Great Moments in Rabble-Rousing

Quote of the Week

"For the good of baseball, we need to have cost-containment."

--Rangers' owner Tom Hicks, who, according to this article delivered these words while speaking from his yacht off San Diego. Sources close to Mr. Hicks, however, have stated that he got a good deal on the yacht.

Since I started writing this column, I've heard from a vocal minority of folks who like me enough to keep reading, but not so much that they feel they need to be nice. These good people have accused me of never actually watching baseball games. They claim that I’m all about steroids, labor negotiations, and big money contracts. They say that I and writers like me do baseball a great disservice by not reporting on the little things like bunts, shoestring catches, and triples to the gap.

They have a point. Looking back at the old archive, I’m shocked to see how little I write about the actual game, and to remedy this state of affairs, starting now, Chin Music promises to include Actual Baseball Content^TM. Say, every couple of weeks. That is, if something interesting occurs on the field and I don’t feel more like writing about whatever lurid scuttlebutt happens to be ruling the half-sheets.

For our first installment of Actual Baseball Content^TM, we turn to last Thursday night’s tilt between the Giants and the Braves. The Giants entered play that night well back of the Western Division-leading Diamondbacks, but only a half-game behind the Dodgers in the wild card race. The Braves are approximately 57 games ahead of their nearest competitor in the National League East, but since they will most likely play either the Giants or Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs, this game had Serious Playoff Implications.

It was a close game, characterized by good pitching. With the Giants up by two runs in the bottom of the ninth, Dusty Baker called on the intimidating Rob Nen to close the deal. With one out, Nen allowed Braves’ speedster Rafael Furcal to reach second on a double. Nen then bore down on Matt Franco, striking him out. Next Nen walked Gary Sheffield, leaving runners on first and second with two down and Chipper Jones at the plate.

The Giants' situation still was not desperate. Jones hadn’t looked good that evening, and given the two-run lead, it would have taken an extra base hit from Chipper to make a difference (no way Sheffield scores from first on a single). Nen went right after Jones, putting him in an 0-2 hole, and the Giants one strike from victory.

Unfortunately for Giants fans, however, Nen got lazy and failed to keep an eye on the runners on base. He let them steal second and third without even a throw, putting the tying run in scoring position. Now instead of extra bases, Chipper only needed to poke a single through the infield to tie the game. And that he did, driving in both Furcal and Sheffield, and forcing into extra innings a game the Giants had all but won.

Only a torrential downpour in the top of the tenth kept the Giants from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. For now the game is booked as a tie. (Since the Braves and Giants aren’t scheduled to meet again this season, no makeup game has been scheduled; if the game turns out to have playoff implications, it will be replayed.) Even though Nen’s gaffe didn’t technically cost the Giants the game, it may have caused some psychological damage. Entering Thursday night, the Giants had won seven of ten; at this writing they’ve dropped three of four.

If the Giants are forced to fight tooth and nail for a playoff spot through September only to end up having to fly across the continent to play a one-game makeup against a rested Braves team at the end of the season, maybe then they will have learned that little things like holding runners on base make a difference, even on lazy, rainy weeknights in Atlanta in the middle of August.

Great Moments in Rabble-Rousing

Ten years ago Slate blogger and former New Republic editor Mickey Kaus wrote a book called The End of Equality. He claimed that the most serious threat to democracy is not so much the gap between rich and poor, but the decay of public institutions where citizens can meet as equals. In other words, our problem is not simply that the rich have too much money, but that their money insulates them more than it used to from the lives of their fellow citizens.

In his latest column the Miami Herald’s Dan Le Batard has applied this same argument to the world of baseball. He blames the "coddled cocoon" of the pro baseballer's life for the current labor disputes. Players, he writes, are insulated from the fans who "squeal" and "clamor" to worship them, and from the media that goes "begging for a morsel of valuable thought." He claims that this detachment from the everyday concerns of Johnny Punchclock and Sally Housecoat is the reason why baseball "deteriorates by the dollar, by the threat, by the empty seat."

At least I think that’s what he means. Maybe he's just hungry:

Baby Ruth. Mars bars. Butterfingers. Twix. Mounds. Almond Joy. Hershey bars. Starburst. Snickers. Milky Way. Kit Kats. Blow Pops. Nerds. 3 Musketeers. Boxes and boxes are stacked atop one another in this lounge, all free, all you can eat. They live and work in a candy store, baseball players do, playing a game for a living in a little kid's fantasy world.

Yep, rather than the exorbitant salaries, the unimaginable pressure of competition, or the fame and adulation that come from being a Major League ballplayer, it turns out that access to free candy is really what separates ballplayers from the rest of us. Sure, Le Batard mentions in passing that ballplayers don’t fly coach or carry their own luggage. But he spends far more time talking about candy, chips and sodas. It’s the Butterfingers, stupid.

