The overweight lover’s in the house…

George King on Jorge Posada, DH.

Ben Kabak on prospects.

William with a fun piece on managers and their baseball cards.

[Photo Credit: Anthony Causi]

Seriously, now…got to love spring training.

[Photo Credit: The Best Way to Spend Time On Line]

Bags vs. Kline

This painting always makes me think of “Flight of the Bumble Bee.”

The winter in New York City brings with it a collection of ridiculously poofy jackets. I’m not saying these coats aren’t effective. I own two. They just look a little silly.

But when we wear them underground, and cram ourselves together in a subway car at rush hour, they become a problem. Some of these jackets double a person’s width. And nobody can control the hems of the longer varieties. Flayed jacket tails obscure newspapers and brush cheeks with regularity.

One of the very welcome aspects of spring will be jumping into a waiting subway car without tucking in the edges of my marshmallow coat. It’ll feel like freedom.

For about two weeks, that is, until the heat becomes so oppressive down there that I’ll long for the onset of the next winter.

Valentine’s Day Edition: Meet Me in Montauk

It’s become something of a cliche to say that the romantic comedy is a dying genre, but I think it might at least be on a ventilator. What was the last really good one? The last romantic comedy as good as Broadcast News, let alone, say, His Girl Friday?

My favorite movie of the modern era that might be called a relationship movie is not really a romantic comedy – although it’s very funny in many places, in that kind of laugh-to-keep-from-crying way – and it is, indeed, set on Valentine’s Day. It’s mostly about a relationship, but it’s also about the human mind and storytelling. And depending on your mood and your general feelings about love at the moment, it can be read as either hopeful or depressing. I think it’s both – or anyway, it’s about as hopeful as a movie can be while still recognizing certain depressing realities. Yep, I’m talking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

When I first saw it, at Brooklyn Heights Cinemas, I was not in a good place, romantically speaking, and while I loved it immensely I also thought it was incredibly sad. Now, while I certainly won’t claim it’s an inspiring cupful of cheer, I take a less bleak view. Not so much that love will triumph (the odds are against it, in this film) but that love is worth it. Or, okay, at the very least inevitable. It’s one of those movies that’s a bit of a Rorschach blot. And beyond the central story of Joel (Jim Carry the last time he was good) and Clementine (a fantastic Kate Winslet), there’s a fairly spectacular subplot featuring mind-twisting sci-fi, Mark Ruffalo, Kirstin Dunst, the great Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Woods in the role he was born to play, a whiny creep. The structure is complex and twisty but always somehow comprehensible in a way that’s pretty much brilliant and explains why I will always have nothing but love for screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and his darker and more intellectual style bounces perfectly off Michel Gondry’s whimsical and less tightly-wound direction. And did I mention the soundtrack is fantastic too? The trailer really doesn’t do this movie credit:

I’ve never gone out to Montauk on Valentine’s Day. But I bet if you did, you’d find some very cold, lovelorn people with good taste in movies.

Grey skies, snow flurries in New York.

Stay warm, eat well, be happy.

[Picture by Bags]

Today we’ve got a tie between a couple of Vons:

First, VonRay Opolous, for whom there is sadly no photo available. Opolous played in 1969 for the Mets minor-league affiliate in Marion, VA — alongside the equally-excellently named Victor Worry. (Worry managed a 2-0 record that year despite an 11.77 ERA, but his career lasted just 13 innings.)

and:

Fritz Von Kolnitz. His full name was Alfred Holmes Von Kolnitz, so no wonder someone came up with “Fritz.” He played for the Reds and White Sox from 1914 to 1916, and ended up with a career line of .212/.264/.261. He… must’ve been an excellent fielder. My favorite part, though, is that he played on that 1914 team with Fritz Mollwitz.

I don’t live in luxury.  I don’t reside in one of those pre-war Park Avenue buildings with those heavy glass and wrought-iron doors and the subdued dark wood paneling on the walls. Nor do I live in one of those gleaming apartment “towers” that dot the skyline.

