrote that Brown "has progressed faster than anyone else the A's drafted that year," and then cites his brief 2006 callup. Those two sentences create a very misleading impression (especially the "has" tense). Brown did rise through the high minors quickly and was (according to Moneyball's epilogue) the first 2002 draftee invited to the A's major-league spring training, but Brown's career stalled soon thereafter. Fellow 2002 draftees Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton and Mark Teahen all reached the major leagues long before Brown's 2006 debut. Those three have gone on to major league careers of varying levels of success, but Brown only appeared in 5 games before being designated for assignment in 2007 (probably around the time Ayers' book was going to press). Brown in fact just announced his retirement.

More generally, the data-driven approach taken by the A's in the 2002 draft was not particularly successful. Another major part of their philosophy, as detailed by Lewis, was the near-categorical rejection of high school players in favor of college players, supported by old research conducted by Bill James among others. Well, we now know that those conclusions haven't been accurate for a while. ($$) The A's themselves have in recent years drafted many high school pitchers, generally regarded as the riskiest possible category of prospect. Moreover, as Derek Jacques notes ($$), most of the other prospects specifically identified in Moneyball as draft targets identified through the A's statistical analysis did not come close to making the majors. It is incorrect to say that scouts' importance to the identification of prospects has decreased in the years following Moneyball's publication - if anything, the opposite is true.

Finally, I'm not sure that Ayres picks the righ theoretical example to illustrate the data-mining that is at the heart of his book. While there are thousands of baseball prospects considered for drafting every year, the differences in their playing contexts (high school vs. college, different areas of the country and levels of competition, etc.) work against the idea that a large database of common baseline experiences can be constructed and analyzed. Baseball people look at their statistics, but the contexts are so different as to make it difficult to analyze usefully in the aggregate - which is what "Super Crunching" is about.

But sabermetrics does present a really good example of what Ayres is looking for: the efforts in recent years to build better defensive metrics. Whether it's David Pinto's "Probablistic Model of Range," Bill James and John Dewan's "Plus-Minus System" or an alternate model, the new measures of defensive performance rely on analyzing thousands of plays in the field. So let's pretend this was the example Ayres meant to cite.

Don't tell the children.

A longer version of that sentence below the fold:

Sort of.

Maybe baseball doesn't naturally translate to the agenda of today's Republican Party, but there is little question that the way the game is played (as opposed to its business context or other aspects) is more akin to a classically liberal, lassiez-faire society than to any alternative.

Specifically, the game is primarily played as a series of individual contests: pitcher v. batter (even fielder v. ball), to which there is no alternative (a player can't pass his at-bat to a teammate). In these contexts, the participant virtually always benefits his team the most by achieving maximum individual success. A home run is always a better outcome than a single - full stop.

While there are certain situations in which a player is called to refrain from maximum individual success, such as a sacrifice bunt, those are marginal events (and the sabermetric scholarship has demonstrated the limited extent of their benefits). Truly, a baseball player promotes the good of (his team's) society by pursuing his own self-interest. When the baseball powers that be were inventing a false creation myth, they should have used Adam Smith rather than Abner Doubleday.

(I note that Fred Barnes argued the opposite in an old Weekly Standard article ($$). That in and of itself might becounted as evidence in favor of my argument. But also - to put it mildly - he didn't really engage the nature of the game. I think making fun of Fred Barnes is the definition of a worthy bipartisan initiative.)

Incidentally, much of what you need to know about baseball and politics, at least at the ownership level, is contained in the following statement: George W. Bush practically counted as a progressive as the Texas Rangers' owner. Showing foresight that he didn't bring to Washington, he consistently dissented from the owners' war on the players' union in the early 1990s that culminated in the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series (he was only one of two owners to vote against requesting the resignation of commissioner Fay Vincent, the event which set the owners' course for war). And he was far from the most conservative owner when it came to politics, either. In fact, his predecessor as Rangers' owner, Eddie Chiles, was an oilman who doubled as a conservative radio commentator. His broadcasts always started with the words "I'm mad."

Check out this moving story about a high school star baseball player, a teammate of A-Rod and Doug Mientkiewicz, who never made it:

Butler was Westminster Christian's best player that year. A left-handed pitcher and first baseman, he went 13-0 in 1992, his junior year. He was named the Dade County player of the year, edging Mientkiewicz and easily beating Rodriguez. He was also named an all-American.

"If you would have said anybody on that team would have gone on to the pros besides Alex, I would have thought Steve Butler," said Steve Owens, a reserve player in 1992 who now works as a financial analyst. "He had a great arm and more talent than anyone. I don't know what happened to him."

Anyone who follows baseball seriously can think of other such examples (Gerry Priddy's failure to keep pace with Phil Rizzuto is the one I can think of most readily). For every successful career we watch on the major league baseball fields, there are many others who do not see, but might have. Whether due to injury, personality quirks or a simple inability to grasp an opportunity, the careers that never were haunt the games we see.

Why so few?

On another note, congratulations to Bill Simmons and the Sports Gal (scroll down to the bottom of the page for the reason).

Check out Joel Sherman's thought-provoking piece on the just-begun baseball season (and why couldn't they have hit like this in Games 4 or 5 last year?).

Steriod vapors have indirectly addled the brains of most of the mainstream media's baseball writers (not that flexibility was their strong suit beforehand), but this piece seems a happy exception. Whether he turns out right or wrong, Sherman is at least thinking flexibly.

Also, see Jayson Stark's about-face from the "All Steroids, All The Time" mindset that has possessed most of the ESPN types and their media bretheren (Buster Olney, this means you):

We've spent this spring surveying general managers, managers, assistant GMs, number crunchers, players and other assorted experts about what comes next in this sport. Their answers will come as a major shock to everyone who has concluded that steroids are to blame for anything and everything they've come to hate about modern baseball.

The percentage of players on steroids probably never was much more than 20 percent � even at steroids' peak � which means 80 percent were always clean.

(Emphasis added.)

to the most famous pitching non-prospect of the last 20 years, Sidd Finch. Alan Schwarz has a great retrospective in today's NYT:

Selected Mets officials were among the few people (including Sports Illustrated editors) even slightly aware of what the magazine was up to. They issued Berton a uniform and allowed him full access to their spring training complex, even letting him sit in the bullpen during exhibition games as Stewart clicked away. Fans would ask the weird-looking guy in the No. 21 jersey if he was trying out for the club, and he would reply: "Yeah. You'll hear about it later."

Did they ever. When Sports Illustrated hit the newsstands several days before the April 1 cover date, "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" staggered baseball and beyond. Two major league general managers called the new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, to ask how Finch's opponents could even stand at the plate safely against a fastball like that. The sports editor of one New York newspaper berated the Mets' public relations man, Jay Horwitz, for giving Sports Illustrated the scoop. The St. Petersburg Times sent a reporter to find Finch, and a radio talk-show host proclaimed he had actually spotted the phenom - who, truth be told, was back in Oak Park teaching art at Hawthorne Junior High.

I was writing a long post until after 2:00 AM last night. I had intended to finish it now.

I thought I had saved it.

Apparently not.

@#$%@!#)%!@$%!!!

There's no way I can reconstruct it now.

It was an extended review of all we have seen over the last couple of years regarding a certain rivalry to be renewed on Sunday night in the Bronx.

Here are some random items from the now-vanished post:

For me the greatness of the rivalry, currently at its peak, exists between the white lines. ... What gives these clashes added allure is not all the peripheral hullabaloo but rather the extraordinarily high level of baseball that is played when these two historic franchises are at their best.

- "Sully"

I'm not even a Yankees or a Red Sox fan, and I have to admit that they've played the best, most dramatic games of the 2004 season. There were times it seemed like anyone could put on the uniforms and have an epic game: Your office could split on hometowns, put on a whiffle ball tournament, and the Red Sox-Yankees match-up would go 11 innings, decided on a miraculous over-the-cubicle-into-the-water-cooler diving stab of a line drive for the last out.
- Derek Zumsteg

What can happen in a best-of-seven that hasn't already happened between these two this season? What kind of heroics can top what we have already witnessed? Is Pokey Reese going to throw three innings of brilliant relief in a 18-inning 1-0 win? Will Jason Giambi pinch-hit in a critical jam and hit a ball that's never found for a grand slam home run to win the deciding game seven? I don't know, but it's going to be interesting and it should be great baseball.
- Derek Zumsteg

You might say that expectations were met - especially if you're a Sox fan.

This has been a very depressing winter all around in NYC, but it may finally lift. Let's get it on.

OK, not just yet. One sour grape to get off my chest (seriously mixed metaphor alert). So help me God and Bill James (don't any Sox fans remember his "Tracers" or other demolitions of old stories?) - in no particular order - if I hear one more reference to how the veteran leadership showed by Varitek in picking a fight with A-Rod for no particular reason "sparked the Red Sox's turnaround" or some other nonsense, I'm sending that person 100 autographed pictures of Derek Jeter (if it's made by a Red Sox fan) or 100 copies of each of "Moneyball" and "Win Shares" (if it's made by a know-nothing in the media). Dean Barnett, consider yourself warned.

Such veteran leadership, which worked so well that the Red Sox lost several games in the standings immediately thereafter and didn't start gaining for another 2 1/2 weeks, inspired the Red Sox to grant Varitek a captaincy and a $40 million contract, which should make him a wealthy man long after his knees have expired.

Previews to follow over the next few days...assuming I remember to hit the "Save" button.

Here's a phenomenal interview with Bill James - one of the best I've seen.

Most of it will be of interest to his disciples (and wannabes thereof), but here's an excerpt of greater applicability:

James T: I have to ask you this. On an internet baseball fan site, I recently saw you quoted to the effect that veteran leadership had enabled the Red Sox to come back from down 0-3 in the ALCS. But, in that forum, the immediate response was to doubt your sincerity. Bill couldn't mean that! And these were people who held you in high regard. Are you resigned to your reputation at this point in time?

Bill James: Well, believe it or not, I don�t worry about my reputation in that sense. I�ll let that take care of itself.

This is probably a long-winded answer, but I�ll try to explain it this way. If I were in politics and presented myself as a Republican, I would be admired by Democrats by despised by my fellow Republicans. If I presented myself as a Democrat, I would popular with Republicans but jeered and hooted by the Democrats.

I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world�a paradigm, if you will�and we need those, of course; you can�t get through the day unless you have some organized way of thinking about the world. But the problem is that the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by our theories�no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.

As in politics we have left and right�neither of which explains the world or explains how to live successfully in the world�in baseball we have the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the sabermetricians against the scouts, however you want to characterize it. I created a good part of the analytical paradigm that the statistical analysts advocate, and certainly I believe in that paradigm and I advocate it within the Red Sox front office. But at the same time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that paradigm.

It is one thing to build an analytical paradigm that leaves out leadership, hustle, focus, intensity, courage and self-confidence; it is a very, very different thing to say that leadership, hustle, courage and self-confidence do not exist or do not play a role on real-world baseball teams. The people who think that way. . .not to be rude, but they�re children. They may be 40-year-old children, they may be 70-year-old children, but their thinking is immature.

Or, to put it in one sentence, if I worried about that @#%$ I would have folded my tent 25 years ago, when my ideas were anathema to the mainstream baseball establishment.

In honor of the Twins' series win over the Yankees (and their making tonight's game much too interesting), please check out the hottest baseball blogger around, Batgirl.

Let's hope Andymakes a speedy and successful recovery. Jason Schmidt has come back just fine from the same injury, so there's hope. Perhaps the Yankee brass was smarter than some bloggers were in December.

Continuing my post from last week about the other AL teams, here's my summation of the Yankees' 2004 season and several key points thereof:

I just wanted to touch on a couple of items from the classic 13-inning game between the Yankees and Red Sox last month.

1) Since the game was played, I've been trying to think of a better regular season game I've seen. I officially give up.

2) For a political columnist, Bob Herbert is a great sportswriter. His NYT op-ed on the game indicates that he's in the wrong department:

By then the players on both sides seemed to have entered a special zone that transcended the rivalry of the two teams. They were locked in an extended competition played out at such a high level of skill and intensity that it conferred a kind of grace on all who participated, no matter who would end up losing.

That was one of the most amazing things about the game - the way the players on both sides dropped all pretense in extra innings, and combined an all-out effort to win the game with undisguised awe at what they were a part of. Except, of course, for the Red Sox's soon-to-be-former shortstop. It wasn't just the sitting out of a key game, or the contrasts with the great plays and efforts of his ancient rivals Jeter and A-Rod. It was the contrast vivdly portrayed by the TV cameras - his Red Sox teammates standing at the top step of the dugout, mouths uniformly agape for innings on end, while Nomar sat by himself on the bench, motionless and emotionless. Sometimes, the TV camera does not lie.

3) My brother had tickets to the game. He gave them away less than an hour before game time. The recipient has promised to name his first-born child after my brother. (Let's hope it's a boy.)

I noted the other day that the Toronto Blue Jays' disappointing season, despite J.P. Ricciardi's efforts that have been applauded by the sabermetrics community, threatens to turn that team into the center of the "Moneyball" wars.

David Pinto comments on yesterday's firing of manager Carlos Tosca and anticipates one justified line of criticism:

[W]hat I want to know is why Moneyball GM's do such a poor job of hiring managers?

...Why do they go for teachers like Tosca, or player's managers like Francona, or people with a presence like Art Howe? Why don't they go for someone like Earl Weaver or Whitey Herzog or Davey Johnson, who basically agree with their philosophy of running a baseball team without being obvious about it? Are these GMs afraid to share the limelight with a strong manager?

Pinto makes a very good point: the managers of the "Moneyball" teams generally range from the mediocre, to the uninspired, to Grady Little. The only such manager I can think of that inspires any respect around the game is Bruce Bochy of the Padres, and that's only if you (a) count the Padres as a "Moneyball" team and (b) assume that the respect granted to Bochy is justified; I'm somewhat skeptical as to both.

I think there are a few factors at work here:

1) There almost certainly is a control-freak aspect at work; insofar as the "Moneyball" GMs feel they need to create a revolution against the entrenched interests in the organization, they feel a manager with any experience at all carries an unacceptable risk of becoming an independent power source. Sandy Alderson was quoted in damning detail on this point in Moneyball with respect to Art Howe. Though the sentiments are never put in Beane's mouth in such explicit fashion, the attitude one gets from reading Moneyball is that Beane feels that the best he can expect from a manager is a Hippocratic goal of "do no harm."

I don't agree with that attitude, assuming it exists. If you are in fact trying to overturn an organization's culture, proclaiming the changes from the top down is only one step towards that goal: you need agents of your program at many different levels making sure that the changes get carried out on every level. Billy Beane understands that; the A's are a model of implementing unified organizational strategy throughout the minor leagues. Why not have an agent of Beane-ball as manager, instead of settling for a cipher like Art Howe? I tried making this point - albeit not very well - some time ago in suggesting that Bobby Valentine might be a good match to manage a Billy Beane team. Justly criticized by David Pinto, my point was that a manager as smart, confident and open-minded as Valentine (or someone like him, with better people skills) would be capable of buying into the analytic program and pushing it forward in a way that an empty uniform like Art Howe could never do.

Incidentally, the team that seems to have best integrated their manager into the organizational philosophy is the Cleveland Indians, with Eric Wedge. I can understand that it would work best with a young, rebuilding team like the Indians, but if any Red Sox fans can explain how Francona helps advance the front office's agenda, I'd like to hear about it.

2) Generally, there are no managers in the game today with the self-confident desire to put their own stamp on the game (or, if you prefer, "egotistical enough to consider themselves strategic geniuses"). There are no Gene Mauchs, Earl Weavers or Whitey Herzogs managing today. Perhaps that fact feeds the feeling of Beane and his ilk that the most they can hope for out of a manager is an innocuous apparatchnik.

The last manager I can think of who really changed the game was Tony LaRussa, who bequeathed us the hyper-specialized, overloaded bullpen. Why aren't there any more like him? I can think of a few reasons (all of which are pure speculation):
a) There were never that many managerial geniuses in the old days either; the "old boys'" network was even more prevalent then.
b) The continuous increase of the media and national exposure for every game and team has increased the costs of dissenting from the conventional wisdom (i.e., a unique managerial strategy might be the lead story on Sportscenter every night).
c) The sabermetric revolution might have had some indirect effect, in that baseball people are now aware of outside sources of knowledge that go by the term "expertise." While they may not actually know what such expertise consists of, they understand that they can't go by their whims and call it expertise any longer.

UPDATE: Thinking about it more this morning, I realzed that the above omits one of the biggest reasons for the lack of larger-than-life managers today: evolution. The late Stephen Jay Gould's articles on evolutionary processes and the extinction of the .400 hitter are much loved by baseball analysts everywhere: to oversimplify into one sentence, his point is that the competitive pressures of the sport have, over time, reduced the differences between the best and worst players, making it that much more difficult to perform extraordinarily disproportionate feats like hitting .400. (I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong. And as a digression, I think there's a good argument to be made that the last decade has seen some reversal of the Gould-identified phenomenon - there seems to be an increase in the extremes between the best and worst players and performances. But that's for another time, preferably reinforced by some real math.)

