J'accuse!

Two years ago The New York Times published an article by sportswriter Steve Kettmann which anticipated the "everybody and their brother is juicing" articles that have become all the rage (you can read the original here, but it will cost you twenty bits). Even though Kettmann didn’t name names, in its day the article created quite a firestorm. Until Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti got into the act last month, it was the go-to reference piece on steroids in major-league baseball. Apparently unhappy with the prospect of losing his title as whistle-blower in-chief, Kettmann decided to reassert his dominance last week by writing a borderline libelous article for the online edition of The New Republic in which he out-sensationalizes even Canseco and Caminiti. This time Kettmann is naming names, and evidence be damned!

But before getting to the alleged juicers, Kettmann has some scores to settle. First he dredges up the old controversy over his New York Times piece by (1) reminding us about how important it was at the time ("My article in the Times inspired a flurry of sports columns and radio talk show discussions on the subject, much as the recent Sports Illustrated cover story on Ken Caminiti and steroids has lately."), and (2) sneering at baseball insider writer-wannabes who think they have something to add to the conversation ("A Yankee strength coach named Brian McNamee even roused himself to write a response in the Times. His column tried to refute my assertions on widespread steroid use in baseball by arguing, "My mother always said, 'If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.'").

But Kettmann has bigger fish to fry. He calls Caminiti a "weasel" for backing off his allegation that 50 percent of all players use steroids. No matter that Caminiti says he was misquoted in the original piece. Anyone who refutes the 50 percent figure that Kettmann says "many of us had been hearing for years" must be a pawn of "the players' so-called union, which never met an intractable position it didn't like."

Seeing Kettmann lay into the increasingly cautious Caminiti, you might think that the way to get into Kettmann’s good graces would be to make unsubstantiated accusations about steroid use in the major leagues. That is, unless you’re Jose Canseco, whom Kettmann labels a cynical money-grubber and irredeemable traitor if he goes ahead with his plan to out the infamous 50 percent. But then, having it both ways, Kettman suggests that Canseco's probably too damn lazy to do it in the first place. And if Canseco decides to steer clear entirely of what Kettmann calls the "unsavory debates" about steroid use, look for him to be handed honorary membership in Caminiti’s weasel club.

Canseco can rest easy on one score, however, because Kettmann has volunteered to do all the unsavory work himself. He comes right out and accuses Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens of juicing, despite acknowledging that both McGwire and Bonds have repeatedly denied steroid use, and that Clemens has never been accused of taking steroids at all. (For extra measure, Kettmann suggests that Clemens was taking amphetamines and steroids during the 2000 World Series. Attaboy, Steve; in for a penny, in for a pound!) Kettmann’s evidence: the scuttlebutt he’s heard in the press box over the years.

But Kettmann's litany of abuse doesn't end with baseball’s greatest active hitter, greatest active pitcher, and most storied home run hitter of the past twenty-five years. According to Kettmann, "[i]f baseball fans are determined to point fingers, they'd better be prepared to point one at themselves," because they don’t believe that "the beauty of a hit-and-run single poked through the right side of the infield easily matches that of many home runs." Setting aside for a moment that Kettmann is the only one pointing fingers, what makes him think that if baseball once again found itself in an era where hit-and-run singles were the order of the day that cheating wouldn’t be a problem? Has he never heard of the spitball? Spiking? The Black Sox scandal? Were fans to blame for those things too?

After reaming the players and fans, Kettmann moves on to the rotogeeks and sabermetricians, stating that "[a] lot of the blame for [steroid abuse] goes to the Bill James school of sports analysis..." It would be nice if Kettmann offered some evidence to support this charge, but in its absence, I can only wonder what, exactly, James’s use of objective methodology to analyze baseball has to do with steroid abuse. Yes, James and his disciples have concluded that home runs are more valuable than hit-and-run singles, but to suggest that such an obvious observation encourages steroid abuse is like saying a criminologist encourages crime.

Look, I’m not saying that McGwire, Bonds, and Clemens don’t take steroids, because I have no idea whether they do or not. Still, I would think that Kettmann would likewise hold his fire, given that his claims that they do appear to be supported by nothing other than gossip. That said, Kettmann has leavened his baseless accusations, unfounded conclusions, and out-and-out insults with enough Caminitiesque language to allow him and The New Republic to weasel their way out of any libel lawsuits stemming from his irresponsible bomb-throwing. But then I suspect that libel is a risk Kettmann is willing to take if it ensures his place as the doyen of the anti-steroid brigade.

Competitive Balance Fallacy of the Week

While I’m picking on the media, I should point out that Salon’s usually reliable King Kaufman got suckered by some erroneous conventional wisdom last week. In seeking an expert opinion about why there have been so many managerial firings this season, Kaufman spoke to current Reds’ hitting coach and former major league manager Jim Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s explanation -- which Kaufman appears to buy hook, line, and sinker -- is that because of players’ high salaries, some teams simply can’t "stay up with the Joneses," forcing them to fire managers more quickly in order to placate grumpy fans. As evidence that economic disparity causes competitive disparity, Kaufman points out that "[t]hrough Tuesday's games, a little past the one-third mark of the season, eight of the 30 teams were [ten games or more out of first place]."

I guess that’s one way to look at it. Another is that through last Thursday’s games, there were sixteen teams either in first place or within four games (i.e. one long weekend series) of being in first. And while we’re talking about competitive balance or the seeming lack thereof, it’s probably a pretty good time to point out that since baseball went to divisional play in 1969, sixteen different teams have won 32 World Series. When you consider that only thirteen NBA teams have won championships over that same span of time, and only 16 teams have won the 36 Super Bowls dating back to 1967, it seems pretty clear that even though there is economic disparity in baseball, there really isn’t a competitive balance problem at all.

Nepotism Watch: The Atlanta Braves

Baseball’s amateur draft took place last Tuesday, and Atlanta Braves’ General Manager John Schuerholz made a bold pick in selecting his own son, Auburn University shortstop Jonathan Schuerholz, in the eighth round.

Now, before you go accusing Schuerholz of nepotism, you should know that Roy Clark, the Braves’ director of scouting, said that Schuerholz-the-younger "has outstanding talent. It doesn't really matter what his last name is." See? Family had nothing to do with it. The kid is preternaturally talented, and the mere fact that the Braves took him in the eighth round when every other team in the game had him scouted as a 15^th rounder merely speaks to the keen eyes in the Braves’ scouting department. "I would have recommended that we take the kid even if my employment did not depend on staying in the good graces of his father," Clark did not add.

Signs and Portents

I can’t get too worked up about nepotism in baseball. After all, unlike law firms, advertising agencies, and various other family businesses, it’s difficult to hide incompetence on the diamond, and just because your dad’s the boss doesn’t mean you won’t get benched. Just ask Cincinnati Reds’ third baseman Aaron Boone (son of manager Bob Boone) who, on Friday, found out that his father’s team traded first base prospect Ben Broussard to the Cleveland Indians for third baseman/outfielder Russell Branyan. Sure, Branyan has been something of a disappointment in his first season as an everyday player for the Indians, but, if he ever manages to lower his strikeout rate from horrific to merely wretched, he stands a very good chance of displacing Boone and his sub-.650 OPS in the Reds’ starting lineup.

But while this trade is mildly interesting when viewed in the context of Boone family harmony, it’s more interesting as it relates to what I believe to be Cleveland’s impending fire sale. The Indians’ booty in this trade -- Broussard -- is a ready-to-go first base prospect who could start for lots of teams. He is not, however, anything near as good as current Tribe first baseman Jim Thome, nor will he ever hope to be. While I would like to think that the Indians acquired Broussard in order to flip him to someone else for someone they actually need, my gut tells me that he’s being kept around until the Indians fall a few more games out of first place, declare the season a loss, trade Thome for spare parts and insert him into the starting lineup at a fraction of Thome’s cost.

I caught some flak last week for suggesting that the Indians were unnecessarily paring payroll. Upon reflection I have to concede that yes, some of the Indians’ offseason moves were at least marginally defensible (Roberto Alomar isn’t doing anything special this year, though there was no reason for the Tribe to expect that when they dumped him). That said, even a team that is rebuilding needs to keep one or two of its superstars, and Jim Thome is The Man in Cleveland. If the Indians trade him or Bartolo Colon (who, by the way, was AL’s Pitcher of the Month for May), you can take it as proof that Indians’ management is far more interested in the bottom line than in putting the best product on the field.

The Nature of the Game

"I think over the last year I've learned a lot. I've learned about how to get guys out."

-- Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine, explaining his dominant performance against the Montreal Expos last Monday night, confusing the hell out of the roughly 3,200 batters he’s managed to get out over the course of his 15+ year, 2 Cy Young Award career. Yeah Tom, glad you finally figured out what you were doing out there.

The Nature of the Game

Last week, ESPN’s Peter Gammons wrote about the putatively surprising struggles of the Oakland A’s and Cleveland Indians (the A’s struggles really are surprising, but smart people expected the Indians to stink). He claimed that "What it demonstrates should be obvious. In both cases, unless one is in the revenue upper class, it is practically impossible to compete for a prolonged time period."

Applesauce. If the A’s and Indians’ example demonstrates anything, it's (1) that even good teams can hit rough patches once in a while, and (2) when you strip your roster of talent in the interest of making money, you're likely to lose a lot of games. Gammons’ bogeyman of economic disparity has little to do with how well the A’s and Indians are doing this year.

There is no question that the A’s suffer from revenue problems. Even though the A's have fielded an excellent squad for the past three seasons, hardly anyone goes to Network Associates Mausoleum to watch them play. Despite competing in one of baseball’s larger and more affluent markets, the A’s also have a pretty piddling media deal (they can thank cross-bay competition from the more popular Giants for both problems). But while finances are important to, say, the A’s ability to sign Tim Hudson, Miguel Tejada, and Eric Chavez when they become free agents in a few years, they explain little to nothing about why the A's are in last place this year. Everyone thought the current roster looked pretty damn good last off-season, when the A’s were coming off of a 102-win season.

The A’s slide in 2002 is all about underachieving, not about having the financial deck stacked against them. Gammons says, "[F]ew general managers have received more praise for creativity, work ethic and evaluation skills than Beane, but at a $40 million payroll, there is no escape for a two-month slide when the starters’ ERA is over 5.00." Sorry Peter, but even a $100 million payroll team "has no escape" when its entire rotation has an ERA north of a finsky. Having had a bunch of good players hit a funk at the same time is just part of the game. The A’s will either bounce back to respectability this season, or they’ll get 'em next year.

Gammons doesn't come right out and say it, but you get the sense that he wants to blame the A’s woes mainly on the loss of Jason Giambi, and the loss of Jason Giambi on revenue disparity. After all, the A’s lost Giambi in a bidding war with the Yankees, and isn’t losing all one’s good players to New York the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics or something? The only problem, of course, is that it didn't happen that way.

The A’s never could have matched Steinbrenner’s offer, but they didn’t have to because the A’s and Giambi had done a deal before the Yankees were even on the scene, which involved far less money than he eventually took from New York. Oakland’s ownership chickened out when Giambi asked for a no-trade clause that, practically speaking, wouldn’t have hindered the A’s a bit. If Giambi continued to play well, they wouldn’t have wanted to trade him; if they became losers and felt the need to unload him, Giambi would probably have waived the clause in order to get himself onto a winning team). It was only when the A’s vetoed the no-trade clause that Giambi felt the need to begin his flirtation with New York in the first place. Yes, the A’s would be doing much better with Giambi, but they lost him because of their own shortsightedness, not Force Majure.

Gammons’ comments about the Indians strike me as even more preposterous:

"Cleveland is coping with the evolutionary reality that ballpark revenues alone do not make a rich franchise, and as the Indians -- remember, they haven’t won a postseason series since 1998 and with the exception of the 2000 White Sox had been playing in the league’s weakest division since they rose to power -- got old, had to be reconstructed and had to downsize and the luster came off The Jake."

Excuse me, but weak or not, the Indians won their division last year by a comfortable margin. They had more wins than Atlanta, only one fewer than the world champion Diamondbacks, and only four fewer than the all-powerful Yankees. When you consider that the Tribe’s interleague opponents (the Astros, Cardinals, and Cubs) were much tougher than the Yankees (the Mets, Expos, Marlins), the difference between the two teams doesn't amount to much. Given their success, why did the Indians "have to be reconstructed?"

And what does Gammons mean by the comment about the strength of the division? One of the reasons the division has traditionally been "weak" is that the Indians themselves have been beating the living crap out of the AL Central for the past seven years (and in any event, their win totals would have been enough to win several of the other divisions in nearly every year of their run). Even if the division’s strength is an issue, why leave out the 2000 White Sox? In effect, what Gammons is saying is that the Indians’ competition has been bad, except of course when it’s been good, which means he’s not really saying anything.

As I predicted in my season preview, the Indians have struggled because they got rid of good players like Roberto Alomar and Juan Gonzales while bringing in bad players like Milton Bradley, Ricky Gutierrez, and Brady Anderson, not to mention keeping a guy with no cartilage in his elbow in the bullpen (Charles Nagy). Teams that trade good players for bad ones are likely to lose. Again, this is the nature of the game.

The real question here is why the Indians got rid of their good players in the first place. Is it, as Gammons suggests, because "the luster has come off" the Indians’ new stadium and falling attendance has required cutting payroll? No chance. The Indians’ attendance didn’t start going downhill until this season -- after the Indians made their cost-cutting moves -- so blaming their problems on fickle fans is a cheap shot of the lowest order.

Call it a hunch, but I think the real reason for the evisceration of the Indians’ roster was simple greed. Last year Dick Jacobs sold the Indians to Larry Dolan. I suspect Dolan was attracted by the perpetually sold-out stadiums under the Jacobs regime which allowed the Indians to be profitable despite having one of the larger payrolls in the game. Dolan probably figured that Indians fans would continue to show up in droves no matter what he put on the field, and unloaded the large salaries hoping to jack up the profits even higher. But Indians’ fans aren't stupid; they're just a little spoiled. After growing accustomed to winning for the better part of a decade, they weren't about to shell out money to see a losing team play. A few masochists like me will go to the ballpark no matter how good our teams are, but having fans fail to turn out for a loser is -- you guessed it -- part of the game, and something Dolan should have expected. There should be no crying for the Tribe.

Gammons is a smart guy, and I suspect he knows he’s peddling bunk when he blames the problems of the A’s and the Indians on economic disparity. But let's not forget that Gammons is essentially a gossip columnist (his real claim to fame is being ESPN's "Mr. Inside"), and the first rule of gossip is that you don't alienate your sources. When Gammons passes along front office canards about revenue disparities dictating results, just remember that it’s not news, it’s just old Pete ensuring the continued access that puts food on his table.

Fire Sale Watch: The Cleveland Indians

While we’re on the subject of the Indians, the hot rumor coming out of the Western Reserve is that Tribe GM Mark Shapiro is shopping his two best players, Jim Thome and Bartolo Colon, for prospects. If that's the case, it validates my hunch that the Indians are selling off good players in order to pocket the cash. Colon and Thome are certified studs whose talents fully justify their price tag, and who would be very hard to replace. Ship them out, and Cleveland is going to be partying like it’s 1969 (record: 62-99). If Gammons thinks the luster has come off The Jake now, just wait until the Indians sell off their franchise pitcher and slugger.

Jose Canseco is Chopped Liver

Two weeks ago I spouted off about steroids in baseball after Jose Canseco threatened to write a book naming names of players on the juice. As it turns out, I was pretty much the only taking Canseco seriously. Most writers seemed to think that Canseco was nothing more than a vengeance-seeking publicity hound. That changed last week when Ken Caminiti came out to Sports Illustrated about his steroid use and -- making claims nearly identical to Canseco’s -- said that a large percentage of major leaguers are using performance-enhancing drugs. Since then scores of sports writers have weighed in on what a significant problem this is all for pro baseball.

Which is all well and good, but I don't know why Canseco’s claims were treated as a non-story while Caminiti's were taken so seriously. It couldn’t be the relative fame of the players, because Canseco was every bit as big a name (probably bigger) than Caminiti. It couldn’t be that Caminiti was owning up to using himself, because only the most naive sports writer could assume that Canseco was excluding himself from his allegations. It couldn’t have been the credibility of the source; after all, Caminiti is the only one of the two who is a convicted felon.

So why was Canseco laughed off while Caminiti became the whistle-blower? I dunno, but any writer looking to get an exclusive would probably do well to follow big Jose around, because nobody else seems to be listening.

It's Raining Mets

Much Ado

In the wake of last year’s claim by Out magazine editor Brendan Lemon that he was having an affair with a player on an East Coast club, and this week’s tabloid speculation about the possibility that a prominent New York Met might be gay, columnists have tripped all over themselves trying to figure out What Such a Thing Might Mean for the player and the game. Some have speculated about the hardships the first active, openly gay player might face. Others have talked about the potential for such a player to become an endorsement-rich cultural hero. Still others have made a huge deal over how little a deal this whole affair should be. I’m with the last group. Rarely (in baseball anyway) has so much been written by so many about so little.

