Monthly Archives: May 2011

Last night's game won't do much for Amaury Sanit's blank expression, nor yours.

By the end of the 4th inning of last night’s game, the Yankees were down 8-0, having made two costly errors and had not a single solitary base runner. Things improved from there – hey, it wasn’t a no-hitter! – but not dramatically much, so forgive me for not describing all the gruesome details. The box score tells the story, although it doesn’t stress how bad Cervelli looked behind the plate, but you can thank me for that later. Final tally: Royals 5, Yankees 11.

Nova wasn’t fooling a soul last night, but in his defense 4 of the 8 (!) runs he eventually allowed in his three innings were unearned. If the night had a bright spot… well, it didn’t, but if it had a spot that was slightly less moonless-night-dark, it would have to be Amaury Sanit, who… yeah, wait, who? Don’t feel bad, he was summoned to the majors today to spare the ‘pen, and will likely return tomorrow from whence he came. While here, he pitched 4.2 uninspired but serviceable innings, insuring that bigger names will available for the weekend series. Yay, I guess. Also, Cano and A-Rod homered, Cervelli had two RBI, and nobody injured themselves seriously.

No team likes losing a series to the Royals, but these are not your slightly older sibling’s Royals, and in any case, the Yankees pitching staff — given that it is currently 60% replacement player and yet has actually been pitching remarkably well over the last few weeks — was due to fall back to earth. I would love for Colon’s resurgence to be for real (and the techniques that contributed to it are pretty fascinating), but it’s too soon to know really, and so for now the Yankees have two reliable pitchers, one of whom is AJ Burnett. Don’t get me wrong, Burnett has been very good this season, but raise your hand if you feel completely confident when he takes the mound.

(Now you, with your hand raised – did you bring enough to share?)

Tomorrow night, our man : goes for the Yanks, so root for him and his stem cells.

The Yankee Score Truck has been gutted–out of service–since the team returned to the Bronx. Wha’ happened?

Son. It’s time for a tune-up.

We’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Times with the story.

ESPN with a follow-up.

There are nine days left to see the Romare Bearden show at the Michael Rosenfeld gallery on 57th street.

From the New York Times review by Roberta Smith:

Romare Bearden (1911-88) spent more than 30 years striving to be a great artist, and in the early 1960s, when he took up collage in earnest, he became one. A small exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, organized to celebrate the centennial of Bearden’s birth, delivers this message with unusual clarity. It contains only 21 collages, all superb, in an intimate context that facilitates savoring their every formal twist and narrative turn, not to mention the ingenious mixing of mediums that takes them far beyond collage.

The works at Rosenfeld were made from 1964 to 1983. Some are not much larger than sheets of typing paper; others are more than four feet on a side. Their suavely discordant compositions involve both black-and-white and color photographs and occasional bits of printed fabric; almost all depict some scene of black life, past or present or imagined.

Highly recommended.

Good times over at Pitchers and Poets where they are hosting a 1990s First Basemen Week:

I wrote a brief memory of Kevin Maas.

Here’s more…

Mo Vaughn by Kris Liakos.

Carlos Quintana by Josh Wilker.

Tony Clark by Drew Fairservice.

Jeff Bagwell by Ted Walker.

Straight Shooters by Glenn Stout.

Jeff King by Joe Pos.

John Jaha by R.J. Anderson.

Rafael Palmeiro by Rob Iracane.

The Big Cat by Tom Ley.

Mark Grace by Jesse Thorn.

Perfect Rangers by Larry Herold.

Wally Joyner by Reeves Wideman.

Searching for the Typical ’90s First Baseman Season by Kenneth Morgan.

Pedro Guerrero by Will Leitch.

J.T. Snow by Eric Freeman.

Bags and the Big Hurt by Jonah Keri.

Missed it by that much…

More than any other sport, baseball is firmly rooted in numbers. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason why, but for well over a century, fans of the game have obsessed over various statistics and worshipped the records they create. This has led to countless debates about who is best and sometimes even who is worst. Rarely, however, has much attention been paid to the average.

