March 30th, 2007
Reminder: less than 72 hours to get in your contest entries…
Think you know the Sox? Put your guesses where your bravado is, and tell me who’ll hit the team’s first home run, what Dice-K’s pitching line will be for his first MLB game, and when J.D. Drew will have his first RBI. If you beat out the rest of the crowd, you win a free, autographed copy of Feeding the Monster. Full details and how to enter are here.
March 30th, 2007
T-3 and counting…
Only one more baseball-less weekend in 2007…at least until October. And sure, opening the season in Kansas City isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, although anyone who’ll actually be in Missouri should make sure to check out Posnanski and Bryant’s. Better yet, do both at the same time.
So to help get you through that final weekend, some thoughts about spring training, the upcoming season, and what to expect going forward…
* 38pitches. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Curt Schilling’s recently launched blog is always interesting, often entertaining, and usually informative. Feelings about Curt tend to run hot or cold; regardless of your take on the big righthander, you need to admire a pro athlete who actually takes time to answer questions sent in by the hoi polloi.
Actually, I guess you don’t need to admire it: Shaughnessy, in one of the meaner-spirited columns I’ve read in a while, painted the whole thing as one more way for Schilling to get his ass kissed. What’s surprising here isn’t that Shaughnessy is being a dick — he’s done that before — but that he missed the mark so completely. (This will surprise some people, but I actually think Shaughnessy is a very good columnist in that he’s great at hitting a nerve and is generally pretty fearless about public’s (and his subject’s) reactions. I often don’t agree with where he’s coming from, and I abhor some of what he’s done in the past…but that’s another story.+) As Daniel Drezner writes, Shaughnessy seems to betray some sort of primal fear: if athletes join the rest of the bloggerati, will the members of the tradition-bound fourth estate continue to lose readers? (It’s worth noting that Schilling provided the first official confirmation of Papelbon’s move to the pen…)
Drezner makes a good point. In this case, I think Shaughnessy’s also worried that he’ll lose access to one of the city’s most entertaining sports personalities. Schilling’s never been shy about expressing his disdain for Dan; in face, I’ve often wondered why Schilling spoke to him at all. Maybe now, he won’t…
(Schilling had a great response to Shaughnessy’s column, in which he referred to Dan as his nom de guerre, Curly Haired Boyfriend.)
Also worth nothing: starting Opening Day, Curt will run an 11-day contest; two winners a day will get the MLB.tv package. All you cable subscribers, take note…
* The NESN-Red Sox highlight clips controversy. (OK, fine, mini-controversy.) This is a story that’s definitely worth following; I’m surprised local stations aren’t making more of a fuss. A recent Globe article quoted NESN VP of programming Joel Feld as saying that “there is no plan in place to charge for highlights” in the future. There’s enough wiggle room in that statement to drive a truck through; I can’t imagine what other real rationale there could possibly be. I also found Sox spokesman Charles Steinberg’s comments on the issue to be laughable. Steinberg said the Sox don’t want “reduction in Red Sox presence in the marketplace” and that the team had nothing to do with NESN’s decision. “Sometimes people miss that the Red Sox and NESN are two entirely different companies with two entirely different management staffs,” said Steinberg. “They share common ownership but are independent companies.”
I call BS on that. The Red Sox and NESN are damn symbiotic. This isn’t a Times (and, by extension, Globe)-Sox scenario. Anyway, stay tuned. Or, you know, don’t. At least if you want to see in-game highlights.
* The Sox’s payroll. Earlier this week, Tony Mazz had an article on how to decipher to team’s payroll (and MLB’s formulas for determining payroll tax, etc.). If you’re going to be talking about the team’s offseason spending, check this out. You’ll sound smarter.
* Theo’s thoughts. In case you haven’t heard, Theo isn’t much of a fan of all of the attention the team gets.+ For that reason alone, the above article on his reflections on spring training is informative, not necessarily for the actual content but for what can (and should) be read between the lines. Theo’s incredibly smart, and he thinks carefully about the effects of what he says in public. (Take note any time this season when he steps up and says he needs to accept responsibility for a rough patch the team is going through; it’ll more than likely mean he thinks some pressure needs to be taken off of the players.) When Theo says “I think the thing I liked best about the club was that there were no real egos on display, as much as any camp I’ve been around,” there’s undoubtedly some truth there. I’d bet there’s also an intended (if subliminal) message to the press: the clubhouse is a placid place. Look elsewhere for your story of the day. Even if this kind of thing doesn’t have a huge effect — and the Boston press isn’t keen on playing down even the most minor of squabbles — if it helps for even a week or two, that one statement will likely have fulfilled its purpose.
