Seeeing the Hughes Half-Full

All the plans were to be protective of Philip Hughes. The number two prospect in the minors last year--pretty close to a consensus, although Delmon Young and Homer Bailey may still want to be heard on that issue--Hughes is a guy that a lot of teams would have had up in the Show last year, when he was beating the everlovin' crap out of the Florida State and Eastern Leagues. But the Yankees had different plans, particularly after the wunderkind's control abandoned him during Spring Training. Hughes would get the Yankees' full course of patience--spending most, if not all the season in lovely Scranton, PA. It was possible he'd get a September call-up, but the Yanks figured they'd picked up so much pitching depth that if he was called up, it wouldn't be out of necessity.

Fast forward to mid-April (trust me, it doesn't take long) and the depth is toast. I've already talked about 60% of the rotation going down to injury--if there's one thing that Hughes's call-up tells us, is that the Yanks maybe aren't too optimistic that Carl Pavano will return quickly from his latest owie. Then there's been the none-too-inspiring early returns on Kei Igawa. There's the injury to Karstens and the general ineffectiveness of Karstens and his baseball twin Darrell Rasner. There was the rushing of Chase Wright to the majors after two career starts above A ball.

Down on the farm, bad things have been happening. Last Wednesday Humberto Sanchez, the top pitcher (and boogie-down Bronx native) the Yanks picked up for Gary Sheffield, had ligament replacement surgery for his pitching elbow. He joins Christian Garcia and Mark Melancon among the top Yankees prospects to have "Tommy John" surgery in the last few months, and J.B. Cox makes for an even four Yanks prospects to have elbow surgery.

Of the remaining healthy advanced pitching prospects in the Yanks system, the early returns haven't been awe-inspiring. Tyler Clippard has a 5.12 ERA at AAA, and Ross Ohlendorf has walked more guys (14 in 20 IP) than he's struck out (12). Steven Jackson couldn't get out of the fourth inning of his last start. Other than Hughes, Matt DeSalvo is the only starter pitching well at Scranton--but giving how low he is on the prospect totem pole, DeS is going to have to
show his stuff for a while longer before the Yanks believe he's major league ready.

So the Phil Hughes era starts on Thursday.

In addition to forcing the Yanks' hand into bringing up Hughes now, Sanchez and the others' elbow injuries reinforce an idea--that pitchers are largely on borrowed time, and sometimes the best you can do is get major league innings out of them while they're still effective. That's a rather dark take on carpe diem, I know, but the point is, if Phil Hughes could be getting major league hitters out now--and there's plenty to indicate that he's ready to do so--then what's he doing in the International League, other than running up the odometer?

****

It's rainy and cool today in New York, and I'm hoping they can get the game in. After the Yanks' disastrous two-game set in Tampa Bay, Andy Pettitte could do Hughes a real favor by winning tonight. It's enough pressure to be the Golden Child, the savior of baseball's most storied franchise. It's quite another to make your first major league start with the pressure of having to end a five- or six-game losing streak on your shoulders.

Week in Review: Sweep/Sweep

Week 3: April 16-22

Record for the Week: 3-3, 44 RS, 32 RA
Overall: 8-9, 114 RS, 91 RA

The Breakdown:

4/17 Cleveland 3, Yankees 10
Onetime Yankee farmhand Jake Westbrook gets brutalized in the second inning, including A-Rod's 8th homer. Chase Wright learns that it can be good to debut as a Yankee.

4/18 Cleveland 2, Yankees 9
Jeremy Sowers is made to squeal like a pig while A-Rod collects more kudos. Kei Igawa gets his first win.

4/19 Cleveland 6, Yankees 8
The unkindest cut of all, the Indians come into the ninth inning leading 6-2, get two outs, then blow the game. Alex gets his second come-from-behind walkoff homer of the year, even more unexcusable since first base was open. This could be the death knell of the "let's disrespect Alex Rodriguez movement" by opposing managers if not the home fans.

4/20 Yankees 6, Boston 7
Now it's the Red Sox turn to come from behind, as a 6-2 lead becomes a 7-6 loss. Mariano Rivera is brought in to stop the bleeding in the middle of the eighth inning with men on--often not a good place for the Sandman--and it turns out horribly. Then the Pinstripers fail to take advantage of the Papelbon Rules, by which the Red Sox closer isn't allowed to pitch three days in a row. The most frustrating loss of the season, thus far.

4/21 Yankees 5, Boston 7
The Sox put the smackdown on a fresh-off-the-DL Jeff Karstens. Yanks waste a game in which they tagged up Josh Beckett for five runs.

4/22 Yankees 6, Boston 7
Back. To back. To back. To back. The second time out isn't kind to Chase Wright, even though the Yanks again lay the bats on Daisuke Matsuzaka (6 runs in 7 innings).

Player of the Week: Yeah, there's not a lot of drama about this one. Jason Giambi got off the schnide, with a .435/.500/.783, 2 homer, 8 RBI week. Nice week...for a mortal. Jorge Poada hit .333/.357/.667--he's having a really good month, so far. But they're not Alex Rodriguez.

Alex added another five homers, and another 13 RBI to his tally. His rate stats .370/.393/1.000 are simply phenomenal. He's having a historic start to this season. By the way,
Alex Rodriguez .370/.393/1.000 5 HR, 13 RBI. He's simply so strong right now that when he makes an out in a big spot--like his lineout in Friday's game against Hideki Okajima, it's a surprise. And I'm starting to get tired of reminding people that it's only April.

On the pitching side of the ledger, Kei Igawa and Andy Pettitte did well for the week, Pettitte again pitching on his throw day against Boston on Sunday. I like that Torre's doing something innovative, but it's a little strange that the innovation is happening with a) a guy with Pettitte's history of injury, and b) the Yanks' only reliable healthy starter. Ick.

Dregs of the Week: Chase Wright uses his one-time plenary indulgence, and isn't a guy we're talking about in the Dregs column. Despite the four-in-a-row bombardment on Sunday, Wright did an OK job in his first start, and should get some leeway considering that he came into last week only two starts away from the Florida State League. Jeff Karstens was pretty brutal, too (7 runs in 4.1 IP), and Melky Cabrera's slump is starting to take the dimensions of something more--.208/.240/.208 this week, .203/.233/.203 for the season, given regular playing time. At least he's doing better than the runner-up, Wil Nieves, who was 0 for the season, 0 for 11 last week.

No, the Dregs honors this week have to go to one of the sacred cows of the Pinstriped faith, Mariano Rivera. Sure, it was only one appearance, but it was his only appearance of the week...which, come to think of it, may be part of the problem. A little perspective--Mo has as many appearances this season as Pettitte. Although Rivera's four-seamer has shown good velocity, his bread-and-butter pitch, the cutter, hasn't been sharp so far.

Rivera spent a lot of time this Spring working on a changeup which looked like a great new addition to his arsenal. However, I don't think I've seen the pitch since Rivera was unable to throw it for strikes in the opening series against the Devil Rays. I don't know if working on the change meant Rivera neglected his main pitch, or if the experiment's thrown his mechanics off. It's altogether more likely that he's just rusty.

As usual, two stright blown leads means that some folks are hitting the "Is Rivera done?" macro in Microsoft Word--which automatically sets up a game story template where all you have to do is put in the details of the latest blown save to frame a discussion of whether Mariano has finally turned into a human being just like the rest of us. The answer, as with many things is that it's still very early, and we don't know anything for sure--Rivera could be on the decline, or it may just be a bad week-plus; A-Rod could be en route to the best offensive season since Bonds broke the home run record, or he could be booed consistently in the second half if he "only" winds up hitting 40 homers.

[SIDE NOTE: I've seen in a few places accusations that Mariano Rivera "threw at Julio Lugo's head in frustation." Get real. If Rivera were throwing at Lugo the guy would've been in the hospital, not enjoying his umpteenth crotch-tug of the inning afterward.]

Story of the Week: Smoke 'em while you got 'em, Red Sox fans. I was flooded with work from my day job last week, so I only caught snatches of the action throughout. Whenever I tuned in to the Yanks/Sox series, something bad happened. I tuned in right before the 8th inning meltdown. The next day, convinced I was a jinx, I boycotted--but I couldn't resist the temptation and saw Karsten's too-too straight fastball getting teed up. Sunday, I turned on the TV for just one moment and saw Manny, J.D. Drew, and Mike Lowell go back to back to back. I turned off the TV in disgust before Jason Varitek joined the home run derby and Chase Wright got a bad place in the history books.

It was a good series for the Red Sox, and for all I know, maybe this is a sea change in the AL East. But taking a closer look, this is Boston winning three very close games, with their three best starters, while the Yanks pitched Pettitte (who pitched quite well), a guy who'd been rushed back from the DL (Karstens) and a guy who'd been rushed in from AA. Under those circumstances, and without Hideki Matsui, and punting offense in the first base slot, the Yanks were in every one of those games at Fenway. So pardon me if I don't give up on the season in April.

