Posted 10:49 PM by Brian
WOOD VS. MORRIS So the Cubs signed Kerry Wood, reportedly for 3 years, $32.5M with a team option for 2007. We all know how this will affect the Cardinals -- Wood is probably one of the ten or twenty best starters in the game, and he'll continue to be a thorn in our side. But how will Wood's signing affect the signability of the Cardinals ace, Matt Morris? At the end of the season, can Matty Mo command a contract comparable to Wood's?

Let's stack up Morris against Wood and see how they rank in terms of market value. Mind you, I'm not trying to determine their true value so much as I am their perceived value, which exerts a stronger hold on the amount of money Morris can demand.

Winningness Last year, of course, Wood was superior to Matty Mo -- pitched 40 more innings, had an ERA 50 points lower. But Morris clearly has the better career numbers. Over his career he's 72-42 with a 3.28 ERA, compared to 59-41, 3.62, for Wood. He also won a career-high 22 games in '01 and finished third in the Cy Young balloting, whereas Wood has never won 15 games in a season. Despite Wood's more recent success, I think it's fair to say that Morris has proven himself a winner every bit, if not more, than Wood.

Upside: Wood is three years younger than Morris, and his stuff is considered more electric. And where Morris' ERA has risen 25+ points each of the past two years, Kerry Wood is coming off of his best, most complete season. Wood's peripherals (11.35 K/9 innings and only 6.48 hits/9 IN) also make his performance easier to gauge going forward. Of course, Morris has had 3 seasons with an ERA better than Wood's career high, so in that sense he may have a higher ceiling, but I think most shoppers would give Wood the edge in this category.

Durability: Well, both pitchers have suffered traumatic arm injuries, with each pitcher sitting out the entire 1999 season. Wood has been more durable recently, logging 200 innings for the second straight year, whereas Mo Mo endured a variety of kinks and stresses last season. Wood racked up the most Pitcher Abuse Points in the majors last year, which is either a sign of his incredible sturdiness or of his imminent collapse. Overall, I give the edge to Wood in this category based on his recent health record.

Marquee Value: This doesn't much impress your average sabermetrician, but it matters to owners, so you have to consider it relevant to a pitcher's demand. My guess is that Wood has a higher Q rating than Morris -- he was the 4th overall pick in the '95 amateur draft, and within three years became a legend with arguably the most dominating single-game pitching performance of all time. Morris has never been that flashy, but he has shined in the postseason, most memorably a series of duels with Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson in the '01 and '02 NLDS. Again, a small edge to Wood here, but both pitchers are considered dyed-in-the-wool "gamers."

Verdict: Morris has better career numbers, but Wood's stuff and his more recent success make him a more valuable property on the open market. But Morris is certainly comparable as a commodity (especially if he turns in a solid 2004), and my guess is that if Wood can land $11 million per year, Morris can ask for and receive $9-$10 million.

Posted 10:48 PM by Brian
KERRY ROBINSON has a theory about why he'd make a good leadoff hitter. Yes, he concedes, he had a low OBP last year. But if you listen to Kerry, that's because he was used so often as a pinch-hitter, and as a PH you've got to go up there swinging:

"The way Tony uses his pinch hitters, he wants you to go up there hacking at the first strike -- fastball, changeup, whatever, anything early in the count. If I'm a leadoff-type, I'll have the luxury of seeing pitches before swinging."

It's a nice theory, although it's entirely unencumbered by actual facts. K-Rob's 2003 OBP was .281 overall -- and .285 when he wasn't pinch-hitting. When he faced a pitcher for the third or fourth time in a game, his OBP rose all the way to .286.

The sad truth is that Kerry Robinson is not good at reaching base, whether he's starting or pinch-hitting, whether he's playing on turf or grass, whether it's day or night. He's already 30 years old, and as any good Hobbesian would tell you, people don't change who they are overnight.

Posted 3:03 PM by Brian
THE HOME OF THE BRAVE Dr. Z has a fun column about different renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner, which includes this anecdote:

For years, the fastest rendition I regularly clocked was that of the Princeton band. Always around 53 seconds. Then in 1977 I covered a Yankees-Red Sox series at Fenway. The organist was an older man named John Kiley who'd been playing the anthem at Red Sox games for years. The first night he hit the turn ("And the rocket's red glare") in 23 seconds. "Oh my God," I said to myself. "He's on a record pace."

When he reached Heartbreak Hill ("Oh say does that Star Spangled banner yet wave...") he looked like he was going to break five-oh, but the Hill got him, as it does all of them. He staggered in, and held the last note for a couple of counts, but the watch still read 55 seconds. Gosh, if he picked it up at the Hill and got off the last note ... well, I had to talk to him about it.

So I entered the booth, and he was a nice old guy, and when I told him what was possible he said he'd have to think it over. "Some people complain that I do it too fast anyway," he said.

Next night the press box was poised. Everyone who owned a stopwatch had it out. John came through. He took the Hill at a gallop and gunned it at the end, and when he cut off the last note, the readout was 51.0. A big cheer went up among the writers...

That reminds me of one of my all-time favorite RBN posts, by our own Mr. Flynn:

Those who have been to Cardinal games over the last quarter centure have undoubtedly heard the song that Ernie Hayes plays between the Star Spangled Banner and the first pitch. A few years ago my cousin met Ernie at some organ-o-rama and asked him about that song. It is an original composition by Ernie and he considers it "The Second Verse" of the national anthem.

If you ever need to interrogate someone to prove he's a Cardinals fan, ask him to imitate Mike Shannon, spell "Schoendienst," and hum Ernie Hayes' "The Second Verse." Works as well as a DNA test.

Posted 2:54 PM by Brian
DEFCOM 12 This story cracked me up -- last Wednesday a rumor surfaced that had the Red Sox sending Trot Nixon to the D'backs for Randy Johnson. Turns out the rumor wasn't true, but for a short while there Yanks GM Brian Cashman was on "Unit alert," which I can only assume involves air-raid sirens, junior execs screaming into red phones, wall maps blinking with trouble spots like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Mr. Cashman supplicating himself before Emperor Steinbrenner on the holodeck.

Posted 2:41 PM by Brian
THE EARL OF BALTIMORE Here's an article in the Baltimore Sun that checks in with the great Earl Weaver. I consider Weaver the greatest manager of my lifetime, so it's nice to know he's still around and doing well. And apparently he's mellowed out some -- asked whether he'd return to managing like fellow geezers Jack McKeon and Frank Robinson, Weaver (a native St. Louisan) said, "I don't know about McKeon or Frank, but I have a lot of doctors' appointments I have to take time to go to."

Posted 2:32 PM by Brian
KUDZU Here's a nice little article about the growing popularity and influence of baseball blogs. Almost all the writers profiled in this piece are New Yorkers, and most of them put out fine work.

You'd think that New York City, being the most populous town in the country, would produce the most baseball blogs, but I believe that title belongs to Chicago, and more specifically the Chicago Cubs. By my count there are 27 serious Cubs blog out there, compared to only 2 or 3 serious Cardinals blogs (which says something about the extent of Cub fandom, or the number of wired Chicagoans, or perhaps something else altogether).

But luckily there are a couple newcomers to the Cardblog field:

The St. Louis Cardinals Ultimate Fan Site -- a very newsy site, lots of good, quick material to keep you busy; and

Get Up, Baby! -- run by a 16-year-old who rightly appreciates the cockeyed genius of Mike Shannon, this blog has already shown some pretty sharp analysis (i.e., check out Dan's take on the Maddux signing).

Fun stuff. And welcome, guys, to the Cardblogosphere.

Posted 1:57 PM by Brian
A PIECE ON LUIS Chris Kahrl endorses Jocketty's pickup of reliever Luis Martinez, whom he describes as "a lefty with decent velocity and a pretty nasty curve." Here's his thinking:

The Cardinals' rotation is still a two-man show, followed by prayers for surprise off-days, scheduled rain-outs, and a lot of whistling. Even then, there's a lot of wishcasting involved, because both Woody Williams and Matt Morris aren't models of durability. Jeff Suppan should fill one of the slots behind them, with the hope that he'll be one of the appropriately aged retreadings that Dave Duncan made his name on. And then… and then it's the hope that Dan Haren sticks, or that Chris Carpenter's finally healthy, or that Jason Marquis will be one of those infrequent ex-Brave success stories. In that circumstance, you can be sure that as the group's token lefty and one of the few guys with a decent health record, Martinez will be taken seriously.

I buy that. Martinez is cheap insurance, for the low-low price of a mere waiver claim.

Posted 1:48 PM by Brian
BASEBALL'S AVERAGE MAN I stumbled across an odd stat the other day: the average batting average, throughout all of major-league history, is .262. I don't know why, but the number fascinated me: .262. Plain, ordinary, not too good, not too bad. Jeff Blauser hit .262 for his career. So did Dave Engle, Willie Upshaw, and Tony Bernazard. Michael Tucker hit .262 last year. All pretty average guys.

So I got to wondering: who's the most average baseball player of all-time? Lawyers and statisticians have tried to define "the average man," so why can't I? I started off by figuring the average numbers for everyone who ever played big-league baseball. Here's what I found:

AVG .262
OBP .328
SLG .383

By looking at these three categories, we can guess that the most average player of all time was probably Babe Dahlgren. Here are his career totals:

AVG .261
OBP .329
SLG .383

Now, of course, Babe Dahlgren wasn't exactly average. The average ballplayer actually plays only a handful of games in the majors, whereas Dahlgren played for 12 years. (Which goes to show that the average ballplayer contibutes real value to a team, a concept which is a staple of sabermetrics.) But in terms of pure rate stats, Dahlgren is about as average as you'll get.

How about active players? Well, over the last ten years the average numbers look like this:

AVG .267
OBP .337
SLG .425

The man in the middle? How about Gabe Kapler:

AVG .272
OBP .335
SLG .430

He's a fine, bland choice. But I prefer the blandest player of our generation, Mr. Todd Zeile:

AVG .266
OBP .347
SLG .427

For sheer generic, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill ordinariness, Zeile out-averages them all.

Posted 1:22 PM by Brian
CYBER-HARDWARE The Primeys Awards -- which are basically the Oscars for the baseball wonkhead community -- have been named. Most of you who read this site are familiar with the winners: Baseball Prospectus as Best Baseball Analysis site; Rob Neyer as top baseball writer; Baseball Musings as best baseball weblog. These are all worthy choices, and there are some pretty good picks among the nominees too, so you might want to check them out.

Posted 1:17 PM by Brian
THERE'S A POLL on the Cardinals official site asking who you'd like to see as the Cardinals leadoff hitter in 2004. The winner (so far, anyway) is Kerry Robinson, he of the .281 OBP last year. Perhaps Michael Lewis is right -- there really are a lot of pre-enlightened folks out there.

Posted 1:13 PM by Brian
STEINBRENNER AND DEAN I got this link from UndertheGunn.com, and it raises a strange question: Why did George Steinbrenner fund a vicious campaign ad comparing Howard Dean to Osama bin Laden?

Posted 1:04 PM by Brian
THINGS TO BLOW UP So the Steve Bartman ball is no longer -- well, there's some charred wisps of yarn left, but otherwise it's been detonated. Athletics Nation has an idea of what his beloved A's should blow up: Jeremy Giambi's shoes (you remember, 2001, bad shoes, didn't slide, Jeter hype, Yanks win, etc.).

As Cardinals fans, what should we want to blow up? Here are a few suggestions:

1. First Base at Royals Stadium. As in, the one that Donn Denkinger said Jorge Orta touched ahead of Jack Clark's throw to Todd Worrell in the '85 Series.

2. A Sea of White Shirts. The ones in which Curt Flood lost Jim Northrup's fly ball in Game 7 of the '68 World Series. The ball fell in for a two-run triple and the Cards ended up losing the game and the series.

3. The Willie McGee Baseball. 1996, the Cards hold a 3-1 series lead over the Braves in the NLCS. In the first inning of Game 5, Willie McGee miscommunicated with Brian Jordan on a flyball, turned an inning-ending out into a 5-0 Braves lead, and the rout was on from there.

4. Tony La Russa's Lineup Card. The one that had Matt Morris batting for himself in the ninth inning of a tie game in the 2002 NLCS. In the bottom half of the inning Morris lost the game and the series.

5. Bowie Kuhn. He had the bright idea of dividing 1981 into two strike-shortened seasons, hence the Cards finished with the best record in their division (by two games) but missed the playoffs entirely.

I have to admit, that's not much in the way of franchise angst (although the Denkinger call outranks the Bartman ball in my opinion). Please weigh in with any further comments or suggestions.

Posted 10:03 AM by Brian
WOODY'S ARM So Woody Williams has shoulder tendinitis, but his manager is taking an Alfred E. Newman approach to the whole thing:

La Russa said he wasn't too worried about Williams being ready to compete once he was cleared physically.

La Russa recalled one year when Williams was supposed to throw a rehabilitation assignment, but was impressive enough that the Cardinals put him back in the rotation.

I wonder if La Russa recalls the year (2002, to be exact) that Woody was rushed back from arm injury and missed half the season. Or if he recalls Woody wearing out last year some time around inning-marker 150. Or if he recalls that Woody's right arm came into being some time around the middle of the LBJ Administration.

It all reminds me of this exchange from an episode of Cheers:

Frasier: Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Woody: You got that right, Dr. Crane. Back in high school I was condemned to repeat History three times.

Posted 9:34 AM by Brian
WEIRD Cubs pitcher Matt Clement has a new teammate -- Greg Maddux. He also has a new son, born a little over a year ago. His name: Mattix. You could look it up.

Posted 9:28 AM by Brian
LOCAL NOTE Jim Bouton, the author of Ball Four and the recent Foul Ball, will appear at the Daniel Boone Branch of the St. Louis County Library, 300 Clarkson Road in West County, on Thursday, March 4, 2004, at 7 PM. Admission is free. I might ask Bouton what felt worse: having Pete Rose yell "fuck you, Shakespeare" at him during a game, or getting shot by Elliott Gould in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye.

Posted 9:20 AM by Brian
MONEYBALL PLAYS HARDBALL Did you read that article in Sports Illustrated by Michael Lewis? He details the reaction to his book Moneyball by the Baseball Establishment (which he calls "a social club... a kind of women's auxiliary"). The article has a number of good zingers, including this priceless jab at Tracy Ringolsby (who I've disliked for about 25 years now):

Ringolsby is just another guy who's assigned himself the job of barring people from the game who, in his view, have no business inside. He's not a writer, he's a bouncer.

It's a good piece, worth reading, and yet... the whole thing left me feeling a bit sour. I'd heard of the article before I received it in the mail, and I assumed it was one of those fluffy one-page memoirs at the front of the magazine. Instead it's a six-page feature spread, full of bitterness and fury. There are no feuds pettier than feuds in the book world (see O'Reilly, Bill and Franken, Al), and when Michael Lewis goes after nobodies like Doug Kirkorian of the Long Beach Press Telegram, I wanted to tell him to grow a thicker hide and move on.

Posted 9:06 AM by Brian
B-BONDS DROPS THE P-BOMB How did Barry Bonds respond to Turk Wendell's charge that he's as doped-up as an East German weightlifter? Like this, of course:

"Just to disrespect other people like that, or talk to the media, I think that's chickenshit. If you've got something to say, you come to my face and say it, and we'll deal with each other, but don't be a pussy and go talk to the media like you're some tough guy."

I don't root for Barry Bonds. And I do root for Alex Rodriguez (or at least I did when he played in Texas). But my guilty secret is that I'll take Bonds' swagger and candor over A-Rods' Brand X inoffensiveness any day of the week.

And speaking of Bonds and steroids, I got a kick out of this observation by Will Carroll:

Stand in the middle of a room. There can be no wall within five feet of your outstretched arm. You're fully nude. Now, with a stranger watching, urinate into a cup. See why the players had a problem with the privacy aspect of drug testing?

Posted 8:57 AM by Brian
SON OF A BLEACHER MAN Paul Giamatti is one of my favorite character actors. He's made his mark playing splenic goofballs, generally in movies (like Planet of the Apes and Man on the Moon) that are otherwise terrible. He missed out on an Oscar nomination for American Splendor, although the film is up for Best Adapted Screenplay, and we'll find out on Sunday if it wins.

So what's Paul Giamatti doing on a baseball blog? I just recently found out that he's the son of A. Barlett Giamatti, who, as you know, was commissioner of baseball in 1989. A lot of people revere Giamatti's essay "The Green Fields of the Mind" (which contains one of the greatest of all baseball lines "It is designed to break your heart"). But it may be that Bart Giamatti's greatest work is actually his son Paul.

Posted 7:15 PM by Brian
TONY'S TRACK RECORD Did any of you think of Tony La Russa when Joel Quenneville was fired by the Blues yesterday? Both have been in St. Louis for 7+ years, both have been given adequate resources, both have piled up lotsa regular season wins, both have suffered some notable collapses in the postseason, and neither has taken his team to the Big Dance.

The headline of this article trumpets "La Russa Still in Command," but, like Coach Q, he's got to realize that the sand is running out of his hourglass.

We covered Tony La Russa's track record pretty exhaustively last Fall (so exhaustive that our four-part series came in five parts), but let's try something different here. There's a handy little method that Bill James created to evaluate a manager's wins over expectations. As this article describes it,

To predict how many games a team should win in a season, we can look at four factors: the three most recent seasons and one hypothetical season of mean performance, or 81 wins. The most recent season accounts for 50% of the weight, the hypothetical season of .500 ball is weighed at 25%, and the two seasons previous to the most recent account for 12.5% each.

So let's run the numbers for Tony and see how he's done during his eight-year tenure in the Lou. Here are his predicted wins vs. his actual wins by year:

	Predicted	Actual	Net
1996	76	88	+12
1997	82	73	-9
1998	77	83	+6
1999	82	75	-7
2000	77	95	+18
2001	88	93	+5
2002	88	97	+9
2003	92	85	-7
2004	87	??	??
Total			+27

(By the way, I did the math here with Google calculator, which is one of the cooler things around.)

As you can see, Tony has generally done pretty well when measured against baseball's centripetal forces. His first four years were as wobbly as a metronome, but he's come on strong the last four years to finish with 27 wins more than you'd expect (or, over 3 wins per year).

To be sure, this formula is a blunt tool for measuring performance, but it does give you a decent indication of how well La Russa has battled expectations. And 87 wins for this season sounds about right -- how Tony does in relation to that threshold may tell us whether he's leaving or staying for '05.

