Big Papi (and what it means to a Jays fan)

In another time and place, there was a young reporter who knew "here it comes" when an editor peered at him and said, "Question for you ..."

Would that George Mitchell could be held to account. As Jason Rosenberg pointed out, the question for him is how is that the much-ballyhood Mitchell Report failed to make mention of David Ortiz and Manny Ramírez and it now it's alleged the Red Sox's erstwhile slugging tandem apparently testing positive for steroids? How could that be when Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, is employed by the Red Sox. (You also know the same media outlet which broke this also owns a stake in that baseball franchise, right?)

That's about it. With respect to Ortiz, you can't convict based on an anonymous survey test, which is what it was in 2003.

Releasing all the names at once just to stop this slow drip is a no-go since there is that troublesome due process, although Rosenblog suggested, tongue-in-cheek, "(Commissioner Bud) Selig sells Fox the rights to the names that get released as part of a one-hour special."

People certainly do care. Ortiz is the top trending topic on Twitter at this moment, with the 3-4 slots occupied by "Manny Ramirez" and "Big Papi," just like Boston's batting order during their championship years (well, actually Ortiz hit third and Manny hit cleanup). It's just that they're not necessarily angry.

Really, though, everyone is compromised and anyone who says they are "done with baseball" due to steroids, well, in Bill Daly's phrasing, you have to question their bona fides as fans.

The schadenfreude of it all, speaking as a Blue Jays fan whose team which isn't the darling of the U.S. media, is that MLB's symbiotic relationship with ESPN and FOX Sports means there is less incentive to expose a Toronto player. It is far-fetched to think the Jays would not have someone among the 104 names.

In other words, praise Buddha the U.S. media is only interested in uncovering positive tests by players on big-market teams, with bonus points if the player is a visible minority.

It (turn on your sarcasm detector) means the Jays are safe since 2003 was their White Jays phase. They don't have anyone who put up big numbers in 2003 and has seen his stats fall down the side of a cliff like Ortiz did for the first part of this season. That doesn't sound like anyone on the Jays, least of all their starting centrefielder. Carry on.

Zen Dayley: Bill James, 'your grandchildren are going to be steroid users'

Thank goodness Bill James can put into words what the rest of us can't.

James has written an essay, "Cooperstown and the 'Roids," for billjamesonline and the Bill James Gold Mine 2010 annual which argues that all those disgraced PED-using pariah ballplayers are going to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame — Mark McGwire, Alex Rodríguez, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro and "probably even Barry Bonds." It's available as a PDF and The Sporting Blog and TheScore.com blog have linked to it. For the most part, it's new to people who don't go down the rabbit-holes which are the hardcore Seamhead sites, plus the Hall of Fame's induction day is on Sunday, so it's topical.

James is far from the only person who has espoused a belief ballplayers affected by what he calls MLB commissioner Bud Selig's "periodic spasms of self-righteousness" will be judged more fairly over time. A lot of people have felt that way for the past couple years while listening to kneejerkers in the media prattle on about PEDs.

It's hard to argue their points, oversimplified though they might be. However, the way some commentators have Plasckhed on and on about fans moving on before sportswriters gave them the OK has never set right. It goes double when it contradicts what a writer said previously. Thank god for Bill James:

"The fact is that, with time, the use of drugs like steroids will not disappear from our culture. It will, in fact, grow, eventually becoming so common that it might almost be said to be ubiquitous. Everybody wants to stay young. As we move forward in time, more and more people are going to use more and more drugs in an effort to stay young. Many of these drugs are going to be steroids or the descendants of steroids.

" ... we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of those drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them ... If you look into the future 40 or 50 years, I think it is quite likely that every citizen will routinely take anti-aging pills every day.

"How, then, are those people of the future — who are taking steroids every day — going to look back on baseball players who used steroids? They're going to look back on them as pioneers. They're going to look back at it and say 'So what?'

At that point, all the moralizing you've heard over the past few years won't have a leg to stand on.

"The argument for discriminating against PED users rests upon the assumption of the moral superiority of non-drug users. But in a culture in which everyone routinely users steroids, that argument cannot possibly prevail. You can like it or you can dislike it, but your grandchildren are going to be steroid users. Therefore, they are very likely to be people who do not regard the use of steroids as a moral failing. They are more likely to regard the banning of steroids as a bizarre artifice of the past."

Whether the self-improvement of future generations actually involves "steroids and their pharmaceutical descendants" is beside the point. For all we know, genetic enhancement might be the future. That is no different from a moral/ethical standpoint, and that is James' focus.

The normalization of steroids is merely the first argument. The others are as follows.

1. Eventually, some players who have been associated with steroids are going to get into the Hall of Fame.
   
   Right now, the "extreme position" that no steroid users should ever be inducted still holds sway. Mark McGwire's weak support in his first two years on the ballot is a case in point. The man hit 583 home runs and he's 12th all-time in park-adjusted OPS, but he hasn't cracked 25% on the ballot.
   
   However, it only takes one. Basically, as James says, once there is "no longer a firm consensus at an extreme position, there (is) an fluid standand that moved inevitably toward more and more openness ... It was like a battle line that disintegrated once the firing started. The important of holding the battle line, in old-style military conflict, was that once the line was breached, there was no longer an organized point of resistance."
   
   
2. History is forgiving. Statistics endure.
   
   James uses the example of 1960s and '70s slugger Dick Allen, who was kind of the Albert Belle or Milton Bradley of his time, a productive power hitter who was a hothead and careened from team to team. Allen dropped off the Hall of Fame ballot when he was first eligible despite having the numbers, albeit over a relatively short career. However, the Veterans' Committee might put him in someday.
   
   Another example is Shoeless Joe Jackson. There was a time when it was unfathomable a player banned for life would ever be inducted, but more people than not believe he should be in posthumously. Professional lobbyists are working to get Jackson into Cooperstown, almost 60 years after his death.
   
   People forget, in time.
   
   
3. Old players play a key role in the Hall of Fame debate. It seems unlikely to me that aging ballplayers will divide their ex-teammates neatly into classes of 'steroid users' and 'non-steroid users.'
   
   Some players who are quote-unquote untainted will be elected. They will speak up for teammates. Off the cuff, Pedro Martínez lobbies hard for Manny Ramírez. Pudge Rodríguez goes to bat for Palmeiro. Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera or Randy Johnson speaks up for Alex Rodríguez, and so on and so on.
   
   
4. ... was there really a rule against the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs? At best, it is a debatable point.
   
   That is the big matzo ball hanging out there for the steroids = cheaters crowd. James notes:

   " 'Rules,' in civilized society, have certain characteristics. They are agreed to by a process in which all of the interested parties participate ... The 'rule' against Performance Enhancing Drugs, if there was such a role before 2002, by-passed all of these gates. It was never agreed to by the players, who clearly and absolutely have a right to partipate in the process of changing any and all rules to which they are subject."

Perhaps the rank-and-file of sports columnists who make a fetish out of simplicity don't want to hear it. When it comes to grey areas with the Steroid Era, a lot of them are like the grown-up brat played by Isla Fisher in Wedding Crashers, holding their breath, sticking their fingers in their ears and stomping their feet until Daddy, played by Christopher Walken, gives in and says, "OK, I will go along with your vision of baseball as it existed when you were 11 years old and say no steroid users in Cooperstown."

