Round 15

Game 7! I'm living vicariously.
Curt Schilling. Still the coolest player left in the playoffs. Gutsy effort, just like that of Randy Johnson when he pitched in relief in Game 7 the day after he'd started Game 6 for the Diamondbacks in the 2001 World Series. I think the word "courage" is thrown around too much in sports--it's just a game, after all--but you have to admire a guy who's fighting through some pain and trying to hold down the Yankees lineup with less than his best stuff.
I also admire that he pulled himself out after seven innings. There's a machismo ethos in sports that says it's admirable to play despite injury or fatigue that limits your effectiveness, but at some point it's just detrimental to your team. For example, pitchers who refuse to admit fatigue and leave the game, hitting astronomical pitch counts that lead to injury or ineffectiveness in their next start. It's a fine line, but Schilling knew where he stood relative to it. A veteran like Greg Maddux is not afraid to tell his manager when he's done for the day, and more pitchers should.
Contrast Schilling with A-Rod, who just may never be as beloved as a guy like Schilling. His slap at Arroyo didn't seem malicious, though it did remind me of Robert Fick's cheap shot tomahawk chop to the arm of Eric Karros in last year's NLDS (the Braves fined Fick for that play and benched him the rest of the series. Somehow I doubt the Yankees will do the same to A-Rod). Anyhow, A-Rod will never get the Schilling love for many reasons. His willingness to chase the biggest contract and his inability to change the perception that he's a mercenary for hire who chased money and then success but wouldn't tradeoff between the two. Who knows if it's true or not? For me to presume to know A-Rod would be, well, presumptuous. But he doesn't own a spot in the Hall of Fans' Hearts the way Schilling does.
I wouldn't object to some instant replay process in the playoffs and World Series to aid umpires on select types of plays when they're not sure about calls. They did get both disputed calls correct today, but what if they hadn't? Would it really hurt anyone to have some umpires in a booth reviewing replays for a minute or two, just as the umpires on the field get together for a moment to confer? Why don't they use that HawkEye system that CBS uses to draw digital replays on television to aid umpires with line calls in tennis? I don't understand the argument that human errors in judgment are part of sports. Would we be satisfied if 100 meter sprints were still judged by a few old men eyeing the finish line as runners blew past at 28 mph?
It will be a zoo tomorrow night at Yankees Stadium. I'd love to be there.

Who's your papi?

Some good baseball last night. I know, because it managed to keep me awake despite the near coma I was in after my longest run to date (I think it was over 20 miles, though who knows because my watch and GPS tracking unit mysteriously stopped tracking after mile 17 or so). I plugged my projector in and just shot it against the wall, lying on the ground with a Gatorade IV into my arm, switching back and forth between the two baseball games and MNF.
Both series, but especially the Yankees and Red Sox series, feel like heavyweights just beating the crap out of each other. The bullpens are depleted, it seems like their games are always on television, and Damon's hair has grown down to his waist. If they served alcohol past the seventh inning in MLB ballparks they'd be carrying Boston fans out on stretchers between innings. While last night's Yankees Red Sox game wasn't, as Theo Epstein argued, the greatest game in baseball history (both teams made a ton of mistakes which stretched the game out longer than necessary), it made for good playoff theater.
It seems like all the post-season managers have learned that an ideal strategy is to use your best relievers as much as possible, and as early as possible in close games. Foulke, Rivera, and Lidge have shown up in just about every game. James Click of Baseball Prospectus wrote an article recently discussing the broadening depth of the ace reliever pool. It used to be that most relief pitchers were failed starters, those without good enough stuff to start. Now you have pitchers who are bred to be relievers from the time they're in college or the minors (e.g. Jorge Julio, Francisco Rodriguez, Ryan Wagner), or you have starters who have good stuff who are just switched to relief where they can just air it out for an inning at a time (Foulke, Isringhausen, Smoltz, Gagne, Dotel, Rivera). The result, as the article notes, is that many teams actually now have better bullpens than starting pitchers. That reversal implies that it might be best for some teams to just pitch an entire playoff game with one reliever after another instead of throwing out some retread fourth or fifth starter.
The Yankees still haven't learned to pitch around David Ortiz. I predict Big Papi will die in about six years when his heart does a big poppy after the three thousandth free meal and five thousandth free beer he receives while out on the town in Boston.
With every hit that drops in front of Bernie Williams (he looked to be somewhere in Connecticut on David Ortiz's bloop single--shouldn't you play in more when Rivera or Loiaza is pitching to a lefty with that jamming cutter?), I just see the contract the Yankees will offer to Beltran going up and up. The Cubbies really need to break the bank and get Beltran, if only to keep the Yankees from getting him.
I wrote earlier that it didn't seem that any young players could make an impact on either series, but I was wrong, as usual. Brandon Backe pitched eight innings of one-hit ball against the Cardinals murderous lineup. Incredible.
In my heart of hearts, I can't really root for any of the teams left--are there really even any underdogs?--but it's hard to turn away. Just when I think I'm done with baseball for the year, it pulls me back in.

