Yeah, _this_ guy.

Last week I began trying to evaluate Brian Cashman as a GM, with full knowledge that this has been discussed on sports talk radio, blogs, and in your office cubicles ad nauseum. I promised that this week we’d examine all of Brian Cashman’s role-player deals, but, uh, there was a lot of holiday shopping to do. And then the Yanks went out and signed Mark Teixeira for $180 million.

So I thought three things in this order: 1) Nick Swisher will be blogging from a corner outfield spot;  2) Anyone who became a Yankee fan within the last decade at age 18 or older deserves a swift kick in the back;  2a) For the last 80 years it has always been thus: Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for i) the Sun, ii) US Steel, iii) Microsoft; 3) God, has Brian Cashman ever made (or needed to make) a trade/domestic free agent signing in which the player received had not yet reached his peak? (Domestic free agent signing = not Alfonso Soriano, Hideki Matsui, etc.)

The Yanks have a lot of payroll money coming off the books in the form of Bobby Abreu, Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, and Carl Pavano, so they’re not spending money above and beyond last year. In the early days of the Depression, without the union and free agency as leverage, owners used the economic climate as a convenient excuse to force ballplayers to take large paycuts – including the Bambino.

If any team is recession-proof, it’s the Yankees with their own network, global brand, and built-in millionaires’ season tickets. And while we’d all rather these lavish contracts going to the labor instead of the Steinbrenners, the whole concentrated excess of the last two weeks feels like, I don’t know, getting into a fight with a drunk octopus who’s been eyeing you at a bar. You know it’s gonna happen, you’re powerless to stop it, and you feel a little sad afterwards.

So as just a little bit of catharsis, I will take an extended look at the deal that Cashman pushed through on February 1^st, 1999, which he’s said before is his biggest transactional regret:

The Yankees trade Mike Lowell to the Florida Marlins, and receive Mark J. Johnson, Ed Yarnall, and Todd Noel.

It’s fairly easy to forget that Ed Yarnall, whale of a fella that he was, was rated pretty highly. Remember, this was one of the two major prospects, along with Preston Wilson, that netted Mike Piazza for the Mets from the Marlins.

Yarnall was the better of the two prospects when he shipped to the Marlins, at least by the standards of Baseball America and even more so by Baseball Prospectus, who wrote, glowingly in June 1998:  

Yarnall, the Mets’ 3rd-round pick in 1996 from LSU, may be the best left-handed pitcher in the minor leagues. He throws 4 pitches for strikes, and with the exception of the one bad start at AAA last year, he has dominated wherever he has pitched. This year his numbers resemble those high-school-pitcher-throwing-95-against-quivering-16-year-olds lines you see in Baseball America. Not even translating his stats can get his ERA above 1. He’s obviously not going to keep doing that, but he is good enough to step into the Marlins rotation right now and be their #1 starter…

(Tangent 1, on the strange and fairly brief career of Preston Wilson. In this same article, Rany Jazayerli says also, quite definitively, “Wilson is not, and probably will never be, a productive major league hitter.” 

Jazayerli points to Wilson’s inability to want to draw a walk, which now with the hindsight of his decade of major league service, is very fair. Wilson had only one year when his OBP reached .350. He topped the .500 slugging mark twice, but his ridiculous strikeout rate was very notable, especially because he wasn’t getting on base in the way that Adam Dunn or other free-swingers did.

Despite the Marlins’ belief that he was a cornerstone talent when they signed him to a $32 million arbitration-avoiding contract in March 2001,  Wilson was traded to the Rockies a year and a half later. Along with personal tragedies (death of an infant son, separation from wife) and chronic knee injuries, Mookie’s nephew hobbled between four teams from 2005 to 2007 and slid into apathetic retirement at 32.

Wilson contributed in sorts to the Marlins and for a year the Rockies, but he was overall pretty bad. Whatever your feelings on strikeouts’ detriments to a hitter’s worth, you’d have to admit that hitting into double plays are worse. Comparing Wilson to Dunn highlights that. Even disregarding Dunn’s far superior OBP, look at this: Sure, Wilson struck out 1,085 times in 4,003 at-bats for a rate of one K every 3.69 ABs, while Dunn’s 1,256 strikeouts in 3,871 at-bats are a rate of one K every 3.08 ABs. But Wilson hit into 129 twin-killings; Dunn has hit into just 57.)

(Tangent 1a:  Reggie Jackson K’d once every 3.79 at-bats. By the way, Dunn is far outstripping Mr. October in the K-race: Through his 28^th year, Jacko had 996 strikeouts.)

The following year, months after Cashman traded Lowell for Yarnall et al., Baseball Prospectus wrote after Yarnall had a decent season at Triple-A Columbus:

…The Yankees have responded by trading away Hideki Irabu and all but handing Yarnall the fifth starter’s job…Take-home lesson: Number one, Brian Cashman completely ripped off Dave Dombrowski, which is a very, very bad sign for the rest of baseball. Number two, this is how good organizations operate: they bring their best pitching prospects (especially starters) along slowly, let them pitch a full year in Triple-A, and give them some low-pressure work in long relief or a meaningless September start before throwing them into the rotation. Yarnall is more likely to contribute as a rookie than any starting pitcher in recent memory: he’s the #5 starter for the defending World Champions, he’s a left-handed pitcher working in Yankee Stadium, he has a year and a half of Triple-A experience under his belt, and he’s simply a tremendous pitching prospect. If ever there was a rookie pitcher worth drafting on a Rotisserie team, this is him.

Cue cartoon trumpet sound that goes “Weah-weaaaaaaah.”

The following season, of course, Yarnall pitched horribly in March, lost the fifth rotation spot, continued a bad streak in Columbus, and got shipped to Cincy for Denny Neagle.

(Tangent 2: The crop of highly-touted rookie pitchers in 1998 and 1999 had two very notable flame-out lefties who were initially compared very favorably to southpaws in the AL; Andy Pettitte was Yarnall’s comp; and the Big Unit’s Little Unit, Ryan Anderson, who, as was ubiquitously noted two years ago, is now a chef.)

(Tangent 3: Ed Yarnall was the Gio Gonzalez of his day.

Well, only in the fact that he was a highly-touted pitching prospect who was involved in three major deals before becoming a major leaguer and averaged well over a strikeout per inning through the age of 22.

Yarnall was flipped in the Piazza, Lowell, and Neagle trades; Giovany moved to Philly for Jim Thome, back to the ChiSox for Freddy Garcia, and over to the A’s for Nick Swisher.)

And Mike Lowell? Mike Lowell ended up just fine.

I don't get no respect. No respect at all.

Brian Cashman has a very strange job. He’s the general manager of a baseball team with the net worth the size of a mid-sized African nation’s GDP, and an annual expectation of making the postseason by both fans and owner(s), who constantly threaten to bake him into a Steinbrenner Ogre Family Pie.

Cashman became GM in February 1998, and his dealings with King George were of constant interest in the New York tabloid papers. It was no secret that Steinbrenner was a demanding Boss^TM; by most accounts Cashman didn’t gain full control of personnel moves until after the 2005 season, so it’s hard to tell what transactions were Cashman’s and which came from on high. Newsday’s Ken Davidoff has his thoughts on the subject, but some of this is still conjecture and hearsay.

Whatever deals have been solely his – Kei Igawa, Carl Pavano? – Cashman has to answer for at least some of 1998-2005, and all of 2006-present. Despite barely tolerating Hank Steinbrenner this past season, Cashman signed a three-year extension this past September, a contract that will take him through 2011, when the A.J. Burnett and C.C. Sabathia deals can be properly judged, re-judged, and judged again over ogre pie.