If the Yanks rotation doesn't get healthy, Alex Rodriguez could hit 75 homers, and the team would still come up short at the end of the season. If Darrell Rasner, Jeff Karstens and Chase Wright break 45 total starts for the season, the streak of first place finishes in the AL East will be over--and the Red Sox will have relatively little to do with it. While the Beantowners did a nice job over the weekend, their team still plays a short lineup, and the bullpen's weak outside of one guy whose pitching shoulder is a ticking time bomb. In a month, maybe I'll get worried; but right now it's important not to get too up when the Yanks sweep, or too down when they get swept.

Week In Review: April 9-15, 2007

Record for the Week: 3-3, 31 runs scored, 21 runs allowed
Overall: 5-6, 4th Place AL East, 2 games behind the Red Sox

The Breakdown:

4/9 Yankees 8, Twins 2
Carl Pavano controlled the Twinkies' attack, while Bobby Abreu led the offense, with two singles, a homer, and 3 RBI.

4/10 Yankees 10, Twins 1
Johnny Damon with 3 RBI, A-Rod with his 6th homer in 7 games, and Andy Pettitte pitched 6 clean innings.

4/11 Yankees 1, Twins 5
It looked so promising--Moose on the mound, Ramon Ortiz on the other side--so promising until Mussina motioned to the dugout in the third inning, and took himself out of the game. Kyle Farnsworth spit the bit after some good relief work by Sean Henn, Scott Proctor, and Luis Vizcaino.

4/13 Yankees 4, A's 5
After more Kyle Farnsworth silliness (homer to Nick Swisher in the 7th) this one went 11 innings before the Yanks took the loss.

4/14 Yankees 4, A's 3
Like the previous game in reverse, the Yanks coming back from early deficits, before breaking out behind Jason Giambi's homer in the 13th.

4/15 Yankees 4, A's 5
It's strange when Mariano--the only guy who normally wears #42, anymore--blows one. I was actually on the phone when Marco Scutaro took the Sandman deep for a three-run shot, and I just trailed off in mid-sentence...of a business call. A fitting end to a lousy week for the team.

Player of the Week: Another three homers, another seven RBI, .364/.448/.864 line. Alex Rodriguez is having a monster April, and leading the league in homers through Sunday. Nice. Jorge Posada put in a good supporting performance, .348/.423/.478 and three doubles. Derek Jeter would make this list with his .360/.467/.360 week, but his defensive troubles continued--he now has six errors in eleven games. Suddenly, people we've never heard criticize Jeter's "d" are saying things like "It's a well-known fact that he's an overrated defender." Yeah, it was a well-known fact back in 2000. Where were these guys then?

As noted above, the starters corrected course after earning joint Dregs honors (dishonors?) last week. Andy Pettitte came back with two quality starts--he gets co-Player of the Week honors with A-Rod--Pavano pitched in one of his own, Kei Igawa and Darrell Rasner managed tolerable starts, going five innings.

Dregs of the Week: Kyle Farnsworth's 13.50 ERA for the week is a great hint. In a bullpen that has a couple of established righthanded setup guys in Proctor and Vizcaino, plus the surprisingly good Brian Bruney, Kyle the blockhead could be losing his his place in the feeding line. His effort was more than matched by Doug Mientkiewicz's .050/.136/.050 week. That's bad enough to make you forget Melky Cabrera's ultrabad .240/.231/.240 week, as well as the bomb Mariano gave up to Scutaro. Lucky them.

Story of the Week: ...and then there were two. At this point, the entire righthanded compliment of the Yankees starting rotation is down with injuries, which we're told are of the nagging type--so far. But hamstring pulls can be a nasty kind of nagging injury, and the fact that be if the injured fellows is Carl Pavano is just plain bad news. Last time he was going to "just miss the minimum" with a not-so-serious problem, we didn't see him in uniform again for more than two years.

The horrible thing is I saw this happening. I watched Pavano's start and thought, "Hey, that isn't bad at all. Guy knows how to pitch." I that point I should have known something bad was going to happen. Maybe I could have called in a warning to the Metrodome switchboard. Too late now.

Chase Wright, who looked good in Spring Training and dominant in his first two AA starts (five baserunners and 19 Ks in 14 innings) comes up to pick up the slack. Wright's a curveballer who tore up the Florida State League last year, albeit at the age of 23. He's not a horrible pick for the start since he's not considered a top prospect--still, it's surprising that with all the depth the Yanks picked up at starting pitcher, the guy who they're calling on is someone who has all of 2 games of experience at AA. It'll be an interesting game.

In the meanwhile, if you see Andy Pettitte or Kei Igawa, please treat them gently.

This One's on Minky...

Yanks dropped the first of their three-game set in Oakland last night, our first official casualty of the Doug Mientkiewicz era. In the eighth inning, the Yanks had the bases loaded with one out (after having started the inning with second-and-third, no outs) and Dougie Spellingerror came up. Now, this is one of the problems with having a dinky hitter like Mientkiewicz in the lineup, and the Yanks not really having a bench. I'd rather have Josh Phelps up in that spot, but the idea that Joe Torre would pinch-hit against the platoon advantage for the left handed "hitting" Mientkiewicz.

Anyway, Minky grounded out as weakly as possible, forceout at the plate, capping an 0-5 night where he left 7 men on base. Couldn't come up with a weak grounder under similar circumstances in the bottom of the 11th inning, when the A's won.

Thanks, Minky!

It's a shame, because Kei Igawa wasn't awful this time out--he was victimized by a brutal fielding error by Bobby Abreu, and a big bomb by Eric Chavez. However, with some help by Minky on offense and Kyle Farnsworth in the pen, Igawa had no shot at the win.

Performance Enhancement=Hamstring Pulls?

On Opening Day, my brother and I were just getting to our seats as the Devil Rays' roster announcements ended, and the Yankees' roster began being called out. As usual, they started with the non-high profile coaches--it's always a lot of fun when trainer Gene Monahan gets to take his bow, since it's the only time all season he'll run onto the field without it being bad news.

One announcement that caused us a shrug and a chuckle was the announcement of the "Director, Performance Enhancement" Marty Miller. The shrug was because it sounded new; the chuckle was because the title sounded a lot like the title that the Yanks gave Chad Bohling a couple of years back--Director of Optimal Performance--which was ironic since the start of the 2005 season was pretty sub-optimal.

Anyway, Miller's fancy new title just means that he took over the Yanks' strength and conditioning program this year. Which is a shame, since so far the main evidence of "performance enhancement" on the 2007 Yankees seems to be a series of hamstring pulls which have taken down four Yankees players so far. Mike Mussina joined Chien Ming Wang, Johnny Damon, and Hideki Matsui in feeling something "pull" in his leg during last night's start. Like Damon (but unlike Matsui and Wang) Moose hopes to avoid the DL, but we'll have to see what happens, since hamstring problems tend to linger.

The lesson here, of course, is don't go for a fancy title when a simple one will do.

The Yanks lost their series finale in the Metrodome, 5-1, after dominating the Twinkies 18-3 in the first two games. Seeing that yesterday's starter for the Twins was retread's retread Ramon Ortiz, there was good reason to anticipate a sweep at the start of the game. Alex Rodriguez continued his hot start, batting in the Yankees' only run.

Week In Review: April 2-8, 2007

Record for the Week: 2-3, 33 runs scored, 31 runs allowed

The Breakdown:

4/2 -- Yankees 9, Devil Rays 5
Crappy defense can't keep the Yankees from feasting on the Rays' middle relievers.

4/4 -- Rainout

4/5 -- Devil Rays 7, Yankees 6
Andy Pettitte makes a not-so-triumphant return to the Bronx, Jay Jaffe and Jonah Keri manage not to freeze to death, even in the bleachers.

4/6 -- Orioles 6, Yankees 4
Mike Mussina can't make it through five, continuing the streak of bad starting pitching.

4/7 -- Yankees 10, Orioles 7
Kei Igawa bombs in his first major league outing. He probably didn't imagine that the United States was this cold in April. Alex Rodriguez bails Dr. Kei out with a ninth-inning walk-off grand slam.

4/8 -- Orioles 6, Yankees 4
It isn't the cold so much as the wind and the horrible starting pitching. Darrell Rasner gets taken yard by Paul Bako, and Rodriguez's first inning homer is wasted.

Player of the Week: This one's kind of obvious, so we'll do the runners-up first. Yankees relievers--with the exception of Scott Proctor--rocked the house after the starters got beat up early. Brian Bruney has been overwhelming (6 Ks in 2 2/3 scoreless), and the icewater in Mariano Rivera's veins wasn't affected by the cold weather, at all (4 Ks in 2 scoreless innings). The big surprise has been Sean Henn, putting in 4 2/3 scoreless innings of work in three appearances. He wasn't overpowering, but it's good enough to make Ron Villone's return from Scranton unlikely.

