Outfield Grass

2007-11-20T15:52:00.000-05:00

Captain Jimmy Rollins Puts His Butt on the Line and Delivers

It was announced today that Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player. He narrowly beat out Colorado Rockies leftfielder Matt Holliday who showed only class this afternoon when asked about his second-place finish by saying, “"It's Jimmy Rollins' day and I don't want to step on his day.”

Rollins had a tremendous year offensively, was recently voted the National League’s Gold Glove at shortstop, and proved prophetic in his Spring Training-statement that the Phils were the team to beat in the National League East.

Rollins’ MVP award is the second in a row for the Phillies’ organization. Last year, first-baseman Ryan Howard won the award. (This year, Howard finished fifth in voting).

I am excited.

Jimmy Rollins is just plain fun to watch. And he has the personality to match – see what he said about waiting for the call this morning.

Ken Mandel, writing on Phillies.com quoted Rollins as saying at his press-conference this afternoon, "When I woke up, I was trying to be nonchalant about it. At about five [a.m. PT], I jumped up and looked at the clock and was like, 'OK, I hadn't missed a phone call yet. At about nine, I was like, 'Oh man, I didn't get the phone call,' but it wasn't supposed to come for another hour and a half. When the call finally came, it was a great thing. I was thinking not to think about it, but you can't help but think about it in a situation like this."

Late this past season, ESPN's Peter Gammons worked a Sunday night Phillies game. He stood by the Phillies dugout for most of the entire game. Afterwards, he reported that Rollins - the entire game - was cheering and pushing the team onwards. Gammons said that he had never seen a player with so much energy pushing his team through all nine innings.

He is a constant ball of positive energy. He could lead this team to a World Series. Effectively, Rollins is now the captain. He put out his butt, staked his place, and led the team to the goal. Now the team is his.

And he is still positive and enthusiastic. He called Holliday and thanked him for inspiring him. And I get that it was not said in condescension or mockery. He genuinely carries himself and plays this way on the ball-field. He is a competitor – a warrior – and sans attitude.

The Phillies did something very interesting last year when they traded right-fielder Bobby Abreay to the New York Yankees.

Abreau was in his ninth-season with the Phillies, had made two All-Star teams, and placed six times in the National League Most Valuable Player voting. Abreau is a career .300 hitter, steals 20+ bases, and is good for more than 100 RBIs a year.

Yet the Phillies traded him and traded him for basically relief-pitcher Matt Smith, a serviceable reliever but certainly no All-Star.

A perception in Philadelphia was that Abreau was a pretty low-key individual, player, and clubhouse presence. At Philadelphia's harshest, we said that Abreau did not hustle.

My sense was that Abreau, for all of his talent, was just not a raw-raw leader personality. Which is how I think he fits so well on the Yankees where he can do his thing and is happy to play in the shadows of Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and the carousel of All-Star and former-All-Star pitchers who come through Yankee Stadium.

But in Philadelphia, especially with Jim Thome's departure, Abreau was senior in the clubhouse and my theory is that his presence created a situation in which it might have been more difficult for the young blood of Rollins, Chase Utley, and Howard to rise such that their team leadership matched their leadership in offensive production.

The Phillies said good-bye to Abreau, put Shane Victorino in right-field, and watched the club thrive. Which may not have been all due to Abreau. But Rollins certainly took the opportunity to step into the role of team-leader.

Pat Burrell said it himself yesterday about Rollins, "This guy, he took us on his shoulders from Day 1, and did things in this game that never happened."

Rollins' achievement also stands-out alongside the awarding of the American League Most Valuable Player award to the Yankees' Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is fun to watch because he is so purely talented as a professional baseball player. He is a dangerous hitter and solid fielder. But boy does he come off as a jerk. Or at least as an individual not as conscious of his actions as one at the top could be.

What also delights me about Rollins winning the award is not just that he is the second Phillies in a row to win it, but he is the second Phillies player of color do win it.

I wrote a long piece on here a year ago, on November 28, 2006 called “Ryan Howard and the light of Dick Allen” after Howard’s award.

The Phillies have a troubled-record on race. I use the word “have” although it is an imprecise word in this case. It is not that they are still perpetuating the problem in so much as I believe an organization or person or nation can not run from its past, but be conscious and mindful of its past and image as it moves beyond it.

I cite this history as running from Jackie Robinson’s National League debut in 1947 through Allen’s departure from the team after the 1969 season.

I wrote last year how this history continued passively through the great teams and the 1993 National League pennant winners by virtue of the All-Stars on these clubs being primary white.

Hear me correctly: I do not judge the Phils to have been problematic on integrating players of color in these years. I do point out that the team’s history did not have a chance to be redeemed by virtue of the absence of players of color.

This is the first Phillies club where the faces of the club – the roles played by Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, and Mike Schmidt on the 1980 team, and Darren Daulton, Lenny Dykstra, and John Kruk on the 1993 team – and in my book, a League MVP as face of the club – are African-American.

And as I wrote previously, the proper response to my noticing that Howard and Rollins are African-American is to say, “Who cares what color their skin is?! They are great players and that is all that matters!”

Exactly! The Phillies have come a long way as an organization and that is pretty awesome.

Viva la Jimmy Rollins! Viva la Jimmy Rollins!

2007-11-06T07:54:00.000-05:00

If Alex Rodriguez Was a Rich Man

Alex Rodriguez, formerly of the New York Yankees, is now a free-agent.

It was reported on Friday, November 2 by ESPN.com that Rodriguez is seeking a minimum of $350 million for ten-years. This would be a yearly salary more than $10 million per-year above his current value as well as that of other top earners in the game.

Rodriguez was the second-highest paid player in Major League Baseball in 2007, slightly behind Jason Giambia and ahead of Derek Jeter, both teammates, according to figures on Baseball-reference.com.

Few argue that he is one of the best players in Major League Baseball.

He has played no fewer than 154 games per-season since 2001. In his career, he averages 44 homeruns per-162 games, 128 RBIs, 23 stolen bases, and a .306 average. At age 31, he has at least another five solid seasons and then maybe another five years where he is just good and not incredible. He could remain among the very best through the 2012 season.

Rodriguez chose free-agency with three years remaining on his current contract.

But not since, well, since Barry Bonds, has a player so good presented so many reservations for signing him. He enters the off-season having jilted the Yankees, and with fans, media members, and even the Commissioner of Major League Baseball angry at him for declaring his free-agency during the World Series.

The problem with all of our complains about Rodriguez is that it falls on deaf ears.

Rodriguez has a singular goal which is to make a lot of money.

Writing for the Associated Press on Sunday, Ronald Blum quoted Rodriguez as saying in Spring Training, “"I love being the highest-paid player in the game. It's pretty cool. I like making that money."

That is it.

He wants top dollar and cares less about the team for which he plays. In this sense, Rodriguez is the ultimate professional baseball player. I use “professional” not as a synonym for “class” but as the opposite of “amateur”. He is a mercenary of the truest type.

The problem is that the more he shows himself to be the mercenary he actually is, the less attractive he makes himself to potential employers.

On January 26, 2001, Rodriuez signed a ten-year contract with the Texas Rangers which would pay him $252 million. He was the highest paid player in Major League Baseball in 2001, 2002, and 2003. He hit no fewer than 47-homeruns per season with the Rangers and was named American League Most Valuable Player in 2003.

With Rodriguez in their lineup, the Rangers went 73 and 89 in 2001, 72 and 90 in 2002, and 71 and 91 in 2003. Figuring that they could lose without Rodriguez’s $22 million per-year salary, the Rangers traded him to the Yankees in February 2004.

Without Rodriguez, the Rangers won 89 games in 2004.

In the postseason, Rodriguez has been merely so-so. He hit .133 for the Yankees in the 2005 American League Division Series against the Los Angeles Angels and then hit .071 against the Detroit Tigers in 2006. He improved to .267 this season against Cleveland including one homerun that came too late to make any difference in the game or series.

In Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, Rodriguez swatted at Boston Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo’s glove to knock the ball loose. Not only is this interference for which he was automatically ruled out, it looked about as a professional as a second-grader playing t-ball.

The New York Times reported on May 31, 2007 that Rodriguez showed equal class in the previous day’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays when he shouted in distraction at Blue Jays third-baseman Howie Clark. The Blue Jays were furious at Rodriguez breaking one of baseball’s unwritten rules while Rodriguez stood on third-base grinning like, well, a second-grader.

Rodriguez originally played for the Seattle Mariners. His final year in Seattle was 2000 when the Mariners went 91 and 71. In their first year without Rodriguez, the Mariners won 116 games.

Playing for the Yankees, he had public feuds with team captain Jeter, and this year, a public feud with his wife. She filed for divorce after Rodriguez was seen at a Toronto strip club with a former Playboy model.

Rodriguez could not even leave the Yankees in a positive way.

The Red Sox played the Colorado Rockies in game four of the World Series last Sunday night, October 28. Rodriguez’s agent, Boras, announced that Rodriguez was leaving the Yankees during the game itself.

Major League Baseball has a blanket moratorium on its thirty franchise clubs on announcements of managerial hires and player trades during the World Series. It is a nice tradition because it keeps the focus on the World Series and the two competing teams.

Game Four of the World Series did take 3-hours and 35-minutes. This is inexcusably too long for many reasons. And, it is not too long to wait to alert the world that you are a free-agent. Rodriguez could have even waited until Monday morning. Easily.

Many blame the World Series announcement and the $350 million demand on agent Scott Boras. I do not because structurally, Boras is Rodriguez’s agent. This is to say that Boras represents Rodriguez and only Rodriguez is responsible for Rodriguez’s salary demands, departures, and character.

Writing in the Times on Sunday, Jeffrey N. Gordon sees the mid-Game Four announcement as a conscious strategic move. In “Yankees Should Opt In for Rodriguez”, Gordon argues that Boras knew that the Yankees would announce the hiring of new manager Joe Girardi at the conclusion of the Series. Had Rodriguez announced following Girardi’s hire that he was opting-out, it could have appeared that he was leaving the Yankees in direct response to the hiring of Girardi. By announcing his free-agency prior to Girardi’s hiring, Gordon says that he left greater room for himself to resign with the Yankees.

It is a reasonable argument and could be true. Still, Rodriguez comes off looking very bad.

But I did not come to bash Cesar, but to defend him. Really.

I do not count myself among those Philadelphia Phillies fans who look at our hole at third-base this past season with Wes Helms, Abraham Nunez, and Greg Dobbs, and salivate at batting Rodriguez with Ryan Howard and Chase Utley. I do not want Rodriguez on the Phillies.

One reason is that the Phillies had a lot of character this season. The team came together and seemed to enjoy playing together. At least the position players did. I am concerned about the team overspending for Aaron Rowand to return to play centerfield, and he was a tremendous on-field presence, and by all accounts, clubhouse presence as well.

The other reason is that $25 to $30 million per-year can buy the Phillies (and any other team), two very good players rather than one. I would take two-players hitting .300 per-season with 20 to 30 homeruns each over one-Alex Rodriguez.

Rodriguez chose to opt out of the last three seasons of his contract with the Yankees, forgoing $91 million in salary, because after his MVP-caliber 2007 season, he believes he can sign a new contract worth more money and for a longer period of time.

Rodriguez cares most for securing the richest pay-day and does not seem to value the particular team for which he plays, city where he works and lives, or championship prospects of the organization.

The only question therefore is about the nature of the market for him.

In 2001, the Rangers and owner Tom Hicks is said to have paid tens of millions more for Rodriguez than the next highest bidder. Now, agent Boras and Rodriguez are looking for the 2007-2008 Off-season version of Hicks.

The natural destinations for Rodriguez would have been, well, the Yankees and Rangers. The Baltimore Orioles love themselves high-priced big-name free agents. By signing with Baltimore, it would also ensure that Rodriguez could continue not winning World Series titles.

But he will not sign with Baltimore.

Pundits point to Rodriguez going to Los Angeles, to either the Dodgers or Angels. They both need big offense, have the financial resources to do a deal, and Rodriguez could hang out with David Beckham and be fabulous in SoCal.

He could also go upstate to San Francisco where the Giants need a new gate attraction to continue paying for their privately financed gem of a ballpark. Detroit is also a possibility if only because the Tigers are one of the few franchises that still have a positive working relationship with Boras.

If Rodriguez’s goal was to make more money over a longer time-period, he only needs one team willing to pay more than $91 million for more than three years to make his departure from the Yankees worthwhile.

All he needs is one team to sign him.

Remember, all he wants is to be the highest paid in Major League Baseball. Is that so wrong?

2007-10-30T10:52:00.000-04:00

Report from Fenway Park and Game 1 of the World Series

by David Goldstein, Guest writer

In my 20-odd years as a sports fan, I’ve known mostly defeat, bitterness, dashed hopes, and self-loathing, so really it makes sense that my first World Series game should be in the stadium of a team I don’t like. Malcom Gladwell once wrote that rooting for the Red Sox or Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft or GE. I say it’s like rooting for Nitro or Turbo on American Gladiators. But hey, it’s the World Series, and I’m going for free, so I’m not complaining.

We get to Fenway about two hours before game one starts, and there are already hordes of people milling around Yawkey Way – scalpers, vendors, drunken fans, and a handful of homeless people, the latter two distinguishable by the presence or absence of Red Sox jerseys.

As a Phillies fan, I find the tenor at the park remarkably giddy and tension-free, almost like the outcome’s assured, the game serving more as the beginning of a formal coronation than anything. This is partially a testament to the transformative effect of the 2004 World Series – Boston’s aura of impending doom having given way to a breezy swagger – and partially a function of Josh Beckett, whose playoff dominance has basically put Colorado in a psychological 0-2 hole.

I’ve wracked my brain trying to come up with plausible scenarios in which Jeff Francis beats Beckett, but since scenarios that involve a 28 year-old well-conditioned athlete having a stroke or having an existential crisis about the evident meaninglessness of athletic competition when children are starving in Botswana, don’t really qualify as ‘plausible,’ we’ll say that games 1 and 5 have already been decided. (Which, given the inevitability of tonight’s outcome, raises interesting questions about how it can possibly be fun or interesting or entertaining to watch an event where the primary selling point is the supposed unpredictability.)

When I see a couple of fans stumble out of a stretch limo, it finally hits me what tonight’s festivities sort of remind me of – a prom, and not just any prom, but one where everyone knows he’s getting lucky. A Philadelphia World Series would be like a prom with self-conscious computer dorks and theater nerds, a prom where everyone is miserable and self-conscious, and just hoping to survive the night with a level of humiliation that won’t necessitate suicide.

Inside the ushers are handing out laminated sheaths so we can wear our tickets around our necks, kind of like a press pass. I’m really excited about this. I flash my laminated ticket at everyone we pass, which is fun, until it occurs to me that every single person in the stadium has the same laminated doo-hickey, and the idea of a universal status symbol is sort of contradictory…and worse, that taunting other people by showing off something that everyone has not only makes you look like an asshole, it makes you look almost unhinged.

Our seats are in the grandstand in deep foul territory in right field. One of my main gripes with Fenway Park is that the grandstand seats are arranged so that if you sit facing forward, you’re staring at the right fielder, which means that to see the pitcher and batter you have to crane your neck to the left for several hours. Also, there’s a stanchion in our sightline blocking the mound, so in addition to craning your neck, you have to lean at a bizarre 60 degree angle. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I call this twisted position an ergonomic holocaust.

I’ve come to the game with David Bernick.

Bernick’s initial reaction to our seats: Wow, this is a lot closer than I thought it would be. Bernick, evidently thought we’d be sitting in the parking lot.

Now, bear in mind that I am not complaining in the least, as Bernick paid for my very expensive seat and I’m getting to go to a World Series game in which the most dominant post-season pitcher of recent memory is starting for the home team. But these are truly bad seats. The only seats further away are in the bleachers, but the greater distance would then be offset by the far superior sightlines and seat angles. We’re in the worst seats in the house. These cost $500 (that again, I didn’t pay. I don’t intend for this to sound whiny or ungrateful, but journalistic integrity compels me to document the experience with as much precision as I can muster. And these are objectively terrible seats.) I can’t give any rational argument as to why this is preferable to watching a game in Hi-Def on a 50 inch LCD screen while stuffing my face with chicken wings, but it is. I can’t see anything. I’m incredibly uncomfortable. I’m sitting next to a snotty 14 year-old who keeps putting his elbows beyond his armrest, and just shamelessly violating my limited personal space.

Still, it’s weirdly exhilarating to be here. I’m at the World Series. This knowledge trumps all. (Which makes me wonder how uncomfortable I’d need to be for the physical discomfort to override the thrill of simply being here. What if someone were sitting on my lap? Or the person behind me kicked the back of my seat for three hours? Or if I was there, but in some kind of iron maiden type contraption?)

We’re sitting for a few minutes before I decide to try and kill the time by playing “spot the non-whites.”

At Boston sporting events, the degree of difficulty is off the charts. Factor in the obscenely expensive World Series tickets, and the game isn’t so much a game as a damning socioeconomic commentary on Boston - the demography of the crowd is about as diverse as a Klan rally. I assuage my conscience by resolving to vote for Obama in ’08. (And then again in ’09. I don’t play by your ‘rules.’)

About a half hour before Carl Yastremski throws out the first pitch, the PA guy announces a special Taco Bell promotion: If someone steals a base during the World Series, everyone in American gets a free taco. Tacos cost about $.75. I have not eaten a Taco Bell taco in five years. So why am I practically crying tears of joy?

A few minutes before game time the ’67 Red Sox totter out onto the field as the crowd cheers appreciatively. While everyone else is enjoying a moment of nostalgia, I’m studying the old-time players, scrutinizing their hunched backs and trembling hands, and just generally feeling depressed at what 40 years can do to once handsome and muscular athletes. Are the ’07 Red Sox watching this and thinking about how bad they’ll look when they’re trotted onto the field in ’47 (all except for Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield, who will both be 137)?

The game starts with Beckett running full counts on Willy Tavares and Kaz Matsui before striking both out. He then blows a 95-mph heater by Matt Holliday to end the first. In interviews Beckett has said that it takes him an inning or two to warm up, so if you’re gonna get to him, it’ll be in the first. The Rockies didn’t come close to putting a ball in play. I write ‘game over’ in my notes. (Bernick and I are both scoring the game. A strikeout looking is denoted by a backwards ‘K’ which is just insanely fun to write.)

I’m admiring my backwards ‘K’ when everyone leaps out of their seats and begins cheering wildly. I’ve missed Dustin Pedroia’s leadoff homerun. Dammit.

A drunken middle-aged man behind me starts a “Let’s Go Red Sox” cheer, which changes for each batter, i.e. it becomes a Let’s Go Manny, a Let’s Go Papi, and so on. The guy is red-faced and wears an expression of the dreamiest contentment you can imagine. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this might be the happiest human being I’ve seen in my life. I’d guess he’s in his mid-fifties, and he appears to have come to the game alone. So now I’m looking at the world’s happiest man, and pitying him, which seems odd.

Before the inning is over, the Sox will tack on another two runs. With Beckett on the mound, a three run lead may as well be 20.

(If you dislike pretentious rants, please skip this next paragraph)

One of the most uncomfortable parts about going to a baseball game in which you have zero emotional attachment to either team, is that it forces you to confront the sheer irrationality of being a sports fan at all. When I’m watching the Phillies, I’m too caught up in the game to think about my reactions, but here, I can watch with a certain detachment, and it’s unnerving.

J.D. drew smacks a double to the gap, and the fans erupt. A baseball player, whom you do not personally know, gets a hit, and this hit makes you incredibly happy, even though you don’t benefit from this hit in any tangible way. I thought I’d reconciled the irrationality of being a fan in the following way – even though it might not be rational to root for people you don’t know, if neuroscientists were scanning your brain during the game, they could track a very real physiological effect in response to your team’s success – the dopamine centers of the brain would be activated and so your ‘pleasure’ would not just be real, but experimentally provable.

So in effect, one can argue that while it might not make sense to hope a complete stranger has success in a game, it absolutely makes sense to root for a chain of events that will culminate in your brain’s releasing neurotransmitters that will make you feel good, and root against the chain events that will make you feel bad. Hence, it is absolutely rational to hope your team does well – you’re rooting for your own wellbeing.

Except this doesn’t solve anything, it just kicks the problem from philosophy over to neuroscience – if you’re not rooting for the team so much as hoping for the release of feel-good dopamine, why then does your team’s success trigger the release of dopamine in the first place? If you’re the kind of person who reads Steven Pinker books, you’d probably argue that this reaction stems from an evolutionary mechanism that favors tribal allegiance, and obviously, if you were witnessing a battle between your own tribe and a rival, you’d have a vested interest in the outcome of this battle, and would feel euphoria if they won, and despair if they lost (despair is probably putting it gently, as you’d be killed or enslaved or raped, etc. which, if you ever need a little perspective after a devastating loss, this thought works pretty well)

But now you have to deal with the dilemma of how arbitrary this tribal identification is in the age of free-agency. If the Phillies had played the Minnesota Twins this year, I’d have been booing Tori Huntert. If the Phillies sign Tori Hunter this offseason (stop laughing) I’d then be rooting for him. This because of a change of uniform. I think it was Seinfeld who once said that we’re not rooting for the players so much as we’re rooting for the uniforms.

Except this isn’t entirely true – I identify with the players on the ’07 Phillies to the extent that if the Red Sox and Phillies traded their entire teams, I’d have no choice but to be a Red Sox fan. But if the Phillies traded Cole Hamels for Josh Beckett, I’d stop rooting for Hamels and begin rooting for Beckett. In the first scenario, personality matters, in the second the uniform trumps all. How does that make any sense? Is there a critical mass of number of players you can change in one off-season before the team loses its identity, and the uniform no longer matters? What if the team is traded gradually over 10 years?

(rant complete)

The only question tonight is whether Beckett will throw a no-hitter, which is answered in the second when Garrett Atkins doubles high off the Monster in left.

Francis gets yanked in the fourth, having thrown over 100 pitches. It’s getting ugly.

In the fifth inning, with the sox already up 5-1, all hell breaks loose. The Sox bat around. Colorado relievers walk in three runs. It’s a 13-1 game, and it’s getting so bad that even the hometown faithful are actively encouraging the Colorado pitchers to throw strikes. My notes for this inning read as follows. “Jesus. Kill me.”

I’m still scoring the game, but it’s hard to pay attention in a blow-out. This leads to conversations like the following:

Sarah: Steal a base! I want tacos!

Me: Yeah! The Rockies are Americans. They can’t be mad. They’d get tacos too.

Sarah: Everyone would win. It’s anti-American to root against this.

Me: Wait…how does it work? Do we all get one taco if anyone steals a base, or do we all get one taco per stolen base?

Sarah: Ooh. I don’t know. Can you imagine if they stole four bases. That’s over a billion tacos!

Me: I bet they put less meat in each taco then.

I then start wondering if the ”everyone in America gets a taco” includes illegal immigrants, and if it doesn’t, if you have to bring proof of citizenship, and suddenly I’m picturing taco bell like customs at the airport, lines out into the street as people riffle through their fanny packs for their passports…which makes the whole promotion just way less appealing.

The game is so out of hand that Red Sox manager Terry Francona has Eric Gagne pitch the ninth. Bernick and I had a debate earlier in the game about how big a lead the Sox would need in order to pitch Gagne. Bernick said seven. I said 10. This, about a reliever who was once the most dominant pitcher in the game. The fans cheer him, and it’s unclear if they’re cheering because they’re giddy and in love with everyone on the team, or if they’re being sarcastic. I’m not sure if they know themselves.

Gagne pitches a perfect ninth to seal the 13-1 win. Drunken fans stumble around and high-five.

This was a game between two teams I don’t really care about. Our seats were bad. It was a bad game with zero tension. The fifth inning took 20 years off of my life. I had an existential crisis about the meaning of even being a sports fan at all. Perhaps worst of all, no one stole a base, which means no free tacos. And I had the time of my life. Go figure.

David Goldstein lives in Boston. Morris will return next Tuesday, November 6.

2007-10-23T00:09:00.000-04:00

World Series 2007; Colorado Rockies vs. Boston Red Sox

The World Series begins tomorrow night, Wednesday. The National League’s Colorado Rockies will play game one at Fenway Park against the Boston Red Sox. The Rockies have won 21 of their past 22 games but will have had an 8-day layoff going into the match-up.

The Red Sox tied for the most regular season wins in the Major Leagues this season with 96. Down 3 games to 1 in the best of seven American League Championship Series against Cleveland, Boston took the last three to win the series and the pennant,

In 2004, I really wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series. I watched more of that Series than any of the World Serieses in the past few years. They had come back in incredible fashion against the New York Yankees in the ALCS from a 3 to 0 deficit. They overcame 86-years of near-misses and what-ifs.

The 2004 Red Sox were playing for the 2004 Red Sox and for the city of Boston and for New England. They were playing for Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Wade Boggs, and Bill Buckner on the 1986 Red Sox who came one-strike from the championship against the New York Mets. They were playing for the 1975 Red Sox and Carlton Fisk who saved the team in game six with his 10th-inning homerun against the Cincinnati Reds, only to lose game seven. They were playing for the 1967 "Impossible Dream" Red Sox and the 1941 Red Sox.

I like these 2007 Red Sox. I like outfielder Manny Ramirez, who after the ALCS game four loss to Cleveland, declared that it did not matter if they won game five, and then went out and delivered a key RBI-double that he somehow managed to turn into a key RBI-single. They have an outstanding pitching staff in Curt Schilling, Josh Becket, and Daisuke Matsuzaka, all three of whom pitch so differently from the other.

And I am not really rooting for them.

My sister Ilana moved to Burlington in 1998 and has grown into a Red Sox fan, living in Red Sox Nation. She watches games on NESN, the New England Sports Network, and we text during Red Sox games. She is still a Phillies fan and despite interleague play, the Red Sox and Phillies rarely play each other and I have no issue with the dual loyalty.

I have my own American League leanings. I lived outside of Cleveland for five season and have a soft spot for the Tribe. I was hoping they would beat the Red Sox last week.

Rachel, my wife grew up in Boston sufficiently close to Fenway Park that we could take a long walk there on one of my first visits to her home when we started dating. It was not in the neighborhood and still, walkability goes a long way towards attachments.

We had our first child at the end of August. My other sister, Yael, immediately gave us a Phillies t-shirt for our daughter to wear next season and another friend sent a Phillies bib from mlb.com. They had decided that she would be a Phillies fan. Which is a fair guess given my loyalty.

The honest truth is that my daughter may not grow up to be a Phillies fan, let alone a baseball fan. My own father is no fan of baseball and it was not until I was seven years old that he relented and took me to my first Phillies game. He would take me once or twice a year and we would spend most of the game arguing over when we would leave. He voted for the seventh-inning to reduce his time there and to beat traffic. I pushed for at least after the final-out, if not until after the Phillies had turned off the Veterans Stadium scoreboard for the night.

Somehow, I still became a huge baseball fan.

Rachel declared that our daughter would be a Red Sox fan. I told Rachel that that was fine so long as Rachel could name two current players on the Red Sox roster.

Growing up, there was an ice cream store in her neighborhood called JP Licks. The store riffed on a Ben & Jerry’s flavor name and honored the then Red Sox All-Star shortstop by naming one its ice creams, Cherry Garciaparra.

“Uh, Garciaparra?” Rachel offered.

Nomar played for the Red Sox for eight and a half seasons, being traded away in the middle of the magic 2004 season.

The other morning, Rachel turned to me and said, “Ortiz!” “Great”, I said, “that is half; what is his first name?” She since come up with two players in addition to Ortiz whose first name, David, she did recall.

Now our daughter can be a Red Sox fan. Which is all academic, because she might be a Phillies fan or a Red Sox fan or – I should be so blessed – a fan of chess or classical music.

Paul Lukas, author of www.uniwatchblog.com, believes that the use of the color purple is anathema to Major League baseball jerseys. The Rockies were the first Major League Baseball team to wear purple, when they joined the National League in 1993.

Purple is untraditional on the baseball diamond, but to me, far from heresy. Purple is a traditional color of royalty. Louisiana State University’s athletic teams have worn purple along with gold. The Los Angeles Lakers have worn purple and gold with distinction since the mid-1960s. The Minnesota Vikings have purple since their first season in 1961.

Team colors, at their best, are like the colors of a nation’s flag. They are the same year by year and are not changed. The Red Sox wear red and navy. The Yankees are midnight-navy and white. The Lakers wear purple and gold. Countries do not change their national colors and for the same reason, I would have teams keep their colors in perpetuity as they do in European basketball and soccer.

The Arizona Diamondbacks entered the National League in 1998 wearing purple, teal, gold, and white. I found the uniforms cartoonish at best, but those were the team colors. Before this 2007 season, they switched to bring-red, sand-tan, and black. I like their new uniforms. They are very sharp and are what I would have a team based in Phoenix wear. But the team already had colors; their colors are purple and teal! They even won the 2001 World Series wearing purple and teal.

The Rockies have worn the same logo on their black and purple caps since 1993. They have worn the same purple, black, and silver combination since 1993. When I visited Denver and walked to their home ballpark, Coors Field in the summer of 2005, I saw how the purple and black fits the environment. It works for me.

That the team for whom I support, the Phillies, plays in the National League, and the Rockies are representing the National League, there are those who say that I would be right to root for the Rockies in the World Series. Given the allegiance of my sister and wife, I would be in good company to root for the Red Sox.

As I wrote above, the Red Sox won 96 regular season games, tied for the most in the League. The Rockies won 90-games and it took them one extra game in the season to do it. I like the system used in European soccer and basketball leagues which awards the league championship to the club with the best regular season record. In this sense, the entire season is like a long playoffs.

When I am Commissioner of Major League Baseball, I will eliminate interleague play, again separate the National from the American Leagues, eliminate the wild-card and even the league divisions. The pennant winner will be the team in the league with the best regular season record who will then play the pennant winner of the opposing league in the World Series for the championship. It will be the best against the best.

With the Phillies out of the picture, I am taking a merit-based approach and rooting for the team with the better record to win. Go Red Sox! But let us have some fun and make it a long series.

2007-10-16T16:37:00.000-04:00

2007 Predictions: How did the experts do?

March 30 this year fell on a Friday. Major League Baseball’s exhibition schedule was wrapping up. Most teams had already come north from Arizona and from Florida. The Angels were playing the Dodgers in their city series; Oakland played at San Francisco. Here in Philadelphia, the Boston Red Sox were in town for two games in what the Phillies called the “On Deck Series”.

The first game of the regular season was scheduled for Sunday night, April 1. The New York Mets played in St Louis against the then World Champion Cardinals. The Mets were a favorite to win the National League this year and the Cardinals were hoping to carry their 2006-post season success into the 2007 season.

With the regular season beginning on Sunday night and then on Monday, April 2, sports writers around the country had to have filed their 2007 predictions to be published by that Friday.

I find preseason predictions to be curious exercises. When a season starts, I think we have a good idea of who has the pieces to have a winning, if not a championship season. We can separate the wheat from the chaff. Yet there are a multiplicity of variables which appear through a season’s long course that make pinpoint predictions so precarious.

This has been my thought process so back at the end of March, I noted the predictions of 24 baseball writers. I took the predictions of 18 writers on ESPN.com, 5 on CBSsportsline.com, and Murray Chass at the New York Times. Local writers trend to pick the local club. ESPN and SportsLine are more national in their orientation, and these are two sites to which I often look for my baseball news.

The pool of ESPN.com writers (in alphabetical order) were Jim Caple, Jerry Crasnick, Peter Gammons, Pedro Gomez, Eric Karabell, Bob Klapisch, Tim Kurkjian, Keith Law, Sean McAdam, Amy Nelson, Rob Neyer, Buster Olney, Steve Phillips, Phil Rogers, Enrique Rojas, Alan Schwartz, Jayson Stark, and John Shea.

Writers from CBS’ SportsLine.com included David Gonos, Eric Mack, Charlie McCarthy, Scott Miller, and Adriane Rosen.

Who did this panel of 19 professionals pick to win the divisions?

The consensus was that that Mets would win the NL East (14 out of 24); St Louis would win the NL Central (11 out of 24); the Los Angels Dodgers would win the NL West (19 out of 24); the New York Yankees would win the AL East (14 out of 24); the Detroit Tigers would win the AL Central (19 out of 24); the Los Angeles Angels would win the AL West (15 out of 24).