Red Sox fans might have trouble accepting this after last year's Game 7 debacle, but I think there's a good argument that today's worst managers are better than the worst managers of the past. There will always be those who can't handle the pressure or get along with people, but today's managers are unlikely to let their prize pitching prospect go for 175 pitches to build his toughness, or even do so with their grizzled rotation ace in order to save the bullpen. Nor will they bat the guy with the .290 OBP leadoff just because he has good speed, or sacrifice 130 times a year. And they probably won't see their primary job as teaching the youngsters how to "pound that Bud" either (though if it's Selig, it might not be a bad idea). Even the smart managers of today did some stupid things back then: not until his team defeated the Yankees in the 2003 World Series did certain sabermetrically-oriented Kansas City Royals fans forgive Jack McKeon for blowing out Steve Busby's arm (by having him throw about 9,000 pitches in a game when Busby was supposedly telling McKeon that his arm didn't feel right).

A final unscientific illustration of the point: Up to a couple of decades ago, a prevailing attitude among many managers went along the lines of "real men don't look at stats." (The last such manager, I think, was Dallas Green. A mutated version of this mindset survives among some recent managers who seem to confuse bunting with machismo, such as Don Baylor and Bob Brenly.) Today, the more common problem is managers who look at stats but don't know what to do with them - as in "I played Player A instead of Player B because Player A has good numbers against this pitcher; he's 2 for 3." (Yankee fans with memories for the ridiculously trivial may remember that Joe Torre used precisely this argument in playing Darryl Strawberry over Cecil Fielder in Game 1 of the 1996 ALDS. He's wized up since then.) I think that's progress.

Check out this outstanding profile of Brian Cashman in this week's New York magazine.

The piece has already attracted some notoriety for a quote from Mrs. Cashman about how her husband might consider going to the Red Sox for his next job. But there are some more informative nuggets in the piece as well. A unique testimonial:

... �Brian comes off as very humble, but he is one street-savvy motherfucker,� says an admiring baseball agent. �Those people who underestimate him in any way�he will cut their throats.�

A preview into how the Yankees are attempting to smarten up their organization:

Cashman has allies in his effort to smarten up the organization. The head of baseball operations, Mark Newman, recently came across a Financial Times story about the cutting-edge University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. �We e-mailed about some issues of mutual interest. As Steven explains it to me, game theory is about the interaction of competitors, whether in the marketplace or politically or on the athletic field,� Newman says. �We want to take advantage of a 200 IQ that happens to enjoy sports. We don�t need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to ask questions. And Cash�s brain works that way, too.� The notion is a long way from being implemented, but the Yankees want to see if Levitt�s thinking can help steel its young, developing players against the pressures of performing in New York.

And a behind-the-scenes look at his workday:

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other issues. Cashman huddles with doctors diagnosing Giambi�s mysterious illness. He also fields complaints from players� wives upset with their seat location. Another afternoon, Kevin Brown is insisting that a groundskeeper travel from the Bronx to Staten Island to manicure the pitching mound for Brown�s rehab stint. (�Man, Brown is a perfectionist,� says the groundskeeper. �No, he�s a prick, is what he is,� snaps a Yankees coach.)

Here are some thoughts about the 2004 baseball season as we pass the 2/3 mark. This post is about the AL only; I will hopefully do a shorter piece on the NL later this week (or I may just do a series of shorter posts on specific teams).

When I'm pressed for time...I find it easier to blog about politics than about baseball, because it requires less analysis.

- An e-mail from the Baseball Crank

That's certainly true now. I can't go too in-depth at this hour, but the deals from this year's trading deadline added another several reasons to the infinite list of why I'm glad to not be a Mets fan. Check out Sabermets for a classic (and spot-on) initial reaction to the trades and for a round-up of reactions from other Mets blogs. My condolences to Mets fans on the coup-d'etat of Steve Phillips - there's no more logical explanation.

UPDATE: Check out this naplam-filled summary from Avkash at the Raindrops. Too true. What were they thinking? (Link from the Baseball Crank.)

I clicked on this Slate piece purporting to be a one-stop-shop for the right guru expecting to be mildly amused at best. Imagine my surprise to find that my guru made the cut! (Scroll to the right and click on the penultimate male.)

(And in terms of his ideal devotee...well, I'm not a computer programmer.)

We have lost another great national hero.

I was always most impressed by Tillman's aversion to publicity about his decision. But would anyone capable of doing what he did be doing so for the publicity?

Check out this feature on great old-time catcher and manager Al Lopez, still going strong at age 95.

Honestly, I had always assumed he was no longer alive. It's too bad he apparently dislikes giving interviews; wouldn't it be great to hear him reminisce more often about catching Walter Johnson ? Kudos to Bill Madden for the catch.

Alex Belth has been on a roll lately, with a massive selection of Yankee preview special posts. But over the weekend, he outdid himself with a four-part roundtable discussion featuring 14 star bloggers and sportswriters. Here's the first part. But do read every part of it.

My latest hiatus was, of course, the only reason Alex didn't ask me to participate. But I can provide my own answers to Alex's questions to you, my loyal readers. As a fellow Riverdalian, I'm sure Alex won't mind.

Alex's questions to his panel are in bold, and my answers/predictions are not.

Will Joe Torre be fired during the 2004 season? If so, when? If he is canned, who will replace him? Will Torre ever manage the Red Sox?

Torre won't be fired. It is difficult to imagine a scenario where the team would be eliminated from postseason consideration before the end of the season, and even if they're on the bubble as the season winds down, even George will be mindful of the risks in replacing Torre with a new manager while the team is fighting for a playoff spot. (If they don't make it, he will certainly not return next year.)

I don't see Torre managing the RedSox. I don't see him signing onto a system where the front office has such definite ideas about how to use the roster (not that Torre couldn't use the help sometimes, but never mind).

The arrival of Alex Rodriguez brings with it plenty of potential for controversy. The biggest issue of course is who should play shortstop? Though the Yankees don't have any intentions of moving Jeter right now, who do you think should play shortstop for the Yankees?

Across town, Mike Piazza has been the victim of a year-long roast by the NY media for showing insufficient enthusiasm for moving out from behind the plate, notwithstanding the fact that neither Pudge nor Posada were waiting in the Shea wings. Assuming Jeter is in fact so bitterly opposed to changing positions, why should he receive less criticism?

Nobody short of Suzyn Waldman denies the fact that A-Rod is the better shortstop. And this isn't first base; the difference between a good SS and a bad one is substantial. What kind of message is sent when one player's preference takes precedence over what's much, much better for the team?

Some baseball observers are more offended that A Rod--the better defensive player, and perhaps the best shortstop since Honus Wagner--will be asked to move positions than they are that he's joined the Yankees. Jeter is famous as a team-first player. Do you think he would ever consider moving positions, ala Chipper Jones, if it helps the team? If he doesn't, how could that change his image? In addition, what position do you think would best suit Jeter's talents?

I will assume that Jeter would move if asked, until proven otherwise. I still believe that Jeter will come up with a mysterious "injury" that has little impact on his offensive game but necessitates his move to 3B during the year. Torre & the gang are good with such face-saving injuries.

I see the argument that Jeter would not do well at 3B due to his slow reaction time. Nevertheless, I'd hide him there this year, because there's no OF spot for him now and a bad 3B will hurt the Yankees less than an bad SS. (This is especially true now that the Yankees have no lefthanded starter - especially a groundball one like Andy Pettite. And I'm on the record as suggesting the 3B move over a year ago.) After this year, I'd move him to CF, as suggested by several members of the Belth panel.

There has been a wide gap in the perception of Jeter's defense. Now that the Yankees have a superior defensive option on their roster, will the perception of Jeter's defensive reputation change?

I think the perception of Jeter's defense - always poor in the sabermetric community - had already begun to change in the larger community since the 2002 debacle against the Angels, when Jeter's glove clearly helped cost the Yankees the series. The fact that most journalists are admitting that A-Rod is better will only speed the change in perception. He can't stay at SS for long once the general perception of his defense catches up to the reality and there's a better option 50 feet away.

How much better is the Yankees bullpen this season than it was in 2003?

Better, but not by as much as people think. Assuming Gordon is healthy, Torre will not be afraid to use him. That will be the biggest change & benefit. However, Karsay is unlikely to do anything in the first half or so. I predict a massive return to earth for Felix Heredia, and Gabe White will probably have taterrific streaks which Torre may or may not allow him to work through. (Bet on "not.") More importantly, unless the Yankees get Jeter off SS and import a 2B who can catch the ball, I think Quantrill (one of the most extreme groundball pitchers in the majors) will be in the same boat as Chris Hammond was last year - pitching fairly decently but not living up to exaggerated expectations, and losing Torre's confidence as a result. And we all know what happens to relievers who lose Torre's confidence.

Will the Yankees sign Mariano to a contract extension before the end of the 2004 season? And should they?

Probably and probably - the latter because while he wouldn't be a good bet to maintain effectiveness to the end of his extension, the Yankees can afford virtually anything and his October magic is a marginal benefit that is worth the risk to this team. (I think the numbers on the extension will likely be around those proposed by Joe Sheehan, with the down market for players generally and closers particularly.)

Who will have the better season: Pettitte or Vasquez? Clemens or Brown?

Caterwauling by certain bloggers aside, Vasquez is almost certain (barring injury) to have a better season than Pettite. The Brown - Clemens question is wholly dependent on the pitchers' relative health. If equally healthy, Brown will be much better than Clemens. But my guess is that Brown will be hurt more than Clemens and contribute less as a result.

I like Steven Goldman's take on the question, though:

[D]ifferences of context � league and park and supporting personnel � make the answer dependent on more than the merits of each pitcher. What I think you�re really trying to ask is, �Did the Yankees make the right choices here?� Vazquez is already a better pitcher than Pettitte and should remain so, but that�s only germane if the choice was Vazquez or Pettitte, which it wasn�t. Whether letting Pettitte go will depend on whether the team�s estimate of his short-term injury future is accurate, and we won�t know that for awhile. Clemens or Brown wasn�t a choice either, and what he does vs. Brown is not at all relevant to the sitch in the Bronx.

Goldman is right: there's a good argument that the best combination the Yankees could have had of these three pitchers would've been Vasquez and Pettite. And if they could've done the Weaver-for-Brown swap in addition to those choices, then the Red Sox would have little chance. But it wasn't to be...

Will Mike Mussina win 20 games? If not, will he at least win 15 games again? How close is Mussina to being a Hall of Famer?

All caveats about the foolishness of the pitcher's "win" stat apply here. That said, given Mussina's health record and the likely strength of the Yankee offense, he is as reliable a bet to win 15 as there is in the game. You'd think he should win 20 one of these years, so why not now?

As for the Hall, I would absolutely vote for Mussina, and he'll have a good historical case if he has a few good years. However, the voting standards for starting pitchers seem to have toughened up noticeably in recent years (it seems to practically be a requirement to win 300 games), so I don't think he'll have much of a case unless both fo the following occur: (a) he uses the Yankees' bats to have a 24-4 season or the like, and (b) the Yankees win at least one Series with him pitching well. If either of those do not occur, I think he'll face an unjustified tough time from the BBWAA.

Do you see Jose Contreras as the x-factor in the Yankees starting rotation?

Brown is the much bigger X-factor, because of his exceptional quality and equally exceptional health issues (as Tom Verducci points out). I personally am not especially worried about Lieber; according to Will Carroll, he was ready to pitch last year and has had an extra winter to rest. I expect he'll hold up the back end of the rotation just fine. If Brown and Contreras can make 60 starts between them, the Yankees should win the division easily. I don't expect that they will.

How do you think Bernie Williams will adapt to being a designated hitter? Will Kenny Lofton's presence distract him or inspire him? How close is Williams to being a Hall of Famer? What does he need to do to qualify?

I think being a DH will be great for Williams, as it will take pressure off his knees and likely increase his hitting production. The biggest problem with him being a DH is the according necessity to have Jason Giambi in the field, with his own physical problems. Lofton's presence already seems to have inspired Williams; I doubt it will be a problem as the season goes on.

I think Williams is already a Hall of Famer, but he is unlikely to be elected by the BBWAA because of his diffuse skills and accomplishments. It is unlikely he will reach the fashionable counting milestones, but he's been better than many other players who did or will. If he has a hitting renaissance and the Yankees win another couple of championships, that might help his cause.

Theo Epstein and Billy Beane are the two most celebrated general managers in the game right now. Is there any doubt that Brian Cashman belongs in their company?

I think it's way too premature to rank Epstein in that category, though he's certainly moving up there. But whatever qualifications are due to Cashman's record due to the diffused responsibilities in the Yankee front office and their cash reserves are more than balanced out by the overall consistency and record of good moves. There's some doubt, but not much. (For what it's worth, I get the sense that the Baseball Prospectus guys talk to Cashman regularly and that he understands sabermetrics more than he lets on - meaning he's already savvier than Epstein, in that he knows enough not to let the media know what he knows.)

The Yankees have a gruff edge this season with the additions of Kevin Brown, Sheffield and Kenny Lofton. Some observers look at this team as a far cry from the Paul O'Neill Yankees. Will the new attitude help or hurt the team?

I won't bother discussing how (with the exception of the 1979 Pirates) the 1970s seemed to prove that "chemistry" was a handicap in trying to win a championship, or how Paul O'Neill was Kevin Brown with better PR. I'll instead refer to a not-quite-masterpiece of NY sports literature, The Worst Team Money Can Buy, an account of the ill-fated 1992 Mets. Aside from being an almost immediate anachronism (as the 1993 version of the team would surpass its predecessor in every category of ignominy, including losses, reporters squirted with bleach and firecrackers thrown at fans), the authors (Bob Klapisch and John Harper, then as now major NY sportswriters) made an argument that looks fairly foolosh now. I can't quote as my copy of the book is in storage, but the authors argue that a fair helping of nastiness, unpleasantness and "*^&$-you" attitude is essential to winning a World Series in NY, using the Bronx Zoo and brawling, boozing & (free-)basing 1986 Mets as proof. Maybe that particular foolish argument is due for a renaissance, replacing the equally foolish argument about how the Yankees' supposed recent harmony was the basis for their championships.

From a writer's viewpoint, is this the most interesting Yankee team since the Bronx Zoo days of the late seventies?

From a non-(professional) writer's standpoint, I think this team is far more interesting. Not just because I was a small child during the late 1970s. As previously discussed, this team is engaged in a fascinating economic experiment - attempting to use its monetary advantages and the inefficiencies of the current market to fight against the encroaching rot from within (the barren farm system & aging of core players). They're trying to fight Bill James' famous "treadmill." And if they fail, it is a bloodier repeat of 1964 or 1981. The dynasty - and a way of doing business - hangs in the balance. Personally, I find that more interesting than whether the players hate the manager. But what do I know? I'm not a sportswriter.

What are you looking forward to about the 2004 Yankees? And what are you dreading about them?

Looking forward...to Vasquez emerging as the star he already is, to (hopefully) Giambi and Williams arresting their declines, to A-Rod and Sheffield performing their magic in pinstripes, to every comeback win, every Boston game and every Mariano appearance...for starters.
Dreading...the possibility of Brown, Contreras, Giambi, Williams, Gordon and Mariano all being on the DL at the same time, and the realization that due to their barren farm system, the Yankees can do nothing to fill those holes.

Do you think the Yankees will get into a bench-clearing brawl during the regular season?

If Brown and Pedro match up, the over/under should be the 3rd inning.

****

And here are a couple of questions I though of, so I'll ask myself:

Who will be playing second base for the Yankees by midseason?

Whichever of Edgardo Alfonzo or Ray Durham the Giants are more willing to dump. I am personally hoping for Alfonzo. Yes, he's probably "29" in El Duque years and has no power left, but he still has a good OBP and is an excellent defensive 2B, and that's all they need. Plus, the ex-Met factor is too tempting for the deal not to happen; every hour of caterwauling on the "Mike & the Mad Dog" show is worth another few thousand tickets. Which leads into...

Who will be the starting pitcher acquired by the Yankees in midseason?

Al Leiter, assuming he doesn't suddenly collapse. He's a lefty and still throws reasonably hard with good breaking pitches, which will be an asset against David Ortiz and Trot Nixon (the only real problem with the Yankees not having a lefty starter). As an old pitcher on a bad contract (and a no-trade, I believe), he can probably be had cheaply (and he will almost certainly waive his no-trade for a chance at the World Series without leaving home). And Jim Duquette has (properly) not been afraid to trade with the Yankees. And this trade will drive the Mad Dog through the roof - it'll be great listening. I know Met fans would prefer to send Glavine (who has "the advantage of sucking," as well-put by a Met fan correspondent) to the Yankees, but no such luck.

So what does it mean?

