singapore sox fan: the red sox from half the world away

Oakland sold

So the Oakland As are sold. Does that mean they'll become the San Francisco Athletics of Oakland?

More seriously, former owner Steve Schott seems to have liked to keep Oakland lean, and continued insisting on the small market nature of the As. He thought it brought out the creativity in Beane or something. Or as Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle put it:

Schott, we know, is a profoundly energetic, even Yorkian, money-minder. He has maintained the laughable fiction that he and Ken Hofmann bought the A's for $85 million, a figure which is at least a third too high, and that they just barely scrape by every year, which is monumentally false. They do swell, year in and year out. (Link)

So now, with a new owner, Billy Beane might have a bit more to play with. Although some people think that Beane works best when forced with constraints - see Tyler Belszinski's comment that the financial constraints will stay here - the idea of Oakland with more money is scary to me.

Of course, Beane's contract is void if Schott sells the team or moves from Oakland.

Tangential link: Fast Company on "How to Play Beane Ball"

Analyse my fantasy teams! #1

I'm reading James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, which talks about how the combined knowledge of people is often better than the thinking of any one expert. So I figured, as a fantasy baseball rookie, I might as well open my teams up for public comments and/or ridicule and gain some knowledge that way.

Here's my first team. Keeper league, roto, 5x5 scoring categories, 16 teams.

C - Javy Lopez
1B - Carlos Delgado
2B - Julio Lugo
3B - Adrian Beltre
SS - Khalil Greene
OF - JD Drew
OF - Aaron Rowand
OF - Jason Lane
Util - Reggie Sanders
Bench - Pedro Feliz
Bench - Aaron Miles
Bench - Brandon Inge

SP - Pedro Martinez
SP - Matt Clement
RP - Armando Benitez
RP - Bob Wickman
P - Brett Tomko
P - Jake Westbrook
P - Scott Kazmir
Bench - Ryan Dempster
Bench - Ugueth Urbina (for when Troy Percival goes down)

Kim to the Rockies

So B. H. Kim is traded to the Rockies, for Charles Johnson (who will probably move on to the Tropicana Field Retirement Home for Aged Ballplayers) and Chris Narveson. Best of luck to a man who once displayed inordinate amounts of talent - all the way until the 2004 season. I know Colorado is where pitchers go to die, but everyone knows that, so the expectations are really low, which might be good for Kim. With any luck, he'll turn out to be a bizarro pitcher, with pitches that break in thin air and not at sea level. Good deal for the Rockies, who have nothing but upside to gain.

Mike Myers returns to the Sox

He's back!

Rosebud

Completely non-Sox related, but Zippy the Pinhead today commemorates the Rosebud Diner (from agilitynut's pictures of Massachusetts diners). I love diners. Mmm.

Lupica on Clemens and steroids

I normally like Mike Lupica, but this is an atrocious column, particularly the harsh words for Roger Clemens on the basis of Clemens' comments on Vioxx.

Bonds will be back to living in the real world, ... the one where your numbers go down as you get older and not up. Unless you're a witch.

To now, Roger Clemens hasn't existed in that world, either. ... Clemens better understand he's a suspect now because he's gotten stronger as he's gotten older the way Barry Bonds has, his pitching accomplishments as dramatic in their own way as Bonds' prodigious home run numbers.

Clemens is a suspect now partly because people like Lupica bandy around claims of his increased strength in the press without necessarily justifying it. Most stats seem to indicate that Clemens has not been increasingly strong, even if his most recent season was very impresive for a 41-year-old. Clemens' ERA+ for the last few years has been 97, 137, 128, 101, 112, 145. That's 3 fairly ho-hum seasons, and 3 good ones. Only once over the last six seasons (i.e. the seasons after he turned 35) has he pitched above his career ERA+ of 141. In none of those seasons did he K more than his career average of 229. In none of those seasons did he pitch more than his career average of 238 2/3 innings. His K/9 rates dropped, albeit by only a minuscule amount (career K/9: 9.59; last 6 years, 9.55). True, he has two Cy Youngs in that period, but he had five Cys before that period and an MVP award.