Remains of a weekend

I haven't set up my television here in NYC, and before that I was traveling for months so I had just sporadic access to a television. I haven't missed it nearly as much as I thought. It's given me time to read and enjoy life outside my apartment. I'm sick of reality television, have no need for CSI: Minneapolis ("Hmm, I think Steve Buscemi died when his partner axed him in the head and put him through the wood chipper. Yaaaa, I do."), and any television show I really want to watch can usually found on BitTorrent. For example, the clip of Jon Stewart on Crossfire as he bitch-slapped Tucker Carlson. Deeply, deeply satisfying. I can't stand Tucker Carlson. What a buffoon. If you don't know how to use BitTorrent, you can see the clip just fine here at iFilm. Could Jon Stewart be any more golden right now? I walked by the Union Square Barnes and Noble when he was there for his book signing, and by the looks of the drooling women in line, you'd think Jude Law or Brad Pitt was there to sign a swimsuit calendar.
Of course, I must have my television set up by this Thursday, when The Office Christmas Specials (part 1, part 2) air in the U.S. on BBC America. I tried to find it on DVD in London this summer, but all I could turn up was pity from Londoners who tsk tsk'd as they revelled in recounting the rapture of humor the special had bestowed upon them. The DVDs? Release in the UK Oct. 25. If you haven't seen the show yet, I either pity or envy you. And who the hell are you and where have you been living?! The show has no laugh track, because you'll provide one. But don't take my word for it. The New Yorker calls it perfect.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about the high cost of prescription drugs with his usual (i.e., unusual) insight.
Wal-Mart.com, of all sites, has audio clips of the Friday Night Lights soundtrack. I'm just about over my Friday Night Lights kick. After watching the movie I bought the soundtrack and inhaled the book (recommended and recommended, respectively). The music has been a nice change of pace from the usual stuff in my "Running" playlist in my iPod, all of which I've heard about eighty times by now.
The baseball stadium in Houston is a joke. People are hitting pop flies out of the stadium in left field for home runs, and that hill with the pole in it in center field is ludicrous. What an atrocious baseball playing field (I've never seen the exterior, but it seems fine). The fact that all baseball stadiums have different dimensions in the outfield used to never bother me, but if they standardize the dimensions of all playing areas of all MLB stadiums, allowing architects to customize all other aspects and dimensions of the stadium, I'd have no objections. Imagine one NBA basketball court having baskets nine feet high instead of ten, or a three point line that was shorter than in other stadiums.
Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS were brutal. Each game lasted about two days. Alan, Sharon, and I rented a movie, started watching when game 3 started, and when the two hour movie finished that game was in the fourth inning. I don't know how anyone who's not a Yankees or Red Sox fan could stay awake. I remain steadfast in my hope that MLB will speed up the games. If you adjust your batting glove and then stand there to take a pitch, why do you need to step out and adjust it again? Is the velcro defective?
I met James, Angela, some of their college friends, Alan, and Sharon for lunch at Carnegie Deli today. The Carnegie sandwiches are MASSIVE. RIDICULOUS. I had a reuben, their specialty, and it was actually just a mountain of pastrami covered by several layers of cheese. It looked like an elementary school model of Mt. St. Helens erupting cheese. I finished about a quarter of it and will nibble on the remains for the rest of the week. Carnegie Deli is a mecca for pastrami and corned beef lovers.
I didn't miss my car until I saw this promotional clip for the new BMW M5. Sweet mother of...sometimes, late at night, when the subway seems like it will never arrive, wouldn't you just like to hop into something like this and just play Pole Position with the cabs.
NYC's arts lineup is overwhelming. Everyday I find at least five things I'm dying to go see. Monday night (oh, that would be tonight) Ricky Gervais is speaking at the Museum of Television and Radio before a screening of The Office Christmas Special. I'd kill to see Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) at the Met. Alex Ross raves about it. What stops me is the memory of my first NYC credit card bill. Upon opening it and reading the balance, I screamed, dropped the bill, my eyes rolled up into my head, and I fainted theatrically, like a swooning movie diva.
The weekend ended with puppet entertainment. No, not the marionettes of Team America World Police, but the puppets of Avenue Q, the much acclaimed musical that won the Tony for best musical in 2003. I am not a huge musical fan, but I enjoyed this one for not taking itself so seriously. It offers quite a contrast to the melodrama of most musicals and seems a descendant of the Rent lineage of musicals, one that's sadly sparse. The show features a cast of puppets and people who live in a rundown neighborhood in Manhattan as they sing about life and its problems. But these are HBO-class puppets, not Sesame Street or Jim Henson muppets (even though some of the characters really resemble Ernie and the cookie monster), so they swear, drink, and have sex. As Phil said at intermission, it might not a musical you'd be comfortable seeing with your parents. The puppets are held by actors who stand alongside them as puppeteers, singing, with their hands clearly inserted up into the puppets or waving their arms around. It's jarring for just the first few seconds, but then, the rest of the time, as the cast sings songs like "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" or "The Internet is for Porn" or "Schadenfreude", you realize it all feels on some level like a clever deconstruction of the musical as an art form. Would Kermit and Miss Piggy have grown up to be a dysfunctional married couple? Would Bert have come out of the closet to confess his love for Ernie? Would Big Bird be surfing porn on the Internet? I'm of the generation that wouldn't find those stories surprising at all, and I'm glad some musicals have caught up.

Game Two

Alan and I took the express 4 up to 161 St./Yankee Stadium last night for game 2 of the ALCS. This time I sat in the center field bleachers instead of right field.

I realized what it is I like about Bob Shepperd's voice (he's the public address announcer at Yankee Stadium): he sounds like he's being piped in direct from the 1930's, through a hole in the space time continuum. Before the game started, Alan and I watched some Red Sox take batting practice. At one point, Pedro Martinez came to the outfield to play long toss to stretch out his arm. Of course, the "Who's your daddy?" chants began immediately.
Why he made that daddy remark I'll never know. He claimed after the game that he didn't regret what he said, but if he doesn't, Red Sox fans and his teammates will. You just can't give the most obnoxious, arrogant baseball fans in the country ammunition. He'll be hearing that chant for the rest of his career at Yankees Stadium, unless, of course, he joins the Yankees this offseason. The Yankees would probably overpay for him, and he's clearly on the downhill side of his career, but still, if you're the Red Sox, do you want to see Pedro in pinstripes? It would be an echo of too many painful memories, and it would just tickle Yankees fans to death.
[Note: the chanting of "Hoosier Daddy" at Bobby Knight when he was still head coach at Indiana remains the most original usage of the phrase]
When the game started, I realized that roll call only occurs from the right field bleachers. Inevitably, we were seated near a completely inebriated Yankees fan who was teetering all over the place. He kept falling into me, and every time he went to buy another beer with his buddy I hoped he'd pass out somewhere and not return. And of course, we had the alpha-obnoxious Yankees fan running up and down our aisle, cursing out anyone who wouldn't stand up and scream along with him. There seems to be one in every bleacher section. He was dripping with sweat, his face red, his voice nearly hoarse. He kept apologizing to a young boy of eight or nine years old everytime he dropped another f-bomb. What a f***.
Most of you know how the game went by now. In the bottom of the first, Pedro walked Jeter on 4 pitches, hit A-Rod, and then gave up line drive single to Sheffield to give the Yanks a quick 1-0 lead. Alan and I were looking at the stadium radar gun, and Pedro was hitting mid-90's with his fastball. He looked to have decent velocity and stuff, certainly better than the last time I saw him here, when he got shelled, but his command was just a bit off. A few non-strike calls here and there hurt him.
One thing I did like about Shea Stadium which I remembered last night was that they post not just the velocity of each pitch but what type of pitch it was. How they figure that out I have no idea, but they do. Most pitches you can identify by the velocity and the path it takes (fastball, curve, slider, changeup, and split are easy to identify). However, for one pitch at Shea the board displayed "cutting fastball." Huh? Amazing, to think that it's someone's job to sit there all game and press a button to display the pitch type. At the Yankees game, from where I was sitting, I had some difficulty identifying between some of Pedro's changeups and curves. We were just a bit too far away for me to see the pitch path clearly.
A side observation: MLB needs to speed up games. I know they tried, a few years ago, but they failed. Umpires at my community softball game do a better job of keeping games going. Batters step out after every pitch to unstrap and restrap their batting gloves, tap their feet, take practice swings. C'mon. Batters shouldn't get to call time or to step out of the box after each pitch. That should be a rule. MLB also doesn't need two minutes between innings. Most pitchers ready after just a couple warm-up pitches. There should be a rule banning the fake pickoff throw to third and then to first. Pedro did that several times. Has that play ever worked? They should just make that a balk.
Meanwhile, the magic pixie dust they sprinkle on players when they join the Yankees to revive retreads was working as Jon Lieber was mowing down the Red Sox, and Olerud hit a go-ahead two-run homer off Pedro in the sixth. Lieber has a nasty slider. It's especially effective against right-handers. Whenever it was 0-2 on a batter, I'd look at Alan and say "slider." If he didn't get the strikeout with it, I'd say "slider" again. The Red Sox had to know it was coming, and they still couldn't lay off of it.
Teams with two million or so lying around can do worse than invest in a pitcher who's coming off of Tommy John surgery. Look at A.J. Burnett, Lieber, Kerry Wood, Ryan Dempster, John Smoltz, Matt Morris, Tom Gordon, Eric Gagne, and Mariano Rivera. It's as commonplace in baseball now as ACL reconstructions in basketball and football. Someday we're going to see a mediocre pitcher undergo pre-emptive Tommy John surgery just to see if it adds some velocity and stability.
Are there a pair of weaker center-field arms than Damon and Bernie? Watching Bernie warmup before innings is painful. He has a strange hitch in his throwing motion. Damon's arm is just plain weak.
They flashed a picture of Jack Nicholson up on the scoreboard at one point. Jack's a Yankees fan? He roots for the most hated basketball team in the country and now the most hated baseball team as well? The next time I watch Karate Kid I half expect to see Jack sitting ring-side, sharing laughs with the Cobra Kai Sensei and cheering on Johnny as he take out opponent's legs.
Gary Sheffield scared the crap out of me everytime he was at bat against the Cubs in last year's NLDS, and he's still imposing in the box with that menacing way he waves the bat around as if to say, "This thing is like a toothpick in my hands it's so light." Baseball needs to do something about batters standing on top of the plate, though. The rules are just stacked against pitchers. It's nearly impossible to throw inside anymore. You either end up hitting the batter, whereupon he either takes first or yells at you and elicits a warning from the umpire, or you hit the inside corner but the batter jumps out of the way, making the ball appear inside, and it's called a ball. They should move the batter box away from the plate a bit, maybe two to three inches. Jeter, A-Rod, and Sheffield were right on top of the plate, and Pedro couldn't drive them off of it.
Against the Yankees in the playoffs, you have seven innings to make some noise. Otherwise, out beyond the center field wall, an unnatural force named Mo begins to stir...