I don’t know what Cashman would do if he were to actually go, as it’s always rumored, to another ballclub like the Nationals. No idea if he’d be able to work under far different parameters – like, uh, one-fifth the budget. So I thought I’d examine the Yanks’ transactions since February of ‘98, in full admission that some of these were not his idea. I just thought it’d be fun.

Under his tenure, the Yankees have:

*Signed marquee former All-Stars on the downswing of their careers (save Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens, though this latter for, uh, different reasons).

*Made headlines by signing splashy international free agents (Cuba, Japan, the Dominican Republic).

*Traded for a number of key role players to fill a spot in the starting lineup, rotation, or bullpen for the playoff stretch.

*Drafted horribly (due, in part, to the loss of draft picks), with the exception of – and we’re still waiting on – Joba, Ian Kennedy, and Phil Hughes.

Here’s part one:

Major Marquee Domestic Acquisitions

 February 6, 1998 – Received Chuck Knoblauch from the Minnesota Twins for Brian Buchanan, Cristian Guzman, Eric Milton, Danny Mota, and cash.

Okay, it’s not fair to include this because Cashman didn’t have the GM throne of blood until later in February. But I bring this up for the following sidebar: It’s not ridiculous to ask whether Knoblauch would be finishing up a Hall of Fame career right now had he never demanded a trade out of Minneapolis. He was granted his request at 29 years old, a four-time All-Star, Rookie of the Year, sporting a .304 batting average and a .384 OBP. It’s possible that his throwing problems were connected with his personal problems (divorce from his wife, father’s Alzheimer’s disease), but it’s also possible that New York intensified it. And he may never have gotten all HGH-y had he stayed in Minneapolis.

February 18, 1999: Received Roger Clemens from the Toronto Blue Jays for Homer Bush, Graeme Lloyd, and David Wells.

Graeme Lloyd has a special place in my heart, not just for looking like the human form of Sam the Eagle, but for being the most memorable part of the big 1998 Orioles-Yankee brawl after The Big Stupid plunked Tino Martinez and gesticulated something along the lines of “Come on New York. I’ll take you all on. And this ridiculous expression of stubborn machismo that ends up with me running around and falling on my ass is a grim omen of how I will pitch with the Mets for the next couple of years.”  Watching the tall, lanky Lloyd and Darryl Strawberry go into full battle with Baltimore, I felt like immediately awarding them a hundred experience points each, and maybe adding ten points to their weapon skills. Is that too generous? They’re probably both wood elves, so who knows. Hey, Curt Schilling plays D&D. Nerd.

June 29, 2000: Received David Justice from the Cleveland Indians for Ricky Ledee, Jake Westbrook, and Zach Day. This was a win-win for both teams. Justice had a great short stint with the Yanks and won the 2000 ALCS MVP.

July 12, 2000: Received Mike Frank and Denny Neagle from the Cincinnati Reds for  Ed Yarnall, Drew Henson, Brian Reith, and Jackson Melian. The Yanks were hot on Neagle, who had a strong first half with the Reds – they ended up shipping off two of their prize prospects in Henson and Melian (though neither ended up doing much of anything). Neagle had a crappy time with the Yanks, outside of four good regular-season games. Neagle signed with the Rockies in the offseason, nailed a hooker, got a DUI, and screwed up his marriage. He’s not around the ol’ MLB anymore.

November 30, 2000: Signed Mike Mussina as a free agent. The Yanks quickly emerged as the favorite to sign Moose in the offseason, and blew other offers out of the water. I don’t think there was really a question where he was gonna end up.

December 13, 2001: Signed Jason Giambi as a free agent. HA HA. You know, despite it all, Giambi’s numbers weren’t as crappy as – ah, screw it. You know who wasn’t worth $120 million over seven years? That guy.

July 5, 2002: As part of a three-team trade, received Jeff Weaver from the Detroit Tigers. Sent Ted Lilly, John-Ford Griffin, and Jason Arnold to the Oakland Athletics. In addition, the Oakland Athletics sent a player to be named later, Carlos Pena, and Franklyn German to the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Tigers sent cash to the Oakland Athletics. The Oakland Athletics sent Jeremy Bonderman (August 22, 2002) to the Detroit Tigers to complete the trade.

The Jeff Weaver debacle. Christ almighty.

December 13, 2003: Received Kevin Brown from the Los Angeles Dodgers for Jeff Weaver, Yhency Brazoban, Brandon Weeden, and cash.

I’m trying to think of names I’ve loved more in baseball than Yhency Brazoban, and it’s tough. Dick Pole? Johnny Wockenfuss? Van Lingle Mungo? (speaking of which, if you never listened to Dave Frishberg’s bizarre and excellent late-night-easy-listening-lounge-song composed solely of baseball names,  you must download it now. I miss baseball songs. Thank god I bought this CD in high school, and now know that Mickey Mantle signing a duet on “I Love Mickey” is the single greatest thing ever. That and Tommy Lasorda’s insane rant about Dave Kingman.)

December 16, 2003:

Received Javier Vazquez from the Montreal Expos for Nick Johnson, Juan Rivera, and Randy Choate. Forgotten in the wake of Vazquez’s meltdown with the Yanks that ended up with Johnny Damon slugging a Game 7 granny off him in the ALCS, is the fact that he was an All-Star that year on the strength of his first half. But man, that was a bad season overall for the guy.

December 19, 2003:

Signed Gary Sheffield as a free agent.

The epitaph on Gary Sheffield’s tombstone will probably read “Gary ‘Respect’ Sheffield: All he respectfully wanted was respect. Rest in respect, Respecty.” He had two really good non-injured seasons with the Yanks, and hit upon something real and very sensitive with his point about Latin players being easier to control than African-American players.  But wherever he’s gone, Sheff seems to have been a me-first kind of guy. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t articulate himself well. Or maybe it’s because he thinks the term ‘respect’ means a flying panda, and because he’s never gotten one, he still wants “respect.”

Here’s an excerpt from Buster Olney’s epilogue to The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, which is a good summation of the Sheffield signing.

After the 2003 season, without soliciting an opinion from Michael or Cashman, Steinbrenner negotiated a $39 million handshake deal with Gary Sheffield, a 35-year-old perennial All-Star with a reputation for complaining. It was a mistake, Cashman thought: the team had to get younger. He had lobbied unsuccessfully to shift Soriano to the outfield and sign the Japanese-born Kaz Matsui to play second base in his stead. And when Sheffield wavered on his oral agreement with Steinbrenner, Cashman, seeing an opening, worked frantically to complete a deal with 27-year-old free agent Vladimir Guerrero. But with Guerrero on the verge of signing for the same annual salary as Sheffield and with one extra year on the contract, Steinbrenner killed the negotiations with Guerrero. Sheffield had capitulated, and Steinbrenner insisted, “I want him, I want him, I want him.”

February 16, 2004:

Received Alex Rodriguez and cash from the Texas Rangers for Alfonso Soriano and a player to be named later. The New York Yankees sent Joaquin Arias (April 23, 2004) to the Texas Rangers to complete the trade.

How different would everything have been had Ol’ Whistlin’ Bat ended up on the Red Sox? Would Jorge Posada have shoved him in the face with his mitt that July? Would Mike Mussina say that he wasn’t a “true Red Sock?” Is it possible that, despite his inner peace at shortstop, his close relationship with Teresa Heinz Kerry would’ve destroyed his marriage? Yeah, probably.

December 20, 2004:

Signed Carl Pavano as a free agent.  HA HA.