We are dealing with something perhaps mentioned in economic textbooks but rarely encountered in real life: an entity with infinite financial resources. Not literally, of course, but when the Yankees are willing and able to spend twice as much as any other team, the practical differences between the hypothetical and the reality are slight. And where the Yanks formerly had advantages over other teams in brainpower and a deep farm system, those have, respectively, eroded (due to the spread of Beane-ball-think) and withered away to nothingness (thanks to trades and bad drafting). So the Yankees have had to rely on their financial advantages more than ever. Fortunately for them, the current marketplace is presenting unique benefits to such financial advantages.

The A-Rod deal exposes certain ramifications of the Yankees' exclusive financial status:

1) A year ago, Will Carroll wrote that as other teams learned not to throw millions of dollars at relievers, non-star regulars and other unworthies, the Yankees' financial dominance would cease to be a competitive advantage and might even begin to work against them. (He wrote this in the Yankees' 2003 "Team Health Report" for Baseball Prospectus; I'd link to the piece, which you wouldn't be able to read anyway without a subscription, if BP's website archives had been updated since the beginning of 2003. Guys?)

It sounded plausible, and may yet prove accurate in the long term. But in the short term, the effect of the Yankees' financial exclusivity has been exactly the opposite of what Carroll predicted. As his BP colleague Joe Sheehan pointed out even before the A-Rod deal:

The willingness the Yankees have to assume contracts is such a huge advantage over just about every other team in baseball that any hole that develops, they can probably fill. It actually doesn't matter. If George Steinbrenner decides he wants to go out and assume a contract, he can fill a hole, even if Jeter goes down, Soriano, Posada, the Lofton/Williams platoon in centerfield. I honestly think that we may be seeing a perpetual success machine... I now realize money simply isn't going to be an object. With so many teams willing to give up contracts regardless of the talent they get back, the Yankees are in a great position.

In a market that is a) deflationary and b) characterized by teams that are unwilling/unable to spend money on players, there is no shortage of contracts that seemed reasonable when signed, and where the players are actually delivering value, but the teams nevertheless are looking to dump (or, in the case of free agents, feel unable to pay in the first place). In that market, the team free of such financial constraints is king.

And if the Yankees really have no financial constraints, then financial efficiency becomes irrelevant - value added on the field is the only concern.

2) The problem with building a team solely through free agents has nothing to do with "chemistry" or some other virtuous benefit imparted via the farm system. The problem is that historically, most players who hit the free-agent market are on the downside of their careers, and thus are unlikely to be valuable parts of a championship team several years after their signing. And historically, star players in or approaching their prime are rarely available via trade.

But things change. What if, due to financial straits (self-imposed or otherwise), stars in or approaching their prime are widely available via trade or free agency to anyone willing to pay the freight? From the a) perspective of a team that has the wherewithal to acquire such players and b) needs to win now due to existing age concerns, which is a riskier strategy - trying to develop new stars through the farm system, with the according uncertainty risks, or acquire those players who are already stars yet are likely to retain their value? The Yankees have turned their only good young players into...players who are just about as young (exactly so, in the A-Rod / Soriano case), but much better. And Vlad the 28-Year-Old-Impaler was also available.

A commenter on Baseball Crank opined that "it's as if Steinbrenner uses the majors as his own farm teams." That's exactly right. Another way of putting it is that the Yankees are outsourcing player development to the other teams - they're letting those teams take the risks of developing stars in the belief that they can obtain such stars, once developed, at less risk.

No, I don't like it either. But I can't say it's irrational, given the system and the Yankees' current needs. (And one could also blame the unwillingness of other clubs to spend past the luxury tax threshhold. But I digress.) And more importantly, it might even work (as Sheehan pointed out). Bill James famously compared the Yankees of the late 80s to a team on a treadmill, constantly buying short-term solutions due to their inability to produce younger replacements from the farm system (or to trust the potential replacements that were produced). Most people assume the problem was in the buying itself, but the real issue was with the products bought. If the Yankees can buy stars aged 26-28 rather than 33-35, the war with the treadmill may be won. I'm still skeptical for the long term, but hope to be proven wrong.

Since the Boston deal fell through, I've been predicting the Yanks would get A-Rod. I never put it on the blog, but I have e-mail proof.

It was just too perfect to not happen:

1) A few years ago, I was in Hong Kong for a Shabbat. The synagogue there is affiliated with a communit center massively well-endowed by certain philanthropists from about a century ago. That kind of financial freedom enables it to do strange things, such as what was recounted in the following story I heard that weekend: Apparently some VIP from the synagogue was away for the summer, and someone from Israel had been retained to serve in his stead. The Israeli imports were supposed to stay at the VIP's home, which was vacant except for the VIP's housekeeper. Said housekeeper was apparently unhappy about the prospect of other people staying in the home, and made her unhappiness well-known. Rather than trying to negotiate a solution with the housekeeper, the synagogue decided it was more efficient to rent hotel accomodations for the Israelis. For the entire summer. In a not-especially-cheap hotel.

Questions of "value" and "efficiency" are answered differently by the massively-wealthy than by you and me. If you want to move Captain Derek "Mr. Clutch" Jeter off his beloved shortstop position - a move which virtually all objective observers believe should happen sooner rather than later - you might try raising the matter frontally (and simultaneously raise a ring-counting storm) and then worrying about whom to replace him with. Or, you might go for the only politically correct way to do so: introduce him to his more expensive former friend. If you have the resources for the latter...

2) More on this later, but the Yankees have positioned themselves as the Option of Last Resort for teams looking to dump large contracts. That position enables the Yanks to drive a better bargain than might otherwise be apparent. As has been noted, the Yankees are adding less than $2 million in salary for this year with A-Rod, and they sold almost $5 million in tickets in the few days after acquiring Rodriguez. They can not only afford A-Rod, but can turn him into further profits.

3) Finally, who can underestimate the "sticking it to the Red Sox" factor? While it is true that A-Rod probably only improves the Yankees by a couple of games over Soriano (especially if A-Rod doesn't remain at SS), those couple of games might be the difference between the two teams. And that's to say nothing of the satisfaction gained by evoking reactions like the following:

My favorite phone call came from my buddy Hench, who was attending a wedding back East. When someone casually told him the news, poor Hench was done for the rest of the reception. His legs buckling under him, he stepped outside for fresh air, pacing in 30-degree weather like a maniac, finally leaving a 90-second message on my machine that featured 20 swears, three tirades and a climactic 10-letter expletive about Gene Orza. Happy Valentine's Day.

The last time so many factors lined up this conveniently, Roger Clemens became a Yankee. It was easy to predict a similar result this time.

It's now time to rationally assess the Yankees' winter, as opposed to previous emotional squeals. It's a lot easier to do so after the A-Rod acquisition, but that's far from the whole story.

With the exception of the Kenny Lofton signing, every move the Yankees made this winter was at least defensible from a baseball standpoint. Assuming health (more on that later), Vazquez and Brown will probably surpass Pettite and Clemens' performance. Even the choice of Sheffield over Vlad the Impaler can be defended on purely baseball grounds (most notably by Lee Sinins in his e-mail newsletter), even aside from the relative injury risks of the two. And I hated to lose Nick Johnson, but: a) barring a discovery of the Paul Molitor Fountain of Health, it's reasonable to assume that he'll never be healthy enough to play a full season, and b) the team could hardly obtain a better yield than Vazquez. And emotionally, good riddance to David Wells. (Logically is another story, as discussed below.)

As Billy Beane might say, the problem is in the aggregate. The net result of the Yankees' moves - even including the A-Rod heist - is to accentuate certain vulnerabilities in a fairly predictable way. The age factor is the most obvious, but the injury and defensive factors are more important.

1) The loss of Johnson means that Giambi will be asked to play first base regularly on his disintegrating knee (and it's unlikely that Travis Lee will be enough of an inducement to Torre to give Giambi the rest he needs) - which is not likely to help matters.

2) It's clear that the Yankees believed Pettite's elbow is unlikely to hold up over the length of his contract. They have a fairly good record with such predictions (see: Jack McDowell, Jimmie Key - but Jeff Nelson defied such doomsaying), but Kevin Brown is not exactly a better bet, health-wise. And the loss of Wells means that for now, the Yankees do not have a reliable extra starter for the inevitable injuries to Brown or other starters. (They are already getting scared over a groin injury to Jon Lieber and a back injury to Jose Contreras.)

3) And not to beat a long-dead horse, but with the addition of Brown, Quantirll and Lieber, the Yankees need infielders who can field the grounders those pitchers will yield. Yet as Steven Goldman wrote before the A-Rod deal, the Yankee infielders "don't view fielding grounders as part of their job." And putting a Gold Glove shortstop at 3B while leaving one of the worst-fielding shortstops in baseball at SS won't help matters. Do the Yanks have a defense attorney on staff for when Kevin Brown tries to assault the captain after a few grounders "past a diving Jeter for a base hit?"

Yet these problems could be solved. I expect both El Duque and Al Leiter to be on the Yankees before too long (more on the latter later). And the inevitable switch of Jeter and A-Rod (which I still think will come before year's end), couple with the team's likely acquisition of a good-fielding second baseman, will help the infield defense enough. And have we mentioned that the Yankees have A-Rod?

More to come.

I most, most certainly can deal with this rationally:

Much, much more later.

Salon's King Kaufman seems like a nice guy, so I don't think he'll object to my reproducing his short item that perfectly encapsulates the appropriate attitude towards the NHL (viewing of a commercial required):

Excellent Sporting News hockey columnist Kara Yorio begins a midseason report, "Attention football fans and baseball hot stove enthusiasts: You've missed half an NHL season."

Thanks for the update, Kara. And we're about to miss another half. Wake us when the playoffs start and the games mean something.

I can discuss this rationally:

This one doesn't upset me nearly as much as the earlier edition. I never truly believed Clemens was retired in the first place; those who go out on a level as high as Clemens did rarely resist the temptation to come back. Had Pettite resigned with the Yankees, I'd have expected a Clemens return for at least part of the year.

And I have very little patience for my fellow Yankee fans who are accusing Clemens of "disloyalty" for taking a below-market contract to pitch in his hometown after giving the Yankees five good years and many memorable moments (including a 1.50 ERA in 36 innings in the World Series). And why shouldn't he pitch until he can't? I hope he can pitch for five more years.

Courtesy of Jayson Stark:

So what does it say about the bizarre pace of the baseball offseason that Saddam Hussein was acquired before Vladimir Guerrero?

I can't discuss this rationally:

We have two unpleasant choices: either the Yankees thought that a) Andy is on the verge of Tommy John surgery, which you don't wish on anyone, or b) letting him go made baseball sense - which, given when you look at the potential replacements, is a conclusion that could only have been drawn by the same person who thinks that Gary Sheffield is a better option than Vladimir Guerrero, or that Ken Phelps was a better option than Jay Buhner....

The treadmill just got a lot faster.

If Theo Epstein was old enough to drink, they'd be popping champagne in Boston right now.

I'm very happy that the baseball writers of America finally ran out of excuses to deny Alex Rodriguez an MVP award, despite illogical arguments about the meaning of "value" from those who don't know better (and those who should). Click here and here for rejoinders, and here for some fascinating tidbits on the voting.

From a selfish perspective, I would not have minded if Jorge Posada had won. But I had other rationalizations for that fall-back position besides team loyalty. Under the Win Shares system, A-Rod led the league with 32 win shares, and Posada was tied for fourth with 28 (technically, he was fifth on percentage points, but those differences are of minimal importance). That is fairly close (Bill James stated that differences of 3 or fewer Win Shares are not terribly meaningful). And this points up my personal favorite flaw in the system: how it rates catchers.

In rating catchers, the Win Shares system essentially has the following equation. I find it difficult to disagree with the first two parts and equally difficult to accept the result:

A+B=C, where:

A= It is virtually impossible for a catcher to contribute the most offensive value in the league (due to the physical demands of the position and the resulting absence from the lineup for 20-40 games per season);
B= It is also virtually impossible for the defensive value of even the best defensive catcher to make up the difference in offensive value between such catcher and the best offensive player, unless you: a) allot so much defensive value to the catcher that there is no defensive credit left over for the other positions on the team, and/or b) allot a disproportionate amount of value to defense generally, which throws off the values ascribed to pitching and hitting by any reasonable analysis;
C= It is therefore virtually impossible for a catcher to contribute the most value in the league.

And according to James' book, only Johnny Bench in 1970 and Mike Piazza in 1997 have pulled off the trick of leading their league in Win Shares, and thus contributing the most value to their team in the league in a given season - i.e., deserving an MVP award.

James is clearly not comfortable with that conclusion either; he basically exempts catchers from his discussion of "least deserving MVPs" for that reason. I am not quantitatively-skilled enough to propose a fix to the system to better recognize the value of catchers. But I do think that it may be appropriate to give a catcher the benefit of the doubt, or a little "off-budget" extra credit, in a Win Shares comparison. Therefore, while A-Rod clearly was the #1 choice, I thought that Posada, by coming so close in Win Shares as a catcher, was the clear #2 choice and would have made a reasonable alternative.

Maybe next year.

Bob Ryan has an emotional piece in the Boston Globe on Len Bias, on what whould have been his 40th birthday.

Without being an expert on basketball or Bias, I think the odds were against him having as much impact as the people quoted in the piece assume; the odds against such stardom are always longer than most people realize. (Just imagine what people would have said and assumed if - God forbid - the player in Bias' situation had been Ralph Sampson?) But that is precisely the promise, and tragedy, of young lives cut short; the improbabilities are blotted out by the final impossibility.

As often happens when the Yankees make a long post-season run filled with exciting games that keep me wound up for hours after they end - especially when every game in the postseason seems like a classic, regardless of who played - I've come down with a lousy cold which - coupled with the same pressures that have killed blogging this month - have prevented me from venting about this year's frustrating loss to the Marlins. (I still have trouble comprehending that the Marlins are World Champions, and not just due to illness.)

Though I've promised many undelivered things, I am working on a lo-o-ong post about the State of the Yankees that will be worth the wait. I promise.

For now, I'll just say that this loss feels - to this Yankee fan - much worse than the one in 2001. The parallels to 1964 or 1981 are pretty scary.

And some of us who were eight years old in 1981, for whom Bob Lemon's pinch-hitting for Tommy John in Game 6 is the first managerial move we remember second-guessing, are very annoyed at the constant assertions by non-Yankee fans that we fans feel "entitled" to win or that we "don't appreciate" anything short of ultimate triumph. Like most Yankee-bashing, those sentiments are based on ignorance and jealousy. The truth is exactly the opposite. We remember how easy expectations of continued success can be transformed into despair, Hemingway-style - "gradually and then suddenly." We remember the decade whose high moments were the 1980s "treadmill" (see the 1988 Baseball Abstract), whose frantic attempts to get back to the championship level led to the low moments, a paranoia-fueled frenzy of Chuck Carys and Mel Halls. We see how hard it can be to get back to the championship level once the team has slipped off it - our friends in Boston are glad to remind us if we ever forget. And when the team returned to excellence in 1993, we promised ourselves that we would appreciate every triumph and achievement. It is the prospect of losing those moments - and who knows for how long? - that drives the Yankee fans crazy.

A little bit.

Seriously, congratulations to the Marlins (if only they had a different owner - more below on that); they were an awesome story and played very well. And even the poor, misbegotten Yankees had a great season to get to Game 6 of the World Series, for goodness' sakes.

It is just hard for a Yankee fan to not feel like an opportunity was missed, and who knows when the next one will come?

P.S. Bud Selig handing the trophy to Jeffrey Loria must have represented the greatest concentration of baseball malevolence since Charles Comiskey dined alone.
But I'm not bitter or anything.

UPDATE: In the New Republic, Spencer Ackerman has similar thoughts regarding an editorial by the NYT which endorsed a Cubs-Red Sox World Series:

[L]et me disabuse Yankee haters like Hartford resident Chad MacDonald, who was quoted in the Times as saying that Yankee fans simply "expect to win." That's not true. Yankee fans like myself had our fandom shaped by the miserable drought years of 1980 to 1995, when not even first-rate talents like Don Mattingly, Willie Randolph, Dave Winfield, and Dave Righetti could rescue the team from bitter loss after bitter loss. On the bus to my Canarsie elementary school in 1986, I remember watching formerly stalwart Yankee fans doing the Tim Teuffel Shuffle in the hope that the Mets would win the World Series. Even during the Yankee renaissance that began in 1996, the victories have always felt precarious (well, maybe not in 1998). It might surprise the Times to learn that today's Yankee fans have a sense of tragedy to go with the triumphalism. Maybe the Times will pay some attention next season.

I don't have time to do justice to last night's game. The best summary belongs, as usual, to David Pinto.

For a Yankee fan's perspective, see Irena Paley:

Better than money. Better than sex. Better than your favorite song. Better than ice cream. Better than 'Empire Strikes Back.' Better than the swimsuit issue. Better than the FDNY calendar. Better than the prom queen. Better than the '94 Rangers. Better than the '70 Knicks. Better than Brooklyn pizza. Better than the Beatles.
That's how good last night was.

