Tom Seaver, R.I.P.

 Memories of his 300th Win

On July 19th, 1985, Tom Seaver, aged 40 and pitching for the Chicago White Sox, threw a complete game 1-0 shutout against the Cleveland Indians.  It was his 298th win.

I looked at the White Sox schedule (I don’t know how; I didn’t possess a pocket computer with the world’s information on it yet), did a little calculating, and called my college buddy Ken.  We had just met as freshmen the year before, and bonded over the Mets.  

“You know,” I said, “if Seaver wins one of his next two starts, he’ll be going for 300 a week from Sunday at Yankee Stadium.”  Sure enough, after losing his first bid for 299, on Tuesday, July 30th, he beat the Red Sox at Fenway the following Tuesday.  The next morning, we headed to TicketMaster at Sunrise Mall, and bought tickets to the White Sox-Yankee game for Sunday, August 4.

What a glorious day.  

You see, it’s not easy being a Mets fan in Yankee Town.  As the great baseball writer Roger Angell put it, “It is the peculiar fate of Mets fans to live in New York, surrounded by the exuberantly smug hordes of Yankee fans.”  (Despite the fact that I do now have a pocket computer with the world’s information on it, I can’t find the quote, and I’m doing it from memory.  I almost certainly screwed it up.)

I should say that I don’t subscribe to the notion that being a Mets fan is one filled with pain and horror.  At least, not exclusively with pain and horror. Let’s do the math.

- Major League Baseball has 30 teams

- The Mets have been in existence for 58 years

- They have won 2 World Series – a perfectly average rate for a 30-team sport over 60 years

- They have won 5 NL Championships – an above-average rate for a 15 team league over 60 years

The Phillies have also won 2 World Series – but they’ve been around since 1883!  Since the final year of the Roosevelt Administration the Cubs have won the World Series once – and that’s the Teddy Roosevelt Administration.  The Padres, founded like the Mets in the 1960s, display no World Series trophy in their offices.

And the Mets didn’t win any two World Series – they won two of the most famous World Series in history.  Tom Seaver’s Miracle Mets of 1969 are one of the great stories in the history of any sport.  (I always loved the George Burns line from the movie “Oh God”: “The last miracle I did was the ‘69 Mets. Before that you’d have to go back to the Red Sea.”).  And I don’t have to remind Red Sox fans – or any baseball fans – what happened in 86.

I would even argue that the pain of the Mets’ low points have their purpose: namely, that they make the high points so memorable.  For example, find a Yankee fan, and ask him to name the 4 teams the Yankees beat for their memorable Title run between 1996-2000.  Most can’t do it.  The titles blur together.  They’re like heroin addicts, always failing to find the high of that first injection.  

But ask a Mets fan to give you the play-by-play of the 10th inning, Game 6, 1986, and most can do it.  Our highs are made higher by their rarity.  

No, the hardest thing about being a Mets fan isn’t the dry periods, it isn’t the inept ownership, it isn’t even the fact that so many of our promising young stars have their path to Cooperstown sidetracked by drugs, injury, and tomfoolery.  No, the hardest thing about being a Mets fan is Yankee fans.

Anyway, where was I?  Right, Yankee Stadium.  August 4, 1985.

###

The Yankees were good in 1985 because, you know, the Yankees are always good.  They won 97 games that year – which in a pre-Wild Card era was good enough for 2nd place and no playoffs.  

But this was a very unusual day at Yankee Stadium.  It was Phil Rizzuto Day, and all of Yankee royalty was there to celebrate the Scooter.  Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford, Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle.  Joe DiMaggio and – well, shoot I don’t remember who was there.  During the ceremony they brought a cow out to home plate, in honor of the Scooter’s signature phrase.  It was kind of cool and kind of silly – two words you rarely associate with the Yankees, who are very serious about themselves.  I’ve always thought the Yankees were a cross between the Renaissance Church and a publicly-traded bank – regal and boring and powerful and corrupt.

But today, the old-timers were having a grand old time at home plate.  If memory serves the cow even knocked Rizzuto down.  But then, the door to the visitors’ bullpen opened, and the White Sox’ starting pitcher, having completed his warmups, strolled to his dugout.  He wore #41 and the crowd – filled with Mets fans on Phil Rizzutto Day - went wild.

Tom Seaver won his 300th of course.  And being Tom Seaver he did it in style.  He went the distance*.  He won 4-1, matching his uniform number.  He got Don Baylor, a borderline Hall of Famer himself, to fly out for the final out.  He jumped into the arms of another Hall of Famer, Carlton Fisk, to celebrate.  

* He was 40 years old and pitched 9 innings in his 298th, 299th, and 300th win.  Think the game has changed?

I should say that my college friend Ken wasn't the only Ken with me that day.  My brother, a Yankee fan, was there too.  But my brother is not a typical Yankee fan.  Maybe it's because he was born in Flushing.  Maybe it's because he lived with his Mets-loving Italian Nana till he was 7.  Maybe it's because Ed Kranepool was our neighbor growing up.  But he is never obnoxious about being a Yankee fan, he never tortures Mets fans.  He loves the Yankees with a purity that is admirable.  

And some time after this glorious day he presented me with this plaque - the ticket from the game, with some selections from his impressive baseball card collection.  A rare moment of Yankee-Met unity.

(As for college Ken - he lost his ticket from that day and it still pisses him off.)

I was too young for the 69 Mets.  My earliest sports memory is the Pete Rose-Bud Harrelson fight in the 73 NLCS, but I have no memory of the 73 Series.  In October of 1986, I was in London for a semester abroad, and while I have some great memories, including listening to Game 6 on Armed Forces Radio, I mostly missed that Series.  Of 2000, we shall not speak.  And in 2015, I was in the stands at CitiField as the Royals beat the Mets.  

But I'll always have August 4, 1985.  And Mets fan will always have Tom Seaver.  

The Unanimity Exception

Cooperstown Follows Up The Baines Blunder with The Mariano Mistake

Before I begin, let’s get a few things straight:

• I fully and firmly support Mariano Rivera’s induction into the Hall of Fame.  He is, without question, the greatest reliever of all time.

• I understand that a unanimous selection technically doesn’t mean anything.  Harold Baines was on the ballot for five years and never got more than 10% of the vote – but thanks to the Eras Committee (which should be pronounced 'Errors Committee', ba-dum-bump), he will be as much of a full-fledged member of the Hall as Mariano and his 100%.

• I believe the New York Yankees are the source of all evil in the universe, and I am not to be trusted as any kind of objective source.

That said…

The Unanimous Selection thing is important.  Yes, I know the history, about how Joe DiMaggio didn’t get on till the fourth ballot and how voting was different in Babe Ruth’s day and all of that. 

BUT – things matter because we, collectively, agree they matter.  There is no reason whatsoever that the Nobel Peace Prize should matter.  Over a century ago, the guy who invented dynamite set aside some money and some vague instruction that five obscure Norwegian legislators should give out a peace prize.

Who they pick shouldn’t matter at all.  And yet, it’s arguably the most prestigious prize a human can win because, well, I HAVE NO IDEA WHY IT MATTERS.

It shouldn’t matter.  But it does.  It does because we’ve agreed it does.  

And I can guarantee you that the term “first-time unanimous selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame” is an honor permanently attached to the name of Mariano Rivera.  It will not be attached to the name of Greg Maddux or Tom Seaver or Bob Gibson.  It is how he will be introduced at every speech he ever gives, in every article ever written about him.  It will be in his obituary.  It will be trotted out in every baseball argument about him.  

It matters.

And as great as Mariano is, the idea that this incredibly prestigious honor should go to a relief pitcher, well…

But First, The Good Stuff!

Let’s get all of the good stuff out of the way first.  

Mariano Rivera was the most unhittable pitcher of the modern era.  He has the 13th lowest ERA of all time, and you haven’t heard of most of the other 12 because they pitched in an era when men wore Civil War beards unironically.  There are some legends ahead of him on the list like Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson, but also such forgotten hurlers as Jack Pfeister and Tommy Bond.  

Those other guys I mentioned above – Maddux and Seaver and Gibson?  They are ranked 234*, 125, and 142.

Nobody born after the invention of the bra has been better at keeping the other team from scoring than Mariano Rivera.*

* I'm using ERA as my uber-stat for this post.  It's the one very valuable stat that traditionalists and saberemetricians can all agree on.  If only hitters had such a stat...

And he was truly otherworldly in the post-season.  Over a decent sample size of 96 games – games in which he was facing generally better hitting than he would in the regular season, his ERA dropped all the way down to 0.70.   Are you kidding me?