With that out of the way, the Player of the Week was clearly Alex Rodriguez. He hit .381/.458/1.095 for the week, hitting four homers in five games, plating 13 runs, scoring eight himself. In the opener, his stolen base set the tone and started the Yankees comeback. On Saturday, his game-ender reached the black seats. Outside of the dropped pop-up in the opener, his defense has been solid. It has been a good week. A really, really good week.

But it's just a week. The same press that rushes to pillory him has been tripping over itself to declare that he's turned a new leaf. Let's give that a little time. It's a good week, against Tampa Bay and Baltimore. Week after next, if he has a bad week against the Indians and Red Sox, this early glory will be forgotten. It's good to see people getting off his back, and when he's got it going on, Alex Rodriguez is an absolute pleasure to watch. But somehow I doubt the season will be this easy for him.

Everyone--and this includes Alex himself--should enjoy this while it lasts.

Dregs of the Week: Can any one person take the credit for this five-man effort? Here are the numbers -- 0-2, 21 2/3 IP, 36 hits, 13 walks, 12 strikeouts, 9.97 ERA. Carl Pavano, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Kei Igawa, and Darrell Rasner, take a bow! The last three did a marginally worse job than the first two, but that's apropos of nothing. Igawa's the only one to make it through the fifth inning, but he gave up seven runs en route, so let's not quite give him a cookie or anything. In the Japanese arms race, the Yanks are far behind the Red Sox, whose big-money signing, Daisuke Matsuzaka, had a sterling debt against the Royals (7 IP, 1 run, 10 Ks).

The Yanks didn't lead through five in any of the games they played, and needed some late-inning heroics to secure both of their wins. On offense, Melky Cabrera struggled (.118/.211/.118) when given some playing time due to Johnny Damon's strained calves. Now that Hideki Matsui's on the DL, Melky had best get himself straight. Jason Giambi didn't hit too well overall (.158/.273/.316) but he got big hits in both Yankee wins, so he gets a pass...this time.

Story of the Week: It was a cold homestand, and we have to hope that a big dose of 30 something-degree weather was at least partly to blame for the Yanks' poor pitching and fielding this week. Still, since it tends to get chilly in October, the Yanks better get used to the cold if they want to achieve their ultimate goal. Until then, they have to hope the starters and defense get back on track.

That's all--we'll keep it short the first week. Enjoy the season!

Razzies for Rasner, Part II

...so Paul Bako--who had 14 homers in 589 games coming into this year, and 46 homers in a pro career dating back to 1993--smashed a homer off Darrell Rasner to give the O's a 5-3 lead, a lead that would hold up for the rest of the afternoon. I'm getting ahead of my week in review here, but it's no secret that the Yankees starting pitching has been a huge disappointment this first week. The Yanks have yet to lead a game through five innings. Darrell Rasner, who I've touted here before, had nothing on Easter Sunday. His fastball was between 86-88 MPH on the Stadium scoreboard, touching 89 on a couple of occasions. And he was trying to bring that stuff up in the zone, which was a recipe for disaster.

More on this tomorrow.

Two other notable features of today's game. The reaction to A-Rod's homer in the first inning was the warmest response I can recall ever hearing for Rodriguez at the Stadium. It's been a long while since I've been to the Stadium without hearing anyone grouse about Alex's salary or nonclutchness...it was nice that that talk was shelved, at least in my section, for a day.

The other thing was the further adventures of Miguel Cairo, major league leftfielder. Cairo was pressed into service--Hideki Matsui's hamstring pull is bad enough he's hitting the DL--and he didn't cost the Yanks much in the outfield; but whenever Cairo appears in the outfield, it's an indication that something has gone very, very wrong with your roster construction. Lineup-wise, having Cairo and Nieves in the lineup at the same time was like putting a speedbump in the Yankees' offense. Erik Bedard's too good of a pitcher to be given that kind of advantage.

More on this when we review the week tomorrow.

Razzies for Rasner

Just got back from Sunday afternoon's loss to the Orioles. Stayed all nine innings, despite it being a nasty, nasty, day for a ballgame. To show how strangely the competitive male psyche works, every time I thought about leaving (invariably when flurries were coming down and the wind was whipping in my face) I thought: if Jay Jaffe and Jonah Keri can do nine innings in this weather at night, I darn well better be able to do the same in the daytime.

So while there is some sense of accomplishment in the "I survived the frozen tundra that is Yankee Stadium" experience, the game was otherwise a downer. It started off well enough, with Melky Cabrera and Derek Jeter singling to start the game, Bobby Abreu collecting a sac fly to score Melky from third, and then Alex Rodriguez going deep to center field to give the Yanks a 3-0 lead. There was the feeling that maybe the Yanks would grab O's starter Erik Bedard by the throat and not let go. But the Orioles would come right back, behind the Fried Chicken Man, Kevin Millar. Then Rasner lost control against the bottom of the Oriole lineup. When Rasner went 2-0 against the #9 hitter, Paul Bako, the Yanks' catcher (Sunday starter Wil Nieves) went out to the mound. I imagine the conversation must have gone something like, "Remember, this is Paul Bako." By the time Rasner threw him a strike, Bako had forgotten that he's Paul Bako--he took Rasner deep for a homer.

To be continued...

Opening Day Photoblog

I was at Opening Day on Monday, the kind of experience that never gets tired. My notes of what went down are up at Baseball Prospectus as a Game of the Week piece--as free basic content. Here's the required taste:

• Speaking of upsets, who had 1:16 PM ET in the pool on when Alex Rodriguez would start getting booed? With two outs and Cark Crawford on base in the first inning, Rodriguez had trouble seeing a foul pop-up off of the bat of first baseman Ty Wigginton. Rodriguez got a late break, then overran the ball for an error, and you’d have thought Project A13 never existed. Happy Opening Day, Alex!

• Twelve minutes later, it was Rodriguez at the plate with two men on and one out in the bottom of the first. As the count went full, a fan behind us hissed “If he strikes out looking here, he’s done. For the season, it’s over.” Again, this was inning one of game one. Fortunately for Rodriguez’s season, he struck out swinging rather than looking, flailing away at a low-90s fastball from Scott Kazmir. The runners eventually came around to score on a Jason Giambi single.

For follow-up I wrote a few additional notes over on BP's Unfiltered...er, blogthingie that they don't want to call a blog. The taste of that (as with all Unfiltered content, that, too is free):

Best Moment of the Day: With not only Lidle, but remembrances for Bowie Kuhn and Hank Bauer at the beginning of the program, things were pretty somber at the Stadium to start the day. So when the Stadium video screen started on a tribute to Bobby Murcer, who was diagnosed with brain cancer less than four months ago, I was ready to get bummed out again–until they showed Murcer, minus quite a bit of hair but looking pretty good otherwise, in the YES Network broadcast booth. Probably the most heartfelt standing ovation I’ve seen, for something that didn’t happen on the field.

But wait, there's more! More brother and I had our cameras, so we snapped a few pics to go along with all this prose:


Here, courtesy of my brother JJ, is a shot from the IRT train platform outside the Stadium. One of the things I discussed in my Game of the Week column was the joy of seeing the ballpark come into view as the 4 Train goes elevated approaching the 161st Street Station. Usually, you can hear a buzz in the subway car as the Stadium pops into view. (Yesterday, however, we were pressed into the Subway like sardines. The only sound as we rolled into the station was the sound of people preparing to exhale).

Here (again, courtesy of JJ) is a view of River Ave, and the creatures waiting to get into the bleachers.








This one's one of mine: the new Stadium, embryonic view. Right now it looks like an extensive (not to mention expensive) collection of wooden scaffolds. Sadly, it won't remain that way, or magically transform itself back into a park.








Another one of mine, this time the Yanks and Rays lined up after the announcements--just moments away from the start of the season.









...and three hours later, we're off to never-never land. This shot (courtesy of JJ, who as you can probably tell by now has a better camera and way better skills than I do) is the final pitch of the game, Mariano Rivera delivering to B.J. Upton. Rivera was absolutely throwing darts out there, pumping fastball after fastball 95 MPH.

Opposition Roundtable: Devil Rays

As we lead off the new season, we're going to try out a few new features here at the WTDB. To lead things off, I've convened a panel of a few of the best and brightest minds covering the Yanks' opponents in their first series, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Our panelists are:

Kevin Gengler, of the Rays Talk Blog

R.J. Anderson, of the DRays Bay Blog

Manny Stiles, of the newly-created Devil Rays Universe Blog


Tell us about yourself as a baseball fan. How long have you been following the Devil Rays? Were you a fan of baseball before the Rays came around, and if so, of what team?

KEVIN: I was a Braves fan until the late 90's, but since I was never really attached to them as a hometown team or anything, I had no problem switching allegiances to Tampa Bay, although I didn't follow baseball really closely until Carl Crawford and Rocco Baldelli were emerging.

RJ: I’ve been a fan of the Rays since their inception in 1998, before that I wasn’t really into baseball and I was somewhat young.

