Put Me In Coach

The Trib's Mike Downey takes a break from retyping his usual scripts about the evils of the Cubs, their organization, and their fans to laud his BFFs for their big trade today:

The Tribune, 9:36 a.m.: "Griffey headed to Sox."

Excellent news. I was stoked.

Oh, that Ken Williams, always something up his sleeve. If not an ace, then a king.

Ken Griffey Jr., in center field at the Cell?

A cause to rejoice -- set off the fireworks.

Uhhh...One wonders if Downey realizes Junior hasn't played center field since 2006. And wasn't particularly good at playing center field back then, either.

Oh, well. Set off the fireworks! Everyone gets a pony!

Words Fail Me

Another reason why bloggers suck and you need four years of j-school to be a real baseball writer...Here's Sully's lead paragraph in his alleged game story for tonight's Reds-Cubs tilt:

When Lou Piniella and Dusty Baker squared off at Wrigley Field on the night of June 3, 2003, Sammy Sosa was ejected in the first inning for using a corked bat.

Have I mentioned that that was the lead paragraph? You know, the paragraph which, if my journalism text book is correct, should be used to summarize all the salient information contained in the article?

You see, traditional journalism used what we in the biz call an "inverted pyramid" structure. All the really, really important stuff goes first. The other interesting-but-not-essential details get shoved to the back.

The reason for this is because you can't assume that people will have the time or inclination to read all your pearls of wisdom. Therefore -- important stuff up top, less important stuff at the bottom (which also makes it easy for your ed to cut as needed).

It seems the most important fact in tonight's Reds-Cubs game for Sully is that Sammy corked his bat five years ago. Rick Reilly was right -- all these damned bloggers are ruining sports journamalism for the rest of us...

Tuesday Night Link Dump

** Last week, Ken Tremendous at FJM pointed out this lovely piece from SI's Rick Reilly:

"It’s all over the map," Reilly says about sports journalism on the dot.com world. "There's some good journalism, and some really horrible crap on there from guys holding down the couch springs in their mother's basement...

Yes, it's another piece from a journamalist who are fed up with all us guys who think we know something about whatever sport we're writing about. Because if we don't sit in the press box and watch the players get undressed, what could we possibly add to the discourse?

I thought of Reilly's assessment today, when the Tribune wasted the lives of more trees printing this piece of crap from Sully.

This has to be one of the laziest things ever written by Sully, who is quickly becoming a master of lazy hack work (like this, for instance). All Sully does is rehash his favorite scripts about Dusty and Lou. If you've read the Trib at any point of the last four years, you've read it all before.

Cut-and-paste. Why, it's as lazy as masquerading a lame collection of links as a real blog post...

** Meanwhile, at the Tower, Fred Mitchell makes this modest proposal:

It took 22 years before the Boston organization and Red Sox Nation publicly forgave first baseman Bill Buckner for his fielding gaffe in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series...

Which raises the question: Are Cubs fans ready to forgive their former first baseman, Leon Durham, whose fielding error in the sixth inning of the deciding game of the 1984 National League Championship Series against San Diego opened the floodgates for a bitter loss?

Or do the Cubs have to win a World Series before their fans get around to forgiving Durham?

To once again quote Mr. Ken Tremendous...f*ck the heck????

I know that, in this hundred year anniversary, we'll be elbow-deep in rehashing of all the alleged tragedies in Cub history. But this is a new one on me. I didn't realize that we Cub Fans were supposed to be hatin' on the Bull.

If I'm going to blame anything for our 1984 NLCS loss, I'll blame the fact that the Padres won Game Five and we didn't.

We didn't lose the game because Durham booted the ball. We lost because the Padres played better than we did. Can we stop trying to gin up some phony "controversy" about stuff that happened almost a quarter century ago?

** Mitchell includes this nugget from Buckner. Talk about burying the lede!

"I really had to forgive, not the fans of Boston per se, but in my heart, I had to forgive the media for what they put me and my family through," Buckner said after throwing out the first pitch. "I've done that, I'm over that and I'm just happy."

Emphasis, of course, mine. Hard to believe that Mitchell would let that slip that some of his cohort might not be as "fair and balanced" about some players as they like to think they are...

** Goat Rider Curt has this trenchant response to Mitchell's idiocy. Bravo, Kurt!

Hey, as a writer of a daily blog, I understand the need to drive quantity sometimes at the cost of quality. Maybe Mitchell's editor approached him and said, "hey, 100 words on Durham and Buckner by 5PM please," leaving poor Fred Mitchell no choice but to write one of the most ridiculous articles ever written by a Tribune columnist not named Phil Rogers.

** Also at the Goat Riders, Byron has a Q&A with Reds blogger Red Hot Mama. RHM becomes one of the first to offer this tired take on a subject that should have been put to rest long ago:

As for Fukudome, he's hardly a rookie. He played at the Japanese major league level for, what, nine years? Giving him the ROY would be like letting the kid who was held back for three years win the pull-up competition.

*sigh* Once more, folks -- Fukudome, and all other players that come from the Japanese leagues, are rookies during their first year in MLB. It doesn't matter if they've spent nine years, one year, or twenty years in the Japanese leagues.

The only way that analogy works is if you're willing to argue that the Japanese leagues are at an equal level of quality as MLB. In which case, Tuffy Rhodes should be considered a brilliant power hitter.

** Shorter Jeff Passan: Nick Swisher -- what a guy! Here's wishing we could all be a little more like him!

I like Nick Swisher. I think he's a good ballplayer. It's funny that when he was with the A's, people griped more about his Moneyball skills than anything. Now, they're beginning to notice that he's got some talent.

** Last week's Rutles video was so well-received I just have to do it again. And with all this talk about Baker, Durham, and Buckner, I know just the song. Enjoy it, won't you?