And for the ultimate Red Sox fan's perspective, see (who else?) Bill Simmons:

Twenty minutes after the Yankees eliminated the Sox, I called my father to make sure he was still alive.
And that's not even a joke. I wanted to make sure Dad wasn't dead. That's what it feels like to be a Red Sox fan. You make phone calls thinking to yourself, "Hopefully, my Dad picks up, because there's at least a 5-percent chance that the Red Sox just killed him."
It's safe to say that Jessica Simpson could have managed Game 7 better than Grady.
Well, he picked up. And we talked it through. We always do. Dad's voice was barely audible. He sounded like he just got out of surgery. Like every other Sox fan on the planet, he couldn't understand one simple question: Why didn't Grady take out Pedro? In the eighth inning, Pedro was running on fumes. Everyone knew it. Everyone but Grady Little.
Little did we know, our overmatched manager was saving his worst for last.

It's not a "Running Diary, but read the whole thing anyway.

In 1996, I would be so wound up after each Yankee magical comeback in the postseason that it would take me a couple of hours after each game to wind down enough to sleep.

That happened again last night. I was so worked up after the eight inning-comeback that I had to drain a bottle of Scotch to settle down.

(Granted, there was about an eighth of an ounce left in the bottle to start with, but still...)

Yankees in 6 in the World Series, although the Marlins could be much tougher than anyone gives them credit for.

Semi-regular blogging will resume early next week.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled silence to bring you some unedited thoughts on tonight's Game 7 between the Yankees and Red Sox.

Will whoever kidnapped Jason Giambi and replaced him with a pale imitation of Reggie Jackson (with Jackson's propensity for strikeouts and greater difficulties against lefthanded pitching, but without the clutch homers) please return him to the Stadium for tonight?

Will the Yankees continue to make Boston's bullpen look like a bunch of Mariano Riveras?

Will Boone or Soriano ever meet a slider in the lefthanded batters' box they don't like?

And finally, WILL JETER, SORIANO OR WILLIAMS EVER CATCH A !&*#%&!ING BALL?

Sorry about that.

I am feeling a lot like Billy Beane in Moneyball, who gets so worked up watching the games that he circles the stadium in his car rather than do so. I might have to find some important errands to do. Though I might be a danger to other drivers on the road...

I correctly predicted last year's World Series outcome (I won't mention that it was my first correct prediction ever). My unpublished prediction for the ALDS & ALCS were the Yankees in 3 and 6, respectively. Since they just took one game more in the ALDS, I'll assume the non-pattern will carry over tonight.

Yankees, 5-3. Four runs off Pedro, one off Wakefield. No fights.

The first man out of the Yankees' bullpen before the 7th inning will be Wells. Contreras will be allowed one baserunner with a multi-run lead.

Only don't expect me to actually watch all of it.

(At least I'm not a Cubs fan. That was bad.)

Yesterday, I had Shabbat lunch with the rabbi of my synagogue, who recently received his Ph.D in English Literature from Columbia (on the work of James Joyce). Reflecting on the experience, he noted that while the quality of our political discourse has never seemed shallower (I don't agree, but it is a common perception), other areas such as the study of literature (not exactly a news-flash; click here and here for people who regularly cover this) and the rabbinate (maybe I'll do a post soon about the latter) have been rabidly politicized as politics has spread "like a germ" (his quote) into other areas of life.
Whether the rabbi is correct about the spread of politics is worth a separate discussion, which I don't feel like getting into right now. But what is one area where the forces of reason and evidence are in the ascent, forcing the retreat of prejudice and politics? That's right - thanks to Billy Beane and friends, baseball management is shaping up. It may be time to update Earl Warren's famous quote about why he read the sports pages first; the sports pages may now provide something more than who won a game - namely, a guide to error-correcting, which is indispensable.

Some of you might have been too distracted by recent events in Israel and Iraq to notice the most important event of the summer: the publishing of the results of a major study by Diamond Mind Baseball testing the veracity of the radical “DIPS” theory of Voros McCracken. For those who might be unaware, McCracken’s theory is that pitchers have little if any impact on the outcome of balls put into play; whatever happens to balls put into play is attributable to the defense or luck. Most tests of McCracken’s theory have tended to support it; it has been endorsed by Bill James and made famous by Michael Lewis in Moneyball.
Well, the people at Diamond Mind did an exhaustive study of the previous 90 seasons to test McCracken’s theory. And the punch line was:

I am convinced that pitchers do influence in-play outcomes to a significant degree. There's a reason why Charlie Hough and Jamie Moyer and Phil Niekro and Tom Glavine and Bud Black have had successful careers despite mediocre strikeout rates. There's a reason why the top strikeout pitchers have also suppressed in-play hits at a good rate. Using power or control or deception or a knuckleball, pitchers can keep hitters off balance and induce more than their share of routine grounders, popups, and lazy fly balls.

Those results are noteworthy enough, but the ramifications are greater than I’ve seen discussed anywhere on the Net.
Aside from McCracken’s theory, the greatest advances in sabermetrics over the last couple of years have been in measuring defensive performance. The most noteworthy examples are the the defensive component of Bill James’ “Win Shares” and similar methods used by Baseball Prospectus.
At the heart of both of those methods are analyses of the outcomes of balls put into play against the defense. They thus were developed in partial response to the issue that Baseball Prospectus called one of the game’s “Hibert Problems” in its 2000 book – namely, how to distinguish the respective contributions of pitching and defense to run prevention. Or, as Michael Lewis writes on pp.235-236 of Moneyball:

…Voros saw someone say that no matter how much research was done, no one would be able to distinguish pitching from defense. That is, no one would be able to distinguish pitching from defense. That is, no one would ever come up with good fielding statistics or, therefore, good pitching statistics. If you don’t know how to credit the fielder for what happens after a ball gets put into play, you also, by definition, don’t know how to debit the pitcher. And, therefore, you would never be able to say with any real certainty how good any given pitcher was. Or, for that matter, any given fielder.
When Voros read that, “I thought, ‘That’s a stupid attitude. Can’t you do something?’…”

And he began the research that would culminate in his “DIPS” theory.
Here’s the problem: As noted above, the new advances in the measurement of fielding performance are based on analyses of the results of balls put in play. As such, absent McCracken’s theory, they are based on a kind of question-begging: they assume that the results of balls put into play are attributable to the fielders rather than the pitchers. If the pitchers influence the results of balls put into play, then don’t you have to take that into account? And if that’s the case, then haven’t you merely reopened the “Hibert Problem” of distinguishing pitching and defense?
McCracken’s theory had value beyond what it said about pitchers’ performance. By largely removing the influence of pitchers from the results of balls put into play, it also provided the justification for the foundation of Bill James’ and Baseball Prospectus’ methods of measuring fielding performance. But now, it seems like we have taken several steps backward. To use an example cited in the Diamond Mind study, in measuring the defensive performance of the Seattle Mariners over the last several years, don’t you have to adjust for the influence of Jamie Moyer? And again, doesn’t that merely reopen the “Hibert Problem” of distinguishing pitching from defense?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m not sure what it is.
UPDATE: David Pinto supplies what I'm missing:

What Tippett is saying here is that you can predict strikeout rates pretty well just by looking at the previous season of the pitcher, but you can't predict -play batting average relative to the team well at all. That's what correlation means. Correlation goes on a scale of -1 to 1, where 1 is perfect correlation (the best at one will be the best at the other), -1 is perfect opposite correlation (the best at one will be the worst at the other) and 0 means no correlation at all; in other words, being the best at one will tell us nothing about how you do at the other. The statistican I learned from used to tell me that if he sees .5 correlation, he assumes the data is random. Seeing a .09 correlation tells me the data is very random. It's not 0, but it's very close to 0.
So, as to Dr. Manhattan's question; yes, you are missing something. The effect Tippett is showing is small, so small that DIPS is still valid. Bill James knew about this when he wrote win shares, but for the aggregate I think it works really well. We don't have to reopen the “Hibert Problem”; we just have to understand that the solution is just an approximation.

So what I was, and am, missing is a real education in statistics. Oh well...

ANOTHER UPDATE: I've just fixed my post. Sorry - my Baseball Prospectus 2000 is in storage so I couldn't double-check it. The correct term is "Hibert" problems. Those problems were a list of 23 fundamental mathematical problems propounded around the turn of the century by a mathemetician nmaed Hibert. In BP2K, Keith Woolner tried his hand at setting out a list of parallel questions, and a primary one was the distinction of pitching and defense. The piece helped inspire Voros McCracken.
A FINAL UPDATE: The name is "Hilbert," not "Hibert." Thanks to Mike Molloy for the tip.

I first thought this was an April Fools' Day joke that got e-mailed four months late, but it unfortunately seems to be true.
Baseball Prospectus is reporting that Pete Rose has signed an agreement providing for his reinstatement to Major League Baseball. Apparently the agreement does not provide for an admission of wrongdoing by Rose, the one thing that baseball had insisted on all along.
For the findings against Pete Rose back in 1989, check out the Dowd Report.

Bill James has written several times (most recently in the New Historical Baseball Abstract) that he believes the case against Rose is far weaker than most people believe. James' writings on the subject are unfortunately not available online. Click here for a piece criticizing James' assessments and here for a piece defending them (in the context of a review of an ESPN-produced "trial" on the question).

UPDATE: MLB has denied the report. The denial would be somewhat more convincing if MLB had any credibility, or if the spokesman didn't have a record of exceptional mendacity and incompetence (even by MLB's considerable standards).
Lee Sinins has the last word on the subject (quote comes from his e-mail newsletter):

With MLB's credibility, this statement is just as good as a confirmation of
Will's story. With their track record, MLB is on my list of at least 3
entities, of which I believe nothing from them until as the events prove
the statement to be correct. Occasionally it does happen, but until it
does, I don't believe it.
Actually, my first reaction to MLB's denial was, if Pete Rose was mentioned
in their statement, then there is the possibility that Rose doesn't even
exist. But, as recently as a day or two ago, I was watching an old episode
of Baseball Magazine on ESPN Classic (which, as an aside, is a show I'd
like to see returned to the air) and Sparky Anderson was discussing Pete
Rose's reaction to Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. So, since independent
evidence of Rose's existence exists, at least that part of MLB's statement
is believable.
I won't even insult Will Carroll by including any discussion of his
credibility in the same sentence.

One of the items on my to-blog list was this piece by Ralph Wiley in which he calls Bill James a racist for pointing out that stolen bases are often overvalued relative to their actual worth. But the Baseball Crank has already set Wiley right in pleasing and efficient fashion.
UPDATE: Eric McErlain has done so, as well.

Thomas Boswell "gets" Moneyball more than most of his sportswriter comrades. But even he, along with many observers, misses the point to a degree.
In his generally solid review of the book and its ramifications, Boswell reduced the "Billy Beane method" to a list of a few factors. And his summary is technically accurate. But it misses the point, which Lewis and Beane take care to stress: that open-mindedness and the ability to search for and accept new evidence are more important than any given maxim.
And that is the best answer to questions like the one contained in an e-mail I received today from a friend:
"How many teams need to operate by those rules before the "overvaluing" stops? Once the A's, Red Sox, and Blue Jays are operating this way, can they all contend every year?"
As Rob Neyer says:

[T]he real key to Billy Beane's success, and also to his continued success (assuming that he continues to succeed): Billy's ahead of the curve. Let's assume, for a moment, that the A's draft philosophy works, and further that it's copied by a number of other teams. That's going to create a problem for those teams, because they'll all be competing for the same players, right?
And how do you solve that problem? By coming up with a new philosophy. And which organization is best-equipped to come up with a new philosophy?
I don't know. Maybe it's the A's, but the Red Sox are well-equipped, and so are the Blue Jays, and maybe the Indians and a few other teams. My point is that if the A's fall back to the pack, it won't be due to other baseball executives reading Moneyball, and it won't be due to other teams copying the A's philosophies. If the A's fall back to the pack, it will be due to a deficiency in management.

There is always more to learn. And the true lesson of Billy Beane's success, and of Moneyball, is that a willingness to learn and adapt will eventually trump a static list of rules.
Here are a couple of examples. The book describes how the A's used a system inspired by Wall Street's valuation of derivatives to calculate the defensive value of Johnny Damon as compared to Terence Long, and how while the difference was extreme by defensive standards, it was a) not as great as the difference in offensive value between extreme players and b) more efficient to make up the difference by adding more offense.
While a) is generally true, b) was a fact-specific conclusion. Another organization might take the moral of the story to be "always value offense over defense." In that case, they would likely overlook the occasional easy availability of an outstanding defensive center fielder who can't hit much. Someone like Chris Singleton, who now patrols center field for Billy Beane's Oakland A's. In that case, his defensive abilities were undervalued, and the A's took advantage of the inefficiency.
Here's another thought. As I've noted before, the biggest flaw in the book is the omission what the A's are doing with their pitcher development. Supposedly they haven't had a major surgery in their organization in years (though I haven't checked that assertion) - by contrast, the Yankees should've gotten a group discount on "Tommy John" surgeries over the last couple of years. Their program is based on a combination of avoiding high school pitchers, constant work with mechanics based on an institute run by Dr. James Andrews (the surgeon who does most major pitcher surgeries), pitch counts, and other things. It's still unclear if they've discovered the secret to pitcher development, but it's looking good.
What if they really have learned the secrets to avoiding pitcher injuries? Maybe in a few years the A's will decide they should shift to preferring high school pitchers - that way, you keep them in-house for longer and avoid the risk that college coaches will shred their arms. That will shock all those who have read Moneyball and taken from it the message "high school pitchers=bad." But the A's may be ahead of the curve again.

I don't know how I missed this, but Robert Birnbaum recently did a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with Michael Lewis.
Some excerpts from Lewis:

This guy Billy Beane is a born Wall Street trader. I have seen this. I worked at Salomon Brothers; I worked on Wall Street. If Billy Beane has been at Salomon Brothers he would be a managing partner. He is excellent at walking into a jungle, seeing the opportunities and seeing the threats, and adapting accordingly. He has wonderful antennae. He knows what you want and he is going to give it to you.
...I've had two interesting institutional responses outside of baseball. One is from the NFL. I gave speech in New York a week before last and someone from the Commissioner's office came and he said this thing is spreading in the NFL. Bill Parcells is giving it out to the Dallas Cowboy's organization. Some guy I never heard of who is the GM of the New York Giants is handing it out to his scouts. I thought, "That's extraordinary." Because the NFL is actually well run. The guy was saying, "The descriptions that you have in the book of the discussions between the scouts and the GM, that was something that died in the NFL thirty years ago. We have become more rigorous the way we think about amateur players and baseball is way behind. The spirit of enterprise is clearly alive in the NFL. People are still looking for a way to get an edge.” The other interesting institutional response has been from Wall Street. The lead investment strategist for Credit Suisse/First Boston, the investment bank, devoted his whole research report a week or two ago to this book. The gist of it was if you want to know how to manage money the Oakland A's are a good example—if you want to look at allocation of resources and how you think about it.
UPDATE: Here is a radio interview with Michael Lewis from NPR. (Hat tip to Mindles H. Dreck.)
MORE UPDATES: The New Yorker has finally put its profile of Bill James online. It describes, among other things, the desire of Theo Epstein and John Henry
to assemble a front office staffed by people who “get it” (shorthand, essentially, for those who can remember the moment they first read a Baseball Abstract).

The literature about Bill James often describes how the narrator or subject describes how he opened the book and was forever transformed - just like a medieval conversion narrative.
Finally (I think), sometime sabermetric ally Thomas Boswell has a decent summary of Moneyball. More to come.

Yes, another Moneyball post.
Rob Neyer's most recent column focuses on Larry Dierker's new book. The book, and Neyer's interview with Dierker, contain some fascinating - and distressing - revelations:

In his book, Dierker writes about the usefulness of OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), and he even includes a matrix listing the various run-scoring probabilities, depending on the number of baserunners and outs.
Where did Dierker come by this information?
"When I was broadcasting," Dierker remembers, "there was a guy named Steve Mann who came down here to work in our baseball operations department, and he was deeply involved in what the club was doing. I made friends with Steve, and we spent many a night having a beer and talking about the game -- about which strategies were antiquated, and which ones were still applicable. I also read a lot of the Bill James stuff, and so I learned what people who didn't have a personal investment in the game had to say about it."
This is, for most baseball players, revolutionary stuff. And Dierker knew it.
"When I became the manager, I kind of knew what were the smart things to do. But I also knew that if I did all of them, it would be at the expense of my credibility with the players. With that in mind, I just had to use my instincts to both win the game and keep the whole team in the spirit of pulling together. I didn't want to come off as an egghead guy who was just looking at numbers and ignoring people, and sometimes those considerations ran into each other."
"For example, Brad Ausmus felt like we should walk the eighth hitter most of the time, with the pitcher coming up next. As an ex-pitcher, I'd rather have the pitcher leading off the next inning. So Brad and I had different opinions a lot of the time. The eighth hitter would come up, he'd look into the dugout for the sign, I wouldn't do anything, and I could see that he wasn't real happy about it. I remember once, we retired the eighth hitter 10 or 15 times in a row. And then Kelly Stinnett reached out and slapped an outside pitch for an RBI single, and Ausmus was really mad."
That sort of thing has to wear on a manager -- especially on a team that's run by veterans like Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio -- and so it did. Fans often think that a manager shouldn't care what the players think, but managing's just not that simple.
"Whenever I was in a flip-a-coin sort of situation," Dierker says, "I'd usually make the move that I thought the players wanted me to make, because it really doesn't make that much difference, one way or the other. And you have to consider what the players are going to think."