The panel picked one out of six actual winners, the Los Angeles Angels.

How did the writers back in March pick the winners for 2007?

I hate to say it but it looks like they picked the 2006 winners to repeat. In 2006, The Mets won the NL East, the Cardinals won the NL Central (and World Series), the Dodgers tied for the NL West crown; and the Yankees won the AL East; the Tigers won the AL Wild Card and made it to the World Series. Only the Angels were an original pick. They finished four behind Oakland last year.

The writers picked the winners like we are all warned in business school not to pick stocks based upon historical performance. It does matter how teams did last year but so much changes during an off-season.

The Phillies did win the NL East and received 7 of 24 votes; the Chicago Cubs did win the NL Central and had 4 of 24 votes; the Arizona Diamondbacks won the NL West and in March had 4 of 24 votes; the Boston Red Sox did win the AL East and were picked by 10 of 24 writers; and Cleveland won the AL Central and were picked to win by only one writer, ESPN’s Rob Neyer.

The best that any one writer in my survey did was pick four of the six division winners. Three of the 24 writers did this, ESPN’s Neyer, Buster Olney, and John Shea. Five of the 24 picked zero of the six; one of these five was ESPN’s Steve Phillips. The other was a writer whose prose I admire and enjoy, Murray Chass at the Times. He picked all of last year’s winners to repeat except for the Tigers who he said would win the AL Central.

As a reader of this entry, the question that I would be asking me is which teams I picked back in March to still be standing come October. I did not pick any.

I am not fond of specific picks for winners. Sports seasons are long affairs. There are primary variables which lead to winning seasons including the presence of All-Stars on a team, team-chemistry, and good managers. Ok, these are variables which we can all see and which general managers can affect, payrolls and scouting departments being equal.

But there are intangibles which are unseen. It was no surprise that the Yankees’ Johnny Damon would eventually break down as a player but it happened this year. It could have happened next year or last year. Pat Burrell had a brilliant second-half for Philadelphia which was not unreasonable given his health and skills but not exactly predictable. Chris B. Young emerged as a star for the Diamondbacks; one could have seen his skills but that he would blossom precisely this year was only a reasonable guess.

Then there are injuries. The Phillies lost All-Star second-baseman Chase Utley for a month mid-summer. One cannot predict such things. The Cardinals were struck by the early-season death of pitcher Josh Hancock which certainly contributed to a few of their losses in the days after the tragedy.

These are normal elements of a season for which a team cannot entirely plan and yet which the inability to address can mean the difference between a respectable second-place finish and a trip to the playoffs.

Before the season, I like to read discussions of a team’s strengths and weaknesses. I want to know what has to go right for the team to win and what variables will cripple a squad. There are stories for which we need the entire season to play out. This is the very drama of the season.

Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, and Roger Clemens won a combined 32 games for the Yankees this year. This is not terrible but from this trio, the Yankees were counting on more. Even three more would have placed them ahead of the Red Sox at the top of the division.

It is easy to sit at my computer and critique these 24 writers and by extension, the entire business of predicting winners. It is especially easy (and fun) when I have not made myself vulnerable to the same deconstruction.

I do want us to be conscious of how we perceive a season from when it begins, being aware that like the stock-market, we have a strong tendency to judge the future on the past, and overlook the potential for so many unforeseen storylines to emerge.

2007-10-09T00:07:00.001-04:00

O Howard Rubenstein, where art thou? On Joe Torre and George Steinbrenner

New York Yankees manager Joe Torre awoke Sunday morning to find that the The Times-Herald Record of New Jersey had quoted Yankees owner George Steinbrenner as saying, “I don't think we'd take him back if we don't win this series.”

The Yankees trailed Cleveland two games to zero in the best of five-game Division Championship Series. The Yankees were to host Cleveland Sunday night at home at Yankee Stadium and the message seemed to be clear: Win three straight games and the Series to save your job!

I am not so sure that the message was so clear and I have doubts that the Yankees will in fact follow through and dismiss Torre as manager.

I am thinking about the context in which Steinbrenner made these comments and how messages from his have made their way to the media in recent years.

These comments about Torre’s job-status were made directly by Steinbrenner to The Record. This in itself is peculiar in so far as Steinbrenner rarely makes Yankees-comments directly to the press anymore, let alone ones that would carry as much gravitas as Torre’s job status.

It is rare these days that any word comes out of Steinbrenner’s office that is nnot publicized by public-relations guru and official Steinbrenner-spokesperson Howard Rubenstein. The New Yorker published a profile of Rubenstein called, “The Fixer” on February 12 of this year. Any fan of baseball who has followed the Yankees in the Steinbrenner-era needs to read this piece to appreciate the communications coming from Yankees upper management.

Rubenstein himself has a profile on his own website by Michael Geffner in the Times-Herald Record on May 20, 2007. Geffner asks Rubenstein about how he works with Steinbrenner. Rubenstein describes the process as, “"If a p.r. issue of any sort comes up, we'll talk as a little group — George, myself, (Yankee president) Randy Levine, (team COO and General Counsel) Lonn Trost and sometimes (GM) Brian Cashman. After that, I'll chat privately with George and ask him what he wants to say. Then I'll write something and read it to him over the phone or I'll e-mail or fax it to him. Then he’ll edit it – he considers himself a very good editor.”

An ultimatum from Steinbrenner, issued to the field manager less than 24-hours prior to a decisive game, seems to me to fall under Rubenstein’s notion of, “a p.r. issue of any sort.”

I would put money that the reporter for The Record made it to Steinbrenner, or vice-versa, before Rubenstein could run interference, or at least, filter the quote for mass-publication.

With the shadow of Steinbrenner’s ultimatum towering over Torre and his loyal players on Sunday night, the Yankees beat Cleveland 8 to 4 to stave off elimination. It was almost fitting that they did so despite Steinbrenner’s $18-million-for-the year-Roger Clemens-rental going only 2 1/3-innings, before leaving with a 3 to 1 deficit and strained hamstring.

Torre was safe to manage another day in the Yankees’ dugout.

Monday night, the Yankees were unable to take a second win and fell to starting pitcher Paul Byrd and Cleveland 6 to 3. After the game, Torre sounded like a deposed elder reflecting upon a previous life as Ronald Blum quoted him in the Associated Press, "This has been a great 12 years. Whatever the hell happens from here on out, I'll look back on these 12 years with great, great pleasure."

The ostensible reason for Torre’s would-be dismissal would be the failure of his teams to make the World Series, let alone win the championship, since 2001.

Six seasons without a World Series appearance is a long time when the Yankees have the highest payroll in baseball. Their 2007 payroll was $195 million. This was over $50 million higher than the second-highest payroll, the Boston Red Sox’ $143 million. They were beaten by a Cleveland team with a payroll of $61 million, more than 1/3 the size of their own. For paying this kind of premium, I would also expect my players to deliver me a World Championship.

Steinbrenner’s comments to on Saturday night reminded us of the old-Steinbrenner, vintage 1980s. This was the Steinbrenner about whom we have forgotten as the man fades from public view in increasingly poor health, hidden behind Rubenstein’s statements and Yankees management. This was the shoot-from-the-hip Steinbrenner who made 20 – yes, 20! – managerial changes between 1974 and 1992 and went through an even greater number of pitching coaches.

That Torre’s 2007 Yankees won even 94 games is impressive and worthy of praise. Yes, he had Alex Rodriquez and his 54 homeruns and 156 RBIs. Derek Jeter hit .314 and catcher Jorge Posada had a career year hitting .338 with 20 homeruns.

But the pitching? Torre would have had killer top-three starters for 1997 with Roger Clemens, Andy Petite, and Mike Mussina. But in 2007, Pettitte is 35-years old, Mussina is 38, and Clemens is 44. Pettitte had the best year of the three winning 15 games with a 4.05 ERA. I love seeing Pettitte back in pinstripes but he is not the late-1990s workhorse that he once was. Mussina pitched so poorly that the Yanks removed him from the rotation late in the season. Clemens went 6 and 6 in 17 starts which works out to $3 million per-victory.

The Yankees used 15 different starting pitchers this season. The Yankees signed former Japanese-league star Kei Igawa in the offseason after losing the Daisuke Matsuzaka sweepstakes to the rival Red Sox. Igawa started 12 games, had an era of 6.25 and spent part of the season pitching for AAA Scranton-Wilkes Barre. Phil Hughes showed promise but at age 21, was good only 5 wins and a 4.46 ERA. Perhaps current Yankees pitching coach Ron Guidry could have turned back his own clock to 1978 and pitched a few innings for the club. At age 57, Guidry is closer in age to Clemens than Clemens is to Hughes.

The Sporting News’ Gerry Fraley suggests today that this offseason may be a natural turning-over point for the franchise. Clemens will not return next year. Posada and closer-supreme Mariano Rivera are free-agents. Posada is 36 and Rivera is 38. Rodriguez could walk and the Yankees could apply this money to free-agent starting pitching, a new catcher, and make Joba Chamberlain the new closer.

Maybe they should and maybe they should not. I am not sure Posada is done and even playing a fewer games, he is a team leader. Rivera at age 39 will still be a superior closer than most of the league’s relievers at age 29. And, come on, has the word “spending-budget” ever had meaning for the organization?

Current Yankees bench coach Don Mattingly, and former coach and catcher Joe Girardi have been discussed as Torre-successors. Both would make fine managers of the Yankees. Or I should write, “will” make fine managers, because at age 67, Torre will not manage forever.

I am just not convinced that this is the end of Torre’s managerial career with the Yankees. My money is that Rubenstein issues a statement allowing Steinbrenner to save face, and allowing Torre to keep his job.

2007-10-02T08:39:00.000-04:00

Mets who???? Ain't life grand at least for the day

This Phillies team is competing for the championship. They competed against the other 15 teams in the National League to reach the play-offs. Here they are in the play-offs and will have to best the seven other post-season qualifiers to win the World Series.

We measure and celebrate great teams not only within the season competition but against itself. That is, we ask how this Phillies team matches up against the other great teams. The Phillies teams with the best season record, the 1977 and 1978 teams, did not make the World Series. The one winner has been the 1980 Phillies who were great but did not have an exception one-loss record.

As if the competition of the 29 other 2007 Major League Baseball teams was not sufficient competition, nor even the historical legacies of the Phillies five previous pennant winners of 1915, 1950, 1980, 1983, and 1993 – the Phillies are also playing now for the hearts of the city of Philadelphia.

The Phillies are playing against the National Football League’s Eagles, the National Basketball Association’s 76ers, and the National Hockey League’s Flyers. Of America’s cities with teams in all four professional major leagues, Philadelphia has now gone the longest without a championship. The 76ers were last when they won the NBA championship in June 1983.

The city is championship starved. This hunger is a collective hunger that cuts across the loyalties of the particular organization or club.

The Eagles have had the inside track since 2001 on bringing a championship parade to South Broad Street. The Eagles went to four straight National Football Conference championship games. In three of the four they fell flat; in 2004, they waited until the Super Bowl to lay-down.

In the absence of Phillies, Sixers, and Flyers success in the past ten years, the Eagles have become Philadelphia’s team. This has in part been due to the on-field success as well as to the brilliant marketing by the team since Jeffrey Lurie purchased the franchise in 1994.

Lurie rebranded the team from logos to uniforms with midnight green, picking a distinct color used only by the Eagles in pro-sports. He banned the use of the traditional kelly-green and under his tenure, the Eagles created the “One” marketing campaign, linking the city itself with a team philosophy placing the entire organization above one individual player.

But I am not so sure that the Eagles have always been so clearly Philadelphia’s team as we might think today in the wake of the Eagles’ success. There were many lean years between 1961 and 1977, and then again in the 1980s. The Eagles played home games in the 1980s that were blacked-out on local television because the team had not sold out Veterans Stadium (which held slightly fewer fans than the current stadium, Lincoln Financial Field).

But in a sense, the Eagles have been playing a dangerous marketing games. The Eagles have come so close for so long that we look for confirmation that something is changing inside the beast – registering that this path isn't progressing.

The Eagles have looked over-matched in three of their four games so far this year and Coach Andy Reid says the same things he says after other losses. Where is the soul of the Eagles? Joe Banner and Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb are clearly talented but where is theexcitement? Yawn!

The Eagles lack fire which may be one reason they are now 1 and 3. They are not playing with any emotional intelligence. The Phillies play hard. I like the bragger of the offense even the pitchers finished with the third worst Earned Run Average in the National League.

The Phillies lost two starting pitchers to season ending injuries, lost another to the bullpen, watched Adam Eaton finish with the worst ERA of all starting pitchers in the league, and even had their ace, Cole Hamels, on the disabled list for part of the season.

The Phillies used 28 different pitchers this season including 13 different starters. They saw nine different pitchers record saves.

The offense plays as if they decided that they do not care about the pitching staff. That is, their hit as if their job is to go out and hit as many homeruns and score as many runs as possible. If the pitchers hold it together, even better, but the offense is showing leadership.

The Phils’ offense this season has come to resemble beer-league softball. They go out and hit homeruns over the short fences, and steal bases because they know that the percentages are with them. They play like a bullying high school squad, sniffing their noses at other would be champions.

This offense dares the pitcher staff, taunting them - we're going to win whether you pitch well or not. But what is great is that this takes pressure off the pitchers who can settle down and concentrate on pitching.

I had feared that the Phillies would only be in the playoffs because of the wild card - that we would sneak in the back. The play-offs are great, sure, but I wanted the Phils to earn their way to a championship
by making the playoffs because they were one of the best in the entire league – not because they were in weak-division.

When I looked up on Sunday in the light of the win, the Phils had 89 wins, tied for second in the league behind the Diamondbacks' 90 wins. Sure, 90 is fewer than the 96 with which Boston and Cleveland finished in the American League – but 89 is up there at the top of the National League. The Phillies really did hold their own and here we are, we made it.

Everyone made a big deal back in spring training about Jimmy Rollins declaring the Phillies the team to beat. The sportswriters rolled their eyes at each other, fans laughed on both sides, and we noted it when the Phillies stumbled through April and May.

Now, headlines read that Rollins follows through on his promise. He took a chance back in spring training and put his reputation among his teammates on the line. And he backed it up with such a superb season. He .300, hit for extrabase hits and hit for homeruns. Plus, he ran again, stealing 40 bases. Rollins set a goal, pushed for it in himself and in his teammates, and led the way to first-place.

Right now, this is Rollins’ team. He was the one who took the microphone at CBP on Sunday after the victory. Rollins was the one to work the crowd at Dillworth Plaza yesterday at the Phils’ rally. Rollins was the one to say that the Phillies were the team to beat. Rollins is the phone who will contend for MVP ahead of Chase Utley and Ryan Howard.

My feeling in Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, was a feeling of waking up into a new view of a baseball team that was already in front of me.

All season, I was looking so close at Ryan Howard striking-out, Pat Burrell hitting .200 for three months, Freddy Garcia going-down with injury, the succession of closer Tom Gordan, and then his replacement, opening day starting pitcher Brett Myers, going down in injuries. Then the Phillies resigned Jose Mesa. Good gosh, this was a nightmare of a pitching staff.

I had not seen the sum of the wins adding up, slowly. I did not see the relief pitchers returning from the disabled list. I didn’t see JC Romero turning himself into a lights-out set-up man. I didn’t see Clay Condrey around his three melt-down appearances and Condrey’s sub-2.00 ERA in the balance of his innings.

Jayson Werth returned from an injury. Chase Utley returned and then Michael Bourn and then Shane Victorino. Everyone was back. September 17 the Phillies were back by seven.

The Mets began losing and the Phillies winning. A friend who is a Mets fan wrote me an email, “In the words of Moises Alou, ‘I hate baseball right now.’” The Mets were so harsh at the end. I was glad to see the Mets lose and I was unhappy to see them lose like they did. It was ungraceful as players stumbled and imploded and then disappeared. Billy Wagner gives the play-by-play through the press.

It was an ugly disintegration, as if they showed themselves with no fight even last week, when they still had a lead and fighting chance. Then last Thursday night came and the St Louis Cardinals were in New York for a make-up game and the Phillies hosted the Nationals. The Phillies won and the Mets lost and they were tied. By then, it was over. Yes, the Mets would be playing the Florida Marlins, the fifth-place team in the division, it did not matter, the Mets had given up. They quit right there in the homestretch. That is what makes their collapse so remarkable – they really could have stopped it had they shown a little fight.

The Phillies showed nothing but fight. Friday night, Cole Hamels struck out 13 batters and delivered the big-game performance which we always assumed he would master. Saturday afternoon’s loss to Nationals was maddening watching Carlos Ruiz and Ryan Howard make hurtful errors out of big-game jitters.

Saturday was the game the Phillies needed to win and when they were losing, they sat in nervous silence. The Fox sportscasters wandered at how quiet and sad they all looked. I was one of them Saturday afternoon, biting my shirt in fearful anticipation. The Phillies would blow it again!

The Mets’ game on Sunday afternoon began 25-minutes before the Phillies’. The Marlins came out punching against Mets starting-pitcher Tom Glavine and hit him for five runs before Glavine was pulled, recording only one out. Fans settled into watch the Phillies play when the score from Flushing came in, FLA 5 NYM 0. By the time the Phillies came to bat in the bottom of the first, it was FLA 7 NYM 0 after one inning.

Rollins started the game with a single. He stole second. He stole third. He came home on a sac-fly. The party was on. That was it. Philly fans started chearing.

It continued until 4:30 PM when Brett Myers closed out the Nationals in the ninth. At 4:36, my grandmother phoned me, crying, “I want you to know, I never gave up on them!”

Here they were, National League East Champions. We started thinking again about 1993 and Kruk and Dykstra and Daulton. We started thinking about 1980 and we thought about 1964 and 1950.

This team is different.

What is different about this team is that the color of its star players matches the colors of this city. Utley and Burrell are white and Rollins and Howard are black. “Big deal!” you say, “they are good for what they do on the field and the rest does not matter.”

Exactly! Which has not always been the perception of the Phillies in Philadelphia. The Phillies, of all the teams in 1947, were the hashest and meanest to Jackie Robinson when the Brooklyn Dodgers came to town. The Phillies were last team in the National League to integrate, in 1959. The star of the 1964 Phillies was Richie Allen who had popular (but racist) Frank Thomas pushed off the team. The top stars of the 1980 Phillies were white. The same was even more the case for the 1993 Phillies (Mariano Duncan does not count!).

Of course, the 1980 and 1993 were not deliberately composed in these ways. But given the legacy of racism in Philadelphia and around the Phillies in the critical years of 1945 to 1970, it is important that the Phillies have a star player of color – who is there because he is really good and not because he is black - as a tangible sign at the Phillies that times had thankfully changed. I think it was important for the soul of the city, as one small but important aspect of its long journey of racial conciliation.

The core of the current Phillies came up through the organization. Five of the eight starters came up through the organization, and a sixth, Shane Victorino, was rescued by the Phillies from the Dodgers’ minor leagues. Two of the play-off pitchers are farm-grown and a third, Jamie Moyer, is from the area.

The 2007 Phillies are looking more and more like the city itself, and playing hard dirty blue-collar baseball like we love here. They are doing so with all of the guts and courage that the Eagles are not showing. And they have a real shot, maybe not this year, but in the near future, of being champions and being the first since 1983 to parade down Broad Street.

2007-09-04T17:56:00.001-04:00

Paternity Leave

"Outfield Grass" is on a short-term hiatus due to the birth of Pardes Elul Garland. The column will resume soon.

2007-08-21T11:02:00.000-04:00

Paul Lukas is my hero; My obsession with sports uniforms

Paul Lukas writes a column, “Uni Watch”, for ESPN.com in which he tracks sports uniforms. He carries this study to his daily blog, www.uniwatchblog.com. He describes his blog as “a media project that deconstructs the finer points of sports uniforms in obsessive and excruciating detail.”

When St Louis Cardinals baseball players wear their pants high on their legs, revealing the navy-blue, red, and white stripes on the top of their socks, usually tucked into the bottom of their pants, Lukas documents it.

I tried for many months not to read his blog. I refused to read it. I had worked in sports uniforms for Mitchell & Ness Nostalgia Co. Personally, I was already obsessed with baseball uniforms. To read Paul’s column, let alone his blog, would have been way too self-indulgent for my own sense of self as a well-balanced mature adult.

This was a personal obsession, and such obsessions, I judged, were not to be encouraged, let alone indulged. It was sufficient that I had channeled it into my working life for four years at Mitchell & Ness.

It helped that my summer employer, PNC Bank, blocked access to the blog (along with personal email accounts) and other work-day distractions. But I am on vacation now and I am hooked. Paul Lukas is my hero – and not just because I am not alone – but he sees a part of the world that I also see, and he really appreciates it.

Paul writes in the “About” section of his blog that an inspiration for writing about uniforms was that “my girlfriend got tired of me pointing at the TV and saying, ‘Look, look at his socks!’ (or whatever) every time we watched a ballgame. ‘Y’know, Paul,’ she said, ‘maybe you need an outlet for this.’”

I can relate. Not having a television has spared my wife such moments - but I can relate.

Some friends think that my knowledge and obsession with game haberdashery is from working at Mitchell & Ness for three summers in high school and college, and then four years after completing my undergraduate degree.

The problem is that I came to Mitchell & Ness in 1993 already hooked.

I am and have been a Phillies fan since the first season I can remember, 1983. I started noticing things about their jerseys that no one else, I thought, seemed to care about, let alone see. I picked up on the fact that in 1987, they changed their jersey numbers in a very subtle way, thickening the letter from previous years.

Every March 17, St Patrick’s Day, the Phillies would wear green versions of their normal red and white game uniforms. The team had started doing this in the early 1980s and were one of the few teams to repeat the tradition every year. I would tape-record the 11 o’clock news just to see the 30 seconds of footage from the day’s game – which, it being March, was an early Spring Training game that was hardly news worthy – to see the uniforms.

I watched and video-taped the All-Star Game every July from 1987 to 1992. This was a chance to see all of the teams’ uniforms together. The best part was the player introductions before the game in which every player, and therefore every team, had a full shot at the camera.

I could go on, but you understand. I took baseball uniforms very seriously. Ok, I take uniforms seriously. I will use the present-tense.

To me, uniforms, and the colors and styles which a team chooses to wear, sets the tone and becomes the shorthand by which to identify a team.

An aspect I adore and respect in English soccer is that a team has a primary color which is their and for decades, has been their color. Manchester United is red; Newcastle is black and white; Aston Villa is maroon and light-blue. Chelsea is called the “Blues” because that is the color they wear.

The Arizona Diamondbacks came into the National League in 1998. It was the 1990s and they wore purple, teal, and black. I did not much care for their colors or their uniforms. And, these were their colors so I was disappointed when they changed their team color-scheme during this past off-season to a brick-red, black, khaki-tan combo. I like this color scheme better but it does them a disservice.

The Diamondbacks spent nine seasons plus the three years prior to their first-game building up a team identity. The power of a consistent color scheme and uniform is that one can glance at a television screen or photo and know the team.

A team’s colors, and by extension, its uniform, is like a country’s flag. It is a symbol. This symbol carries within it the collective memory of those who follow or support the body for which the flag represents.

The United States flag has a white star for each state; the horizontal stripes represent the original 13 colonies. The Phillies’ red pinstripes, and stylized word mark may not carry the history of the nation and its Enlightenment ideals of liberty.

The Phillies current uniform does connect one to all of the teams back to 1992, the first year they wore it. This includes the joys of the 1993 National League pennant winners and the collective sorrows of the 1997 last-place finishers.

The uniform is very similar to that worn by the club from 1950 to 1970. In this sense, it also connects us back to the 1950 National League pennant winners, the last years at old Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium in North Philadelphia, and even to the terrible 1961 team and the tragic 1964 team which lost the pennant at season’s end.

Like a nation, a team’s history is of both its joys and triumphs and lows and tragedies. It is the constant, carrying the collective energy of the team and the army of fans who give the team its life.

There is more to my obsession with sports uniforms. Paul refers to those who share his obsession as, “Those Who Get It”. They are to be distinguished from “people who Don’t Get It™.” [Yes, Paul uses the trademark symbol there].

There is The Simpson’s episode where Homer teaches a class on marriage at the local community college. Struggling to find what to say to the class, he picks up an orange, and peering into it lectures, “A marriage is like an orange…” Or, life is like riding a motorcycle or a pack of Camel cigarettes. Or, pick another metaphor or system and life is like this too.

Which is not to belittle Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence or Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker, or even The Simpson’s (God forbid!). The close study of a system reveals patterns and systems. It reveals the relationship between us as humans and how we make sense of ourselves and the world in society.

Sports is one system that today stands at a center of our society. (In my ‘umble opinion, there are virtues and vices to this, but that is for another piece of writing).

We pour a tremendous amount of energy, time, and money into it all. Uniforms are the ways by which we delineate who is us, and who is other, or not us. This begins to explain my obsession with them.

Paul, I am hooked on your blog. I tried to resist. But like the Borg, resistance is futile! Now, just promise me you won't go writing about Phillies baseball cards.

2007-08-14T14:04:00.000-04:00

Maybe the Philadelphia Phillies have some fight in them after all

I rode the subway home from Citizens Bank Park on Sunday night after the Philadelphia Phillies had defeated the Atlanta Braves. The Phillies played well in the game and took two of three from Atlanta in the series. The stadium was sold-out and the train was full heading back to Center City from the Sports Complex.

Pity the Braves fans on the car. One wore a white Atlanta jersey with number 10 on the back (for Braves third-baseman Chipper Jones) and Braves cap. He found himself next to an exuberant Phils fan who mocked the Braves and celebrated the Phillies’ assent in the National League, which he promised would land the team in the playoffs come October, and send the Braves home early.

After Sunday’s win over Atlanta, and tonight’s win over the Nationals in Washington, Phillies fans have reason to be excited with one and a half months left in the 2007 season. The two games highlight sources of optimism.

The return of pitchers Tom Gordon and Brett Myers to the bullpen from the disabled list has stabilized both the starting and the relief pitching.

On Sunday night, Phillies starting pitcher Jamie Moyer went into the seventh inning. He gave up two quick runs in the first. He settled down and threw 83 mile-per-hour fastballs and 70 mph changeups past the Braves All-Star lineup. I sat with a good friend behind the Phillies dugout. We played high-school baseball together and faced pitchers in southeast Pennsylvania’s Tri-County League who threw harder than Moyer was throwing.

Moyer had a four to two lead entering the seventh. He ran into trouble when Brian McCann opened with a single. Martin Prado followed with a no-outs double to cut the lead to 4 to 3. A sac-fly moved Prado to third.

There we were, one out in the seventh, the tying run 90-feet away, with the top of the Braves order coming up. Four of the Braves first five hitters are hitting over .300 for the season. The exception is Mark Teixeira who in his young career has averaged over 30 homeruns and 100 RBIs per-year.

This is usually the part in our program where I begin to think about how great the Phillies might be next year. Instead the rejuvenated bullpen saved the game.

Phillies manager Charlie Manuel came out, pulled Moyer, and called for Antonio Alfonseca to face the Braves numbers one and two hitters. Alfonseca was signed to be the Phillies set-up man but was pressed to be the closer after both Gordon and his replacement, Myers, were injured.

I am fascinated by Alfonseca.

The man has six fingers on each hand (and foot). This led The Onion to report on October 6, 2005, “Antonio Alfonseca Once Again Leads Major-League Relievers In Fingers.” (See http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41417.)

More so, the man has a body the shape of the Phillie Phanatic. Baseball-reference.com lists him as standing 6’5”. He stands tall even next to other ballplayers, few of whom are what we consider short. He has broad shoulders and a normal chest. It is the man’s belly which juts out like a thick couch throw-pillow, pressing squarely against his jersey. Like the Phanatic, Alfonseca’s belly continues down below his waist into his hips, and then juts back in above his knees. It has to be fake - it has to be! But there he is throwing 90 mph fastballs.

Performing the role for which he was originally signed, Alfonseca struck out both Yunel Escobar and Matt Diaz. Brett Myers might have recorded the official save for the game, but Alfonseca did it right there. Upon nailing Diaz for the third-out, Alfonseca pumped his fist and twirled his body off the mound in celebration. The Inquirer called it a "dance" in yesterday's paper. After he bailed out the team with these two outs, he could have done anything. The fans went nuts.

Phillies relievers worked the rest of the game like clockwork. JC Romero secured the first two outs of the eighth. Tom Gordon, now the set-up man, retired the third. Brett Myers was perfect in the ninth to close the win.

Tonight, Kyle Lohse pitched into the seventh inning for the Phillies. He gave up two runs. Alfonseca entered for the third out. Gordon pitched a scoreless eighth and Myers struck-out the side in the ninth for the save. Again.

Phillies beat-writer Todd Zolecki wrote of the bullpen’s improvement today in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since July 17, the Phillies’ bullpen has an ERA of 2.30, the fourth lowest in the major leagues in this period.

Even Jose Mesa has re-emerged for the Phillies as a strength in the bullpen. Mesa returned to Philadelphia this summer after posting an ERA of over 12.00 for the Detroit Tigers. I was at Mesa’s first-game back in June when the Phillies hosted the Tigers at Citizens Bank Park. The Phils were losing bad and we booed Mesa. But he has done good and has a 2.52 ERA for the Phils this season.

The strong bullpen is a plus in itself.

It also takes pressure off the starting pitchers. Manuel need not leave tiring pitchers in the game in the seventh or eighth innings for fear of a bullpen, that was until recently, comprised of too many pitchers who should have still been at AAA Ottawa if not for the injuries.

Moyer, Lohse, and Kyle Kendrick are all good pitchers and they are not aces like Cole Hamels. These three can give a solid six or seven innings. This is great when there is a strong bullpen to back them up which is what the Phils now have.

The Phillies hitting is fine. All-Star second-baseman Chase Utley is on the disabled list along with young outfielders Shane Victorino and Michael Bourn. The Phillies miss them and they are not struggling at the plate.

What I really liked seeing on Sunday night was the Phillies’ aggressive-play.

In the bottom of the first, down two to zero, the Phillies had the bases loaded with two outs and Jayson Werth at-bat. Werth drove a single into right-field which scored Jimmy Rollins from third easily. Phillies third-base coach Steve Smith sent Pat Burrell home. The throw from Braves right-fielder Jeff Francouer was a strike to catcher Brian McCann. It was not close, Burrell was out, and the inning was over.

In the fourth inning, Phillies third-baseman Abraham Nunez came to bat with one out and runners on first and second. Pitcher Jamie Moyer, a career .147 hitter with a .197 on-base-percentage, was due up. Nunez singled to right.

What would you do? Would you send Werth, who has decent speed, home to score and try and tie the game? Do you hold Werth at third to bring up Moyer with the bases loaded and a potential double-play? Smith sent Werth and again Francouer hit McCann with a perfect strike. Werth was gone for out number two.

Fans sitting around me cursed Smith for seemingly throwing away not only two outs, but two runners who would have been at third-base.

I disagree. It took two strong and accurate throws from Francouer to nail Burrell and Werth. Had the throws been a couple feet off, Burrell scores easily and Werth likely makes it. They had to be dead on target and Francouer did it. In a close game like that, I like Smith taking those chances and forcing the Braves to make the play.

Smith’s gamble paid off in the seventh.

Jimmy Rollins tripled to lead off the inning. Iguchi grounded to third which kept Rollins at the bag. The next batter, Burrell, hit a fly ball to right. Francouer caught it and Smith sent Rollins. Francouer gunned the ball way over McCann’s head and Rollins scored to give the Phils an extra-run to cushion the lead. The Phils forced the Braves to make a mistake, they did, and made the Phillies’ pitcher’s job one run easier.

This is the way a good team wins.

There may not be a lot of baseball left for my fantasy baseball team, mired in ninth place in a 16-team league, but there sure is for the Phillies. The New York Mets still lead the National League East, three games ahead of Philadelphia. The San Diego Padres are ahead of the Phils in the National League Wildcard race. But the Phillies are right there.

I have been following the English Premiership football league off and on for the past ten years. I had never really followed one team, not knowing enough about individual players or organisations to root for one.