Still Fighting the Moneyball Wars

It's five years on, and some people still don't get it. Today's clueless member of MLB's Ladies' Auxiliary is Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal:

Pedroia would be the ideal protagonist if author Michael Lewis wrote a sequel to Moneyball, a best-selling book that mocked old-school scouting while hailing the A's for their use of statistical analysis. Teams are more accepting of such analysis than they were when the book was published in 2003, but tensions between the two sides remain.

Forgive me if I'm being shrill, but Moneyball was not all about how swell the A's were because they used statistical analysis. It was about how a small-market team had to find inefficiencies in the talent marketplace because it didn't have the dough to out-spend the Yankees and Red Sox.

Oh, and if you can find anywhere in the book where Lewis mocked scouts, let me know. Granted, it's been a while since I read the book, but I don't recall any mockery...

For good measure, Rosenthal gets this boot in:

The scouts who derided Brown for being pudgy take satisfaction knowing that only two of the A's seven first-rounders have developed into quality major leaguers — the two who were the most highly regarded, Nick Swisher and Joe Blanton. Yet, the game is too humbling for scouts to be rigid with their judgments and analysts to be smug with their projections.

Cardinals first baseman Josh Phelps, once a darling of the statistical community, is with his sixth organization since appearing on the cover of the 2003 "Baseball Prospectus" annual; his career OPS is .820, but scouts say he lacks the bat speed to hit good fastballs consistently. Even some established players — Bobby Abreu, J.D. Drew, even Carlos Beltran — are viewed as less valuable than their stats might indicate.

Parsing these paragraphs a certain way, once could get the impression that Rosenthal is making fun of those dumb stat geeks who thought that fat-assed Jeremy Brown was a good prospect, or who thought so much of a bum like Josh Phelps that they put him on the cover of a book.

The lesson for today: mocking scouts is bad, mocking the stat geeks is OK. And they said irony died all those years ago...

Narrative Dies Hard

A few days ago, I examined how the scripts explaining why the Giants have been genetically incapable of developing young talent swiftly moved from Dusty Baker hates young players to Brian Sabean knew the team had to Win Now™ while Barry Bonds was still around.


In that bit, I marvelled at the fact that the new script served to (at least partially) absolve Sabean, current Dodger GM (and former Giant assistant GM) Ned Coletti, and the rest of the front office crew from any culpability in the team's player development shortfalls. Even more puzzling to me was that, even while admitting that the Giants front office was intentionally pursuing a strategy of frittering away draft picks and signing Proven Veterans™, no one cut Baker any slack. He was still the ogre in this fairy tale, no matter what Sabean's strategy was.


As if in answer the my unspoken prayers, Yahoo's Jeff Passan offers up this observation on Baker, as Reds camp opens:

“I know what I’ve got to do,” Baker said Thursday, and while his .527 career winning percentage inspires confidence, his track record with young players is spotty enough to cause concern.

In his 10 seasons with the Giants, Baker did not develop a single everyday player. The closest was Rich Aurilia. Three starting pitchers from the Giants’ organization stuck: Kirk Rueter, Russ Ortiz and Shawn Estes.

With the Cubs, Baker oversaw the destruction of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood’s careers. He trotted them out for 130-pitch starts. Baker isn’t big into statistics, so he probably wasn’t aware that comprehensive studies on pitch counts show 130 is a young pitcher’s equivalent to a national threat level of red.

Still, Baker met the suggestion that he might give Bruce or Cueto or even Votto more time at Triple-A with some derision.

“Who says they need to be eased in?” Baker said. “I wasn’t eased in. Junior wasn’t eased in. A whole bunch of guys weren’t eased in. A lot of it has to do with need.”

Funny how Passan disappeared that Win Now™ script. And bonus points for his unabashed two-fer: trotting out the Dusty hates using young players and the Dusty abuses young players scripts in back-to-back grafs.

But so it goes with your baseball media today. They have their favored scripts and narratives. And if they are hard to reconcile with logic and history, then logic and history must be wrong.

Dusty-ing Off an Old Script

Jim's recent preview of the San Francisco Giants' season jogged some long-dormant brain cells into life with this comment:

Giants management pursued a scorched earth policy in the farm system for the past decade, trading prospects for veterans trying to win a World Series championship while Barry Bonds was the greatest player on earth.

That's a perfectly valid critique of the Giants' wheeling and dealing over the years. But it's a very recent development in the pundits' assessment of Brian Sabean's efforts. Up until about...oh, let's say 2005, the scripts used to explain the dearth of useful prospects turning up in the City by the Bay was quite different.

Readers of a certain age may remember it: Dusty Baker hates young players.

I first noticed the trend in the late 1990's, when the youngest guy in the Giants' lineup was Bill Mueller and people were wondering why Baker didn't give that nice Marcus Jensen a chance to play. One fantasy guide I read flat-out said that it was because Dusty done hates him some young players, rejecting the distinct possibility that maybe perhaps Mr. Jensen wasn't really all that good to begin with.

After Baker was fired/quit/allowed to file for free agency after the 2002 season, there was some gab in the baseball press about how Giants Fan could look forward to a new era of youngsters getting a fair shake under Felipe Alou. Except that didn't happen. The youngest guys to get close to landing everyday jobs during the Alou years were Jason Ellison in 2005 and Eliezer Alfonzo in 2006. Would it be rude to say that these guys weren't all that good, either?

Meanwhile, Sabean was trading marginally-useful guyw in his system -- guys like Jeremy Accardo, David Aardsma, Jerome Williams, Jesse Foppert -- for flotsam and jetsam like Randy Winn and LaTroy Hawkins. And the less said about the Saint A.J. trade the better (for Giants Fans, if not Twins Fans).