What’s going on here? Does Le Batard really think that free junk food is ruining the game? That the players will only give up their Snickers bars when they’re pried from their cold, dead fingers? Of course not. He's just trying to rile up the fans. Digging into the details of a labor negotiation is hard work. Making it interesting to a general readership is even harder. It's much simpler just to bang out 750 words about the unfairness of a system that distributes candy unequally. And of course it doesn't hurt that inflammatory columns tend to bring TV appearances, syndication deals, and more money.

Contrary to what most wags are saying these days, populism isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Cynical populism like Le Batard’s, however, is divisive and destructive. It’s the journalistic equivalent of junk food.

Lukewarm: HBO's Unconvincing A City on Fire

When I was a child my parents would take me to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Detroit. Except, of course, they didn’t really live in Detroit. They lived in the suburbs of Livonia, Oak Park, Dearborn, and Rochester Hills. In fact, none of my relatives had lived in Detroit since the late 1960's because, in the words of an uncle I have thankfully lost contact with, "that’s when the ni****s took over." He was talking about the 1967 Detroit riots that left 46 dead, thousands injured, and over 2,500 businesses burned to the ground. The long-term effects were even more devastating. A good part of Detroit's population fled north of 8 Mile Road, leaving the city crippled by poverty, crime, and despair.

The Detroit riots provide the backdrop for the HBO Sports documentary A City on Fire: The Story of the '68 Detroit Tigers (airing on HBO throughout August, and again in early October), about a city divided and the championship baseball team that brought it together. It's a great concept: Americans at odds over race and class coming together over the national pastime. Too bad the facts don't cooperate. No matter how hard the filmmakers try, they never quite manage to show that the Tigers' World Series run had any healing effect on the city.

City on Fire does provide a terrific and chilling view of the Detroit riots themselves. The opening moments place viewers right at the epicenter of the coming earthquake: the corner of 12th Street and Clairmont, on July 23, 1967. We see the rioters' faces close-up as tensions boil over; we watch a car full of terrified people tentatively accelerating down Grand River Avenue; we witness the beginnings of what was essentially the military occupation of inner city Detroit. In these brief, early segments, City on Fire makes for gripping television.

It also provides a telling glimpse of race relations in Detroit. Even though baseball had been integrated for over two decades, in 1967 the Tigers still had only three black players on their major league roster. Black fans at Tiger Stadium would often root for the Tigers’ better-integrated competitors. And yet on the night all hell broke loose, Gates Brown -- the Tigers’ stocky and seemingly unassuming pinch hitter, and one of its three black players -- stood in the middle of 12^th Street in his uniform and pled unsuccessfully for calm. I could have listened all day to Brown and teammates Willie Horton and Earl Wilson talking about day-to-day life in black Detroit. Unfortunately, Brown, Horton, and Wilson are relegated to bit-part status as soon as Dick McAuliffe grounds into the double play that ends the Tigers’ 1967 season.

At that point City on Fire loses focus and becomes essentially two different documentaries: one a tired account of the domestic turbulence of 1968, the other an occasionally engaging recap of the Tigers’ 1968 World Series run. The former seems an afterthought. 1968 is represented by an all-too-familiar montage of the Tet Offensive/MLK/RFK assassination/Democratic National Convention. Yes, the world was spinning out of control in 1968, but you'll learn more about it in the average U2 video than you will here.

The digressions on national politics get in the way of the real subject. The film would have done better to focus on what was going on in Detroit between July 1967 and Opening Day 1968. Instead we get little more than vague suggestions that the city feared another riot. No one discusses the tensions that gave rise to the previous violence. No one explains why another explosion might have been likely. We do, however, get to watch Detroit native Ted Nugent shock absolutely no one by telling how he carried a nine-millimeter pistol while walking the streets of Motown in those uncertain days. This is not exactly an illuminating detail. Given Nugent's well-known enthusiasm for firearms, he probably would have been packing heat even if the whole city had been dancing in rings and joyously proclaiming the eternal brotherhood of man.

City on Fire regains some momentum when it turns back to baseball. Tigers fans will already be familiar with the high points of the 1968 season, but others ought to find the rundown of major developments -- Denny McClain’s gonzo 31-win season, Al Kaline’s injury, and pitcher Mickey Lolich’s World Series heroism -- quite entertaining.

Ironically, the most enjoyable anecdote in the film has nothing to do with race at all. When Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson tells how when he broke the World Series strikeout record in Game 1, catcher Tim McCarver trotted up to the mound to offer congratulations. Gibson promptly told McCarver to shut up and get on with the game. Brilliant! I think I speak for all baseball fans when I beg Mr. Gibson to repeat that noble deed, and stop McCarver from ruining another post-season with his similarly intrusive and distracting brand of television commentary.