My good friend Gene is a diehard Tottenham fan. His brother played for Tottenham and he grew up in London. He was excited for the season which opened this past weekend. Gene assured me that Tottenham was ready to challenge the big four, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal, for the top of the league.

I picked Tottenham. I signed up for news feeds for the club and today followed the action for Tottenham’s match against Everton on Yahoo! Sports UK. Tottenham lost 3 to 1 - which is not as close in English football as it is in say, major league baseball.

If the Phillies keep playing like they have been in July and August, I may not need to find myself a winner across the Atlantic in north London.

The Mets won the division last year. The Braves had won the division every year since realignment in 1995. I was with that Braves fan on the subway on Sunday night, the Phillies have not won anything yet. But these days, they sure are playing like winners.

2007-08-07T17:02:00.001-04:00

Jason Giambi leads Commissioner Selig through the darkness of Barry Bonds

Neifi Perez, reserve infielder for the Detroit Tigers, was suspended on Friday for 80 games for testing positive for a banned substance by Major League Baseball. The positive test and suspension came as Perez was serving a 25-game suspension for the same violation.

If Perez’s legacy was in question before Friday, it most certainly is open for debate after the second violation. He had one homerun this season for the Tigers and had two last year for the Chicago Cubs. He has 64 career homeruns going back to his rookie year in 1996, long before MLB began testing for controlled substances in 2002. Maybe we should put an asterisk next to his 64 in the Baseball Encyclopedia as well as next to his .267 career batting-average.

If there is such a feeling within Major League Baseball or among its fans to censure Perez, it is certainly no louder than a whisper. News of Perez’s latest positive-test registered and died on the news-wires. It is now a single line on Perez’s ESPN.com player profile. That is the sound of baseball crickets, chirping in the silence of indifference.

Meanwhile, in San Diego this past weekend, there was plenty of talk of asterisks and homeruns where the San Francisco Giants were playing the Padres. On Saturday, August 4, Bonds hit homerun number 755 to tie Hank Aaron for Major League Baseball’s career homerun record. San Diego fans met Bonds with more asterisk signs and boos.

We do not care about Neifi Perez; we care about Bonds who, according to Bonds himself, is misunderstood; to Giants fans, a hero; to non-Giants baseball fans, a cheater; and to this writer, a piece in a much larger puzzle.

Reporting for the Associated Press on August 7, Tim Dahlberg wrote that fans at Petco Park in San Diego “booed Bonds when he returned to left field and booed him every time he came up to bat. It was mildly amusing afterward when Bonds thanked San Diego fans for being so good to him. Maybe he missed the giant asterisk hung on a high-rise condo balcony overlooking right field or maybe he was just happy no one threw a fake syringe at him like last year.”

When we look at a player like Perez, or Jason Grimsley, or now even Jason Giambi all of whom have either tested positive for or admitted to using performance enhancing drugs, we do not shout for the expungment of career records or statistics. Which is strange if you think about how baseball games play. A critical hit or homerun by a Neifi Perez can change a game as significantly as a hit by a perennial All-Star like Bonds. The same is true for a pitcher.

As I wrote about last week, we have recreated the current-player Barry Bonds as a totem of our juiced up ambivalence about the proliferation of steroids in the game for so long. Perhaps we might also consider the responsibility of Commissioner Bud Selig in this steroids mess. Granted, it is hard to boo a pro-sports commissioner when he never steps up to bat or jogs out to the field. More so, we do not vote for commissioner so there is no public referendum.

Kate Zernike wrote in the New York Times how president George W. Bush has been likening himself to former president Harry Truman. Trumas was “an unpopular president when he left office, but one applauded by history.” On the 2008 Presidential campaign trail, while Republic candidates contort themselves to be Reaganesque, Democratic hopefuls also look to Truman.

If only Commissioner Selig would look as well to the former president. Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office which read, “The Buck Stops Here”.

Commissioner Selig would have himself be a distant observer in the Bonds homerun record chase, casting a disapproving eye on the whole spectacle. This was indeed his body language in San Diego on Saturday night. As Bonds circled the bases, Selig stood in his place with his arms folded across his chest, his face locked in a frown.

He issued the following statement of, well, congratulations but very shadowed congratulations, after number 755,

"Congratulations to Barry Bonds as he ties Major League Baseball's home run record. No matter what anybody thinks of the controversy surrounding this event, Mr. Bonds' achievement is noteworthy and remarkable.

"As I said previously, out of respect for the tradition of the game, the magnitude of the record and the fact that all citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty, either I or a representative of my office will attend the next few games and make every attempt to observe the breaking of the all-time home run record."

Uh, hello? “No matter what anybody thinks”?! “All citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty”?! Commissioner Selig might have just stated, “We all know that Bonds did steroids, I don’t like this one bit, but he is breaking the record and there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Bonds has not helped Selig out either, continuing to deny having used steroids.

One steroids-era slugger who has come clean is the New York Yankees’ first baseman Jason Giambi. Playing for the Oakland Athletics, Giambi hit 33 homeruns in 1999, 43 in 2000, and 38 in 2001. Giambi became a free-agent at the end of 2001 season. He signed with the Yankees and increased his annual salary from $4.1 million in 2001 to $10.4 in 2002 (according to www.baseball-reference.com). It pays to use the ‘roids.

In May, Giambi was quoted by USA Today saying, “I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up — players, ownership, everybody — and said, ‘We made a mistake.’”

Finally, a ballplayer had the courage to put words to the truth that we all knew. It was gravy that he took some degree of responsibility.

Commissioner Selig responded to Giambi’s truth-telling by threatening to suspend Giambi unless Giambi spoke to former-Senator George Mitchell’s Commissioner-sponsored steroids investigation.

Basically, Giambi tells the truth and is threatened with suspension. Bonds continues to deny and nothing happens. The message that the Commissioner sends to other players who used or are using steroids is very clear. Commissioner Selig is telling these players not to speak about their steroid use. This is the message we learn from Bonds and Giambi.

As Commissioner Selig glares at Bonds and offers him the most uncongratulatory of congratulations messages, and threatens Giambi with suspension, he remains one individual who himself has not come clean with the public.

Maybe Commissioner Selig does not read Sports Illustrated. He might not although the very first issue of the magazine featured Milwaukee Braves third-baseman Eddie Mathews playing at County Stadium in the Commissioner’s hometown. SI out Lyle Alzado on its cover on July 8, 1991 with the headline, “I Lied”. Alzado detailed his use of steroids and his own cover-up. This was 1991. On April 14, 1997, the magazine’s cover story was on the proliferation of steroids in sports and how athletes were going undetected.

I am picking on Commissioner Selig because he is the head of the organization, the CEO of Major League Baseball. It is his job to be proactive in pursuing questions like the use of performance enhancing drugs. He is a busy man and he can also surround himself with individuals who will call such things to his attention.

Selig has been commissioner of Major League Baseball since 1992. From 1992 to 1998, he held the title of “Acting Commissioner” and has been “Commissioner Selig” since 1998.

A leader at the top of an organization sets the tone and priorities for a major business like a professional sports league. I am waiting for Commissioner Selig to say, “The buck stops here!” and to take responsibility onto his own shoulders about his own failure to pursue

Steroids grew in baseball on Commissioner Selig’s watch. Let the Commissioner follow Giambi’s lead and say, “I made a mistake.”

2007-07-31T00:26:00.000-04:00

Barry Bonds Really is Our Homerun Champion

As I write this, San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds has 754 career homeruns. He stands one homerun behind all-time leader Hank Aaron who hit 755. Be it in a matter of hours, games, or days, Bonds will soon break Aaron’s record and be the career leader.

Janie McCauley, writing about Bonds for the Associated Press yesterday in the article “Big day brewing in baseball: Bonds, A-Rod and Glavine could go for milestones all at once”, put it succinctly, “The 43-year-old slugger… is booed and derided on the road, partly because of steroid suspicions surrounding his quest.”

Aaron himself spoke as loudly about Bonds’ pursuit of the milestone. Michael Melia reported that Aaron told the AP yesterday, “I am making a comment by not making a comment.” Aaron was offering neither encouragement nor congratulations to Bonds.

After Bonds hit number 752 and 753 in Chicago against the Cubs on July 19, Commissioner Bud Selig relented and decided that in fact he would go and see Bonds play in person and perhaps be present for the record tying homerun. From Chicago, the Giants traveled to Milwaukee for games on July 20 and 21. Selig was the long-time owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and maintains a personal residence and office in the city. It would have been hard for Selig to have been unavailable those nights.

Selig was spared from attending the Giants’ games this weekend in San Francisco against the Marlins. The Baseball Hall of Fame induction weekend took place in Cooperstown, New York. One of the duties of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball is to attend such festivities. (What, you thought Commissioner’s only pursued gambling officials and dog-fighting superstars? They do fun things, too!)

Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were inducted into the Hall this weekend but baseball fans could not even escape the shadow of steroids in idyllic Cooperstown. Ripken and Gwynn retired at the end of the 2001 season. So did Mark McGuire who would have certainly been standing on the stage with Ripken and Gwynn on Sunday afternoon had he not cast himself under the same dark shadow in which Bonds now plays.

The Giants begin a three-game series this evening in Los Angeles against the rival Dodgers. The fans are expected to boo Bonds relentlessly. There is a picture from the July 19 game in Chicago. As Bonds rounds the bases during of the homeruns, one can clearly see a fan in the stands holding up a white poster-board with an asterisk on it.

Major League Baseball did not test for steroids until 2002. Under the terms of this testing program, a positive test resulted in counseling and the player’s identity was kept confidential. The MLB steroids test as we know it today began only with the 2005 season.

Barry Bonds hit his season-record 73 homeruns in 2001. Bonds hit well over 500 homeruns before MLB began testing. To date, Bonds has never tested positive – at least to public knowledge – for steroids. Thus, every article about Bonds and about his pursuit of the homerun record uses words such as “suspicious” and “alleged”. There is no smoking gun as Major League Baseball has defined the smoking gun. This is the reason that Selig has to show for Bonds because Selig as official MLB adjudicator does not have his conviction.

I could type a couple thousand words recapping the thousand points of evidence of Bonds’ use. Bonds has changed his story about his not using; his personal trainer remains in prison for refusal to testify to the grand jury currently investigating Bonds; his change in physical characteristics. One can go on.

For the sake of this piece of writing, let us pretend that Bonds really did use steroids. Let us pretend that that we do not need to use the word “supposedly” or any other clarifying words to say what we want to say without saying so. Bonds used steroids and will break the record.

My buddy Jake was over for dinner on Friday night and declared that sports was dead. It was not nearly as funny as last week, when having just seen Transformers, he kept booming ala-Optimus Prime, “When the time comes, put the cube in the chest!”.

It was a rough week for professional sports and I suppose it was all an example of just how professional (which means, “for money”), professional sports are.

Michael Vick, quarterback for the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons entered a plea of not guilty in the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia on Thursday. Public opinion has turned on him so much that Reebok pulled his Falcons jerseys from retail stores and the Upper Deck sports-card company removed his football cards from card sets. This was the same week that a National Basketball Association referee was accused of betting on games for which he officiated. This was the same week that the Tour de France became a Tour de Farce as top readers were led away in handcuffs by the French police.

Bonds was one more reason to be gloomy about sports. Former United States Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren is quoted as having said, “I always turn to the sports page first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures.” Last week, the ongoing devastation in Iraq was beginning to look a bit more promising than the sports section.

Bonds and his pursuit of Aaron’s record remains unpopular. PollingReport.com, to which I usually turn for updates on presidential races, has a section cataloging public opinion surveys regarding Bonds. You can explore it at http://www.pollingreport.com/baseball.htm.

For all the public displeasure with Bonds, I have a hard time vilifying him, let alone rooting against Bonds. The new career homerun record will belong not only to Bonds and testify to his steroid use, it will be about us and how much we wanted our baseball heroes to use steroids. This record is as much for us as it is for Bonds.

On a certain level, we wanted ballplayers using steroids. We did not want to talk about it and we did not want to call it what it was when so many individual voices called to us of its elephant presence in the middle of the living-room ballpark.

The Baltimore Orioles’ Brady Anderson appeared with ripped muscles in 1996 and hit 50 homeruns that year. This was at age 32. He had broken 20 in one season only once in his first eight seasons in the major leagues. It must have been the juiced baseballs or the short fences in the new ballparks.

Sammy Sosa went from a high of 40 homeruns a season in 1996 to 66 in 1998. Sosa made $5.5 million in 1997 and saw his annual salary jump to $11 million in 2000, according to baseball-reference.com. In January 1999, Sosa was a guest of the President and First-Lady at the Capital for the State of the Union. It pays to hit the homeruns.

There are more examples of how individual players benefited from using steroids and how we as baseball fans loved the explosion of offense. We showed our approval and joy with the new state of the game in how we tuned into McGuire’s and Sosa’s 1998 pursuit of Roger Maris’ single-season homerun record. We showed our approval in joy in the merchandise we bought. Todd McFarlane purchased McGwire’s 1998 homerun ball number 70 for almost $3 million.

Major League Baseball showed its own approval for the steroid use by refusing to test or push for a test with the MLB Players Association. MLB showered praise on Sosa and on McGwire. It sold tickets and television contracts and counted the dollars pouring in. MLB waited until 2005 to start testing with juicy consequences.

We loved what steroids was doing for baseball. We loved the offense that steroids brought us that revived interest in the game after it was devastated by the 1994 players’ strike. We chose not to ask too many questions or press too hard.

Barry Bonds thrived in an environment that the Commissioner’s office condoned in its silence and which we the fans encouraged in our spending. Bonds looked around and saw the opportunity – there was no test and he would not be caught – and he used steroids and put on tremendous displays of offense for our pleasure.

The use of steroids in pro sports is so complicated. We do not know precisely how long they have been used in baseball. We do not know who used how much and when. Even today, current tests cannot detect all kinds of steroids so players may still be using. We know some are as they continue to fail tests (see Neifi Perez). For all of Commissioner Selig’s assertions, we do not know for sure.

Bonds is now at the center of the baseball world, at a crossroads in our reckoning with steroids in the game, and on the verge of the record. I believe we boo Barry Bonds because he has come to embody all of our baseball-world ambivalence and anger around the proliferation of steroids in the game. We cannot return to 1989 or 1998 or 2001 to stop the game and be that child on the parade route laughing at the king for not wearing any clothes. Even if we could, we might have been enjoying the balls flying over the fences too much to even notice or be that child.

It is not so much that Barry Bonds deserves the career homerun record but that we deserve Barry Bonds. He really is our homerun champion.

2007-07-24T21:46:00.001-04:00

Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn, and the Creation of Brand Equity

Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this coming Sunday. They were elected in January by the Baseball Writers Association of America in each their first year of eligibility.

They are both well deserving inductees who put up stellar numbers, Gwynn in 20 seasons and Ripken in 21. Gwynn finished his career with 3,141 hits, a .338 career average, and led the league in average in eight years. Ripken won two MVPs, hit 431 homeruns, and holds the record for consecutive games played.

They are connected by their mutual stardom through the late-1980s and 1990s, meeting regularly each summer in the All-Star Game. Gwynn went to 15 games and Ripken to 19. They are now linked by their shared induction in Sunday.

They are also connected as two players who played their entire career for one team. Cal Ripken is identified with the Baltimore Orioles and Gwynn with the San Diego Padres.

Bill Carle studied players who played their entire career for one team and published his findings in the article, “One-Team Players” in issue 35 of The Baseball Research Journal published by SABR.

Carle identified 63 players in the history of major league baseball who played for one team for a minimum of fifteen years. Wally Ritchie, who pitched his entire four-year major league career for the Philadelphia Phillies, does not count. Carle does include Gwynn and Ripken in the 63.

Let us dispel the idea that the advent of free-agency has brought the number of players who play for only one team plummeting. Gwynn and Ripken are two of six players who made their major league debut in the 1980s and played for one club for at least 15 seasons. Six is the same number of single-club players who made their debut in the 1930s. The most for one decade is 11 – in the 1960s.

A third of the six 1980s-players is Craig Biggio. Biggio announced today that he will retire at the end of this season. When he does, he will have played his entire 20-season career with the Houston Astros.

Carle concludes his article on the subject by opining that “a player playing his entire career with one club has always been a rarity… and should be appreciated for their loyalty to their clubs.”

I would respectfully disagree with Carle on the issue of player loyalty to clubs.

First, I cannot fault a man for choosing an alternative employer who offers him more money. A player plays out his contract and while he is healthy enough to play the game, I wish him all the power in the world to try and make as much money as he can for himself and his family.

Second, loyalty only makes sense if it is reciprocal. Mike Lieberthal played thirteen seasons with the Phillies through 2006. When his contract expired last year, the club made no effort to resign him. Not that the Phillies should have resigned him. But just as players can be fickle in choosing money over a single postal-address, teams can be equally shrewd in cutting its employees.

Third, I would argue that the terms of this discussion is not so much “loyalty” to clubs, or even the fans, but rather the creation of a player’s brand-equity as identified with a team. Ripken, Gwynn, and Biggio are all paradigms of the successful creation of such equity.

Ripken is identified with the Baltimore Orioles. Gwynn is identified with the San Diego Padres. Biggio is identified with the Astros. When each goes into the Hall of Fame, there will be no question about which ballcap they will wear on their plaque. They are each not just great ballplayers but they are city heroes.

This is especially important in their post-career lives and in the creation and trade of memory and nostalgia. They each have value as personalities in their communities and because they played for one team can be associated with ideas like “trust”, “loyalty”, their individual cities, “reliability”. (This “loyalty” is the result of the career and not necessary the motivation for staying with the club).

Barry Bonds has such equity in San Francisco playing for the Giants. Bonds came to the Giants after starting his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Bonds came to San Francisco in part because his father, Bobby Bonds, had played for seven seasons with the club and because his godfather, Willie Mays, played most of his own career with the organization. Today, Barry Bonds might be one of the most disliked current players but he is loved at home. Beyond his role as a baseball player, he has a role as city hero in San Francisco which he would not have elsewhere.

Each city has its own icons. In Philadelphia, these icons include William Penn, Ben Franklin, David Rittenhouse, and Frank Rizzo, as much as it includes its sports heroes, Wilt Chamberlain, Bobby Clarke, Julius Erving, Ron Jaworski, and Mike Schmidt.

Think about Pittsburgh with Andrew Carnegie, the Heinz family, August Wilson, and its own sports heroes, Roberto Clemente, Terry Bradshaw, Dan Marino, and Mario Lemieux.

I wonder what Alex Rodriguez’s baseball career might have been like had he spent it all in Seattle with the Mariners. He played his first seven major-league seasons with the Mariners. He left as a free-agent after the 2000 season and is now on his third-team.

When he hits his 500th career homerun in the next few games, he will be the youngest player to reach the mark. He has won two MVP awards and if he retired tomorrow at age 31, would still make the Hall of Fame. He is that good.

But for one of the best players of this generation, he is not exactly popular. He has an uneasy relationship with Derek Jeter. It is even unclear if the Yankees will bring him back in 2008. Even without his wife wearing obscene t-shirts to the ballpark, he does not bring much to the table beyond his bat. Yes – it is a ginormous bat. But the Yankees are struggling this season because of pitching and ARod is playing third.

Rodriguez could have owned Seattle from simply being so good in one place for so long.

I also wonder if Roberto Alomar will be elected into the Hall of Fame. He illustrates what not to wear in building such brand-equity.

Alomar has Hall of Fame numbers. He has 2724 career-hits in 17 seasons and a career .300 batting average. He won ten Gold Glove awards at second-base and went to twelve All-Star Games. By comparison, Ryne Sandberg finished his 16-year career with 2,386 career-hits and a .285 average. While Sandberg did have 282 career homeruns, Alomar had 210 and more career RBIs than Ryno.

The biggest difference between Alomar and Sandberg is that Sandberg was a one team player. Yes, Sandberg started his career with the Phillies and we see that “1981 PHI G 13 AB 6…” on his career stats entry. But Sandberg is not a Phillie just as Lou Brock is not a Chicago Cub and Trevor Hoffman is not a Florida Marlin.

Roberto Alomar played for seven teams in his 17 seasons. His longest stint came with the Toronto Blue Jays where he played for five years. I associate Alomar with Cleveland where he played from 1999 to 2001. I was living in Oberlin, Ohio then and he and Omar Vizquel anchored the middle-infield for those great teams.

Ripken and Gwynn have each leveraged this regional brand-equity in their post-playing careers. Ripken has established a base in Aberdeen, Maryland where he runs an operation that includes ownership of minor league baseball franchises, a youth baseball camp and academy, and a memorabilia company, Ironclad Authentics. Gwynn is the head coach of the San Diego State University baseball team and often sits in on television broadcasts of Padres games.

I am all in favor of ballplayers spending their career with one team because it is not just the team and fans who stand to benefit, but the players who give themselves a chance for increased future earnings when their playing career is done.

2007-07-17T17:35:00.001-04:00

Ordinal Numbering and the Pennant Races

I maintain my primary personal email address on Yahoo!. My email account is attached to my personal settings on the system so that when I visit Yahoo! Sports, a small box is set-aside with my baseball team's of choice - the Phillies - most recent scores as well as their record and standing in the division.

As I write this today, before the team plays the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Yahoo! tells me, "(46-46), 3rd NL East". The team has been in third place for most of the season which might not seem too bad. After all, third place is right behind second place which is one off from the top.

Pretty good, it would seem. But while the Phillies are the third-best team in the National League's Eastern Division, they are third out of five teams. There are now six divisions in Major League Baseball. Four of the six have five teams. One division has four teams and one has six.

Major League Baseball teams are divided into two leagues, the National and American Leagues, a remnant of the time when they were two separate business operations. The American League became a major league in 1901 and by 1905, the two leagues had worked out an arrangement to play a championship series at the end of each season. We call this series, the World Series.

Baseball was the last of the four major professional sports in the United States to stage post-season play-offs. Until 1969, the regular 154-game and then 162-game season served as a six-month playoff series in which every team in the league competed against the others. The team with the best record at season’s end was the league champion.

This system is most familiar to us today in European football leagues. For example, Manchester United football club won the English football Premiership. They 89 total points for the season in a system in which wins count for 3-points and ties for 1. They finished six points ahead of second place Chelsea. In baseball-speak, we might say that Chelsea finished two-games back.

Man U had the best record. The season is over. They are the champions.

Some will argue that European football (and basketball) is not a fair comparison. There are parallel club competitions which crown their own champions like the English Football Association Cup. Imagine if every professional baseball team from Single-A minor league teams all the way up to the Boston Red Sox competed in a season long knock-out tournament. Professional soccer in this country has its own version called the U.S. Open. That is the FA Cup.

The fact remains that there is one league champion in England which is the team with the best record over the course of the season.

The National League and the American League each expanded from ten to 12 franchises in 1969. They divided each league into two-divisions, an east and a west. Each division would crown a champion and then play each other for the league’s championship and right to play for the championship in the World Series.

The play-offs were expanded by Major League Baseball in 1995. The now 14-team leagues were divided into three divisions each. Each of the six division-champions would qualify for the play-offs as well as a wild-card team, the club with the best-record who did not win a division.

The justification behind the expansion of the number of divisions and qualifiers was that it would maintain the interest of fans late in the season when their team would have otherwise been eliminated from post-season qualification. Rather than have two pennant races or four divisional races, there would now be six divisional races and two playoff qualification races. Eight races! Woo hoo!

Rumor has it that there was a proposal to create 15-divisions of two teams each to enable all 30-teams to enjoy a pennant race. Well, there was not such a proposal but why should any team be made to feel excluded? They should not and we could take it to the logical conclusion like they did when I played little-league and give every player a trophy. If only we really did all win when everyone wins.

The consequence of the current Major League Baseball playoff scheme is such that there are zero pennant races and two wild-card races.

We as baseball fans remember with fondness, honor with pre-game ceremonies, and price with commemorative prints and autograph baseballs great moments and games that decided seasons.

There never would have been the Bobby Thompson’s homerun to win the pennant for the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 had it taken place today. Both teams would have been on their way to the playoffs. In fact, it is likely that many of the stars, Willie Mays, Thompson, Jackie Robinson, and Duke Snider might have been rested that day to rest for the playoffs.

Our current playoff system has actually created more late-season meaningless games for the best teams and more late-season meaningful games for the good-but-not-great teams. In this sense, we are rewarding mediocrity. Well, maybe not mediocrity, but certainly devaluing the games of the teams that proved themselves over the course of the season.

This led me to wonder what the current season would look like were we using pre-1969 standings. The standings here are for all games until the All-Star Game which was last Tuesday. These standings are five-days of games stale and not too-stale as the positions are relatively unchanged in the past-week.

These are the current regular standings in the format with which we are familiar.

I also adjusted for interleague play because it brings an unequal level of imbalance to each team’s schedule.

Teams already play unbalanced schedules. That means that each team currently plays about 19-games (give or take a couple depending on the number of teams in the division) per-season against each team in its division. This fosters divisional, and therefore geographic rivalries. For example, the Phillies play the New York Mets 19-times a year, the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees, the Chicago Cubs play the St Louis Cardinals, and the Los Angeles Dodgers play the San Francisco Giants and so-forth. Each team plays the balance of the teams in the same league six or seven times each. It is unbalanced but kept within the league.

Interleague play messes with this balance. Each team plays only five or six other-league teams per year. For example, the Phillies do not play all 14-American League teams each season; the Phillies play about five or six.

Major League Baseball schedules Interleague play in roughly three-year cycles so that each team will have played every one of the teams in the other league in a three-year period. This means that one year, a National League team might have to play the best of the American League in the Yankees and Red Sox six-times while another National League team might score the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers. This is unbalanced and creates unfair grounds of competition.

From each team’s All-Star break record, I subtracted their Interleague games. I then calculated the winning-percentage for each team and ordered them by this percentage. I used the formula for games-behind described in “How to compute standings in baseball” at http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/baseball.html.

What emerges is a picture of what a league-wide winner-take-all pennant race would look like. It is pretty exciting.

These are the standings.

In these standings, Cleveland is in first place in the American League, but by only a half game over Seattle and Boston. Detroit and the Los Angeles Angels are right there, three games behind Cleveland. This would be a very exciting pennant race! Five of the 14 teams are right in there - more than 1/3.

The National League would also have five teams right in the race. Milwaukee would be in first place, half a game up on the Los Angeles Dodgers and one game in front of the New York Mets. The San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves are close behind. My second-place Phillies? They would be 8 1/2 games back.

I would welcome a change in league schedules and standings to this form. They could eliminate the divisional and championship playoff series which would transform the last month of the regular season into playoff-level games. We would watch tight pennant race games in September rather than World Series games in November.

This would be exciting and would then guarantee that the World Series pitted the team with the best record in the National League against the team with the best record in the American League.

2007-07-10T00:02:00.000-04:00

**ON VACATION** It's the All-Star Break

2007-07-03T22:05:00.001-04:00

Phillies' 10,000 Losses Is Sooooo 1930s

The Philadelphia Phillies are on track to be the first professional franchise to lose 10,000 games. Of course you knew this because the impending milestone has reached beyond the corners of the sports-pages, and up from the depths of niche sports blogs into the mainstream American media.

On June 12, the New York Times ran a 1400-word story “Climbing Towards 10,000 Defeats” by Jere Longman. Last Saturday, June 23, National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer reported on the losses on “Weekend Edition – Saturday” when she interviewed Phillies fan and writer Joe Queenan. The Phillies will have completed the Triple Crown of my non-sports-news sources if the New Yorker also profiles the accomplishment.

The 2007 Phillies are playing .500 this season as injured pitcher after injured pitcher is moved to the Disabled List leaving a potent offense at the mercy of a minor league bullpen.

The frustration of games lost in the seventh and eighth innings this year is compounded by the expectations for this club for which pitching was seen to be a strength and which has come close to playoff-qualification. The Phillies finished five games back of the Wild Card in 2003, six in 2004, one in 2005, and three last year. The Phillies have been close enough for Septembers to be interesting.

On June 18, Philadelphia marked the topping off of the Comcast Center. The new skyscraper will be the tallest in the city. Affixed to the last steel-beam was the traditional mini pine tree. Alongside of the pine was a small statue, a replica of the William Penn statue that stands atop Philadelphia’s City Hall.

The Penn totem was hailed to assuage the “Curse of Billy Penn”. A long-standing gentleman’s agreement held that no building in Philadelphia was to stand taller than City Hall. Liberty Place exceeded the Penn statue in March 1987.

Since this violation, Philadelphia has now gone the longest of all American cities with professional franchises in the four major sports leagues – Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League - without a championship. The NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers were the last in 1983.

Coincidence? Disregard at your own risk, sports-fan!

Philadelphia urban legend has it that the championship drought is result of the 1987 construction. The performance of the city’s teams in the playoffs is a direct result of 1987 urban development.

The problem with this line of reasoning – aside from the physics questions about the statue’s means of influence – is that the Phillies, NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, and 76ers were not exactlty racking in the championships UCLA Basketball or Boston Celtics-style prior to the 1974 to 1983 glory-decade. Which begins to tell the story of the Phillies’ 10,000 loss march.

Both the article in the Times and the story on NPR, as well as Daniel McQuade’s cover-story on the issue in the June 27 issue of the Philadelphia Weekly note the recent championship drought and also the Phillies’ history of losing (not just losses).

McQuade reminds us that the Phillies suffered the most lopsided shutout in Major League Baseball history, losing 28 to 0 to Providence. Anyone remember that game? Of course not. Providence has not had a major league team since prior to 1901.

The Times reminds us of the Phillies-game losing streak, the longest in history. I rooted in 1988 for the Baltimore Orioles to break the Phillies’ streak but the Orioles lost only 21 and then played the White Sox.

And yes, we did boo Mike Schmidt, Dick Allen, and the Easter Bunny, and the Phillies traded away Ryne Sandberg, Ferguson Jenkins, and Julio Franco for the equivalent of 24 dollars in trinkets.

McQuade wants to conclude, “the Phillies are the biggest bunch of losers to ever grace a baseball field. But the Phillies are our losers, our 10,000-loss team.”

They are and they are not. The early history is such distant history that it has not been on the mind of the current field management. Longman quoted current Phillies manager Charlie Manuel as saying “I didn’t know [about the 10,000 losses] until a week ago. It means they’ve had a team here a long time.”

Oh yes, we also boo Charlie Manuel. But the man has a valid point. The Phillies of the past six years have been terribly frustrating and inconsistent, floating around .500. The 1995, 1996, and 2000 squads were pretty lousy. But the worst team? The “biggest bunch of losers”? I respectfully disagree.

The Phillies have been around a long-time, and for three decades, they did stink.

The Phillies’ first season of play was 1883 which makes 2007 the organization’s 125th. The Phillies were especially bad between 1919 and 1949.

How bad were they? The Phillies have lost 100 games or more in 14 of these 125 seasons. 12 of these 14 seasons are between 1921 and 1945.

It is not so unusual for a club to lose 100 games in a season. Teams do have bad seasons in the cycle of winning and rebuilding. So what I did is I looked at the Phillies’ winning percentage every year from 1883 through 2006. Since fans forgive short-runs of losing, I was curious to look at trends – when the losing begins to add up.

To look at legacies, I calculated each season’s ten-year trailing winning percentage. That is, for a fan watching the team in 1935, what was the Phillies’ cumulative winning percentage in the previous ten-seasons? I did this for every year from 1893 – ten years after the first season – through 2006.

Now, let us talk about scale. There is a difference between the team’s number of losses and the winning percentage. The team’s worst winning percentage of all-time is .173 in 1883 when the team played only 98 games and lost 81 of them. The most number of losses came in 1941 when the club lost 111 in a 154 game season for a .279 percentage. The best seasons are 1976 and 1977 when the club went 101 and 61 for a .623 percentage. The Phillies all-time winning percentage is .468.

Here is how these numbers translate into the contemporary 162-game season:

.173 is a 28 and 134 record in 162 games;
.278 is to go 45 and 117;
.300 is to go 49 and 113;
.400 is to go 65 and 97;
.468 is to go 76 and 86;
.500 is to go 81 and 81;
.600 is to go 97 and 65;
.623 is to go 101 and 61.