Andrew Stoeten of Drunk Jays Fans fame made a good point that James has added "a layer of complexity that we can't just barge our way around by screaming that PEDs are illegal and whoever did them is a cheater." It's an important arrow to have in the quiver.

People are coming around. Former Chicago White Sox pitcher Jim Parque wrote an op-ed where he confessed to using human growth hormone to try to come back from an injury. He now runs a youth baseball academy, and as he told it, enrolment went up after he told people he had taken HGH and regreted it.

People are forgiving. The Hall of Fame might, as Craig Calcaterra noted, be "owed just as much reverence as Wal-Mart, Google, Congress or any other useful yet ultimately self-interested institution," but ultimately it is going to reflect the principles of society of general. It will take pressure and time. The pressure will likely be economic; as Pete Rose said in February, what's going to happen if in 10-15 years, no players are getting in? It's hard to have an induction weekend when there was no one to induct.

Related:
The Hall of Fame: it's all about the money (Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases)

Mannywood, Air McNair and the death of manufactured outrage

You live in a moral grey zone. You don't exit it when you are in sports fan mode.

That is the ketchup answer — covers everything — for whatever has been said in the past week about Manny Ramírez and the late Steve McNair. Some sportswriters based in the cities where Manny has hung his do-rag, Boston and Los Angeles, were apoplectic that Ramírez got a hero's welcome when he returned from a 50-game suspension for a positive drug test. Less than 24 hours after Ramírez rejoined the L.A. Dodgers, McNair, who played QB in the NFL for 13 years, was found dead next to the body of his 20-year-old girlfriend. As you know, McNair was still married to the mother of his four children (and God forbid that U.S. lawmakers realize allowing a 20-year-old, not much more than a child really, to buy a handgun is a really bad policy it's a bad idea to have a society where a 20-year-old can easily get a gun).

The common thread is how to deal when sports get crowded by stupid reality again. Once and for all, it is time to divest oneself of the notion that sports fans, much less sports writers get to play the ethics and morality squad. We don't.

Honestly, distancing oneself from the scribbling practised by the likes of the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke and Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, is about the best thing a sports nut can do. It's not clear if they really hate Manny Ramírez, or if it's just a routine, a face-dance. Either way, very little of it is needed.

Life is too short for both hate and for pundits who substitute shtick for trying to honestly convey what an event was like. When did manufactured outrage replace telling the shades-of-grey truth? As a L.A. Times user, reading Plaschke rail about, "Manny did the time, but what about the crime?" is a little like a pivotal scene near the end of The Shawshank Redemption. You know it. Red (the Morgan Freeman character) tells off a parole board official over the meaning of the word "rehabilitated."

"I know what you think it means sonny. To me it's just a made up word. A politician's word so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job."

That is really part of what we're talking about. It's not whether Ramírez's return proves standards have gone all to hell. It's about respecting that ultimately, everyone gets to assert their own terms, not adhere to society's, like Red/Morgan Freeman did with his redemption. This is about getting rid of a sportswriting construct where the columnist fulminates over What Should Be, which has made Bill Plaschke semi-rich.

The hero's welcome Manny got in places such as Albuquerque while playing a few tune-up games in the minor leagues was not reason to go off half-cocked. Americans have always loved outlaws, from Wild Bill Hickok to Barry Switzer. This was not going to change on the say-so of some sportswriters who wanted Manny to do their jobs for them by being all teary and apologetic.

Honestly, Dan Shaughnessy comes off less like a gatekeeper (an outmoded old-media concept) and more like an out-of-touch grouch.

"The longer this goes on, the more it seems that the only people who care about steroids are Hall of Fame voters, a handful of baseball purists, and perhaps those players who have not cheated and now feel like suckers.

"I called the commissioner to ask him about Manny getting the Charles Lindbergh treatment in San Diego (site of his first game back with the Dodgers).

" 'The only comment I have on that score is that fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment,' said a disgusted Bud Selig. 'That certainly is out of our control. That’s all I'll say on that.' "

Far be it to say there was another way to take Selig's comment that "fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment." No one who was not privy to the conversation know that the MLB commissioner was really "disgusted."

Perhaps Selig, in the parlance of our time, actually dared to address baseball fans as if they are adults. Maybe those aggrieved Hall of Fame voters, rather than act above the rabble who pay for tickets and the MLB Extra Innings package, ought to heed the people who support the whole pro sports apparatus with their discretionary income. Just because you memorized baseball stats as a kid and that influenced your choice of profession doesn't mean you have superior reasoning skills.

Thankfully, there are a few who can better channel their rage and get a post up about this much sooner, such as ShysterBall. ("What all of these columns seem to boil down to is anger at the fact that there has been no sturm und drang associated with Manny's suspension. The minute baseball actually discovers and penalizes a major star in a drama-free and orderly fashion, however, everyone gets bent out of shape.") There is also Charles Pierce, who wrote a wicked piece for Slate on Monday pointing out that if anything, Ramírez betrays the general attitude toward steroids, exposes the big lie.

"... it was of a piece with Manny's greatest gift as a professional athlete — his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it's Manny's who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives. So, there he was, an Albuquerque Isotope, selling out the ballpark and, by all accounts, happy as a clam.

"... the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans — who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers — have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he'd pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he's back. That's the way things are going to be from now on."

No one says you have to like what has gone on in baseball any more than you have to like hearing that McNair was found dead next to a Woman Not His Wife.

This is not an apologia for anyone. There is no hair-splitting about the nature of Ramírez's cheating. Steroid experts say the fertility drug he tested positive for is one that "every steroid dealer carries." It is in the same vein with McNair. Not to speak ill of the dead, but there is little to no defending someone straying outside her/his marriage.

The question is why, as a sports lover, one would assume the best about a NFL player, whom you only know through TV images on Sunday afternoons and the odd Monday night, along with some touchy-feely PSAs for the United Way. It might be best to presume everyone, whatever their many virtues while in the moment doing their thing, is flawed like everyone else. One of the most perceptive comments in that vein came from the Chicago Bears defensive end, Adewale Ogunleye:

"Life is not a game. Football is a game. You can't expect a guy to make pinpoint decisions the way he would as a quarterback. I'm not condoning anything but at the end of the day, he's a human being."

You know this already, but there are other, better options to have as heroes. Point being, people need to let up a little on the knee-jerk judgments. Meantime, and everyone does this in sports (present company included), it's important not to conflate ability with character.

You cannot keep real life from seeping into sports. If anything, sports seeps into real life. The desperate traditional media might be getting high-school catty, but you don't have to play ball. You just have to accept, hey, in this age you have to stickhandle through a lot of weirdness and shamelessness, kind of like the protagonist in Douglas Coupland's JPod.

I am not advocating for everyone to have lower personal standards for her/his conduct. If anything, it's as important as ever to try to set a good example. But if you're going to have people on that we should expect unambiguous virtue from sports figures, you're dead wrong.

Thank you, Manny Ramírez, and thank you, Morgan Freeman.

Zen Dayley: Mauer could be another Ted Williams, but .400? No ... no

In the box marked It's Not For Nothing, please note that Joe Mauer had his first 0-for-5 all season on Tuesday, dropping his average down to .395.

Mauer is a wicked player, but the idea of him hitting .400, really? One should stay on the stathead side with respect to the Sports Illustrated cover story about Mauer being the literary device in Tom Verducci's argument that, post-Steroid Era baseball's "most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average." The snark has already been covered off Tommy Craggs ("Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer").

