Daily Archives: December 8, 2008

As we wait for the Winter Meetings to heat up…

Things changed on the 145th Street Bridge yesterday. The wind barreling down the Harlem River stung my face and the new buildings going up at the old Bronx Terminal Market cut down my view.

That view of the old Yankee Stadium has been dying for a long time. I just didn’t want to see it because my whole life has been spent believing that everything I love would always be there.

That has spared me the trouble of ever saving anything. I love scoring baseball games, but don’t save scorecards. I love opening packs of baseball cards, but I’m not a collector. I love writing baseball stories, but have never saved any of them.

Maybe I’m too interested in what’s next to care about the past. Or maybe that’s just the easy way out. Looking forward has always given me hope and I don’t look back because Satchel Paige said that something might be gaining on me. He was, of course, correct.

Paige was always correct although his direction was sometimes off. The new Yankee Stadium has been closing on me for a while now, but it wasn’t sneaking up from behind. It was coming head on all along.

I should have seen it during the last night at the old Yankee Stadium and when the team contacted me about a relocation plan and when my seats at the new Yankee Stadium arrived a few weeks ago. But old habits die hard and I continued to focus on what had always been in front of me.

Then standing in the bitter cold on the 145th Street Bridge it struck me that the new view – which includes parts of both Yankee Stadiums – might be even better than the old one.

It won’t last forever so I took something to save: A picture. It’s not as sharp as a memory, but it already has me thinking about keeping my scorecard from Opening Day.

Joe Gordon was elected to the Hall of Fame this afternoon.  Gordon spent the first seven of his eleven-year career in pinstripes.

Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.

Crash Davis

Of course Greg Maddux is retiring tenth on the all-time strikeout list (3371). Still, when I think back on Maddux in twenty, thirty years from now, my guess is what I’ll remember the most about him is a dinky ground ball to second base. That was the signature out of his prime, a crappy grounder, a squibber that rolled harmlessly to a waiting infielder. Or maybe a little jam shot pop-fly.  Or yeah, even a strikeout, the late-breaking fastball tailing back over the plate leaving hitters with their asses out, hands up and bats still on their shoulder.

In his prime, you rarely saw good swings or heard solid contact against Maddux.

There will be a host of tributes to Maddux this week. Here are the early birds.

Joe Posnanski:

I never presumed to think with Maddux or have a deeper understanding of why he was so good. I just loved watching him pitch, loved the whole scene, loved seeing the frustration batters would show, loved the way umpires over the course of a game became willing co-coconspirators, loved the way catchers would just let the ball tumble into the glove without moving, loved the way Maddux would fidget when he didn’t have all of his stuff working, loved it all. He was Mozart, I was Salieri, and no I couldn’t reproduce it, no I couldn’t get close to it, but I felt like I could hear the music.

Over at SI.com, Tom Verducci writes:

The magic show is over. I dislike absolutes, but of this I am sure: Greg Maddux is the most fascinating interview, the smartest baseball player and the most highly formed baseball player I have encountered in 27 years covering major league baseball. There is no one alive who ever practiced the craft of pitching better than Maddux.

…I will miss watching him pitch. In his prime, Maddux never received enough credit for the quality of his stuff. Too many people equate power with stuff, but Maddux’s fastball, at least back when he was throwing 90 mph, had ridiculous movement — late, large movement. Think about this: he dominated hitters with no splitter and a curveball that was no better than high-school quality.

That’s how good were his fastball and changeup. It wasn’t just location.

Here is Verducci’s 1995 feature profile on Maddux for SI.

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Once upon a time the winter meetings mainly consisted of boozy old general managers getting boozy and doing business.  Today, it is one of the biggest events of the baseball year, and certainly the highlight of the off-season.  It is covered breathlessly on-line and on TV.  It’s where fantasy teams are born.  It’s about rumors and gossip and Did You Hear? and I Gotta-Scoop. 