City on Fire has other enjoyable and informative moments like that one, but they aren't enough to salvage the whole. Specifically, the film’s central premise -- that the Tigers’ 1968 World Series "may not have saved the Motor City, but there's little doubt they helped it to heal" -- never really pans out.
For instance, it is implied that the Tigers’ race-blind esprit d'corps set a good example for the rest of Detroit. But that notion suffers a bit when we hear Lolich blame his slow start in Game 5 on Jose Feliciano’s bluesy, mournful interpretation of the National Anthem. Here Lolich is echoing the views of the (mostly white) establishment, which treated Feliciano's rendition as an assault on American values.

Likewise, when you hear that the Tigers won the World Series over a black and Latino-heavy St. Louis Cardinal squad, it’s hard not to think of those black Detroiters who were in the habit of rooting for more integrated teams. Might it have been predominately the white fans who rallied ‘round the Tigers? We never really find out.

Ultimately, the filmmakers’ argument that the Tigers "healed" Detroit rests upon reminiscences of how the entire city seemed to spend the summer of 1968 watching or listening to Tigers’ broadcasts in perfect harmony. But setting aside for a moment that such things are always said about a team mounting an improbably successful season (e.g. Boston during the Red Sox’ "Impossible Dream" season of 1967 and Seattle as the Mariners rode Ichiromania to 116 wins last season) it's worth noting that there's a significant difference between healing and distraction. Detroiters may have forgotten their troubles during the binge of 1968, but the city was in for the hangover of a century once the World Series ended.

RICO Suave

RICO Suave

Commissioner Bud Selig and Expos/Marlins owner Jeff Loria are being sued (link requires registration). Fourteen Canadian companies with an interest in the Montreal Expos have charged Selig and Loria with, among other things, racketeering. According to the New York Times, the complaint alleges that Loria conspired with Selig and MLB’s Chief Operating Officer Bob DuPuy to swindle the Expos’ minority partners out of much of their ownership interest. Allegedly, the aim was to facilitate the contraction of the Montreal franchise and award Loria the ownership of the Florida Marlins.

This is no gentlemanly, contractual dispute. To sue someone under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act ("RICO") is to go thermonuclear. And while you probably care just about as much as I do (i.e. not at all) about a bunch of obscenely wealthy Québécois getting deked out of their vanity investment, consider that a RICO suit will almost certainly involve gobs of invasive discovery. If nothing else, Selig's and Loria’s dirty laundry is sure to get a good airing. And if the suit isn't settled relatively quickly (which, given Selig’s demonstrated lack of foresight, it probably won't be), we should finally get the inside skinny on some of the league's more titillating misadventures in ownership.

For example, we'll get to see what the supposedly cash-strapped owners of small market teams do with their revenue-sharing money. On Loria’s watch, the Expos received massive amounts of money from the Yankees and Braves of the world, and plowed little if any of it into player salaries. Some have suggested that the money went directly into Loria’s pocket, but until now it seemed possible that the money was lost to bad management. If the suit’s allegations are borne out, it means that Loria kept the money for himself. Given that the owners are demanding vastly increased revenue sharing in the next collective bargaining agreement, this is an issue worth keeping an eye on.

As enticing as all that might sound, Selig-haters might get more entertainment out of seeing the case settled. I’ve not seen the complaint, nor do I know how much money the plaintiffs are demanding, but rough figuring and common sense places the figure well above $200 million. (The plaintiffs claim a dilution from a 76% to a 6% stake in a $120 million asset, and the RICO claims treble any liability.) If Selig and MLB try to settle this thing before it gets embarrassing, each team will likely have to kick in a couple million a piece, and that’s being conservative. The owners have been content to keep Bud Selig employed up until now because, despite their disapproving rhetoric, revenues remain high and Selig has really only managed to humiliate himself. If, however, his foolishness were to cost short-tempered fellows like George Steinbrenner and Rupert Murdoch serious money, I have no doubt that baseball would soon have a new commissioner. And that, as another disgraced mogul likes to say, would be a good thing.

By the way, now that baseball has been served with gnarly lawsuits relating to both Minnesota and Montreal, I think we can safely say that the grand contraction experiment is officially over.

There Goes the Coldest Hitter Who Ever Lived

I’m coming a little late to the whole Ted Williamsicle thing, but in doing some research I came across this fabulous quote from online encryption guru, molecular nanotechnology theorist, and self-proclaimed cryonics expert Ralph Merkle:

"A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition of "death" is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions" the future ability to revive a patient preserved with today's technology implies the patient wasn't dead."

Clever! Perhaps, for his next project, Merkle will demonstrate that black is actually white.

If a mere redefinition of life and death doesn't hold your interest, read on. According to the website's fine print, Dr. Merkle is not just any old cryonics expert; he sits on the board of Alcor, the company now in possession of the Splendid Splinter’s allegedly undead body. Even better, Merkle is the great grand nephew of one Fred Merkle, the first baseman who cost the 1908 New York Giants the National League championship against the Cubs when he failed to run to second base on what would have been the game-winning hit. His mistake, which came to be known as "Merkle’s Boner," resulted in a general ruckus that prevented the game from continuing, causing it to end in a tie [Is Merkle related to Selig too? -- ed.]. Eventually a one-game playoff was held for the pennant, and the Cubs won.

