Monthly Archives: May 2003

AND THEN THERE WAS ONE

The Angels handed the Yanks their ass on a platter once again at the Stadium last night. The Bombers have now lost three-straight, and now lead the Sox, who defeated Texas 7-1, by one game. Boomer Wells wasn’t terrible, but he lost his first game of the year. Scott Spezio went 4-4, and wishes he could play against the Yankess all the time. (The most interesting play of the night came when Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter almost cut down Spezio at the plate as he tagged from third on a fly ball—Buster Olney has a great recap of the play in the Times.)

Point blank, the Yankee offense is slumping. Giambi still can’t see; Lil’ Sori—whose father passed away yesterday, isn’t hitting jack-boil-scratch, and Bernie has cooled down as well (Bernie kills me, when he slumps he turns into a poor man’s Rod Carew). Of course, the biggest concern in the BX, is the Yankees sorry excuse for a bullpen. Filip Bondy reports:

The Yanks lost again, however, and their bullpen has a gaping hole. There is nothing sexy about middle relief. Juan Acevedo isn’t comfortable in the role of baton passer. Acevedo gave up a grand slam to Spiezio on Tuesday, another scream for attention. Torre says there is something wrong with Acevedo’s mechanics, but the manager probably suspects it is more than that. Ever since the temporary closer has been asked to be a permanent middle man, he hasn’t approached the game the same way.

“They have to feel important,” Torre was saying yesterday, about the delicate egos of long relievers. “You always shower alone. You don’t start and you don’t finish.”

From a temperamental point of view, Osuna is much better suited to this sort of existence than Acevedo. His ego fits more easily into the corner of the clubhouse, and in the bullpen.

Olney hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

The Yankees need somebody to give the starters a breather, as they wait for their second wind to kick in.

I watched the game with Emily at her place upstate last night, and was smoldering from the 7th inning on (I couldn’t even enjoy watchin Benji Molina truckulate his fat ass around the bases, scoring from first on a double in the 8th inning). The worst part of it is that I didn’t want to cause a ruckus and yell and curse. Now I got indigestion, but what are you going to do? I’m going to my first Yankee game of the season tonight, so let’s hope they can avoid getting swept. Aaron Sele is pitching for the Angels, and if that dipshit shuts the Bombers down, then I’m going on strike.

Today’s papers are filled with tributes to former Knick (and former Chicago White Sox), Dave DeBusschere, who died of a heart attack yesterday. I best remember DeBusschere almost jumping out of his skin when the Knicks won the Patrick Ewing sweepstakes in 1985, but he was considered to be the heart and soul of the great Knick teams of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

On the train ride into the city this morning, I was standing next to two Wall Street suits: a wily veteran, and an eager youngster. The older guy was your classic Goomba, talking shit the whole way, as his young friend listened intently. The Goomba had a thick New York accent, slicked-back hair, and leathery skin. He was all of a piece–straight out of one of Eric Bogosian’s monologues.

“Hey, I remember when the subway was 35 cents, my friend. Can you imagine that? Those were the good ol’ days.”

I decided to bring up DeBusschere. The conversation didn’t last too long. My man had to get back to his riff.

He continued: “You wouldn’t believe this, but I saw Mickey Mantle play. I don’t look old, but it’s true. I’m 42, but I don’t look it.”

“How do you do it?”

“I drink. I fucking drink, man. Lemme tell you something, I work with all these guys who are work-out freaks. Health nuts. Guys in their twenties. They’re sick four, five times a year. Me? I’m in the bar five, six nights a week, I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, and I feel great. Hey: I had three grandparents that lived past 90. When my grandfather finally went, he was 99. Guy says to me, ‘What was the cause of death?’ I say, ‘He was fucking 99, what do you mean ’cause’?” Hey, I haven’t spent one cent in a bar or restaurant in New York since Mayor Bloomberg passed that no-smoking law. I’m not kidding. Screw that. And I’ll tell you something else: I haven’t gone to a movie theater since they banned smoking there either. Hey, I’m single, I feel great, I’m going to drink and I’m going to smoke as long as I like. Right?”

Hey, whatever gets you through the night, brother.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS

Book Review

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

All the A’s marketing studies showed that the main things fans cared about was winning. Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies became stars; lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies. Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor team.

Billy could give a fuck about baseball tradition. All Billy cared about was winning.

It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was more important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

I.

Billy Beane, the charismatic and driven general manager of the Oakland A’s, is the central character of Michael Lewis’ smart, new book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” There is little doubt that “Moneyball” will be popularly known as “The Billy Beane” book (the other Billy Beane book), but it could easily be called, “Revenge of the Nerds,” because this story is, in large part, about how the baseball outsiders finally kicked in the door to professional baseball. While Beane is a provocative protagonist, don’t get it twisted: this is not his biography. Beane is just a featured player of a bigger story.

The cast includes the likes of Bill James, the godfather of the sabermetrics movement; Sandy Alderson, former general manager of the Oakland A’s, who first tested James’ theories on a major league level; Paul DePodesta, Billy Beane’s, Harvard-educated right-hand-man-behind-the-curtain; Scott Hatteberg, the A’s gregarious first basemen; Chad Bradford, an unorthodox side-arming reliever who was signed by Oakland on the cheap; Jeremy Brown, a slow-footed catching prospect; as well as Beane’s invaluable instructors—pitching coach Rick Peterson, and Ron Washington, Oakland’s infield coach.

“Moneyball” is remarkable in many ways. First of all, it is compulsively readable. Lewis is an expert at shifting between tenses and moods, and he does it in a simple and direct style. He is, if nothing else, a crack reporter. The book is also striking because it presents a candid look at how a major league baseball team is actually run.

How often do you read anything truly revealing about the professional game these days? “Moneyball” offers a rare glimpse into the inner-workings of a major league baseball team, and Lewis depicts this world with a sharp ear for dialogue and an eye for the telling detail; the storytelling is very cinematic. (Has Michael Mann bought the movie rights yet?) Lewis, a baseball outsider, gets behind the scenes and he conveys what he sees with urgency, and intelligence which makes “Moneyball” a thrilling read.

The draft-day meetings with Paul DePodesta and the Oakland scouts are crackling good entertainment, right out of a David Mamet play (minus the affected cadences). Lewis’ proclivity for Wall Street, and Vegas analogies, also help illustrate the new breed of thinking in baseball.

“The chief social consequence,” of quantitative analysis over gut instinct, writes Lewis “was to hammer into the minds of a generation of extremely ambitious people a new connection between “inefficiency” and “opportunity,” and to re-enforce an older one, between “brains” and “money.”

Reading “Moneyball” I had the same feeling I get when I first hear a great album, or see a great movie, and I realize almost immediately that what I’m experiencing is something unusual, something great. Or if not great, then at least very, very good. I don’t usually read books twice, but it’s been a week since I first read the damn thing, and I’m already psyched to get back into it.

II.

So what is “Moneyball” about? There are a lot of things going on here, but at the core of the book is just how thoroughly organized baseball resists change. Voros McCracken, a young sabermetrician tells Lewis:

“The problem with major league baseball is that it’s a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter [But] “If you’re an owner and you never played, do you believe Voros McCracken or Larry Bowa?”

The book is about efficiency vs. excess; progressive thinking vs. static tradition; empirical, or quantitative analysis vs. subjective evaluation; outsiders vs. insiders, or more to the point, underdogs vs. over dogs; and process vs. outcome.

At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to re-think baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why.

In what amounted to a systematic scientific investigation of their sport, the Oakland front office had re-examined everything fro the market price of foot speed, to the inherent difference between the average major league player and the superior triple-A one. That’s how they found their bargains.”

As the chapters on the 2002 draft illustrate, Beane’s likes spitting in the face of tradition (His lasting achievement may be his insistence on drafting college players over high school kids).

Lewis has written acclaimed books on Wall Street (“Liar’s Poker”), Silicon Valley (“The New, New Thing”) and the Internet (“Next: The Future Just Happened”). The lifeblood of “Moneyball” is, not surprisingly then, economics, and the shrewd operators like Beane who manipulate the system to their benefit. The rise of sabermetrics in the pro game can be attributed to economic necessity. This is why Rob Neyer wrote that the new school of baseball management could in fact be revolutionary:

There are, today, baseball executives who are actively seeking guidance from brilliant men from other disciplines and professions. This is happening, in large part, because the new breed of baseball executives is both incredibly bright and incredibly educated, and so they’re not intimidated by other people who are incredibly bright and incredibly educated.

I’m not suggesting that the “traditional baseball man” isn’t bright. Of course he’s bright. I’ve spoken to a dozen traditional baseball men in the last year, and I can report that not one of them wasn’t bright.

But there’s bright and there’s bright. Knock-your-socks-off bright. Paul DePodesta is that kind of bright, and so is Theo Epstein. I’ll stop there because I don’t want to make a big list and miss somebody, but they’re out there and they know who they are.

Do you know how to spot those guys, the ones who knock your socks off? They’re the ones who tell you they still know just a tiny bit of what they want to know, the ones who think they’ve still got plenty to learn and aren’t afraid of going out and looking for what they want to know.

Most baseball executives, even the bright ones, don’t want to try anything new, because new is hard. Instead, their goal is to do things the way they’ve always been done … but better. And that can work. Both of 2002’s World Series teams were (and are) run by men who have little use for this newfangled objective analysis that everybody’s writing about, and it’s hard to argue with their results. If you do it well enough and you get lucky enough, it can work.

III.

Lewis’ story begins with sabermetricians like Pete Palmer and Bill James—the outsiders who challenged baseball’s traditional belief system.

Lewis writes about Bill James:

There was something bracing about the way he did it-his passion, his humor, his intolerance for stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire— that inspired others to join his cause The cause was the systematic search for new baseball knowledge.

“The thing that Bill James did that we try to do,” Paul [DePodesta] said, “is that he asked the question WHY.”

The new studies proved that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are a better representation of a player’s productivity than the tradition measuring sticks like Batting average and RBI’s. Stolen bases are overrated, walks are underrated.

Bunts, stolen bases, hit and runs-they were mostly self-defeating and all had a common theme: fear of public humiliation. “Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said [Pete] Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

But that isn’t all.

James also had something general to say to Billy, or any other general manager of a baseball team who had the guts, or the need, to listen: if you challenge the conventional wisdom you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.

The whole point of James was: don’t be an ape! Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be. Don’t believe a thing is true just becomes some famous baseball player says that it is true.

The first baseball general manager to utilize James’ wisdom was Sandy Alderson. It should come as no surprise that Alderson, a former Marine officer and lawyer, was a baseball outsider. While Tony LaRussa’s A’s were busy stomping the rest of the league in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Alderson set about to systematically change the A’s organizational philosophy from the bottom up. He didn’t have the leverage to tell Tony LaRussa what to do, but he could control the minor leagues. When the A’s were sold in 1995, and were no longer willing to spend top dollar on talent, Alderson was able to extend his ideas to the big league club. His protZgZ was Billy Beane, a former first round draft pick, who had been a big league bust.

The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field. Billy Beane had himself been one of those illusions.

IV.

“What Billy figured out at some point,” said Sandy Alderson, “is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.”

In 1980, the Mets selected Beane as their second overall pick (Daryl Strawberry was the first). He was a five-tool prospect, a bonafide stud. He was fast, had power, and not only could do no wrong, but did things that other players just didn’t do. Raised in Southern California, Beane had the opportunity to attend Stanford on a scholarship, but he ended up signing with the Mets instead. He would live to regret that decision. (When Beane turned down the Red Sox GM position this past winter he said that he had made a decision based on money once, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.)

Beane had never confronted failure, and when came face to face with it in pro ball he unraveled. The Mets rushed him through the minor leagues, hoping that with his good looks and his five-tool talent, he would be playing in Shea before you knew it. (Lee Maz, eat your heart out.) Strawberry was zipping along nicely, why shouldn’t Beane be too? To make matters worse, Beane expression his frustration with the fury of a football player. He was not prepared to suck. Plus, he had the red ass.

You could see why guys used to come down from the bullpen when Billy Beane hit, just to see what he would do if he struck out. To describe whatever he’s feeling as anger doesn’t do justice to it. It’s an isolating rage: he believes, perhaps even wants to believe, that he is alone with his problem and no one can help him. That no one should help him.

The longer Beane played, the more depressed his career became. He hit with fear, he thought too much, he didn’t have a baseball mentality. The truth was, he wasn’t happy as a baseball player. An early sign that he wasn’t cut out for it came when Beane roomed with a young Lenny Dykstra. Dykstra was the antithesis of Billy Beane: a scrub, an over achiever. He wasn’t bright, but he had horse sense, and knew he was a ballplayer.

Scott Hatteberg, the A’s first baseman, told Lewis:

Some guys who are the best are the dumbest I don’t mean dumbest. I mean they don’t have a thought. No system.”

Stupidity is an asset?

“Absolutely. Guys can’t set you up. You have no pattern. You can’t even remember your last at bat.” He laughs. “Arrogance is an asset too. Stupidity and arrogance: I don’t have either one. And it taunts me.”