I went to the 2003 winter meetings in New Orleans after my first year blogging and introduced myself around to guys like Tom Verducci and Jack Curry, Howard Bryant and Tim Marchman, Nate Silver and Joe Sheehan.  Jay Jaffe and I went down together.  Will Carroll, who had been to the ’02 meetings urged us to come.  It’s the perfect place for a guy like Will who loves the adrenaline of the scoop world, of being on the inside, or at least being close to people on the inside.

I had a good time and met a bunch of great guys but I haven’t been back and wouldn’t want to go to another winter meetings unless I was getting paid for it.  For a writer, it is a lot of hard work.

From what I could tell in my one brief encounter, being at the meetings means a lot of standing around.  It has all the trappings of a seventh-grade dance, everybody anxious, waiting for something to go down.  But instead of the girls being the objects of desire for the groups of men, general managers like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein, personalities like Peter Gammons and Buster Olney, are the ones that everyone is gawking at, pretending that they are not being obvious. 

The hotel lobby is filled with columnists and beat writers (Internet writers and bloggiers now too), agents and their assistants, general managers and their assistants, a few managers, a stray former player possibly looking for a coaching job, smart college kids looking for front office work. 

It is a heavily cologned scene.  Too bad Hunter Thompson isn’t still around.

The Hot Stove has been ice cold this year unless you consider the Giants signing Edgar Renteria or the Cardinals trading for Khalil Greene hot transactions.  This year the meetings are in Vegas, which you would hope will enough by itself to instigate some action.  Vegas is either the best place in the world to holding the winter meetings or the worst (or maybe it’s just a little bit of both, depending on your luck).

Even if nothing much happens, being in Vegas at least gives caption writers and columnists plenty to work with.  We’ll see variations on a theme—Viva Las Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas, Ocean’s Eleven, The Rat Pack, Snake Eyes, Flush, Full House, Stip Poker, you name it.  Yes, the writers should have a field day.

We’ll have our ears to the ground, breathlessly following the breathless action, hoping above all else, that somebody gives us something to be breathless about.

What, if anything, do you think will change in the Yankee Universe in Vegas?

With memories of my father, who passed away on this day 14 years ago … this update is for you dad:

• Bryan Hoch of MLB.com has a rundown of the top starting pitchers to be had,  including for each the teams interested, latest chatter, reasons they haven’t been signed yet, and chances of them being signed during the Meetings.
• George King of the Post offers a preview of the Yanks plans for the Winter Meetings.
• Over at the Times, Dan Rosenheck writes of the differing qualities of a save, and how K-Rod’s gaudy 62 save season was actually less impressive than Mariano Rivera’s:

A far better way to measure a reliever’s value is a statistic called Win Probability Added, which compares a team’s chances of winning a game before a pitcher takes the mound to the same figure once he departs. So the closer who protects the three-run lead in the ninth is credited with only 0.035 wins — the difference between the 96.5 percent likelihood of victory when he entered and the 100 percent when he left — while the setup man keeping a game tied in the eighth gets 0.113 wins, for increasing his team’s odds of victory from 36.5 percent to 47.8 percent.

Rodríguez’s 3.33 W.P.A. was only the fourth best among American League closers last year, trailing Mariano Rivera, Joakim Soria and Bobby Jenks. Many of his official saves were insignificant; on Aug. 12, he received one for recording a single out with a four-run lead and two runners on. And some of his blown saves were excruciating, like the walk, single and game-winning homer he surrendered to blow a two-run cushion on July 9.

• John Perrotto of BP.com offers a team-by-team preview for the Winter Meetings.  The Yankee section is pretty much as we expect it.
• Pete Toms at the Biz of Baseball surveys the changing landscape of televised coverage of baseball, especially in light of the launching of the MLB Network on New Year’s Day.  Here’s a reference to the thinking of teams like the Yanks that have their own RSN (Regional Sports Network):

Clubs also see themselves as better able to grow their brands locally when they control the local TV content.   Sports consultant Marc Ganis said of the Yankees’ RSN,  “YES has not only been a financial success, but also a critical success creating programming and implementing sponsorships that bring fans closer to their favorite team and players that likely never would have been done with a non-team-affiliated broadcaster,”

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