Posted 6:31 PM by Brian
SHORT AND CENTER If you get a chance, read this piece on Jeter and Bernie Williams by Richard Lederer and Alex Belth. It's one of the finer pieces of sportswriting I've read in the past year, and demonstrates the blurring distinctions between the best of amateur blog-writing and the best of professional journalism.

Posted 6:27 PM by Brian
THE THREE-LEGGED RACE Joe Sheehan continues to throw a little love our way in his continuing look at the NL Central. He picks the Cubs to finish first this year, but concedes that

the Cardinals have the easiest route to improvement. They need a first baseman (or left fielder), maybe a second baseman and some arms. That's a lot easier to find than the shortstop and center fielder the Astros need, or the leadoff-hitting middle infielder and catching help the Cubs could use.

To be honest, I think Sheehan has been going out of his way lately to disparage the Cubs, but I do agree that the Cards should be in the mix.

Another interesting sidelight to Sheehan's piece is the woodshed-job he does on Astros centerfielder (still feels weird to call him that) Craig Biggio:

Let's just get this out of the way now: if Craig Biggio walks into Kissimmee as you're reading this and announces his retirement, forcing the Astros to use Jason Lane in center field every day, the team improves by about four games. Not only is Biggio barely above replacement level at the plate, but he's a lousy center fielder, nine runs below average in '03 and projected... to be eight runs below average in '04. He should be a bench player at this point in his career, and might actually be an asset in a Tony Phillips role. As an everyday center fielder and leadoff hitter, he's a millstone.

Among CFers with over 400 plate appearances last year, Craig Biggio tied for 28th (along with Ryan Freel and Trenidad Hubbard) in Runs Created Above Average.

Posted 6:11 PM by Brian
BUMPER CROP Here's Baseball Prospectus' annual list of the Top 50 Prospects in baseball. Twins phenom Joe Mauer grabs the pole position. Cards' righthander Adam Wainwright checks in at #43.

Surprisingly, there are no Cubs or Astros in the top 50, although a couple Cubs make honorable mention, and a few more would be considered second-tier prospects. J.P. Ricciardi and his Amazing Talent Machine up in Toronto produced the most top prospects, with six. And over in the NL, the Dodgers nab four spots, the Mets claim three of the top dozen prospects in baseball, and the Brewers have almost an entire infield in the top 20 (Prince Fielder at first, Rickie Weeks at second, and J.J. Hardy at short).

The fun part is what happens next with these prospects. A few will pan out, a few will flame out, and perhaps one or two will be the guys you someday tell your grandkids about.

Posted 5:49 PM by Brian
YOUNG TURK Here's Rockies reliever Turk Wendell on Barry Bonds taking steroids:

"I mean, obviously he did it. [His trainer] admitted to giving steroids to baseball players. He just doesn't want to say his name. You don't have to. It's clear just seeing his body."

What is it with Rockies relievers and idiotic comments? Remember, Wendell is the same guy who, after being tossed out of a game a few years back for throwing at Mike Mathey's head, asked rhetorically, "when Ankiel is out there and he throws balls everywhere, why don't they throw him out of the game?"

Posted 5:41 PM by Brian
THE FORMER RAY THAT GOT AWAY Yeah, I wanted the Cards to go after Travis Lee, but would you pay $2.25 million for him in this market? I guess it depends how confident you are in our other options.

And don't forget, our other options may include more trades. A reader of ours named Rob R. looks at all those young arms in the minors -- Ankiel, Narveson, Luis Martinez, Wainwright, Hawksworth, Haren, Parrott, Pearce, Caple, Duff, Tyler Johnson, and Jason Ryan -- and draws this conclusion:

We still have a lame farm system overall, but we ARE (now) practically overstocked in young pitchers, and not by a little. I am convinced Walt J has been stockpiling pitching on purpose -- to pull a late pre-season trade.

I'm not so convinced. After all, only a couple of those guys will fetch you prime beef, and this is the second year in a row Jocketty has aimed for quantity over quality in his pitching staff. But by the same token, I agree with Rob that Walt may not be done wheeling and dealing. Don't we still need a leftfielder?

Posted 5:30 PM by Brian
BLEEDING DODGER BLUE Chris Kahrl looks at the big picture with the Dodgers' hiring of new GM Paul DePodesta:

If there's a problem here, it's the idea that the Dodgers are finally run by somebody I can't help but root for. If Bostonians have their evil empire, and football fans everywhere have the Cowboys, as a kid growing up in Northern California, there was one great Satan: the Dodgers. Where the Giants of the '70s and early '80s represented a sort of moribund leftover from the honeymoon age of Mays and McCovey, and the threadbare post-Green Machine A's resembled a past-prime pinup trying to avoid mention on the cover of People magazine and just disappear after one failed comeback attempt too many, the Dodgers represented slick, sunny sanctimony. They were the team of Steve Garvey, stealth sinner, and the Pastaman, all tinsel and little actual mining-quality ore. Naturally, they were loathsome, and having no fictive commitment to journalistic "professionalism," it's a feeling I've yet to entirely discard.

Funny, when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn they were known as Dem Bums, a shaggy bunch of clowns and ragamuffins. Then they moved to sunny Southern Cal, got a facelift, and somehow transmogrified into the most buttoned-down, starched-shirt 2% milk drinkers in all of baseball. And DePodesta -- handsome, dutiful, Ivy League educated -- fits right in.

Posted 5:23 PM by Brian
STRICTLY BUSINESS George Steinbrenner had this to say about the Boston Red Sox: "Esposito, their GM, has done a wonderful job."

Does he really not know Theo Epstein's name? Or -- and I suspect this is more likely -- is he pulling a routine like Senator Geary in Godfather II, who clumsily mispronounced Vito Corleone's name as VYE-toh CARLY-on, then turned into a snake behind closed doors.

Posted 5:12 PM by Brian
HITTER PITCHERS I stumbled across this exchange in a Baseball Prospectus chat transcript:

Alex Sims (Houston): Do the Cubs have the best-hitting pitching staff ever assembled?

Rany Jazayerli: Always love the oddball question... it's an interesting thought, because both Wood and Prior are among the best hitting-pitchers in the game. The answer is no - no staff with Matt Clement and his lifetime .084 average is going to rank with the all-time greats.

The Pittsburgh Pirates of the mid-80s, if I recall correctly, had some fearsome bats on the mound. Rick Rhoden and Don Robinson could outhit a quarter of the starting shortstops at the time.

Those who read this site regularly know I'm a sucker for these types of argument-starters, so I did a little poking around. And I discovered that the best hitting pitching staff was clearly the 1915-1918 Boston Red Sox, led by some fellow named Ruth. But it wasn't just Ruth -- Joe Wood, Rube Foster, Ray Collins: they could all rake. The 1915 Sox staff had a .686 OPS at the plate, which was 26 points higher than the league averge at any position.

For those of you uncomfortable with a pre-modern team that includes Babe Ruth, some other contenders for the best hitting pitching staffs would include the 1926 Reds, the 1958 Braves (led by Spahn and Burdette), the 1965 Dodgers (Drysdale had 7 homers), the 1974 Pirates (Ken Brett and Jim Rooker), and the 1988 Mets (Darling, Fernandez, etc.).

And is it just me, or do the current Cubs remind you of the mid-'80s Mets?

Posted 4:55 PM by Brian
STENSON TRIBUTE I got from Dave Pinto this link to an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. At the bottom of a series of team notes is this item:

The Reds will remember outfielder Dernell Stenson with a 30-second video tribute on Opening Day at Great American Ball Park. Stenson, who played in 37 games after the Reds claimed him off waivers from the Red Sox last season, was murdered on Nov. 6, 2003 in Chandler, Ariz.

I can't say why exactly, but I find that almost unbearably sad -- a 30-second video tribute, probably stashed in between the announcement of the Reds lineup and Dave Concepcion throwing out the first pitch. That's not to say the Reds are treating Stenson unfairly. The fact is, he was less well-known and less appreciated than stars like Darryl Kile and Thurman Munson, and I guess in some ways that's why I find his tribute so sad.

Posted 4:47 PM by Brian
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE HOLY MAZZONE EMPIRE Does it strike you as odd that the Braves rotation this year will likely be Russ Ortiz, Mike Hampton, John Thomson, Horacio Ramirez, and Paul Byrd? Shouldn't those guys be wearing those powder blue Braves unis from 1984?

Posted 4:43 PM by Brian
MANGLERS There's a grand tradition in baseball of ex-athletes joining the broadcast booth and generally raping and pillaging the English language -- from Dizzy Dean ("He slud into third") to Ralph Kiner ("On Fathers Day, we again wish you all happy birthday") to Jerry Coleman ("The first pitch to Tucker Ashford is grounded into left field -- no, wait a minute, it's ball one, low and outside") to our own Mike Shannon ("Gilkey was originally born in University City"). And now Trident Fever makes a case for adding Mariners announcer Ron Fairly to the list. I think my favorite is his line about Bruce Sutter: "He's thirty-five years old, that will give you some idea of how old he is."

Posted 6:37 PM by Brian
DEADBIRDS? Today Joe Sheehan devotes an entire column to the Cardinals' chances for 2004. Apparently a number of his readers agreed with Jim Bowden's assessment that the NL Central will be a two-team race this year, so Sheehan looked into the matter more deeply.

In short, Sheehan stands by his comment that the Cards will be players alongside the Cubs and Astros. He has real questions about our pitching staff (who doesn't), but thinks we should improve simply by untying that ballast called Yan and Fassero. Our lineup suffers holes at catcher and leftfield (cumulatively those two positions are below replacement level), but the rest of our lineup is relatively solid.

Although beware. As much as Sheehan believes in the Cards, he's still not totally sold:

That structure -- four or five stars carrying a roster -- reminds me of the Seattle Mariners in the last days of the Kingdome. They had Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez and Edgar Martinez and Randy Johnson and Jay Buhner and... Dan Wilson? Russ Davis? Bobby Ayala? That team seemed like it should have been more successful, but the inability to surround a championship core with quality players kept it from making an extended run.

Which pretty much echoes what we said about the Cardinals in our midseason report from last season:

The Cardinals need to find [role players], or we’ll become just another version of the 1980 Cardinals, or the 1982 Expos, or the 1996 Mariners – failed teams who couldn’t cobble together enough average players to play the positions not manned by great players.

In other words, the division won't be won on the backs of Albert Pujols and Scott Rolen -- we know what those cats can do, we know they'll probably be great, and we know we can finish in third nevertheless. No, if the Cards win this year it'll be on the backs of grunts like Ray King, Jason Marquis, Steve Cox, and Marlon Anderson. They might not be much, but they're all we got, so start crossing your fingers for a career year from some of those guys.

Posted 6:23 PM by Brian
PLAYING HARDBALL Fascinating interview over at Go Cardinals with Jeff Luhnow, the Cardinals' Vice President for Baseball Development. A bunch of readers submitted questions to Luhnow, and he was kind enough to answer them, even the Mike Wallace-style finger-pointing questions. You should check it out.

Luhnow's boosterism can be annoying, but he is an employee and an advocate for the Cardinals, and in general I was impressed with the guy. He says pretty much all the right things, and his general philosophy on player development and talent evaluation appears sound. One thing struck me, though. Someone asked if it made more sense to keep Pujols in left and start Gall and Cox at first. Luhnow said that "the strongest Cardinal team is one where Albert Pujols is healthy and playing every day," and more or less implied that Albert would find a home at first. But is Pujols that big an injury risk in leftfield? And if so, yikes!

Also, someone asked Luhnow whether the Cardinals were dead sharks heading into this season. For the record, it wasn't I who asked that question, even though I used that same metaphor in a post last week. I still think the Cardinals are doing very little to move forward, though, and if our team isn't moving forward, they may not wind up dead last, but they will wind up in third place.

Posted 6:09 PM by Brian
THE NEWEST CARDINAL I know very little about this Luis Martinez guy that we just claimed off waivers. He was the Brewers' 2003 Minor League Pitcher of the Year, although that may be like winning the Miss Liechtenstein beauty pageant. He also seems like a bit of a headcase. He was recently arrested in the Dominican Republic for shooting a man in a parking lot dispute, and although he was later cleared of all charges, he was dubious enough for the pitching-strapped Brewers to waive him.

I've always thought headcases faired a little better in baseball than they do in team sports like basketball (think Roy Tarpley) or football (think Lawrence Phillips). But I'm not so sure. Baseball is littered with enough carcasses of the emotionally unstable (Steve Dalkowski and Denny McLain come to mind), and I'm not so confident in our scouting staff to get jazzed up by this signing.

Posted 5:56 PM by Brian
ROLLING THE DICE Josh Schulz reports the latest Vegas odds on the Cardinals winning the World Series: 22 to 1. The odds that a random team wins the W.S. is 30 to 1, so the Cards aren't much better than average. (Well, technically they're 36.4% better than random chance, but why quibble.)

Posted 5:51 PM by Brian
TIME WARP J.D. Drew is already battling injuries in Atlanta's training camp. In other news, the Brewers face tough challenges this season, Ben Affleck has called off wedding plans with J.Lo, and George Bush still hasn't found bin Laden.

Although to be fair to Drew, he knew he'd experience some tenderness this spring, and, according to him, his knee is "heads and shoulders above where it was last spring." Considering he put up decent numbers last year with two legs made of Swiss cheese, I wouldn't count him out just yet.

Posted 5:39 PM by Brian
BUCS LAND THE BULL So the Pirates signed Raul Mondesi. I hear it's for one year, about $1.5 million. First off, I'll say that Mondesi has always been one of my least favorite players in the game -- he's got sort of a reverse Midas thing going on, turning everything he touches into shit.

But he's not that bad, especially if you take a few steps back and squint your eyes just right. He's not that old (33 in a couple weeks) and his .272/.343/.484 line last year, while nothing great for a corner outfield, at least outdoes that two-headed monster (Sorry Taguchison) we have pegged in left.

As for the Bucs, I'm not sure why they grabbed Mondesi. As Christian Ruzich points out, his playing time retards the growth of Craig Wilson (just as the Randall Simon signing squeezed Wilson out of the firstbase job). My guess is that the Pirates are hoping Mondesi will be this year's Jose Guillen -- a masher who'll fetch prospects at the midseason trading deadline. If all goes according to plan, expect the Cardinals to be unloading Chris Narveson in exchange for Mondesi sometime in late July.

Posted 5:27 PM by Brian
THE CURSE OF STEVE BARTMAN About 24 hours from the time of this post, the Steve Bartman baseball will be no longer. It's going to be destroyed in a public ceremony in front of Harry Caray's restaurant on Thursday night. The method of execution is unclear, but that's not for lack of options:

One fan suggested using Caray's glasses to ignite the fire that will melt the ball, collect the ashes and have Bartman fly over Yankee Stadium and scatter the ashes, thus transferring the curse to the Yankees. Several proposed involving NASA and depositing the ball into eternal orbit, with one e-mailer adding, "I actually know a guy in the program who can get it done."

Another fan suggested "slicing the ball into thin pieces, cover with milk, sugar and flour, bake at 350 degrees for a half-hour, then feed it to a billy goat. When it passes through the goat, the curse will be gone forever." One fan wanted it unraveled a little at a time at a Cubs game. Several wanted it pickled in Budweiser. Others suggested it be dropped off the Sears Tower, devoured by animals at Lincoln Park Zoo or knocked into Lake Michigan by Ron Santo, whose own battle with diabetes inspired the charitable involvement.

I'm surprised those Northsiders didn't try all those tactics on Bartman himself.

Posted 5:18 PM by Brian
CHRIS CARPENTER SIGHTING Why is Tony La Russa excited about Chris Carpenter?

"Part of the confidence we have in Chris is what he was before his injury," La Russa said. "He had a track record up in Toronto of facing hitters that was very impressive."

But is that true? The big question with Carpenter this Spring has been: can he stay healthy? But even if he can stay healthy, what's his upside? His career high in ERA is 4.09. Over the past four years he's had season ERAs over 5.00 and over 6.00. He's only pitched in 13 games over the past two years. In short, he's never fully recovered from the way he was mishandled by ex-Jays skipper Tim Johnson.

There's no question about Carpenter's stuff, which is ace material when he's got it going on. But I recall hearing the same arguments last year on behalf of a certain Brett Tomko. Between Morris and Williams' arm kinks, and the flakiness of Carpenter, Suppan, and Marquis, this season may present Dave Duncan's biggest challenge yet. (Then again, they're all challenges for Dunc, aren't they? The guy should get a Purple Heart or something for his years in St. Louis.)

Posted 5:04 PM by Brian
ARMS RACE Have you ever heard so much preseason discussion about great pitching rotations? The Red Sox, Cubs, Yankees, A's, Astros -- they're all loaded. Guess this finally puts to rest all that talk about how diluted pitching is, how there are no great arms out there anymore. That was a veritable cottage industry back in the late '90s.

As for Cardinals fans, well, the bad news is that our rotation is only about half as good as the Cubs or Astros. The good news is that we're not quite as bad as I'd have thought -- we rate middle-of-the-pack, which isn't so awful given how many projects we have in our rotation.

Posted 4:54 PM by Brian
PUJOLS' REAL AGE, CH. XXXVII Chris Kahrl brings up an interesting point: if a mid-market team like the Cardinals were willing to commit a nine-figure salary to Albert Pujols, surely someone in the organization resolved the "age issue" to their satisfaction. I mean, it's not that difficult to verify Albert's birthdate, especially with so much at stake. I'm more and more convinced that either (a) Pujols is genuinely 24 years old; or (b) he's a couple years older but, like the Yankees and Alfonso Soriano, the club is aware of it.

Posted 4:49 PM by Brian
HEAD TO HEAD Tony La Russa tells us that Bo Hart, Marlon Anderson, Brent Butler, and Hector Luna will all battle it out for the Cards' second base job this season. Does this "healthy competition" thing work? Do players train harder or play better when someone is breathing down their back? I'm assuming they probably do to some degree, but it would make an interesting study...

Posted 4:41 PM by Brian
SAME OLD SAME OLD From Peter King's Monday Morning QB column:

Bob Costas said on WFAN radio in New York Monday morning that if he'd been commissioner of baseball, he'd have vetoed the A-Rod-to-the-Yankees deal. "It's not in the best interests of baseball,'' Costas said. "Unless you think of the rest of baseball as the Washington Generals... all this does is compound the already overwhelming advantage the Yankees have. They're just bludgeoning everybody.''