The Mauer meme was probably started by Joe Posnanski. Poz wrote a column a month ago where he noted most of the highest batting averages recorded in recent times where by players who almost never struck out, like 4% of the time. Using that 4% strikeout rate, he figured that Manny Ramírez might have hit .416 one season and that Canadian Larry Walker might have hit .400 a couple times for the Colorado Rockies (and .398 in another season).

This is not an attack on two writers who have put out/will put out a book this year every baseball fan will likely want to read (Verducci's The Yankee Years and Poz's The Machine, which is about the 1975 Reds). The problem is that one guy is ignoring math and the other was ignoring intent.

The question about whether we will ever see another .400 hitter was answered by the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. Chris Lynch at A Large Regular dug out a great quote from Full House:

1. Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over an extended period of time. As systems improve, they equilibriate and variation decreases.
   
2. As play improves and bell curves march toward the right wall, variation must shrink at the right tail. (Emphasis mine.)

Like Lynch says, "The disappearance of the .400 hitter is seen as basically a measure of an overall improvement in play."

League batting averages, give or take a few percentage points, have been relatively stable over time. In 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406, the entire American League hit .266. You know what the league average was in 1977, when Rod Carew hit .388? The exact same, .266.

Three years later, when George Brett took his run at Williams and wound up at .390, the AL hit a collective .269. Last season, it hit .268, with the highest average in the league being Mauer's .328.

You can pretty much go back to any season from the wayback era when the .400 hitter was commonplace (when black athletes were barred from playing and scouting and player development was next to nonexistent) and find similar support of Gould's theory that the best players don't lap the field by as much because there are more good players.

Take 1911, when Ty Cobb hit .420 and Shoeless Joe Jackson was runner-up at .408. Twenty-one players (i.e., those who batted enough to qualify for the batting title) hit at least .300 that season, almost three per team in an eight-team league. In the first post-Dead Ball season, 1920, when George Sisler hit .407, there were 26 .300 hitters in the AL. There were similar totals throughout the heavy-hitting '20s, the last decade where .400 hitters appeared with any regularity.

By '41, though, when Williams turned the trick, 15 players hit .300 in the AL, less than two per team (the eight-team NL had only 11). Fast-forward ahead to 2008 and only 17 everyday players in the 14-team AL hit .300, just one per team on average.

Those are only randomly gathered examples, but you should see the trend. The more competitive the game gets, the less likely you are

There also (sorry, Poz) does not seem to be any correlation between batting averages and strikeout rates. His aforementioned column certainly did stimulate thought, but it ignored intent. Players do not intend to strike out. Even a world-renowned space cadet such as Manny Ramírez does not say, "Okay, this will be one of my 100 strikeouts for the year, it's just a cost of doing business." He is trying to make solid contact and sometimes he misses because the pitcher he is facing is better than him that day.

Pitchers generally go for strikeouts more than their decades-ago brethren, who were often expected to pace themselves to last the full nine innings and did not have to worry the threat of Dr. Longball. Besides, as I'm sure someone much smarter long ago pointed out, there is no relationship between strikeout rates and overall batting averages.

Last season, when the entire AL hit .268, Jack Cust led the league with 197 strikeouts. Sixty years earlier, when only one player in the AL (Pat Seerey, remember him?) struck out 100 times, the entire league hit .266. The year after that, the entire league hit .263 without a single player joining that dubious Century Club.

This is not meant to be ad hominem. Verducci and Posnanski both write like a dream. Baseball fans are blessed to have them writing about the diamond game. They and their editors are smart to understanding it's all in how you package a story. Any baseball fan would be stirred if Joe Mauer was hitting .410 deep into August, even those who know batting average is a bunko stat. What Verducci says about Mauer is good writin', Dickie:

"Here is where Mauer comes in. With home runs having gone the way of junk bonds, derivatives and no-document mortgages, the most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average, in part because of their daily drama and the stirring of the ghosts that come with them. Not since the Reds' Pete Rose hit in 44 straight games in 1978 has a hitter come within 15 games of Joe DiMaggio's single-season record of 56 straight. Not since the Rockies' Larry Walker and the Padres' Tony Gwynn, in 1997, has anyone hit .400 even as modestly deep into a season as June 22 — until Mauer."

A counter-point might be, who said Mauer has to hit .400 for the average casual sports fan to be regarded as an awesome ballplayer? FanGraphs has him down to finish this season with rate stats of .354/.433/.579 and he plays catcher, the most demanding fielding position. That hardly needs any high gloss.

Related:
Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer (Tommy Craggs, Deadspin)
Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely Crush You (Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated)

Manny: Clear the dance floor for the jig of the self-righteous

The question is how much stickiness there is with Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension for a positive drug test.

On pure gut reaction, not much. There's a fatigue with the constant media hoopla over who's the latest ballplayer to get smeared (Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and so on and so on). Maybe in 2007 you could have people on that this is, like, the worst thing ever, but life has become a bit more serious in the past 12 months. It's best to wait and see if Ramirez can produce a prescription slip. Ultimately, this is a time when Ramirez's space-cadet routine might help. Knowing what we know about him, he's not going to pour gasoline on the fire like that last two players listed above, since he could not give a patoot. (And it might have been something he was taking for erectile dysfunction?)

As it happens, I just got around to picking up J.C. Bradbury's book The Baseball Economist (published in 2005, but still highly topical). It's in paperback at Indigo and Chapters in Canada, so you should skim the chapter, "The Steroids Game." He calls BS on the whole notion of opposing steroids on the grounds they're "unnatural," pointing out Tommy John surgery, cortisone shots, laser eye surgery and everyday stimulants like caffeine and energy drinks are hardly natural. He even threw in Curt Schilling's bloody sock. At the time, it seemed like a heroic act of self-sacrifice, but at the end of the day, having a torn tendon stabilized and putting off having the proper procedure was not something people would do normally.

Bradbury goes a lot deeper. The point is, when someone plays hurt like that, the standard response is, "It's his career." The same holds true for what players ingest in post-Mitchell Report Major League, like it or not.

Anyway, how smart are the Red Sox for dumping Ramirez last summer? Of course, people are wondering about his former teammate, David Ortiz, still stuck on zero homers five weeks into the season.

The upshot is Ramirez stands to miss about 30% of the Dodgers' games (50 of 162). That's on par with the San Diego Chargers' Shawne Merriman sitting out of four games of a 16-game NFL schedule (25%) in 2006, when he was the league's top defensive player. Anyway, others have already spun it this way: The L.A. Dodgers didn't get Manny Ramirez until July 31 last season and reached the National League Championship Series. He is eligible to return July 3, so hey-hey, they're ahead of the game.

Batter up: Boston Red Sox

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a team who you know fully well won't win. In honour of an popular Internet meme, we're presenting lists of 25 things tangentially about each Major League Baseball team. At bat: The Boston Red Sox.

1. Clay Buchholz, who threw a no-hitter in 2007, didn't even make the team. Their pitching staff is pretty loaded.
   
   
2. They're projected to score the most runs in the American League. They have eight solid hitters (and then there's 'Tek. And then there's 'Tek!). They're not a consensus pick to beat the Cubs in the World Series for nothing.
   