* Manny and Roger. SI had a squib the other day about possible Manny-Ichiro trade discussions; it got virtually no attention…but I don’t think we’ll get through a season without a Manny flare-up. And, of course, when Roger decides he is, indeed, going to come back for one more season, the Sox will be in the hunt…
+ There is, of course, lots about Shaughnessy’s weird and wooly relationship with the Sox and the roots of Theo’s press and publicity aversion in Feeding the Monster, which is available from Amazon for only $17.16 (cheap!). And don’t forget: free signed and personalized bookplates are here for the asking. How else are you going to get ready for Opening Day?
March 29th, 2007
Deep in the heart of Texas: Anna Nicole, Houston Chronicle to compete in spelling be
On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle ran the following caption on a picture illustrating a story about Anna Nicole Smith:
“..the model could barely right a sentence.”
On a different story, a critic for that same paper recently produced this gem, “She looks a bit uneasy when she bears her breasts to the camera.” (This was obviously not about ANS, who never looked uneasy when she was baring her breasts.) (Warning: that link is neither safe for work or family friendly.)*
It makes one think. Rarely is the question asked: is our newspapers learning?
(The original link — not the Anna Nicole Smith one — via Romenesko.)
* Neither “right” nor “bears” was misspelled; however, a Chronicle columnist recently spelled diminished “disminished,” prompting one of the paper’s readers to comment, “You’d think spell checker would catch that type of mistake.” You’d think, right? And I’ve thunk. But for some reason that I still don’t understand, newspapers are unable to use a feature that’s been built in to word processing programs for the last, say, 20 years.
You’d think spell checker would catch that type of mistake.
disminished
March 29th, 2007
A rare moment of public advocacy
A quick break from baseball (and free books) (and Murray): my brother, the estimable Jake Mnookin, will, after a multi-year Teach For America stint and a degree in public policy, be starting a public charter school in New York City. At least he hopes to: he’s been hired (by Building Excellent Schools — also worth learning about) and all that, but right now there are a whole mess of anti-charter school provisions in a bill making its way through the New York State Assembly. If this is an issue you care about (and if you’re a resident on New York State), take a moment and check out this page from the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence - there is a backgrounder on anti-charter provisions, among other things. And then, if you’re so inclined, click on the links for letters to Governor Spitzer, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Silver.* And finally, if you’re still so inclined, send them off one of those letters. I will be forever indebted to you. Along with my brother. And the children of New York City.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programing, in which we do our best to block out the outside world and focus our attention on grown men hitting small balls with wooden sticks.
* But do it quickly: the bill is going to be voted on on April 1.
March 28th, 2007
All I can say is wow: ol’ Murray impresses once again
He’s taunting me. That’s the only explanation I can possibly come up with.
The “he,” of course, is our old friend Murray Chass. He’s finally moved on from his Ahab-esque obsession with the J.D. Drew signing. (At least Moby Dick was an actual whale; Chass appears to have come up with the object of his obsession in his own muddled mind.) But he has not, to absolutely no one’s surprise, been able to move on from the Red Sox.
To wit:* today’s gem, titled “Boston Got What It Wanted, Or So It Seems.” Give Chass credit for one thing: he is consistent…in his ability to use odd, unnamed sources to prove a point, even when it’s contradicted by both the evidence and any number of people who are willing to be quoted on the record. Today, he writes that the Sox’s main motivation in bidding for the rights to negotiate with Dice-K was that they wanted to keep him from the Yankees. How does he know this? Well, supposedly one of the Henry-Werner-Lucchino trio told “a person who works as a consultant in Major League Baseball that had they been unable to sign Matsuzaka to a contract, they would still have considered the enterprise a success because he wouldn’t be on the Yankees.”
This remarkably thinly sourced item — and to call it sourced at all is generous — is apparently worth a column. Despite the fact that John Henry told Chass this was “malarkey” and “utter nonsense.” So to review: someone who is a “consultant” to MLB told Chass the Sox wanted to keep Dice-K out of New York. Not a consultant to the Red Sox, mind you. Not an MLB official. A “consultant.”
That’s not even the best part of the column. Check this out: “The Red Sox, according to the account that Henry is denying, figured that they would get the negotiating rights to Matsuzaka but would probably be unable to negotiate a deal for him with his agent, Scott Boras, who can be particularly tough to deal with in high-profile bargaining.”
