April 15th, 2007
Manny speaks!
No, really: he does. At least a little…but not to any of the Sox beat writers; instead, he decided to share (a very little bit of) the Tao of Manny with The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath* for an article that comes out tomorrow (and is now online).
It’s quite a good piece. It’s long (it’s hard to imagine another magazine that would devote eight pages to Manny) and strikes a nice balance between introducing his Mannyness to the non-baseball world and offering insight to those of you who…well, to those of you who read my blog everyday. Some choice bits:+
* Ortiz calling Manny “a crazy motherfucker” and then practically insisting McGrath put it in the piece.
* The beautiful anecdote about how the teenaged Manny used to wake up every morning at 5:30 and run up a hill behind his high school with a spare tire attached to a rope that was tied around his waist.
* A semi-plausible explanation of why Manny’s uniform pants are so baggy — while in Cleveland, he “borrowed” the pants of 250-pound bullpen catcher Dan Williams one day before a game.
There were some disappointments as well. The Manny portrayed here is a sort of sweet, almost Zen-like figure. There’s some truth to that, to be sure; almost every time I’m asked about Manny, I tell people I’ve never met anyone who seems to simultaneously work so hard and remain so disengaged. But some of Manny’s true…well, insanity doesn’t come out.#
Another part of Manny’s personality I would have liked to have seen explored (or explained) a little more is his seemingly tenuous connection with a world in which reality is not mutable. Even after his annual “trade me/I love it here” episodes, I’ve never thought Manny was a liar; my impression has always been that Manny believes whatever it is he’s saying whenever he’s saying it.
One more complaint: in the one place where I’m mentioned, Feeding the Monster isn’t acknowledged, and there’s an unspoken rule in journalism that if you’re going to use someone else’s reporting, you do the common courtesy of letting the world know where said reporting originally appeared. (In a section that alludes to my description of how Manny, after he was placed on irrevocable waivers, called the Sox ownership “motherfucking white devils,” McGrath writes, “The next spring, according to the writer Seth Mnookin, Ramirez let the Sox ownership know that he felt angry and insulted.” This anecdote, as it’s related in the piece, also leaves what’s arguably the most crucial detail: that Manny’s reps had signed off on the waiver filing because at the time, Manny was desperate to get out of Boston.)
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out one error that somehow made it past The New Yorker’s much vaunted fact-checkers: Manny is identified as being six feet tall, which is, indeed, how he’s officially listed. This is definitively false. And yes, I have proof. I’m about 5-11.5…and Manny, as you can see, is shorter than I am.
McGrath doesn’t quite get to the bottom of Ramirez; the Sox employee who pulled me aside and pleaded that I discover what was actually going on in his head is likely to remain as frustrated as ever. That’s not to say this isn’t a wonderful piece, and likely the best one we’ll get about the best right-handed hitter of the last twenty years.^
* Note: Ben^^ is somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance. He’s also the son of Chip McGrath, who reviewed my book for the Times. Us Red Sox fans: we travel in packs.
+ My prediction: the Boston media is going to seize on the following quote: “You know where I want to go? I want to go to China. I want to go and see–it’s a city that I don’t know how to say. It’s the Prohibit City? I saw it on the History Channel. They do a lot of tours over there.” This will serve as one more piece of evidence used to prove that Manny is a moron. That is profoundly unfair, and it goes a long way towards explaining why there are those players who say Boston is an exceptionally tough city in which to play.
# This might be a bit unmerited; after all, I didn’t include these stories — and I’m sure they’re stories Ben heard as well — in my book, and I imagine we both left them out because we couldn’t get anything close to on-the-record confirmation. That said, in his Times review, Ben’s dad criticized FTM for not including nearly enough “porn — intimate, Boutonesque details about the players’ off-diamond lives and antics,” and, you know, the whole sons bear the sins of their fathers thing…`
^ Albert Pujols has a ways to go before he supplants Manny.
^^ Ben’s demonstrated the extent to which us journalists can use our jobs to satisfy our obsessions: this is his third Sox-related piece for the New Yorker, following one on Bill James and one on Tim Wakefield (although purportedly about the knuckleball).
` Chip McGrath also said I larded my book with copious footnotes. Some habits die hard.
April 15th, 2007
Daisuke Matsuzaka: the drain on the pitching staff
Over the last four games, the Sox’s non-Japanese starters have posted a 3-0 record to go along with a .082 ERA. Dice-K? He’s 0-1 with a 3.86. How'’d we end up this guy? Geesh.