This doesn’t happen.  Take Derek Jeter, for example.  Jeter and Mariano are unique in baseball history because they are the only two players to have a very long career spent entirely in the Wild Card era on a team that not only played every October, but often advanced deep in the playoffs.  As a result, their post-season stats amount to just about a full MLB season.

And Derek Jeter, in the post-season, was, well, Derek Jeter.  He hit .310 in the regular season, and .308 in the playoffs.  His OPS was .817 in the regular season, .838 in the playoffs.   Give Jeter credit for maintaining his high performance in the post-season, but he didn’t become a better player.  He was almost exactly the same player.  

But Mariano Rivera got into the playoffs and – I mean – what the hell?  He takes the best regular season ERA since Hoover was President...and shaves 2/3rds of that in the offseason?

My only question is:  how did he throw that cutter with his Superman cape on?

The Dubious Value of Closers

And yet…there is significant, powerful, arguably irrefutable evidence that the Closer is just about the most useless position in all of professional sports.

Now if you're one of those people who rolls your eyes at the truths uncovered by baseball researchers lo these past many years, you should click away from this page.  Here's a crotchety old "get off my lawn" anti-stats piece for you.

Project Retrosheet is an organization that goes back and looks at old box scores, at every inning of every game ever played.  And one thing they learned - I should say, one thing they proved, because we all kind of know this anyway - is that teams with 9th inning leads tend to win those games.

And I mean, they win them all the time, and they win them regardless of what relief pitcher strategies team employ.   Back when guys were starting 65 games and going 40-15, they won 90% of the games.  Back when Goose Gossage was coming in for 3 innings and blowing 1/3 of the save opportunities, they won 90% of the games.  And now, in the age of the 9th inning specialist, they win 90% of those games.

Specifically, for all of baseball history, going back to the days before basketball was even a thing:

- teams leading by one run after 8 innings win 85.7% of the time
- teams leading by two runs after 8 innings win 93.7% of the time
- teams leading by three runs after 8 innings win 97.5% of the time

Do you know what Mariano Rivera's save rate is?  89.1%.  Which is, you know, almost as good as Joe Nathan's.

In just about every game Mariano has ever played, the Yankees were going to win anyway.

But Wait, There's More!

There are, of course, other reasons to wrinkle your brow at a closer getting the unanimity honor.

• Rivera pitched 1,282 innings in his career
• Mike Mussina, Rivera's Hall of Fame classmate and Yankee teammate, pitched 3,562 innings in his career
• Tom Seaver, who used to be able to say he was elected to the Hall of Fame with the highest %, pitched 4,783 innings in his career

When you're only pitching 70 innings per year...when you don't have to go through the lineup 3 or 4 times in one night...it is a LOT easier to be dominant.  That's why Rivera has no ERA titles, despite that tiny ERA; he never pitched nearly enough innings in a season to qualify*.

  *  Last year, Jacob DeGrom won the ERA title, posting a glittering 1.96 ERA over 217 innings.  But this guy you never heard of, Blake Treinen, had a 0.71 ERA for the Oakland A's.  He pitched only 80 innings, a total Rivera only reached once as a reliever


Want more proof that closer is kind of an easy gig?

Terrible starters become great closers (like, um, Mariano Rivera; turns out having just one pitch isn't particularly useful for a starter).

Mediocre starters can have epic seasons as closers (see Isringhausen, Jason).

And legitimately good-to-great starters like Dennis Eckersley and John Smoltz?  Tell them they only have to pitch one inning a couple times a week, and they set records.

Some Trivia!

- Who is the only closer in major league history to blow a Game 7 World Series lead in the 9th Inning?

o Hint: it’s not Kent Tekulve

- Who is the only closer to blow two saves as their team blew a 3-0 lead in a Championship series?

o Hint: it’s not Dan Quisenberry

Okay, now I'm just being a jerk.  But also making a point.  Mariano Rivera mowed people down in the post-season, but he wasn't perfect.  In fact, he was 42 of 46 in save situations which is 91.3%.  It's very good.  But 5 closers in baseball last year had better save %'s.



In Closing
So everyone enjoy this year's Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, where the inductees will be:

- One guy who only pitched 70 or 80 innings a year
- One guy who didn't play defense
- One guy who never got more than 10% of the vote while eligible
- Two guys who would never have gotten in with their Wins totals if not for the impact of advanced metrics on voting

Meanwhile, the greatest pitcher of all time and the greatest hitter of all time will be denied entry once again.  But that's a subject for another day.

The Volunteer Commissioner

Due to popular demand (okay, one guy asked), I'm compiling all the pieces in the Volunteer Commissioner Series into one helpful post.

In the VCS, I graciously offer my services to fix broken sports.  Or rather, to enhance sports who have not asked for my help.  Some of my suggestions have already been enacted (You're welcome Baseball!) and some I've changed my mind about (the USA-Portugal match in the 2014 World Cup showed me the entertainment value of a draw).

Anyway, enjoy:


Fixing Softball (Women's softball)

The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)

The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)

The Slowest Game (lacrosse). 

The Winter Classic  (Major League Baseball)

Swimming is Boring (Swimming...which is unfixable.)



I was going to help out Major League Baseball again - incredibly long low-scoring games are not good for the sport - but MLB is already testing out some of the suggestions I was going to make.

And eventually I'll get around to fixing Women's Lacrosse, which has the single stupidest - and easily fixable rule I've ever seen in any sport.  

Chasing Honus Wagner

Is Derek Jeter an All-Time Great?

Ever heard of Sam Rice?

Rice played for the Washington Senators from 1915 to 1933, and in that time amassed 2,987 hits. He hit .322, stole 352 bases, and must have had a great arm: only 4 right fielders in history have thrown more guys out.

But those 2,987 hits...  Old Sam just missed 3,000, and the baseball world has entirely forgotten him. Didn't even make the Hall of Fame till the Veterans Committee voted him in thirty years after he retired.

13 hits.  One more hit a year.  In Crash Davis' words, "just one extra flare...just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail...", and Sam Rice would have 3,000 hits.

And you'd have heard of him.  Because in baseball, we care about milestones.  We care about them a lot.

I bring this up because our old friend Derek Jeter announced his retirement this Spring.  He has one more season to brush up the back of his baseball card, to submit his final report card to Baseball Posterity.

He's in no danger of being forgotten like poor old Sam.  He's got his 3,000 hits.  Plus 5 World Series rings, 13 All-Star games, $250 million in career earnings, and 5 dubiously earned Gold Glove awards.  He's a lock for the Hall of Fame.

But is he, as ESPN (and many others have) asked, an All-Time Great?*

*  If you're one of those people who believe this sort of argument/debate is pointless, well, you're wrong.  Every sports argument, every sports conversation ever had, is ultimately about one thing:  How good is X?  How good is that player, play, team, game, season, coach, GM, sport, rule, manager, call, skill, prospect, announcer, camera angle?  And the best sports conversations, the most enduring ones, are the All-Time Great discussions.  Jeter, because of his vast legions of worshipers and critics, is, along with Brady vs. Manning, the best sports debate of our time.  


In 2009, I argued that he'd need to get 3,516 hits to claim that status.  Jeter critics have long argued that Jeter has too few individual accomplishments to rank among the best of the best.  No MVPs, no batting titles, no home run titles.  And for most of his career, he wasn't even the best shortstop in the league, as guys like A-Rod, Nomar, Tejada, Tulowitzki, Hanley Ramirez - heck, even guys like Rafael Furcal and Erick Aybar - had better seasons.  

Derek Jeter does have one all-time great skill though:  getting hits.  Yes, he's had a TON of plate appearances*, but he hit for a very good average his whole career, and all those dying quails add up. (And man, even his biggest fans would acknowledge, he was the King of the Dying Quail.)

* he led the league 5 times in plate appearances, and had over 700 ten times!  If you want to be an all-time hit leader, I strongly encourage you to stay healthy, and hit at the top of an order that scores 900 runs a year.

I argued that if Jeter reached 3,516 hits he'd pass Tris Speaker, and crack the Top 5 all-time, earning him All Time Great status.  In fact, the math showed that if, like Pete Rose, he stayed healthy and played into his 40's, he had an outside shot at 4,000 hits.

The next two years he got 341 hits, including his 3000th.  And he had a fantastic 2012 campaign, leading the league with 216 hits.  But 2013 was lost to injury and he announced his retirement for the end of the 2014 season.

Tris Speaker is 198 hits away.  It's possible, given his 216 hits only 2 years ago, but he turns 40 in June and is coming off major injury.

But there's another interesting target in reach:  Honus Wagner.  The Flying Dutchman had 3,420 hits, and moderately healthy season from Jeter will give him the 104 hits he needs to catch him, making him the shortstop with the most hits all time.