These factors help explain why, as part of Billy Beane's quest to impose reason on his organization, the Athletcs' front office felt that it had to concentrate as much power as possible in the general manager's office, including over matters of game management that had traditionally been within the manager's purview. According to Beane's predecessor, Sandy Alderson (quoted on p.61 of Moneyball), the hapless Art Howe was hired specifically because he would be a figurehead.
But it stands to reason that Beane wouldn't mind having a manager like Dierker, who would commit to the sabermetric program out of intellectual conviction rather than career preservation. So who would be the best candidate?
As readers of Moneyball know:

Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means - anger, passion, even physical intimidation - to do it.

Not to mention liberal uses of each variation of the word "f$%#."
The perfect managerial match for Billy Beane would share his intellect and volatility. He would not be afraid to cause controversy in his commitment to doing what he felt was the right move (in baseball terms: to tell his detractors and the media to go f$#% themselves). And a connection to the Mets wouldn't hurt.
Bobby Valentine, would you like to move to Oakland?
Think of it like Chazz Palmienteri berating Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects: A man who could run Todd Hundley (and other unproductive veterans) out of town! A man who can use the word "sabermetrics" on national television! A man who can tell the New York media that batting order really doesn't matter!
At the very least, the sequel to Moneyball would virtually write itself.
Seriously, I think that Valentine's intellect and fearlessness would be an ideal combination for an organization committed to analytical principles. And I think that Billy Beane would respect the viewpoints of someone like Valentine even in disagreements, which would not be the case for an establishment cipher like Art Howe.
It could happen. Right?

I've been very remiss in not pointing out the many excellent pieces on Moneyball published over the last couple of months. For a good reference, go to Mariners Musings and scroll down to the appropriate right-hand list of links. The lucky Mariners fan has also transcribed interviews with Michael Lewis and Billy Beane conducted by Will Carroll on Baseball Prospectus Radio.
Also check out this interview with Michael Lewis on Baseball Primer, which contains some nuggets I hadn't seen elsewhere. Slate had a fabulous discussion between Rob Neyer and James Suroweicki about the book; the three parts are here, here and here. They also featured a great interview of Bill James by Suroweicki. Finally, check out this article by Matt Welch.
UPDATE: I forgot a few things - most notably, this recent review in the Weekly Standard:

[Lewis'] most recent book, "Moneyball," is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written.
(Emphasis in original.)

And I had meant to discuss this excerpt from the book about fact-checkers, but Matt Welch beat me to it. Daniel Okrent, a writer for Sports Illustrated, had read the first Bill James Baseball Abstract:

“I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that a) this guy existed and b) that he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence [Kansas] to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’ arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying ‘everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind, asked Okrent to retry again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year after that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the Baseball Abstract, and made it a national best-seller.
This story has additional resonance in light of the Jayson Blair scandals.

Thanks in part to the Pedro-induced hand injuries to Soriano and Jeter, the first two hitters in the Yankees' lineup tonight are Enrique Wilson and Todd Zeile, neither of whom has any business being in the first nine batters to come to the plate in a baseball game. I know the importance of the batting order is very overrated, but this is a bit much.

In light of last night's 1-0 overtime victory by the Mighty Ducks over the Devils in game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals, King Kaufman recently encapsulated my feelings about hockey (especially the playoff variety):

My problem is that I'm an unsophisticated idiot. I like goals. I think scoring is a good thing, and while I can appreciate good defense and snappy goaltending as much as the next unsophisticated idiot, a little of it goes a long way. I like bright, shiny objects. Hockey rinks come equipped with this red spinning light that flashes on when someone scores a goal. That light makes me happy. I miss that light.
...I hear you out there, hockey fans. You're saying, "Your mind-numbing three paragraphs of statistics don't tell the whole story, slide rule boy! If you had any appreciation for hockey you'd realize that tough, tense, low-scoring playoff battles are thrilling entertainment. What about the dazzling goaltending of Anaheim's Jean-Sebastien Gigu�re and New Jersey's Martin Brodeur, the two goalies in the Finals? What about the nail-biting excitement of sudden-death overtime? When goals are at a premium, each goal is that much more exhilarating. Get a clue, abacus breath!"
To which I say: Wake me for the World Cup. At least there I know not to even hope to see any scoring.
I don't disagree with any of those sentiments, hockey fans, except the one about my breath. There's no doubt that a 1-0 game can be fantastic, but I'd turn that rarity argument around: 1-0 games get more exciting as they get more scarce. When an average game is 4-3 and a 7-5 game isn't uncommon, 1-0 can be a treat. When 1-0 is common and 7-5 is beyond the realm of possibility, a 1-0 game is just another snoozefest.
A 1-0 baseball game can be exciting because yesterday's game, and tomorrow's, might have been 13-11. And also because every single pitch represents a chance to score. Scoring opportunities create excitement in the form of a goal or a great defensive play or a spectacular save. Those opportunities are lacking in the NHL.

Michael Lewis� best books have always been morality plays. Whether his subjects are the misanthropic mortgage traders of Salomon Brothers from Liar�s Poker or the frighteningly precocious investor Jonathan Lebed from Next, Lewis has been our best chronicler of those outsiders who have invented better mousetraps and forced the world to beat paths to their door.
What if that story was transferable to baseball? What if the story could be told primarily from the perspective of an insider groomed for stardom, who only achieved a different kind of success by embracing the theories and worldview of a previously invisible group of outsiders (and who came with a wonderfully volatile personality)? And what if that story was combined with an intellectual history of a mass movement, which was invisible to the larger baseball world for almost two decades before forcing a reluctant industry to yield to its insights? And finally, what if, instead of having to resort to statistics and abstractions about how the resulting efficiencies enrich a larger public, the morality play could be completed by showing individuals getting a chance to dream a little longer (and make plenty of money as well) who would have been barred from doing so under the old, prejudicial ways of doing business?
If you had all those things, you would have Michael Lewis� new book Moneyball. And we do.
The book is a combination of a business case study, an intellectual history and a morality play. And as Rob Neyer notes, it is the story of an idea - "the notion that objective knowledge does have an important role in baseball, an industry that's long resisted this notion." It is a story of how the Oakland Athletics, primarily (though not solely) through the leadership of general manager Billy Beane, dared to think for themselves and learned the lessons of two decades� worth of baseball scholarship that was viewed condescendingly by the baseball establishment � on those rare occasions when it was viewed at all, that is. In doing so, the team has built a very successful organization and overturned several decades of conventional wisdom, creating competitive pressures that are forcing the rest of the industry to adapt or die � or, even worse, become the Detroit Tigers. And thanks to the A�s new way of doing things, certain players who would have languished in the minor leagues or never even been drafted by professional baseball are getting the chance to play baseball for a living � and do very well (both on the field and at the bank). Few writers could have told any of those stories as well as Michael Lewis, and no one can tell them all together as well. This book should become a staple of MBA syllabi and any list of great baseball books. (I have suggested to friends who are Met fans that the most productive thing they could do for their team is to mail a copy of the book to the team�s owners.)
The book arose out of a question: Virtually everyone who wrote or spoke about baseball from an official or publicly authoritative standpoint argued that a team without lots of revenue had no hope to compete for a championship. Yet as those arguments grew louder, the A�s, whose revenues and payroll ranked virtually last in baseball, kept winning more and more games even as they kept losing many of their best players to other teams for financial reasons. After making the playoffs three straight years, it was hard to argue with a straight face that their success was an aberration (though that never stopped baseball commissioner Bud Selig). How were the A�s doing it?
The answer is explained through the book�s main subject, Billy Beane. Beane was a spectacular athlete who was drafted by the Mets out of high school in 1979 and expected to be a star, but was temperamentally unsuited for the game and never became more than a fringe major leaguer. He entered the front office of the Athletics, which was already in the middle of an organizational revolution based on the ideas of a writer relatively well-known among baseball fans but utterly ignored within baseball: Bill James. Lewis explains how and why Bill James is viewed as a Jedi Master for a certain subset of baseball fans, and how Beane and the A�s draw on James� theories and modes of questioning to rethink just about everything about building a baseball organization.
The centerpiece of the book describes the 2002 amateur baseball draft, where Beane overruled his scouts� traditional perspectives and drafted a number of prospects whom no other team would deem worthy of consideration. Lewis focuses on one particular player, Jeremy Brown, and notes how he was rocketing through the minor leagues faster than even Beane could have anticipated. Lewis� account of the draft shows how Beane�s A�s, by daring to do things differently (the clich� �thinking outside the box� would actually be appropriate in this case), are able to unearth talented players that other teams choose to ignore. More importantly, as Lewis notes on page 117:

A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A�s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, �He�ll never go anywhere because he doesn�t look like a big league ballplayer.�

Of course, the book sparkles throughout with typical examples of Michael Lewis quotations. My favorite example is the description on page 101 of a scout�s entrance:

Billy O doesn�t bother to smile. Too much trouble. He somehow conveys the idea of a smile without moving a muscle. � Billy O is what you�d get if you hammered Shaquille O�Neal on the head with a pile driver until he was six feet two. He�s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival.

For what it describes, the book is close to perfect. It is important to note, though, that the book does not discuss two key aspects of what the A�s have done in building their organization: one which is not original to the A�s, and one which may be more original than anything Bill James ever devised or described by Lewis.
The first aspect is the A�s judicious use of multi-year contracts with their young players. In baseball, a player�s salary is generally determined by a mixture of performance and seniority. A player�s rights belong to his team for the first six years of his career � thus, another team cannot bid for his services � limiting competition which could drive up his salary. After that time, any team can bid for a player whose contract has expired (the player becomes a �free agent�), thus driving up his salary through competition for his services. Since the A�s have no money, they generally cannot afford to outbid other teams for players who have become free agents and can sign with any team. By signing their good young players to long-term contracts early in their careers, the A�s accomplish two things. First, the team achieves cost certainty with respect to those players and do not have to risk unanticipated budget increases imposed by salary arbitration � essential for a team whose budget is as tight as the A�s. Second, by showing a commitment to the player, the A�s can often induce a player to agree to extend the contract a year or two beyond the point at which he would become a free agent � thus increasing the length of time the A�s can afford to keep him. This tactic was used to great effect by the Cleveland Indians in the early 1990s, but it is even more essential for the A�s because they have a tighter budget. When business schools teach classes on Billy Beane�s management of the A�s, this aspect will be highlighted as an important cost-saving measure.
The second aspect is the A�s program with their young pitchers. The current centerpiece of the A�s team is the trio of young starting pitchers: Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. To have developed three young pitchers without having any of them break down is impressive enough; the actuarial statistics on young pitchers are nothing short of gruesome. It is possible that the A�s have merely been lucky to this point, but they don�t think so. They have an extensive program at every level of the organization regarding pitching mechanics and pitch counts, and they have a fascinating program in the lower minor leagues regarding pitcher usage. As Lewis describes in the book, the A�s do not believe in drafting high school pitchers (pitchers aged 18-22 are the worst injury risks in baseball, by several orders of magnitude). The A�s are loaded with pitching prospects in their minor leagues, and they apparently did not have a single major arm or elbow surgery all of last year (the Yankees, by contrast, should have qualified for group discounts on such surgeries). A while ago, I had an e-mail debate with James Suroweicki of The New Yorker about the likelihood that the A�s program truly represented an advancement in the development of young pitchers. The jury is still out on that question, though some of what I�ve read over the last few months has led me to be more optimistic. But the possibility that it may be true is something very newsworthy. Nothing in baseball is tougher than developing a young pitcher, due to the massive rates of injury among the species. If the A�s have really built a better system for doing so, then they should rename the Hall of Fame after Billy Beane. Lewis should have discussed the subject in Moneyball.
Notwithstanding those two omissions, it is difficult to overstate the accomplishment of this book. If anything, I understate. In particular, those of us who have been reading Bill James and his heirs for 15+ years have reacted viscerally to the book. Part of it is due to Lewis� skill and comprehensiveness in describing the work of James and the sabermetric community (he even describes, quite skillfully, the recent pathbreaking work of Voros McCracken regarding pitching and defense); we have finally found our bard! But Lewis speaks to us as more than a biographer: he provides validation. Virtually every fan of Bill James, every would-be sabermetrician, has raged at his favorite team at some point over the last two decades for some blitheringly stupid personnel move. Virtually every such fan has raged at the clich�-choked ignorance of the sports media on a mostly constant basis over that time. We knew that at our fingertips, available to anyone who cared to approach the subject with an open mind, was information that could easily disinfect the garbage being spewed by the ignorant media. We knew that if our team had only read the same books we did, or had only cared to think about the issues as much as we did, it would have been better off.
And thanks to Lewis and Beane, we know we were right.

�It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong,� [Bill James] concluded. �Would God that I might have the feeling again before I die.� He never had a clue � not then, not later � that the world was not entirely wrong. No one ever called James to say that an actual big league baseball team had read him closely, understood everything he had said along with the spirit in which he had said it, and had set out to find even more new baseball knowledge with which to clobber the nitwits who never grasped what Bill James was all about.

- Moneyball, p.96.

During my hiatus, I received a request for an e-mail interview, asking me to expand on certain issues raised in my big Bill James post from a while ago.
I could be nice and respond to the inteviewer directly. But why do that when I can share my answers with the rest of the world? Here are the questions and my answers.

When did you first start reading Bill James?
When I was about 13, with the 1986 Baseball Abstract and the first version of the Historical Baseball Abstract.

How would you say that you have applied his ideas in your life?
Mostly in a generic attempt to apply modes of critical thinking to whatever I do. I was a history major in college, and took every opportunity to trumpet my belief that with respect to "it was better in my day" jeremiads, 9 out of 10 of such laments are utterly bogus, and the 10th example is usually overstated. Bill James' books are an inexhaustible source of good examples for that point.

Other than just the idea of critical thinking, what would you say are the most
important things James has written about that are applicable to areas outside of
baseball?
As noted above, I think his scrutiny of the historical record is remarkably relevant for those who would draw lessons from history - i.e., most of us.

Do you feel that James' ideas are expressed more by conservative writers, or equally by writers across the conservative [I assume my interviewer means "political" - Dr. M] spectrum. If you feel the ideas have
been more embraced by conservatives, why do you feel this is so?
Dan McLaughlin has written on certain similarities between conservative political media and sabermetric analysts. I see his points, and I'd add another: I do think there is a strong revolutionary undercurrent to James' work, and for many of us who grew up in major metropolitan areas and attended elite universities in the "blue" states, the conventional wisdom that attracted our scorn was primarily liberal.
That being said, I'd be surprised if there was a strong political tilt to James' fans. The skepticism that one picks up from James' work is equally applicable to conservative conventional wisdom as to the liberal variety. Even if there are more conservative Bill James fans among bloggers than liberals, that may simply be a function of sample size or a function of what factors drive people to start blogs, of which I have my own theories that I hope to expand into a post later.
I'd prefer to look on the bright side; sabermetrics, and good baseball writing in general, provides fans with areas for debate and potential agreement that have little to do with one's political leanings. You get situations like Eric Alterman (justifiably) rhapsodizing over George Will's baseball writing.

In what other areas do you feel James has had influence, besides baseball and political journalism?
Not systematically, but there are people in every field who would cite James as an influence. Critical thinking skills are pretty transferable.

Is there another influential writer you would compare Bill James to?
It's become a cliche, but Dan McLaughlin nails it: the George Orwell comparison works to an extent.

Do you know of other writers you would recommend that I speak to regarding this article?

Check out the commenters to my earlier post. Given the theme of this interview, I'd particularly recommend Dwight Meredith (he can give a political liberal's perspective) and Derek Lowe (he's a chemist who cites James as an influence in his work). I'd also contact Matt Welch and Doug Pappas, neither of whom is a political conservative.

Bloggers generally refer to "Fiskings" in the context of articles about the war or politics. But the best example I've seen in a long time of the genre has been from college student Aaron Gleeman. In this piece, Gleeman patiently demolishes an unbelievably fatuous article from an alleged professional baseball writer at ESPN.com. Gleeman's piece is an excellent illustration of some of my arguments about the compatibility of baseball and blogging - in fact, it's a better illustration than my post was.
I highly recommend Gleeman's blog.

The Yankees' pitchers and catchers report to spring training today.

A preview of the Yankees' new strategy, brought to you by (who else?) the Onion.