April 15th, 2007
New comments policy
A number of people have been writing in asking about the possibility of an approved “white list” — perhaps not the best term when we’re celebrating Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, but there you go — whereby previously approved readers can post comments without waiting for them to be cleared by me. So let’s try something along those lines. As of right now, commenters must have signed on with a screen name, as has always been the case; they’ll also need to have a previously approved comment. Beyond that, they won’t be held for moderation. New users will have their comments posted as well; they’ll just need to wait for me to clear them for takeoff.With this comes a new, stricter disciplinary measures: posters will no longer be warned the first time they test positive — from here on out, if you post something that gets dinged because it’s hateful, or racist, or sexist, or gratuitously offensive, or whatever, that’s it: you’re gone. For good. Or: Imus wouldn’t have had a week to flail around like a beached whale before getting canned if his only job had been posting on my blog. (Of course, nobody would have cared if he’d only been posting on my blog.)
Got it? Good. Any questions, etc., can be posted in the comments section below…
April 14th, 2007
Whither Wily Mo?
It’s the 10th game of the season, which means the Sox have played approximately 6 percent of the 2007 games…and Wily Modesta Pena (or, as Joe Castiglione once called him, Wilfredo Modesto Pena) has started exactly zero games and racked up a grand total of four plate appearances. This puts him on pace for about 65 plate appearances over the course of the entire season, which is approximately how many Julio Lugo will have by the end of this week’s Toronto series.*
What gives? Pena was so highly considered by the Sox that they acquired him by trading Bronson Arroyo, a dependable workhorse who had just signed a three-year deal for considerably below market value. In an injury-shortened 2006 season, he showed flashes of the raw talent and awesome power that made him so desirable in the first place: in the first two weeks of August, he had five home runs and 10 RBIs. (It was at that time that I argued that Pena’s potential was as good an argument as any for jettisoning Trot Nixon; at the time, I didn’t realizing the Sox had $14 million a year to play around with.)
I’ve always been a fan of WMP’s, if only because when he’s at bat, there’s always a chance that someone in the Monster seats is gonna get his head ripped off by a line drive. (As Bill James once said to me, sometimes the fact that a player is fun to watch is enough of a reason to want him on your team.) But even if I didn’t like him, I’d be confused by what’s going on. There have been several obvious places where he could — and should — have gotten a start; today’s afternoon start, coming after yesterday’s night game, is one of them. (It’s not as if the team’s outfielders are tearing it up: Manny and Coco have a combined .156 batting average to go along with their six RBIs. Make that seven: Manny just drove in Eric Hinske, another one of the team’s MIA players. And J.D. Drew, the best offensive player on the team thus far, could always use a day off to keep him healthy.) If, for whatever reason, the Sox have lost faith and/or interest in WMP, they’re not helping his stock on the trade market by keeping him on the bench. And if they still think he could develop into a valuable player, they’re not helping his confidence (or his mood) by not letting him play.
Role players almost always play a crucial role on good teams. Wily Mo isn’t a selfish prick in the Jay Payton mold, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who’d be happy seeing so little action. If he isn’t in the starting lineup in the next week — which features both Monday’s 10 am start and the Wednesday-Thursday night-day combo — I’m going to need to assume he was caught doing something very bad with some very important person’s wife.
* As it turns out, Francona told the press before today’s game that Wily Mo would likely get a start in the next couple of days…which would put him on pace for a whopping total of 14 starts all year.
April 12th, 2007
Look, over there! On Deadspin! Or: about last night
No, I haven’t fallen into a stupor after last night’s King Felix-Dice K match up; I spent the day on the Acela, heading back home (yes, to New York). Also, the brilliant Will Leitch, the man behind Deadspin, asked me to do a write up for him. And anyone who’s ever seen Will knows he’s a hard man to turn down.
So without further ado, here it is. Read all about the flash-bulby brilliance of April 11th, why Manny’s pathetic “on slugging percentage” means he should be jettisoned, and why Felix Hernandez will end the season with an ERA+ of infinity.
April 11th, 2007
It’s true: I’m sticking up for the Times. (Obviously, this isn’t about Murray.)
Those of you steeped in the minutiae of baseball should appreciate the extent to which an obsessive can drill down when dissecting his subject of choice. For folks who’s bete noire (or object of affection) is the media and the New York Times, there’s no amount of detail that could ever seem trivial. (Trust me: I know.) That’s why a columnist in Los Angeles is writing about the bad review the Times gave to a play written by one of its former staffers.