The issue of homosexuality in team sports isn't worth all the hand-wringing. Yes, when a ballplayer finally gets outed the occasional Neanderthal will say that he’s afraid to shower with a swishy shortstop; but most players are pretty bright. At the very least, none of them want to end up the bad guy in the inevitable made-for-TV movie (if for no other reason than that they want to avoid being portrayed by a B-lister like Eric Roberts). Like L'Affaire O'Donnell, it will be a big deal for a week, and then it will go away, and we’ll all be left wondering why we wasted our time worrying about it.

It would be nice if the punditry showed some perspective. The impact of a gay player on a pro clubhouse is an interesting topic, but not nearly as interesting as some of the real-life-intersects-baseball stories the columnists ignore. At least one player has been revealed as a bigamist. Another tried to run down kids with his SUV. Teammates have taken swings at each other around the batting cage. Several players have beaten their wives. And, if recent reports are to be believed, a future Hall of Famer turned teenage batboys into drug mules. Am I alone in thinking that it would be tougher to work with sociopaths like that than to deal with a gay locker-mate? If not, why don't people write half as much about those guys as they do about hypothetical gay baseball players? Heck, I had to link the Village freakin’ Voice to find something other than a simple police blotter story about players’ domestic violence. Where the hell were all of ESPN's sociologists after Bobby Chouinard held a gun to his wife’s head? Oh yeah, fretting about what other ballplayers might think about a full-grown adult whose sexual orientation hasn’t been a scandal since Three’s Company was on prime time.

The Fall of Beane

Earlier this year I wrote about that group of baseball junkies who have (with good reason, really) lionized Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane for turning a low-revenue club into a consistent winner by stressing plate discipline and the promotion of cheap young talent, while simultaneously ripping off his fellow GMs in one-sided trade after one-sided trade.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In a move that sent the Cult of Beane reeling, the A’s traded leftfielder Jeremy Giambi to Philadelphia for the offal that is John Mabry. Casual fans may not know much about either of these players, so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you that this was not just a bad trade; it was bungling of the highest order. Giambi is young and cheap, gets on base more often than most, and hits for power. Mabry is, um, from Delaware. It’s so unbalanced a trade, coming from so unlikely a general manager that some are suggesting that Beane did it either under duress or as a way to intentionally sabotage his team.

I doubt Beane is consciously throwing a monkey wrench into the A’s works, but he does have some ‘splainin to do. At the press conference on Wednesday, Beane claimed that Giambi was eighty-sixed because he is "a one-dimensional player." That's an unusually boilerplate explanation coming from a general manager known for his candor. Besides, even if Giambi is a one-dimensional player, that dimension -- hitting the cover off the ball -- is supposedly what the A’s are built around.

Apart from simply getting snookered, there are two reasons a team accepts less than equal value in a trade. The first is that they’re dumping salary. That explanation, however, doesn’t really hold water here. Giambi makes a skosh over a million this year, bargain-basement for a player at his level. Even though Mabry only makes a half-million, the A’s could have gone cheaper than that simply by asking for a minor leaguer instead of Mabry (or nobody – ever heard of the "player to be named later"?). Indeed, getting a minor-leaguer with some upside is standard salary dump procedure -- a procedure that Beane himself has perfected over the years. Mabry’s a known quantity, and that quantity is zero. If it was a salary dump, it was a poor one.

The other time a team lets itself be gypped in a trade is when the departing player is carrying baggage the team wants to get rid of. A great example was when the St. Louis Cardinals sent recent MVP and perennial all-star Keith Hernandez to the New York Mets for nobody Neil Allen in 1983. Less than two years later -- when he was granted immunity to testify in the prosecution of Philadelphia caterer/cocaine dealer Curtis Strong -- it was revealed that Hernandez was deep into blow going back to the disco era. That might have been ok in New York City, but it was never going to fly on Whitey Herzog’s St. Louis Cardinals.

I’ve only got a search engine at my disposal, not a network of spies, so I can’t say whether Giambi was such a clubhouse cancer that Beane felt he needed to get rid him regardless of value received in return. Sure, Little G. was cited for marijuana possession in Las Vegas back in December, but that was misdemeanorville (my grandmother carries a half-ounce to Vegas), and it doesn’t explain why Giambi wasn’t traded back then. Others have reported that Giambi was involved in a "drunken, obnoxious performance" on the team flight back from Toronto last Sunday. Interesting, but it still doesn’t explain why Beane didn’t get more for him in return. Heck, even if Giambi was running guns to al-Qaida he should have brought more in return than John Mabry.

Well, that got us nowhere. For now, Billy Beane’s fan club remains in a tizzy. I have no idea what to make of this trade, though I do know that famous Beane-backer Rob Neyer’s defense -- "it's safe to assume that [Beane] knows what he's doing" -- is not an acceptable answer. (Rob, you’ve made your bones being critical! Don’t back down now!) I don’t know when the whole story will come out, but I’m guessing it will be a good one when it finally does.

Boycott Watch

As I predicted in an earlier piece, columnists who owe their salaries to the public’s interest in professional sports have began dressing up as populists and telling us to boycott baseball as a means of showing our dissatisfaction with the status of labor negotiations. (For a variation on the boycott theme, check out this hackwork.)

I have no problem with anyone who wants to ignore baseball because they find the labor wars distasteful, but the idea that these columnists are peddling -- that we have a civic duty to boycott baseball because players and owners have somehow failed in a duty allegedly owed fans -- is nonsense. Major League Baseball is a business that provides a product. If you think the product is worth the price, you should pay for it. If not, you shouldn’t. The owners and players don't "owe" you anything more than Georgia Pacific "owes" buyers of Angel Soft toilet tissue.

Juice on the Loose

Jose Canseco announced his retirement last Monday, and the very next day announced his intention to write a tell-all book about his career. Assuming he hires a decent ghost writer, it’s a book I’d love to read. After all, in addition to hitting 462 home runs and becoming baseball’s first 40-40 man, Jose liked to live it up. He fooled around with Madonna. He drove and crashed the finest Italian sports cars. He was arrested for everything from gun possession to domestic violence to nightclub brawls. The man must have some stories to tell.

But what really has the baseball world atwitter is Canseco’s pledge to blow the lid off of steroid use in baseball, and name names in the process. Canseco, some may remember, was one of the first really muscular guys to make a mark in baseball and was famously accused by The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell of using the juice during the 1988 playoffs (Boswell subsequently retracted his accusation). Though he continues to be coy about his own drug use, he recently said that steroids "revolutionized baseball" during his era.

And they very well might have. While baseball’s lack of drug testing makes verification impossible, anecdotal evidence points to widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs. In October 2000, The New York Times interviewed major league strength coaches, general managers, league officials, and players, and reported that there was a "general view that steroid abuse has become a problem in baseball," with insiders opining that anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent of all baseball players were juicing. Indeed, one look at the ever-increasing home run totals -- especially when posted by players who gained significant amounts of muscle mass over a single off season -- makes it hard to imagine that Canseco couldn’t names lots of names if he chose to.

To me, the more interesting question in all of this is should we care, and if so, why. We all know that steroid abuse causes impotence, acne, water retention, aggression, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, palpitations, jaundice, and death. (by the way, I copied that list from a pamphlet aimed at high school athletes; notice how it leads with the side effects that are the least serious but the most likely to resonate with 17 year olds? One of the Great Moments in Rhetoric, I’d say). Obviously, anyone who uses the stuff is an idiot.

But though they may be idiots, it’s hard to believe that any major league player using steroids is unaware of these risks. If anything, they’re well aware of the risks but have chosen to take them nonetheless. The libertarian in me wants to say that anyone can do anything that is plainly bad for them as long as he isn’t hurting anyone else, and if the guys on Canseco’s list want to piss on this virtual electric fence, that’s their decision. Politics aside, if the players themselves don’t care enough about this sort of thing to insist that there be rules about it, why should I lie awake at night worrying whether some overgrown first baseman can’t get it up? Or dies?

Health aside, is there any other reason to care? Recently, the extremely smart readers of Baseball Primer (a site I frequent and you should too) discussed this in reference to Barry Bonds’s response to the steroid rumors that have dogged him in the past couple of years (Gary Hart, er, I mean Barry Bonds challenged his accusers to prove that he uses). Many of the Primer posters posited that because baseball doesn't test, all of its players operate under a "cloud of suspicion," tarnishing the accomplishments of all of those who don't use. While such arguments strike me as a bit Ashcroftesque ("I’m sorry to be interrogating you Mr. Abdullah, but I wish to remove the cloud of suspicion that hovers over your people"), I sympathize with the sentiment. Sure, I’ve argued in the past that differences across eras don't tarnish records, but when some athletes start playing by rules different from those of their own contemporaries, even my logic starts to unravel.

