DOH!

The Mets misbegotten season took another dopey turn yesterday at Shea as the Mets brass bungled the long-awaited Piazza-to-first experiment. Who is driving this rent-a-wreck anyway? It sure isn’t GM Steve Phillips anymore. It’s simply a matter of time before he’s fired. Art Howe? Mmmm, not likely. (“I didn’t realize you say something on the radio around here it’s all over the place before you even blink,” Howe, the Mets’ first-year manager, said. “It’s a learning process for me.” Can he truly be this naive?) That leaves Fred and Jeff Wilpon. Still, it’s bewildering that an incident like yesterday can actually happen.

The New York press has been swirling around the Mets all season, and the sharks have gone in for the kill this morning. Joel Sherman, John Harper, Lisa Olson, and George Vecsey all sink their teeth into the Metroplitans.

Sherman reports:

These days it seems the Mets sit around and devise new ways to humiliate themselves. The Mets moved seamlessly from haircut-gate to another episode of front office ineptitude. For five years, they shunned this vital subject. Then in one thoughtless afternoon – in the same week GM Steve Phillips and Art Howe said they had no immediate intentions to meet with Piazza – they ended up more slapstick about who’s on first than Abbott and Costello.

Vecsey opines:

The Mets’ front office has a severe case of bone spurs of the thought process. In addition to all the gruesome things happening on the field and in the sick bay, the Mets have ticked off their best player, Mike Piazza.

They are a national example of how not to run a sports team: dawdle, and duck an inevitable decision. Then, when backed into an unfortunate corner by injuries, embarrass your big guy in public.

Sadly, Mo Vaughn’s career could be over. Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus reported yesterday:

Mo Vaughn is fighting the good fight, looking to the best doctors across the country to try and find an answer for his painful, swollen knees. He seems almost hell-bent on having surgery to remove bone spurs that would likely return in just months. There are open questions about options he has for surgery that would allow a return to the field, not only this year, but possibly this career. My guess is that for all intents and purposes, Mo Vaughn is done. He may make cameo appearances, but his days as a feared hitter or even a productive one are now a memory.

MOOSE ENDS SKID

Mike Mussina improved his record to 7-0, Godzilla Matsui hit a homer, and the Yanks rolled over the M’s last night, 7-2. Mussina struck out 12 in 8 innings of work and drew raves from the Mariners:

“The guy is straight nasty,” Joel Pineiro said of Mike Mussina. “He’s filthy.”

…”He spotted his fastball well and had a good knuckle curve and changeup, but he pitches very different now,” [Seattle skipper Bob] Melvin said. “Now he’s got the cutter and the slider, and the arm angles he can throw from.

“He doesn’t put the ball in the middle of the plate, so you’re looking for the ball on the corner, and when you get the balls on the corner, there’s not much you can do with them, anyway.”

Joe Torre added:

“He did a lot of damage with his fastball,” said manager Joe Torre, who compared his ace with Giants Hall of Famer Juan Marichal.
“Marichal used to pitch from a lot of different angles,” Torre said. “And he could throw strikes when he wanted to.”

Joe Torre held a team meeting before the game, and seems less bothered by the Yankees sloppy defense, than he is with their lousy bullpen.

Derek Jeter started his rehab assignment in Trenton, NJ last night and will join the Yanks next week:

When Jeter trotted onto the field to run wind sprints before the game, he received a huge ovation. Even in the red-white-and-blue uniform of the Thunder, Jeter stood out. He was taller, stronger and more poised. Someone suggested that Jeter should have worn his Yankee pinstripes because he looked so different anyway. Jeter jerseys and funnel cakes were the most popular items in the stands.

CHOCK FULL OF NUTS

A mental patient came on the 1 train at 168th street this morning muttering about Art Howe. I kid you not. The beauty part is that he was a dead-ringer for the Mets skipper.

I attended my first game of the season last night at Shea. My oldest and dearest friend in the world, Lizzie Bottoms, works for a non-for-profit organization that supports disabled people. They had a company outing to the ballgame last night, so I basically watched the game along with 500 retards (insert cruel and insensitive Mets joke here). The ‘clients,’ as they are called, were great, clearly the most exciting part of the Mets 2-1 loss to L.A. Steve Trachsel pitched against Hideo Nomo, and I was prepared for a drawn-out, tedious affair, but both pitchers worked surprisingly quickly. The two pitchers are a contrast in styles, but they essentially both look like men doing their morning stretches out there on the mound.

Some people call Shea a dump, and I can see their point, but there is something charming about it’s scrubbiness. It feels so suburban compared with Yankee Stadium. There is a great ethnic mix of people at Shea, but it’s much more about Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island than money-makin Manhattan. When Woody Allen used to crack jokes about guys who wore wool hats and delivered flowers for the florist, he was talking about the kinds of people who frequent Shea. The vendors are worth almost worth the price of admission. “Beeeeah heeeah.” My favorite beer guy (one Todd Gomer) looked like the artist R. Crumb. He had a long neck like an ostrich, and tilted his head to the side before he called out, “Beeeah heeeah.” Another guy was a dead-ringer for the actor Adrian Brody (also from Queens).

“It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me when that guy won the Oscar. They used to say I was John Cusak, now I’m Adrian Brody. Except I’m much better looking, right?”

The other highlight of the evening was spotting Mike Piazza’s poppa outside the stadium on our way in.

The lowlight on the night was having the misfortune to be sitting behind your classic obnoxious Yankee fan. As we filled in our All-Star ballots, he voted for nothing but Yankees and then proceeded to make a loud case for why Jeter is better than A-Rod. I couldn’t hold back and so I got into it with him, until I realized it was a pointless exercise. Man, no wonder Yankee fans are so loathed.

I haven’t talked much about the state of the Mets this week, but they have been all over the papers, most notably Rey Sanchez and his infamous haircut. Today, Bill Madden attempts to set the record straight:

So now, upon further review, it turns out reports of Armando Benitez serving as clubhouse barber to Rey Sanchez were greatly exaggerated. Not to mention totally fabricated.

…By this time, Fred Wilpon must not know whether to laugh or cry at the media’s unquenchable thirst for more and more blood from his wounded ballclub, which succumbed in rather pathetic three-hit fashion, 2-1, to the Dodgers last night. If nothing else, however, I suspect the manner in which the Sanchez haircut affair was misreported and overblown (to the point of “off with his head” hysteria), provided some brief, welcome amusement for the beleaguered Mets owner.

Meanwhile, Mo Vaughn’s career is in peril, though he appears to be taking it in stride:

“I’m 35 years old and I’ve got the rest of my life in front of me. I can’t just let this be,” Vaughn told the Daily News yesterday, rubbing the knee as he spoke. “I’ve got to get this fixed. If (my career) ends tomorrow, I’ll deal with it. I’m not scared. I’m not going to play just because it’s the easiest solution.”

BRONX BANTER INTERVIEW: ROB NEYER

PART II

BB: Are you still attached to the Red Sox now that Bill James is working for them?

Rob Neyer: Sure. It’s kind of funny, because I now have three favorite teams, after years and years of not really caring about anybody but the Royals. Maybe even four, if you count the Mariners. I want the Red Sox to do well because Bill works for them; I want the Mariners to do well because I’m up here now and I see them all the time; and I want the A’s to do well, because I’m such a fan of the work that Billy Beane does down there.

BB: What are your thoughts about theMichael Lewis book?

Neyer: It’s hard for me to answer that question with any objectivity, because I’ve actually become friendly with Michael. I’m a huge fan of his work, and was before I even met him. I’ve read “Moneyball,” his new book, three times. I read it twice while he was writing it, and then I read it once more in galleys. I think it’s a fantastic book. Michael is a great reporter. He’s just brilliant at being in a place and picking out the details that make the story jump out at you. It’s a very vivid story that he tells. Nobody has ever written a baseball book quite like this one, and I think it’s going to be a huge success. Now, the book is going to ruffle some feathers, there’s no question. Already has. I saw a column that Joel Sherman wrote on Art Howe the other day, and there is going to be more stuff like that when the book comes out. Michael had amazing access to the A’s and he wrote some stuff that I’m sure Billy Beane wishes that he wouldn’t have written. But I think the book is fantastic. And if people want to know how baseball teams really work, and what the next wave is in baseball management, this is the place to go. It’s going to be portrayed as a book about Billy Beane and secondarily about the Oakland Athletics, but it’s truly about a lot more than that. It’s really about a new way of looking at the game, and evaluating players, and building teams. I think it will be very influential. Maybe not this year or next year, it might not be for another ten years, when the people who are in college today are working for major league teams. But I really think it’s a great book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

BB: Who are some of the other teams in baseball following suit?

Neyer: They all sort of fall in a continuum. I saw a story in Baseball America recently where everybody was divided up into four categories. And it just isn’t quite that simple. Certainly there’s Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta in Oakland, and Theo Epstein in Boston, and J.P. Riccardi in Toronto, who worked for Billy. And there are a lot of other GM’s that pay attention to that kind of stuff. Mark Shapiro in Cleveland, certainly. Dan O’Dowd in Colorado. I mention these guys, and I know I’m missing another half-dozen.

BB: Cashman?

Neyer: Oh, absolutely. One man can’t really do anything in that organization. It’s too big of a job. But yeah, Cashman is a big believer in statistical analysis. Really, you have to look at what they do as opposed to what they say. To really make it work the way I think it should work, everybody has to be on board. It can’t just be the GM. It has to be the scouting director, it has to be the owner: they all have to be on board with the approach. That’s the tough thing to do. That’s what the Blue Jays ran into when J.P. Riccardi took that job. It’s what everybody runs into when they try to remake an organization. But one of the things that I think is important to talk about is the difference between a new approach and statistics-based approach. I don’t really think that talking about statistics—and that’s what everybody talks about when they talk about what this new approach focus’ on—is what it’s all about. It’s more than that. I think it’s about trying to figure out a different way to do things. And that may be statistics-based or it may not be. It may be coming up with a new way of scouting, or a new way to evaluate scouts, or a new way to hire scouts. And you may still have scouts out there trying to figure out who is the best player, but you have a different kind of scout too. I don’t know. I don’t think the movement or the idea is that we need to rely on statistics more than we already do. That may just be part of it. But that isn’t the underlying principle. The underlying principle is, “Hey, maybe there is a better way to do this, so let’s see if we can figure out what that would be.” As opposed to doing it the way it has been done for twenty, or thirty, or fifty, or a hundred years. Which is the way a lot of organizations still do things.

BB: I’ve noticed how condescending the mainstream media has been towards the sabermetric-based philosophies. The YES announcers have been belittling the Red Sox bullpen strategy all year. What’s worse is that they don’t even seem to understand the principles behind the strategy.

Neyer: This is what every new idea runs into in every field. This isn’t just baseball. Baseball might be particularly backward. Certainly I think football teams have been quicker to embrace new ideas than baseball has. Basketball perhaps as well. I’m not sure why baseball is so resistant to change. Maybe because it’s the oldest sport. It’s more bound by tradition, I think. It’s harder to change the rules in baseball, for example, than any other sport. The other sports, they change the rules all the time. Baseball never changes anything. I think baseball, for whatever reason, is more conservative than the other sports, and the broadcasters and the writers fall in line. A lot of that is because of fear. If a new idea takes hold of baseball, then all these guys who have been in the game, writing about the game, broadcasting the game for decades, have to learn something new. And that’s a tough thing for people to deal with. It’s not a conscious thing. We all resist change. And the longer we’ve been in the middle of a thing, the more we resist changing that thing.