Everybody? Does that include the '01 D'backs or the '02 Angels or the '03 Marlins? Do the Washington Generals include the mighty Red Sox or the spiffy-looking Cubs and Phillies? Costas is an adopted son of St. Louis, so perhaps I should cut him some slack, but his knee-jerk pieties are pretty insufferable.

Posted 4:40 PM by Brian
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR By the way, if you think the Yanks-Sox rivalry has maxed out, consider what will happen if the Yanks nab Lowe, Nomar, or Pedro in '05.

Posted 4:26 PM by Brian
TEAMS OF THE DECADE Brian over at Sox Nation had a post yesterday about the 1990s Toronto Blue Jays, in his opinion one of the most underrated "decade" teams in recent history. That got me wondering -- what are the Teams of the Decade? With a little help from Baseball-Reference.com, as well as Lee Sinins' Sabermetric Encyclopedia, I tried to get at some answers:

1901-1909 Chicago Cubs (814-517 .612)

The Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Honus Wagner, could lay claim to this title -- in fact, they had the best winning percentage of any team in any decade (.642). But the Cubs won two crowns to the Bucs' one, and, of course, the 1906 pre-Wrigleyites won games more frequently than any club in history. Side note: the White Sox, at 744-575 .564, had perhaps their last decade among the greats.

1910-1919 Boston Red Sox (857-624 .579)

The New York Giants actually won at a better clip (.598), but they were also the Buffalo Bills before the Buffalo Bills -- they lost all four World Series they played in. How bout the A's? They featured a truly powerhouse team in the first part of the decade, winning 3 world titles, but Connie Mack's fire sales left them under .500 for the decade. No, the team of the Teens was the Boston Red Sox, who won four World Series and are perhaps the only forgotten dynasty of the last hundred years.

1920-1929 New York Yankees (933-602 .608)

The 1920s Giants had great teams, but the 1920s Yanks are legends. Three rings, Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, and enough mojomentum for the next 45 years.

1930-1939 New York Yankees (970-554 .636)

What could the Yankees do for an encore? Well, in my opinion the '30s Yankees are the best team of any decade, period. They won more games than any decade team, and swept all five World Series they played in. (And if you listen to Neyer, their 1939 squad was the best team of all time.) As for the NL rep, the Giants and Cardinals finished with the exact same number of wins, but the Cards get the nod by dint of two world championships.

1940-1949 St. Louis Cardinals (960-580 .623)

The Yankees actually won one more crown this decade, besting the Cards 4 to 3. But the Cards won 30 more games, had stiffer competition (namely the Dodgers), and were one of only four teams to average more than 95 wins for an entire decade. Besides, the Yankees shtick was getting old and I wanted to mix it up some.

1950-1959 New York Yankees (955-582 .621)

But you can't mix it up for too long -- the Yanks are once again the undisputed decade champs, with 6 rings in 8 trips to the Fall Classic. The Boys of Stengel are known for feasting on the Boys of Summer, but the Dodgers weren't exactly doormats this decade. They finished the decade with 913 wins and two world titles.

1960-1969 Pick 'Em

True to the turbulence of the times, the '60s were the most difficult decade from which to choose a best team. Here are the contenders:

Orioles 911-698 .566
Yankees 887-720 .552
Cardinals 884-718 .552
Dodgers 878-729 .546

No real standouts there -- if it was a whole season, only 3 games would separate the four teams. So let's do this by process of elimination. First off I think we can strike the Orioles, even though they had the decade's best record. They're the only team of the four to win fewer than two championships (in fact, they closed the decade getting spanked by the Miracle Mets), and that's enough for me to take them out of the top slot.

Next let's lose the Yankees. They were superb for the first half of the decade, going to five straight World Series and winning two. But frankly they sucked for the latter half of the '60s, finishing no higher than 5th place and actually falling as low as 10th.

Neither the Cards nor the Dodgers ever got that bad. But deciding between those two teams is nearly impossible. Both won 2 World Series in three trips. Both won 90+ games four times and 100+ games once. Only a handful of games separate them in the decade standings. How to decide?

I went with the Cards. Their record was slightly better than LA's, and their only World Series loss was a nail-biter, whereas the Dodgers got swept in four by Frank Robinson and those mighty O's.

1970-1979 Cincinnati Reds (953-657 .592)

The Mustache Gang A's actually wore more rings than the Big Red Machine, but they collapsed at the end of the decade. The Reds win on the strength of overall greatness.

There were a lot of truly fine teams in the '70s. The Orioles went to four World Series and had a record almost identical to the Reds'. The Pirates averaged 92 wins and nabbed a couple of championships. And the Yankees were one of four teams this decade to win two world titles. Even the Dodgers were excellent, although they lost three World Series in one decade for the third time in franchise history.

1980-1989 Los Angeles Dodgers (825-741 .527)

Another dead heat with the Cardinals. Both teams won the exact same number of games over the ten-year span, and the Runnin' Redbirds won one more pennant than the Blueboys (even downing them head-to-head in '85). But the Dodgers were the only team in the decade to win two World Series, which is enough to push them over the top. Besides, we gave the Cardinals the '60s, so turnabout is fair play.

As for other teams, the Yankees once again had the best record, but they didn't win squat. The Royals and Tigers played fine baseball for the decade, both winning more games than the Cards and Dodgers, but each team won only one pennant. The Mets had flashes of brilliance, but didn't have one of the top five best records. And the A's played pretty good ball, but they got sorta caught between decades.

1990-1999 New York Yankees (851-702 .548)

Cleveland finally put together a string of good years. And as Brian pointed out, the Blue Jays won it all twice. But the competition is really between the Braves and Yankees. The Braves had the better records; the Yankees have the rings.

The Braves really played superbly -- they had 925 wins, 7 divisional titles, 5 pennants, and one world championship. In fact, they represented the NL in over half the World Series played in the '90s. But even though the Yankees won 7 fewer games per year, I had to go with the team that won two extra World Series.

If the Braves had won just one of the four Fall Classics that they lost, they'd be kings. And if sustained excellence is your criterion for greatness, then they ARE the kings. In the end it comes down to taste, and my palette favors the Yankees.

2000-2003 New York Yankees (386-258 .599)

The Yanks again -- I know, it's getting old. But I can't see who else you'd choose. There are five teams within eleven wins of each other for the decade: the Mariners (393), A's (392), Yankees (386), Braves (385), and Giants (382). But the Yanks are one of four teams with a ring, and the only team to go to the World Series more than once. Until someone comes along to knock them out of the top slot, they're the reigning champs of the last millennium, and this one.

Posted 2:42 PM by Brian
THE YEARLING Now that Woody Williams has become a big question mark, and now that Matt Morris seems sorta blase about re-upping with the Redbirds, there's going to be more attention than ever on our young arm waiting in the wings: ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Adam Wainwright.

We all know how unpredictable pitching prospects are, but Wainwright seems even less predictable than most. Exhibit A: the dispute that erupted over Wainwright's chances during a recent Baseball Prospectus roundtable. The responses were all over the map.

Rany Jazayerli kicked things off by suggesting that Wainwright was one of the ten best pitching prospects in baseball (#10, in fact). He likes Wainwright's upside, even without the maternal effects of the Braves farm system. BP's Dave Cameron chimed in with this feedback:

I've seen Wainwright a ton the past two years, and he isn't improving. He's still 87-91 on the fastball, despite the 6'7" frame. The curve is a knockout pitch, and the change has potential, but he's basically a tall Aaron Sele right now. I'd move him down.

Nate Silver kindly disagreed:

The conventional wisdom on Adam Wainwright seems a little bit backward to me. He had, far and away, his best year statistically, halving his walk rate, but nevertheless lost status in many people's eyes. I think a lot of people shared in Dave's disappointment that Wainwright's velocity hasn't increased, and I'll admit that it limits his upside to a certain extent. But the guy has demonstrated a pretty good understanding of how to pitch, should have an opportunity waiting for him in St. Louis, and I think he deserves his place in the middle tier.

Chris Kahrl went even further, suggesting that Rany had Wainwright too low and that perhaps AW should leapfrog over other prospects in the top ten.

None of this surprises me very much. Wainwright has chops, for sure, but he's streaky -- his progress hasn't been linear. What's more, he's apparently added a couple inches to his frame over the last year or two, and some people aren't sure what to make of that in terms of mechanics.

As for velocity, Wainwright himself thinks his fastball can top out in the mid-90, if not higher. Besides, as Dayn Perry has pointed out, a high strikeout rate in the minors is not a prerequisite for success in the bigs. For example, Matt Morris and Curt Schilling's minor league K/9 innings were lower than Wainwright's last year in AA.

So obviously a lot of questions still need to be answered regarding Wainwright's future. But an even bigger question lingers out there: now that we got AW in exchange for JD, do you think we can replace chants of "Dreeewww" with "Awwwwww"?

Posted 1:37 PM by Brian
BUM SHOULDER What to make of Woody William's shoulder tendinitis? Well, I don't know much of anything about the injury, so I did a little Googling to find this:

Tendinitis is inflammation (redness, soreness, and swelling) of a tendon. In tendinitis of the shoulder, the rotator cuff and/or biceps tendon become inflamed, usually as a result of being pinched by surrounding structures. The injury may vary from mild inflammation to involvement of most of the rotator cuff.

From what I can tell, this injury is either mild or serious. It'll either keep him out of a few spring training games, or it'll linger throughout the year. It'll either derail his career, or it'll turn out to be a minor ailment. In other words, it could be a mountain, could be a molehill.

My guess is that Woody will spend a few weeks on the DL. The track record for older guys with this injury -- e.g., Dave Veres, Mike Jackson -- is not good. Beyond that, we'll have to wait for word from the estimable Will Carroll.

Posted 1:20 PM by Brian
THE END OF HISTORY Interesting article in the New Republic by Aaron Schatz, about the rise of sabermetric analysis in baseball's front offices. As Schatz sees it, the competitive advantages of Beaneball diminish with each successive stathead in positions of power:

...in the long-term, once everyone is using sabermetrics, every team will correctly value players, and there won't be any more inefficiencies to exploit. Suddenly major league baseball will be right back where it started: With the richest teams buying up the best players, and the poorer teams settling for the dregs.

Well, that day may come, but I'd say we're about, oh, two or three hundred years away from that. There's just so much we still don't know about talent evaluation and player development. Once some franchise comes along to precisely quantify defensive prowess, or how to avoid injuries to young pitchers arms, or how to determine the attitudes and adaptability of the best players, then we'll see a whole new set of competitive advantages and a whole new group of franchises trying to catch up.

(By the way, Dave Pinto beat me to the punch with some similar thoughts, so check him out for further explication.)

Posted 1:05 PM by Brian
RAISE YOUR ARMS AND COUGH So Pujols wouldn't sign his mega-deal if he had to first undergo a physical. Now, obviously I can understand a guy not wanting to submit to a physical -- when that much cash is on the table, you don't want to give your adversary any advantage whatsoever. But... the way I read this article, Pujols and Co. were adamantly opposed to the physical, even prepared to walk away from the deal if he had to take one. Don't you find that more than a little odd? I suspect there's some other side to this story I'm not aware of.

Posted 12:51 PM by Brian
TRIVIA TIME! The largest contract ever for a three-year player: Albert Pujols, $95 million. The second largest contract ever for a three-year player: Torii Hunter, $32 million.

Posted 12:50 PM by Brian
HIS WILL BE DONE "I'm pretty sure people think, 'What can I do with that money?' But it's not my money. It's money that I have borrowed from God. And He has let me use it. Whatever He wants me to do with it, that's what I'm going to do." -- Albert Pujols after signing his historic deal.

Posted 12:46 PM by Brian
THE BASEBALL WIDOW is back with a true fantasy team -- her nominations for the cutest players in baseball. She kicks things off with Javy Lopez at catcher. And if my girlfriend has anything to say about it, we'll be seeing Reggie Sanders in right, and Robert Horry and Chris Webber in left and center.

Posted 12:39 PM by Brian
SKINNY WALKER Check out this photo of a slimmed-down Larry Walker (evidently vying for the Widow's fantasy team). Makes me wonder why the guy was on the all-Crisco diet for the rest of his career.

Posted 12:36 PM by Brian
SUPER SCOUT Here's a nice obituary of Jimmy Russo, a longtime St. Louisan who scouted many of the Orioles players (like Jim Palmer and Mike Cueller) that made Baltimore a powerhouse for several decades.

Did you know -- this is a pretty wild stat -- that for a 40-year stretch, from 1958 to 1997, the Orioles had a better record than the Yankees? You could look it up.

Posted 12:20 PM by Brian
BRING IT Curt Schilling is about this close from taking the mound for the Red Sox wearing war paint and clutching a Jeddart axe. He's taking no prisoners, not even his own boss. Damn, it's gonna be a fun season.

Posted 12:10 PM by Brian
THE MIDNIGHT HOUR has some cool thoughts about music and baseball. His basic point is that baseball is as much art as science, which is a good lesson to all the sabermetric wonkheads out there.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't take this point too far. Statistics and analysis needn't be a deterrent to the joys of baseball. Taken properly, they can enhance our experience, in the same way I like knowing that the movie E.T. quotes Jean Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux and I like knowing how Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" expands on the Isley Brother's "Footsteps in the Dark." It's just a different kind of mystery, that's all.

Posted 11:31 AM by Brian
AGEGATE CONTINUES They're coming out of the woodwork -- O's prospect Denny Bautista is the latest ballplayer who, Jack Powell-like, aged a couple years overnight. I suspect we haven't heard the last of this trend.

And reader Matthew Rollo brings up an interesting point in relation to Alfonso Soriano's new age:

Wait a minute. Didn't I read something about a player being suspended for a year if caught lying about his age?

Well, close. The owners recently made changes to MLB's governing rules, including "a year suspension for any player fabricating his name, age or nationality on documents such as U.S. entrance visas." Merely lying about your age is presumably okay, but if it includes tampering with documents you're in trouble.

Which leads to the question -- how was Sori able to fiddle with his age? If he didn't have documents to back up his age, why did the Yankees ever believe him? And if he did present false papers, shouldn't he sit out for a year?

Posted 11:17 AM by Brian
THE RITES OF SPRING Here's Devil Rays GM Chuck LaMar on Tino Martinez:

"He is the complete package. He's had a successful career at the major-league level. On the field, we think he has another year or two left to continue to play at a high level. The championships that he's won, the way he carries himself - I think the word 'professional' is overused sometimes in sports, but this is the consummate professional. His work ethic, what he brings on and off the field, is going to be a tremendous example to our young players."

Now where have we heard that before?

Posted 11:13 AM by Brian
WELCOME TO THE GABFEST Here's a fun blog I just discovered called Yankees, Mets and the Rest. It's nice and breezy, with just the right balance of passion and thoughtfulness. Check it out.

Posted 12:50 PM by Brian
MADDUX REDUCTION Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus is pretty underwhelmed with the Greg Maddux signing. He figures that Maddux is good for about one win over Juan Cruz, which isn't worth the dough -- especially given the shifting demographics up in Chicago:

The move is another step in the steady aging process the Cubs have undergone since Dusty Baker arrived 15 months ago. Bobby Hill lost the second-base job that was to be his to Mark Grudzielanek and was traded; Hee Seop Choi lost his first-base job to Eric Karros and was traded. Now Maddux replaces Cruz. Only Corey Patterson has been able to establish himself under Baker, and his 2003 season was cut short by an knee injury before he had a chance to fall out of favor. The Cubs may win a championship, but there's no question that Baker's impact has shortened their timeframe for doing so.

Sheehan does have a suggestion for how the Cubs might meet that timeframe -- by packaging Juan Cruz, Corey Patterson, and possibly minor-league 3B David Kelton to the Royals in exchange for Carlos Beltran. Without such a move, says Sheehan, "they need a bat, and until they get one, they're not clearly better than the Astros and Cardinals."

Posted 12:42 PM by Brian
BRONZE GLOVES Avkash Patel over at the Raindrops has come up with a pretty legit way to measure defensive performance. But it ain't good news for Cardinals fans. According to Avkash's metrics, the Cardinals underperform their reputations when it comes to gloveliness. To wit:

Edgar Renteria rates as a mediocre shortstop. Bo Hart and Marlon Anderson come in as poor 2Bmen. And even Scott Rolen is ranked in the vicinity of Tony Batista and Sean Burroughs at third. Jim Edmonds comes out okay, but he's also a tad lower than his Gold Gloves suggest.

This isn't the first time I've heard questions from the stathead community about the reputation of the Cardinals infield. And while I take some of these metrics with a grain of salt (partly because so many of them contradict each other), the lump total of them -- which is exactly what Avkash set out to measure -- has me more than a little concerned. The Cardinals don't have a big strikeout pitching staff, so it's crucial that when balls are put into play, our glovemen can catch them.

Posted 12:30 PM by Brian
THE BASEBALL CRANK wrote an opinion piece back in May 2002 that's as timely as ever. You should check it out -- it's about morals in sports, role models, steroids, gay ballplayers, and a lot of stuff in between. The Crank concedes that football may well be the nation's groin, but baseball is still its soul. (And basketball is, I guess, its hairstyle and wardrobe.)

Posted 12:29 PM by Brian
ONE FURTHER THOUGHT that struck me about the Baseball Crank -- I've known him for over ten years; he was a year behind me in college. We both went to Holy Cross, a small liberal-arts school in Massachusetts. (Trivia: HC's greatest baseball player may have been a Native American named Louis Sockalexis, and the Cleveland Indians are, in fact, named after Sockalexis.)

Anyway, I was also in the same class at HC as Bill Simmons, who writes for ESPN.com. And I was in the same class as Brian of Sox Nation. Add them to the Baseball Crank and I'd like to think we make, pound for pound, a pretty good contender for best sportswriting alums on the internet.

Posted 12:05 PM by Brian
THE GRAPEFRUIT CIRCUIT One thing I like about spring training is how small towns in Florida or Arizona adopt the major-league clubs that visit them every year. It's like some dude letting his rich college buddy crash on his couch for a couple weeks. To that end, there've been daily articles in the TCPalm (which covers Florida's Palm Beach and Treasure Coast, home of the Cards' spring training site in Jupiter) about the Cardinals' prospects this season. This piece, for example, does as good a job at capturing the pulse of St. Louis fans as any article I've read in the Post-Dispatch recently.

Posted 11:55 AM by Brian
THE OLD GUARD Richard Lederer has an excellent piece on the reaction of the L.A. press to the hiring of Paul DePodesta as Dodgers GM. It goes to show that, no matter how well the A's have done, no matter how many weeks Moneyball was on the NYT best-seller list, there's still huge resistance from the mainstream media to wonks like DePodesta. Of course, as TwinsFan Dan reminds us, DePodesta shouldn't be crowned with laurels yet -- he hasn't done a damn thing as GM. But by the same token, he shouldn't be roasted alive before he gets a chance to prove himself.

