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2010 AL Preview

[ 16 ] April 6, 2010 | Scott Lemieux

East: 1. NYY 2. BOS (*) 3. TB 4. BAL 5. TOR I don’t like it either, but let’s start here: the Yankees were the best team in baseball last year, and got younger in the OF and added an outstanding starter basically in exchange for 2 fourth outfielders and a lefty one-out specialist. So what’s going to stop them from still being the best team? Right, they are older than an actor playing a high school student in an early 80s Canadian music video. And, sure, Posada and *&^%$ Jeter are likely to be down this year (though not Slappy), and Rivera probably only has another 30 or so years injury-free years as the best closer in history left. But both of these guys can lose ground and still be among the best in the league at their positions, and they have a lot of company — this is still the best team in the division, and hence baseball. The Red Sox are interesting, and I do like the additions of Cameron and Beltre. I think the lack of a first-rate power bat in the middle of the lineup is a worry, but the depth is definitely improved over previous years (with Varitek reduced to backup a major plus.) Great bullpen too; they can certainly win, although Beckett pitching like an ace in the regular season would help. Sabermetric types seem to think of the Rays as co-favorites in this division. If you agree, answer me this: where are they better than New York or Boston? Better than both in left, than the Red Sox at 3rd, as good as Boston and better in New York in right if Zobrist is for real, probably not much worse than Boston at short, similar in center if Upton comes back, and…that’s about it. Given that their rotation, while excellent, is also inferior to either team (and the bullpen substantially inferior), I just don’t see how you can pick them. It’s tragic that the third- or fourth-best team in baseball plays in a division with the other two, but them’s the breaks. They’re good enough to take advantage of a lot of injuries on the part of either, but you can’t pick them. The Orioles are finally in the hands on competent people, which is different than actually being a good team or anything. It will be a very sad situation in Toronto, a rebuilding team not overflowing with young talent in a brutal division; it’s hard to see the road back for a while.

Central: 1. MIN 2. CHI 3. DET 4. CLE 5. KC Two picks here are pretty easy. The injury to Nathan is regrettable but livable, and their lineup — featuring a real second baseman and shortstop for the first time since the Clinton administration — is easily the best in the division. You’d like to see a real ace in the rotation, but it’s mostly at least decent and they’re not exactly going up against the ’96 Braves in this division. On the other hand, the Royals are by far the worst team in the league; to paraphrase Bill James on Hank Peters’s tenure with the Tribe, I know there’s a lot of respect for Dayton Moore throughout baseball, but Jesus Christ what a pathetic operation he’s running. It’s a shame that Greinke and Soria are stuck with an organization this unserious. (And I don’t want to hear about revenue imbalances when you’re paying an ungodly sum to Kyle Farnsworth.)  The rest of the division is just…eh. Chicago and Detroit define mediocrity, with the latter having more upside but more holes. I could see either winning if things break right, at least, which is more than I can say for the Tribe. I can sort of see Neyer’s point about the new manager, but…the pitching looks ghastly, the offense unexciting, and I’ll believe in Carmona and Pronk when I etc.

West: 1. SEA 2. TEX 3. ANA 4. OAK As everyone has already said, a weird division, with at least three decent teams and no especially good one. Given that it’s throwing darts for once instead of a reverse hedge I’ll make a counter-backlash pick. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with picking Seattle if Lee was healthy, but assuming he’s back in two weeks Seattle’s pitching + defense is the strongest component any team in the division has, and their biggest weakness (power in the corner spots) is the one most easily remedied by trade if they’re in the race, and they should be. Texas is the new trendy pick, and they could win, but while we’re used to them having a fine offense I find it pretty underwhelming (especially with Kinsler’s status uncertain.) It’s also awfully hard to develop young pitchers in that park, so I’ll give Seattle that .01% extra chance of winning. Since I pick the Angels to fall off every year I can’t stop now, especially since their rotation features exactly one guy I’d be confident will be healthy and above average, and Weaver ain’t exactly King Felix or Lee. Their underrated offense and correctly highly rated manager will keep them in the race, though. The Prospectus projects the A’s to be over .500 and hence well in contention in baseball’s egalitarian division. They also project Sheets and Duchscherer to pitch upwards of 300 quality innings, their bad-peripheral young starters to also be healthy and effective…good luck with that, especially with an offense that will be hard pressed to outscore the Mariners.

Deep Thought

[ 12 ] April 5, 2010 | Scott Lemieux

Watching Mike Jacobs up there hacking is almost enough to make me miss Daniel “the poor man’s Ed Kranepool” Murphy….

LGM Baseball Challenge Reminder

[ 7 ] April 3, 2010 | Robert Farley

Tomorrow is Opening Day! Please celebrate accordingly; I am also informed that some minor Middle Eastern mystery cult celebrates the encore performance of its demigod tomorrow by eating chocolate bunnies. On Monday, the Queen City Bolsheviks will host the St. Louis Cardinals in the real season opener.