Four years later, Merkle was involved in yet another boneheaded play. This one cost the Giants the 1912 World Series when, in the bottom of the tenth inning of the final game of the series, Merkle let an extremely catchable pop foul thud to the ground next to him. The batter then drove in the tying run, setting the stage for a winning sacrifice fly two batters later. The opposition: the Boston Red Sox, who would one day feature a splendid left fielder by the name of Ted Williams.

In other words, the son of arguably the greatest baseball player who ever lived has entrusted his father’s immortality to the nephew of the guy whose incompetence cost his team two championship games. Is this a karmic mix-up or what?

Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

The Yankees have made a couple of high-profile moves in the past few weeks. First they acquired Raul Mondesi from the Blue Jays, then traded for Tigers ace Jeff Weaver. Predictably, most fans and writers viewed these moves as further evidence of the Yankees' unfair financial advantage. The experts are saying that because of these deals, the World Series is New York’s to lose, and that baseball is the worse for it.

Don’t believe a word of it. Sure, the Yankees may win the World Series, but if they do, it will be in spite of these trades, not because of them. Let’s take a hard look at the alleged ringers Boss Steinbrenner stole from the poor sisters of the American League. The fabulously overpaid Mondesi is a career underachiever, currently enjoying his worst season in the majors. As we go to press, he’s sporting an execrable .307 On Base Percentage and a shortstop-like OPS of .733. Mondesi was brought in to replace the right-field platoon of Shane Spencer and John Vander Wal who between them have posted an OBP of .328 and an OPS of .722. In other words, the Yankees took on over $12 million in salary obligations in order to get a theoretical .011 bump in production. I say theoretical, because Mondesi has actually been worse than his .733 OPS since joining the Yankees.

The Weaver trade was equally meaningless. Unlike Mondesi, Weaver is a valuable and reasonably-priced commodity who has the potential to anchor a rotation for years to come. The problem, however, is that the Yankees didn’t need a rotation anchor, or even another starting pitcher. After all, they already had six solid guys on the squad. Besides, in order to get Weaver, the Yankees gave up promising starter Ted Lilly. Lilly serves virtually the same function as Weaver, and may be the better pitcher two or three years down the road. If the Yankees had been content to hold on to him they would have saved money. More importantly, they would have been able to keep two prospects -- John-Ford Griffin and Jason Arnold -- who many feel have bright futures. The trade was a three-way affair with the Oakland A’s (Billy Beane once again making out like a bandit, taking Lilly and prospects from both Detroit and New York), and the Tigers did make made out worse than the Yankees. But to suggest that acquiring Weaver makes the Yankees invincible is hooey. Heck, if the Yankees make the playoffs, Weaver won’t even be in the starting rotation.

Cries about "the rich getting richer" go up every time the Yankees issue a press release, but neither the Mondesi nor the Weaver trade constitutes evidence that the system is broken. To the contrary, there are only two conclusions to draw from these trades: first, that the Blue Jays’ new front office continues to do a good job reshaping the pathetic roster they inherited from the previous regime; second, that the Tigers’ new front office should take Billy Beane off its speed dial. Baseball has plenty of problems these days, but George Steinbrenner’s largesse isn’t one of them.

The Man Comes to His Senses

Since I slammed MLB and the Astros last week for trying to shut down Astrosdaily.com, It would be unfair of me if I failed to report that they seem to be sensible business people after all. Much to their credit, the ’Stros have reached a quick and reasonable settlement with Ray Kerbey. It’s good to see that sanity still has a place somewhere at baseball’s kitchen table.

The Peril of the Yellow Journalist

Rosebud

In one of my favorite scenes from Citizen Kane, yellow newspaperman Charles Kane explains to one of his editors how to squeeze a juicy story out of the disappearance of one Mrs. Silverstone, whatever the facts may be:

KANE

(gently)

... Right now, I wish you’d send your best man up to see Mr. Silverstone. Have him tell Mr. Silverstone if he doesn’t produce his wife at once, the "Enquirer" will have him arrested. (he gets an idea) Have him tell Mr. Silverstone he’s a detective from the Central Office. If Mr. Silverstone asks to see his badge, your man is to get indignant and call Mr. Silverstone an anarchist. Loudly, so that the neighbors can hear.

I love that glimpse of a bygone era of rough and tumble journalism, the likes of which haven't been seen since Hearst's and Pulitzer’s penny paper wars raged in the streets of Gotham. Of course, yellow journalism is one of those things that's much more amusing in the movies than in real life. I certainly got no pleasure out of the almost identical ambush perpetrated by Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly just last week.