I live in a simple, non-descript seven-story brick building erected in 1965 in Queens. But, our building (a co-op in which I am renting) does have one of those items seen in the “classier” buildings . . . a doorman.

Having lived in walk-up brownstones, residing in a doorman building is a treat. You have an added sense of safety when you arrive home. They hold packages for you, rather than you having to trudge to the post office or asking a neighbor to take in an expected parcel for you. They usually know what’s going on in the building before any of your neighbors.

Our building provides doorman coverage from 10AM-11:30PM weekdays, and 2-10PM on the weekends. Our doormen aren’t dressed in matching grey suits and hats like the ones you find “on the avenue”, but they’re always wearing nice shirts, ties and jackets.

I’ve only been in the building for a little over three years, but I understand that our weekday doorman has been in that position for many years. We haven’t been quite as fortunate in terms of night doormen.

The first one I met was a then-recent immigrant in his late 30s/early 40s, who was in the midst of studying for Medical School. He’d have one eye on the front door, and one on his books. It isn’t a bad gig for someone looking to have some quiet time while making a little dough. Sure enough, when he got his notice of acceptance into Med School, he gave up the doorman job.

His replacement was a nice-enough fellow, probably late-40s, wife, two small children. I came home one night to find him polishing the brass handrails. He held the bottle of polish up and asked me somewhat hesitantly “do you think this is safe to use on these rails?” I took a look at the bottle, and assured him it was OK. Another time, I came home at 11:30PM, to find his family waiting in the lobby for him to pack up and go home. Whatever his story was, it was short . . . he was gone within one month.

Next came Silvio, a Hispanic fellow in his early-to-mid 20s with a quiet demeanor and a well-kept ponytail and goatee. Silvio didn’t have any textbooks with him at the desk. Sometimes there would be a laptop, sometimes he’d be chatting on a celphone headset. I often wondered why someone his age would be subjecting himself to sitting behind a desk and collecting the recycling in an apartment building every weeknight. Was he saving his dollars for something? Was he between “real jobs”?

One night a few weeks ago, I came home to find that Silvio had ditched the ponytail. I thought, “hmmm . . . job interview coming up?”  Maybe I was right, as Silvio was gone a week later. His replacement hasn’t been hired yet, but I’m sure he’ll have his own story.

Picking up on her Varsity Letters presentation, here’s Emma’s debut article for Baseball Prospectus:

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the maxim that if you can imagine it, there’s porn about it on the Internet. That’s no joke. It was only a few years ago that I first learned of fan fiction, when a friend explained that one of his coworkers not only contributed to, but ran, an extensive website entirely dedicated to fan-written stories about the characters from the animated series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. The stories that turned sexual—yes, stories about cartoon chipmunks that turn sexual—were called slash fiction, named for the typographic symbol in the “Kirk/Spock” liaisons that launched the genre in the 1970s.

Naturally, this prompted my friends and I to go online and see if there was any kind of subject, anything at all, and that did not have something pornographic written about it and posted on the Internet. The answer: not really, no. We couldn’t find anything pairing Jay Leno with bandleader Kevin Eubanks, but that was about it.

What we did discover was a trove of imagined romance and sex between baseball players, on multiple websites. I thought that over the years I’d seen most of the dark corners of sports fandom, but as it turns out, I still was not fully prepared for baseball fan fiction. If you’ve thought about it at all, you might expect to find quite a few tales of Jeter and A-Rod, and those are certainly there. But I was less braced for just how prominently players like, for example, Doug Mirabelli feature. You just do not ever expect to encounter the phrase, to quote one story, “Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed…”

Well—Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed anything, really. Let’s leave it at that.