It taunted Beane too, and he was a much better athlete than Scott Hatteburg. The way the pugnacious Dykstra showed no fear at the prospect of facing the great Steve Carlton said it all to Beane. But Beane soon learned:

The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. ‘Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,’ said Billy. ‘He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea where he was. And I was the opposite.’

V.

Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his anti-theses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn’t play anything but baseball. Young men who had gone to college.

If Lewis stumbled onto a story that he loved in the A’s, he found the ideal protagonist in Billy Beane; baseball’s answer to David O. Selznick. A calculating and charming opportunist, Beane is, from a dramatic point of view, practically irresistible. Beane looks like Kevin Spacey’s better-looking, younger brother, but the character that first comes to mind is the Alec Baldwin character in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

“Billy’s a shark,” JP Ricciardi had said, by the way of explaining what distinguished Billy from every other GM in the game. “It’s not just that he’s smarter than the average bear. He’s relentless—the most relentless person I have ever known.”

The beauty part about Beane is that he’s not just an arrogant, narcissistic prick with an inflated opinion of himself. He’s complicated too. Beane is at turns warm, playful, intelligent, funny, and most importantly, vulnerable. Lewis does a neat job of exploring Beane’s insecurities when the GM contemplated taking the Red Sox gig last winter.

The constant tension with Beane is how he tries to balance his hot temper with his empirical approach to business. When the A’s play, Beane is not so different from the average, short-tempered fan.

Reason, even science, as what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means-anger, passion, even physical intimidation-to do it. ‘My deep down belief about how to build a baseball team is at odds with my day-to-day personality,’ he said. ‘It’s a constant struggle for me.’

VI.

Of course, despite all of Beane’s success with the A’s, his team has not thrived in the playoffs.

The post-season partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientific research: to ANY purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team. It wasn’t just that the game was run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was that the season ended in a giant crapshoot. The playoffs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem.

But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five game series the worst team in baseball will beat the best about fifteen percent of the time Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason.

Beane put it bluntly:

“My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is fucking luck.”

Paul DePodesta, Beane’s own personal Mr. Spock, is more philosophical:

“It’s looking at process rather than outcomes,” Paul says. “Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process.”

After all, you can control the process, but not the results. Even if your name is Billy Beane.

Unfortunately for the A’s, we live in a culture that is obsessed with results. I heard several casual fans talking about Beane this week, and they scoffed, “Billy Beane? How many fucking rings does he have?”

Paul DePodesta hopes organized baseball overlooks the A’s success too (though after this book is released that may be harder to do):

“I hope they continue to believe that our way doesn’t work. It buys us a few more years.”

Not everybody in baseball is going to buy into the A’s philosophy of course, and that’s okay. Diversity is good. But the Blue Jays and the Red Sox are already on the bandwagon. Hell, the Yankees current run is based, in part, on acquiring high on-base percentage hitters. The real question is how long will Beane and the A’s be able to use the sabermetrics-approach to such an advantage? DePodesta isn’t going to hang around forever, you know.

It will be interesting to chart the fate of “Moneyball” this summer. It has already caused quite a stir. Beane’s fellow GM’s aren’t particularly pleased about the book (I’m sure he wasn’t too thrilled about portions of it himself). Kenny Williams, the general manager of the White Sox, has already had some choice—if not terribly astute—words for Beane. Fomer scouting director Grady Fuson isn’t too pleased either. I’m sure others will follow suit. I doubt however, that it will hurt Beane’s ability to perform; in fact, I’m sure he’ll find a way to use it to his advantage.

Of course, the internet-based media is charged up about “Moneyball”, but Lewis is really preaching to the choir there. No, what I want to see is how everyone from the mainstream press, to the casual fan responds to the book. It feels like an important book, but let’s see if it really becomes an influential book.

Rob Neyer thinks it will be.

I think it will be very influential. Maybe not this year or next year, it might not be for another ten years, when the people who are in college today are working for major league teams. But I really think it’s a great book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Whether or not he’s right, all I know is I’m looking forward to reading it again.

Oh yeah, not for nothing, but according to Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus:

This week’s Baseball Prospectus Radio will be all about Moneyball, the controversial new book giving the insider look at the Oakland A’s. Excerpted in NY Times Magazine and this week in Sports Illustrated, Moneyball is currently #10 on the Amazon.com bestseller list and will debut on the NY Times Best Seller list next week. In one of only two radio interviews he will do, author Michael Lewis will speak with BPR about the book, what he saw in his year with the A’s, and whether the controversy surrounding the book is justified. BPR will also feature the subject of Moneyball, Billy Beane. Beane is currently General Manager of the Oakland A’s and a former major league baseball player. His unique approach is changing the game, but his brash personality is rubbing many the wrong way. Is it truth or sour grapes? Tune in to find out: http://radio.baseballprospectus.com

Don’t sleep.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

If nothing else, last night’s Yankee-Angels game was as a painful reminder for Yankee fans as to how soundly Anahiem whooped the Bombers last fall. Mike Mussina was less than sharp, he didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from the home plate umpire, and the Angels were just plain pesky, fouling balls off, and working their magic. The Yankees played like a-s-s, and made John Lackey look like Tim Hudson. It made for a less than spectacular return for Derek Jeter, who singled in four times at bat (he popped out three times to the right side).

Personally, I cursed and hollered at the TV throughout the ugly affair (“Sori, try getting your body in front of the ball precious!”). I guess I’m still sore about last year. A friend called during the game and said, “You got to love that scrappy little Eckstein.”

I said, “I don’t got to love dick. You love that little bastid, I’m too busy being furious.”

“Awww, nutzo.”
I wasn’t any happier this morning when I read the headline for Harvey Araton’s column in the Times: “Can’t the Yankees be a Little Vunerable?” Perhaps he hasn’t been paying attention. Fortunately John Harper and Joel Sherman detail the Yankees flaws in their columns today.

According to Sherman:

The rotation suddenly has become more pedestrian, the defense more shabby and the offense more homer dependent (nine of 12 runs over the past four games are on long balls). Over the past 10 days, the A’s pitching and the Angels’ passion have exposed Yankee flaws. Those are two possible playoff opponents.

Naturally, the Sox came from behind yet again, this time beating the Rangers. They now trail the Yankees by a scant two games. Given the Sox propensity for late-inning come-backs and the Yankees less than stellar bullpen, you think we’re going to see some humdingers come next week?

I think we can count on it.

HERE AND NOW

Last week, Rob Neyer told me:

Baseball gives the fan the opportunity to be happy a number of times during the season. If you are a Cincinnati Bengals fan, you may only have the chance to be happy once or twice in a whole season. But if you’re a fan of a truly bad baseball team, you have a chance to be happy 60 times a year.

I was thinking about this on Sunday when I saw Baseball Tonight’s week-in-review. The Reds won three games in their final at-bat last week, and Mike Piazza hit a homer to win a game on Saturday for the Mets. Piazza, who has been the focus of negative attention in the papers recently, looked like a Little Leaguer as he crossed the plate. It was a sight for sore eyes, indeed. (Yazzie collected three hits in the Mets victory last night in Colorado, though Murray Chass writes that all is not kosher in Sheaville.)

One of the drawbacks of rooting for a succesful team like the Yankees is that they spoil you rotten. Watching highlights of the Reds celebrate last week I thought of how often I scoff at such celebrations: “Act like you’ve been there,” or “Man, you’d think you guys won the World Serious. Settle down, now.” But really, I’ve just become a snob, because those come-from-behind wins are exciting for the Reds and their fans, and why shouldn’t they be effusive? A little “Bad News Bears” never hurt anyone. I’ve got to lighten up a little bit. Not everybody can be the cool, efficient, big city, Yankees. And thank God for that.

HEY MR. DJ PLAY THAT SONG

Derek Jeter returns to the Yanks tonight, when they host the World Champs at the Stadium, and though they’ve played well without him, they haven’t been nearly as much fun to watch. Mike Lupica opines:

Jeter is like the owner of the Yankees in this one big way: If he doesn’t win it all, he feels as if he lost…Jeter is supposed to be the best winner. It starts with him being a terrible loser.

It’s hard to disagree with Lupica, but I don’t know of many players who enjoy themselves more than Jeter either. Winning may be the only thing that makes Jeter sleep well at night, and we don’t know what kind of loser he really is, because he’s never been in a losing situation, but between the lines, the guy is all smiles, all-confidence, all the time. During tense games, I often yell at him on TV, “Dammit Jeter, would you stop having so much fun. This shit is killing my stomach and you’re smiling. Throw a bat, smash a water cooler, do something.” But Jeter is no Paulie O. His confidence is unflappable, and so is his insistence that competition is supposed to be enjoyed. Looking at Jeter play baseball, it’s hard to think there is anything else he’d rather be doing.

“I don’t think he thinks about a whole lot other than playing,” Joe Torre told the writers in Oakland over the weekend.

He may not be the best player on the team, but he is their biggest star. Lupica continues:

He is not the ballplayer DiMaggio was, or Mickey Mantle, or even Don Mattingly in his prime. There is no rule in the books that the star of the team has to be the best player on the team. It is that way with Jeter. He is the star of these Yankees and comes home tonight, at short.

OLD MAN RICKEY

When Rickey Henderson was on the Mets a few years back, he was thrown out trying to steal second base one afternoon in Pittsburgh. As he trotted off the field the organist played “Old Gray Mare.” I started humming along, but it wasn’t until about twenty minutes later that I realized what I was humming. Man, an organist with a sense of humor is a beautiful thing. Acclaimed baseball writer Alan Schwarz conducted a brief Q & A with the old gray mare in yesterday’s Times magazine. There isn’t a great Rickeyism to be found, but still, it is mildly amusing.

JUST WRITING MY NAME AND GRAFFITI ON THE WALL

In the shadow of Yankee Stadium, you will find the 149th street subway station on the Grand Concourse. “The bench” as it used to be known, was a famous meeting spot for graffiti artists in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This spot was immortalized in Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver’s documentary “Style Wars.” You may have caught it on PBS over the years. If you haven’t, it has just been released on DVD, with all sorts of extra goodies, and it is well-worth checking out. Not only because it captures a bygone era in New York City history, but because the young kids that are interviewed in the movie are priceless. The movie was filmed in 1982, when Graff writers and B-Boys (and DJs of course) were the most popular arms of the Hip Hop tree. (Nobody thought you could make any money rapping yet.) Unlike the rap game, Graffiti didn’t exlude Latinos and white kids from getting down; “Style Wars” features middle-class Jewish kids, Italian kids from Brooklyn, Spanish kids from the Bronx, and black kids from Harlem. For a rich, poignant, and funny (not to mention aesthetically appealing) look at New York in the early 80s, look no further than “Style Wars.”

BREAKING EVEN

For the past two weeks the Yankees have played exclusively against the Mariners and A’s, two of the best teams in the league. When all was said and done yesterday, they ended up beating the M’s 2 out of 3 twice, and losing 2 of 3 to the A’s twice: .500 ball. Which is to say, it could have been worse, could have been better.

The Yanks faced Hudson, Zito and Mulder in Oakland over the weekend and they managed to get to Zito on Saturday (my cousin Gabe was at the game, and I hope to get a report from him when he returns home sometime this week), while they were stymied by Hudson on Friday and Mulder yesterday. Fortunately, Pedro and the Sox lost on Friday, and D. Lowe got bombed last night (although the Sox did manage another furious comeback), so the Yanks remain three games up in the AL East.

The Yanks return home for three against the Angels and then host the Rangers over the weekend before they go up to Boston for the begining of the madness. Both Don Zimmer (stomach) and Derek Jeter (shoulder) are expected to rejoin the team tomorrow night at the Stadium. Jose Contreras is on his way back to New York, and Antonio Osuna is expected to come off the DL this weekend.

Jason Giambi is all dinged-up, and he sat out of Saturday and Sunday’s games. But he did take Tim Hudson deep on Friday night. It was encouraging that it was hit to left field. Perhaps with a couple of days off, Giambi will start getting more comfortable.

Meanwhile, Nick Johnson continues to impress. According to Ken Rosenthal:

“He’s turning into a mini-Giambi, which is what everyone thought he was,” A’s GM Billy Beane says. “It’s not going to be fun facing two Giambis. One is bad enough.”

This interview originally appeared at BaseballProspectus.com.

Roger Angell, The New Yorker’s celebrated baseball writer, has a new compilation out titled “Game Time”, which contains many new pieces along with some previously published ones as well. BP correspondent Alex Belth caught up with Angell last weekend and talked about growing up a New York Giants baseball fan, the present-day Yankees, plus other topics New York baseball-focused and otherwise.

Bronx Banter: How did you get your start as a baseball fan, and as a writer?

Roger Angell: I got my start as a fan in the most traditional way possible: My father was a big baseball fan. My father had grown up in Cleveland, and when I was a kid, we would be going to Giants games here in New York, and Yankees games. As I’ve written, I think it still works with kids under 10 that their first big obsession is with baseball. They become aware of this gigantic lore. Some of the first players that I saw were people like Babe Ruth, and Carl Hubbell and Lou Gehrig, and I remember when Joe DiMaggio first arrived in my teens. So it goes back a ways.

BB: Where did you grow up?