So here we are. Lots of players are probably using steroids. Everyone presumably knows the dangers. No one in the game itself appears to care, except to the extent that they're worried about being called out by Jose Canseco. Most fans probably care in abstract ways, but based on the continued popularity of the Olympics and professional wrestling, it isn’t as if allegations of drug use are going to cause them to make their displeasure felt in a way that will impact the game financially. I guess that means that until some slugger keels over on the field from a juice-induced heart attack, the issue of steroids in baseball is going to remain the bailiwick of sports ethicists like Bob Ley and Bryant Gumbel. At least when it doesn’t pop up as tabloid fodder.

Olde Tyme Baseball

My grandfather died before I was born, so I never had the privilege of having an old man sit me on his knee and tell me about the days of Liberty Cabbage, Hoovervilles, and Dusenbergs. On the one hand, this was regrettable because I missed out on the opportunity to learn about history from my own flesh and blood. On the other hand, I never had to argue with my grandpa about "good old days" that featured rampant racism, crippling global depression, and genocidal world wars. I would like to have known Garfield Calcaterra, but it’s much easier to criticize a whitewashed view of history when it comes from a stranger like Tom Brokaw.

Or Joe Falls. Falls is a baseball columnist for the Detroit News, who last week wrote a few hundred grandfatherly words about how the iron men of yore never missed games due to little things like broken bones, pulled muscles, and torn ligaments. Apparently these ailments were treated quickly and simply by applying a compress of boiled milkweed on a wad of cotton, Lister's Carbolic Unguent, and a curative galvanic belt. (wait, maybe that was for dropsy...oh, never mind). Falls’s point is that too many players spend too much time on the disabled list these days.

At least I think that was his point. Read the article yourself and let me know what Falls was talking about, because I can’t seem to figure it out. All I can see are self-aggrandizing anecdotes and tired clichés about the softness and greed of today’s players. What Falls leaves out of his analysis is that because today’s players actually treat their injuries with medicine rather than voodoo, they have considerably longer careers and likely spend their retirement suffering considerably less chronic pain than the tough guys he seems to admire. I could continue attacking the benighted ramblings of Noachian columnists such as Falls’s, but it has already been done to perfection.

For the time being, I will content myself with wondering just how in the hell guys like Falls get paid by major newspapers for their nearly incoherent scribblings while much better writers are forced to sleep in their cars.

It’s Not the Size of the Sample That Matters. Oh, Wait, it is.

Most people have probably heard about the dustup that recently took place in Cincinnati. For those who haven’t, some local television station ran a phone-in poll asking which of the Reds’ outfielders should be benched when Ken Griffey Jr. comes off the disabled list this week. The majority of people who have little enough of a life to vote in this sort of thing decided that Griffey himself should ride the pine and that phenom Austin Kearns, second-year sensation Adam Dunn, and surprise of the year Juan Encarnacion should continue to start every day. Not surprisingly, the poll set the notoriously thin-skinned Griffey off.

Nearly everyone in baseball heaped scorn on the idea of benching a future Hall of Famer. Most correctly pointed out that the TV station’s poll wasn't random or representative. But while baseball people appear to appreciate that sample size is critical to opinion polls, many of them routinely discount it in the context of player evaluation. If you want to know who really understands the concept of sample size and who doesn’t, just take note of who Reds GM Jim Bowden manages to swindle when he gets around to addressing his outfield logjam.

Juan Encarnacion has been a life-saver in Griffey’s absence, but given that Dunn and Kearns represent The Future for the Reds, he is likely to be the odd man out in the outfield mix. Rather than keep him around as a caddy for Griffey, Bowden will probably try to trade him for some much-needed pitching. Attention GMs: if by the time Jim Bowden calls you shopping Encarnacion you don’t know who the sucker is, you’re the sucker. That’s because Encarnacion’s OPS in the first 40 games this season is nearly one hundred points higher than anything he’s ever posted in a full season and is likely to plummet back to the extremely ordinary baseline that he’s established over the course of his six year career once he’s been given a representative sample of at bats. Put simply, Encarnacion’s season is a fluke, and wise men don’t trade good pitchers for flukes.

Despite my warning, however, someone is going to blow it and give up a good young arm for Juan. My guess is that it will be a panicky George Steinbrenner, but it might just as easily be Baltimore’s fluke-loving Peter Angelos (see his signing of one-season-wonders Marty Cordova and David Segui). Neither of them seem all that hip to the concept of statistical significance.

Insanity Watch: Bud Selig’s Telephone Habit

Two weeks ago I reported Bud Selig’s strange habit of taking time out of his busy schedule to call and personally berate writers Rob Neyer and Doug Pappas after they wrote things the commish didn’t care for. Now reader Kevin Holmes informs me that Budzilla called Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski last December too.

While I have to admit that I’m a little irked that the local writer for one of baseball’s worst teams got the ring before a nationally known columnist like me, [Ed's note: I like your optimism, but perhaps you should change this to "nationally available"] I like Posnanski’s work, so I’ll cut Bud some slack. Besides, Bud’s apparent obsession with stamping out dissent is clearly a symptom of an unwell mind, and I’d hate to disturb him anymore than he already is. For now I’d just like to tell Bud that I’m in the book, and if he feels well enough to call me, I’d love to hear from him. If not, hey, the road to good mental health is a long one and I’ll wait as long as necessary.

Johnny Sportswriter and the Ottawa Lynx

It’s always the same. Every time the owners and players wage labor war, Johnny Sportswriter at the Daily Bugle rolls out a column lambasting the bigs and recommending that you take advantage of the affordable prices, motivated players, and small-town flavor of minor league ball.

Don't believe a word of it. Johnny Sportswriter doesn’t really want you to ditch the majors for the minor leagues. After all, he works the major league beat in a major league city. Johnny Sportswriter is just venting his frustration and inoculating himself against the pain of the forced hiatus that usually accompanies these owner-player dustups. Once he’s had time to clear his head, he’ll be back to stuffing himself at the press box buffet table and thanking his lucky stars he gets to watch the majors for a living.

But inevitably there will be people who take Johnny Sportswriter's advice more seriously than Johnny Sportswriter does himself. They boycott the big leagues, having convinced themselves that the minors are better than the real McCoy. Are they on to something? Do the bush leagues hold pleasures impossible to find at the big league level? Even though I live in a triple-A town, I had only been to one minor league game in the past ten years, and couldn’t answer with my usual brand of half-cocked certainty. So to find out whether the minors live up to their billing, I spent last Friday night watching the International League’s Columbus Clippers battle the Ottawa Lynx. I even took notes. What follows is the tale of the tape.

Cost:

One of the biggest complaints about major league baseball is how expensive it is. By the time you pay for tickets, parking, hot dogs, pennants, shirts, big foam fingers, and beers #1-7, you’re out a mint. At Columbus’s Cooper Stadium, parking was $2 and box seats $ 8.50 (though I could have paid $ 5.00 general admission and snuck past the geriatric ushers into the good section pretty easily). The beer and the foam fingers were more in line with big league prices, but if you really wanted to rough it and do without the foam finger, you’d still come out with enough money for a sack of post-game sliders. Mmmmmmmm, gastro-intestinal distress . . .

Verdict: the minors.

Location:

One of the fictions spun by big league boycotters is that the minor league game is somehow more accessible and "closer to home." This may be true for the 22% of the population that lives in rural America, close to the Carolina Mudcats and the Tennessee Smokies of the world. But most people live in big cities, and most big cities either have major league baseball or are near it. As for accessibility, tell me, if you had to choose, would you rather be dropped in the middle of San Francisco and have to find your way to PacBell, or would you rather be dropped in the tobacco fields of Zebulon, North Carolina and have to find your way to Five County Stadium out on Highway 39? Would it help if I told you that it was banjo night at Five County?

As for Columbus, Cooper Stadium is located in the part of town where the leukemia rates are high and the check cashing businesses outnumber banks. Something tells me that if Columbus ever got itself a major league team, it wouldn’t be playing in the Appalachian ghetto that some locals refer to as "pig town." I’m not necessarily a fan of gentrification, but if I’m leaving a ballpark at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night with a few Miller High Lifes in me, I’d prefer not to be in a part of town where cabbies fear to tread.

Verdict: the majors.

Fan Camaraderie:

On account of the increasing costs and corporate influence associated with the major league game, the chances of sitting next to an A-1 yuppie scumbag at a major league stadium are very good these days. I guess your feelings about this category will all come down to your tolerance for yuppie scumbags.

