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.

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.