The reason I’m writing about a column about a bad review of an Off-Broadway play is because, well, the media habit can be a hard one to break. (I want credit for avoiding all “Brokeback Mountain” puns.) So without further ado, I’ll unpack this whole thing…and then point out who patently absurd it all is.
* Bernie Weinraub, the former staff in question, was, for years, married to a movie executive at the same time that he was covering Hollywood.
* As he acknowledged in a grimace-inducing story he wrote upon his retirement, Weinraub not only saw nothing wrong with this, he thought it small minded of those who would dare raise questions about the propriety of a reporter living with one of the top people in an industry he’s reporting on.
* When Weinraub’s play came out, the Times farmed the review out to a freelancer to avoid any conflict of interest.
* The freelancer didn’t like the play.
* Now Weinraub is complaining and Nicki Finke, who says right off the bat that she’s “one of Weinraub’s closest friends,” is giving those complaints some legitimacy. Weinraub seems to think the Times is unhappy because his play criticizes the the paper’s Holocaust coverage. (There are plenty of lifers at the paper…but there’s nobody there who was patrolling the newsroom in the forties.)
My reaction? Man, Bernie Weinraub is a whiner. (Given his history, there’s some irony that he’s the one calling the Times “unprofessional.”) There’s no way in hell the Times could have given the play to one of their own writers. And once they decided to assign it elsewhere — to David Ng, the Village Voice’s theater critic — they couldn’t very well have demanded the outside reviewer soft-pedal his opinion; that would have been a clear sign of meddling.
As befits this whole mess, Finke’s column doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. “I am not suggesting any sort of conspiracy theory,” she writes, “[e]ven though I happen to know that Weinraub and [Times theater editor] Lyman, who took over the Hollywood correspondent beat from Bernie, never got along and didn’t like each other.” She goes on: “I am also not maligning the choice of Village Voice theater reviewer David Ng for the assignment nor impugning his integrity as a reviewer,” although she does feel obliged to point out that “this does appear to have been not just his first theater review for The Paper Of Record but his first piece on anything for the NYT since I could not find his byline there either in Nexis or the NYT’s own online archives.” So what’s Finke’s beef? Unclear: “What I am doing is simply drawing attention to what I consider to be a gross unfairness.”
I’ve drawn the shit end of this particular stick in the past: in 2004, when the Times reviewed Hard News, my book about the paper’s full-scale meltdown, Slate’s Timothy Noah has tapped to do the honors. He wasn’t impressed. It was virtually the only bad review I got: the Washington Post named Hard News one of the best books of the year; the Los Angeles Times compared it to a Greek tragedy, and EW gave it an A-. Unfortunately, the Post, LA Times, and EW don’t carry as much weight as the Sunday Book Review does. If anyone had cause to suspect the Times was deliberately sabotaging his work, it would have been me — Arthur Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher and CEO, told me to my face he wished the book hadn’t been written. But there wasn’t a conspiracy going on; there was just a writer who didn’t care for my book. That’s life. And it’s a lesson Weinraub could certainly stand to learn.
April 11th, 2007
I don’t want to rain on the parade. But…
I was as impressed with Josh Beckett’s performance yesterday as anyway was. In fact, I was probably more impressed than people who were watching the game from the heated comfort of their own homes, because every eight-pitch, up-and-down inning he turned in seemed like a particular blessing to someone freezing his ass off in a wooden seat built for a guy who tops out at 140 lbs. But let’s wait a bit before we christen the Sox’s rotation as one likely to harken back to the glory days of the Orioles (for those of you younger fans out there, yes, the Orioles did have glory days) and post multiple 20-game winners. Beckett’s two starts this year have been against the Royals and a Mariners staff that’s been building snowmen for the past week. And he’s turned in precious few starts like this since moving north last year; indeed, as Jackie MacMullan inadvertently points out in her column today, Beckett’s moments of brilliance have come against less than prodigious lineups: there was last July’s four-hitter against the Royals, last September’s the-year’s-already-over six-hitter against the Twins, and yesterday’s game. I’m pretty certain Manny isn’t going to end the year with no home runs and a .280 slugging percentage. I’m also unconvinced that we’ve seen Beckett turn the page. Let’s see how he pitches when he gets in trouble, when he needs to rely on his off-speed stuff instead of having being able to play around with whatever he wants due to the freedom that comes with a 46-run lead.