MANNY: I have been a baseball fan essentially since birth. I only became a fan of the Devil Rays this month after putting my fanship and writing skills up for charity to the highest bidder on ebay. Matt Silverman, the President of the Devil Rays won and now I am of course, a Devil Rays fan. Before that, I just pretty much liked whatever team was beating the Yankees.


What do you think of your team? What place will they take in the AL East, at the end of the year? Do you think they'll make the playoffs, and if so, how far will they get?


KEVIN: I think they have more talent than ever, but we'll see how that translates to the win column. The important thing this year, in my opinion, is to get the youngsters as many at-bats as possible. Hopefully we minimize the at-bats guys like Greg Norton get and maximize the at-bats for guys like B.J. Upton and Elijah Dukes, who need to experience but don't really have a regular spot.

RJ: Best case scenario? 3rd place in the AL East, realistically? 4th. Playoffs? Nope, but watch out next year.

MANNY: 2007 WORLD CHAMPIONS!


Who's the one player on the Devil Rays that every Yankee fan shouldn't take his eyes off of when he's in the game? What's so great/interesting about him?


KEVIN: The obvious answer has to be Delmon Young. He's got it all: He can make the diving catch, nail the runner at third, and then knock one out of the yard. Also, Carl Crawford obviousy has the athleticism to make anything happen. And B.J. Upton, because he can make the impossible look routine and the routine look impossible.

RJ: The obvious answer here would be Carl Crawford, but since I want to go a different way I’m going to say Delmon Young, he’s just got that aura that screams superstar.

MANNY: I would say Carl Crawford, but you already knew that. Most exciting player in baseball. So watch out for Delmon Young instead!


Is there any player on your team who you wish would be traded elsewhere? Why?


KEVIN: I wouldn't "like" to see anyone go, really. But it's pretty obvious that someone has to get moved. Assuming we move one outfielder (to make room for Dukes) and one infielder (to make room for Upton), my two guys would have to be Baldelli and Cantu. I'd hate to lose Baldelli, but like I said, one of our outfielders will probably have to go. And Cantu is the IF choice because Upton seems to have taken to 2B the best, and has much better tools than Cantu. The return on Cantu would likely be minimal, but that's how it goes.

RJ: Indeed there is, Josh Paul, he’s really not all that useful to be honest.

MANNY: I would never WANT to trade any of my players away.


Are there any moves your team made this off-season that particularly excited you? Why?


KEVIN: Yup, that Scott Dohmann signing. Seriously, we didn't do much this offseason, and I don't really view the Iwamura signing as something that got me excited. Unless he absolutely rakes, he's essentially just keeping the seat warm for Evan Longoria, who'll be up for Opening Day 2008 if everything goes according to plan.

RJ: Signing Al Reyes to a minor league deal. Well, re-signing, but nonetheless I’d say he’s going to be a hot commodity in the league and in fantasy leagues if/when he gets his chance to close.

MANNY: I am most excited to see a full season of Delmon Young in the bigs.


What is the one player move you think your team should make?


KEVIN: This is a really tough call. Logic says deal a strength (outfield) for a weakness (pitching), but honestly, we're so stocked with pitching prospects that I don't know about that. Unless you can deal Baldelli or Crawford for a bona-fide #2/borderline #1 pitcher, I think the right deal would be to deal an OF for a top-of-the-line relief pitcher and an A-/B+ prospect. To throw one out there, how about Rocco Baldelli to Atlanta for one of their relief guys (*ahem* Mike Gonzalez) and Jarrod Saltalamacchia.

RJ: Trade Jorge Cantu for a reliever, and move B.J. Upton to second.

MANNY: DON'T trade anyone


What do you think of this year's Yankee team?


KEVIN: Scary-as-hell lineup, serviceable pitching. Concerned about the bullpen, since Torre seems to ride 1-2 guys too hard during the year. My money says they win another division crown, but fall short in the playoffs again. And I have to say, I'm really excited for the Phil Hughes era.

RJ: They’re very talented, I think Brian Cashman and the front office has begun to learn that money doesn’t always buy wins or titles. I think the prospects they got in the Sheffield deal may be slightly overrated, but then again when you’re getting an animate object for a near-40 year-old who's had some injury issues, I’d say you came out on top of that deal.

MANNY: They suck.


Which Yankee player (if any) do you dislike the most? Why?


KEVIN: Just one? Okay, let's go with... Actually, the Yankees don't really have that one standout guy that just grates on you (Curt Schilling, I'm looking your way). Let's go with Robinson Cano, since I don't believe he's nearly as good as the stats say.

RJ: I don’t really ‘hate’ any Yankee to be frank. I respect what Jeter and Mariano have done, but if I have to go with my least favorite it’s gotta be Giambi.

MANNY: All/Any of the Yankees. I am particularly fond of disliking Derek Jeter a.k.a. "Plays like #2"


Which Yankee player do you like the most (or, if you must, which player do you dislike the least)? Why?


KEVIN: Does Phil Hughes count? If not him, then possibly Bobby Abreu. No real reason

RJ: Same feel as the last question, I don’t particularly like any of them, Derek Jeter has earned my respect from the money he (along with Tino Martinez) have poured into the University of South Florida baseball program.

MANNY: I think A-Rod is FAR better than Jeter and anyone who doesn't see it needs sterilized for the good of society.


Have you ever been to Yankee Stadium, and if so, what did you think of the experience?


KEVIN: I've been there once, and didn't really have as good a time as when I went to Citizen's Bank Park. Of course, the following factors were in play: I was watching the Rays in Philly, I think it was Yanks-Mariners at the Stadium, and I was with my friends at CBP compared to my parents at YS. I'm really interested to see how they go about things with the new park, and I'll probably try to get out to Yankee Stadium at least once more before it's gone.

RJ: Nope, never been to New York at all.

MANNY: Been to the neighborhood but never to a game there, which saddens me a bit.


How do you like the Devil Rays' ballpark? Any features fans shouldn't miss when they visit (special food, seats with a special view, nearby bars or restaurants)?


KEVIN: N/A, never been to the Trop since I live in New Jersey.

RJ: It’s better than advertised. The ‘must sees’? Eh depends, if you have a child the rays touch tank may interest you, or the numerous museums/games may be your thing

MANNY: I haven't been there (YET). Bu I am going next month (I live in Arizona) and am planning on doing a LIVE running blog from the stadium on the Monday night ESPN game (April 23) vs. the Yankees. I'll get details to you as they emerge, because I'd like Yankees fans and ALL onlookers to enjoy the unique perspective.


What's your favorite pro-Devil Rays chant? What's your favorite anti-Yankees chant? Favorite thing you've ever heard a heckler say about the Yankees or a Yankees player?


KEVIN: I dunno, if the "Ee-Wah-Mur-Ah" thing catches on here like it did in Japan, that'd be pretty cool. Are there even anti-Yankee chants? I'll just play it safe and go with "Yankees suck," though that's not really a chant. Nothing in particular comes to mind in the way of heckling, but anything The Heckler says is my favorite.

RJ: To be frank we really don’t have a ‘chant.’ My favorite anti-Yankee chant? Ditto, but maybe I can start the ‘2000’ chant?

MANNY: Don't know any Devil Rays chants... "Year 2000 clap, clap, clap clap clap" is always fun, or my personal favorite --
"Any Yankees fan born after 1920 is a bandwagon jumper" - Manny Stiles


The Yankees and Devil Rays are going to play 18 times this season. Off the top of your head, predict how the season series is going to wind up.


KEVIN: Yankees 10, Devil Rays 8

RJ: I’d love to say the Rays win the series, but I’ll go 8-10 Yankees.

MANNY: 18 wins for the Devil Rays, ZERO for the Yankees.

Well, thanks for the insights, guys! A few comments:

1) It looks like the Devil Rays need some lessons in chanting and heckling. Please, feel free to use the comments to share some pro-Rays chanting options, or perhaps share some of your favorite heckling concepts, for the education of our brothers in baseball down in Tampa.

2) Ask for Cantu to be driven out of the lineup, and Upton to replace him, and ta-da! the Devil Rays front office sends Cantu down to the minors. Very accommodating, those folks.

3) If gambling were legal, there'd be a pretty decent living to be made off of Manny Stiles...

Spring Training, 2007 in Review

Spring Training Record: 14-13-3

A winning record, barely. Usually, George Steinbrenner would be acting as if squeaking out a .500 record in the Grapefruit League was either a rousing success or a barely-tolerable embarrassment. Alas for the Boss, the Steinbrenner family has far bigger fish to fry. Let's look at the awards:

Spring MVP: Since the big things are people fighting for jobs or showing they're coming back from injuries, the Yanks' Grapefruit League MVP should be a player who had something at stake--in this case, Josh Phelps. Phelps, playing for the righthanded side of a first base platoon with Doug Mientkiewicz, hit three homers and ten RBI, each a tie for the team lead. This in a limited number of plate appearances. Other big offensive performances by people tuning up for the season? Robinson Cano suffered a number of indignities that happens when you're a junior member of a veteran team--long bus rides, no early exits from the games, even when the other starters were already on the golf course...and he made the argument for some preferential treatment by smacking the ball up, getting a team-leading 24 hits, nine of them doubles. Alex Rodriguez's three homers suggest that maybe unburdening his soul to the media is good for his swing.