Remember that LGM has a Baseball Challenge League:

League Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

Andy McCarthy on the moral superiority of cheaters.

[ 8 ] March 21, 2010 | SEK

Over on The Corner, Andy McCarthy unwittingly claims that Democrats are morally superior to Republicans:

I know we tire of the hypocrisy, but I really think this is remarkable. We spent the eight years through January 19, 2009, listening to Democrats complain that President Bush had purportedly caused a constitutional crisis by issuing signing statements when he signed bills into law. Democrats and Arlen Specter (now a Democrat) complained that these unenforceable, non-binding expressions of the executive’s interpretation of the laws Bush was signing were a usurpation Congress’s power to enact legislation. But now Democrats are going to abide not a mere signing statement but an executive order that purports to have the effect of legislation—in fact, has the effect of nullifying legislation that Congress is simultaneously enacting?

Democrats, he argues, were correct when they complained that signing statements were “unenforceable, non-binding expressions of the executive’s interpretation of the laws [and] a usurpation Congress’s power to enact legislation.” They were right to complain when the Bush administration appended them to legislation, but now they must defend the very principles conservatives have never had and stop President Obama from appending anything to H.R. 3590 when he signs it into law or be branded rank hypocrites. Consider this in baseball terms:

Read more…

Damon

[ 20 ] March 13, 2010 | Robert Farley

Query: Could Johnny Damon be the first 3000 hit player to miss the Hall of Fame? Of course, this excludes the obvious problems (Rose, Palmeiro), and assumes that Biggio will make it… Damon is currently 36, and has 2425 hits. It’s not at all difficult to imagine that he could play for four more years and collect his 3000th hit without substantially improving his candidacy. Baseball Reference lists Damon’s HoF Monitor at 78 (100 is the average HoFer), and HoF standard at 38 (50 is average). Damon has played for the Red Sox and the Yankees, but I don’t think that he’s ever been perceived as much more than he is; a good, valuable baseball player who falls short of greatness.

Random Notes

[ 0 ] March 3, 2010 | Scott Lemieux
  • Great stuff from Joe Posnanski and Tom Scocca on the Pete Hamill non-review of the new Mays biography.
  • To apply what Atrios said yesterday to a more trivial subject, I suppose the real person to blame here is not so much Hamill as Sam Tanenhaus. As Posnanski and Charles Pierce point out (and in this respect the analogy with Hiatt is null), it’s not that Hamill isn’t a gifted writer, but that he was obviously the wrong person for the review. It’s an editor’s job to find a more appropriate reviewer, and failing that to at least make clear that he’d like a review that was something other than an unholy mix of cliched nostalgia and abject nonsense about the “innocent” 50s. Given the Book Review‘s track record, it seems pretty clear that dreary cliches, preachy drug war moralism, and abject nonsense are exactly what Tanenhaus wanted.
  • Speaking of preachy moralism, Emily Bazelon has a good piece about “sexting” by teenagers being inappropriately criminalized. As to this question: “Give prosecutors the discretion to charge sexting as a juvenile offense and trust them to use it wisely—or don’t give them this new tool for fear it will be misused and a lot of more or less good kids will end up with a record” — the answer is pretty clearly “B.” The law should be unequivocal that the consensual, noncommercial dissemination of pictures taken of one’s self between teenagers should not be illegal, and absent such clarity you’d have to be crazy to trust prosecutors with broad discretion.
  • I think Neyer has a good response to the question of who should be on a “Mount Rushmore of managers,” except that McCarthy has to be on it. It’s Cox’s misfortune that he managed Atlanta in the 90s rather than in Brooklyn in the 50s; in the right context one World Championship and (many fewer) playoff losses (with only one round to win) could make you part of the Purest Expression of Baseball Greatness There Ever Was rather than being part of a alleged bunch of chokers.
  • Marc Danzinger’s sputtering defense of Mickey Kaus fails to understand that it’s not a defense of drawing conclusions based on transparently unreliable evidence that a conclusion happened to be true. Obviously, when you assume that every rumor about a Democratic politician you dislike is true sometimes you’re going to be right, but that doesn’t retroactively make weak evidence reliable, let alone mean that someone owes Kaus an apology. Danzinger tastefully omits further discussion of some other examples of Kaus’s methods in action which make this clear. This campaign’s promise of comedy gold is already off to a promising start, though — the yostabee set will be partying like it’s 2002.

Enough Already. Nobody Cares.