In every year between 1919 and 1949, a 31-season span, the Phillies have a ten-year trailing winning-percentage less-than .400. This would be like watching the Phillies every season from 1977 until today and the team losing between 95 and 100 games every year. For 30 years. 95 to 100 losses.

Talk about brutal.

We have known they lost a lot of games in this period for, well, since about the 1950 team won the pennant. That the 2007 Phillies will lose game number 10,000 is a reflection of three decades of losing that came between World War I and World War II.

What is the current ten-year trailing? The Phillies are currently holding at .491 which is a record of 80 and 82. A .500 record is neither good enough for the post-season nor bad enough for the second-division. It means the Phillies have been playing average baseball the past ten years. The team is average.

We the fans are dragging around a history of losing, cemented in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and reinforced by the 1961-losing streak and 1964 collapse. It is not that we have seen stretches of bad baseball. It means that my grandmother (she should live and be well until 120 years of age), who skipped school in the 1930s to see the Phillies play in North Philadelphia, saw losing baseball. But she has known that for the past seventy years.

It is nice that the Phillies made it to the Times and onto National Public Radio. But come on people! That the Phillies lost all those games between the two World Wars? Jeez, that is like, sooooo last century.

2007-06-26T07:51:00.001-04:00

Cranes Over Shea and the Mets

Cranes and concrete towers rise beyond the outfield walls at the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium in Queens. They are harbingers of the team’s new stadium, Citi Field, which is scheduled to open for the 2009 season.

The new stadium will have all of the features we have come to expect from ballparks in the post-Camden Yards construction-era: Wide concourses, luxury boxes, clear sight lines, tradition evocative architecture, asymmetrical outfield, and seating for a baseball-friendly 45,000.

Renderings for Citi Field can be seen on the Mets’ website at www.mets.com and they are very cool. The primary entrance is to mimic the exterior of Ebbets Field, the home to the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 until their move to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

Shea Stadium was built as a consequence of the Dodgers’ move west, as well as that of the New York Giants, who accompanied the Dodgers to California for the 1958 season.

The Dodgers experienced great success in the late-1940s and 1950s. Ebbets Field held 32,000 and owner Walter O’Mally judged the club to have outgrown the then 40-year old park. The Giants played at the Polo Grounds, built in 1891 and renovated in 1911. The Bronx construction of Yankee Stadium in 1923 displaced the Polo Grounds as New York’s choice for marquee sporting events. So in 1957, the Dodgers and Giants moved west, breaking hearts as Ken Burns traces in “Inning 7: The Capital of Baseball”), in his 1994 nine-part documentary Baseball.

The departure of the Dodgers and Giants left the National League without a franchise in New York City, the largest U.S. market both in 1958 and today in 2007. The National League and American League each had 8 teams each in 1958. While franchise moves had brought major league baseball to Milwaukee, Baltimore, Kansas City, and California, additional cities were ready to play host to major league organizations.

The National League had had eight teams since 1901. The American League was the same. But American cities had grown since 1901 and the integration of Major League Baseball in 1947 increased the size of the available player pool.

In 1958, New York City attorney William Shea proposed the creation of a third league, the Continental League. Shea named former Dodgers president Branch Rickey as chief-executive. In 1959 they announced the placement of franchises in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Toronto, and New York. This would return major league baseball to New York City.

Rather than admit competition, the American League expanded to Minnesota and Los Angeles in 1961. The National League placed two new teams in 1962, one in Houston and the other in New York. While these commitments killed the Continental League, it fulfilled Shea’s goal of returning National League baseball to New York. When the city built its new multipurpose stadium in Flushing next to the site of the World’s Fair, it named the stadium in Shea’s honor.

Shea seats 55,000 for baseball. Seating wraps in a circle from left-field around to the symmetrical spot in right. The stands end along each foul-line like giant cliffs leaving a gaping space beyond the outfield walls.

Shea was a forerunner to the multipurpose stadia built in subsequent years in St Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. All four were unloved for their concrete circular bowls, Astroturf, football capacities, and absence of architectural character. But the seating at St Louis’ Busch Stadium II, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, and Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, all wrapped entirely around the field such that when the stadium was full, one felt surrounded on all sides, enveloped by fans. One looked out from one’s seat and saw either more seats or more fans.

Shea was never closed. The original plans left the outfield open such that more stands could be added which would complete the open circle and raise capacity to 90,000. The Mets originally shared Shea with the American Football League’s New York Jets; Yankee Stadium held 67,000 in the 1960s and the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams played the Los Angeles Coliseum which sat over 100,000. 90,000 seats were not unreasonable for the premier sports stadium in New York City.

But the additional seats were never added and the outfield remained open. The space was filled by bleachers in left field, the bullpens, and the huge scoreboard and billboards in right-center.

It is a lot of prime real-estate given over exclusively to a scoreboard, bullpens, and billboards.

As we rode the number 7 subway from 43rd Street out to the ballpark on Sunday afternoon for the Mets game against the Oakland Athletics, I asked my buddy Peter if we would miss Shea. Peter was born a Mets fan in Brooklyn and after tours out of state, lives again in New York. He said he would not. When I returned to work on Monday morning, a coworker asked if I had found the place “a dump”.

Yes, the concourses are narrow. And they were dark even on this gorgeous sunny June day. I gave up looking for a water-fountain and paid $4 for a bottle of Aquafina-brand bottled water. We had little leg-room and the seats were narrow. The scoreboard is a (relative) antique and the replay monitor small by contemporary major league standards.

But I thought Shea was kind of cool. The stadium tells the story of the Mets history.

The Mets wear blue in honor of the Dodgers and orange for the Giants. Do you see the NY on the Mets’ cap? It is the same NY worn by the Giants through their final 1957 season. The stadium name picks up the story of the team from the departure of the Dodgers and Giants.

The Mets won the 1969 World Series at Shea in their eighth season of existence. Game Six of the 1986 World Series was at Shea where Mookie Wilson’s grounder to first-base rolled through the legs of the Boston Red Sox’ Bill Buckner. The Mets won Game 7 and the Series at the ballpark the following night.

It was at the stadium on September 21, 2001 where the Mets played their first regular season game after the September 11th attacks. Mets’ catcher Mike Piazza hit a two-run home run in the eighth inning against the Atlanta Braves to lift the Mets to a 3-2 victory. Piazza left the team after the 2004 season and he is still a hero to many New York fans, his Mets career defined by this moment.

The Mets will take their franchise history and uniforms to the new ballpark in 2009. But a team’s stadium is the stage and context. The stadium is a piece of the history and as it is part of the history it is part of the brand which is the team’s value-proposition. The stadium’s contribution to the value-proposition is the participation and witness to history. As players come and go, and teams win and lose, the team’s colors and stadium are the constants. They are the testaments to the team’s history.

It is not that teams should not move into new stadiums. It is not that I am against new construction. What I am for is being mindful of what we lose – the price we pay in leaving and razing old ballparks.

Yes, there is an economic-financial debate about financing new stadium construction. This is especially true when public funds are solicited to pay for these sports theaters. The San Francisco Giants demonstrated that such projects can be pursued with private funds.

The Phillies closed Veterans Stadium after the 2003 season. After the last out of the last game, the team brought back retired pitcher Tug McGraw. McGraw was the Phillies’ pitcher who struck out the Kansas City Royals’ Willie Wilson to end the 1980 World Series. It was the Phillies’ first and only World Series championship and had taken place at the ballpark. That night in 1980, McGraw leaped off the mound, his arms extended to the skies, and was mobbed by the team.

Before the Phillies would leave the stadium, they wanted McGraw to recreate his leap so that the fans and team in 2003 could relive this moment one last time. This was where it happened; soon a parking lot would stand here. The renovation of an old park means that such moments maintained in the present,

I find it hard to believe that there are not creative architectural solutions that could have brought solutions like luxury boxes, high-definition video boards, additional office spaces, and wider concourses to Shea. I looked at the area of bullpens and bleachers, scoreboards and fixtures beyond the walls and wondered what could have been done with this space. I wondered how the Mets could have had their new revenue streams, improve fan comforts, to stay at the ballpark and continue playing on the same stage.

A crane is considered auspicious in China and Japan. It is a sign of a bright future. The Mets have outstanding management in general manager Omar Minyana and field manager Willie Randolf. The Mets won on Sunday 10 to 2 behind solid pitching by John Maine and a potent offense.

They have an auspicious future with or without the cranes that peer from the site of the new stadium onto the field of the old. Maybe Shea could have been part of this future as it has been the past.

2007-06-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

How the Philadelphia Phillies Came To Wear White Sox

At the north-west corner of 5th and Bainbridge Streets is a restaurant-supply store called John C. Paul’s. It sells all matters of paper, plastic, and aluminum goods, and other mainstays of take-out meals. It has hardwood floors and smells of wet dog. In the window facing 5th St, as it leads to South Street, is a hand-made Phillies booster sign updated daily in magic marker.

On Thursday morning (before the team collapsed against the Tigers), it celebrated the Phils’ 8 to 4 Wednesday win over the Chicago White Sox and the club’s move into a tie for second-place in the National League East, two games behind the first-place New York Mets. The Phillies took themselves four games over .500 with the victory and kept themselves winners of seven of their last ten.

Wednesday’s was a solid win during a day-game at Citizens Bank Park. The weather report had the chance of rain at 60% and it was blustery, almost chilly, up at the top of the stadium where I sat behind third-base. The flags whipped the entire game like it would rain at any moment. The rain held-off and the Phillies held-out for the W.

Beyond the victory, it was a day of baseball soap-opera unique to the current connections between the Phillies and White Sox.

This is unusual given the minimal connection between the clubs in the past couple generations.

Oh, the Phillies sold outfielder and fan favorite Greg Luzinski to the White Sox in March 1981. Luzinski was one of those ball players for whom the creation of the designated hitter was an act of clemency. Luzinski had been a four-team All-Star for the Phillies and had three productive seasons in Chicago before his release after the 1984 campaign.

The Phillies traded outfielder Gary Redus to the White Sox for starting-pitcher Joe Cowley in March 1987. Cowley had pitched a no-hitter for the White Sox in 1986, a game in which he walked 11. Cowley lasted five games for the Phillies in 1987. He recorded a 15.43 ERA and was out of the Major Leagues.

Relief pitcher Bobby Thigpen set the season-record for saves with 57 for the White Sox in 1990; he pitched in 17 games for the 1993 Phillies and recorded his lone Major League at-bat in that stretch.

The White Sox had reached the American League Championship Series in 1983 and 1993 and would have faced the Phillies in the World Series in these years had they been able to beat the Baltimore Orioles in ’83 or the Toronto Blue Jays in ’93.

What else? Uh, there had been Spring Training games when the White Sox trained in Sarasota, Florida between 1960 and 1997. Sarasota is down Route 75 from Clearwater past the Cardinals in St. Petersburg (until 1997) and Pirates in Bradenton.

It is not for the White Sox playing in the American League such that the two teams play only three games every three years. The Phillies are connected to other American League clubs. The Phillies have working relationships with the New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and Blue Jays because they all hold Spring Training and have their minor-league complexes around Tampa and St. Petersburg.

The Phillies and Orioles have a friendly rivalry due to their geographic proximity. Phillies fans travel to Oriole Park at Camden Yards when the Phillies play there and there are stretches of southeast Pennsylvania and parts of Delaware where loyalties are split between the Phillies to the north and Orioles to the south.

But the White Sox? Yeah, not much until the Phillies had a log-jam at first-base with Ryan Howard and Jim Thome after the 2005 season.

2003 was to be the Phillies last-season at Veterans Stadium. In anticipation of the move into the new ballpark in 2004 and the expected increase in payroll, since-deposed Phillies general-manager Ed Wade went free-agent shopping. The centerpiece of his acquisitions was Thome.

Thome had spent his entire 12-year major league career with Cleveland where he hit between 30 and 50 homeruns a year and had been a centerpiece of the club’s dominance of the American League Central Division between 1995 and 2001.

But Cleveland had slipped to third place in 2002 with a 74 and 88 record and the buzzword in northeast Ohio was “rebuilding”. For Thome, this meant that the team would not pay the highest dollar to keep the then 32-year old at Jacob’s Field.

Enter the Phillies with their newly expanded payroll. It helped that when Thome visited South Philadelphia in the winter of, the construction workers building the new ballpark next to Veterans Stadium, stopped and cheered for Thome as he drove by. It was a blue-collar reception for a blue-collar player and Thome and Philadelphia were hooked on each other.

The Phillied hosted the Pittsburgh Pirates on Opening Day 2003, the last at Veterans Stadium. Thome received the longest ovation during pre-game introductions. In his first official Phillies at-bat, he drove a pitch to the fences. We went nuts – this would be an amazing way to start his Phillies-life. The ball caromed off the wall and we settled ecstatically for the triple. Thome finished the season with 47 homeruns and 131 RBIs. Philadelphia had not seen a slugger like this since Mike Schmidt in the mid-1980s.

In 2005, Thome went down with an injury; he would play only 59 games that season and finish with seven homeruns. Like Wally Pipp being replaced by Lou Gehrig, rookie Ryan Howard filled in by hitting 22 homeruns in 312 at-bats and winning the National League’s Rookie of the Year award.

After the 2005 season, Philadelphia fans questioned how the Phillies would solve their first-base log-jam. They asked if Thome would return healthy in 2006 and whether Howard would blossom in a full-season. The Phillies had tried Howard in the outfield in practice, an experiment that lasted, maybe 48-hours. Thome was long past his days of playing third-base.

I met Howard in early November 2005. Mike Lieberthal was then the Phillies’ catcher and fans awaited the end of his contract in 2006. I asked Howard if he could catch. He returned my deadpan question with his response, “I’m a lefty.” “We’ll take it!”, I joked, and we laughed together. The man is huge and built to play first-base or outside linebacker.

On November 25, 2005, the Phils traded Thome to the White Sox for Aaron Rowand. Like the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers trading Allen Iverson this past season, it was necessary bittersweet trade of a loved-player.

The trade had the potential to be win-win. The White Sox had just said goodbye to Frank Thomas and wanted Thome’s bat in the lineup. Thome was from Peoria, Illinois, southwest of Chicago and just north of the Illinois capital, Springfield; he was returning home. The Phillies needed a centerfielder and Rowand’s hard-charging play would be welcomed in Broad Street Bullies Philadelphia, and now first was open to Howard.

It worked.

Thome bounced-back to hit 42 homeruns for the 2006 White Sox. Howard hit 58 homeruns for the 2006 Phillies and won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award. Rowand endeared himself to Phillies fans early in the ’06 season when he ran his face into the centerfield fence at Citizens Bank Park on May 11 against the Mets to make a game-saving catch.

The Phillies finished 2006 a couple-games out of the playoffs and entered the off-season in need of a starting pitcher. Yes, like almost every team in baseball, they wanted pitching. Phillies general-manager Pat Gillick turned to the White Sox and made it happen.

This White Sox series was Thome’s first visit to the Phillies’ home since the trade. He had sat during Monday’s and Tuesday’s game and Wednesday he had the start. This was a homecoming.

Kyle Kendrick started the game for the Phillies. He was making his major league debut, starting in place of injured Freddy Garcia – former White Sock Freddy Garcia.

Last December 6, Gillick traded Phillies pitchers Gavin Floyd and Gio Gonzalez to the White Sox for Garcia. Garcia had won 17 games for Chicago in 2006 and was the winning pitcher in game four of the 2005 World Series when he threw seven shut-out innings against the Houston Astros giving up only four hits.

On December 8, ESPN.com ran the Associated Press’ article, “White Sox trade Garcia to Phillies for Floyd” and quoted Phillies assistant general manager Mike Arbuckle as saying, "[Garcia]'s had to pitch when it's on the line. He's had the opportunity to do things you want a pitcher to be able to do. He's going to fit nicely into our rotation and we feel like he's a guy that's going to be able to give us innings. He's a proven winner."

"Proven winner", as in past-tense.

Garcia was struggling with the Phillies this season when he left June 8’s game in Kansas City after 1 2/3-innings. In 11 starts, he has an ERA of 5.90 and a batting-average-against of .318. He might now be out for the season with a shredded-shoulder. His one win was not what Philadelphia had in mind.

The loss of Garcia was tough to take because he follows a string of would-be All-Star pitchers who flopped in Philly.

The Phillies acquired Andy Ashby in November 1999 for three prospects. Ashby had pitched 206 innings for the 1999 Padres and won 14 games. He was to be the number-two pitcher behind ace Curt Schilling. Ashby went 4 and 7 in 16 starts for the Phillies before they dumped him to the Atlanta Braves on July 12 of that season.

In October 2002, the Phillies signed Terry Adams to start for them in 2003. Adams had been a reliever with the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1995 but had made 22 starts for Los Angeles in 2002 and finished the season with a 12 and 8 record. Adams made it through 19 starts for the ’03 Phillies before they returned him to the bullpen.

It was Garcia’s turn to start on Wednesday against his former team. Instead, Garcia was in Alabama obtaining a second opinion on his shoulder. In his place, the Phillies started Kendrick. Kendrick’s lanky presence on the mound was a reminder of Garcia’s bust.

This game was the third and last of the three-game mid-week series. Thome has been the White Sox’ designated-hitter and with the pitcher batting at the National League park, he had sat out Monday’s and Tuesday’s games. He was penciled in to start at first on Wednesday. Thome batted third and came to the plate for the first-time in the top of the first.

The fans gave him a warm and extended ovation. It reminded me of the reception that we gave Ozzie Smith during the 1996 All-Star Game held in Philadelphia. Ozzie had announced he would retire after the ’96 season and this was his final All-Star Game. Like Ozzie, Thome stepped out of the batters-box and doffed his batting helmet in appreciation. Both Thome and the fans showed a lot of class.

I was sitting next to a buddy of mine behind third-base. As we applauded, he grumbled that Thome was great but he had left us with Charlie Manuel as manager.

Manuel had long been a coach in the Cleveland Indians’ farm-system and had replaced Mike Hargrove as manager after the 1999 season. Manuel was fired during the 2002 season and in deference to Thome, the Phillies hired Manuel as a scout in 2004. The Phillies fired fan-favorite Larry Bowa as manager at the end of the 2004 season. The team conducted a drawn-out interview process where they paraded through Philadelphia top managerial candidates. The fans’ choice was Jim Leyland. The Phillies chose Manuel.

On Friday, Marcus Hayes wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News in “Manuel’s Cooler Head Helping Phils Previal”, “Manuel has never been a popular hire in Philadelphia. He followed incendiary icon Larry Bowa. He was chosen over managerial legend Jim Leyland, whose resuscitated Tigers, AL champs under him last season, visit today.”

One on-going criticism of Manuel is that he had never understood the double-switch. The double-switch is used in the National League in the latter innings whereby one replaces a fielder at the same time as a pitcher, but flip-flops the batting order to maximize the innings the pitcher might pitch before he would bat, and the need would arise to pinch-hit for him.

The game was already ripe with the undercurrents of the White Sox-Phillies with Kendrick on the mound and Thome at first-base.

Manuel had given Rowand, the regular centerfielder, the day-off. It was a 1:00 PM start and a privilege of being a veteran player is that one receives periodic rests when afternoon games follow night-games. But Kendrick had gone six-innings in his maiden outing and now there were runners on first and third and one out with the Phils down 3 to 2.

Manuel sent Rowand to hit for Kendrick. Rowand grounded-out to third, the run scored, the game was tied, Kendrick was off the hook for the loss, Rowand had done his job, and Manuel looked pretty good. Even better, Manuel left Rowand in the game in the ninth position and sat Jayson Werth who had started in Rowand’s place. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a double-switch.

One inning later, Rowand made Manuel look like a genius and the White Sox mourn their loss. The Phillies had tacked on an additional run to go ahead 4 to 3 when Rowand came up with the bases loaded. Matt Thornton was now pitching for the White Sox and Rowand sent a shot down the left-field line and over the wall for a grand-slam. This took the Phils ahead by a score of 8 to 3, too much for even Geoff Geary and Yoel Hernandez to cough up. Rowand circled the bases and then we kept cheering and called him out of the dugout for a curtain call.

Which is how Jim Thome made a sweet return to Philadelphia and Kyle Kendrick came to replace Freddy Garcia and how Aaron Rowand was a hero against his old team.

This is how the Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Phillies are curiously connected these days.

2007-06-12T20:17:00.001-04:00

From the Major League Baseball June Draft to the 25-Man Roster

Baseball’s annual draft of amateur players, which took place on Thursday and Friday of last week, is the most removed from current rosters of all of the amateur drafts of the top American professional sports leagues, the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and even Major League Soccer.

The NBA’s Portland Trainblazers and Seattle SuperSonics eagerly await selecting Ohio State’s Greg Oden and the University of Texas’ Kevin Durant. Both Durant and Oden are considered franchise players who could single-handedly bring success to the franchise. The NFL’s Cleveland Brown selected Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn with the 22nd pick in April’s football draft; Quinn will compete for playing time this season.

Read ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, the sports pages of the local newspaper, and one does not find pundits grading how MLB clubs did in last week’s draft. I was in Pittsburgh on Thursday night and watched the local news report on the Pirates’ draft. The theme was “signability” which is Major League Baseball short-hand for “agent Scott Boras represents this player and will demand more money than we want to commit to a draft-pick”. The Pirates had passed on Georgia Tech catch Matt Wieters for this reason and chose Clemson pitcher Daniel Moskos.

This particular broadcast questioned the Moskos pick in the context of the Pirates passing on a player for financial reasons. This has nothing to do with Moskos and everything to do with both a team’s desire to work with Boras – the Phillies now shy-away from Boras clients after selecting Boras-client J.D. Drew in the 1997 draft – and Pittsburgh’s deepening frustration with the decisions made by the current ownership group.

It did not help that Moskos is the eighth pitcher that the Bucs have selected with their first-pick since 1998; none of the first seven have yet enjoyed Major League success. But do not blame Moskos for this legacy.

With few exceptions, first and second round selections receive a bit of press in the days after the draft. The Phillies have invited their first-round pick to Veterans Stadium, and now Citizens Bank Park, where they tour the clubhouse, meet the local press, and if they are a hitter, take some batting practice. Then they are shipped off to the low minor leagues and the life of long bus rides and McDonald’s meal money, out of the spotlight.

Sometimes we see these players again in the big leagues. More often than not, they fade from view.

I was curious about the relationship between the draft and whether a player’s selection in the early rounds might say something about the likelihood of his reaching and succeeding on the major league level. But rather than look at past drafts and the future success of the draftees, I looked at two current rosters to see where the players were drafted. I chose the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox. As of yesterday, Monday, June 11, each club had the best record in their league.

Each Major League club has a 25-man active roster. These are the players designated as available to play. The list excludes individuals on the Disabled List. For example, Pedro Martinez is excluded from the Mets’ 25-man roster as he recovers on the DL.

This is the Mets’ 25-man roster with players listed by last-name and the round in which they were drafted. Those players drafted in the same round are listed in alphabetical order and not by the order within the round.

Castro 1
Green 1
Heilman 1
Sele 1
Wagner 1
Beltran 2
Glavine 2
Wright 2
Schoenweiss 3
Smith 3
Maine 6
Ledee 16
LaDuca 25
Easley 30
Feliciano 31
Gotay 31
Delgado -
Franco -
Gomez -
Hernandez -
Mota -
Perez -
Reyes -
Sosa -
Valentin -

This list shows that 16 of the 25 players were drafted. The average round in which the 16 drafted players were selected is the 9.75th round. This is weighted of course by LaDuca, Easley, Feliciano, and Gotay being chosen in the 25th through 31st rounds. The median selection round is the 2nd; 11 of these 16 players were taken no lower than pitcher John Maine in the sixth round.

Nine players were not drafted. This is due to the structure of the June amateur draft which applies only to American and Candian players as well as those who came through American and Canadian high schools, junior colleges, and four-year colleges and universities. Amateur players in the Dominican, Puerto Rico, Valenzuela, Cuba, and so forth are not subject to the draft. Carlos Delgado, Pedro Martinez, Orlando Hernandez, and Jose Reyes were open to be signed by any team in the Major Leagues.

This is the Red Sox’ 25-man roster with players listed by last-name and the round in which they were drafted. Again, those players drafted in the same round are listed in alphabetical order and not by the order within the round.

Beckett 1
Drew 1
Ramirez 1
Snyder 1
Varitek 1
Pedroia 2
Schilling 2
Cora 3
Lopez 4
Papelbon 4
Mirabelli 5
Timlin 5
Crisp 7
Wakefield 8
Youkilis 8
Pineiro 12
Hinske 17
Lowell 20
Donnelly 27
Lugo 28
Matsuzaka -
Okajima -
Ortiz -
Pena -
Tavarez -

The Red Sox have 20 players who were selected in the June draft. These players were taken, on average, in the 7.85th round. The median round of selection is the 4th with 15 of the 20 having been taken no lower than Kevin Youkilis and Tim Wakefield in the 8th.

David Ortiz was signed out of the Dominican Republic. The Red Sox bid on the right to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka before signing him.

This is no academic study and there are initial trends. The first, second, and third rounds yield more Major League-caliber talent than the later rounds. That being said, there is talent to be had. Paul La Duca is no slouch at catcher and he was taken in the 25th round. 165 other players were taken before the Red Sox selected Wade Boggs.

Given the importance of the amateur draft, we might also note how it does not apply to Latin American players. Pedro Martinez was one of the top pitchers of the late 1990s and early 2000s and David Ortiz is one of the top hitters today. We do not see their likeness in the draft and yet they compose one-third of the Mets’ first-place roster.

A rough estimate would suggest that a third of an active 25-man roster is made of players drafted within the first four or so rounds; one-third are players drafted between rounds four and 30; one-third are non-drafted players, primarily those signed out of Latin America.

2007-06-05T18:15:00.000-04:00

Phillies Add Cassandra to Struggling Bullpen

The Phillies played the final game of their three-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks last Wednesday night. This was the game for which Jamie Moyer started for the Phillies and Randy Johnson for Arizona; the media noted that their combined age was the highest ever of two starters.

The game ended with Ryan Howard pinch-hitting, two-outs, and the Phillies down by a run with speedy Michael Bourn on second-base. Howard had sat this game out, going easy on his hamstring, and we in the crowd chanted “M-V-P” as Howard swung for a game-ending homerun. Howard smacked a line-out to second which ended the game when Bourn was doubled-off the base.

The final 4 to 3 score shows the Phillies to have lost by one, and suggests it to have been a close game. It was not close. The game did highlight the talent of the club, the very presence of which causes the limitations to be even more frustrating.

The Phillies had returned home to Citizens Bank Park on Monday night, May 28, after sweeping the three-game weekend road series against the Atlanta Braves. This was an important sweep beyond the Phillies' three wins. It was against the Braves and the Phillies moved two-games above .500 for the first time this season.

The Braves have been the best of the National League since 1991. They won their division every year between 1991 and 2005 except for 1994. Some fault them for winning the National League Championship Series only six times in this 14 year-run and the World Series only once. I do not. I will take 90 to 100 wins a season every year over 70 to 80. But then again I am not George Steinbrenner. Even in second-place in the National League’s East Division, after such a long run, the Braves are a team to beat. The Phillies were in third-place, and to sweep the Braves, the team at whose backs the Phils were peering in the standings, was exciting.

The Phillies opened the 2007 season with high expectations: Howard was the reigning National League Most Valuable Player; second-baseman Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins had developed into All-Star players, each with his own thirty-plus game hitting streak that brought national media exposure; the Phillies had six legitimate starting pitchers.

Then the season came and the Phillies tripped and by the end of day four, they were 0 for the season. On April 20, the Phillies were 4 and 11. Feh. But returning to Philadelphia from Atlanta last Sunday night, the Phillies were two-games over .500, gaining on second-place, and with the Diamondbacks coming to town and the San Francisco Giants behind them, the Phils had a chance to pick up momentum. As I tell myself looking at my fantasy baseball team, it is only the end of May – now early June. There is still a lot of baseball left.

But something happened to the Phillies on the way to the forum.

Freddie Garcia started for the Phils in the opener against Arizona. He gave up three early runs, settled down, and pitched eight innings registering nine strikeouts. This is not a bad outing. After eight, the Phils were down 3 to 1. It is a deficit and two runs are not impossible to make-up.

Ryan Madson came in to pitch the ninth and quickly secured two outs. But then he walked Tony Clark and two doubles later, the Phillies were down 5 to 1. Two runs are doable; four runs are difficult.

The Phillies did three. Greg Dobbs pinch-hit a three-run homerun which brought the Phillies to 5 to 4. Had Madson held the lead, the Phillies would have won. Had Madson given up only one-run, the Phils could have been tied. “Would-haves” and “could-haves” and the Phillies still lost.

I need to read-up on the Official Rules of Baseball. I do not understand how Garcia was credited with the official loss and not Madson.

Tuesday night was similar.

Phillies starting pitcher Jon Lieber gave up five runs in the second inning and Arizona was ahead. The Phils scored one in the home second and two more in their seventh. Entering the eighth inning, it was a 5 to 3 ballgame. Again, two runs are doable.

The Phils brought in Geoff Geary to pitch the eighth. Arizona’s Alberto Callaspo grounded out. Miguel Montero reached on a fielding error and went to second on a wild pitch. Scott Hairston struck out for the second out. But for the second night in a row, the bullpen could not hold it there.

Another Phillies error, a walk, single, hit batsman, and triple later – all of this with two outs – and the Phillies were down 10 to 3. A seven run deficit in the eighth inning in the Major Leagues is pretty bad. The Phillies plated a run in the eighth and again in the ninth for five on the night. By then, the Diamondbacks had 11 and the victory.

Wednesday night was a great game for the first seven innings. Johnson and Moyer pitched like it was 2001. Johnson gave up one hit through six innings; Moyer gave up a game leading-off homerun and then threw shut-out ball through the seventh. Not only was it 1 to 0, but Moyer and Johnson were working fast and going to have us home early from the ballpark.

Moyer retired the first-batter in the Arizona eighth. Eric Byrnes, who had hit the game’s lead-off homer, drove a Moyer pitch deep into left-field and the score was 2 to 0. Again, two runs are doable.

Conor Jackson was the next batter and he smoked a double off the wall in deep left. This was beginning to look like batting practice. Orlando Hudson mercifully flied to right for out number two. We were almost there. So close. Moyer was so very close when Mark Reynolds, the rookie clean-up hitter, drove a pitch into the shrubbery behind the centerfield wall. Two runs are doable; four runs are difficult.

“Look kids, Big Ben!”

I was now ready to beat the crowds and call it a night. My buddy Jake was like – it ‘s only four runs and it’s only the eighth inning – let’s stay! I don’t know, I replied. With another late inning deficit, the Phillies are goingt to rally and fall short – I can’t take it.

But we stayed and Aaron Rowand led off the bottom of the ninth by reaching first on a hit-by-pitch. Shane Victorino grounded the ball through Hudson’s open legs at second so that with no outs Rowand was on third and Victorino on second. Rollins, up next, drove the ball to centerfield. Chris Young came six inches from catching it on the fly, Rollins raced to third, two runs scored and the score was 4 to 2.

The crowd was on its feet, cheering. Utley came to bat and the girls started screaming. If there was a standard dress for the women in the crowd between the ages of 17 and 25, it was short denim-skirt, flip-flops, and a tight red Phillies t-shirt with UTLEY 26 on the back.

Utley flied out but Pat Burrell singled to bring Rollins home and it was 4 to 3. Bourn pinch-ran for Burrell to create the Hobbesian moment for Howard with two-outs and the tying run half-way around.

Sitting, and then standing in the right-field stands, chanting “MVP” for Howard, I felt a little like Cassandra, the mythic figure who can see the future and do nothing about it. I really wanted Howard to deliver; the Phillies had a chance to tie-it if not win the game.

But the game did not have to have come to this. And even if this game, on this night, had had to come to the Phillies fighting back from a deficit in the ninth, it looked way too similar to Monday night and Tuesday night. Even if Howard had drove-in Bourn and even if the Phillies had won it there in the ninth, or later in extra-innings, this Arizona series had exposed the team’s weaknesses.