I imagine Mariano Rivera lounging around during games like Brad Pitt's Achilles in Troy, dozing on a couple of furs with a couple naked women, when the bullpen coach comes running in.
"Mo, Joe needs you."
Rivera looks up, somewhat groggy. "Have them lay out my uniform, shoes, and glove. In the meantime, two hot towels and my razor, please."

And then Mo comes trotting out to Enter Sandman, the entire stadium starts rocking, because it's easy to be an arrogant, cocky Yankees fan when Mo comes in to clean up the mess. He comes in, and like Achilles with that jumping-shoulder-stab move, wields his cut fastball like the sickle of the Grim Reaper, not just handcuffing batters but literally boring through the handles of left-handers bats, leaving the debris of exploded bats lying all over the grass in front of home plate.
Now comes news that Schilling can't start Game Five. If the Yankees play the Cubs' arch nemeses the Cardinals in the World Series, I'm not sure who I could root for.

1-Love, Yankees

Well, I didn't expect the Yanks to shell Schilling. He was off. If he's injured and can't recover during this series, the Red Sox are in trouble.
Manny's defense in LF cost the Red Sox at least a few runs. He should have cut off Matsui's ball in the 1st to hold Sheffield at third. He didn't catch the ball, he didn't dive, he didn't cut it off. That's just lazy/bad. He should have caught that ball in the 8th, though I couldn't tell if he was just slow or lackadaisical on that one. The other thing about Manny is that he seems to be a guess hitter, even with two strikes. I've seen him get caught looking with balls right down the middle so often. He can hit, though, so you live with all that.
Should be a lot of chants of "Who's your daddy?" at Yankee Stadium tomorrow. Ooh, it's going to be crazy. Four cool things about Yankees games:

• Roll call--the RF bleacher fans chant each Yankee defenders name in sequence in the top of the first (all except the pitcher and catcher) until each player looks back and waves the glove. The order is Matsui, Bernie, Sheff, Olerud, Cairo, Jeter, and A-Rod. One of the best cheers in sports.
• The playing "Enter Sandman" by Metallica when Mariano Rivera trots out of the bullpen. Gives me chills because you know Rivera can back it up.
• The playing of Sinatra singing "New York, New York" after wins. Obnoxious, and if it were happening against the Cubs, I'd want to shoot myself, but it's Sinatra,
• The voice of the Yankees public address announcer, Bob Shepherd. I only heard it just recently, at my first game at Yankees Stadium, and it gave me goosebumps. He's the best public address announcer I've ever heard. I'd pay to have him say my name over the speaker stadium at Yankees Stadium just once.

Clash of the Titans

Is it possible the Yankees are finally the underdog? Granted, we're talking about the richest team in baseball being dogs to the second richest, so it's not exactly David versus Goliath, but it's news nevertheless.
The Red Sox have a stronger lineup 1-9. The Yankees have some great batters, but then they also have Ruben Sierra, John Olerud, and Miguel Cairo. Sierra is about 73 years old, Olerud was cut this season by the 63-99 Mariners, and Miguel Cairo was once a Cub utility player. The Red Sox lineup is ridiculous. They scored 949 runs this year. It's the type of patient and powerful lineup the Moneyball philosophy would produce if you actually had money. The Yankees ranked second in MLB with 897 runs scored and have also been marked by solid plate discipline over their championship years. These teams don't let mediocre pitching off the hook. The bench for Boston is also stronger. You can hide your lack of pitching depth in the playoffs by stretching out the number of innings your best starters and relievers throw, but you have to start a lineup of nine batters, and the Red Sox have an edge there. I haven't heard if Giambi is healthy, but last time I saw him he looked sickly.
The Red Sox have an ace in Schilling. I've always loved Schilling for the way he goes after people with his fastball (or these days his fastball/spliter combo). He's a gamer, and he's a gamer: he plays Everquest. Cool dude. Twilight years Pedro called the Yankees his daddy (maybe he's mellowing out in his old age), but he's a solid #2 guy. Arroyo looks good, and Wakefield has not, but knuckleball pitchers are wildcards. On any given day the knuckler could be dancing. The Yankees would have a great starting staff if all their starters were healthy, but no one really is except for Jon Lieber. For some reason, Lieber was pitching at every Cub game I attended for a two, three year stretch. He's a solid throw-strikes-and-let-defense-do-the-work guy, an inning-muncher during the regular season, but he doesn't scare anyone with his. Left-handers have always hit him hard, even after he added a changeup to his sinker-slider repertoire. Mussina, Brown, and Vazquez/Hernandez are all top-notch when healthy, but only Vazquez is whole, and for some reason he never took that next step into stardom this year. Mussina is the de facto ace, though a healthy Kevin Brown with his 10 pound power sinker would usually play that role. If Brown is healthy, he can be the Yankees' Schilling. As it stands now, though, not a sub-4.00 ERA among the bunch, though. Amazing what a crappy pitching staff nearly $200 million will buy you.
The bullpens are top heavy. Gordon and Rivera, and Foulke, Timlin, and Embree, and if anyone else is in the game it's a bad sign. Lowe might be a pleasant surprise out of the bullpen for the Sox. Those guys may need surgery to re-attach their arms by the end of the series, and Francona and Torre will be the ones applying the sutures. Just thinking about seeing guys like Tanyon Sturtze, Felix Heredia, Esteban Loaiza, Mike Myers, or Curtis Leskanic in the ALCS is sickening. Oh, this Cubs fan is in mourning.
[The one thing this series lacks is a rookie, late-season call-up, or young stud who steps up with no fear and lights up the game's brightest stage in his first post-season appearance, like Andruw Jones, or Josh Beckett and Miguel Cabrera, or Francisco Rodriguez (K-Rod). When you've got money to spend, you can buy older, known commodities.]
Francona doesn't inspire much confidence in Red Sox nation, but it's AL baseball, so managing consists of making sure to bring in the right pitchers at the right time and knowing when to make the proper defensive substitution. I'm fairly certain he won't leave Pedro in too long this year.
In the end, the Red Sox should prevail. Tom Gordon's vision is blurry from being hit by a champagne cork during the Yankees' ALDS celebration. Kevin Brown hurt his hand punching a wall in anger. They have the highest payroll in baseball history. These are omens straight out of a Greek tragedy, one with $186 million of hubris. And of course, there's the Ex-Cub Factor, which says that the team with the most ex-Cubs is doomed to lose. The Yankees have five ex-Cubs: Cairo, Lieber, Lofton, Gordon, and Heredia. The Red Sox have just two--Bill Mueller, Mark Bellhorn--and they traded one of their former stars, Nomar, to the Cubs, which should have the effect of working in reverse.
Alan and I are going to catch game two tomorrow, and though I'm still depressed over the Cubs' collapse, I'm fired up to be a witness to baseball's fiercest rivalry. Red Sox in five.