   
3. First baseman Kevin Youkilis actually batted more in the cleanup spot than anywhere else in the lineup last season. He hit .299/.399/.569 batting fourth, pretty on par with his season averages.
   
   
4. Jon Lester is could be viewed as the ace by the end of this season than Josh Beckett, but there's not much drop-off between the pair of them.
   
   
5. Daisuke Matzusaka has a lot of pitches and you will see all of them, usually by the end of the first inning. He doesn't work deep into games, but that's half his charm.
   
   
6. Shortstop Jed Lowrie (.258/.339/.400 in '08) is a big X factor for this season, although he's probably not going to be hitting like a superstar. At third, Mike Lowell is coming off an injury-marred year (he OPS-plused 103, which is adequate).
   
   
7. Leftfielder Jason Bay's first minor-league manager when he was in the farm system of a team which no longer exists was Ottawa resident Tim Leiper, how about that?

   "Leiper still never has seen anyone, from the minors or majors, so utterly destroy spring training pitching.
   
   "... The Expos, at Leiper's urging, decided Bay would begin his career with a high-A affiliate in Jupiter, Fla." — Adam Kilbore, Boston Globe

8. Jose Canseco is linking former Sawx slugger Manny Ramírez to steroid use. Of course, it's dirty pool to put that in the Red Sox preview just because they both played in Boston, but not at the same time.
   
   
9. Ten of the 25 players on the Opening Day roster were born outside the continental United States: Three in Japan, two in Canada, two in the Dominican Republic, two in Puerto Rico and one in Jamaica.
   
   The Red Sox do not have a black player born in the U.S., notwithstanding whoever the player is on utilityman Nick Green's Yahoo! Sports page. That's not a reflection on the organization, as much as some people would like it to be ... the sport is getting more international all the time.
   
   
10. Canadian George Kottaras made the team as the designated Tim Wakefield wrangler. He caught another knuckleballer, Charlie Zink, all last season in Pawtucket.
    
    The best way to catch a knuckleball, as Bob Uecker once said, is wait for it to stop rolling and pick it up.
    
    
11. The team that used to be famous for plodding baserunners (see, Rice, Jim, Game 6, 1986 World Series) had a 77.4% stolen-base success rate last season, second-best to the Oakland Athletics . Even if Jacoby Ellsbury (50-for-61 to lead the American League) is factored out, they were still successful almost three times out of four.
    
    
12. He seems to personify what makes Boston teams insufferable, but it's hard to completely hate second baseman Dustin Pedroia. He was the first middle infielder since Zoilo Versalles in 1965 to be elected American League MVP while hitting less than 30 home runs. Players with a balanced skill set have been traditionally overlooked in MVP voting, so it's good it's changing.
    
    
13. The bullpen was a trouble spot at times in '08. Sidearmer Justin Masterson is going to be in the 'pen from the start of the season, which helps.
    
    
14. C'est la vie: Being a Blue Jays fan whose all-time favourite ballplayer is Ted Williams and whose favourite sports figure is another Red Sock, Bill (Spaceman) Lee.
    
    
15. Masterson's sidearm offerings break in on left-handers and they already have two good lefty options in the bullpen,Javier Lópezand Hideki Okajima. It will be hard to get much off them in the late innings. Right-hander Manny Delcarmen has punched above his weight the past couple seasons.
    
    
16. The wannabe wordsmiths who write the headlines are going to love Daniel Bard once he matures into a major leaguer.
    
    
17. Only two of the top five articles on the Boston Herald website at this writing are about the Red Sox, who haven't a World Series in more than 17 months. Celtic Nation has spoken.
    
    
18. The franchise which shrewdly gauged the best-before of Pedro Martínez and Nomar Garciaparra is rolling with 37-year-old catcher Jason Varitek, who couldn't hit a right-hander. Which of these things is not like the other?
    
    
19. Minor-league slugger Lars Anderson, who's at Double-A Portland (the one in Maine), will man first base before too long. It won't be much longer until the Red Sox are sending him on some goodwill trip to Stockholm to stake out that player pool the way they have with Japan.
    
    
20. Junichi Tawaza, the Japanese phenom signed late last season, is going to be in Double-A. Examiner.com pointed out every AL East team has a Japanese player of note in its system, except the Blue Jays. Hey, it's not like Japan has won the first two World Baseball Classics.
    
    
21. The Red Sox ended their affilation with a single-A team because its park was hitter-friendly and they didn't want it to skew their evaluation of young hitters. Talk about leaving nothing to chance.
    


22. Reliever Mike Timlin retired after last season. He was the last active player in the majors from the 1992-93 Blue Jays.
    
    
23. Fun fact: Lowrie will be the first switch-hitter to start on Opening Day for the Red Sox since the immortal Spike Owen in 1988. A funner fact is that he's not Julio Lugo.
    
    
24. You're excused for wanting to smash Dustin Pedroia's face into a bowl of mashed potatoes after seeing his spot for for MLB 09: The Show.
    
    
    
    
25. Pedroia referred to the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez "as a dork" during a puff-piece magazine feature. He needs to hire UFC president Dana White to advise him on more creative insult methods.

Batter up: Los Angeles Dodgers

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a baseball team who you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things about each team. Now batting: the Dodgers of Los Angeles.

1. It's Vin Scully's 60th (60th!) year broadcasting Dodger baseball. Just thought everyone should know.
2. In case you forgot, they made the playoffs last year. They actually won a round (okay, it was against the Cubs). Including October, they went 88-82, which, wouldn't you know it, is a worse record than three American League teams who didn't get invited.
3. Dave Cameron at Fangraphs called them the 13th-best organization in baseball, dinging the (sometimes clueless) front office with a D+.
   
4. For those who want to keep in touch with the team, like U.S.S. Mariner, Jon Weisman's Dodger Thoughts (now part of the Los Angeles Times) tells you pretty much everything.
   
5. Strong points last year? Hitting...nah. Pitching...maybe. Dodger Stadium makes anyone look good. That doesn't apply to Chad Billingsley, who Dodger Thoughts pegged as the most indispensable (or least dispensable) Dodger, or #2 on-the-same-list Clayton Kershaw (not to be confused with Clayton Andrews; really, don't confuse them). Solid pitchers, both.
   
6. MannyBManny is only third? Weisman knows more than I do, and there's no way an OPS+ of 219 holds up over more than 53 games, but that is surprising.
7. So who is this Kershaw, anyway? Worth the hype? Sure is. Lefty. He was born in (sigh...) 1988. Drafted 7th overall three years ago out of a Texas high school. 276 strikeouts and 91 walks in 221 minor league innings. Struck out nearly a batter per inning in his first season in the majors last year. At age 20. Young pitchers will break your heart, but that's half the fun, isn't it?
8. Let's not forget the impact the studly Russell Martin may have on the pitching staff. Or his decision to go by J. Martin this year--his mother's maiden name is his third middle name, Jeanson. Or his quitting of the chewing tobacco.
   
9. Then again, any positive results from the pitchers, or J. Martin, will quickly be nullified if certain conditions come to pass.
   
10. But wait! Unless Orlando Hudson has something to say about it as he replaces the he's-still-a-second-baseman-really?-huh-that's-odd Jeff Kent. Hudson, interestingly, joined the Dodgers on a huge incentives contract: if he reaches 569 plate appearances (three-year average), he gets $7.18 million instead of $3.38M. He is worth it. Nobody is allowed to disparage the O-Dog, who is was one of the best defensive second basemen in the game and would win every mayoral election of any city in which he has spent five or more minutes.
    