The bullpen showed itself to be uneven. The Phillies were and are without Tom Gordon and Brett Myers. Gordon was the closer before going down with an injury. Myers stepped-in and was effective in the role before he succumbed to the disabled-list. The team is now carrying seven relief pitchers. No one has been designated the closer in Myers’ absence. Since no one is the closer, no one is the go-to set-up man, which means that no one is the seventh inning man and onward. Little is defined.

More so, with two on the DL and seven pitchers in the pen, rather than five, there is little disincentive for poor performance. I would like to see the Phillies demote two and create an environment in which the relievers pitch with the back-of-the-mind pressure of the demotion to AAA Ottawa.

The weakness of the bullpen adds pressure to the starting rotation. When the bullpen is unreliable, a manager is less likely to pull a starting pitcher in the sixth or seventh or eighth. Moyer may not have had a high-pitch count in the eighth inning on Wednesday night but it is easy to justify turning the game over to a reliever knowing there is a good chance he will be more effective in his one inning than Moyer after six or seven. After Madson’s work on Monday and Geary’s on Tuesday, Manuel was praying that Moyer could have pitched ten innings.

Seven pitchers in the pen also means there are two fewer hitters on the bench. The Phillies have 13 non-pitchers. Eight start and the second-catcher is not used as a substitute, just in case. This leaves four players for pinch-hitting and defense. Two pinch-hitters and a defensive replacement later, and the Phillies have a good shot at entering extra-innings with one position player available to pinch hit. The Phillies used pitcher Cole Hamels as a pinch-hitter in a game earlier this season. Huh?!

I really like the core of players that the Phillies have. Rollins, Utley, Howard, Victorino, and Carlos Ruiz are young and could have long careers with the club. Bourn could be a starting player. This is not a bad team and I took issue with a friend when he compared them to the Cubs this season. I mean, that’s below the belt! It is not like Phillies players are throwing-down fists in the home dugout.

The Phillies are playing like a .500 club, winning like the collection of All-Stars that they can be half the time and dropping the other half in a flurry of deficits and lost opportunities.

Cassandra is a Phillies fan (and she wears a red Phillies Chase Utley t-shirt).

2007-05-29T22:30:00.000-04:00

The Economics of Uniform Number Changes and Trades

2007-05-22T17:42:00.000-04:00

MLB Interleague Attendance is Less Than Meets the Eye

This past weekend saw the first series of Interleague games in Major League Baseball.

Reflecting the separate origins of the National League in 1876 and the rival American League in 1901, the teams in the two leagues have historically played regular season games exclusively against League opponents. Beginning in 1997, Major League Baseball began scheduling regular season games between teams from the two teams. Doing so would create regularly scheduled contests between metropolitan rivals like the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics, and the New York Yankees and New York Mets, and bring baseball’s All-Stars to cities and crowds that would normally have not been able to see them play in person.

Indeed, this past Sunday night, ESPN featured the Yankees playing at Shea Stadium against the Mets for its Sunday Night Baseball game of the week. Locally, Philadelphia fans could see Vernon Wells playing the outfield at Citizens Bank Park this weekend against the Phillies.

Major League Baseball loves Interleague play and wants us to know how great it is. MLB.com headlined its story on May 21 on the weekend with the statement, “Interleague's first weekend a big hit: Rivalry matchups lead to huge ticket sales across country”.

The article, by Tom Singer, pooh-poohed Los Angeles Dodgers’ second-baseman Jeff Kent who called Interleague games “comical”. Singer reported Kent as saying, “I grew up in this game not playing Interleague games. Then all of a sudden, they force-feed it to you.” Singer commented by writing that MLB does so because, “…the fans keep lining up at the buffet table in record numbers ...”

Singer tells us in his piece about the record numbers, the percentage increases, and just how big this Interleague phenemom is, even comparing it to college basketball’s rivalry week. If only Interleague play really was as big as Singer’s literary use of hyperbole.

Major League Baseball, the umbrella entity operating out of Park Avenue, is a huge supporter of Interleague play. Which is curious given how much its onfield personnel does not like it, and a recent study that has shown that Interleague play is not generating as great an increase in attendance as it may appear.

Jeff Kent was not alone in voicing his displeasure in the arrangement. Sam Carchidi, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Saturday, May 19, after the Phillies had beaten the Toronto Blue Jays Friday night in the series opener, wrote, “If manager Charlie Manuel had any input, he would like to do the same thing to the interleague schedule that Tony Soprano did to his nephew. Kill it. Interleague play brings too many inequities to the schedule - and takes away from the World Series, Manuel said. Eliminating it ‘would make the season more fair,’ he said.”

What is unfair about the schedule? Teams play different schedules now. The Phillies compete in the same division as the Mets. The division winner has a playoff spot. Therefore, both clubs ought to play the same teams an equal number of times through the 162-game season. This would for a fair contest. When we have two runners run the 100-yard dash, they compete on the same track, in the same weather conditions, under the same rules. But the Mets will have played the Yankees six times by the end of the season while the Phillies will have played them no more than three times, and some years, not once. Not equitable.

MLB would overlook this schedule inequity for the sake of increased attendance and viewership. Baseball may be a game but Major League Baseball is a business. What is the curious is the way in which Major League Baseball champions a boom in attendance at Interleague games when it the increase may not be as significant as MLB.com headlines suggest. Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer suggest as much in their article “Interleague Attendance Boost Mostly a Mirage” in Number 35 of The Baseball Research Journal published by SABR.

Interleague games have boosted attendance by 13.2% from 1997 to 2006. Gillette’s and Palmer’s article indicate that this increase may not be best explained by the games matching two teams from the different leagues against each other but when the games are scheduled. They found that “more than 61% of interleague games have been played on the weekend, compared to only 46% of intraleague games.” In addition, Interleague games are played in May and June, months that draw better than April and September which can be cold on the East Coast. Major League Baseball draws better on the weekends and in the late spring and summer across the board. This is true whether the National League Phillies play the American League Boston Red Sox or the National Cincinnati Reds.

Gillette and Palmer also highlight that Major League Baseball has changed the way it counts attendance the past few years. Look at the bottom of a baseball box-score and we see the attendance for the game. Now, most box scores even have the park’s capacity in parentheses so we can see how the game’s attendance compares to what it could have been. Until a few years ago, the attendance figure was the number of fans who had passed through the turnstiles for that game and which we can presume sat in the stands.

The attendance number is now the number of tickets sold for the game regardless of the number of patrons who pass through the gates. One might go to the ballpark on a chilly night, see only 10,000 other fans, and had the club sold 25,000 for the game, will still see the 25,000 number in the next day’s box-score.

Also counted in these tickets-sold attendance numbers are the number of tickets that a team gives away for charity. Gillette and Palmer remind us of MLB’s Commissioner’s Initiative for Kids program in 2004 and 2005 in which Ameriquest paid $1 per ticket and donated 1,000,000 tickets each season to charities. Generous? Yes. Do we support? Yes. When these 1,000,000 tickets are counted as part of attendance numbers, not knowing if they were used or not, it is unfair to make claims about attendance by which MLB would extrapolate to claim an increasing popularity of and demand for its product.

It is great fun to watch the Yankees and Mets play games-that-count in mid-season. In the Philadelphia area, Phillies fans make the short drive down to Baltimore to watch the club play at Camden Yards. There are virtues to Interleague play and there are short-comings.

Whatever the positives and negatives may be, a greater negative is the misreading of attendance numbers to identify a positive that may not be a result of an Interleague contest and more a result that it is more fun to attend a baseball game on the weekend in May and June than a mid-week game in September.

2007-05-15T23:36:00.000-04:00

Tuesday in the Park in May; of Baseball in Vermont

Rain fell and stopped, and fell again throughout the day here in Burlington, Vermont. Dark clouds hung over the mountains east of the city, towards Stowe, in the morning. The rain began as I sat with my sister, Ilana, in a coffee shop on Church Street, the pedestrian arcade, and primary artery of downtown Burlington.

We read through the morning papers, Burlington’s Free Press, the Times, and the sports-section in USA Today. I am on vacation and she took two days off from work while I am in town. This year she joined my fantasy baseball league, the Smilin’ Joe Fission All-Stars, and we worked through the box-scores and team-notes, looking at potential pick-ups and deconstructing the merits of our respective teams. The Free Press listed the University of Vermont (UVM) as having a home ballgame this evening at 6 PM against the University of Connecticut.

The rain had lightened and faded into a gray overcast sky by 5 PM and even a little sunshine was peaking through. Ilana picked me up at quarter to six and we drove over to Centennial Field for the game.

According to the UVM athletics website, the field has been used for organized baseball since 1906 and the current ballpark was constructed in 1922. This ages it with Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Fenway Park in Boston, and Wrigley Field in Chicago. The park was built for a piece of writing like this: the grandstand seats are wood with chipping green paint; the bleachers beyond the corner bases are unadorned concrete; the field is asymmetrical with the left-field fence defined by the rear of the old football field’s bleachers and pressbox. The game clock in centerfield is digital now, and the bats for this collegiate game were pinging metal – and watching the game here is likely remarkably similar to what it has been for decades.

When we pulled in to the parking lot at five past six, the left-field scoreboard showed the game to be in the fifth inning with the score tied at four. Maybe the teams had not read the same paper that we had this morning, or the Free Press had not spoken with the clubs. We walked through the gate on the parking-lot third-base side and came into the grandstand behind home-plate.

We had eaten a late lunch this afternoon, stopping at Burlington’s City Market, the Co-op. Ilana said she would pick-up a hot dog at the game. But this was not a game given to contemporary sports event retail practices. There were no concessions stands. The souvenir shop was three UVM guys sitting in the third-row directly behind home plate, with white UVM baseball t-shirts draped over the seats of the fourth row. Sales for the game were one shirt (according to one of the guys), which at a rate of one shirt per 40 fans, works out to 1,000 t-shirts were the attendance a robust major league 40,000. I would take that conversion-rate given the current mark-ups on souvenir t-shirts in this country.

Ilana and I worked our way around, behind the screen, to the rows behind the first-base side home dugout. Here, we were still under the cover of the grandstand’s roof, and we were just to the right of the screen. We had both a dry as well as an unobstructed view of the action. We sat down in front of a scattered group of a dozen girls, all around 20 to 22 years old. Were this the major leagues, we would have been sitting in the designated players’ wives and girlfriends section. They had brought blankets, snacks, wore Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle sweatshirts, and cheered for the Vermont players by their first names.

Vermont plays in the American East Conference and entered the game five games under .500 with a record of 20 and 25. UConn had entered the game with a 27 and 24 record.

UVM took an 8 to 4 lead into the eighth inning. With the stands nearly empty, the PA system blessedly used at a minimum (ACDC is a favorite band between innings), and both teams sitting on folding chairs in front of the dugouts, each bench’s chatter, celebrations, and dismays were audible to all of us. UConn came back in the top of the eighth to take a 9 to 8 lead. The happy chatter moved from the first-base UVM side around to the third-base UConn side.

Then it grew interesting. Perhaps it was the wet field and that a very light rain was now falling.

Vermont opened the bottom of the eighth with two of the first three batters reaching base on singles. Down by a run, UVM had runners of first and second with one out. UConn pitcher David Erickson made a quick pickoff move to first-base. One might say that it was an “errant throw”. One might also say that the first-baseman was not paying close attention. The ball sailed through the spot where his glove would have been had he seen the pitcher’s move and returned to the bag. The UVM runner on second-base scored; the runner on first went to third; the game was tied at 9 in the bottom of the eighth with one out and the go-ahead run 90 feet away.

Erickson retired the next UVM batter, which brought up Kyle Henry. The UVM website is generous tonight in its game account: “Kyle Henry (Brattleboro, Vt.) singled through the right side to give UVM a 9-8 lead.” A more detailed telling would recount how Henry put the ball on the group on the right-side, how the UConn second-baseman charged it on the infield dirt, slipped in the wet conditions, and as he watched from his butt, the ball scooted by him and into right-field. I had been feeling bad for the UConn first-baseman and was glad that he how had the second-baseman’s company.

UVM took their 10 to 8 lead into the ninth. They called in their closer, Jeremiah Bayer. Bayer looked every bit the poised closer as he warmed up on the bullpen mound in the eighth inning. He is tall and lean, and walks very slowly and deliberately, with a sense of self-purpose that we have come to expect from the contemporary baseball closer. He appears focused and dedicated, knowing that he is a cut above the rest, both in skill and in poise of character. His warm-up pitches snapped on target in his bullpen catcher’s mitt.

On the game mound, away from the bullpen, Bayer’s accuracy and confidence dissipated into balls that bounced in the dirt or sailed high and away. He fell behind to the UConn batters and then they hit his strikes on clean pinging line-drives into the outfield. He walked slowly, almost shuffling his feet, five runs later, off the mound at the end of the top of the ninth with UVM now down 12 to 10.

This is how it ended around 7:30. There was still a bit of evening light in the western sky. I exhaled into the cool air and watched my breath in front of my nostrils. This was May baseball in Vermont. Like the end of a hockey game, both teams lined up and shook hands, walking past each other at homeplate. UConn held a team meeting in left field as their bus idled in the parking lot. UVM did sprints and stretched. In a couple minutes, the rain would begin to fall hard as Ilana and I returned to downtown to watch the Boston Red Sox – Detroit Tigers game from Fenway and grab some dinner.

2007-05-08T21:43:00.000-04:00

What Ty Cobb's Homerun Record Tells Us About Barry Bonds

Ty Cobb was a great homerun hitter.

We know Cobb in the context of his career batting and base-running records, three of which have been surpassed in our generation. For more than two generations, Cobb held the career-records for stolen-bases, base-hits, and runs. In August 1977, the St Louis Cardinals’ Lou Brock broke the stolen-base record; in September 1985, the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose eclipsed the career base-hit mark; Ricky Henderson, playing for the San Diego Padres, set the mark for runs scored in September 2001.

Cobb was also one of the top homerun hitters of his generation.

Baseball-reference.com has a nice feature on its player pages in which it lists the season finishes of a player in multiple statistics categories. The Cobb link is at http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/cobbty01.shtml.

Cobb led the American League in homeruns in 1909, finished second in the League in 1907, 1910, and 1911, and finished in the top-ten in every other season between 1908 and 1918 as well as in 1921. Roy E. Brownell II, writing in his article “Was Ty Cobb a Power Hitter?” in the most recent SABR The Baseball Research Journal, highlights that Cobb’s 11-career top-ten season homerun totals compare with the Toronto Blue Jays’ Frank Thomas who has nine top-ten league finishes, Gil Hodges who had ten, and Hall of Fame slugger Al Kaline who had 8.

Cobb made his American League debut in August 1905 with the Tigers. This was the dead-ball era which is said to have ended with the 1920 season when both the spitball was outlawed and the official ball was wound tighter so that it carried harder and further when hit. Cobb would play through the 1928 season but the majority of his career, and certainly his prime years, and the years in which he led the Tigers to the American League pennant, were during the dead-ball era which was also the pre-Babe Ruth era. Ruth would not make his major league debut until 1914 by which time Cobb was a well established star.

Hank Aaron, playing for the Atlanta Braves in 1974, broke Babe Ruth’s career record for homeruns which had stood at 714. Aaron went onto hit 755 for his career. As I write this article, the San Francisco Giants’ Barry Bonds has 745 career homeruns and could realistically hit career number 756 prior to the mid-July All-Star Game.

Who held the career record for homeruns prior to Ruth? As long-time Phillies broadcaster Richie Ashburn would say responding to a question posed by booth-partner Harry Kalas, “How about that Roger Connor?!” Yes, Roger Connor was the Major League Baseball career homeruns record holder from 1895 until 1920. The Baseball Hall of Fame lists Connor’s primary team as the New York Gothams, the National League team that we know as the “Giants”. Connor finished his career with 138 career homeruns which Ruth exceeded during the 1921 season.

138 career homeruns does not seem to us like very many. Even in 2007, an era that may or may-not be post-steroids, we would not be surprised to see a player hit 138 over the course of three straight seasons. But this was a lot in the years prior to 1920 and 1921 when the ball was squishier (yes, that is a technical term), spitballs and doctored balls were legal, and outfield fences were, on average, further from home-plate than they are today.

Homeruns are about gravitas and finitude. One has hit the ball over the fence such that one is able to jog around the bases at one’s leisure. The damage is done and there is no play for the fielders to make. It is a very definite hit.

And yet homeruns are relative. There are thirty seasons from 1966 when Frank Robinson led both leagues with 49 homeruns, and 1995 when Albert Belle hit 50, which was two years prior to Mark McGwire hitting 58 and subsequent explosion by McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Bonds. Of the 30 season leaders, 22 hit between 40 and 49 homeruns, five hit between 30 and 39, and three hit more than 50. Basically, for thirty years, the best homerun hitters each season hit around 45 homeruns.

Of course, this changed. McGwire hit 70 in 1998, 65 in 1999, and Bonds hit 73 in 2001. This gave us a new metric for season homerun success.

What do Ty Cobb and Roger Connor have to do with Barry Bonds? Everything. ABC News and ESPN conducted a telephone poll of 799 adult baseball fans between March 29 and April 22, 2007. This poll found that 52 percent of fans hope that Bonds will not break the career homerun record, while 37 percent of fans do want him to surpass Aaron's mark.

That Bonds has hit more homeruns than Ruth, and will soon have hit more than Aaron, does not therefore define Bonds to be the greatest homerun hitter of all time. It does not mean that he is the career homerun king. (It does not mean that he is not, either). What Bonds is doing, and has done, is prove himself to be one of the greatest homerun hitters of this generation of baseball players. He is one of the best hitters of the 1990s and 2000s. The same is true of Rafael Palmeiro and McGwire and Sosa. These players are the best homerun hitters of the past fifteen years.

Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson has zero major league homeruns; he played his entire career in the Negro Leagues and passed-away prior to 1947 when the National League and American League desegregated. We count Gibson among the greatest homerun hitters of all-time.

I write this because I am not sure that if Hank Aaron or Josh Gibson or Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb or Roger Connor were playing in 2007, or especially 1998, that they would not have been contenders for the single-season homerun mark or career homerun record. Ted Williams might have challenged Ruth for the record had Williams not flown fighter planes in World War II and in the Korean War. Mickey Mantle might have challenged Ruth had he not had chronic knee injuries.

As finite as the integers of baseball records are, they are relative numbers. We measure the success of ballplayers against contemporaries and whether we do so knowingly or not, using the adage of economists everywhere, “all things being equal”.

Ty Cobb was a great homerun hitter in his age. Barry Bonds is a great homerun hitter in our age. Bonds will, in all likelihood, pass Aaron’s 755. Let us not narrow our gaze to the number alone.

2007-04-24T19:22:00.001-04:00

8.4% is a Sign; It is Not a Statement

I am curious if anyone has surveyed Black professional-ballplayers and asked them what it was like coming through the system into the Major Leagues.

The Associated Press referred to a study that the amount of Black players in the big leagues has dwindled in recent years -- only 8.4 percent of major leaguers last season. Yahoo! Sports carried this in its April 23 report, “Phillies, Astros pay tribute to Jackie Robinson”.

Others tell us that this is down from a height of 30% thirty-years ago. That is a long time ago and a big drop. Well, the last time we were this low was soon after the 1947 Integration which was a result of our sin of Exclusion. The 8.4% could suggest that we are heading towards a future-Exclusion as we subconsciously push them out.

We might ask what does 8.4% mean. It may not be such a mean number.

There are far fewer Black MLB players now then there were before. A drop to 8.4% from 30% is stunning – and more so in thinking of the more than 750 players. It could be that something has changed in our society’s conditions to contextualize this drop. I would like to believe that identification of the cause will enable our self-correction of our actions to the goal.

So let us think about where the Black prospect come from. Let us consider his first official interaction with a representative of Major League Baseball who could be a scout, coach, or front office staff. Let us consider whether this interaction is positive as showing the respect that this could be a long-term partnership.

When prospects are released we might consider if they are given information and resources for making it in the working world as non-Athletes. We can point them towards GED equivalency courses, vo-tech schools, four-year college programs, masters programs. We can give them instructions in signing a lease to rent an apartment, purchasing health-care, writing a resume, dressing for work.

8.4% is a sign and not a statement. We are not clear right now what it is a sign of. If we keep going forward like this, than 8.4% will be a statement about our marginalization of the American Black community. In this way, to do nothing is to choose to confirm the fear and in so doing, really make us racist.

We can do something about 8.4% to redefine the value as the first letter of the answer to the question its asking.

Let us begin to ask our Black professional-ballplayers what happened to him when he came up through our system. His stories will be numbers on which to grow the game for all of our good.

2007-04-17T21:03:00.000-04:00

Major League Baseball Celebrates Itself Celebrating Jackie Robinson Day.

Major League Baseball celebrated Jackie Robinson Day this past Sunday, April 15. Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in their season-opener on April 15, 1947. In doing so, Robinson became the the first Negro ballplayer to play in the major leagues since the 1880s when organized baseball tacitly agreed to bar Negro [or ‘colored’] players from its rosters.

Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of Robinson’s debut and Major League Baseball commemorated the event. Boy, did MLB commemorate the event.

The Cincinnati Reds’ Ken Griffey, Jr, who had been the first current-player to request permission from Commissioner Bud Selig to wear Robinson’s retired number 42 on Sunday, did wear 42. So did All-Stars Andruw Jones, Derrek Lee, Dontrelle Willis, Barry Bonds, David Ortiz, Jim Thome, C.C. Sabathia, and Grady Sizemore; so did managers Willie Randolf, Ron Washington, and Joe Torre; so did coach Harold Baines, umpire CB Bucknor, and the entire rosters of the St Louis Cardinals, Milwaukee Brewers, and Los Angeles Dodgers. The Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Houston Astros all had planned for every player to wear number 42 and their games were rained-out.

Every playing field was adorned with the official MLB Jackie Robinson Day trademarked logo. Major League Baseball’s website had the logo as its background on Sunday and Monday. The website’s online store has a section, “Featured Jackie Robinson Day Collection Selections” for all of our JRD apparel and collectible needs. Every player who played on Sunday wore a Jackie Robinson Day patch on his uniform sleeve. They even placed Jackie Robinson Day decals on the batting helmets.

Los Angeles was the heart of the commemorations. The Dodgers held a 90-minute pre-game ceremony at the end of which Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson threw out the first-pitch(es). Bud Selig awarded the Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award to Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, at a press-conference in Los Angeles prior to the Dodgers game.

Mark Newman, writing on MLB.com yesterday, referred to number 42 as “sacred”. The headlines of the articles on MLB.com echo this theme: “Sabathia cherishes wearing No. 42”; “Cameron proud to wear No. 42”; “Andruw wears No. 42 with pride”; “Anderson has deep respect for No. 42”.

Something is wrong with this picture.

It is not that something is wrong with our desire to honor Jackie Robinson. But when we need a 657-word article on MLB.com telling us how much C.C. Sabathia cherishes wearing the number, I begin to wonder. This is not a knock on C.C. Sabathia, who may be among the top five pitchers in MLB right-now. But multiple 700-word articles reporting how honored/special each individual team-All-Star feels to wear it, decals on batting helmets, and painted trademarked logos on every field are a bit much.

We might be trying trying too hard to convince ourselves.

Jackie Robinson is a hero. He is a hero in baseball where he began the process of MLB-integration. He was an outstanding player and was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. He was an advocate for the inclusion of Negro League players into the Hall of Fame and for the hiring of managers of color in MLB. Playing for the Dodgers in 1947, he faced sharpened spikes on the base-paths and death-threats off of them. You bet Jackie Robinson is a hero.

Rituals like the retirement of a players’ jersey and public display of the number and name at the ballpark, anniversary commemorations, feature articles in the press, and achievement awards all serve to pay our respects to those who paved the roads on which we walk. More so, these commemorations educate our children, and re-educate ourselves, giving us models of conduct and reminders of lessons that we must often relearn.

Major League Baseball retired number 42 in honor of Robinson in 1997 and number 42 is now displayed in all 30-ballparks across the League. If there is a stadium in which it is not displayed, well, it should be. April 15 is an entirely appropriate day to remember Robinson, and the 10-year mark (50th anniversary, 60th anniversary, etc.) is a natural plateau for longer commemorations.

But decals on batting helmets and multiple 700-word articles saying the same thing seem less about Jackie Robinson and more about Major League Baseball’s marketing department.

The more MLB pushed Jackie Robinson Day with its logos and decals and ceremonies and patches, the more MLB made the day seem like it was about MLB and less about Jackie Robinson. MLB shifted the focus from the man and his achievement to the way in which MLB was celebrating Robinson. In this sense, I was less sure that MLB was celebrating Jackie Robinson in 1947 than that MLB was celebrating itself celebrating Jackie Robinson in 2007.

I write this because reading about Robinson, I have the sense that he was a man suspicious of official gestures when the deliverable fell short of that which was promised.

MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn invited Robinson to appear before Game Two of the 1972 World Series in Cincinnati where the Reds were hosting the Oakland Athletics. Robinson resisted, hesitant to support MLB when not one African-American had yet been hired to manage. Kuhn promised Robinson that he would encourage the owners to do so and pressed Robinson to attend. Robinson did and Kuhn presented Robinson with a plaque at what was then the 25th anniversary of his debut. Robinson used the public stage to speak his truth to the baseball powers when he said, “I'm going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”

Robinson also spoke out against the marginalization of black players in Major League Baseball when he chastised Commissioner Kuhn and the Baseball Hall of Fame for its planned treatment of Negro League players. The Hall of Fame did not admit a Negro League player until 1971 when it formed a special committee, the Committee on Negro League Veterans, which selected Satchell Paige in February 1971 as its first honoree.

However, these Negro League admits would not be Hall of Famers. After all, they had not met the criteria for induction that they have played Major League baseball for a minimum of 10 years. Instead, they would be honored as part of a new exhibit in the Hall for the contributions of Negro League players.

Robinson protested this arrangement. The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Memories and Dreams, in its May-June 2006 issue, reports Robinson as having said, “If the blacks go in as a special thing, it’s not worth a hill of beans. It’s the same rotten thing all over again. They deserve to be in it, but not as black players in a special category. Rules have been changed before. You can change rules like you change laws if the law is unjust.”

Robinson might have wanted to be hanging out with Billy Williams on Sunday. Williams played for the Chicago Cubs and Athletics from 1959 through 1976 and was elected himself to the Hall of Fame in 1987. The Associated Press reported yesterday, April 16, that when Williams was asked about MLB and its relationship to black fans and players, he responded, “We look at the problem, read about it, talk about it and nothing much changes.”

Look at it another way – there are thirty major league teams each of which has a five-man rotation of starting pitchers. This is 150 starting pitchers. How many of these starting pitchers in 2007 are African-American? Two. Dontrelle Willis and C.C. Sabathia. When one watches a baseball game, on which player does the camera focus the most attention? Yup.

It took Major League Baseball 15-years before it hired its first African-American coach, Buck O’Neil in 1962. It was not until 1975, three years after Robinson passed away, that Frank Robinson was hired as the first black manager. Today, where do we stand? There are two black managers, one black general-manager, and zero black owners.

It is a lot easier to celebrate ourselves celebrating Jackie Robinson than to celebrate Jackie Robinson.

2007-04-10T23:40:00.001-04:00

Chief Wahoo Rides the Pine During MLB Civil Rights Game

April is Black History Month for Major League Baseball. The United States marks Black History in February, orienting the commemoration to the February birthdays of Frederick Douglass, born February 17, and Abraham Lincoln, born February 12. But in February, MLB is still in winter hibernation with spring training games not beginning prior to March 1.

Nope, Black History is April for MLB. Jackie Robinson reintegrated Major League Baseball when he played in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ season opener on April 15, 1947, against the Boston Braves. Born in Jim Crow Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, and a product of Negro League baseball, Robinson was the first ballplayer of color to play in white baseball since the 1880s; he joined the International League’s Montreal Royals for the 1946 season. In 1947, he and the Dodgers reopened the gates of the Major Leagues.

In 1987, Major League Baseball commemorated the 40th anniversary of Robinson’s debut. For example, when the Philadelphia Phillies opened the 1987 season in Atlanta against the Braves, there were pre-game activities and second-base was decorated with a blue number 42 in Robinson’s honor.

Ten years later, in 1997, then-president Bill Clinton, who Toni Morrison would label “the first black president” in The New Yorker in October 1998, presided at the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium – the Mets are the historic combined-standard barer of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants – as Major League Baseball announced that uniform number 42 would be retired across all American League and National League clubs in honor of Robinson. Those players who were then wearing the number would continue to wear it until they retired – like National Hockey League players grandfathered to be allowed to skate without helmets in the 1980s after the headgear was made mandatory during the 1979 off-season.

Across Major League Baseball stadiums, the number 42 joined the banners and flags and displays of those uniform numbers previously retired by each individual club. In Philadelphia, this royal-blue 42 joined the scarlet-red numbers 1, 14, 20, 32, and 36 that hung in the outfield backdrop at the Phillies’ Veterans Stadium. In addition, every team wore a sleeve patch during the 1997 season with Robinson’s signature stitched on it along with the words, BREAKING BARRIERS. It was a season long celebration.

This year, 2007, is the 60th anniversary of Robinson’s debut; celebrations and commemorations are planned for this Sunday, April 15. Commissioner Bud Selig has granted a dispensation to allow every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers to wear Robinson’s number 42 on Sunday. It will be an army of Jackie Robinsons. Similar events are planned around the League. Ken Griffey, Jr. will wear 42 for the Reds and Jimmy Rollins will do the same for the Phillies.

This brings us to the subject of this week’s article, MLB’s Civil Rights Game and the Cleveland Indians.

In keeping with its dedication to honoring the legacy of black ballplayers, Major League Baseball added a new annual event to its yearly calendar, the Civil Rights Game. Last December 4, MLB announced the creation of the exhibition game, which was designed, in Selig’s words, as reported on MLB.com on 12/04/2006, "to commemorate the Civil Rights Movement, one of the most critical and important eras of our social history.”

The city of Memphis was chosen as the site of the game due, in large part, to the location of the National Civil Rights Museum. The Museum was built in 1991 in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. One can view the balcony on which Dr. King stood when he was shot; the museum traces the Civil Rights Movement in almost a day-by-day manner. MLB plans to play the Civil Rights Game the weekend prior to Opening Day which will play it every year in the days prior to the anniversary of Dr. King’s murder.

This year’s game was played on Saturday, March 31. The St Louis Cardinals were a natural choice. Memphis is home to the Memphis Redbirds, the AAA minor-league team of the Cardinals. Memphis is relatively close to St Louis and the Cardinals were playing the following night at home in the season opener.

Cleveland was the second major league team to reintegrate, and the first in the American League, when Larry Doby debuted with the club in July 1947. The following year, Cleveland would win the World Series with both Doby and long-time Negro League phenom Satchel Paige.

For the game, the two teams were outfitted in special uniforms. (Like every piece of special commemorative sports-wear, the caps and jerseys are available for purchase online). The Cardinals were designated the home team and they wore white while Cleveland wore gray. Each team had its city spelled-out across the front in a plain san-serif font (this article appears on your screen as a san-serif font) and wore caps in the team’s primary color – red for the Cardinals and navy for Cleveland – with a white STL for St Louis and C for Cleveland.

Where was Chief Wahoo?

Banished to the back of the proverbial uniform-bus was Cleveland’s American-Indian mascot, Chief Wahoo. Since the 1950s, Cleveland has represented itself with the red skinned, hooked nose, grinning smile of its mascot. He is called Chief Wahoo. Since 1986, when he replaced a red and white full-block C, he has adorned the club’s primary game cap.

If you go to the Indians’ ballpark in Cleveland, Jacob’s Field, you will meet the team’s furry stadium mascot, Slider. Slider is a good guy as far as mascots go, and looks something like a purple love-child of the Phillie Phanatic and a Growth Hormone -Muppet (not that MLB is testing mascots, yet). Slider is no Indian and he does not look like Chief Wahoo – which is a good thing because a life-size version of the chief might scare children, both young and old.

We as a nation have become increasingly conscious of how we label and portray groups and people in this country that we have long marginalized. We might cringe at the capacity for political correctness to overreach itself, and, that being said, it would be hard to argue that we do not do well to be careful about how we speak of or portray people who we have historically used the law to injure or harm.