BB: Woody Allen said ‘Change equals death.’

Neyer: Exactly. If tomorrow a law was passed that all baseball writers had to learn sabermetrics, you’d have a lot of guys out of a job. It won’t be a law, of course, but at the same time it’s a little scary for those guys. This thing is happening. It scares people like Hal Bodley to know that something is happening and he doesn’t understand it. A few guys have been able to hang on. Peter Gammons has been able to adapt. I don’t think he buys into sabermetrics really; I don’t think he does. But he’s able to drop terms like OPS into the conversation often enough, where you don’t really know that he doesn’t buy into it. Most writers can’t even go that far, and they are kind of stuck. People like Hal Bodley, for example, are not in danger of losing their jobs. He can write for USA Today for as long as he wants to write for them. But it is a bit disorientating for them to be on the outside looking in as these things happen, and writers like Bodley become less relevant with each passing day.

BB: Christian Ruzich, Jay Jaffe and Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus are just a few of the writers who have been covering the topic of pitch counts, and recently Christian reminded me that in baseball, change doesn’t happen rapidly. You wrote a column about pitch counts last week. What do you make of all of this?

Neyer: I wish I had an idea. I don’t think anybody does. This first time it came across my radar screen I would guess, was four or five years ago. Not that it had never been talked about before that, but it’s when I first really started to focus on it. And now I’ve been hearing promises from people who do analysis, I have been hearing these promises for years: “We’re working on the big one, the Big Study.” And the Big Study hasn’t come out yet! And the reasons it hasn’t come out yet are that most of these guys are amateurs and they don’t get paid for their work, but the biggest reason is that it’s a huge, huge job to sort through all this stuff. There are just so many variables: age, body-type, mechanics, type of pitches a pitcher throws, how hard he was working high school and/or college. You can maybe come up with some very basic rules but the problem is, when your rules are basic you are going to run into obvious exceptions. And when you have obvious exceptions, it will invalidate, at least in the minds of many people, your conclusion.

BB: Randy Johnson ruins it for everybody.

Neyer: Yeah, and I think what a lot of people would argue is that Johnson didn’t throw that many pitches when he was 21. A 35-year-old pitcher is a lot different than a 22-year-old pitcher. But, yeah you’re right. Neanderthals will conclude that if Randy Johnson can throw a million pitches, then everybody else should, too.

BB: What about guys like Doc Gooden, Saberhagen and Orel Hirshiser?

Neyer: People say that Gooden’s drug use killed his career. I think his career got blown out because he got worked too hard when he was 21. He should have been a Hall of Fame pitcher, and might have been if he hadn’t been overworked. But again, that’s really speculation on my part. I think its informed speculation, but it’s still speculation. Because nobody has done the work. I think the work will be done. Frankly—and I don’t have any inside information here, honest I don’t—I think it will be the Red Sox who wind up doing the work. Because they have a real commitment to research, and they have the money to spend on it. So I think that the work will be done, though of course if the Red Sox do the research, nobody else will have it. I’ve been advocating, for at least a few years now, that every baseball team should kick a certain amount of money every year into a central fund that is used to research things like this. “Why do pitchers get hurt?” It hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen, and the Red Sox are going to end up knowing a lot more than anybody else because they’re going to be the only ones willing to spend the money on it.

BB: Speaking of the Sox, I wanted to ask you: Has there been a pitcher in history who has been simultaneously as dominant and as physically fragile as Pedro Martinez has? Or does he stand-alone in this regard?

Neyer: I don’t know. Not as dominant, no. Because the number of pitchers who have been as dominant as Pedro you can count on one or two hands. I read about a pitcher named Slim Sallee back in the teens, who was considered a great pitcher, and he was a great pitcher for a few years. But his reputation was that he could only pitch every five days. Back then there weren’t many top pitchers with that reputation. Most guys were expected to pitch every three or four days. So I think there have been pitchers acknowledged to be fragile, and were still great pitchers. But along the lines of Pedro, no I don’ think so. Everybody knew that Koufax was on borrowed time. He had to use all that ice, and hot, volcanic balm on his arm. There was a perception he had of himself that it wasn’t going to last forever. But no, I think Pedro might be unique.

BB: I understand the appeal of the Red Sox. The Sox have a rich history, dubious as it may be. And the same goes for the Cubbies too. They are teams that are famous for being losers. But what about the White Sox? They are just as sad, and nobody thinks they are literate or cute. What’s up with that?

Neyer: It is kind of odd. Of course what stopped the White Sox in the ’50s were the Yankees, who won the pennant almost every year. It’s interesting; people talk about these curses like they are really odd. There are three curses that I really know about: the Cubs have the Curse of the Billy Goat (or whatever), the Red Sox have the Curse of the Bambino, and the Indians have the Curse of Rocky Colavito. The White Sox should have a curse, too, but nobody ever really talks about it. It would be the Curse of Shoeless Joe, or something. So you have four teams that haven’t won a World Series in basically forever. What I think is odd is how many teams you have that are like that. Of course, three of the teams are American League teams, and some of those franchises have had pretty good teams. The Indians and White Sox were good in the ’50s, but couldn’t do anything because of the Yankees. The Cubs don’t have that excuse, although people say all of those day games were a problem, and I think they probably were. The reason I don’t put a lot of stock in that stuff—first of all, I don’t believe in curses—is that if there are four teams that have the same curse going on, how weird can it be?

BB: I’ve read a bunch of your columns regarding Minnie Minoso and the Hall of Fame. Considering how prominent Latin stars are in today’s game it’s surprising to me that nobody has politicked for Minoso.

Neyer: I don’t really understand the lack of support for Minoso. I think it’s very odd.

BB: He was a popular guy, right?

Neyer: He was popular with the fans. Very popular. And he was both black and Hispanic, which you’d think would do him some good in these sorts of things. A few years ago Tony Perez played the Hispanic card when he didn’t get elected one year to the Hall of Fame, and the next year he got elected.

BB: Did Cepeda play the Latin card as well?

Neyer: No, I don’t think that he did. I don’t think Cepeda ever spoke out. Generally when people talked about why Cepeda wasn’t in the Hall of Fame, the reason given was that he’d been convicted of drug smuggling after his career. I don’t care about the drug thing, but I didn’t think he should have been elected to the Hall of Fame, because he just didn’t do enough things that a Hall of Fame first baseman should do.

BB: Koufax and Gibson are the most venerated pitchers of the 1960s these days. Why has Marichal’s reputation faded so dramatically?

Neyer: I think that are a couple of reasons for that, at least. One obvious reason is that the Giants didn’t win a World Series, and the Cardinals did. And Gibson was outstanding in ’64 when they won, and in ’67 when they won. He also had the 1.12 ERA in ’68 that people still talk about. The other thing is that it’s quite likely that if Tim McCarver had been Juan Marichal’s catcher rather than Bob Gibson’s catcher, I think we’d hear a lot more about Marichal than we do. Because McCarver talks about Gibson all the time. I think it’s those two things: the World Series Effect and the Tim McCarver Effect.

BB: You don’t think the Johnny Roseboro fight has anything to do with it?

Neyer: I really don’t. I don’t know, maybe there’s a little something there. That’s one of my pet peeves about baseball: How we take these tiny little incidents, and blow them out of proportion. It’s like the Alomar spitting incident. Alomar and the umpire [John Hirschbeck] made up years ago, but people still hold it against him. It’s crazy. Roseboro and Maricial are friendly now. People still talk about that incident and try to demonize Marichal—not to excuse the action—but I think if Roseboro was able to forgive Marichal, so should we.

BLAST OFF

Here are a couple of fun columns which take the mainstream media to task, brought to you by The Cub Reporter and Mighty Mike C respectively.

LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY INTO ASS

I’ve become smarter as I’ve gotten older. I don’t watch or listen to any Yankee west-coast games during the work week. No matter what the early score is, I know it will jack me up too much, and then I’ll never get a decent night of sleep. I also know how poorly the Yanks have played on the coast since I was a kid (though I’m not sure of the numbers), so the crank always emerges in me and I never expect to wake up to discover the Yanks have won. And if they prove me wrong, it’s a nice surprise to start the day.

I can’t say I was shocked when I saw the backpage of the tabliods this morning and saw that the Yanks played a sloppy game in Seattle last night, and lost 12-7. Did I say they would be sounding the alarm in Boston yesterday after Nomar made an error that cost the Sox a game? Well, now that the Yanks have dropped three-straight, we’ll be conducting duck-and-cover drills in throughout the Tri-State area this morning.

Naturally, the Sox won, and the Yanks lead in the east stands at a scant two and a half games.

On my way to work this morning, I stumbled across two very lost looking tourists standing on the corner of 50th street and 7th avenue. They were a squat, Midwestern couple. When they saw me they asked, “How do we get to the ‘Today Show?'” I helped them out and then walked with them for a block. The husband commented on my “Eight Men Out” varsity jacket and figured I couldn’t be all bad since I was representing Chicago.

“You a White Sox fan?”

“No, we’re Cubs fans.”

“Well, hell, what’s not to like about the Cubs,” I said.

I got around to talking about the Mets and the Yanks and he says, “I don’t like George Steinbrenner much.”

“Well, I don’t like him too tough either, but I do like the team he’s provided us.”

“What about Arizona? Those Diamondbacks beat you guys in their first year of existence.”

I didn’t have it in me to lay into this rube, even though I was in less than a cheery mood after reading about last night’s game.

“Hell, that was nothing to be ashamed of, especially after they won three in a row.”

“Yeah, well, where is the ‘Today Show’ again?”

BRONX BANTER INTERVIEW: ROB NEYER

PART ONE

Rob Neyer is the most popular sabermetrician not named Bill James. The ESPN analyst has just published his third book, “Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups,” and has prettied-up his home page to boot. I read Neyer’s column regularly and appreciate him for his even-handedness, his self-depricating wit, and his willingness to get to the heart of the matter. I was fortunate enough to talk with Rob last week, and I’m pleased to say he’s as genial over the phone as he appears in print. (It’s always nice when people you admire don’t suck.)

I generally don’t like the idea of splitting interviews up into two parts, but after I transcribed my conversation with Rob, I felt it was the best way to go. We spoke for a long while, and when I went back to see what I could edit out, I found that I just liked too much of what he had to say. I don’t want to completely blast the reader with too much information all at once, so here is Part One, where Rob talks about his how he became a baseball fan and a baseball writer. Neyer talks about his apprenticeship with Bill James, his adventures as a freelance writer, and the experience of writing a book about Fenway Park that his editor hated. Part Two will follow tomorrow.

This interview was conducted via telephone between the Bronx, NY and Portland, Oregon on Wednesday, April 30, 2003.

Bronx Banter: Where did you grow up?

Rob Neyer: I grew up in the Midwest. We moved around a lot, mostly in the Minnesota, North Dakota area, and finally settled in the Kansas City area when I was about ten.

BB: Did you play sports as a kid?

Neyer: Yeah, I was like most kids I think. Or at least most kids that I knew in that era, before video games and cable TV. Playing sports is just what we did. It seems to me, looking back on it, pretty much every day when it wasn’t too cold out, we were playing baseball or basketball or football. I wasn’t all that good at any of those things but I sure did enjoy them. We moved to Kansas City when I was nine, about to turn ten, in the winter or early spring of 1976. It was a great time to be in Kansas City because that was the year of their first division title.