January 3, 2006:

Signed Johnny Damon as a free agent. For $13 million per year over four years, which was a year more than the Red Sox were offering. Damon throws like this: (imagine me in a schoolgirl outfit with pigtails, throwing with my left hand and yelling “ooooof!”)

January 11, 2005:

Received Randy Johnson from the Arizona Diamondbacks for Javier Vazquez, Brad Halsey, Dioner Navarro, and cash.

The Big Unit is going to get his 300^th win this year, and he seems to be just fading away. When people talk about the best post-Tom Seaver pitcher, they limit the argument to Clemens, Pedro, and Maddux. Poor Randy. He’s unreal.

July 30, 2006:

Traded Matt Smith, C.J. Henry, Carlos Monastrios, and Jesus Sanchez to the Philadelphia Phillies. Received Bobby Abreu and Cory Lidle. 

The Hardball Times has an excellent lookback at that deal, noting that at the time, Philly writers were ready to take to the streets to demand Pat Gillick’s kidneys. 

The gist: the Phils were 14 games behind the Mets in 2006 and needed a salary dump. The Yanks were half a game behind the Red Sox and needed a healthy outfielder.

Cory Lidle’s tragic end makes this trade hard to judge – though it should be noted he never pitched past the sixth inning for the Yanks (despite a good start against the Red Sox), and did pretty awfully in his postseason mop-up appearance against the Tigers. None of the mid-level prospects in the deal panned out to anything. The Yanks ended up running away with the division in ‘06 and Abreu performed very well that second half; but for the last two years, he’s been far less valuable than his $31 million price tag.

Next week, Cashman’s role-player deals. (Mike Lowell for Mark Johnson and Ed Yarnall! Ridiculous!)

Why yes, I'll happily trade you Duaner Sanchez for this old sneaker.

Well, this is what I imagine would’ve been fair value for them, had you asked any average Met fan over the last three months. But somehow, Omar Minaya has actually gotten return on – so far – Aaron Heilman, Joe Smith, and Scott Schoenweis. Duaner Sanchez and Luis Ayala better be next in this Shea Putsch.

 Let me now quote famous men:

 ”Athletes, like surgeons and concert violinists, know the dry mouth of pressure. It costs them sleep and shapes their dreams…Pressure can stunt an athlete, but evidence argues powerfully that a major league ball player is fully grown. To make the majors at all, a man first survives other pennant races, other play-offs. As he rises, pressures rise with him. A Little Leaguer feels the eyes of his parents and his neighbors and his teammates when he comes to bat. If he wriggles helplessly, he has found something out. High-pressure competitive baseball is not for him. A minor leaguer, driving toward the majors, has coaches and scouts studying him every day. The man who collapses into tremors with men on base dies, as the saying is, in Peoria.”

-Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

 This is in the passage preceding Clem Labine’s concession that he didn’t want to face Bobby Thomson at the Polo Grounds on October 3^rd, 1951. Labine was a very successful reliever that year, and had struck out Thomson the day before, but he was nervous about pitching to him with two runners on base. When Labine used a sore arm excuse to beg out of warming up, Ralph Branca’s entrance became history. The thesis here is that ballplayers can handle pressurized situations, but for the love of God, they’re still human.

So guess who else wasn’t real happy about pitching with men on base? Scott Schoenweis, who allowed batters to reach 4 out of 10 times he pitched with guys on. Ok, look, he was overall a successful LOOGY this past year. When we rely on our memory to make judgment calls, we tend to pick and choose. Like, oh, “Jim Rice was such a feared hitter that teams would intentionally walk him all the time.” Much like Rice was only intentionally walked 77 times in his career (and finished in the top five in that category just one season and led his team in it just twice), Schoenweis actually did have very successful appearances as a LOOGY.

But this isn’t really about stats – even though the Phillies signed left-handed demigod Raul Ibanez! Oh no! Tear out your hair! Wail in the streets! Mothers, start teaching your sons to be southpaws! – it’s about catharsis. There’s something to be said for a general manager who understands the needs of his fan base. (Bill Simmons might call on the VP of Common Sense.) And I’d imagine when Minaya was in Vegas for the winter meetings, there were about 1,283 fat guys with mustaches and faded Lee Mazzilli jerseys from Queens parked outside the Bellagio waiting to beg him to trade the entire bullpen for a bottle of the $1.99 cologne Roger McDowell used to wear.

The reason I started with that Roger Kahn quote is because, for that bullpen, dividing themselves from the human emotional aspect of being a professional athlete wouldn’t get any easier in 2009 if they were all still around. Sure, the Show will get mercilessly booed the first (and probably only) time he appears in a D-Backs uniform at Shea. But the hailstorm of vitriol, seething rage, and vinegar that would pour down the first 50 times he appeared in Shea were he still in the blue and orange come April would make a grown man cry himself to sleep even if he were curled up next to Mark Kotsay’s wife.

I’m not saying Heilman and Schoenweis, whether they deserved it or not, would necessarily have let the sturm und drang get to them, but why not just make a clean break for the sake of Met fans and these beleaguered major leaguers who just want to make four million dollars and go home to their McMansions and Humvees? Will Connor Robertson be marginally better than Schoenweis in these high-pressure situations? Who the crap cares? Fresh slate, and a new way for the Mets to embark on Collapse V3.0 come September.

(Speaking of McDowell and Rubber Arm Orosco, here’s hoping Jerry Manuel employs the Putz-Francisco Jose Rodriguez tandem in the same way Davey used those guys. Pow-pow, none of this designated Sandman bullshit.)

Oh, here are two things that are annoying me today:

1. These omnipresent banner ads that lead with “(Celebrity)’s IQ is 117! Are you smarter than (Said Celebrity)?” Obviously, all banner ads deserve a special place in hell, right above regicidists and people who stand on the left side of the escalator, but these latest banner ads got all omnipresent in a hurry. Maybe I hate them because they’re tailored to the genre of website you’re visiting. When I’m at, say, CNN, I’m sized up against Sarah Palin. And on ESPN, they compare me to Chase Utley or Donovan McNabb. How do these guys know Donovan McNabb’s IQ? And is he okay with this info being spread? And what if it turns out that Dan Uggla’s IQ is 86 (which I guess is possible)? How embarrassing for everyone involved.

Granted, these ads still pale in comparison to the most detestable, horrible, loathsome, ungood banners ever, courtesy of LowerMyBills, that scourge of humanity. Apparently, those ads sadly worked.

For what it’s worth, both the company’s founder, Matt Coffin, and the graphic artist Jennifer Uhll, who spearheaded the campaign, deserve a tremendous pie in the face. Here’s what the article says about Uhll’s, uh, inspiration:

So Ms. Uhll combined the two concepts, animating her silhouetted, pony-tailed woman with a swaying modern dance. Ms. Uhll said she is a dancer and took a variety of dancing classes for more than a decade. She is also a fan of the pet sequences in “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which relates to the animal ads. “I usually put into my creative work what I love and what makes me happy and gets my attention,” she said.

(Me, cringing in full knowledge that this woman draws a paycheck.)

 2. That time in movies when the big confrontation between the idealist protagonist who finally thinks he’s unraveling the mystery and the slightly evil, unethical businessman/politician/astronaut. The latter rebuffs the protagonist by saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” What the crap? What does that mean? Who says that? Nobody says that. “You just don’t get it, do you?” That’s ridiculous. Seriously, count the number of movies this appears in. It’s mindboggling.

This all said, I would much rather have Jennifer Uhll and the physical embodiment of that particular screenplay line in the Mets bullpen instead of the trainwreck we threw out there last year.

No more Burrell nightmares for me, thanks.

