Daily Archives: September 11, 2003

Is Mike Mussina the best starting pitcher to have never won 20 games in a season? Ben Jacobs thinks so. Check out his fine article over at Universal Baseball Inc.

I want to offer my apologies to Mike C of Baseball Rants. His wife gave birth to a baby boy last week, and not a baby girl as I initially reported. Congrats are in order either way. Thanks for setting me straight Murray.

Count Boswell in. Tom Boswell, one of the great baseball writers of the last 30 years, believes that this will be the Red Sox year. Hey, if the Angels could do it last year, why not dream big like Jayson Stark and imagine a Sox/Cubs World Serious, right?

You would think that veteran writers would know better than to choose Boston, despite the very real evidence that the Sox could in fact pull it off. Even Boswell’s wife knows this:

To this day, my wife will not watch an important Red Sox game. Why? “Because it will make them lose.” She’s not much of a sports fan. But she got a proper New England education. If you put hope in the Sox, they will lose. Yet for eons that hope lingered, until the hope itself became an anchor.

But that’s what makes all of this fun. The bigger the expectations, the bigger the celebration, or in the case that history repeats itself, the harder the fall.

As soon as I finished reading Boswell’s article, I recieved the following news from Lee Sinins:

Redsox RF Trot Nixon’s strained left calf is expected to keep him out of
the lineup until at least the weekend. But, BP’s Will Carroll is reporting
that it might be serious enough to put the rest of the season in jeopardy.

What if the White Sox end up being the “cursed” team to win it all?

Greg Maddux will try and win his 15th game of the season tonight against the Phillies. If he is successful, Maddux will break Cy Young’s 98-year old record of consecutive seasons with 15 or more wins, with 16. I’ve been rooting for him to get the record all year, but haven’t mentioned it, cause I didn’t want to put the whammy on him or nothing.

Maddux isn’t talking too much about it either, but the rest of the Braves are:

Leo Mazzone (pitching coach): “It’s a standard of consistency that will never be matched again…”I’ll say it. I want him to get it real bad. He’s meant too much to all of us, on the field and in the clubhouse. He’s been a great influence on the other pitchers. We won’t see the likes of him come by again.”

Don Sutton (announcer): “He could have slammed his hand in the car door. He could have slipped on a flake of cereal his kid left on the kitchen floor. There could have been a player’s strike, and there was. So many things have to go your way. Not only do you have to be good, but you have to be blessed with good fortune.”

John Smoltz (Braves closer): “Absolutely, he wants it. He’ll make it seem like he’s oblivious. Last year he struggled, too. He wanted it. There are certain things you can downplay and certain things you can’t.”

He’s got four more starts left in the season. Good luck Maddog.

Two years ago today the Twin Towers fell. It is a beautiful morning in New York today, clear blue skies with a distinct autumn chill in the air. This is almost exactly the same weather we had two years ago. I heard several conversations on the subway this morning about 9.11. People sharing where they were, and what they saw. I don’t want to think back on it, and re-open those wounds.

But it is meaningful to remember the lives that were lost on that day. It is 8:00 a.m now. In an hour, there will be a moment of silence around town. I will be at Yankee Stadium tonight. I’m sure I’ll get the chills during the seventh inning stretch.

King Kaufman has an interesting article on the derth of football blogs today at Salon.com. Both Edward Cossette and I were quoted in the piece. To be honest, I don’t read much about football, so I don’t know exactly why it hasn’t caught on in the blogging world.

My guess is that most football writing centers around front office and locker room gossip. But that wouldn’t make it much different from any other sport really. Statistics are not the lifeblood of football like they are in baseball.

“In football, statistics are a lot simpler, and mean less, because the situations are a lot more widely varied,” says Sean Smith, whose Purgatory Online blog is about the Angels. What he means is that while baseball is built on a straightforward batter vs. pitcher competition, everything that happens on a football field is dependent on the performance of teammates and opponents. “Compared to football, it’s easier to figure out which [baseball] statistics are meaningful,” Smith says.

Considering how popular statistical analysis is in baseball, it’s confusing why football hasn’t attracted a similar audience. Kaufman opines:

Football, aside from being massively popular, seems ideal for the blogosphere. It’s highly technical and complicated, yet it can also be followed and understood on a “Did you see that hit?!” level. It seems to me that brainy programmer types can appreciate the intricacies of strategy, blocking schemes, zone coverage and quarterback checkdowns at the same time that the, shall we say, less complicated among us can appreciate the game on a more foam-finger-in-the-air level.

The problem with football is that you only have games once a week. What are you going to write about: practice?

The Yankees and Tigers played a game that felt like it was staged by Mack Sennett last night at the Stadium. There were eight errors, three each by first basemen Nick Johnson and Carlos Pena. But if the state of affairs was ugly, it was also amusing for Yankee fans, as they bombed Detroit 15-5.

Johnson made up for his fielding nightmare by scoring four runs. Godzilla hit a homer, and had three RBI; he now leads the team with 99 (Giambi, who was hit by a full-count pitch with the bases loaded, has 96). Aaron Boone hit his first homer at the Stadium and Jorge Posada had seven RBI (89), including a salt-in-the-wounds grand slam in the eighth inning.

The Tigers followed Jorge’s 28th homer with three more errors. Oy.

The Yankees lead remains at 3 1/2 over Boston, who shut out the Orioles yesterday, 5-0. Prince Pedro Martinez pitched eight commanding innings, allowed three hits, walked two, and whiffed nine. Both Oakland and Seattle won too, so there was no change in the playoff standings.

Jayson Stark is the latest writer who thinks this will in fact be Boston’s year:

“If I had to pick one team, I’d pick them,” says one GM. “And the only reason is, I think Pedro (Martinez), (Derek) Lowe and (Tim) Wakefield give them a chance to get the game to the seventh inning. Which is what they need, because their bullpen scares the hell out of me. But they’ve got the best offense in baseball, which makes them the least likely team to get shut down by good pitching.”

Stark adds:

We’re going to pick the best story: Cubs vs. Red Sox. Why the Cubs? Because Prior and Zambrano are a combined 14-1, 1.40 since the break, and if Kerry Wood is your third-best starter, nobody can top that. Why the Red Sox? Because this is baseball’s best lineup since the ’95 Indians — and they can run Pedro out there twice in a short series.

Now if those two teams really played in a World Series, it would be reasonable to wonder if anybody would win. But our first prediction is: Somebody would. Our second prediction is: That team would be the Red Sox, because they’re better-balanced. And our third prediction is: The party in New England wouldn’t end till Opening Day.