If you still held out hope of seeing Matt Holliday in pinstripes, you can stop now.
ESPN is reporting that the Rockies are close to dealing Holliday to the Oakland A’s, in exchange for pitcher Greg Smith and some number of other players from a group including P Brett Anderson, OF Ryan Sweeney, OF Carlos Gonzalez and perhaps even closer Huston Street.
By Rob Neyer
My first visit to Yankee Stadium, and for that matter my first visit to the East Coast, was in 1991. I was working for Bill James then, and accompanied Bill to New York for the annual Society for American Baseball Research convention. At that time, I had seen only five major-league ballparks, and none east of Cleveland.
Of course I’d been reading about Yankee Stadium since I was a little boy. By 1991 I was utterly obsessed with baseball — this was before I developed any other serious interests — and in a sense Yankee Stadium was New York.
Just one problem: When Bill and I were in town, the Yankees weren’t. Instead we went to a Mets game at Shea. Now, I don’t mean to complain because it was baseball and it was New York and of course there’s been plenty of history at Shea Shadium. But it wasn’t where Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio played. So one afternoon during our stay, I hopped on the subway and headed for the Bronx, just to see what I could see.
From the outside, I couldn’t see much. If you’ve been there, you probably know that the building doesn’t look like much (and I didn’t walk around to the third-base side to see the big Louisville Slugger). But a big gate beyond the right-field corner was open to the sidewalk, and I could see the field, blindingly green in the sunlight. I wanted to see more, so I scrunched up my courage and walked in like I belonged there.
I got about two steps when a beefy security guard with a mustache and a blazer stepped right in front of me. I couldn’t see the green anymore.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Uh. I just wanted to, umm, see the field.”
“You can’t do that.”
So that was Yankee Stadium, and would be for nearly nine years.
The weather was making everyone uncomfortable. The guys gathered around Juan Carlos’s coffee cart opened their collars and glanced at the early-morning sky.
“It looks pretty good,” someone said. “Another nice day is on the way.”
Everyone nodded and went back to their coffee.
“The weather is too damn good,” someone finally said. “We need it to get really cold. We need it to snow and sleet and pour down freezing rain so we can get this over with. We’re all looking forward to Opening Day and winter won’t even get here.”
“You gotta be patient,” someone else said. “The players need to rest up and Brian Cashman needs time to get the team rounded into shape.”
They all cracked smiles.
“We’re still gonna need a break in this nice weather,” someone said.
“It’s always gotta be something with us doesn’t it?” someone else said.
“Yeah.”
Unless you were living under a rock for the past year or so, had absolutely no interest whatsoever in the race for the White House, or somehow missed Cliff’s Honeymoonlighting post from a couple of days ago, you undoubtedly came into contact with Nate Silver and his election projection site www.fivethirtyeight.com.
Nate’s statistical acumen, part of the driving force behind Baseball Prospectus, is unquestioned. Nate took that knowledge base, and applied it to predicting the outcomes of various political races. His projections for this recent election cycle were quite amazingly on the money.
Today’s New York Times has a very nice piece on our friend Nate. In a quote similar to what we typically find on the cover of the BP annual, we read:
FiveThirtyEight is “among the very first things I look at when I get up in the morning,” said Allan McCutcheon, who holds the Clifton chair in survey science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “He helped make sense of some of the things that didn’t seem sensible.”
Nate even got a pat on the back from the analysis-disdaining Murray Chass:
Using his obvious brilliance with statistical analysis, Silver has expanded his numbers game to Presidential politics and has become an instant superstar in his first time at bat. He correctly forecast the outcome of the Obama-McCain race in 49 of the 50 states, called the total popular vote within a percentage point and was closer on the electoral college voting than anyone else.
That’s a performance that is more impressive and more worthwhile than anything he has done with VORP and WHIP.
Congrats to Nate on his work in both realms.
Some people are turned off by armchair pyschoanalyis, but not me. I love it, far more than I enjoy breaking down managerial decisions or roster construction. So let’s return to our favorite superstar head-case, Alex Rodriguez.
This summer, a magazine writer who once wrote a piece on Rodriguez, told me that the Yankee third baseman is clearly a bright and sensitive guy, the kind of guy who doesn’t feel comfortable in the locker room environment. “He knows it, so does everybody,” the writer told me.
I’ve asked some of the Yankee beat writers about Rodriguez and they contend that he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, but that he does try, too-hard, to be one of the boys.
At the end of the season, I spoke to a Yankee scout who said what I’ve always assumed–Rodriguez’s problems stem from the fact that he didn’t have a father in his life as a kid. Armchair Shrink 101.
I got to thinking about this last week when I re-read an old–and expertly written–profile on Jimmy Connors and his stage mother Gloria, by Frank Deford (SI, 1978):
Playing, competing, with a racket in his left hand, Jimbo is more a Thompson [his mother’s madien name] than a Connors—in a sense, he is Jimmy Thompson. Has any player ever been more natural? But then, in an instant, he wiggles his tail, waves a finger, tries to joke or be smart, tries too hard—for he is not facile in this way, and his routines are forced and embarrassing, and that is why the crowds dislike him. He is Jimmy Thompson no more. He is trying so hard to be Jimmy Connors, raised by women to conquer men, but unable to be a man…He is unable to be one of the boys.
Rodriguez is the natural, he works as hard as anyone, yet he still comes across like a candy ass not a bad ass. I believe that he’s such an achiever that he can do anything he sets his mind to, but he also has a knack, a gift, for getting in his own way, for saying the wrong thing, for coming across exactly how he doesn’t want to come across.
He’ll be in the gossip pages all winter. After what some considered a “down” year in ’08, I can’t wait to see how he’ll produce next season.
Monday Monday (la la la la la la) …. here’s the press:
