YFSF

Annals of Bad Headlines

Someone at the Post's sports desk needs a political sensitivity chip installed.

Shorter (Longer?) Tony Massarotti

The Red Sox should have signed Mark Teixeira because it would only have cost them a couple of million dollars a year extra, especially in light of the fact that they haven’t dealt with Jason Bay’s free agency yet even though he’s not a free agent and they might not re-sign him (but they might, also). Also, JD Drew is dead while Johnny Damon is not, even though I am going to list statistics that show Drew is better, but all that matters is that Damon is a free agent after this year and Drew is not.  I think that makes sense, but I am not sure. Oh, Coco Crisp is in Kansas City, too. Forgot to mention him. Theo really missed the boat on that guy, right?! I need to list a bunch of guys the Sox obtained thinking they’d be better than they were – let’s see.  Lugo. Wily Mo. Matt Young. Lugo. Jack Clark. Lugo. Nick Esask- no, wait, he had vertigo, he didn’t actually suck. Still, vertigo? Seriously? I mean, that’s weak. I am a “torn ACL” career-ending injury kind of guy, not a “I can’t go up in that Ferris Wheel” kind of career-ending injury guy. But back to Teixeira. This column is about Teixeira and how he would have helped the Sox, especially because Ortiz is struggling. Lars Anderson Lars Anderson Lars Anderson I read SoSH Minor League forums. Oh, wait, you know what? I forgot, Ortiz wouldn’t have been replaced by Teixeira, Lowell would have, my bad, but I have to admit Lowell is really doing well.  Also,the Sox do have a lot of good prospects, and they spend money, and that’s great and all but really it’s a lot less relevant because they have guys on their roster who are dead. Like JD Drew. I wonder if they will find him in the Atlantic Ocean with those other Brazilian and French people. (Just kidding, it’s a metaphor, JD Drew isn’t dead!  He’s alive! Lugo? Not so sure, he might really be dead!). Now, let’s get back to Jason Bay, who might or might not be a free agent. Since we don’t know what’s going to happen in November, I’ll just assume he will be a free agent, it makes things easier to imagine. I also need to mention Hanley Ramirez and how the Sox traded him, in the context of the Teixeira non-deal. Why? It has to do with those two million dollars and prospects like Hanley, who are great players the Sox squandered for noth-- wait, they won a World Series with Beckett? When? 

Anyhow, Ortiz is stuck on the Sox, Teixeira is on the Yankees, and Jason Bay is going to be a free agent at the end of the year. Unless he isn’t.

Every Picture

It's hard not to look at this picture by Rob Carr, which was plastered across today's New York Times Sports section, and see disdain, cockiness, anger, and release.  A-Rod, having just launched a first pitch home run in Batlimore, flicks the bat up in the air strongly (that bat is UP there), a show of stern confidence, perhaps - no, definitely - arrogance.  His face, looking clearly towards something off the field, no smile.  It is both emotional and emotionless, a really fine work of sports photojournalism, a moment caught in the context of Alex' current catharisis, injury, and return to the field.  It is a picture that offers little in the way of flattery, but it seems an honest portrait.

A Tale of Two Tales

As they see it in this town, Teixeira not only dissed the Sox by signing with the Yankees as a free agent over the winter, but played them as suckers along the way. So they booed [Teixeira] Friday night the way they booed A-Rod when he showed up here as a Yankee for the first time five years ago.

- MIke Vaccaro, NY Daily News

Fans gave a cursory booing to Teixeira, who signed with the Yankees after a protracted and public negotiation with Boston, but it was nothing like the greeting for Damon or Alex Rodriguez, who is down with an injury.  And it had none of the jilted hometown anger Teixeira found in Baltimore this month.

- Tyler Kepner, NY Times

One guy is a columnist, the other is a beat writer.  One crafted a fictional dramatic, artistically licensed (to be generous) narrative of the rivalry, the other reported, vividly, about a game. It is not hard to guess which person started his story about four hours before he even showed up at the ballpark. 

Tyler Has Some Bookmarks

When I picked up the paper this morning and opened up the Times' SportsTuesday section, I was struck by a story on the attention paid to the homers flying out at YS2.5.  It wasn't because of the content, which, typical of Tyler Kepner, is very good, but rather because in the first seven paragraphs Kepner cites as the main sources of his story two very different but significant baseball websites, Greg Rybarczyk's hittracker Steve Lombardi's waswatching.  As the Times threatens to shutter the Globe, and as old media wonders how the hell to make money in the new media world, this story shows that blogs are doing yeoman's work and providing key analysis and news outside the bounds of typical news gathering methods.  Though we who traffic these sites know this and therefore this assertion may sound uncontroversial, to see two such websites cited on the front page of the Times sports section as his sources by the Yankees' beat writer is a verification and validation of the strengths and speed of the minds (kudos to Greg and Steve) working solely within our own chosen medium.  

Times, and the Times, are-a-changing.*

*now, how do they make money off this?

Shattering the Globe

There's a blog rally underway among Boston-based blogs in an effort to save the Globe, which as you may have read is facing the prospect of closure. The text of the rally post is this:

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here’s your chance. Please don’t write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe’s community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.