BB: Were the Kansas City Kings still around when you were a kid?

Neyer: You know, they were. They were there until ’81 and ’82, I think. I was a big Kings fan as well.

BB: Tiny Archibald.

Neyer: It was right at the end of the Tiny Archibald era, I’m not even sure if I ever saw him play. The guy I liked to watch was Phil Ford, who was a fantastic point guard. I still have their starting line up memorized. They were good for four or five years there. I didn’t like the Chiefs, both because they weren’t very good and because I’d become a fanatical Vikings fan when I was in Minnesota. Basically I stopped caring about the NBA when the Kings left for Sacramento. I don’t know if I’ve watched a complete NBA game since the early ’80s, asides from the ones that I’ve attended.

BB: Were you interesting in baseball writing when you were young?

Neyer: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I was ever that focused on what I wanted to do. I was a voracious reader as a child, in addition to playing sports and watching as much bad TV as I could fit in. I read a lot, and I think anybody who reads entertains some fantasies about writing some day, but it was never something I was really focused on doing. I didn’t read books about sports, really. I mean I read a couple of kids’ books. One of my favorites was “Strange But True Baseball Stories”; I must have read that one a dozen times. And I remember reading a book about Phil Rizzuto when I was in the fourth grade or fifth grade. It was in the school library. God knows why; this would have been 25 years after his heyday, but there it was. I actually tended to read more science fiction novels and spy novels than anything. I read stuff like Bradbury, Asimov. Yeah, all the robot stories. And I read a lot of military history. Even in the fifth grade, I was reading giant books about stuff like submarine warfare in World War II. So I was a voracious reader, but there really that many sports books, at least that I had around. So no, being a sports writer is nothing I ever really thought about. I never had any idea what I would do one day.

BB: How did you then get your start in baseball writing?

Neyer: Well, it happened all of a sudden when I got a job with Bill James. When I went to college–this was in the fall of ’84–I was a huge Royals fan already, because they had been good. I think it’s a lot easier to become a fan if your team is good. Which is why, parenthetically, that I think it’s good for baseball that the same teams don’t win every year. Because I think you end up with more baseball fans in the long run. Anyway, I went to college at Kansas, which is about half an hour from Kansas City. I went to KU for four years, and was essentially a wash out as a college student. Especially the last couple of years. I quit before I got my degree, and I think I would have probably gotten kicked out if I hadn’t quit. I got a job working as a roofer and had that job for exactly nine months. And then I heard that Bill James, who happened to live a half an hour away from me, was looking for a research assistant, and I applied for job. I have no idea why Bill hired me, but he did.

BB: Were you already familiar with his work?

Neyer: Yes. I meant to say that before. When I was a freshman in college in 1984, the Royals were improbably involved in a pennant race even though they were a pretty average team. I was completely caught up in it, and hungry for anything baseball-related that I could find. I was in the university bookstore one afternoon, and I ran across this book, “The Bill James Baseball Abstract.” I had never seen it before. I was fascinated by it, so I picked it up and brought it home, and I probably devoured it in one sitting. From that point, I was obsessed with Bill’s stuff, and went out and got the books as soon as they came in. Every spring I would haunt the bookstore, literally every day from March 1st until it came out. Is the Abstract here, is the Abstract here yet? That is not a unique experience. I’ve talked to many people over the years who did exactly the same thing every spring. I just happened to be lucky enough to live not far from where Bill lived.

BB: Did you entertain fantasies of working for him when you found out he was a local?

Neyer: I do think I entertained fantasies of working for him one day. I think you almost had to. You had to think that if you’re young, Well, maybe this guy is looking for somebody to help him. It was a dream job, but I didn’t consider it a realistic option. It never would have occurred to me to actually approach Bill and ask him for a job. I even had a chance to meet him a couple of years before he hired me. A bunch of members of this group called Project Scoresheet, which was sort of a precursor to Stats and other organizations, we went out to a Royals game, and I sat next to Bill, but I didn’t really talk to him too much. I was too intimidated. There are people in the world who will identify what they want out of life, and they’ll go get it. And that’s just never been my personality. I have always waited for things to happen, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate, where they just have. For example, an agent e-mailed me one time, and said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Well of course I had but I had never done anything about it. Once I had an agent, I thought, “Well, I should probably try to do this.” It was the same thing with the Bill James. A mutual friend of ours came to me and said, “Hey did you know Bill is looking for an assistant?” And I said no, I didn’t know that. He said, “He should send him a letter and apply for the job.” I sent Bill a letter, and we met for an interview and he hired me almost immediately. I’ve been very lucky in my life. A lot of things have happened to me that…welI, sure I helped a little bit, but for the most part I was lucky to be around where I was.

BB: You mentioned being intimidated by James when you first sat next to him at a ballgame, what was your impression of him when you interviewed for the job?

Neyer: I don’t think I was all that intimidated by him, because it just seemed like a goof. Why on earth would Bill want to hire me? I think once he agreed to see me for an interview, I wasn’t so intimidated any more. Bill is, for the most part, is the person that you’d expect him to be if you’ve read his writing. I remember where we were, were we ate, but I don’t remember much else about the interview itself. The only thing I remember about the interview, literally, is that Bill asked me what my favorite baseball books were. And it wasn’t hard to answer that question. I already had a list in my head. And they happened to be a lot of the books he had listed in his baseball books as his favorites. I believe I told him, “Your stuff, of course. But after the Baseball Abstracts, my favorites are probably ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’, ‘The Glory of Their Times’, and ‘Ball Four.'” I didn’t do that on purpose, it’s just the way it worked. Oh, the other thing I remember is that Bill asked me for a college transcript, and I told him I’d get one, though I really didn’t have any intention of doing that because my grades had been absolutely terrible from my sophomore year onward. Anyway, I got a phone call from Bill a week or two later, and he said he wanted to hire me. That was probably the best moment of my life up to that point. This would have been in December of ’88. I went to work for Bill on January 2nd, 1989.

BB: What did you do as his assistant?

Neyer: I did a lot of everything. I did everything from ordering books for his library to baby sitting his kids from time to time, which I really enjoyed because I love kids in general, and Bill’s kids were great. I paid the bills. Most of my work revolved around writing the Biographical Encyclopedia for Bill’s Baseball Book, a book he did for three years from ’90 to ’92. I was fortunate to do a lot of writing on those. That was really the stuff I enjoyed.

BB: How long did you work for James before he encouraged you to write?

Neyer: I think from the very beginning he encouraged me to write. I have a fair amount of stuff in the first Baseball book, which he started working on three or four months after I started working for him. I would say that my initial efforts were pretty piss poor. I still have a memo someplace that Bill left on my desk one day, critiquing something I had written about Bill Almon, a shortstop of the 1970s and ’80s. It was a harsh, but useful and appropriate, lesson in writing. It pointed out obvious things like Don’t write in the passive voice; People Don’t have things done to the them, they do things. Some of that stuff was hard to take because Bill can be brusque. Especially when he’s the middle of writing a book. But they helped. That’s not to say that I learned all of those lessons immediately, but they did sink in eventually. And I think by the time I left Bill, after four years, I was ready–or at least more ready than I’d been— to go out on my own.

BB: So you really got your degree at Bill James University. He was your mentor and your editor.

Neyer: That’s exactly right. Bill is an amazing editor. I’ve seen him mark up things that I have written, but also things that other people have written, things that were submitted for him to publish in his books, and he’s really amazing. He could have been a brilliant editor at a magazine or a publishing house.

BB: When you were working with James, did you guys go to a lot of ballgames together?

Neyer: You know, we didn’t get to that many games. We went to some games. I remember one game in particular, with Tommy John beating the Royals for his last major-league victory. We probably went to half a dozen games a year, at the most. For three of the four years I worked for Bill, we didn’t live in the same town, we both lived about an hour from the ballpark, and Bill had a family. And from the middle of the summer on, we were always working on the next book.

BB: And the manuscripts were due when, in December?

Neyer: That’s right. The Biographical Encyclopedia stuff, we could work on that at anytime. But once we got under the heavy book crunch, we didn’t do anything else. Bill’s schedule would get crazy and it would consume his life, so we didn’t get to as many games as I wish we would have, in retrospect. But I did see a number of games with Bill and that was always a great experience.

BB: Where did you go after you left?

Neyer: After four years I felt it was time to go. The job was still good, I just felt like I filled that apprenticeship as long as I should have, maybe longer, and it was somebody else’s turn to have that opportunity. We parted on really good terms. I did some free-lancing for about nine months and was a terrible free-lance writer. Just awful. To be a good free-lance writer you have to be able to go out and get work. Unless you are established and people come to you. But I wasn’t at that point yet. I am better at it now than I was ten years ago, but if I had to do that again, I’d still be a bad free-lance writer because I’m not good at making phone calls and getting people to hire me. The first few months weren’t bad. But I had gotten a really good gig writing the backs of baseball cards. There was a set called the Conlon Collection. Basically, they were all photos that were taken by a guy named Charles Conlon in the first forty years of the 20th century. The Sporting News published these cards. I did a lot of research for the cards, and wrote the text for the backs. I like doing historical research anyway, so that was a lot of fun, and they paid really well. After that job ran out, I basically lived hand-to-mouth and check-to-check. I saw my tax return from that year the other day; I think I made something $8,000. This was in ’93. I worked for Bill from ’89 to ’92. In ’93 I freelanced, I made $8,000 bucks and I was reduced to buying food with my mom’s Amaco credit card. It was pretty bad. Then I was fortunate, in that STATS, Inc. was looking to hire somebody to work on publications. They hired me. I believe my first day was November first or November second, 1993. And I worked there for about two and a half years.

BB: Did you put the book together, or were you a general editor?

Neyer: I did all that stuff. After the first year, I think my title was assistant director of publications, which was a lot more high-falutin as it sounds. Did a lot of writing for the various STATS books, all sports: basketball, football, baseball. I helped design some books, and did a lot of editing.

BB: Are you naturally inclined towards math and science?

Neyer: I was always good at math; I was never great at math. In junior high and in high school I was in the advanced math classes, but I wasn’t a math star, or anything like that. I did better on the verbal sections of the standardize tests than I did on the math sections. The brutal truth is that like a lot of other things in my life, I didn’t really have a passionate interest in things mathematical unless they were related to baseball. I dropped out of my Algebra 2 class in high school because it just didn’t interest me. It was too theoretical. I wasn’t very good at my physics class in high school, or college for that matter, because I wasn’t able to apply it to anything that I really cared about. So no, I wasn’t a math or science whiz by any means.

BB: One of the things I appreciate about your writing is that you make statistical formulas human. You aren’t cold or clinical stylistically and that helps me grasp the information much more readily. You also appear to be as interested in the characters who play the game, as you are in the stats themselves.

Neyer: I think that that is certainly true for me. And Bill as well. I don’t get this as much because I’m not as famous as Bill. So people don’t feel quite as compelled to put a label on me, but there are a lot of people who think that all Bill cares about are numbers. That he’s some geeky guy who sits around with a calculator all day. When the fact is that for the last decade plus, Bill has written a lot more about people and stories behind the numbers than the numbers themselves. It’s characteristic of humans that we like to categorize things, to put labels on them and put them in a nice, neat box, because it makes life a lot easier. But if people do that with Bill, and to some extent with me, then I think they are going to get it wrong.

