Our man Cliff takes a look at Roy Halladay’s Hall of Fame chances over at SI.com:

In each of the five seasons since then, Halladay has won at least 16 games and finished in the top five in the Cy Young voting in his league. He has led his league in complete games in each of the last four seasons and in six of the last eight, led the majors in complete games in three of the last four seasons, led his league in shutouts and strikeout-to-walk ratio in each of the last three seasons, and the majors in both categories in two of the last three years.

Over the last three seasons combined, he has clearly been the best pitcher in the majors, leading all hurlers with 500 or more innings over that span in ERA (2.67), ERA+ (157), wins (58), innings (735 2/3), complete games (27, 10 more than his closest competitor), shutouts (10, four more than the next man on the list), K/BB ratio (6.09), WHIP (1.07), fewest walks per nine innings (1.27), and average game score (61, tied with Tim Lincecum), and Baseball Prospectus’s win-expectancy based Support Neutral Lineup-adjusted Value Above Replacement (SNLVAR), which rates him as worth 24.6 wins more than a replacement starter over the last three years.

So Roy Halladay gets traded to the Phillies last winter and goes out and wins the Cy Young award. Got a no-hitter and a perfect game too and led the majors with nine complete games. Jesus, what a load.

Good for him.

Joe Posnanski wrote a great post recently on Bud Selig and his claim to believe the long-since disproven tale that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, a post which began as follows (with considerable abridgment here because Posnanski is a fantastic writer but good lord, the man is not concise — and you should really go read the whole thing):

Look, I like Bud Selig. Veteran readers of this blog will know that when I start that way — with “I like Person X” — that usually follows with me attempting to then skewer Person X. Well, I can’t help it. I do like Bud…

…So, because I like Bud, I just kind of shook my head sadly when I saw Tommy Craggs’ story at Deadspin, the one where he prints a Selig letter that calls Baseball’s Easter Bunny* Abner Doubleday the “Father of Baseball.”

Joe Posnanski is a nice midwestern fellow. I am not, so I’ll begin my post a little differently: I do not like Bud Selig. He probably does love baseball, as Posnanski asserts, and good for him. But he’s also fond of collusion, allergic to taking responsibility for his role in any of baseball’s problems, rigidly opposed to any change that does not directly lead to profits for the owners, and in favor of any that does. It doesn’t help that he possesses the sense of humor and charisma of a damp cauliflower. And then to find out that the freaking Commissioner of baseball believes a silly, baseless fable about how the game he represents came into being… sure, Bud. And the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and the internet is powered by magical fairy gerbils.

When I read about Selig’s statue going up outside Miller Park this summer, my first reaction was to hope that, in my next life, I might come back as a Milwaukee pigeon.

Anyway, I bring this up now because Selig has been talking about a plan to expand the playoffs and add another Wild Card team in each league, and according to an article in USA Today this morning, many of the GMs at this week’s meetings in Florida are in favor of the idea. And I, although I do mostly like the Wild Card, and give Selig credit for adding it, am not.

Selig plans to address the possiblity of adding one wild-card team in each league to the postseason at this week’s general managers’ meetings. That would create 10 playoff teams. The two wild-card teams would play a first-round series — likely in a best-of-three or one-game tiebreaker — while the six division winners would have a first-round bye.

Obviously the “best” team doesn’t win the World Series every year, whether you go by overall record or overall hitting and pitching stats – and that’s fine; the playoffs would be pretty boring otherwise. But one wants, at least I want, the best teams competing. The San Francisco Giants were not the best team of 2010 by any measure I’d use, but they were a team with legitimately great pitching and I enjoyed watching them win.  The 2006 Cardinals, however, were (in my view) a pretty mediocre team that got hot at the right time (Jeff F****** Weaver pitching like Cy F****** Young, do not even get me started)… and that’s okay too, it was all fair and aboveboard, but I wouldn’t want a team much worse than that winning the World Series. When you play 162 games the weight of your record should mean something.

Moshe over at The Yankee U just put up a post expressing similar concerns. I appreciate the Wild Card because it adds spice to the last months of the season and gets more cities, and more fans, involved til the end. But I think already it rewards mediocrity more than one would want in an ideal world, and I don’t think baseball should push it any further.

Am I just being reactionary here? I don’t think so – I support changes like instant replay; I’m not a purist. But this seems like a cash-grab to me.

Bronx Banter is proud to present “One Throw,” a classic piece of short baseball fiction by the great W.C. Heinz.