So his late-career pitching hardly shows him getting "stronger as he's gotten older". You could argue that Clemens might have taken something to make the usual age-related declines less steep, I suppose, but what we seen in Clemens is a slight decline from a very high peak, not a Bonds-like surge of awesomeness in his dotage.

Admittedly, even the original Selena Roberts article on Clemens and Vioxx noted that Clemens' mention of Vioxx "was either a candid admission by a renowned pitcher about his fragile age or a kind of masking agent for prior use of steroids", but at least Roberts turned it into a comment on the current state of affairs in baseball, rather than an implied accusation.

The sad thing is, now everyone who has a sudden fall-off in performance at a late age is a suspect these days. Since I'm ornery, unless anything else happens to make me change my mind, I'll be happy to give Rajah the benefit of the doubt. Heck, he's 41. His performance could fall off the cliff any time for any number of reasons, the way Willie Mays dropped 50 OPS points from his age 41 season to that final creaky age 42 one. (Mays stats)

In David Pinto's musing on whether you can count Vioxx as a "performance enhancer", insofar as it helped Clemens pitch every five days, there's this interesting comment:

Clemens has made this statement [on Vioxx] after the FDA commission that was looking into COX-2 inhibitors recommended that Vioxx be put back on the market, and Merck has said they may do so.
It's likely that during this season, Vioxx will be available again, and Clemens should know this. So why set himself up with an excuse that might evaporate in a month?

Makes sense to me. I mean, if Clemens was using and was worried about being caught, he could've just retired, an idea which he's been flirting with for a while now anyway.

The MVP Baseball soundtrack

Playing MVP Baseball, I was struck by the quality of the backing soundtrack. I'm not much of a gamer, so while I've heard about bands using games as a new means of getting exposure I've never really experienced it. The High Speed Scene's "The IROC-Z Song" is stuck on repeat in my head, and it was a really nice surprise to hear some songs I really like: Louis XIV's "Finding Out True Love Is Blind", ... And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead's "Let It Dive".

Of course, these songs seem unlikely to be the actual songs played when real players step to the plate or charge out of the bullpen (Rivera has Metallica, Hoffman has AC/DC, Foulke has Danzig)... but they form a higher-quality mix.

New Sox lineup

So Francona now is going to put Nixon second against righties, instead of Bellhorn. That's an interesting strategy - basically Mueller at #8, Bellhorn at #9, and Damon at #1 form the wrap-around on-base machine, and then Nixon-Manny-Ortiz bring in the runs. I suppose this way if you want to bring in a lefty against Damon and Nixon, the lefty has to either tough it out against Manny if you want him to get to Ortiz, or sit down for a righty.

None of your beeswax

Of course, one reason real baseball is such a joy as opposed to virtual baseball is that bizarre incidents such as former Sox player Darren Oliver getting attacked by bees happen only in real baseball.

"It seemed like wherever anybody went, a swarm of them popped up," Colorado catcher J.D. Closser said.

Must be the first time Oliver managed to get a whole series of pop ups. I also liked this line:

The bees then moved to the first base area in the next half-inning, where the Rockies' Todd Helton swatted them away.

Typical Helton, solves everything by mashing.

MVP Baseball 2005

There's a reason posts have become a bit infrequent over the last few days. It's called MVP Baseball 2005. Gosh darn if the game ain't addictive. Keyboard controls are awful though. The uppercut swing key is the same as stealing second base, which caused a lot of my runners to get thrown out stupidly. And you can't control how much of a lead your runners have, or execute a pickoff. How insidious - now I have to buy a gamepad controller.

Slideshows

As we lead up to the season, here's some memories of last season... 2004 ALCS and WS slideshows, set to the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight" and Springsteen's "The Rising" respectively. I've seen them before, but thanks to the people at Stocky Dog Shirts for pointing the site out...

Boycott Fever Pitch

Some people are asking that you boycott Fever Pitch. I think people are just peeved that Fallon got to go on the field after Game 4 ended.

Clemens's child carelessly causes car calamity

Someone has stolen Roger Clemens' 300th-win Hummer. He gave it to one of the K-kids to drive to school, and Koby left it unlocked.

He began letting Koby Clemens drive the orange Hummer to school after he signed a letter of intent last November to play baseball for the University of Texas, whose colors are burnt orange and white. Before that, Koby drove a black Hummer to school.