On Friday I sat next to a couple named John and Jamie. Both are students, with John holding down a full time job at the local Anheuser-Busch brewery to boot (did you know that employees are given two free cases each month as a part of their compensation package? I’m in the wrong line of work.). My intuition told me that Jamie would rather have spent her Friday night being wined and dined at Alana's than to be dragged out to a ballgame and listen to John sing the SportsCenter theme every time Drew Henson made a great stab at third. But she seemed like a good sport about it. In fact, the place seemed to be full of good people. Some borderline insane people like the lady behind who kept warning me that she’d "knock [my] ass over" if a foul ball came our way, but good people nonetheless. I liked it.

Verdict: the minors.

Fun! Fun! Fun!

As I’ve mentioned before, more and more major league teams have decided that the game on the field isn’t enough to hold the fans’ interest, so they've started turning the ballparks into carnivals, complete with merry-go-rounds, ferris wheels, and sideshows. This phenomenon is still pretty new in the majors, however, and there are still places like Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium where the game will always be king. The minors are a different story. Because they know that they're peddling second-rate talent, the minors have always been about showmanship and distraction.

Something other than baseball was happening every half-inning Friday night. There were pizza giveaways, shopping cart races, baseball bingo, scavenger hunts, winning seat numbers, and dash-for-cash events. Even worse, Friday night’s game had a theme: Animal House Night. In honor of this special occasion, the first pitch was thrown out by an apparently plastered member of some college’s Sigma Chi chapter. The pitch was high and outside, but I’ll cut him some slack considering he was wearing a toga.

Some would say that all this peripheral business is good because it encourages people who wouldn’t otherwise come – people with small children for example – to come out to the ballpark. I would say that it’s very bad because it encourages people who wouldn’t otherwise come – people with small children for example – to come out to the ballpark.

Verdict: the majors.

Seats:

There isn’t a bad seat at Cooper Stadium, or most minor league parks for that matter, and even though I arrived ticketless an hour before game time, I managed to get a seat right behind the home team dugout. The great seats had their drawbacks, however. Even though I’ve read Ball Four and ought to know better, I'd always hoped that ballplayers were generally decent guys you wouldn't mind hanging out with. But sitting so close to the action, I got the "pleasure" of overhearing two Clippers discuss all the fine "tail" in the crowd that night. Classy. Still, this is really no contest.

Verdict: the minors.

The Actual Ballgame:

Minor league aficionados will try to convince you that minor league games are somehow more refreshing or uplifting, and that the guys in Richmond, Rochester, Pawtucket, and Columbus are more enjoyable to watch because they’re playing the game for the love of it rather than a paycheck. Right. Maybe there are some players in it for the sheer love of the game, but everyone I saw on the field Friday night would give his right arm for the minimum salaries, per diems and charter flights of the show. Anyone who'd tell you otherwise is lying. Now that we've got that little romantic conceit out of the way, let’s turn to the actual quality of play.

Ok, let’s not. No one would seriously argue that you’re seeing a better ballgame at Triple-A than you are in the majors. I mean no disrespect to the Columbus and Ottawa players I saw last Friday night, but with a scant few exceptions, hardly any of them will have a legitimate gripe if they don’t make it to the big leagues. It may be cruel to say that Columbus’s backup catcher Creighton Gubanich will never play for the parent club Yankees, but it’s the truth. What’s more, it’s a truth that Gubanich himself seemed well aware of as he flailed his way to an 0-4 night against Ottawa, cussing at the umpire and yelling at himself each time he took the walk back to the dugout. This wasn’t uplifting; this was kind of sad. Perhaps it’s better at the lower levels where everybody still thinks they have a chance, but even if the major leaguers hit the picket lines tomorrow, I would have a hard time watching the not so quiet desperation that is Triple-A baseball day in and day out. Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe Gubanich was the guy talking about all the tail at the ballpark that night and he gets his share of fulfillment from that and that alone. I just kind of doubt it.

Verdict: the majors.

So where does this all leave us? Tied 3-3 in my completely arbitrary categories. Perhaps there are a dozen better things about the minors that I’m not taking into account, and maybe watching millionaires argue with other millionaires in the majors is draining the life out of those of us who still care, but I’m the judge here and the judge has to make a decision. The majors get my nod in the tie-breaker. I enjoyed myself much more than I thought I would Friday night, but there’s no way I’d turn my back on the big leagues. The minors are called the minors for a reason. Johnny Sportswriter may flirt with abandoning the bigs for his small-town mistress when the news turns bleak, but he’ll be back. And with the exception of a few grudge-holding fans out there, so will the rest of us. We always have.

Bud Selig Never Calls

Quote of the Week

"The fact of the matter that they're winning on the field doesn't solve their problems."

-- Baseball Commissioner Bud $elig, referring to the early season success of contraction targets Minnesota (one game out of first place) and Montreal (leading their division), essentially admitting that the owners’ professed concern about competitive balance on the field is nothing more than a smokescreen.

Speaking of Bud Selig, I have a complaint to make. Last December, ESPN’s Rob Neyer ran an anti-Bud column which precipitated a telephone call from the man himself. On Friday, Baseball Prospectus’s Doug Pappas got the ring. I ask you, what does a guy have to do to get yelled at? I’ve been taking pot shots at Bud and his cronies for weeks now, and I’ve heard bubkis. If I still haven't heard anything by Memorial Day, I’m gonna have to start calling myself.

At any rate, is it just me, or does anyone find it incredible that the leader of a multi-billion dollar enterprise is taking the time to harass sports columnists just because they disagree with him? Does he really think he can convince smart guys like Neyer and Pappas that they’re wrong, or is he simply that insecure? All I know is that if Bill Gates started calling the guys at Slashdot every time someone made fun of his operation, people would start wondering whether the boss was making the best use of his time.

Ground Chuck

While we’re quoting, here’s one more:

"Prototype size and speed...has a very large wingspan...has the speed and motor to chase...explosive at a good pad level...massive widebody..."

No, it's not marketing copy from Lockheed Martin’s strike-fighter catalog. It's a collection of quotes lifted verbatim from scouting reports on ESPN.com's "NFL Draft Tracker". The Draft Tracker (and any number of other draft supplements like it) compiles tons of important information about the future elite of pro football. For example, it tells you that Julius Peppers, a defensive end from the University of North Carolina, "shows the ability to bend at the knees." Thank goodness for that. One thing it doesn’t seem to do too well, however, is tell you whether or not young Peppers and his fellow draftees can actually play the game of football.

The modern NFL draft and its attendant analysis have turned twenty-two year old kids who thought they were football players into cuts of meat, stopwatch times, and IQ-test results. This failure to see the forest for the trees has transformed pro football from a beautiful game of strategy and physical prowess into the freakshow of a sport it has turned into today. If he were coming out of college in 2002, Joe Montana would go undrafted because he lacks scrambling ability. Walter Payton would slip down the list due to a hundredth of a second lag in his 40 yard dash time. Lawrence Taylor would be knocked for not having an adequate "wingspan."

In evaluating talent, baseball has largely avoided the worst excesses of the NFL. Unfortunately, there are more and more scouts and GMs out there leaning towards the NFL approach. It's becoming increasingly common to read about players being analyzed in terms of their "tools": raw abilities like speed, arm strength, and power. The thinking of the "tool" school is that anyone with a healthy combination of these raw talents can be transformed into a great player.

Obviously, anyone who runs a baseball team wants players who are fast, powerful, and can throw. But more often than not, teams fixated on "tools" have had a terrible track record developing players. They routinely dismiss short, weak-armed guys who just happen to hit the cover off the ball (like Pittsburgh’s all-world outfielder Brian Giles, inexplicably let go by the Cleveland Indians) in exchange for fast, powerful, good-throwing guys who can’t play baseball very well (like Ruben Rivera, Juan Encarnacion, and Alex Escobar). Toolsy players look great in uniform, but most of the time they don’t do much to help their teams win ballgames.

Call me naive, but I can’t help thinking that the best indicator of a player’s ability to do well in the majors is how well he did in the minors, and in high school or college before that. How much he can bench press or how fast he can run a 40 yard-dash should be a secondary concern at best.

And Then There Were Three

Another week, another manager fired, with Colorado’s Buddy Bell biting the dust on Friday evening. Not counting Montreal’s lame duck Frank Robinson, that leaves three guys (Tony Muser, Mike Hargrove, and Hal McRae) as sure bets in my dead pool.

