Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Pettitte to the Yankees


This is why it's a sucker's game to follow the offseason rumor mill:

The New York Yankees and Andy Pettitte are close on a deal that will bring the veteran left-hander back for a year, Major League Baseball sources told Buster Olney on Monday.

The deal, sources told Olney, could be done as soon as Monday afternoon. It would pay Pettitte nearly $6 million, with incentives that could make it worth as much as $12 million.

Pfun Pfact! Barring any other major signings, Pettitte will now be the 12th highest paid Yankee in 2009, coming just behind Robinson Cano and just ahead of Xavier Nady.

Anyway, I'd venture a guess that there were approximately 576 articles written about this song and dance over the past three months, with the majority of them talking about how poisonous the relationship had become between the player and the team. All of that's out the window now. For his part, Pettitte's misreading of the market early in the offseason probably cost him several million dollars, but he has made so much money over the years that he won't miss it.

Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:30pm (4) Comments

MLB Front Office Manager


There was a time when every boy wanted to play ball for a living, and until they could, they'd play ball outside all day.

At some point, every boy stopped playing ball outside all day, and began to play action-oriented computer baseball games inside all day.

At some later point, every boy stopped playing simple action-oriented computer baseball games and started playing roto, fantasy baseball, and computer games with GM modes so that they were simultaneously pretending to be ballplayers and general managers.

That phenomenon has now reached its logical extreme.

On Tuesday, 2K Sports will release its MLB Front Office Manager, and for those addicted to the stat-heavy pastime of running fantasy leagues, being a Major League Baseball general manager may never get closer . . .

. . . There is no end to the roster of baseball video games that pay homage to the complexities of building a team from the ground up. They have mechanisms for relying on stats to determine which players are best in different kinds of situations -- and many have had the endorsement of real-life players and the blessing of big league baseball.

But MLB Front Office Manager isn't like any of them. That's because the game is really about the process of running a team rather than the play-by-play action in which gamers have to swing at pitches, try to dive in the hole for sharp-hit grounders, and master all kinds of joystick button combinations in order to steal a base or pick someone off first.

The new 2K Sports game puts all the focus on what it takes to get a major league team going, and operates on a calendar that begins the moment the World Series ends and commences from there. That's because that's how it really is for each of the real-world big league general managers.

Given the direction we're heading, at some point they'll make a game where players simply sign checks, grouse about labor costs, and sucker municipalities into paying for new ballparks.

(thanks to Pete Toms and Crowhop, who sent me the identical link withing approximately 7 seconds of one another)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:11pm (12) Comments

Greinke Extended


All of you deluded Braves fanboys who thought that Dayton Moore was dumb enough to trade Zach Greinke for Jeff Francoeur and a bucket of warm spit (or should that be reversed?) can finally kiss those dreams goodbye:

The Royals reached agreement Monday morning with right-handed pitcher Zack Greinke on a four-year contract that buys out his first two seasons of free-agent eligibility.

Financial terms were not immediately available.

The deal comes after Greinke, 25, produced a breakout season in 2008 by going 13-10 with a 3.47 ERA in 32 starts. He achieved career highs in numerous categories, including victories, innings and strikeouts.

Let's forget for a moment that I was one of those deluded Braves fanboys, and say that for the first time this offseason, the Royals did something right.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:31pm (5) Comments

POTUS baseball factoids


We already had one presidential post, so why not another?

Yesterday Newsday had a nice rundown of the highlights of presidential baseball trivia. My favorite tidbit: Grace Coolidge -- Calvin's First Lady -- kept her own scorebook.

If paintings are any guide, she was quite a looker too. If I had been born 100 years earlier, I would have married that woman.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:00pm (7) Comments

I’m waiting for the Chester A. Arthur “Redstockings” model


What all of the cool kids will be wearing soon:

The Chicago White Sox are aiming to release a President Barack Obama-themed version of their cap in time for the start of spring training.

The club has developed two prototype designs of its club hat with Obama marks on the side and back. The hats have been approved by MLB Properties, and the White Sox now are awaiting a formal blessing from the Obama administration before league licensee New Era goes into production. Both designs will be made if accepted by Obama.