BB: When did you start working for ESPN?

Neyer: In March of ’96. Back then it was called ESPNet SportsZone. The site was run and maintained by a company called Starwave, an independent company that had a business agreement with ESPN; basically we licensed the name. And used some of their talent to provide content, but essentially it was a completely independent operation.

BB: How many columns are you contracted to write weekly for ESPN?

Neyer: It’s changed a little bit. When I first started I was doing one every day. And they were short. And then I started doing one every day, but longer. Then we cut back to four columns a week during the season, and during the off-season it was more like three columns a week. But it’s not really set in stone. I could do three columns a week and maybe a chat a session, or maybe three columns a week and a special sidebar. Like I just wrote something, I took the “no” side of a debate on whether or not Rafael Palmeiro should be in the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t a column, but could count (if I wanted it to) as one of my four columns for the week. I’ve got a contract and it’s pretty open-ended. Basically we just trust each other. They trust me to put out a certain number of words every week, and I trust them not to load too much work on me.

BB: When you’ve finished a piece does it go to an editor before it is posted?

Neyer: Yeah, it does. When I initially started doing this stuff, back in ’96, I had access to all the publishing tools and I would often publish my own column. But in the years since we’ve gravitated away from that, not really by any preference, just that I don’t have the publishing tools on my computer any more. And I think it’s a good idea to have it run by an editor anyway, because it keeps everybody from getting in trouble. I send my column off to an editor and it will be posted anywhere between a half and hour and three hours depending on how busy they are.

BB: Have you been tagged with the label as a Bill James clone?

Neyer: I don’t think I really have. Partly because there is a certain distance between when I worked for Bill and when I worked for ESPN. Also because it wasn’t that obvious to people. When I first did the column I didn’t put at the bottom of the column, “Rob Neyer used to work for Bill James.” You know there are people that do know I worked for Bill; I’ve written about it in every book that I’ve done for example. I’ve probably mentioned in the column a few times. And the fact is if people want to label me that way, I’m perfectly happy to be labeled that way. It wouldn’t bother me at all. I treasure the association. And to an extent, I foster it. There is a quote from Bill on the first book I did, “Baseball Dynasties,” and there is a quote from Bill on the book that just came out. If I wanted to get away from that I could, but I don’t have any desire to let that go.

BB: What was the deal with your second book? The book about Fenway Park?

Neyer: I wrote an article about that experience on my webpage. In a nutshell, what happens was, I signed a contract with a major publishing house to write book about spending a year in Boston going to every Red Sox game. Which I did in the 2000 season. I lived in an incredibly over-priced apartment just three blocks away from Fenway, and went to all 81 home games; I think I went to 105 baseball games that season (including games in Seattle, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Kansas City). I submitted the manuscript. On time. And my editor at this publishing house just basically hated it. Wanted to have nothing to do with the thing. Which is obviously a pretty rough thing to have happen. Not only was there a level of embarrassment—I mean no author wants to submit a manuscript and have it rejected out of hand—but there was a big financial hit there. Because I was living that year as if I was going to get paid for the book I wrote. As it turned out, I ended up getting paid for half of what I should have gotten paid, and I owed the publishing house a significant portion of that money. To this day, I still haven’t paid them back and I’m going to have to do that one of these days.

BB: Was the manuscript something radically different from what they expected?

Neyer: I think that was part of it. I don’t know that they should have expected anything radically different. But one of the things I’ve tried to avoid doing is trying to get into the head of my editor. This was a very successful editor, who’s edited many, many successful books. I don’t know what he was expecting. Clearly he wasn’t expecting what I sent him. But I’m not sure what he was expecting. I think that what I submitted was at least moderately close to what I had promised in my book proposal. But either it was far off from what he thought that was, or it just wasn’t nearly as good as he expected. I don’t really know. But the upshot was, he made some soft noises about trying to salvage the book. Basically rewrite the entire thing. I just found that impractical. And I got the impression from him, but more so from my agent, that they really weren’t interested in rewrites, they just wanted to say that to assuage me a little bit. Maybe keep me from doing something like taking him to court, I don’t know. So we took the book back and tried to sell it someplace else. We had some interest from a few editors but at that point it was too late to publish it that spring. But if you do a book in the 2000 season, what you want to do is publish the following season. There wasn’t time to do that so the people who were interested in it wanted me to rewrite the proposal, and at least some of the book. Make it less focused on the 2000 season and a little bit more on the general Fenway experience. Then we could publish it in the spring of 2002. At that point I just wanted to get this thing out of my way. The publishing experience had been so distasteful. We did get an offer from a company called “iPublish,” which was a division of Time/Warner. “iPublish,” did e-books. They also published mine as a trade paperback for people who asked for it, and it’s still available in both formats. There only as many copies as people order. Economically, you are not going to make a lot of money doing that, because people don’t buy e-books. But my attitude toward that book is that I had fun working on it. I had a lot of fun going to all the games. I met some really good people when I was in Boston. And there are some people who really like the book. Today, I don’t know how good it is. But there are people who like the book, and I’m not going to tell them that they shouldn’t like the book. I learned a lot important things in the process, so I wouldn’t call that book a success, in a lot of ways I’m glad that I wrote it.

BB: Were you a Red Sox fan before you went up there?

Neyer: No, not at all.

BB: Were you a Red Sox hater?

Neyer: No, I wasn’t a Red Sox hater either. Since I was ten I was a Royals fan and haven’t cared about any other team. I have some small rooting interest in the Mariners because I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while now. For the most part, the Red Sox were just another team to me. I visited Boston and saw Fenway Park for the first time in the fall of ’99. I just immediately fell in love with that ballpark. I was there for three games in a row against the Orioles, in September of ’99. I loved it so much I tried to figure out a way to get back there, and writing a book about the park and the Red Sox was the only way I could figure out how to do that.

BB: Did you find yourself pulling for the Sox that year you watched them up close?

Neyer: Oh sure. Yeah, I became a huge fan of the Red Sox. Personally, it would have impossible for me not to become of fan of the Red Sox. I believed it would help the book if the Red Sox did well. If they had won the World Series, then next spring people would want to read about them, and boom: I have a book ready. But even beyond that, I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. I made friends with Red Sox fans. You know, I was at the Park every night, and I’m surrounded by people who care so desperately, so passionately about what this team is going to do. That’s what attracted to me to the project. It was the ballpark, yes, but it wasn’t the ballpark in the sense of this building; it was the ballpark in the sense that when you’re in this place you are surrounded by people who are so passionate about what’s happening. That’s what really struck me. I love going to games in Kansas City; I love going to games in Seattle, but the feeling from the people sitting around you is completely different in Boston than anyplace I’ve been, except for maybe Yankee Stadium. But just this notion, all around you, packed in so tightly, are all these people care so much about what’s happening on the field. It’s something I’ve never felt anywhere else.

BB: Did you make it down to Yankee Stadium that year?

Neyer: I did. I was there for one of the great games of the year. I think it was a Sunday night game: Pedro vs. Roger Clemens.

BB: The 2-1 game.

Neyer: The 2-1 game, that’s exactly right. I wrote about it in the book.

BB: Yeah, I remember that fuggin game. Nixon, that som’bitch hit the homer off Clemens.

Neyer: Yup, you got it. That was an incredible experience. I went to a few Yankee-Red Sox games that year, and they were all great. The fans are just insane for those games, of course.

BB: What were your impressions of Yankee Stadium?

Neyer: I like Yankee Stadium. I don’t like the building a lot. It’s so big; the upper deck is so far from the field. I sat in the right field upper deck, way down the line, one game. I mean you couldn’t hear the P.A. announcer. You couldn’t see the players, they were so far away. By that point I had been to twenty or thirty games at Fenway Park, where basically every seat is close to the field, and it’s a completely different experience. I’m not that thrilled with the building. I don’t like all the blue of the walls and the black of the batter’s eye. I have this prejudice that everything possible at a baseball stadium should be green. And Yankee Stadium doesn’t really have any green accept for the playing surface. So I’m not a big fan of the Stadium. I do enjoy the passion of the fans. I do enjoy sitting there, and looking out on the field, and knowing that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played here. For that reason I think Yankee Stadium is a great place to watch a game. I don’t like the physical plant, per se.

BB: It’s funny because every place the Yankees play on the road, you’ll hear a vocal contingency of Yankee fans. That never happens at Yankee Stadium. Okay it does a little for the Subway Series, but it doesn’t happen unless the Red Sox are in town. If the Stadium is sold out, you know to expect 10-15,000 Boston fans to be in the house.

Neyer: Maybe this is not representative, but after a game at the Stadium with the Red Sox I was on the subway train. It was mostly Yankee fans but there were some Red Sox fans too. And there was a lot of back-and-forth going on. One of the wonderful experiences that a person can have as a baseball fan-it was maybe my favorite memory from that entire season—was being in a subway car after a game and hearing the Red Sox and Yankee fans chanting back-and-forth. And there was no malice. It was all very good-natured. I was standing next to a Yankee fan, and he was having a great time. The Red Sox had won the game, but he wasn’t at all upset. And I asked him about it. He said, “You know what? In the end, we’ll win. So why should we let it bother us.” That’s the attitude Yankee fans should have: “You know what? We’ve been winning since 1920, and the Red Sox haven’t. So we should have fun with it. Eventually we’ll win anways.”

BB: I always take the opposite approach. I worry that the Yankees have won so much, that eventually it will be the Red Sox turn. They have to win it sometime, I worry. Why not now?

Neyer: Well, they do have to win sometime, and it is going to happen. In our lifetime the Red Sox are going to win a World Series.

BB: I agree.

Neyer: But to me, as far as the Yankees are concerned, when you’ve been on top for so long, it’s almost upon you to be a little bit magnanimous about this thing. To me, the Yankee fans should basically just humor the Red Sox fans.

BB: What drives me crazy about Yankee fans is that the downside of what has transpired over the past decade is the sense of entitlement they have about winning. As if the Yankees have corned the market on winning, which is nonsense.

Neyer: Right, exactly. You hear about this all the time with Yankee fans. Yankee fans think that Thurman Munson, and Don Mattingly, and Goose Gossage should all be in the Hall of Fame. Now I think Gossage should be in the Hall of Fame, but the other guys, I’m a bit iffy about. I tended to paint Yankee fans with the same brush, but I’ve met some very nice and very magnanimous Yankee fans who feel very lucky to have their favorite team be greatest franchise in the history of sports. At least in this country.

BB: Hell, you are talking to one of them. It’s what makes me focus on appreciating what we’ve got, every day.

Neyer: That’s right.

BB: I know I’m going to enjoy the season, regardless of whether they ultimately win it all or not. Sure it would be great if they could win another ring, but if they don’t it won’t necessary ruin the year for me.

Neyer: Baseball gives the fan the opportunity to be happy a number of times during the season. If you are a Cincinnati Bengals fan, you may only have the chance to be happy once or twice in a whole season. But if you’re a fan of a truly bad baseball team, you have a chance to be happy 60 times a year. Now, if you are Yankee fan you have a chance to be happy 100 times a year, which is even better. If you win the World Series, then you are happy for the whole winter. Baseball is a marathon. You have all these games, and all these ups and downs, and it’s like a soap opera and all that stuff. I think if you are lucky, you can take it day-by-day. For example, the Royals this year, got off to this amazing start. I’ve never been under the illusion that it’s going to last, or that they are going to win 85 games and the division title or anything, but I’ve been able to enjoy it because you have to take every day as it comes. I’ve enjoyed every one of their wins this year whether they win the division or not.