You still couldn't put his accomplishments quite up there with Wagner.  Like other members of the GOAT Club (Greatest of All Time), old Honus' trophy cabinet is overflowing with individual titles.  He won 8 batting titles, had enough pop to lead the league in slugging 5 times (no homers but truckloads of doubles and triples), and took the stolen base crown 5 times.

But if Mr. November picks up his 3,421st hit sometime this summer, he can show up at the GOAT Club meeting, turn to all his critics and say....well, something bland and boring, because that's what he always says.

But he will belong.

Maybe Not Next Year

These are tough times for Yankee haters.

Coming into the 2013 season, there was abundant evidence that the Yankees glorious 18-year run was finally coming to a close. As all baseball fans know, from 1996 to 2012, the Bronx Bombers won 5 world championships, 7 AL titles, and made 17 playoff appearances.  How did they do this?

1. The simultaneous appearance of 4 great farm product players: Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte, and Posada.  That's two lock Hall of Famers and two perennial All-Stars, arguably the greatest crop of players ever produced by one team in one year.
2. The greatest spending spree in American sports history.  From 1999 through 2009 the Yankees signed or traded for: Clemens, Mussina, Giambi, Brown, A-Rod, Randy Johnson, Texeira, and Sabathia.  They outspent everyone for the best international talent (Contreras, Matsui, El Duque).  They did this while keeping the 4 guys above (except for a brief Pettitte Houston trip). If there was an expensive available player, the Yankees got him, and their payroll was regularly $50 million or more higher than the 2nd highest paid team.
3. The Wild Card era.  The Yankees run started in 95, the first year of the Wild Card era, so even when the Yankees weren't dominant, they still made the playoffs.   They had 7 playoff appearances during this period that would have been misses before 1994, and won the Series two of those times*.

* four Wild Cards, and three seasons in which the Indians, formerly of the AL East, had a better record.  In 1996 and 2000 the Yankees won the World Series with regular season records that would've missed the playoffs only a few years earlier.  

But that's all over right?  Even before the great injury avalanche of 2013, the Yankees had seemingly returned to the pack.  Posada had retired, Texeira was in decline, and three aging superstars - Jeter, A-Rod, and Mariano - were in various stages of return from 2012 injuries.

The Wild Card system isn't going anywhere, but in the 19 seasons since the Jeter/Mariano/Pettitte/Posada bounty (not to mention Bernie Williams a few years earlier), the Yankee farm system has produced one great player (Robinson Cano).  And the Steinbrenner boys have said they don't plan on quite outspending their competition as much as dear old Dad.  

Things were already looking bad when the Yankees got serious about putting together the Greatest Disabled List Ever. Texeira went down.  Jeter's backup and his backup's backup. Youkilis, Pettitte, Nova, Joba and Hughes.   Granderson got hurt in spring training, returned for a few days, and got hurt again.

And the uninjured guys were, you know, old.  Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Kuroda, Vernon Wells, and Mariano Rivera are between 35 and 43 years old.

Last night the Yankee starting lineup included David Adams, Reid Bringnac, and Chris Stewart.  If you knew who those people were before this year, you're a more devoted Fantasy baseball player than I am.

So naturally the Yankees have the 5th best record in major league baseball!

What does all this mean?  Part of me is tempted to make the regression to the mean argument.  I mean, you can't keep fielding a team of 39 year old pitchers, those three guys above, and Lyle Overbay and win 95 games, right?  A team that features Brett Gardner as its 2nd best hitter doesn't make the playoffs, right?  I mean, he's a good player, but this is the frickin' Yankees!

And Brian Cashman has quite a task ahead of him the next few years.  Over the next couple years he's going to need: a first baseman, shortstop, third baseman, catcher, right fielder, closer, and a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th starter.

Where he's going to find these people?  The Yankee farm system isn't producing the way it used to.  Other teams have caught up in international scouting.  And the free agent talent isn't there.  Many of the best players in baseball - Votto, Braun, Trout, Cabrera, Fielder, Wright, Tulowitzki, Harper, McCutcheon - are signed for years to come.

But I've been burned before.  The Yankees exist in an alternate universe where the normal laws of baseball don't apply.  I refuse to allow myself hope.

But then again, this happened last night...

I Got Thome

The other day, the great Joe Posnanski* wrote a piece about how in sports we don't need a reason to choose what we celebrate, we just need a consensus. In other words, if we all agree that hitting streaks are worth celebrating, we celebrate them. But if we all agree that 10,000 rebounds, a feat achieved by 34 men, isn't such a big deal, we don't celebrate them.

* When I do these little asterisk/italics things, I am using a Posnanski invention called the Posterisk. It is superior to parenthesis and footnotes, and I hope it catches on.

As it turns out, his timing was perfect. Because last night Jim Thome hit his 599th and 600th home runs. It was an astonishingly rare achievement, one of the rarest in sports. Only 8 men in baseball history have accomplished the feat, and the other 7 are baseball legends, admitted steroid users, or both.

And yet...the world yawned. There will be no HBO special commemorating his chase for 600. His achievement did not pass the Lucille Test. Few people marveled at the way he achieved it, being the first man to hit back-to-back jacks to get to a six-pack.

Most importantly, ESPN's SportsCenter this morning followed up the highlight of this game with a segment titled "Hall of Famer?" The report, by Tim Kurkjian, concluded he was a Hall of Famer. But that's quite a question mark. 600 homers does not punch your ticket to the Hall.

This is in stark contrast to the celebration around Derek Jeter's 3,000th hit. 3,000 hits is a much more common achievement. 28 guys have gotten to that level.*

* In a related note, sometime this September Clinton Portis will become the 26th NFL player to rush for 10,000 yards. Will anyone care?

In fact one can argue Thome has been a better player than Jeter. He's almost certainly a better hitter. He got to his 600th homer with far fewer (around 900) plate appearances than Jeter needed for 3000. He has a lower batting average (.312 to .277), but a higher On-Base Percentage (.403 to .383) and a much higher slugging % (.557 to .449).

Of course, Jeter was a far superior fielder and a much better base runner (335 stolen bases to 19). The Captain was not quite the October superhero people think he was, but he was a very good post-season player, whereas Thome wasn't. Most importantly, Jeter is the rare modern athlete who has spent his entire career with one team, so his connection to that fan base is greater, certainly, than Thome is to Minnesota, or even Cleveland.

The point here isn't to bash Jeter, who deserves the credit he received. It's to wonder why Thome's far rarer achievement is virtually ignored.

It's not because he's a bad guy - in fact by all accounts he's a great guy. According to Joe Pos, he's won the Clemente Award and the Gehrig Award. He's been voted the nicest guy in baseball by his peers. And it has something to do with the fact that homers have been devalued in our post-Bonds era.

But still...there's a good chance that in about 8 or 9 years, Jeter will be cruising to Cooperstown as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. And Jim Thome might be on his 3rd year trying to get in. Will he be joining him?

Note:

About the name of this post...in 1992 my friends and I founded the Madisox Fantasy Baseball League. (Odd Couple fans know the name comes from an episode involving television's greatest sportswriter). That first year, well, the details are hazy but my buddy Costello drafted this Indians prospect named Jim Thome. Later, somebody tried to draft Thome but Costello, looking over his roster, said, "No, I got Thome. I definitely got Thome." Only he pronounced it with a Th- sound, rhyming with home. Anyway, "I got Thome" is one of the catchphrases of our league, and has been repeated at every draft since.

Congratulations, Mr. Jeter

I have to admit that even I, a card-carrying Yankee hater and full-fledged member of the "Jeter is Overrated Club", got a kick out of that 5-for-5, dinger for 3k, game-winning RBI performance on Saturday.

It's true that if Michael Kay said "the Captain" one more time, with that mix of teen-girl breathlessness and religious awe that one associates with lunatic cult members, I would have thrown my beer at the television screen.

But at the end of the day, I am a) a reader and writer who loves a great story, and that was an amazing story, and b) a baseball fan who revels in the statistical oddities of the sport. And the idea that Derek Jeter, who had hit a homer in precisely 1 of the previous 132 Yankee games (including post-season) would homer for his 3000th hit, is a statistical oddity of the highest order. Toss in 4 other hits and a game-winning RBI, and you have one of the most improbable days in baseball history. What baseball fan wouldn't love that?

(You buying any of this?)

Anyway, in honor of 3000, I'm linking to my piece entitled Chasing Tris Speaker, in which I make some attempt to estimate Jeter's career hit totals, and explain how important they are to his legacy. The short version is this: Jeter needs 516 hits to catch and pass Speaker, which would put him in the Top 5 all time. That's 171 hits over 3 full seasons, meaning he'd need to stay healthy and reasonably productive through his current contract, and get at least one more season in the bigs.