On the pitching side of the ledger, Darrel Rasner won a job by getting through 12 innings uninjured. The 1.50 ERA was far less significant than the fact that unlike Chien Ming Wang or Jeff Karstens he could still throw off a full mound at the end of the month. Brian Bruney locked down a spot in the pen with 13 strikeouts and two walks in six innings. Andy Pettitte didn't allow a run this Spring, although that comes with a bunch of time lost to back spasms.

Dregs of the Spring: Ron Villone still hasn't come back from the bout of ineffectiveness he suffered at the tail end of 2006. With a roster spot on the line, he got raked to the tune of 13 baserunners and two homers in four and two-thirds innings. Andy Phillips had to leave camp at the start of Grapefruit action to care for his ailing mother. Thank heavens, she got better, but he never recovered losing out to Phelps, dropping through waivers, and now heading back to AAA. Chris Britton, after having a very solid middle relief season for the Orioles last year, lost out on a roster spot, getting railed to the tune of an 11.11 ERA in eight appearances.

As for guys that made the team? The good news for Doug Mientkiewicz is that three of his five hits this Spring were doubles. The bad news? He hit .132 with .211 slugging. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your starting first baseman! I hope Phelps starts out the season hot against Kazmir, and that quickly the Yanks turn first base into an offense/defense platoon between Phelps and Minky. Melky Cabrera didn't do much to win the fourth outfielder's spot. Irony is, if Bernie Williams had accepted Torre's offer to come down to Spring Training on a minor league deal, there's a chance he could have taken the whippersnapper.

Story of the Spring: A-Rod me no A-Rods--this is baseball, not Days of Our Lives. Let's talk pitchers, instead. It's been a month full of upsets. Rock-solid Tiger Wang got injured, Carl Pavano hasn't [Ed. note: ...yet] and so it's Can't Play Carl that gets the Opening Day assignment in a bigger upset than the first Liston-Clay fight. Jeff Karstens pitched his guts out to make the team, only to come up lame when the fifth spot in the rotation opened up for him, and Darrell Rasner backed into a roster slot. Sean Henn broke camp with the club under similar circumstances, not quite dazzling anyone with his stuff, but making it by being lefthanded at a time when Villone faltered. While these guys made the staff, Colter Bean had another nice Spring Training, and again discovered that he cannot buy, beg, borrow, or steal a spot on this team.

At this point, it looks like the key man in this pitching staff is going to be newcomer Kei Igawa. In his native Japan, Igawa was nicknamed "Iron Nerves." At times this Spring, it took iron nerves to watch Dr. Kei pitch. Igawa struck out more than a man an inning, but walked almost as many (19/12 K/BB ratio in 17 innings). Can this Yankee pitching staff hold together in Wang's absence? Will Mussina and Pettitte show their age? Will Phil Hughes be ready to take things to the next level, if/when he's called on this season?

For better or for worse, the Spring records are all erased. In a month, no one will recall how well or badly anyone hit in the Grapefruit League. Here's wishing everyone in the Yankees organization (yes, even Can't Play Carl) a great 2007 season. Have a wonderful Opening Day!

There Goes the Future...

I saw this one first at Pete Abraham's LoHud Blog, which is my first priority to add to this site's links the next time I decide to wade into this site's HTML:

Steinbrenner’s son-in-law and designated successor, Steve Swindal, has been sued for divorce. Jennifer Steinbrenner filed papers in the Hillsborough County Circuit Court’s family law department on Tuesday. She cited “irreconcilable differences.”

The divorce proceedings came 40 days after Swindal was arrested for driving under the influence and speeding in an unsavory section of St. Petersburg. Swindal is expected to lose his position as general partner.

In some ways, we've been expecting this since Swindal was busted for DUI earlier in Spring Training, but it's still a shocking fall from grace. Swindal's divorce effectively leaves the Yankees organization decapitated. George Steinbrenner's been in seclusion, and despite his claims to the contrary, it's widely-reported that he's in bad health and not really up to the day-to-day job of running the ballclub, anymore. The jockeying to fill this vacuum could be a King Lear-type melodrama--or not, if, as some believe, none of Steinbrenner's children has much interest in being a baseball team owner. With Swindal, we had someone who was fairly a lock to be interested in running the club in the future; now, when the Boss is no longer with us, it's no longer unthinkable that the Steinbrenner family will want to unload the franchise. And as we know from past experience, that means that our beloved baseball franchise could soon be in the hands of mental incompetents and/or cronies of Bud Selig's (and there's a lot of overlap in these groups).

As someone who was until recently in the marital strife industry, I'm sensitive toward what Steve Swindal and Jennifer Steinbrenner must be going through. The end of a marriage is a real human tragedy, also something truly private and really not the business of anyone outside of the couple and perhaps their immediate family, friends, and business partners.

But as a Yankee fan, I just gotta look at Swindal and say "You jerk! We were counting on you! You had it all in the palm of your hand and you blew it, just completely and totally blew it!"

***

In other ways you can destroy your future, you could simply emulate Ugueth U. Urbina, and get sentenced to 14 years in a Venezuelan prison for attempted murder. The other day, hanging out with the Prospectus gang at the Yogi, we were talking about relief pitching and I wondered aloud whatever happened to Uggie's criminal case, thinking that perhaps he'd be like a number of beisbolistas who've skated on charges ranging from rape, to drug dealing (who can forget the Pedro Guerrerro "I'm too stupid to be a drug dealer" defense?) and murder/manslaughter. Well, now we have an answer. Nothing can quite kill a career like being in lock-up from your age 33 to 47 seasons. Vaya con dios, Triple-U.

This is Why You Stockpile Pitchers

Remember Jeff Karsten's big shot at the Opening Day roster, his chance to get a start or two in during Wang's absence, and maybe be this year's surprising success story? Uh, not so fast. Karstens had to leave his start early on Sunday, suffering from a "stiff elbow." Reader Matty Matty got this one on to the blog before I did--although, in my defense, I did say that Sunday's start was huge for Karstens. It's a shame.

In Karsten's absence, Darrell Rasner--who, might as well be Karsten's professional twin with the Yanks--could pick up that slot. Unless something else goes wrong, that is. That's why the somewhat absurd level of righthanded depth the Yankees acquired this winter makes sense. Mike Mussina's old, and likely to need a breather this season; Andy Pettitte's no spring chicken, and he, too, has been known to break down; Kei Igawa is an unknown quantity, but he throws a ton of pitches, which suggests he might not give the team a titanic number of innings; Can't Play Carl Pavano...well, the name says it all. In the bullpen, Mariano Rivera's up there in years, and coming off an injury that kept him out the last month or so of the regular season; Kyle Farnsworth's a hothouse flower, the days he's not in the trainers room are more remarkable than those when he is dealing with a nagging something-or-other; Scott Proctor pitched a ton of innings last season--his entrance music should be a ticking-clock sound, maybe the effect used in 24. Wang was really the rock of this pitching staff, and he's the guy who got injured first. So while it may be disappointing for a Chris Britton (who had a good season for Baltimore last year) or a Phil Hughes (who many feel has nothing left to prove in the minors) not to break camp with the big club, the advice is "Patience. Your time will come, likely sooner than you think."

****

Other members of the AL East have rosters in flux, too. The Red Sox have reversed their decision to put Jonathan ("Don't Call Me Jon") Papelbon in the starting rotation. The story wasn't that unpredictable, given that the Red Sox closer candidates were Mike Timlin and Joel Piniero. The excuse for keeping Papelbon out of the rotation was that he was "medically not cleared" to close. Suddenly, when no new reliever stepped up to the role, Papelbon apparently got cured. Miraculous!

I also smell a rat in Bill Madden's Daily News column today. As most of you must have heard, Tony LaRussa was busted on a DUI, found unconscious in a car where the engine was running and the car was in gear. Of this incident, Madden says:

As for La Russa, his arrest after being discovered asleep at the wheel of his car while stopped at an intersection around midnight on Thursday was not only unfortunate but totally out of character. Anyone who knows the Cardinals' manager knows he's anything but a big drinker - more like a two-glasses-of-wine-a-night guy, if that. Nor is he one to be out and about in the late night. According to sources close to La Russa, the world championship has resulted in his having to spend a lot more time at dinners and functions this spring and he's tried to accommodate everyone. While it was fortunate he had his foot on the brake pedal and not the gas pedal when he conked out, the fact that his .093 blood alcohol was only a shade above the legal .08 limit suggests he was more exhausted than intoxicated.