Hey, Now…

I know many of you are, to say the least, wary of Twitter. I don’t blame you at all. I avoided it for a long time, only signed up under pressure from my publisher to promote my book last year, and approached it with a lot of eye-rolling and sighing about how the 140-character limit would be an oppressive bind on my beautiful, beautiful words. I know Alex (or @AlexBelth, if you will) has some doubts about it. And it’s far from perfect – it can be silly, shallow, repetitive, a self-promoting extravaganza. But it can also be funny and useful and downright supportive. It did end up being useful for book promotion and networking and what have you, but I’ve also made actual, flesh-and-blood friends through Twitter; for me, anyway, it helped me connect with people I might not have otherwise. So I know it’s not for everyone and understand the reasons for avoidance, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Well, mostly.

Anyway, via Hardball Talk, here’s a list of more than 200 MLB players with verified Twitter accounts, from Bobby Abreu (mostly in Spanish) to Ben Zobrist (yawn). Most of these guys, in my experience, aren’t a fascinating read – most are too PR-savvy and/or not great with words. I still follow my guy Denard Span, but only because I’m still hoping to find out whether he has any short, poorly coordinated Jewish relatives. And sometimes players slip the PR leash, for better or worse: the Rays’ Logan Morrison is usuallyentertaining, as is Dirk Hayhurst, author of The Bullpen Gospels. Nick Swisher does a lot of charity work on there. So does Curtis Granderson, who has also been pondering his at-bat music for this season; Ozzie Guillen is just as hilariously semi-comprehensible as you might’ve hoped. And the other night the Orioles’ Adam Jones tweeted a photo of turtles having sex.

Have fun out there, kids.

Okay, so I don’t entirely mean that headline. As usual, I’ve been looking forward to spring training since late November. In fact, I always have to stop myself from needlessly capitalizing it — Spring Training — because it seems like it ought to be some kind of official holiday, like Christmas or Independence Day.

So it’s not that I’m not happy that, starting this weekend, we’ll get something vaguely resembling real baseball news. It’s just that I don’t actually want spring training — I want real baseball. Spring training is a plate of carrot sticks and celery when you’re craving a huge hamburger and fries. It’s fine at first, but hardly a long-term substitute.

Sure, the first few days are blissful. Photos of Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada loosening up, stretching hamstrings and that sort of thing. Noting that someone got skinny and someone else fully enjoyed the holidays. Seeing all those shiny pitching prospects practically glowing with promise, before the real world tarnishes them. Seeing that, somewhere, skies are blue and the sun is shining, and the whole world isn’t like New York, covered in filthy gray slush. Yes, there is hope… yes, baseball is coming.

But: still not for six weeks. That’s the thing. Once you’ve looked at the sunny photos for a few days, and then a few weeks later once you’ve watched a few games, which are a pale imitation of real games in that no one really gives a hoot about them and the teams play accordingly, spring training is pretty much a six-week dry hump. If a player does well in spring training, it doesn’t mean he’ll do well in the regular season, so you can’t fully enjoy it. If he plays badly, you worry anyway even though, again, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s good to see prospects you don’t normally get to see on television, but it’s no substitute for genuine baseball where the score is important, or at least as important as a baseball score ever is.

Of course, the good news there is that six weeks isn’t really such a long time. And I guess that’s why I still look forward to spring training… we’re not out of the dark yet, but it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.

Here’s some Yankeeness for you fiends out there:

Over at River Avenue Blues, Joe P links to a Wallace Mathews piece on Kevin Long.

And at IATMS, here’s a note via Buster Olney that C.C. Sabathia has lost 30 lbs.

Joba Chamberlain, on the other hand, has reportedly put on some weight. Check out this great Yankee weigh-in by Steve Goldman. And while you are there, dig the Aceves Challenge by Jay Jaffe.