It was around this time, when Sabean was bringing in Ray Durham and Omar Vizquel and Moises Alou and Marquis Grissom, that the "Giants need to bring in Proven Veterans™ because they need to Win Now™" became the new standard. And it was around this time that some people grudgingly allowed that perhaps both sides have had their aversions to young players.

And while the media ran to cover Sabean's butt with this minty-fresh Win Now™ script, no one cut Baker any such slack.

Almost from the moment he landed in Chicago, Baker was under attack for "hating" those young players. In 2003, there was worry that he'd bury Corey Patterson and Hee Seop Choi. In 2006, people wailed and gnashed their teeth at the thought that someone other than Ronnie Cedeno would man shortstop for my heroes. And why won't Dusty give Matt Murton a break?

In between, of course, there was the Wood/Prior drama. Oh, the irony -- Dusty Baker, hater of young players, using his young pitchers way too much. But I digress...

The idiocy following Baker's youngster-hating reached a fever pitch in '04 with this bit of crackpot analysis from Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan. This is from May 2004, and the link has long since been lost in the internet tubes. My apologies...

[Hee Seop] Choi, by the way, is at .277/.405/.692 so far. Derrek Lee is a good player, but the Cubs could have had Ivan Rodriguez and Choi for what they're paying Lee and Michael Barrett. That they don't is a cost of employing Dusty Baker.

I commented on this bizarre statement in real time at our old site. The years have not added any new insight.

At the time, I tried to parse what Sheehan meant. The Choi/Pudge combo made slightly less cash in 2004 than the D-Lee/Barrett duo. But Rodriguez had just signed a four-year, $40 million contract, which was a helluva lot more than Lee's $22.5 mil deal (over three years).

The only other possibility I could tease out was the Dusty hates young players argument (hinted at as a "cost of employing" Baker). At the time, Lee was three years older than Choi -- a decrepit 28-year-old man on his last legs. Rodriguez was 32, while Barrett checked in at 27.

So there you go -- the Cubs picked up a twenty-eight year old and a twenty-seven year old. When they could have had the twenty-five year old and the over-thirty catcher. Damn Dusty's young-player-hating ways!

Why did Sabean get a pass, while Baker took heat for his GM's acquisition of a twenty-seven year old catcher? I'm not a mind reader, or a psychiatrist, so I can't say for sure. Let's just chalk it up to the lasting power of scripts...

The Unbearable Faultiness of Memory

In the midst of an article about Cub GM Jim Hendry's off-season moves, the Tribune's Fred Mitchell dropped this nugget of joy in out of the blue, and appropos of nothing that came before or after it:

The Cubs were favored to win their division last season, yet they had to scramble to overtake the upstart Milwaukee Brewers to make the postseason.

They were? I don't remember that. I remember a lot of smack about how they spent "$300 million" during the winter and still sucked.

But, as I always say, never rely on your memory. Let's fire up the Way-Back Machine and see who the favorites to win the NL Central last year were.

First up is the Wall Street Journal, if only because they still have a link up. The WSJ asked ten writers for their picks to win the divisions and wild cards.

Of those ten guys, three went for the Cardinals, three went for the Reds. Only two went for the Cubs -- Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus (who said he had "no faith" in three of his picks, then names the AL Central, AL West, and NL Central specifically as divisions too close to call -- hardly a ringing endorsement of the Cubs) and Dave Studeman of the Hardball Times (who makes a joke about how he'll "look like a genius for picking the Cubs" -- again, hardly a ringing endorsement).

Brandon Stroud of The Dugout picks the Cubs to win the wild card, and go on to the World Series. But that's not the same as being favored to win the division, is it?

Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News picked the Cubs to finish second.

Athlon Sports' Baseball Annual pegged the Cubs fourth.

ESPN's Dan Patrick predicted the Brewers would win the Central.

Four out of thirteen writers at Baseball Prospectus listed the Cubs as their faves to take the flag. The opinions on the NL Central were so split that was enough to make my heroes concensus favorites (by a small margin) to win the crown.

Baseball Weekly's season preview listed the Cubs third.

And what of Mitchell's own publication? How did they view the Cubs' chances in 2007?

Unfortunately, the Trib's Opening Day special section only lists their "experts" top picks, not the complete divisional standings from each. Here's the run-down:

Mike Downey -- Milwaukee
Mark Gonzales -- Saint Louis
Big Mouth Morrissey -- Saint Louis
Dr. Phil -- Milwaukee
Sully -- Milwaukee
Dave van Dyck -- Chicago

From my brief survey of 2007 guesswork yields a grand total of seven examples of the Cubs being the favorites. Out of a possible thirty-four. Actually, it's six, because I'm counting BP's Joe Sheehan twice.

So fewer then twenty percent of the crystal-ball gazers pick the Cubs to take the NL Central. It doesn't matter. Nine months later, Fred Mitchell waves his magic wand and turns that into a ringing endorsement of Sweet Lou's squad -- and jiminy jillikers, how could they have almost pissed away the division to the Brewers like that?

This is how scripts get started. In Mitchell's mind, he probably does feel he Cubs were a solid favorite to win the division (although I can't be sure, since I'm not a mind reader). After all, they spent all that money!

So he types his script, cleverly slips it into his column about Hendry, and it passes into the record. Unknowing readers will plunk down their seventy-five cents for the paper, nod sagely to themselves, and say, "Why yes -- the Cubs were favored to win the division last year. Everybody knows it."

Technically, I guess, some people favored the Cubs. So Mitchell is technically correct (which is the best kind of correct). But if you believe that he intended to say that only some people (rather than the vast majority) of prognosticators favored the Cubs, then you probably believe a "simple" plus-minus system is a good analytical tool.

Human memory is extraordinarily faulty, especially on matters dear to our hearts. Mitchell wants us to believe his claim, but the real-time record of those predictions shows that the Cubs were, at best, a prohibitive favorite. Just another example of the difference between knowledge and bullshit.

