February 22nd, 2007
Big Papi: The biggest bargain in the history of professional sports
OK, fine, that’s probably an exaggeration, but David Ortiz has to be up there. (There was some brief discussion of Ortiz’s relative pay in today’s press conference.) To recap, here’s a rundown of the man’s paydays since he’s been in Boston.
2003: $1,250,000
2004: $4,587,500
2005: $5,250,000
2006: $6,500,000
2007-2010: $12,500,000/yr (with a team option in 2011).
If you throw in the $2 million signing bonus Ortiz got when he re-upped last April, that’s a total of $82,087,500 for nine years of service (or $69,587,500 for eight years, if the Sox decide he’s not worth the $12.5 in ‘11). Put another way, if Ortiz never played another game in his life and still collected the four remaining years of his contract, he’d have averaged $17,396,875 per year for ‘03-’06. That’s less than Manny, Jeter, and A-Rod…and none of them has finished in the top 5 in MVP voting each of those years. (Fine, fine…A-Rod did win the award twice. But his lips are blue.)
Eighty two million dollars — or sixty nine million, for that matter — is an obscene amount of money, and it speaks to nothing so much as the insane paydays afforded professional athletes than there’s any world in which this could be considered below market value. But take a gander at this season’s free agent signings. That’s right: Ortiz was signed last April for just a little more than guys like Gil Meche and Ted Lilly are making.
February 22nd, 2007
The grass is always greener
I’ve only been to one spring training in my life — 2005’s, when I was just beginning work on Feeding the Monster (bookplates, get yer free bookplates here!). Spring training is, for the most part, pretty tedious stuff…especially before the games start. (I never cease to amazed at the number of fans who truck down to Ft. Myers just to watch the workouts!) But every now and then, I miss it.
Today is one of those days. I would have liked to have seen Dice-K’s 103-pitch bullpen session, which, apparently, is no big deal for the $51 million man. I definitely would have liked to have been on hand for Curt’s press conference after Theo told him the Sox wouldn’t be offering him a guaranteed contract for ‘08 before the end of the year. And I’ll never, ever tire of watching David Ortiz play baseball or talk to the press. Now that I’m no longer a working journalist — or at least one covering the Red Sox — I have absolutely no problem admitting that Ortiz is, far and away, my favorite player on the team, and certainly the only one who can get away with wearing lime green Izod shirts on a regular basis.
There’s more than a month before I’ll see the ‘07 edition of the Sox in person. And yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
February 22nd, 2007
What price consistency?
Here’s a lesson I should heed: when trying to cut back on interblogging, jumping into the maelstrom du jour isn’t the best way to go about it. And yet, and yet…I can’t resist one quick comment on February’s annual Mannypalooza.
I’m not going to get into the whole does-Manny-get-a-fair-rap-in-the-media debate, just as I’m not going to get into a Manny-being-Manny or a Manny-as-spoiled-manchild debate. But Keith Foulke’s recent retirement — a retirement scheduled in a way that would assure he wouldn’t collect any of the $5 million he was set to receive from the Indians — reminded me of two other Boston icons: Bobby Orr and Ted Williams. After leaving Boston, Orr played a total of only 26 games over three season for the Chicago Blackhawks. Because he was being paid to play hockey, and because he wasn’t playing, he refused to cash his paychecks.
Williams, who was rightly accused more than once of being a bit of a prima donna, also turned down money he was owed when, after a 1959 season in which he hit .254, he insisted on a pay cut from $125,000 to $90,000.
Manny Ramirez makes $20 million a year. One of the things he is paid to do is come to spring training, and February 27 is the mandatory reporting date; his spokesman, Julian Tavarez, said Manny would be a late arrival due to his mother’s illness, although it has since come out that he’s also scheduled to appear at an antique car show this weekend. Manny, as we all know, is not big fan of rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, but by going to said show, he can expect a higher auction price for his ‘67 custom Lincoln convertible, a car valued at around $200,000.
Will Manny come back and have his usual .320, 35, 120 season? I’d bet on it. I’ll let you draw conclusions about everything else on your own.
* Edit: Jason Brannon points out that there’s a basketball icon who refused money at the end of his career as well: Larry Bird. Or at least that’s how Brannon remembers it. The story — Bird was a couple of days away from a bonus clause kicking in when he announced his retirement — rings a bell but I can’t find any reference to it online. Anyone?
February 19th, 2007
Keith Foulke: Heading back home to patch his bones
In a recent Dirt Dogs online poll, El Guapo and D-Lowe tied as the favorite Sox relievers of the past thirty years, beating out Paps, UUU, and, of course, the Stanley Steamer.
Oh, and also, Keith Foulke, who’s retirement last week didn’t get much attention in RSN. (As far as I can tell, the only Globe article on Foulke calling it quits was one that outlined locker-mate Josh Beckett’s reaction to the news. This in a paper that documents everytime Dice-K takes fielding practice.) After one great year and two painful years in Boston, Foulke opted for free agency instead of picking up his player option for a fourth year with the Sox; he signed earlier this year with the Indians for $5 mil and was supposed to be competing for the closer spot. Had he showed up for spring training and then hit the DL, he would have collected that not-insignificant check; instead, he decided his body couldn’t perform the way he wanted it to and hung up his spikes.