11. Sadly, if Hudson does have something to say about it, you will need a good rewind button to figure out what he said. (Ten points to anyone who can transcribe this.)
12. Last note on the pitching: Randy Wolf, far from young, "has not put together a full season of above-average pitching since 2002" (link) but is somehow in their starting rotation.
13. 2009 predictions: 84 wins and too close to call from the CHONE system (one of the best predictors), 92 from PECOTA (probably the only better one), and a first-place 91 wins from a math prof at NJIT. All of those are enough to win the West.
    
14. They open April with a lot of games on the road. The quick-to-snark fan would say "because clearly it makes no sense to play early games in warm and snowless Los Angeles" but their April road games are in San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, and Denver. You, the Southern Ontarian reader, were not fooled by today's high of 17 and would take a trip to those cities in a second.
15. There's a joke about "you have the wrong Blake!" but someone else will have to put it together: Casey Blake (age: 35) may or may not start over Blake DeWitt at third (age: much less than 35). I must be missing something. Casey B. is tolerable, but B. DeWitt apparently wasn't handsome enough to tempt Joe Torre.
16. They do have a good roster of young and talented players, though. Come October, Matt Kemp will be just 25, James Loney only 24 and Andre Ethier all the way up there at 27. Career OPS+ for each of them: 116, 114, 109. It doesn't matter which is which. All three are also at that early stage of their careers where they are ridiculous, ridiculous bargains.
17. No, seriously, check out that lineup.
18. Unrelated, but possibly interesting: both Kemp and Ethier hit fly balls in the 2008 NLCS that stayed in the air for six seconds before landing in a glove. Hang time, even on outs, is supposed to be a pretty good indicator of a hitter's power.
    
19. Their manager is Joe Torre. Ever heard of him? Conventional widsom: he's one of the best. One statistical view (David Gassko in the 2008 THT Annual): he's about a win below average; good with hitters but awful with pitchers. Paul Quantrill's Overworked Right Arm: agrees.
    
20. "Big Bill McCloskey coming up. As soon as he pops out, we'll go right to the post-game show." Wondering who used to have their AAA team in Las Vegas? It was in fact the Dodgers. Thanks to the Blue Jays (well, not really, but work with me), Ken Levine can now mention the Albuquerque Isotopes references during Dodger Talk without collecting residuals (well, he didn't write that episode, but work with me)
    
21. Hey, look. Fernando Valenzuela, pitching cereal.
22. There's nobody at this site who would like to publish a book one day, right? Good.
    
23. The Sons of Steve Garvey: Great April Fool's Day gag or greatest April Fool's Day gag?
24. For almost the bottom line, back to Weisman: "The possibility of having Ramirez, Rafael Furcal and an improving Kershaw for full seasons ought to mitigate many of the concerns that this can’t be as good a team as [last year's]."
25. And finally...this retrospective-from-the-future could, plausibly, happen: "The Dodgers went 92-70 in 2009 because of an NL-best offense, a young, athletic defense improved by the absences of retired 2B Jeff Kent and Juan Pierre (traded in June), and a bend-but-not-break pitching staff led by Clayton Kershaw. Jason Schmidt stepped in as the team's closer when Jonathan Broxton went on the DL for the month of August, and cemented his 9th inning role with gritty saves in a September pennant race against the Giants, his former team."

Batter up: Cleveland Indians

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a baseball team who you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things about each team. At bat: The Cleveland Indians.

1. Centrefielder Grady Sizemore once missed the start of the game after he caught a glimpse of himself in a reflective surface and was unable to look away. Slap a sawbuck down on Sizemore being AL MVP, Chief (or not). All he would have to do is put up something close to his 2008 numbers, except do it on a division winner so the right people notice.
   
   
2. The wormballer, Fausto Carmona, will probably bounce back. Righty Anthony Reyes, now that he's out St. Louis' bad books, might be able to turn his career around and give Cleveland a solid third or fourth starter.
   
   
3. Eric Wedge is one of MLB's youngest managers and one of its most old-school. His teams don't steal a lot of bases (the Mets' Jose Reyes had more base swipes than the entire Cleveland team, 78-77) and his starters go deep into games.
   
   
4. Cleveland's bullpen ERAs, from 2005 to '08, have been 2.80, 4.73, 3.92 and 5.07. They will either return to compentency, or try to shoot for a 6-something figure this season. Rafael Betancourt and Rafael Perez typically handle those seventh and eighth-inning situations.
   
   
5. The team on the field Opening Day, give or take super-prospect Matt LaPorta, is probably the one they'll have all season. The estimable Terry Pluto reported, "I sense ticket sales have not been brisk -- although Opening Day is a sellout. I doubt there will be much money available in the budget for a midseason pickup of a player who has a hefty contract.
   
   
6. Ohio is suffering its worst job losses in three generations. What happens if LeBron James leads the Cleveland Cavaliers on a long playoff run and then the Indians make the MLB post-season? You could see a lot of empty seats.
   
   
7. Cy Young Award-winning left-hander Cliff Lee finished spring training with a 12.46 ERA. C'est la vie for a flyball pitcher. Maybe it was the dry, dusty Arizona air (or not). His fake baseball ERA last spring was 5.68 and he turned out OK.
   


8. The AL Central winner will likely face the wild-card team in the Division Series. Consider yourself warned if Carl Pavano's surgically repaired wing holds up the entire season and the Yankees end up making the playoffs, because you'll hear all about that storyline.
   
   
9. Kerry Wood is now the closer. What are the odds of seeing him pitch in a World Series against his old Cubbies team?
   
   
10. Eric Wedge can win bar bets and impress his grandchildren by telling them he was one the home run leader on a team which had Jeff Bagwell. Yes, it only took five homers to lead the 1990 New Britain Red Sox.
    
    
11. Travis Hafner is probably not going to hit again like he did in 2007, let alone '06. He's a buyout waiting to happen.
    
    
12. Asdrubal Cabrera (yes, it was naive to think once that the Jays could somehow trade for him) and Jhonny Peralta are a not half-bad middle-infield combo at second base and shortstop. Both of them will probably rotate one spot to the right before long.
    
    
13. Fielding was not the Clevelanders' strongest suit last season, which might explain why they crashed to an 81-81 record. Sizemore won a Gold Glove more as a consolation prize than anything else.
    
    
14. One drama for the Indians is that Lee's personal catcher, Kelly Shoppach, presents a pretty good sell-high proposition. He's better than most teams' starter, but probably won't produce an .865 on-base-plus slugging again. Having two co-No. 1 catchers, the other being Victor Martinez (who moonlights at first base and DH), means Cleveland could jettison one of them and become a better team, at least on paper.
    
    
15. Cleveland has gone 45 years without a major pro sports championship (the nearby Ohio State football team doesn't count, since they're, technically amateur and their sport doesn't have a real championship). This fact gets run into the ground any time a Cleveland team is in the hunt for anything, so thankfully you only have to hear it in May with the Cavs and October with the Indians.
    
    
16. Corner outfield used to be a Cleveland strength since the days when they had Albert Belle and Manny Ramirez in the same outfield. They were so deep in the late '90s that they let Brian Giles go for very little.
    
    Wedge is a master of, well, wedging three or four players into the right and left-field jobs. Shin-Soo Choo probably offers the most after OPS-ing .946 last-season.
    