Ichiro vs. Gwynn

Pointed comment from Gary Huckabay of Baseball Prospectus in a recent roundtable on Ichiro:

Ichiro is Tony Gwynn with an MLB work ethic.
Gwynn is one of the most overrated players in the history of the game, and in my view, one of the most tragic and confusing. He got a ton of press for basically being someone who pounded the videos and was chronicled as a "dedicated and disciplined student of the game," which is crap.
Discipline isn't manifested through compulsive and repetitive execution of those tasks which you enjoy, like cage time and video study. It's manifested through the diligent repetition of those tasks you don't like--in the case of Mr. Gwynn, cardio workouts, weightlifting and proper nutrition--so that you're in a position to perform the entirety of your required task set at the highest possible level. The final years of Gwynn's career were a pathetic waste, plagued by excessive fragility and impaired defense, primarily because of miserable conditioning. Barry Bonds could look like Tony Gwynn instead of like a 28-year-old Rickey Henderson. He doesn't.

MLB playoffs

I'm having a hard time watching the baseball playoffs, given the Cubs collapse at year end. Sharon, Alan, James, Angela, and I were at the game at Shea Stadium (one fugly-looking stadium, I might add) when the Cubs blew a three run lead with two outs and two strikes in the ninth. Ryan Dempster walked two batters to lead off the ninth, and Latroy Hawkins came in and gave up a three run home run to Victor Diaz. Yeah, I have no idea who Victor Diaz is either. Two innings later, in the eleventh, Kent Mercker gave up a game winning walkoff home run to some guy named Brazell. Brutal. The Cubs went on to lose a few extra inning games to the Mets and Reds (two awful teams) and basically flamed out to end the season.
In the game, Sammy Sosa struck out four times, and his fifth at-bat, he grounded into a double play. In the final game of the season, Sosa arrived late and left early. Later, Sosa blasted Dusty Baker for blaming him for all the team's woes. Clearly, it's time for Sosa to go, especially since his bat speed has evaporated. He's always been vulnerable to good fastballs, and now he's lost his plate discipline and willingness to go to the opposite field. He proved sensitive to the fans booing, his manager's innocent comments, and the harsh words of the press. In other words, he needs to be fitted for diapers.
The rest of the Cubs were a whining crew as well. They complained about announcers Steve Stone and Chip Caray (especially Kent Mercker). They complained about the umpires (especially Alou). It was really unbecoming and made it difficult to root for them as hard as I usually do. The Cubs had a team OBP of .328, ranking them 11th out of 16 NL teams, and thus they went through long offensive droughts between home run binges.
Fortunately, though they're certainly no spring chickens, the Cubs are not as old as the competitive teams they've fielded in the last twenty-five years. An imminent collapse can be avoided by building around the really young and talented (Prior, Zambrano, Leicester), reasonably young and talented (Wood, Lee, Ramirez, Barrett, Hawkins), and old but still effective (Maddux, Walker). Patterson is so frustrating, but he's still young and cheap, so he'll probably stay. Everyone else is either too old, too ineffective, too expensive, or some combination of all three. They can go.
I like the Red Sox and Astros to go the World Series.

You bleeping bleeper! Bleep bleep!

Sunday, I visited Yankee Stadium for the first time to catch the rubber game of the Yankees-Red Sox series. My seat was in the right field bleachers, a few rows down from the DiamondVision scoreboard.
Before the game started, I took in the view of the stadium. It didn't impress me. The history of great players and great games played there is undeniable, but the actual structure itself is non-descript and rather dumpy. It lacks the distinguishing visual features of other stadiums of seniority like Wrigley Field (ivy-covered outfield walls, manual scoreboard, views of Lake Michigan and buildings outside the outfield walls) or Fenway Park (the Green Monster). The thing I do like about Yankees Stadium is the P.A. announcer. The deadpan delivery (a refreshing contrast from the biased, Michael-Buffer-like grandstanding of most home team introductions) and the acoustic texture of his voice as heard through the old-school speaker system gave me goosebumps. I'm not sure how to describe it without a sound clip, but every name he uttered sounded like a legend, even Miguel Cairo.
The best bleacher seats in sports are those that attract the die-hard, loud-mouthed fans. The ones at Wrigley Field certainly do, and by the end of the Yankees game, I had no doubt that the ones at Yankee Stadium did as well. Bleacher seats are the modern day equivalent of the standing-room only cheap seats at the Globe Theatre back when a Shakespeare play was mass entertainment, except nowadays the rabble are further from the stage than the well-to-dos. These are the fans that will throw back a home run ball if it's hit by an opposing player, assuming they're sober enough to toss it in the right direction.
And of course, they also taunt everyone, from opposing players to opposing fans. I wasn't surprised to hear profanity-laced trash talk from the fans around me, but the sustained viciousness impressed me.
Any Red Sox fan brave enough to venture into the bleachers was serenaded by a rhythmic chant of "ass...hole...ass...hole" and pointed out by a forest of jabbing index fingers, moving in time to the chanting. A few younger boys, Red Sox fans, had their Red Sox t-shirts turned inside out. I suspect their mothers forced them to do so out of fear for their lives.
In the top of the first inning, after the Yankees took the field, the bleachers conducted roll call. They started by chanting Ber-nie, Ber-nie, Ber-nie, until Bernie Williams acknowledged them with a wave of his glove. Then they moved to Mat-su-i, Mat-su-i, and then Sheff, Ole-rud, Cai-ro, Je-ter, and A-Rod. No roll call for Mussina and Posada, busy pitching and catching. I hadn't seen roll call performed at a baseball game like that before, and it was impressive. It offered a sense of camaraderie between the right field bleachers and the players, even if most of them were purchased as free agents like so many bobble-heads off of eBay.
In the bottom of the first, the bleacher fans turned from love to hate, and the target of nearly all their ire was center fielder Johnny Damon, who hasn't cut his hair since the Carter administration. I'm not sure what to call his coiff--a caveman mullet? His do and the varied hirsuteness of his teammates were a great affront to Yankees fans, perhaps in deference to the strict grooming rules passed down from Steinbrenner.
Some of the chants directed at Damon (these choruses were chanted to the "Let's go defense" cadence, i.e., [chorus in four beats], clap clap clap-clap-clap, repeat):
You're a wookie
Jesus Damon
Get a haircut
You're a homo
Take a shower
You're a [two syllable expletive]
[expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]
One Red Sox fan sitting in front of me had on a Red Sox cap, white and red and navy blue Red Sox t-shirt, and dark, thick-rimmed glasses. A Yankees fan walking up the aisle saw him and started shouting "Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo?" Then, pointing at the Red Sox fan in glasses, "Here's Waldo!"
In the sixth inning, between innings, the Village People's YMCA played. Yankees fans sought out all the Red Sox fans and pointed at them while altering the chorus: "Whyyyy are you gay?"
By the seventh-inning stretch, when the famed Irish tenor (so famous I've forgotten his name; if he's so famous shouldn't he have another gig somewhere else?) popped out to sing God Bless America, the game was out of reach. Pedro Martinez got knocked around pretty good by the Yankees. Pedro has lost a few mph off of his fastball (reducing the velocity differential and effectiveness of his nasty changeup) and some bite off of his curveball. He's still good, but he's no longer dominant. The score was 8-1 by now, Pedro had stalked off to the showers to a derisive chorus of PEEE-DROOO, and Yankees fans were preening in triumph.
One particularly obnoxious Yankees fan, a young punk with a bandana on his head, was nearly frothing at the mouth. He found one mild-mannered Red Sox fan and stood over him, screaming, "You're an asshole! Boston sucks! Get your ass back to Boston!" Unlike some other Yankees fans, Punk Yankee Fan lacked the gift of wit or creativity, so that was all he could muster, over and over. The Red Sox fan, who looked like a skinnier version of Alan Cummings, was a bit shell-shocked, so stunned he made the mistake of forgetting to remove his cap during God Bless America. Some Yankees fans shouted at him, "Hey asshole, remove your effing cap!" Though I doubt he was a Communist, Alan-Cummmings-Lite refused to acknowledge requests uttered with such disrespect, even if it offended the crowd's sense of patriotism.
After the seventh inning stretch was over, Punk Yankee Fan went over to Alan-Cummings-Lite and knocked his Red Sox cap off and kicked it down the aisle. The two of them started shoving each other and had to be separated.
The Yankees won, increasing their AL East lead to 4 1/2 games, and everyone piled back on the uptown 4. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend bringing young children to the Yankees bleachers for games against the Red Sox, even if those are the cheap seats. The threat of collateral damage is just too great.
Next week they repeat a 3 game series, but this time in Boston. I wish I could be there to see how Yankees fans are received in the bleachers at Fenway, though I suspect the reciprocity principle holds true here.

