Omar Minaya “is thought to have signified a willingness” to offer five years to Jason Bay.
A deal between the Red Sox and Padres for Adrian Gonzalez “is not close, and might not happen at all.”
The Cardinals are negotiating with Matt Holliday, and “one Cardinals person expressed faith it could get done.”
But “a baseball source familiar with the negotiations” for Holliday said he and agent Scott Boras “are still looking for something that they’re not finding.”
Reading this article from Bill Baer on Baseball Daily Digest about how Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik turned the franchise around after a miserable 2008 season reminded me to remain hopeful about the future of the Mets.
Of course, Zduriencik and the Mariners haven’t won anything yet, but in a remarkably short time he’s made Seattle appear primed to become a regular contender, and restored a ton of fan confidence.
And the article reminded me of this, probably my favorite sports blog post of all time, from Tirico Suave: Using the Animal Kingdom To Demonstrate Bill Bavasi’s Tenure With The Mariners.
The video makes me laugh so hard every time I watch it (all due respect to the goat), for a variety of reasons, probably more for what actually happens than the metaphoric value assigned to it by the good folks at Tirico Suave. Anyway, it’s this:
This was supposed to be baseball’s big bear market year, I thought. Right? Was I the only one hearing the the streets would be paved with cheap, talented free-agents, and All-Stars would be non-tendered by their folding teams, and anyone getting more than the Major League minimum for a small-market club would be trade fodder?
Doesn’t appear to be the case. The Brewers signed Randy Wolf to a three-year, $30 million contract. Multiple bad catchers have been signed for multiple years at multiple millions of dollars. The Cardinals have reportedly offered Matt Holliday an eight-year deal. The Rays have said they’re willing to “overextend” for just this year.
And, as Tim Dierkes points out, 39 players were non-tendered, as compared to 36 last season, and they formed a pretty typical non-tender class.
I don’t know the mechanics or the economics here, but I’m beginning to think maybe the financial situations of Major League clubs weren’t as doom and gloom as they were made out to be in September. It’s almost as if they’re still making money hand over fist.
Were there a few surprising non-tendered players? Sure. Were there a few trades obviously prompted by the arbitration system? Of course. But does it seem like there’s some huge economic disparity that’s going to choke the life out of the game anytime soon? I doubt it.
That gap exists, of course. I’m just not certain it’s growing wider. And of course, it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you don’t know the right way to spend it.
According to Alden Gonzalez at MLB.com, 21-year-old Cuban defector Aroldis Chapman will throw a side session for Major League teams tomorrow.
Chapman’s fastball has been clocked in the high 90s, and he is expected to receive a free-agent contract worth multiple millions of dollars.
That’s just the most likely outcome, though.
If this were the movies, Chapman would join the hapless and ragtag gang of sandlot players in his adopted homeland of Andorra, train them in a three-year long montage that lasts until the next World Baseball Classic, and lead them to an improbable victory over Cuba.
Smart money says he ends up on the Yanks.
Fangraphs has unleashed a new stat today, wRC+. It’s meant to replace OPS+, baseball-reference’s park- and league-adjusted version of on-base plus slugging scaled so that league-average is 100 (like IQ and the SATs).
The difference between wRC+ and OPS+ is that the former is based on wOBA, a stat described here that more accurately assesses offensive production than OPS.
Of course, as with all stats, it’s a safe bet something will come along to render this one obsolete. And I’ll probably still rely on OPS+ some because I find baseball-reference so easy to navigate and operate.
But the career wRC+ leaderboards are here. The career OPS+ leaderboards are here.
Ty Cobb is a big mover, going from 10th all-time in OPS+ to six in wRC+. Really old dudes, like Dan Brouthers and Pete Browning, drop off a lot in wRC+.
Also, wRC+ appears to suggest a slightly greater variance in players’ offensive outputs, as it lists 26 players over 160 — or 60% better than average — whereas OPS+ only lists 14.
Originally published by “Duke Casanova” on The Nooner Blog, March 5, 2009.
The following format is completely unoriginal. It is a tribute to Fire Joe Morgan, which some of us think is the funniest Web site in the history of Internet. We read this piece on Mike Piazza’s bacne on Murray Chass’ blog and couldn’t help ourselves. So here goes. In keeping with FJM format, the bold words are Chass’, the others are ours.
Joel Sherman of the New York Post and I do not have any kind of relationship. We have not talked for years. There’s no need to bore you with the reasons why.
“Because I’m an old crotchety jackass and he’s a younger crotchety jackass.”
But the other day his column caught my attention. Not many of his columns do. He writes them, after all, for the New York Post.
As compared to the bastion of journalistic integrity that is MurrayChass.com.
Circumstantial evidence against Piazza is almost as strong as it is against Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. A 62nd round draft pick in the 1988 draft and drafted only as a favor to his father, a close friend of Tommy Lasorda, Piazza wound up as the No. 1 home-run hitting catcher in major league history.