Ironically, sabermetrics has helped to rectify some of this neglect. Because so many new stats rely on a baseline to define relative value, the common player has gained some extra notoriety, at least in conceptual terms. In fact, average has become a benchmark of sorts. Several metrics, such as OPS+ and ERA+ (both of which measure performance relative to an average baseline of 100), not only serve to herald the game’s best players, but also trumpet the mediocre by exulting them over the laggards.

Although it doesn’t take a mathematician to know that Babe Ruth was one of the game’s best hitters, it’s still fun to put a number on his superiority.  For example, Babe Ruth’s OPS+ of 206 tell us that the Sultan of Swat was more than twice as good (106% to be exact) as the typical major leaguer of his day. Meanwhile, his ERA+ of 122 reveals that he was also a well above average pitcher (22% above the mean). If the legends aren’t enough to convince you of Ruth’s epic greatness, there are plenty of stats that can back them up.

Babe Ruth is almost universally regarded as baseball’s greatest performer. Just about every stat developed, both new and old, ranks the Bambino ahead of all others, leaving the remaining 17,543 to find their place in line.  It’s easy to lose track of the thousands of players that pale in the shadow of Ruth’s excellence, but there must be someone who epitomizes the game’s underappreciated mediocrity? Who is the champion of the average?

Currently, there are 42 players with at least 1,500 plate appearances and a career OPS+ of 100. From this group, the most obvious poster boy for the average player seems to be Willie McGee, who regressed all the way to the mean over a career spanning 8,188 times to the plate. McGee’s downtrodden appearance, with hunched shoulders and a bowed head, also seems to be a fitting tribute to the common man, but alas, the speedster could not pitch.

Middle of the Pack: “Top-10” Players with an OPS+ of 100

Note: List contains the 10 players with the most plate appearance from among a group with an OPS+ of 100.
Source: baseball-reference.com

From among the list of 42 average hitters, only one player also qualified as pitcher: “Wabash” George Mullin. A Toledo boy who literally made a name for himself pitching semi-pro ball in Indiana, Mullin was an eccentric man prone to superstition. However, the one thing he took very seriously was pitching.

After escaping the Western League (quite literally, in fact, as the owner of Mullin’s minor league club actually tried to have him arrested for jumping over to the majors), the strong-armed right hander racked up almost 3,700 innings in 14 seasons, most of which came with the Tigers. Throughout his career, there were many notable achievements, like his Fourth of July no-hitter against the St. Louis Browns in 1912, his league-leading 29 wins and three World Series complete games in 1909, as well as his one-time record of 12 straight consecutive victories. For the most part, however, Mullin was, you guessed it, rather average. When the right hander retired in 1915, his ERA+ of 102 was a testament to his dual mediocrity.

Because he was so common, Mullin turned out to be so unique. Although it’s probably a stretch to call him the poor man’s Babe Ruth, it’s worth noting that he was a precursor to the two-way threat that the Bambino would become. Mullin just did it on a much smaller scale.  Wabash George may not have been one of the greatest to ever play the game, but being the most average doesn’t seem like such a bad consolation.

The Tigers’ George Mullin (left) was a “poor man’s Babe Ruth” in many ways. Like the Babe, Mullin also had a mascot (middle), a young African American boy named “Li'l Rastus”.

Over the past five-plus years, I have been reading and commenting at Bronx Banter on almost a daily basis. In many ways, it has become my internet home. So, needless to say, when Alex Belth invited me to contribute to this forum, I was both humbled and deeply honored. The next step, however, was deciding upon a topic.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in some circles, statistics are more than just numbers on a page. They are the lifeblood of baseball’s epic history: both guardians of the past and milestones to the future. Statistics have the ability to not only spotlight greatness and shame futility in the present, but also resurrect long forgotten names from the past. It might seem silly to ascribe to numbers the evocative powers of poetry and prose, but in baseball, statistics provide the color between the lines that make the picture complete.

It’s my hope that “Color by Numbers” will not only inject more statistics into the discourse at the Banter, but also provide some leeway to tell a few stories along the way. I can’t promise to live up to the incredible standards of excellence established by writers like Alex Belth,  Matt Blankman, Cliff Corcoran, Jon DeRosa, Diane Firstman, Bruce Markusen, Emma Span, Hank Waddles and Will Weiss, and certainly won’t even try to reach the level of the late, great Todd Drew, but I know I can at least be average. Just like good old “Wabash” George.