What Madden fails to mention is that LaRussa's .093 blood alcohol level was measured about two hours after his arrest, so that was likely not his alcohol level at the time he passed out behind the wheel of his car, endangering himself and the public at large. Madden, who's a hardass about players behaving badly--regardless of whether anyone but the player himself was endangered--is now an apologist for a guy who could have injured a number of people if his foot had slipped off the brake pedal. Nice. I'm not the type to demonize LaRussa for his behavior, but I certainly don't think it's right to bend over backwards to excuse what he did, either, particularly when I've never heard a member of the press concoct a "shades over the legal limit" excuse or a "he must be exhausted from all the dinners and functions he's attended" excuse for any player accused of this crime. At best, LaRussa was irresponsible in getting behind the wheel when he was in no condition to drive; at worst, the police gave LaRussa a break by giving him two hours to sober up before breathalyzing him. But if you're going to simply absolve LaRussa for this, I don't ever want to hear you talk about personal responsibility, ever again.

Whirlwind Tours and Actual News

Just got back from Baseball Prospectus's second annual appearance at the Yogi Berra Museum, on the campus of Montclair State University. The Yogi as we call it, is a great place with a great staff--we're really lucky to have these folks open up their museum to us and let us basically have run of the grounds for a whole day. This time, I was on the panel with twelve other BP authors--Will Carroll, Jay Jaffe, Christina Kahrl, Steve Goldman, Jim Baker, Kevin Goldstein, Clay Davenport, Will Weiss, Neil deMause, Marc Normandin, Ben Murphy, and John Erhardt, who decided to watch the proceedings from the crowd, as did BP.com editor Alex Carnevale and Salon.com's Allen Barra, who was on the panel last year. We did about two and a half hours' worth of talking to (and with) the substantial crowd that made it out Upper Montclair, and afterward we had a rare get-together of a quorum of Prospectus's active workforce at a great restaurant called Gaucho's in Montclair. I hadn't met a number of the guys before, most notably Baker (who has a wonderful, self-deprecating sense of humor), Davenport (who looks quiet, but when he answers a question speaks with that special self-confidence that only scientists display), and Goldstein (who's the very spirit of understatement--it was like being on stage with Dean Martin). Normandin and Murphy look so young, that when I first saw them on the stage I thought they might just be fans who mistakenly followed us to our seats (I hadn't yet been introduced to them).

For me, this was a whirlwind weekend which featured an appearance at the Columbia University bookstore with Goldman, Kahrl, Jaffe, Weiss and deMause on Thursday, and hosting a small party for Alex Belth, Will Carroll, Kahrl, Jaffe and Jay's wife Andra, and his friend Nick Stone and Nick's date. I haven't had this kind of...baseball holiday, for lack of a better word, since I was a teenager playing in the Inwood Table Baseball League, dropping in at Yankee Stadium at gametime and getting good tickets, and going to Strat-o-Matic Tournaments. Definitely good times.

The times are not so good in Tampa, where the big story was Chien Ming Wang's strained hamstring, which will keep the pitcher out for a month. To show you how quickly things move in baseball, Wang came into 2006 hardly assured of a spot in the starting rotation, thirteen months later, he's the Yankees' ace, and news that he's injured is an agita-inducing event. He'll now start the season on the DL, missing at least the first three weeks of the season.

In Wang's absence, it looks like Can't Play Carl Pavano is the Opening Day starter. This is also...unexpected. Not necessarily the optimum circumstances for Can't Play Carl to re-introduce himself to the Yankee Stadium crowd. Apparently, it was judged that given the issues each is dealing with, it wouldn't be a good idea to take Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, or Kei Igawa off their established schedules to pitch the opener against Tampa Bay, a week from Monday.

Of course, the idea of Carl Pavano, Opening Day starter, makes one huge assumption--that Can't Play Carl will somehow survive the last week of Spring Training without turning an ankle, bruising his buttocks, getting knocked unconscious by a line drive, burning the roof of his mouth by eating a microwave pizza too fast, or contracting the deadly Mutaba virus from an illegally-imported capuchin monkey. As always, the attitude with Can't Play Carl should be "I'll believe it when I see it." Heaven willing, I'll be at Yankee Stadium for the opener to make sure that's actually Carl Pavano and not some CGI superimposed by the YES Network.

Wang's (and Pavano's) misfortune is Jeff Karstens' gain, since Karstens looks on track to break camp with the big club. Tomorrow's start against the Tigers could be enough to seal the deal.

In better news, Bobby Murcer is reportedly "clear" of the brain tumor that he was diagnosed with over the holidays. I hope Bobby is well enough to make it out to the Stadium for the opener. If not, he will be in our thoughts, there. It's just good to hear he's feeling better.

At BP: Hope & Faith, The Tampa Bay Devil Rays

New article up at Baseball Prospectus, for the Hope & Faith series. Hope & Faith is BP's season preview series, that has run every publishing day at BP for the last month or so. The point of each article is to make an argument how each of the 30 major league teams could win the World Series this year--in Bud Selig lingo, why fans of each team should have "hope and faith" that their team can win. The series has featured guest writers like Rich Lederer, Tracy Ringolsby, and BP founder Gary Huckabay.

I drew the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as my Hope & Faith assignment. I started out by working on humorous ways the Devil Rays could win (the Yanks and Red Sox get thrown into quarantine after it's revealed--during a bench-clearing brawl--that Carl Pavano is infected with a flesh-eating bacteria, which he was hiding from the Yankees brass; Toronto forfeits half its schedule when the U.S. declares war on Canada, and the Blue Jays are sent to Guantanamo as enemy combatants; Billy Beane's [expletive deleted] doesn't work in the playoffs, that kind of thing), but in the end I decided to play things straight and look at ways that the Devil Rays could emulate recent world champions. Here's the obligatory taste:

That’s a lot of ifs, mights, coulds and maybes up there. To some, this entire exercise may seem ridiculous. The Devil Rays have never come within ten games of a winning record, in their entire history. They’re in a tough division, with two of the best-heeled gatekeepers in the game’s history. Nothing in this team’s track record indicates that they have what it takes to contend.

That’s why we leave you with a lesson from the 1997 World Champions. History doesn’t matter in baseball. Every Opening Day, you start with a clean slate, no matter how bad or good your team was the year before. The Florida Marlins won the World Series in the first winning season of their franchise’s history. So did the New York Mets. It would take hard work, good timing, and an almost ridiculous amount of luck, but for the moment we can still wonder: why not the Devil Rays?

It's a pay article, but there's also an interview with me and BP Radio's Brad Wochomurka, which is available for free--either by using the radio interface on BP's new-look front page, or by clicking this link here. Monday's BP Radio spot with Brad on the Mariners is available here. Of course, if you use iTunes you should already be subscribed to BP Radio's podcast (c'mon...it's free!).

Hope to see all you locals at the Columbia University event tonight at six.

Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Baseball Prospectus (But Were Afraid to Ask)

This one's a little bit personal and more than a little self-involved, so if you're just here for the baseball you might want to come back tomorrow.

I got news Saturday that Baseball Prospectus 2007 hit (or will hit, I've never quite figured out how this works) #9 on the New York Times Bestseller list, in the "Paperback Advice" section, as of March 25. Apparently, this reflects how well the book sold through March 10. Saturday was March 17, by the way. Confused? Me, too!

More certain (but certainly not less confusing) is that this means that all the authors of BP2K7 (as we like to call it) are best-selling authors. Including me. This was unexpected (apparently, this is Baseball Prospectus's best-ever showing), and it came on the tail of some big changes in my life.

So the last few weeks, I've been dealing with the ups and downs of being a BP author. On the up side, at the end of February, I was interviewed for Japanese television, a story about the Yanks/Red Sox rivalry and Daisuke Matsuzaka. The opportunity was sent my way by BP colleague Neil deMause. It was pretty cool: the crew came to my home, and did a detailed interview in which I talked about the Yanks' and Sox's finances and payroll advantage, explained the luxury tax, and gave the Yanks an extremely slight edge going into the season. Then they asked me for action shots of me at my computer, which you can see above. Sadly, the interview will only air in Japan; if I'm able to get my hands on the footage, I'll be sure to share. But it was weird being interviewed on TV, particularly since they were interviewing me...and Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe.

That's a weird feeling. Ryan's been one of the top sports writers in the country since I was in high school, if not earlier. How'd I become the next name they pick out of the hat?

On the down side of all this, came the news just after BP was released that four players were missing from the book--and two of them were from my chapter, including the one that people would be most likely to miss, Seattle third baseman Adrian Beltre. Now, as one of my editors, Christina Kahrl, made clear on BP's Unfiltered Blog, if wasn't that we forgot about Beltre or anything. The team working on BP2K7 had a really cool web-based interface that we used to submit and edit our work, rather than emailing dozens of Word files to each other. From what I understand, something went wrong in that interface, causing the entries on Beltre, Wladimir Balentien, Bob Wickman, and Hernan Iribarren (how's that for a bizarre random sampling of players?) to get lost on their way to the publisher, and so none of those guys made it into the book.