For those of you unaware, Reilly approached Sammy Sosa in the Cubs’ locker room, told him that the only way to for him to clear his name of steroid rumors was to piss in a cup, and then handed him the name and address of a nearby clinic that would test him. Sosa understandably took offense and asked Reilly if he was trying to set him up. Reilly’s response: "I asked how he could get in trouble if he wasn't doing anything wrong."

To his credit, Sosa refrained from pounding Reilly into a thick, pasty goo, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. Who the hell is Rick Reilly? When was he appointed baseball’s drug czar? What civics teacher dropped the ball at little Ricky’s junior high school during "Civil Liberties: Why They Count" week? More to the point, where does Reilly get off using Sosa’s demurral as the basis for a piece of character assassination like the one he wrote in SI, not to mention the post-publication radio interviews Reilly has given stating that Sosa’s reaction was an obvious symptom of "'roid rage?"

Contrary to Reilly’s ugly innuendo, there were several excellent reasons for Sosa to decline a starring role in Reilly’s witch trial -- reasons that have nothing to do with any juicing he may or may not be doing. For example, he may have refused because he has an obligation to the player's union (which is opposed to testing) not to break ranks until it devises a policy on steroids. Or maybe he was just trying to find a way out of serving on student council.

Or as fellow baseball junkie David Jones noted in a recent thread over at Baseballprimer.com, maybe he said no because Reilly’s proposal was simply preposterous from the start: "Here, Sammy, stop what you’re doing. Get in your car and drive 45 minutes to this address and see this guy that you've never seen before in your life. Pee into a cup once, and then whatever the guy tells me about the results I'll print in a nationwide publication." Who in their right mind would do that, and how on Earth can Reilly claim that he was surprised at Sosa’s reaction?

The truth, I suppose, is that Reilly wasn’t surprised. Reilly is a grandstanding hack who doesn’t care whether Sammy Sosa or any other ballplayer is taking steroids. He cares only about his own celebrity and the thrill of gotcha journalism. If Reilly is taking his cue from the "Mr. Silverstone" scene in Citizen Kane, I must applaud him on his good taste in film. Nevertheless, it would probably be a good idea for him to watch the rest of the movie as well. Set-ups, cheap shots and other forms of manipulation may have made Charles Foster Kane famous, but they also caused him to die a sad and lonely death.

The Man Comes Down on astrosdaily.com

People ask me why I spend my free time writing about baseball when I could be busting my hump to try and make partner at my law firm. I think this sort of thing has something to do with it (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see the attorney’s letter). Note the soul-killing paradox of a threatening letter written in the passive voice. Note how the letter was sent the day before a federal holiday, thereby increasing the likelihood of cutting the recipients’ response time down by a day or so. Note the cc’s to no fewer than three other attorneys, demonstrating the corporate lawyer’s tendency to hunt in packs. Indeed, apart from the law firm’s way-cool domain name (mofo.com) there appears to be absolutely nothing fun or life-affirming about the letter itself or the place from whence it came.

My thinly-veiled career ennui notwithstanding, isn’t that one of the dumber things you’ve seen in a while? Sure, the Astros are legally justified in worrying about the unauthorized use of their trademarks, but the zealousness with which they appear to be pursuing this matter seems a bit much. Ray Kerby, the operator of astrosdaily.com obviously puts a lot of time and effort into promoting his favorite team (probably more time than the Astros do themselves, given MLB’s notorious record of poor-mouthing its own product), but rather than pick up the phone or drop an email in an attempt to work out some mutually beneficial deal over the use of their intellectual property, the Astros and Major League Baseball have their legal gladiators launch mindless cease-and-desist letters. How creative.

Looks like one of my favorite websites is about to get a new addition.

Goodbye, Teddy Ballgame

As we established last week, I’m not the person to come to for deep reflection when a ballplayer dies. Of course, if there were ever an appropriate time for a lengthy ballplayer obituary, the passing of Ted Williams is it. Williams was the best player of what, rightly or wrongly, is known as baseball’s golden age, bridging the gap between Gehrig and Mantle (outhitting them both) while still finding time to fly combat missions in two wars. If he had played tenor sax, he’d be three Ken Burns documentaries in one.

But to me, Williams’s battles with the reporters who covered him were every bit as interesting as those fought against opposing pitchers, the Empire of Japan, and North Korea. Why? Because they show that even in a sport that prides itself on the unassailable superiority of its alleged golden age, some things have always been pretty much the same. Williams was robbed of at least three MVP awards -- coming in second in two seasons in which he hit for the Triple Crown and one in which he hit .400 -- primarily because sportswriters hated him. Compare this to Barry Bonds, who was robbed of an MVP in 1991 because the baseball writers held his much-publicized confrontation with manager Jim Leyland that spring against him, or Albert Belle, who lost the 1995 MVP to Mo Vaughn simply because Johnny Sportswriter didn’t like the cut of Belle’s jib.