Serious Eats offers 10 lovable salads.

I’m not sold on figs. They can be too sweet for me. But I’ve had some that are appealing, especially when combined with something tart like a balsamic reduction.

Boogaloo baby.

[Picture from The Girl Can’t Dance]

Movie Star hubba hubba:

Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman

Speaking of the Seventies…how about the Cobra?

Here’s Roy Blount, writing in Sports Illustrated about Parker back in the spring of 1979:

“He’s like the 10th man in Softball out there,” says First Baseman Stargell. “On a ground ball he’s backing up first before I’m there to take the throw. We were both after a foul ball one time with our arms outstretched, and we came together face to face like two big pairs of scissors. It was the only time I ever kissed him. We hit and flew apart by yards and yards.” Parker covers second on infield pop-ups, he gets involved in rundowns between second and third, he is everywhere. Pete Rose may be Charlie Hustle, but Parker hustles just as hard and considerably faster.

On the bases, too, he takes all he can get. Says Parker, “The highlight of the game to me is scoring from first on a double in such a way that people look at me in amazement, as if they’re saying, ‘My, how fast that big man can move.’ ”

Big he is—6’5″, 230 pounds. His legs terminate, after a lengthy run, in an upper body that looks like two Doberman pinschers bound tightly together. In addition to his speed afoot, he has general quickness—hence his nickname, Cobra—and a rifle arm. “He’s one of those rare individuals who come along every 15 or 20 years,” says Stargell. “Rare, and unique, and strong.”

Photo Credit: Frank Franklin II/AP Photo

I’m forty-one years old, and if you’re close to my age, it doesn’t matter how bad the Kansas City Royals get because the Royals in your head will always be those from the late 70s and early 80s, a lineup that comes to mind as easily as any team in your memory — Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff, or Lary Gura on the mound throwing to Darrell Porter; Willie Mays Aikens, Frank White, U.L. Washington and his toothpick, and George Brett in the infield; Hal McRae, Willie Wilson, and Amos Otis patrolling the outfield; and Dan Quisenberry waiting out in the bullpen.

More than just pine tar, the Yankees-Royals rivalry has seen historic moments. Chris Chambliss hit a walk-off home run in Game 5 of the 1976 ALCS, sending the Yanks to their first World Series in twelve years, and in the following year’s Game 5 Graig Nettles and George Brett would slug it out at third base in a game the Yankees would eventually win with three runs in the 9th inning. In fact, the Yankees and Royals squared off in the ALCS four out of five years, and when Kansas City finally beat them in 1980 after losing three straight series in ’76, ’77, and ’78, Brett said, “In 1980, finally winning, for us it was like winning the World Series.”

Recently, though, things have been different. The Yankees have been the best team in baseball over the past fifteen years while the Royals have been circling the drain as the poster children for small market ineptitude. All of that is about to change, at least according the good folks at Baseball Prospectus, who list ten Royals in their top 101 prospects of 2011, including five in the top twenty-one.

Number 12 on that list, Eric Hosmer, had a game to remember on Wednesday night. Still enjoying his first week in the major leagues, Hosmer came to the plate in the fourth inning with his team trailing, his family watching, and A.J. Burnett straight dealing. Hosmer quickly found himself sitting pretty at 3-0, took the obligatory fastball down the middle, swung and missed to bring the count full, then deposited the next pitch into the second deck for Kansas City’s first hit and run of the game. If not for the fact that it sliced the Yankee lead in half, it would’ve been a nice moment. Kim Jones had already interviewed the Hosmer clan up in the stands a few innings earlier, and now the cameras recorded their response to their boy’s blast: mom out of her seat immediately, eyes wide; dad doing his best to hold on to his video camera while pumping his fist in the air; brother shaking his head in absolute disbelief. A nice family moment.

And for a while it seemed like that’s all it would be. Burnett recovered nicely to fashion something of a masterpiece. Sure, he walked five batters and hit another, but there was only that one hit over seven innings along with six strikeouts, and when he left the game he seemed ticketed for a win.