These things happen. The first Baseball Prospectus annual, back in 1996, was missing an entire team, the Cardinals. As was the case back then, we're trying to make the inconvenience up to people--this time, by making all the information from the entry, plus quite a bit more, available to the public by making all four players' PECOTA cards available to the public for free (you can click on any of the player names above to see what those PECOTA cards look like, and the comments that should have been in this year's annual). Still, it sucks because a) a bit of work, by myself and others, went into those comments, and it sucks that they didn't get into print, and b) there are plenty of people who will buy the annual but never see Christina's Unfiltered post, or know that they could get the missing entries online. To all those people, I am very deeply sorry.

Even without Beltre (and Balentien), it's still a great book, and I'm still proud of the Seattle chapter, which is where I made my contribution.

Still, I'd only just gotten over the waves of nausea that the missing players caused me, when another hubub erupted, having to do with my chapter. This one was simultaneously more annoying and far less substantial. Someone took one of the players comments as a personal insult against one of his friends, and decided to make a giant public stink about it. The post about this no longer exists, but the Baseball Think Factory thread on that post can be found here, and another post from the same website giving the denouement of the whole affair can be found here. All in all, I guess the firestorm took maybe six or seven hours one afternoon and evening. It didn't help that I got to the party late, by which time there were many, many comments at both the site in question and at BTF, accusing me and my colleagues of all manner of ugly and scurrilous conduct.

The worst part is, people took great umbrage over the fact that the person who wrote the comment in question (me) was anonymous, as a result of BP's policy that team chapters and player comments are written by the Baseball Prospectus Team as opposed to any particular author. To understand why that policy makes sense, you have to understand how the book writing process works. There are chapter authors, each responsible for writing the team essay and a number of player comments. Each author decides--with the able assistance of BP's resident prospect expert, Kevin Goldstein--which players he'll write about, and who will get a full comment or just a single-sentence Lineout comment. Kevin will also give input on the minor leaguers, ranging from the incredibly detailed to a simple "big fastball, no command."

Then it's off to deal with the blank page, but even that isn't a solitary process. Writers have the backup of BP's technical staff and internal mailing list, where they make requests for statistical queries, often drawing commentary and suggestions from other members of mailing list. By the time all's said and done, the research is collaborative enough that if you had to attribute all the individual contributions, something like "based on research by Ben Murphy with suggestions from Keith Woolner, and a verbal smackdown about historical context from Jim Baker..." by the time you got through with all the shoutouts, you wouldn't have much wordcount left to actually say anything.

Once all the research is done there's the writing, and after the writing, our editors get their thing on. Sometimes their influence is relatively small, just covering up the fact that the writer doesn't know when one should use "that" as opposed to "which", or that he doesn't have any idea about the proper use of the semicolon. In other situations, they're streamlining the text, making it more readable, adding jokes, and trying to make the whole thing read less like a dozen different authors writing in their own voices, and more like a chorus singing in a single key. Sometimes the verbal surgery they perform is radical--in one 120-word player comment I submitted, the editors kept only two of my words, re-writing everything else. Those words? "Hamster wheel."

So the point is, it takes a village to write a player comment.

This comes into play in the weird internet argument I was talking about before. The problem was, I wrote a comment about longtime Mariner Raul Ibanez, in which I looked back at BP's 2004 comment about Ibanez, in which the Mariners' signing Ibanez away from the Kansas City Royals was labeled a waste of money, and pointed out that the previous comment had turned out completely wrong: Ibanez stopped his decline, started playing like a completely different person, and was a bargain over the course of his contract. At the end of this, my editors appended, for humorous purposes "...the guy who made that comment isn't with us anymore."

Someone assumed that this last part was a dig at former BP author Derek Zumsteg, who did the Mariners chapter for several years, including 2004. The only problem with this theory was, well, that the Ibanez comment in 2004 wasn't in the Mariners chapter--it was in the Kansas City Royals chapter, which was written by someone else. I knew that when I wrote the comment (although I'll admit that I forgot for a while in the post-accusation shock period; I thought the guy who'd accused me of being a miserable person was right, and that my memory was wrong). I have absolutely no grudges against either Zumsteg or the person who actually wrote the comment (to the contrary, they're two of my favorite writers). The idea wasn't to get a dig in on anyone, it was to take accountability for a prediction that turned out wrong--one that lots and lots of people, and not just at Baseball Prospectus, shared.

Anyway, all of this comes up because as of today, I'm outed from my Seattle chapter anonymity. I did a Baseball Prospectus Radio spot for today previewing the Mariners' season--ironically, in connection with a piece Zumsteg wrote for Baseball Prospectus's Hope and Faith series. With any luck, my own Hope and Faith entry--on the Tampa Bay Devil Rays--will be up on the site later this week. On Thursday night, I'll be at Columbia University and on Saturday afternoon I'll be at the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, signing copies of Baseball Prospectus 2007 and talking baseball (details can be found on BP's events page). Feel free to come by and have your book signed. If you've happened on a copy of Bombers Broadside 2007, I'll gladly sign that, also.

Heck, if you bring a printout of the Adrian Beltre or Wladimir Balentien PECOTA cards, I'll sign those, too.

[UPDATE: fixed typo]

Working Overtime for Carl Pavano

The Yanks lost their game with the Phillies in Clearwater today, 3-2. Andy Pettitte pitched the first five innings, allowing only two hits and netting four Ks, and leaving with a 1-0 lead. Then Can't Pitch Carl Pavano took over. The Phils tied it in the sixth, the Yanks took the lead back in the top of the seventh, and then the Phils broke it open in the bottom of the frame, scoring twice to get the lead.

Can't Play Carl actually didn't look that bad. His fastball topped out at 89 MPH, but had good movement. His breaking ball had good action, but wasn't terribly sharp. Pavano was victimized by some bad defense, including some gawdawful work by Andy Phillips at the hot corner.

Although the box score linked above doesn't show it, Pavano actually pitched 3 1/3 innings yesterday. The plan was to get Pettitte five innings of work, and Pavano four innings, so as to keep both men on pace to start the season in the rotation. To make sure Pavano got his work in, Joe Torre made an unusual request of the Phillies--that if they were ahead in the game after the top of the ninth, they should send their batters up against Pavano in the bottom of the inning, even though the game was over.

So when Ryan Madson pitched a scoreless ninth to end the exhibition game, the Phils came out on to the field to congratulate each other, the crowd let out a big cheer over having bested the infamous Yankees...and then the Phils players remembered the arrangement and hustled off the field so that Pavano could take the mound again. Pavano then registered an out before hitting a batter and allowing a fly ball which Kevin Thompson dropped in the outfield. By then Torre and Ron Guidry had seen enough of Can't Play Carl, and indicated to Phils manager Charlie Manuel that the game was over...again.

***

I don't mean to get all Paul Lukas on you, but he Spring Training caps the teams have been given this year are outright stupid. In their continuing quest to diddle with the unis just enough that people who already have plenty of their favorite team's gear will buy some more, the manufacturer (New Era?) added a stripe over where the ears would go on the cap for Spring Training. That's it--not a new color, new logo, new design, just a dumbol' stripe. This is like the weird pixelated dots that Nike added to the sleeves of baseball undershirts. These stupid embellishments have no functional purpose, no aesthetic purpose, only a marketing purpose. "Sure, you have a cap, but you don't have a cap with a white swoosh over your ear, do ya?"

Here's hoping that what's worn in Spring Training stays in Spring Training.

Notes from a Backlog of Newspapers

* I missed his appearance tonight, but Kei Igawa's walkitudinous ways are a bit scary. More interesting was watching Tyler Clippard throw a few innings after ol' Dr. Kei exhausted his pitch count with four walks and five strikeouts in three scoreless innings. Clippard allowed one run in two and a third pitched, the run coming on a solo shot Chipper Jones absolutely nuked over the rightfield fence. The homer aside, Clippard looked impressive, throwing his 91 MPH heat up and over the plate as if he were Roger Clemens, and featuring a nice changeup (well, nice changeups aside from the one Chipper hit halfway to Miami).

* Clippard was demoted after the game, which is less a reflection of his performance than a reflection that there are only two weeks of Grapefruit action left, and the Yanks have a ton of righthanded pitchers vying for only a couple of slots. With Jeff Karstens tossing zeroes, there was simply no room for Clippard in the inn.

* A-Rod talks to the New York media so much, I actually worry about his health and safety. Alex should heed the Errol Morris axiom, "Let someone talk for long enough, and eventually they'll hang themselves." He's said he sucked. He's talked about his relationship with Jeter, or lack thereof. Now he's saying that it's "Do or die." Whatever. It's all so much noise.

I mean, we all get the points that Rodriguez is trying to make: 1) he's not forswearing his right to opt out of his contract after this season (he'd be an absolute and total sucker to do so) and 2) just because he's keeping his option(s) open, doesn't mean he doesn't want to stay in New York, with the Yankees. Everything else he says is a reiteration, repetition, or rephrasing of those two points, with a few variations. Enough, already!