This would seem to be a problematic formulation, and does nothing so much as to refute the entire premise of Chass’s column, because, of course, the Sox did sign Dice-K. How to explain that? According to good ol’ Murray, “[a]s the negotiating progressed, the Red Sox grew intrigued, and they offered more than the $5 million to $6 million a year they had originally planned as their ceiling.”
Wow. This is a player the Red Sox spent years scouting. For most of last season, there were two team employees who followed Dice-K more or less full-time. Never mind all that; Murray’s convinced, on the basis of absolutely nothing, that it was only as the negotiating progressed that the Sox grew “intrigued.”
A couple of weeks ago, Murray got some attention (and not just from me) when he bragged about his insistent ignorance regarding baseball. Now, once again, he’s come up with a column that is contradicted by all the facts and has no real sourcing. And so once again, I’m left wondering: why does the Times print this dreck? And will they ever get sufficiently embarrassed to pull the plug? Past history doesn’t give us much reason to be optimistic. But I’m holding out hope…
(As reader scotthp49 points out, I left out the best part of the article, where Chass points out that Wakefield “had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs.” The Sox finished 11 games behind the Yankees and nine games behind Detroit for the wild card; Wake, who started 23 games, ended the year with a 7-11 record. (It’s worth noting that his peripherals weren’t that out line with the past couple of years…but we know Murray doesn’t much care for “numbers.”) Which means, assuming Wake got the same number of decisions in his starts, he would have had to put up a 15-3 record. (It’s 15 wins and not 16 because one of those losses was to Detroit, meaning if Wake won that game, the Sox would only need to make up 8 games total.) Clearly, the fact that Boston didn’t make the playoffs in 2006 was Wakefield’s fault.)
* Nevermind…
March 28th, 2007
The 2007 Pre-Season Contest: Win free books here!
There are five days left until Opening Day. What better way to get excited than another Feeding the Monster prediction contest? Instead of a single winner, this time there’ll be (a minimum of) three lucky winners. Here are the categories:
* The player who hits the Sox’s first home run. Include game and inning.
* Dice K’s pitching line in his first outing. Include innings pitched, hits, walks, strike outs, runs, and earned runs.
* The date of J.D. Drew’s first RBI. Include game and inning.
The lucky winners will get a signed, personalized copy of Feeding the Monster, shipping and handling included. (Or, if you’d rather read about the Times, a personalized, autographed copy of Hard News.) For simplicity’s sake, every component of each guess will count equally, so someone who gets Dice K’s IP and hits correct but is off by a walk, 2 K’s, and 2 earned runs will get a -5, the same as someone who is off by 2 innings and 3 earned runs.
I’m going to cut off the entries at 100. Post your predictions in the comments section of this post by April 2 at noon, EST. One entry per person, etc etc etc.
March 27th, 2007
Opening Day, 2003: An FTM excerpt explaining one more reason why it makes sense to put Papelbon in the pen…
Last Friday, I posted some quick thoughts about the Pap to the pen move; I also promised to post a historical lesson that would provide some insight as to why installing the Baby Faced Killer as the closer was a good idea simply because of the distraction it would cause if the Sox blew so much as a single game in the first weeks of the season because Tavarez (or the corpse of Mike Timlin) was closing.
And yes, at the time I promised that second post would come “in a few hours.” So here I am, sticking to my word…so long as you’re willing to consider 100 or so “a few.” Anyway, without further ado, here’s an excerpt from Feeding the Monster^ that takes us all the way back to Opening Day, 2003…a quaint and innocent time that feels like it was several lifetimes ago. Theo was the newly appointed GM, Jeremy Giambi was ahead of Ortiz on the depth chart, and the Sox’s “closer by committee” experiment was being derided even before the season started. It only took one game — one blown Opening Day game against the Devil Rays, to be precise — to fire up the populace’s bloodlust. But did that game actually say anything about the possibilities of a closer by committee? Nope. It did show a lot about the stupidity of Grady Little. Read and learn…
^I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to point out that FTM is available from Amazon for only $17.16 (cheap!) and that free signed and personalized bookplates are here for the asking. It’s a perfect gift for Opening Day. For yourself, even.