Angell: I grew up close to where I live now. I grew up on 93rd Street, and on the way to school, my school bus which went up 5th Avenue when 5th Avenue went both ways, sometimes in the morning I would meet Col. (Jacob) Ruppert on his way to his brewery on the east side. He owned the Yankees. By that time I was 10 years old, so I would have a mitt, and I would give the mitt a whack and look at him, and expect him to stop and say: ‘Young man, here’s my card, take this up to the Stadium for a tryout.’ It never happened. My father was a real fan, and he told me what to watch for. He had grown up in Cleveland in the Cy Young, days, and uh, his heart was broken for the rest of his life (laughs).

BB: So did you grow up as a Giants fan or a Yankees fan?

Angell: Both. I think I was more of a Yankee fan at first, but the Yankees were winning so often…that I discovered along the way that I was more a Giants fan than a Yankees fan.

BB: (Did you pull for the Giants) strictly because they were the underdog?

Angell: Cause they were the underdog, sure. And naturally you attach yourself to the underdog. But I think I enjoyed the Polo Grounds more than Yankee Stadium because it was such an eccentric and interesting park.

BB: Were most of the Giants fans of an older generation, because they were the dominant New York team before the Yankees?

Angell: Yeah, it’s true. But I think if it had been some other city like Pittsburgh, I would have been a Pirates fan. It was just local. I was not a Dodgers fan, because the Dodgers always meant trouble for the Giants. I didn’t actually go to a game at Ebbets Field until I was almost grown up.

BB: When did you want to become a writer?

Angell: My parents were divorced and I was living with my father during the weekdays. My mother was an editor at The New Yorker, was one of the first editors of the New Yorker. So it was sort of a family business. And she was married to E.B. White. So there was a writer close at hand. I think the aspirations came naturally.

BB: Did your mother write herself?

Angell: No, she was a famous fiction editor and early art editor. Famous figure in the family of The New Yorker, Katherine White. She was head of the fiction department, so I wound up in the fiction department myself many years later. But I remember watching E.B. White write, and I was a great admirer of his stuff because it looked so effortless and at the same time I could see how much effort had gone into it. He used to write the Comment Page, in the first page of the New Yorker. Every week. And that day, up in their place in Maine, he would close himself in his office and he would come out for lunch, and not say anything, and then you’d hear the sounds of sporadic typing in there, and then he’d mail it off and the end of the day and say it wasn’t good enough. He was always saying that writing is hard, which is true.

BB: So writing was the family business.

Angell: The New Yorker was the family business. There was endless talk about The New Yorker all the time. Harold Ross, and all these people. I knew these people when I was young. Sure, it was an everyday sort of thing. My father was a lawyer, and I saw a lot of him, but he never begrudged me going into writing; in fact he encouraged me. So it was a natural sort of thing, and I grew up thinking I was going to do something in publishing. I had no idea I’d end up at The New Yorker, and I had no idea that I’d end up writing about baseball.

BB: When did you arrive at The New Yorker?

Angell: Well, I graduated from college, went overseas in the Pacific and became the managing editor of a G.I. weekly out there. Air Force. A magazine called “Brief.” I had amazing preparation for what I would do later on. After the war, by this time I had begun to publish in The New Yorker, when I was quite young, publishing fiction. I wrote an article about a bomber mission in the Pacific. I didn’t want to go to work for The New Yorker because it was the family business and you know you want to do things on your own. I went to work for a magazine called “Holiday,” a new monthly started up after the war by Curtis Publishing. It was a famous travel magazine; it was a wonderful magazine that produced great writers, and artists and photographers from around the world. And I had a lot of fun doing that. I went to The New Yorker in the fall of ’55. My parents were living in Maine. E.B. White was writing other stuff and my mother had retired by this time. It was a natural thing for me to do since I was a writer and editor and contributor to The New Yorker.

BB: When did you first write about baseball?

Angell: In ’62. I had written some sports pieces, I had written a piece about the New York Rangers. I was a hockey fan; I was a sports fan. I did a couple of other things. And I had written a baseball piece for “Holiday,” sort of a generic baseball piece. I said if you want I could go down to spring training. I certainly did not have it in mind to write a lot about baseball. The thing was, (my editor) didn’t want sentimental writing about sports and he didn’t want tough guy writing about sports, which were the choices back then. You were either weepy, or you were tough. The first year I went to spring training I found the newborn Mets in St. Petersburg. This is 40 years ago. I didn’t think of myself as a sports writer so I didn’t dare go in the clubhouse or sit in the press box. I sat with the fans. And I realized that the stuff that’s ignored and never gets reported on is the fans. Nobody ever wrote about the fans. So I wrote about the fans, and I’ve continued to do so. I’ve continued to write in a form that allows me to write in the first person. And that allows me to say I am a fan of this team, or react to things as a fan as well as a baseball writer that now knows something about the game. The Mets were just a great fan story when they arrived. They played in the Polo Grounds and they were one of the worst and most entertaining teams that ever played. And that was a terrific story. And New York was used to the Yankees, winning all the time. Somebody said they had become like General Motors. And here was a team that was just terrible, but large numbers of people turned out to cheer them on, and if they won a game there was wild excitement. So I wrote that. They were something like anti-matter to the New York Yankees. I remember sitting there at the Polo Grounds, and there was a guy sitting near me in the stands blowing this mournful horn. TWUUUHH-TRUUUHP. And I wrote that there is more Met than Yankee in all of us, because losing is much more common than winning. When I heard that horn blowing I realized that horn was blowing for me. In some way, I began to settle into the kind of writing that I would do later on. They call me a “baseball essayist,” or a “baseball poet laureate,” and I hate that. I’m not trying to write baseball essays, and I’m certainly not trying to be poetic. I try to avoid it. I’ve been able to find myself and baseball a natural fit, and everybody wants to write about himself. That’s why we do it (laughs).

BB: When were you aware that this was going to be something you were going to be doing regularly?

Angell: I think what happened was, I went to the World Series every year, again keeping my distance. But what happened in the 60s was that there were three great World Series and pennant races in a row. In ’67, there was a four-way race in the American League between the White Sox, Twins, Tigers and the Red Sox. The White Sox went out first, and the Tigers were in it until the last day. The Sox had won and I was in the Red Sox clubhouse when news came that the Tigers had lost, and the Red Sox were in.

BB: The Impossible Dream Team.

Angell: Yeah, there was a great World Series that fall. Carl Yastrzemski was an extraordinary player, carried that team all the way through September. The Red Sox lost of course. And the next year was the Tigers and the Cardinals, and Bob Gibson struck out 17 batters in the first game. Something that never had happened before. And the year after that was the sudden arrival of the Mets: The biggest upset in modern times. These were three great late seasons and post seasons in a row, and by that time I was there writing about this first-hand. I was involved in some way. I felt involved. I learned how to attach myself to teams and I learned how to ask the right questions. It was a lot of fun. And the readers liked it so I went on doing it.

BB: When did you start approaching the locker room and the press box?

Angell: I did that in the sixties. I began to sit in the press box. I remember following the Red Sox around and sitting in the Press Box at Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium. A lot of writers were very good to me, and Cliff Keane one of the old Red Sox writers, famous guy for needling people, would make fun of me for taking so many notes. I’d fill up my notebooks, because I knew I was going to be writing much later, and I didn’t know what would be useful at that time. So I would take notes and take notes. Keane would say to me, “How many pages today Rog, 20, 30?” I remember Keane trying to be cynical about Yastrzemski because Yastrzemski was such a great star. There was a game in Tiger Stadium where the Sox were behind a couple of runs, and Yaz came up and he said: ‘OK Yaz, prove you’re the MVP: Hit a home run.’ And he hit a home run (laughs).

BB: What was it like in the locker room during that period?

Angell: Well, it wasn’t nearly as crowded as it is now. The masses of TV people weren’t there. You didn’t have every local television channel in the land trying to represent something in the clubhouse. I think players were a little more accessible. And they were different, they were different. The great example that comes to mind right away is [Bob] Gibson after that 17-strikeout performance. He stood in front of his locker; writers were four and five deep at this point. And all of us had our pencils poised. This was in ’68, and racially things were very uptight still. Someone said to Gibson: ‘Were you surprised at what you did today?’ Gibson looked at him and said: ‘I’m never surprised by anything I do.’ You could see this going through the writers like: ‘What did he say? What did he say?’ I hung around, after the crowds had left, and I was talking with Gibson a little bit, and I said: ‘Are you always this competitive?’ He said: ‘Oh, I think so. I got a three-year old daughter, and I’ve played about 500 games of tic-tac-toe with her and she hasn’t beat me yet.’ And he meant it. He meant it.

BB: What were your impressions of the Cardinals in the 1960s?

Angell: You have to remember that when Gibson joined the Cardinals, he had played with the Globetrotters, as a second team. Many people forget this. But they played in the South and the black players would have to stay with black families when they went down there. Gibson hated this. Those were tough times.

BB: What was Bill White like in those days?

Angell: I didn’t get to know him until later. He was a roommate of Gibby’s at one point. He reminded me that when he changed clubs–he went over to the Phillies, I think the first at-bat he had against Gibson, Gibson hit him. He said: ‘We’re no longer roommates.’ And of course that has really changed. This business of knockdown pitches and fighting for the inside part of the play has gone by, and if anybody gets hit now they look deeply insulted. It’s too bad, because I really love the inside pitch, and the struggles of the batters to establish themselves.

BB: Those Cardinals were known for being a very racially integrated team. Did you get that impression from them?

Angell: Yeah, I think so, but the team I remember for that was the ’79 Pirates. The greatest racial mix that there has ever been. Just unbelievable combinations of people. Suave, inner-city African Americans, and white guys from the South. Phil Garner was the son of a minister from the South. And of course Willie Stargell. You had South Americans, Latinos. The clubhouse was a mass of ethnic energy. All kinds of music going on. At one point I thought they were going to start sacrificing chickens. And rock music. That was the “We Are Family” thing. And everything revolved around Stargell, who was the guy that held it together. And they were so excited by themselves. It was just terrific.

BB: One thing I noticed in your feature about Gibson was that his reputation had diminished when the piece was published in the early ’80s. These days Koufax and Gibson are clearly remembered as the outstanding pitchers of the 1960s, while Juan Marichal’s reputation has suffered in comparison.

Angell: Well, Marichal was the one whose reputation has faded, you’re right. And if you asked players from that era, ‘who was the best pitcher?’ they always mention Koufax, they always mention Gibson, and they all say the one everyone overlooks is Marichal, who was so tough because he had all those different pitches coming from so many different directions. He really knew how to pitch. Had a very wide range of skills.

BB: What are your impressions of the Yankees during the past 10 years?

Roger Angell: Torre’s Yankees have made me a Yankee fan again, because of him. I was not particularly a Yankee fan, because I was not a Steinbrenner fan. I was just interested in other teams. But the way the Yankees played, and the atmosphere that prevailed there, the sense of professionalism and accomplishment….the presence of people like, well particularly Paul O’Neill, and Bernie Williams and David Cone. So many people all working together, who made very little reference to themselves. There were occasional exceptions; players here and there like Wells. But it was the perfect clubhouse atmosphere and it was a new thing for New York to have a Yankee team like that. I didn’t enjoy it because it was like the old Yankees; I just liked it for itself. And they became the most interesting team in baseball, which is really amazing with the Yankees because there are so many preconceptions that are attached to the Yankees. So much of that encrusted history and lore. But these were interesting and lively teams that rejuvenated themselves. That post-season in 2001 was a great thing for everybody in a way. The play that Jeter made against the A’s, which was like the necessary last ingredient, was really something. Everybody remembers that.

BB: Does Jeter rank with the all-time Yankees yet?

Angell: I don’t need to rank anybody, let’s wait and see. There is no hurry to rank him. I don’t like to rank people unless they’ve arrived. I mean ranking Barry Bonds is extremely interesting now. But I don’t need to rank Jeter yet. Let’s see what happens. I remember when Doc Gooden had that great year (in 1985) and everybody was putting him in the Hall of Fame. And only some people said: ‘Well, it was a pretty good year, let’s see what happens.’

BB: The same can be said of Soriano now.

Angell: Yeah, he’s just arriving. It’s fun to watch people arrive. I don’t have a great interest in the Best Ever. Or the Best this, or the Best that. You can play that out in the winter, but it is overwhelming sports now. We all want to have the sense that we were there at a historic moment, or that we were watching something historic, this next home run, or base hit. It makes you think about this constantly. If you look back in baseball history, I look back at the consecutive game streak, when Lou Gehrig broke the existing record. I’ve looked back at the newspapers of the time, and it was a little thing at the bottom of a paragraph. That was all. There was not this self-consciousness about records in the old days. What you watched is what mattered.

BB: Are you a fan of baseball writing?

Angell: I’m a fan of baseball books, yeah. I think my favorite baseball book of all time is “The Glory of Their Times,” because it was thrilling to find out that some of these early players that we saw in distant, historical terms, were still around, living as old guys here in the country with perfect memories of what it had been like to play country ball. Larry Ritter went around with a tape recorder, while no one else noticed this. Suddenly there was a connection. We knew about baseball being in the past. We knew that baseball was both an old game and a young game. Which is still the case. It was an extraordinary piece of writing and reporting.

