YFSF

Newsflash: Stephen A. Smith is a Blowhard

According to Stephen A. Smith, the Yankees have somehow done wrong by Jorge Posada.  Terribly wrong.  True to form, Smith expounds with great conviction about something, although in this case, perhaps because this is not professional basketball, he has no clue what he is talking about.  Smith's foray into baseball analysis may simply be an indication that he is prepping himself for the prospect of an entire year without professional basketball to holler about.  If so, he needs a lot more prepping.

Say What?

Ok, so the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees in eight of nine games this year, including a second series sweep in the Bronx for the first time since the Boston ace was Smoky Joe Wood, but we're not here to gloat.

Well, maybe just a little bit:

Ok, got that out of the way. Now let's discuss the strange lede to New York Times beat writer Ben Shpigel's game story this morning. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or the unthinkable sweep he had just witnessed, but Shpigel breaks out some strange interpretation of history here:

Babe Ruth was a 17-year-old pitching prodigy at the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. The Red Sox had yet to win a World Series, and the Yankees did not exist. They were still called the Highlanders, playing not in the Bronx but in Manhattan, at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds.

Derek Jeter greeted Curtis Granderson after Granderson's homer in the Yankees' rain-delayed game.

The Red Sox won all 10 games in New York during that 1912 season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. But over the last 99 years of their rivalry, they had yet to win as many as six in a row.

This is certainly strange because, as most baseball fans and writers should know, the Red Sox won the World Series in 1903. And the Yankees did, in fact, exist, even if they were known by a different name. Shpigel seems to be laboring under the mistaken belief that a franchise does not exist until it is known by its present name. Not only is that glaringly incorrect, it's ludicrous. It would mean the Cincinnati Reds, generally recognized as baseball's oldest continuously operated franchise, did not exist from 1954-59 when the team joined the ranks of those bending before the insanity of anti-communist paranoia by changing its name to the Redlegs.

Apparently, early morning historical inaccuracy is contagious: Peter Abraham in his game story said this was the first time the Sox had swept two three-game series from the Yankees in New York since 1913, but this isn't correct either, as the Sox went 2-0, 1-0-1, 2-0 and 2-2 in four separate series, the first three presumably truncated by rain.

All the historical head-to-head matchups are available at Baseball-Reference. I know it was late, but it doesn't take long to double-check this kind of stuff.

Jon Heyman: Officially Wrong About the Adrian Gonzalez Deal

Call me bitter if you want (you'd probably be right), but the horrendous Twitter-fueled reporculation of Jon Heyman about the Boston Red Sox' negotiations with Adrian Gonzalez can officially be debunked. Not only was the Sox' trade for Gonzalez never deceased, as Heyman "reported," but Gonzalez will now be in a Red Sox uniform for quite a while, as he has signed a seven-year, $154 million deal that would lock him up through 2018 at $22 million per season.

It's the Red Sox' second-largest contract ever awarded and the largest since John Henry et al. took over ownership of the club in 2002. The average annual value is the eighth-largest in baseball history. Congratulations to him. Now go out there and celebrate by clubbing a few homers tonight.

Manny, Being Manny Until the End

We haven't commented all that much here about the sudden, perplexing retirement of Manny Ramirez, which is pretty remarkable given how much time we've spent discussing the enigmatic slugger over the years. Starting in 2005, Manny has been the source of near-constant conversation. We've defended him, and we've criticized him. And we grew tired of doing both.

Manny Ramirez in a Boston Red Sox uniform entailed incredible highs and stupefying lows. Aside from the two World Championships, one of those highs was the play described in the beautiful chart above from Beyond the Box Score's Justin Bopp, his catch-and-high-five-and-throw double play just two months before the Sox severed their relationship with him. It was the exclamation point near the end of a Boston career that ultimately ended with ellipses.

In the end, however, the relationship with Manny was too strained, too broken to survive, as I described three days before the deadline-day trade that sent him to Los Angeles and brought aboard Jason Bay:

Yes, I'm tired of defending Manny Ramirez, but I'd be more than willing to do it -- if it were worth doing. Now, I'm not sure. Now, I feel not so much fatigue at the idea of defending Manny. I feel fatigue at the idea of Manny himself, and all that entails.

It entails more rounds of bizarre and maddening comments -- allegations that the Sox' front office lies to its players, expressions that he's "tired" of Boston, failing to communicate about injuries right before a key series with the Yankees. It entails more rounds of self-righteous columns from sports writers inexplicably angry about various slights, real and imagined, Ramirez has perpetrated against the game of baseball. And, worst of all, it entails inexcusable actions -- as relatively unimportant as staring at a home run that winds up hitting the wall and being held to a single or failing to run out a ground ball that gets booted, or as serious as shoving a team employee or hitting a teammate.

After he left, Ramirez drifted from Los Angeles to Chicago to Tampa. His name was reported to have appeared on a list of players who failed at least one drug test in 2003, though the exact nature and relevance of the list remain sketchy at best. He then was suspended for 50 games after he failed a drug test, and now he's retired rather than be suspended for 100 more.