It's more than a bit naive to believe comments on blog posts will contain the answer that can single-handedly save New England's largest newspaper (and by extension the entire industry, for the Globe's problems are in some way the problems of all newspapers).

The fact is this, and it's a hard truth: When a company is threatening to shutter a newspaper, the decision to close it has already been made. No amount of drastic action was able to save the Rocky Mountain News or Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and I strongly doubt anything will pursuade the Sulzbergers to continue to bleed millions for the Globe.

Likewise, any decisions that could affect the newspaper will likely be incremental stopgaps that do not address the real problems. Because the problems are caused by decisions that have already been made -- stupid, short-sighted decisions to acquire newspaper companies or build glamorous new buildings, acquiring millions in debt, and stupid, greedy decisions to take private companies public, exposing the newspapers to the whims of investors and the demands of stock-holders.

It's maddening. This was avoidable. Not the recession and the painful cuts that would have been necessary to get through it, but the death spiral caused by the blind slashing of newsrooms while pouring millions into marketing and sales. It's too late now. For the Globe, certainly, and likely for the Philadelphia newspapers, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Detroit newspapers, and at least one of the New York newspapers (if not both the Times and the Daily News), and the Chicago Sun-Times (if not both Chicago papers) and even the great grandfather of them all, the Hartford Courant, the oldest continually published newspaper in America.

I'm tired of mourning the losses of newspapers as I would the losses of old friends. Yet I can do nothing else. And whether others realize it yet or not, in the end we all will mourn what transpired here, at the end of the 21st century's first decade.

Jaw Dropped

This tidbit from yesterday's Boston Globe spring-training live blog:

Nick Green, currently the leading hitter on the Red Sox, just blasted a home run to straight away center. Green, who did not play in the majors at all last season, has been destroying the Grapefruit League this spring; he came in with a .526 batting average, and he's got 11 hits now. That homer must have gone about 435 feet; it was an absolute bomb. In his career, Green, 30, has an OPS+ of 72.

What's so amazing about this? Not that AAAA player Nick Green is rocking the exhibition games, which is great and all -- but that a reporter for the Globe just used OPS+ as a stat without referencing someone's mother's basement. Adam Kilgore, stick around a while. Please.

A Dark Day

It's another in a long line of awful days for journalism, and thereby this country, with the announcement today that tomorrow is the final issue of the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's longest-running newspaper, Denver's longest-running business and one of the best newspapers in the country.

This is slightly personal for me. I spent a week there, covering for the Rocky the Democratic National Convention. It was personally and professionally one of the best weeks of my life. They did good work there, and the closure is a big blow for one of the nation's best cities.

On a baseball note, this seems to leave the fate of one of baseball's best writers, Tracy Ringolsby, up in the air. He wasn't one of those immediately picked up by the Denver Post, so it seems that, beginning tomorrow, he will join the dozens of other Rocky employees in searching for jobs in an industry that is collapsing all around them. All around us.

Reality Check

Every so often, you'll read some jackass who has gone through Baseball-Reference, snarkily disproving an old-timer's fond remembrance of an event that probably didn't happen the way he told it. I love those guys.

Now it's my turn! Except the old-timer in question is Takashi Saito, who is old only in baseball terms. Still, one wonders if he truly thinks this is what happened:

Saito has no illusions of being the closer in Boston, and he knows one of his biggest challenges is adapting to a setup role he's not had before. When he came back from elbow issues last September, the Dodgers used him to close, but then he became a mop-up man.

"Just before the playoffs, and even after we clinched, I came in to close a few games," he said. "I think there were some difficulties in communication, but I had prepared to be a closer but I'd be brought into games and situations where it was 10-0 and I wouldn't perform really well. At the time, I don't know if I felt disappointed . . . but I moved beyond that, and if the team had advanced to the World Series I would have been ready to come back in."

Nobody had ever mentioned this possibility before -- just that he had struggled after returning from the injury -- so I made a quick run to Saito's 2008 gamelog. And it's not true. Not even close.

Saito pitched six times after returning Sept. 15, and true enough he wasn't sharp: A 4.76 ERA in 5.2 innings, striking out seven, walking four and allowing runs in three games while taking a loss and a blown save. But only once was her brought in with the game not within a run -- his first game back, with the Dodgers up eight, and he pitched a scoreless inning.

On Sept. 18, he blew a save by giving up the game-tying run in the sixth of an eventual Dodger win; on Sept. 20, he pitched a scoreless seventh inning in a tie game and got the win; on Sept. 21, he gave up the game-winning run in the 11th and took the loss; on Sept. 25, he gave up a run in the eighth after the Dodgers were already down one; and on Sept. 27, he pitched a scoreless ninth in a one-run game to earn the save. Granted, the usage is different from what he was used to -- he had never appeared in a game before the ninth inning until Sept. 15, but the leverage index for his final five games was very high -- over 1.0 in each game. "Mop up" doesn't really describe it.