The Atlanta Braves have consciously fazed out their use of the screaming-Brave logo that you will see on its uniforms, on baseball cards, and official team letterhead going back to the 1950s when the club played in Milwaukee. Sometime in the past few years, the club ceased using it in official capacities. Today, the club’s logo is the team name with a tomahawk. Say what you will about a tomahawk, it is not a screaming Mohawked brave.

I am not suggesting that Atlanta change its nickname nor that even Cleveland does. (Although it would be cool if Cleveland used one of their nicknames from the early part of the twentienth-centory, like the Naps or Blues.)

We need not go that far.

The Civil Rights Movement, as embodied by Martin Luther King, and towards which Malcolm X might have been moving after his pilgrimage to Mecca, was about breaking barriers for everyone in this country, and not only the country’s people of color. It was not a black-nationalist movement – which in contrast, the Black Power movement saw itself to be. It is very peculiar for Major League Baseball to be patting itself on the back celebrating the Civil Rights Movement when one of it’s 30-club members adorns its game uniform with a relic of our collective cultural prejudice.

Cleveland released an alternate game cap a couple years ago, which it now wears for home games with its white jersey-vests. It is a navy cap with a cursive-looping capital-letter I in red and white. Let them wear this for every game and let this be an additional way in which MLB continues to celebrate Jackie Robinson.

2007-04-02T15:22:00.000-04:00

** ON VACATION **

Outfield Grass will not be published April 3 due to the first-day of the Passover holiday.

2007-03-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

The Reds Were First, or Why We Should Bring Opening Day Back to Cincinnati

Major League Baseball opens the 2007 championship season on Sunday night, April 1 when the New York Mets visit Busch Stadium in St Louis to play the Cardinals. The game will begin at 5:05 pm EDST and feature the reigning winners of the World Series in the Cardinals, and the Mets, who many consider one of the top teams in the National League.

The Sunday night timing is a creation of MLB’s relationship with ESPN. It is an attractive entertainment product. The game will be the only contest that day for Major League Baseball so it will attract the baseball world’s spotlight. More so, the game is placed the day after the NCAA’s Final Four basketball semi-final double-header on Saturday night, March 31, and the day prior to the championship game on Monday, April 2. The Mets and Cardinals will have the attention of the sports world (with perhaps the exception of two schools’ college basketball fans).

The isolation of the season opening game mirrors the move of the National Football League in recent years to play a single game on the Thursday evening prior to the Week 1 Sunday matches. Last fall, the New England Patriots met the Pittsburgh Steelers pitting the dynastic Patriots against the reigning Super Bowl champions.

2007 is the third consecutive year that MLB has opened on a Sunday night. In 2005, the Red Sox played the Yankees in the Bronx. Last year, Cleveland played the White Sox in the rain on the south-side of Chicago. The previous season’s World Series champion has the opportunity to bask in the national media attention for the night and pit itself against a strong opponent.

For all of its benefits, this move to Sunday night does come at a cost.

For all the benefits of media attention, advertisement revenue, and the spotlight for the two clubs, we disempower the strength of Opening Day and lose another connection to the long held baseball practice of showing the Cincinnati Reds the honor of playing the season’s very first game.

Opening Day is unique in the four American professional sports leagues. It coincides with the beginning of spring. Spring is renewal and it is new beginnings. In two weeks is the Christian holy day of Easter and next week is the Jewish festival of the Passover. Both speak messages of renewal and rebirth, and while rooted in their unique cosmologies and theologies, connect with and to the physical season in which we all participate.

American football is the late summer and fall. Hockey is a winter sport, the NHL playoffs not withstanding. Basketball is a winter sport, invented in western Massachusetts during the winter, despite its definition by the International Olympic Committee as a summer event. Only baseball returns to us in the spring and matches its season opener to the season and beginning of April.

In no city does this return enjoy greater municipal recognition than in Cincinnati.

On Monday, April 2, Cincinnati will host the 88th edition of the Findlay Market Opening Day Parade. While its origins are humble, in a handful of local merchants closing up shop and walking together to the ballpark for the opener, it now has full city support and organization. This year, former Reds All-Star outfielder Eric Davis will be the grand-marshal of the parade.

Chicago has the St Patrick’s Day parade. Philadelphia has the January 1 Mummers’ Parade. New York does the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Pasadena has the Rose Bowl Parade. Each civic celebration speaks of the city’s character and speaks about our own connections to the event and the city. (Please do not speculate on how the Mummers’ Parade speaks of Philadelphia).

The Reds are the only team in the American or National Leagues that opens every season at home (barring labor strife work-stoppages). For many years, the very first game of the season was scheduled for Cincinnati.

We had this tradition to celebrate and honor the Cincinnati Reds as the first professional team in baseball history. The Reds’ first season was in 1869, seven years prior to the organization of the National League itself. The Reds had this crazy innovative idea to pay players to play the sport, and then charge admission to generate revenue. The Reds pioneered the business model.

When MLB celebrated its 100th-year anniversary in 1969, and 125th-year anniversary in 1994, they celebrated the birth of this business idea. Remember that all Major League clubs wore anniversary patches in 1994 to celebrate the 125th. The patches were all identical, featuring the MLB batter logo, except for the Reds’ patch which had a photograph of the 1869 team.

Rituals, neumonics, and traditions connect us to a narrative-line. The singing of the national anthem prior to the game began in war-time and frames the event as a community event. Managers wearing uniforms is a legacy of the time when most managers were also players.

Major League Baseball has become a slave to the economics of television and broadcasting. It is such a significant issue that its current deal with DirecTV is receiving scrutiny from Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and his colleagues in Congress. You would be a slave too if the television industry was paying you billions of dollars.

Major League Baseball is a professional company whose goal is to maximize profit and the return on the investments of its capitalists, the owners. This is all well and good. I enjoy consuming the product that MLB offers. And, MLB, for all of its smart minds, could find a way to balance the pressures of a national television contract and its desire for a unique Sunday night, single opening game product, with the pull of traditions that have made the game what it is. There is no valuable game without the work of those who came before us, especially the Reds.

Let the Reds have the Sunday night telecast. I will watch on Sunday night - not because it is the Cardinals and Mets - but because it is professional baseball and the game counts. Outside of St Louis and the New York metropolitan area, I suspect so too will most other fans. Opening Day – even Opening Night - belongs in Cincinnati.

2007-03-20T00:15:00.000-04:00

Pete Rose is not a "scheming degenerate"

Pete Rose never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

He now says he bet on the Cincinnati Reds “every night” while he was manager in the late 1980s.

Jeff Passan, writing about Rose in a column called “Liar, Liar” in Yahoo! Sports on March 14, calls Rose a “scheming degenerate”. This is not an atypical response by journalists and columnists to this example and previous Rose utterances. I am fond of Passan’s writings and only quote him because I am a regular reader.

Pete Rose is not a scheming degenerate. At least he is not a degenerate - and if he is a schemer, he is a poor schemer at best.

Pete Rose is a narcissist and likely, a chronic liar.

The Reds have a team museum and Hall of Fame in their four-year old ballpark in Cincinnati, Great American Ball Park. Pete Rose is the most accomplished Reds player in history. He is number one lifetime for the Reds in at-bats, hits, and doubles, fourth in RBIs, and was an All-Star in 12 of his 19 seasons with the club. He is from the region and remains popular among Cincinnati fans. On Saturday, the Reds opened a new exhibit celebrating Rose’s playing-career and his Major League Baseball record for career hits.

The exhibit is appropriate given Rose’s achievements as a player with the Reds. Simultaneously, it is delicate opening such an exhibit because Rose is banned for life from Major League Baseball. As manager of the Reds in the late 1980s, Rose bet on the club and was expelled from MLB by the Commissioner in 1989. The Reds had to receive permission from the Office of the Commissioner for the exhibit.

Last Tuesday, March 13, Rose appeared in Cincinnati to celebrate the opening of the exhibit. Most individuals, including retired athletes, would appear, be gracious about being celebrated, smile for the camera, and leave with everyone feeling good. Rose can not do this.

In an interview on The Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio, reported by the Associated Press on March 14, Rose claims that as manager he bet on the Reds “every night”. As if he had not put a sufficient portion of his foot in his mouth right there, Rose justified doing so “because I love my team, I believe in my team.”

Let us set aside for the moment the poor marketing judgment shown by Rose in claiming something that makes him look bad and then offering a sorry explanation which he would have justify the poor choice.

Let us back up and consider the history of Rose’s admission to having bet on the Reds. John Dowd wrote the report in 1989 that collected the evidence against Rose and supported his ban. Dowd found that Rose bet on Reds games except when certain Reds pitchers were starting. Rose denied the veracity of the report. He attacked Dowd and denied having bet on baseball. Rose did this for 15 years. Then, in 2004, Rose published My Prison Without Bars in which he admitted that he had bet on the Reds. Dowd had been correct; Rose had been lying for the fifteen years.

So long as he is on the Commissioner’s no-fly list, Rose is ineligible to manage a ML team, which he would like to do, and to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose is 65 years old and can still petition the Commissioner for reinstatement. In this sense, he is on perpetual probation. His actions and words are the content now of his relationship with the game and his opportunities for a major league rehabilitation.

This is classic Pete Rose.

When the Atlanta Braves ended his 44-game hitting streak in 1978, Rose lashed-out at the team. He could have followed the lead of previous record-setters like Roger Maris in 1961 and Hank Aaron in 1974. But Rose could not be gracious. After all, he had just set the longest National League hit-streak. No, Pete verbally attacked the Braves and Atlanta pitcher Gene Garber for playing tough. Rose gratuitously attacked Phil Niekro, the veterans Braves pitcher and future Hall of Famer. Niekro is not exactly on any baseball bad-boy list.

As the Reds manager in 1988, Rose scratched umpire Dave Pallone during a manager-umpire argument. Rather than say ‘mea culpa’ and take his lashes for physically touching an umpire – a standard baseball no-no - Rose said that it was Pallone who had provoked him. Umpires make mistakes and are fallible and the need for umpire authority in baseball dictates that the umpire and League have the final word.

Jim Gray interviewed Rose on NBC at the 1999 World Series prior to Game Two when Rose appeared as part of the All-Century Team, Gray, being the journalist that he is and paid to be, asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. Gray asked Rose if he was prepared to admit that he had bet on baseball. Five years later, Rose would admit this in exchange for a lucrative book deal, but on national television, Rose attacked Gray for asking a “prosecutor’s question”.

Listen to Rose’s statements from Monday, March 13. These are the statements of one self-obsessed who believes he does only good: “I believe I’m the best ambassador baseball has”; “my name is synonymous with baseball”; fans would be “elevated” if MLB reinstated him. There is another word by which to describe this notion of self: Narcissism.

Even now, admitting that he did bet on baseball, Rose is not playing the part of the contrite penitent. This would be to eat even the slightest morsel of humble-pie. Ever self-indulgent, Rose now autographs baseballs with the inscription “I bet on baseball”. (Yours for the low low price of $350!). Last Tuesday, his tone was almost to gloat about having bet on games making himself a paradigm of managerial belief in one’s players. Rather than say “I bet on the team and I am sorry I did”, Rose celebrates it.

Pete Rose is a narcissist.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV, which is the clinical authority on the subject, divides personality disorders into three clusters based on symptom similarities. Narcissism is part of Cluster B. It is exhibited in grandiosity, obsessive self-interest, and the primary pursuit of selfish goals. It is estimated that this disorder is exhibited in 1% of the general population.

As Casey Stengel would say, “You could look it up!”

I am suggesting that Pete Rose is not a degenerate schemer but rather that he is mentally troubled. We know that he has struggled with a gambling addiction. We know that he shows himself to be a liar.

It is time for the media and for baseball to stop expecting Pete Rose to be someone he is not. Pete Rose is Pete Rose and that means he will continue to lie, that he will continue to consider himself bigger than he is, and that he will attack anyone who questions this self-perception.

Rose is troubled and there is nothing to suggest that this will change. What can change is our understanding of mental illness and the place out of which Pete is acting. When we do this, we might move beyond calling him names and begin making sense of his reputation-destructive behavior and words.

2007-03-13T06:14:00.000-04:00

The HOF Veterans Committee Whifs on Two

The National Baseball Hall of Fame announced on February 28 that the Committee on Baseball Veterans, what we know colloquially as the "Veterans Committee", had once again chosen to elect none of the candidates under consideration.

This Committee, under the rules redefined in 2001 after the election of Bill Mazeroski, an election that many within baseball viewed as one in which sentimentality outweighed Hall of Fame-merit, now votes every two years. It works out that these votes take-place in odd-numbered years. The Committee considers players who had not been elected by the Baseball Writers´ Association of America during the player’s 15 years of eligibility following his retirement and the requisite five-year waiting period.

As has been the past few years, frontrunners were Gil Hodges and Ron Santo. The 2005 publication of Thomas Oliphant's Praying for Gil Hodges and Santo's battle against diabetes and the 2005 DVD This Old Cub only increased the din of support for these men. But, they have not been sufficiently popular to win election. In the 2005 vote, they each missed by eight votes. Last month, Santo missed by five votes and Hodges by 12. We will see them again as candidates in 2009.

Managers, umpires, executives, and pioneers are only considered in every-other election. They were voted on this year and will next be subjects of the poll in 2011.

The Veterans Committee is viewed by some, including Hall of Fame chairperson Jane Clark, to be a "second chance" for players denied election by the BBWAA. [See Ms. Clark's statement of March 2, 2005 following the release of the 2005 Vet Committee vote]. More than merely a second-chance, the Veterans Committee gives the player, judged and passed-over by the journalists, the chance to be judged by his peers, retired players, who now compose approximately 75% of the Committee. It is an appeals court.

For umpires, managers, general-managers, and other MLB executives, the Veterans Committee is the only gateway into 25 Main St. (An exception has been the special committees to consider and elect Negro League candidates. These congresses were exceptions to address oversights born of historical-system bias.)

For these non-players, the Veterans Committee is their 15-year BBWAA player-eligibility. Two candidates, one of whom was considered and not elected, deserve induction under these categories. They are Marvin Miller and Buck O'Neil.

Marvin Miller revolutionized Major League Baseball in the 1960s and 1970s. He was Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players' Association from 1966 through 1982. Miller pioneed the very idea of collective-bargaining in pro sports when the Players' Association negotiated their first agreement in 1968. There had been no collective bargaining prior to this time. Under Miller's leadership, the players raised the minimum salary from $6,000 [Approximately $35,000 in 2006-dollars adjusted for inflation] to $10,000 [$58,000 in inflation-adjusted 2006-dollars]. You can read more about the players claiming more of the MLB-revenue pie in the post from December 26, 2006, "The Players Strike Back and Gil Meche Wins Big".

Miller helped the players break the Reserve Clause to gain the ability to choose their own employers after playing out a contract. Prior to, players were bound to their team which could renew their contract at-will. We like to gripe about how much the players make in free-agency. We often forget that the owners are no more entitled than the players to retain MLB revenue. More so, most all of us desire or would desire the chance to negotiate for ourselves the best terms of employment possible.

Living Hall of Fame players who played after at least 1976 and the advent of Free Agency, if not 1968 and the first collective bargaining agreement, should have voted for Miller this year. Miller received 51 of the 61 votes necessary this year for election. Let us hope he is given his due in 2011.

Buck O'Neil was not on the Committee's ballot this year and he deserves election - not as a player - as a pioneer in the Hall's Executives and Pioneers category. He did play for the Kansas City Monarchs, was the first Major League coach of color when he joined the Chicago Cubs' field-staff for the 1962 season, and a long-time scout for the Cubs and Kansas City Royals. He excelled in these positions and we are not electing him for these accomplishments. He deserves election for his work on behalf of the Negro Leagues, their memory, and the players who came before Jackie Robinson integrated the American League and National League in 1947.

O'Neil was the Negro Leagues' de facto Chief Marketing Officer for the past 20 years. He was instrumental in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City which opened in 1990 and of which O'Neil was Chairman of the executive board until his death last year. The NLBM runs a museum in Kansas City, supports educational programs, and serves as the licensing arm for Negro League team merchandise. When one purchases a cap for any of the 30 MLB, a portion is paid to MLB as a royalty. MLB is a profit-making business. When one purchases a Homestead Grays t-shirt or New York Black Yankees cap, a portion goes to the Museum which is a not-for-profit org.

O'Neil's most prominent work came with Ken Burns in Burns' nine-part series Baseball. Burns devoted "Inning 5", which he called "Shadow Ball" to the Negro Leagues. We saw and heard O'Neil tell a great deal of the story. This work opened the story of the leagues - the Negro National League, Southern Negro League, Eastern Colored League, East-West League, and Negro American League - and its teams and players to baseball fans born after World War II who had never seen the players in person.

The Baseball Hall of Fame had been considering and electing players from these leagues since the early 1970s. O'Neil was part of the group in the 1980s that considered such players.

We have come a great ways in integrating the history of these great teams - the Monarchs, Atlanta Black Crackers, Detroit Stars, Homestead Grays and on and on - into our current cycles of commemorations and celebrations. The Royals now have a yearly tradition of wearing KC Monarchs uniforms for a Turn Back the Clock game. The Detroit Tigers often wear Detroit Stars uniforms.

The Negro League history has increasingly become our collective baseball history. O'Neil was an activist story-teller and historian's subject. He was a baseball giant and for this work alone has earned his plaque in the Hall of Fame gallery.

Santo has his Cubs-loyalists to remind us of his merits and Hodges the legions of Brooklyn fans. Philadelphia Phillies fans long had a bumper-sticker that they displayed with pride on behalf of Richie Ashburn which read “Richie Ashburn: Why the Hall Not?!” Miller wore a suit and was the public-face of labor stoppages and owner complaints. There are no fans to sing his praises.

O’Neil is thought to have had his last opportunity with last year’s special committee on the Negro Leagues which elected 17 individuals who were not Buck O’Neil. With his passing departed the urgency to see him in while he was with us in the land of the living.

2011 will not be too late for either O’Neil or Miller who both led critical changes in Major League Baseball.

2007-02-27T11:29:00.001-05:00

The Cubs Have Hitters; Can Soriano Pitch?

The Chicago Cubs entered Spring Training 2007 ranked number 1 all-time in dollars-spent in a baseball off-season. Totally unadjusted for inflation, the Cubs’ $297 million beat-out the $268 million spent by the Texas Rangers. The New York Mets wrote contracts for $196 million in and rank fourth. The Rangers finished 2001 with a record of 73 and 89 while the 2005 Mets finished in third-place in the NL East at 83 and 79. What does this mean for the 2007 Cubs?

The 2006 Cubs finished 15th and of 16 National League teams in runs-scored, last in the League in on-base-percentage, and first in the most number of losses with 96. Derrek Lee was injured and played only 50 games. Lee returns healthy in 2007 and the Cubs enhanced their lineup by resigning third-baseman Aramis Ramirez and adding Alfornso Soriano through free-agency. This is a revamped line-up that will score runs.

The problem is that hitting helps win pennants but it is hard to carry a team on the strength of the position players alone. The 2001 Rangers finished first in homeruns and third in batting-average. This was a line-up arguably stronger than the 2007 Cubs. Ivan Rodriguez was the catcher, Alex Rodriguez played short, Raphael Palmeiro was at first, Michael Young played second, and Ruben Sierra was the designated-hitter. That is a lot of all-star selections and MVP votes right there. Meanwhile, the pitching was entirely mediocre. The team ERA was 5.71, the highest in the American League. Rick Helling “led” the team with 12 wins.

The New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics, and Seattle Mariners had the three highest victory totals in the American League in 2001. The top six finishers in the 2001 AL Cy Young balloting were all on these three clubs. The Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series in ’01 and their Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson finished one-two in the NL Cy Young award voting. Pitching won.

The 2007 Cubs are not the 2001 Rangers nor are they the Colorado Rockies of the late-1990s with Todd Helton, Vinny Castilla, Dante Bichette, and Larry Walker bombing homeruns on their way to 90 losses. The Cubs do have a staff-ace in Carlos Zambrano. Zambrano struck-out 210 batters in 2006, won 16 games, and had an ERA of 3.41 on his way to finishing fifth in the NL Cy Young balloting. He is a confirmed ace who should only increase his win totals this year with the stronger line-up.

The Cubs also have a decent number two pitcher in Ted Lilly who they signed from the Toronto Blue Jays. He went to the All-Star game in Houston in 2004 and won 15 games in 2006 while throwing 181 innings. His ERA was 4.31 which is not stellar and is acceptable in this day and age. Zambrano and Lilly are a solid one-two set-up.

The picture grows murky after this despite the insistence of Outfield Grass’ resident Cubs-consultant Ben Daverman. In addition to Lilly, the Cubs lured Jason Marquis north from St Louis. Marquis is another serviceable starter who logged 194 innings in ’06. He won 14 games for the Cardinals but his ERA was 5.02 which raised his career ERA to 4.55. In the second-half of the season, his ERA climbed to 6.72.

The number 4 and 5 pitchers, Mark Prior and Rich Hill also have question marks. Mark Prior is reported to be healthy and Larry Rotschild, the Cubs pitching coach, is carefully monitoring his workouts this spring in Mesa. Prior started nine games in 2006 and registered a 7.21 ERA.

Hill started 16 games, won six, and has an ERA of 4.17. He started the year 0 and 4 with a 9.31 earned-run average. He was sent down to AAA Iowa mid-season and went 7-1 with a 1.80 ERA in 15 starts. When he returned to the North Side, he went 6 and 3 with a 2.93 ERA for the Cubs the rest of the season. Daverman reminds me that Peter Gammons is a big fan of Hill. I am a big fan of Mr. Gammons and Prior and Hill remain unproven.

The Cubs have a good team. They will, will all likelihood, improve on their last-place 2006 finish. But it is hard to look past the Cubs rotation which has its strengths but simultaneously so many question-marks and what-ifs. Prior may regain his strength and can still be the devastating pitcher which he has shown himself to be in the past. Marquis may regain his poise and benefit from the change to Chicago. Hill may mature and improve on his 2006. And they may not.

Back east in Queens, the Mets are hoping to improve on their National League East 2006 Divisional win by advancing beyond the NLCS to the World Series. Yahoo! Sports player ranking has half of the line-up in the top fifty hitters in baseball. David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, plus Carlos Delgado are a scary four for opposing pitchers. What scares Mets fans are graphics like the New York Times published in its Sunday sports section on February 18 where it showed the 11 pitchers who may constitute the starting rotation this season. This is not how championship ball clubs open spring training.

The Cubs are not the only team with a decent staff led by a star. The Giants have Barry Zito. The Dodgers have Jason Schmidt and Brad Penny. The Phillies have Brett Myers and Freddy Garcia. The Diamondbacks have Brandon Webb and Randy Johnson (who could rediscover his strength in the Phoenix-desert). What makes this Cubs team that much better than the other good teams in the National League?

2007-02-13T22:51:00.000-05:00

Philadelphia Waits to Shine Its Light on the Phillies

Cleveland was an especially fantastic baseball city in which to live in the late 1990s. The Indians dominated the American League Central division. They won 100 games in 1995 and finished in first-place every year through 1999. They sold out every game at Jacobs Field from mid-1995 through April 4, 2001. It was a city for which sports and being a fan meant the Cleveland Indians. The Philadelphia Phillies now have the opportunity, under different circumstances, to capture the loyalty of its city. It is a wonderful feeling to stand at the center of a region’s devotion - the opportunity for which is rare.

The Indians in the late-1990s were one of best teams in baseball and they sat in a vacuum created by the absence of other Cleveland sports teams. Who else was competing for fan attention? There was no professional football between the 1995 departure of the Browns for Baltimore, and the team's 1999 rebirth. The Cavaliers missed the National Basketball Association playoffs in 1997 and suffered through losing seasons from 1998 through 2004. Hockey? The American Hockey League’s Lumberjacks did not draw at Gund Arena. Cleveland State, even with coach Rollie Massimino, was never a big player in NCAA basketball. The Indians owned Cleveland sports.

The Phillies will open their 2007 Spring Training on Thursday, February 15, when pitchers and catchers report to work in Clearwater, Florida. This is a good team with the potential to be a very good team. Ryan Howard is the reigning National League Most Valuable Player. Chase Utley is already one of the top second-baseman in the League. Jimmy Rollins may not be the best candidate to lead-off and he is a spark-plug on base and in the field. The Phillies have six legitimate starting pitchers. This is a good team and it is a good team with diminished local competition.

Local competition is critical. The Sacramento Kings have one of the most loyal and vocal fan bases in the NBA. They are a strong club with savvy owners who have capitalized on being the only game in town. Yes, there is the Sacramento River Cats AAA baseball team which plays in the Pacific Coast League. Their ballpark even seats 14,680 (a decent crowd for NBA games in some cities). But minor league franchises play at the behest of the parent organization. The players never quite belong to the team, and by extension, to the city. The Kings belong to Sacramento.

The National Football League’s Saints captured the embrace of New Orleans this season in large part due to their on-field success following their return to the city after Hurricane Katrina. It was a near-perfect season for a city crying for light. Even my sister-in-law, a disavowed sports fan and long time NOLA resident, was rooting for the Saints by season’s end – this is how much they pulled together the city. They did well and there was no other team. There is no major league baseball team or hockey team. New Orleans kind of has a NBA team although the Hornets started wearing “Oklahoma City” on their white home jerseys this year. So much for civic pride.

The Philadelphia Eagles have owned Philadelphia sports the past five years. The Eagles went to the NFC Championship game in 2002, 2003, and 2004, and surprised the city by reaching the second-round of the playoffs this year behind Jeff Garcia. But there is uncertainty now in Birdland. There are questions about whether quarterback Donovan McNabb and coach Andy Reid are capable of taking the organization through the playoffs and into a Super Bowl victory. Wins are no longer sufficient for this club and it enters the 2007 off-season with many question-marks.

The Philadelphia 76ers have the lowest attendance in the NBA this season. “Official” attendance numbers exceed the true number of fans in the seats; television cameras show swaths of empty red chairs. The organization is in transition between the Allen Iverson-era and a future which may be bright with a young core of players, but which is still a couple seasons away. In the mean time, the club is entirely mediocre and fans have tuned-out.

The Philadelphia Flyers? The Flyers have the fewest points in the National Hockey League, the fewest wins, and the most number of losses. The team has a loyal fan base and is ranked fifth in the League in attendance. But the team has not captured anything of the public’s imagination.

Even college basketball is a non-starter in Philadelphia this winter. The University of Pennsylvania has a shot at the NCAA tournament by virtue of their first-place standing in the Ivy League. And this is a good but not great Quakers team that has made a late run at first by knocking off Ivy League competition and is facing Princeton tonight. Villanova is good, ranking just out of the top-25, and Temple always has a shot with a strong performance in the Atlantic 10 tournament. But there is no NCAA powerhouse this year - certainly nothing like St. Joseph’s University was in when they almost went undefeated.

Baseball teams compete not only with other baseball teams but they compete with the other local teams for fans and media attention. On Friday morning, the local television stations and newspapers will report on the opening of the Phillies training camp. Will they devote an entire newspaper page to the story and push-out the Sixers and Flyers? Come May, will a local fan choose to go to a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park and purchase a red Phillies baseball cap rather than head across the street to the Wachovia Center and watch the Sixers or Flyers lose? Will the newspaper print commemorative mini-posters of Sixers guard Kyle Korver or of Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels?

As the NBA rolls into Las Vegas for its All-Star weekend, there is talk of which league will be the first to plant a franchise in Clark County. There will soon be a franchise there be it NBA or NHL and they will have the first-movers advantage of capturing the affection of resident sports fans.

The Phillies will open Spring Training this week with a good team. This in itself is exciting. It is even more exciting that they have the chance to succeed and do so with the stage all to themselves. This is when it can be really fun to be a baseball fan.

2007-02-06T21:32:00.001-05:00

To which Yankee Stadium will the 2008 All-Star Game Say Good-Bye?

Yankee Stadium has been awarded the 2008 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Confirmation of the designation, a given around MLB the past few months, was made at a press conference at City Hall in Manhattan last Wednesday, January 31. The Yankees are building themselves a new ballpark which will open in 2009, just north of the existing stadium, between 161st and 164th Streets. The All-Star Game will be a centerpiece of the 2008 Farewell. But to which stadium are we saying good-bye?

Major League Baseball would evoke the memories of 1923 and the 84 seasons that will have passed since the Yankees moved across the river from the Polo Grounds to the Bronx. Jack Curry reported in the New York Times on February 1, Commissioner Bud Selig saying at the press-conference: “We really believe that this is the way we can honor the cathedral that has meant so much to this sport for so long.” The problem is that this storied “cathedral” was shuttered on September 30, 1973. The current Yankees’ park is a classic in having hosted the club since 1976, but it is a legacy of 1970s municipal architecture and resembles the Stadium in place only.

How did we arrive here in 2007 celebrating a story borne of the great marketing minds of baseball than the game’s historians? The St Louis Cardinals moved into their new playground last April and christened it “Busch Stadium”. It is their third home with this name. What we call “Old Busch Stadium”, the concrete circle in which the Cards played from 1966 through 2005 – the home of Whitey Horzog’s pennant winners and Mark McGwire’s fantasy summer of 1998 – was itself called “New Busch Stadium” when it opened in May 1966. The Cardinals had just moved out of “Old Busch Stadium”, which had been called “Busch Stadium” since 1954 when the name was changed from Sportsman’s Park. The Cardinals now play in Busch Stadium III. We forget that the Yankees now play in Yankee Stadium II.

Yankee Stadium I – the House that Ruth did build with his immense popularity – opened on April 18, 1923. The Yankees had won their first ever pennant in 1921 and they captured their first World Series championship that first year at the Stadium in 1923. It was a grand stadium that featured the famous copper façade around the roof, a deep outfield (that was 463 feet to centerfield as late as 1967), sat over 70,000 fans, and was home to the Yankees, the New York Giants football team, and championship boxing matches. It was a center of the American sports-world.

By the early Seventies, Yankee Stadium I had grown old and obsolete in a decaying neighborhood and housed a mediocre team. We think the current stadium is inhospitable today with crowded restrooms, narrow aisles, tiny concession stands, and minimal parking. New York City was falling apart in the late-1960s and early-1970s and so was the stadium. The Yankees had won their last championship in 1964 but by 1972, the team was below-average and Mickey Mantle, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford, Clete Boyer, and Roger Maris were long gone from the Bronx.

Yankee Stadium I needed repairs. The Yankees vacated the Stadium after the 1973 season. They took up residence in Queens where they subleted from the Mets. We forget that for two years, the Yankees’ home stadium was Shea. Not that we want to remember. The club was decent – winning 89 in 1974 and 83 in 1975 – but far from great. Most notably, George Steinbrenner was suspended from Baseball for two-years by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn after Steinbrenner was convicted in federal court for making illegal contributions to the re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon. This too is Yankees history!

Yankee Stadium II opened on April 15, 1976. The organization brought in the widows of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to bear witness. They were joined by Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Don Larsen and eighty-five year old Bob Shawkey, who pitched for the 1923 Yankees at the then brand-new ballpark. The new structure was infused by the spirits of the old one.

Indeed, it was a new stadium. The ramps that curl around the stadium’s exteriors were added during the renovation. Lost were the copper façades, the view-obstructing pillars, the upper deck, and wooden seats. Gone was the limestone exterior that will be revived in 2009 in Yankee Stadium II. Luxury boxes were added. They had even dug up and removed the concrete bunker under second-base that housed the electrical equipment used for boxing matches. This was a 1970s-era stadium built on the earth of and sold on the name of the 1923 version.

There is much to be said for the sacrosanct nature of the field as distinct from the structure that rises above it and seats the fans. The Tigers left not only Tiger Stadium and the stadium’s 88 years when they moved to Comerica Park in 1999. The Tigers left the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues and 104 years of Detroit baseball played at the intersection since 1896, five years before the Tigers opened for business. The Polo Grounds, that we know as the home of the Willie Mays-New York Giants and infant New York Mets, was the fourth Giants’ ballpark to use this name and the third to rise at Coogan’s Hollow between 155th and 159th Streets in Manhattan.