* Sadly, Richard Jeni made his own health and safety a moot issue, committing suicide last week. Jeni was one of my favorite standups of the late 80s and 90s, I'll miss him for that. Another one of my favorites from that era, Elayne Boosler, remembers him as a friend in the Huffington Post; Scott Long, whose act I've never seen, but whose blog I read regularly, has a much less sentimental take (at some point in the comments section, it kinda becomes Please Explain: Suicide).

* So far, the biggest non-A-Rod stirs at Yankee Camp happened because Roger Clemens decided to attend a game--as a spectator, mind you--and because Carl Pavano's girlfriend had an unspecified health situation. I think that can speak for itself.

* Best at bat of the spring: Jose Tabata's opposite field dinger on Sunday. Just a really nice flash of strength, to give us something to think about while we wait for him to be ready for the Show.

* Pete Rose used to say he never bet on baseball. Then he admitted he bet on baseball. Now he claims he bet on the Reds, every day. I suppose it's a form of justice that by now Rose has told so many lies (and the truth is so underwhelming) that no one really gives a damn anymore. Used to be that every year, around HoF election time, a dedicated and noisy group would gnash their teeth about the big injustice being done to the Hit King. Haven't really heard a peep from that crowd since Rose's book came out a couple of years ago (and as an added bonus, they seem to have taken the "Free Shoeless Joe!" lobby down with them).

Over the next few years, I think what we'll get from Rose is a series of increasingly desperate confessions in the hope that one of them will finally trigger the American public's forgiveness, until eventually he's confessing to stuff like the Kennedy assassination, the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, and fixing Ali-Liston II. Not that anyone will care about that, either.

* The wonderful, synergistic relationship between MLB and Viagra appears to be over, which I think is just the kind of victory over artificial performance enhancers that the league needs. This relationship was doomed from the beginning, given that MLB's first Viagra pitchman was Raffy Palmeiro.

Movie Reviews: Breach, The Host

Been a while since I posted any movie thoughts here, so here's a couple of highly recommended movies I've seen recently:

Breach -- This is the fictionalized account of the Robert Hanssen case. Hansen was an FBI counterintelligence expert who spent almost 20 years spying on the US for the Russians. Breach covers only the very end of that period, focusing on the events leading up to Hanssen's capture, particularly the role played by Eric O'Neill, an FBI trainee who went undercover as Hansen's assistant.

Like Training Day or The Last King of Scotland, this movie features a younger actor protagonist (Ryan Phillippe as O'Neill) who gets the most screen time, but the focus is really on the veteran actor/antagonist (Chris Cooper, in the role of Hanssen) with whom the younger character finds himself partnered. Cooper, biting deep into the meaty role of the ultra-patriotic, extremely religious, traitor, gives a performance that's as Oscar-worthy as Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker's performances in those other films. What's special about Cooper's performance here is the unrelenting intensity he brings to each scene. His Hanssen is a man who never lets down his guard, and never stops thinking. He doesn't look at things and people, he scrutinizes them. To Cooper's (and writer/director Billy Ray's) credit, no effort is made to explain Hanssen's behavior or put him in a sympathetic light. Cooper just lays the man, with all his contradictions and oddities, out on the screen.

Based on the trailer, it was expected that Phillippe (best known, until recently, as Mr. Reese Witherspoon) would get blown off the screen by Cooper's performance. Amazingly, Phillippe does a better job of hanging in there than his counterparts did in Training Day or Last King of Scotland (and that's no insult to James McAvoy and Ethan Hawke, both of whom are actors I really like). As O'Neill, Phillippe uses his pretty boy looks and lightweight demeanor to inhabit a role that requires everyone, including Hanssen, to underestimate him. Phillippe's line readings, which have always sounded slightly artificial in his other roles, are effective in the role of a relatively ordinary man called on to pull off a huge deception. Overall, the confrontations between Cooper and Phillippe make for a very satisfying movie.

The Host -- Probably the best horror movie I've seen since 28 Days Later, the Host is a Korean import which draws some of its inspiration from a real-life incident in which a U.S. army coroner ordered several gallons of toxic formaldehyde to be disposed of using a normal sink in the U.S. military base near Seoul. In director Joon-ho Bong's imagination (he co-wrote the script, also), this leads directly to a huge mutant creature, looking like a cross between Geiko gecko and the giant worms from Tremors, coming out of the waters of the Han River with a surly attitude and a taste for human flesh.

The action centers on the dysfunctional Park family, who own a riverside food stand. Hyun-Seo, a 12 year old schoolgirl, is the only member of the family who really seems to have her act together. Her father, Gang-du, is a dyed-blond layabout whose main gift seems to be an ability to fall asleep at will. Her uncle, the first college graduate in the family, is unemployed and has an alcohol problem. Her aunt, a competitive archer, seems like an achiever, but her perfectionism keeps her from being a success. The patriarch of the clan raised Gang-du and his siblings, so he's immediately suspect.

When the monster from the river drags Hyun Seo back to its lair, the Park clan doesn't quite pile into a yellow VW bus, but they do embark on a rescue mission while dodging cops, shady health officials who want to keep them in quarantine, and, of course, their surly feelings toward each other. Horror/Comedy is a hard genre to pull off, because most films that try for it wind up simply as limp comedies, which don't function as horror films at all. The Host keeps up the suspense while mining some unexpected situations (such as a scene at wall of remembrance for the victims of the monster's attack) for laughs. The secret ingredient here is a lack of sentimentality reminiscent of the best of Peanuts. No matter how bad the Park family's situation is, or how badly its members screw up, we're never invited to pity them. Not even when they're being chased by a giant amphibian lizard.

A Week of Grapefruit League

Sorry for the delays. I've been flagged for neglect of blog, but there's been a lot of peripheral stuff going on that merits its own post.

In the meanwhile, we've had baseball. What passes for it, anyway, in Spring Training. I'm happy that baseball's back, but Spring Training has a limited appeal. Wins and losses don't matter; the pace is, to put it bluntly, lazy; the play is often sloppy. I have never been to Spring Training in person, and I've often wondered if being in the ballpark would make a difference here. Still, what Spring Training action really allows you to do is get an introduction to all the new guys on your ballclub--be they prospects, people acquired in trade, whatever. I've gotten to watch parts of a number of the Yanks' Grapefruit games, and here are a few first impressions of pitchers:

Phil Hughes -- Not to rip off Larry Mahnken, but from time to time I've caught myself calling Hughes "the Precious." Hughes' debut last Thursday was hardly the stuff that dreams are made of--his control was off, and the curve wasn't as sharp as we've been told--but it was enough to make you daydream him into pinstripes, rather than the blue pullovers they use in Spring Training. On Tuesday--a game I didn't get to see--he pitched two clean innings. Hughes was just named Baseball America's #4 prospect in baseball (behind Daisuke Matsuzaka, Alex Gordon, and Delmon Young); John Sickels did one his "crystal ball" projections on Hughes, which put Hughes at roughly the same career numbers as David Cone.

I think we'd take that :)

Kei Igawa -- Erratic first start, striking out three and walking three in an inning-plus on Monday. Stuff was pretty much the same as in his exhibition start against the major league All-Stars; lots of working up in the zone with the fastball, nice breaking pitch. In the broadcast, they repeated the meme that he's a thinner David Wells, and I don't see it. Wells works very differently--off-hand, I'd say he establishes the big overhand curve more than Igawa does his own three-quarters breaking pitch--and Boomer has a lot more precision with his pitches than we've seen from Igawa, yet.

Jeff Kennard -- Not too excited about him, on Monday he came in in relief of Igawa and showed a fairly straight fastball and poor command. It'd be nice to see him under better circumstances, rather than coming in with a man on--but those are the kind of circumstances he'd likely face if he makes it to the Show this season.

Steven Jackson -- Also not impressive. Kept the ball on the ground, but looked fairly generic overall. He'll have to do a lot to stand out in the large corps of young righthanded pitchers the Yanks have on the verge of the majors.

Chris Britton -- Looks like a young Bob Wickman--y'know, before the Wick started hitting those all-you-can eat buffets. Nice movement on his fastball, good slider, thought I saw a changeup in there.

Luis Vizcaino -- I know I've seen this guy pitch elsewhere, but honest, I can't remember him. Interesting arm angle, definitely knows how to pitch, but the stuff didn't look too amazing. People keep talking about the backup catcher battle (a yawner in which I favor Todd Pratt over Wil Nieves and Raul Chaves) and the backup/platoon 1st base...I don't know if you can even call this a fight, given that Andy Phillips now lags Josh Phelps by a week. The real interesting fight of this camp is that the Yanks have about ten relievers in camp who could break camp, and can take eight, max (man, are 13-man bullpens depressing...) A biggish trade is going to have to happen (or a convenient DL stay) because not all these guys can go north with the big team. Again, this topic probably deserves a post of its own down the line.