    
17. Josh Barfield (son of Jesse) has gone from being a potential 20-homer-a-year second baseman to being kept on the team as the "designated runner." Thing is, he's not that great a base stealer.
    
    
18. Sizemore's 33 homers and 38 steals last seson made him Cleveland's second-ever 30-30 man after Joe Carter in the '80s. Sizemore also actually knows how to draw a walk, too.
    
    
19. The power hitter positions are all pretty malleable over the next two seasons, save for Travis Hafner being owed $52 million through 2012. The Indians have a lot of good hitters coming through their system.
    
    
20. Their Double-A team in Akron might be more worth watching than the major-league club on some nights. Four genuine hitting prospects, lefty DH Beau Mills (former Expo Brad Mills' son), lefty outfielder Nick Weglarz, oversized shortstop Carlos Rivero and switch-hitting catcher Carlos Santana (chuckle once at the name and get it out of your system) will all be opening the season there.
    
    
21. Nick Weglarz is red-haired, left-handed and Canadian, which automatically makes him pretty awesome. The big takeaway from his '08 season is he cut his strikeout rate from one whiff every 4.1 times at bat to one per 5.8. The power numbers are not yet there (20 doubles, 10 dingy-dongs), so keep an eye on that at Double-A Akron.
    
    
22. Weglarz' extended family lost out a bit when the Indians moved their Triple-A affilation from Buffalo to Columbus, since he's from Stevensville, Ont., just across the border. The upshot is the Tribe's top two farm clubs are both in Ohio, so it's not too far a drive.
    
    
23. Utilityman Jamey Carroll had his No. 3 jersey retired by the Ottawa Lynx. His highest batting average in three part seasons with the late and lamented Triple-A team was .280, but his hustle forever endeared him to the now forlorn faithful (who have not given up fighting to bring pro ball back to the city in 2010).
    
    
24. Family Ties did a send-up of the Indians' poor attendance long before the Major League movies. In one episode, Jennifer Keaton called the Municipal Stadium box office to ask, "Do you have two tickets for tonight's game? (Long pause) You have 35,000?"
    
    Incidentally, everyone knows Michael Gross, who played the dad on that series, appears in How I Met Your Mother as the father of Ted Mosby, who's from Ohio and who is an Indians fan.
    
    Similarly, the guy who played Dauber on Coach, which was set in Minnesota, plays the factor of the Jason Segel character, Marshall Eriksen, who's from St. Cloud, Minnesota. That attention to detail is legendary.
    
    
25. It's a real shame some of Bob Uecker's best film work was wasted in Major League II.

    Back goes Cerrano. He's gonna need a rocket up his ass to catch this one. That one's out here. That looked like like the'terminator,' only slower. Maybe it was his 'out-of-stater.' Maybe it was the hibernator. That baby is definitely goin' away for the winter. Whatever, for Vaughn, it could be 'see ya later,' he's probably going to become a spectator.

    
    
    

Batter up: Los Angeles Angels

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a team which you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things about each team. At bat: The Los Angeles Angels.

1. They won the division by 21 games last season. That is way too big a gap for the rest of the AL West to make up in one year, right? Well ...
2. Based on their run differential, L.A. should have won 88 games last season, not 100. Its starting rotation, according to those big Baseball Prospectus brains, was seventh-best of the eight playoff teams. Three starting pitchers are beginning the season on the disabled list and the front office lost the Mark Teixeira derby.
   
   What's the point? If they fall hard, everything will be blamed on the absence of someone who pitched less than 5% of their innings last season. They're probably still the favourite, for now.
   
3. Halos Heaven has coined the phrase "Los Angeles Angels of Aspirinaheim" to describe a presumptive starting rotation of lefty Joe Saunders, Jered Weaver, Kelvim Escobar (who's coming back from arm troubles), Dustin Moseley and Nick Adenhart.
   
4. No. 1 starter John Lackey is going to miss Opening Day again. It's becoming a tradition for him (yes, it's only his livelihood, make cheap jokes). Escobar and Ervin Santana are also starting the season on the DL. The Angelenos could begin the season with the AL's weakest rotation.
5. Manny Ramirez would have looked good in Angels red and white, although ex-Yankee Bobby Abreu is an okay silver medal. L.A.'s left fielders hit an execrable .262/.316/.402 last season.
6. Abreu — you all know you have a better chance of finding a bullfighter in Newfoundland than seeing him hit the wall to try to catch a long fly ball? — is entering his age-35 season. His closest comp, Brian Giles, had a big drop-off during his age-35 season, just saying.
7. The Angels starting outfield has a combined age of 101 with Abreu, 35 and Guerrero, 33, at the corners and centrefielder Torii Hunter, 33. That's pushing it for a supposed championship team.


8. If you could put Mike Napoli's pop and Jeff Mathis' catch-and-throw abilities into one body, you would have an all-star catcher.
9. Vlady Guerrero OPSed .969 as a DH, compared to .850 when he was in right field, which is an indication of where he is headed.
   
10. FanGraphs rates the Angels as MLB's 10th-best organization.
11. One big reason why: They don't have a player among The Beep's top 50 prospects. Minor-league pitcher Jordan Walden checks in at No. 58.
    
12. You'd swear second baseman Howie Kendrick's career is some kind of cosmic joke on fantasy baseball folk. He hits somewhere around .30o when he's healthy enough to play (92 games last season), and someone gets gulled into spending an early-round pick on him. Then they thick they hate a right to bemoan their lot in life when he ends up pulling a hamstring sometime in the middle of May.
    
13. Outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. is not useless because he's a backup outfielder making $10 million a season. You can always bring him up when some Toronto knowitall starts whining about Vernon Wells having the worst contract in baseball.
14. Saunders had just 103 strikeouts in 198 innings, which makes it pretty tough to sustain a 3.41 earned-run average.
    
15. It's too funny by half that the Florida Marlins management made several players cut their cornrows. Guerrero's dreadlocks rate a spot on the all-time all-hair team and it hasn't affected his play.
16. Once upon a time, Dallas McPherson and Brandon Wood were supposed to be the left side of L.A.'s infield, at third base and shortstop. That's half-right, since Wood might end up at third.
17. The Angels' bullpen was not overtaxed last season since their starters often went deep into games. That could change this season.
18. New closer Brian Fuentes apparently replaced Francisco Rodriguez or something,
    
19. SI.com's team capsule includes former Jay Justin Speier as one of their key relievers. That is the same Justin Speier who was left off the post-season roster, if you're looking for a portent of doom.
    
20. Remember the Seinfeld when Elaine gets turfed from Yankee Stadium for wearing a Baltimore Orioles hat in the owners' box? That was inspired by an incident which happened to Larry David at Angel Stadium, when it was known as Anaheim Stadium.
    
    (It was the one where Jerry dates an artist played by Catherine Keener, and they break up, and she sends him a letter that he thinks is heartfelt, until he realizes she ripped it off from Neil Simon's Chapter Two — "I don't offer happiness! James Caan didn't offer happiness!")
21. Owner Arte Moreno has a home in Phoenix that's next door to former NFL coach Mike Holmgren. Moreno presumably has the grace not to bug Holmgren about the time he elected to kick a field goal with only two minutes left in the game when his team was down by four points (and ultimately lost by one).
22. Sept. 30 will be the 25th anniversary of Mike Witt's perfect game. His game score for retiring all 27 Texas Rangers hitters that day was 97. In other words, he was perfect and still couldn't get 100. And you thought your teachers were tough graders.
    