What to say about Buddy Bell? Not much. Like this season’s other two casualties, he was dealt a losing hand before the season began. No one was going to do anything with that team in Colorado, and now that Rockies’ management has figured that out, maybe it’s time to get creative. One hot rumor floating around last week was that the Rocks were considering trading pitcher Mike Hampton and outfielder Larry Walker to the Red Sox for Manny Ramirez. I don’t really see that happening with the Red Sox in first place, but wouldn’t that be a humdinger of a trade? Manny could hit 80 home runs in Coors Field. Short of that, the Rockies could consider giving more playing time to guys who could actually help them instead of screwing around with dead wood like Terry Shumpert.

Cool it, It’s Early

My spot-on managerial predictions notwithstanding, I received an email from a reader the other day asking if I was willing to recant my preseason predictions in light of the fast starts by the Pirates and Expos, and the slow starts of the Astros and Braves.

Look, I love and respect all twelve of my readers, but buy-high-sell-low guys like that are the ones who end up working three jobs into their 80's because they screwed up their IRAs. It’s April. There’s tons of baseball to go. Besides, even if I'm wrong all down the line with my predictions, do you think I'd throw away a perfectly good post-season column idea ("Why It Wasn’t My Fault That I Was Wrong") by admitting it now? Patience, grasshopper, the truth of the season will be revealed in time.

And There’s no Santa Claus Either

Last Thursday, my wife was out to dinner with clients (she always was the harder working Calcaterra), leaving me at home with a turkey sandwich, a couple of beers, and an Atlanta Braves game. Even better, it turns out that my most favoritist baseball player in the whole wide world -- Greg Maddux -- was pitching that night. I sank into my Eames lounger to watch the artist at work.

Maddux got creamed. How bad was it? This bad.

My idol allowed eight runs and walked four batters in a nightmare of a fifth inning. Maddux normally goes a month without walking four guys. Always the perfectionist, he’s notorious for launching F-bombs at the top of his lungs when his pitches miss their mark (and by his definition, missing a mark means being three inches outside). On Thursday he could do nothing but watch as his stuff went wherever the hell it wanted to go.

You can't read too much into one start, and Maddux's recent back troubles may go a long way towards explaining his feebleness. Still, watching him struggle that night was like watching someone whup your old man. I wouldn't wish the feeling on...Bud Selig.

Barry Bonds Among the Tents of the Achaeans

Last Thursday, the Milwaukee Brewers became the second team this young season to fire their manager. After two-plus years of futility, it’s probably no surprise that Davy Lopes got the axe, but he's hardly the only reason for the Brewers' woes. The fact is, Milwaukee faces a talent deficit of major proportions, and even the reanimated corpse of John McGraw wouldn’t be able to win with what Lopes has had to work with. Of course, when the guy who decides whether or not the manager gets canned -- Brewers’ GM Dean Taylor -- is the same guy responsible for bringing in talent, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s the manager who's going to be cleaning out his desk when things go south. It has always happened this way in baseball, and it probably always will.

Still, two firings and it's not even Secretaries’ Day yet. Normally I wouldn’t start my managerial dead pool until midseason, but since this year is shaping up as a bloodbath, I may as well get going now:

Go ahead and refinance, you’re not going anywhere:

Joe Torre (NYY), Grady Little (BOS), Charlie Manuel (CLE), Ron Gardenhire (MIN), Jerry Manuel (CHIW), Luis Pujols (DET), Lou Pinella (SEA), Mike Scioscia (ANA), Bobby Cox (ATL), Jeff Torborg (FLA), Jimy Williams (HOU), Tony LaRussa (STL), Bob Boone (CIN), Bob Brenly (ARI), Dusty Baker (SF), Jim Tracy (LA), Bruce Bochy (SD), Whoever the Hell follows Lopes (MIL).

Cox, Pinella, and LaRussa are all safe because (a) they have good teams that should be in the playoffs, and (b) even if something weird happens and they don’t make it, they don’t have bosses known for flying off the handle. Torre has four World Series rings and probably the best team of all, but he also works for Steinbrenner, and on the off chance the Yankees don't win, he could be in danger (not that the thought should be keeping him up nights). The rest of these guys are either new enough or have decent enough teams to make continued employment a relatively sure bet through the 2002 season. Well, except for Jeff Torborg, whose continued tenure as manager of the Expos/Marlins strongly suggests that he must have compromising pictures of owner Jeff Loria.

Dust off your resume just in case:

Buck Martinez (TOR), Art Howe (OAK), Jerry Narron (TEX), Larry Bowa (PHI), Bobby Valentine (NYM), Don Baylor (CHIC), Lloyd McClendon (PIT).

Martinez has a new boss who doesn't favor him. If he slips up once, he’s toast. The others are potential victims of the expectations game. Some, like Valentine and Howe, need to make the playoffs to be safe. Others, like Baylor and Bowa, preside over teams that are expected to continue improving. Either one could be out if his team even looks like it's starting to backslide (it doesn’t help that both of them have the rare ability to alienate star players). This is Narron’s first full season, but the ship he’s steering in Texas is mighty expensive, and Tom Hicks isn’t paying for a fourth place finish. McClendon is subject to lower expectations since his team is so bad and he’s only been on the job a year. But if the Pirates’ new stadium is three quarters empty in August, he could get axed too.

Dead men walking:

Hal McRae (TB), Mike Hargrove (BAL), Tony Muser (KC), Frank Robinson (MTL), Buddy Bell (COL).

Since he’s merely the MLB trustee for the soon to be liquidated or moved Expos, Frank Robinson doesn’t count. The rest of these guys are presiding over teams that look to be really stanky this year, and someone’s gonna have to pay.

So if you include Detroit and Milwaukee, we could have six firings by the end of the season -- a bit more than usual, but not at all impossible.

Good Faith Negotiations:

According to Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, the owners’ most recent proposal to the players’ union included an item called a "Competitive Balance Tax." The idea is that teams would pay a 50 percent tax on payrolls above $98 million. But contrary to the impression given by the name of the tax, the proceeds would not go to the teams that Czar Bud Selig thinks are unable to compete with the Yankees of the world. Instead, the money would flow into a "Commissioner's Discretionary Pool." Will Bud distribute it among the owners? Will it go towards buying Selig some botox injections, which he appears to need desperately? I have no idea, but until the owners say what it would be used for, the players are likely to view it as nothing more than a giant burning pit where money that would otherwise go to them would disappear. Not exactly the sort of proposal the owners should be making if they really want to reach a compromise with the players.

Even more revealing of the owners’ motives is another one of their proposals: the implementation of "a mechanism through which clubs can secure the independent verification of offers purportedly made to free agents." -- in plain English, price-fixing. They were doing it informally in the mid-1980's, and got busted for collusion. Now they're at it again, but this time they're hiding their true intentions with lots of pious talk about preserving "competitive balance". Clearly their real goal is to lower player salaries. That’s fine; after all, it’s their negotiation. But just remember this when the owners claim that the coming strike is about the players’ greed and the owners’ efforts to protect the integrity of the game.

No Mulligans in Baseball:

It’s 2001 all over again in the AL West. Once again the A’s biggest competition -- the Mariners -- have roared out of the gate despite the absence of a superstar, and once again the A’s have stumbled in the early going despite being the better team on paper. Sixteen games in, and Oakland already finds itself four games back. Perhaps the A’s representatives should make their own proposal for the next labor agreement: the implementation of do-overs for April.

The Giants’ Achilles Hamstring:

I don’t know much about Barry Bonds’s upbringing, but rumor has it his mother dipped him into the River Styx as a child, rendering him invulnerable except at the hamstring by which she held him. [Ed's note: She held him by the hamstring?]

Now that Bonds has injured that hamstring , the outcome of the war against hated, er, Arizona, is in doubt for San Francisco. Luckily, the Giants have started quickly, so disaster may yet be averted if some Patroclus can be found to fight in Bonds’s armor in the event he has to go on the disabled list. That said, over the long run the Giants need Bonds to overcome the Hectors and Sarpedons of the NL West. If Bonds's injury proves too much for him, it will be the Giants dragged around the walls of Troy, while their women wail and beat their breasts in lamentation.

Hypocrisy Watch -- Yankees’ Fans:

As you probably know, New York Yankees fans booed Jason Giambi mercilessly on April 5^th after he "failed" to earn his massive new contract in the first four games of the season. The booing was an example both of the ridiculous impatience of Yankees fans and the complete irrelevance of 16 at-bats over the course of a season. Since the boo-birds came out to sing, Giambi has been, well, Giambi, posting an on base percentage of .400+ and hitting three home runs. Eventually he’ll go on a tear and once again find himself atop the American League leader boards. Question: why do Yankees fans get so angry when they think you're denying the greatness of their team (a perception which usually stems from your failure to root for the Yankees as vigorously as they do) when they themselves are so damn fickle?