Foulke’s surly attitude in ‘05 and ‘06 will keep him from ever getting the acclaim he deserves, and he’ll be remembered as much for his infamous Johnny Burger King comments as he will for anything he did on the field. He’s been accused of not liking baseball, of being a mercenary, of only talking to outlets that paid him money, and of running over litters of stray kittens in his truck. He’s certainly not warm and cuddly: during the ‘05 season, the most animated I saw him was when he was talking about the attractive lady fans at this or that country music concert.
But Foulke will always be one of my favorite members of the ‘04 squad, and anyone who thinks he doesn’t care about baseball should go back and watch their DVD’s of the Yankees ALCS. (When Foulke signed with the Indians a couple of weeks back, I posted a Feeding the Monster (signed bookplates still available, folks!) excerpt about Foulke’s Game 6 heroics. It’s worth reading…not because I’m such a brilliant writer, but because that was such a brilliant moment in the history of Red Sox baseball.) It was Foulke, along with Papi, that truly saved the season during Games 4, 5, and 6, three games jammed into just over 48 hours in which Keith threw more than 90 pitches. (The always worth reading Art Martone has a nice appreciation of those days in Sunday’s Providence Journal.) I’m not going to go over all the game logs since ‘04, but I’m willing to bet no reliever has topped that. I’m of the opinion that the punishment his body took was one of the main reasons he never regained his elite form.
Foulke could be a prick, to be sure. When he wasn’t on the mound, he didn’t do a lot to endear himself to the public or the press. But he was a helluva competitor, and, in his own weird way, a classy guy. God’s speed, Keith. Enjoy the hockey.
February 15th, 2007
(Yawn! Stretch!) Did I miss anything?
It’s true: I haven’t posted in a week, which is by far my largest absence from the Interweb since I started blogging back in June. Sadly, I don’t have any great excuse: I haven’t been in Washington blogging the Libby trial; I haven’t been getting laid off by the Globe; I haven’t been obsessively chronicling Dice-K’s every long toss; and I haven’t been fomenting Mariano’s discontent.
My days have been spent on much more pedestrian tasks: scrambling to deal with the one-two punch of Valentine’s Day and the pre-wife’s birthday, and trying to buy a place to live in the ulcer-inducing New York City real estate market. (I’ve also been taking full advantage of the latest medical breakthroughs and treating myself to a minimum of one nap per afternoon.) Oh, I’ve also been making a thus-far less-than-impressive effort to, um, what do they call that? Ah yes: work.
There’s also the little matter of there being almost nothing to write about. Yes, Lefty Lenny has decamped for California, but really, all that means is that the last member of this illustrious crew has finally has left town. J.D.’s finally on the 40-man and the beginning of several weeks of non-news out of Fort Myers has begun (the Globe is actually running a hacked version of Google Maps that marks “attractions” and “Globe picks.” I’ve been to Fort Myers. There’s no such thing as a Fort Myers attraction.)
So. I’ll make every effort to be more diligent. But if I’m going to try to stick to my “don’t open my mouth unless I have something to say” policy (as well as my temporary hiatus from Chass-ville on my heart doctor’s orders), I’m going to need some more material to work with…
February 8th, 2007
I speared some monkeys in my time too, you know
Spring 2001: what an innocent time. First-wave Internet companies were still chugging along. Alex Kuczynski was writing about the media and not about her ass-lifts and lip-jobs. And self-styled gonzo journalists were spearing monkeys off an island in Florida.
Or so they (he, actually — Jay Forman) claimed. Forman’s “monkeyfishing” piece was the third of Forman’s “Vice” pieces for Slate. Close readers smelled bullshit right off the bat, but it wasn’t until Forman’s monkeyfishing column that Slate had a full-blown Stephen Glass-esque fiasco on its hands. It only took a couple of days for the media feeding frenzy to begin, and, Slate’s protestations to the contrary, it soon became abundantly clear that no such thing as monkeyfishing had ever taken place.
As media reporter for the sadly defunct Inside.com, a new-media site started by two old-media stalwarts (Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn) that was dedicated to covering old media, I was a big part of that feeding frenzy. Inside was a great site and a great place to work; now, there’s not even a placeholder website out there that acknowledges it once existed.
And so, sadly, there’s no record of my contribution to the monkeyfishing clusterfuck. And when, earlier this week, Forman finally admitted he made the whole thing up, I didn’t even get a cursory pat on the back from Slate’s Jack Shafer. “In 2001, Jay Forman wrote an article about “monkeyfishing” that I edited and published in Slate,” Shafer wrote in this week’s Slate piece. “Almost immediately, bloggers, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, and the New York Times ($) gouged huge holes in the piece.”