Tomorrow Rob talks about pitch counts, Pedro Martinez, and Michael Lewis’ hot new book, “Moneyball.” Stay tuned…

YOU GOTS TO CHILL

Nick Johnson may have had his walks-streak snapped on Sunday, but the Times saw fit to give him some props today all the same:

“You see a guy with Nick’s plate discipline in your system and you know that everything else, over time, is going to fall into place,” Cashman said. “The homers and the hitting for average, that’s going to come as he refines his game. But the plate discipline, he already has that. He’s got a pretty high ceiling as a player.”

The Yanks open a three-game serious in Seattle tonight and then move on for three more in Oakland this weekend. Both teams have played the Bombers well so far. It would be a terrific week if the Yanks can go 4-2 on this trip, but 3-3 is acceptable. Anything less than that would be a discouraging.

Meanwhile, the Royals won their 11th straight at home, and finally beat the Red Sox. Nomie tied the game with a homer late in the game, but then his error lead to the Royals comebackvictory. Once again, Derek Lowe was not effective. Oh how the alarm must be sounding in Boston this morning.

ICED

Before Roger Clemens and Barry Zito faced off on Sunday afternoon, Oakland’s Scott Hatteberg–who is featured in Michael Lewis’ forthcoming book “Moneyball,” said that it was going to be like, “Cy Young vs. Cy Old.” He immediately caught himself. He wasn’t trying to stir any shit up.

So what does he do, but hit a homer off of Clemens his first time up. It would be enough for the A’s, because even though Rocket pitched well—allowing 1 earned run in seven innings of work—Zito was better, and the A’s bumped off the Bombers, 2-0, taking the series, the first the Yankees have lost this season.

I don’t mind losing to Hudson, but Zito is tougher to swallow. Pedro is about the only guy who is harder to stomach. But man is Zito sharp. Jim Kaat mentioned several times during the broadcast that Zito, and the other Oakland pitchers look like they are simply playing catch with the catcher. Kaat compared Zito with Lefty Carlton, in that Zito is oblivious to the batters, concentrating soley on putting the ball in the catcher’s mitt.

Zito also had the Gods with him yesterday. When the Yanks hit the ball hard, they hit them at an Oakland defender. When they got on the bases, they ran (or didn’t run) themselves into outs. The only part of the game that frustrated me was that Nick Johnson was brought in to pinch hit with two-out in the ninth and he flew out to center, ending the game and ending his nifty little consecutive-games-with-a-walk streak.

Nuts. But hey, at least the Sox lost, and so things are exactly as they were going into the weekend: Yanks ahead of Boston by three. Red Sox fans must feel like they are right where they want to be. If they were three ahead, they’d be nervous. But three behind is a comfortable place to be.

GIVE AND TAKE

I left work early on Friday to accompany Emily to a doctor’s appointment on the Upper East Side. I had some time to kill so I walked up from midtown, and boy let me tell you, the East Side is as weird and as wack as it’s always been. Strange, cadaverous old honkies, poorly-dressed young honkies, and of course, the occasional nut case. On the corner of 68th street and Second Avenue, a toothless chap was standing there handing out business cards of some sort, running an open dialogue with himself.

“No, I’m not happy at all today. I should be in California. The Lakers won, and so did the Celtics. There are three games tonight, and I wish I could be there. Yeah. I don’t like that Busch at all. No sir. Did you see him in that outfit? Who does he think he is, Tom Cruise?”

I told him not to worry: The Lakers will win. I moved on. I actually entertained myself with fantasies of running into Jason Giambi. I don’t fully understand why it is that many of the jocks that choose to live in Manhattan select the Upper East Side, but I forgive them, because they are not from New York, and so they can’t be totally at fault. After all, who said these guys knew anything about taste (watch Cribs lately)?

Still, I was hoping to run into the big lug, so I could tell him to relax, we are behind him and he’ll turn it around before you know it. But wouldn’t you know it? He never did materialize.

I sat in on Em’s appointment ostensibly to take notes; there is so much information to digest, it’s easy for her to forget half of it by the time she walks out the door. I introduced myself to the Doctor as her food-taster. Em’s medical problems are not over, but we were encouraged, that she still had options. Her Doctor was attentive and reassuring, and how rare is that? When we were done, we jumped on a cross-town bus and went to see “A Mighty Wind,” over by Lincoln Center. Brought to you by the same creative team that made “Waiting For Guffman,” and “Best in Show,” this new movie will appeal to those who enjoyed the first two flicks.

It was exactly what the Doctor ordered. Something light and stupid. After the movie, we strolled up Broadway to the best produce-fine-foods emporium in the city, Fairway, and stocked up for dinner. By the time we were done, a thunderstorm broke out, and we happily got soaked on our way to the subway.

The Yankee game was delayed for over an hour, but they eventually got it in. This is how lucky I am: Not only will my girlfriend tolerate me watching a game; she actually enjoys watching a game herself (I know she enjoys watching me watch a game). Hell, she’ll even sit through a rain delay with me.

Ted Lily, looking thinner in the face than he did last year with the Yanks, pitched against Boomer Wells. It was another awful night for Em’s boy, J. Giambi, who struck out three times, including once with the bases-loaded.

Emily was plum tuckered out, and napped on and off during the game. At one point she woke up and exclaimed, “I don’t know if I was dreaming or not, but I think the Yankees have someone named Bubba playing for them. What the fuck is up with that?” She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

The Yanks won 5-3, and it was a close, tense game. Robin Ventura drew a bases-loaded walk to break the tie, and Nick Johnson later pinch-hit with the bases-juiced again, and guess what? After taking two big hacks and fouling pitches off, he too drew a walk, which extended his streak of games with a base on balls to sixteen. Hooray!
Rivera pitched for the third-straight day, and for the second-straight day, looked sharp.

On Saturday morning, the Gods answered Emily’s prayers and we tackled many messy area’s in my apartment: the refrigerator got a thorough inspection and scouring, my closest took a beating, with old clothes being tossed, and the remaining one’s being folded and put away neatly, and the corner of the room next to my bed, at long last, was straightened-up and organized. Oh, was Ms. Shapiro ever happy. Delicious relations followed all this purging, and then Em was off, and I was left to my own devices for the rest of the afternoon.

It was a cool, but sunny day in the Bronx, and when I was out getting the papers (getting the papers) in the a.m. I thought, Hey Giambi generally strikes me as an optimist. It’s a brand new day. Maybe he can come out and relax a bit today.

Tim Hudson went up against Jeff Weaver in what turned out to be a dandy at the Stadium. Weaver pitched well, but let a couple off two-strike pitches get away from him, and left the game trailing 3-1. Hudson was brilliant. While Hudson may not be as dominating as Pedro Martinez (who pitched his first complete game of the year in Boston yesterday afternoon), he is built in his mold: diminutive, composed, and nasty. Roy Oswalt belongs to the club as well too.

Tim Hudson is the leader of the A’s pitching staff and you can see why. He looks like the leader. On the mound, he has an icy-calm, and seems to be able to maximize his energy on each delivery. He was in full control yesterday, getting ahead of the Yankee hitters and making them hit the ball on the ground with his efficient sinker.

With his cap pulled down over his eyes, he almost looks like a kid’s idea of a badass. Like something out of a comic strip. Hudson has a small mouth that gapes open as he looks to the catcher for the signs, and his scowl reminds me of a young Ray Liotta (though Hudson has a better complexion). He looks like Baby-faced Finster. There is nothing rushed about his demeanor. Calmly, he is in control of the proceedings. He could be a prison guard right out of “Cool Hand Luke,” or maybe he could be Luke himself.

When Jorge Posada flew out to end the 7th inning, third base coach Willie Randolph made jogged by Hudson and made a comment that brought a smile to Hudson’s face. It was no doubt a compliment.

Trailing 3-1 in the ninth, Oakland’s manager gave the Yankees an opportunity by lifting Hudson in favor of closer Keith Foulke. I was preparing a sammich in the kitchen between innings and plotted out the perfect scenario: Nick Johnson leads off with a single; Giambi follows with a homer; Bernie follows that with a homer himself. And if he doesn’t, then better yet, Godzilla does! See how easy it is to be a spoiled-ass Yankee fans?

Johnson did his part, by lining an outside fastball into the left field corner for a leadoff double. Of course, he had drawn a base on balls earlier against Hudson, and tied Willie Randolph for the team record of consecutive games with a walk at 17. Next, Giambi did his part, and got off the schnide, when he blasted a fastball off the faZade of the upper deck in right field to tie the game. I had my mouth full of sammich when he hit it, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I just made a loud “MMMMMMM” chant, like Peter Boyle in “Young Frankenstein.” I got up and started stomping around the living room, “MMM-MMM.”

I even called Emily, who had been watching on her own. Needless to say, she was very happy for her boy.

But Bernie and Godzilla must have missed my cosmic memo, and the game went into extra innings. Juan Acevado coughed up the lead when Eric Chavez absolutely creamolished a fastball into the bleachers for a two-run homer. It was enough to give Oakland the “W,” 4-2.

The Red Sox bullpen blew Friday night’s game to drop the Home Nine four behind the Yanks, but they made it up on Saturday and again trail by only three.

The funniest moment in the Yankee game came in the top of the fourth. Eric Chavez popped out to Ventura in foul territory to start the inning. The winds were swirling yesterday and every pop fly became a miniature adventure. Ventura broke back to his right for the ball, and just at the last moment pivoted his shoulders back to the left to make the catch. Ventura slows the game down, and yet always seems in complete control. He had the ball the entire way. The only problem was that Erick Almonte was chasing the pop fly as well. There was no communication between the two, and right as Ventura squeezed the ball into his glove, he bumped into Almonte and the two fell over each other.

Almonte looked like an over-anxious puppy at the dog run. Ventura was nice not to scold him, let alone bite him. After Tejada reached on a single, Durazo sent a pop up to short left field. Ventura and Almonte went after the ball again, and this time Ventura clearly called him off. Almonte still was probably too close to Ventura, but that’s only because puppies always like to hang around the older dogs.

DEAD MAN WALKING

I’ve never been a fan of the Mets GM Steve Phillips, but there is nothing that is entertaining about the Phillips death-watch across town with the Mets. The Mets lost in extra-innings to the Cards yesterday (their fifth straight L), and it feels as if Phillips will not make it through the weekend. Jay Jaffe, the futility infielder, one of the best, if not the best baseball writer in the blogging universe, weighs in with take on the situation. Mike Lupica killed Phillips in the News yesterday, and today Joel Sherman lays some of the blame at the feet of the Wilpons.

According to the Daily News today:

Mets’ chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon left Phillips open for increased scrutiny Wednesday when he told the Daily News: “Fred and I are only as good as the info we get.”

Phillips didn’t try to deflect blame when he was asked about those comments.

“My name is on every move that’s been made here,” Phillips said. “That’s how I look at it.”

If they are going to can him, I say do it and do it now. Don’t draw this out any longer than you have to, fer cryin’ out loud.

Somewhere, Bobby Valentine is enjoying a good laugh.