Bill Plashke of the L.A. Times has been the worst offender (click here to read Aaron Gleeman's merciless body-slam of the guy), but T.J. Simers has been pretty bad too. Simers -- one of those annoying guys who couldn't make a living as a sports journalist or a comedian, so decided to do something in-between -- writes a whole column on DePodesta based on innuendoes and gut impressions. I wrote him an email asking if he was familiar with DePodesta's work in Oakland. Simers was kind enough to reply: "never heard of him before." That actually explains a lot.

Posted 7:26 PM by Brian
THE MEEK INHERIT THE EARTH There's been a lot of talk lately (including from yours truly) about how the A-Rod deal is a blow to the poor and the downtrodden and a triumph for the rich and powerful. But this article by Chris Isidore argues just the opposite. Isidore points out that

the Yankees, the team in desperate need of [A-Rod's] services with the greatest resources to spend, was unwilling to pay even two-thirds of the average remaining cost of his contract. His former team, the Texas Rangers, agreed to give the Yankees a reported $67 million to shed the contract, an amount that allows the Yankees to pay A-Rod a relative bargain price of $16 million a year, less than two other members of their current infield.

He also points out that baseball's market is still generally depressed, with this winter's crop of free agents taking an average 26.6 percent pay cut.

Does this mean that the new collective bargaining agreement is working? Difficult to say, but I do think that under the old market standard -- with Jeter making $18.9 million per year and Mike Hampton making $14.4 million per -- Albert Pujols could have commanded considerably more than the annual $14 million he's getting from the Cardinals. So maybe it's time to be a little more thankful for the current environment and thank the CBA that we've been able to hold on to our best players.

Posted 7:16 PM by Brian
THE INNER SANCTUM OF AWESOMENESS Rob Neyer recently published his list of the nine greatest ballplayers of all time. It goes a little something like this:

1. Ruth
2. Mays
3. Williams
4. Wagner
5. Cobb
6. Bonds
7. Aaron
8. Musial
9. Mantle

I can't really argue with any of those choices. I'd swap Musial and Aaron, if only because the Man's peak was higher than Hammerin' Hank's. But beyond that quibble I think this is one of the best "all-time" lists I've seen.

Posted 7:10 PM by Brian
SWIMMING WITH SHARKS I was struck by this comment from the great Dave Pinto:

The big movers in the offseason have been the Cubs, the Red Sox, the Yankees and the Phillies, four teams that came up just short of their goals. That's the great thing about losing a close one; it really makes you focus on what went wrong and how to fix it.

He's right -- all of these teams have committed tremendous resources to reach the mountaintop, even making choices that might otherwise seem unwise. The Phillies will shell out $8 million for an 85-inning closer; the Cubs just inked a 38-year-old to $15 million plus; the Yanks are spending more than $35 million on the left side of their infield; and the Red Sox signed a 37-year-old to a guaranteed three year, $37.5 million deal. These team want to win now, come hell or high water.

All of which makes me wonder what Walt Jocketty was doing after the 2002 season. Yes, I know, it's water under the bridge; and yes, each of the above teams are in bigger markets than St. Louis and have a little more latitude than we did. But it still grates at me. The Cardinals won 97 games in '02, went to the NLCS, and lost out on the World Series because of bad luck more than anything else. What's more, the core of our team was intact heading into 2003, which suggests the Cards were, like this year's Cubs or Red Sox, only a piece or two away from making a serious charge at a title.

And what did Jocketty do? Not much. He traded for Brett Tomko, re-signed Woody Williams, invited a few journeyman relievers to spring training. But that's it. At the time Jocketty even admitted that he wasn't going to do anything drastic. "Our everyday club is pretty well set," he said as soon as the 2002 season ended.

Again, I know this is sour grapes and all, but to paraphrase Alvy Singer, "a baseball team is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies." The question is: has our ballclub become a dead shark?

Posted 6:41 PM by Brian
BASEBALL'S RESIDENT EGGHEAD Greg Maddux has been more than a record-setting hurler -- he's also a pioneer of sorts. Back in 1984, teams were reluctant to draft Maddux because he didn't fit the image of a flamethrowing ace pitcher. (He's always seemed to me sorta like Jay Ward's cartoon character, Sherman.) As Alan Schwarz explains in this article for ESPN:

The persistent concern with Maddux among most scouts was that he didn't have the prototype, 6-foot-3 and 210-pound body they looked for. In fact, in the 19-year history of the draft to that point, no pitcher as small as Maddux had ever been chosen in the first round. "You really have to stick your neck out when a high pick is a guy of that size," [Cubs scout Gene] Handley later recalled. "When the owner goes to spring training and sees him -- 'That boy there? He looks like the batboy!' -- you can be in trouble."

Maddux's success opened the door for countless baseball misfits, from Pedro to Mike Hampton to Tim Hudson.

Posted 5:15 PM by Brian
BASEBALL RICHES If you'll allow me to moralize for a moment -- the next time you rail against superstar athletes for being overpaid, try to recall this story about Miguel Tejada. Yes, he's making multi-millions for playing a boy's game, but he's not spending that money on kidney-shaped pools or a fleet of Lamborghinis. Instead, he's giving back to his impoverished hometown of Bani, Dominican Republic:

Tejada has committed more than $1 million to replace that old field where he started playing baseball with a modern complex, complete with lights. And he routinely ships Mizuno equipment back to Soto to distribute around the old neighborhood.

On the eastern outskirts of Bani, Tejada is building a shopping complex. Closer to downtown, his father runs a new Esso gas station built with Tejada's earnings from baseball.

It reminds me of something Joe Sheehan wrote when A-Rod was being asked, back in December, to forfeit a portion of his salary for the good of the game:

I hate the argument -- which is set up in a macro for some people -- that if a player makes X, he shouldn't care about some amount of marginal dollars because "he could never spend it all in one lifetime." The amount of money even the most well-compensated athletes make is really nothing if your goals are ambitious, and the notion that someone should take less, in a business with Pohlads and McMorrises and, my god, Reinsdorfs, is appalling to me. What if Alex Rodriguez wants to own a baseball team? What if he wants to run for president? What if he wants to find a cure for cancer?

Miguel Tejada might not be curing cancer, but he's been a salve to his people all the same.

Posted 4:54 PM by Brian
COOPERSTOWNERS A couple weeks back I did a post about contenders for the Hall of Fame. A guy named Bill Gilbert comes to pretty much the same conclusions I did, but he does it in a much more comprehensive and systematic fashion.

Posted 4:52 PM by Brian
POWERHOUSE There's been a mega-merger in the baseball blogosphere. All-Baseball.com, already home to some of my favorite seamheads out there, has now added even more of my favorite writers to their roster of all-stars. Check 'em out...

Posted 4:47 PM by Brian
CHECKING IN WITH DICK ANKLE This probably qualifies as a "dog bites man" story, but I'm always curious how our old friend Rick Ankiel is doing -- and, as you'd expect, he's frustrated but hopeful, antsy yet patient, etc., etc. Whether he's truly as chipper as he says, or whether he's actually going out of his mind, I wish him well. If Rick Ankiel could ever come back to MLB and throw a good game and get the win, I seriously think that would be worth a playoff victory or two.

And is it just me, or do you still do a double-take every time you read Rick Ankiel's age? The guy's younger than Hee Seop Choi, for crying out loud.

Posted 4:41 PM by Brian
ASSESSING MADDUX The Baseball Savant makes an argument on behalf of Greg Maddux's good-but-not-great numbers from 2003. But he engages in a form of logic that I find slightly annoying -- that is, if you take away Maddux's six worst starts (where he got pounded for 39 runs in 24 innings), his record would be 16-5 and his ERA would be 2.60.

Well, yeah, and if you take out Matt Morris' six worst starts his ERA drops to 2.47. If you take out the Cardinals' worst 15-game stretch, they finish with the best winning percentage in the NL Central. And if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle. Those runs Maddux gave up led to losses; and those losses count in the standings; you can't just factor them out.

Having said that, I do agree that when Maddux is on, he's one of the best pitchers out there, and I also agree that he helps the Cubs. (If you read more of the Savant's piece, make sure not to miss his assessment of the Cards' chances this year: "Well I think they aren't even a factor any longer and I'm sort of surprised that the Cardinal brass let it come to this." Ouch.)

Posted 4:11 PM by Brian
A-ROD HAS LEFT THE BUILDING One more bad thing about A-Rod leaving the Lone Star State: it means the Cardinals won't get to play him this year! I had June 11th circled on my calendar (well, not literally, or even metaphorically for that matter) -- that's when we play the Texas Rangers for the first time ever. I was looking forward to seeing the Rod strut his stuff against Matt Morris and Co.; now we're left with Brad Fullmer as a consolation prize.

By the way, I've mentioned this before, but I still can't believe our last game against the Cubs this year comes on July 20th, only one week after the All-Star break. What a disgrace.

Posted 3:53 PM by Brian
SILVER LINING The Baseball News Blog makes an interesting point -- it's certainly bad for the Red Sox that A-Rod joined the Yanks, but it's not at all the worst-case scenario for them:

[I]t would have been worse if A-Rod had joined the Blue Jays, Angels, A's or Mariners. It doesn't matter if the Yankees win 100 games or 110 or 120; if the Sox can finish ahead of Toronto and Baltimore and the Central runner-up and the West runner-up, they're in the playoffs, and anything can happen then.

Posted 3:48 PM by Brian
HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU Larry Stone of the Seattle Times has a fitting tribute to the late Hub Kittle. My favorite tidbit involves the first time Hub met Whitey Herzog, when the White Rat was a young player sent to the Dominican Republic to play for Hub's team:

As Kittle told it, Herzog was waiting for his ride at the airport, when Kittle rode up to the terminal on a horse, emerging out of the jungle in full gallop.

"Are you Herzog? Get on."

Posted 3:43 PM by Brian
DIVISION RIVAL UPDATE Will Carroll has this rumor:

The Astros are actively trying to move Richard Hidalgo. Only Drayton McLane's reluctance to eat any of the contract is holding up a deal at this point and Hidalgo may not open the season in Houston.

Hidalgo's an odd duck -- two great years, otherwise awful. Last year he was probably one of the 20 best players in the NL, but no one noticed, which makes me wonder why McLane is so eager to ship him.

Posted 6:58 PM by Brian
WE GOT HIM Seven years, $100 million. I've been arguing for this move for several weeks now (not that that's going out on a limb or anything), so I don't have much to add. But this puts Albert in a Birdnals uniform through age 30, and through the year 2010, which is also the last year of the Scott Rolen contract. This ensures that no matter how things get for the team over the next couple years -- and things might get awfully bleak -- there will always be the compelling drama of the Albert Pujols Saga. It's gonna be an awful lot of fun to watch...

Posted 6:25 PM by Brian
THE VISIBLE HAND There's a very fun article from Bill Simmons about the A-Rod deal. He has, I think, the right perspective on the whole thing -- he's mostly amused and challenged by it. But I do disagree with one thing he wrote:

If you're upset because the Yankees ruined the spirit of baseball as we know it, just remember: EVERY business works this way. Monopolies come in and swallow up rivals that can't compete, whether we're talking about the Yankees, Microsoft or Oprah. It's a part of life.

This is fairly similar to what Peter Gammons wrote in his ESPN column:

That's just the way it is, good old-fashioned Republican baseball, and six strikes haven't changed the fact that the Yankees are in a different world from the Red Sox, who have a huge advantage over the Rangers or the A's, just as George W. Bush and John F. Kerry were born with an advantage because they were born rich.

In other words -- that's free-market capitalism for you. The rich get richer, and the poor can make lemonade out of it.

The problem is, the economy of baseball is not a free market. MLB is, in fact, a state-sanctioned monopoly with a presumed anti-trust exemption ("presumed" for reasons that are too complicated and legalistic to get into here). As a public trust, baseball has an obligation to maintain a sense of regional and competitive balance.

For example, if MLB were a true free market, teams that don't compete (say, the Brewers) would go out of business -- they wouldn't be propped up by the largesse of their competitors. And the Yankees wouldn't have hegemony (along with the Mets) over the biggest market in the U.S. -- instead, you would see at least one other team rushing in to fill that market need. In fact, for the first half of the last century there were three teams in New York, and the only reason one left is because there was an even bigger untapped market out West.

But contrary to what Simmons says, baseball isn't like the software industry, and baseball fans aren't like other consumers. In the free market, consumers choose between Brand X and Brand Y, and if Brand X is a superior product, then Brand Y will eventually declare bankruptcy.

But this isn't at all how people select ballclubs. If you're anything like me -- and I suspect most of you are -- you didn't choose your favorite baseball team in a vacuum. More likely you were born into your allegiance. And you wouldn't switch teams as easily as you'd switch from Brand X to Brand Y. Imagine, for example, rooting for the Yankees rather than the Cardinals this year solely because they put out a superior product. This scenario seems patently absurd, if only because your favorite baseball team is invested with a considerable amount of shared memories and regional pride.

That's precisely the justification for baseball's anti-trust exemption, and that's why there are all kinds of central controls on the industry. Or, as the Baseball Widow put it:

Artificial economies won't survive absent lots of manipulation. The good of the entire industry is tied to the success of the least well off. (Nerd Alert: it's called the maximin principle.)

I'm not sure I'd go that far -- I wouldn't strap the health of MLB so much to the health of the weakest team. But I do think it's important to recogize that baseball is a unique industry, and should be protected from the ravages of a volatile free market. What that means in concrete terms, well, that's an article for another day...

Posted 5:43 PM by Brian
O'S COME UP ZEROES We know how the A-Rod deal affects the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rangers. But how discouraging it must be for the Orioles, who finally cleared the Albert Belle contract off the books and seemed willing to make a run at a playoff spot. But, says Baseball Prospectus, "massive buildups by Boston and New York... leave the Orioles in roughly the position faced by the Polish Army in September 1939 -- stuck between two idealistic Goliaths who can't stand each other."

Posted 5:38 PM by Brian
BRUISED WING Jim Edmonds is still recovering from December surgery, which means he won't be up to game speed for another few weeks. Edmonds has had problems with both his left and right shoulders over the past year, and there are two ways of looking at this --

Negative Spin: Given Jedmonds' age (34 in June) and his defensive style (Buster Keaton-like floppability), you have to be worried that he's entering the ranks of the chronically injured. Last season alone he suffered from a calf strain, an injured ribcage, a sore left hip, a stiff right shoulder, a bruised right knee, and a sore left shoulder. And that's in addition to the other bumps and pulls and bruises he's battled for most of his career (abdomen, thumb, groin, etc.).

Positive Spin: Both of Jedmonds' shoulders seem to be healed. If so, look out: last year he hit only .214 with 11 homers on his bad wings. But when his shoulders were healthy, he hit .303, jacked 28 homers, and amassed a gaudy 1.066 OPS. That's a 50-homer guy over a full season.

At this point, however, a full season is a lot to ask from Jed.

Posted 1:43 PM by Brian
A DEAL WITH THE PHAT ONE? The Cardinals Birdhouse has this announcement:

A team source has reported that the buzz among the Cardinals late today was that Albert Pujols and the team have come to agreement on a seven year deal. This is pending approval by the Players Association and MLB offices in New York. With no glitches, an announcement could come as early as tomorrow or Thursday.

Of course, we don’t know how much money is involved, how much might be deferred, whether there is a no trade clause or option years or any of those specifics yet. In fact, while the source of this report is a credible one, at this time, it is still only a single source.

Posted 9:18 AM by Brian
GOIN' HOME As you've heard, Greg Maddux is returning to his roots. He'll try to win #300 (he's only 11 W's shy) with the team that gave him his start, the Chicago Cubs. Evidently they'll pay him $6 million this year, then $9 mil over the next two years.

Is this a good deal? In the abstract, no. Thirty-eight-year-old pitchers with diminishing ERA and strikeout rates are not worth $8 million a year. This would not, for example, be a good deal for the Cardinals.

But the Cubs are not the Cardinals, and I think this deal works for them. First of all, they're not hurting for money (the Tribune company had a variety of favorable cashflow developments this winter, from the ticket scalping scam to the rooftop seats deal). Secondly, the Cubs are, I think, closer to a pennant than we are. There's nothing wrong with overpaying for the final piece of the puzzle. Flags fly forever, and all that.

My first thought on hearing the Maddux-to-the-Cubs rumors several weeks ago was, "If I were them, I'd be just as happy with Juan Cruz at $340,000." But Cruz, as promising as he is, is only 25 years old, and he's still finding his sea legs. Last year he pitched only 61 innings, with a 6.05 ERA. Maddux is a definite upgrade.

What's more, Maddux alleviates pressure on Carlos Zambrano. Dusty ran CZ ragged last season, but with Maddux slipping into the 3-spot, Zambrano won't need to pitch as often; what's more, the Cubs have another arm around if Zambrano goes down. Like the Marlins last year, the Cubs now have the best rotation 1-5 in the majors. And unlike the Marlins of last year, they have two bonafide aces (and two #2 guys) in the front end.

And, last I looked, Maddux could still pitch a little. Here are his average yearly totals the last three years:

W: 16
L: 9
IP: 217
H: 213
SO: 138
BB: 35
ERA: 3.22

His numbers are more impressive than Andy Pettitte's over that same time, and, as Christian Ruzich points out, the Astros just rewarded Pettitte with a contract that's more lucrative than Maddux's.

Overall, I'd say the Maddux deal improves the Cubs by about 2 or 3 wins. And as a Cardinals fan I can't help but see that as 2 or 3 losses.

Posted 8:56 AM by Brian
SOMEBODY UPSTAIRS LIKES THEM Who was perhaps most responsible for getting the A-Rod deal done? Sports Illustrated suggests that it was none other than uber-agent Scott Boras:

It was Boras who, while discussing another client (first baseman Travis Lee) with Yanks general manager Brian Cashman, suggested that A-Rod could fill New York's hole at third base. Boras then phoned Rodriguez, asking him if he would be willing to play third if that’s what it would take to put him in pinstripes. Rodriguez decided the next day that playing shortstop was less important to him than joining the winningest franchise in sports, which quickly turned the potential move from pipe dream to realistic possibility.