2002 Season: First Impressions

Strike Nine!

So it's only two weeks into the season, and already reporters and commentators are playing the "on pace" game. You know the one: Barry Bonds is "on pace" to hit 113 home runs, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson are "on pace" to win 35 games each, and the Detroit Tigers are "on pace" to lose 162. It's all bunk, of course, but this year Johnny Sportswriter may be doing us a service. The way things are going, fantasy projections might be all we have to remember the 2002 season by.

For the first time since 1994, Major League Baseball began the year without a collective bargaining agreement in place. As most of you will recall, 1994 brought a nasty strike that managed to do what the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Loma Prieta earthquake could not: cancel the World Series.

But apart from the duration of the work stoppage, 1994 was a pretty typical year for baseball, in the sense that every labor contract expiration since 1972 has been followed either by a player’s strike or an owners’ lockout. The current total is eight work stoppages.

Plainly, the odds of going a full 162+ games this year are not good. The owners got some good press early on by pledging not to lock players out during the season, but those promises meant essentially nothing. During the season, the players have all the leverage. The owners get almost all their income from putting butts in the stands. They're far more likely to declare an impasse and impose a lockout the day after the World Series ends than any time during the regular season. If there is a work stoppage during the season, it will be a players’ strike designed to keep the owners from unilaterally imposing new work rules after the season ends (which, due to the mind-numbing intricacies of labor law, the owners are allowed to do).

No baseball fan wants to see a strike, but if and when one occurs, don’t buy into the "screw those greedy players" hype that hacks like Mike Lupica like to peddle when talking the business of baseball. Yes, the players make a lot of money, but no one put a gun to Tom Hicks’s head and made him pay A-Rod 250 large. And contrary to conventional wisdom, baseball tickets, concessions, parking, and souvenirs have not become prohibitively expensive because of escalating player salaries. Basic economics tell us that player salaries are high because ticket prices are high, not the other way around. If you flunked basic economics but got a gentleman’s C in statistics, consider that there is absolutely no correlation between where the various teams rank in terms of payroll and ticket price. If you flunked both those subjects, just remember back to your days at Big State University when you used to have to pay pro-level ticket prices to see unpaid athletes.

I could riff all day about the ins and outs of baseball economics, but we’re going to have plenty of time for that when the season comes to a premature end. For the time being, suffice it to say that labor negotiations aren’t simple, and only in the simple mind of guys like Mike Lupica do single issues like player greed adequately describe their dynamics.

Enough of that sad business for now, what else is going on?

C.Y.A.

The Detroit Tigers fired their manager and general manager a mere week into the season. Though no one who knows anything would suggest that it was a bad move to let Phil Garner and Randy Smith go, it's hard not to question the timing. Presumably, five or six months ago, Tiger honcho Dave Dombrowski thought that Garner and Smith were the right men for their jobs. Otherwise else he would have fired them back in November or December. But now, a mere six games into the season, they’re suddenly wrong?

Dombrowski may have done the right thing getting rid of Smith and Garner, but he gets a half-point deduction for style. If he would have cleaned house before the season, he would have sent Tiger fans a clear message that he was assuming responsibility for changing Detroit’s losing ways. Having waited to move until the Tigers had posted an 0-6 start, Dombrowski will now no doubt spend the next six months laying all the blame for the wretched season (did you hear that the Tigers are on pace to lose 162 games?) on the Garner and Smith-led slow start. Just watch, next winter, Dombrowski will be telling the Detroit Free Press how the 2003 season is really his first crack at making the Tigers into a winner.

Addition by Subtraction

In 1998, the Seattle Mariners had Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Edgar Martinez on their roster. All four were clearly the best players at their respective positions at the time, and both Griffey and Rodriguez could reasonably claim to be the best player in all of baseball. The 1998 Mariners were less than the sum of their parts, however, and finished with a dismal 76-85 record.

Each of the following three seasons, the Mariners shed one of their marquee players, with Johnson and Griffey leaving by trade, and Rodriguez via free agency. The Mariners improved slightly in 1999 after losing Johnson, dramatically after Griffey’s departure in 2000, and went off the charts (116 wins) in 2001 after saying good bye to A-Rod. No one expected the Mariners to recover from any of these defections, let alone thrive, but thrive they have.

Last week the last of Seattle’s four stars -- Martinez – went down with a torn hamstring. I hereby predict that they will not lose a game for the rest of the season.

Anarchy Watch: The Texas Rangers

Before Opening Day I suggested that the Rangers were flirting with disaster by signing John Rocker, Carl Everett and a handful of other notable malcontents. Two weeks out of the chute, it looks like the great chemistry experiment is coming along quite nicely. In keeping with today’s other predictions and projections, I’m setting May 17^th as the before/after line for a full blown Ranger implosion. I’m not exactly sure how the inevitable chaos will usher itself in, but I wouldn’t rule out fisticuffs, a clubhouse coup, or multiple superstar trade demands.

2002 NL West Preview

Arizona Diamondbacks:

Every so often, bad decisions lead to good outcomes. As proof, I give you the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks.

In 2000, the Diamondbacks finished a distant third in the National League West, with a roster full of aging B-listers like Matt Williams, Steve Finley, and Jay Bell. Inexplicably, Arizona brought in even more old-timers for the 2001 season (Reggie Sanders and Mark Grace), and benched their lone young slugger Erubiel Durazo. The result? An improbable World Series championship run fueled by unexpectedly good performances from a number of guys on the wrong side of 30. Clearly, Lady Luck shined her ever-loving light on the D-Backs last season.

But it would be sheer folly for the Snakes to count on luck two years in a row, wouldn't it? Unfortunately for Diamondback fans, however, that's exactly what their team appears to be doing.

Instead of infusing the Arizona lineup with young blood in Durazo and minor league masher Jack Cust, Diamondback GM Joe Garagiola Jr. traded Cust to Colorado for a spare part-level lefty reliever, and announced that Durazo would once again be riding the pine. Cust has shown no glove-skills whatsoever, and his trade may be marginally defensible, but continuing to block Durazo with the geriatric Mark Grace is nothing short of outrageous, and has even inspired a guerrilla movement of sorts among Durazo's supporters.

It may seem a bit picky to criticize a world champ for not playing its youngsters, but the Diamondbacks aren't your typical world champion. The average age of Arizona's everyday players and most frequently-used pitchers was 33 last year, making them the oldest World Series winner ever by a long shot. Given that they hardly made any moves on the roster this offseason, that age is going to be even higher in 2002. It's always possible that the Diamondbacks will once again beat the odds and not avoid having a gaggle of starters succumb to injuries and statistical regression, but I wouldn't count on it.

A strong starting rotation and an overall weak division will probably save the Diamondbacks' bacon this year, but time is not on their side. They'll probably still win the division, but if they run into some bad luck, they may find themselves looking up in the standings at...

San Diego Padres:

San Diego is this year's fashionable pick to surprise in the National League -- which is usually a bad sign, since fashions in sports aren't much more rational than deciding that brown is this year's black. Still, at the risk of looking foolish six months from now, I have to say that the Padres are going to surprise a lot of people this year. My prediction, however, has nothing to do with fashion, and everything to do with wine.

The Padres kind of stank last season, but in baseball, not all smells are equal. The 2001 Orioles, for example, had the stink of a rotting corpse, but the 2001 Padres had the slightly yeasty funk of an immature burgundy. You didn't want to drink last year's Padres, but connoisseurs knew that given some more time in the cellar, 2001 Padres Noir would eventually show its good breeding.

The Padres' vintner is general manager Kevin Towers, who has shown a great deal of patience and savvy in his craft, always seeming to know the exact time to plant, prune, pick, and preserve the fruits of the Padre farm system. He showed his technique last year, as he pulled off one of the better steals of the season, trading Jay Witasick to the Yankees.

Witasick, a perpetually average pitcher, was picked up by the Padres for almost nothing late in the 2000 season. Before the 2001 season, San Diego moved Witasick to the bullpen where he began the year strong, as many converted starting pitchers do when first assigned to relief duties (over time, a starter moved to the bullpen will usually revert to his mediocre ways). Despite all the obvious signs that Witasick was a flash in the pan, Towers fooled the Yankees into giving up prized middle infielder D'Angelo Jimenez for him. Predictably, Witasick immediately slid back into mediocrity, while Jimenez established himself as the Padres' second baseman of the future. Towers has pulled off several deals like that over the past few seasons, and as a result, the Padre organization is loaded with talent.

