Over at Deadspin, Barry Petchesky breaks down the 2014 payrolls and salaries for every team in baseball. 

[Photo Via: Daily Dot.com]

Rest in Peace, Frank Jobe. 

Head on over to Victory Journal and dig into Brin-Jonathan Butler’s story on our man El Duque (lavishly illustrated by Mickey Duzjj).

Charlie Pierce on the Sox:

The Red Sox of my youth [early 1960s] were losers, and not particularly lovable ones, either. They were shamefully late to integrate, and they lost enthusiasm for their work reliably around Memorial Day. They were not losers because they would reach the apex of the sport and then fail. They were losers because they lost, a lot. This is where I learned the basic lesson of being a Red Sox fan, a lesson that was lost for many years beneath an avalanche of mystical hoohah: It Could Always Be Worse.

So last season’s team was almost perfect. The local sports punditocracy spent almost the entire summer waiting for it to fail. This was partly because sports-talk radio is a job neither for grown-ups nor for advanced primates. But it also seemed for a long time to be grounded in empirical fact; sooner or later, the league would catch up to Koji Uehara, or Mike Napoli would strike out 111 times in a row, or Jonny Gomes would take a wrong step and send his kneecap spinning off into centerfield. I was waiting for it all to happen, and it never did. I waited for Tampa’s young talent to usher the Red Sox out of the playoffs. That didn’t happen. I waited for the Detroit pitching staff to melt their bats into a puddle. That didn’t happen. I waited for St. Louis’s obvious superior talent at most of the positions to assert itself. It could always be worse. But it never was.

This was the first Red Sox championship of the Post-Nonsense Era. It was achieved through the careful, and very wonk-based, construction of a roster that had precisely the right strengths at precisely the right times. And now, they are going about the business of defending that championship in much the same way. Winning is the newest normal. There are no curses to worry about anymore. Sometimes, a fishing knife is only a fishing knife.

Not for nothing but: there will be no repeat.

[Photo Credit: Pete Abe]

The new rules and how the Yanks will adjust to them. 

Man, sour times for Jesus Montero. From the Seattle Times:

After each season, players meet with training and medical staff to set up their offseason. Each player is given a target weight they are expected to come in at for the following season. According to sources, Montero has never once met that target weight since joining the Mariners. This year he came in 40 pounds over the weight the Mariners wanted him to come in at.

It’s led to frustration within the organization. General manager Jack Zduriencik was particularly critical of Montero and his future.

“We are disappointed in how he came in physically,” Zduriencik said bluntly.

That disinterest in conditioning in the offseason didn’t do much change the minds of people who have been skeptical of Montero’s work ethic. It certainly didn’t inspire Zduriencik, who was clearly unhappy with the situation.

“It’s up to him,” Zduriencik said. ” I have zero expectations for Jesus Montero. Any expectations I had are gone.”

[Photo Credit: USATSI]

An interview from 1983.

From an essay I wrote about Richard Ben Cramer’s Esquire story on Ted Williams for the latest e-magazine from The Classical:

They came to Ted Williams the way those eight ill-fated adventurers came to Everest, thinking they could scale it, conquer it, reduce it to something mortals could comprehend. John Updike almost made it to the top when he wrote that gods don’t answer letters, but Ed Linn got off just as good a line in Sport magazine summing up Williams’ last game: “And now Boston knows how England felt when it lost India.” Leigh Montville weighed in with an almost poetically profane biography, and now Ben Bradlee Jr. has delivered a massive biography of his own at nearly 1,000 pages. But none of them—and I’m talking about a great novelist, two splendid sports writers, and a deeply committed researcher here— made it to the top of the mountain where dwelled Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, the Kid.

Richard Ben Cramer did.

He had only 15,000 words to work with, and he had to scheme and skulk and send flowers to get those, but he climbed inside Williams’ life and mind and special madness the way nobody before him did and nobody after him has. His story – “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” – reached out from the pages of Esquire‘s July 1986 issue and grabbed you by the collar. Once you read his first sentence – “Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those” – you didn’t need to be forced to go the rest of the way.

Check it out here. 

I just read on Twitter that Ralph Kiner has died. Salute.

We’ll get there when we get there. 

Soon, dammit, soon. Baseball is coming. Promise.