23. It's a total cheat to include it, but the baseball scene from The Naked Gun did include the Angels (even if it was actually shot at Dodger Stadium).
    
    
    
    
24. No one who is not professionally mandated to do so calls them the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
25. Anaheim was a charter member of the late, great American Basketball Association, and ABA represents a theme for the division: Anybody But Angels. Sorry, but familiarity breeds contempt.
    

The ATJs report: Seeing victory and the moral high geekhood

One of us is owner of the the all-time Toronto Blue Jays team — the ATJs — in the Seamheads.com Historical League (SHL). So how about those Blue Jays? At this writing, they are 56-49, clinging to a two-game division lead over the combined Arizona-Colorado D-Rocks .

Out of Left Field has a bone to pick with who's out in left field.

It veers dangerously close to that Warcraft episode of South Park, but it set the blood to boil to see "M. Teixeira, LF" appear in the boxscore of a recent 7-4 win over the Angels (Roy Halladay, FTW: Complete-game win and a two-run single which knocked Nolan Ryan out of the game). It just flies in the face of a personal geek code which puts a premium on verisimilitude in sports simulations, even if judging by the fact he's made eight errors in 28 games, Mark Teixeira probably has tried to catch a few flies with his face.

Truth be known, it's a huge dice-roll by Angels GM Chad Finn from Touching All The Bases to use Teixeira as a leftfielder. The current poster child for the armageddon has only played 25 major-league games in the outfield, all in 2003 when he was with a team not named the Angels. It gets another power bat in the lineup and this is a fun thing for a bunch of baseball obsessives, so fair play to Chad. The problems are all on this end.

It probably is classic projecting-all-over-the-place to have even picked up on something so picayune. The SHL uses only players' stats accumulated for that team, which means if you wanted to put Manny Ramirez on the Dodgers after he hit .396/.489/.743 for L.A. over the final third of the last season, go right ahead.

It's a similar story with Teixeira, who hit .358/.449/.632 (batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage) after the Angels brought him last season as a rental player (and never played him anywhere but first base, which is the only spot he'll play for the Yankees).

Some SHL owners will do that, and that's OK. For some, it all harkens back to the epitaph a friend unwittingly offered long ago, late on night over Madden: "Neate, you always try to play the game right." He was referring to actually punting when it was fourth down and forever, instead of having the quarterback scramble around behind the line of scrimmage and heave the ball downfield like Rex Grossman in his most fevered dream to get a miracle completion (to say nothing of people who would call fake field goals in every kicking situation).

As the years have rolled past like some sunny day, it's come to take the form of a left-handed compliment. Half the fun of getting into this was to go with the players who had lasting impact in Toronto, just like how the manager who got the Jays to the mountaintop, twice, Cito Gaston, could be loyal to his guys to a fault (see Joe Carter's 1997 batting splits).

Great hitters, but not out standing in their field!

The whole verisim-whatever thing was paramount in the construction of the All-Time Jays, for good or ill. Apparently, it is so be it, if it means having a team which played .500 ball since May 1 since someone had a Seamhead hang-up about running Dave Winfield out to right field every day, because he played only 26 games there while he was OPS-plusing 137 as the DH for the 1992 championship team. The same could go for having Paul Molitor, who played only 28 games as a first baseman across his three-year stint as the Jays' DH (OPS-plusing 138 in the 1993 and 143 in '94). Molitor might have been a better call at third base if not for a huge yes-but: He didn't play that position regularly for the Blue Jays.

What's it called if you cut corners and stop at nothing, by not staying true to your team's history? Uh, winning?

Believe it, all manner of history-affronting solutions have been contemplated as the Jays have eked their way through the past couple months like, well, a 32-year-old copy editor who shares a one-bedroom apartment. Third base, both corner outfield spots and the back end of the starting rotation have been troublesome. It still would have felt wrong to have Winfield or Molitor as an everyday position player.

On the mound, David Cone, based on his two partial seasons in Toronto (3.14 ERA over 183 1/3 innings during the '92 pennant drive and the turn-out-the-lights '95 season), might have bolstered a pitching staff whose ERA has ballooned to a garden variety 4.73, including 4.89 for the starters (both in the bottom third of the league).

Finn's gambit, though, has provided inspiration to call up 1980s-vintage first baseman Willie Upshaw, hitting .292/.354/.516 at Triple-A Las Vegas, so he can be about the sixth player to have a crack at holding down a semi-regular role in the outfield. Upshaw at least has a fielding rating in left field. His rating is 1. In the Out of the Park baseball simulation, by the way, the higher the number the better. Still, the other outfielders beyond Moseby and Devon White haven't been very good, producing McGlovin-esque stats:

• Joe Carter: .761 OPS
  
• Alex Rios: .684
  
• George Bell: .637
• Jesse Barfield: .580
• Vernon Wells: .561

In the infield, Orlando Hudson, who is blocked by Robbie Alomar at the only position he's ever known, second base, is also coming up. The O-Dog, who's hit .312/.363/.481 for the 51s, might end up becoming some kind of utilityman, filling at third base and shortstop, since Troy Glaus has been useless vs. righties and Tony Fernandez has started all 105 games.

The road ahead, the final 49 games, are going to be tough, most notably a fast-approaching four-game series against the Arizona/Colorado team. Ultimately, it still feels like the right choice to have not kept Molitor or Winfield, or do something crazy like With no DH, having Carlos Delgado and Freddie McGriff rotate between first and the outfield, like how Hall of Fame sluggers Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda did for the early-'60s San Francisco Giants. Do you remember Delgado's short-lived stint as an outfielder in 1994? (King Carlos is still second in the league with a 1.041 OPS).

It's just that using a player who was only with the team for a brief period isn't true to what it's like to follow a team down through the years. You want to take in their bad seasons, their struggles as a young player, the years after they peaked. Granted, that is pretty self-serving coming from someone who did take Roger Clemens, who only pitched in Toronto for two now-tainted seasons, but let's not go nuts. There's a division title at stake and he has proven to be the one sure thing in the starting rotation.

He must have been winded: Pitchers having to run the bases is the 11th-most hilarious aspect of National League baseball (Nos. 1-10 are all actual teams), so what happened to Jimmy Key in a recent 10-7 win over the Angels did not escape notice. With two out in the bottom of the third, Key came around to score for first base on a two-out double by Rios on a 3-2 pitch, putting the All-Time Jays up 7-0. The next inning, presumably still winded, he was touched up for six runs and was yanked before he could qualify for a win. B.J. Ryan picked him up with 3 1/3 innings scoreless relief.

Rance Mulliniks The Player also scored the first run of that game without the ball leaving the infield (walk, sac bunt, up to third on an infield out, wild pitch). Rance Mulliniks The Broadcaster then spent the next five innings talking about the need to manufacture runs.

That's about the low point: The absolute teeth-gnasher has to be a four-game sweep at the hands of Florida/Tampa Bay which included three losses in extra-innings, which must have had the Jays Talk knowitalls going on about the team's lack of heart and scrappy grit. A potential comeback win in the opener turned into an 11-9 loss when Conine ripped a three-run homer off Tom Henke in the bottom of the 10th. Two nights later, the Terminator couldn't hold a lead for Pat Hentgen, as Derrek Lee hit a tying, two-run homer, and then homered again in the 12th for a 5-3 win.