Of course, this is by no means a comprehensive survey of 2007 pre-season predictions. But I'd be willing to bet that I spent more time looking things up than Mitchell did.

Check Your Brain at the Door

This has been out there for a while, but I'm still trying to get back in the swing of this blog thing...
After the Hall of Fame vote was announced, The Sporting News' Sean Deveney made this...well, for want of a better word, interesting observation:

Today, Rich Gossage was elected to the Hall, but, as usual, some of the top offensive stars of the 1980s remained out in the cold. Boston's Jim Rice finished with 72.2 percent of the vote, 16 votes shy of induction. Andre Dawson got 358 votes, 50 shy of induction. Tim Raines, one of the best all-around players of the '80s, got just 24.3 percent of the vote. Murphy -- a back-to-back MVP who hit 398 home runs -- got just 13.8 percent of the vote.

All four deserve Hall entry. But all four are greatly underappreciated because of the Steroid Era that came immediately after their careers were over. They were impressive players during their time on the field, but the problem is, by the time they came up for the Hall of Fame, baseball numbers everywhere were swelling -- thanks in large part to steroids. That made numbers put up earlier look paltry.

Deveney doesn't say anything I disagree with here. It's obvious to any sentient being that there were a lot more home runs hit in the 1990's than the 1980's. Kinda like how there were a lot more home runs hits in the 1930's than that 1910's (for different reasons, of course).

And that's why guys like Bill James and the folks at Baseball Prospectus and a host of other people who are smart at math have developed a variety of methods of comparing different eras.

But I digress...It's the last line of Deveney's piece that made me laugh out loud:

With baseball infected by swollen stats from the last 15 years, the stars of the 1980s are easily overlooked.

Note the clever use of the passive voice. Writers (and other assorted weasels) will use the passive voice when they don't want you to know who is actually performing the action they describe.

Let's recap Deveney's argument. Swell players like Rice, Dawson, and Raines "deserve Hall entry." But the offensive inflation of the Steroids Era made their numbers "look paltry." And because of those "swollen stats," Rice, Dawson, and Raines are "easily overlooked."

Ask yourself, Gentle Reader -- who overlooked those players in this year's Hall of Fame balloting? If Deveney wanted to be honest, he could have reworked that last sentence thusly:

With baseball infected by swollen stats from the last 15 years, the BBTAA easily overlooked the stars of the 1980s.

Deveney's entire piece is a lamentation over those damned dirty steroid cheats, and how their damned dirty cheating ways have unfailry kept our faves of the '80s out of the Hall. But is it really those dopers' fault? Or is it because the members of the BBTAA can't be bothered to conduct some critical thinking when it comes to cast their ballots?

Look, since McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro first when to Capitol Hill, we've been inundated with reports about the phony, fake numbers of the Steroid Era. You'd think those phony, fake numbers would be easy to disregard, especially in comparison to clean players like Dawson, Rice, and Dale Murphy. Apparently, you'd be wrong.

Is it because the members of the BBTAA can't grasp math more complicated than "fifty homers is more than thirty homers?" Is it because concepts like OPS+ or Equivalent Average get too close to the heresies espouses in Moneyball?

In fairness to Deveney, he wasn't the only one to make this argument, or the only one to disappear the conduct of his cohort. He's just the guy unlucky enough to have had an easily-found web link.

But all the arguments are ludicrous. If Rice and Dawson aren't in the Hall of Fame, don't blame McGwire or Bonds. Blame it on your fellow typists, the guys who actually vote. Bonds might be the worstest person in the history of the universe, but it's not his fault the writers check their brains at the door when it comes time to vote.

Burying the Lede

Dr. Phil reports this on his blog:

SAN DIEGO -- Someone surprising is rooting for Barry Bonds in his quest to break Hank Aaron.

"I hope he does it, just not here,'' Greg Maddux said on Friday night. "I've been pulling for him the last few weeks or so, but not the next two days.''

Why would Maddux, seemingly as straight of an arrow as there has been in the major leagues in the contemporary era, pull for Bonds? Aren't they the alpha and omega of modern players?

"I've always admired and respected how he's played,'' Maddux said. "He's always played hard, for the most part. He's definitely been very good in the outfield, way above average; he's run the bases good, played the game right. How do you not root for that? I do. I don't care about all that other stuff. I appreciate what he's done on the field.''

Maddux, 41, came to the big leagues with the Cubs late in the 1986 season, which was also the first for Bonds in Pittsburgh.

"I just respect what he's done the last 20 years,'' Maddux said. "I've watched him, played against him for 20 years, and even though we were never teammates I can still respect what he does on the field.''

Dr. Phil mentions Maddux’ “surprising” comments in his story about Bonds’ record-tying homer. Except for his print story, you have to read through 923 words to get to that point.

On the other hand, Dr. Phil made several mentions of Hank Aaron and Baron Budhausen’s ambivalence towards Bonds in those 900-odd words. And, of course, he recapped the steroids allegations we all know so well.

“Surprising” comments? In today’s journamalism, those are buried at the end of a 1,200 word report. Scripts calculated to please? Those are put right in the lead graf.

Announcing His Intentions

Here's what Dodger announcer Vin Scully told Yahoo sports about the prospect of Barry Bonds' record-setting home run:

That time is upon us now. And I can't imagine what it's going to be like. I really don't want to...I'd like to think I'm the rare announcer who can keep his opinion out of it. That's not my job. I'm here to tell the story of what's happening at that particular moment and putting it into the appropriate context.

Wow. I think that qualifies as a professional, rational point of view, expecially when contrasted with some of what I've heard from the baseball punditocracy. Care to elaborate, Vin?

I probably would just as soon it not happen against the Dodgers. With Aaron, it was a privilege to be there when he did it. It was just a great moment. With Bonds, no matter what happens now, it will be an awkward moment. That's the best word I can think of now. If I had my druthers, I would rather have that awkward moment happen to somebody else.