Two thoughts: 1. How hard is it to miss an ORANGE Hummer? 2. High school boys really shouldn't be getting Hummers. As for lower-case-'h' hummers...

Edit: Hummer found. No word on whether the person who tipped the police off will receive the award. Of course, they could be evil and say, "You have received as a reward $10000... $10000 worth of Debbie Clemens products, to be specific."

Rob Neyer interview

Over at Royal Rooters, "Cambridge" interviews Rob Neyer. This bit on Mark Fidrych struck me, since it repeats something Neyer said in his book on baseball lineups:

It seems that Fidrych was one of the very rare pitchers who can thrive with a low strikeout rate, due to an ability to keep the ball down nearly all the time. A bit like Brandon Webb, but with better control. Do I think Fidrych would have been a Cy Young candidate every year? No. But I do think he’d have been a good or excellent major league pitcher for at least a few more years.

I do believe that there're some pitchers who can pitch well despite low K/9 rates. Presumably if your ball sinks to a level where your G/F ratios are consistently ridiculous (above 3?) you'd fall into this category...

Blaine beauty

So Adam Hyzdu gets traded for Blaine Neal. I'm sorry, but I can't look at the name Blaine without thinking of that chain of beauty schools. Funny that most of the Neal pics that come from a Google image search are of his fight with the ump last year. Anyway, the deal seems to make sense: Hyzdu and Stern give us a glut of outfielders and Hyzdu with the Sox would be a backup's backup, while the Padres have an amazing bullpen in Linebrink and Otsuka and probably need more help in the OF department. And clearly Theo Epstein remains connected to Kevin Towers from his days in San Diego...

New town

Been devouring all the season previews - bought the Lindy's and Athlon guides while lounging around the Detroit airport to while the time away - and I gotta say, it still looks weird to see the abbreviations WAS and LAA. The WaPo had a good article on former Washington Senator Frank Howard, who had one of my favourite nicknames in a sport rife with good ones - the Capitol Punisher. Here's his thoughts on baseball returning to DC, including this bit on Ted Williams as a manager:

"Awww, he was one of the most electric, charismatic guys I ever met in my life," Howard says. "You know, he's one of the true gods of baseball."
He recalls his third day in training camp that '69 season, when word came Williams wanted to see him in the clubhouse office. "I knocked on the door and said, 'Skip, ya wanna see me?'

"He said, 'Yeah, yeah, come on in here, bush.' He called everybody 'bush.' Bush leaguer, ya know. He said, 'Can you tell me how a guy can hit 44 home runs and only get 48 bases on balls?'"

Who knew Ted Williams was a proto-Moneyball manager?

Opening Day starter

I'm typing this from the Detroit area Best Western thanks to being bumped off the plane back to Singapore (fortunately Northwestern gave me a nice travel voucher for my pains, although really couldn't they come up with a better hotel?)... pity the season isn't on, otherwise I might take the pains to see Comerica.

Anyway, it took me a while to figure out from Gordon Edes' tortuous syntax in his opening paragraph that David Wells is starting the season opener, with Tim Wakefield starting the home opener. Wakefield's a great choice for the home opener, having been with the Sox forever, but Wells? Hmm. The idea of using Wells to start the season against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium is immensely entertaining, a sort of giant screw-you to Steinbrenner, but I really would've liked to see Arroyo, the only other available starter who was in the 2004 rotation, take the start. Arroyo pitching to A-Rod seems to start things off... of course, Francona chooses to let actual baseball decisions get in the way, dagnabit:

Francona said a factor in his decision was his desire to have Arroyo make his first start against the Blue Jays in what will be Toronto's home opener April 8. "One of his best games of the year last year was against Toronto," Francona said, referring to the May 15 start in which Arroyo allowed just three hits in eight scoreless innings. (Boston Globe)

Oh, and the Sox lost to Baltimore 8-0... what is it with the Orioles and their Sox-bashing?

Take me out to the ball game

Pierce College rents out a baseball field for porn video:

Spice spokesman Scott Barton described the video as "provocative, playful, sexy and fun."

"It was baseball-themed," he said. "There were two teams - nine women and nine men - playing baseball, who were provocatively dressed."