Conine also got another 10th-inning game-winning hit off Henke in a 3-2 win the next day. That was set up by a triple by Hanley Ramirez, whose RBI double in the eighth sent it to extras. (For some reason, Roger Clemens was allowed to start that inning even though he was at 119 pitches after seven innings.)

He just has it in for Hall of Fame closers: A three-game sweep of the Padres included Robbie Alomar hitting a game-winning homer off Goose Gossage. It actually came in the seventh inning, so Robbie probably didn't throw up his hands as he started toward first base like he did in October 1992 vs. Dennis Eckersley.

'Spos daze: The All-Time Jays are 0-6 vs. Montreal, the team mastermind by Jonah Keri. Despite all that help, nos amours are still second in the Expansion Two division.

Take that, Seaver: The Cincinnati version of Tom Seaver has been roughed up whenever he's faced "us." Delgado hit a pair of two-run homers off him in a 7-5 win July 28, but has gone yard only once since, which is kind of a drag.

What's coming up: A four-game series on the road against the Arizona-Colorado D-Rocks.

Zen Dayley: Carlos and the Bagman

It's been around the blogosphere and back, but a pre-eminent baseball writer batting out a column calling ex-Jay Carlos Delgado "the lost slugger of the Steroid Era" demands a response, especially when you totally called this spin:

"It's been hard, as a Jays fan, to shake the idea that Carlos Delgado's reputation might improve even though there's no way to presume anyone was clean as a bean."
-- Feb. 10, 2009

Discretion seemed like the better part of beating the Delgado drum two weeks ago.

It is zero-sum to play the guessing game of who was clean and who was juicing in baseball in the 1990s and 2000s. Tom Verducci, though, makes six figures writing about baseball (oh, the envy is just dripping off the computer screen), so maybe he can feel a little safer stepping out on to that ledge. The rest of us, who don't have editors and advertisers to answer to so much, can, as Jason at It Is About The Money, Stupid did, call this a "fool's errand." There is no way of knowing, so you can't turn Delgado into this smiling, ebullient bald-headed beacon.

It is also curious, mildly, whom Verducci doesn't seize upon as the Lost Slugger as he did his tour of spring training camps, carrying a lantern in the daytime. Delgado hit the ninth-most home runs in baseball from 1996 to 2003, which is taken to be the full run of the Steroid Era, to which Jules in Superbad would say, "Wow, that's a bit of an oversimplication there." Another first baseman of that period, Jeff Bagwell, is tied for sixth on the list (with Mark McGwire, who actually didn't play in two of those seasons).

Bagwell was not forgotten. He was simply underrated. He is also retired as a player, plus there was a New York Daily News report last spring that a trainer supplied drugs to him, Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte when all three played in Houston. It didn't have much of stickiness factor, perhaps since "the rules of American sports journalism prohibit steroid allegations from being directed at average-sized Caucasian ballplayers on teams based in Red States." (OOLF, Dec. 15, 2006.)


Point being, Jeff Bagwell is not as good a literary device as Delgado. He's also not as a big skin to hang on the wall compared to Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or Clemens and Mark McGwire. Being underrated and playing your whole career in a football state has its perks. (As an aside, someone claimed the spike in Bagwell's home-run rates was fishy, failing to point out he hit only four homers in his Double-A season in 1990 because he played in an extremely pitcher-friendly league; no one on his team hit more than five homers, and Bagwell led the league in doubles, which is an indicator of a burgeoning home-run stroke.)

Getting back to Delgado, it's easy to see why he would put on such a pedestal. He plays for the other New York ballclub and he could soon be in rare company when it comes to his counting stats.

"This season, be it anything close to ordinary for him, Delgado will become only the 11th player in baseball history with 500 home runs, 500 doubles and 1,500 RBIs. It is a club with no back door. The others: Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Eddie Murray, (Ken) Griffey, (Manny) Ramirez, (Rafael) Palmeiro and (Barry) Bonds. And yet Delgado never is talked about as a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and is rarely discussed as a Hall of Famer at all."

It's a fun thought, although piling up the big career hit, home run and RBI totals is somewhat a combination of longevity and the era where someone played. The first five names on that list are all-time greats beyond that doubt. The next five involve a guy who played forever and four who had the benefit of playing in the ArenaBall era, including two whom most people would call drug cheats.

Delgado should not be turned into a hero after the fact. He was a terrific hitter in Toronto. The vibe with him was the same as it has been with Roy Halladay since the start of the 2005 through on or around July 31, 2009,. He made it feel like the Blue Jays would always have some hope as long as he was as around. Perhaps Hall of Fame voters, who tend to give a lot of credence to someone having won a MVP award or Cy Young Award, will consider looking at it as if he won in 2003, when he was edged by Alex Rodriguez.

The bottom line, as ShysterBall noted, it's really hard to except people to believe who was clean and who was dirty.

"Look, I appreciate what Verducci is trying to do here. He, like so many of us, wants to bring some kind of certainty to bear on steroids' impact on baseball. He wants to draw a line around certain players and statistics so we can at least have some kind of a foothold for assessing the era in which we find ourselves. The fact of the matter, however, is that no analysis, such as it is, like this one going to achieve that certainty or allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff. Rather, it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of reporting and scholarship. In the meantime, we're just going to have to live with our vague senses about this stuff and have some faith that the enduring nature of the game -- and the work of history -- will sort all of this stuff out for us."

In the meantime, Carlos Delgado is 31 homers from 500. He'll probably achieve the milestone in September. Sure, it would have been great if he could have done it in a Blue Jays uniform.

Bloggers can't be choosers, though. Only Sports Illustrated gets make such choices.

Related:
Appreciating Carlos Delgado, the lost slugger of the Steroid Era (Tom Verducci, SI.com)

Zen Dayley: Park helps Phils avoid opening on a Lowe

One way to look at Game 1 of the NLCS is to say the Phillies were helped out by the dimensions of their ballpark, which is as it should be.

There are not many parks in the majors where you can hit a ball 400-plus feet and not end up with a homer, but Manny Ramirez hit it to that one spot in the first inning and ended up with a RBI double instead of a two-run homer. The two homers that the Phillies socked off Derek Lowe in the sixth inning, when they got the only runs that Cole Hamels needed, would have been warning-track fly balls in a lot of places.

Hamels still pitched a very good game, but it's important to have that bit of context when the columnists are talking about who was clutch. (The second Dodgers run was also ballpark-assisted, with Matt Kemp looping a ball down the right-field line that fell in and bounced out of play for an automatic double.)

The best reads on the web coming out of this game are Crashburn Alley's writeup on the game and the response Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan wrote in regard to Tim McCarver's ignorant comments about Ramirez. The Dodgers can still win this in seven games.

Something to mull over is whether the Dodgers bring back Lowe in Game 4. He was taken out in the sixth inning. By the way, when was the last time Fox aired a LCS game and it was over in less than three hours? (ShysterBall coined a new word to describe the typical Fox playoff broadcast: "Turgid-a-thons.")

Other bidness

• For the ALCS, The Beep's Christina Kahrl says Rays in six.
• An Ottawa Can-Am League update: The city does want to work to keep baseball in town, even as it's trying to recover costs from the Zipperheads.