I find the New York Times to be a funny paper when it comes to metropolitan news and sports reporting. It’s like they do it because they know that by tradition, they’re forced to have these sections, like: “Yes, we realize some of our button-down, work-a-day-johnny readers care about such drivel like ‘what’s to be done with the MTA’ and this new-fangled sport called Base Ball, which seems to be an upstart mix of the gentlemen’s athletic endeavors of rounders and kick the can.”

The Times has good journalists in the sports section; George Vescey, William Rhoden, and Richard Sandomir are all very good writers. The problem is that the Grey Old Lady’s sports writers are not, uh, kept up to date that much. I’ve already cyber-mocked Murray Chass’s similarity to Ted Stevens; but generally, the Times’s baseball writers are either waxing nostalgic about pitchers throwing 500 innings a year or using batting average to determine a player’s overall worth. (Not that the Daily News or the New York Post are much different on this steadfast refusal to reevaluating what “worth” is in MLB.)

I actually like Ben Shpigel’s reporting in the Times; much like the older journalists, he has a good feel for putting together coherent copy. But something like this from this past Friday makes me want to eat my own hand:

The gist of it is “The Phils signed the amazing unbelievable Raul Ibanez, and he will make life living hell for the Mets’ pitching staff unless the amazing unbelievable Oliver Perez is re-signed.”

Huh. Okay. Shpigel lauds Ibanez’s RBI total over the last three years and his lefty bat as the main reasons this 36-year-old outfielder deserves $31.5 million over three years instead of Pat Burrell.

As a Met fan, here is a partial list of things I would rather see at the plate against us instead of Pat Burrell with the game on the line:

Any other MLB player, except Chipper Jones

Zombie Ted Williams

Megatron

The embodiments of Famine and Pestilence

A man made out of maple, parallel-grained wood

Yeah, Pat the Bat had a terrible 2008 against the Mets. He had an OPS under .600, struck out almost a third of his at-bats against us, and even with a BABIP of .275, hit just .197. (The man still drew 11 walks- one less than the number of hits he had.) For the first time in Burrell’s career – CAREER – he hit more homers against a team other the Mets. Let me reiterate this in case 2008 sticks out too broadly for Burrell not being a Met-destroyer.

Patrick Brian Burrell has played 1306 games. 151 of those games have come against the Mets; 151 have also come against the Marlins. The aforementioned Messr. Burrell has hit 251 career home runs. Twenty-six of those have come against the Marlins. FORTY-TWO of them have come against the Mets.

And these homers are not all solo shots in the eighth inning of a blowout. Some of these are soul-crushing blows, destroying the Met fans’ hopes, desires, and sunshiney dreams. It’s like a black cloud made up of equal parts of ravens and bees striding to the plate when he comes up.

To wit: June 7^th, 2007. The Mets, first in the division, lead the Phils by a run going into the ninth inning. Billy Wagner, who at that point in the year has converted 13 saves in a row with a 1.44 ERA, is on to close it out. Burrell hits a solo shot to send it to extras, and the Phillies win in 10.

August 27^th to August 30^th, 2007. Despite the fact that Collapse V1.0 didn’t _really_ start until September, this was the loud pounding on the Mets’ palace door. A four-game series against the Phillies. Burrell hits four homers and drives in seven runs, leading to a full sweep of the Shea folk.

This respected Mariner blogger  and this respected Philly blogger both feel the same way about Ibanez: Despite his better clubhouse presence and his slightly higher average, he’s as bad a fielder as Burrell, is older, is not appreciably less expensive, will cost the Phillies a draft pick, and – most importantly – won’t gain them any wins. Even if we need a southpaw something fierce right now, I’d rather face Ibanez than Burrell with the game on the line.

Which leads me to this second point about Oliver Perez. Here’s a very good article about why you shouldn’t let Scott Boras’s typical gilded-bordered client book about Ollie get to you. Perez is pretty good, but if Boras wants money comparable to Burnett, pppbbbbbbhhhhh. Ibanez is not a player we should start strategizing against. The fact that Burrell is (hopefully) moving out of the NL East is fine with me, and that’s maybe the biggest development of these last couple of days for the Mets.

Postscript:

Look, I’m a Times man. Always have been. However, I feel that by now I could kinda ghostwrite most of its op-ed columnists. Here’s how I’d do it if I were…

Paul Krugman: “As my readers will recall, my September 2003 column accurately showed that whatever the hell is happening right this minute would eventually happen. I am God, all bow down to me.”

Thomas Friedman: “While I was in Addis Ababa last week, my two friends hosting me there told me something about the country, and that clearly speaks for the entire country; I am significantly in touch with this flat world.”

Nicholas Kristof: “Fala Tulawi is a 15 year old girl who saw unspeakable horrors in Countryiana, including but not limited to: the loss of her house, the butchering and stewing of her parents, the rape of her turtle, etc.”

Maureen Dowd: “Here’s a funny prescient nickname for a higher-up who has comic foibles.”

David Brooks: “Bemoan the fall of the Republican brand, and wail in the streets for the division of conservatism, and blibberty blabbity bloop.”

(I won’t include Bill Kristol here, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I recognize him as a columnist.)

Don't worry, KC. We've got a plan. And here it is. *cough*

So the Yankees sign C.C. and could very well sign A.J., the Mets sign Francisco Jose Rodriguez (for info on boycotts of bad nicknames, read this), and the Red Sox could sign Big Tex. Much is written every winter about how lavish splashy contracts don’t mean anything come baseball season – look at the Rays last year, the Twins for much of the decade, and, conversely, the Yankees’ repeated failures in the last handful of autumns.

Well, duh. Signing Jason Giambi, Ol’ Whistlin’ Bat, Trainwreck Pavano, and the Big Unit didn’t do anything for a Bronx World Series drought. Small market (this is a misnomer – let’s say small owner) teams have been doing quite well in the won-lost column, thank you – the Marlins beating up on the Bombers in ‘03, the Brewers nabbing a wild card berth over the Mets’ Collapse^TM v2.0 in ‘08, etc. So, yeah, for the Fall Classic, landing Johan Santana or Manny Ramirez in January is rarely the definitive solution.

But here’s what a big splashy contract can do: Keep fans engaged.

Baseball, like all sports, is an entertainment, a diversion. (Except for this guy.)  Plenty of fans attend games for the thrill of the immediate nine-inning drama, or because it’s a fun family excursion, not for the season writ large. But even for small owner teams, as long as we still live in an age of taxpayer-subsidized ballparks, a front office owes the fanbase its vision for success. Or if not success, at least a good show at the ballpark. After all, without a successful team, attendances could suffer, and a vicious cycle of budgetary restrictions could ensue.

And let me now kind of disprove what I just said with some numbers:

Marlins 1997 September last homestand (9/12-9/22): average attendance was 28,971.

Marlins 1998 April first homestand (3/31-4/6): average attendance was 23,668.

This came after the Marlins won the World Series and then famously gutted its team (Moises Alou, Al Leiter, Robb Nen, Jeff Conine, and Kevin Brown), leading to media and public excoriation. Their attendance dropped from the last week of the playoff berth season to the first week of the new season by 18%. Horrible! Ridiculous! Cat-gnawingly mind-boggling!

Athletics 2004 September last homestand (9/27-10/3): average attendance: 29,585.

The A’s lost the division to the Angels in that final week of the season, but still finished with 91 wins. Then in the offseason, the A’s traded Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, moves that, again, were excoriated by the average fan (but praised in, uh, smarter circles). At the very least, it ought to have hurt the attendance:

Athletics 2005 April first homestand (4/11-4/17): 25,939.

An average loss of 12%.

Yankees 2000 September last long homestand (9/11-9/18): average attendance was 39,981.