Never mind. So much for keeping his opinion out of it...

Things Change

With the calendar flipped to the proverbial second half of the baseball season, it's been amusing to see how things have changed in the last few months:

** Cub Fans who were ready to run Michael Barrett out of town on a rail for his poor defense and puzzling base running choices now want to run Koyie Hill and Rob Bowen out of town for their Girardi-like lack of hitting. How could Hendry be so foolish as to trade Barrett? they cry.

** Cub Fans (and members of the baseball punditocracy) who were desperate for Felix Pie to take over in center field. It doesn't matter what he hits, they claimed. He's better than anyone else they've got.

Apparently not. After posting a .216 BA and .617 OPS, Felix is once again enjoying the sights and sounds of Des Moines. And those Friends of Felix? Now they're comparing Pie to Corey Patterson -- and blaming the Cubs for rushing the poor fellow.

Reports of irony's death seem to have been exaggerated...

** It's not just Cub Fans changing their tunes. Here's a nugget of joy from White Sox stalwart Paul Konerko:

Less than two years after winning a World Series title, the White Sox aren't even considered among the top four teams in Chicago included in an ESPN poll.

The Sox were omitted from an ESPN SportsNation poll that asked: "Which sports team do you most associate with Chicago?"

Listed were the Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls and the rival Cubs.

First baseman Paul Konerko took exception to the Sox's omission during an
interview Friday on ESPN News.

Can it really only have been two years ago Paul and his teammates proclaimed their total disinterest in what the vile media was saying about them? Things change, indeed...

By the way, who would Konerko cast his ballot for?

When asked which team he would vote for, Konerko answered "Bears."

Well, maybe not everything changes...

** ...like the latest missive from Big Mouth. Read it if you can stomach it. Here's a recap if you don't have the time or inclination:

Shorter Big Mouth: Cub Fans are stupid.

What with all the changes this month, it's good to see that we still count on something...

Oh, Snap!

Sometimes, it's nice to see that you're not the only person who feels the way you do. Jim and I have long felt that Roger Clemens' retirement/un-retirement antics are shameful, selfish, and, ultimately, counter-productive to his chosen team's chances of winning the World Series.

Today, I saw this from ESPN's Scoop Jackson:

He's a self-absorbed, beyond-arrogant, bigger-than-the-game, I-have-no-respect-or-honor-for-the-concept-of-team, I-only-pitch-when-I-feel-like-it, any-team-should-feel-blessed-to-have-me, Randy-Johnson-will-never-be-on-my-level, the-world-revolves-around-me, kiss-the-ground-I walk-on, worship-who-I-am-because-I-am-the-me-myself-and-I-in-MLB pimp.

But again, my problem is not with Roger, it's with us. The media cowards. Because all of us, for too long now, have looked past all of this and validated what I've said my whole life: "Pimpin' ain't easy, the media is just scared."

That just might be the greatest thing I've read today -- a media guy who corroborates my feelings about both Clemens and the media...

They Write Letters

A recent survey found that most white folks don’t think the negative perception of Barry Bonds has anything to do with race. On the other hand, most of our African-American brethren believe the opposite.

The subjects of Barry Bonds and race are prime fodder for the boneheads on sports talk radio and indignant letter writers. The eds at the Tribune Tower do not disappoint, selecting this letter from Chicago’s William P. Gottschalk for publication:

Allegations…that aversion to Barry Bonds and disinterest in, and/or disgust with, his likely successful assault on Henry Aaron’s home run record are racially motivated are outrageous and irresponsible.

Any objective and honest study would find equal disdain for Sammy Sosa, who at last look is Hispanic, and for Mark McGwire, who certainly seems to be white. Pete Rose, who is banned from baseball and thus ineligible for the Hall of Fame, is also white.

The conclusion is that we do not respect, and will not honor, cheaters and liars, regardless of race, creed, or color. Barry Bonds’ limited number of supporters are merely cloaking themselves in the mantle of racism in order to try to cloud the real issue, which is that, despite all his talent, he has cheated and lessened the game.

As long as we’re being objective and honest, let’s look at how the players Mr. G references before the drug and gambling scandals caught up with them:

Before he charmed the world with his 66 homers and Pepsi adverts, Sammy Sosa was not the beloved cartoon character he turned into. When he was a member of the White Sox, many pundits considered him an uncoachable malcontent. He took a lot of criticism (some deserved, some not) during his first six years as a Cub for being a selfish player who torpedoed the Cubs’ chances to win with his desire to pad his own stats.

McGwire was an all-American hero who led the A’s to three consecutive World Series appearances. When the andro was found in his locker, hordes of people leapt to his defense, outraged that anyone would dare taint his awesome assault on the record book.

Jim and I have vowed not to mention Charlie Hustler, so I’ll make this as brief as possible. The Hustler claimed his innocence for nearly twenty years. That fraud was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by thousands of fans and journamalists. Right up until the time he admitted that he had been lying.

Finally, I remember Bonds bashing as far back as 1990, during the Pirates’ last period of excellence. The scripts about Bonds’ surly, selfish ways got their start back then. Also making the rounds – whispers of his unsavory actions in college, as further explored by Jeff Pearlman and others. There were some people who swore on a stack of Bibles that Bobby Bonilla was a much, much better player than Bonds (no, that last bit is not relevant to the topic, but it’s always amazed me).

If you’re scoring at home, that’s two white guys who got the benefit of the doubt, and two not-white guys who were treated with “aversion, disinterest, and/or disgust.” Bonds and Sosa were taking heat long before they began bashing at home run records.

It certainly could just be coincidence. This is not even close to being a rigorous study of public attitudes towards these four players. And there have been white players lambasted for being selfish jerks, just as there have been black players lauded for their achievements.