When you consider the timing of the Boone injury, plus the timing of Drew Henson's move to the NFL (which freed up more cash), plus the timing of Scott Boras discussing clients with the Yanks, it's astonishing how this deal fell into the Yankees' laps. Dare I suggest that Somebody wanted A-Rod to play in New York?

Posted 8:50 AM by Brian
TRIVIA TIME! Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi give the Yankees two players who have won the MVP award on their 25-man roster. What is the only team to have more MVPs on its current roster?

The Astros have three MVPs: Jeff Bagwell (NL '94), Roger Clemens (AL '86), Jeff Kent (NL '00). The Reds, with Barry Larkin (NL '95) and Ken Griffey Jr. (AL '97), are the only other team with more than one.

Posted 8:48 AM by Brian
AGEGATE, CONTD. I read the following in Lee Sinins' daily transaction report:

Alfonso Soriano admitted to lying about his age. He's really 28, not 26. The Yankees were informed about this last year and GM Brian Cashman did tell Rangers GM John Hart about it when they were discussing the trade.

Soriano is, in fact, only 6 months younger than A-Rod. Sorta changes the relative merits of the trade, doesn't it?

It also diminishes Soriano's accomplishments thus far. For example, Soriano has 95 lifetime homers, which was the most by any second baseman through age 25. But when you adjust for his actual age, he falls to 30 home runs behind the leader through age 27, Joe Gordon.

(Incidentally, this also adds fuel to those who believe Albert Pujols is older than he says he is. After 9-11, federal officials did a sweep where they demanded proper documentation from foreign ballplayers. But this only applied to players leaving and entering the country. Neither Soriano nor Pujols has left the U.S. since '01, meaning they've never had to verify their age to authorities. Obviously this doesn't mean that Pujols, like Soriano, is guilty of lying about his age. But it does mean that he could get away with it if he wanted to.)

Posted 10:52 AM by Brian
NO WAILING, NO GNASHING OF TEETH I asked my friend Brian -- a lifelong New Englander who writes for our sister site, Sox Nation -- what he thought of the A-Rod deal. Here was his reply:

What difference does it make? The Sox' troubles last year was with their bullpen, especially finishing games, and that problem is fixed with Foulke. Their second biggest problem was a manager who was unable to understand even a little bit about what statistical analyses can do to help win a ballgame. As far as the Red Sox team that takes the field next week, it would have been only slightly more potent if the Manny/A-Rod/Nomah/Ordonez deal went through...

Now, this trade does make the Yankees better. How can it not? But the Yanks have created some problems for themselves. They needed to give away their best young player (Nick Johnson) just to make sure their pitching staff stays equal to last year's staff -- in other words, a net loss. They have nobody to play second base, and their big bopper DH (Giambi) is falling apart. Sheffield's outfield defense is curious, and Williams is getting older as we look at him. Moreover, if Jeter stays at shortstop, they are still very weak defensively up the middle.

One problem it does not create for the Yankees is payroll flexibility down the road. The Yankees are showing that they will LITERALLY spend whatever it takes to win. Whatever it takes. Of course they will, with Steinbrenner having a Captain Ahab-like obsession with the Red Sox and staying ahead of them.

On the other hand, the Red Sox do have a limit on what they can spend on players. My guess is that they have the second or third biggest wallet in baseball, but it is significantly smaller than the Yanks'. Even though the Sox would've shed Nomar's and Manny's salary, the A-Rod to Boston deal needed to be for fewer dollars, period. Much of the media and fan reaction goes something like this -- "for only $28 million dollars more..." True. But that $28 million more could mean that Varitek or Lowe would walk next year. It could mean that Nixon wouldn't be signed up right now. It could mean that Foulke would not be closing games for the Sox this year. The Sox just can't afford to make the moves that the Yankees do...

I know that sounds strange to fans of teams not from New York or Boston; the Red Sox have the second biggest budget in baseball, and I'm talking about how they have to be budget conscious -- but they do. I even know that it sounds strange to be talking about the A-Rod deal as if it were no big thing. Am I talking like a fan, putting a "no big whup" spin on things? Sure. But are those who feel that the Red Sox were duped and that the A-Rod trade will be bigger than the Babe Ruth sale talking like typical Boston pessimists? Absolutely. No doubt, the first time A-Rod beats the Red Sox with a game winning hit (and it will happen) there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But something that the Patriots have shown is that it's not about big names, it's about getting big value. I don't know if there is more value per dollar spent with A-Rod in the lineup or not. I do know that the Sox management didn't think so; they're managing with a plan -- and a plan not based on media or fan reaction -- but a plan based on value per dollar spent. I think this is a winning plan. I think they are better off without A-Rod at the price they would've had to pay for him. I'm glad we didn't make the trade -- Dan Duquette would've.

To be sure, A-Rod going to the Yankees is tough to swallow from an emotional standpoint. I think there has never been a rivalry in pro sports like the 1998-present Sox-Yanks rivalry. The best player in the game going to your biggest rival after already picking out a locker in your clubhouse -- that's tough to take. It's a great storyline, and it adds to the myth and mystique of this rivalry and to baseball in general.

But you know what? After I break it all down from a level-headed baseball point of view, I just don't think it matters that much. When the offseason began, if you asked baseball people if they could have A-Rod or Schilling/Foulke, I'll bet there would be plenty of takers for the latter. That's what we got. We're in good shape.

Posted 12:52 PM by Brian
A-ROD ROUNDUP A grab bag of thoughts about the Great Yanqui-Texican 2004 Winter Spectacular:

• There's some awfully good reaction from the blogosphere about the trade. Alex Belth has the most interesting Yankees' perspective. Evan ("the Fire Brand of the American League") has perhaps the most level-headed Red Sox angle. And Larry Mahnken has the most apt metaphor for the Yankees' latest gambit: Shock and Awe.

• I've heard a lot about how this trade will affect NY, a lot about how it'll affect Boston, and very little about how it'll affect Texas. Jamey Newberg has the goods. (Are the Rangers becoming the '00s answer to the 1950s Kansas City A's?)

• A Yankees blogger named Cliff C has this to say:

Is this deal bad for baseball? Well it's certainly good for the New York Yankees, and to my eyes (as to the eyes of most fans out there -- more than 80 percent of them according to ESPN's SportsNation poll) it's good for the Texas Rangers, who were never going to improve with A-Rod's contract on the books. So if it's good for both teams involved, how can it really be bad for baseball?

Cliff, this deal sucks for baseball. Sure, MLB must love having one of its best players in the biggest media market in the country, enlivening the biggest rivalry in baseball, getting a chance to play in the postseason. But having one team with a payroll almost 10 times higher than the lowest-paid team is not good for baseball. Mega-merging half the game's superstars into one division is not good for baseball. And having one team with almost limitless funds -- think of the Yankees as the House in black jack -- is not good for baseball.

• And who says this deal is good for Texas? Some SportsNation poll (where probably half the respondents are Yanks fans to begin with)? The Rangers are subsidizing a huge portion of A-Rod's future contract. What's more, Soriano may be cheap now, but the bill for his services will get very steep over the next couple years. As Joe Sheehan points out, "what Soriano can be expected to make is completely being left out of the media coverage of this, and is a huge factor in evaluating this deal." Sheehan goes on to sum things up pretty nicely -- "I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the Rangers are trading Rodriguez to subsidize the Chan Ho Park contract. That's unbelievably dumb."

• Like Aaron Gleeman, my biggest regret about the trade (aside from the obvious sickening feeling you get when talent becomes concentrated on the East Coast) is that it hurts A-Rod's standings among the game's all-time greats. A-Rod is a shortstop -- that's his vocation, his calling, his legacy. Putting him at third is like having Tim Duncan run the point for the Dream Team.

• Nonetheless, I agree with Neyer -- it's possible A-Rod is much better suited to the 5-hole than Jeter. For one thing, Jeter's weaknesses are his first step and his footwork, both huge detriments for a third-sacker. What's more, if A-Rod is truly the better athlete, he may be better able to adjust to a new position in the next month or two.

• Pet Peeve: Boston whining in general, and Ben Affleck in particular. Here's the reaction of Affleck (Reindeer Games, Paycheck) to the trade:

"You know, George Steinbrenner is the center of evil in the universe. There's no question about that. Eventually, they might be able to just buy everybody."

Here's the deal -- someone from Milwaukee or Pittsburgh has a right to go off on the A-Rod deal. As a fan of the team from the 26th biggest media market in baseball, I feel like I have a right to go off on this deal.

But Boston is in the fourth biggest market in baseball. They just completed a winter shopping spree that included Keith Foulke, Curt Schilling, and a bunch of lucrative re-signs. They have the second highest payroll in the game. And if they play even modestly within their expectations, they're assured of a wild card. So does Boston have the high ground to complain about their lot in life? As my cousin Mark says, "that's like Mark Cuban complaining that Bill Gates has too much money -- he might be right, but he ain't gonna get any sympathy."

• I much prefer Curt Schilling's reaction to the deal. As he wrote to the Sons of Sam Horn: "A-Rod to the Yankees, if it happens, just makes winning this whole thing that much sweeter. It's another challenge, but after 85 years did any of you think that getting over this final hurdle and winning it all was gonna be a cake walk? No, it'll be more fun this way... Let's focus on the fact that the best Boston Red Sox team in the last 100 years takes the field in seven days, for a ride that is guaranteed to be the most memorable of any of our lives over the next 8 months, and enjoy the hell out of it.''

• Did you hear that the Red Sox made a last-ditch effort to land A-Rod over the weekend? Could you imagine the repercussions of that switcheroo?

• There's a press conference at 5pm EST to announce the A-Rod signing. Just watching A-Rod put on that black cap with the big Yankees logo behind him -- I'll say it again: uggh.

Posted 12:09 PM by Brian
OLD TIMERS DAY We commented back in the Fall how Tony La Russa loves to surround himself with familiar faces. Remember how the late '90s Cards were transformed into the St. Louis Athletics? Now we're in danger of becoming the St. Louis ex-Cardinals. Look at the alums invited to spring training this year: Doug Creek (Class of '95), Alan Benes ('95-'01), Wilson Delgado ('02-'03), Ray Lankford ('90-'01), and John Mabry ('94-'98, '01).

Posted 11:58 AM by Brian
LAWRENCE RITTER, author of the seminal book The Glory of Their Times, passed away yesterday.

The Glory of Their Times, a set of oral histories told by turn-of-the-century ballplayers, was a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1966. Roger Angell said it was "almost perfect;" Stephen Jay Gould called it the greatest of all baseball books; and, along with the publication of the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia in 1969, it spurred renewed interest in baseball's early days that hasn't really abated to this day.

I discovered the book as a kid and fell in love with its cast of characters: Specs Toporcer, Fred Snodgrass, Joe Wood, Stan Coveleski. (It was because of this book, in fact, that I wrote Coveleski a letter many years ago. Well into his 90s by then, he wrote me back a lovely note in a distinctively crabbed script.) The impression one gets reading The Glory of Their Times is that players back then were, indeed, more eccentric and colorful than the players today. As Davy Jones said in the book, "we had stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country." It was guys like these that Ritter helped bring back to life.

Posted 11:38 AM by Brian
CARDS IN THE 2K's I'm as guilty as anyone for ripping on the Cards front office as a bunch of old fogeys who aren't hip to modern sabermetric principles. But Jayson Stark reminds us just how successful we've been in the first part of this decade:

We have the sixth-best overall record -- better than the Red Sox and better than 3 of the 4 world champions. Among NL teams, we have the second highest batting average, the third highest OBP, and the third most home runs. We've scord the most runs of any NL team that doesn't play in Coors.

That's a pretty good little run.

Posted 11:20 AM by Brian
PAUL HARVEY DEPT. Will Carroll passes along this link to a news story about a man who tried to obtain a photo of everyone who had ever played major-league baseball. Pretty wild.

Posted 11:17 AM by Brian
STAT OF THE DAY Rick Hummel gives us this tidbit:

When was the last time a National League team won two World Series in a row? Try the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds.

True, but what's even stranger is that 1982 was the last time any NL teams won back-to-back titles. From 1979 to 1982, the Pirates, Phillies, Dodgers, and Cardinals pulled the trick. Since then the National League has never lofted the World Series trophy two years in a row.

Posted 11:11 AM by Brian
ROIDS VS. WADE Edward Cossette makes a case for the legalization of steroids which is, almost point for point, the same as the pro-choice argument for abortion. Sanctioning steroid-use, he says, would be safer, more equable, and would prevent the trade from going underground.

Certainly a valid argument, but I would say a better comp for steroids is, say, seatbelt laws: they protect users, but they also protect those who do play by the rules from having to pay a higher premium in order to drive. In the same way, I think the ante for playing MLB would be too high if drug-enhancement were the baseline norm.

Posted 11:10 AM by Brian
THE WEBOSPHERE In the wintertime, about 400-450 people read this blog every weekday, with about 500 to 600 page views. I have no idea if that's good or bad (although I suspect it pales in comparison to the number of hits received by, say, Alex Belth or Christian Ruzich). For comparison's sake, last Wednesday, when Matt Drudge published specious reports about John Kerry's personal life, the Drudge Report got 15 million hits. Makes you feel sorta, well, flaccid.

Posted 10:03 PM by Brian
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOW I've been defending Texas' contract with A-Rod as fairly reasonable. No longer. Guess how much the Rangers will end up paying A-Rod for three years of work? $140 million. That's over $46 million per year -- or, almost exactly what we paid last year to Matt Morris, Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen, Jason Isringhausen, Edgar Renteria, Woody Williams, and Albert Pujols combined.

Posted 10:25 AM by Brian
HOW HIGH, HOW FAR? The Yankees 2004 payroll (excluding payments made to the MLB Benefit Plan) is currently $194.8 million.

If the Big Deal goes down, the Yanks will send out Soriano's $5.4 million salary and assume A-Rod's $24.08 million salary for this year. That brings their payroll to $213.48 million. Throw in the additional luxury tax levied against the team (30% of all salary over $120.5 mil), and the Yankees overall payroll comes to $222,574,000, give or take a few pennies. That's almost $100 million more than the second highest payroll in the league. Scary, right?

In 2003, the Yankees' YES Network (their own regional sports network) brought in an estimated $200 million from cable operators and advertising, most of it derived from Yankee telecasts. The bulk of the proceeds will stay in the pockets of Steinbrenner and his YES partners. As far as I can tell, this figure doesn't include operating costs, but it also doesn't include all the other mainstream forms of income -- ticket sales, merchandising, the share of the TV deals with Fox and ESPN, etc.

Which means -- and this is the scariest thing about landing Alex Rodriguez: they can afford him.

Posted 10:15 AM by Brian
KEN ROSENTHAL of the Sporting News asks how the Red Sox will react to the A-Rod trade, and then answers his own question: "Trading for Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols would be the most effective counter..."

Rosenthal admits that this scenario is unlikely, and I agree, but the assumption behind it -- that the AL East is some gaping maw into which all talent rolls downward -- is real.

Posted 9:29 AM by Brian
UGGH A-Rod playing for the Yankees? And moving to third with iron-gloved Jeter at short? Please tell me this story is a hoax.

Posted 9:28 AM by Brian
MADDUX ETC. Look like the Cubs move back into the pole position in the now-tedious Maddux sweepstakes.

Posted 1:43 PM by Brian
OUR LUCKY FRIDAY THE 13TH Dave Cameron over at USS Mariner (which may well be the liveliest team-based blog on the web) sends along this juicy email:

Not sure if you had caught wind of this or not, but it was announced today that the Cardinals have hired Ron Shandler, Deric McKamey, and several other BaseballHQ analysts to serve as part of a six man advisory board, which will help steer the Cardinals as they begin to focus more on statistical analysis. Personally, I'd expect this board, if utilized correctly, to be even more of an asset to St. Louis than the other notable statistical analysts are to their clubs, including Bill James in Boston. This is a big step for Walt Jocketty and crew and a very positive thing for your organization.

Quick introductions: Ron Shandler is the author of the Baseball Forecaster, the publisher of BaseballHQ.com and RotoHQ.com, and the first guy to develop sabermetric applications for fantasy league play. He's very well-respected in the sabermetric world. Deric McKamey works with Shandler as an expert in minor-league scouting. He's written a few articles for Baseball Prospectus, which you can check out here and here.

Needless to say, this is fantastic news. Just today Aaron Gleeman divvied up major league franchises according to saber-friendliness. Here's how he has it (this was assuming the hiring of DePodesta by the Dodgers, which, we're now told, is not the done deal it seemed 24 hours ago):

First Tier:
Oakland A's
Toronto Blue Jays
Boston Red Sox
Los Angeles Dodgers

Second Tier:
New York Yankees
Cleveland Indians
San Diego Padres
Colorado Rockies
Kansas City Royals

And the third tier is, well, everybody else -- the lumpenproletariat of stat-averse GMs who often grade talent as if, in Edward Cossette's words, they were judges at the Westminster Dog Show.

Our top dog, Walt Jocketty, belongs to this class of guys. He's old school. (Although, to be fair, there are benefits to being old school -- i.e., there are a lot of other old-school GMs around, and Walt is a wizard at working the phones come trading time.) But you gotta hand it to Walt. The hiring of Shandler, McKamey, et al is a definite step in the right direction, a willingness to go new school.

Will these new guys help the Cards? The key phrase is supplied by Cameron: "if utilized correctly." Craig Wright was a sabermetric pioneer hired by the Texas Rangers in the early '80s to do objective analysis for the ballclub. He had a lot of answers for what ailed those Rangers teams, but no one above him came up with the right questions, or if they did they didn't bring them to Craig. Apparently he spent a lot of time twiddling his thumbs before parting ways with the Rangers a couple years later.

Only time will tell how well Jocketty utilizes his new team of analysts. But in the meantime I'm thrilled. Welcome aboard, Ron and Deric and all the newest members of the Cardinals family.

Posted 10:28 PM by Brian
THE BIG BIG PICTURE Yesterday I'm reading an article about the Dodgers in the Feb. 9th edition of Sports Illustrated. And at one point the writer, John Schulian, says of the Dodgers, "here was one of baseball's storied franchises, right there with the Yankees and Cardinals."

And I thought, hm -- thanks for the shout-out, John. I've always considered our local club to be one of the game's grand franchises, but wasn't sure if that was a common perception or not. Then I got to wondering: is there some way to quantify how storied a franchise is? I know that sounds like a puff project, but I like debating this kind of stuff, so bear with me.

I started out by doing a Google search of each franchise and seeing how many hits they got. But it became clear that there are many problems with that approach, not least among them that you basically have the Yankees on top, and then about 10 franchises clumped in a group after that. Not too illuminating.