Gives new meaning to the phrase "bases on balls"...

Fantasy setbacks

Man, I thought my fantasy team had dodged some bullets when Bonds was out, as were Prior and Wood (thanks to the Dusty Baker programme for abusing young pitchers, apparently) after they were drafted... then Reggie Sanders gets appendicitis. Ah, such is life. Here's hoping J.D. Drew has his second healthy season in a row...

Queer Eye for the Center Fielder

Johnny Damon poses for Sox wives and girlfriends after his Queer Eye makeover - so, they keep his hair and put him in pinstriped pants? Pinstripes?? That's so 2000...

Yahoo! News has a slideshow of the made over players.

The steroid hearings

Watching the steroid hearings, one phrase comes to mind: witch hunt. Why only baseball players? If you wanted to eliminate performance enhancing drugs, why not also call up track and field players? So Canseco releases Juiced, and so suddenly Congress feels it needs to step in with oversight of baseball?

McGwire's performance was bad, but really, the whole idea is terrible. And on Sportscenter, Buster Olney was complaining that Selig has "somehow" become the target instead of Fehr - hey, MLB benefited from the McGwire-Sosa summer of 1998, I'm tired of hearing that it's only the players who're culpable.

Sigh. Can't wait till teams actually play ball.

RIP Monster

RIP Dick Radatz... among Boston's greatest ever relievers.

St Patrick's Day

Apologies for the lack of updates... was lounging away in Chicago, land of the dyed-green river. Happy St Patrick's Day one and all!

Also: not much time to write a full post, but the congressional hearings on steroids seem like grandstanding to me.

Nomar article

Great article on Nomar from Howard Bryant. I really don't understand why the Boston media often feels it has to villify superstars who get traded away - perhaps he was sulky, perhaps he wasn't - does that mean he was an utterly awful person? Here's Nomar on the Boston fans:

"There will always be a place for them there. Just because I'm not there doesn't mean I'll forget them. They were out there on my birthday, singing 'Happy Birthday.' Not just once, but every year. It was incredible. How many other players does that happen to?"

In the article, Nomar also points out that he did want the ring:

"I was saying, 'Wait a minute. Time out.' Are you kidding me?'' he said of the Red Sox ring flap. "I was so happy for those guys. And I couldn't tell you how I felt when the guy calls me and asked me for my ring size. My ring size? I mean, that was awesome. I got all excited, because I didn't even know my ring size."

The sad thing is because the initial idea - that he didn't want the ring - has already been planted, a cynic could now say this is just PR - even though the original report was a hoax.

Parity in baseball

Jayson Stark has a column on a point I made a while back: for all the complaints about the Yankees' budget and so on, there really is parity in baseball right now.

How many teams are truly hopeless? It's a list that's shorter than David Eckstein.

It could be as few as four teams. It might be as many as eight. But six is more like it. And that's a long ways from two-thirds, in anybody's math book.

To get a clearer picture, we did a recent scout-and-GM survey on this. Shockingly, only four teams – the Rockies, Royals, Pirates and Devil Rays – got a vote from all six of the people we polled.

Queer Eye for the Sox Guys

News I missed while travelling:

Rather than have him face the Fab Five from Bravo's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'' all by his lonesome, Kevin Millar's teammates have decided to help him out. Not only will Millar get a makeover, but Bill Mueller, Tim Wakefield, Doug Mirabelli, Varitek and yes, Damon will also participate. Carson Kressley, the most fabulous of the show's five hosts, will don a special pink Red Sox jersey to help him focus on his duties. (Boston Herald, link via Empyreal Environs)

All those Sox players invited, and Carson doesn't deal with the Arroyo cornrows?

Indiana Sox Fan

I'm temporarily in Indiana, for the next 10 days or so, so I apologise, the "Red Sox from half the world away" tag isn't quite true at the moment.

Meanwhile, good luck to Rick Ankiel, who wants to become an outfielder. I can't forget his meltdown - so bizarre. Wouldn't he have more value trying to be a Brooks Kieschnick / Dave McCarty two-way player though?