But as much as we like to pretend, our society is not color-blind (recent debates over whether Barack Obama is “black enough” to connect with black voters is the latest example of that). It is disingenuous to say that race has absolutely nothing to do with Bonds’ issues. Just as it is disingenuous to say that race has absolutely everything to with them.

Revisionism

Our good friend Sully takes time from his busy schedule to answer questions from Cub Fans at the Trib’s web site. This question caught my eye:

The end of your column is very annoying. Just what mistakes did Prior make in Chicago? Did he not try to get along better with people like you? His body broke down. It happens. How is that a mistake? --Mike Wuebben, Nutley, N.J.

Good question, Mr. W. Even in New Jersey, readers can sense that the media (i.e., people like Sully) just didn’t seem to like Prior. Maybe it was the past three years of carping about how soft he was, how he wasn’t tough enough to pitch in The Show.

So how does Sully answer?

Aside from his general rudeness and condescending attitude, Prior's biggest mistake was his reluctance to be totally upfront with management about his health. As late as the end of March when he was sent to Triple-A, Prior was insisting he was healthy and could get major league hitters out, implying the demotion was undeserved. He pitched two innings in his first extended spring game before leaving with arm soreness. This led to the medical examinations that preceded the surgical clean-up of his shoulder. So are we supposed to believe he got injured in that two-inning stint? Please.

Hilarious. For three years, Sully and his cohort dumped all over Prior for being a wuss. Now, Sully paints Prior as a guy so desperate to pitch that he lied about being injured in a last-ditch effort to stay with the team.

If I may paraphrase attorney Lionel Hutz: Your honor, are these the actions of a man who’s too soft to pitch?

Of course, there’s plenty of mind-reading going on in Sully’s world here. I’ll venture a little mind-reading of my own – it’s just possible that Prior didn’t feel any soreness before his demotion. Or perhaps he was desperate to help his team and fulfill the expectations of the fans and tried to pitch through it.

I don’t know, and neither does Sully. But this week’s script says Prior is a rude liar, and Sully is nothing if not an efficient typist.

I did allow myself a rueful smile when I saw the last two questions posed to the illustrious scribe:

Paul, I don't know if it's your goofy "Rascals" hairdo or your glasses, but you really should fix one of them, if not both! -- Nancy Chesnutt, Seattle

Paul, how come you never address your unsightly hair in your Q&A columns? Us women out there want to know! --Patti Van Noord, Batavia, Ill.

At least Sully’s enough of a sport to take questions as fatuous and inane as those he poses to the players…

Mind Games

ESPN’s Jayson Stark poses this question:

What does it say about the strange saga of Alex Rodriguez that when he gets hot, our first inclination is to break down his psyche instead of his swing?

At first, I thought we would be treated to a look at the media’s “inclination” to play amateur psychiatrist with A-Rod. Alas, Stark then touches on Rodriguez’ swing. Better late than never, I guess.

Hilariously, Stark quotes an anonymous scout who talked about what Rodriguez was doing wrong last year. Why didn’t Stark and his cohort talk to this guy last year when Rodriguez wasn’t hitting home runs? Was it just too boring? Was it more fun to speculate about Rodriguez’ allegedly fragile psyche?

We are not mind readers, so we can’t say for sure. We will, however, go out on a limb and suggest that laziness contributed to the scripts that followed. We will also admit we could be wrong.

Right or wrong, it reminded us that we have seen more than the usual amount of stories in the last week or so that required more than the usual amount of mind reading and amateur psychiatrics from the press.

Like Ben McGrath’s profile of Manny Ramirez in the 23 April issue of The New Yorker. The whole piece is full of non-psychiatrists offering their diagnoses. But this might be my favorite line of all:

Popular diagnoses abound – “If we didn’t have Manny to talk about, who would we talk about?” Duquette says – and tend toward the faintly condescending, clichés about Ramirez as man-child (“He’s great with kids”) or idiot savant or holy fool.

Ironic, since the McGrath’s profile is also faintly condescending…

Manny being Manny is big out east, but here in America’s Heartland it’s a pitcher whose mind is most probed and dissected. And now that Mark Prior is out for the year after shoulder surgery, we’ve been hearing a lot about him.

Like this bit from ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski:

Royals backup catcher Paul Bako, who spent two seasons with the Cubs, motioned me over to his locker.

“What's going on with Prior?” he said.

“He's hurt – again,” I said. “And you know how it is in there. I think some guys on that team think he's a wuss.”

It’s a two-fer from Wojo – he subtly introduces the Prior Is a Wuss script (“He’s hurt – again.”), and then deftly reads the minds of Prior’s teammates to expunge himself of culpability.

The “I think…” construction is among the most useful in journalism. It ranks right up there with “Some say…” We used a variation earlier in this piece, when we offered laziness as an explanation of our press corps’ conduct.

Perhaps the most surprising take on Prior came from the Trib’s own Big Mouth. Here, he lays the smack on his brethren:

…the simple description is that there was enough dead tissue inside his shoulder that it should have sounded like car tires on gravel whenever he threw.

That doesn't sound like too much fun. It also doesn't sound like an easy thing for someone who makes a living with his shoulder. It might explain why his fastball had dropped from 93 m.p.h. when he was healthy to 82 m.p.h. in spring training.

Ah, but he's supposed to be worthless and weak, remember?

One whisper begets a windstorm. Along the way, someone decided Prior's problems were either in his head or in his gut. Now the theorists are saying he waited too long to get the surgery because he was afraid of it. On the mound, off the mound, the guy can't win…

Many pitchers experience arm problems. Some don't. Some can pitch through pain. Some can't. Prior is in the last category. It could just be that nobody is to blame for what happened. It could be the guy is injury prone.

But when you want blood, that's not a very satisfying answer, is it? It's why the theories have branched out to include Prior's mind-set. It's why we're talking about a squeezeably soft pitcher now.