The animosity of the press towards Williams was even worse. As noted in ESPN’s excellent obituary, the sportswriters seemed to have it in personally for the Splendid Splinter, "always fishing for an exclusive or scrambling for a fresh angle . . .seiz[ing] on any scrap of gossip or conjecture and blow[ing] it up into a headline . . . and they had no qualms about investigating an athlete's private life if it sold newspapers. Turn this crew loose on a guy like Williams, who stubbornly insisted on his right to privacy, and you had all the elements of a political battle."

Knowing that Williams had to put up with that kind of abuse makes his accomplishments seem even more amazing. Knowing that Sammy Sosa has to put up with the same damn thing does the same for his.

The Collective Wisdom of Individual Ignorance

Mencken’s All-Stars

H.L. Mencken once said that democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Ladies and gentleman, I give you the starting lineups of the 2002 All-Star teams, as voted by the unwashed masses:

National League: 1B Todd Helton; 2B Jose Vidro; 3B Scott Rolen; SS Jimmy
Rollins; C Mike Piazza; OF Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Vladimir Guerrero

American League: 1B Jason Giambi; 2B Alfonso Soriano; 3B Shea Hillenbrand; SS Alex Rodriguez; C Jorge Posada; OF, Ichiro, Manny Ramirez, Torii Hunter

Mencken might have been surprised. The fans did a pretty good job, picking the best player at just about every position. Ok, they probably blew it at third base -- Shea Hillenbrand and Rolen are maybe the fourth-best third basemen in their respective leagues this season -- but overall, those appear to be the only dud choices in the democratic portion of the All-Star roster.

How did the so-called experts do? Not so good. All-Star managers Joe Torre and Bob Brenly each used their dictatorial powers to fill out the roster with their cronies. In addition to the three Yankees voted in by the fans, Torre took shortstop Derek Jeter, third baseman Robin Ventura, and closer Mariano Rivera. No Diamondbacks were voted in, but Brenly selected six pitchers and reserves from his own team: Catcher Damian Miller, second baseman Junior Spivey, outfielder Luis Gonzalez, and pitchers Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, and Byung-Hyun Kim.

Rivera, Johnson, Schilling, Spivey and Kim all deserve to be there, but the other choices are less compelling. Adding Derek Jeter means that the AL will have five shortstops on the thirty-man roster. If Torre took only four shortstops (which is still probably one too many), he could have selected Toronto’s deserving rookie third baseman Eric Hinske, the guy who should have gotten Hillenbrand’s slot. But instead of using his individual wisdom to correct the lone error of collective ignorance, Torre chose to play politics and mollify the big star with whom he has to share a clubhouse all season. Cowardly move, Joe.

Brenly’s roster choices are even worse than Torre’s. Luis Gonzalez (OPS .916) over Larry Walker (1.050) Jim Edmonds (1.045) and Brian Giles (1.031)? Benito Santiago (.776) over Michael Barrett (.824) and Paul Lo Duca (.823)? Sure, the managers’ hands are tied somewhat on account of the stupid rule that requires them to take at least one player from every team (What is this, tee ball? Does everyone get a trophy too?), but that consideration didn’t come into play with either Gonzalez (teammate of Randy Johnson) or Santiago (teammate of Barry Bonds). Brenly actually thought those guys were deserving on merit. Yikes.

So, as always, there are errors and omissions on the All-Star rosters. This time, however, it isn’t the fault of the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Unless of course we’re talking about Bob Brenly’s individual ignorance.

M. Colon est un Expo!

Up is down. Black is white. Israelis and Palestinians are walking arm in arm singing a peace ballad by Limp Bizkit. Impossible you say? Well, no more unlikely than last week’s trade that sent Bartolo Colon to the Montreal Expos.

It was a deal riddled with seeming impossibilities. For starters, it marked the first time in, well, ever, that the sad-sack Expos acquired a star player in midseason to assist them in a playoff run. Usually its Montreal that gives up its good players in exchange for prospects, not vice-versa. The other improbable -- and far more shocking -- aspect to all of this is that it means that (gasp!) I was wrong about something.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: "But Craig, didn’t you say that the Indians would start selling off their big names a mere two weeks ago?" Well, yes and no. I did predict that the Indians would start shedding payroll and stars fairly soon, which they are certainly doing. On the other hand, I characterized the predicted purge as a fire sale, and no matter how loudly Indians’ players and fans bitch and moan about losing Colon, this trade was anything but a mere salary dump.

A fire sale is when a team gets rid of productive but expensive players for no real competitive reason and receives little more than reduced salary obligations in return. The Indians, however, have established by now that they’re going nowhere this year (though, admittedly, this was partly because they consciously avoided acquiring decent players to replace the ones they lost in the off-season). More importantly, as ESPN’s Peter Gammons correctly notes (another impossibility, I know), the players Cleveland received in return from Montreal -- Brandon Phillips, Cliff Lee and Grady Sizemore -- are all legitimate prospects who have an excellent chance of making the Indians competitive again fairly soon. This is especially true of Phillips, who could find himself Cleveland’s starting shortstop as early as next year.