LE JOIE DE FREAK

Alfonso Soriano continues to confound and amaze. Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus admits he doesn’t know how he would approach pitching our favorite Martian:

Seeing him take inside pitches and turn on them with those whip-fast hands, I honestly have no idea how I’d pitch to him. I keep thinking of Ball Four: smoke in on the hands. I think I’d ride him way inside on the hands, out of the strike zone, and see–and I know how bad this sounds–if you can either tie him up or hit him for a strike either way, because I haven’t seen him bail out on that pitch.

Filip Bondy has a nice little puff piece on him in the Daily News today. When Soriano connected off of Seattle’s impressive right-hander Joel Pinero in the sixth:

Soriano hesitated a moment at the plate, then rounded the bases. He can never get all the way back home without breaking out in a smile, because this game is so much fun, because there is always a teammate waiting to congratulate him, and because somehow it always feels like the first time for Soriano.

…There is nobody else in New York, and maybe nobody in baseball right now, who plays with this sort of joy and elan. Not Bernie Williams. Not Derek Jeter, even when he’s healthy.

…”I’m waiting for the pitching more,” Soriano said. “They no throw my pitch, and it’s important to be on base for me. I try to be more patient.”

The kid hasn’t let success go to his head. As Kevin Kernan reports in the Post today:

All the players appreciate [manager, Joe] Torre, but no one appreciates him more than Soriano, who has become the best player in the game under Torre.

“He has allowed me to grow, he’s been so patient,” Soriano said of Torre. “If I make a mistake he doesn’t get on me. He’s been like a father to me. He is the perfect manager.”

Speaking of Joe, regardless of the constant mishegas with the Boss, Torre isn’t leaving anytime soon.

EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY

Every fan has one player on the team he roots for that for one reason or another, serves as your own personal whipping boy. Mine is Jorge Posada, he of the weak chin, big ears and red ass. Whenever I need to vent some frustration, Jorgie is the one who gets it. I can accept all of Bernie Williams’ flaws, his lousy baseball instincts, his flakiness, but it’s just the opposite with Posada. Even when he’s doing okay, I’m usually cursing his ass out. This isn’t rational, but it’s the way it is. Maybe it’s because Posada is such a spaz, maybe it’s just his looks, I don’t know.

Well, I have to give it up for him today, because he played as good a game as I came remember him playing. Especially on the defensive side of things. Posada made three sterling plays—nailing Ichio at second on a bunt attempt by Randy Winn, and then later throwing out both Winn and Ichiro trying to steal second. Jorgie threw Winn out in the sixth with a picture-perfect throw that had some mustard on it; he rushed his throw to get Ichiro later on, but it was on-line and shortstop Enrique Wilson made a nice pick to record the out.

Joe Torre told reporters:

“He’s been terrific,” Torre said. “He seems so much more calm. I’m not sure it’s going to last all year, but right now, he’s developed a lot more confidence, and pitchers are developing more confidence in him. It’s affecting every part of his game.”

Posada was hampered by shoulder problems last year, but he seems to have recovered nicely. Back-up catcher Joe Flaherty added:

“He’s always had that little hop with his feet that made him so quick,” Flaherty said. “And you could see from the beginning of spring training that he’s worked hard on that. His feet right now are as good as anyone’s. He’s so quick.”

Posada also added a solo home run in the Yankees taut 2-1 victory over the Mariners last night. Mike Mussina improved to 6-0, striking out nine in eight innings of work (he has K’d at least eight batters in each one of his starts); Mariano Rivera looked much sharper than he did the night before, and retired the M’s in order in the ninth for his first save of the season.

Jason Giambi’s slump continues, and he looks tense and constipated. Meanwhile Nick Johnson drew another walk, and now has drawn a base-on-balls in fifteen consecutive games. Oh, by the way, Lil’ Sori hit a towering homer to left which proved to be the game winner.

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

Here is some feedback I received yesterday on the subject of queers in baseball. First up, is Steve Keane from The Eddie Kranepool Society:

I find the whole gay ballplayer discussion fascinating. I feel the lack of tolerance on the part of some people is on their upbringing. I am a born raised and New Yorker. I saw things growing up that most people could live to be 100 and never see. I also work for the City of New York in an office more diverse than the UN. Straight, gay, Black, White Hispanic, Jew, Gentile, Muslim you name it I know someone of any persuasion.

I looked up where Todd Jones was from and I found he was born in Marietta Ga. I’m guessing that Marietta is not as diverse as Boro Park Brooklyn where I was born and raised so I guessing he did not have much interaction with people of diferent backgrounds.

I never understood where many straight males get so angry and defensive about gays. What is ther fear? I just don’t get it.

In a way I feel bad for Jones for he is so ignorant he did not even think before he spoke. He said some very hateful things. It will be interesting to see if the Used Car Salesman takes action against him and if the MLBPA will back Jones if he is disciplined.

Jones has not been disciplined yet (and I don’t think he should be either), but he did issue an apology yesterday.

Here is what my cousin Gabe Fried had to say:

I forgot to tell you, I think, that I saw Take Me Out. It’s not wonderful, but it is striking on a number of levels, among them the implicit suggestion that Jeter and A-Rod are lovers.

It’s dreamy to imagine some big star with $20 million in endorsement contracts coming out with a smirk and a strut. Maybe Jeter (and maybe only Jeter) COULD come out and survive, standing in tact, perhaps even in weird ways enhanced. But I suspect that one aberrant superstar doesn’t change the mores of baseball as much as you’d think. So Jeter comes out, which, in New York, would probably fly okay, at least as well as it would anywhere. But that doesn’t suddenly give Geoff Blum permission to come out, or Denny Hocking, or Michael Tucker. It will take a long time before certain segments of the population stop equating being gay with being weak.

There is a portion of the population who become enraged at the suggestion that there are gay players. (Many of these people are the players themselves.) And there is another portion that thinks that ALL professional athletes are gay. Honestly–and I don’t say this glibly or thoughtlessly–I suspect that if you removed social conditioning, the need for parental approval, and a potent, deeply embedded fear of exclusion, there would be a higher rate of homosexuality among professional athletes than there is among a broader cross-section of the population. Would it be ALL athletes? No. Would it be half? Maybe not. But if you’re a gay man raised to believe that it’s somehow corrupt to be a gay man, there are two vocations you can enter where you can a) prove your manliness and honor, and b) surround yourself with men: sports and the military.

I really do think that if you took all professional baseball players and bared each one’s unconscious in a vacuum, free from outside influence, the portion of them who were gay would be somewhere around 30-40%.

I had the opportunity to speak with ESPN’s Rob Neyer—who wrote a column on the Jones situation yesterday, and we got around to talking about homosexuality in baseball. Actually, it came up as we were discussing Curt Flood:

Rob Neyer: I’m not perfectly clear on why Flood did what he did. He wasn’t doing it for the money from what I understand. And whether or not one agrees with the principle, what was admirable about him is that he was willing to chuck his career for the principle. To me, that’s worthwhile. I just wrote a column today that was posted an hour or two ago, in response to what Todd Jones said about having a gay player on his team. What I concluded was that if a gay player came out today he should be considered a hero, because he would be doing it basically to make a point about a principle, which very few baseball players, or anybody really is willing to do. Very few of us are willing to take a big risk in our professional life or our personal life for a cause. To me, anybody who is willing to do that, whatever the cause may be, is in substance a hero. Whether we agree with the cause or not. And I think that is why Flood is relevant. It isn’t because he brought about free agency; I think that has been miscast over the years. I don’t think anybody really knows how much Flood had to do with it. Did he play a small part; did it help speed the movement along? Maybe a little bit. But the fact is, he lost his case. But I think Flood is bigger than baseball in the sense that he was willing to stand up for something he knew was going to cost him an immense amount of money and his career. There are very few people who are willing to do that. To me, that’s what makes Flood interesting, that he was a rare individual. Most professional athletes are trained from an early age, and in fact are admired for not going against the grain. You’re trained from Day One, the day you arrive in a major league clubhouse, to go along, to do what the veterans say, to pay attention to the manager. All of which are probably good if you are trying to get along with the team, but it’s not exactly heroic to do what everybody tells you to do. And Flood went the other way, and that’s what to me, makes him an appealing figure.

BB: I’ve been talking about what kind of player it will take to come out of the closet, and I’ve think, like Jackie Robinson, it will have to be a man of great character as well as great skill.

Neyer: Yeah, I think that’s right. And in fact, I think the comparison is apt. I got some flak from some people today in response to my column. I said the first gay player to come out would be a hero, to me at least, along the lines of Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood. People said, You can’t compare being gay to being black. Okay, fine, so it’s not exactly the same thing, although one could argue that people are born gay, or at least with the propensity toward being gay, just as you are born black. But my point was, though I didn’t make it explicitly, is that the thing that Todd Jones is saying about a gay player is the exact same thing that was being said about a black player in 1947. What he’s saying is, Oh no, I don’t have anything against gays personally, I just don’t want them around here because they’ll be a disruption. It’s the same kind of crap that members of the Dodgers were saying in 1947. It’s a bunch of bullshit. He doesn’t want to have to deal with it, that’s what it comes down to. The point of my column was that Todd Jones should be able to say whatever he wants to, without fear of being fined or suspended.

BB: Or getting killed by the P.C. Police.

Neyer: Exactly. But I also made the point that I think he’s full of shit. It’ll be a great day when a gay player comes out. And eventually—I hope in my lifetime—there will be lots of gay players, and nobody will give a damn.

BB: Buster Olney told me that he thinks the first gay player will probably have to be an established star—although he made the point that Billy Bean was in as good a situation as he’d seen for someone to come out, with the Padres in the early ’90s. Do you feel it would take an established star to be able to get away with it?

Neyer: I do. I think you have to have the combination of being a great player and also having the personality to withstand all the hassle. If you weren’t a good player it would become very awkward for a couple of reasons. One, the other players would not be as accepting if you are the 25 guy on the roster. Now if you are the best player on the team, or close to it, your teammates are going be a little more likely to say, Okay we can live with this guy the way the Dodgers did with Robinson. It would also make it much tougher on management if the player wasn’t great. It’s going to cause a disruption; there is no question about that. The media circus is going to be crazy when it happens. And the team will be put in this really awkward position. What if the guy is the 25th guy, and he really didn’t deserve a spot on the club? But they wanted to send him out. People will say you are only sending him out because he’s gay. And nobody wants to be put in that position, no team wants to be put in that position.

BB: Nobody wants to be the Pumpsie Green of the movement.

Neyer: That’s right. For all parties considered I think it’s going to work better if it’s a great player, or at least a good player. I think having him be the back-up shortstop could be a problem.

BB: One of the questions I have is what would a player stand to gain by coming out? Is it simply a guy saying, “I don’t want to live a lie anymore?”

Neyer: Or again it could be a guy who thinks this is important for other gays. That’s talking about the principle. I don’t know if it’s really our job to distinguish between motivations. It’s certainly more admirable if the player is doing it out of a sense of justice as opposed to a sense of “I just can’t live a lie anymore.” Either one is admirable I suppose, and we should be sympathetic to either position. But if there is something larger involved than just, “I can’t do this anymore unless I tell people I’m gay,” it would be meaningful. It’s not a selfless act in that situation, it’s more of a selfish act, which I can certainly sympathize with, and would cheer for him as well, but it wouldn’t be the same as somebody who would do it because he felt that he had a responsibility to make things better.