Yes, that is almost as strong as federal perjury cases, grand jury testimony, doping calendars, and receipts for steroid purchases. Because all longshot success stories must have cheated. Tom Brady? Juicehead. Cinderella? Boob job. We’ve got circumstantial evidence.
Piazza wasn’t a terrific catcher; he would have fared better as a designated hitter.
Well, except then… Oh, we won’t even get into it. Let’s just skip to the bacne.
Early in the column Sherman writes about Piazza’s acne-covered back. This was a physical feature I had always noticed with Piazza. Not that reporters spend their time in clubhouses looking at guys’ bare backs, but when a reporter is talking to a player at his locker before he puts on his uniform shirt or after he takes it off and he turns around to put something in or take something out of his locker his back is what is visible.
First of all, gross. Second, you just broke the cardinal rule, Murray Chass. Please turn in your BBWAA card immediately and let Jack Morris know that he will not benefit from your Hall of Fame vote next year. Never acknowledge checking out an indecent baseball player, ever. We thought you went to journalism school.
Now as naïve as I might have been about steroids, the one thing I knew was that use of steroids supposedly causes the user to have acne on his back. As I said, Piazza had plenty of acne on his back.
“Another thing I know about steroids is that they supposedly cause the user’s testicles to shrink. And one time in the Tigers’ clubhouse in 2000, I noticed that Bobby Higginson had some tiny testicles. Now I had never seen Higginson’s testicles before he started playing baseball so I have no idea if they shrank to that size, but hey, he had small testicles and he hit home runs. Obviously he was a steroid user.”
When steroids became a daily subject in newspaper articles I wanted to write about Piazza’s acne-covered back… But two or three times my editors at The New York Times would not allow it. Piazza, they said, had never been accused of using steroids so I couldn’t write about it. But wait, I said, if I write about it, I will in effect be accusing Piazza of using steroids and then someone will have accused him of using steroids.
This is the best logic we’ve heard since the Old Dirty [expletive] said, “I don’t have no trouble with you [expletiving] me, but I have a little problem with you not [expletiving] me.” Honestly, we have no idea how this line of reasoning didn’t work on the editors at the New York Times.
I always took the veto to stem from the Times ultra conservative ways
Ahem? (Also, you need an apostrophe there, chief. And probably a hyphen between ultra and conservative.)
but I also wondered if it maybe was the baseball editor, a big Mets’ fan, protecting the Mets.
Or doing his job.
Then all of a sudden the acne was gone… I heard a radio commercial for a product called Proactiv (cq) Solution… Piazza’s name was not on the list and his picture was missing from the group of pictures that adorned the site. So Proactiv Solution wasn’t the answer for his problem.
And since Proactiv is, as we all know, the only product on the market known to fight pimples, obviously Mike Piazza used steroids. It’s as clear as our skin was once we started using Accutane, Clearasil, Stridex and Oxy.
The conversation was aimed at eliciting if Piazza planned to play another season or would be retiring, but I also asked him about steroids.
“I don’t really think about stuff like that,” he responded. “I think in a way these investigations there’s a positive in putting the whole thing to rest. This game is very resilient. There will be a time when people will say there was an issue and they dealt with it.”
That’s probably true, but it’s going to take a really long time, because people like Murray Chass won’t shut up about Mike Piazza’s bacne.
His back is presumably clear in retirement.
We’re not so sure, Murray, and you should probably do some investigative reporting on this one.
But it was Piazza’s back that undermined Sherman’s column.
Is there video footage of that? Because Mike Piazza’s been denying rumors of his homosexuality for a long time, and it seems downright irresponsible for some unaffiliated blogger like Murray Chass to go spouting off rumors about Piazza “undermining” Joel Sherman’s “column” with his back, if that’s what they’re calling it these days.
I didn’t send an e-mail.
“Because I couldn’t figure out this newfangled thing.”
We actually feel kind of bad picking Murray Chass like this because he strikes us as a pathetic old man lashing out at something — Internet — that he still can’t wrap his head around, all while trying to come to grips with his own obsolesence on the very forum that has rendered him so. And that’s got to be tough, we get that. Tragic stuff.
But we make no pretenses to unbiased journalism, and we love Mike Piazza in a totally platonic, heterosexual way, and we couldn’t allow his good name to be sullied in this way. So Mike Piazza had bacne and then it went away. That makes him guilty of nothing more than being kind of gross.
…addendum, Friday, 10:34 a.m….
We want to go back to this line, briefly:
Piazza, they said, had never been accused of using steroids so I couldn’t write about it. But wait, I said, if I write about it, I will in effect be accusing Piazza of using steroids and then someone will have accused him of using steroids.
This might be the funniest thing we’ve ever read. We hope Chass is trying to be cutesy here, and we guess that’s his right. But if Chass — Mr. I’m-a-responsible-journalist-and-I-hate-blogs — was actually trying to pitch his stories using this type of Salem witchtrial rationale, it pretty much trivializes everything he’s ever written.