A long time ago, Greg Connors called for more sports blogs, a request met with skepticism by Glenn Reynolds.
The almighty Professor was wrong. Specifically, baseball – the sport I know best and thus will confine this discussion to – is absolutely perfect for blogging, and there should be more baseball blogging than there is at present. Some thoughts on why:
1) Josh Marshall recently criticized the tendency among some bloggers to assume that they automatically know more about a given subject than ignorami like reporters for the New York Times. While that criticism is certainly unwarranted in many cases – many of the best bloggers are those who are knowledgable specialists in a given subject and can outclass reporters with less experience in the field – it’s something important to keep in mind. It’s not crazy to assume that a reporter’s experience covering a field gives him special knowledge of that field, that many bloggers wouldn’t have. (For example, a political journalist’s knowledge of inside gossip is a specific source of knowledge, often relevant to the story, that many bloggers can’t match.)
This is less true about baseball than most fields. Journalists who cover teams do have inside knowledge, but that knowledge is often less valuable than performance analysis in analyzing the game. Outsiders can and do performance analysis – or “sabermetrics” – better than most baseball journalists. The intellectual action in baseball analysis is with the outsiders, at places like Baseball Prospectus or Baseball Primer. It’s not that outsiders have access to special knowledge – just that most inside journalists don’t use sophisticated analysis, making it easier for outsiders to compete. (It’s getting better, but slowly. Some mainstream journalists – most notably Joe Posnanski – use all the tools at their disposal, but they’re the exceptions.) The single most important insight into baseball analysis in the last few years was developed by a college student, working with numbers that had been freely available for decades. He was just the first one to ask the right questions.
2) The Godfather of sabermetrics, Bill James, contributed more than specific insights into the game, which systematically undercut decades of received wisdom with no empirical support. His work - most notably in his annual Baseball Abstracts and two editions of the Historical Baseball Abstract, and more recently with Win Shares – introduced a generation of fans to a methodology of critical thinking, which – as explained by Eric Neel – had ramifications far beyond baseball. Describing the experince of reading James' New Historical Baseball Abstract:

The experience reminded me of the winter of 1983, when my friend Matt Welch first introduced me to the "Bill James Baseball Abstract" books, and the two of us spent the better part of several gray Long Beach weekends playing Strat-o-Matic, eating microwave burritos, listening to Beatles records and reading James with the zeal of revolutionary converts.
We loved the way he spoke plainly, and said smart, provocative things that cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. If he thought a player was underrated or overrated, or believed a theory was nonsensical, he said so and then set about demonstrating why. It wasn't fancy, but it was rhetorically sharp and intoxicating.
...We were 16, and we heard in James the clarity and wit we wanted to fashion in our own voices.
We grooved on his mathematics, too, on which statistics are actually significant in terms of understanding how the game is played. He made basic claims that were nonetheless revolutionary, like, "a hitter's job is not to compile a high batting average. The job is to create runs. That is what all hitters are trying to do in every plate appearance: They are trying to create runs."
Working through James' formulas gave us a chance to cut our teeth as problem-solvers, and it gave our devotion to the game a kind of scientific weight; it made us believe we were doing real work in the world when we examined and debated the relative offensive value of Don Mattingly vs. Wade Boggs, or Henderson vs. George Brett. And we were exhilarated when we assumed, along with James, a kind of iconoclastic, fight-the-powers-that-be attitude.
...It sounds silly, and my wife laughed that "oh, sweetie, you're so cute" laugh when I told her, but I don't think it's too much to say that James' approach to baseball helped a lot of us decide what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.
"I devoured those early abstracts," Matt said when I talked to him last week, "because they were reorienting my thinking about life, believe it or not." Matt's a terrific journalist now. He and some friends started a newspaper in Prague in the early 1990s, and he's since come back to the States to work as a freelance political writer. He told me that reading James was the beginning of his own life as a writer. "There are a lot of journalists out there who don't write about sports who are directly influenced," he said. "James really is my No. 1 journalism guy because the thing that mattered to him the most was finding a way to the truth, regardless of how he got there." For guys like Matt, James is part of the 1960s New Journalism, along with Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and a bunch of others. He got our attention because he talked about baseball, which we were already interested in, but his approach helped launch us into our own so-called adult lives, too.
I've been an English teacher and a writer most of my so-called adult life, and though I hadn't thought about it until now, I like the idea that my tendency to turn texts inside out and to stretch ideas thin enough to see their hidden underpinnings is somehow the product of reading Bill James.

Yes, that Matt Welch. In an e-mail to me about a year ago, Welch opined that a “huge number of warbloggers are Bill James freaks.” I know of Welch, Dan McLaughlin, Aaron Haspel and Max Power, but that’s about all I know of. (Any other warbloggers who wish to be so classified should let me know.) When you consider his methodology and the amount of BS he hacked through, Bill James has a valid claim to be the first “anti-idiotarian.”
I was reminded of that thought by this article, arguing (mostly tongue-in-cheek) that James should turn his attentions to politics:

[W]hen President George W. Bush makes a statement like, "Today, the women of Afghanistan are free," as he did in Tuesday's State of the Union address, there is no way to establish the veracity of that statement short of traveling to Afghanistan or doing lots of dull, boring newspaper reading, which almost no one can be bothered with anymore. You've got to take his word for it.
It would be harder to be cynical, both from a producer and consumer point of view, if we had better stats for politics. Sure, groups like the Americans for Democratic Action and the Sierra Club rate politicos on their lefty-righty percentages (that is, whether they lean liberal or conservative on key issues), but those only scratch the surface.
We need the kind of numbers that announcers toss off casually in baseball and football games: "The congressman has made 28 misstatements and 12 deliberate falsehoods out of sixty statements in this address for a calumny percentage of .667. The all-time record of .812 was set by Senator Huey Long (D-LA) in his Jefferson Day address, 1933." Or more appropriately, "Afghanistan population: 26.8 million. Afghanis living in freedom: 4. That would have to be classified as something of a misstatement, wouldn't it Bob?"
Baseball has a Manichean transparency that politics lacks: the proof is in the standings. A team can claim a good faith effort at contention, but a 72-90 record is what it is. On the other hand, a president can propose a tax plan and say that it will give a break to everyone, but unless you're prepared to wade up to your elbows in the U.S. tax code, it's hard to know whether the plan will be good for some, all, or none -- and often that's just what the plan's proponents are counting on.
This would no longer be the case if James (now a consultant for the Red Sox) could be convinced to turn his attention away from the horsehide sphere for awhile and produce a new magnum opus, the Bill James Political Abstract. Your senator is running for reelection and says he's working 24 hours a day to pass legislation for you. Not sure? Pick up your copy of the BJPA and flip over to the attendance tables, then head to the back of the book for the all-time records and see where your guy ranks.

It’s a seductive argument, but I don’t think it would work out as well as the author hopes. In the end, baseball’s results are objective and easily found on the scoreboard. Empiricism in political analysis rarely reveals objective results as easily, a basis for the existence of many competing think tanks in Washington (even after accounting for the inevitable self-interest). It’s easier to demonstrate the efficacy of a strategy in baseball than in most public policy, and it’s not so easy even in the former case. (This helps explain why George Will’s writings on baseball are infinitely more convincing than his political columns. And I like the latter, but the comparison is still true. Will is a big Bill James fan, by the way.) And finally, political weblogs try do the fact-checking which the author deems impossible. He must not be familiar with the blogosphere...
3) Prof. Reynolds has compared the potential impact of blogs to the newsletters of I.F. Stone, which had a narrow but influential readership and thus had influence disproportionate to its circulation.
Many baseball fans of “sabermetric” bent will recognize a historical parallel – James’ early Baseball Abstracts, especially before they enjoyed national distribution. More contemporaneously, Baseball Prospectus has built up an influential following - including among baseball insiders - even though they’re not yet a nationally recognized brand.
And the Prospectus, along with Baseball Primer, has been using the Web for years to develop its ideas in shorter form before putting them into their annual book.
UPDATE: This post has been revised slightly to correct some sloppy writing pointed out by Matthew Yglesias. And check out the comments - Bill James fans of the world, unite!

Very quietly, Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli have resumed their "Rob & Rany on the Royals" feature. Welcome back, guys!

Why have the Boston Red Sox not won a World Series in 84 years...and counting?
In an effort to keep warm through this longer-than-usual (for a Yankee fan) baseball winter, I recently paged through a book that offers a partial answer to that question. In Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, Howard Bryant (a sportswriter for the Bergen Record who grew up in Boston) details how, for many years after Jackie Robinson entered major league baseball, the Red Sox did not attempt to sign black players and passed up chances to sign players such as Willie Mays. Even after the Red Sox integrated, Bryant describes how, into shockingly recent times, the team has often made life difficult for its black players. Others such as Glenn Stout have also described how the Red Sox’s slowness to integrate contributed to its mediocrity in the 1950s and 1960s, but Bryant’s book goes further in explicating the residual effects of the team’s problems with race.
The Red Sox’s problems recruiting and keeping black players have been, first and foremost, a moral failing. But they were also, as the team’s fans probably realize, a bad business practice. A sports team’s business is to win, and - as Bryant notes - a team in a competitive environment such as major league baseball cannot ignore a talent stream as substantial as African-American players and expect to win championships.
Similarly, while the integration of major league baseball was most importantly a cessation of an immense moral wrong, it also expanded the talent pool from which baseball teams drew. As such, it introduced a competitive pressure upon teams. Those that adapted to the post-Jackie Robinson era succeeded at the expense of those that did not.
All this was, or should have been, understood at the time by those whose primary priority was to win. While Branch Rickey certainly deserves tremendous moral credit for providing the means for Jackie Robinson’s entrance into the major leagues, he was just as undoubtedly interested in the competitive advantage his team would derive. When the Dodgers combined black players such as Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcome and Junior Gilliam with white players like Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Carl Furillo, the result was a team that won six pennants in Robinson’s ten seasons. As Adam Smith might have predicted, the Dodgers’ self-interest was a moral force.
The National League generally followed the Dodgers’ example to a greater extent than the American League did, with the expected result: according to Bill James’ Win Shares method, there were 11 National League players in 1963 that were better than any American League player that year. (The contrast is especially stark because Mickey Mantle was injured for most of that season, but the general point remains true.). Probably not coincidentally, the National League dominated the All-Star Game in that era.
Even the mighty Yankees were forced to adapt the competitive pressure exerted by the integration of baseball. As Bryant describes, the Yankees’ record on race was almost as bad as the Red Sox’s for a long time. The Yankees’ first noteworthy black player, Vic Power, was judged too “flashy” and quickly traded away despite his talent. The star catcher Elston Howard met the Yankees’ criteria, but not many others did. In his book October 1964, David Halberstam describes how the Yankees’ neglect of the talent afforded by the integration of African-American (and by then, Latino) players into baseball contributed heavily to the downfall of the Yankee dynasty in the 1960s. (There were, of course, other contributing factors: the Yankee player-development system was starved for resources in the early 1960s and didn’t develop many good white players, either.) When the Yankees resumed winning championships in the late 1970s, the team included outstanding minority players such as Mickey Rivers, Chris Chambliss and, of course, Reggie Jackson (who satisfied no era’s definition of decorum). And, as Bryant describes, the current dynastic Yankees are a model of diversity in terms of players’ backgrounds. Lingering prejudice against groups of players is, practically speaking, incompatible with George Steinbrenner’s monomaniacal desire for championships, and such prejudice has accordingly been overcome. The Yankees’ most recent moves - the signing of Japanese outfielder Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui and Cuban defector pitcher Jose Contreras - perfectly illustrate how the demand for the best players has overcome any prejudice against groups of such players. While it would be nice to assume high-minded motives on the Yankees’ behalf, it seems like Steinbrenner’s insatiable appetite for championships deserves the credit for the overcoming of such prejudice.
None of the above is especially novel. What is not understood as often, though, is that competitive pressures analogous to the ones exerted by the integration of baseball a half-century ago (though not usually with the same moral imperative) continue to be exerted.
About 20 years ago, the Dominican Republic became a tremendous source of talent for baseball. Teams such as the Blue Jays and Dodgers took early advantage of that source and gained a competitive advantage. More recently, the influx of Japanese baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki and Hideo Nomo has introduced a new source of talent, which has been best exploited by the Mariners and Dodgers. The Yankees’ most recent moves may be understood as a response to those pressures, in addition to the specific tactical benefits afforded by signing those players. By signing Matsui, the Yankees joined the competition for Japan’s best players and signaled that the team would not allow the Mariners and Dodgers to monopolize the talent from that source. Similarly, the signing of Contreras continued the Yankees’ efforts to take advantage of the too-few opportunities to sign Cuban players, which began with Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez and the ill-fated Andy Morales. (We can all hope for the future expansion of such opportunities, as a minor fringe benefit of the not-soon-enough downfall of Castro.)
No team that aspires to win a championship can afford to ignore any source of talent, including intellectual. Over 20 years ago, Bill James began popularizing certain principles and methodologies of statistical analysis with respect to players’ performances (which he dubbed “sabermetrics”). For a while, his work was mostly ignored by the baseball establishment. In recent years, though, a number of baseball executives – especially Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics - have begun incorporating many insights pioneered by James (and his successors such as Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Primer) into their management, with positive results. Most notably, Beane’s Athletics have made the playoffs for three consecutive years despite having a budget as low as any team in baseball. Baseball is currently being subjected to competitive pressure by the spread of sabermetrics throughout baseball management, and teams that adapt to that pressure will succeed at the expense of those who do.
One team that is adapting to the pressure is the Red Sox. The team has an owner who is familiar with the work of Bill James, and recently hired a 28-year-old general manager who is steeped in James’ work. Most notably, the Red Sox recently hired James himself as a special adviser – the first time James had ever been employed by a major league team in a permanent capacity, despite his influence on the sport. It would be obscene to equate the delay in hiring James to the prejudice suffered by African-American players before the integration of baseball, it seems apparent that one of the reasons it took so long for teams to hire James was due to his outsider status. Having never played or been involved in the game in any official capacity (though he recently has contributed some commentary to Major League Baseball's official website), James seemed to be outside the pool of acceptable baseball hires, despite his influence on the game. (Baseball teams have employed statistical consultants in the past, but none of them have had as high a profile or as much influence as James.) After 84 years…and counting, the Red Sox’s desire for a championship overcame any prejudice against hiring an outsider. And, as Bryant notes at the end of his book, there have been indications in recent years that the Red Sox are finally removing the last vestiges of racial and ethnic prejudice from their organization (an effort that began under the management of the much-maligned general manager Dan Duquette). The desire to do the right thing has surely been part of the Red Sox’s calculus in those efforts. The desire to catch the resurgent, hated Yankees, with their talent drawn from virtually every conceivable source, probably played a greater role. (Significantly, the Red Sox apparently tried as hard as the Yankees did to sign Contreras. While they did not succeed, similar efforts will undoubtedly pay off in the future.)
As Adam Smith noted, people’s attempts to satisfy their self-interest may have beneficial consequences to society. In the context of professional sports, a team’s desperate desire to win a championship might lead it to overcome prejudices which many people assume are immutable.

UPDATE: David Pinto comments:

What killed the Yankees in the 1960's was:
1. Ownership by CBS, which didn't have the killer instinct for winning.
2. The implementation of the baseball draft, which prevented the Yankees from signing the best young players to bonuses. The baseball draft, like today's luxury tax, was an item specificially designed to end Yankee hegemony at the expense of player wealth.

Those factors help explain why the Yankees were down for so long, but they don't explain the team's initial sudden collapse in 1965 after winning the pennant in 1964. CBS bought the Yankees in November 1964, and the amateur draft began in 1965. If the team's development system had been in great shape at that time, it should have taken a while for CBS' ownership and the draft to bring down the Yankees. Those two factors could not have caused the Yankees to collapse immediately. It takes a while for drafted players to reach the major leagues, and if an organization is in decent shape, it takes a while for ownership to wreck it, even if they try hard - Peter Angelos' stewardship of the Baltimore Orioles is a good example.