SBC Park

I visited SBC Park (formerly Pac Bell Park) for the first time tonight. One of Jon's coworkers gave us five tickets for the Club Level to watch the Giants play the Rockies.
The ballpark lived up to the hype. It feels extremely intimate, almost like a really expensive and upscale college or minor league ballpark. It might just be the coziest baseball stadium I've ever been seen a game at. Club Level seats put us almost directly on top of home plate. The visuals of the ocean over the outfield wall are awesome, just one of the ways the stadium integrates seamlessly with (and takes advantage of) its surroundings.
The food selection impressed as well. I had an excellent Sheboygan bratwurst sandwich to start, accompanied by some garlic fries. From there Jon and I moved on to Compadres Beef Taco Trays and Nachos with Beef. If I hadn't gone for a walk to explore the stadium, I might have been arm-twisted into Krispy Kreme to top it all off. I've never been to a ballpark with a broader and more diverse selection of foods. Wine, fruit from a farmer's market, Carl's Jr., and sushi were just a few of the surprising additions to all the ballpark staples like hamburgers and pizza.
And, had I known about the Giants Wi-Fi Network ahead of time, I would have brought my laptop and been surfing the web between innings to check up on my fantasy players. Rumor has it fans will soon be able to see wireless instant replays and order food for delivery to their seats through the wi-fi network. Awesome.
Bonds was walked three times, two times intentionally. He hit a ball hard and deep in the other bat, but straight to the center fielder. Giants fans wave rubber chickens and screamed their displeasure everytime a pitcher threw a ball to Barry, let alone when the catcher stood to signal for the intentional walk. When you see his stats, you understand why opposing teams avoid him: his OBP this season is .608, and his slugging percentage is .818. Those are video game numbers, or those of someone in a slo-pitch softball league. Pedro Feliz, who bats behind Barry, has an OPB of .294 and a SLG of .467, most of it compiled against pitchers working out of the stretch. Of the 44 balls hit out of SBC Park into McCovey Cove since its inception, 31 of them have been hit by Bonds.
The Rockies seemed to be fielding a minor-league roster with the exception of Helton, Castilla, and Burnitz: Clint Barmes, Luis Gonzalez, Matt Holliday, Todd Greene, and Choo Freeman. Fortunately for them, the opposing pitcher was Kirk Rueter, a soft-tossing lefty who this season has allowed 200 hits in only 159 inions. He also has only 48 strikeouts to 57 walks. His WHIP is over 1.6!
The Giants lost, 4-1. The Cubs won in Montreal, 2-1, to take a one game lead in the wild-card race. The lone Colorado player on my fantasy roster (Barmes) went 2-3 with a walk and also snagged a few tough grounders. It was a good night.

click click click

Jessica Alba can't escape being cast as a comic book fantasy. She'll play Nancy in Sin City. Hellllloooo, Nancy. She'll also play Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four movie. Why would anyone want Alba to be invisible? Can we make her new boyfriend Derek "Overrated" Jeter invisible?
How to fold a t-shirt in two moves (.mpg), as seen in Esquire. Gives me the goosebumps.
Movie Ministry (as seen in Time magazine) - need to tie your sermon in to a movie in theaters now?
Dusty Baker calls Sammy Sosa sensitive for refusing to be moved out of the 3 spot in the batting order despite being in a horrendous slump. The truth hurts; Sosa is a sensitive prima donna.
Quicktime trailer for Fight Club, the videogame. Looks like you can choose to play Bitch Tits. With x-ray cam cut shots a la Romeo Must Die.
Martin Scorsese Collection coming on DVD. Richard Linklater's Slacker gets the Criterion Collection treatment, as does Battle of Algiers. The Best of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog also arrived on DVD, just this week. Sweet.
Use the popular vote, not the electoral college to elect our president - Amen.
Great little article by Louis Menand on Michael Moore and the history of the documentary. Where and when did we get this notion that documentaries were supposed to be completely unbiased?
Confessions of a Questec operator

Edgar retires

Edgar Martinez retired today. I never became a Mariners fan in my years living here (true baseball fandom is like religion, it's acquired in one's youth), but I'll miss watching Edgar hit. The way he stayed behind the ball and produced power to the opposite field was beautiful to watch.
UPDATE: Edgar won't retire until season's end, giving his fans an opportunity to bid him a fond farewell.