[ 5 ] March 2, 2010 | Scott Lemieux

There are valid reasons, related to public health, to be concerned about athletes using PEDs. These reasons probably justify some measure of paternalism with respect to amateur athletes, and may be good reasons for professional athletes and leagues to agree to a ban and testing regime (although whether they want to or not is their business.) Particularly where baseball is concerned, though, the hysteria about steroids has little to do with health and a great deal to do with bizarre myths about purity, about the frankly absurd idea that the use of steroids somehow constitutes something new or uniquely distorts statistical achievements or takes the “magic” out of the game or some such.

These arguments are pretty annoying in themselves. But combine them with blurry-eyed nostalgia about the Only Great Era In Baseball History, i.e. the time in which an especially narcissistic generation of New York writers were growing up, and things get positively painful. I give you Pete Hamill:

A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids.

This is pretty much reactionary bullshit from beginning to end (Adding 8 games to the regular season destroys the purity of baseball? Baseball is no longer beautiful if a starting pitcher throws 7 innings?) The stuff about baseball being “innocent” before some players used steroids is of course especially embarrassing, like people who think that America “lost its innocence” not, say, when the framers agreed to a constitution that protected slavery but when they found out as kids that TV game shows weren’t on the level. But what really gives away the show, I think, is the complaint about too many teams. In large measure, this complaint is about New York sportswriters craving a return to to what Ken Burns called “the Capital of Baseball” era — the 2/3rds of the 50s in which baseball was completely dominated by New York teams and large parts of the nation were deprived of major league baseball. This New York domination was terrible for baseball, of course, creating stagnating or declining attendance during a boom economy, but this is something we’re never supposed to notice. And to draw a line under it, he devotes another long paragraph to the elevently-billionth assertion that the Brooklyn Dodgers mattered more than any team has ever mattered to anyone ever, although this has nothing to do with either Willie Mays or the book under review.

Hammil’s whining about how the magic and innocence of baseball were destroyed by steroids is the whining of someone who is not in any meaningful sense a baseball fan at all, and to make that clear he amusingly notes that he also pretty much stopped watching baseball in 1957. I guess baseball’s innocence is kind of like “born-again” virginity (although, in fairness, your team leaving is a better reason to be upset than players using different kinds of drugs than your childhood heroes used.) Why the Times didn’t give the review assignment to someone who knows something about baseball rather than someone who would use the forum to indulge in puerile nostalgia for the most over-discussed era (Jackie Robinson aside) in the sport’s history I can’t say. For those who don’t click through, I think Greil Marcus on Don Henley provides an adequate analysis:

While it’s well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one’s very existence, it’s generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so.

As I Suspected

[ 0 ] January 26, 2010 | Dave Brockington

At least until Jack Z arrived in Seattle, I always figured that God was on Billy Beane’s side.

Funny Because it’s Funny, Funny Because it’s True…

[ 0 ] January 22, 2010 | Robert Farley

Tickets to Chapman’s starts at Great American will be a hot commodity for more than one reason:

Dusty Baker Destroys Aroldis Chapman’s Arm Within Minutes Of Arrival

The Politics of Glory

[ 0 ] January 7, 2010 | Paul Campos

Scott’s thoughts on the latest HOF ballot got me thinking about the whole “the first ballot ought to be sacred” line of thinking, this year ably represented by Jay Mariotti’s nonsensical preening.

Although I think the apparently increasingly common practice of having a different voting standard for players on the ballot for the first time is silly, it does highlight a problem with institutions like the HOF, which this year can be called the Andre Dawson Dilemma. Was Dawson an outstanding player for a long time, and a truly great player for a short one? Absolutely. Can he be compared to, say, Willie Mays without laughing? Absolutely not. Now there are some people who think the HOF should be reserved for players who can be more less reasonably compared to Willie Mays, which would mean that, ballparking it, there would be maybe 50 in there, tops.

I’m not saying, of course, that there have been 50 players as good as Mays — I’m saying that the difference between Mays and, say, Stan Musial is one of degree. The difference between Mays and Dawson is more one of kind.

But it seems a shame to have a Hall of Fame that is so restrictive that you end up shutting out lots of legitimately great players, including guys like (to just stick with Dawson’s fellow right fielders) Clemente and Kaline and Gwynn, all of whom in my opinion flunk the Willie Mays Test. On the other hand you don’t want to start putting Paul O’Neill and Jesse Barfield in there either, at least if you’re trying to maintain some standard of greatness as opposed to nostalgia-drenched pretty goodness. Dawson, who is south of Kaline but well north of Barfield, is very much in my particular gray zone.

One solution to this dilemma has been suggested by Bill James, who recommended having a Hall of Fame with different circles. Mays and Musial would get monuments. Kaline and Gwynn would get plaques. And there could be a place for the Jesse Barfields as well.

For now, the only division the voters have is this unwieldy informal business of not voting for guys on the first ballot, which seems arbitrary and ultimately pointless. (There’s the Veterans Committee of course but that’s another post).