Prior's prognosis should give pause to the people who recklessly referred to him in print as Mrs. Prior. An apology might be in order.

Wow. Big Mouth might be in danger of losing his BBWAA membership for that broadside blast. We can’t remember the last time we’ve heard someone in the media take his fellow journamalists to task for their amateur diagnoses and/or mind reading. Although, of course, Big Mouth does some mind reading of his own when he claims that Prior can’t pitch through pain. Oh, wondrous irony…

Despite Big Mouth’s brazen call for apologies, he still knows which side his bread is buttered on:

It's very possible the Cubs were the ones who whispered first about Prior's lack of toughness, and they should know.

This one sentence is utterly hilarious on two levels. Big Mouth excuses the press gaggle’s conduct by saying “it’s very possible” the Cubs started all those vicious rumors. Can’t blame the scribes for that, right?

And then he adds that beautiful flourish at the end – “and they should know.” What the hell does that mean?

Does it mean that if the Cubs perhaps maybe started the Prior Is a Wuss script, they’d be in the best position to know that what they’re whispering isn’t really a script? By our reckoning, that implies the Cubs were right, and Prior is, in fact, a wuss.

And that little bit of logic torpedoes the rest of Big Mouth’s argument that Prior isn’t a wuss, because the surgery proves it.

Thankfully, the NFL draft was this weekend, and the Bulls won their playoff series. Those events should give Big Mouth plenty of opportunities to mind-read and diagnose other sports figures. For a while, at least, baseball will be spared his ministries.

There Are None So Blind…

I came across this in The Sporting News this week. An enterprising fan is selling foam asterisks (a la the #1 finger) as a protest.

The web site describes it thusly:

We make no attempt to single out Barry Bonds. Barry just happens to be carrying the steroid banner presently. McGwire, Sosa, Bud Selig, etc...all of them are guilty of drinking from the steroid trough. We do indeed protest the steroid era... and the efforts of Bud Selig. Like a good parent...we do not accept the "everybody does it" excuse... the integrity of the game is at stake. We know the asterisk will never be applied but at least we fans will have said to the future fans ...we knew what was going on and we did not stand by and ignore it.

Our asterisk is simply an acknowledgment that we the fans were not ignorant to the truth. Future baseball fans will certainly look back on this time... the steroid era... and they will wonder why no one took a stand and called foul. So this year, we stand up for the past, to show the future, that the now matters. And we will make our stand... in the stands... at the ballpark... for all to see. Our little piece of foam does not attempt to change the record book or right a wrong. That would certainly be beyond our ability and would only add to an already convoluted tangle of words and facts. This little foam asterisk simply allows the fans to demonstrate, in a peaceful simple way, that we were not blind. We were not fooled. And we did not stand by and look the other way while the integrity of the game was ground into the dirt.

The Fans

Perhaps the folks running this company “were not fooled.” But making this statement in the name of “The Fans?” Spare me.

Were “The Fans” really cognizant of the steroid use in MLB during the 1990s? If they were, they sure hid it well.

“The Fans” loved the McGwire-Sosa show. Those two “saved baseball,” you know.

“The Fans” expressed outrage at the hapless AP reporter who chanced upon the bottle of andro in McGwire’s locker. Real time reaction by “The Fans” scorned this reporter for “tainting” McGwire’s pursuit of the record. (Oh, irony! Terrible and wonderful to behold…)

“The Fans” showered admitted steroid user Ken Caminiti with adulation for taking an IV of fluid, chowing down a Snickers, and rising up off his sick bed to hit a game-winning home run. What a gamer! What a gladiator!

“The Fans” (and the press) shared a manly laugh with Lenny Dykstra when good ol’ Nails explained away his new muscular physique by quipping, “I took some real good vitamins.” What larks, as Virginia Woolf used to say!

Were these the actions of a group of people who “were not blind,” “were not fooled,” and who “did not stand by and look the other way?”

Holding a foam asterisk in the stand may help some people believe that they’re taking a bold stand against the evils of steroids. But the time to take the stand was 1993, not 2007. All the foam rubber in the world can’t disappear the actions of MLB, the press, and “The Fans” for the last fifteen years.

One more thing: This web site also lists the “sacred numbers of the game we love.” Ironically, two of the numbers listed are 61 and 755. If you take a cursory look back at the game’s history when those two records were set, you’d see that there were quite a few people who weren’t down with the new sacredness they were watching.

Even more hilarious, another “sacred number” is 190. Come on, guys – that should be 191. The record keepers found an error in the official records years ago. Guess they don’t make “sacred numbers” the way they used to…

They Write Letters

It seems I wasn’t the only one moved to dark, mordant chuckling over Dave van Dyck’s wailing and gnashing of teeth over the relocated press box at U.S. Cellular Field. The eds at the Tower saw fit to print two letters from readers taking our wayward press to task for their whining.

The first, from T. Bron in Tinley Park IL, says:

Those complaining writers would do well to remember that many of their readers can’t afford to attend more than a couple of White Sox games a year. They also ought to realize that some of their colleagues cover things in the real world, like the war in Iraq, and I doubt they’re doing it on wall-to-wall flat-screen TVs.

Suck it up, guys, and count your blessings.

In fairness, T, the press corps have already done the first part of your directive – they do, in fact, suck.

And Brian Hughes of Chicago checks in with this:

So the White Sox’s decision to move the press box to a less desirable location isn’t going over too big with the press. Who cares? Why don’t they buy a pair of binoculars like I have to when I sit in the seat that I paid for, along with parking, food, and beer?

What are these guys going to complain about next – the shrimp cocktail wasn’t cold enough at the free pregame luncheon?