Yankee Stadium may not be Yankee Stadium but Ron Guidry and Andy Petite pitched from the same geographical coordinates as White Ford and Waite Hoyt. Reggie Jackson’s and Tino Martinez’s homeruns traveled through the same airspace as Mantle’s, DiMaggio’s, Gehrig’s, and Ruth’s. Sure the grass is replanted and infield dirt refreshed and we still see Derek Jeter in 1996 covering the same spots as Tony Kubek in 1961.

There are many reasons to hold the 2008 All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees have not hosted the game since 1977 so we can say they are due. More so, Manhattan has yet to host what has become the MLB All-Star marketing festival in this age of the FanFest, Home Run Derby, and Future’s Game. We might even say what we all know which is that the Yankees are good for business! The NFL chooses warm weather locations for the Super Bowl for this reason (the occasional venture into places like Minneapolis and Detroit aside). Sponsors much rather party in Miami in January than in Boston! Marketing in itself is a compelling reason.

Baseball follows a thread of history, honoring tradition and the past as we play through the present. The Yankees have done very well for themselves in these past 31 years and there is much to celebrate at Yankee Stadium II. We need not make-believe that we are bidding farewell to a historic monument when we close this stadium in 2008. The House that Ruth built closed in 1973; that is o.k. We need not trot out, again, the Babe’s tired ghost. We need not recreate a non-existent history when we can celebrate the post-1976 revival of the franchise in the concrete 1970s monument that has staged 31 years of great Yankees history.

2007-01-30T23:46:00.001-05:00

So long Brooklyn Dodgers; it’s been good to know you!

We are watching the Brooklyn Dodgers fade from active memory.

My grandmother tells me that as a child in the 1920s, Civil War veterans came to her school for assemblies and they marched, slowly, in Veterans Day parades. I recall seeing veterans of World War I marching in similar parades in the 1980s. This past December, survivors of the attack of on Pearl Harbor gathered in Hawaii for their 65th reunion. It is 2007 and we are informed by and contextualize the present with the past. But every year the past recedes on itself and we know that soon the generation of the Depression and the War will pass. So too in baseball.

For my generation, born in the 1970s, who passed through elementary school in the Pete Rose 1980s, we were oriented by the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. My grandfather, like so many of ours, served in World War II. I was taught to understand my grandmother’s pantry, stocked with cans of food, to be a legacy of the Depression. My grandfather told me of going to Negro League games in Philadelphia and in Atlantic City. My mother’s favorite players were Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays. Baseball in the 1950s was the dominance of the New York Yankees and the social progress, eventual triumph, and heart-breaking departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

We compare current ball players to their predecessors but to those who we knew or saw ourselves. We compare Roger Clemens and Barry Zito to Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, and Don Drysdale. It has been been many years since we referenced Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard let alone Grover Cleveland Alexander or Dizzy Dean who pitched in the 1920s and 1930s. Christy Mathewson may have been better than Clemens and Gibson but Mathewson does not live as even Bob Feller continues to today – Matty is now a plaque in Cooperstown, entry in the Giants’ media guide, statistic in the hands of Bill James.

This is quickly becoming the fate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In different eras, different clubs have captured our imaginations and Brooklyn has been a beacon of reference for baseball fans for sixty years now. But times are changing and fewer and fewer Americans know the club from Brooklyn. I was reminded of this fate on January 4 in Paris, at Charles de Gaulle airport. I was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers cap – the classic all Dodgers-blue cap with the white B that the Dodgers wore from the late 1930s through their final season in Flatbush in 1957. This is the hat worn by the 1955 World Champions of Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges.

Another American traveler, also on his way to the same flight to Philadelphia, turned to me and said, “Go Red Sox!” I nodded because he was looking at me and it is easier to nod than to question how he chose me and the Red Sox and put us all together. “Are you from Boston?” he asks. “No” I reply. “But you’re wearing a Sox hat” he says. I receive this often enough now when wearing this cap that I understand his logic.

The Boston Red Sox B is almost identical to the Brooklyn B and we are in a merchandising era where we are divorcing the trademark from the color. We no longer define a Red Sox cap by the Red Sox colors, navy, scarlet, and white. Spike Lee was the first to popularize official caps in alternate colors when he wore a red fitted Yankees cap to Knicks games in the early 1990s. We now see ‘official’ caps in all colors including pink and camouflage.

We have liberalized our identification of the logo, the B in this case, with the colors, and assimilated into the mainstream a trend that started with Lee and was embraced by Hip Hop America. At the same time, the Red Sox have achieved tremendous success under the current ownership of John Henry by marketing itself as a national franchise, through their onfiield success, beyond New England and the reach of cable station NESN, the New England Sports Network. (My sister, who now lives in Burlington, Vermont, and maintains dual Phillies-Red Sox loyalties, reminds me that it is pronounced “ness’en”).

This coincides with the recession of the awareness of the Brooklyn Dodgers in American culture.

World War II was a catalyst of the nation’s struggle with race and civil rights in the 1950s and into the 1960s. American servicemen of color were welcomed as conquering and liberating heroes in Europe in 1945. They were young men of color treated as heroes let alone equals. Europe in 1945 and 1946 celebrated the American servicemen white and black alike. These men of color returned to a segregated America where it had become unreasonable deny these veterans the rights at home for which they had fought abroad.

WWII was over for two years when Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947. The Dodgers were a fantastic club with future Hall of Fame players Reese, Snider, Roy Campenella, and Robinson. More so, they reflected the increasingly changing – slowly – but increasing face of integrated America. On a certain level, the Dodgers 1955 World Series championship represented the possibility for the success of the nation’s integration project. Remember, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954! America saw the possibility for success in Brooklyn.

The Dodgers left New York City for Los Angeles after the ’57 season. Disney World had opened in Orange County in July 1955, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, which talked of the great journey West, in 1951 and it was published in 1957, and McDonald’s, a legacy of the car-centric society of the West Coast dates its start to April 1955. America was moving west and the Dodgers’ (and New York Giants’) move to California reflected the nation’s shift from east to west and from cities to suburbia. Recall that Brooklyn’s full nickname was originally “Trolley Dodgers” because the team’s fans used to dodge the trolleys around the ballpark on their way to games. The name is anachronistic in LA where the city’s trolley tracks were paved over in the 1920s and where Dodger Stadium rises amid a sea of parking lots.

So strong was the pull of the Dodgers and Giants – Robinson was the first player of color and Willie Mays was the first superstar of color – in New York City and the loss at their departure was so great that within five years, the National League had a team back in the city who adopted the two teams’ colors – blue and orange.

How much time has passed? Dodger Stadium is now the second oldest ballpark in the National League and the Mets turned 45-years old this past season. They have reached middle-age and there are fewer and fewer fans – and Americans – who watched the Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

The era of the Brooklyn Dodgers is leaving us. My generation’s grandchildren will ask us about concrete Astroturf multipurpose stadiums, the players’ strikes of 1981 and 1994, and of the time when pitchers threw more than 100-pitches in a game. We forget and we create monuments to jog our memory. MLB retired Robinson’s uniform #42 across baseball in 1997. The Mets wear blue and orange and will someday come to their senses and drop the black. The team will incorporate design elements from Ebbets in their new ballpark in 2009. The LA Dodgers marked the 50th anniversary of the 1955 club by wearing the ‘B’ hats but this is only a memory where B now stands for Boston.

2007-01-09T20:20:00.000-05:00

The 9th Circuit Reminds Us How Ugly Steroids May Still Be

On December 27, 2006, the United States 9th Circuit Court ruled that the Federal Government may access the identities of those Major League Baseball players who tested positive for steroids in the spring of 2003 under a confidential MLB screening. This magic list was seized by Federal agents in an April 2004 raid as part of the ongoing BALCO case. The list has remained under lock-and-key as the government argues in court with the Major League Baseball Players’ Association over access. Federal agents want to question the players who tested positive to gather more info for their larger case. The MLBPA is appealing the decision of the 9th Circuit which will keep the identities concealed for the time being. However, as it almost always happens, the names will be released in time which will trigger a fresh round of Major League-caliber steroid dramatics.

Did Barry Bonds test positive in 2003? Did Garry Sheffield test positive? This will be more compelling than Mark McGwire’s self-incriminating testimony before the U.S. House Government Reform Committee in March 2005. It will be juicier than Rafael Palmeiro testing positive in August 2005 and then blaming teammate Miguel Tejeda. We thought the soap opera was thick when Palmeiro tested positive even after swearing before Congress that he was clean. Then he went and turned on a teammate. We are watching a huge messy car-crash in slow motion, exacerbated by MLB’s proven track record of missteps in this ongoing sharp edged steroid-crisis.

It was all pretty simple in the spring of 2003. Everyone outside of MLB was clamoring for steroid testing only the players did not want it and the owners did not want it. So the sides made a deal. The owners would contract with an independent testing agency who would test 100-players. All names would be kept secret. If more than 5% tested positive, then testing would begin across Baseball in 2004. Then, the players would be on notice, have one year to clean their systems, and the names of those who tested positive would be forever deleted. Only the Feds made it to the list of names before the names made it to the shredder.

The players are angry and they are scared. Players who agreed to be tested only under condition that such testing was confidential may soon be revealed to have been using. The players are angry because the condition by which they agreed may be violated. The players are scared because players who have tested positive have been exiled including Palmeiro, Jason Grimsley, and McGwire.

Baseball's steroids soap-opera has developed in stages, even with the Congressional hearings and the lament of innocence-lost that followed, and on which this column commented on December 12, 2006 in “George Mitchell Strikes-out on MLB Steroids“. Time passed and Palmeiro fell five months later and Grimsley in June 2006. Let us suppose that that these revelations, player stammerings, public shock, government murmurings, and media finger-waggings all happened at-once. Imagine we learned all the dirt in one clean press-release. This is what is going to happen with this list. We will be at work or at school or listening to the radio – even National Public Radio will cover this story, not just the all-sports AM stations – and we will all know who kissed who and when.

The current presidential administration did a lot of double-speak in their original claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. We now know the administration to have been lying. But man, the Bush-Cheney White House can give lessons on staying on message and speaking with a unified voice. They are models of effective communication.

The players better be paying attention to the model of crisis management at 1600 Pennsylvania because when the news breaks, we are going to hear a multiplicity of player responses. We will have the players who denied but actually were using. We will have the players who we never asked but were in fact using (“Joey Joe-Joe Junior Shabadoo used steroids?! But he had a 6.32 ERA for the 1998 Devil Rays!”) Everyone will have a statement and opinion from players’ union attorneys, shocked former teammates, supportive current teammates, team spokespersons, the Commissioner’s office, even the Phillie Phanatic will have an opinion. (Well, maybe not the Commissioner’s office.) ESPN will not have enough microphones to record it all and Commissioner Selig will wish he had retired after the magic 1998 season when the going was great rather than his planned 2009.

Union head Donald Fehr is fighting the ruling of the 9th Circuit very hard. Legally, Fehr is petitioning the 9th Circuit to rehear the case or for the U.S. Supreme Court to accept it on appeal. The players who took this test did so only on condition that it was confidential and would be confidential until the test-results were destroyed. They almost were destroyed.

U.S. agents raided and took possession of the results on April 8, 2004 the day before they were scheduled to be destroyed. On the one hand, this is unfair to the players, legal issues of evidence and privacy aside. We are punishing the players for honoring an agreement.

On the other hand, these players were using a controlled substance and we assume – which is the interest of U.S. government prosecutors – obtaining it not by legal prescription channels. Who is the Commissioner’s office to guarantee the players legal privacy?

My grandfather, Albert Levin, of blessed memory, taught me never to gamble more than I could afford to lose. This advice has saved me plenty in Las Vegas on multiple occasions. We gamble with the law all the time in our society. We park our cars illegally and most of the time we do not receive the $15 or $35 ticket. As 19-year olds, we drink alcohol because such a low percentage of underage-drinkers face legal charges. We gamble with the law when we buy or sell tickets above the legal limit; in Pennsylvania, a ticket may only be resold for as much as 25% above the face-value. We can argue that any disregard for the law is unethical but pragmatically, we all live within gray areas of conduct on which society does not fall. We may yet fall as a nation for other reasons but these reasons will not be illegal parking, alcohol consumption by those under 21-years old, recreational drug use, ticket scalping, or steroid use.

Still, using steroids is illegal and as much as the players will want to remind us that it was not banned by Major League Baseball until the 2005 and that the test was to be confidential, the players broke the law. There is no going around this.

The players gambled with steroids for many years and did very well. A lot of players made a lot of money through their use. Now a number of players will pay the price because they will have the dumb-luck of being caught. The soap opera is still unfolding and there is a lot of ugliness still to be seen.

2007-01-02T04:16:00.000-05:00

We Have No Idea How Much Barry Zito is Worth the Giants!

Barry Zito signed a seven-year contract with the San Francisco Giants on December 29 that will pay him $126 million. Last week, this column discussed the shift in Major League Baseball as the players have claimed an increasing share of MLB’s revenues which the owners had long controlled. This is all well and good but as David Goldstein reminded me, this column left unexplored the market value of a Major League baseball player.

The Giants will pay Zito a salary of $18 million per-year through the 2013 season. Zito and his family do well in this deal when the US Census Bureau estimated the median annual household income to be $43,389 in 2004. Zito’s salary is also at the top of MLB salaries. Only seven players made more than $18 million in 2006. But the question remains as to Zito’s value to the Giants. It may be that the Giants overpaid for Zito and it may be that the Giants underpaid for him. On what basis do we evaluate the monetary value of a player to an organization? How much money does Zito earn the Giants? To ask it another way, how much do the Giants earn per-year in exchange for their $18 million investment?

Major League Baseball values players on something of a relative scale. We have Alex Rodriguez at the top. Rodriguez was paid $21.7 million in 2006 by the Yankees. Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Manny Ramirez, and Todd Helton were between $20 and $16 million. Randy Johnson made $15.7 and Pedro Martinez $14.9 and we go down through the list of players. Zito entered the open market this off-season with his 2002 Cy Young award, three All-Star game selections, 156 strikeouts per-year, and 3.55 career ERA. He asked for a salary larger than those of Johnson and Martinez.

Let us see, Johnson and Martinez are at the end of their careers and had decent but not outstanding 2006 seasons. Zito is 28 years old and in January 2007, a superior pitcher. If Johnson is worth $15.7, than certainly, our logic reasons, Zito is worth more. The Texas Rangers offered Zito $13.3 million per-year over six years. The Giants offered more plus Zito could stay in the Bay Area where he has played his entire career. The market set Zito’s price. Zito is happy, Zito’s agent is happy, and you can bet new Giants manager Bruce Bochy is thrilled to have Zito to lead his pitching staff.

But baseball is both sport and business. We expect our teams to value winning and championships above the profit making bottom-line. In England, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ owner Malcolm Glazer bought controlling interest in the English Football Association’s Manchester United Football Club in May 2005. United fans were outraged in fear that the new American owner would place profit-making above winning. Some fans even broke-away and started a new club, FC United of Manchester which now plays in the North West Counties Football League Division One, level 9 of English soccer.

Sure we all like winning. A former co-worker expressed surprise once when I discussed the Phillies' salary budget. He is a Mets fan and the Mets were spending huge sums on Martinez in December 2004 and Carlos Delgado in November 2005. He argued that it is not our money as fans that teams are spending. Who cares how much teams pay? Our only interest is that they acquire players who will win.

But financial stability and health is a prerequisite of a team continuing operations. A team cannot stay in business unless it generates sufficient revenue to pay its bills. A condition of teams playing, let alone winning, is that their income equals or exceeds their expenses. If they do not meet this condition, there is no team to play the games.

Does Zito’s $18 million per-year make business sense? The street vendor who sells bottles of soda provides me with a service. He or she is there to help me quench my thirst. Let us say that this vendor pays the soda distributor $0.50 per bottle of soda and sells it to me for $1. I am happy to pay the dollar and the vendor makes $0.50 profit with which the vendor pays for the vendor’s cart, electricity, taxes, and eventually provides for themselves and their family. If the vendor cannot sell the soda for more than the soda costs the vendor, than the vendor cannot stay in business and we lose the convenience of being able to purchase a drink along the street.

My father and I both invest in the stock market. If I suggest selling a stock, my dad always asks me if I think it will continue to go up. His question is whether he can sell the stock for more than he paid – who cares what its intrinsic value may be. Great question and this is a primary principle of business. What do the Giants receive from Zito in exchange for their $18 million? How much do the Giants earn?

The Yankees paid Rodriguez a salary of $21,680,727 to play third-base this past year. The Yankees had the highest attendance in baseball with an average of 51,858 fans per game at Yankee Stadium according to ESPN.com. The Yankees have one of the largest television deals in professional sports in the world. Were the Yankees to drop Rodriguez, by how much would attendance, advertising revenue, and television money decline? Would the Yankees lose more than $21.68 million? Will Barry Zito generate revenue through ticket sales, advertising sales, and merchandise sales that exceeds $18 million per year?

Let us suppose the Giants win the World Series. How much is this worth? Maybe the Giants should have also signed Alfonso Soriano who was available to the highest bidder and bid for and signed pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka for whom the Boston Red Sox outbid all other teams. But the Cubs overpaid for Soriano and the Red Sox for Matsuzaka, you say! Maybe – but on what grounds did they overpay?

Connie Mack understood that he could make more money from his teams if he came close to winning but did not win. Mack managed and owned the Philadelphia Athletics from 1901 through 1950. He won nine pennants and five world championships. He is remembered as much for winning championships as he is for deconstructing them. He lead the 1914 A’s to 99 wins and the American League pennant. After the season, Mack broke up this great team in outrage when his star players signed lucrative contracts with the new Federal League. The 1915 squad lost 109 games and fell to last place. His 1916 team is considered among the worst of all time as they lost 117 games. He broke up his 1929-1931 dynasty due to financial difficulties in the Great Depression. Is baseball a sport or a business?

BaseballLibrary.com quotes Mack as observing, "It is more profitable for me to have a team that is in contention for most of the season but finishes about fourth. A team like that will draw well enough during the first part of the season to show a profit for the year, and you don't have to give the players raises when they don't win." Jeff Suppan proved this true last week. Suppan won the MVP award for the National League Championship Series this past October and commanded a four-year contract with the Brewers that will pay him $10.5 million per-year. He would have signed a nice contract without his post-season achievements but the MVP award certainly boosted his market value.

The relationship between gate attractions and revenues manifest itself recently in the National Basketball Association in Allen Iverson’s departure from the Philadelphia 76ers. The Sixers were 5 and 12 on December 8 when they removed Iverson from the active roster with the intention of trading him. The club finished the 2005-2006 season with a losing record and out of the NBA playoffs – an impressive feat where 16 out of the 30 teams make the post-season. How valuable was Iverson to the team? In regards to winning, the Sixers could have missed the playoffs without Iverson and his $18.3 million salary!

But man, was Iverson good for business! NBA.com reported in December 2005 that Iverson’s was the second most-popular NBA jersey sold at retail, and on his back, the Sixers were the fourth most popular team in jersey sales. The fans certainly were not buying Chris Webber and Willie Green jerseys! When the Sixers played at home at the Wachovia Center after deactivating and then trading Iverson, television cameras showed stretches of empty red seats. The Sixers might have been a mediocre team with AI, but he was fun to watch in person, sold tickets, and sold a lot of merchandise.

Not one Major League Baseball team operates as a public company. This means that all financial records of every organization are closed to the public. We do not know how much revenue each team earns. We sometimes hear owners and general managers claim that they lose money. This may be true and it may not be. We just do not know with financial statements closed to us. This also means that we do not have the information to evaluate the financial value of a player to an organization. Barry Zito is a great pitcher and it will be fun to watch him pitch this year. Giants fans are excited to have him for good reason. But did the Giants underpay or overpay for Zito’s services? We really do not know.

2006-12-26T12:48:00.000-05:00

The Players Strike Back and Gil Meche Wins Big

Gil Meche signed a five-year contract with the Kansas City Royals on December 7. Meche, a right-handed starting pitcher, will be paid approximately $11 million a year according to Dick Kaegel on MLB.com. The Royals were delighted to announce this acquisition and give Kansas City fans hope after years of poor play. The rest of us? We are scratching our heads at how a pitcher who has never pitched more than 187 innings in a season, has a career-ERA of 4.65, and only twice in six seasons, has exceeded 100 strikeouts, can command a contract that not only pays him $11 million a year, but also locks in job security for the next five – a long duration in the career of a Major League pitcher.

This is not to pick on Gil Meche and the Royals. The Cubs signed Ted Lilly, 30 years old, who was 15-13 with a 4.31 ERA to a four-year, $40 million deal. Alfonso Soriano’s agent negotiated an eight-year contract with the Cubs. Soriano is a very good player, but eight years? It reminds us of Dave Winfield signing a ten-year deal with George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees after the 1980 season. (It was a long-time coming when the Yankees traded Winfield to the Angels in May 1990.) Meche and the Royals represent this off-season’s signings and are the current manifestation of a larger trend which has been growing for the past thirty-five years. One after another, the players are asking for and taking a larger chunk of baseball revenues.

On July 12, 2006, the last day of the three-day All-Star break, Major League Baseball announced its new seven year television agreement with Fox and Turner worth an estimated $3 billion. Major League Baseball is composed of the 30-owners of the 30 teams in the National and American Leagues. This television money flows into Major League Baseball offices in New York City and out to the bank accounts of the clubs. When I watch a Major League baseball game, am I watching to see Bud Selig sit at his desk and write memos, Phillies CFO Jerry Clothier sign payroll checks, or Angels owner Arte Moreno guide the organization? No offense to Messrs. Selig, Clothier, and Moreno, but I want to see the Phillies play and I want to see great players like Albert Pujols, Ichiro, Roger Clemens, and Chris Carpenter.

Fox and Turner are willing to pay $3 billion over seven-years because they want to make money. They expect companies to pay them more than $3 billion over this period to advertise on their networks during ball games. The companies want to make money and they expect that we fans will purchase their products when we see them advertised during games. What of us the fans? For the most part, we are ok with this trade. Companies advertise to us, and we purchase their products and we purchase cable television in exchange for the opportunity to watch our favorite players and teams. So, we indirectly pay Major League Baseball to watch our favorite teams and players. The players then have to negotiate with the owners for a share of this pay-off. This is their salaries.

Until the mid-1970s, players were bound to a single-club with the Reserve Clause. There was no free-agency. A player had a little power to negotiate a new contract but ultimately he could play or not-play. If a player would not negotiate a new contract, a team could reduce his salary up to 20% and impose a new contract. In this sense, the owners controlled the amount of revenues that the players earned. The owners called the shots.

Think about it from the player’s point of view: You sign a contract at the end of which you have little power to negotiate with other employers. Once you sign with one employer, you cannot subsequently decide at contract’s end to move to another city or employer. Want to be closer to home? Sorry. Want to earn more now so that you can retire early? Sorry.

The owners had control of MLB's revenue for generations. Why should the players not have some of this control now? We are watching a shift in the power of the purse from the owners to the players. It gained momentum in the late-1960s, was spurred by Jim Bouton with Ball Four where he wrote openly about salaries and deals, Curt Flood in his case Flood v. Kuhn (407 U.S. 258) in which he challenged the Reserve Clause in the U.S. Supreme Court, and then blossomed in free-agency in 1975. This trend is about the players dictating their own fate, what each wants, and that each is going to ask out-loud for money in which they are partners in earning.

Who did the great playing in the 1920s, and 1930s, and 1940s? Who did the revenue earning for the owners? The players! The media asked Babe Ruth in 1931 how he could demand $80,000 a year in salary when President Herbert Hoover was making (only) $75,000 in salary. What did Babe say? “I had a better year than he did.” Ruth said it because he meant it and I would expect also because he was a little bitter. Ruth had almost single-handedly restored the game’s popularity after the 1919 World Series White Sox gambling scandal. He was wildly popular and yet he could not command the share of receipts that he likely deserved.

The players blossomed with free agency and some like Pete Rose and Nolan Ryan claimed millions because they had just come though most of their career without free agency. They had been the most recent generation of passive-earners so they went out and showed what they could do, and in part, as reparations to support themselves in their future. Ryan jumped the California Angels after the 1979 season to sign the first ever $1 million per-year contract with the Astros. Rose left his hometown Reds in 1979 when he became a free agent and signed a four-year, $3.2 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies, temporarily making him the highest-paid athlete in team sports.

We saw players negotiate for themselves and show other players what could be done. It was Winfield buying 10-years of job security earning millions. It was Ricky Henderson – already a superstar in Oakland who bought himself the Yankees for his resume. It was Rose orchestrating a trade back to the Reds – negotiating out the then current manager Vern Rapp right in front of his own eyes – and landing safely. Pete had left Cincinnati in 1979 because he was now calling the management’s bluff – no longer would Pete allow management to dictate the terms of his employment. So Pete says he is going to show that he and the players can take the money and run. He did it and led the way for other players and then he returned to the organization, again, on his own terms.

We are not sure that Meche is going to turn around the Royals. Outside of Chicago’s North Side, few expect the Cubs to be the best team in baseball in 2007. No, we are witnessing something much bigger which is the shift in earning power and self-determination from owner to employee. Who among us would turn down the opportunity to earn $11 million per year?

2006-12-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

George Mitchell Strikes-out on MLB Steroids

George Mitchell has been retained by Commissioner Bud Selig to investigate past steroid-use in Major League Baseball. Selig hired Mitchell in March of this year following the publication of Game of Shadows about Barry Bonds and the proliferation of steroids in the game. On Friday, December 1, Mitchell updated the public on the progress of his investigation, or rather, lack of progress. Ronald Blum reported Mitchell’s statement for the Associate Press, “…Much more work will be necessary. Cooperation has been good from many of those from whom we have sought testimony and documents, but has been less than good from some others. This will not affect the result of the investigation, but it has increased the length of time it will take me to complete the investigation." It has been more than eight months and he still needs more time.

Previously, Mitchell was the Governor of Maine, United States senator from the same state, and U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland where he helped broker the 1998 Good Friday Belfast Peace Agreement. It is quite a resume and certainly he has done some investigation work before. In the Senate, Mitchell had the power of Congressional subpoena and as Special Envoy, the power of U.S. foreign policy sticks-and-carrots.

But Major League Baseball is not the U.S. government and here Mitchell has encountered a new entity, the Major League Baseball players, who he can neither subpoena nor subject to State Department rewards and pressures. It was the players who were using, the players who he is asking, and the players over whom Mitchell has zero power. It makes one wonder just how effective Mitchell might be in this round of peace making.

Mitchell essentially stated on December 1 that the players are not cooperating with his investigation. Mitchell, and his current boss, Commissioner Selig, want the players to talk about past and current steroid use (yes, players are still using which we know as players continue to fail MLB’s drug test) while the players have circled the wagons in a stance of speak-no-evil. Mitchell presented his words so as to suggest disappointment with the players and imply that they somehow should be speaking about who used and when. Mitchell almost suggests that they were the ones acting inappropriately by using drugs and taking advantage of the fans’ and Commissioner’s trust, and therefore it is now time for the players to be purified in the confessional of his investigative committee.

If only baseball’s redemption from the shadow of steroids was so simple! That Mitchell would expect player cooperation is especially strange and unusual in light of the Commissioner’s ongoing silence over the Commissioner’s own long-time silence and inaction, and consequently de facto permission, in allowing the use of steroids in baseball.

Did the Commissioner’s office have a role in the use of steroids in MLB? Yes, the Commissioner’s office did have a very important role in the widespread use of steroids, and the subsequent fallout we have all experienced since the Congressional hearings in March 2005. In talking about the players, Mitchell and Selig paint a picture of past-use in a world that was somehow beyond the knowledge and legislative reach of MLB at 245 Park Avenue. However, it is hard to take Selig seriously as a leader and administrator without asking about his own complicity – and that of MLB Commissioners going back to Bowie Kuhn who took office in 1969 – in the proliferation of performance enhancing drugs in the game.

The House Government Reform Committee held hearings on steroid use in baseball in March 2005. Mark McGwire implicated himself. Raphael Palmeiro swore he had not used which hastened his exit from the Orioles and baseball when he subsequently tested positive later that season. Jose Canseco accused everyone of using. The word was out that the players really had been juicing.

After the hearing, Sports Illustrated printed the lament of a baseball fan on its March 25, 2005 cover, “What am I going to do with this scrapbook full of memories and the stories I used to tell? Another summer full of moments will soon begin, the biggest home run record of all ripe to fall. What will we do, each of us, now that we know?“ Now that we know?! WHAT?! Was Sports Illustrated serious in this romanticized lament? SI should have been given a 15-yard penalty for failing to read its own back-issues.

The cover suggested that we the fans, journalists, and Major League officials had not known. Really?! Did we really have no idea? Did we truly believe that it was the shorter ballpark fences or the balls themselves that were juiced? Did we and Sports Illustrated’s own writers not read earlier front-cover stories on this issue? And notlittle mentions at the end of articles about the East German Olympic swimming team or Bulgarian weight lifters.

There was the January 5, 1987 Sports Illustrated issue chronicling Oklahoma Sooners football player Brian Bosworth’s drug failure and drug use in the NCAA. There was the July 8, 1991 cover featuring retired NFL player Lyle Alzado chronicling his steroid use. There was the April 14, 1997 issue on the cover of which Sports Illustrated warned, “Don’t be fooled: Athletes of all kinds are still using drugs to improve performance – and they’re getting away with it.” This was a full year before McGwire and Sammy Sosa smashed homeruns and surpassed Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record. In March 2005, Sports Illustrated, Selig, and many fans all wanted to blame the players. We did not take one-minute to consider that we ourselves have known all along and that we have been as much complicit in not asking questions and not using our rationalizing brains to draw the most obvious of conclusions.

The players certainly used steroids. We debate the extant to which this was unfair or deceitful. We debate the nature of the message it sends. We debate how we understand baseball statistics and achievements in the shadow of their use. But they used them – and given the nature of the current steroids tests which can only screen for known drugs – some are still using steroids. However, responsibility for the proliferation of their use does not rest on the players alone. The Commissioner of baseball makes the rules – and yes, the Commissioner does so in necessary partnership with the players’ union, the Players Association. But the Commissioner has the duty and obligation to act in the best interests of the game and the Commissioner has the power to shape the rules of the game.

Ostensibly, Selig is eager to examine the past, what we knew and when we knew. If so, then let Selig come clean with the baseball public. Let Selig share with us what was going through his mind as Sosa and McGwire were pumping baseballs out of stadiums in 1998, aside from how great it was that America was finally paying attention to the sport again. Selig has a wonderful opportunity to lead by example. In his December 1 statement, Mitchell lamented that cooperation from former ballplayers “has been less than good from some...” Until Selig steps-up and signals the culpability of his own office, it is difficult to fault the players for following his leadership with silence of their own.

2006-12-05T22:30:00.001-05:00

Albert Pujols and Derek Jeter On Graciousness and the MVP Award

Last Wednesday, St Louis Cardinals first-baseman appeared at a news conference hosted by the Dominican sports ministry in Santo Domingo. Asked about his second-place finish in the National League’s Most Valuable Player voting behind the Phillies’ Ryan Howard, Pujols said in Spanish, (which was translated by the Associated Press and reported by the AP’s Dionisio Soldevila), "I see it this way: Someone who doesn't take his team to the playoffs doesn't deserve to win the MVP." Let’s translate from English into English: Ryan Howard does not deserve the MVP award; I deserve the MVP award. This is a baseball cringe moment, whether we agree or disagree with the content, and in spite of Pujol’s public apology on Monday.

Ah, the baseball cringe moment. Pujols violated the great unwritten code of baseball honor and honors which dictate that second-place finishers do not criticize the award’s winner. If Pujols did have a case, we would leave it to the St Louis baseball writers or national writers like Jayson Stark at ESPN or Peter Gammons at The Boston Globe to admonish their colleagues in the Baseball Writers Association of American for erroneously selecting Howard over Pujols. But what is frustrating is that Pujols’ does more harm to himself in saying what he said than any harm he might have received in not finishing first.