All thanks to Heinz’s daughter, Gayl, for making it happen. In a recent e-mail, Gayl wrote:

“One Throw” was first printed in a July 15, 1950 issue of Collier’s magazine. In 1959 Summer Time Scholastic magazine picked it up. I don’t know if it was printed anywhere in between, but it has been reprinted many times since in English textbooks as an instructional piece on how to build a plot, use dialogue, and so on. The most recent contract for a textbook reprint was this past summer. “One Throw” also appears in “The Third Fireside Book of Baseball,” 1968, edited by Charles Einstein….and who knows where else?! I know Dad was always pleased with its timelessness and longevity.

Here it is. Hope you enjoy.

“One Throw”

By W.C. Heinz

I checked into a hotel called the Olympia, which is right on the main street and the only hotel in the town. After lunch I was hanging around the lobby, and I got to talking to the guy at the desk. I asked him if this wasn’t the town where that kid named Maneri played ball.

“That’s right,” the guy said. “He’s a pretty good ballplayer.”

“He should be,” I said. “I read that he was the new Phil Rizzuto.”

“That’s what they said,” the guy said.

“What’s the matter with him?” I said. “I mean if he’s such a good ballplayer what’s he doing in this league?”

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “I guess the Yankees know what they’re doing.”

“What kind of kid is he?”

“He’s a nice kid,” the guy said. “He plays good ball, but I feel sorry for him. He thought he’d be playing for the Yankees soon, and here he is in this town. You can see it’s got him down.”

“He lives here in this hotel?”

“That’s right,” the guy said. “Most of the older ballplayers stay in rooming houses, but Pete and a couple other kids live here.”

He was leaning on the desk, talking to me and looking across the hotel lobby. He nodded his head. “This is a funny thing,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

(more…)

Do the Bus a Bus

Rookie of the Year Awards are out – in the NL, the Giants’ Buster Posey beat out Jason Heyward for the prize, while Neftali Feliz takes home the honors in the American League.

I’m okay with these picks – there’s a very good argument to be made for Heyward, who had more time in the majors, but I think I give Posey the edge for coming in as a rookie catcher and handling the Giants’ staff beautifully. And Feliz over Jackson is tough because he’s a reliever, whereas ex-Yankee Austin Jackson played every day for Detroit, but I think Feliz is the more impressive player.

Also, of course, he has the better name. So.

What do you guys think? Let’s hear it for the kids…

Congratulations are in order for NY Daily News Yankees beat writer Mark Feinsand, who was announced yesterday as the next Chairman of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Feinsand has spent the past four seasons covering the Yankees for the Daily News and the previous six as the Yankees.com beat writer. Some might criticize him for “going legit” and working for a newspaper outfit, but at a time when that was the only way to get the BBWAA card, it was a choice that any of us who write primarily in cyberspace would have also made.

Many in the web community have criticized the BBWAA for being stale, stodgy and not progressive enough in including the ever-growing Web community into its gates. That’s changed in recent years, most notably with Christina Kahrl of Baseball Prospectus receiving her BBWAA card.

For the New York chapter to bestow this honor to Feinsand is a sign of progress. He’s a top-notch reporter and writer, and regardless of the distribution platform, that’s what matters. That was part of the discussion Phil Pepe and I had more than five years ago when discussing why Internet writers don’t have BBWAA cards (Phil was, and is, a proponent, for the record), and it should continue to be the focus.

Perhaps in his new role, Feinsand can be an advocate for the Internet writing community that is working every day to be a complementary resource alongside the stalwarts of the BBWAA. It’s where he came from, after all.

Good luck, Mark, and well-deserved.

Margo Channing had her Eve Harrington. McMurphy had his Nurse Ratched. John McClane had his Hans Gruber.

Every protagonist needs a good villain… and we, the baseball geeks,  just lost an excellent foil in the form of one Joe “Fire Joe Morgan” Morgan.

I’m sure there are people out there — indeed, lots of people — who enjoyed Joe Morgan’s work as an announcer on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. But I don’t know many of them; I don’t think we read the same blogs. For years and years, even before I discovered Bill James and Baseball Prospectus and, of course, the great Fire Joe Morgan, I rolled my eyes at Morgan on Sunday nights. He was a great, great player and is by all accounts a smart man (also a Hall of Famer and the winner of every conceivable baseball award, as you may have heard him mention weekly for the last two decades), but he has the intellectual curiosity of a halibut. He had a pomposity and a petrified worldview that was impervious to questioning or new ideas. Among the writers I read often, Craig Calcaterra was the only one to offer a semi-defense, if you count “Morgan annoyed me, but never so much that I’d celebrate his departure. Mostly because, for as wrong as he could be at times, he was fairly easy to ignore” as a semi-defense. That Craig didn’t feel compelled to mute Morgan, merely tune him out, is the nicest thing I’ve read about the guy’s announcing in years.