The Yanks won the World Series in five games over the crosstown Mets, I was at the final heroic Al Leiter game at Shea surrounded by Yankee fans, on the verge of punching the quiet, meek Met fans around me who seemed unperturbed by the goings-on on the field. Anyhoo, the Yanks won and then signed Mike Mussina in the offseason. Yanks were still a favorite for postseason in 2001.

Yankees 2001 April first homestand (4/2-4/8): average attendance was 33,512.

So their attendance…dropped by 16%. Whoops.

Ok, there are a lot of factors here (quality of opponent, cold weather in April, small sample sizes, pennant races are more exciting than spring ball, etc). And this is a very long passage simply to disprove something I conjectured. Really, I’ve proven nothing but that September baseball is more exciting than April baseball. So, broader:

2004 A’s: 2.20 million

2005 A’s: 2.11 million (following postseason campaign, down 4%)

1997 Marlins: 2.36 million

1998 Marlins: 1.73 million (following postseason campaign, down 26.7%)

2000 Yanks: 3.06 million

2001 Yanks: 3.26 million (following postseason campaign, up 6.5%)

Well, okay, but the 2003 Marlins were a similar case to ‘97 – winning the WS, then trading off Derrek Lee, Juan Encarnacion, and Mark Redman, and letting Ivan Rodriguez and Oogie Urbina jump ship. So:

2003 Marlins: 1.30 million

2004 Marlins: 1.72 million

I can’t understand attendances at all now. Except that there isn’t much of a demand for baseball in southern Florida. And I would really like to track the rise of a club’s record with the rise of attendance, but I don’t think that that’s a simple correlated ratio.

Theoretically, it would be nice to say that big free agent signing/marquee player arrival has a lot to do with attendance. And in the very short run a midseason acquisition might – the Mike Piazza signing in May 1998 briefly drove Shea population up from the middling averages they were receiving, and I’m sure merch sales had a quick spike. But the impact of an offseason signing is hard to calculate because of all the mitigating factors that come with the beginning of the season (see above).

What I do know is that there isn’t much excitement at all right now in SD, where the team “had” to trade Khalil Greene and has to trade Jake Peavy because they’re shedding payroll. And their minor league system – beyond, say, Kyle Blanks and Cedric Hunter – isn’t anything special.

Nor is there excitement in Milwaukee, whose run at the Series just waddled and limped out the door. As for Washington, I’m amazed that the Nationals are floating a $160 million offer to Big Tex. Guess it puts the botched negotiations with first-rounder Aaron Crow in a new light, as well as their oath to go aggressively after Stephen Strasburg. Even more surprising would be if Teixiera signs with them. Two years in, he could be begging, a la Paparazzi Alex, to play for a contender. After all, Washington has no groundplan to speak of, and their latest trade – Jon Rauch for Emilio Bonifacio – hurts to think about.

Point is, it’s not hard to keep, say, Red Sox fans interested in the offseason: Success last year, rosy 2009, good prospects in the system, and the strong possibility of landing a great new player in January. Not every team can be that confident, and again, note to Washington, dishing out mega-contracts aren’t a sure bet for the World Series. Building blueprints for a franchise’s success is. Sure, Brian Cashman and Omar Minaya don’t have to think outside the box; they are the box. But other front offices can be less opaque in their strategies to field a good team. Oakland’s fans grumble, even though Billy Beane, aware that he’s on an uneven playing field, has continued to make wise personnel moves; Tampa fans didn’t show up for much of the 2008 campaign, but it was clear for the last four years that something big was in the works.

So the difficulty is letting those fans – and Teixeira, if he signs with the Nats – know that a plan is in the works. What I’d be doing if I worked in San Diego or Milwaukee or KC, I’d be promoting the crap out of the positives and explaining how the team is going to get better. “Hey Padres fans, this is the deal. We’re strapped for cash right now, and we know you guys are upset at the thought of losing our Cy Young winner, but lookit. We’re going to get some golden boys in exchange for him.” “Hey Kansas City! We’re going to ride our youth movement, starting with Alex Gordon, Billy Butler, and the soon-to-come Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer to victory!”

And so forth.

The Wild Horse of Osage, not P-Mart

There are some who say the English language has lost its way; that the recent regression of high school English essays into internet chatter (IMHO, Hamlt iz compltly re a prince whos rly suicidal) is the final straw in communication breakdown. There are others who say it’s a new adaptive form of the language. I could give a fig. All I want back is the lyricism of old baseball nicknames.
 
If the enduring thing about the once-national pastime is its fables that aren’t-quite-true-but-true-enough, the quality of sports monikers is a necessary ingredient to its vibrancy. Oh, for the days when the Splendid Splinter – alliterative and evocative in both talent and appearance – roamed the grass in front of the Green Monster. When the Say Hey Kid turned his back to home plate and ran to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds. Or when the Meal Ticket struck out the Sultan of Swat, the Iron Horse, Double X, and Bucketfoot Al in the 1934 All-Star Game. Through these sobriquets of talent, majesty, endurance, and a strange batting stance, the stories grandfathers would later tell their grandsons were enhanced with a Homeric touch.
 
Now the wit of the current sports cognoscenti is boiled down to this methodology: First initial of first name + first syllable of last name. Example: Even though the Yankees let veteran catcher I-Rod go to free agency, they still have A-Rod at the hot corner. Oh, sure, there are some slight changes to this formula. Take the Mets, who are about to tender an offer to K-Rod (K for strikeouts) and O-Dog (Dog instead of his given name, Hudson, because Dog, you know, is slang for ‘guy’). And who knows? If Omar Minaya gets really greedy, he could throw $30 million at Man-Ram, much to the delight of the unofficial captain, D-Wright.
 
It seems too easy to blame ESPN and even its swami Chris Berman (whose nicknames are clever but rarely stick), with their catch phrases, sound bites, highlight reels, and reductivist wrap-ups. But whatever the cause, we’re now forced to argue over the merits of two NL East shortstops, the skilled, but nominally-uninspired H-Ram and J-Roll. Some of the players’ titles are merely derivative: Derek Jeter, as classic and classy a guy as ever walked in pinstripes, is disrespected by nothing better than Mr. November, which recalls Reggie Jackson’s original nickname. Jason Giambi, loud, unkempt, one of the friendliest ballplayers in the bigs – the plagiaristic “Giambino.”
 
Ok. This isn’t fair. Nicknames have always been faddish, even if time makes them glossier. Back in the day, dozens of Chicks, Reds, Babes, and Leftys also represented the ages’ vernacular. They even sported derivatives of their own, like the fabled Rabbi of Swat, Moe Berg. And Three-Finger, while simple and, uh, descriptive, was not exactly on literary par with The Wild Horse of Osage.
 
But with the omnipresence of cameras, replays, and constant playback, have the stories lost their rhetorical flourish as well? I wasn’t there to witness the “Homer in the Gloamin’” or “Merkle’s Boner” or “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.” I did, however, watch Gonzo bloop a Mo Rivera cutter into the Bank One Ballpark outfield to win the 2001 Series for the D-Backs. But why hasn’t it been designated for lore with a mythic reference like “The Pop in the BOB“?
 
There are, of course, some good names scattered among the pros these days. The Greek God of Walks, Kevin Youkilis, is coming off a fantastic season in New England. The Big Unit (Randy Johnson) is a proud bearer in a long line of “Bigs” – Big Train, Big Cat, Big Hurt. And Vlad the Impaler not only suggests Vladimir Guerrero’s hack-it-all swing, but also teaches kids about Dracula’s inspiration.
 