This was supposed to be an extended discussion of this year’s candidates for the Hall of Fame.
After working on it for several days and only gotten to half of the viable candidates after several pages, I’ve decided that less is more.
For a more comprehensive look at the candidates, check out Aaron Gleeman’s outstanding overview, with both basic biographical and statistical information on each candidate, as well as an assessment of each candidate’s case. I won’t try to repeat his efforts (i.e. I will free-ride on his)
As mentioned below, David Pinto recently noted an e-mail exchange between us. What prompted my original e-mail to Pinto was that this year’s ballot has an exceptional number of borderline candidates, as opposed to having one or two sure inductees and many clearly unqualified ones, which seems to have been a more common pattern in recent years.
Rob Neyer has made a similar observation:
What's amazing about the current Hall of Fame ballot is how many viable candidates there are, candidates about whom we can argue.
Personally, I would vote for only six players on the ballot (I'll name them later). But I believe I might be wrong about five or six others, and there are still more candidates who have their rabid supporters, and wouldn't be among the most undeserving Hall of Famers if they were elected. There are 33 players on the ballot this time around, and 19 are viable candidates according to at least somebody's standards.
Those 19 players are Bert Blyleven, Gary Carter, Dave Concepcion, Andre Dawson, Steve Garvey, Rich Gossage, Keith Hernandez, Tommy John, Jim Kaat, Don Mattingly, Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, Eddie Murray, Dave Parker, Jim Rice, Ryne Sandberg, Lee Smith, Bruce Sutter, and Alan Trammell. Every one of those 19 players has a decent argument on either analytical premises or based on historical precedents (or both).
I think the current playing environment is distorting the current voting on two levels:
1) Due to the offensive explosion since the mid-1990s, the batting statistics of the current candidates seem superficially less impressive when compared to active players. Specifically, Gary Carter’s numbers – properly regarded as historic in his context – pale besides Mike Piazza’s, and don’t impress as much as they should when compared to Ivan Rodriguez or even Javier Lopez. Dale Murphy’s MVP numbers of the mid-1980s look pedestrian now. Same for Jim Rice; people have focused on his difficult relationship with sportswriters in attempting to explain why he hasn’t been elected, but I think the changed offensive climate is as responsible. (Analysts such as Bill James have pointed out that Rice was very overrated, but I don’t think that the BBWAA voters are using that argument. It’s a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.) Had Eddie Murray not cleared 3,000 hits or 500 HRs, he may have had to wait a while for induction as well.
2) To a lesser extent, the increased concentration of saves in one pitcher and increased specialization of closers over the last 15 years has hurt the prior generation of great closers in the voting – both because the career leaderboards are rapidly being re-written, and that 35 saves isn’t nearly as big of a deal as it was 20 years ago. Examples include Gossage, Sutter, Dan Quisenberry and even Tom Henke.
In short, I would definitely vote for Blyleven, Carter, Gossage, Murray, Sandberg, Trammell, Kaat and John. I would probably vote for Dale Murphy as well, and one surprise candidate who’ll be described below. But there is no candidate out of the 19 listed above whose selection would be a travesty.
I’ve retained one of my original extended discussions, regarding Gossage and Sutter:

Rich Gossage and Bruce Sutter make for a fascinating joint discussion. They were probably the two most feared “firemen” of their time (the term “closer” not commonly used at that time). Gossage’s career was much longer, in part because he bounced around as a back-of-the-bullpen type for a decade after he was no longer an All-Star. And he wasn’t too bad, even in those years. (Contrast that with Steve Carlton’s last couple of years, for example.) Sutter’s career was basically wiped out by arm injuries approximately five minutes after signing a “lifetime” contract with the Atlanta Braves. Oops.
Under Win Shares, Sutter’s 1977 season ranks as barely better than Gossage’s best season (also 1977) by a 27 to 26 margin. Sutter and Gossage each had 3 seasons of over 20 Win Shares. Their primes basically overlapped, and I think it was generally accepted that Sutter was slightly better at their peaks. In the original edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract (published in 1986), Bill James ranked Sutter #1 among relievers for peak value, with Gossage #2. Part of that reputation is probably due to the fact that Sutter closed out four consecutive All-Star games during the time that the NL won every year, and made the American Leaguers look like a bunch of Little Leaguers in the process.
The story is often told about how Sutter’s second-half fades in 1977 and 1978 due to overwork inspired Cubs manager Herman Franks to restrict Sutter’s use to save situations, thus creating the modern “closer” role. I’m not sure if there’s more to the story than that, but if it is true, it may indicate Gossage’s superiority. Gossage pitched over 130 innings in relief 1975, 1977 and 1978 (not to mention 225 innings, along with 15 complete games, in 1976 in an ill-advised experiment as a starter) and was none the worse for wear. After an injury sustained in a famous fight with Cliff Johnson cut short his 1979 season, Gossage’s workload was more reasonable for the rest of his career, but his effectiveness did not seem to be compromised by extensive use the way Sutter’s was.
Based on durability and length of career, I’d pick Gossage over Sutter, and I’d feel comfortable voting Gossage to the Hall of Fame. But the question is whether Sutter qualifies as well. I’ve probably gone back-and-forth on Sutter more than any other candidate on the ballot. At the moment, I probably wouldn’t vote for him based on brevity of career. But I could easily go the other way. Was Bruce Sutter the Sandy Koufax of relievers – i.e., were his peak accomplishments of sufficient magnitude to outweigh his short career? The answer may be “yes.” Yes, I know closers are overrated (though that was less true when they pitched 100-130 innings as Sutter did, as opposed to today’s 65) But Sutter has a reasonable claim to being the best reliever of all time, judged on his peak. If a player can reasonably be called the best ever at his position – including closer - for any length of time, I don’t think we can complain if that player makes the Hall of Fame.
In fact, I just convinced myself. I’d vote for Sutter as well.

David Pinto refers to an e-mail dialogue we have had regarding this year's ballot and first-ballot inductees generally.
His information regarding historical patterns of first-ballot inductees is very enlightening. However, he drops in the following conclusion:

As time goes on, I believe the percentage of first time ballot elections will continue to rise until we have about 90% of players being elected on their first try.

I'm not sure why he believes that, but I don't think it's true. I think that a large part of what makes for first-ballot inductees is the timing of when players retire. Even though the large backlog of deserving candidates has essentially been cleared away, as Pinto notes, there's no reason it can't be replenished to a degree - enough so that 90% just seems far too high.
More specifically, I think that Pinto doesn't account for the historical factor that Bill James alluded to in the 1986 Abstract when he developed his system for predicting HOF induction based on historical patterns, and in his book on the Hall of Fame: voters (especially the Veterans Committee) have historically not adjusted sufficiently for extreme playing conditions. What that means is that as the players who compiled their stats in today's hitter-happy era retire (and assuming that conditions move somewhat closer to a center, which is already happening), many of today's hitters, with their gaudy stats, may eventually gain induction into the Hall as time passes and voters forget the historical context (especially if the Veterans' Committee continues in any substantial form). That forgetting may take time, which may lead to players getting in after a while on the ballot (and it will also take time to sort through the many players likely to retire with vaguely similar and inflated stats).
Later tonight or tomorrow, I hope to post more on this year's candidates for election

On the recent managerial ongoings regarding the Mets, A's, Mariners and Devil Rays...
Regarding Lou Piniella ending up in Tampa Bay, Joel Sherman writes:

An NL GM said Piniella will find working for the hopeless combo of Tampa owner Vince Naimoli and GM Chuck LaMar is "baseball hell . . . I can't believe he wanted to go to Tampa Bay regardless of how much money was given to him. The guy who is the GM there has no idea what the [bleep] he is doing. If Chuckles [LaMar] is still really in charge, Piniella is [bleeped]." . . .

I think nicknaming a general manager of a major-league baseball team "Chuckles" qualifies as an insult.

On the Mets' hiring of Art Howe, Jon Heyman sums it up:

Beset by panic and poor taste, the Mets have settled on the worst possible man for an impossible task. Good luck to Art Howe, a nice man with a misleading resume, misguided confidence and almost no chance to succeed as Mets manager.
...To get away from a boss whom he believed disrespected and underpaid him, Howe dived right into a hornet's nest without insecticide. The only possible result is that he'll get stung. It is only a matter of time.
...For some reason, the Mets believed they had to have a manager with experience, so they took a manager who has managed 12 years, won a bunch of games and impressed almost no one. They didn't want to be left standing with no one, so they panicked and took Forrest Gump, an earnest man who lucked into the best team west of the Yankees.
A partial listing of men who would have made better Mets managers: Baker, Piniella, Ken Macha, Dave Righetti, Joe Maddon, Ron Wotus, Robby Thompson, Bud Black, Willie Randolph, Kevin Kennedy, Terry Francona, Bobby Valentine.
We'll produce the second installment of names after we give it another few minutes of thought.
The first clue that Howe isn't exactly Joe McCarthy should have been that his boss, esteemed A's general manager Billy Beane, spent the past few weeks begging someone to take him. Too bad for the Mets that Beane is a wonderful salesman, and Mets GM Steve Phillips is a bad shopper.

I don't agree with all the names on Heyman's list, but his overall points are accurate. As many have pointed out, the Chicago White Sox offered Jeff Torborg to the Mets in 1992 despite coming off two very good seasons. the Mets eagerly snapped up Torborg, to their regret. And Billy Beane's track record is even better than that of the White Sox in the early 1990s.

Just click here. You'll be happy you did. (Via David Pinto.)

I predict it will be won by the first team to win four games.
(Well, after the All-Star Game, you never know...)
Seriously, the teams look pretty evenly matched to me.

Points in the Angels' favor:
Slightly better bullpen, including the "K-Rod" (and I love that nickname) X-factor
A manager who's learned from his one postseason boneheaded in-game move
Home-field for seventh game
Lineup prone to unstoppable phases

Points in the Giants' favor:
Bonds
Slightly more reliable starting pitching
A manager who looked great compared to his NLCS counterpart
My brother's in-laws as fans

Both teams have been clicking on all cylinders and strike me as exceptionally solid from 1-25 on the roster, as opposed to relying on front-line talent as the Yankees did in their recent run.
Because I must make a pick, it'll be Angels in 7.
Check out Rob Neyer and Derek Zumsteg for some good analysis of why the
Angels should pitch to Bonds more often than not.

Coming tomorrow. I need to think a little more.

Rob Neyer has a fascinating piece on how the Angels' and Giants' peaks may each have come in 1962. (Presumably, he's only referring to the period after the Giants moved to San Francisco; they won a number of World Championships in New York.)

You, too, can apply for the Mets' managerial opening by filling out this application.

David Pinto, via STATS Inc., lists the top 10 finishers in each league in Bill James' "Win Shares."
A couple of notes on the leaders:
1) I'm surprised Alex Rodriguez and Miguel Tejada are so close; they were further apart under the short-form method of figuring Win Shares. Texas must have played as a really great hitters' park this year. I had thought that it would be a travesty to give Tejada the MVP over A-Rod; this indicates that they're closer than I thought.
2) One fascinating item in Bill James' book introducing Win Shares was a description of how often a team has the top two pitchers in the league. It happens surprisingly often, and occurred again this year in both leagues. But in the NL, Arizona had the top 3 pitchers in the league - which happens much less often.

A while ago, I discussed an assessment of Billy Beane written by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker.
I received the following e-mail from Mr. Surowiecki, from which he has permitted me to quote:

A couple of things: you're absolutely right that signing young players to long-term contracts has been key to the A's success. That point got left on the cutting-room floor because, well, I couldn't get it all into 950 words. I also think that that strategy isn't what's most distinctive about Beane's approach, since, as you point out, the Indians used it to such great effect in the 1990s.
On the question of how lucky the A's have been, though, I think the issue is more complicated than you make it sound. Schoenfield's historical analysis is interesting, but I think he in effect begs the question that he's trying to answer: namely, is Billy Beane's acumen the fundamental cause of Oakland's success. Schoenfield looks at history and effectively says, "No other team
has produced three homegrown star starters in a two-year span, and only the Braves did it in a three-year span. Therefore Beane must be lucky."
What if, though, Beane really is just better than anyone before him at drafting young pitchers, and what if the A's are better at developing pitchers and (very important) keeping them healthy? Then of course you'd expect him to have better results than anyone before him, precisely the way he does. Historical comparisons are useful, but by their very nature they can't tell us why things are different, only that they are.
I think there are some concrete reasons to think that Beane really is better, too. Take the most obvious fact about the three A's star starters: they were all college pitchers. Traditionally, baseball GMs have wasted draft picks on high school pitchers, when we know that very few high school pitchers -- and almost no right-handed high-school pitchers -- ever become stars. I don't
have the information, but I bet if you looked at the staffs of all the teams Schoenfield surveyed, a huge number of the pitchers were high-school pitchers. So it's not surprising that only a very low percentage of all the pitchers would be stars. Beane, by contrast, never wastes high draft picks on high-school pitchers, so he's got a big advantage right there.
The A's are also incredibly rigorous about pitch counts, not just for minor-league pitchers, but for their starters as well -- much more rigorous, maybe, than any team in history. You probably know this, but in the early part of the season the starters have much lower pitch counts than they do later in the season. That's crucial to keeping young pitchers healthy. And Rick Peterson, the A's pitching coach, is obsessive about mechanics, arm strength, and health. One of the reasons they kept Ted Lilly on the DL so
long after the Yankees' trade was to build up the strength of his back muscles. Again, all this increases the odds that Oakland would have successful starting pitching.
Finally, I think the A's general philosophy on pitching, which Beane and Peterson have inculcated through the whole organization, is a recipe for success: throw strikes, get groundballs, don't give up home runs, and don't worry too much about strikeouts. Again, this is far from conventional wisdom in baseball, especially when it comes to young pitchers. Hudson and Zito are great, but I don' t think they would be as great if they were pitching for a lot of teams in baseball. (Mulder probably would be.)
Anyway, sorry for going on like this. It's still very possible that Beane is lucky. But in this case, I think whatever luck he's had really is the residue of design, and he deserves credit for it.

I don't really disagree with Surowiecki's points. The one thing I'd stress is that it is far too early to determine whether Oakland's methods really constitute a better mousetrap in terms of developing pitchers, or if it's just a matter of three pitchers who've been lucky enough not to get hurt yet. Surowiecki is right that Oakland is doing just about everything that analysts recommend in terms of developing young pitching. But the actuarial statistics on pitchers are so gruesome that, even though it seems clear that Oakland is reducing its odds somewhat by its program (especially drafting college rather than high-school pitchers, for which there is copious evidence as to its lessening the chances of catastrophic injury), it's just way too early to say that the program yields better systematic results.
I draw on two particular points of caution:
1) The Atlanta Braves have a program where pitchers throw every day, rather than taking days off completely as most pitchers do. For much of the 1990s, the Braves had a deserved reputation for keeping their pitchers healthy. In 1999-2000, though, so many pitchers broke down at all levels of the organization that Baseball Prospectus joked in one of its books that the team was getting "bulk discounts on Tommy John surgeries."
2) The Seattle Mariners got religion a few years ago and, among other things, have gotten strict with pitch counts at all levels of the organization (including the big club) Perhaps as a result, they have started producing young pitching at a great rate. Two of their best prospects, Gil Meche and Ryan Anderson, have broken down in career-threatening fashion despite being handled very carefully. (Admittedly, they were both drafted out of high school.)

The Yankees are at a pivotal stage. Their minor-league system has been very depleted due to a combination of Johnson and Rivera graduating to the majors, the failure of Marcus Thames and Drew Henson to progress, the Weaver trade and a few strategic injuries (most notably to Brandon Claussen). They need to get younger, especially in the pitching staff. Also, for the first time in a while, they're stuck with several bad contracts which they may find diffcult to get rid of due to the new collective bargaining agreement. Here's a preliminary mission statement. I'm not going to speculate on which players from other teams may be made available, with a few exceptions.
A - Pitching
1. Be stricter with pitch counts for all the starters. Under Torre, the Yankees' starters have (at least since about 1998) historically had the highest pitch counts in the league. That was partially due to the fact that they were the best in the league and thus didn't get knocked out early too often, but I think that they should be stricter so as to save pitches for the postseason. I can't find a link, but Thomas Boswell had a column in 2000 pointing to increased pitch counts early in the season for Mike Mussina as a reason for an early-season slump that year. Torre should look for opportunities to pull them early, and cut 10 pitches off the number he'd usually let them throw.
2. Don't commit big bucks for Roger Clemens. He's just not that good or physically reliable anymore, and already has $10.3 million coming to him from the Yankees due to the weird extension he signed a couple of years ago. If he wants much more than that, let him go.
3. Pick up Andy Pettite's option, assuming his elbow is OK. If so, open up talks on a reasonable extension. He's not a truly great pitcher (and his last few postseason starts should put the lie to any claims of his being a "big-game pitcher," but he's reliably above-average with the potential to have an outstanding season.
4. I know he has a no-trade, but I'd rather trade David Wells than El Duque. Wells was not nearly as good as his won-lost record would indicate, and I don't like his chances to have another big season. I think he will combust suddenly when the time comes.
5. Notwithstanding the above, I would trade El Duque if he can fetch good prospects. I doubt that he will, due to age and unreliability.
6. Make Sterling Hitchcock disappear. Please?
7. Notwithstanding the need for youth, I'd sign Greg Maddux if he can come at a reasonable price (and especially if money is cleared by numbers 2 and 6 above). I know he can't pitch too long in a game and has issues with the postseason, but he's still great, even if not as great as he once was. He'd be an improvement over Clemens, for example.
8. Only re-sign Mike Stanton if he'll come cheap.
9. Re-sign Ramiro Mendoza.
10. Look seriously at the Cuban defector, Jose Contreras, if he becomes a free agent. If he is good, he would represent improvement without having to give up players.
11. Play vulture: pluck the bones of franchises in chaos. The commissioner's office may not approve a vulture-like trade with Montreal, but look to Florida, a franchise with great young pitchers (if Jeff Torborg hasn't blown their arms out), clueless management and no money. A promising combination.
B - Lineup/Defense
1. Strongly consider moving Derek Jeter to third base. Seriously. Third base would utilize his strenghts (coming in on softly-hit ground balls, strong arm) while minimizing his serious weakness - very little range, especially to his left. I'm not sure who would replace him at short, though.
2. I have to see the final defensive numbers on Soriano before deciding whether his defense is so bad that he needs to be moved, but I know it's not good (especially on turning the double play). Have him work extensively on his defense (and plate discipline) in the off-season.
3. Sign Hideki Matsui. He's allegedly very good, and there are two more important reasons: 1) He wouldn;t cost players, and 2) since the Hideki Irabu misadventue a few years ago, the Yankees have essentially ceded the Pacific Rim to the Mariners and Dodgers. The Yankees cannot afford to write off an entire region and maintain their dominance. Signing Matsui can help, even if he's not quite as good as advertised. (See this Keith Olbermann piece for a description of how the signing might work in a luxury-tax-friendly manner.)
4. Continue to reduce the number of games Giambi plays at first base in favor of Nick Johnson.
5. Move Bernie Williams to left field; his Gold Glove days are far beyond him. If not other moves are made, Juan Rivera can probably play a better center than Bernie at this point.
6. Make Rondell White and Raul Mondesi disappear. Pretty please? (As an aside, isn't it amusing how many people who ripped the Yankees for making the move out of "gluttony" are now falling over themselves to point out how bad Mondesi is now? If so, weren't the Yankees doing the rest of baseball a favor?)