But David Robertson (not Joba Chamberlain) opened the eighth by walking our old friend Melky Cabrera and, two batters later, Billy Butler. He made quick work of Jeff Francoeur, striking him out on three pitches, and when he worked Wilson Betemit into a 1 and 2 hole, it looked like Houdini would wriggle free of yet another jam. But Betemit lined a single to right, plating Melky and snatching a win from Burnett.

Aside from an RBI single from Jorge Posada in the second inning and a Curtis Granderson home run in the third, the Yankee offense was fairly inept, missing opportunities all night long. Posada and Russell Martin led off the sixth with consecutive singles but were stranded. The bases were left loaded in the seventh. In the eighth, minutes after losing the lead in the top half, Brett Gardner led off with a single, and things looked good. Even though Gardner had been caught stealing earlier in the game, I found myself yelling at him to go on the first pitch. Instead, Jeter popped up a bunt attempt for the first out and Granderson followed by rapping into a double play. Inning over.

Mariano Rivera needed fourteen pitches to blitz through three Kansas City hitters in the ninth, the Yankees left two more runners on base in the bottom half, and Buddy Carlyle (not Joba Chamberlain) came in for the top of the tenth. What happened next came as no surprise. Well, except for this part: the fearsome Melky Cabrera opened the inning by drawing his second of three walks in the game. If you’re thinking of scouring the internet to find the last time Melky walked three times in a game, let me save you the trouble — it’s never happened. (In fact, check this out. Back in July, August, and September of 2008, Melky walked a TOTAL of two times in 131 at bats.)

But back to Buddy Carlyle. Hosmer was due next and erased Melky on a fielder’s choice, but Hosmer quickly reached second base on a wild pitch, the first of two Carlyle would throw in the inning. He’d come home a few pitches later on a Francoeur double, giving the Royals their first lead of the night.

With Joakim “The Mexicutioner” Soria coming in, it seemed the Yankees were dead, but they were able to scratch out a run after Martin walked, Gardner bunted him to second, Jeter pushed him to third with a ground out, and Granderson drove him in with a single to right. Sure, the game would’ve been over if they had only been able to execute like that once or twice during the first nine innings, but better late than never, right?

(A quick word about Granderson. It never makes sense to project May 11th numbers over a full season, but let’s do it anyway just so we can appreciate how good he’s been through 34 games. Grandy, who just happens to be leading baseball in home runs, is on pace to hit 57 homers and drive in 119. Not bad.)

This game ended the way it had to, though. Not satisfied with the mess he made of the tenth, Carlyle (not Joba Chamberlain) started the eleventh by walking Chris Getz on four pitches, which was finally enough for Joe Girardi to hook him. There was a bunt, an infield single, a stolen base, an intentional walk (Melky!), and the kid (or The Hos, as he’s called) cashed it in with a sacrifice fly. The Yanks went down like lambs, and it was over. Royals 4, Yankees 3.

And somewhere Freddie Patek is smiling.

Gene Monahan will retire after this season…Rafael Soriano doesn’t appear to be seriously hurt…A.J. Burnett is on the mound tonight…

Score Truck anyone?

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Stella Simon]

Nice piece on David Robertson by Bob Klapisch today:

How he destroys hitters is a secret that baseball technology is only beginning to understand, but Robertson was at his blow-away best against Kansas City. After getting Aviles to fly to center, Alcides Escobar and Chris Getz whiffed.

How? Because neither Royals hitter had a chance against Robertson’s 82-mph curveball.

Why? Because both hitters had been battered by the ferocity of Robertson’s fastball, which, although clocked at 93 to 94 mph, has the signature of a 97-mph heater.

That’s made possible by Robertson’s enormous push-off from the mound – a full 7 feet from the rubber, the most behind Tim Lincecum. Last month, Sports Illustrated profiled a Dutch company, Trackman, which extrapolates virtual speed from actual velocity and distance from the plate. Robertson can add as much as 4 mph to his fastball because he’s closer to the hitter than other pitchers. The average major league stride is 5 feet, 10 inches.

…That’s the beauty of his gift: Robertson doesn’t have to repeat any internal monologue to get his legs into gear. Instead, in times of stress, he thinks about the machinery of strikes-throwing, watching as hitters struggle to catch up to his heat, deciding when it’s time to unleash the killer curveball.