What If?

There are three kinds of baseball teams.

There are teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies that, barring catastrophe, are likely to win 90+ games.

There are teams like the Pirates, Mariners, and Diamondbacks that, barring a miracle, are likely to lose 90+ games.

Then there are the What If Teams. The What If teams are those that, if everything breaks right, something magical could happen. The San Francisco Giants were a What If team last year. They were 22-1 odds to win the World Series. Yeah, they had some young live arms, but their best hitter was Aubrey Huff – Aubrey Huff! They finished ten games behind the Dodgers and Rockies in 2009, a lot of ground to make up. The Giants needed a lot of things to break right for a magical season.

And they all did. The young pitchers delivered. They scored just enough runs, mostly at the right time. Minor league prospect Buster Posey came up in late May and hit 18 homers. The Dodgers and Rockies, both of whom won 90+ games in 2009, dropped to the low 80’s. And the Padres, oh the Padres, who were the Ultimate What If team all year, fell apart in September.

I bring this all up because the New York Mets are one of those What If teams.

If Everything Breaks Right

I won’t go into detail here (I did in this post), but look at the Mets’ Ifs.

- If the starting pitching does what it did last year (7th in team ERA; 19 shutouts);

- If K-Rod continues to punch out batters the way he did last year (before punching out his kids’ grandpop);

- If Wright, Reyes, and Bay play like the great offensive players they’ve been most of their careers;

- If young players like Ike Davis, Mike Pelfrey, and Jonathan Niese continue their growth;

- If you get some great performances from unexpected places (my vote is on Chris Young, who I took in the 23rd round of my fantasy draft Sunday night);

- If a new manager - one that doesn’t look like, sound, and manage like a Jazz bassist backing a beat poet in 1968 Greenwich Village basement cafe- can inspire this team

- If all these things happen, well...

But you don’t just need good internal things…it helps if bad things happen to other people. And the Phillies could be ripe for the sort of catastrophe that derails a promising team.

Would I like to have their rotation? Sure. But remember, the Big 3 are over 30, and candles in a birthday cake hit pitchers faster than hitters. And here's some Did You Knows...

Did you know Cliff Lee, before his great October, was 4-6 with a 3.98 ERA as a Ranger?

Did you know that in 2009 Roy Oswalt’s ERA was 4.12

Did you know Cole Hamels’ record the past two seasons is 22-22?

And did you know Roy Halladay’s given name is Harry Leroy Halladay? (I have nothing bad to say about his pitching. Guy is awesome.)

And that’s the pitching vulnerability. It’s on offense where they can have real problems.

Ryan Howard, Team Stud, took a significant step backwards last year. Instead of 45 HRs/140 RBIs he went 31/108. And while he played fewer games, his OPS also dropped, from .931 to .859. He is nowhere near the monster player he was in 2006and his comps on baseball-reference.com aren’t encouraging*.

* If you like baseball stats, one of the coolest features on baseball-reference is the comps – where you can compare players to other players in history.The player most like Ryan Howard, at the same age, in all of baseball history, is Richie Sexson.

But Howard isn’t the problem. Chase Utley’s injury, Jayson Werth’s absence, and Jimmy Rollins’ overall suckiness – the guy’s career has been in a free fall since his undeserved MVP in 2007 – are the problems. That’s a lot of Ifs, but all are possible.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they all happened?

And wouldn’t it suck if they all happened…but the Braves had all their What Ifs happen and won the NL East?

Do Managers Matter?

We humans are stubborn creatures. We form an opinion, grab hold of it, and over time tighten that grip until “changing your mind” becomes nearly impossible. This is true if it is something trivial, like believing defense wins NFL championships, or of life-and-death importance, like believing holistic medicine cures disease better than modern medicine.

When we receive new data about the issue, we filter it through our bias. For example, I can provide reams of data to a “defense wins championships” believer that prove a good offense is as or even more important than a good defense, but he will discard the facts that don’t support his belief, and latch onto the ones that do. “Sure, the Saints scored with more frequency than a rich nerd at a gold digger convention,” he’ll say, “but they didn’t win a championship until Gregg Williams started blitzing like Rommel.”

Cognitive scientists call this “confirmation bias” – we naturally select data that support our existing beliefs, and discard data that refute those beliefs. Think about confirmation bias, and it will change how you look at everything from the Middle East to marital spats.

I bring all this up because I’m changing my mind about a long-held belief, a belief of enormous magnitude: I’m beginning to believe baseball managers matter.

###

Many of you are saying, well of course managers matter (or you’re saying, sheesh, another sports story? I’m outta here). But I’ve always believed managers had a minimal effect on a win-loss record. Take any intelligent baseball fan and side him up with a decent bench coach, and he could do a passable job managing. Write the lineup. Set your rotation. Change pitchers. Talk to the press. Lose arguments with umpires. Spit. Is that it?

I have no doubt I can perform that job with fewer embarrassing blunders than I would as, say, a plumber or biochemist or Federal Reserve chairman or software engineer or submarine sonar officer or sous chef or air traffic controller or ambassador to Norway* . Or, for that matter, football coach, where you need to not only know what Red-Z Omaha Split means, you have to create it, teach it, and decide when to employ it.

* Sidenote: congratulations to the obscure Norwegian politicians who pick the Nobel Peace Prize winner - you didn't screw it up this year! As for the Swedes who give out the Literature prize, I'm still waiting for you to honor Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth or pretty much anybody with an American passport, but at least you didn't give it to a total obscurity this year.

In fact, I figured (and still do), it is harder to manage baseball in the minors and college where teaching the fundamentals is a big part of the job. I’m reasonably sure Phillies manager Charlie Manuel doesn’t have to tell Chase Utley how to pivot on a double play or Shane Victorino which cutoff man to hit or Ryan Howard to never ever EVER bunt.

And so, for years, I didn’t particularly care who managed my team. What I mostly hoped is he would be entertaining in interviews, like Bobby Valentine.

But here’s the thing: I’m watching these baseball playoffs and, except for the Yankees and Phillies – which are absolutely loaded with talent – I see a bunch of lineups and rotations that aren’t particularly impressive. And yet, these teams are in the playoffs, and my Mets are home again.

The Elements of Winning

I was recently in Minneapolis and had a chance to visit Target Field, the Twins’ new digs. I looked up at the Twins’ lineup and saw Joe Mauer and…well, a bunch of guys few people outside of Minnesota had ever heard of before. Michael Cuddyer has been on my fantasy teams a couple times, and is a pretty good hitter. But this is not an all star team. Justin Morneau missed most of the season with an injury, closer Joe Nathan hasn’t thrown a pitch since spring training. And yet here they were, in first place as usual.

And it got me to thinking about my team, the Mets, who have most of the elements of a winning team, but were once again muddling through a meaningless September:

Established stars
David Wright and Johan Santana are proven superstars. Carlos Beltran missed most of the season, but has been one of the premier centerfielders of his generation.

Up and coming players
Ike Davis had the second best rookie season by a hitter in Mets history. Mike Pelfrey broke through this year, pitching on an ace level most of the year. Jonathan Niese opened eyes all year long.

Unexpected performances from journeyman

Angel Pagan and R.A. Dickey? Did any journeyman hitter/pitcher combination have better unexpected seasons than these two?

Consistently good starting pitching
The Mets threw 19 shutouts this year. They had a team ERA of 3.73, a ¼ run better than the league average, and the 7th lowest in all of baseball.

A reliable bullpen
Francisco Rodriguez’s season ended in disgrace, and he had a few tough blown saves this year. But look closely and you’ll see that he had his best season since 2006, when he finished fourth in the Cy Young voting. His ERA was 2.20, he had a career low walks per nine innings, his WHIP was the second lowest of his career and he struck out an astonishing 3 batters for every one walked. A lot of Mets fan believe he struggled this year, and he had his patches – but those patches were surrounded by multiple weeks and even months of unhittable dominance.

Good baserunning
The Mets led the league in stolen bases. Again. In fact, the Mets have led the league in stolen bases every year since 2004, except for 2008 when they finished 2nd.


Established stars. Up and coming players. Unexpected performances from journeymen. Consistently good starting pitching. A good, occasionally great closer. Speed in the basepaths. The Mets took all of these elements and ended up…79-83.

Ron Gardenhire has been manager of the Minnesota Twins for nine years. In those nine years his team finished 1st six times. In eight of nine the Twins had a winning record. His only losing season was 2007 when they finished with the same mediocre record the Mets finished with this year, 79-83.