Or later this year, if Indians’ GM Mark Shapiro is smart. Now that he has raised the white flag on the 2002 and 2003 seasons, Shapiro has to follow through on the rebuilding program, which means getting rid of any other high-priced veterans that (a) will still bring value in a trade and (b) will likely not be worth their paychecks come 2004. That means shopping current shortstop Omar Vizquel, who is both aging and having an unusually late career year, and attempting to move Ellis Burks, Jim Thome, and Chuck Finley. If they can get anything close to the talent for those players that they got for Colon (a tall order, I know), the Tribe should be sitting pretty in a couple of years.

Would I have preferred that the Indians have kept Colon? Absolutely. But after five years in which the Tribe got rooked on trade after trade involving their prospects (they have virtually nothing to show for trading away then-future stars like Jeremy Burnitz, Brian Giles, Richie Sexson and Sean Casey), it’s probably for the best that the Indians have started seriously rebuilding now rather than waiting until next year to bottom out.

Now, having said all that, allow me to raise a more cynical point about the Colon trade.

As a result of Major League Baseball’s seemingly doomed contraction gambit, MLB now owns the Montreal Expos. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the owners originally decided to contract the Expos rather than move them to, say, Washington D.C., so that in a few years a brand spankin’ new expansion team could be started in the nation’s capital. Expansion, you see, is a cash cow. Anyone who wants to start a new team must first pay a gigantic fee to the existing owners.

But now that real and potential legal problems have made contraction (and hence later expansion) unlikely, the Expos have become an albatross around the owners' necks. Consequently, the owners have gone to Plan B, which involves selling the Expos to an investment group in the Washington area. Selling the Expos in their current state would likely bring the owners far less money than an expansion team would, but it would be better than keeping the team in Montreal.

So here's the paranoid scenario: the owners realize they have to sell the team, and likewise realize that they've diminished the value of their asset by poor-mouthing the Expos over the past five years. They know that if this D.C. plan is going to work, they need to boost the value of the Expos, and fast. One way to do that would be to create the illusion of a winning ball club in Montreal -- say, by getting a star like Colon on the team pronto. (I say "illusion" because I still don't think that Colon’s presence will be enough to put Montreal into serious contention this year.) In other words, the owners may be trying to drive the selling price of the Expos up by buying Colon's services -- even if it means buying them at a ludicrous price. If that is indeed the case, it would raise some obvious ethical questions, sticky wickets, and dilemmas of various sorts.

But no matter where the truth of the matter lies, it will be good for the game to have the Expos at least somewhat competitive this season. Baseball has always seemed to do the wrong things for the wrong reasons. If it now ends up doing the right things for the wrong reasons, well, that's a kind of step up.

Darryl Kile

As everybody knows by now, Cardinal pitcher Darryl Kile died last Saturday. Kile’s death was both tragic and unexpected, and his passing has no doubt had a major impact on his Cardinal teammates. (They’re 2-5 since Kile’s death, and in the three games of theirs I’ve watched, they’ve all understandably looked like they’d rather be someplace else than on a baseball field.) Unlike most columnists, however, I am having trouble thinking of anything poignant to say.

I suppose I could haul out 400 trusty words to the effect of, "This sure is sad, my thoughts and prayers go out to his wife and kids," but it seems pointless. Kile’s wife and kids probably don’t care a lick about what some obscure columnist in Ohio has to say about the most devastating loss they’ve ever had and likely will ever have to contend with. Saying something like "Wow, this puts things in perspective," is a similarly hollow cliché. Kile’s death didn’t put anything in perspective. People have been dying young since the dawn of time without causing anyone to seriously take stock or lead more fulfilling lives. On the whole, we still work too much and see too little of our families. We still eat poorly. We still seem to have a collective hard-on for violence and negativity of every stripe.

When we wax philosophical or sentimental about the passing of a stranger -- even a celebrity -- we are really only doing it out of a sense of propriety and habit. In reality, we think for a few minutes, "Wow, that was surprising," and then go have a beer, and watch a movie, and generally get on with our lives, as I did when I heard that Kile had died. Maybe that makes us heartless and selfish. Maybe it means that we have serious denial issues for which we should all seek professional help. Then again, maybe it just means that for those of us who aren’t Darryl Kile’s family members, friends or teammates, his death is nothing more than a news item. An unexpected news item that brings fleeting sadness, to be sure, but still just a news item all the same.

Rob Dibble's Dubious Code of Honor

Quote of the Week

"They didn't want to play. Instead they worked to prevent us from playing our game. It worked, but it was markedly different from Ecuador, Italy and Croatia, which played and competed."