Not the One I Would Have Chosen, But…

[ 0 ] January 6, 2010 | Scott Lemieux


This year I forgot to do a “put Rock on the Rock” post, so I’ll delegate to Neyer and Posnanski (a better idea in any case.) I would like to think that the induction of a Dick Williams-era Expo would have forestalled the need for another one, but…

Because said Expos were the team that made me love baseball, I’m certainly not upset that the Hawk got voted in. As Neyer says, by historical standards, he’s reasonably well-qualified (and was a better player than Jim Rice, inducted last year.) And I would also point out that, while his 1987 MVP was a joke, the Joe Carter-with-an-arm most people remember from Chicago wasn’t his peak form; at his best, he was a good centerfielder with OPS+s from 136 to 157, a genuinely great player, and if his knees had held up for 2-3 more years he’d be a pretty easy selection. The real issue, of course, is context — he clearly wasn’t as good as his teammate Raines, or Alan Trammel, or Barry Larkin. I’d also probably prefer Dale Murphy, who had fewer decent seasons to fill out his career but sustained his as-good-or-better peak for more years. So while I’m fine with Hawk being in, I probably wouldn’t vote for him and certainly think that there are more deserving candidates who have gotten a lot less support.

Needless to say, Alomar getting rejected is a travesty, but presumably that will be rectified next year. And while he didn’t get in Blyleven falling five votes short is probably good news on balance for his eventual (and richly deserved) enshrinement. I’d have liked to see Edgar get a better start but that’s not bad. He shouldn’t be ahead of Raines, who is moving in the right direction but too slowly. I’m not sure whether his 30% or Trammel’s 22% is the bigger outrage; both would be no-brainers in a rational world.

Juan Gonzalez Stole My Lunch Money!

[ 0 ] December 27, 2009 | Robert Farley

In the process of dubbing Juan Gonzalez the Least Valuable Player of the aughts, Jayson Stark deems Long Gone Juan an embezzler:

The ability to steal money is a quality I always look for in an LVP. And clearly, that became one of Juan Gone’s specialties. He had one season in the ’00s (2001) in which he hit 30 homers and drove in more than 75 runs. Yet he managed to parlay that season, and past reputation, to a total of $46.925 million worth of paydays in the ’00s.

Yep, $46.925 million. That’s more than Chase Utley, more than Miguel Cabrera, more than Hanley Ramirez, more than John Lackey. More than David Wright, Joe Mauer and Prince Fielder combined, for that matter. Yikes.

It’s also more than the salaries of the five AL MVPs from 2000 through 2004 put together. And it’s more than the opening-day payroll of 56 different teams in the ’00s. So how impressive is that?

Indeed. It’s clear that Stark understands this failure in moral terms; the term “steal” and the tone both indicate that Juan Gonzalez managed this theft because of a string of serious moral failings. While some might suggest that 34 year old outfielders often suffer from a series of nagging injuries that sharply curtail both playing time and effectiveness, Stark will have none of it; Gonzalez figuratively robbed, virtually at gunpoint, the Kansas City Royals of $4.5 million in 2004. Neifi Perez, oddly enough, isn’t considered a thief for the $4.1 million that the Royals paid in 2002 because “it can’t be just about the ability to string together production-free numbers,” and Derek Bell isn’t eligible for LVP even though he claimed explicitly that he was reducing his productivity because of unhappiness with the team.

No; the villain is Long Gone, who had the temerity to accept the contract offers that teams made, then went on to perform, repeatedly, the outright dastardly act of actually cashing the checks that team offices handed to him. What a monster! And then, just because he wanted to steal MORE money from the fans of Major League Baseball, he played half a season in the Atlantic League, and three years in the Puerto Rican League.

This would all be just plain stupid were it not for the fact that Stark is part of a sports journalistic machine that habitually blames players for the idiotic mistakes made by team owners. Somebody gave Juan Gonzalez $4.5 million? Blame Gonzalez! There’s a strike? Those greedy players are at it again! Ticket prices going up? Stupid greedy players! And of course, it would be nice if this pattern weren’t duplicated in coverage of labor-management disputes in the rest of the economy.

There’s certainly a way in which someone might determine the decade’s Least Valuable Player, and it would involve comparing salary and productivity. It might, moreover, be the case that Juan Gonzalez actually was the LVP, although I rather doubt it, and it would almost certainly be because of the $24 million he made in 2002-3 from the Rangers, rather than from the $4 million that the Royals wasted on him. But that rather gives away the show. Accepting a $4 million contract offer from the Royals on the heels of several unproductive seasons doesn’t make you a thief; it just means that you have a pulse.

…I think that one LVP candidate has to be my beloved Ken Griffey, who was paid $97 million for 17 wins above replacement over the course of the decade. Other possibilities?

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