How many people, with Ruben Sierra standing on third base Wednesday night, Aura and Mystique shaking their moneymakers just behind second base, and Mariano Rivera getting loose down the left-field line, would have figured this World Series would not only be going back to New York, but going back with the Yankees down three games to two? Other than Jack McKeon, I mean. The idea that the Yankees have some stash of special skills that only come into play in October took a huge hit the last two nights, as the Marlins not only bounced back to win Game Four in 12 innings, but took advantage of the Yankees’ bad fortune and bad baseball to move within one win of their second championship in seven seasons.
It’s time to announce the winners of the 12th annual Internet Baseball Awards. More than 1,500 cyberspace baseball fans participated in this effort to select the baseball players whose 2003 seasons were most deserving of honors.
“This is the famous Allen “Bud” Selig. We know of no Commissioner in any age that costs the game as much in action and in sloth. His unique harebrained ideas and wild schemes produce a sense of dread you will find in no other executive in any sport…” I wrote that little parody of the Budweiser label off the top of my head and, relatively, I don’t even drink that much Bud. Which is to say I drink a lot of it. Selig said that he thought the Marlins’ post-game celebration after winning the NLCS was “tacky and out of place in today’s society which is less tolerant of alcohol abuse.” No problem with the victory cigars, apparently, but the alcohol…oooh nooo…save me from the deadly alcohol, where in a joyous clubhouse celebration following one of baseball’s great team achievements, being sprayed over the head with sweet, delicious champagne causes: Nation-wide increase in SIDS Tripling of federal budget deficit Teenage pregnancy Massive outsourcing of middle-class jobs to India Outbreaks of the deadly mutaba virus in every metropolitan area All of which clearly call for–no, demand–the intervention of Bud Selig.
The Orioles begin their search for a manager. The Rockies weren’t lucky or unlucky–they were just untalented. And the Mets are trying to lure away Rick Peterson from the A’s. All this and much more news from Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Dear Aaron Boone: It was a home run, not diplomatic immunity. Love, Joe Boone, whose Game Seven home run won the ALCS and sent the Yankees to the World Series, has been swinging at pitches he has no hope of hitting ever since then. I looked it up, expecting to see that Boone has taken about four pitches in the World Series. It turns out that he’d actually let 25 baseballs go by in the first three games, just shy of half of the 51 pitches he’d seen. He’s pushed counts to 3-2 in a number of at-bats, so it’s hard to make the argument that he’s not being patient enough. That said, he was horrific last night. The Yankees’ three biggest chances to win the game landed in his lap, and he approached his at-bats as if it were fifth-grade gym class or a co-ed softball league with some goofy rules like “swing or you’re out.” Against Carl Pavano in the second inning, with the bases loaded, one out and the Yankees down 3-0, Boone swung at the only two pitches he saw and flied to center field on the second one. Sacrifice flies down three runs with the pitcher coming up aren’t team baseball, they’re a lifeline for the opposition. Boone got another chance in the ninth, after Ruben Sierra’s triple tied the game. Boone again went up hacking, fouling off the first and third pitches he saw to fall behind 1-2, then grounding out weakly to shortstop after two more foul balls. Finally, in the 11th inning, Boone again batted with the bases loaded and one out. And just as he had against Pavano and Ugueth Urbina, he made Braden Looper’s job easy by hacking at fastballs up and in, pitches he doesn’t have the bat speed to hit. Boone swung at six of the seven pitches he saw, looked completely overmatched, and struck out. Three at-bats, two pitches taken out of 15 seen, three times falling behind in the count, three outs. Boone needed to have a solid approach last night, and his mental effort was completely lacking, leading to wild swings that gave the pitchers all the leverage they needed to get out of jail.
There’s no accounting for tastes, right? I think Jamie Foxx is the greatest living American actor. Angelina Jolie doesn’t really do it for me (Claire Forlani, however…). I’d rather fall down the stairs or sleep in a tuxedo than listen to a Bob Dylan album. It’s a long-held belief of mine that outdoor activities not named “golf” are mostly for suckers. And so on, and so on. More germane to the Web site at hand is that I’ve always preferred Ivan Rodriguez to Mike Piazza. I know that for most of their careers Piazza has dated more Playmates and put up notably better numbers with the bat in far less accommodating environments. I’m also aware that Piazza’s defensive infirmities have been overstated in many circles. If pressed, I’ll probably concede that Piazza’s offense has been so otherworldly that it more than makes up for his paltry glovework and establishes him as the best catcher of his generation. But I still prefer Pudge. So please allow me to try to account for this particular taste of mine.
I tried to get inside Roger Clemens’ head before his last final start, which turned out to be a mistake. I won’t do that this time; I have no idea how this being his current final start will affect him. None. I do know that, this being Game Four, it is his final final start. There can’t be a next final start unless.you know, I don’t even want to imagine what kind of scenarios Bud Selig and Jeffrey Loria might concoct to bring us a Game Eight.
I do know that he was up in the zone in his Division Series outing against the Red Sox, which was his seventh or eighth “final start” after his final regular-season start, his final start at Fenway Park (which was only his next to final start at Fenway Park), his final start in the All-Star Game, his final start at Yankee Stadium (also just his next-to-final), his final start in a foreign country, his final start in front of a record-low crowd and his final start with nasty heartburn.
This matchup isn’t as bad for the Marlins as Mike Mussina was. Clemens works up and down with the splitter and fastball, and has shown a fairly persistent reverse platoon split since joining the Yankees. With a bunch of right-handed hitters who can drive a good fastball but who will chase once they fall behind in the count, Clemens’ success will again come down to getting ahead in the count and avoiding leaving his fastball up in the zone. There’s not a lot of middle ground here; look for a 3.2-7-6-6-4-2 line, or a 7-4-1-1-2-10 one.