Nietzsche wrote that “He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of that enemy’s life”. Of course, he also wrote “Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray.” So let’s not get too carried away with the Nietzsche, but I think that point’s well taken here. Everyone needs a good bad guy, and for baseball fans who were interested in sabermetrics and advanced stats and research (or at least respected those things), Morgan was perfectly cast. He was wealthy and famous and popular enough that you didn’t have to feel guilty about skewering him – not like some random beat writer, who you’d feel bad about ganging up on. And his counterarguments were not exactly reasoned and convincing, as can be seen in this immortal exchange he had with Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs more than five years ago now, recounted in a classic SF Weekly story:

[Craggs]:It seems that you almost take [the book] personally.

Joe:I took it personally because they had a personal thing about me saying Durham should’ve stolen second base in the game that they lost — he stayed at first base, and they hit three fly balls, and the A’s lose another fifth game.

[Craggs]: And that’s the chief reason you don’t even wanna read the book?

Joe:I don’t read books like that. I didn’t read Bill James’ book, and you said he was complimenting me. Why would I wanna read a book about a computer, that gives computer numbers?

[Craggs]:It’s not about a computer.

Joe: Well, I’m not reading the book, so I wouldn’t know.

I remember reading that story when it was published, and after that Joe Morgan wasn’t just another announcer I ignored or rolled my eyes at; he was the face of the enemy. Not in a personal sense; of course I have nothing against Joe Morgan, as a person, and wish him a long and happy life. But he had taken a stand against learning, or reading, or even having a conversation about new ideas, and he had done it in a particularly boneheaded way. He came to symbolize a way of thinking that drives me, and — judging by the comments here all season, every season — many of you right up the wall. But now that Morgan’s gotten the hook, who embodies what I want to argue against? Surely no one with as broad and loud a platform, so much money and influence, no one who will make it so much fun to play the righteous underdog. So yes, I think in a perverse way, I’m really going to miss Joe Morgan.

Sandy Alderson has assembled a super-Moneyball team over in Queens and is being showered with praise, and Morgan’s only real anti-SABR peer, former New York Times columnist Murray Chass, is off in a basement somewhere writing a blog that he furiously insists is not a blog. Who am I supposed to yell at on my TV screen now?

Of course, as was pointed out to me last night, we’ll always have Buck and McCarver. I have no doubt they will outlive us all.

Would you believe?

Break ’em up.

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s the late, great Vic Ziegel on Ali-Spinks II:

he copy of Money magazine offered to Leon Spinks during his flight to New Orleans was full of splendid suggestions for a new career. Soccer coach, that was something the heavyweight champion might want to think about. Nowhere is it written that soccer coaches have to run through strange cities at five in the morning. Or spend great hunks of each day inside expensive hotel rooms that offer baskets of apples and Gouda instead of X-rated film selections. And there aren’t small armies of people telling the cover-boy soccer coach to kick this, do that, no this, no, no, no . . . armies that depend on the heavyweight champion to provide their per diem expenses.

The magazine went unread, of course. Leon Spinks was in Louisiana to defend his title against Muhammad Ali, a 36-year-old body with the staying power of Tutankhamen. Ali was the favorite. Ali was the attraction—the once, twice, and future champion. Leon Spinks? Come on. Just another name on an expired driver’s license.

“Did you hear what Spinks did when he came off the plane?” The lawyer is talking to a sportswriter after the fight. The party is at the Windsor Suite of the New Orleans Hilton. Sportswriters are badly outnumbered by designer suits. Worse yet, the lawyers had heard all the best available fiction.

“Spinks gets off the plane and he does an interview. Everything’s cool. No problems. And then they hustle him into the sheriff’s private car to drive him to the hotel. The first thing he does—this is in the sheriff’s car, right?—the first thing he does is take out a joint and light up.”

Ali won the rematch.

[Art by Neil Adams]

Terrific stuff from Jon Weisman:

If the celebration of Fernando Valenzuela was a highpoint in the history of the Los Angeles Dodgers and baseball, an exhilarating transcendence of a minority among a majority, then the desolation of Glenn Burke was the opposite.

It’s my general opinion that, for all the problems in our society, tolerance eventually defeats intolerance. It can take a long time – decades, centuries – but if you’re on the intolerant side, the side that would deny rights and respect to those who are different, you’re on the losing team. And sometimes I’m mystified by how many people don’t see that, how many people stay with the losers, in such a bitter place.

The reason is ignorance, which fuels fear. Solve the ignorance, and you’ll go a long way toward solving intolerance.