This year, Towers will focus on making sure that nothing goes wrong with the aging process. The Padres will open the 2002 season with two rookies in the infield: third baseman Sean Burroughs and shortstop Ramon Vazquez. These guys are so good that the Padres moved their two best players -- Phil Nevin and Ryan Klesko -- to different positions in order to accommodate them. In addition, the Padres have two of the best starting pitchers in the minors in Dennis Tankersley and Jacob Peavy. While one or both may begin the season in the minors, they are likely to contribute sooner rather than later. If Burroughs, Vazquez, Tankersley, and Peavy perform well, the Padres may be worth decanting come October. If any of them have a breakout season, Robert Parker might just give them a 90+.

San Francisco Giants:

Barry Bonds is without question the best player in baseball, and barring injury will smack 60+ homers this year. The Giants, meanwhile, are a respectable club in a division lacking a clearly dominant team. Once again, they should find themselves challenging for the division title.

But that's been the story for the past five or six years now, and it's getting a little stale. So instead of rehashing the question of whether Tsuyoshi Shinjo can handle centerfield every day or whether Jeff Kent will rebound from his wrist injury, let's talk about ballparks.

Baseball has seen a stadium-building boom over the past decade. Since 1992, twelve new baseball-specific stadiums have come online, with future parks slated for at least three other cities. With few exceptions, these parks were funded primarily from public sources: the issuance of tax-exempt bonds, the hiking of sales taxes, or the out and out underwriting of construction costs by state and local governments. Why do Mayor Smith and Governor Jones continue to foot the bill? Because they believe that new stadiums spur economic growth and that government subsidies will be offset by revenues from ticket taxes, sales taxes on concessions, and property tax increases arising from the stadium's presumed economic impact on the region.

Unfortunately for John Q. Taxpayer, this theory is bunk. As people smarter than me have conclusively shown, a new sports facility has an extremely small and perhaps even negative effect on a region's overall economic activity and employment. Even when a stadium provides a spark for its neighborhood -- as Camden Yards did for Baltimore's Inner Harbor -- such benefits usually come at the expense of other areas in the city.

Rather than spreading benefits among the general public, a new baseball stadium usually redistributes wealth upward to rich baseball owners. Owners typically keep all revenues from luxury boxes, advertising, concessions, and parking. They even have the right to all rents derived from non-baseball use of their publicly-owned stadium. It's a first-class scam, and the local governments that finance these things are either accomplices or dupes.

Thank goodness for guys like Giants' owner Peter Magowan. After 20 years of owners trying to shake down the citizens of San Francisco for a publicly funded stadium, two years ago Magowan and a band of bankers opened PacBell Stadium: the first privately financed ballpark since Dodger Stadium was built in 1962. Contrary to Bud Selig's prophecies of doom, the world didn't end when the Giants footed their own bill. In fact, it got a whole lot brighter: PacBell is widely considered to be the best new park in baseball, and the Giants cover the $20 million/year debt service on the new joint with billboard advertising alone. Over time, owning its own park will also dramatically enhance the value of the franchise.

So the next time you hear your favorite team whining about how it can't compete because taxpayers won't give it a shiny new ballpark, remember that there is a team in San Francisco that never drew a large number of fans, and had fairly piddling annual revenues, but somehow managed to both pay for its own stadium and put a consistently solid product on the field. Nice story, no?

Colorado Rockies:

Some of the most intuitive but underused analytical tools in baseball fall under the category "park effects." These are statistics that account for the ways the physical characteristics of a ballpark can increase or decrease offensive production. Some of these characteristics are static, like the distance of the fences from home plate; others, like wind and humidity, can change from year to year.

Playing in the mile-high environs of Coors Field, the Rockies have to contend with the most extreme park effects in the history of baseball. The thin mountain air allows balls to fly out of Coors at an unprecedented rate. Knowing this, outfielders tend to play deep, allowing weakly hit balls to fall in for cheap base hits. As a result, Coors makes ordinary hitters look like Hall of Famers, and solid pitchers look like scrubs.

Unfortunately, the Rockies have learned the wrong lesson from their freakish park. Rather than acknowledging that their mostly average hitters are only apparently good, and that their mostly decent pitchers are only apparently bad, the Rockies have done an inordinate amount of fiddling with their pitching staff. In some cases, this has led them to try interesting and harmless tactics like carrying 12 or 13 pitchers on their roster. In other cases, however, they have spent way too much money on free agents like Daryl Kile or Mike Hampton.

The key to winning in Colorado is to face the facts. Rather than try to fight the laws of physics by developing a Coors-proof pitching staff, the Rockies should acknowledge that their juiced park has led them to overestimate the quality of their hitters. Sure, they have plenty of guys who put up big numbers, but only a couple of them (Larry Walker and Todd Helton) have shown that they can put up those numbers on the road as well as at home. It may seem counterintuitive for a team that routinely scores in double digits, but I think the answer for the Rockies is to add offense.

And in fact, while they didn't have a particularly busy offseason, the Rockies do seem be pumping up. Their best trade -- unloading relief pitcher Mike Meyers to Arizona for masher Jack Cust -- was an absolute steal. As I mentioned in the Diamondbacks preview, Cust's inability to play defense does pose a bit of a problem, but for a team facing the challenges of baseball at altitude, Cust's mighty bat will come in handy. Emphasizing pitching and defense didn't work for Colorado; who's to say that improving their offense at the expense of their defense will be any worse?

Los Angeles Dodgers:

The Dodgers have had more nicknames than just about any team in baseball history. Since their founding in 1884, the Brooklyn/Los Angeles franchise has been known as the Dodgers, the Superbas, the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, the Grays, and the Atlantics (why any team would get rid of a great name like "the Superbas" is beyond me, but we'll leave that for another column).

Now that they've won six world championships and sixteen pennants as the Dodgers, it's unlikely they'll be changing their name anytime soon. But maybe they should, since "the Dodgers" just doesn't seem to fit anymore.

Part of the problem is geographic. The name "Dodgers" supposedly comes from the phrase "trolley dodgers," which is what players walking to the ballpark through 1930's Brooklyn really were. But as anyone who has been there knows, nobody walks in L.A. -- least of all, millionaire baseball players. And the auto and real estate industries did away with L.A.'s Red Line Trolley years ago (remember Roger Rabbit?).

The other and more important reason "Dodgers" doesn't fit is that most people associate that nickname with the well-run franchise that was the envy of the baseball world for decades. The O'Malley family owned the team for nearly 50 years, and under their watch, the Dodgers established baseball on the West Coast, financed their own stadium, and compiled a record of on-the-field success rivaled only by the Yankees. The O'Malley Dodgers symbolized class, stability, and a good deal of horse-sense. All that ended, however, when the National League's most legendary franchise was sold to News Corp.'s Fox Broadcasting Company in 1998, becoming merely another horse in Rupert Murdoch's corporate stable.

Since then, the Dodgers really haven't been the Dodgers. Despite fielding one of baseball's most expensive teams for the past few years, Los Angeles hasn't made the playoffs since 1996, and the extremely questionable personnel decisions made by Fox executives over the past few years will no doubt ensure that the current losing streak will last a long, long time. Two months after Fox bought the Dodgers, it traded Mike Piazza -- perhaps the best-hitting catcher in the history of the game -- to the Florida Marlins for Gary Sheffield, who was recently traded to the Braves for spare parts and little else. And if you think turning a living legend into scrap is a good trick, wait until you hear what Fox has done on the free-agent market. Before the 2001 season, the Dodgers signed free agent pitcher Darren Driefort to a contract paying him Roger Clemens money despite the fact that, statistically speaking, Driefort is most similar to Harry Byrd, Pete Redfern, and Bob Milacki. Don't remember those guys? Don't worry, because in a couple of years you won't remember Driefort either.

Prior to this season, the Dodgers tried to solidify their outfield (an outfield that needed solidifying the minute the Dodgers got hosed in the Sheffield deal) by inviting a lot of "big name" free agents like Dante Bichette, Roberto Kelly, and Mark Whitten, to camp. Unfortunately, the talent attached to these names hasn't been impressive since Clinton's first term, and none of them will make the team. Of course, with a couple of exceptions, the players that will make the team aren't much better than the flotsam that will get cut before opening day. The team was somewhat respectable last year, but this feels like the year the Dodgers hit bottom.

And there's no relief in sight. It's hard to have any confidence that the same people who brought you "Celebrity Boxing" have the class or wisdom necessary to do what's necessary to restore Dodger blue to its former glory. The least Fox can do is change the name of the team to protect the innocent. The Los Angeles Superbas, anyone?

PROJECTED FINISH: Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco, Colorado, Los Angeles