The only time all season in which Saito came in with his team ahead by 10 was on April 12, when he hadn't appeared in six days. He pitched a scoreless ninth. In fact, his ERA over the six games in which Saito appeared in a mop-up role (ahead by five or more)? 0.00. So I would guess there were other reasons for Saito's poor performance -- unless he simply cannot pitch earlier than the ninth inning, in which case he won't last long on the Red Sox. 

If it's not the injury (and that's the most likely explanation), maybe it was just bad luck combined with some rustiness. Take a five-game stretch from any elite closer, and you'll find some less than stellar lines. From May 28 to June 20, Saito had an ERA of 4.50 because he gave up runs in four out of nine games, losing two and blowing a save. During a five-game stretch from July 4-13, Jonathan Papelbon posted a 5.79 ERA and lost a game. Even Mariano Rivera from July 1-19 gave up runs in three out of five games (surrounding the All-Star break) and took a loss. It happens.

It's not a big deal if Saito doesn't remember correctly the events of a few months ago (I know I don't!), or interpreted pitching earlier than the ninth as mop-up duty even if it really wasn't. But it seems strange that a reporter would just let that stand, however, when it's so easy to check and so easy to see that it's simply untrue.

The Bombshell Reverberates

Unconfirmed reports (read: I just made this up) tell YFSF that Theo Epstein was heard this afternoon thanking the baseball gods over and over again for the MLBPA, Larry Lucchino and their mutually assured destruction of the 2004 A-Rod deal with Boston.

Meanwhile, around the Infotubes, reaction has been swift and varied:

Joel Sherman:

A-Rod giveth, and A-Rod taketh away. 

The Yankees already were about to begin a season steeped in pressure because: 1) They didn't make the playoffs last year. 2) They spent nearly half a billion dollars this offseason to make sure that never happens again. 3) They are moving into a new stadium. Now Rodriguez has again had the messy details of his life destructively suffocate an entire organization. He is the bad gift that keeps on giving.

"It is a PR nightmare, but nothing we can do anything about," one Yankees official said. ...

There will be a defense mounted. One of his friends, for example, said today that Rodriguez had not failed a test at either the 2006 World Baseball Classic, which used Olympic-level testing, or since Major League Baseball instituted random testing and suspensions for failing tests in 2004.

That would be a lot more convincing without SI's equally important scoop about Gene Orza informing A-Rod about a test in 2004.

The NYT, with two sources of their own:

It remains unclear why the union did not have the 2003 tests destroyed once the survey was completed. It had the right to do so under the original testing agreement with Major League Baseball. The union is restricted by court order from commenting on why the tests were not destroyed.

Rodriguez, too, may be pondering why those tests weren’t destroyed.

Or why he, such a supremely gifted athlete, felt the need to take the drugs in the first place.

The Daily News:

A friend close to A-Rod, who is due to report to Yankee spring training in Tampa on Feb. 18 and is currently staying in Miami, told the Daily News Saturday that Rodiguiez "has turned his phone off. This is a mess. I'm not sure how he's going to take this. He's never had to deal with anything like this before."

Yankees' general manager Brian Cashman had very little to say about the report, having learned of it less than an hour before being reached by the Daily News.

"At this stage, we have no comment," Cashman said.

Adam Kilgore in the Globe didn't take long to break out the photo comparisons:

Despite his size (compare this A-Rod and this A-Rod) and accomplishments, Rodriguez had never been widely suspected as a steroid user, even after Jose Canseco’s accusation. In 2006, The New York Times used as the cover for its baseball preview section a painting of Rodriguez blasting a home run into a light tower whose bulbs spelled “755.” The headline to the accompanying article was “Aaron’s Ultimate Challenger May Be a Natural After All.”

The news could not only affect the Yankees, but also baseball as a whole. Attendance was bound to plummet, anyway, this season because of the nation’s economic woes. There are 104 names on that previously anonymous list of players who tested positive in 2003. Who else could be on it, and what will happen if those names enter the public eye?

The ramifications of this revelation on baseball attendance are likely miniscule compared to the ramifications of the sliding economy -- for that matter, likely miniscule, period.

RAB accurately divines the real blockbuster in this stor and why it destroys the "no positive tests aince '03" argument:

At this point, I have to assume that A-Rod has passed numerous drug tests and has been clean, but this story will still be a P.R. disaster because of a subsequent development in 2004. After A-Rod’s failed test as a member of the Rangers in 2003, he may have been warned in 2004 when, as a Yankee, his name popped up on the testing rolls again. Reportedly, A-Rod is the unnamed player whom Gene Orza, COO of the players union, was accused of tipping off to an impending drug test in 2004.

Was Watching is notable for this comment, posted before the SI report hit:

How cool would it be to have a full 12-month period, or longer, where A-Rod doesn’t have “another thing” to deal with?

A quick perusal of the Sox blogs has them taking the high road -- at least for now -- with little commentary beyond the straight news reporting/link posting. Well, except for Surviving Grady (not known for their restraint when it comes to the Yankees), with the headline, "Juicer!":

Sports Illustrated is reporting what many of us in Red Sox Nation have suspected for quite a while: A-Rod tested positive for steroids. ...

Perfect.

Count me, then, among the few in Red Sox Nation who suspected this -- or think it is anything resembling perfect.