Last time, we cooked up a way to remove park effects when looking at Bill James’ Defensive Efficiency, a stat that measures the percentage of balls in play fielded by a team’s defense. The new metric, tentatively called PADE, ranked teams on a zero-centered scale, showing how well a team performed against the league average with their given schedule. The intent was to more fairly judge defenses against each other rather than punish teams like Colorado and Boston for having to play in more difficult venues.
As stated before, defense can be broken down into many facets, but the three most prevalent parts are park factors, pitching, and actual defensive performance. Since we’ve already figured out how to remove the first one–park factors–the next logical step is attempting to correct for pitching, leaving us closer to a metric that measures only defensive performance.
To do this, we’ll take a similar approach to the first version of PADE, but instead of defensive park factors, we’ll use defensive pitcher factors. The first step is to determine an expected defensive efficiency for every pitcher, based on their career history.
With no baseball games last night, I watched, or tried to watch, Monday Night Football. I cannot for the life of me fathom how people can directly compare baseball and football and conclude that baseball is boring. The pace of a pro football game is completely unbelievable, with television timeouts after nearly every possession in some stretches, regardless of length. Play, play, play, punt, break. Play, play, turnover, break. Or my favorite: towards the end of a drive, one team calls a timeout. Commercials. On the next play they score, kick the extra point, commercials. Kickoff, touchback, more commercials. You end up with one actual play run in a 12-minute stretch.
If it’s interminable watching at home, what’s it like at the game? I haven’t been to a pro football game in nearly a decade, and the idea of sitting through that kind of stretch–10 minutes without any actual football in some spots–isn’t likely to push me into breaking that streak anytime soon.
I pride myself on doing what I say, but when I sat down to write the World Series Health Report, I found myself staring at a blank sheet and a bunch of worthless information. Like last year, we have teams that have no current injuries of significance. There are fatigue issues on both sides, and each team is dealing with long-term injuries that they’ve been able to adjust around. The lesser injuries, like Mike Lowell’s hand or Josh Beckett’s blisters, are in the past due to solid work from the respective medical staffs. Both teams headed to the field at Yankee Stadium as ready as they could possibly be. That fact is in some part responsible for their being on the field and not back home golfing.
The Red Sox look to repeat 2003’s historic hitting campaign next year. Running down the list of GM candidates for the Reds. Gary Bennett is the only person surprised that the Padres released Gary Bennett. All this and more from San Diego, Cincinnati, and Boston in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
I’ve never been to a World Series game. I’ve had chances, but it’s been people calling me days before and asking if I can fly down for one game, always at times when I can’t afford the last-minute air fare. No longer. I’ve found a sure way to get primo tickets to the World Series: I’m going to be a cast member in a provocative new drama from Fox. Or I’ll create a new drama that everyone’s talking about. Oh yes. Critics will be talking, though we’ll be selective about which critics and which things they’re saying we quote them on. Fox is such a generous employer. I got a free T-shirt this year from Prospectus, and it was one of the early batches that might have been tainted with the deadly mutaba virus. And yet here are these well-paid beautiful people (and Ron Silver, who also was the villain in “Heat Vision and Jack”) who are presumably treated to a game by Fox. People say Fox is a soul-sucking multinational ghast, but I have to disagree. Going that far to show these employees how much they’re appreciated: that’s something you don’t see often enough in today’s go-go corporate culture. Largely because the expense of flying your Indian outsourcing firm over to the states for the World Series doesn’t make much sense when they’re not baseball fans.
Dusty Baker doesn’t believe in curses. Aaron Boone had help from some ghosts. Grady Little tries to defend leaving Pedro Martinez in the game. And Don Zimmer has some strong words for The Boss. All this and much more in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.
It’s been so long since we’ve seen a nondescript baseball game that when we finally got one, it felt strange, and I’m left not knowing how to write about it. Think about it. For the first time in weeks, we had a day of baseball that provided no real tension, no elimination hanging over a team’s head, and no question as to who would win. Other than Friday, when no games were played, we’d been riding a red-stitched roller coaster for two weeks, spoiled by games that left us on the edge of our seats, holding our breath and repairing the damage to the walls of our homes and offices. (OK, so that last one is just me.) In fact, the only think we learned yesterday was how Hideki Matsui, with just 16 home runs and a .435 slugging percentage, Matsui turned on a 3-0 fastball from Mark Redman and launched a three-run home run over the 408-foot marker in center field that put this game away early for the Yankees.
As you might expect from managers Joe Torre and Jack McKeon, there were plenty of decisions made in advance of Game One that provided cause for discussion.
The most significant of these was McKeon’s decision to make Dontrelle Willis a reliever. This move addressed one of the Marlins’ key disadvantages in facing the Yankees: the lack of a good left-handed reliever to counter the team’s left-handed power late in the game. Michael Tejera is neither a specialist nor a safe bet in high-leverage situations. Willis’ motion makes him tough on lefties (.216/.293/.307) and he is good enough against right-handers that he can be used for multiple innings.
The move paid immediate dividends, as Willis threw 2 1/3 shutout innings last night with the Marlins protecting a one-run lead.
The Florida Marlins are back in the World Series for the second time in seven seasons. The Yankees are back in the World Series for the first time in two seasons. And the Pirates… well, they’re just hoping to be .500 next year. All this and much more news from Florida, New York and Pittsburgh in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.