[Picture by Bags]

Best Worst Movie

As I’ve probably mentioned at some point, for the last year and half or so, I’ve been meeting up with a few friends every Tuesday for Bad Movie Night. We have a few beers, order pizza, and sit around and laugh/cringe/stare in disbelief at a lousy or confusing or misguided movie: Highlander II: The Quickening; Howard the Duck; Bionic Ninja; Gladiator Cop; Body Rock… we’ve been doing this for a while now and the list is extensive. But one of our all-time favorites (“favorite” being a relative term here) is a real classic of the genre, Troll 2. It’s hilariously inept, with laughable costumes, some of the worst acting ever put to film, and a ludicrous plot that not only has nothing whatsoever to do with Troll 1 but is actually about goblins. It’s about a family that makes the mistake of vacationing in a town called Nilbog… which is, of course, “goblin spelled backwards!”

Troll 2 is so much fun in its way that it’s developed quite a cult following, with midnight screenings and gatherings around the country. Best Worst Movie, directed by Michael Stephenson (the now-grown child actor who played the son in the movie) and focusing on the small-town dentist who played his father, is a fascinating look at the bad-movie-loving subculture, and at how the people involved in a film react to having it become famous – or infamous – for all the wrong reasons. It’s alternately very funny and, at times, touching, sad, and uncomfortable. And it’s well worth a watch.

In case you were wondering, tonight’s Bad Movie selection will be Robot Jox.

Has the regular season lost all significance to us as fans?

In the 2010 stretch drive, we watched the Yankees rest their players for the looming Postseason tournament. While there were voices on both sides of the debate, all parties had to agree their was a heirarchy of achievement in which the World Series placed at the top. This reduced the substance of the argument for those of us gunning for the division crown to purely nominal terms.

And the Yankees don’t even hang a little felt pennant unless they win the Series.

But we marginalize the regular season at our own peril. Sooner or later, and possibly even this year, it’s all we’ll have. In those years, I don’t intend to stop being a fan, so I think it’s a good idea to try to realign priorities in order to make that fandom possible. After all, what value is the regular season if losing out on the World Series invalidates everything that preceded it?

Baseball viewed through the prism of the postseason ignores the fact the foundations of championships extend all the way back into April, and even into surrounding seasons. It’s an iceberg viewed from an airplane – most of the mass is underwater.

But no more! We have exhumed the “Lost Classics” of regular seasons past. Games that deserve our attention. Games that defined players and teams, that set-up championships, that were epic poems in and of themselves. Without these games, there are no Hall of Fame inductions, no retired numbers, and no parades. And after all, isn’t baseball a summer game?

THE BIRTH OF COOL (AND CONFIDENT) – July 4th, 1995

Our first extract from the vault of “Lost Classics” hails from the pre-natal days of the most recent dynasty. It was Independence Day, 1995 and the Yankees were visiting Chicago. We need not describe their opponent any further, because way back in 1995, there was no interleague play. Both teams, division leaders at the time of the 1994 strike, were struggling since the return to play and found themselves on the frowny side of .500.

The Yankees had problems in the rotation (I guess as almost every team does almost every year) and were searching for answers.  Even back in 1995, Jack Curry had the goods:

Without Jimmy Key for at least the rest of the season and probably without Melido Perez and Scott Kamieniecki until the second half of the season, the Yankees have desperately searched for starters. They have talked on the phone about trades and searched on the farm for the right prospect.

Rookie Mariano Rivera had debuted earlier in the season and spilled his first cup of coffee with the Yankees right down the front of his brand new uniform. He got the ball four times and was awful three times. In 15 innings, he allowed 18 runs, and even more striking, walked as many men as he struck out – eight. He got battered back to Columbus dragging a 10.20 ERA behind him. But in Columbus, something clicked.

Rivera had not allowed a run in his last 20 2/3 innings in the minors, so when the right-hander returned on Monday for his second stint of the season with the Yankees, he carried a scoreless streak with him. … In his last start, Rivera won a five-inning no-hitter for Columbus against Rochester. … With a microscopic 1.17 earned run average in five starts at Columbus and a 1-2 record and 10.20 e.r.a. with the Yankees before today, Rivera had a goal: to prove he could win in the majors.