Mets manager Jerry Manuel has also managed nine seasons in the majors, with the White Sox and Mets. He had one first place finish. He’s had back to back 4th place finishes with the Mets. And he gives boring interviews.

The Mets just fired Jerry Manuel. Can someone else take this collection of promising talent and bring them to October? As the great Tug McGraw said, Ya Gotta Believe.

Something Borrowed

I generally surf the web at lunch, and these two sports-related things both brought me pleasure:

1. A beautiful piece by the great Joe Posnanski about Armando Galarraga's "perfect" game: The Lesson of Jim Joyce

2. This link was sent by KMac in Chicago about Blackhawks fans getting on the bandwagon. I was in Chicago the week they won the Conference Finals (is that what they call it in hockey?) and the city was aflame with Hawk Love. Even the Art Institute had huge Blackhawks banners hanging out front. Anyway, a fun video about fans jumping on the bandwagon:

Opening Eve

The United States government is going bankrupt, unemployment remains at 10%, and the NBC series Chuck* is at risk of being cancelled. But as far as I’m concerned, all is right with the world because, ladies and gentlemen, baseball is back!

* Seriously, I have completely fallen for Chuck. I’m mildly embarrassed by this; should I be?

So as I bask in the glow of the Mets' ritual Opening Day victory (32-9 on ODs since the 69 Miracle Mets), I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.

Naming the Day
These days its unclear which day actually is Opening Day. Was it Sunday night when the New York Billionaires lost to the Boston Multi-Millionaires? Or Monday, when the other 30 teams get their mojo on? Well, here at FreeTime, we don’t complain, we propose solutions.

Let me start by saying I have no problem with change and innovation. Folks who sit around growling that the Cincinnati Reds should kick off every season at Noon on Monday because “Dadgum it, that’s how we did it when I was a boy” are trapped in a time warp. They should stick to the New York Times sports section and their lineup of octogenarian columnists who think 1950’s New York baseball should be frozen in amber and replayed over and over and leave modern baseball to the rest of us.

That said the Sunday night game has caused a bit of a linguistic problem. Monday is the true Opening Day, with 15 games played across the continent, grown men scheming to leave work early, with sunshine and American flags and hot dogs and rookie debuts and “recording artists”* you’ve never heard of singing the National Anthem.

* That would be a good name for a band, The Recording Artists. “And now, to sing the National Anthem, Columbia recording artists, The Recording Artists!”

Where was I? Right, our linguistic problem. Some have proposed we call Sunday night Opening Night, but c’mon, this isn’t theater. This is Baseball with a Capital B. Opening Day is a holiday, not a show making its debut and hoping not to be cancelled. (Okay, it was cancelled in 1994. But that was different).

We are all very comfortable with the concept of Eves. December 24 is Christmas Eve, December 25 is Christmas Day. December 31 is New Year’s Eve; January 1 we nurse our hangover and watch East Illinois State play Acorn University in the Fremulon Insurance Who Gives a Crap Bowl. Why not do the same thing for Opening Day?

From here on, Sunday Night is Opening Eve and Monday is Opening Day. My will be done. Now let’s move on to other, more pressing issues.

Sympathy for the Devil
And what a wonderful Opening Eve! The New York Stormtroopers blew a 4-run lead with their best pitcher on the mound. The Yankees are in last place!

But of course they won’t stay there. How glorious it must be to be a Yankee fan. To root for a team that finishes in 1st place nearly ever season, a team that plays in October nearly every season. A team for whom Opening Eve really is like Christmas Eve, because Daddy George has bought us the most expensive toys in the off-season.

To root for a team that has won 1/3 of all the Championships since the Hoover Administration. Think about that.

There are some 120 teams in the 4 major sports in North America. Throw in the major college football and basketball teams and we’re talking almost 200 teams with serious rooting interests.

But none of them has a sustained record of winning like the New York Yankees, not even close. The Lakers you say? Please. Ruth, Mantle and Company had 20 rings before the Lakers even moved to California. North Carolina basketball? Yanks had more titles during Clinton’s second term than the Tar Heels have racked up since Dean Smith’s first season.

But there is a dark side to all this winning. A basic human truth is that when something is hard it is more rewarding. Reading Shakespeare, drinking single-malt scotch and running a marathon are significantly harder than reading James Patterson, drinking Coors Light and watching a sitcom while eating an entire bag of Cheetos. But the rewards are far greater.

Being a sports fan offers the same rewards. Sports teams are supposed to follow some natural arc – promise, disappointment, dejection, promise again, heartbreaking loss – and then, occasionally, a championship! The sweetness of that title is accentuated by the depth of the despair.

Ask a New York Rangers fan about the 1994 Stanley Cup and you’ll hear a game-by-game breakdown of the entire playoff run. Ask a Yankee fan who they beat in the 1999 World Series and you’ll get, quite often, a thoughtful frown followed by an answer with a question mark. “The Braves? No, that was ninety, um, six. Wait, okay, Braves were 96, then 98 was the 114 wins and they beat the Pa-a-a-a-dres…and of course 2000 was the Mets! Maybe it was the Braves again. I dunno. Doesn’t matter.”

It’s like being a drug addict. The high is awesome at first, but eventually it loses its power to excite. In fact, for some portion of Yankee Nation last year’s title was like a junkie’s relief at the moment the needle goes in.

So today, my friends, as the Yankees defend yet another title, I ask for just a little sympathy.

Hope Springs Eternal
Oh, who am I kidding? It must be awesome to be a Yankee fan.

My team, the New York Metropolitans, is in one of those deep, jagged valleys that teams not named the Yankees occasionally find themselves. In 2006 they ran away with the NL East and had a lead late in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. But then, well, if you’re still reading this you know what happened next. Stunning collapses in 07 and 08, and an avalanche of injuries in 2009.

But it’s April and every fan from Kansas City to Seattle and everywhere in between should be filled with hope. Here’s my quickie case for Mets hope: And yes, I know that if ifs and buts were candy and nuts every day would be Christmas. And my case for Metsie Hope is drowning in ifs and buts. But dadgum it, it’s Opening Day!

- If Jose Reyes comes back (as expected) and Carlos Beltran comes back (who knows?), the foursome of Reyes/Wright/Beltran/Bay is pretty fearsome. Throw in a bit of Francouer power, Castillo’s .390 OBP and 20 steals, and you’re gonna score some runs.

- Only five closers have strung together 5 consecutive 35-save seasons. Two of them are over 40. K-Rod is one of the other three. He’s as close to a sure thing you get this side of the Bronx.

- Yes, the starting rotation is filled with question marks, but question marks are better than negative answers, no? John Maine, Oliver Perez and Mike Pelfrey have all proved they can pitch on the major league level, and all are young enough to have strong seasons in them. Last year was rough and spring training worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these guys won 15 games with a low 4 ERA.

And if not, it'll be easier to get good seats at CitiField this year!

Carthago delendo est
Allow me to repeat a rant from last year, a point I plan on remaking in all future baseball pieces moving forward.

"Maybe I'm a little OCD, but it drives me crazy that the AL West has 4 teams, the NL Central has 6, and the other four divisions have 5 teams. Isn't that unfair? Everything else being equal, an AL West team has a 25% chance of winning the division, whereas an NL Central team has a - um, hold on, let me get my calculator - shoot, I dunno, a 17% chance. Something like that. And it's not like this is a hard problem to fix. You simply take the Brewers, who used to be in the AL anyway, and move 'em to the AL West. Voila! Six teams with 5 divisions each! Why don't they do that? Oh wait, I remember..."

Vote for Pedro

A Surprisingly Short Baseball Post with only One Goofy Statistic

Many people believe that Sandy Koufax's run from 1963-1966 was the greatest in baseball's history. They are wrong.

As spectacular as he was (and I'm not saying he wasn't), Koufax played in an era when spectacular pitching performances were commonplace. He posted ERAs under 2.00 3 times, but from 1962 to 1972 the league leader in ERA was under 2.00 12 times, capped by Bob Gibson's record-setting 1.12. In addition to playing in a pitching-friendly era, Koufax played in a pitching-friendly park, Dodger Stadium.

On the other hand, let's look at the fellow starting for the Phillies tonight, and his run from 1997-2003. Pedro Martinez won 5 ERA titles, the same as Koufax, and posted some ridiculously low ERAs, including twice below 2.00. He didn't win as many games, but that was a product of his era, not his pitching. And he had a ridiculously high winning percentage, over .700 every year.

But here's the thing: he played in the homer-happy millenial era. He faced a DH, he faced guys juiced on steroids, he played in that dinky park in Boston.

During this 6-year period, the six highest single-season HR totals in the history of the game were recorded.