-- Mexico coach Javier Aguirre, sharing his somewhat curious definition of "compete" after his boys’ elimination from the World Cup at the hands of the US of A last Monday. It would seem that in Aguirre’s bizarro universe, the only teams that "want to play" are those that have the decency to lose to or tie Mexico, as Ecuador, Croatia, and Italy did.

No, it’s not baseball, but then it’s not like last weekend’s matchup between Toronto and Montreal rated very high on the international drama scale.

A Question of Honor

Last Saturday, Mets’ pitcher Shawn Estes zipped one behind Yankees’ ace Roger Clemens, apparently trying to throw one up the Rocket’s wazoo in retaliation for Clemens’s multiple assaults on Mets’ catcher Mike Piazza in 2000. Clemens knew it was coming, danced like a fool when the pitch came, then tipped his hat to Estes as if to say "I deserved that, now let’s get on with our lives." The game resumed without incident, and Clemens’s was further put in his place when both Estes and Piazza homered off him, leading the Mets to an 8-0 victory. I don’t care for baseball’s "If you hit my guy, I’m hitting yours" brand of machismo, but if players are going to insist on taking revenge, a purpose pitch followed by an on-field humiliation like the one Clemens got on Saturday should just about close the deal.

Which it did for just about everyone except ESPN commentator/troglodyte Rob Dibble, who said that Estes’ pitch and subsequent drubbing of Clemens "showed me nothing." He went on to say that the Mets "sent a boy to do a man’s job," and in a subsequent column said that "had [Estes] knocked down Clemens or hit him in the numbers, I wouldn't have had to criticize him on SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight."

That Rob Dibble is an idiot goes without saying. As a player, Dibble was a notorious hothead who once threw a ball into the stands, striking a first-grade teacher (don’t worry, she probably had it coming), and routinely threw at batters who had the audacity to hit off him. As such, he should excuse us if we tune out his babblings about baseball’s alleged code of honor. ESPN executives, on the other hand, should take note because Dibble’s antics are turning the once-essential "Baseball Tonight" broadcast into drive-time talk-radio.

Saturday Night Massacre Redux

Mets general manager Steve Phillips fired hitting coach Dave Engle last week in an attempt to shake up a club that ranks near the bottom of the league in runs and batting average despite the off-season addition of Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar, Roger Cedeno and Jeromy Burnitz. It’s fitting that Engle’s firing came a week before the 30^th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, because Phillips’ sacking of Engle looks like the first steps in a cover-up of Nixonian proportions.

It was Phillips, not Engle, who gambled eight figures on an aging and out of shape Mo Vaughn, a strikeout-prone Burnitz, and a leadoff hitter (Cedeno) who can neither get on base nor field his position at anything approaching an adequate level. It was also Phillips who spent the past few years gutting the Mets farm system in an effort to win it all now rather than build for the future. Phillips may think that canning Engle will take the heat off of him for the bad deals he made last winter, but then again, Nixon thought firing Archibald Cox was a good idea too. On the bright side for Mets fans, it won’t take a constitutional crisis to get rid of Phillips; Mets ownership is likely to take care of that themselves this coming off-season.

Great Moments in Symbolism

Boston pitcher John Burkett has said that he won’t play in the All-Star game if selected. His reason: the game is in Milwaukee this year, and a boycott would be his way of protesting Commissioner (and Milwaukee Brewers owner) Bud Selig's handling of labor negotiations.

Interesting, but if anti-Bud publicity is what Burkett wanted, he’s going about it the wrong way. In order to stage a meaningful boycott, you first have to participate in the thing you're boycotting. Now that Burkett has said that he won’t serve if drafted, he will almost assuredly be passed over for consideration by AL manager Joe Torre, rendering his pronouncement a non-issue ("No Burkett? Good, we didn’t want him anyway"). I hope for the players’ sake that their labor negotiators have a better understanding of leverage than Burkett does.

Of course, it might be fair to consider whether Burkett’s potential wildcat strike is truly meant to be an act of defiance. After all, it’s par for the course for players in all of the major sports to stage phantom injuries around All-Star time in an attempt to get a couple of days off. Perhaps Burkett is just taking the idea in a new direction. If that’s the case, I’ve gotta give him some extra points for style.

Great Moments in Symbolism II

While we’re on the subject of All-Star symbolism, some of you may have heard that there's a movement afoot to stuff the All-Star ballot boxes with the names of Twins and Expos players in order to protest Selig’s attempts to contract those teams out of existence. At this point the results are mixed. The Expos have placed one player in the top five of five out of the six positions for which fans have a vote. This looks less impressive, however, when you consider that three of those players (Vladimir Guerrero, Jose Vidro, and Michael Barrett) deserve to be there on merit anyway (Barrett may actually be getting hosed by only placing third among catchers). On the American League side, Twins have made the top five in all six positions, but it isn’t as if any of them are that far ahead of where they would be had there been no call for a protest vote to begin with.

Go here to level your blow against the empire.

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.