[Photo Credit: Book Owl via It’s a Long Season]

Dolla, dolla bill y’all.

[Photo Credit: Chris Williams/Icon SM]

Over at Deadspin I found two posts–with related links–of interest: one on Greg Maddux, the other on Jerry Coleman.  Dig in.

Ray Ratto delivers the best–and least self-important–Hall of Fame column of the season.

The vote comes this afternoon and word around the web says that Maddux, Glavine, Biggio and the Big Hurt all make it.

Jay Jaffe’s got the scoop. 

Jon’s new home. 

Oh, it ain’t over…

[Photo Credit: Eric Salerno]

That’d be Tom Seaver and Pat Jordan. Head on over to Sports on Earth and check out Jordan’s nice, long profile on Seaver:

We walked between the rows of vines, up and down the steep terraces in the hot sun. Tom’s three Labrador Retrievers romped around us. Big, playful, doofus dogs with their tongues hanging out. He told me their names. “Major, Bandy, Bricks.” I said, “Bricks, like in chimney bricks?” He said, “No, Brix.” I said, “Bricks?” He said, “No, Brix.” I said, “Who’s on first?” He didn’t get it, so I said, “Spell it.” He spelled, “B-R-I-X. It’s French for the sugar content in grapes.”

We stopped at a vine drooping with clusters of grapes. He snipped off a cluster and handed it to me. I held it over my head, like in one of those old paintings of Roman orgies, and ate the small, black, sweet grapes off the cluster. “Delicious,” I said. Tom explained that each variety of grapes had different characteristics that you could only tell by tasting them. That’s why each row was numbered.

I said, “Very good, Thomas. You always did explain things precise.”

“Ly,” he said. “Precise-ly. You’re supposed to be the fucking writer, and you don’t know your grammar.”

“OK. Precise-ly.”

“Thank you very much. You know I got a journalism degree from USC.” Irony of ironies! Tom Seaver, trying to impress me.

I said, “Yeah, and I had a better fastball than you.”

But he went on. “I was always like that about pitching. I had to be precise. I couldn’t just mail it in!” Then he began to explain more about his vines, about the cordon and proper height for each vine. I tuned him out and ate my grapes, the juices running down my sweatshirt. He looked at me, annoyed, and said, “Pay attention. I’m gonna give you a fucking lesson.”

“I don’t want a fucking lesson.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m giving you one. Now, if the secondary fruit grows too high, you have to snip it off or else they’ll take energy from the vines.”

I feigned interest. “How high?”

“Each row has to be only to a height of 14.”

“Fourteen what? Inches, feet?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a standard height. Stop asking questions and just listen. This is important, for Chrissakes. If you didn’t talk so much you might learn something. If the vines are too high, you have to trim them.” He reached up with his snips and trimmed a vine.

“Oh, I see. The height of each vine is a template for the row. Your job is to go down the row trimming the tops, to make them conform to the template. I can see how the monotony of this appeals to your precise, fucking methodical nature. It’s therapy for you.”

“Bullshit. You think too much. You always did.”

“I had a better fastball than you.”

“In your dreams.”

“I did.”

“Yeah, and between us we won 311 major league games.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely! I tell everybody that!”

I asked him if he’d still have his vineyards if he hadn’t missed out on today’s big baseball paydays. Tom made more than a million dollars a year only twice in his career. If he were pitching in his prime today, he’d be making $30 million a year.

“I started to lose interest,” he said. “I wanted to go home. I couldn’t do it anymore. I never was pissed I missed the big paydays. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. If I’d made that $30 million a year, maybe I’d just have bought that huge, finished vineyard and let others do it all. I’d have missed out on the pleasure of being in the vineyards every day. My pleasure has always been in the work, not the ego.”

Is it over yet?

Our boy Jon Weisman has been hired by the Dodgers as the director of digital and print content.

Fuggin’ sellout.

Could not be happier, man. Jon is one of the great baseball bloggers so it’s cool to see an organization like the Dodgers recognize.

Best news of the week.

More gossip.

Yentas start your engines.

The Yanks have already made moves. More to come, of course. My favorite spot for all of the latest is MLB Trade Rumors.

Enjoy this open schmooze to chat about all things baseball.

[Photo Credit: Bruce T Brown/Getty Images]