BB: Have you followed Bill James’ writing career?

Angell: Yeah, I like Bill James. I’m not a sabermetrician, but I got to know Bill James early on, and I liked him a lot. He certainly opened up an entirely different area for us to understand baseball.

BB: Did the first publication of the Baseball Encyclopedia change the way you looked at statistics?

Angell: I wrote a long piece when it came out about what a significant thing it was to have it. I was aware of certain marks before it came out–number of games played, home run records. We are reminded of it every day now. I think that I had already sensed that every player who plays is playing against every other player who has ever played. Certainly if you have the Encyclopedia there, you look back at the lifetime stats of anybody, and of World Series games, it confirmed for you in interesting and exciting detail what you had already sensed. And we all had a few records that we would carry around as our favorites. Now they are all printed out. I remember a record I picked up very early on, that almost nobody is aware of. One of my favorite stats of all time is that from August of 1931 to August of 1933, the Yankees played something like 304 games without being shut out once. An extraordinary team record; nobody has ever come close to that. Just think of that. And there were great pitchers pitching then too.

BB: What was your experience like writing “A Pitchers Story” with David Cone?

Angell: He was just great. We had no written agreement. We had sort of talked about this as a joint venture. He kept wanting me to do it, and then we had a contract. But he wasn’t involved in the contract and he could have said at any point when he started to lose, I’m sorry I can’t do this. Nine out of 10 players would have gone that way, and all he did was keep apologizing. He said: ‘I’m sorry I’m letting you down.’ I said: ‘You’re not letting me down.’ And at some point I said: ‘This is more interesting that winning.’ Which is true: Losing is much more interesting than winning. It was actually thrilling to go through with this and again, instead of looking at it from somebody who is a masterful pitcher, in control of everything, to see him hold onto some vestige of what he had been, to pull off a decent performance now and then.

BB: Was it awkward for you that he pitched so poorly?

Angell: It wasn’t awkward, it was painful. It was horrible. It was painful for everybody that knew him, including his teammates. It was tough to see an accomplished and proud and extremely successful guy like that suddenly lose his form entirely, and struggling to find it. Torre, to his credit, stayed with him, and stayed with him. It was an amazing summer all along.

BB: What was your impression of Cone’s 2001 season with the Red Sox?

Angell: He pitched well. He had a good season. He had some bad luck. He had some setbacks. The team completely fell apart. They fired the manager (Jimy Williams) mid-season. They had an inappropriate pitching coach who became the manager (Jim Kerrigan), who did not get the backing of the ownership. It was extremely ineffective, horrible. But Cone hung on and pitched well, through difficulties. He pitched a great game in Boston against Mussina, where Mussina came one out away from a perfect game. David was the losing pitcher but pitched nine innings. He had to go chew out Mussina, because he knew what a great game he pitched. Really. That was standard for David. The Sox came back down here and played at the Stadium the following week, and David made it a point of going to see Mussina, and said: “‘What you want to remember is that we both pitched in a game that we’ll never forget.’

BB: What do you make of Cone’s comeback? When we first spoke last week, Cone had just hurt his hip, pitching for the Mets.

Angell: It’s a good story. But yeah, I had a bad feeling about it last week. I could see it coming. I can’t understand why nobody said anything about it. The writers or the coaches, but I saw Cone limping around, favoring that hip for a while now. I could see this coming.

BB: You’ve shifted your rooting loyalties over the years. Which teams are you pulling for these days?

Angell: I always change my loyalties because I get interested in the team I’m writing about. If I go and spend two days watching a team, I follow that team for the rest of the year. If I become aware of the people in the lineup and talk to the players a little bit, I’m interested in that team. I’m always interested in the Mets, I’m always interested in the Red Sox, I’m always interested in the Giants, my childhood team. I’m interested in the A’s because I was always close with that team. I knew Bill Rigney very well. They were a great story in the ’70s, and later when they came back with Tony La Russa, who ran such an admirable outfit. There are a lot of teams. I’m sort of a fan of the Angels now because they played so well in the World Series last fall.

BB: You weren’t heartbroken that the Giants lost?

Angell: It almost killed me. It almost killed me. It was horrible. I mean I was there, I saw it happen with Giant fans. It was just appalling. Extremely painful. My God, they are up by five runs in the seventh inning of Game Six and lose? You don’t get over that right away.

BB: What players do you follow closely these days?

Angell: Well, there are obvious ones like Pedro, Jeter. I was a great fan of Edgardo Alfonzo. When he arrived with the Mets, he really knew how to play baseball. A few of his coaches said: This guy already knows how to play. He picked it up in South America somehow. He was a complete ballplayer from the moment he arrived. And then there are always players that I haven’t noticed before. Nowadays we are all victims of Bud Selig’s horrible new schedule, and we are sequestered from seeing teams except in local divisions. I’ve never seen nearly enough of Garret Anderson for instance, who is a wonderful player. And that happens a lot.

BB: Are you not a fan of interleague play?

Angell: Sure, I think interleague play is fine. I have to say in defense of Bud Selig–I’m not a huge Bud fan for various reasons–but a lot of what he’s done has been a success. Interleague play has been a success; the three divisions are working out OK. I don’t like the schedule. I’m dead against the new schedule. I mean the new schedule was passed because teams didn’t want to spend all that money on traveling, and the writers didn’t want to be away from home so long, so far. But if you think about it, the great thing about baseball now is that we have some extraordinary stars, some of the best players who have ever played, but they are scattered all over. And you’ve got to be alert now. I mean the Giants are going to here (at Shea) for three days in the middle of August. Three days to look at Barry Bonds: That’s terrible. Meantime, we get to see the Mets play Montreal, and the Phillies and Florida over and over and over again, which is not my idea of the best outcome for baseball.

BB: How do you like the contemporary game compared with previous generations?

Angell: I don’t think in those terms. I don’t think: This is the best time. I think that’s a way to make yourself not enjoy what’s going on. There is no doubt in my mind that we have as talented a bunch of players playing right now that the game has ever known. There is no doubt. These guys are extraordinary athletes. We have a rush of wonderful infielders, and great shortstops. Great shortstops who can hit. So why don’t we enjoy what we are seeing? I don’t have to say, this is the best time. Why make that choice? People are always ready to give up on baseball and say It wasn’t what it was. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, and maybe it’s about to be the best it’s ever been. It’s perfectly possible. I don’t think people have any awareness of the contributions Hispanic stars have made to the game. They are the powerful force that has made the game as good as it is right now. They are not nearly appreciated enough.

BB: Is it more difficult to talk with players now?

Angell: It’s much harder, because I’m so old. I’m 82. I approach them with my white hair. When they call you “sir,” you’re in trouble.

BB: Does the same thing go for the likes of Torre, and Zimmer?

Angell: No, the old guys know me, so I can talk to them. We go back a long ways. We look at each other and say, ‘still here?’ But a lot of my best friends in baseball are gone. Bill Rigney was my best friend in baseball, and he died a couple of years ago.

BB: Underneath his stoic calm, Torre is a tough Italian guy from Brooklyn, huh?

Angell: Torre was a catcher for most of his career. No gentle guys are catchers. Torre has got an immense sense of authority. He’s tough enough. He doesn’t go around acting tough because that’s not his nature. But the players who come to play for him come to realize that he was a hell of a player. He shared an MVP award one year, lead the league in batting. So the next year he lost 64 points off his batting title. And he always points to that. He’s also the guy who’ll tell you about the day he grounded into four double plays. He’s always putting himself down, which is a way he can help his team, because every player has horrible times, and they want to be reminded of that and not how great a player their manager was. But I go back to Bonds, who is one of the most exciting and interesting people to think about that I’ve encountered in baseball. It’s amazing to me what he’s done in the past couple of years. And all the old players that I’ve talked to about it, have said, ‘I’ve never seen a guy locked in like this’–never, ever, ever. It’s just astounding. It’s really fun to place him in the category of the best who ever played. You have to put him among the top three outfielders of all time. He now belongs there with Ruth and Mays. I had a long exchange with a writer named Charlie Einstein, who is a friend of mine, a retired writer who lives around here. He used to cover the Giants; he went out with the Giants from New York to San Francisco. He’s the biographer, and chronicler and closest friend of Willie Mays. And I wrote in my piece, I quoted a local writer out there, Ray Ratto, saying that Bonds is the best outfielder now that’s ever played. He’s number three. And he’s never going to rise above three because the other two were Mays and Ruth. Of course Bonds was pissed off. But Einstein wrote, if I can remember this correctly, this means we have a second outfield of Aaron and Williams and DiMaggio, a third-best outfield of Clemente, Cobb and Mantle. And he said: ‘Who is going to tell Stan Musial that he’s on the fourth team?’ (laughs)

FREDDIE GETS FOXXED

Two years ago it looked as if Freddie Garcia was going to be one the star pitchers in the AL for a long time, but he struggled last year, and last night took it on the chin again, as the Yanks pounded him for nine runs in the third inning, on route to a 16-5 win over the Mariners.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

What was so baffling about Garcia’s terrible outing is that other than the results, it wasn’t all that bad. By all accounts he had great stuff, had command of all his pitches and didn’t lose his cool. When Garcia struggles, that usually means home runs, yet he gave up only one extra-base hit, a double.

“In the bullpen I was warming up, and I was like, ‘This is my day today,’ ” said Garcia, who fell to 3-4, 5.40. “I had good stuff, good velocity, everything going, and then in one moment, it disappeared.”

“The kid got hit,” pitching coach Bryan Price said. “I don’t think he nibbled, I think he went after ’em. They hit his mistakes and they hit them hard.”

The U.S.S. Mariner reports:

What an ugly game that was. Long, cold, and painful. From a fan’s perspective, Garcia seems to self-destruct so completely it’s difficult to believe. Fans are starting to boo him now, and there were a bunch of fans behind me who carped about him for innings after he left — standard stuff, he’s overpaid, see below, but also that he needs to go to the minors to work things out… which may be something to watch, now that I think about it — the Mariners have a long history of abusing the DL and rehab assignments when they need to make someone disappear and in this case, possibly collect juicy insurance money.

Here’s hoping the Yanks still have some runs left in their bats, because they are headed for Oakland, and the three-headed monster that is: Hudson, Zito, Mulder.

DOH!

The Mets misbegotten season took another dopey turn yesterday at Shea as the Mets brass bungled the long-awaited Piazza-to-first experiment. Who is driving this rent-a-wreck anyway? It sure isn’t GM Steve Phillips anymore. It’s simply a matter of time before he’s fired. Art Howe? Mmmm, not likely. (“I didn’t realize you say something on the radio around here it’s all over the place before you even blink,” Howe, the Mets’ first-year manager, said. “It’s a learning process for me.” Can he truly be this naive?) That leaves Fred and Jeff Wilpon. Still, it’s bewildering that an incident like yesterday can actually happen.

The New York press has been swirling around the Mets all season, and the sharks have gone in for the kill this morning. Joel Sherman, John Harper, Lisa Olson, and George Vecsey all sink their teeth into the Metroplitans.

Sherman reports:

These days it seems the Mets sit around and devise new ways to humiliate themselves. The Mets moved seamlessly from haircut-gate to another episode of front office ineptitude. For five years, they shunned this vital subject. Then in one thoughtless afternoon – in the same week GM Steve Phillips and Art Howe said they had no immediate intentions to meet with Piazza – they ended up more slapstick about who’s on first than Abbott and Costello.

Vecsey opines:

The Mets’ front office has a severe case of bone spurs of the thought process. In addition to all the gruesome things happening on the field and in the sick bay, the Mets have ticked off their best player, Mike Piazza.

They are a national example of how not to run a sports team: dawdle, and duck an inevitable decision. Then, when backed into an unfortunate corner by injuries, embarrass your big guy in public.

Sadly, Mo Vaughn’s career could be over. Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus reported yesterday:

Mo Vaughn is fighting the good fight, looking to the best doctors across the country to try and find an answer for his painful, swollen knees. He seems almost hell-bent on having surgery to remove bone spurs that would likely return in just months. There are open questions about options he has for surgery that would allow a return to the field, not only this year, but possibly this career. My guess is that for all intents and purposes, Mo Vaughn is done. He may make cameo appearances, but his days as a feared hitter or even a productive one are now a memory.

MOOSE ENDS SKID

Mike Mussina improved his record to 7-0, Godzilla Matsui hit a homer, and the Yanks rolled over the M’s last night, 7-2. Mussina struck out 12 in 8 innings of work and drew raves from the Mariners:

“The guy is straight nasty,” Joel Pineiro said of Mike Mussina. “He’s filthy.”

…”He spotted his fastball well and had a good knuckle curve and changeup, but he pitches very different now,” [Seattle skipper Bob] Melvin said. “Now he’s got the cutter and the slider, and the arm angles he can throw from.

“He doesn’t put the ball in the middle of the plate, so you’re looking for the ball on the corner, and when you get the balls on the corner, there’s not much you can do with them, anyway.”

Joe Torre added:

“He did a lot of damage with his fastball,” said manager Joe Torre, who compared his ace with Giants Hall of Famer Juan Marichal.
“Marichal used to pitch from a lot of different angles,” Torre said. “And he could throw strikes when he wanted to.”