The White Sox enjoy a special relationship with the newly inaugurated president due to his roots in south Chicago. Should the hat happen as intended, proceeds from its sale would be donated to charities, likely ones that provide services near U.S. Cellular Field.

Given that the proceeds are supposed to go to charity, this is pretty cool. But -- and I say this even though I'm as big an Obama guy as anyone -- how lame will this hat be if Obama totally face-plants on the job over the next four years? It would be like having a lower case "a" Braves cap with "Carter" on the back circa 1979, no?

Then again, a lot of guys made money selling those "Nixon: tanned, rested and ready" shirts back in the 80s, so what do I know?

(thanks to Pete Toms -- proud owner of a Louis St. Laurent Montreal Royals model -- for the link)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 12:09pm (1) Comments

The next Rays


FanHouse's Andrew Johnson proclaims the Rangers to be the next Rays:

Trying to find the next Tampa Bay Rays a year after their meteoric rise to the top of the American League is a bit of an insult to what the Rays accomplished in 2008. Going from worst to first in one season just doesn't happen very often in baseball.

The 2008 Rays were the next 1991 Braves, if anything, so trying to find the heir to the Rays one year later when it might actually take a full generation for that team to emerge could be a fool's errand.

On the other hand, if we look at the 2008 Rays as following in the footsteps of the 2007 Rockies and 2006 Tigers, it's much easier to find a team that could take the mantle of enormous surprise in 2009. Enter the Texas Rangers.

I think Andrew is right that the Rangers are going to be very good very soon, but I kind of hope this "The Next Rays" thing doesn't become a new meme in baseball. You know and I know and Andrew knows that good teams don't arise overnight, but there's a wide swath of fandom and mediadom that probably doesn't understand that. I'd hate nothing more than for baseball to become like football, where people expect some team to come out of nowhere every season, with the identity of that team serving as the offseason's primary parlor game. Such a dynamic creates impatient fans and is a disservice to the scouts and front office folks who put a lot of damn work into turning losers into winners.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 11:00am (9) Comments

Tal Smith moonlights


Here's an interesting article about Astros' President Tal Smith's second gig -- or maybe first gig; it's hard to tell -- representing teams in arbitration cases:

When it comes to salary arbitration in baseball, Smith has seen it all. He argued his first cases in 1974, the year baseball adopted the process, when he was an executive vice president with the New York Yankees.

Over the years, Smith and his staff have prepared more than 900 arbitration cases, with more than 160 going to a hearing . . .

. . . When Drayton McLane bought the Astros in 1994, he recruited Smith back to the organization. Smith was leery to give up his consulting business, which over the years had a staff of as many as 10, including part-timers who worked during arbitration season. McLane said it would be OK for Smith to keep his consulting business, as long as his work was limited to arbitration cases. Smith was named president of baseball operations. He is 75 - although he looks years younger - and this will be his 52d year in pro ball.

Smith's role with the Astros has led to small amounts of criticism, particularly from the media, that his handling of other clubs' arbitration cases is a conflict of interest.

"People who raise that issue don't understand," Smith said. "When you represent a club in arbitration, you're acting in the best interests of ownership as a whole. If you prevail, it helps the salary structure for the entire industry.

I suppose that's right inasmuch as one only views conflicts of interest through the prism of player-owner relationships. But don't teams compete too, or is that merely a quaint fiction designed to placate the fans? Because I don't think it's that hard to imagine a situation in which a person who works for one team doesn't give his best when representing another team -- say, in his own division -- with the result being that the competition gets stuck with a much higher payroll obligation than it might otherwise have.

Is this a real risk? Eh, probably not, and it may not even be worth the trouble if it was. But there are a lot of folks out there who believe that appearances of a conflict of interest are nearly as bad as conflicts which actually come to fruition, so I don't know if we can dismiss it that casually.