But there are far too many future Hall-of-Famers running around sans legitimate nicknames. No “Poosh ‘Em Up,” no “Dominican Dandy.” To have one of the best ballplayers we’ll ever see in Alex Rodriguez swatting longballs in the city where Red Smith and Gay Talese wrote, it seems a great disservice that he’s saddled with the modern formula (A-Rod). With the House that Ruth Built torn down, don’t we owe it to the sport’s poetic history to dream up a glorious, authentic name for him? Like “The Billion Dollar Question Mark” or “Paparazzi Alex” or “Ol’ Whistling Bat” or – um – suggestions?

Someday, maybe.

Why the Baseball Writers’ Association of America should vote Bert Blyleven into the Hall of Fame:
Rich Lederer says this and Rob Neyer is all that, and Dayn Perry goes.   

Why the BBWAA won’t:
Jon Heyman garbles this and Mike Nadel mumbles that. 

The guys who make the cohesive argument for Blyleven (e.g. Rob Neyer) are not members of the BBWAA, though they did famously turn Cowboy Tracy Ringolsby onto their side two years ago. The guys who don’t (e.g. Jon Heyman, who voted for Francisco Rodriguez as AL MVP this year) still value wins and winning percentage and winstuff and windom as the big metric, and often point to one or two famous games as proof. Though Bill Mazeroski was one of the two best defensive second basemen of all time (Frank White the other), the Veterans’ Committee voted him in probably due in some part to his famous homer (and his popularity), despite the fact that he was a fantastically shitty hitter.

The stats v. scouts (analysis vs. personal experience/legend/instinct) argument has been the big debate in baseball for about a decade now, and there’s tremendous antipathy on both sides. The former generally regard the latter as moronic dinosaurs, and the latter spurn the former as reductivist mathematicians (as evidenced here by MSNBC’s Ted Robinson. The smarter writers of the new wave take the middle ground and acknowledge that there can be something beyond numbers (Bill James’s backing off his disregard for clutchiness made ripples last year), much like the more adaptable of the old guard are able to acknowledge that there’s merit to stats like ERA+ and WARP3.

But I always find it hard not to look at this argument on a larger, social scale; that there’s one group using empirical evidence and the exponentially-increasing amount of knowledge at our fingertips and another relying solely on one’s eyes, selective memory, and tradition. But this may be because we’ve had eight years of an executive administration repeatedly lying to us about our day-to-day reality, and appointing people to jobs they’re grossly unqualified for based on loyalty and reputation.

Here are three pretty good examples of how it’s hard to impress upon an older, stubborn crowd that new technology/ways of thinking are ok:

1. The BBWAA’s website. Christ almighty. This was created by a fourth grader who trained in two-dimensional turtle graphics from Logo.

2. Sportswriter Murray Chass’s website, which he says is “for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs.” Doesn’t even want to know what the definition of a blog is, apparently. It’s a series of tubes, Murray.

3. My dad’s bizarre reluctance to get a DVR. My father worked at IBM for 35 years, taught object technology, and many forerunners of computer programming. He is also a man who devours instruction manuals as if he were a 12 year old girl waiting for the next Harry Potter installment. And yet the very idea of getting a DVR – WHICH IS JUST A DIFFERENT TYPE OF CABLE BOX THAT YOU CAN USE TO RECORD THINGS DIGITALLY – is heretical to him. He’s perfectly happy to go through the time-tested rigmarole of putting a blank tape into the VCR and painstakingly setting the timer to – sweet Jesus Alou, I can’t even finish this sentence.

Anyhoo, the reason Blyleven may not make it into the Hall of Fame again is because Michael Brown was appointed head of FEMA, and my dad loves his collection of VHS tapes.

Nice guy, nice bike.

I’ll use the Plaxico Stupid story as a launching point for the new feature “Not a Jock,” which profiles a professional athlete who does non-jock type things. Like, for example, not abuse wives /girlfriends / potentially gay teammates, maybe not carry loaded firearms out in public without a permit, not disparage ethnic differences by making “Chinese eyes”, and generally exhibit non-jocklike qualities while maintaining high levels of athletic ability.

Today it’s Jeremy Guthrie, the Orioles pitcher who’s emerging as a fan favorite and solid starter. Yeah, he did the Mormon mission and probably wears the magic underwear, but the guy practices what he (literally) preaches. Guthrie bikes to work. This is remarkable. And his reason for biking to work is actually environmental, as evidenced by the bumper sticker on his Camden Yards locker which says “One less car,” and his eminently quotable,

 I hate cars, I hate driving, I hate doing something I don’t have to do. For me to drive downtown is a waste of gas; it’s a waste of my time. I can ride faster than I can drive.

This is unlike, say, teammate Luke Scott, who bikes as well, but says,

I have an Infiniti QX 56 — it’s a large SUV… I get about 14 to 18 miles per gallon, but I’ve saved hundreds of dollars just from biking.. … The gas prices are so absurd that for some people, they make enough money just to drive to work.

So Scott does it to save, uh, money. Not, say, the planet. And he still has a preposterous vehicle which he drove all the time when he played for the Astros. Nonethewho, it’s still refreshing to see that Guthrie’s had a positive impact on some of his teammates, when the sight of Cadillac Escalades streaming towards stadium parking spaces is the norm. Christ almighty, Escalades. I wish I could pull the banana in the tail pipe stunt whenever I see these in the city. If you own a car that gets under 13 miles per gallon, you should have to pay environmental taxes. And if you own a non-hybrid light truck in the city and conduct no business outside of said city, you should have to, like, give massages to the homeless twice a week. Or eat a boiled foot.

Guthrie participated in and spoke at National Bike to Work Day back in May with the mayor of Baltimore.
Ooooh, sidebar (and The Wire spoiler): The mayor of Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, was city council president and succeeded Martin O’Malley; O’Malley jumped from the council to the mayor’s office, and used Baltimore as a stepping stone for Annapolis’s gubernatorial seat. Council president Naresse Campbell on The Wire was also intent on the mayor’s office, and succeeded Tommy Carcetti after he became governor. Yes, both Campbell and Carcetti were (presciently) based on their real-life counterparts. Nobody’s based on Jeremy Guthrie in The Wire. Well, maybe Wee-bey. No, not Wee-bey.

Guthrie’s story is also kinda interesting; he was a (bad) pitcher during his freshman year at BYU, went on a two-year Mormon mission in Spain, transferred to Stanford, and became a first-round pick for the Indians. But regardless of tithing to golden plates, here’s a big hurrah for Jeremy Guthrie.

Pumpkin Pie Traynor?

Ok, I’m a Johnny-Come-Lately here on this topic, but my calendar’s been a bit off. In light of all the holiday festivities, here’s a collection of the Best Thanksgiving-Themed Players. Notice that there’s no middle infield. See, I imagine that Pie and Stuffy have the horizontal range to make it work. Also, teams would be so freaked out about playing a collection of zombie All-Stars (Berryhill and Bean not withstanding), that they wouldn’t be able to hit. You know, what with the fear of brains being eaten if they reach base.

1B: Stuffy McInnis
Between 1921 and 1922, McInnis went 1700 fielding chances without making an error. That’s ridiculous. McInnis also posted a lifetime .307 batting average and won four World Series with three different teams.

3B: Pie Traynor
The late 1920s Pirates were really, really good. Well, their offense was: Paul and Lloyd Waner, Pie Traynor, and Kiki Cuyler (before he was traded to the Cubs to give Lloyd a starting job). Christ, what an outfield Big and Little Poison with Cuyler would’ve been.