BB: I assume that there are gay ballplayers just like there are gay accountants. Do you think that teams and the writers who cover those teams know or suspect that some guys are gay, but just don’t want to deal with it publicly?

Neyer: I do think that’s the case. From what I understand, and I don’t know this to be a fact, because it’s been a while since I read anything about it, but I do think that there were people who knew that Glenn Burke was gay when he played for the Dodgers. I think there are gay ballplayers. I have no doubt about that, whatsoever, and I suspect that some of those players are either known to be gay by their teammates or are suspected to be gay. I think that it’s out there; I just don’t think people want to have to deal with what happens when you make it public. Think about all of the players who really aren’t going like you if you’re gay. They are certainly out there. I honestly believe that if a player came out, for the most part he’d be accepted by his teammates. I really think that. Would it be tough? Sure. Would there be some teammates that wouldn’t talk to the guy? Yeah. But you know what? Every clubhouse has guys that don’t get along now. It would just be a different reason not to get along. But for the most part I think they would be accepted, just like we accept gays that we know in our profession. Just like people grew to accept Jackie Robinson. Some of them didn’t like him, and didn’t go out to dinner with him, but they accepted him as a teammate. I think it would work exactly the same way in baseball with a gay player if someone gave it a chance.

BB: Someone’s going to be the Pee Wee Reese and go out and put his arm around the guy.

Neyer: That’s right. It sort of has a different connotation I suppose.

BB: Maybe he’ll squeeze his ass instead.

The complete interview with Rob will be posted early next week. Stay tuned…

RETURN OF THE SANDMAN

Jamie Moyer was hit was some dumb luck in the first inning, when his fielders couldn’t quite hold onto a couple of shots off Yankee bats (including a grand slam to Raul Mondesi), but he settled down and was his usual vexing self through seven innings. But the Yankees had a 5-0 lead, and received a strong outing from Andy Pettitte, and outlasted the M’s for a 8-5 win. Juan Acevado and Chris Hammond got roughed up in the eight, and the Mariners drew closer, 5-4. (There was a lot of cursing in my crib at this point.) But the Bombers were able to add three insurance runs in bottom of the inning, which gave Mariano Rivera ample wiggle room in his first appearance of the season.

Understandably, Mo looked a bit tentative. You could even see it in his face. The icy calm wasn’t there. He didn’t look nervous, simply atrophied. Randy Winn battled him to start the inning, and it took 10 pitches for Rivera to retire him. Mo tapped his front foot before each pitch as if he was trying to gain his footing, or calm himself down, or both. He struck out Winn on a tailing fastball that I thought was a two-seamer, but has been called a sinker as too. That pitch was something new from Rivera. Brett Boone followed with a walk, and after falling behind 3-0 to Edgar Martinez, Mel Stottlemyre came out to talk with his closer. Mo then retired Edgar—who absolutely owns him—on three straight fastballs. Mike Cameron followed with a RBI double off the center field wall, before John Mabry popped out to Godzilla Matsui to end the game.

Nick Johnson walked again (which makes it fourteen games in a row), but he’s hitting as well. The same cannot be said for J. Giambi, who heard the boo’s from the ever-understanding and patient Yankee faithful.

Meanwhile, the Royals continue to shit the bed against the Sox in Beantown. The Home Nine rallied for three runs in the ninth and continue to trail the Yanks by a scant three games.

FATTY

My brother Benny Eggs used to frequent the 2nd Avenue Deli regularly with my old man. This is before pop had quadruple bypass surgery a couple of years ago. Although the old man still indulges in the occasional steak–sometimes it’s not so occasional–his eating habits certainly don’t approach the unbridled excess of the old days. One night Eggs and the old man were sitting in a booth at the 2nd Avenue Deli, waiting to order. My dad was furiously stuffing down the complimentary cole slaw when the waiter arrived, so my brother order two pastrami sammiches. Just then pop started choking on the cole slaw. He slammed down a glass of water and held up a hand for the waiter to stay. Before he could fully recover, let alone draw a breath—his eyes now bloodshot, and tearing, he simply reminded the waiter: “Fatty.”

I was reminded of this story on my train ride home yesterday evening. The Times had a great article on Pastrami on the front page of the Dining In section. Here is a classic New York scene:

I want a pastrami on rye, fatty, not too lean,” said the middle-age man in line at Katz’s, on the Lower East Side, practically wagging his finger at the counterman. “Pastrami shouldn’t be lean. And I want coleslaw on the sandwich, but put it on the side, because I got to drive my truck to Jersey and I don’t want it to get soggy. Put the mustard on the side for the same reason.”
A pause. The counterman gave a world-weary shrug and continued to put together the sandwich, laying the slices of juicy meat onto the bread.

“And don’t give me any of those half-sour pickles,” the customer added. “Give me some really good sour pickles.”

This scene might have taken place in 1946. Or ’67. In 1980, even, it would have starred two Jewish men of a certain age and demeanor. On this recent day, however, the customer was black, and the counterman, Dominican

These kind of stories are dangerous to read with an empty stomach, and I got so worked up that I had to stop by Loeser’s Deli on 231rst street and pick up a couple of dogs and a knish (as well as a couple of half-sour pickels and yes, a container of cole-slaw to boot). Okay, it wasn’t a fat-ass Pastrami sammich, but they are foods that go well with mustard all the same. And it was delish, and terrif. About the only drawback is the awful bellyache I’s got this morning. Hell, it was worth it.

BACK TO BASICS

Jose Contreras had an impressive start yesterday for the Columbus Clippers, throwing five scoreless innings, allowing three hits and striking out eight. Apparently, the big Cuban’s heater was clocked at 98mph, a far cry from what we saw from him when he was with the Yankees. To be fair, Contreras is a starter, and was regulated to the bullpen in New York.

Mariano Rivera is ready to go for the Yanks, and Derek Jeter was back with the team last night, shit-eating-grin and all. Jeter was goofing around on the bench, certainly a sight for sore eyes for us Yankee fans. He expects to be activated in a couple of weeks.

With a base on balls last night, Nick Johnson has now walked in thirteen consecutive games. He leads the AL in that category too.

Not for nothing, but I’m glad that Suzyn Waldman is not calling the games for YES any longer. He strength is doing the pre and post game shows, and I think she does that fine (although she’s better suited for the radio, and I used to like her coverage of the Knicks as well as the Yanks). But I’ve noticed that she has become so breathy, that I’m going to start calling her ol’ Iron Lungs. Each breath she draws sounds dramatically like it will be her last. Not only that, but she’s looking more and more like Karl Malden with each passing day.

The Yanks face ol’ man Moyer in the Bronx tonight. Moyer has an even better Bugs Bunny change than Chris Hammond. I don’t know what his numbers are against the Yankees, but I always feel like he kills us. And it’s a slow, painful death at that. I practically feel like jumping out of my shoes at home. My cousin Gabe said it would be good for baseball if the Yanks lost tonight (making it three in a row). “Then they can win 44 straight of whatever.”

FORBIDDEN FRUITS

The subject of homosexuality in baseball is a touchy one indeed. After all, who really wants to talk about it? We’re not Gay. Well, Christian Ruzich, The Cub Reporter, and I do, and we’ve exchanged e-mails on the topic, and I thought I would share them with you. First, here is what New York Times reporter Buster Olney had to say about it when we spoke several weeks ago:

BB: Do you think baseball is ready for a gay player to come out?

Buster: No. It’s interesting cause when I covered the Padres Billy Bean was on the that team [that’s Billy Bean, the gay ballplayer, who came out publicly a few years ago, not Billy Beane the Oakland GM]. I really believe that if any team would have been able to handle that situation, it would have been that team. Because the best player, Tony Gwynn, is a very tolerant person, he’s very broad-minded. It was a very young team, that had stripped it down and they had all these young players, and Billy was very well liked. Some of the other leaders on the team like [Brad] Ausmus, were very bright guys. Trevor Hoffman, very accepting personality. If it was going to work, it would’ve worked on that team. But there is no doubt veteran teams like the Yankees I covered, or the Mets now: no chance. There is no chance.

BB: Because of the hoopla that would surround it?

Buster: Well, not only that, but the anticipation of it would prevent the front office from even making the move. Saying that, if the greatest pitcher in the game came out and said he was gay, they’d probably bend the rules. But it would have to be a great player. If you think about how they did it with Jackie Robinson, part of the reason why it worked was because he was a great player.

BB: And they chose him for his personality as much as his ability as a ballplayer.

Buster: Exactly. Billy Bean said that it’s basically unworkable, and I agree with him. It would have to be a player who is established. A player who won three Cy Young awards and then came out. Right. And even at that point, he would never be accepted by half of the players. No matter what he did or what he said.

Here is the first letter I received from Christian:

I’m interested to know what you think about what he has to say about a gay player coming out. Do you think it’s as impossible as he does? I go back and forth — on the one hand it seems like a baseball clubhouse is probably one of the most homophobic places on Earth, but on the other hand I imagine if a player came out while playing in a more liberal city (San Francisco jumps to mind, but Chicago or Minneapolis are other possibilities) he might be accepted, or even embraced, by the city. Of course it would matter quite a bit who the player was, if he was already beloved, etc. I mean, if Kirby Puckett had come out, I don’t think it would have been a big deal, but Carl Everett might have run into some problems.

Whaddya think? Also, was Buster’s reference to a “three-time Cy Young award winner” purely hypothetical?

To which I responded:

I’m sorry to say that I do think it would be pretty tough for a player to come out of the closet in the pro game today. It’s not that he wouldn’t be excepted, or even lauded by some fans in certain cities, but I’m not sure if his supporters would out-number his detractors.
Think about the constant taunting the player would receive. Not only would some unruly fans call him a faggot when he’s batting, but the ump could be thinking the same thing, and so could the catcher, and even the guy on deck.
I think his problem would lie in the locker room. It’s like Olney was saying about women in the locker rooms: there is a sizable percentage of the players that would never accept them.
Yes, I think Olney was being hypothetical when he said that player would have to win 3 Cy Young awards to get away with it, but his point is well-taken. It would probably take a player who is an established star to get away with something so bold as coming out of the closet.
I think that for a queer player to come out publicly, he would have to be a man of tremendous character, strength and confidence. The Jackie Robinson analogy applies here, especially in that the player in question would have to be a stronger man than he is a player.
Of course there are gay ballplayers out there. Perhaps they are comfortable being private about their sexual orientation. I don’t know. What I mean is that even if there was a triumphent example of a gay ballplayer coming out, I don’t know that it would lead to others following suit. I could be wrong.
The question is: What does a gay ballplayer have to gain by coming out? We certainly know he’d have a lot to lose. Do I think this is a sad commentary on our culture as well as our favorite game? You bet. But what are you going to do?

Here is Christian’s reply:

I think it’s a damn shame that there isn’t an out major league player. I love sports, but I hate the macho bullshit that often comes along with it. For so many people, sports is wrapped up in some weird belief system where success in sports equates with success as a man, and too often an adjunct of that is homophobia. Athletes talk about how trust is one of the most important factors in making a team, and how they could “never trust” someone who was gay, and it just makes me mad. And then I read Todd Jones go off on this very subject, and it just makes me madder:
I suppose it’s just a reflection of the beliefs of the majority of America, and living in San Francisco and Oakland for the last six years has skewed my concept of what “everyone” thinks, but basically I can’t wait for someone to be brave/stupid enough to come out while still active. It’ll be a shitstorm to rival what Jackie Robinson went through, but I think (most) people will get over it relatively quickly and ultimately it will be good for baseball and America as a whole. We’ll see, I guess.