It's a sad end to a great career, yet it makes perfect sense: Manny going out on his own rules, flouting the conventions, making head-scratching decisions. Manny doing whatever it takes to compete, to succeed, to be the best at his job. As it's usually been with Manny Ramirez, those two formulations are uneasily married, different sides of the same coin.

Now come the debates about his inclusion in the Hall of Fame. The sportswriters obviously will keep him out. If their sanctimony can extend to the likes of Jeff Bagwell, whose only known tie to PEDs is hitting home runs before (and after) the implementation of testing, it will certainly cover the twice-failed Ramirez, despite the ratings, single-copy sales and Web hits he provided with his antics on and off the field. 

Sanctimony, however, has yet to cover the huge numbers of amphetamine users, sign stealers, bat corkers and ball scuffers from the 1900s-1970s, many of whom hold (or held) some of baseball's most cherished records and were inducted with nary a peep into the Hall. As with many other facets of the sportswriters' conflicted relationship with Ramirez, this one also will be drenched in hypocrisy.

The Most Awful Thing That Ever Awfulled an Awful

I don't know what's worse:

Is it the fact that the song and video overall just suck worse than anyone could imagine were it not melting the eyes and ears out of/off of our skulls?

Is it the fact that the rap spends more time talking about the 2004 ALCS than about the 2004 World Series, the 2007 World Series or the upcoming season, which I think is supposed to be the point of the video?

Is it the stupid, pointless, poorly done digital enhancement of the scoreboard to give the Sox 102 wins and put the Yankees 28 games out of first?

Or is it the fact that all of the above are true, and it was done by NESN, which means it was done by the Red Sox? John Henry needs to step in and cancel this abomination.

On the other hand, watching Carl Crawford try to hold it together while the guy raps next to him is fairly entertaining. Welcome aboard, Carl. Hope you like doing crap like this for the next seven years!

(h/t Red Sox Beacon)

Baseball Players + Reading = Bad Idea

Sorry for the slowness around these parts of late, but how many stories about spring training stats, players looking and feeling great or Adrian Gonzalez's shoulder do you really need to read? Besides that, a nasty stomach bug took me out early last week, and I've been catching up ever since, so we'll get back to our Century Mark series shortly. In the meantime, I present you with these videos.

Dustin Pedroia continues to prove he may be the funniest person in sports, particularly when Terry Francona makes a guest appearance: "I can't wait to knee him."

This becomes even clearer in this video with ESPN's Tim Kurkjian and John Kruk, as Pedroia and Francona go after each other. Pedroia describes his new haircut as "the convertible look -- top's always down." Francona said Pedroia "looks like a moron, and I thought he looked bad before."

Of course, no one looked like a bigger moron than Kruk, who inexplicably started ranting about advanced stats like OPS (really?) to the manager of a team who's been immensely successful in no small part because its GM and owner rely heavily on ... advanced stats. Watch Francona manage the awkward effort to turn the conversation away from the subject:

Must-see TV. Or something like that.

Big Media

Head over to Marketwatch, as an old YFSF supporter, Sam Mamudi, has taken over the task of sports business reporting for that site. Sam's first piece looks at WAR, actual wins, and payroll expenditures.

We're really happy for Sam, even if he does root for a certain team from the Bronx (and also Manchester). Congrats!

 

The Serious Stuff

Really, who wants to talk about statistics, our great second basemen, or anything about this coming season? We'd rather discuss the insanity of a certain franchise's third baseman, a guy who apparently lives in a world where sitting in the Owner's box in full public view while at the most-watched sporting event of the year in the US means you are off-limits to the cameras.

We have a word for this type of guy here in Brooklyn. Hint: it rhymes with "Masshole".

Don't Know Jack

The increasingly acrimonious debate over the Hall of Fame seems to have grown in intensity yet again this year, with Jack Morris once again taking center stage. A good forum for addressing the tenor and scope of the debate this year is Tyler Kepner's recent New York Times column, which attempts to at least be fair to both sides while reaching completely the wrong conclusion.

How It Went Down, or: Why Twitter Sucks

Gordon Edes wrote a nice three-part series on the Red Sox' newest slugger over the holidays. Much of it is the usual feature fluff you do when you're assigned these kinds of things -- talk to the family, dutifully report the childhood foibles, add some color and a fancy lede -- but, as I predicted, it also includes the most in-depth look at the turbulent day in which the trade was confirmed, then reported to have "fallen thru," then given the George Romero treatment.

The most important thing to note: At no point in Edes' paragraphs on the matter, does he say the trade was dead, or that it had fallen through. Those phrases do not appear. (In fact, he explicitly said this shortly after Gonzalez was introduced: "At no point was the deal dead.") I think this is important because for much of the day, discussion of the Red Sox and the way they do business was driven by a completely inaccurate tweet by Jon Heyman, one he has never, to my knowledge, retracted or even addressed.