There's a statistic called Adjusted ERA+ that looks at a pitcher's ERA, and adjusts it for the league average and the parks he pitches in. By this measure, Pedro had 5 of the greatest 20 seasons since the First World War, including #1 all time, his 2000 season. Koufax's best season, 1966, is good for 34th best.

To put it in golf terms, Pedro shot a 63 playing Bethpage Black in U.S. Open conditions, while Koufax shot a 62 at the Hartford Open.

I've always been somewhat mystified by the awe people have for Sandy Koufax. Not only was he not quite as special during that 5-year period as people think, but that 5-year period represents nearly his entire career. He was in the majors for 8 mediocre seasons before that, during which he went 54-53 with an ERA over 4.

Pedro not only exceeds that period, he bookended with four strong seasons in Montreal, and a decent if injury-marred period with the Mets. And if the Phillies win the World Series, he'll be the first pitcher in history to win a Cy Young and a World Series in both leagues.

Maybe then he'll receive the awe deserves.

Bonus Fun Facts: If you don't feel like clicking the link above, I'll share with you some highlights. Besides Pedro, the other stud on the list is Walter Johnson with 4 seasons in the Top 30. Greg Maddux has the #2 and #3 seasons, but doesn't appear again. Kevin Brown made a surprise appearance. And in case you needed any more reasons to watch this kid, Zach Greinke cracked the Top 20 with his 09 season. This is all based on ignoring the pre-WWI seasons.

The Winter Classic

The Yankees equipment manager, Rob Cucuzza, is getting ready for the playoffs. He’s gathering up dozens of pairs of polypropylene* thermal underwear, cold weather batting gloves made with Aegis Micro Shield technologies, officially licensed New York Yankees earmuffs, and fur-lined parkas for the coaching staffs.

*The polypropylene material used in some cold weather gear was developed by a Nobel Prize winner, back when Nobel Prize winners had to, you know, do something in order to win

Mr. Cucuzza has a collection of high-tech cold weather gear that would make Ernest Shackleton weep with envy. And he’s gonna need it because it’s frickin’ cold in New York. As Game 1 of the ALCS starts tonight, the temperature is forecast for 42 degrees, lower with the wind chill. And the baseball playoffs are still scheduled to go another two and a half weeks.

It wasn’t always this way. Babe Ruth and the 1927 Yankees won the World Series on October 8th. Mickey Mantle celebrated the 1956 title on October 10th, and that series went the distance. In 1978, Reggie Jackson had earned his Mr. October moniker by the 17th, and that included an ALCS. Heck, even Derek Jeter and the 1996 Yanks - the first Yankee team to win a championship in the Wild Card era - had wrapped things up by October 26th.

This year, the World Series won’t even start until October 28th. Even if it’s a sweep, it’s guaranteed to go until November. If it goes the distance, Game 7 will be on November 5th. If the Yankees win, they’ll have to combine the Canyon of Heroes parade with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. (They'll probably let Jeter ride in Santa's sleigh, and Yankee fans will truly believe he was more clutch than St. Nick)

Luckily, I’m not the kind of guy who just sits around and complains about the old days. I bring solutions. And I know how to fix baseball.

Cold Teams
But first, a little more complaining, because cold weather is only part of baseball’s problem. The other, more insidious problem, is that crappy teams keep winning the World Series. Think I’m kidding? Let’s look at recent history.

2006 Cardinals - LaRussa's team scratched out 83 wins during the regular season, had the lowest winning % of all 8 playoff teams, and a losing record in August and September. But they got hot for a couple of weeks and were crowned World Champion.

2004 Red Sox - a very good team, but not good enough to win the AL East. In 2004 they became the 4th Wild Card team in 7 years to win the Series.

2003 Marlins - this time of year, all the "experts", from Steve Phillips to Mike Francesa to the nameless newspaper guys, give their "predictions" about who will win the World Series. The 03 Marlins are a constant reminder as to why these predictions are useless, as everyone had them rated 8 out of 8 of playoff contenders that year.

2000 Yankees - the worst regular season team of the Torre era. They won 87 games, lowest of all the playoff teams, and fewer than every Yankee team since. But the AL East wasn’t very good that year, and 87 wins was good enough for a divisional title. Most years, this team wouldn't have made the playoffs.

Fixing Baseball
How, you are wondering, will I kill both birds with one stone, hit both balls with one bat, field both grounders with one glove? Easy - end the regular season on the last Sunday of September, and add another Wild Card team. Here are the Rules of the FreeTime Playoff system:

1. No matter what, the season ends on the last Sunday in September. If the last Sunday is September 25, that is when the season ends. If the last Sunday is September 30, that is when the season ends. No nonsense like this year when regular season games were being played on October 4.
2. To accommodate rule 1, if necessary the season will start in late March, add more day/night doubleheaders, and/or take fewer days off.
3. All Northern teams will open up on the road. Send the Phillies and Mets down to Miami and Atlanta for the first week of the season.
4. Now, comes the radical part: add a Wild Card team and a round of playoffs to each league.
5. The regular season ends on the last Sunday in September; immediately following the two Wild Cards in each league will play a Mon-Wed 3-game series.
6. The winner of that series - road-weary and pitching-depleted - will immediately fly to the home city of the team with the best record in the league to start the Divisional Series on Thursday.
7. At this point, we essentially resume the same schedule we have now. But because our regular season has ended in September, we have guaranteed the playoffs will not extend into November.

The main benefits of this system should be obvious:

1. An extra Wild Card team keeps more cities interested in baseball late.
2. However, we have made it MUCH harder for a Wild Card to advance. The punishing schedule should eliminate most mediocre Wild Cards going all the way.
3. We have restored something resembling the old Pennant Race. The reward for League Best Record - getting to play a tired, depleted Wild Card team - has real value, rewards season long success, and makes the likelihood of the worthiest team winning higher.
4. The owners and television - Gods that must be given tribute - get their due. More playoff games, a greater likelihood of great teams advancing, and more meaningful September games for more teams.
5. The World Series is finished in October - as God and Kenesaw Mountain Landis intended.

Bob Costas and other "purists" will hate this. But remember something about the purists - they don't care whether or not your team is playing meaningful September games because they get to go to the action wherever it is.

And ignore everyone who complains about the power of television. Television wants the most fans possible to see the games - a desire that dovetails with the needs of the most fans, no? Costas might like afternoon playoff games, but the rest of us have to go to work.

And as for the Yankees and Angels, bundle up. It's cold out there.

Note: This is part of the Volunteer Commissioner series, in which I graciously fix problems in various sports. The others posts in the series are:

Fixing Softball (Women's softball)

The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)

The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)

The Slowest Game (lacrosse).

Swimming is Boring (Swimming)

You're welcome.

Chasing Tris Speaker

My Final Word on Derek Jeter

On August 16th, Derek Jeter had 3 hits. Two of them were significant as he tied and passed Luis Aparicio for the most hits by a shortstop. Three weeks later he passed Lou Gehrig on the all-time Yankee hits list.

Except for a few passing references, I haven’t spoken much about Derek Jeter on this site. But among my friends and email correspondents, I am well known as a boorish and boring critic of The Great Mr. November. His “records” got me thinking about his lifetime statistics, and made me realize my opinion of him is improving, even if I don’t shy away from my earlier criticisms.

My Jeter Obsession has gone through 3 phases:

Phase 1: The Big Three – 1996-1999
In the late 1990’s, baseball fans noticed the American League had 3 great young shortstops – Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Nomar Garciaparra. When Miguel Tejada hit 30 homers and drove in 115 runs in 2000, the group added a fourth member, three in the AL East. It was a bounty of greatness at a position that had seen few truly great hitters.

Jeter immediately became the biggest star. A-Rod was putting up better numbers (and was rumored to be a better fielder) but was stuck in the baseball backwater of Seattle. Nomar was in Boston, but the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry was nowhere near as hot in the late 90’s as it is now, and Nomar played in relative obscurity. Jeter, meanwhile, playing on four championship teams for the most famous sports franchise on earth, was a fixture on national television.

Plus, he was handsome, graceful, charming – a media and fan favorite. This combination launched him to national fame and convinced many baseball fans he was actually better than A-Rod and Nomar.

Which, naturally, was madness. Here are the seasonal averages of the Big 3 from 1996-1999:

Jeter: .325 BA, 17 HRs, 82 RBIs, 124 Rs, 17 SBs

A-Rod: .304 BA, 37 HRs, 113 RBIs, 117 Rs, 28 SBs

Nomar: .337 BA, 28 HRs, 96 RBIs, 110 Rs, 13 SBs

Three excellent players obviously. You can make a case, I suppose, that the late 90’s Jeter was as good as the others, but this would be a novel baseball argument. Nomar hit for more power and a higher average. A-Rod hit for far more power, stole a few more bases, and was no slouch in average. You’d need to be a Yankee fan or a lazy announcer to think Jeter was the best of the three.