Joe Torre held a team meeting before the game, and seems less bothered by the Yankees sloppy defense, than he is with their lousy bullpen.

Derek Jeter started his rehab assignment in Trenton, NJ last night and will join the Yanks next week:

When Jeter trotted onto the field to run wind sprints before the game, he received a huge ovation. Even in the red-white-and-blue uniform of the Thunder, Jeter stood out. He was taller, stronger and more poised. Someone suggested that Jeter should have worn his Yankee pinstripes because he looked so different anyway. Jeter jerseys and funnel cakes were the most popular items in the stands.

CHOCK FULL OF NUTS

A mental patient came on the 1 train at 168th street this morning muttering about Art Howe. I kid you not. The beauty part is that he was a dead-ringer for the Mets skipper.

I attended my first game of the season last night at Shea. My oldest and dearest friend in the world, Lizzie Bottoms, works for a non-for-profit organization that supports disabled people. They had a company outing to the ballgame last night, so I basically watched the game along with 500 retards (insert cruel and insensitive Mets joke here). The ‘clients,’ as they are called, were great, clearly the most exciting part of the Mets 2-1 loss to L.A. Steve Trachsel pitched against Hideo Nomo, and I was prepared for a drawn-out, tedious affair, but both pitchers worked surprisingly quickly. The two pitchers are a contrast in styles, but they essentially both look like men doing their morning stretches out there on the mound.

Some people call Shea a dump, and I can see their point, but there is something charming about it’s scrubbiness. It feels so suburban compared with Yankee Stadium. There is a great ethnic mix of people at Shea, but it’s much more about Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island than money-makin Manhattan. When Woody Allen used to crack jokes about guys who wore wool hats and delivered flowers for the florist, he was talking about the kinds of people who frequent Shea. The vendors are worth almost worth the price of admission. “Beeeeah heeeah.” My favorite beer guy (one Todd Gomer) looked like the artist R. Crumb. He had a long neck like an ostrich, and tilted his head to the side before he called out, “Beeeah heeeah.” Another guy was a dead-ringer for the actor Adrian Brody (also from Queens).

“It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me when that guy won the Oscar. They used to say I was John Cusak, now I’m Adrian Brody. Except I’m much better looking, right?”

The other highlight of the evening was spotting Mike Piazza’s poppa outside the stadium on our way in.

The lowlight on the night was having the misfortune to be sitting behind your classic obnoxious Yankee fan. As we filled in our All-Star ballots, he voted for nothing but Yankees and then proceeded to make a loud case for why Jeter is better than A-Rod. I couldn’t hold back and so I got into it with him, until I realized it was a pointless exercise. Man, no wonder Yankee fans are so loathed.

I haven’t talked much about the state of the Mets this week, but they have been all over the papers, most notably Rey Sanchez and his infamous haircut. Today, Bill Madden attempts to set the record straight:

So now, upon further review, it turns out reports of Armando Benitez serving as clubhouse barber to Rey Sanchez were greatly exaggerated. Not to mention totally fabricated.

…By this time, Fred Wilpon must not know whether to laugh or cry at the media’s unquenchable thirst for more and more blood from his wounded ballclub, which succumbed in rather pathetic three-hit fashion, 2-1, to the Dodgers last night. If nothing else, however, I suspect the manner in which the Sanchez haircut affair was misreported and overblown (to the point of “off with his head” hysteria), provided some brief, welcome amusement for the beleaguered Mets owner.

Meanwhile, Mo Vaughn’s career is in peril, though he appears to be taking it in stride:

“I’m 35 years old and I’ve got the rest of my life in front of me. I can’t just let this be,” Vaughn told the Daily News yesterday, rubbing the knee as he spoke. “I’ve got to get this fixed. If (my career) ends tomorrow, I’ll deal with it. I’m not scared. I’m not going to play just because it’s the easiest solution.”

BRONX BANTER INTERVIEW: ROB NEYER

PART II

BB: Are you still attached to the Red Sox now that Bill James is working for them?

Rob Neyer: Sure. It’s kind of funny, because I now have three favorite teams, after years and years of not really caring about anybody but the Royals. Maybe even four, if you count the Mariners. I want the Red Sox to do well because Bill works for them; I want the Mariners to do well because I’m up here now and I see them all the time; and I want the A’s to do well, because I’m such a fan of the work that Billy Beane does down there.

BB: What are your thoughts about theMichael Lewis book?

Neyer: It’s hard for me to answer that question with any objectivity, because I’ve actually become friendly with Michael. I’m a huge fan of his work, and was before I even met him. I’ve read “Moneyball,” his new book, three times. I read it twice while he was writing it, and then I read it once more in galleys. I think it’s a fantastic book. Michael is a great reporter. He’s just brilliant at being in a place and picking out the details that make the story jump out at you. It’s a very vivid story that he tells. Nobody has ever written a baseball book quite like this one, and I think it’s going to be a huge success. Now, the book is going to ruffle some feathers, there’s no question. Already has. I saw a column that Joel Sherman wrote on Art Howe the other day, and there is going to be more stuff like that when the book comes out. Michael had amazing access to the A’s and he wrote some stuff that I’m sure Billy Beane wishes that he wouldn’t have written. But I think the book is fantastic. And if people want to know how baseball teams really work, and what the next wave is in baseball management, this is the place to go. It’s going to be portrayed as a book about Billy Beane and secondarily about the Oakland Athletics, but it’s truly about a lot more than that. It’s really about a new way of looking at the game, and evaluating players, and building teams. I think it will be very influential. Maybe not this year or next year, it might not be for another ten years, when the people who are in college today are working for major league teams. But I really think it’s a great book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

BB: Who are some of the other teams in baseball following suit?

Neyer: They all sort of fall in a continuum. I saw a story in Baseball America recently where everybody was divided up into four categories. And it just isn’t quite that simple. Certainly there’s Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta in Oakland, and Theo Epstein in Boston, and J.P. Riccardi in Toronto, who worked for Billy. And there are a lot of other GM’s that pay attention to that kind of stuff. Mark Shapiro in Cleveland, certainly. Dan O’Dowd in Colorado. I mention these guys, and I know I’m missing another half-dozen.

BB: Cashman?

Neyer: Oh, absolutely. One man can’t really do anything in that organization. It’s too big of a job. But yeah, Cashman is a big believer in statistical analysis. Really, you have to look at what they do as opposed to what they say. To really make it work the way I think it should work, everybody has to be on board. It can’t just be the GM. It has to be the scouting director, it has to be the owner: they all have to be on board with the approach. That’s the tough thing to do. That’s what the Blue Jays ran into when J.P. Riccardi took that job. It’s what everybody runs into when they try to remake an organization. But one of the things that I think is important to talk about is the difference between a new approach and statistics-based approach. I don’t really think that talking about statistics—and that’s what everybody talks about when they talk about what this new approach focus’ on—is what it’s all about. It’s more than that. I think it’s about trying to figure out a different way to do things. And that may be statistics-based or it may not be. It may be coming up with a new way of scouting, or a new way to evaluate scouts, or a new way to hire scouts. And you may still have scouts out there trying to figure out who is the best player, but you have a different kind of scout too. I don’t know. I don’t think the movement or the idea is that we need to rely on statistics more than we already do. That may just be part of it. But that isn’t the underlying principle. The underlying principle is, “Hey, maybe there is a better way to do this, so let’s see if we can figure out what that would be.” As opposed to doing it the way it has been done for twenty, or thirty, or fifty, or a hundred years. Which is the way a lot of organizations still do things.

BB: I’ve noticed how condescending the mainstream media has been towards the sabermetric-based philosophies. The YES announcers have been belittling the Red Sox bullpen strategy all year. What’s worse is that they don’t even seem to understand the principles behind the strategy.

Neyer: This is what every new idea runs into in every field. This isn’t just baseball. Baseball might be particularly backward. Certainly I think football teams have been quicker to embrace new ideas than baseball has. Basketball perhaps as well. I’m not sure why baseball is so resistant to change. Maybe because it’s the oldest sport. It’s more bound by tradition, I think. It’s harder to change the rules in baseball, for example, than any other sport. The other sports, they change the rules all the time. Baseball never changes anything. I think baseball, for whatever reason, is more conservative than the other sports, and the broadcasters and the writers fall in line. A lot of that is because of fear. If a new idea takes hold of baseball, then all these guys who have been in the game, writing about the game, broadcasting the game for decades, have to learn something new. And that’s a tough thing for people to deal with. It’s not a conscious thing. We all resist change. And the longer we’ve been in the middle of a thing, the more we resist changing that thing.

BB: Woody Allen said ‘Change equals death.’

Neyer: Exactly. If tomorrow a law was passed that all baseball writers had to learn sabermetrics, you’d have a lot of guys out of a job. It won’t be a law, of course, but at the same time it’s a little scary for those guys. This thing is happening. It scares people like Hal Bodley to know that something is happening and he doesn’t understand it. A few guys have been able to hang on. Peter Gammons has been able to adapt. I don’t think he buys into sabermetrics really; I don’t think he does. But he’s able to drop terms like OPS into the conversation often enough, where you don’t really know that he doesn’t buy into it. Most writers can’t even go that far, and they are kind of stuck. People like Hal Bodley, for example, are not in danger of losing their jobs. He can write for USA Today for as long as he wants to write for them. But it is a bit disorientating for them to be on the outside looking in as these things happen, and writers like Bodley become less relevant with each passing day.

BB: Christian Ruzich, Jay Jaffe and Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus are just a few of the writers who have been covering the topic of pitch counts, and recently Christian reminded me that in baseball, change doesn’t happen rapidly. You wrote a column about pitch counts last week. What do you make of all of this?

Neyer: I wish I had an idea. I don’t think anybody does. This first time it came across my radar screen I would guess, was four or five years ago. Not that it had never been talked about before that, but it’s when I first really started to focus on it. And now I’ve been hearing promises from people who do analysis, I have been hearing these promises for years: “We’re working on the big one, the Big Study.” And the Big Study hasn’t come out yet! And the reasons it hasn’t come out yet are that most of these guys are amateurs and they don’t get paid for their work, but the biggest reason is that it’s a huge, huge job to sort through all this stuff. There are just so many variables: age, body-type, mechanics, type of pitches a pitcher throws, how hard he was working high school and/or college. You can maybe come up with some very basic rules but the problem is, when your rules are basic you are going to run into obvious exceptions. And when you have obvious exceptions, it will invalidate, at least in the minds of many people, your conclusion.

BB: Randy Johnson ruins it for everybody.

Neyer: Yeah, and I think what a lot of people would argue is that Johnson didn’t throw that many pitches when he was 21. A 35-year-old pitcher is a lot different than a 22-year-old pitcher. But, yeah you’re right. Neanderthals will conclude that if Randy Johnson can throw a million pitches, then everybody else should, too.

BB: What about guys like Doc Gooden, Saberhagen and Orel Hirshiser?

Neyer: People say that Gooden’s drug use killed his career. I think his career got blown out because he got worked too hard when he was 21. He should have been a Hall of Fame pitcher, and might have been if he hadn’t been overworked. But again, that’s really speculation on my part. I think its informed speculation, but it’s still speculation. Because nobody has done the work. I think the work will be done. Frankly—and I don’t have any inside information here, honest I don’t—I think it will be the Red Sox who wind up doing the work. Because they have a real commitment to research, and they have the money to spend on it. So I think that the work will be done, though of course if the Red Sox do the research, nobody else will have it. I’ve been advocating, for at least a few years now, that every baseball team should kick a certain amount of money every year into a central fund that is used to research things like this. “Why do pitchers get hurt?” It hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen, and the Red Sox are going to end up knowing a lot more than anybody else because they’re going to be the only ones willing to spend the money on it.

BB: Speaking of the Sox, I wanted to ask you: Has there been a pitcher in history who has been simultaneously as dominant and as physically fragile as Pedro Martinez has? Or does he stand-alone in this regard?

Neyer: I don’t know. Not as dominant, no. Because the number of pitchers who have been as dominant as Pedro you can count on one or two hands. I read about a pitcher named Slim Sallee back in the teens, who was considered a great pitcher, and he was a great pitcher for a few years. But his reputation was that he could only pitch every five days. Back then there weren’t many top pitchers with that reputation. Most guys were expected to pitch every three or four days. So I think there have been pitchers acknowledged to be fragile, and were still great pitchers. But along the lines of Pedro, no I don’ think so. Everybody knew that Koufax was on borrowed time. He had to use all that ice, and hot, volcanic balm on his arm. There was a perception he had of himself that it wasn’t going to last forever. But no, I think Pedro might be unique.

BB: I understand the appeal of the Red Sox. The Sox have a rich history, dubious as it may be. And the same goes for the Cubbies too. They are teams that are famous for being losers. But what about the White Sox? They are just as sad, and nobody thinks they are literate or cute. What’s up with that?