So I went to the Baseball Index, which lists just about every publishing media you could imagine for each team: books, articles, song sheets, yearbooks, advertisements, media guides, cartoons, poems, and more. They claim to have, in their database, nearly 90% of all baseball books ever published.

So there I had it -- stories. Millions of 'em. Except... my findings didn't remotely jibe with common sense. Oh sure, you had the Yanks on top again, with the most indexed items of any team. But in second place you have... the Braves? Mabye the recent Braves are storied, okay; and then you have Henry Aaron and the 1914 Miracle Braves, fine; and then you have, frankly, not a whole lot else when it comes to baseball lore.

That's when I realized that this was the wrong place to look. After all, the Baseball Index is a great warehouse of stories, from the very big to the very little. But I was interested in only the BIG STORIES. The ones that make a franchise. The ones that every kid with a passing acquaintance of baseball history could tell you about. The legends. That's what we mean by a storied franchise.

And there's no good way to quantify that. Instead I figured I'd throw my two cents in, then open the floor to you all. So here are my best guesses:

First off, you can't really get around the fact that the New York Yankees are the most storied franchise in all of baseball, if not all of sports. Their thumbnail history goes something like this:

Ruth Ruth Ruth, the Clipper, Mantle and Maris, "like rooting for U.S. Steel," Reggie: 3 times on 3 swings, the Bronx Zoo, King George, 26 world titles

Obviously there are a zillion stories in between, but just those touchstones alone embody what we think of as baseball writ large. I mean, that's David Lean, man.

Next up among storied franchises -- I went with the Red Sox: the Curse of the Bambino, the Splendid Splinter, Pesky holding the ball, the Impossible Dream, Bucking F. Dent, the ball through Buckner's legs, Clemens punching out 20 guys ten years apart. There's a lot of history there. Let's plug them in at #2.

Next up... Well, my first instinct was that it'd be either the Dodgers or the Cardinals, and I favored the Cardinals, if only because the Dodgers, for all their Koufaxian glory, have seemed a bit too starched since they moved out of Ebbetts Field. Whereas with the Cards you have Alexander whiffing Lazzeri, the Gas House Gang, Stan the Man's corkscew swing, Gibby and El Birdos, Whiteyball, "Go crazy, folks!," Big Mac, and on and on.

But then I thought some more and realized that the Giants, as a franchise, have the Cardinals beat when it comes to epic tales. Think about it. We have one of the greatest players of all time, Stan Musial. They've got a better one, Willie Mays. Mays was no more liked in his day than Musial, but he was flashier, and for whatever reason his star has shone brighter over the years. The most storied manager in Cards history? Probably Herzog. One of the most vivid managers to come around in the last couple generations. But then, of course, the Giants had maybe the most storied manager of all time (at least one of the top three) in John McGraw.

Pennant races? 1964 was pretty intense, with the Phillies collapsing and the Cards swooping in to snatch the pennant on the last day of the season. But the 1908 pennant race among the Giants, Cubs, and Pirates -- highlighted by the famous boner by the Gints' Fred Merkle -- was, in my opinion, the greatest of all-time (it was so astonishing that I can't recount much here; see John Shiffert for details).

How about great moments? Well, Mark McGwire thrilled us all with his mammoth, record-breaking home runs. But the Giants' Barry Bonds came along a couple years later to break McGwire's records, and, along the way, established himself as one of the top 3 or 4 hitters the game has ever known. And, of course, the Giants gave us what is, to my mind, the single most dramatic moment in the history of baseball -- Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard Round the World, the Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, to clinch the 1951 pennant.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I have to put the Giants second. Two original NY franchises, right off the bat, as the most storied franchises the sport has ever known. The rest of my top ten -- thoroughly intuitive, ultimately meaningless, and totally open to arguments from all sides -- looks like this:

1. Yankees
2. Giants
3. Red Sox
4. Cardinals
5. Dodgers
6. Athletics
7. Cubs
8. Reds
9. Tigers
10. Braves

Posted 9:49 PM by Brian
JOSH SCHULZ of Go Cardinals has a new web address, a bunch of cool new features, and a spiffy new page design. Josh has been blogging about the Cardinals longer than we have, and he was something of an inspiration to us when we started -- he showed us what was do-able. His comments are always refreshing and it's a pleasure having an astute Cardinals fan sharing the blogosphere with us. So stroll by his new-and-improved site and say hello.

Posted 9:48 PM by Brian
MADDUX REDUX One of our readers named Rumfelt sent along a pretty in-depth statistical analysis of Greg Maddux and weighed the pros and cons of signing him. He seems to think Maddux would be a good fit; I'm not as sold (although I am concerned about him going to one of our division rivals). But one set of stats did jump out at me: Maddux was 6-0 against the NL Central last year, with a 2.45 ERA and an opposition OPS under 600.

Posted 9:42 PM by Brian
CIRCLE YOUR CALENDARS Just over a month from now. March 15th. 1pm. Cards/Braves. Grapefruit League game. On ESPN2.

Posted 9:39 PM by Brian
SLEEPERS Greg Simons, an old friend to Redbird Nation, has a new online column in which he forecasts teams for fantasy baseball. The other day he covered the Cardinals, and his projections make a lot of sense. Check him out.

Posted 9:25 PM by Brian
TRAVIS' TRAVELS I don't have a strong desire to see Travis Lee in a Cardinals uniform. He's only an adequate solution at first base, plus he'd keep Al Pujols and his tender elbow in left. But he'd certainly be an upgrade over the two-headed hydra we have in our lineup right now (So-Rob Taguchison). So it's not a little discouraging to see Travis Lee about to sign with -- who else -- the Evil Empire. Mind you, the Yankees already have some firstbasemen (Giambi, Tony Clark, and, if need be, Mike Lamb), plus a team payroll approaching the gross national product of Micronesia.

Posted 9:14 PM by Brian
YOU THOUGHT THE JOHN KERRY STUFF WAS STARTLING Bud Selig goes out on a serious limb with this breaking news.

Posted 9:13 PM by Brian
PANTHERA PARDUS Christian Ruzich a.k.a. the Cub Reporter recently mentioned this quote from Dusty Baker:

"The only reason people say (Patterson) is a leadoff hitter is because he's fast and he's short. If he was fast and tall, you wouldn't think about him being a leadoff man. He's a swinger. He doesn't know how to work the count. Last year, he was coming into his own, learning how to hit. I think he's a perfect third hitter to me."

I don't envy the Cubs much for having Baker -- to me he's basically Tony La Russa with better taste in music (I recall reading that he was into Curtis Mayfield). But man, I wish Tony thought like Dusty when it came to lineup construction. He makes a lot of sense here.

Speaking of the Chubs, I thought there were only two good reasons to root for the Cubs in the NLCS: one, they're our Midwestern brethren, and you gotta respect that; and two is Doug Glanville. Glanville is, to my mind, the sharpest, funniest, most engaging personality in all of baseball -- you can get a glimpse of what I'm talking about in this article he wrote for ESPN.com. Here's his description of one of the beasts he saw on a recent trip to Africa:

Leopard (Panthera Pardus) -- Stealthy and nocturnal, surveyors during the day, hunters by night, extremely agile and fast runners. Led National League in stolen bases six times since 1995.

Okay, so maybe the joke isn't as funny when you put a frame around it (Glanville is much funnier discussing the videogame EverQuest). With a little luck he'll be entertaining us for decades to come from the broadcast booth, maybe Bob Uecker for the 21st century (unless Uecker plans on being Bob Uecker for the 21st century).

Posted 8:55 PM by Brian
THE RIDDLES OF THE UNIVERSE Some great stuff over at Baseball Prospectus lately (what else is new). By the way, if you haven't yet subscribed to BP Premium, do so now. If you can't afford it, just knock off a convenience store. Priorities.

Anyway, there are three articles I thought worth passing along. The first is Keith Woolner's piece on vexing problems in the field of sabermetrics. It's a call to arms more than anything else -- an open invitation to shed light on some of the biggest blind spots in baseball analysis -- but it's also a keen reminder of just how much we don't know about the game. If you're like me, you'll surely feel dumber by the end of the article -- but hopefully in a good, Socratic way, with a better understanding of the limits of understanding.

Woolner continues his hot streak with a charming article about -- there it is again -- the limits of understanding. But it's more a funny reminiscence of his first baseball game. I don't remember my first ballgame, although I do remember a game I went to in the mid-'70s where a Padres player corked a home run to leftfield, and I couldn't figure out why he didn't just keep running around the bases after crossing home. I mean, the ball was over the fence. For some reason I do remember my brother Sean's first ballgame. Here it is. It was all uphill from there.

Lastly, there's this blurb from BP's Chris Kahrl, who reacts to the Cardinals recent acquisition of ex-Astros farmhand Colin Porter:

Not a bad claim by Walt Jocketty, considering that Tony LaRussa has had to lean on Kerry Robinson without much success, Orlando Palmeiro skedaddled, and "Me" So Taguchi should probably only be permitted to be as nasty as he wanna be in Memphis. Considering that they're counting on Reggie Sanders to be healthy, the Cards have encouraged Ray Lankford to unretire, resurrected Greg Vaughn, and hauled in equally disappointing Mark Quinn and Todd Dunwoody. Against that assemblage of retreads, Porter resembles a prospect, even at 28. If you're getting the sense that the chasm within the lineup between the value of the big four (Pujols, Edmonds, Renteria, and Rolen) and everyone else isn't getting any smaller, you're not alone.

Posted 2:39 PM by Brian
REMEMBERING HUB Hubert Milton “Hub” Kittle, the pitching coach for our last world champion team, died yesterday at age 86. Most of you may remember Hub -- the raspy sandpaper voice, his salty vocabulary, his love of booze and cigars and sturdy baseball-guy phrases like “intestinal fortitude.” He was as old school as they come.

Hub had one of those careers like Duster Mails, Ray Dandridge, or Smead Jolly: long, epic, but unknown to most fans. He surfaced in the majors for a handful of years – as a pitching coach for the 'Stros in the early 70s and for the Cards in the early 80s – but in fact (and in temperament) he was a bush-league guy. He did a little of everything. He pitched for a few teams, he played for the U.S. Army, he coached, he managed, and he even acted as general manager (his innovative dealings in the Northwest League earned him the Sporting News Minor League Executive of the Year award in 1960).

A lot of people think of ballplayers as spoiled, overpaid brats. And they’ll haul out stats to make their case, quoting the average salary as $3 million per year or whatever it is. But actually your average ballplayer isn’t a major leaguer at all. He’s some grub going from town to town in a bus with cigarette holes in the upholstery, then working in the winter installing heating units to earn some extra cash. These are the young men among whom Kittle thrived. Yes, he climbed the mountaintop with the ’82 Cardinals, but he was equally at home in Yakima, Terre Haute, Santa Catalina, Everett, Hermosillo, or Klamath Falls.

(Actually there’s one other place Hub showed up: in the superb war thriller Under Fire, Richard Masur plays a PR agent working for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. The character’s name? Hub Kittle. The screenwriter? Ex-minor leaguer Ron Shelton, of Bull Durham fame.)

In 1981 Whitey Herzog brought in Hub to coach his pitchers. But the arms were nothing to write home about – the previous year’s staff had compiled the club’s second highest ERA in the last 20 years. There were a couple old goats like Darold Knowles and Jim Kaat, and then a lot of newbies still finding their way. Fortunately Kittle was, like Herzog, a master at taking wayward players and finding them a home. Said ex-Cardinal Bob Forsch, "He spoke to everybody the right way in order to get the most of them. He always gave you the feeling that you were the best."

His greatest project was, of course, Joaquin Andujar, an Astros castoff deemed too unstable to hold down a major league job. Hub spoke Andujar’s language – not only Spanish, but the bizarre Joaquinspeak that was utterly untranslatable to the rest of the world. Under Kittle, Andujar set a career high for ERA and won all three of his starts in the ’82 postseason, including the clinching Game 7.

Kittle also worked closely with John Stuper, Dave LaPoint, Dave Rucker, and Steve Mura – guys who were never as good (and in some cases never any good) except on Kittle’s watch. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that without Hub guiding our ragtag collection of young pitchers, the Cardinals would not have won it all in 1982. Can you imagine if our World Series drought stretched all the way back to 1967?

Longtime Cardinals coach George Kissel once said of Hub, "He's the Santa Claus of pitching coaches. Only he can't come down the chimney anymore, his bag is so full of tricks. Nobody teaches pitching like he does." Pitching was in Hub’s blood. An ex-forkballer, he talked about the nuances of grip, windup, plant, and release til the cows came home.

"I remember going into a hotel in Chicago and there were Cardinals fans everywhere," Forsch shared with the Post-Dispatch. "He corners me in the lobby and he's picking up his foot and telling me how to turn my hip toward home plate. I was so embarrassed.” Another time, during the ’82 stretch run, Dave LaPoint stumbled into his New York hotel at 3 in the morning to find Hub Kittle teaching the Latino bellman how to throw a forkball.

Hub liked pitching so much that he played professionally in six different decades. It’s true. He pitched an inning and a third of emergency relief for Savannah in 1969, then a few years later Astros manager Leo Durocher let him pitch in an exhibition game. Kittle retired all three Tigers he faced and picked up the save. That was his fifth decade of work. The experience, said Kittle, “gave me the idea of pitching in six decades."

He got his chance six years later while working as a pitching coach for the Cardinals’ AAA affiliate (all the papers this morning said it was Louisville, but it was Springfield back then). John Garrity memorialized the evening in a 1989 Sports Illustrated articled called “The College of Cardinals”:

It was Senior Citizens Night, and the old folks rose and gave 63-year-old Hub Kittle a sustained ovation when he took the mound against Iowa of the American Association.

"The place was packed with people as old as me," he recalls fondly. "I signed a contract for one dollar just before the game, and when I walked out there, the national anthem was playing and the moon was shining, and I tell you, it felt great to be alive."

The first batter Kittle faced was no sentimentalist; he tried to bunt on the old man on the first pitch but fouled it off. A mistake. "He went down on his ass the next pitch, I tell you," Kittle roars, his eyes flashing. "I put one under his whiskers." Kittle needed just nine more pitches to retire the side.

Kittle is survived by two sons, one daughter, four stepchildren, 18 grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, and countless young ballplayers who flourished under his tutelage. Joaquin Andujar used to call Kittle "my daddy." And to a lot of rootless kids from Latin America to Springfield to the Pacific Northwest, the phrase was probably something more than a mere salutation.

Posted 11:51 AM by Brian
MY FRIEND MATT just passed along to me the Cardinals' new slogan for 2004: "Red Means Go!" Wow. That might be as bad as the Brewers' tagline. It sounds like something O'Brien tried to cram down Winston's throat in 1984.

Posted 10:02 PM by Brian
THE WHITE HAIRS You know how, during the Academy Awards, they show a montage of dearly deparated movie folks? I gotta admit: it gets me every time. Yesterday's Post-Dispatch honors those Cardinals who have left us, and it's sad in a similar sorta way.

There's a lot of good writing about athletes fading away (e.g., Ernest Hemingway's short stories, Roger Angell's "Gone For Good," etc.), and they all get at the small tragedy of young men facing a lifetime as has-beens (although the tragedy lessens considerably when you think about the millions in their bank accounts). Anyway, the Cardinals bid adieu to Russ Springer, Lance Painter, Joe Giardi, and Garrett Stephenson, and each of them may have played his last major-league game. I never much fell in love with any of those guys, but I wish them well all the same.

Their departure makes the accomplishments of baseball's hangers-on even more remarkable. To that end we salute the guys who have been around the longest. My dad is a lawyer, and he tells me that when they confront a particularly knotty legal standstill, and they need the venerable old hands to come in and straighten things out, they say "bring in the white hairs." So here's our all-star team of white hairs for the upcoming season:

Catcher: Benito Santiago
Major League Debut: 9/14/86
One-time teammate of Steve Garvey, Jerry Royster, and Dane Iorg.

First Base: Rafael Palmeiro
Major League Debut: 9/8/86
McGriff and Galarraga have been around longer, but don't have major league contracts yet.

Second Base: Roberto Alomar
Major League Debut: 4/22/88
On Opening Day of his first full season in 1989, he was the youngest player in the NL; got his first hit off Nolan Ryan.

Third Base: Todd Zeile
Major League Debut: 8/18/89
I'll never forget Flynn's nickname for him as a young Cardinal: Todd "Warning Track" Zeile.

Shortstop: Barry Larkin
Major League Debut: 8/13/86
Hall of Famer? I'd vote for him. Disagree? Name 10 shortstops who are better.

Leftfield: Barry Bonds
Major League Debut: 5/30/86
Bonds has now had very likely the best seasons ever by a 36 year old, 37 year old, and 38 year old.

Centerfield: Steve Finley
Major League Debut: 4/3/89
Amazing story. Not much by age 30, productive just about every year since.

Rightfield: Ruben Sierra
Major League Debut: 6/1/86
I thought Sosa might claim this spot, but somehow the guy La Russa once called the Village Idiot is still lingering around.

Designated Hitter: Edgar Martinez
Major League Debut: 9/12/87
Of course, back then he was an iron-gloved thirdbaseman; it took a few years for the Mariners to realize he was a human hit machine.

Starting Pitcher: Roger Clemens
Major League Debut: 5/15/84
When he broke in, Ronald Reagan was still in his first term as President.

Other tenured starters: Terry Mulholland (6/8/86), Jamie Moyer (6/16/86), Greg Maddux (9/3/86), Kevin Brown (9/30/86)

Ace Reliever: John Franco
Major League Debut: 4/24/84
Now that Orosco is gone, he's been around longer than anyone in baseball. Here's a list of some (but not nearly all) of his teammates.

Oh, and one player missing from this list -- good old Rickey. But he'll be back, won't he?

Posted 7:48 PM by Brian
CARDINALS JOIN THE 21st CENTURY Remember when the Cards hired John Mozeliak -- a decided baseball wonk -- as their assistant GM a couple months ago and every sabermetrically inclined St. Louisan had daydreams about the front office turbo-charging into the cyberage? Well, he's now taken one small step for Redbirdkind -- new software! (Or is it just a glorified spreadsheet?)

Posted 7:44 PM by Flynn
This is Bob Broeg for Fred Broeg...

“You know, they’ve got a statue of me outside that stadium in St. Louis. Yeah, some guy named Musial did it.” – Bob Uecker

As a certified fanatic about Musialania I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the final paragraph from the Jefferson City News Tribune article Brian found that mentioned Gene Geiselmann going into the Missouri Hall of Fame...

“Hall of Fame executive director Jerald Andrews also revealed plans for the development of a life-size bronze statue to be placed outside the Hall building of former Cardinals great and Missouri Hall of Famer Stan Musial entitled "The Boy and The Man.” It will feature Musial signing an autograph for a youngster admiring the baseball star.”

In Musial, an unauthorized biography of the Man by James Giglio, it was reported that sportswriter Bob Broeg originally proposed that a statue of Musial signing an autograph for a little boy be erected outside the then new Busch Stadium in 1965. Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes, though, had other ideas. The artist chosen to design and create the statue was reportedly a friend of the mayor.

So, after 37 years of watching millions of Cardinal fans “meet” at the famous Musial statue, which looks like it belongs in front of a factory in Soviet-era Volgograd, it appears that Bob Broeg will finally get his wish.

So who will the little boy be?

Posted 6:29 PM by Brian
ACHILLES ELBOW Interesting little exchange from a recent chat session over at Baseball Prospectus:

Bill Johnson: Just what is the problem with Albert Pujols' elbow, and why is it so worrisome? It obviously didn't affect his hitting much ...

Will Carroll: Pujols has a non-complete tear of his ulnar collateral ligament. This is the type of injury that leads to TJ [that's Tommy John surgery for the acronym illiterate -- ed.]. For a pitcher, we know the drill, but for position players, it's different. Both Pujols and Luis Gonzalez rehabbed to strengthen around the ligament - and remember, those don't heal - while others like Tony Womack have the surgery.

The Cards - and TLR in particular - did a great job protecting his elbow by sending the SS out to cut throws and explaining to everyone why this was the case. While it didn't affect his hitting, if it were to snap, would you want to see a Cards team without Pujols in the middle of the lineup?

Posted 6:24 PM by Brian
GREG MADDUX WATCH I'm starting to get the feeling that 'dux is gonna sign with the Dodgers. L.A. has had a lousy winter, they're close to Maddux's Vegas home, and they could turn around and trade one of their other pitchers for some needed hitting. And seriously, do the Cubs need to get into a bidding war to beef up their pitching staff? It's already championship caliber, especially if Juan Cruz, who's had an excellent season in the winter leagues, anchors the 5-spot in the rotation. Either way, we'll probably have an answer from Maddux some time early next week.

Posted 6:17 PM by Brian
THE GOOD FOLKS AT RETROSHEET have updated their list of all the hidden ball tricks in baseball history. I don't know why, but the hidden ball trick has fascinated me since I was a kid (back in May I ranked it as the #1 way to end a World Series). It's been almost 5 years since someone perpetrated the trick (J.T. Snow was the last), and almost 25 years since a Cardinal pulled it off (Obie and Tempy caught ex-Card Bake McBride napping). Come on, Marlon Anderson -- do the HBT this year. Just one. We'll put you in the Redbird Nation Hall of Fame.

Posted 6:17 PM by Brian
LIKE HOTCAKES I made the point the other day that a star like Greg Maddux might spike Cardinals ticket sales, and a couple of smart readers mentioned that Cardinals fan aren't like most -- they'll come out to the ballpark regardless of the product on the field. They're the opposite of fair-weather fans (call them the Northwind Polartec Fleece fans). And, sure enough, this past weekend the Cardinals -- without Maddux, without even a real leftfielder -- set a record for single-game ticket sales.

Posted 5:59 PM by Brian
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO... former St. Louis Cardinals trainer Gene Gieselmann? Why, he's right here, where else?

Posted 5:57 PM by Brian
THE GAY JACKIE ROBINSON Alex Ciepley has a fascinating take on what may happen when the first ballplayer comes out of the closet. I'd quote a portion of his piece, but the best thing about it is its nuance, so do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Posted 5:52 PM by Brian
MORE ON GAEDEL Flynn had a charming post yesterday about Bill Veeck and his pre-P.C. stunt of sending a midget to bat for the St. Louis Browns. Gaedel, at 3'7" and 65 pounds, is surely the tiniest player to ever play in the bigs (although Taguchi might give him a run for the money in the weight department), and his 15 minutes of fame are among the oddest in baseball history.

Unfortunately the rest of Gaedel's tale is not a happy one. Ten years after his famous pinch-hitting appearance he was dead at the young age of 36. Only one person from the baseball world showed up at his funeral -- former Tigers pitcher Bob Cain, who had never formally met Gaedel but was, in fact, the man who walked him on four pitches back in 1951.

And what of the Browns uniform that Gaedel wore, the one lent him by future Cards owner Bill DeWitt? According to Gaedel's mother, an anonymous man claiming to represent the Hall of Fame swindled it from the family and its whereabouts are evidently lost to history.

Posted 5:41 PM by Brian
BASEBALL EDISON There's been a lot of talk recently about GMs like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein who are reinventing the game of baseball. And then there's Milwaukee honcho Doug Melvin to remind us that not all inventions are created equal:

Melvin... is in the early stages of a plan to have relief pitchers start some minor league games, then have starters come in beginning in the third inning.

"We want our starters to pitch important innings, the eighth and ninth, and not look for the bullpen," said Melvin, a former minor league pitcher. "We want them to know it's their game. This is what we're developing them for. Some guys never see the ninth inning... Even if the relievers give up runs early, you have more time to come back than if a reliever gives up runs in the eighth and ninth," Melvin said.

I don't know where to begin.

Posted 5:36 PM by Brian
LINE OF THE DAY From Joe Sheehan's preview of the Baltimore Orioles: "they have a rotation with more question marks than Frank Gorshin's wardrobe."

Posted 9:45 AM by Flynn
... As In Wreck.
Today would have been the 89th birthday of Bill Veeck. Veeck, as most of you know, is the man most responsible for the "sideshow" that now accompanies almost every major league baseball game. Giveaways, exploding scoreboards, mascots, and attractions at the ballpark can all be attributed to Veeck. Whether you love the hoopla or detest it, there is no denying that Veeck's ideas have permeated the entire game. The best places to find out more on Veeck are his books.

You can thank Veeck for innovations like names on the back of uniforms and the ivy at Wrigley Field. (He also planted eight trees in the bleachers but they were blown over by the wind from Lake Michigan or from thousands of futile Cub swings and misses, depending on whom you believe.) You can curse Veeck for the non-stop noise that some stadiums play between innings, batters, pitches, thoughts, and breaths. Not that Veeck implemented that wonderful new feature of 21st Century baseball, but he started the domino effect that resulted in stadium operators believing that the game itself is so lacking in appeal that fans must be saturated with stimulation to keep them inside the ballpark. (But that's a rant for another time...)

Veeck, in fact, was at the helm of the team that first drew over one million fans -- the Chicago Cubs. Ironically, the Cubs today present just about the purest baseball experience one can have at a ballpark. Minimal music and announcements, no exploding scoreboards, no Team Fredbird, no arcades in the concourse, no ice cream specialty shop, no haircut in left field, no home mortgage consultation, no personal development mentor, no transmission repair, etc...

Veeck is to be highly commended for integrating the American League. As owner of the Indians, Veeck had Larry Doby and Satchel Paige join the team and lead it to its last World Championship in 1948. Well, OK, Paige didn't "lead" the pitching staff -- Bob Lemon, Bob Feller, and Gene Bearden did. But he did go 6-1 out of the pen at the tender age of "41."

Veeck's greatest stunt, of course, took place in St. Louis on August 19, 1951. 3'-6" Eddie Gaedel was sent in to pinch hit for the Browns. (He walked.) A fantastic trivia tidbit was discussed, I believe, on KMOX a few weeks ago but it's worth repeating here. Bill DeWitt Jr., of the Cardinals' owners, was the Browns batboy in 1951 and it was his uniform that Gaedel wore in that game.

Veeck's son Mike currently owns several minor league franchises and continues his father's legacy of goofiness at the park. My personal favorite promotion is the one where all pregnant women get into the park free on a certain day. That day? Labor Day.

So, pause for a second and remember the birthday of baseball's greatest showman.

Posted 2:32 PM by Brian
LOOK AT THE CALENDAR The baseball season is approaching like a Randy Johnson fastball to the eyes. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in 6 days. Position players report in 11 days. And the season opener -- between the Yanks and Rays in Tokyo, Japan -- is only 50 days away. If you've barely digested your Super Bowl nachos and you're having trouble getting into the spirit of things, check out these pictures from last season. They offer a nice little capsule of why we watch the game.

Posted 2:26 PM by Brian
MATTY MOVING ON? I'm sure most of you have read about Matt Morris in the Post, where he discussed his future after turning down the Cardinals two year/$15.5 million deal. The key quote:

"I never thought it would come to this point. My position always has been what's best for me - and St. Louis. Now it's what's best for me. I'm very comfortable being there, but this is a business and these guys are businessmen."

The positive spin: Morris is just playing hard to get as he negotiates a new deal. Besides, he recently offered to restructure his contract so that the Cards could sign Greg Maddux, so cleary he's willing to help the team.

The negative spin: Morris is more upset by the Cardinals' penny-pinching ownership than he's letting on, and he's prepared to skip town once his contract expires at the end of this season.

Josh Schulz favors the negative spin. He writes:

The Cards have previously had a very good rapport with their players, and have been able to induce them into below-market value quite often. Could the dismissal of Vina and Eduardo Perez have caused the bad feelings? I don't know, but it's interesting to consider because the team's ability to sign players cheaply is the team's biggest advantage over it's rivals. If they have lost that advantage things could get ugly in the next few years.

Forgive me for piling on the pessimism, but I agree with Josh here. The players aren't stupid -- they can see that the Astros and Cubs are doing what it takes to upgrade their teams; and they know that the Cards' farm system is a dry well. With big contracts due in the next couple years, it's understandable that our marquee stars would want to bail on a sinking ship.

Which brings us to this week's Topic A:

GREG MADDUX. The press is really pulling a cock-tease here: one hand tells us not to hold out hope for Maddux, while the other tells us to keep hope alive. Bernie Miklasz chimes in with a special appeal to the owners to make the deal:

The Cardinals' owners have a combined worth of more than $1 billion, and they're receiving generous public assistance, in the form of lucrative tax breaks, in building the new ballpark. If this franchise wanted to really make a commitment to winning, it should have pursued a legitimate No. 3 starter. And now they are down to one last chance: Maddux, a four-time Cy Young Award winner.

I've said all along that Maddux is too pricey for his value, and for the most part I stick by that. But I'm starting to agree with Miklasz and others. Signing Maddux could be a symbolic gesture that tells both the team and its fans that the organization is committed to winning.

Now, one could easily respond by saying, "Screw symbolic gestures -- let's see a little less commitment to winning and a little more actual winning." To that end, it doesn't make sense to sign Maddux. His ability to put W's on the board is probably not equal to $8 million a year.

But considering that players like Morris and Edmonds want a little more good faith from the owners, and considering that the owners need to protect their fan base as they gear up for a new stadium in '06, then I can see how symbolic gestures may have real impact. The fans would be more likely to buy season tickets, as well as reserve luxury seats at the new ballpark. And the players would be more likely to commit to long-term deals if they knew that the owners were similarly committed to winning.

It's a watershed moment for the franchise. I suspect over the next few months we'll know whether the Cardinals plan to keep up with the Joneses (Houston and Chicago) or whether we're prepared to sink into the festering swamplands of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee.

Posted 1:26 PM by Brian
MORE FROM WILL CARROLL Make sure you're sitting down as you read this:

That gasp you just heard was National League hitters after hearing that Mark Prior has added a couple extra MPH to his fastball this winter.

That actually doesn't surprise me. In an SI article last summer, Prior and Cubs pitching coach Larry Rothschild confirmed that Prior hasn't yet maxed out his fastball during a game. In fact, he routinely throws a few mph harder in his bullpen sessions -- ratcheting it up to 97 mph -- than he ever has in live action.

What does this mean for the Cardinals? Intense quivering fear. Prior has already proven his chops, but it looks like he may go all Gooden or Pedro on the National League this year. Just take his second half of last year, spread it out over a full season, and you end up with these numbers:

20 wins
2 losses
165.1 innings pitched
134 hits
190 strikeouts
32 walks
1.52 ERA

Just the other day Aaron Gleeman had a post about Twins prospect Joe Maurer, whom he calls "the perfect catcher." But Mark Prior, the guy the Twins passed up to draft Maurer, is surely the perfect pitcher. Perfect mechanics, location, velocity, work ethic, and competitiveness (remember his showdown with Bonds two years ago?). And he can even hit a little too.

It's gonna be fun watching he and Bert Pujols go at it the next few years.

Posted 1:08 PM by Brian
WILL CARROLL reports that

Roger Clemens has confirmed that he'll have some longer rest this season as he adjusts his schedule to be home more to see his sons grow up. This was expected, but initially denied. A quick look at game logs shows Clemens is deadly on long rest (six days or more)...

Actually that's not quite true. Here are Clemens' average game scores according to rest:

4 days rest: 56 average game score
5 days rest: 52
6+ days rest: 46

At first blush it seems like he drops off with additional sitdown time. But that low game score on six or more days' rest is due solely to one poor game against the Red Sox, on July 5th, when he gave up 8 runs to a high-octane offense. Otherwise his game scores on long and short rest are virtually identical (56 - 52 - 55).

I'm not sure it matters much, though, because I can't imagine Rocket sitting down any longer than he has to.

Posted 12:49 PM by Brian
ALFONSO SORIANO, ST. LOUIS CARDINAL? According to Yankees execs, the rumor is rubbish.

Posted 12:47 PM by Brian
ELLIS BURKS was weighing contract offers between both the Seattle Mariners and the Boston Red Sox. How did he make his decision? As this article reports --

He spent a lot of time on the Internet comparing the two teams. The research and discussions with Red Sox GM Theo Epstein convinced Burks he had a better chance to win a championship in Boston.

Yes, that new-fangled World Wide Web thing seems to be taking off.

Posted 12:43 PM by Brian
PUJOLS UPDATE A couple weeks ago I passed along a rumor that Pujols isn't happy playing the outfield this year. But as reader Frank Rabinovitch points out, Albert's public statements say otherwise:

"I think we're gonna get down to Spring Training and Tony's gonna figure out how our team looks good. If it looks good with me playing first base, he's gonna put me in there. If it looks good with me playing outfield, I'm gonna play outfield. So it doesn't matter to me until we break camp and we start the season. And even then, during the season, if somebody goes down that I have to move to the outfield, I'm gonna do it. Because I'm a teammate guy, man. I want to win. Whatever looks good [for the team], that's what we're gonna do."

Posted 12:35 PM by Brian
BASEBALL PRIMER is currently taking votes for its annual Primey Awards, for the best in online baseball research, analysis, and commentary. Redbird Nation was shut out for the 28th year in a row, but some other great pieces of writing are nominated, so it's worth checking out.

Posted 11:28 AM by Brian
DODGERS CIRCLE DEPODESTA Paul DePodesta has been, for a few years now, the GM of my dreams -- a brilliant young Turk who could become St. Louis' answer to Theo Epstein. But now it looks like DePodesta may have found another date to the prom. The Dodgers (spurned by the A's in their attempt to nab Billy Beane) are now wooing DePodesta, Beane's assistant/consigliare.

If you have any doubts about DePodesta as a first-class brainiac, read this think-piece he did for a Boston investment bank, in which he name-drops trendy eggheads like Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Kuhn.

Posted 11:17 AM by Brian
MORE SPORTS CROSSOVERS Alex Belth mentions Curt Flood as forerunner to Maurice Clarett, the former Ohio State football player who successfully challenged the NFL's policy barring underaged players from the draft.

Clarett, of course, is a spoiled buffoon, whereas Flood was as dignified and principled as they come, but otherwise I think the analogy holds. In challenging the NFL's sweetheart deal (which currently allows them to use college football as a free farm system), Clarett is taking a real chance. Says the AP's Tim Dahlberg:

Clarett's biggest risk is that he ends up being the Curt Flood of football, unloved by most, hated by some and never able to play his way past the stigma that comes with helping change the way sports does business.

One other similarity between Clarett and Flood -- in 2002 Clarett received improper gifts while at Ohio State and was suspended for the entire 2003 season; Flood received gifts as an amateur too, although the circumstances were, well, different from Clarett's. As Allen Barra reports in this anecdote --

June 30, 1991. I get a phone call from Bill James telling me he is in town (with his then-assistant, Rob Neyer) for the SABR convention. I ask him if he'd like to get together with me, Marvin Miller (founder of the Players Association whose autobiography I had worked on), and Curt Flood at the Pierre Hotel in New York. Somewhere during our round table conversation, Bill got the idea for his great book on the Hall of Fame, The Politics of Glory. Curt Flood told the marvelous story about how the Cincinnati Reds wooed him by sending his mother a set of golf clubs. "Picture," said Flood, "this middle-aged black woman opening this huge cardboard box and finding this set of golf clubs. She moved them into the hall closet." To which Bill added, "Where they remain to this very day."

Posted 10:07 AM by Brian
PINSTRIPES TO PIGSKIN Drew Henson is officially leaving the Yankees to try a career in the NFL. If you recall, Henson was one of the all-time great sports prodigies -- a few years back, a lot of people thought he was both the best high school football player and the best high school baseball player in the country.

Now he's just a football player. But Joe Sheehan says Henson still chose the right career path:

Two-sport athletes should always choose baseball first, because the skills required to play the game -- to hit, specifically -- atrophy quickly if they go unused.

Interesting. I had always heard that two-sports athletes should try baseball because it's a more reliable game: it's more lucrative, careers are longer, it has fewer cases of catastrophic injury, and players are more likely to flourish as individuals than within a potentially limiting system.

So I got to wondering -- who has a better track record, baseball players who become football players, or football players who become baseball players? Is the conventional wisdom accurate?

Obviously there's no simple way to answer those questions, so I'll just present a list of two-way athletes and let you decide (the list, which I culled with help from Baseball Primer, is actually much longer than I thought).

Baseball-to-Football Guys:

Josh Booty, Quincy Carter, D.J. Dozier, John Elway, Derrick Gibson, Chad Hutchinson, Bo Jackson, Vic Janowicz, Andre King, John Lynch (actually threw the first pitch in the history of the Marlins organization), Ricky Manning Jr., Ace Parker, Jay Schroeder, Akili Smith, Jim Thorpe, Chris Weinke, Ricky Williams

Football-to-Baseball Guys:

Carroll Hardy, Brian Jordan, Deion Sanders

I don't know if the conventional wisdom is true or not, but most athletes do tend to start in baseball before moving on. And of course, a few of those guys tried playing both sports at once. There are a few basketball/baseball guys as well -- people like Dick Groat, Danny Ainge, and Scotty Burrell -- but I think the football/baseball tradeoffs are more interesting.