Still, the young Jeter, through the 2001 season, was a genuinely great hitter, even if he wasn’t quite as great as his rivals.

Phase 2: Stealth Decline and Attack of the Stats Geeks, 2002 - 2008
Two things happened in the first decade of the 21st century – both largely unnoticed by Madison Avenue and the average fan, but of keen interest to close watchers of baseball statistics. First, Derek Jeter saw a steady decline in his hitting, and second, he became the whipping boy for a new breed of stats geeks called Sabermetricians.

Attack of the Sabermetricians
Let’s take the sabermetricians first. Armed with calculators, spreadsheets, and advanced degrees in statistical analysis, they began creating and popularizing a form of statistical analysis that went way beyond the traditional triple crown categories. They had been around a while – the patron saint Bill James published his first Baseball Abstract in 1977 and his disciple Rob Neyer had been writing a popular column on ESPN.com since 1996. But it was Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller Moneyball, about the Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane and his adoption of these new metrics, that introduced the broader baseball world to things like OPS, Win Shares, and Pythagorean Winning Percentage.

Jeter became an irresistible target for the Moneyball crowd. Stats geeks, more than anything else, seek to bring down the overrated and rise up the underrated. Jeter, through no fault of his own, was the most lavishly praised player in baseball.

Announcers gushed over every thing he did - he'd get more praise for hitting a ground ball out that moved a runner over than the next guy would get for doubling the runner home. He appeared in commercials with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, two guys who were indisputably the best in the world in what they did*. Fans, even non-Yankee fans, seemed to truly believe that Jeter’s singles were more valuable than A-Rod’s homers.

* I used to imagine Albert Pujols or Vladimir Guererro, sitting at home after another .340/40 homer season, wondering why a guy who hit .310 with 14 homers was appearing in Gatorade commercials with Michael Jordan while they were stuck doing spots for local auto dealers.

But the other reason stats geeks wrote so damn much about Derek Jeter is that, well, he’s Derek Jeter. He was the most famous player on the most famous team in baseball. An article claiming he was a statistically horrible fielder was more likely find a larger audience than, say, an article on how Kevin Youkilis has a higher VORP than Carlos Delgado.

The Stealth Decline
But the more interesting thing, one that to this day I’m amazed so few people have noticed, is that he ceased to be a great hitter.

In 1999, Derek Jeter had a genuinely great season, based on traditional statistics, sabermetric statistics, or any other way you want to measure it. In the traditional Triple Crown categories he hit .349 with 24 homers and 102 RBIs. For the sabermetricians, he had an .OPS of .989 - higher than ARod and higher than that year's AL MVP, Ivan Rodriguez (though not nearly as high as Nomar, who had a spectacular season).

He was 25 years old, an age when most guys have yet to reach the peak of their powers. But it turns out Jeter had maxed out. He took a step back in 2000, and again in 2001, and continued to decline through the 2005 season. He bounced back a bit in 2006, and and remained a good player, even a very good one. But the promise of power shown in those 24 homers went away, he didn’t seriously threaten for another batting title, and his OPS showed a steady year-on-year decline. Quite simply, he was not a great hitter.

For a comparison, click here and here, and compare Jeter to Gehrig. Gehrig had his breakout season in 1927, at age 24. It was an eye-popping season – he hit .373 with 47 homers, 175 RBIs and an OPS of 1.240. Wow. But he hadn’t peaked – he followed it up with 11 more spectacular seasons – each one better than Jeter’s best season. He had a good season in 1938 at age 35, and then had his career cut short by disease.

Jeter, by contrast, spent his age 26 through 35 seasons as a good, but not great hitter, that never approached the across-the-board success of his age 25 season.

Despite the decline, announcers, sportswriters and fans breathlessly spoke of Jeter as if he was the same great hitter that burst on the scene in the late 90’s.

Phase 3: The Rethinking Things Era

As the 2005 season was closing, Derek Jeter was on his way to becoming the most overrated player in the history of American sports.

Imagine a gathering of the Baseball Gods, Hitters’ Division. There is Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Mike Schmidt, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez.

And in walks Derek Jeter. He alone would have no home run titles or batting titles. His best MVP performance was a distant 3rd – despite the luck of always playing on a playoff team. His lifetime average is a shade over .300. He led the league in Hits one year, but led in Plate Appearances that year too. He led the league in Runs Scored once, but playing leadoff for the Yankees tends to help that out.

In fact, there is only one individual statistic that Derek Jeter has consistently placed in the Top 10 in the league in: Salary. Since 2000, he has ranged from 3rd to 6th in that coveted individual category.

But…but…something else happened in the intervening years. A bunch of things, actually. Alex Rodriguez was outed as a steroid user. So was Tejada. Nomar Garciaparra had a series of injuries and became a backup. And Derek Jeter just kept getting hits. Lots of them. Every year.

Not as many as Ichiro. And on the all-time list he still trails such such non Hall of Famers as Al Oliver, Vada Pinson, Andre Dawson, and Harold Baines.

But, he’s only 35 and having his best season since 1999. He has more hits than Pete Rose - the all-time leader at 4,256 - had at the same age. I charted out Jeter’s shot at reaching the highest levels of the hit list. And here are my conclusions:

• Rose's record is in reach, but he'd need to average 175 hits a year till he's 44


• Joining Rose and Ty Cobb in the 4,000 hit club is more achievable - though it probably still means avoiding injury and playing well into his 40's


• Much more achievable and interesting, is 3,500. Only five players are on that list: Rose, Cobb, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, and Tris Speaker


• And finally, if he sticks around for 3,500, he only needs 15 more to pass Tris Speaker, and place him in the Top 5

Projecting the Captain's Legacy

All in all, Derek Jeter is the weakest hitter to ever be mentioned as one of the all-time greats. But if he pursues, catches, and passes Tris Speaker and breaks into the Top 5 hit list, I promise I will declare him to stand proudly with the elite.

If not - he will assume a proud place among the lesser Hall of Famers, with Tony Gwynn and Robin Yount, rather than Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. And I'll be the jerk in the corner pointing out that Yount had two MVPs and Gwynn had 8 batting titles, whereas Jeter needed Mariano and 23 other guys to get him his jewelry.

Yanks & Rebs

What do Robert E. Lee and Derek Jeter have in common?


For a couple years now I’ve been wrestling with an important question - why do Yankee fans hate Alex Rodriguez so much?

It’s not because of the steroids. He was being booed at Yankee Stadium long before the steroids story broke. And admitted steroids users like Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi have been welcomed back with open arms.

It’s not because he hasn’t won a championship. Don Mattingly never won a championship or even led his team to the playoffs, and is far more beloved than many players who did.

It’s not because he hasn’t performed up to expectations. He wins the MVP every other year.

It’s not because he doesn’t play hard.

It’s not because he’s a really bad guy. Yeah, he has some annoying personality traits, but he doesn’t carry loaded guns to nightclubs or watch dogs kill each other for fun. Besides, arrogant image-conscious super-jocks are the norm, not the exception.

Is it because he has played poorly in the post-season? Yeah, that’s part of it, certainly. But the Yankees as a team have been so thoroughly awful in the post-season since Mariano blew the save in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, it wouldn’t have much mattered if he played a bit better. (The Yankees led that pivotal game 2-0 till the 5th inning, thanks to a 2-run home run by…Alex Rodriguez).

It’s tempting to say it is some combination of all the above. That would be an easy explanation and it’s mostly true. But there is a bigger picture here – and I think I know what it is.

The real reason Yankee fans hate Alex Rodriguez so much is that…well, let me tell you a story about the Civil War.

The Lost Cause

The Confederate States of America was, for a “country” that existed all of four years, quite a patriotic place. The Confederates believed in themselves. They believed in their cause. And they absolutely believed they were going to win the Civil War. It’s 150 years later and some folks in the Deep South still wave Confederate flags and put “Hell No, We Ain’t Forgettin’” bumper stickers on the back of their pick-ups. All this for a nation that spent its entire abbreviated existence fighting a war it lost.

So you can imagine how they felt right after the war ended. They were angry and confused and needed to blame someone. One could argue that Robert E. Lee would receive some of the blame. It was Lee, after all, who advocated the strategy that lost the war.

Lee believed the South should engage the Union in massive set-piece battles. If they won enough of them, he reasoned, the North would lose their will to fight, European nations would recognize the Confederacy, and the South would win the war.