Whatever the case, I find it interesting that the President of a major league team so readily identifies players as the opposition/competition as opposed to other teams.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:15am (4) Comments

Under the Hood


A couple of questions about Joe Torre's new book:

1. Why write it now? No matter who has the moral high ground, doesn't this sort of thing wear better after you retire?

2. Why the detached, third person narrative and cursory handling of his early years with the Yankees? I'm certain there's a very interesting first person story inside Joe Torre that speaks to all he did and all he felt in his life. If so, and if you're going to write a book now, why not write that one?

3. Michiko Kakutani reviews sports books? She's probably the highest caliber book reviewer in the country. If Salinger or Pynchon come out with something new, she'd be on it. So I ask: isn't that a bit of overkill for Joe Torre? Heck, I review sports books for a New York paper too. Which leads me to wonder: why am I not getting invited to any parties with Michiko Kakutani?

I like Joe Torre, so I'll probably read this eventually, but I do find both the timing and the apparent content of this book to be rather curious.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 8:55am (5) Comments

Lie down with dogs . . .


The prosecutors in the Roger Clemens perjury case have already called Kirk Radomski before the grand jury, so one presumes that they intend to use him as a witness at any criminal trial against Clemens. They need to rethink that now:

One week before Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens testified before a House committee at a contentious public hearing last February, McNamee sat down for a deposition with committee investigators.

During questioning behind closed doors in a Capitol building office, McNamee said that as part of his job as Clemens’s trainer, he had injected him with steroids and human growth hormone. McNamee gave the deposition under oath. He was asked several times if he had ever informed Kirk Radomski, a steroids dealer, that he was injecting Clemens with drugs. In each instance, McNamee answered no, he had not.

That assertion has been contradicted by a passage in “Bases Loaded,” a new book by Radomski, in which Radomski says that McNamee indeed told him that he was injecting Clemens. That contradiction and others have raised concerns that Radomski has hurt his credibility as a government witness in the perjury investigation against Clemens, and that he might have damaged McNamee’s credibility as well.

Interesting, but this presumes that Brian McNamee had any credibility to begin with. Oh sure, he may be telling the truth about some specific things related to Clemens and Clemens may very well have lied himself, but as the experts quoted in this story and any practicing attorney knows, credibility is a much larger and much more amorphous concept than the simple matter of whether a given statement is perceived to be true or false.

As I noted back when this story didn't make me physically ill, Brian McNamee has always had a problem with the truth. He lied to Clemens' people before the Mitchell Report was out. At least twice. He lied to the media about whether he was involved in steroids. He used to lie and tell people he had a PhD when he didn't. St. Petersburg, Florida police claimed that he lied to them several times in connection with the investigation with an alleged incident of GHB-fueled date rape. Oh, and then he stiffed the law firm that represented him in that investigation, using the old "my dog ate those legal bills you sent me" defense. According to that same ESPN article, he lied about why he was let go from a teaching position at St. Johns, telling people that he was a victim of the steroid investigation when, in reality, he had a one-year contract that was up and not renewed long before the steroid news hit the papers.

The Kirk Radomski contradiction noted by Schmidt in yesterday's story is certainly a problem, but it's nothing new. McNamee is an admitted drug dealer and a serial liar, dating back years. Does any of this make Roger Clemens any more credible? Of course not. But when your star witness in a perjury case is himself a demonstrated liar and arguable scumbag, you have a serious problem with your case.

(thanks to Jason at IIATMS for the link)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 8:05am (1) Comments

Stronger than dirt


The Yankees are sanitizing their new home with some sort of specialized disinfectant coating in order to prevent staph infections. Infectious disease expert Paul Sax, M.D. wonders if they'd be better off simply scrubbing the place down with some Comet. Then again, these are the Yankees, so if they're going to solve a problem, you can bet your life that they'll do so in the most unnecessarily expensive way possible. While they're burning money, they might as well give all of their players a curative galvanic belt too.

By the way, Dr. Sax is not just a Harvard Medical School professor and the Clinical Director of the HIV Program and Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He's also a ShysterBall reader going back to the old Bull Magazine days. But before you say anything, if you think that I'm offering up this little tidbit simply to make me seem smart and special by showing off how brainy and accomplished my readership is, well, you're 100% correct about that.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:30am (6) Comments

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