Nomaa

Even as out of touch with the news from home as I am, I couldn't miss the Cubs' acquisition of Nomar Garciaparra over here in London. It was the lead sports story in the International Herald Tribune and the international USA Today. I nabbed the last copy of both from the local newsstand, bought a tomato basil pasty from Marylebone station, and rushed back to Peter's flat to dissect the deal.
Since I arrived in Europe, the Cubs have dropped out of contention for their division title. I'm not sure what happened, but the Cardinals went on a ridiculous winning streak to end up with the best record in baseball, leaving the Cubs to choke on their fumes. At this point in the season, the Cubs only realistic chance to make the playoffs is to win the NL wild card.
The Cubs primary offensive shortcoming is at SS, and there were several names bandied about as likely trade targets: Omar Vizquel, Rich Aurilia, Orlando Cabrera, and Nomar Garciaparra. Nomar seemed the least likely as the Red Sox were rumored to want Matt Clement in return. Then I heard they wanted Angel Guzman and Felix Pie, too high a price for a shortstop rental.
At the same time, Omar Vizquel and Rich Aurilia were over-the-hill offensive liability. I was glad the Cubs stayed away from them. Likewise, I was not high on Orlando Cabrera, who parlayed one solid all around season in 2001 into heaps of unjustified praise. You just knew that even as a 29 year old he was due for a serious offensive regression this year, and to boot, he had chronic back injuries that had reduced his defense from Gold Glove in 2001 to just above average in 2002 and 2003. His offense at SS is average at best, and this year it's atrocious.
So I was tickled to discover the Cubs had somehow obtained not just Garciaparra and cash but also a solid outfield prospect in Matt Murton for not much more than Alex Gonzalez and some middling prospects. The Cubs are woefully short on position player prospects, so adding a left fielder who hits for both power and average is a bonus.
Garciaparra is on the downside of his career, a purported clubhouse cancer in Boston, and chronically injured. An Achilles tendon injury has reduced his range to way below average. However, he's still a huge offensive upgrade over the Cubs sad-hitting trio of Alex Gonzalez, Ramon Martinez, and Rey Ordonez. His defensive shortcomings are much less of a liability on the Cubs since their pitching staff leads the major leagues in strikeouts. And already Cubs fans and the media are welcoming him in a way that must seem like release from prison after the brutality of the Boston media. Maybe it will prove a win-win for both the Red Sox and the Cubs since Nomar was likely to leave Boston after the season in free agency. The Red Sox are sacrificing offense for defense (Mientkiewicz and Cabrera are above average fielders, below average hitters for their respective positions) and the Cubs are sacrificing defense for offense which fits their team philosophy in recent years.
I liked Brendan Harris, but he wasn't an A-List prospect. Francis Beltran throws hard but has little command, and these days those are a dime a dozen. Alex Gonzalez was an albatross. Lefty starter Justin Jones showed lots of potential, but I don't agonize much over trading injury-prone pitching prospects at the triple-A level. Most never amount to much.
The Cubs still need to make the playoffs (at the moment, they're two games out in the wild card chase), but if they do, they set up as a dangerous wild card team, just like they were last year. With a pitching staff of Prior, Wood, Zambrano, Clement, and Maddux, a random alignment of the stars could be devastating on an opposing lineup, especially one heavy with right-handed hitters. The Cubs offensive lineup is stacked with free-swinging, homer happy batters who can all be pitched to, but they're also liable to hang four or five homers a game on a starter having an off-day.
I don't always agree with what Jim Hendry and Dusty Baker do, but after waiting since 1908 for a World Series victory, a win-now strategy is nothing Cubs fans should complain about. I'll go against character and see all this as filling the glass half full.

Mauer sans meniscus

Will Carroll reports that Twins catcher Joe Mauer, still known as the guy drafted ahead of Mark Prior for monetary reasons, had the medial meniscus in his left knee removed. Removed! When I tore my ACL and MCL, I tore my meniscus, but the doctors simply shaved down one tear and inserted a staple in another.
The medial meniscus is a wedge of cartilage that cushions the upper leg bone from the lower. For a catcher to have it removed...well, it's a bad omen for Mauer's career squatting behind the plate. Without much power, he'd be much less valuable at, say, 1B, though he could be a plus at 2B.
And speaking of Prior, I saw his first start back against the Pirates, and he was aces. Same Prior that was lights out in August and September of last year, and he even toseed in a few of his new changeup.

K Rod: #$@&!

I finally caught some highlights of Francisco Rodriguez's pitching this year. The clips were from a game he closed out against the White Sox.
Ridiculous. He may have the filthiest stuff in baseball. K Rod's slider seems to break a foot down and a foot and a half sideways while coming in at 90mph. He simply overpowered Thomas, Valentin, and Konerko. The ball moves so much it appears he's throwing a whiffle ball. His slider reminds me of Kerry Wood's unhittable slurve, the one he threw his rookie season and used to get most of the 20 strikeouts in his 20 K game against the Astros. It's also the pitch that put so much stress on Wood's elbow he had to have Tommy John surgery at season's end.
NOTE: I had F Rod instead of K Rod in here before. Robert corrected me. I really am ignorant when it comes to the American League. This is why I need to manage an American League fantasy team.

Kind of Blue

As soon as I had purchased my plane ticket to Chicago, I made plans to jump online the first day Cubs tickets went on sale in March.
That first day of ticket sales, the Cubs set a MLB record for single day ticket sales. I made it out of the Internet waiting room just 3 times all day and managed to buy tickets to the Giants game last Wednesday and the Cardinals games Friday and Sunday.
Wednesday in the bleachers was a blast, even sans Sosa and Bonds. Mike and I went Friday afternoon and also enjoyed the game despite the Cubs loss 7-6. Maybe it was the four beers that just managed to kill off the brain cells containing memories of Sergio Mitre's horrible performance. Not only does he have lousy stuff, but he made several mental errors this game, including a wild pitch on a pitchout. The Cubs made it close on two Barrett homers and an Alou 3-run blast, but because of the 2:20 p.m. start time, when the ninth inning rolled around, Cardinals closer Isringhausen was pitching out of the sun to batters standing in the shade of the upper deck. With such poor visibility, the Cubs were helpless to rally.
Sunday's contest, the rubber game of the Cubs-Cards series, was the ESPN Sunday night game of the week. A few random observations from that game:

• ESPN suspended a remote-controlled camera on a cable that ran from the left field foul pole to the press box. It provided some unique angles for replays because it could not only pan along the cable but tilt to follow the baseball and action at the same time. NBC once used a similar remote controlled cable-camera for the NBA, though I haven't seen it in recent years. Here's hoping they use more such innovative cameras in the future, in all sports. These days, you can get better camera angles in a sports video game than on live television.


• I wore the Mark Prior jersey I received for Christmas to all the games, but I wasn't alone. Prior's jersey is the best-selling one in Wrigley, by a large margin.


• From my terrace reserved seats, I had a new perspective on the electronic ticker under the center field scoreboard, and I stand corrected on one thing. The Cubs do show races on that electronic scoreboard between some innings. The new electronic scoreboards along the first row of the upper deck in left and right fields are useful for something else besides pitch velocity: pitch counts.


• The Cubs have pretty much sold out their entire season already, and the attendance for the 3 Cardinals games was 39,298, 40,131, and 40,090. The standing-room only section behind our seats Sunday was packed.

Celebrity Cubs fan John Cusack sang the 7th inning stretch. Joannie and I cheered along with the rest of the fans in the terrace reserved seats down the left field line when John walked by on the catwalk behind the luxury boxes. Everyone also cheered for the young woman with him--who was that?
Clement pitched against Matt Morris. For some reason, Matt Morris's strikeout rate is way down this year, and his fastball velocity is also down. When you can't strike people out, and you don't walk them, they tend to put the ball in play. Aramis Ramirez did just that to one of those unimpressive fastballs in the first inning, hitting a line drive missile that might have killed some fan in the left field bleachers, or on Waveland Ave. That 3-run homer and a Barrett RBI double in the 1st were all the offense the Cubs got, and it proved just enough.
Pujols's second at-bat, after the first pitch, some fans started a chant of "Pujols sucks! Pujols sucks!" The very next pitch, Pujols clubbed a home run. As he crossed home plate, he put a finger to his lips to shush the crowd.
The Big Borowski came on in the 9th to shut down Pujols, Edmonds, and Rolen, whose wind-blown flyball stopped hearts all over the stadium until it fell into Patterson's glove just in front of the warning track.
While it's always satisfying to take two of three from the hated Cardinals, the Cubs have serious problems. Injuries have exposed the team's lack of depth. Sosa, Grudzielanek, Gonzalez, Remlinger (now Mercker), Prior, and Wood are all on the DL. The Cubs bench players have dubbed themselves the Lemons, an unfortunate name in its honesty. Ramon Martinez (OBP of .274, SLG of .260!), Jose Macias (OBP of .291), Tom Goodwin (OBP .227, SLG of .280), and Paul Bako (OBP of .313, SLG of .225), and Damian Jackson (OBP .222, SLG .267) couldn't crack a dish in a china shop with bats in each hand. With the exception of Todd Hollandsworth and Todd Walker, it's one of the weakest hitting benches in baseball, and both the Todd's have to start now anyway. Light-hitting shortstop Rey Ordonez waits in the wings. The horror.
The Cubs are a free-swinging team, with only Derek Lee and Sammy Sosa (among the season-opening starters) possessing on-base percentages over .350. That will lead to lots of feast or famine games, and indeed, the Cubs have hit a lot of home runs and been shut out six times this season already.
The Cubs pitching staff has been reduced to starting the aforementioned Mitre (often described as gritty, which is baseball speak for pitcher with lousy stuff), Glendon Rusch (cast off by the Brewers!), and soon, Jimmy Anderson (cast off by the Pirates!). The best pitching prospect with a chance to crack the majors, Angel Guzman, has just started pitching again after coming back from an arm injury that ended his season last year.
Meanwhile, Corey Patterson still swings at everything within ten feet of home plate. I'd like to see the Cubs trade Patterson and someone (Mitre and Francis Beltran?) for Carlos Beltran if they're in the pennant hunt in August. Depth isn't essential in the post season, but you can't make it to the post season over a 162-game schedule without it. I thought the Astros started the season with a slightly stronger 25 man roster, and the gap has widened. We need Prior, Wood, and Sosa back.