[Photo Credit: Post 34 Baseball]

John Schulian is one of our most gifted storytellers and a wordsmith who has been compared to Red Smith and A.J. Liebling. He came of age as a newspaper reporter and sports columnist in the 1970s, part of a generation of young turks that featured the likes of David Israel, Leigh Montville, Mike Lupica, Jane Leavy, Tony Kornheiser and Tom Boswell. Then he left sports behind and went to Hollywood where he wrote for “L.A. Law,” “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy,” “JAG,” and numerous other series–including “Slap Maxwell,” the short-lived Dabney Coleman show about a sportswriting hack. He was also the co-creator of “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Before, during and after his foray into show business, Schulian wrote long-form articles for Sports Illustrated and GQ. His work has been collected in “Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists,” “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” and the forthcoming “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand.” Schulian has been featured in “The Best American Sports Writing,” and, on ten occasions, the old “Best Sports Stories” series. He also edited “The John Lardner Reader” and co-edited (with George Kimball) “At the Fights: American Writers of Boxing.”

Last fall I sat down with John to talk about his career and what came out was more than just an interview but an oral history of the newspaper business, of the sporting scene and of Hollywood.  So I am proud to present John’s story, in his own words, “From Ali to Xena,” which will be posted in column-like segments twice a week.

You are in for a treat.

–Alex Belth

From Ali to Xena

By John Schulian

PREAMBLE

Good things have happened to me all my life, whether I deserved them or not, and “At The Fights”is the latest of them. When George Kimball and I started working together, we had nothing more in mind than a modest book of stories by writers who had won awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America. The way we looked at it, no sport has inspired more wonderful prose than the Sweet Science. But for every great piece we found, there was another one that even a generous critic would have had a difficult time calling mediocre. I won’t say we were ready to give up, but the bloom definitely was off the rose.

Then, out of nowhere, George’s literary agent, Farley Chase, called and said the Library of America was interested in having us edit an anthology of great boxing writing. “The same Library of America that does Twain and Poe and Raymond Chandler?” we said. “That’s the one,” Farley said. So we wrote a proposal and talked to LOA’s big cheeses and lobbied like a couple of Tammany Hall politicians. And we got the gig.

It turned out to be an incredible amount of work that was definitely pleasurable. You don’t have to ask me twice to read Heywood Broun, W.C. Heinz, and Carlo Rotella, and I know George feels the same. But there was also more than a little pain in the process because we didn’t have room to include all the pieces we love and all the writers we admire. The book we wound up with, though, is one we believe in wholeheartedly. “At the Fights” reflects both our personal tastes and the importance of boxing in American nonfiction. Just think of the big names whose work we’ve showcased: Mailer, London, Baldwin, Schulberg, Plimpton. Maybe George expected to be to sit in judgment of them at some point in his career, but it’s a complete surprise to me.

Honestly, I never expected any of what has happened to me over the last four decades. Not the big-city sports column or the magazine work or the books, not Hollywood and the modest success I had in TV, not the fascinating projects that still fall in my lap as I enter my golden years. Sure, I dreamed about it when I was a kid, but dreaming is far different than expecting. There were guys I met on newspapers who fairly radiated their expectation of success and became wet-behind-the-ears sensations. I, on the other hand, moved at a far slower pace, forever unsure of what lay in store for me.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous. That’s just a natural fact. I knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, but I thought I might just as easily wind up as a copy editor. (I can hear the copy editors I worked with saying, “You never could have cut it.”) If I saw myself doing anything, it was bouncing around to a lot of different newspapers — but not papers in glamorous cities and not papers with glowing national reputations. I was thinking more along the lines of Toledo for a couple of years, then maybe see what was available in Portland or Albuquerque. The only thing I was sure of was that I had a shot at an interesting life.

(more…)

Will the Heat finish off the Celtics tonight? I’d like to see it but I think the Celtics will win.

Can the Thunder beat the Grizzles tonight in Oklahoma City to go up, 3-2. Sure, they can, but I’m picking the Grizzles. Hope I’m wrong but I’ll believe the Grizzles (and Celtics) are done when I see it.

[Picture by Patrick Joust]

Hubba hubba Part II.

Grace Kelly: Eternal Style.

Click here for a photo gallery of the one and only Gordon Parks.

Say goodnight, Gracie…