Neyer: It is kind of odd. Of course what stopped the White Sox in the ’50s were the Yankees, who won the pennant almost every year. It’s interesting; people talk about these curses like they are really odd. There are three curses that I really know about: the Cubs have the Curse of the Billy Goat (or whatever), the Red Sox have the Curse of the Bambino, and the Indians have the Curse of Rocky Colavito. The White Sox should have a curse, too, but nobody ever really talks about it. It would be the Curse of Shoeless Joe, or something. So you have four teams that haven’t won a World Series in basically forever. What I think is odd is how many teams you have that are like that. Of course, three of the teams are American League teams, and some of those franchises have had pretty good teams. The Indians and White Sox were good in the ’50s, but couldn’t do anything because of the Yankees. The Cubs don’t have that excuse, although people say all of those day games were a problem, and I think they probably were. The reason I don’t put a lot of stock in that stuff—first of all, I don’t believe in curses—is that if there are four teams that have the same curse going on, how weird can it be?

BB: I’ve read a bunch of your columns regarding Minnie Minoso and the Hall of Fame. Considering how prominent Latin stars are in today’s game it’s surprising to me that nobody has politicked for Minoso.

Neyer: I don’t really understand the lack of support for Minoso. I think it’s very odd.

BB: He was a popular guy, right?

Neyer: He was popular with the fans. Very popular. And he was both black and Hispanic, which you’d think would do him some good in these sorts of things. A few years ago Tony Perez played the Hispanic card when he didn’t get elected one year to the Hall of Fame, and the next year he got elected.

BB: Did Cepeda play the Latin card as well?

Neyer: No, I don’t think that he did. I don’t think Cepeda ever spoke out. Generally when people talked about why Cepeda wasn’t in the Hall of Fame, the reason given was that he’d been convicted of drug smuggling after his career. I don’t care about the drug thing, but I didn’t think he should have been elected to the Hall of Fame, because he just didn’t do enough things that a Hall of Fame first baseman should do.

BB: Koufax and Gibson are the most venerated pitchers of the 1960s these days. Why has Marichal’s reputation faded so dramatically?

Neyer: I think that are a couple of reasons for that, at least. One obvious reason is that the Giants didn’t win a World Series, and the Cardinals did. And Gibson was outstanding in ’64 when they won, and in ’67 when they won. He also had the 1.12 ERA in ’68 that people still talk about. The other thing is that it’s quite likely that if Tim McCarver had been Juan Marichal’s catcher rather than Bob Gibson’s catcher, I think we’d hear a lot more about Marichal than we do. Because McCarver talks about Gibson all the time. I think it’s those two things: the World Series Effect and the Tim McCarver Effect.

BB: You don’t think the Johnny Roseboro fight has anything to do with it?

Neyer: I really don’t. I don’t know, maybe there’s a little something there. That’s one of my pet peeves about baseball: How we take these tiny little incidents, and blow them out of proportion. It’s like the Alomar spitting incident. Alomar and the umpire [John Hirschbeck] made up years ago, but people still hold it against him. It’s crazy. Roseboro and Maricial are friendly now. People still talk about that incident and try to demonize Marichal—not to excuse the action—but I think if Roseboro was able to forgive Marichal, so should we.

BLAST OFF

Here are a couple of fun columns which take the mainstream media to task, brought to you by The Cub Reporter and Mighty Mike C respectively.

LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY INTO ASS

I’ve become smarter as I’ve gotten older. I don’t watch or listen to any Yankee west-coast games during the work week. No matter what the early score is, I know it will jack me up too much, and then I’ll never get a decent night of sleep. I also know how poorly the Yanks have played on the coast since I was a kid (though I’m not sure of the numbers), so the crank always emerges in me and I never expect to wake up to discover the Yanks have won. And if they prove me wrong, it’s a nice surprise to start the day.

I can’t say I was shocked when I saw the backpage of the tabliods this morning and saw that the Yanks played a sloppy game in Seattle last night, and lost 12-7. Did I say they would be sounding the alarm in Boston yesterday after Nomar made an error that cost the Sox a game? Well, now that the Yanks have dropped three-straight, we’ll be conducting duck-and-cover drills in throughout the Tri-State area this morning.

Naturally, the Sox won, and the Yanks lead in the east stands at a scant two and a half games.

On my way to work this morning, I stumbled across two very lost looking tourists standing on the corner of 50th street and 7th avenue. They were a squat, Midwestern couple. When they saw me they asked, “How do we get to the ‘Today Show?'” I helped them out and then walked with them for a block. The husband commented on my “Eight Men Out” varsity jacket and figured I couldn’t be all bad since I was representing Chicago.

“You a White Sox fan?”

“No, we’re Cubs fans.”

“Well, hell, what’s not to like about the Cubs,” I said.

I got around to talking about the Mets and the Yanks and he says, “I don’t like George Steinbrenner much.”

“Well, I don’t like him too tough either, but I do like the team he’s provided us.”

“What about Arizona? Those Diamondbacks beat you guys in their first year of existence.”

I didn’t have it in me to lay into this rube, even though I was in less than a cheery mood after reading about last night’s game.

“Hell, that was nothing to be ashamed of, especially after they won three in a row.”

“Yeah, well, where is the ‘Today Show’ again?”

BRONX BANTER INTERVIEW: ROB NEYER

PART ONE

Rob Neyer is the most popular sabermetrician not named Bill James. The ESPN analyst has just published his third book, “Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups,” and has prettied-up his home page to boot. I read Neyer’s column regularly and appreciate him for his even-handedness, his self-depricating wit, and his willingness to get to the heart of the matter. I was fortunate enough to talk with Rob last week, and I’m pleased to say he’s as genial over the phone as he appears in print. (It’s always nice when people you admire don’t suck.)

I generally don’t like the idea of splitting interviews up into two parts, but after I transcribed my conversation with Rob, I felt it was the best way to go. We spoke for a long while, and when I went back to see what I could edit out, I found that I just liked too much of what he had to say. I don’t want to completely blast the reader with too much information all at once, so here is Part One, where Rob talks about his how he became a baseball fan and a baseball writer. Neyer talks about his apprenticeship with Bill James, his adventures as a freelance writer, and the experience of writing a book about Fenway Park that his editor hated. Part Two will follow tomorrow.

This interview was conducted via telephone between the Bronx, NY and Portland, Oregon on Wednesday, April 30, 2003.

Bronx Banter: Where did you grow up?

Rob Neyer: I grew up in the Midwest. We moved around a lot, mostly in the Minnesota, North Dakota area, and finally settled in the Kansas City area when I was about ten.

BB: Did you play sports as a kid?

Neyer: Yeah, I was like most kids I think. Or at least most kids that I knew in that era, before video games and cable TV. Playing sports is just what we did. It seems to me, looking back on it, pretty much every day when it wasn’t too cold out, we were playing baseball or basketball or football. I wasn’t all that good at any of those things but I sure did enjoy them. We moved to Kansas City when I was nine, about to turn ten, in the winter or early spring of 1976. It was a great time to be in Kansas City because that was the year of their first division title.

BB: Were the Kansas City Kings still around when you were a kid?

Neyer: You know, they were. They were there until ’81 and ’82, I think. I was a big Kings fan as well.

BB: Tiny Archibald.

Neyer: It was right at the end of the Tiny Archibald era, I’m not even sure if I ever saw him play. The guy I liked to watch was Phil Ford, who was a fantastic point guard. I still have their starting line up memorized. They were good for four or five years there. I didn’t like the Chiefs, both because they weren’t very good and because I’d become a fanatical Vikings fan when I was in Minnesota. Basically I stopped caring about the NBA when the Kings left for Sacramento. I don’t know if I’ve watched a complete NBA game since the early ’80s, asides from the ones that I’ve attended.

BB: Were you interesting in baseball writing when you were young?

Neyer: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I was ever that focused on what I wanted to do. I was a voracious reader as a child, in addition to playing sports and watching as much bad TV as I could fit in. I read a lot, and I think anybody who reads entertains some fantasies about writing some day, but it was never something I was really focused on doing. I didn’t read books about sports, really. I mean I read a couple of kids’ books. One of my favorites was “Strange But True Baseball Stories”; I must have read that one a dozen times. And I remember reading a book about Phil Rizzuto when I was in the fourth grade or fifth grade. It was in the school library. God knows why; this would have been 25 years after his heyday, but there it was. I actually tended to read more science fiction novels and spy novels than anything. I read stuff like Bradbury, Asimov. Yeah, all the robot stories. And I read a lot of military history. Even in the fifth grade, I was reading giant books about stuff like submarine warfare in World War II. So I was a voracious reader, but there really that many sports books, at least that I had around. So no, being a sports writer is nothing I ever really thought about. I never had any idea what I would do one day.

BB: How did you then get your start in baseball writing?

Neyer: Well, it happened all of a sudden when I got a job with Bill James. When I went to college–this was in the fall of ’84–I was a huge Royals fan already, because they had been good. I think it’s a lot easier to become a fan if your team is good. Which is why, parenthetically, that I think it’s good for baseball that the same teams don’t win every year. Because I think you end up with more baseball fans in the long run. Anyway, I went to college at Kansas, which is about half an hour from Kansas City. I went to KU for four years, and was essentially a wash out as a college student. Especially the last couple of years. I quit before I got my degree, and I think I would have probably gotten kicked out if I hadn’t quit. I got a job working as a roofer and had that job for exactly nine months. And then I heard that Bill James, who happened to live a half an hour away from me, was looking for a research assistant, and I applied for job. I have no idea why Bill hired me, but he did.

BB: Were you already familiar with his work?

Neyer: Yes. I meant to say that before. When I was a freshman in college in 1984, the Royals were improbably involved in a pennant race even though they were a pretty average team. I was completely caught up in it, and hungry for anything baseball-related that I could find. I was in the university bookstore one afternoon, and I ran across this book, “The Bill James Baseball Abstract.” I had never seen it before. I was fascinated by it, so I picked it up and brought it home, and I probably devoured it in one sitting. From that point, I was obsessed with Bill’s stuff, and went out and got the books as soon as they came in. Every spring I would haunt the bookstore, literally every day from March 1st until it came out. Is the Abstract here, is the Abstract here yet? That is not a unique experience. I’ve talked to many people over the years who did exactly the same thing every spring. I just happened to be lucky enough to live not far from where Bill lived.

BB: Did you entertain fantasies of working for him when you found out he was a local?

Neyer: I do think I entertained fantasies of working for him one day. I think you almost had to. You had to think that if you’re young, Well, maybe this guy is looking for somebody to help him. It was a dream job, but I didn’t consider it a realistic option. It never would have occurred to me to actually approach Bill and ask him for a job. I even had a chance to meet him a couple of years before he hired me. A bunch of members of this group called Project Scoresheet, which was sort of a precursor to Stats and other organizations, we went out to a Royals game, and I sat next to Bill, but I didn’t really talk to him too much. I was too intimidated. There are people in the world who will identify what they want out of life, and they’ll go get it. And that’s just never been my personality. I have always waited for things to happen, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate, where they just have. For example, an agent e-mailed me one time, and said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Well of course I had but I had never done anything about it. Once I had an agent, I thought, “Well, I should probably try to do this.” It was the same thing with the Bill James. A mutual friend of ours came to me and said, “Hey did you know Bill is looking for an assistant?” And I said no, I didn’t know that. He said, “He should send him a letter and apply for the job.” I sent Bill a letter, and we met for an interview and he hired me almost immediately. I’ve been very lucky in my life. A lot of things have happened to me that…welI, sure I helped a little bit, but for the most part I was lucky to be around where I was.

BB: You mentioned being intimidated by James when you first sat next to him at a ballgame, what was your impression of him when you interviewed for the job?

Neyer: I don’t think I was all that intimidated by him, because it just seemed like a goof. Why on earth would Bill want to hire me? I think once he agreed to see me for an interview, I wasn’t so intimidated any more. Bill is, for the most part, is the person that you’d expect him to be if you’ve read his writing. I remember where we were, were we ate, but I don’t remember much else about the interview itself. The only thing I remember about the interview, literally, is that Bill asked me what my favorite baseball books were. And it wasn’t hard to answer that question. I already had a list in my head. And they happened to be a lot of the books he had listed in his baseball books as his favorites. I believe I told him, “Your stuff, of course. But after the Baseball Abstracts, my favorites are probably ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’, ‘The Glory of Their Times’, and ‘Ball Four.'” I didn’t do that on purpose, it’s just the way it worked. Oh, the other thing I remember is that Bill asked me for a college transcript, and I told him I’d get one, though I really didn’t have any intention of doing that because my grades had been absolutely terrible from my sophomore year onward. Anyway, I got a phone call from Bill a week or two later, and he said he wanted to hire me. That was probably the best moment of my life up to that point. This would have been in December of ’88. I went to work for Bill on January 2nd, 1989.

BB: What did you do as his assistant?

Neyer: I did a lot of everything. I did everything from ordering books for his library to baby sitting his kids from time to time, which I really enjoyed because I love kids in general, and Bill’s kids were great. I paid the bills. Most of my work revolved around writing the Biographical Encyclopedia for Bill’s Baseball Book, a book he did for three years from ’90 to ’92. I was fortunate to do a lot of writing on those. That was really the stuff I enjoyed.

BB: How long did you work for James before he encouraged you to write?