Cubs win! Cubs win!

Mike, Joannie, Derek, and I caught the Cubs Giants game tonight from the left-center field bleachers. It's been ages since I was able to sit in the bleachers, and it's still a blast. Wrigley Field might be one of the few stadiums in baseball where the outfield seats are the most coveted seats in the ballpark (not coincidentally, it's the best section for ogling bikini-clad babes on a sunny day).
Wrigley has installed a few thin strips of electronic color scoreboards in the upper deck down both left and right field, and the thin electronic scoreboard below the massive manual scoreboard in center has also been upgraded to color. Neverthless, it remains to me the most old-fashioned and charming of baseball stadiums.
Contrast it with Safeco Field, one of the prototypical modern ballparks. Between innings at Wrigley, there are no crazy scoreboard games or promotions. After having been aurally assaulted at Sonics and Mariners games for several seasons now, it's refreshing to be able to just listen to the sounds of the ballpark between innings. When batters walk up to the plate at Wrigley, rap songs (or Creed, in the case of Bret Boone) do not blast out from speakers around the stadium. Wrigley does not sell $6.00 high-falutin microbrews. The view behind Wrigley's home plate is clean, devoid of any advertisements. For all the talk of distracted Wrigley fans focused on anything but the ballgame, the ballpark makes the game the focus of attention more than any stadium in MLB. It's also a ballpark that is fairly symmetrical and free of any gimmicky dimensions or features.
The tiny new electronic scoreboards are somewhat of a visual distraction, but they do offer pitch speeds which I enjoy watching if no other reason than it helps me to determine what pitch the pitcher threw to a batter.
The bleachers offer not just the most obnoxious and entertaining fans in the stadium but some of the best sightlines. We had a great view of the pitcher's pitches and of all the action.
It was Shawon Dunston baseball card today. That seemed strange until he showed up to sing the 7th Inning Stretch. Some old Cub fan revived the Shawon-O-Meter which stood at a sturdy .267. It's a sign of my age that I recall seeing Dunston's first MLB home run at Wrigley Field.
Unfortunately, Bonds and Sosa were both sitting and contemplating trips to the DL b/c of back injuries, Sosa's from some particularly violent sneezes. That reduced both offenses to starting punch-and-judy hitters like Jose Macias, Damian Jackson, and Ramon Martinez. Dusty Baker hit Macias and Jackson 1 and 2 in the order. Ugly.
Twice Corey Patterson threw his between-inning warm-up balls at us. Once he tossed it to Joannie and the guy in front of her snatched it away. The second time the ball hit Mike in the hands and he committed an error and let some other guy pick it off. Oh, the tragedy! I was standing next to Mike and if only my arms were longer I could have had it.
Zambrano was pitching for the Cubs. Before the game, he was 2nd in the NL in ERA. He's filthy, with a mid-90's heavy sinker and a nasty slider. He also seems to have learned to pitch more efficiently by letting batters put the ball in play. Through 7 innings he had thrown only 87 pitches.
He and Michael Tucker provided some solid entertainment. Tucker homered off of Zambrano in the 4th and apparently flipped his bat and said "How's that?" The next time Tucker batted in the 7th, Zambrano fanned him and then shouted "Get the hell out of here" while pumping his fist. Good stuff. In his next at-bat, Tucker got hit on the elbow by a 2-2 Latroy Hawkins fastball, causing Tucker to throw his bat angrily to the ground.
The Cubs won 4-3 in the 10th on a walk-off homer by Moises Alou. Jim Brower threw a fat change-up right down the middle and Alou tagged it. As soon as he hit it I knew it was gone. I don't care if Alou pees on his hands as long as he keeps hitting.
The Cubs offense is vulnerable when Sosa is out. Let's hope the Cubs can hang close to the Astros until Remlinger, Sosa, Prior, Wood, Gonzalez, and Grudzielanek return. It seems like half the team is hurt.

Spider cents (and dollars)

Seems that most of the media is up in arms over MLB's decision to strike a marketing deal with Columbia Pictures to promote Spider-Man 2 with logos on bases and on-deck circles. Even Ralph Nader is decrying this travesty against the sacred field of play of America's pastime (I guess his campaign isn't occupying too much of his time).
Very strange, this outcry. First of all, none of the fans will be able to see these logos on the bases unless the entire base is painted. The only fans with an angle to see the top of the bases will be in the upper deck, and they'll be too far away to make out the logo.
Second, baseball and all sports are already overrun with advertising. At Safeco Field the entire scoreboard is surrounded by ads. Every piece of scoreboard entertainment, even the scoreboard itself, is sponsored. Stadiums are named after corporations. Stadium giveaways are always sponsored. The manager signals to the bullpen for a reliever? That's sponsored. Bowl games are no longer referred to by their non-corporate nicknames alone (e.g. Nokia Sugar Bowl). On television, pre-game shows, graphics, and regular features such as trivia questions are all sponsored.
Frankly, I'm surprised they don't place ads above urinals so I have something to look at while I pee ("This pee brought to you by Budweiser, literally").

Testing the notion that "I don't care if I ever get back..."

Losing a massive post like this to a browser crash is brutal. Just brutal. Here goes again, with condensed text and more photos, since the picture to word information ratio is said to be 1000:1.
Monday night, Eric and Christina took me to the Mariners game. They scored Eric's manager's sweet seats, just a few rows behind the visiting A's dugout.

It afforded us a great view of the A's players...

...and the batter's box. I could admire Edgar's swing up close and personal, and it does share some qualities of some of my favorite swings in baseball (it's sad that I've learned more about the baseball swing studying books these past two years than I did in several years of Little League as a child).

Safeco offered its usual lineup of sights, including Ichiro, Freddy, Johnny O, and the ball-in-hat scoreboard game..

But this game had a few tricks up its sleeves, and long sleeves they were. 14 innings long.
For example, the concessions stand now offers low-carb pizza. What is that? Do they just hand you an empty cardboard box with a few dabs of spaghetti sauce and cheese in it?