Pujols is among the top players in the league. He may be the best. He entered the National League in 2001 and at age 26, already has 250 career homeruns and has hit at least 34 homeruns in each of his six seasons. He has one first-place MVP finish and three second-place finishes. (Think second-place is so inferior? He is now in the company of Stan Musial and Ted Williams as three-time second-place finishers). Has any player been better since 2001? Howard has had only two outstanding seasons - two seasons! Don Mattingly, Fred Lynn, and Dwight Gooden all looked to be Cooperstown-bound after their second season. We look for excellence over time and Pujols is meeting this criteria. This column is a fan of Howard’s but until he continues his stellar play for another few years, Pujols remains the superior player. Pujols’ stock is, or was, at the very top of Major League Baseball! Starting a new team? I would take Pujols’ track-record over Howard’s promise (and we do love Howard).

In addition, the MVP award is a funny award by which to measure greatness. All retired three-time MVP winners are in the Hall of Fame. But even the greatest players have not exactly racked up multiple wins of the award. Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson, and Roberto Clemente each won it only once. Derek Jeter, who was the American League’s runner-up for the 2006 MVP, has won zero MVP awards despite a .317 career average, being well on his way to 3000 career hits, and being arguably the MVP of the Yankees’ post-1995 dynastic run of excellence. For sheer constituency and outstanding play in the past 10 years, no one matches Jeter. Pujols’ greatness is not diminished for having only one MVP award.

It is precisely in the ambiguous stature of the MVP award and Pujols’ extraordinary place in the elite of the game that render his comments so out of place. Sure, we debate the nature of the MVP award. Andre Dawson won the National League award in 1987 after a monster offensive year and we debate the appropriateness of Dawson’s win because he played for a last-place team. The Cubs could have finished in last-place without Dawson so just how valuable was he? We debate whether pitchers should be eligible for the award – after all, players playing the eight other positions sure are not eligible for the Cy Young Award. This is all well and good but this is not the case as Pujols’ Cardinals made the play-offs and he is not a pitcher. Given Pujols’ stature in the game and given the strange nature of the MVP award, Pujols’ claim that an injustice was done is troubling in his speaking about it at all.

Jeter himself was a model of graciousness in finishing second this year in the AL MVP award. The day after the BBWAA announced that Howard was the National League MVP, the Association named the Minnesota Twins’ Justin Morneau the American League MVP. Morneau was voted 320 points to the Yankees’ Jeter’s 306. In its November 22 on-line edition, the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune reported Jeter’s post-MVP announcement statement, "I want to congratulate Justin Morneau on this well-deserved honor. He is a special player, and I suspect this won't be the last time you will hear his name mentioned when awards are being passed out." That’s class. You know who looks good? Everyone! Morneau receives the honor of recognition for his great season. Jeter shows himself to be class-act. The Twins look good because their player won the award. The Yankees look good because their player was a gentleman. Major League Baseball looks good because its employees were respectful and respected.

Ripken and Tony Gwynn will be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame next month. This is their first year of eligibility and yes, Gwynn was one of the best pure hitters of the past 25-years and yes, Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games-played streak and redefined the position of shortstop. But more so – everyone likes them! There is genuine pleasure in baseball around their entry into the Hall. We are looking forward to their inductions in July because it will be a celebration of not just two great careers but two players who we are happy to see succeed and be recognized for their success.

The Boston Red Sox are trying to trade Manny Ramirez who Phillies’ general-manager Pat Gillick has labeled “a headache”. How often do GMs publicly label players like this? Barry Bonds found no offers other than from the Giants who have waited for the market to reduce his price before they resign him. In the NBA, Stephan Marbury is tanking what was left of his career and marketability as he mopes around the New York Knicks.

Sammy Sosa played his last season for the Cubs in 2004. He had built up significant negativity in the clubhouse and on the final day of the season he infamously left the stadium during the game. His teammates took a baseball bat to his stereo in the clubhouse and the Cubs were glad to be rid of him after the season. When the Orioles chose not to resign him for 2006, only one team, the Washington Nationals offered him a minor league contract. 588 career homeruns and not one team was eager to invite him to their major league spring-training camp. The Associated Press reported on November 4 that Sosa was hoping to return to the Majors for the 2007 season. On Sunday, Sosa was interviewed on ESPN Sports Center Conversation and told viewers that "without a doubt" he'll be picked up by another major league team, "they need my bat." Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, don’t it?

Pujols said all the right things in apologizing for his statement and in apologizing to Howard. Pujols has every reason in the world to learn to emulate Jeter, the other 2006 MVP-second place finisher. It’s good for him, good for others, good for baseball, and good for business.

2006-11-28T23:25:00.000-05:00

Ryan Howard and the Light of Dick Allen

The Phillies’ Ryan Howard was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player on November 21 by the Baseball Writers Association of America. It has been a busy month. Howard lead the Major League All-Stars to a five-game sweep of the Nippon Professional Stars in Japan and earned the series MVP award. As the series concluded, it was announced that Howard was voted the Players’ Choice Major League Player of the Year as well as the National League’s Most Outstanding Player. After two years in the majors, Howard has propelled himself into the elite of Major League Baseball.

At a press conference last Tuesday at the Phillies’ ballpark, Howard grinned alongside manager Charlie Manuel, general manager Pat Gillick, and team president David Montgomery. The city unfurled a 57-foot tall banner at City Hall congratulating Howard and mayor John Street held a celebratory press conference. That night, Howard received an ovation at the Sixers-Pistons game at the Wachovia Center. This is very exciting for the Phillies and for the city of Philadelphia for many reasons; one is that Howard has the chance to be the Phillies’ first great superstar of color.

Philadelphia has fallen hard for Howard. He is a brilliant hitter, surprisingly strong fielder, and he is gracious and friendly. Howard’s emergence as a superstar is refreshing in the shadow of the Phillies’ complicated history with race. By way of example, of the eight pre-1962-expansion National League franchises, only the Phillies do not have a player of color in the Hall of Fame, nor have they had a dominant Latino or black superstar. This history is a legacy of the Phillies’ 1947 anti-Jackie Robinson actions, the ball club’s own segregation of the 1950s, and the team’s ineptitude in managing Dick Allen, a player of color who could have been a Phillies legend but whose encounter with the white baseball-establishment in the 1960s the Phillies were unprepared to mitigate.

The Phillies acquired a reputation as unwelcoming to players of color for their treatment of Jackie Robinson when Robinson and the Dodgers integrated major league baseball in 1947. Before Brooklyn’s first road trip of the 1947 season to Philadelphia, the Phillies had phoned the Dodgers and instructed them “not to bring that nigger here.” The Phillies were lead by manager Ben Chapman, an Alabama-born bigot who encouraged his players to "make Robinson's color an issue." The Dodgers and Robinson did come to Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. The Phillies infamously lined-up on the top step of their dugout and pointed their bats, rifle-like, at Robinson when he came to bat. Phillies pitchers threw at Robinson’s head, and in the field, Phillies base-runners slid into Robinson, playing second, with their spikes high.

The Phillies’ behavior galvanized nationwide support for Robinson while the Phillies were known for their racism. Many major league clubs responded to Robinson’s success in Brooklyn and Larry Doby’s success in Cleveland – Cleveland won the pennant in 1948 with both Doby and former-Negro League star Satchell Paige - by rushing to sign Latino and black ballplayers. Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, and Ernie Banks broke into the majors in the 1950s and became popular and successful stars. Meanwhile, the Phillies continued to refuse to integrate their own club. It would not be until 1957, a full ten years after Robinson joined the Dodgers, that the Phillies integrated when they played John Kennedy in five games and gave him two at-bats.

But baseball was changing and when it came time to rebuild the Phillies in the post-Whiz Kid era, in 1959, 1960, and 1961, the Phillies invested heavily in young prospects, black, Latino, and white alike. They gave their largest signing bonus to a young black prospect from Wampum, Pennsylvania named Dick Allen. This would be a new era for the Phillies. The organization was integrating itself and building a contender. Only the Phils did not have a clue how to address the challenges that might face a young prospect of color coming up through its farm system in the early 1960s. Rather than dispel their reputation for racial insensitivity, the Phillies reinforced this reputation and enabled the city to turn on its young star.

Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey had famously had a conversation with Robinson before he signed and sent him to play, first in Montreal where he integrated the International League in 1946, and then the National League a year later. Rickey knew that Robinson would encounter the taunts and insults of fans, and be stigmatized by fellow players. Rickey instructed Robinson to withhold his anger and that Robinson and the Dodgers organization would be 100% supportive of him. Robinson was stoic in the face of these attacks and Rickey kept his word. Carpenter and Phillies general manager Pat Quinn could have borrowed this lesson from Rickey’s playbook before they assigned Allen to the Phillies’ AAA minor league club, the Arkansas Travelers, in Little Rock in 1963.

It had been at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, only six years earlier, that Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus joined local whites in resisting integration by dispatching the Arkansas National Guard to block the school’s entrance from its first black students. In 1963, Gov. Faubus was a regular at Travelers ballgames and while President Eisenhower had compelled Little Rock Central to integrate, the Travelers through 1962, remained an all-white ball club. 1963 would be the first year that Little Rock would be the Phillies top minor league affiliate and where else would they send their top prospect? Allen would integrate Little Rock.

Think about what was happening in the United States in the spring of 1963. As baseball season was opening in early April, Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Alabama where he wrote his seminal "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." The following month, during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor would turn fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. The summer of 1963 would culminate with the March on Washington where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Dick Allen had just turned 21-years old in April 1963 and was entirely unprepared for the racism he would encounter in Little Rock. The Phillies did not offer support like Rickey did for Robinson and Allen reports that he came to feel isolated and under siege in Little Rock.

Allen survived the 1963 season, escaped Arkansas, and made the Phillies starting lineup in 1964. He hit .318 with 29 homeruns and 91 RBIs and was voted the National League’s Rookie of the Year. The fans loved him, he was excelling, and the Phillies had played championship baseball from April through August. The Phils had a talented young star and the fans had what appeared to be a young team built to contend. Tony Gonzalez, from Central Cunagua, Cuba, played centerfield and hit .278 in 1964. Ruben Amaro, from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, (the father of the current Phillies assistant-GM), split shortstop duties with Cuban Cookie Rojas. Tony Taylor, another Cuban of color, was growing into a fan favorite at second-base. At skin level, the 1964 Phillies had successfully integrated and were erasing the legacy of the 1940s and 1950s. But Frank Thomas and Allen would soon remind the organization and city that the situation was unresolved. They again illustrated the inability of Phillies management to protect its players and mitigate racial tensions.

The Phillies had acquired the veteran Thomas from the Mets in August 1964. Thomas had been a three time All-Star in the 1950s and led the 1962 Mets with 34 homeruns and 94 RBIs. At age 35, he was a veteran bat and the fans were fond of him. What the fans did not know was that Thomas had been riding the team’s young players of color in 1965 including Allen, and Allen’s best friend, outfielder Johnny Briggs. Before the July 3, 1965 game against the Reds, Allen’s and Thomas’s verbal sparring escalated into a full-out brawl. Allen knocked down Thomas with a left-hook to the jaw. Thomas recovered and took his baseball bat to Allen.

After the game, the Phillies released Thomas. Thomas was hitting .250; Allen was hitting .348. In his essay, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism”, William C. Kashatus reports what happened next: "Thomas took his case to the press, exploiting the role of a victim. 'I’ve always liked Richie,' he insisted. 'I’ve always tried to help him. I guess certain guys can dish it out, but can’t take it.' Fans began to blame Allen for the fight, booing him unmercifully."

Phillies management, in saying nothing, said everything. They set Allen up to be the scapegoat. It was the beginning of the end for Allen with the Phillies and with the city. The fans booed Allen in 1965 and through his last season with the Phillies in 1969. Major League Baseball celebrated its centennial in 1969 and the Phillies held a fan poll to elect their all-time team. Allen was so unpopular by then that even having been arguably the organization’s best first-baseman of all-time, fans voted Eddie Waitkis to the team; Waitkis’ lone claim to fame was his presence on the 1950 pennant winning club. Waitkis had never had more than 49 RBIs in a season for the Phillies; his highest average with the club had been .291. This is the legacy of the Phillies’ first would-be great superstar of color.

Certainly, the Phillies have changed since Allen’s departure in 1969, and the team has had very good players of color. Dave Cash was an All-Star in each of his three seasons with the Phillies in the mid-1970s. Garry Maddox won eight Gold Gloves playing centerfield for the Phils from 1974 to 1986 and was a star of the hard-fought 1980 National League Championship Series against the Astros. Three years later, Gary Matthews was named MVP of the Phils’ NLCS victory over the Dodgers.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the Phillies lack of great Latino and black stars was due to bad luck injuries, soft prospects, and poor draft choices. Jeff Stone, Ron Jones, and Ricky Jordan all sparkled in the minors before fading in injury or mediocrity. Juan Samuel found success in the late 1980s but was never the superstar he hinted at being when he stole 72 bases in 1984. Fans still bemoan the Phils’ selection of high school outfielder Jeff Jackson in the 1989 June draft ahead of Frank Thomas by the White Sox. Jimmy Rollins has emerged as one of baseball’s top shortstops but while popular in Philadelphia, he is not among the game’s elite. The closest the Phillies have had to a superstar has been Dick Allen.

There was a time when Philadelphia was perceived to be a hostile environment for athletes of color. When Allen was playing in the mid-1960s, whites were fleeing urban Philadelphia for its surrounding suburbs. The city neglected Center City and allowed black neighborhoods to become ghettos. Frank Rizzo was appointed Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner in 1967 and came to be seen as an antagonist of the black community for the nature of his public comments and the tactics used his department. One of the most notorious moves by Rizzo's police officers were the raids on the Philadelphia offices of the Black Panther Party in 1970. Rizzo forced the arrested Panthers to strip and stand naked in front of the news cameras. But Philadelphia in 2006 is a different place than in 1966. Mayor Street is the city’s second mayor of color. The Philadelphia Eagles are on their second All-Pro quarterback of color – a position historically denied to black athletes in the NFL. Sports have changed and Philadelphia has changed.

Ryan Howard and Philadelphia are all smiles enjoying this round of post-season accolades. This young player and this old city deserve it. Both hope Howard will continue his stellar play and enjoy a long and successful career with the club. His stardom for the Phils is welcome and long overdue.

2006-11-21T16:04:00.000-05:00

Barry Bonds Tests 756 and Free-Agency

Barry Bonds will hit his 756th career homerun next season providing that his body holds, Major League Baseball and George Mitchell do not suspend him, and a team finally signs him. Bonds has hit 734 and the San Francisco Chronicle has its Bonds-O-Meter counting down to 755 on its Giants homepage. He really is close. To my generation, born in the 1970s, and raised on a baseball in which Hank Aaron was a retired legend and 755 a distant unattainable record, (as Babe Ruth and 714 was to a previous generation), Bonds’ approach to 755 could be an exciting time for us and for Major League Baseball. But there is little Bonds-buzz this off-season for his record or for him, and one senses that most of us would just as soon like to see Bonds call it a career, hold a press conference, and retire into the Pacific sunset.

Performing like that of a very good but no longer amazing player in 2006, Bonds hit 26 homeruns and once again led the National League in walks. Neither All-Star superstar nor bench-player, and yet on the brink of career homerun 755, not only have the Giants, his team of 14 years and that of his late father, not rushed to resign him, but other clubs are not exactly beating a path to the foot of his overstuffed clubhouse armchair. It was rumored recently that the Texas Rangers were a suitor. It is rare that one hears a denial of interest stronger or sharper than that of the Rangers’ owner Tom Hicks in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "You can be adamant in saying that Barry Bonds won't be signing with the Texas Rangers," Wow, are you absolutely sure about that Tom? On November 16, the Padres denied they had interest. As the national sports press reported that the A’s were interested, the San Francisco Chronicle was reporting on November 18 that the Athletics were in fact not interested, and were pursuing others to replace Frank Thomas at DH. What about the Giants? They are not saying anything much about Bonds, playing coy as they look at players like Carlos Lee to take Bonds’ place in the outfield and lineup.

This is how far Bonds has descended in stature and how little we value his career homerun achievement. Bonds may hit his 756th career homerun in 2007 to pass Hank Aaron on the all-time list and not one team is publicly displaying enthusiasm to have him on their team. Aaron finished the 1973 season with 713 career homeruns. He had hit 40 homeruns in 1973 and would be 40 years old on Opening Day 1974. Aaron was really going to do it and American noticed and cared passionately.

Many cared so passionately about the significance of Babe Ruth’s record 714 career homerun record that through the end of the 1973 season, and during the 1973-1974 baseball off-season, they sent Aaron hate-mail cursing him, a man of color, for approaching one of the great records of the pre-Jackie Robinson baseball-era. This was a baseball record that resonated deeply beyond baseball and American professional sports into the American soul with all of our collective ideals and light, contradictions and ghosts. What this anger showed, as well as the parallel pride and joy that many took in Aaron’s approach, was how much gravitas we attached to numbers 714 and 715. This was a huge deal and we took the record very seriously.

Bonds? We reveal our feelings about Bonds and his approach to 755 with our sweeping indifference.

Who in baseball believes – truly – that Bonds’ homerun mark is an extraordinary generational achievement? Our indifference belies our conviction in the insignificance of Bonds’ approach to Aaron. In late October, AP-AOL Sports released a poll that reported that 48% of respondents hope that Bonds falls short of 755. Jeff Borris, Bonds’ agent and a man hoping to collect his percentage of his clients’ next contract, responded by saying, "It saddens me. I think true baseball fans who know and understand everything Barry has done to get to this point should be pulling for him. They should feel fortunate that they'll have the opportunity to see him break probably the most hallowed record in sports." One hopes Borris was able to keep a straight-face as he tugged at our heartstrings. It is bad news when an agent has to implore fans that we should feel fortunate.

But it is precisely because true baseball fans do know and understand everything Bonds has done to reach this point that we are not pulling for him. When we look at Bonds, we look at achievement-inflation, and like converting between 1957 and 2003 dollars, we know that an Aaron homerun is of greater value than a Bonds homerun.

The team that signs Bonds this year will receive the public relations that will accompany his march to 755. They say that any PR is good PR but do not tell that to the front-offices scampering to distance themselves from any rumors of Bonds coming to their club. As Bonds approaches 755, the questions and dialogue will grow louder about the past steroid use. Bonds will attract media attention and it will not be the honorific attention like that for Pete Rose as he approached 4,192 hits or as Cal Ripken moved in on Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak. This will be prolonged public trial rather than national celebration. Which team wants Barry Bonds’ large armchair in their clubhouse? Who wants the shadows of steroid-use and denials? Who wants the ambivalence about how to mark number 756?

With his five-year contract expired, and his family friend Felipe Alou out as Giants’ manager, it is not clear that Bonds will return to San Francisco. Historical baseball rhythms bring homerun champions back to their first cities to close their careers. The Braves obliged Aaron and traded him to the Brewers in November 1974 so that Aaron could return to County Stadium in Milwaukee where he had begun his career with the Braves. Aaron would play two more seasons, finishing his career with the Brewers in 1976. Babe Ruth returned to Boston at age 40, to Braves Field, across the Boston University campus from Fenway Park where he had come up with the Red Sox in 1914. Willie Mays was traded back to New York City and played his last two seasons with the Mets, the team that carries the legacy of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. Reggie Jackson went back to the Athletics and played his final season in 1987 with the organization with whom he had begun. While such poetry dictates that Bonds sign with Pittsburgh, Bonds will not be wearing black and gold next season, or the Pirates’ frightening new red alternate jersey. [Note to MLB Properties: It is not too late to recall this concept before Opening Day!].

But Aaron returned to Milwaukee the homerun king. Ruth had long been crowned the homerun champion when he suited up for the Braves. Mays was already a sure-Hall of Famer when he again donned a NY cap. Rose returned home to Cincinnati to manage and break the hit-mark. Bonds is in free-agent limbo before he has broken the record, lingering at 734, so close, and no one team is laying out a welcome mat and stitching up a number 25 jersey.

Recent steroid-colored homerun hitters both burn-out and fade-away. Rafael Palmeiro was caught midseason, turned on his teammates, and was instructed by the Orioles not to return to the club. Sammy Sosa faded with the Orioles in 2005 and turned down the offer of a minor league contract for 2006 with the Washington Nationals. Two weeks ago, Sosa expressed his desire to return to baseball and no team has stepped up showing strong interest. McGwire burned before Congress and the Baseball Writers Association of America will punish him this January when they choose not to elect him to the Hall of Fame.

This would be all so much easier for us if Bonds would call a press-conference at AT&T Park and gracefully retire. The Giants are beginning a new era with their recent hire, manager Bruce Bochy and would like to turn the page. The Giants could celebrate Bonds, close the Bonds-era, and enter 2007 fresh. The Giants are hosting the All-Star Game next July and Bonds would throw out the first ball and be the National League’s honorary captain. The Giants would look good, Bonds would look good, and MLB would be spared a 756-public relations balancing act.

But this will not happen. Bonds will not submit to our public unspoken desire that he retire. The question remains: Who will sign him? Which team will accept his armchair into their clubhouse next April?

2006-11-14T19:03:00.000-05:00

McGwire, Steroids, and the Baseball Hall of Fame

Mark McGwire appears on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year. He is the first of the steroid-superstars to be considered for induction and he will not be elected this year. Still, there are arguments for his eventual inclusion.

This discussion is not about whether McGwire should or should not be elected; this is about the nature of changing metrics and the redefinition of excellency that we as baseball fans do every generation as the game itself changes. Satchell Paige and Ted Williams illustrate an example of one such change that took place forty years ago and the time it takes for us to shift our baseball perspectives.

Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken will be first-ballot electees when the 2007 results are announced. Both Ripken and Gwynn were shoo-ins before they even announced that 2001 would be their final season. Gwynn was a fifteen-time All-Star and won eight batting titles. Ripken was a nineteen-time All-Star, two-time MVP, and he played in 2,632 consecutive games (this many games equals sixteen seasons; there are Hall of Famers whose entire careers did not last 16 seasons). More so, in the free-agency era, both played their entire careers for one team winning devoted fans in San Diego and Baltimore.

Gwynn and Ripken had previously announced that 2001 would be their final seasons and were celebrated as the season drew to a close. In November 2001, six weeks after the regular season had ended, ESPN reported that McGwire had told the network’s Rich Eisen that he was retiring. While unconventional for a player of McGwire’s caliber to retire through the press rather than at a press-conference, it looked like McGwire would make it a three-player party in Cooperstown in July 2007. After all, McGwire had 583 career homeruns, was a twelve-time All-Star, and had the best at-bats per homerun ratio in history. Baseball-Reference.com lists Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor score which “assess how likely an active player is to make the Hall of Fame. It's rough scale is 100 means a good possibility and 130 is a virtual cinch.” McGwire scores a 169.5.

McGwire was coasting towards election until he appeared before the House Government Reform Committee in March 2005. Previously, he had denied using steroids. However, when asked to put his money of the table and say-so under oath and before Congress, McGwire showed his hand when he refused to say that he had not used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. We heard his admission to steroid use when he responded to questions with, "My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, and myself." Never had the fifth-amendment been so incriminating.

With his admittance-through-silence in Washington, McGwire’s Hall of Fame candidacy plummeted. Later that summer, at Hall of Fame induction weekend in Cooperstown, baseball writers, who themselves would be voting in 2007, told me they would not vote for McGwire this year.

Does McGwire deserve induction in the Hall? What about Sammy Sosa and Rafel Palmeiro in 2011, and Barry Bonds in 2013? Do they merit plaques alongside Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, and Steve Carlton? McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro, and Bonds were all among the best of their eras, strong criteria for permanent residence at 25 Main St.

We are now asked to calibrate our definition of greatness and Hall of Fame inclusion to this era. We have done this before in baseball – redefining who is in and who is out. In every baseball generation we encounter new questions. Enter Williams and Paige who were at the center of one such shift. These shifts take time and we will not decide today, or in 2007, how to treat the steroid-superstars.

In 1966, there was one ballplayer of color in the Hall. Jackie Robinson had been the first in 1962 and four years later, remained the lone player enshrined. Satchell Paige had ended his professional playing days 13 years earlier in 1953 (yes, he had pitched three-innings for the KC Athletics the previous summer as a publicity stunt). Cool Papa Bell had been retired for sixteen years and Josh Gibson had passed away, mid-career, nineteen-years earlier. There was consensus that these and other Negro League stars would have dominated the National and American Leagues, and therefore would have been HOF inductees, had not major league baseball segregated itself from 1885 through 1946. Yet the Hall was for those who had excelled in the American League and National League and in their systems of statistical record keeping and championship play.

So it was in July 1966 that Casey Stengel and Williams were being inducted into the Hall. During his Hall of Fame induction speech, on the stage behind the Hall’s library, Williams said,

The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second homerun. He has gone past me, and he's pushing, and I say to him, 'go get 'em Willie.' Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as anybody else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given the chance.

Baseball gives every American child a chance to excel. Those who excel are the best and recognized in the Hall. Williams was arguing that professional baseball had not fulfilled its obligation to give every child his chance. Now, Major League Baseball could recalibrate its metrics to recognize achievements and excellence which the current definitions failed to include.

That there was one ballplayer of color and no Hispanics in the Hall was a passive result and not an active decision on the part of the Hall’s stewards. Certainly Paige, Gibson, and Rube Foster were amazing but none had played in the American or National Leagues (Paige had, and his best years, for which he would eventually be honored, were in the Negro Leagues).

But Williams certainly had a point. These players were among the titans of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and themselves would have been perpetual All-Stars and record setters had Commissioner Landis and the owners not closed the doors to them. They did deserve honor but what would this look like? What was the appropriate way for Cooperstown to honor these giants? The current parameters no longer worked effectively so we needed new ones.

The movement to honor the Negro League stars gathered momentum when Dick Young, president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America echoed Williams’ advocacy. It took five years and after much debate about the nature of the induction, Satchell Paige became the first Negro League electee. In July 1971, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn presented Paige with his HOF plaque. In 1972 it was Buck Leonard and to date, 35 individuals who starred in or lead the Negro Leagues have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. The Negro Leagues basically folded around 1950 – that is more than twenty years for the Hall to open its doors to its players.

What this means is that the electors defined new standards – they did not lower the standards – they recognized that these individuals called us to redefine who is in and who is out. And these changes take time. They take years of thought and debate, newspaper columns and speeches at dinners.

The steroid-superstars have not been nor are they being marginalized as were the Negro League stars. How do we react and relate to changes in definitions? Williams called baseball’s attention to a perspective through which we had not looked at the Hall of Fame nor at these great players. We are now asking ourselves how to look at McGwire and his contemporaries.

We recalibrate our perspective in response to the soaring offense of the 1930s and the anemic hitting of the late 1960s (which would eventually result in the designated hitter). We are still debating the inclusion of relievers in the Hall. Bruce Sutter went in this past summer and we debate Goose Gossage. They do not fit our clean metrics of 300 wins and/or 3000 strikeouts so we find new ways to judge.

McGwrire finished with 583 career homeruns and is now seventh on the all-time list. We already knew that not all homeruns are created equal. Frank Baker earned the nickname "Home Run" during the 1911 World Series when he hit a go-ahead home run off Rube Marquard in game two and a ninth-inning game-tying home run off Christy Mathewson in game three. He lead the American League in homeruns for four consecutive seasons. What was his highest season total? 12! Carl Yastrzemski led the American League in batting average in 1968 with a .301 average; lead the league!

As we did for Baker and Yaz, we ask ourselves how to evaluate McGwire and Bonds and Sosa and Palmeiro. We will ask ourselves the questions we ask of all potential Hall of Famers: Would they have excelled in any era? Were they the best of their own era? Should their steroid-use exclude them from the Hall?

Like baseball encountering the Negro Leagues between 1966 and 1971, we are now rolling around their Hall of Fame credentials in our collective baseball minds. McGwire will not stand with Gwynn and Ripken this summer in Cooperstown. It will take us a few years to figure this one out. We are not used to saying that we do not know, that we are not sure. Sports is about instantaneous decision making – but not here. And the fans, in our collective will, and the sportswriters who vote for the inductees, do not have to make a decision yet. Players are on the HOF ballot for fifteen years for this reason.

To its credit, the Hall and baseball found a solution for the Negro League stars. Our generation, in time, will figure out how to understand the accomplishments of the steroid-era.

2006-10-31T20:45:00.000-05:00

Red Bird Mediocrity

The Cardinals won the World Series this past weekend after winning 83 regular season games, the fewest wins of a World Series champion ever. The adjective “worst” has been used by baseball writers to identify this World Series winner.

During a mid-World Series awards ceremony at St Louis’ Busch Stadium, Derek Jeter was asked whether the Cardinals’ participation devalued the World Series. “No, it doesn’t cheapen the World Series,” replied Jeter. But Jeter has worked for George Steinbrenner for fifteen seasons now, eleven at the major league level. Jeter is a seven-time All-Star and a lasting face of Joe Torre’s dynasty Yankees. Reggie Jackson owned the Bronx in the late-1970s and led the Yankees to back-to-back championships. But Steinbrenner owned the Yankees and by 1982, Reggie was leading the Angels to the American League West title. ESPN will soon remind us of the Jackson-Steinbrenner-Billy Martin emotional quagmire with its film adaptation of Jonathan Mahler’s 2005 book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning. Jeter however will finish his stellar career with the Yankees because in addition to being a brilliant player, he is also a diplomat.

Derek Jeter knows when not to say something. So there is Jeter, who made $20.6 million in 2006 playing in the Major Leagues, at an event hosted by Major League Baseball, at Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals and a reporter asks him if the Cardinals inclusion cheapens Major League Baseball’s marquee event. If Jeter says “yes”, he not only embarrasses the Cardinals while a guest in their workplace, but also undermines the event presently being conducted by Major League Baseball, the system through which he earns his very healthy living. WWJD? What would Jeter do? Of course he says that it does not cheapen the World Series!

A team wins 83 games, good for the fifth best record in the National League and 13^th best in the National and American Leagues combined. Not even good enough to finish in the top third of all thirty teams! Two games over .500! They win three games against the Padres and then win eight out of 12 over the Mets and Tigers to win the championship. Even the Devil Rays, who finished 2006 with a .377 winning-percentage, the worst-record in baseball, pulled off a hot-streak when they won eight of 12 (June 10 to June 22).

Let’s give the Cardinals the benefit of these three post-season series and add these games to their record. When we add this post-season hot-streak to their regular season, they have a combined won-loss of 94 and 83 for a winning percentage of .531. A .531 win-percentage over a 162-game schedule translates into only 86 wins. Had they won 86 games in the regular season, they would only have tied the Red Sox for the 12^th best record in the Majors. And we are supposed to appreciate them as World champs?

The 83-win Cardinals’ victory cheapens the World Series because it breaks the implicit promise of the Series itself: Major League Baseball’s best, competing to be the best. This is the promise of the World Series. Or, it was. When the Cardinals, fifth best in the NL, face the Tigers, third-best in the AL, we do not see baseball’s best face off against each other.

Major League Baseball would have the message of the current structure and outcome be, Cardinals = World Series Champions, and World Series Champions = Baseball’s Best Team. Therefore, Cardinals = Baseball’s Best Team. Where is the boy, standing alongside the Cardinal’s parade route calling out, “the champion has no clothes on!”?

Do not read this as a knock against the Cardinals. It could have been the Tigers who had won. In 2003, it was the Marlins. Tony LaRussa would still be a future Hall of Fame inductee. Albert Pujols would still be one of the top players of this generation. The Cardinals still be wearing one of baseball’s most classic uniforms. St Louis would still have, arguably, the most gracious baseball fans in the country.

The word mediocre is derived from the Latin, mediocris which refers to a middle height or standing. When a team finishes 13^th out of 30, in the middle of the pack, they receive the term mediocre. This is a knock against a system that rewards season-long mediocrity, short-term success, and makes a marketing promise on which it does not deliver.

This World Series registered the lowest television ratings to date for the Series. Paul Gough speculated in The Hollywood Reporter on October 30 that Fox must have been disappointed to have two small-market franchises in the Series. But it does not take the Yankees and Dodgers in the Series to make for a compelling Series. It takes great teams. The Cardinals were ok and grew hot. The Tigers were good.

The Mets and Yankees each finished the 2006 regular season with 97 wins each, good for a .599 winning percentage. I would have loved to have seen these two teams face each other in the Series. The Mets had blown away the National League and the Yankees had fought through injuries and falters to prevail over the long-haul. This would have made for great October baseball and a World Series champion worthy of the title.