Rivera earned another shot in the bigs. He faced the Chicago White Sox who were an above average offensive team – they could hit for average and scored the fifth most runs in the American League. It wasn’t a powerhouse, but it wasn’t a bad representation of the division-winning White Sox lineups from 1993 and 1994. And they couldn’t sniff Mo’s stuff.

He struck out 11 batters, and nine of those were swinging whiffs. When they put the bat on it, they could only manage weak contact as the Sox grounded 12 outs to the infield while getting only four balls to the outfielders. Dave Martinez (later corroborated by John Kruk on Baseball Tonight) offers Curry a likely explanation: “The scouting report we had said that he throws about 85 or 86,” White Sox outfielder Dave Martinez said. “He was throwing a lot harder than that.”

Frank Thomas got him for two singles and a fly out, but in those days, that was not a bad line versus the Big Hurt at his most bone-crushingest. None of the rest of the team had any chance, though the veterans were annoyingly patient and worked all four walks (Kruk twice, Dave Martinez and Ozzie Guillen). Robin Ventura made two loud outs (around a swinging strike out), so I guess he was able to square it up a little bit, too.

Not only was Mariano dominant, he was only in one mini-jam the whole game. It was the type of jam that you’d expect from a rookie, but one that seems totally uncharacteristic given what we know of the pitcher today. After Paul O’Neill staked him a 1-0 lead in the top of the fourth with a solo jack, Mariano committed the cardinal sin of walking the lead off man Dave Martinez in front of Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura. He got Thomas to fly out, but then balked Martinez over to second – that’s one of three balks in his 16-year career.

With the runner in scoring position (the only one he would allow all game), he bore down and struck out Ventura to culminate an eight-pitch at bat. He lost John Kruk on a full count, but rebounded to strike out Warren Newsome to end the threat.

Already cruising, after the fourth he found a higher gear. He allowed only one more single and one more walk, and struck out six to wrap up his night. He left after 129 pitches and eight superb innings and his final line tallied 11 strikeouts, four walks, two hits, and zero runs. The Yankees iced the game with a couple of sac flies and a Bernie Williams triple. John Wetteland wobbled in the 9th and gave up a run but never had to face the tying run as the Yanks won 4-1. I assume there was much rejoicing.

(more…)

Over at PB, Jay Jaffe takes a look at what BP’s PECOTA means for the back of the Yankee rotation.

And while you are there, check out Cliff’s take on Eric Chavez, and Steve Goldman on Jose “Can You See” Cruz.

There’s a movement to make the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday; I don’t know about that, but today I’d be all for it because it’s also PECOTA Day, when Baseball Prospectus unveils its yearly projections regardless of what that silly groundhog might’ve said last week. Always fun to look at, and today, the site is free to all, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

I’ll try to check in later with some thoughts once I’ve had a chance to take a good look.

Happy end-of-NFL-season, everybody. Yankee catchers and pitchers, such as they are, report to Tampa one week from today.

Meantime, it got a bit lost in the Andy Pettitte shuffle from last week, but I’ve been meaning to mention another Yankee news item from Friday: Robinson Cano ditched his previous agent and signed with Scott Boras. It’s no substitute for the actual baseball we’ll get in a few short weeks, but I still found it interesting. Cano is in the last year of his contract, but the Yanks have two option years coming up; in the 2014 season, with Boras on board, do not expect Cano to offer the Yankees any kind of hometown discount. (Not that he should – they have plenty of money, and he’s turned into a genuine star; there’s no reason he shouldn’t get paid accordingly). Second basemen that hit like Cano aren’t easy to find, and I’m sure Boras will get him a massive payday. But I wonder why Cano chose to do this now, with the next two years pretty much taken care of already.