City of Champions

Random piece of trivia: the 2004 Red Sox are the 4th team that trains in Fort Myers to win the World Series, joining the 1960 Pirates, the 1985 Royals and the 1991 Twins... 3 underdogs (with the 60s Pirates perhaps the most unlikely winner ever) in 3 great World Series, and then the offensive juggernaut that was the 2004 Sox, who, while not underdogs, did have to come back from 0-3 down. Something in the air.

The farm system

Since I've been talking about Hanley Ramirez, I should note that John Sickels has been rating the Sox prospects.

Is Pedro the greatest pitcher ever?

Over at Sons of Sam Horn, there's a discussion going on as to whether Pedro Martinez is the greatest pitcher ever. Clearly in terms of career longevity, the case right now would be much stronger for Clemens, Lefty Grove, and Walter Johnson - a lot depends on how Pedro's next 8 years or so go. But was his peak the greatest peak anyone's ever seen?

Great 5-year stretches: Pedro 1999-2003, Maddux 1994-1998, Clemens 1986-1990, Koufax 1962-1966, Grove 1928-1932. (And yes, that excludes Cy years for Pedro, Maddux, and Clemens.) I would argue that of that group, Pedro's peak - even taking into account an injury-shortened 2001 - is the strongest of the lot. The utter ability to dominate a league in an era of offensive explosion with a huge arsenal of pitches was just stunning. The flameballing Pedro was fun to watch, but when he became the wiser Pedro, when he realised he could throw any of his pitches over on demand and used that fact to toy with batters... that was on another plane of pitching. 1999 and 2000 may be the two best seasons ever pitched.

Here's an interesting bit on Pedro on mechanics:

"Every time a pitcher throws on a mound," he said, "I'm watching. I want to see what they're doing. Both good and bad. I try to learn something and put it in play.

"Like once I was watching Greg Maddux, the master of control, and how straight up he holds his head when he looks into the batter. I realized that sometimes I tilted my head to the left a bit." He demonstrates for me. "And you'd be amazed what that does to your mechanics.

"If you keep your head quiet," he added, his eyes steady and hard, "you land softly."

He said he used to study Roger Clemens every chance he could. "He has the best mechanics," Martinez said. "The best." (Times Herald-Record)

The rest of that article is about the wonder of seeing Pedro pitch in person.

Sox 5, Phillies 4: Three times the pleasure

Thanks to its afternoon timing, I only managed to catch an inning of this game, the 6th, but I suppose I got lucky in choosing the best possible inning to watch. Hanley Ramirez's triple play was awesome, can't remember the last one I saw. That's the kind of play that makes people sit up and take notice of a prospect, although of course every Sox fan should already know about Hanley by now.

"As soon as we got the third out, [Youklis] came to me on the bench, threw the ball to me and gave me a hug," said Ramirez.

Oh dear. Will the Sox demand the ball back?

And the 4-run bottom of the 6th was good too - Petagine looks like he has a nice stroke, sweet swing he had for that 2-run single.

The 80s and the Hall of Fame

Just read a long article on Doubleswitch.com on how the 80s are being cruelly shafted in the Hall of Fame (thanks to Batter's Box, a Blue Jays blog which pointed it out). The ignoring of the 80s is one of my favourite points to make about the Hall, second only to the Hall's ritual blindness to 2Bs and 3Bs. The writer points out that he would vote for Alan Trammell and Bert Blyleven, both of whom are Hall of Famers in my book.

I think the 80s are screwed partly by the transition to the offensive explosion of the 1990s: Trammell was a great shortstop and good hitter, but on the cusp of a period in which great shortstops became sluggers (Nomar, A-Rod, even Jeter). And right on cue, the latest Gammons column has a quote from Tony La Russa supporting Trammell for the Hall -

"No question," La Russa said, "it's Alan Trammell. He did everything perfectly. He could and would hit anywhere in the order because all he cared about was winning. How he's not in the Hall of Fame is a mystery." (Link)

I also wonder, now that 3B has suddenly seen some superstars - Scott Rolen, A-Rod - as well as some offensive forces like Mora (until Sosa came on board, Baltimore's power looked like it was going to come from Mora, Tejada, and Javy Lopez - a 3B, SS, and C - bizarre), will the most underrepresented position in the Hall of Fame get some love in the future? Seems like while the Hall takes a fairly lenient approach with many of the rest of the positions, you're not getting in as a third baseman unless you play like Schmidt, Brett, or Boggs. Second basemen and catchers are also similarly screwed.