Who has the better track record? Tough to say -- there aren't too many guys who tried pro football first, although Brian Jordan certainly did okay after leaving baseball for a few years.

Posted 7:43 PM by Brian
FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY Redbird Nation has added a feature which allows you to leave comments and feedback after every post -- it's that "Comment" link in the lower lefthand corner of this blog entry. Feel free to email us as well, but if you'd like to air your views publicly (even if it's to tell us we're full of shit), click that little porthole and join the fray...

Posted 2:29 PM by Brian
ALBERT, TRAVIS, AND GREG A few reactions to this intriguing article in the Post-Dispatch:

The Cardinals and slugger Albert Pujols appear headed for compromise on a one-year contract or an arbitration hearing later this month as talks on a franchise-record multiple-year deal remain stalled.

I know I might be beating a dead horse here, but I'll reiterate what I've said elsewhere: every year the Cardinals wait to lock up Pujols is a mistake. As hard as it is to wrap our brains around it, we've got to understand that the guy is still maturing as a hitter. He may not duplicate his numbers from last year, but the more he accumulates, the more un-signable he becomes. Close the deal, Walt. (A cold pathetic feeling passes through me as I realize the odds that Walt Jocketty reads this blog.)

The club has used the break in talks with Pujols to further examine its place in the pursuit of free agent pitcher Greg Maddux.

I've never been sold on Maddux as a Cardinal -- it seems like we'd be paying more for the name than for the goods (although I have to admit I'd get a half-chub seeing Maddux with the birds on the bat for the first time).

But one thing Maddux does offer: innings. Take out 2002, in which he finished two outs shy of 200 innings, and the guy has logged 200+ IP every year since 1988. Those quality innings could be crucial to a team relying on Chris Carpenter (lots of Band-Aid residue), Matt Morris (various ailments last year), Woody Williams (injury history; wore down in second half last year), Jason Marquis (never pitched more than 130 innings in bigs), and/or Danny Haren (still physically immature).

The Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers are also believed to have interest in the four-time Cy Young Award winner.

Of course, there are the Cubs too, whom I still consider the front-runners for Maddux's services. But don't count out the Dodgers -- they've had an awful winter, handcuffed by the sale of the team to new owner (and non-Pulitzer Prize-winning author) Frank McCourt. Plus they've freed up some cash with the departures of Andy Ashby and Kevin Brown, and McCourt seems like just the kind of gambler to throw money at Maddux. At the very least, Boras can use this scenario to drives up his client's price, so even if the Cubs do land 'dux, they'll have to pay out the ass.

The New York Yankees recently offered a package including second baseman Alfonso Soriano for Pujols.

Thank God I wasn't operating farming equipment when I read that line. Just the thought of Soriano-for-Pujols (hell, just the thought of Pujols in pinstripes) terrifies me.

For now, Pujols' immediate future with the Cardinals remains at first base. The club no longer has interest in free agent first baseman Travis Lee.

Wonder what Travis Lee is doing to turn people off -- the guy can't get arrested anymore. He's no great shakes, but he's serviceable. He was 6th among AL firstbaseman last year in Runs Above Replacement Level. Apparently the Pirates are zeroing in on Lee as an alternative to Randall Simon (who, oddly, was born on the exact same day as Lee).

More importantly, if Pujols plays first, that's going to devastate our outfield situation. It's funny how we were just talking about the Cardinals' proud tradition of great leftfielders, and now they're prepared to pass the torch to Kerry Robinson. That's like letting Udday take your daughter to the prom.

IT DOESN'T STOP WITH ALBERT Where's the love for E-Rent? If Tejada (admittedly a bigger name as a former MVP) can land $12 million a year over 6 years, then I think it's reasonable for Renteria to ask for and receive $9 million a year for five. After all, there are only a handful of elite shortstops (A-Rod, Jeter, Garciappara), plus a few guys who will probably deliver the next few years (Furcal, Berroa, Cabrera), and then the well starts to run a little dry. I believe the Cardinals have another option on Renteria after 2003, but I'm not sure about that.

HERE'S JOE SHEEHAN on last month's Drew-for-pitching deal:

I think it could work out for both teams. I like Jason Marquis, who could be another Braves' #5 starter who doesn't establish himself in Atlanta but goes on to have success elsewhere. King is just a guy, and Wainwright is nothing special, although I like his usage pattern so far.

Drew could -- could -- replace 90% of Sheffield's production. There's concern that Drew's knee problem is going to be exacerbated by playing in a corner, as decelerating causes him considerable pain.

All in all, I think it's a good gamble for both teams.

THERE HE GOES AGAIN Doug Pappas reacts to the latest from Herr Bud --

Mike Bauman of MLB.com interviews the Commissioner, who's happy to tell him about baseball's "renaissance" in the wake of the labor agreement he negotiated:

"Look, the economic landscape of the game is changing," Selig says. "The fact that Anaheim and Florida won the last two years, that's something that couldn't have taken place seven or eight years ago. Wouldn't have been possible."

Ummmm... Bud? Seven years ago, the World Series was won by... yes, the Florida Marlins.

Posted 2:03 PM by Brian
HERE'S A HANDY CHART that breaks down how much salary each team is prepared to dole out over the next several years. The Yankees are now up to $184.8 million for their 2004 payroll/luxury tax fees -- that's over $50 million more than the second-highest paid team in baseball, and twice that of the Seattle Mariners, the 6th highest paid team in baseball. To take this one step further, you'll notice that the Yankees' payroll comfortably exceeds the combined incomes of the five lowest-paid teams in baseball. In fact, the money that the Yanks presently owe in the year 2009 is greater than the Brewers' entire payroll for this year. Staggering.

Posted 1:53 PM by Brian
REDBIRD NATION = MORONS A few readers took me to task for misstating the money owed to Mike Hampton by the Braves. And of course, they're right. I said that the Braves paid Hampton $13.6 mil last year. Turns out they only paid him $2 million and Florida (who had a complicated arrangement with the Braves and Rockies, where they were able to unload Charles Johnson and Preston Wilson and bring in Juan Pierre, among others) paid Hampton $9 million. (However, the Braves still had 5 other guys making over $10 million last year, so I stand by my point that you can pay superstar salaries and win.)

And reader Greg Simons points out that the Giants didn't pay Hammonds $8.2 million last year, as I claimed. The Brewers released him in June 2003, prepared to eat his entire contract (that's a lot of cholesterol), and the Giants paid only the pro-rated portion of the MLB minimum salary once they signed him a couple weeks later.

Posted 1:35 PM by Brian
ESPN SPORTS NATION ranks the Cardinals as the third best franchise in all of baseball, according to a survey of fans. You gotta wonder about the list though. It includes a lot of goofiness, such as --

* The Astros, who have never won a playoff series, are ahead of the Red Sox in terms of championships.
* The Cardinals supposedly have the best ownership in all of baseball (?).
* Anaheim is evidently a great place to watch a ballgame (I've been there; worst stadium experience of my life, and I've been to a bunch of 'em).
* We're supposed to believe that fans value something called fan relations ("ease of access to players, coaches & management") as much as they value winning. Yeah.

A-MAZING Aaron Gleeman passes along this eye-popping statistic:

Alex Rodriguez ranks 9th all-time in homers through the age of 30. This might not seem particularly interesting, except for the fact that Rodriguez will be playing his age-28 season in 2004. That means he's got three seasons to add to his 30 and Under total, which likely means he'll be at the top of the list at some point.

ARod has averaged 52 homers a season over the last three years. If he can duplicate those numbers over the next three years, that would put him at 501 career homers through the age of 30.

500 homers by age 30!? It's not far-fetched -- A-Rod played in a great hitter's park, he's in great shape, he's yanking home runs at a furious pace, and players typically experience a power spike from 28-32.

The youngest player to hit his 500th home run is currently Jimmie Foxx, who hit his 500th at age 33 but hit only 34 thereafter.

SPEAKING OF YOUNGSTERS... Here's a thought piece about everyone's favorite bad baseball player.

Posted 12:39 PM by Brian
BEST OF THE BEST A nice fellow by the name of David Stokes responds to our thoughts about the best franchises at each position:

1B: A's (Foxx, McGwire, Giambi, Fain, McInnis), Giants (McCovey, Terry, G. Kelly, Cepeda, W. Clark)

2B: Cubs (Sandberg, Evers, Herman, Hubbs, Beckert), Tigers (Gehringer, Whitaker, McAuliffe, Bolling)

3B: Phillies (Schmidt, Whitney, Dick Allen, Rolen, Willie Jones) Senators/Twins (Killebrew, Bluege, Yost, Gaetti, Buddy Lewis)

SS: White Sox (Appling, Aparicio, Guillen), Orioles/Browns (V. Stephens, Belanger, Ripken)

LF: Red Sox (you listed them), Cardinals (Medwick, Musial, Brock)

CF: Yankees (already listed), Cardinals (same), Indians (Speaker, Doby, Averill, Lofton), Braves (Hamilton, Murphy, A. Jones, Wally Berger)

RF: Pirates (P. Waner, Clemente, Parker, Bonilla)

C: Yankees, Dodgers, Reds (Bench, Hargrave, Lombardi, J. Edwards)

Nice list. Off the top of my head I'd add in the Pirates' shortstops, who represent with Honus Wagner, Arky Vaughan, Dick Groat, and Jay Bell. The Cards' firstbase entries are also pretty sweet -- Bottomley, Mize, Musial, Bill White, Cepeda, Hernandez, Jack Clark, Pete Guerrero, a couple good years from Jeffries, and a couple great ones from McGwire. Damn, that's impressive.

How about starting pitchers? Let's see, you've got the Dodgers of course (Koufax, Sutton, Vance, Drysdale, Hershiser), the Braves (Spahn, Niekro, Glavine, Maddux, Smoltz), the Giants (Mathewson, Hubbell, Marichal, Gaylord Perry), and a nice big three from the Phils (Carlton, Robin Roberts, Pete Alexander).

Relievers? Well, the Yankees have had some good ones (Marianio Rivera, Dave Righetti, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, Johnny Murphy, Ryne Duren). And the Expos have been blessed (Reardon, Urbina, Rojas, Wetteland, Tim Burke).

Speaking of newer franchises, how have they done? Here are some up-and-comers:

Blue Jays 1B (Mayberry, McGriff, Olerud, Delgado)
Astros 2B (Joe Morgan, Bill Doran, Biggio)
Royals CF (Amos Otis, Willie Wilson, Carlos Beltran)
Padres RF (Winfield, Gwynn)
Expos RF (Rusty Staub, Ken Singleton, Andre Dawson, Larry Walker, Vlad Guerrero)
Mariners DH (Willie Horton, Richie Zisk, Ken Phelps, Edgar Martinez)

I should probably stop there. This game is pretty addictive...

Posted 10:43 PM by Brian
GROANING FOR DOLLARS Jeff Gordon of the Post-Dispatch reprints a series of letters from fans who weigh in on the Pujols contract situation. A gentleman named Steve Rataj from Pasadena spells out a line of thinking that's quickly passing into conventional wisdom:

A-Rod signed a mammoth 10-year deal and only a few years into his contract, he is unhappy because the team is not winning. Unless you're in Yankee pinstripes, you cannot have it both ways. You will either get a colossal salary on a sub-par team, or you get a more sensible contract for a competitive organization.

i.e., you can either win or you can sign big stars to big contracts, but you can't do both. This is a cozy sentiment, perhaps born out of admiration for scrappy teams like the Marlins who won on the cheap, and for homegrown heroes like the Oakland A's, who (Jermaine Dye contract notwithstanding) consistently get more for less. But it's not accurate to say that colossal contracts will make a team non-competitive. In fact, it's provably false.

Look at the other top teams in the National League last year: the Cubs, Astros, Giants, and Braves. The Cubs managed to win last year despite the beefy salaries of Sammy Sosa ($16 million) and Moises Alou ($9 million) -- in fact, those two contracts alone equal what we paid to Morris, Edmonds, and Rolen combined.

How bout the Astros? They won despite four players making over $8 million a year, including Bagwell at $13 extra-large. The Giants? They paid $8.2 million to Jeffrey Hammonds, for Chrissakes. They also shelled out $15.5 million to some guy named Bonds. One might say he's the exception... but then again, doesn't Pujols' age and upside make him something of an exception too?

And then there's the Atlanta Braves. Won 101 games. Most in the league. With these elephantine contracts on their hands:

Greg Maddux $14,750,000
Mike Hampton $13,625,000
Chipper Jones $13,333,333
Andruw Jones $12,000,000
Gary Sheffield $11,416,667
John Smoltz $10,666,667

I think it's safe to say Steve Rataj doesn't know what he's talking about -- you can pay big salaries and still win. Sure Things are hard to come by these days, which is why you dole out beaucoup de monies to guys like Pujols.

MORE PUJOLSIANA There's a great new website called Dugout Dollars, which keeps up with all the latest salary situations.

And what of the Cardinals' salary situation? Do we have enough petty cash laying around to land Big Al? Jayson Stark thinks a deal will get done eventually:

The Cardinals and Albert Pujols are still several time zones apart on Pujols' contract demands. And since Pujols' arbitration hearing date isn't until Feb. 20, this one figures to take a while. But it still appears Pujols is headed for an eight-year contract in the neighborhood of $100 million.

A nine-figure salary -- that would be the largest lump of cash guaranteed to a ballplayer since, well... Scott Rolen.

IS GARY SHEFFIELD A HALL OF FAMER? Rich Lederer makes a pretty convincing case for the guy.

Right now I'd consider Sheff a fence-sitter -- could go in, could stay out, depends on how he does the next couple years, not to mention a little luck. Here's how I'd break down other active players (mind you, this is not who I think should go into the Hall, only who I think will; also, I dashed off this list pretty quickly, so feel free to argue with and refine my selections):

The Shoo-Ins: Bonds, Rickey, Clemens, Sosa, Maddux, Piazza, A-Rod, I-Rod, Pedro, Griffey, Unit, Frank Thomas

The Fence-Sitters: Sheffield, Glavine, Bagwell, Biggio, Larkin, Robbie Alomar, Raffy Palmeiro, Edgar Martinez, Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman

Youngish Guys On Track to Get In: Jeter, Chipper, Vlad, Helton, Manny Ramirez, and, I guess at the rate he's going, Pujols

Not Quite: Thome, Nomar, Smoltz, Giambi, Juan Gone, Larry Walker, McGriff, Schilling

SCHILLING VS. THE STATHEADS Dave Pinto mentions a recent brouhaha that erupted online, when Curt Schilling (tactfully, but undeniably) jabbed at ESPN's Rob Neyer for falling too hard for the sabermetric revolution. Schilling wrote in a recent chat session:

[Neyer] talks about the numbers as they pertain to future performance almost as if it's an absolute... I've seen him say things in the past about players, and be so far wrong it's ludicrous...

Well, true, Neyer does get it wrong sometimes, but he certainly gets it right far more often than your average beat writer. And he's rarely, if ever, as wrong as Schilling was when he made up a bunch of falsehoods about the QuesTec system and blabbed about it as if he knew what he was talking about.

That doesn't mean I don't understand where Schilling is coming from. At the end of the day he's a jock, and jocks always want to believe success and failure have more to do with courage and dedication than trends and numbers. That's fine. But that's also why we shouldn't understand the game by deferring only to the guys who play it. It's the same reason we let impartial judges decide the fate of criminals rather than the victims of the crime -- sometimes those with the most passionate attachment to something are the ones who are least able to think about it clearly.

MORE FROM BOSTON As if the Patriots' second Super Bowl win in three years (grumble, pout, grumble) wasn't enough, Boston is also lucky enough to have the smartest young GM in the game, Theo Epstein. Theo has become the darling not just of the seamhead press, but of media outlets like The New Republic. Unfortunately this piece is subscription only, but I will reprint for you my favorite part:

In December 2002, the Yankees and the Sox duked it out over the much-hyped Jose Contreras, whom Steinbrenner was apparently so determined to sign that, as one baseball insider told The New York Times, "He told his people, 'Lose Contreras and you're done.'" But Epstein wasn't about to cave. At one point the Sox rented every single room in Contreras's hotel for the sole purpose of straight-arming fawning Yankees representatives. The Yankees ultimately signed Contreras, but they were undoubtedly worse for the wear. To close the deal, Steinbrenner had to cough up a hefty $32 million over four years, which shredded his (already tattered) pledge to reduce the Yankees' outsized payroll. (Not that Epstein was satisfied with the outcome. According to some reports, he was so upset about losing Contreras that he smashed a window upon hearing the news.)

I wish Jocketty would smash a window now and again.

DEE-FENSE! DEE-FENSE! The Win Shares Blog has an interesting breakdown of the greatest fielding teams of all time. It includes a complete chart of the top defenses for each league.

Not surprisingly, the '44 Cardinals squad (led by Marty Marion and Whitey Kurowski on the left side of the infield) gets the nod as the best glove group in Cards history. We stumped for the '46 team as the best fielding team a few months ago; seems we may have been off by a couple years.

Other Cardinals teams receiving attention: the 1986 team (Ozzie, McGee, Pendleton, Herr), the 1996 team (Ozzie and Willie again, Lankford, Jordan), and the 1926 World Champs -- a surprise entry, in that 1B Jim Bottomly, 2B Rogers Hornsby, and SS Les Bell were all weak defensively; the real anchor here was Taylor Douthit, one of the best centerfielders of all time.

Thinking about Taylor Douthit got me wondering if the Cardinals -- with Douthit, Edmonds, McGee, Curt Flood, and Terry Moore -- have the greatest collection of defensive centerfielders of any franchise. As it turns out, I think the Pirates can one-up us. They had a pretty great gloveman in center almost every year from the turn of the century into the 1990s: Tommy Leach, Max Carey, Lloyd Waner, Vince DiMaggio, Bill Virdon, Omar Moreno, and Andy Van Slyke.

Here's a fun project: seeing which franchises have the best hitters and fielders at each position. The Yankees, for example -- with Mantle, DiMaggio, Earle Combs, Bernie Williams, even Rickey Henderson for a couple years -- are renowned for having great centerfielders. The Red Sox have had some outrageously good leftfielders: Duffy Lewis, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Manny Ramirez. The Dodgers always seem to have good catchers. Oh well. It's a nice study for some other time...