Also intriguing in that, from what I understand, Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano are reasonably close — and Rodriguez famously parted ways with Boras after the PR debacle (though financial success) of his last opt-out. Hmm. Speaking of A-Rod, the FOX cameras caught him and Cameron Diaz together early in the game, and of course she was hand-feeding him at the time:

Only A-Rod. As my friend said tonight, he should probably just stop appearing in public.

[Screencap from the gentlemen at River Avenue Blues.]

Andy Pettitte has retired. That is very sad. We will miss him. Cliff Lee signed with the Phillies. That is very… something else. I guess it depends on the fan.

But these two events, hardly unlikely, and, in retrospect, perhaps foreseeable, are now the crux of a major problem for the New York Yankees. The Yankees, as they stand today, do not have the starting pitching to mount a serious challenge for the AL East crown nor ensure themselves the consolation of the Wild Card.

Since the Yankees made their first spirited run at Cliff Lee in July, there have been 44 trades or signings of credible Major League pitchers (ie, pitchers better than Mitre).

We can whittle that list down quite a bit by eliminating players the Yankees had no chance to acquire – like Javy Vazquez and Matt Garza – and players that were trade chips for bigger pieces – like Daniel Hudson and Joe Saunders. And no need to include the “injury fliers” since the Yanks require immediate help – like Erik Bedard and Brandon Webb. And might as well forget about the dregs, the guys whose marginal improvement over Sergio Mitre isn’t worth the paperwork to execute the contract – like Bruce Chen.

Still, we’re left with over a dozen solid pitchers that changed teams at the exact same time the Yanks were looking. Half of those guys were acquired via trade, the other half by free agency. The better pitchers were all acquired through trade (Oswalt, Haren, Grienke, Marcum, Lilly, Westbrook, Jackson). The free agents, as we have been picking over recently, were not as good (Kuroda, Westbrook, De La Rosa, Francis, Garland, Harang).

But regardless of their relative worth amongst themselves, they are all big-time improvements over the Yanks’ current options. Why aren’t any of them Yankees? I think the Yankees passed on all of those guys because they were saving seats on the 2011 bus. Gotta have a seat open for Cliff Lee. Gotta have a seat open for Andy Pettitte. Never mind that Cliff Lee signing with the Yankees was at best a 50/50 proposition. Never mind that Andy Pettitte was only able to start 21 games in 2010 and would be contemplating retirement for, what, the fourth time?

The Yankees failure to act has now impacted two seasons as their starting rotation was too weak to dispatch the Rangers in the 2010 ALCS.  But I have no idea why. When the Yankees run out of seats on the bus, they should just buy a bigger bus. Yankee money is best used to allow them to deal with excess. In this case, the “excess” would have been having six starting pitchers.

If everything went perfectly, they could have had Dan Haren or Roy Oswalt for the 2010 stretch run. Then signed Cliff Lee and had Andy Pettitte knocking at the door looking for one more go around. CC, Lee, RoyDan, Pettitte, Hughes, Burnett. That was the worst case scenario – having an excess of good starting pitching.

In order to avoid this terrible outcome, the Yankees maneuvered themselves into having a rotation with one good pitcher (I have hopes for Hughes, too). How on earth is this 2011 rotation, which was a very foreseeable outcome from opening day 2010, a better scenario than paying for a possibly superfluous pitcher?

The sound strategy from July 2010 through today was for Brian Cashman to go balls out filling two rotation spots. That strategy gives them the best chance to win the 2010 World Series, and sets up their immediate future in the best possible shape.

The Yanks should be primed for a three-peat and a dynasty. Instead, placing themselves at the mercy of these two decisions, they’ll be scrapping for a place at the table.

Lots of mustache news today, which is my favorite kind of news.

Not only can you order nifty ‘stache-silhouette t-shirts — if you fit into men’s sizes; women, of course, would never be interested in clothing that’s not pink and/or sparkly! Not that I’m bitter or anything — but now Tim Lincecum is growing a lip-warmer of his very own.

Well… sort of. Keep at it, Timmy.

Photo via @ChronLiveCSN.