I don’t know if I counted as a “blogger” at the time — in fact, “blogging” (as opposed to keeping an online diary) was a relatively new concept — but dammit I was poking holes, too! Just check out Taranto’s WSJ.com coverage — I’m all over that like stink on shit. In fact, if I don’t say so myself, I was on the cutting edge of debunking Forman’s “I used a homemade silencer to shoot up a New Orleans house” piece. Here’s a surviving snippet from my piece: “On the subject of whether Forman could have manufactured a silencer (so he could shoot cocktail onions out of a bag in his living room, natch), Kinsley writes that Slate “described the device to the director of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Jack Atwater, who said that such a device could work.” (This is technically true; Atwater says he told a Slate editor that such a device could work. But, he adds: “When you fire a supersonic round, you hear a crack, like a bullwhip. So dampening down the noise of the round isn’t going to do a lot of good. It would be a hell of a noise. This sounds to me implausible, but not impossible.”)” (See: my love of parenthetical clauses goes back a long ways.)
I did manage to track down a wrap-up piece I wrote* at the time. I present it here, in it’s entirety. And Jack, next time, show me some love.
Slate’s Defense of ‘Monkeyfishing’ — One Only a Lawyer Could Love
Monday, June 25, 2001
Slate editor Michael Kinsley was trained as a lawyer and built his lofty journalistic reputation through Boiesian cross-examinations of poorly thought-out logic, eviscerating them with his parsing intellect. But his exquisitely tuned bullshit meter seems a bit off when he’s on the defensive. Take, for example, his increasing sophistry in defense of Slate’s piece on “monkeyfishing,” which, after weeks of attack, has finally, definitively been shown to be a classic tall tale in an article today in The New York Times. “Slate … now acknowledges that it published falsehoods and we apologize to our readers,” Kinsley wrote on Monday after The New York Times got a supposed participant in the fated monkeyfishing excursion to admit it never happened; prior to this, Kinsley had insisted that the burden of proof lay at the hands of the accusers. But instead of admitting he’d screwed up and leaving it at that, Kinsley is taking one last stand on behalf of author Jay Forman. “Despite suggestions by others that the entire episode was fiction, this excursion did take place,” Kinsley writes. “In fact the Times story, by Alex Kuczynski, quotes the fisherman who took Forman and his friend on the trip.” Reaching Clintonian levels of obfuscation, he continues: “Contrary to allegations that no such practice ever existed, Kuczynski also confirms that monkeyfishing occurred on other occasions before the one Forman describes. She quotes the fisherman saying he had gone on similar excursions once or ‘maybe twice.’ ”
What manifestly happened, if you read Kuczynski’s piece, is that one or more likely drunken expeditions did occur in which fishermen played at tossing lines in the direction of an island but that said island was so well protected that the likelihood of success was as high as, say, standing on Fifth Avenue and spearing a sightseer on the top of the Empire State Building. Kinsley on Slate and in response to questions from Inside, nonetheless is insisting something called “monkeyfishing” took place; this, despite the quoted opinions to the contrary of scientists, wildlife officials, area journalists and longtime fisherman. (The assorted experts punch holes in virtually every aspect of the tale, ranging from whether its possible to bait a fishing line with an apple to whether monkeys would ever approach humans.) But Kinsley has his position and he’s sticking to it: if there was a fisherman and he on at least one occasion maintains that he threw a line in the direction of some monkeys, whether or not said monkeys took the bait, and irrespective of whether it was even theoretically possible to fish thusly, “monkeyfishing” therefore exists. All depends on what you think the meaning of “is” is.
This may all be moot, of course. Asked about whether author Forman would still be welcome to contribute his tales of unusual elevation, Kinsley replied: “Of course he will not be writing for Slate.” — Seth Mnookin
* Re-reading this piece, I suspect it went through some heavy Hirschorn edits. He got an advanced degree in literature; I didn’t. I’m pretty sure I’ve never “manifestly happens” anything…
February 7th, 2007
Scott Boras lobbies to be the subject of Al Franken’s next book
Dan Drezner drew my attention to this Herald Q&A with the warm and cuddly Scott Boras. In particular, Drezner pointed out the following:
Q. It seems like you’ve been very high profile with the Red Sox the last couple of years. Does it seem to you like you do a lot of business with Boston or is it just cyclical?
A. I would say we do and we don’t. I’m still very surprised the Red Sox did not sign Johnny Damon. That was the one thing I thought for sure that would happen, because I felt it was something that was good for Johnny at the time and good for the team. I reflect back on that negotiation and wonder if there was just more I could do but we really made our best efforts about sharing information. We had four or five face-to-face personal meetings, the calls to ownership, I did the best I could to do that. But with Varitek being there, representing Derek Lowe, and Johnny and now the additions of J.D. and Dice-K, we have some solid communication. Players that we didn’t sign there end up doing well and players that we did sign there end up doing well. So, for me, what I cared about was, I kept saying to them, we felt that these players would continue to have very good years in their careers. Boston agreed with us on a couple of fronts, and disagreed with us on others.
(Emphasis added to point out what a total snake Boras is.)
That, as Drezner, along with astute readers of this blog and of Feeding the Monster (available at Amazon for just $17.16. Cheap! And don’t forget, free, signed, personalized bookplates are still available!) know, is a giant load of steaming crap. Boras not only did not do everything he could to keep Damon in Boston (fun with double negatives!), he did almost everything he could to ensure that Damon left Boston. Lies and the lying liars, indeed.