Oh well. I'll develop these thoughts further, but to close on the 80s - I think Tim Raines will get screwed over in the Hall votes partly because he played in the obscurity of Montreal and partly because he was one of the greatest leadoff men of all time, perhaps the best the NL ever had, but he had the misfortune to play at the same time as Rickey.

Say it ain't so, Joe

Joe Torre talks about the Sox-Yankees rivalry and how last year's win changed the tenor of the rivalry, and then invokes the c-word:

"I'm curious to see, every year the pressure seemed to mount because that 1918 was further back in time," Torre said Friday before the Yankees played Pittsburgh. "Now that’s not an issue anymore, I’m curious because The Curse is not the motivating factor." (Link)

Now, as an old-timer in the game, Torre must surely have known that no one talked about a curse - and certainly not a Curse with a capital C - surrounding the Sox until about 1986, as Glenn Stout's research has shown. So was he talking about only recent history, or is human memory fallible like that, with the proliferation of 'Curse' talk in the stream of conversational chatter making him think there's always been talk of a curse?

Yankees continued their losing streak against the Pirates, incidentally. When was the last time they won a game? Oh yeah, sometime in October.

Sox 4, Twins 3: Kim possible?

Spring is here, and the games are starting... and I forgot to renew my MLB.tv subscription! So until I settle that, everything I'll write about the Spring Training games will have to be based on reports. It's good to hear that Kim's throwing well. I always figured that while you don't play someone just because you paid a lot for him - standard sunk costs - trading him at the nadir of his value isn't much use either. Francona had these words to say:

"Nobody has given up on him - or remotely given up on him - because of what he can do," [Francona] told the media. "At the same time, he has to do it. This is a big spring for B.K. and there's nobody more in his corner than me."

Nobody puts BK in the corner!

Sox 17, Northeastern 0

Was it really necessary to cream the Northeastern team 17-0? Poor kids have probably never even seen a proper knuckler, and they throw in Wakefield and a no-hitter? And 17 runs? Boy, the Sox sure are hungry for it this year. And Dave McCarty continues to be a March beast. I liked that they used Ron Johnson, PawSox manager, at first base.

Sox at Walter Reed

This is a really nice gesture. (Picture taken from the Army News Service)

Fame! I'm gonna live forever

A Baltimore Sun article talks about the perils of fame for Theo Epstein:

Epstein couldn't even escape during a visit to Vieques, the remote Puerto Rican island the U.S. military was using for target practice. Epstein was in a restaurant when he was recognized one night by the staff. "Some of the dishwashers were wearing Red Sox hats," Epstein told the News.

Man. Does Theo's twin brother Paul pull the whole "hi, I'm Theo Epstein, one of the most successful people under 30 around" routine to meet women? (Of course, given that they're fraternal twins, I don't know if the resemblance is close enough to pull that off.)
Of course, to quote Theo's dad Leslie when Theo was first hired:

"What's all the fuss? At Theo's age, Alexander the Great was already general manager of the world." (Link)

Geez. Talk about setting high standards.

Speaking of family resemblances, here's Justin Varitek, via Cursed to First.

Kevin Millar's having twins

So Kevin Millar is having twins... and that could be part of the explanation for his lousy early-2004 performance. Hmm. Now I feel bad for ragging on him.

Actually, over at SoSH, star stathead poster Eric Van once noted that sometimes a player's performance slipping is pure statistical variation, but sometimes it could signal the effects of certain stressful non-game-related events - leading to this theory about the impact of Johnny Damon's divorce and custody battle back in 2002.

This other part, though, about Millar's mother sending him a care package of sorts, is just disturbing:

The box of chocolates cost $12, the shipping $40. The chocolates arrived in the mail Tuesday, packaged with a Playboy magazine, and a note, saying he'd have something to read while eating his chocolate.

I guess it's funny, in a way, but the idea of a mother sending her son Playboy is very strange to me.