Those might seem like platitudes, but they become starkly real in “Out. The Glenn Burke Story,” which premieres Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at San Francisco’s Castro Theater and at 8 p.m. on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. (According to a spokesman for the channel, the documentary will be available in Southern California on DirecTV’s Sports Pack Channel 696 and Dish Network’s Multi-Sports Package Channel 419, but hopefully at some point it will come available to a wider audience in Los Angeles.) The program depicts nothing short of a tragedy of ignorance and intolerance surrounding a gay man, and though society has made progress since then, it reminds us that greater tolerance can’t come too quickly.

[Photo Credit: The Diamond Angle]

Today’s local NFL action begins with thoughts of Jill Clayburgh.

Photo from phitenusa.com's official blog.

For weeks now I’ve been griping about the silliness of those Phiten necklaces that almost all the Texas Rangers, and many of the players on every other MLB team, were wearing this fall. The necklaces are nothing new (Phiten has an “MLB Authentic Collection” endorsed by Joba Chamberlain, among others), and indeed plenty of Yankees have worn them for years now, but they’ve rarely been as noticeable as the model so many Rangers sported: thick ropes that looked like some of the hideous if well-intentioned friendship bracelets I used to make at Indian Brook Summer Camp back in the day.

I was all ready to unleash a full-on rant, because the “science” behind Phiten sounds like absolute 100% shameless steaming bullcrap; from their website:

Oh sure… “Aqua-Titanium™” technology. Please, tell me more!

Phiten Technology is based around the different applications of our high-intensity Phild Process. Titanium has been found by our scientists to be particularly responsive to the Phild Process; meaning, it is consistently effective in emitting, or “passing on” the stabilizing effect of the Phild Process.

Thanks for defining “emitting” for me, that is a tricky one. And what is the Phild Process, again?

Miniscule beads of titanium are created using the Phild Process. These perfectly spherical beads can then be mixed into a compound to be printed or layered directly onto material to target specific areas of the body with concentrated effectiveness… 

At first glance, the inner core of Phiten necklaces and bracelets may look like mere rubber. However, it actually contains Micro-Titanium Spheres and Carbonized Titanium held together in a compound by the elastomer rubber.

You get the idea. I’m no scientist… in fact, in college the only science courses I ever took were Ecology 110, Intro to Computer Programming, and, I’m ashamed to admit, “Science Fiction, Science Fact”. So maybe I don’t have any right to say it, but I feel confident saying it anyway: this is not real science. It is not how the human body works. It is fairy dust. Besides, I’ve had titanium rods in my spine since high school, and the stability of my energy flow is nothing to write home about, believe me.

I was gearing up for a good screed when much to my surprise, multiple friends on Twitter – people I actually know, and who are quite smart – mentioned they’d used Phiten products, and said that it had worked for them. Which I found… startling.

Upon further reflection, I can believe that it did, even though I’m certain that this product is utter snake oil. I don’t believe that “Aqua-Titanium” does a damn thing for the body, but I absolutely do believe in the placebo effect. Ever had someone mention lice or bedbugs and start itching? Ever taken a pill and been sure it was working, only to discover it was actually a much lower does than could’ve possibly been effective? Not to say that positive thinking can cure cancer, or anything so dramatic. But there are a million examples, and tons of studies: psychosomatic symptoms, and even pyschosomatic cures for real symptoms, are very real… even if they’re not real.

So yes, I believe that Phiten is essentially a scam. On the other hand, if a $36 necklace makes your neck hurt less, or a $25 bracelet makes your carpal tunnel more manageable — well, that’s not such a bad deal. I may resent the pseudo-science, but hey: probably those old 19th century snake-oil salesmen made a few people’s joints feel better, too. Whatever works. And to quote Bull Durham:

If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE!

That rings a lot truer to me than the Phild Process does.

Over at SI.com, Tim Marchman looks at where the Giants rank among the surprise champions of the wild card era:

The baseball commentariat didn’t like the San Francisco Giants’ odds going into this year. Nor did it like them going into the stretch run, as they were behind the similar, but seemingly more talented, San Diego Padres in the NL West. Nor did it like them much going into the Division Series, the Championship Series or the World Series. Which surely makes the wins all the sweeter, and the triumph all the more deserved.

Just how much of a surprise is the Giants’ first championship since moving to San Francisco? Putting a number on this isn’t actually as hard as one might think. There are three factors that make a team a surprise, or none at all: The actual strength of the team, its star power and its position going into the stretch run. A fundamentally mediocre team with few stars and a low payroll that enters the late season in a tight race will, if it wins the Series, stun everyone. A terrific team with lots of pricey veterans that leads the race all year will not.

Charles Pierce and Steven Goldman on Sparky Anderson.