Todd Jones is quoted in an article by Denver Post theater critic, John Moore, on Richard Greenberg’s play “Take Me Out.” The piece is an indepth and insightful examination of the deep-rooted homophobia that exists in pro sports. Greeenberg told Moore:

"I think it would be an enormously difficult thing to do," said Greenberg, "and I think it will probably be hellish for whoever does it, no matter who he is. There is nothing but disincentive...You can imagine what a gay player would be up against," said Greenberg, an openly gay man. "You're endangering his life."

The only incentive for doing it anyway, he said, “is if the player just can’t stand it anymore. When living the lie becomes impossible.”

Colorado pitcher Todd Jones probably speaks for the majority of ballplayers when he said:

“I wouldn’t want a gay guy being around me,” Jones said. “It’s got nothing to do with me being scared. That’s the problem: All these people say he’s got all these rights. Yeah, he’s got rights or whatever, but he shouldn’t walk around proud. It’s like he’s rubbing it in our face. ‘See me, hear me roar.’ We’re not trying to be close-minded, but then again, why be confrontational when you don’t really have to be?”

That kind of attitude “speaks volumes about America,” said actor Daniel Sunjata, a Jeter lookalike who plays Lemming in “Take Me Out.” “Sports are the last bastion of sanctioned homophobia in this country. The fact that something like sexual preference can so adversely affect your career and your income is depressing. If I were a pro baseball player, and I was gay, I might not come out, either, for those exact reasons.”

All-around good guy, Mark Grace had a more enlightened take:

“I’ve played for 16 years, and I’m sure I’ve had homosexual teammates that I didn’t know about,” he said. “If one out of six or seven men are homosexual – do the math.”

“I think the perception in the clubhouse would be one of, for lack of a better word – fear,” Grace said. “Fear that they’d be stared at or (that a gay player might fall) in love with them. But I think if you’re intelligent at all, you’d understand that homosexuals are just like us. They don’t think everybody’s attractive. Just because this guy’s homosexual doesn’t mean he’s attracted to me.”

I’d like to think that there are more guys like Mark Grace than Todd Jones out there, but I’d also like for money to grow on trees. Still, I think this is a fascinating subject and I’ll continue to write about it as long as there is something to add to the discussion. Anyone with thoughts or comments, please send them in. I’m curious to know what the readers are thinking. Are you saying, “Enough already with the Fruits, let’s get back to boxscores and pitch-count?” Let me know.

GIL, A REAL MECHE

Seattle right hander Gil Meche overshadowed Roger Clemens and the hoopla surrounding Ichiro and Godzilla at the Stadium last night, as the Mariners shut out the Bombers, 6-0. Meche, winner of the Audie Murphy award, looks like he just jumped out of an old WWII movie; he has the innocent good looks of the boy next door. (“He’s attractive,” my girlfriend Emily remarked, “but he could use a hair cut.” For what it’s worth so could Matsui. “Godzilla needs to get his ass to Barbazon.”) He pitched quickly, and had the Yankee batters out of synch all evening.

After the game, Meche told reporters:

“Probably the biggest night of my baseball career,” said Meche, who scattered six singles and walked two. “How could it not be? Beating a Hall of Famer and this lineup? It’s unbelievable.”

Clemens wasn’t terrible (he did strike out eight), but he did give up 3 dingers (Boone, Davis and Edgar).

I was reminded just how much strong the rivalry with the M’s has been over the past few years last night. Damn, I hate losing to those guys. But honestly, with the exception of Brett Boone, there is hardly anyone to dislike on Seattle. I don’t even hate Boone, it’s just that his cockines is easy to root against. Sheeet, what’s not to love about Olerud, Edgar and Ichiro? And Bob Melvin appears to be a good guy as well.

No, the worst part about last night was that the Sox just keep coming and coming.

But fug it, I shouldn’t be riffing. The Yankees will probably not be shut-out too many times this year. It could be worse,after all: I could be a Mets fan.

Speaking of which, my cousin Gabe called me in the middle of the Card-Mets game last night. I had caught Ty Wiggenton’s at-bat with the bases-loaded in the first. He battled Matt Morris to a full-count and then smacked a grounder deep in the hole at short, which Edgar Renteria fielded and then threw a seed to first to record the out. Typical Mets I thought. About 20 minutes later, I saw on the ticker that the Cardinals had scored three in their half of the first. Ugh.

Gabe, who is anything but an alarmist, calls and says, “I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but this could be the season right here. They could be done. And I don’t mean that as a judgement, but as an observation.”

That just may be the case. Hey Steve Phillips, remember what ol’ Satch said: “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.”

YANKEE BENCHES

By Guest Columnist: Chris DeRosa

Hello, Bronx Banterers. Alex asked me to come off the bench with a Yankee-related feature, so I thought I would take substitution as my theme and discuss Yankee benches: the best benches the team has had in the past and those of the current dynasty.

Yankee fans of a sabermetric bent tend to ignore the slew of coffee table books about the team, and therefore may have missed the fact that Bill James wrote three parts of the latest entry in the genre, The New York Yankees: One Hundred Years, The Official Retrospective. He writes short essays on each of the 25 greatest Yankees as selected by a group of sportswriters, five of the most famous Yankee teams, and six of the club’s greatest managers. It is a pricey book, but it is fun to have James’s always intriguing perspective and to have him take on greatest- (NY)-team-ever debate, even in abbreviated form. Besides, what other coffee table book is going to diss the ’61 club and poke fun at Bobby Meacham?

Anyway, one thing James mentions in talking about Casey Stengel was how frequently his teams led in “Bench Value Percentage,” a measure of the percentage the non-starters contribute to a team’s success. Stengel’s Yankees led three times, 1949, 1951, and 1954. I looked them up. Not surprisingly, these three also had the three highest win shares totals that any of Stengel’s Yankee benches amassed. Might one of those clubs, I wondered, be identified as the best bench in team history?

Choosing one is harder than I thought. First of all, who should count as being a bench player?

If someone is acquired in the last third of the season to be part of the starting lineup, is his contribution really “off the bench”?

If a bench player plays himself into the starting lineup halfway through, score one for the bench? Or count him as a regular?

If you’re half of a strict platoon, are you a semi-regular, or riding the pines?

Chili Davis is supposed to be your regular DH, but he gets hurt. Darryl Strawberry steps in and leads the team in homers much of the way. Strawberry gets sick and Davis makes it back late in the year. Strength in depth for sure, but which one counts for the bench?

The easiest thing to do is to define the bench as the contributions of everybody beyond the eight (or nine with DH) players who got the most playing time. Even then, you’ve got to make some common sense adjustments. Joe DiMaggio shouldn’t count as a bench player for the 1949 Yankees even if he got less playing time than Cliff Mapes. Clearly, what matters in discussing the bench is the contribution of Mapes and other players who stepped in when DiMaggio was injured.

The question of injuries raises a further complication. The 1949 team was famously riddled with injuries. Is a reserve squad that is called on more often for this reason better than another that is equally ready and able, but kept on the bench by a healthy lineup? Maybe not better, but probably “greater.” It’s like when they rank the presidents. You have overcome a major crisis or two in order to rate with the greatest ever. Here are the total win shares claimed by some of the most active Yankee benches and their top not-ready-for-full-time-players:

1949 59 Mapes 12, Johnson 9, Lindell 6, Silvera 6, Stirnweiss 6, Keller 5, Kryhoski 4, Phillips 4
1951 51 Brown 13, Mantle 13, Collins 11, Jensen 9, Hopp 2, Johnson 2, Silvera 2
1954 48 Skowron 13, Coleman 6, Robinson 5, Slaughter 5, Miranda 4, Woodling, Cerv 3
1955 44 Howard 11, Collins 9, Robinson 7, Rizzuto 6, Cerv 5, Martin 2
1980 46 Gamble 11, Murcer 9, Piniella 7, Spencer 7, Lefebvre 4, Werth 3
1997 47 Curtis 11, Boggs 10, Posada 6, Sanchez 5, Whiten 5, Stanley 4, Duncan 3, Kelly 2

Another reason the total doesn’t tell the whole story is that it is difficult to measure the crucial bench quality of versatility. The variety of problems a team can solve off the bench is important along with the overarching measure of their contribution offered by win shares.
Comments on Some Great Yankee Benches

All of which goes to say that it may be too hard to identify the one best bench in team history. Here are some of the excellent ones, though. The bench didn’t figure much until Casey Stengel came along, and he always had a deep and talented roster. There is an extensive literature on Stengel’s use of reserves, so I won’t rehash all that here. In 1949, he did most of his rotating in the outfield and at first base. I think it was his 103-win 1954 club that best exemplified his concept of the roster as 16 players who were all worthy, with the batter-by-batter circumstances dictating which eight were playing and which were licking their chops.

1954: Only Mantle and Berra, the two best players in the league, batted 500 times on this team. The rest of the team was like a giant awesome bench. Charlie Silvera hit well in a handful of at bats backing up Berra, as he always did. At first base was Joe Collins (343 ab), Moose Skowron (215), and Eddie Robinson (142) combining for 22 homers and 89 walks. In the infield were Andy Carey (411), Gil McDougal (394), Phil Rizzuto (307), Jerry Coleman (300), and Willie Miranda (116). The outfielders after Mantle in descending order of playing time were Irv Noren (426), Hank Bauer (377), and Gene Woodling (304), Enos Slaughter (125) and Bob Cerv (100). All these players, with the arguable exception of Miranda, were important contributors to the Yankee dynasty, although not all played well in 1954. James’s Guide to the Baseball Managers reports the 1954 Yanks set a record for pinch hitters, 262, who hit .292 and set a record with 7 dingers.

1977: An example of a fine bench that didn’t get to strut its stuff the way Stengel’s did is that of the 1977 World Champions. Billy Martin got over 500 at bats for seven regulars, but he had in reserve plenty of offensive punch and a couple of glove men who didn’t hurt the team at the plate. Despite the signing of Reggie Jackson, Lou Piniella managed to get over 300 at bats again in a platoon outfielder-DH role, and he hit the snot out of the ball: .330 and slugging .510. Cliff Johnson hit .296 and slugged .606 in 142 at bats, in 56 games at 1B, DH, and catcher. Infielder Fred Stanley (.261) and outfielder Paul Blair (.262) came bearing gloves. George Zeber and Dell Alston both hit .320 in limited trials, and subsequently appeared on those four-head-shot Topps rookie cards in 1978. Klutts’ also had Alan Trammell and Paul Molitor, so that turned out to be a pretty good card.

1980: Like 1954, a 103-win team that didn’t go all the way and had few regulars. Only Reggie, Randolph, and Rick Cerone batted 500 times, Cerone actually led the team with 147 games. The bench was deep in bats. Switch-hitting outfielder Bobby Brown got a big break in center when Ruppert Jones got hurt and played pretty well, hitting 14 homers and swiping 27 bases in 137 games. From the right, Lou Piniella again had a good 300+ at bats, hitting .287 and slugging .462. When Graig Nettles went down, Semi-regular DH Eric Soderholm hit .287, slugged .462, and subbed at the hot corner when Nettles got hurt (though they later added Aurelio Rodriquez to play third and he didn’t do much