It's hard to be too analytical about the Yankees' loss to Anaheim. When 9 out of 10 pitchers get absolutely shelled, there's not much else to say. The defense was bad, the pitching was awful, and the Angels played brilliantly.
It is silly to criticize the offense; it averaged six runs a game in the playoffs. It is doubly silly to say things like the following:

Under Torre's watch, the Yankees used to know how to stare down a rival pitcher, but this year the batters too often went out and took their hacks.

A few facts to consider in response to that assertion: In 2001, the Yankees drew 519 walks and had a .334 on-base percentage. In 2002, the Yankees who "went out and took their hacks" drew 640 alks and had a .354 on-base percentage.
The Yankees' revamped lineup played shoddy defense, but the players they replaced weren't much of an improvement at that stage of their careers (with the exception of Giambi v. Tino at 1B, and that wasn't what cost them the series. The Yankees' failings were elementary enough; there is no need to attibute them to other factors.

James Surowiecki discusses the acumen of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, noting the general applicability of many of his accomplishments:

Oakland's success is the fruit of what the legendary corporate theorist Michael Porter likes to call "strategic fit." Every part of its business is tightly linked with every other part, creating, in Porter's words, "a chain that is as strong as its strongest link." You get strategic fit only when you have a clear sense of what you are and of what you are not. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," Porter says. By choice and by necessity, Beane decided that the A's would never be a team of conventional stars. And that has made him the best general manager in baseball.

Of course, this is an oversimplified portrait. First, a large part of Oakland's success has been due to the extraordinary performance of its top three young starting pitchers (Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito). Young pitchers are the most unreliable products in all of baseball, due to injuries; as such, Oakland has been extremely lucky. Second, Suroweicki does not discuss one of the most important strategies in the Oakland program: signing young players to long contracts very early in their careers, giving them financial security while saving money for the team in the long run. That way, the Athletics can have several "conventional stars" on their roster, contra Suroweicki's assertion (Miguel Tejada, their MVP-candidate shortstop, doesn't even walk much) - just at affordable prices. This strategy drove the Cleveland Indians' success in the 1990s, and is being successfully emulated by Oakland.
To back up Suroweicki's point about the difficulty of copying such methods, the Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers have tried to emulate the tactic of signing young players to multi-year deals. Unfortunately for them, the players they produced and signed were by and large not as good as those produced and signed by Cleveland and Oakland. Talent assessment if the most important part of building a winning team. Possibly the most important achievement of Billy Beane is that he has forced baseball to recognize that in assessing talent, the sabermetric methods used by Oakland can compete with the more subjective observations that have held sway throughout most of baseball history.

(Thanks to David Pinto for the link.)

WHY DIDN'T I TRY THIS CAREER? There is a young boxer who is a budding star and an observant Jew, thanks to Lubavitch. (Thanks to Mighty Max Power for the link.)

SPORTS-FAN MANIFESTO: A fabulous list by Eric McErlain. I agree with everything except #20.

THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR OPTIMISM: On baseball, that is. Seriously. Thomas Boswell recently interviewed ex-comissioner Fay Vincent, who provides the best reason for fans to hope that the World Series will be played:
["]I know for sure that the banks are owed over $3 billion. That's a big number," said Vincent, who set up the credit line for almost half that amount. "I think Bud bailed out Tampa Bay and Phoenix [from bankruptcy] after the World Series last year.
...The day the players go out, the banks will give baseball one week to make a deal.
And [union president] Don [Fehr] knows it. He has all the cards."

Let's hope so. Maybe fans should be encouraging the players to strike ASAP, so as to get a deal finalized and not risk destroying next season when the owners try to implement their system.

THE ANGEL OF DEATH IN TWO COUNTRIES:Joe Sheehan has a good article on Jeffrey Loria and how he has run two teams into the ground. In the piece, he summarizes the facts regarding the Marlins and their profitability problems:

The 1997 championship team that was dismantled is held up as an example of how teams in "small markets" can't be successful, even though we know that the reason the team looked unprofitable is that the stadium was assigned all the revenue generated by the Marlins' games there. At the time, Wayne Huizenga owned both entities, so this was just another example of the shell games MLB teams play with their finances.
Years later, those same conditions are in place: the Marlins remain a victim of Huizenga's greed, appearing to bleed red ink while making money for the man who lied his way through 1997, then threw a tantrum when he didn't get his own publicly-funded stadium.
The Marlins' problem isn't Pro Player Stadium; the Marlins' problem is their lease with slumlord Huizenga, which makes it virtually impossible for them to make money there. That's not a ballpark issue, it's a negotiating one. It has nothing to do with markets, or player salaries, or competitive balance, or any other damn thing. It's simply an arrangement that never should have been allowed to occur, and for which the baseball fans of south Florida have suffered.
If MLB cared at all about anything but lowering labor costs and getting taxpayer dollars, they would have addressed this in 1998, when the Marlins were sold. They don't, of course, and the problems the Fish face are exactly the same, four years and one owner later.

WALK TO DAYLIGHT: Joel Sherman notes how the Yankees have resumed drawing many more walks than their opponents, an important part of their recent dominance. Long-time readers of the defunct "Rob & Rany on the Royals" are familiar with their "Royals Walk Watch," where they constantly pointed out that a team which consistently had the worst walk differential in the league could not possibly win.
I would have preferred that Alfonso Soriano develop some more plate discipline before becoming the leadoff hitter, but if he continues to have 5 hits a game it doesn't really matter.

PREACHING TO THE UNINITIATED: A glowing review of Bill James' New Historical Baseball Abstract by Bob Ryan.

BASEBALL PREVIEW: I know the season has already started, but better late than never.
AL East
1. Yankees
Can they lose? Sure � if they have several major injuries and everyone on the Red Sox is completely healthy. Will they lose? No. Look for Ted Lilly and Juan Rivera to make an impact as injury replacements, and for David Wells, El Duque and Sterling Hitchcock to rotate through the DL, solving the 3-for-2-spots dilemma.
2. Red Sox
I�ve already discussed the pros and cons of Dan Duquette�s reign. But the worst outcome of last year�s mess may be the loss of Joe Kerrigan as pitching coach. It would seem unlikely that Tony Cloninger would be as likely to work miracles with the motley crew of Derek Lowe, John Burkett, Dustin Hermanson and Darren Oliver. And all this is irrelevant if Pedro Martinez is not completely healthy all season. Since he hasn�t been completely healthy since 1998 and couldn�t get anyone out all spring, it looks like 84 years and counting.
3. Blue Jays
Now that they have a real G.M. in J.P. Riccardi, watch out for them next year. This year is a retrenching. Second place is possible if Boston implodes.
4-5. Orioles � Devil Rays
Two organizations rotted to the core � no talent, be it in the majors, the minors, or in management.
AL Central
1. White Sox
Decisions regarding their pitching leave a lot to be desired, but they have enough talent (and the rest of the division has little enough) that the race should not be close.
2. Twins
They were lucky last year and will need another year, but look out if a couple of bats develop.
3. Indians
They were due for a fall, but it�s going to be very hard due to avoidable actions on the part of its management (i.e., trading Roberto Alomar to save money and signing Matt Lawton and Rickey Gutierrez to long-term deals for about the same amount)
4. Tigers
Their long-term picture is bright thanks to a decent farm system and Dave Dombrowski running the team.
5. Royals
Yes, they have no money. But they wouldn�t have a clue what to do with it if they did. See Rany Jazayerli for details.
AL West
1. Mariners
In March 2001, if you�d told them that they�d win 95 games in 2002, they�d probably have taken it. It�s amazing how expectations change. Their dominance in recruiting players from the Pacific Rim may be the greatest threat to the Yankees that nobody talks about.
2. Athletics
If they decline, it won�t be because of the loss of Jason Giambi. It will be because one of their big three starting pitchers is hurt or regresses to the mean. I think Mark Mulder is likely to do either one, as he took the biggest step forward last year.
3. Rangers
Just what they needed � another great hitter in Hank Blalock. Still no pitching, though.
4. Angels
Underrated on-field management can�t make up for the fact that upper management wasted the second half of the 1990s.

NL East
1. Braves
They were in danger, but Gary Sheffield will cure many ills.
2. Mets
Their hitting will not be quite as good as people think. There is no more interesting experiment in baseball than the Mets� starting rotation; Pedro Astacio, Bruce Chen, Jeff D�Amico, et al are all high-risk, high-reward types. The team could win 100 games or 75.
3. Marlins
If Dave Dombrowski and a good manager were in charge, this team would have an outstanding chance to replicate the 1969 Mets story; no other team has a comparable group of young pitching. With Jeff Torborg and Jeff Loria in town, that seems less likely.
4. Phillies
Larry Bowa�s act will quickly wear thin, especially when the organization is at war with its best player and did not improve itself in the off-season.
5. Expos
�The Team That Baseball Killed� � thanks to a revenue-sharing plan that created incentives for teams like the Expos to not even try to compete.
NL Central
1. Cardinals
Tony LaRussa, Tino Martinez and Jason Isringhausen are all overrated, but there is still plenty of talent on hand. What is Bud Smith doing in the minor leagues?
2. Astros
One of baseball�s best organizations will give Daryle Ward the full-time job he has deserved for three years and use a seasoned group of outstanding young pitchers. One of these years, they�ll actually win a playoff series.
3. Cubs
I think they will disappoint this year, as Don Baylor�s issues with young players may cost him his job. Watch out for them starting in 2003, as baseball�s best farm system kicks in.
4. Reds
By 2004, Griffey, Adam Dunn and Austin Kearns will be the best outfield in baseball and may be so for five years. They won�t win until they get a real manager and some starting pitchers better than Elmer Dessens.
5. Brewers
Yes, they have their new park. They are already learning � as Detroit did previously and Pittsburgh did simultaneously � that a new park doesn�t automatically deliver good players. At the rate they�re going, they should figure out how to produce those in about 15 years.
6. Pirates
Now that they have a real GM and �Operation Shutdown� has been terminated, there may be reason to hope. But the organization needs several years of care before it can recover.
NL West
1. Giants
They need some more pitching, but Barry Bonds should be good for about�65 or so home runs.
2. Diamondbacks
Age is going to catch up with this team sooner or later.
3. Padres
Watch out for this team in 2003, with their stockpile of young talent. (I�m still resentful over the D�Angelo Jiminez-for-Jay Witasik deal.)
4. Rockies
If they don�t win in the next two years, I�m going to conclude that no team can win in Denver. They could easily win the division this year.
5. Dodgers
This team is a couple of injuries (to Green and Brown) away from being the Orioles. Their manager, Jim Tracy, is extremely underrated.

GETTING THERE: Thomas Friedman gets close to the truth:

The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of "desperation" stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, � la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.
The reason the Palestinians have not adopted these alternatives is because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.
Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

But his solutions do not compute:
... Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay. ... Israel must tell the Palestinian people that it is ready to resume talks where they left off with Mr. Clinton, before this intifada.

First, the "strategy" behind Sharon's actions has actually not been so difficult to discern: he's been trying to "deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay" that falls short of all-out war. But recent events have shown that nothing short of all-out war will indeed make that point. Second, if Israel then offers to negotiate starting from where the Clinton talks left off...then hasn't terror paid off?

No Middle East correspondent has ever been better than Friedman at describing the details of 2+2. But he has a persistent habit of coming up with 5 as his answer.

ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE ROYALS FANS: Rany Jazayerli is losing faith in his Royals earlier than usual this year. Not that he doesn't have plenty of justification, but it's sad to see nonetheless. This week's "Rany on the Royals" is about the franchise's determination to not sign its best players to long-term contracts:
David Glass announced that the Royals could not negotiate any long-term deals with their players until a new Collective Bargaining Agreement was reached.
...It could be that Glass is one of Selig's closest allies in the game, and has been reassured that a new CBA is coming, one that will prune the salaries of high-priced star ballplayers. Who can blame Glass for believing Selig? When has Allan H. Selig ever been proven wrong?
Regardless, Glass put his foot down, and squashed whatever hope remained. Refusing to sign your best young players to long-term contracts isn't fiscal responsibility; it's suicide. Offering young players long-term security in exchange for locking them at below market value (what they call "cost certainty" in the business) is the small-market franchise's weapon of choice. Glass's announcement was tantamount to throwing down arms and running from the field of battle. (This military reference brought to you by Tony Muser.)
Sign Jermaine Dye to a long-term deal? The Royals couldn't even get Rey Sanchez's name on a new contract. Employing the logic that has served the team so well for the past 12 years, the Royals decided they could live without a booming bat in right field a lot easier than they could live without a slick glove at shortstop. With Neifi Perez, the Royals were pleased they had killed two birds with one stone, even if in the process they strangled fan interest, butchered the trust of their players, and knocked off about six wins a season. Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do as much damage with a single shot.

AT LEAST RUBEN RIVERA UNDERSTOOD HE WAS STEALING: Pirates outfielder Derek Bell, signed before last season to a two-year, $10 million contract for no discernible reason, had a truly horrific season last year and looks worse this spring. So how does he react to the news that the Pirates might be considering other options - such as players who might actually be able to play? He threatens to commence "Operation Shutdown," as Mark Kriedler explains. One question that Kriedler doesn't answer: how would "Operation Shutdown" be any different than what Bell has done since the first half of 2000?

A CONTEMPORARY FAIRY TALE: Thomas Boswell looks at the Washington, D.C. sports scene through the lens of the tale of the genie who grants three wishes:

A genie might grant you three wishes. In storybooks, this never works out well for the poor sap who gets the wishes.
Within the last year, the fans of Washington's three major pro sports franchises got the equivalent of their own three wishes.
So far, just as in those diabolical genie fables, things aren't working out exactly as expected.
Sixteen teams make the NBA playoffs. Sixteen teams make the NHL playoffs. It's a challenge to miss 'em. But right now, it does not look like the Wizards or Caps will make the postseason. Somewhere a malicious genie is rolling on the floor laughing. And he probably can't wait for the Redskins' 2002 season to begin.
Maybe this is the same genie who got Ken Lay to wish that he could be "the most talked-about CEO in America."

"WHEN REALLY, REALLY STUPID BEHAVIOR IS INVOLVED, CAN BUD SELIG BE FAR BEHIND?" A memorable (and depressingly accurate) line from Doug Pappas' seventh entry in his series on interpreting baseball's financial statements. It has been revealing. (The stupid behavior he refers to was when Bud owned the Brewers, he took on a tremendous amount of debt to cover operating expenses rather than to finance investments - making it very difficult for the team to borrow money to finance its new stadium. This, from the man who now wants to penalize teams who borrow to finance revenue-increasing new stadiums and save money by signing players to long-term contracts.

A WARM DAY IN HELL: Bud Selig is at it again, announcing that he will enforce the "60/40 rule" (which states that baseball teams cannot have debt exceeding 40% of their value) in a manner aimed to penalize teams that do things that Selig doesn't like - i.e., sign players to long-term contracts and obtain private (rather than state) funding for new ballparks. Joe Sheehan discusses the plan's faults in detail, most notably:
Selig plans to set the value of clubs at twice their revenues, a number presumably pulled from the same place as the rest of baseball's numbers.

Three teams--the Expos, Marlins, and Red Sox--were sold this winter. The Red Sox had revenues of $177 million in 2001, and were sold for $660 million. The Expos had revenues of $34 million, and were sold for $120 million. The Marlins has revenues of $60.5 million, and were sold for $158 million.

...Hasn't his basic thought process been revealed? Invest in your product, and you're the enemy. Better to get the money from 1) taxpayers and 2) ballplayers, no matter how many lies have to be told to get it.

Enough said.

THE ALOMAR TRADE JUST GOT BETTER: Fragile prospect Alex Escobar, the key player given up by the Mets to acquire Roberto Alomar from the Indians, is out for the season with a knee injury. Sometimes subsequent events make you look smart. (Considering Escobar's injury history, this development is much less surprising than it'd be for another player, so some of it was real smarts on the Mets' part.)