We also got a view of new Mariners LOOGY Mike Myers. He is a novelty in that he throws both overhand and submarine with about equal frequency. If his arm doesn't fall off, he'll be making decent cash for years. Want your son to earn a good living? Teach him to throw lefty and sidearm. In about twenty years he'll be getting the call to come in to retire a 60 year old Barry Bonds.

Another momentous occurrence, courtesy of our advantageous positioning: Christina could run up to the railing between innings to plead for a ball from the A's coaches and players. Is there a more win-win form of charity than the donation of baseball from professional player to fan? Never has more happiness been created than when a pro baseball player discards a baseball by tossing it to a fan. I saw a grown adult dive over two seats to try and snag a foul ball, bloodying his nose on a seat back in the process. All this over a dirty sphere of leather and yarn that costs $5 in the pro shop.
Lo and behold, Christina finally received one from an A's coach, the ball the A's infielders had used to take grounders after taking the field in the bottom of an inning. Christina, usually underwhelmed and collected, jumped up and down screaming for a good two minutes. Compare her reaction to that of the young boy with a glove sitting in the front row. He received some seven or eight baseball purely by the virtue of his youth, yet he regarded each with the same jaded, gluttonous gleam in his eye. Not endearing in a nine year old, and I contemplated assaulting him outside the stadium and robbing him of his collection just to teach him to appreciate his bounty, but the game went on so long I forgot my plans.

New Mariners closer "Everyday" Eddie Guadardo came in in the 9th to preserve the 1-0 lead, promptly serving up a home run to Jermaine Dye to send us into extra frames.

Things got weird. A's CF Mark Kotsay got tossed for arguing balls and strikes, so the A's moved All-Star third baseman Eric Chavez to left field. The Mariners got men to third with less than two outs twice in extra frames, causing the A's to then bring Chavez back to third base to give the A's a five infielder, two outfielder alignment. The M's failed to capitalize.

Eric, Christina, and I made it onto the jumbo scoreboard three times. The one time I was able to get my camera pointed quickly enough to fire off one shot, I made the cardinal rookie mistake of looking up to see myself, causing me to move enough to cut off Christina's head. The dreaded digital camera shutter lag also caused me to take the one shot where all three of our faces were obscured. It takes skill to fire off a photo this poor.

By the 14th inning, Rich, who was sitting about ten rows in back of me with some clients of his, was struggling to stay interested.

Most seats had emptied out, but staying to the bitter end of an extra innings game is a matter of pride.
Finally, mercifully, pitcher Justin Duchscherer of the A's balked in the winning run in the bottom of the 14th inning. Some 4 hours, 47 minutes after the first pitch, perhaps Duchscherer simply needed to get some sleep. Maybe that Mexican lunch he had was knock knock knockin' on heaven's door.
The remaining fans, all seventeen of us, staggered out into the cold Seattle night.

Yankees payroll

Just how egregious is the Yankees payroll this year? The Yankees have always been rich, but the A-Rod deal seemed to set everyone off. Fans to general managers have lamented that this time Steinbrenner has gone too far, that baseball's competitive balance has reached its logical end.
But, as some analysts have noted, the Yankees have always had one of the top payrolls in baseball. It's only now that they're winning that people are griping. A massive payroll is no guarantee of victory.
Still, a payroll of nearly $190 million seemed outrageous. I was curious how far overboard the Yankees had gone this time so I went back to compare Yankee payrolls against the total MLB payroll for every year since 1977 (the first year free agency in baseball really took off), using data from Doug Pappas's website and, for 2004, from Dugout Dollars (both are great sites for this type of data; this Internet thing might just catch on). Click on the image below to see a larger image of the graph.

A few things I learned. One is that the Yankees haven't always had the highest payroll in baseball. For a stretch from 1989 to 1993, not only did they fail to have the highest payroll, they ranked as low as 10th among all teams. It's important to note, however, that from 1990 to 1993, Steinbrenner was banned from baseball by Fay Vincent over the Boss's dealings with gambler Howard Spira. Is it also a coincidence that the Yankees had a losing record from 89 through 92, four of only five seasons in which they've had a losing record since 1977?
Steinbrenner returned as Yankees GM in 93, and that would be the last time the Yankees weren't the highest paid team in baseball. They've also had a winning record every season since and captured four World Series.
This season, however, their payroll is high even by Yankees standards. The Yankees currently make up nearly 10% of all of MLB's payroll (9.5%, to be exact), the highest percentage since 1977. I'm guessing it's the highest of the modern era. Their payroll is 43% larger than the second largest payroll, that of the Red Sox. The Yankees are taking their lavish spending to new heights.
Despite that, it's difficult to conclude that it's the end of competitive balance in the sport. Though the Yankees have four World Series titles in the last 11 years, you could argue that the team with the highest payroll should have more than that. After all, the Bulls won six NBA titles in eight years, and basketball has a salary cap. I suspect that competitive parity in football has more to do with the number of players required to field a team than with the salary cap in that sport.
And, as plenty of other teams have shown over the years (A's, Marlins, Angels), it's perfectly possible to field competitive teams with modest payrolls. In the playoffs, in a short series, anything can happen. The Yankees are a very old team, and their farm system is weak. This sudden spike in their payroll might be the desperate thrashing of a franchise trying to stave out some lean years on the horizon. They rode an unusually strong nucleus of homegrown talent (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettite) to a couple of World Series victories, but unless they want their payroll to continue to mushroom, they'll have to grow from within at some point.
The Yankees are also playing by the rules laid down in the last collective bargaining agreement which all the other owners signed off on. As long as the population of cities follows a Zipf distribution, the Yankees will likely always swim in the biggest pond and have the largest treasure chest of revenue to spend. The Yankees bring in more money to baseball than any other team, and it floats the boat higher for all the teams on board. That some small market team owners choose to take their share of the pot and put it in their back pocket rather than investing it in trying to field a more competitive team is a loophole in the system. As Baseball Prospectus noted in their Yankees introduction this year, since the luxury tax was put into place, the Yankees have actually stepped up their spending while all other teams have treated the luxury tax threshold as a de facto salary cap. Bud Selig can argue until he's blue in the face that he helped to negotiate an agreement that restored competitive hopes to all teams in baseball, but if anything the payroll disparity between the largest and smallest teams has only increased since the CBA.
The players certainly aren't going to argue for a salary cap. You don't see players from other teams complaining about the Yankees free spending. That's because a salary cap would hold down the collective salaries of all players in baseball.
What free agency and the lack of a salary cap has done is give the Yankees a higher margin of error than other teams. When you can afford more players than other teams, you have a larger talent base from which to select. You can offload player development to other teams and then pick off stars when they hit free agency and are valued at market prices that other teams are unwilling to pay (e.g. Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Gary Sheffield). Steinbrenner's "payroll-is-no-obstacle" attitude has managed to stave off the Yankees down cycle.
My jealousy of the Yankees is no different than the envy I felt of kids whose parents spoiled them silly and purchased them the box of 64 Crayola crayons in grade school when I had to settle for a sorely inadequate palette of 16. The Yankees are spoiled, and if they are healthy, they will field the strongest lineup in baseball.
I admit to a certain fascination with seeing just how far Steinbrenner is willing to go. If he fails to win a World Series this year (oh, let us hope), what will he do next? I do admire his competitiveness. If his team starts to flounder, will he start calling players into his office like his friend Donald Trump and fire them on the spot? The sheer volume of joy/schadenfreude that Yankees struggles would bring to baseball fandom in 2004 is staggering. It's a magnitude of happiness that no amount of Steinbrenner's money could buy.