Sad news from the world of basketball: Maurice Lucas is dead.

Charles Pierce remembers Lucas in the Boston Globe:

Thirty-nine years ago this fall, I moved into the 11th floor of a 12-story dormitory at the corner of 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a freshman at Marquette University. (The dorm, McCormick Hall, is round and shaped like a beer can, which is remarkably appropriate in more than the metaphorical sense, and the building has been rumored for almost 40 years to be sinking into middle Earth.) Not long after I moved in, I found myself intrigued by the music coming out from under the door of the room next to mine — music which I now know to have been “Eurydice,” the closing track from Weather Report’s astounding debut album. (Mmmmmm. Wayne Shorter!) As I was listening, an extremely large man came out of the room and introduced himself. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?’ he said.

And that was how I met Maurice Lucas.

For the next couple of years, we talked about music, at least as much as Luke talked to anyone, him being what you call your campus celebrity and all during the glory days of Warrior basketball and the high-sun period of Al McGuire Era. Whatever I know about any jazz recorded after the big band records to which my father listened — Mmmmmmm. Basie! — I learned from Luke, with whom I don’t believe I ever exchanged four words about basketball.

Later that same year, when I was practicing with the fencing team in the basement of the old gymnasium while the basketball team practiced upstairs, Luke came out of the shower wearing only a towel. “Hey,” he said, “show me how to do that.” I handed him a foil and we squared off, I in my full regalia with a mask and Luke in a towel. I touched him once, lightly, in the ribs. He slapped my blade out of my hand and about 20 feet back down the hallway, hitched up his towel, and went off chuckling.

Lucas was one of the memorable characters on the Blazers’ championship team in the ’70s. I remember him later in his career–he was a professional tough guy and a fine player.

If you’ve never read David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game,” you should. There’s some good stuff on Lucas in there. Did I mention that he was tough?

Before the NBA, Lucas played with the infamous Marvin “Bad News” Barnes for the St. Louis Spirits in the ABA. Spirits announcer Bob Costas told Terry Pluto in Loose Balls:

It was interesting to watch Lucas develop. Early in his rookie year, he was coming off the bench. One night the Spirits were playing Kentucky in Freedom Hall and Lucas was trading elbows with Artis Gilmore. At 7-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Gilmore just towered over Maurice. Lucas’s only chance was to beat Gilmore to a spot on the floor and then try to hold off Artis. Despite his enormous size and strength, Gilmore was never known as a ferocious player and he seldom was in a fight. But all of a sudden, Artis just got sick of Lucas’s bodying him and you could see that the big guy was really hot. Gilmore took a swipe at Lucas and missed. Lucas put up his fists, but he was backpedaling like any sane man would when confronted by Gilmore. It was almost slow motion–Gilmore would take a step, then Lucas would take a step back. It was obvious that Lucas didn’t want to fight and was trying to figure out where he could go. Finally, he was trapped in the corner; he had run out of court. He didn’t know what else to do, so he planted his feet and threw this tremendous punch at Gilmore, and it caught Artis square on the jaw. It was a frightening sight. Artis hit the deck. Lucas was going crazy. Now he really wanted a piece of Artis. Guys were holding Lucas back and Artis was still down. For whatever reason, from that point on Lucas developed into a helluva player.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lucas.

Rob Neyer thinks that the Giants are worthy champions:

It’s fair to be surprised that the Giants won in five games. Historically, most World Series have lasted longer than five games. It’s fair to be slightly surprised that the Giants won the World Series at all, because most of the numbers suggested that the Rangers were the slightly better team.

Anyone who is shocked by the 2010 World Series hasn’t been paying attention, over the years. The Giants were a very good team that played better than another very good team over the course of five games. If they play another five games next week, everything might be different.

They’re not going to play another five games. This one’s over. The great majority of Giants fans have never seen their team win a World Series. No Giants fan has seen their team win a World Series since moving to California more than a half-century ago.

Now they’ve got one. And as anyone who followed the Royals in ’85 or the Twins in ’87 or the Reds in ’90 or the Cardinals in ’06 will tell you, the only thing that matters is getting one. All the rest is details.

The Giants are Whirled Champs for the first time since 1954.

Congrats on what’s been a great run.

This is a money game for Cliff Lee, in more ways than one.

I say he comes up Aces and the Serious goes back to San Fran.

Madison Bumgardner, 21-years old, branded the Texas Rangers tonight, but good, throwing eight shut-out innings.

Wait, who? That’s right, Madison Bumgarner. Believe it, folks, it was a thing of beauty.

The Giants won the game, 4-0, and now the Rangers look to Cliff Lee to save their season.