Neyer: I think from the very beginning he encouraged me to write. I have a fair amount of stuff in the first Baseball book, which he started working on three or four months after I started working for him. I would say that my initial efforts were pretty piss poor. I still have a memo someplace that Bill left on my desk one day, critiquing something I had written about Bill Almon, a shortstop of the 1970s and ’80s. It was a harsh, but useful and appropriate, lesson in writing. It pointed out obvious things like Don’t write in the passive voice; People Don’t have things done to the them, they do things. Some of that stuff was hard to take because Bill can be brusque. Especially when he’s the middle of writing a book. But they helped. That’s not to say that I learned all of those lessons immediately, but they did sink in eventually. And I think by the time I left Bill, after four years, I was ready–or at least more ready than I’d been— to go out on my own.

BB: So you really got your degree at Bill James University. He was your mentor and your editor.

Neyer: That’s exactly right. Bill is an amazing editor. I’ve seen him mark up things that I have written, but also things that other people have written, things that were submitted for him to publish in his books, and he’s really amazing. He could have been a brilliant editor at a magazine or a publishing house.

BB: When you were working with James, did you guys go to a lot of ballgames together?

Neyer: You know, we didn’t get to that many games. We went to some games. I remember one game in particular, with Tommy John beating the Royals for his last major-league victory. We probably went to half a dozen games a year, at the most. For three of the four years I worked for Bill, we didn’t live in the same town, we both lived about an hour from the ballpark, and Bill had a family. And from the middle of the summer on, we were always working on the next book.

BB: And the manuscripts were due when, in December?

Neyer: That’s right. The Biographical Encyclopedia stuff, we could work on that at anytime. But once we got under the heavy book crunch, we didn’t do anything else. Bill’s schedule would get crazy and it would consume his life, so we didn’t get to as many games as I wish we would have, in retrospect. But I did see a number of games with Bill and that was always a great experience.

BB: Where did you go after you left?

Neyer: After four years I felt it was time to go. The job was still good, I just felt like I filled that apprenticeship as long as I should have, maybe longer, and it was somebody else’s turn to have that opportunity. We parted on really good terms. I did some free-lancing for about nine months and was a terrible free-lance writer. Just awful. To be a good free-lance writer you have to be able to go out and get work. Unless you are established and people come to you. But I wasn’t at that point yet. I am better at it now than I was ten years ago, but if I had to do that again, I’d still be a bad free-lance writer because I’m not good at making phone calls and getting people to hire me. The first few months weren’t bad. But I had gotten a really good gig writing the backs of baseball cards. There was a set called the Conlon Collection. Basically, they were all photos that were taken by a guy named Charles Conlon in the first forty years of the 20th century. The Sporting News published these cards. I did a lot of research for the cards, and wrote the text for the backs. I like doing historical research anyway, so that was a lot of fun, and they paid really well. After that job ran out, I basically lived hand-to-mouth and check-to-check. I saw my tax return from that year the other day; I think I made something $8,000. This was in ’93. I worked for Bill from ’89 to ’92. In ’93 I freelanced, I made $8,000 bucks and I was reduced to buying food with my mom’s Amaco credit card. It was pretty bad. Then I was fortunate, in that STATS, Inc. was looking to hire somebody to work on publications. They hired me. I believe my first day was November first or November second, 1993. And I worked there for about two and a half years.

BB: Did you put the book together, or were you a general editor?

Neyer: I did all that stuff. After the first year, I think my title was assistant director of publications, which was a lot more high-falutin as it sounds. Did a lot of writing for the various STATS books, all sports: basketball, football, baseball. I helped design some books, and did a lot of editing.

BB: Are you naturally inclined towards math and science?

Neyer: I was always good at math; I was never great at math. In junior high and in high school I was in the advanced math classes, but I wasn’t a math star, or anything like that. I did better on the verbal sections of the standardize tests than I did on the math sections. The brutal truth is that like a lot of other things in my life, I didn’t really have a passionate interest in things mathematical unless they were related to baseball. I dropped out of my Algebra 2 class in high school because it just didn’t interest me. It was too theoretical. I wasn’t very good at my physics class in high school, or college for that matter, because I wasn’t able to apply it to anything that I really cared about. So no, I wasn’t a math or science whiz by any means.

BB: One of the things I appreciate about your writing is that you make statistical formulas human. You aren’t cold or clinical stylistically and that helps me grasp the information much more readily. You also appear to be as interested in the characters who play the game, as you are in the stats themselves.

Neyer: I think that that is certainly true for me. And Bill as well. I don’t get this as much because I’m not as famous as Bill. So people don’t feel quite as compelled to put a label on me, but there are a lot of people who think that all Bill cares about are numbers. That he’s some geeky guy who sits around with a calculator all day. When the fact is that for the last decade plus, Bill has written a lot more about people and stories behind the numbers than the numbers themselves. It’s characteristic of humans that we like to categorize things, to put labels on them and put them in a nice, neat box, because it makes life a lot easier. But if people do that with Bill, and to some extent with me, then I think they are going to get it wrong.

BB: When did you start working for ESPN?

Neyer: In March of ’96. Back then it was called ESPNet SportsZone. The site was run and maintained by a company called Starwave, an independent company that had a business agreement with ESPN; basically we licensed the name. And used some of their talent to provide content, but essentially it was a completely independent operation.

BB: How many columns are you contracted to write weekly for ESPN?

Neyer: It’s changed a little bit. When I first started I was doing one every day. And they were short. And then I started doing one every day, but longer. Then we cut back to four columns a week during the season, and during the off-season it was more like three columns a week. But it’s not really set in stone. I could do three columns a week and maybe a chat a session, or maybe three columns a week and a special sidebar. Like I just wrote something, I took the “no” side of a debate on whether or not Rafael Palmeiro should be in the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t a column, but could count (if I wanted it to) as one of my four columns for the week. I’ve got a contract and it’s pretty open-ended. Basically we just trust each other. They trust me to put out a certain number of words every week, and I trust them not to load too much work on me.

BB: When you’ve finished a piece does it go to an editor before it is posted?

Neyer: Yeah, it does. When I initially started doing this stuff, back in ’96, I had access to all the publishing tools and I would often publish my own column. But in the years since we’ve gravitated away from that, not really by any preference, just that I don’t have the publishing tools on my computer any more. And I think it’s a good idea to have it run by an editor anyway, because it keeps everybody from getting in trouble. I send my column off to an editor and it will be posted anywhere between a half and hour and three hours depending on how busy they are.

BB: Have you been tagged with the label as a Bill James clone?

Neyer: I don’t think I really have. Partly because there is a certain distance between when I worked for Bill and when I worked for ESPN. Also because it wasn’t that obvious to people. When I first did the column I didn’t put at the bottom of the column, “Rob Neyer used to work for Bill James.” You know there are people that do know I worked for Bill; I’ve written about it in every book that I’ve done for example. I’ve probably mentioned in the column a few times. And the fact is if people want to label me that way, I’m perfectly happy to be labeled that way. It wouldn’t bother me at all. I treasure the association. And to an extent, I foster it. There is a quote from Bill on the first book I did, “Baseball Dynasties,” and there is a quote from Bill on the book that just came out. If I wanted to get away from that I could, but I don’t have any desire to let that go.

BB: What was the deal with your second book? The book about Fenway Park?

Neyer: I wrote an article about that experience on my webpage. In a nutshell, what happens was, I signed a contract with a major publishing house to write book about spending a year in Boston going to every Red Sox game. Which I did in the 2000 season. I lived in an incredibly over-priced apartment just three blocks away from Fenway, and went to all 81 home games; I think I went to 105 baseball games that season (including games in Seattle, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Kansas City). I submitted the manuscript. On time. And my editor at this publishing house just basically hated it. Wanted to have nothing to do with the thing. Which is obviously a pretty rough thing to have happen. Not only was there a level of embarrassment—I mean no author wants to submit a manuscript and have it rejected out of hand—but there was a big financial hit there. Because I was living that year as if I was going to get paid for the book I wrote. As it turned out, I ended up getting paid for half of what I should have gotten paid, and I owed the publishing house a significant portion of that money. To this day, I still haven’t paid them back and I’m going to have to do that one of these days.

BB: Was the manuscript something radically different from what they expected?

Neyer: I think that was part of it. I don’t know that they should have expected anything radically different. But one of the things I’ve tried to avoid doing is trying to get into the head of my editor. This was a very successful editor, who’s edited many, many successful books. I don’t know what he was expecting. Clearly he wasn’t expecting what I sent him. But I’m not sure what he was expecting. I think that what I submitted was at least moderately close to what I had promised in my book proposal. But either it was far off from what he thought that was, or it just wasn’t nearly as good as he expected. I don’t really know. But the upshot was, he made some soft noises about trying to salvage the book. Basically rewrite the entire thing. I just found that impractical. And I got the impression from him, but more so from my agent, that they really weren’t interested in rewrites, they just wanted to say that to assuage me a little bit. Maybe keep me from doing something like taking him to court, I don’t know. So we took the book back and tried to sell it someplace else. We had some interest from a few editors but at that point it was too late to publish it that spring. But if you do a book in the 2000 season, what you want to do is publish the following season. There wasn’t time to do that so the people who were interested in it wanted me to rewrite the proposal, and at least some of the book. Make it less focused on the 2000 season and a little bit more on the general Fenway experience. Then we could publish it in the spring of 2002. At that point I just wanted to get this thing out of my way. The publishing experience had been so distasteful. We did get an offer from a company called “iPublish,” which was a division of Time/Warner. “iPublish,” did e-books. They also published mine as a trade paperback for people who asked for it, and it’s still available in both formats. There only as many copies as people order. Economically, you are not going to make a lot of money doing that, because people don’t buy e-books. But my attitude toward that book is that I had fun working on it. I had a lot of fun going to all the games. I met some really good people when I was in Boston. And there are some people who really like the book. Today, I don’t know how good it is. But there are people who like the book, and I’m not going to tell them that they shouldn’t like the book. I learned a lot important things in the process, so I wouldn’t call that book a success, in a lot of ways I’m glad that I wrote it.

BB: Were you a Red Sox fan before you went up there?

Neyer: No, not at all.

BB: Were you a Red Sox hater?

Neyer: No, I wasn’t a Red Sox hater either. Since I was ten I was a Royals fan and haven’t cared about any other team. I have some small rooting interest in the Mariners because I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while now. For the most part, the Red Sox were just another team to me. I visited Boston and saw Fenway Park for the first time in the fall of ’99. I just immediately fell in love with that ballpark. I was there for three games in a row against the Orioles, in September of ’99. I loved it so much I tried to figure out a way to get back there, and writing a book about the park and the Red Sox was the only way I could figure out how to do that.

BB: Did you find yourself pulling for the Sox that year you watched them up close?

Neyer: Oh sure. Yeah, I became a huge fan of the Red Sox. Personally, it would have impossible for me not to become of fan of the Red Sox. I believed it would help the book if the Red Sox did well. If they had won the World Series, then next spring people would want to read about them, and boom: I have a book ready. But even beyond that, I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. I made friends with Red Sox fans. You know, I was at the Park every night, and I’m surrounded by people who care so desperately, so passionately about what this team is going to do. That’s what attracted to me to the project. It was the ballpark, yes, but it wasn’t the ballpark in the sense of this building; it was the ballpark in the sense that when you’re in this place you are surrounded by people who are so passionate about what’s happening. That’s what really struck me. I love going to games in Kansas City; I love going to games in Seattle, but the feeling from the people sitting around you is completely different in Boston than anyplace I’ve been, except for maybe Yankee Stadium. But just this notion, all around you, packed in so tightly, are all these people care so much about what’s happening on the field. It’s something I’ve never felt anywhere else.

BB: Did you make it down to Yankee Stadium that year?

Neyer: I did. I was there for one of the great games of the year. I think it was a Sunday night game: Pedro vs. Roger Clemens.

BB: The 2-1 game.

Neyer: The 2-1 game, that’s exactly right. I wrote about it in the book.

BB: Yeah, I remember that fuggin game. Nixon, that som’bitch hit the homer off Clemens.

Neyer: Yup, you got it. That was an incredible experience. I went to a few Yankee-Red Sox games that year, and they were all great. The fans are just insane for those games, of course.

BB: What were your impressions of Yankee Stadium?

Neyer: I like Yankee Stadium. I don’t like the building a lot. It’s so big; the upper deck is so far from the field. I sat in the right field upper deck, way down the line, one game. I mean you couldn’t hear the P.A. announcer. You couldn’t see the players, they were so far away. By that point I had been to twenty or thirty games at Fenway Park, where basically every seat is close to the field, and it’s a completely different experience. I’m not that thrilled with the building. I don’t like all the blue of the walls and the black of the batter’s eye. I have this prejudice that everything possible at a baseball stadium should be green. And Yankee Stadium doesn’t really have any green accept for the playing surface. So I’m not a big fan of the Stadium. I do enjoy the passion of the fans. I do enjoy sitting there, and looking out on the field, and knowing that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played here. For that reason I think Yankee Stadium is a great place to watch a game. I don’t like the physical plant, per se.

BB: It’s funny because every place the Yankees play on the road, you’ll hear a vocal contingency of Yankee fans. That never happens at Yankee Stadium. Okay it does a little for the Subway Series, but it doesn’t happen unless the Red Sox are in town. If the Stadium is sold out, you know to expect 10-15,000 Boston fans to be in the house.