Anyway, Pie Traynor was a steady star, if never the driving force on Pittsburgh. Sort of like the Betty White on Golden Girls. Traynor finished in the top 15 of MVP voting eight times – but six of those times he was behind at least one other teammate. He only slugged above .500 once (1930, ironically the year that the NL discontinued the MVP award – though the BBWAA took over from thereon out). But at the very least, he’s a delicious dessert at the hot corner.

By the way, I was just looking at walks and strikeouts totals from the late ‘20s and the current era. In 1998, the Yankees – arguably the best team of the past two decades – saw their offense tally 653 walks and 1025 strikeouts. In 1928, only five of the 16 MLB teams had more strikeouts than walks. And of these, only one had a delta larger than 50. Oddly, the aggregate OBPs of the American League teams in 1998 and 1928 had just a four point difference (.340 vs. .344). Of course, the aggregate OBPs go up and down depending on whether the era was pitcher-favorable (late ‘60s) or batter-favorable (‘90s, et al). But maybe more interesting was the stolen base efficacy; in 1928, the AL had an aggregate stolen base percentage of 59%. That’s awful. In 1998, the AL had an aggregate stolen base percentage of 68.9%.

C: Damon Berryhill
Man, I really thought I had a good story about Berryhill, but I don’t. I’ll just make fun of the fact that he sounds like he should be a junior at some Connecticut boarding school getting beaten up for always asking the teacher if the essay is due tomorrow. That or a porn star.

LF: Bill Bean
The other one. This one doesn’t have an “e” at the end of his name. And never became a general manager. And is gay. In 1999, Bean became only the second – astounding, really – professional baseball player to come out of the closet, after Glenn Burke (who deserves a movie made about his life – jeeeeez, he had it tough). Bean’s best year in the majors, 1993, saw him hit five homers for the Padres. Two years later, at the age of 31, he packed it in, despite very good numbers in AAA. In 2003, Bean wrote a well-received chronicle of his life as a closeted athlete called Going the Other Way. There are four blurbs on the back of the book: Jim Bouton (author of the best autobiographical baseball book in Ball Four); Richard Greenberg (playwright of Take Me Out, which envisions a star gay ballplayer); Peter Lefcourt (television writer and author of The Dreyfuss Affair, a satire about a gay ballplayer); and Brad Ausmus! The only then-active ballplayer! Who’s Jewish in a very Christian – often evangelical – dominated sport.

By the way, Bean now restores vintage houses in Miami Beach. Anybody need work done?

CF: Turkey Stearnes
Best known in a Detroit Stars uniform, he played for five teams in the Negro Leagues, and had a stance and running motion more maligned than Al Simmons and Honus Wagner put together. The best Thanksgiving name for the best player on the team, Stearnes won six or seven home run titles, three batting titles, and in 1932 what the Negro Leagues Players’ Association website calls the “Quadruple Crown” which refers to leading the league in homers, doubles, triples, and stolen bases. I’m not convinced those are the stats that should go into the Quadruple Crown, but that all makes for a lethal combination of power and speed. And he batted fourth! What’s he doing stealing all those bases in that spot? According to the Baseball Library (for which I worked back in the day), “Research confirms that he had a .350 career batting average, a .664 slugging average, and 172 home runs in 750 games.”

Well, that number could also be 183. And he was nicknamed Turkey either because of the way he ran (arms flapping) or because of his weird distended stomach when he was a child. He was quiet, subdued, and supposedly took his bat to bed with him. Though I think that’s a rumor of every great hitter who played pre-1950. This is a good article about him, including the tidbit that he married pitcher Double Duty Radcliffe’s niece. Cool.

RF: Gavvy Cravath
In 1913, the Phillies outfielder led the NL in slugging, OPS, total bases, homers, RBIs, runs created, and hits. He finished second in MVP voting to Brooklyn first baseman Jake Daubert, who led the league in batting average, with a .350 mark. Second in the league? Cactus Gavvy, with a .340 mark. Cravath destroyed the NL that year. I mean, really now. Oh, he’s in the Thanksgiving lineup because for most of my childhood I thought his name was Gravy.

UTIL: Squanto Wilson
Yeah, you heard me. This Bowdoin grad’s real name was George Francis, but they called him Squanto, the name of the Patuxet Indian who showed the Pilgrims how to plant crops during the winter of 1619. Wilson played five games in 1911 and one game in 1914. He batted .188 (all singles), and was actually a catcher in his first “season” with the Tigers.

SP: Chief Bender
Of all the “chiefs” in baseball – and there are 28 of them (though Freddy Garcia’s and Chad Cordero’s nicknames don’t have the same racial overtones that were afforded to the Native Americans of the early 20^th century) – this one was the best, and the only Hall of Famer. Bender was also the first Minnesotan elected to the Hall of Fame, was a 19-year-old Ojibwe when he first broke into the bigs, and went to the same weird Indian-assimilating school (Carlisle Indian Industrial School) that Jim Thorpe did.

RP: Hot Potato Luke Hamlin
Hamlin, nicknamed Hot Potato because he juggled the ball on the mound before pitching, won 20 games in 1939, which accounted for more than a quarter of his lifetime wins (73). He was pretty much dreadful every other year, including one game in 1944 with the A’s, when he gave up 19 hits but still recorded a complete game against the Yanks. He lost that one 14-0.

And here’s something else:
LUKE Hamlin played with Pee Wee Reese who played with Don Drysdale who played with Bill Buckner who played with Roger Clemens who played with JOBA Chamberlain.
Yes? No? Forget it.

Manager: Yam Yaryan
Nineteen years after he played (with minimal success) in the majors, Yaryan was still playing the minors, and batting over .300 – as a 48-year-old catcher-manager for the Brewton Millers in the low Class-D Florida-Alabama League. Three years earlier, he won the home run title in the same division.

Anybody going to a ballgame next year?

In January 2002, Chan Ho Park was coming off a career year with the Dodgers, sporting a 1.17 WHIP, 218 Ks in 234 IP, and an All-Star appearance. Despite the preposterously large home/away difference in Park’s ERA and batters’ SLG, not to mention Park’s second-half downturn, and the fact that he was coming off five straight years of 192+ innings pitched, the Texas Rangers awarded him with a five-year deal for $65 million.

The following is a list of pitchers who have or had been given albatrossy contracts similar to Park: Mike Hampton (signed Dec 2000, Colorado Rockies, $121 million / 8 years); Denny Neagle (Ibid to both, $51 million / 5 years); Carl Pavano (Signed Dec 2004, New York Yankees, $39.95 million / 4 years); Barry Zito (Signed Dec. 2006, San Francisco Giants, $126 million, 7 years).

Here’s the difference with Park’s contract, and why I’m bringing it up now. In January 2002, while Wall Street was making a moderate recovery from the terrorist attacks of four months prior, indicators were not rosily optimistic (and for good reason, considering the upcoming recession, based largely on those attacks, the dot-com burst, and all those Enron/Tyco/ImClone type dealies that questioned accountability).

So on September 30, 2008, the Cardinals signed a fairly solid #3 pitcher, Kyle Lohse, to a four-year, $41 million contract. This was after all economic indicators showed that a big pile of corn-ridden poo was heading towards the fan. In the three weeks before the signing, Lehman Bros. had filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold, AIG was in the middle of getting $85 billion from the government, Goldman Sachs became a bank holding company, WaMu was sold to Chase, and it was pretty damn clear to most four-year-olds that the economy was in the tank for the foreseeable future.

So, what the hell?

A story we may hear shoved down our throats over the next two months is how sports, movies, and the entertainment industry by-and-large (sorry, megamarket Broadway crap) are recession-proof; that in the wake of the Depression and numerous recessions, people will keep streaming into baseball stadiums. These articles will be written hand-in-hand as teams get into bidding wars to hand out record contracts to C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and to a lesser extent, Derek Lowe and Brad Penny.