And it nearly worked. At Bull Run and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville the South showed they could whip the Yankees (the Union army kind; not the Bronx Bombers kind). War support in the Union wavered. European diplomats watched closely. But Lee, who was so gifted at getting the measure of his opponents on the field, underestimated the lanky bearded fellow in the White House. While Lee methodically ground down Northern war support with bullets and cannon balls, Abraham Lincoln built it back up with words, words, words. Union armies stayed on the field, Europe stayed on the sideline, and the South ultimately lost.

You can make a very good case that Lee should have followed the strategy that George Washington followed in the Revolutionary War. Washington knew he was outnumbered and outgunned. But he also knew that he didn’t have to win the war – he just had to avoid losing. So GW avoided set-piece battles at all costs, nipped at British ankles when he could, kept his armies in the field with minimal losses, and finally struck at Yorktown when absolutely everything was in his favor. Checkmate.

By contrast Lee, an aggressive and pugnacious general chose to fight one battle after another. And he lost. So he should get some of the blame, right? No way. Lee was the great hero of the South, the master of those early victories

Therefore, Jefferson Davis took the fall. He became a disgraced figure in the South in the years after the war. Not a single ounce of blame could fall upon the majestic silver-maned head of Robert E. Lee.

Yankee Doodle Dandy
What does any of this have to do with the booing Alex Rodriguez is treated to at Yankee Stadium?

Let me take you back to November 4, 2001, at approximately 11:38 PM EST. Mariano Rivera took the mound in the bottom of the 9th with a 2-1 lead in hand. Three more outs and the Yankees would win their 5th title in 6 years.

It was certain the Yankees were going to win that night, and it was starting to seem as if the Yankees were always going to win. Baseball would become like tennis in the Federer era – one great champion would win nearly every title.

But Mariano blew the save, of course and the Diamondbacks won. And the Angels won the next year and the Marlins the next. Then came the awful collapse against the Red Sox (2 more Mariano blown saves), then the 3 consecutive 1st round losses, and then finally missing the playoffs entirely in 2009.

Yankee fans are not happy about this. They were supposed to win all – or at least most – okay, some of the titles. But despite signing every monster free agent available, despite the gap between them and the 2nd highest paid team growing every year, they enter their 9th straight season without a title.

Who to blame? Well, one could argue that the likely candidates would be Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

How has Mariano done the last 8 years? In 2001 he became the first closer in baseball history to blow a Game 7, 9th inning save, the ultimate blown save. In the catastrophic 2004 ALCS collapse he blew not one, but two saves, both series-clinchers. Has he pitched well? Yes. Has been clutch? Ah, no.

As for Jeter, he reached his peak as a player in 1999 when he hit .349 with 24 homers and 102 RBIs. Or if you prefer sabermetric numbers an OBP/SLG/OPS of .438/.532/.970. Jeter dropped off in 2000 (.339/15/73 and .416/.481/.897) and again in 01 and 02. During the Yankees 8 year title drought Jeter has had only great offensive season (2006) and never hit again the way he did in 1999.

People are always telling me that you can’t measure Derek Jeter with statistics – you can only measure him by the little things he does to help his team win. I guess he hasn’t done quite as many little things the past eight years.

What you end up with is all this Yankee fan frustration and it has to go somewhere. But none of it can fall on the heads of Jeter and Rivera, or even Posada. Very little can fall on the heads of the lesser free agents the Yankees have collected this century. Ownership is essentially off the hook – the Boss has won too many titles and is too frail now to catch any heat. Management, in the form of Torre and Cashman, took some criticism, but they too have a bunch of titles they can claim some credit to.

And so all this rage falls on the head of one person – the guy who far and away has the best single season on the team every year. Alex Rodriguez is the Jefferson Davis of the New York Yankees.

And if you think this is a lot of words to expand on such a meaningless subject, let me just say I'm a Mets fan who remembers the 2000 World Series...and Hell No, We Ain't Forgettin'.

Moose in the Hall?

I’ve always had a soft spot for Mike Mussina. His first full year as a starter, 1992,was the first year I played Rotisserie Baseball. I selected him in the draft that year, proclaiming he would be “the Scott Erickson of 1992”. (That may sound like faint praise, but the year before Erickson exploded on the scene with a 20-8 record). Moose proved me right, going 18-5 with a 2.54 ERA. I continued to pick him for years and felt a sense of ownership with him.

It’s possible I was drawn to Mussina because he reminded me of my boyhood hero, Tom Seaver. Both pitchers combined power and craft, both came out of college ball in California, and both seemed to possess an intellect rarely found in baseball.

Seaver is one of the greatest pitchers of all time. He won three Cy Youngs (and arguably should have won two more, in 71 and 81). He finished in the Top 3 among ERA leaders thirteen times. He had five 20-win seasons. He led the league in strikeouts five times, and set a then-record 9 consecutive seasons with 200+ Ks. He appeared on 12 All Star teams and started seven times. And he finished his career with 311 wins. He not only made it to the Hall of Fame, but he did so with the highest percentage of votes ever given to any player.

Mike Mussina? His case for the Hall isn’t nearly that strong…but interesting nonetheless.

The Case Against
Mussina was no Seaver. He made only 5 All-Star teams (though he did start thrice). No Cy Young trophies adorn his case. He has no ERA titles, no strikeout titles, no Wins titles. He never won 20 games. He did lead the league once in Wins – and is surprisingly doing so again this year.

And he was nowhere near the best pitcher of his era. During his prime, baseball fans were arguably treated to the greatest quartet of starting pitchers that ever played at the same time. (Proving that is something I’ll do at another time, but in an era when offense ruled, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez strung together a run of seasons that rivals or surpasses anything ever seen before.)

And he doesn’t rank particularly high on any of the all-time lists. He’s 37th in Wins and 39th in Win %.

At the time of Goose Gossage’s election, I wrote the following:

In order to win election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY, the highest honor conferred on an American athlete, a player must do at least one of the following:

- Be an elite, dominant, Top 5 guy for a period of about 10 years
- Be a consistently very good player for a very long time, placing high on all-time career lists


Based on my own criteria, Mike Mussina will have to settle for the Stanford University Hall of Fame, because he ain’t going to Cooperstown.

The Case For
And yet…

In any conversation with any reasonable baseball fan, it is agreed that the game has changed and we need to begin revising in our own minds what an all-time great number looks like. 500 homers used to punch your ticket, but now – maybe not.

And Wins? It used to be agreed that 300 Wins got you into the Hall of Fame; even compilers like Don Sutton eventually got in. But the modern game, with 5-man rotations and active bullpens, has significantly cut down on the numbers of decisions – and Wins – that a pitcher can earn.

Mike Mussina, with 265 Wins (and counting) is the perfect test case for this theory. What is the new 300? 250? 275?

He ranks 21st all-time in strikeouts, which is impressive. When thinking about that, along with his 37th in Wins and 39th in Win %, you should know that there are 71 pitchers in the Hall of Fame. Those rankings suddenly look a little better, don't they?

And here’s your stat of the day: According to the New York Times today Mike Mussina just moved into 5th all-time in one of those obscure statistics that Joe Morgan hates but that, when you think about it, is incredibly compelling:

"According to the statistician Lee Sinins, Mike Mussina has moved into fifth on the American League’s career list for the statistic R.S.A.A., or runs saved above average. Mussina trails Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martínez. Sinins said the figure 'measures how many runs a pitcher saves or costs his team compared to the average pitcher who pitched the same number of innings in the same offensive context (same league average E.R.A., park adjusted to his home park).'"

In other words Mike Mussina is one of the all-time greatest pitchers at the single-most important thing a pitcher can do - prevent runs - when you compare him to the time and place he worked.

Finally, according to Baseball-Reference, Mussina's career stats are most similar to Juan Marichal and his statistics through age 38 are most similar to Clark Griffith. Marichal (who pitched in a very pitcher-friendly era and park) and Griffith both have plaques in Cooperstown.

One last thing on Mussina's resume: he won 6 Gold Gloves. Gold Glove voting is an absurdity, but it's still worth mentioning.

The Decision
So does he deserve it? I think he's still on the bubble, but getting closer. As much as my rational side opposes arbitrary things like milestone numbers and 20 wins, I can't quite shake my attraction to them.

At the end of last year I would have said he hasn't earned it. But his surprising renaissance in 2008 changes that. He has a shot at 20 wins, he has a shot at a Cy Young, and more importantly he has a shot at extending a career that looked over, which will only push his career numbers higher.

Right now, I don't believe he's earned his plaque. But check back at the end of this season or maybe next, and he may have pushed himself over the top.