Santo not elected

And a big BOOO goes out to the Hall of Fame Veterans' Committee, for continuing to deny entry to the best eligible player not in the Hall, Ron Santo. I attribute it to the Hall's extreme bias against third basemen and against the Cubs - and so does this article:

Of the 212 players in the Hall, only 12 of them - including 2005 inductee Wade Boggs - are enshrined as third basemen, according to the Hall's Web site. It's the lowest total at any position.

3B is the only position in the Hall for which I can name almost every inductee off the top of my head. (Let's see... Schmidt, Boggs, Brett, Eddie Mathews, Brooks Robinson, Pie Traynor, Jimmy Collins, Home Run Baker, Dandridge, Kell... dang, forgot Freddie Lindstrom and Judy Johnson.) It's clearly a "no mistakes" position for the Hall - every single one of them deserves to be in - but Santo is definitely in that elite group.

Lefty groove

How important are lefty starters? All I know is, it's weird to see a lefty starter at Fenway.

Petagine

The Globe has a nice piece on Robert Petagine today. The key question: how do his stats translate? In the same period of time, as the article notes, Hideki Matsui slugged 170 homers and 429 RBIs while Petagine had 160 and 414. So it looks favourable. If he can hit like 80% of Matsui, the Sox would have a great bargain.

And that's where the "if" comes in - how do we translate the stats? Personally, I feel that since Japanese ballparks have different and often smaller dimensions, how the Japanese league stats translate is quite tricky. If you're a line drive hitter, I would guess you would still hit good hard line drives in MLB. If you hit a lot of short flies that were homers in the Japanese leagues, I'd guess you would just get a lot of fly outs. And that's just for starters. Different pitch selections, wider foul ball territory - they all add up to making the task of figuring out how Petagine will do in spring training and (if lucky) in the majors that much harder.

Tangential Link: Baseball Guru Japanese baseball primer

Fever Pitch trailer

The Fever Pitch trailer is out. And as an avowed Nick Hornby fan (I've got signed copies of High Fidelity and How To Be Good, from when I saw him in New York) and Sox fan I've got to say... it looks terrible. What Hornby does well is write about the dilemmas of a guy growing up in a world where it's easy to be stuck in perpetual adolescence. Fever Pitch, the book, talks about lots of conflicting emotions: Hornby recognises both that it's selfish and childish to want to watch games every Saturday, and that he still wants to do it. The trailer makes it look like it's Drew's character "curing" Fallon's obsession with the Sox with her love.

And of course, there's the whole point about the film being forced into rewrite after the Sox won it all. They didn't expect the Sox to win it all? Didn't they read the book? The Arsenal need to win 2-0 on the last day. They get the goal in injury time, the last possible moment. It never is over till it's over. Trust your source material.

Blink and you'll miss it

I've always been a big fan of the writing of the fast-becoming-ubiquitous Malcolm Gladwell - here's a recent ESPN interview with him talking about his new book Blink as it applies to sports. It repeats many of the central ideas of the book, but the "Warren Harding error" is the most interesting in a baseball context i.e. that we sometimes end up hiring people who look right, as opposed to those who really do perform. Which could be the central lesson of Moneyball.

Gladwell also talks about the idea that those who can do often really can't teach, because they themselves aren't too aware of their own movements - at some level of athletic performance the amount of time required to process what to do would be too long, and your instincts take over. As happens in batting, presumably.

WWJDIHWTTTY?

What would Johnny do if he were traded to the Yankees?

Damon is the Sox's Jeter - part matinee idol, part baseball star, complete with a superhero's name. He's been feted by fans at Red Sox camp as much for his looks as for his World Series ring and has said that he'd prefer to re-sign with Boston and never think about another team.

The idea of becoming a Yankee has not crossed his mind, he said, but he admitted that other people have brought it up to him repeatedly. (NY Daily News)

I think Damon's great, and in 2004 he was the best lead-off man in the business (and yes, I'm counting Ichiro). But he's got a pricey contract, so it would depend on how the negotiations go. The interesting part of that article is how Damon's friendship with Jason Giambi - presumably from the Oakland days - might sour him against the Yankees. Yeah, nothing that an extra $20 million wouldn't solve, but this is the first year it seems the Yankees don't have limitless funds (thank you Beltran for going to the Mets)...