Neyer: Maybe this is not representative, but after a game at the Stadium with the Red Sox I was on the subway train. It was mostly Yankee fans but there were some Red Sox fans too. And there was a lot of back-and-forth going on. One of the wonderful experiences that a person can have as a baseball fan-it was maybe my favorite memory from that entire season—was being in a subway car after a game and hearing the Red Sox and Yankee fans chanting back-and-forth. And there was no malice. It was all very good-natured. I was standing next to a Yankee fan, and he was having a great time. The Red Sox had won the game, but he wasn’t at all upset. And I asked him about it. He said, “You know what? In the end, we’ll win. So why should we let it bother us.” That’s the attitude Yankee fans should have: “You know what? We’ve been winning since 1920, and the Red Sox haven’t. So we should have fun with it. Eventually we’ll win anways.”

BB: I always take the opposite approach. I worry that the Yankees have won so much, that eventually it will be the Red Sox turn. They have to win it sometime, I worry. Why not now?

Neyer: Well, they do have to win sometime, and it is going to happen. In our lifetime the Red Sox are going to win a World Series.

BB: I agree.

Neyer: But to me, as far as the Yankees are concerned, when you’ve been on top for so long, it’s almost upon you to be a little bit magnanimous about this thing. To me, the Yankee fans should basically just humor the Red Sox fans.

BB: What drives me crazy about Yankee fans is that the downside of what has transpired over the past decade is the sense of entitlement they have about winning. As if the Yankees have corned the market on winning, which is nonsense.

Neyer: Right, exactly. You hear about this all the time with Yankee fans. Yankee fans think that Thurman Munson, and Don Mattingly, and Goose Gossage should all be in the Hall of Fame. Now I think Gossage should be in the Hall of Fame, but the other guys, I’m a bit iffy about. I tended to paint Yankee fans with the same brush, but I’ve met some very nice and very magnanimous Yankee fans who feel very lucky to have their favorite team be greatest franchise in the history of sports. At least in this country.

BB: Hell, you are talking to one of them. It’s what makes me focus on appreciating what we’ve got, every day.

Neyer: That’s right.

BB: I know I’m going to enjoy the season, regardless of whether they ultimately win it all or not. Sure it would be great if they could win another ring, but if they don’t it won’t necessary ruin the year for me.

Neyer: Baseball gives the fan the opportunity to be happy a number of times during the season. If you are a Cincinnati Bengals fan, you may only have the chance to be happy once or twice in a whole season. But if you’re a fan of a truly bad baseball team, you have a chance to be happy 60 times a year. Now, if you are Yankee fan you have a chance to be happy 100 times a year, which is even better. If you win the World Series, then you are happy for the whole winter. Baseball is a marathon. You have all these games, and all these ups and downs, and it’s like a soap opera and all that stuff. I think if you are lucky, you can take it day-by-day. For example, the Royals this year, got off to this amazing start. I’ve never been under the illusion that it’s going to last, or that they are going to win 85 games and the division title or anything, but I’ve been able to enjoy it because you have to take every day as it comes. I’ve enjoyed every one of their wins this year whether they win the division or not.

Tomorrow Rob talks about pitch counts, Pedro Martinez, and Michael Lewis’ hot new book, “Moneyball.” Stay tuned…

YOU GOTS TO CHILL

Nick Johnson may have had his walks-streak snapped on Sunday, but the Times saw fit to give him some props today all the same:

“You see a guy with Nick’s plate discipline in your system and you know that everything else, over time, is going to fall into place,” Cashman said. “The homers and the hitting for average, that’s going to come as he refines his game. But the plate discipline, he already has that. He’s got a pretty high ceiling as a player.”

The Yanks open a three-game serious in Seattle tonight and then move on for three more in Oakland this weekend. Both teams have played the Bombers well so far. It would be a terrific week if the Yanks can go 4-2 on this trip, but 3-3 is acceptable. Anything less than that would be a discouraging.

Meanwhile, the Royals won their 11th straight at home, and finally beat the Red Sox. Nomie tied the game with a homer late in the game, but then his error lead to the Royals comebackvictory. Once again, Derek Lowe was not effective. Oh how the alarm must be sounding in Boston this morning.

ICED

Before Roger Clemens and Barry Zito faced off on Sunday afternoon, Oakland’s Scott Hatteberg–who is featured in Michael Lewis’ forthcoming book “Moneyball,” said that it was going to be like, “Cy Young vs. Cy Old.” He immediately caught himself. He wasn’t trying to stir any shit up.

So what does he do, but hit a homer off of Clemens his first time up. It would be enough for the A’s, because even though Rocket pitched well—allowing 1 earned run in seven innings of work—Zito was better, and the A’s bumped off the Bombers, 2-0, taking the series, the first the Yankees have lost this season.

I don’t mind losing to Hudson, but Zito is tougher to swallow. Pedro is about the only guy who is harder to stomach. But man is Zito sharp. Jim Kaat mentioned several times during the broadcast that Zito, and the other Oakland pitchers look like they are simply playing catch with the catcher. Kaat compared Zito with Lefty Carlton, in that Zito is oblivious to the batters, concentrating soley on putting the ball in the catcher’s mitt.

Zito also had the Gods with him yesterday. When the Yanks hit the ball hard, they hit them at an Oakland defender. When they got on the bases, they ran (or didn’t run) themselves into outs. The only part of the game that frustrated me was that Nick Johnson was brought in to pinch hit with two-out in the ninth and he flew out to center, ending the game and ending his nifty little consecutive-games-with-a-walk streak.

Nuts. But hey, at least the Sox lost, and so things are exactly as they were going into the weekend: Yanks ahead of Boston by three. Red Sox fans must feel like they are right where they want to be. If they were three ahead, they’d be nervous. But three behind is a comfortable place to be.

GIVE AND TAKE

I left work early on Friday to accompany Emily to a doctor’s appointment on the Upper East Side. I had some time to kill so I walked up from midtown, and boy let me tell you, the East Side is as weird and as wack as it’s always been. Strange, cadaverous old honkies, poorly-dressed young honkies, and of course, the occasional nut case. On the corner of 68th street and Second Avenue, a toothless chap was standing there handing out business cards of some sort, running an open dialogue with himself.

“No, I’m not happy at all today. I should be in California. The Lakers won, and so did the Celtics. There are three games tonight, and I wish I could be there. Yeah. I don’t like that Busch at all. No sir. Did you see him in that outfit? Who does he think he is, Tom Cruise?”

I told him not to worry: The Lakers will win. I moved on. I actually entertained myself with fantasies of running into Jason Giambi. I don’t fully understand why it is that many of the jocks that choose to live in Manhattan select the Upper East Side, but I forgive them, because they are not from New York, and so they can’t be totally at fault. After all, who said these guys knew anything about taste (watch Cribs lately)?

Still, I was hoping to run into the big lug, so I could tell him to relax, we are behind him and he’ll turn it around before you know it. But wouldn’t you know it? He never did materialize.

I sat in on Em’s appointment ostensibly to take notes; there is so much information to digest, it’s easy for her to forget half of it by the time she walks out the door. I introduced myself to the Doctor as her food-taster. Em’s medical problems are not over, but we were encouraged, that she still had options. Her Doctor was attentive and reassuring, and how rare is that? When we were done, we jumped on a cross-town bus and went to see “A Mighty Wind,” over by Lincoln Center. Brought to you by the same creative team that made “Waiting For Guffman,” and “Best in Show,” this new movie will appeal to those who enjoyed the first two flicks.

It was exactly what the Doctor ordered. Something light and stupid. After the movie, we strolled up Broadway to the best produce-fine-foods emporium in the city, Fairway, and stocked up for dinner. By the time we were done, a thunderstorm broke out, and we happily got soaked on our way to the subway.

The Yankee game was delayed for over an hour, but they eventually got it in. This is how lucky I am: Not only will my girlfriend tolerate me watching a game; she actually enjoys watching a game herself (I know she enjoys watching me watch a game). Hell, she’ll even sit through a rain delay with me.

Ted Lily, looking thinner in the face than he did last year with the Yanks, pitched against Boomer Wells. It was another awful night for Em’s boy, J. Giambi, who struck out three times, including once with the bases-loaded.

Emily was plum tuckered out, and napped on and off during the game. At one point she woke up and exclaimed, “I don’t know if I was dreaming or not, but I think the Yankees have someone named Bubba playing for them. What the fuck is up with that?” She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

The Yanks won 5-3, and it was a close, tense game. Robin Ventura drew a bases-loaded walk to break the tie, and Nick Johnson later pinch-hit with the bases-juiced again, and guess what? After taking two big hacks and fouling pitches off, he too drew a walk, which extended his streak of games with a base on balls to sixteen. Hooray!
Rivera pitched for the third-straight day, and for the second-straight day, looked sharp.

On Saturday morning, the Gods answered Emily’s prayers and we tackled many messy area’s in my apartment: the refrigerator got a thorough inspection and scouring, my closest took a beating, with old clothes being tossed, and the remaining one’s being folded and put away neatly, and the corner of the room next to my bed, at long last, was straightened-up and organized. Oh, was Ms. Shapiro ever happy. Delicious relations followed all this purging, and then Em was off, and I was left to my own devices for the rest of the afternoon.

It was a cool, but sunny day in the Bronx, and when I was out getting the papers (getting the papers) in the a.m. I thought, Hey Giambi generally strikes me as an optimist. It’s a brand new day. Maybe he can come out and relax a bit today.

Tim Hudson went up against Jeff Weaver in what turned out to be a dandy at the Stadium. Weaver pitched well, but let a couple off two-strike pitches get away from him, and left the game trailing 3-1. Hudson was brilliant. While Hudson may not be as dominating as Pedro Martinez (who pitched his first complete game of the year in Boston yesterday afternoon), he is built in his mold: diminutive, composed, and nasty. Roy Oswalt belongs to the club as well too.

Tim Hudson is the leader of the A’s pitching staff and you can see why. He looks like the leader. On the mound, he has an icy-calm, and seems to be able to maximize his energy on each delivery. He was in full control yesterday, getting ahead of the Yankee hitters and making them hit the ball on the ground with his efficient sinker.

With his cap pulled down over his eyes, he almost looks like a kid’s idea of a badass. Like something out of a comic strip. Hudson has a small mouth that gapes open as he looks to the catcher for the signs, and his scowl reminds me of a young Ray Liotta (though Hudson has a better complexion). He looks like Baby-faced Finster. There is nothing rushed about his demeanor. Calmly, he is in control of the proceedings. He could be a prison guard right out of “Cool Hand Luke,” or maybe he could be Luke himself.

When Jorge Posada flew out to end the 7th inning, third base coach Willie Randolph made jogged by Hudson and made a comment that brought a smile to Hudson’s face. It was no doubt a compliment.

Trailing 3-1 in the ninth, Oakland’s manager gave the Yankees an opportunity by lifting Hudson in favor of closer Keith Foulke. I was preparing a sammich in the kitchen between innings and plotted out the perfect scenario: Nick Johnson leads off with a single; Giambi follows with a homer; Bernie follows that with a homer himself. And if he doesn’t, then better yet, Godzilla does! See how easy it is to be a spoiled-ass Yankee fans?

Johnson did his part, by lining an outside fastball into the left field corner for a leadoff double. Of course, he had drawn a base on balls earlier against Hudson, and tied Willie Randolph for the team record of consecutive games with a walk at 17. Next, Giambi did his part, and got off the schnide, when he blasted a fastball off the faZade of the upper deck in right field to tie the game. I had my mouth full of sammich when he hit it, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I just made a loud “MMMMMMM” chant, like Peter Boyle in “Young Frankenstein.” I got up and started stomping around the living room, “MMM-MMM.”

I even called Emily, who had been watching on her own. Needless to say, she was very happy for her boy.

But Bernie and Godzilla must have missed my cosmic memo, and the game went into extra innings. Juan Acevado coughed up the lead when Eric Chavez absolutely creamolished a fastball into the bleachers for a two-run homer. It was enough to give Oakland the “W,” 4-2.

The Red Sox bullpen blew Friday night’s game to drop the Home Nine four behind the Yanks, but they made it up on Saturday and again trail by only three.

The funniest moment in the Yankee game came in the top of the fourth. Eric Chavez popped out to Ventura in foul territory to start the inning. The winds were swirling yesterday and every pop fly became a miniature adventure. Ventura broke back to his right for the ball, and just at the last moment pivoted his shoulders back to the left to make the catch. Ventura slows the game down, and yet always seems in complete control. He had the ball the entire way. The only problem was that Erick Almonte was chasing the pop fly as well. There was no communication between the two, and right as Ventura squeezed the ball into his glove, he bumped into Almonte and the two fell over each other.

Almonte looked like an over-anxious puppy at the dog run. Ventura was nice not to scold him, let alone bite him. After Tejada reached on a single, Durazo sent a pop up to short left field. Ventura and Almonte went after the ball again, and this time Ventura clearly called him off. Almonte still was probably too close to Ventura, but that’s only because puppies always like to hang around the older dogs.