***
The Red Sox began the 2003 season hundreds of miles away from their Fenway home, in Tampa’s Tropicana Field, a domed stadium that housed the moribund Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The first inning of Opening Day seemed like it could serve as a microcosm for the two teams. In the top of the first, the Sox scored three runs off of two Tampa Bay errors, a pair of singles by Nomar Garciaparra and Kevin Millar, and a two-run double by Shea Hillenbrand. In the bottom of the inning, Pedro Martinez retired the Devil Rays in order, with a strikeout sandwiched between a pair of groundouts. For most of the game, that was as exciting as it got. The Red Sox scored again in the fifth, and Tampa scratched out an unearned run off of Martinez in the seventh. After finishing that inning, Martinez’s night was complete, and he seemed to be in prime form. He’d thrown 91 pitches, striking out six while allowing only three hits. Ramiro Mendoza came in on relief to retire the Devil Rays in order in the eighth, and Boston was three outs away from its first victory of the season. With a three-run lead against a team that had finished in last place every year of its existence, it was the perfect opportunity to test out the Red Sox’s closer-by-committee approach in a low-stress situation.
With three left-handed batters coming up to the plate, lefty Alan Embree was the first pitcher summoned out of the Boston bullpen in the ninth. Embree, a former member of the Padres, had been picked up by the Red Sox on June 26, 2002, four days after he struck out seven of ten Yankees—including the last six in a row—in a game in San Diego. For the remainder of the 2002 season, he had thrown well, pitching in 32 games for Boston with a 2.97 ERA. Epstein was hoping that, in 2003, he’d become one of the linchpins of the Red Sox’s bullpen.
Embree gave up a single to Travis Lee, the first batter he faced, prompting Tampa manager Lou Pinella to send up the right-handed Terry Shumpert to pinch-hit for the Devil Ray’s lefty designated hitter, Al Martin. Shumpert, in his 13-year Major League career, had only 47 home runs and had batted only .235 in 2002. Before the game, the Red Sox advance scouting team had prepared a report on Tampa Bay and left it for Grady Little. With regards to Shumpert, the instructions were clear: Shumpert was all but useless at the plate so long as you don’t, under any circumstances, throw him an inside fastball. Embree soon demonstrated that Little had either never read the report, or never shared the information with his pitching staff, and Shumpert hit one of Embree’s inside fastballs for his 48th home run (and the second to last of his career).* After Embree gave up another single, this one to right-fielder Ben Grieve, Little summoned Chad Fox to the mound.
Fox struck out the first batter he faced, and then, with one out and a man on first base, induced a bouncer up the middle that looked like it would result in a routine, game-ending double play. But after stepping on second base for the force out, Nomar Garciaparra fumbled the ball as he prepared to throw to first, leaving a man on with two out and the Red Sox clinging to a 4-3 lead. After a seemingly rattled Fox walked pinch-hitter Marlon Anderson, Carl Crawford, the Devil Rays’ leadoff batter, came to the plate.
Crawford fouled off four straight pitches, putting him in an 0-2 hole. Fox’s fifth pitch was high, bringing the count to 1-2. His next pitch was low and inside, exactly where he wanted it, but Crawford got his bat around on the ball, golfing it in to the right-field stands for a game-winning, three-run homer.
It was a tough loss, but it didn’t predict anything one way or another about the Sox’s bullpen plan. Save for Garciaparra’s bobble, Chad Fox would have been out of the inning, and the pitch Crawford hit to end the game was an excellent one. Still, the reaction in Boston was swift and harsh. After a grand total of one game, the Herald’s Jeff Horrigan dubbed the Red Sox’s bullpen experiment “loser[s] by committee.” The Globe said the opening night loss had given “rise to the darkest fears of the scheme’s architects” and reported that a 73-year-old woman had been prompted to call the paper for the first time in her life. She relayed this message: “I’m so disgusted. What’s with this closer by committee?” Dan Shaughnessy wanted to “start with a memo to Bill James: Perhaps the seventh inning is not the most important inning to hold a lead.” After an offseason “spent reinventing baseball,” Shaughnessy wrote, “young Theo saw it all implode in the hideous confines of Tropicana Field.”
The bullpen brouhaha was just one of the distractions that would occupy the team during the first half of the season. In April, soon after his $17.5 million contract extension for the 2004 season was picked, Martinez seemed to falter, sparking a round of hand wringing and second-guessing. When the team’s relievers continued to struggle, the closer-by-committee experiment was more or less discarded, as Grady Little announced that Brandon Lyon and Chad Fox would, until further notice, both serve as the Red Sox’s closers. And in late May, after Martinez landed on the disabled list with a strained muscle in his back, Epstein succeeded in swapping an increasingly bitter Hillenbrand for some pitching help, trading him to the Arizona Diamondbacks for their 24-year-old Korean pitcher, Byung-Hyun Kim.
* One member of the team’s baseball operations staff said of that night, “That’s when I had a feeling Grady wasn’t going to work out.”