There have already been a handful of pieces arguing the veracity of baseball’s ability to withstand economic downturns. Tim Marchman, writing in the beginning of this year in the late New York Sun, argued that not only did baseball have a plethora of revenue streams that would shield it from monetary failure, but that in recessions of the past, baseball attendances didn’t suffer:

In 1948, 16 teams drew a total of 21 million fans, an average of 1.3 million per team. In November, the economy tipped into a recession that lasted until October of the next year. During 1949, attendance held steady at 1.26 million per team. These are figures baseball didn’t regularly exceed for another 40 years, until the 1978 expansion led to great gains in popularity in the teeth of yet more negative growth: In 1980, during a recession that lasted from January until July, attendance rose from 1979’s 1.6 million fans per team to 1.7 million. Every team in the National League drew at least a million fans that year.

Examples abound. In 1969, the 24 teams drew 1.15 million fans per team. During a recession that began that December, and lasted until November 1970, attendance increased to 1.25 million per team. More recently in 2000, baseball set a new attendance record at 73 million; the next year, despite a meltdown in technology stocks, it drew 73 million again.

Craig Calcaterra at ShysterBall tepidly rebukes Marchman’s principle, noting that it takes a year for GDP recessions to have effects on the population’s wages and mindsets: 

1948-49 Recession
pre-recession attendance (1948): 20,938,388
recession year attendance (1949): 20,215,365
post-recession year one attendance: (1950): 17,462,977*
post-recession year two attendance: (1951): 16,126,676*

2001 Recession
Pre-recession attendance (2000): 72,702,420
Recession year attendance (2001): 72,567,108
Post recession year one attendance (2002): 67,944,389
Post recession year two attendance (2003): 67,630,052

I’m not suggesting the attendance decline in these two examples was caused by post-recession ennui. Indeed, in each example there were factors — the Korean War and September 11th/Afghanistan/Iraq War — which may have contributed to people turning their attention to things other than baseball in the ensuing years. That said, none of these events had such a great impact that they themselves led to recessions, so we shouldn’t overstate their impact on baseball attendance.

Calcaterra agreed with Marchman re: “(a) season tickets are purchased by richer, more recession-resistant folks; and (b) during recessions, sports and entertainment are often the only things keeping folks away from the ledge.” But he also noted that the different revenue streams MLB has (MLB.tv, merchandise, etc) are also more passive forms of activity, and therefore easier to discard.

A counter-argument came this summer from Peter Bernstein in ESPN the Magazine (which, by the way, is the print nomenclature parallel to like Cedric the Entertainer. Really? This is a magazine, not a tv network? At least with CedricTE it’s part of his appeal. With the magazine I want to eat an old man’s foot whenever I hear a commercial announcer call it as such). Apologies. Back to Bernstein, who shows the economic disparity between average hourly wages of blue-collar workers and ticket prices over the last 17 years:

Earnings versus ticket costs
Year	Avg. MLB Tkt. Price	Avg. Hourly Earnings
1991	$8.64	$10.52
2001	$18.99	$14.55
2008	$25.40	$18.01

Since 2001, the average worker has fallen further behind and their average hourly earnings are now 29 percent less than the average cost of a ticket.

Bernstein also makes the point that “since going to 30 teams in 1998, MLB attendance has grown an average of just one percent per year. The sport has been making money not by drawing a lot more fans, but by drawing different fans-businesses that are willing and able to pay top dollar to have their place at the ballpark.”

That may be so, but as Marchman and Calcaterra pointed out, there are different revenue streams for teams, and gate receipts are just a portion of that.

Over at the Biz of Baseball, Maury Brown essentially repudiates Calcaterra’s point of easily-discarded other profit outlets, by not worrying about attendance revenue: 

The possible difference in economic downturns in the past and its impacts on baseball as an entertainment option may be that MLB’s increased development of television and the internet products provide new outlets for fans, and therefore, provide a stronger revenue stream for MLB than in the past. If you see that the cost of going to a game is too much, perhaps taking in MLB.TV, Extra Innings, or the upcoming MLB Channel provides fans a way to connects where those options were either not available, or not yet fully utilized during the last recession.

A recession will most likely slow growth for baseball, but at this point, with a number of teams adding new stadiums and the aforementioned MLB Channel coming online in ‘09, the odds seem long at this point for a downturn for MLB’s revenues.

Lastly, MLB has at least one serious trump card, should they be faced with numbers that are not to their liking. Placing MLBAM as an IPO would garner a massive cash infusion to MLB. In 2000, MLBAM was said to be worth approximately $2 billion. There’s little doubting that it would be worth more now.

Whew. Ok. That’s a lot to take in. Here are some questions: 1) Will teams suffer economically over the next few years? 2) And even if they don’t think they will, how many teams are going to make a bad business decision this offseason? 3) And does signing a pitcher for two years too many for too much money count as a bad decision?

Here are some thoughts to said questions:

1) I don’t see how, even with those different revenue streams, professional sports franchises won’t take a hit much like every other industry in America.

In the Chan Ho Park thing from way above, the Rangers didn’t get hurt so much. Sure, that contract along with the megadeal A-Rod walked in with were boondoggles that Texas decided to take a step back from. Player expenses (salaries, benefits, and bonuses) for Texas 2001-06:

2001: $76 million
2002: $95 m
2003: $108m
2004: $106m
2005: $81m
2006: $73m

As Texas recovered from those two big contracts, their payroll recouped and took a breather before beginning the climb towards nine digits again. But the overall health of the franchise was fine, thanks to market share and brand management.

But that all still depends on people and companies willing to pay for things. Like jerseys. Or advertising. As this Wall Street Journal article reports, the consumer price index dropped 1% in October, the highest monthly drop ever, consumer spending plummeted 1%, nobody’s building houses, and it’s probably going to be a historically-weak Christmas season, and unemployment will most likely reach at least 8% next year.

Again, this may not matter for the season-ticket holders, but it will matter for lots and lots of fans who are less likely to go to games, sign up for MLB.tv, or buy merch, here or in England/Japan/Italy. Or, say, companies that used to be fine throwing around payments for naming rights a la CitiField may not be doing much.

By the way, one of the things that wasn’t really taken into consideration in the articles – and I’m surprised, actually – is the total cost amount for a family of four to go to a ballgame as compared to real wages between previous recessions and now. The “suburb” ballparks that Chavez Ravine’s Dodger Stadium ushered in – by which I mean ballparks that people are more apt to drive to – are more plentiful now than they were in the early ’30s and late ’40s. Between parking and inflated concessions, I’d imagine (can’t say for sure) that the real cost of attending a three-hour long baseball game is much higher now than it ever was, in accordance with workers’ wages.)

2) Many teams will make bad decisions. If baseball history has proven anything, it’s that team ownership/front offices are slow to the pickup. The MLB entity may be at the forefront of marketing and technology, but the way the businesses are run are not. And yes, bidding wars, shortsightedness, and failure to adapt will ensure that Derek Lowe is for some reason getting a four- or five-year contract somewhere, like in Chicago.

3) And no, those pitcher contracts are not going to be bank-breaking bad decisions, because Chicago, New York1 and New York2, and Boston will be able to take the hit when Fatty Sabathia is rolling around in his own inflated ERA juices in 2011, unable to move his arm past joystick control. Milwaukee, despite its “attempt” at offering a contract, is not really in the hunt for C.C.

 
Major League Baseball as an entity will be fine, of course. Now, will Kansas City be unable to cope with the $24 million they still owe Jose Guillen? That’s a better question.