Guess what? We’ve heard that Murray Chass stomps puppies. Granted, no one’s ever accused him of that before, but guess what: We just did. Try to disprove it, Chass. The ball’s in your court.
Every time a team signs an old catcher, we hear about how well he handles pitchers, which is a useful thing to rely upon in absence of substantive arguments because it’s difficult to quantify.
One simple attempt to evaluate a catcher’s various game-calling abilities is to determine his Catcher ERA, a stat proven useless here and elsewhere and valuable only because it is abbreviated CERA and so makes me think of George Michael Bluth.
Bengie Molina, for example, had a very low CERA in 2009. Of course, Bengie Molina spent the 2009 season catching one of the National League’s best pitching staffs in one of the league’s best pitcher’s parks.
Anyway, just for kicks, I figured I’d point out that Molina — for all his reputation as a great handler of pitching staffs — actually had the second worst OPS against of the five catchers who caught games for the Giants in 2009.
Of course, there’s a lot of small-sample sizes at play there, but pitchers throwing to Eli Whiteside, the Giants’ primary backup catcher, had a .654 OPS against as compared to a .695 OPS against when pitching to Molina.
What’s more, Whiteside only spent one of his 47 games catching Tim Lincecum.
That’s not to say Eli Whiteside is a better handler of pitchers than Bengie Molina, or much at all, really. It’s only to say that whatever rep Bengie maintains as a good pitcher’s catcher is probably undeserved or at least overblown.
Hey, Mets fans: Are you looking to meet the New York area’s hottest sabermetrically inclined singles? Would you like to find an attractive, eligible partner who wants nothing more than to enjoy a long walk on the beach while discussing the relative merits of VORP versus WAR?
Well, I can’t help you. But if you want to get together with a bunch of other fans to discuss the Mets’ offseason, come to the Blue and Orange Hot Stove Huddle next Wednesday, Dec. 16, at 7 p.m.
I will be there and probably participating in some sort of to be determined discussion or forum or pie-eating contest.
It’s at River on 500 W. 43rd St. and 10th Ave. in Manhattan.
You should come. I’m told they serve booze there, and, let’s be honest, you almost certainly have nothing better to do. I know I don’t. Avatar doesn’t even come out until Friday.
So RSVP via Facebook.
And if you do come, please say hello. I’ll be the ridiculously handsome guy standing in the corner, drinking Jack and coke, and making snarky and judgmental comments to and/or about Joe Janish from MetsToday.com.
Big day in anonymous sourcing.
David Lennon, as mentioned in my last post, reported that if Bengie Molina accepted a two-year, $12 million contract, he’d be a Met today. Joel Sherman tossed out exactly the same figures in a blog post, and added that the contract would be offered this afternoon.
Ken Rosenthal, about 10 minutes ago, tweeted that the Mets have not yet offered a contract to Bengie Molina, as they’re unsure of the market. Steve Popper, from the Bergen Record, says that the Mets are still hoping to sign Molina to a one-year deal.
Where are these men getting this information? No one can be sure. What information is accurate? No one knows.
Welcome to Winter Meetings 2K10: The Twitter Year.
Many would have argued that the Winter Meetings jumped the shark a couple of years ago, specifically whenever MLB.com first came up with a special logo to brand their Winter Meetings coverage.
But I’m pretty certain the shark was actually jumped about a half hour ago, when AOL Fanhouse writer Ed Price tweeted that he heard a rumor the Mets had acquired Edwin Jackson.
Twitter nearly imploded. Every Mets fan and blogger weighed in, and numerous perplexed members of the New York media scrambled to find out if it was true.
I know this, of course, because they were all Twittering about it, too.
Then Price himself, only a few minutes later, clarified his Tweet, writing:
To be clear: #Mets and Edwin Jackson not confirmed. Heard in the lobby
Ah yes. It was Ed Price in the lobby with the cell phone.
But you can’t really blame the guy, I mean, after all, he had a reliable source: He heard it in the lobby.
Now, I have no idea who broke the news to Price, but I’m enjoying imagining that it was some guy who recognized how funny it would be to loudly spread false gossip.
My friends and I used to do this all the time: One time we had a loud discussion at a basketball game about Clyde Drexler’s mysterious death (note: No disrespect to Clyde the Glide, it was completely made up), and by the time we exited the arena, we overheard other people discussing it.
So if you’re in Indianapolis this week, I strongly urge you to consider standing in the lobby of the convention center, loudly forwarding nonsense. If anyone calls you on it, say it’s performance art. Trust me; that excuse always works.
To be fair to Price, it’s not really his fault that he desperately Tweeted the rumor from the lobby without investigating further. That, much like Tiger Woods’ extramarital affairs, should be blamed on the relentless news-media environment.
Tedquarters 