Bwa-ha-ha! Kudos to you Brian – although I have often referenced the free spread available for our hungry journamalists, the shrimp cocktail is the perfect detail to illustrate this particular folly. Wish I had thought of that.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. Glenview’s Chip Marshall gets in what I’m sure will be the first of many takes on this subject:

For the life of me, and as a long-suffering Cubs fan, I still can’t fathom the logic behind Cubs general manager Jim Hendry’s decision to trade [Greg] Maddux for [Cesar] Izturis during the 2006 season, perhaps the worst in memory. Bad enough the Cubs organization let the future Hall of Famer get away at the onset of his prime, via free agency, for nothing in return. Worse yet might be allowing Maddux to escape a second time with very little if anything to show for it.

I agree with Chip that Izturis does qualify as “very little if anything.”

However, he must have a very short memory. Or perhaps he is very young. There are several years that immediately spring to mind as being worse for my heroes than 2006. Like this one. Or perhaps this one. And this one. And for fans of a certain age, these three seasons will bring back cringe-worthy memories.

Chip, if you’re a Cubs Fan, you should know one absolute truth: it can always get worse.

But Chip’s more egregious statement is his assertion that the Cubs “let” Maddux depart as a free agent after the 1992 season. Perhaps this is also a function of his lack of long-term memory.

In the fifteen years that have passed between then and now, the predominant media script of the Maddux negotiations is that Cubs GM Larry Himes was a jerk who hardly made an effort to keep the Cy Young Award winner. While Himes was indeed a jerk, to say he “let” Maddux go is a gross misrepresentation of what happened.

If you look at the real-time reporting, you will see that Himes tried to get Maddux signed throughout the ’92 season, at one point offering the largest contract the team had ever given a pitcher. And if you look at what Maddux was saying in real-time, you don’t need to be a mind-reader to get the feeling that he didn’t want to come back.

I’ve threatened to do this before, but now I think I’ll go back through the archives and examine this subject in more detail. Like all scripts, if offers a pleasing tale. And like all scripts, it plays the fans for rubes. Himes did plenty to find fault with; we shouldn’t have to make stuff up in order to prove what a weasel he was…

This Is What Four Years in J-School Gets You

Sully checks in with this news flash:

It’s easier to hit in the warmth and sunshine of Arizona in March than the bitter cold and biting winds of Wrigley Field in April.

No kidding.

Ironically, there was a blurb last week that mentioned that while the Cubs’ team ERA was tenth in the NL, it was best among the NL teams that trained in Arizona. And since it was easier to hit in Arizona than Florida, the Cubs’ staff was doing OK. The blurb then went on to say that the Cubs offense had opened a can of whoop-ass lately, and weren’t things just rosy?

I wish I could find a link to it, but I can’t, so please take my word for it.

But anyone with the critical thinking abilities of a middle school student should be able to see the disconnect in that statement. You can say that the Cubs’ ERA is okee-dokee because it’s so damned easy to hit in Arizona. But that makes it a bit difficult to bask in the warming glow of the Cubs’ offense glowing warmth.

If Sully wanted to talk about spring training stats, he could write about how nobody gives a rat’s hinder about them after about April 10 instead of pestering A-Ram about how he’s going to adapt to the artic conditions in Chicago.

How Scripts Are Disseminated

After yesterday’s Cub-Royals game on WGN radio, I hung around for the Sports Central gabfest. And hosts Jim Memelo and Glen Kozlowski provided a terrific example of how the media spreads around its favored scripts.

Mark Prior, of course, was brutal in his stint against Kansas City. And so the first topic for discussion was Prior’s fate. One of the guys (forgive me – they’re pretty interchangeable to me, and WGN provides no transcripts) started out by lamenting that the Cubs didn’t trade Prior to Baltimore for Tejada back in December of 2005. He did have the good grace to admit that hindsight is 20/20. But, damn, moving Prior would have saved them a lot of heartache, if only Jim Hendry had been willing to pull the trigger.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard this sentiment. But it has come up more and more often, even in casual conversations, and I fear it will become as much of a favorite as the Greg-Maddux-really-really-really-wanted-to-stay-a-Cub-in-1992 script that we all know and love.

There is nothing wrong with the way the Sports Central crew laid out the Prior-for-Tejada script. Except that the way they laid it out was completely incorrect.

One of the guys even admitted it on the air during the discussion. He said that the Orioles must have known something that the Cubs didn’t, because they didn’t want Prior.

Judging from information in the Palatial Archives, Hendry had no problem shipping Prior to Baltimore. As the Trib’s Dave van Dyck notes in this report from 30 December 2005:

The Cubs, apparently, would be willing to part with Prior for Tejada, which would save the Orioles money and give them a young starting pitcher.

The proposed deal has been altered several times to include such Cubs as Corey Patterson and Todd Walker and perhaps Rich Hill. The Cubs would want young lefty Erik Bedard back. The Orioles prefer Carlos Zambrano to Prior.

One could argue that Hendry was getting a little grabby when he asked for both Tejada and Bedard.

On the other hand, I can see why Hendry would get cold feet. Besides the names listed above, other players that Baltimore was rumored to want in the deal include Felix Pie, Ronny Cedeno, and Brian Dopriak. Patterson wound up going to the O’s in a separate deal a few weeks later, so let’s take him out of the equation. That leaves the deal as Tejada and Bedard for Zambrano, Hill, and some combination of Walker, Cedeno, Pie, and Dopriak.

Yikes. That price may be a bit steep. Even for a guy like Tejada.

At any rate…the why-didn’t-the-Cubs-trade-Prior-for-Tejada script is slowly working its way into Cub Fans consciousness, with helpful pushes by hapless radio hosts like Memelo and Kozlowski. They’ll question Hendry for not making the trade.

If you’re lucky, they’ll tell you the trade was killed by Baltimore, not the Cubs. If you’re really lucky, they’ll tell you why Hendry balked at the asking price.