I wrote:-Has Vegas released their odds on which new Yankee pitcher is going to fall off of the MLB map? ... as good as he can be, Pineda has two things going against him.

And now he's out for the rest of the season.

So okay, here's one of the things I mean when I say "money isn't the advantage people make it out to be in baseball." It made perfect sense to pay Carl Crawford like a star player. His numbers and recent past demanded it. Problem is, when you're paying a star player, you are only paying for past performance.

Okay, Cid, so how do you pay for his potential? Run stats assuming a drop off, or just hope that past performance does equal future performance?

ampersand wrote:Okay, Cid, so how do you pay for his potential?

You don't. There's no such thing. Incentive-heavy contracts are frowned upon in Major League Baseball.

ampersand wrote:Run stats assuming a drop off, or just hope that past performance does equal future performance?

I know this will sound arrogant, but I honestly believe I could be a passable GM. Won't go higher than "passable," but I feel I could pull that much off. So, here goes:

-The first step you should take is to make sure that you are fielding a top-level medical staff. This is the Red Sox' biggest problem with spending money: they spend it on injury-prone players who drag out 4-8 week injuries for an entire season. Some part of that has to be on the medical staff that keeps having to re-diagnose Crawford. Failing that, you do an awful lot of research before you dole out your contract.

-You should only spend money on a player that will help you in the short term. Again, young guys just about to enter their prime aren't the big free agents. The big names are guys toward the end of their prime, who have already had "career years." Short term, star players will likely help you. In the long term, so much more can go wrong. They can get hurt. They can lose some of their skill. They could be named John Lackey.

-Only pay for the genuine article. I have no problem with a team ponying up for Pujols, even if it's a near certainty that he won't be a top-three player at the end of that contract he has with Los Anaheim, and even if he never turns back into the guy he was in St. Louis. The Angels had to pull the trigger. The potential benefits are too great to ignore.

-Invest in people who aren't players. Get a good pitching coach and sign him for the long term. Get great scouts. Hire someone from SABR to crunch numbers for you. I already mentioned the training staff, but there are also minor league coaches and all manner of front office personnel to land. Know what I'd add? A "fan ambassador," someone who is well liked in the area that can do press conferences and interviews. (Here the obvious choice would be Curt Schilling.) Done well, this will yield a sustainable model.

-Spend the most money in-house. The advantage that being the richest team in baseball gives the Yankees is that they get to keep Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera around until they don't feel like paying those guys anymore. That's really THE advantage of having money--the ability to keep guys around. If you bring someone up through your farm, and they become a star for the big club, you should keep that person around. Not only does it help clubhouse chemistry to do so, but it makes the fans happy. If the Rays had this advantage, they'd be the scariest team in baseball.

-Top out around $100-$125 million, tops. Nobody should spend more than a million dollars per win. Right now, several teams do. You'll notice those teams tend to have plenty of common threads: older lineups, injury issues, chemistry issues, streaky play and underperforming veterans. You want a fair amount of people who are entering their prime, because some of them are going to break out and become great. High payrolls suggest teams are paying a lot of money to players who may very well have already peaked.

Mariano Rivera has torn his ACL. That's a significant enough injury that, given Rivera's age, there is now a possibility that he will retire before he pitches again. A shame. Nobody should have to go out like that.

Admit it, Cid. There was some part of you that's cheering that the Yankees will now blow more games.

You've got it all wrong. We're not Philadelphia Eagles fans. We're not bloodthirsty. Besides, you're talking about Boston's Favorite Yankee. ("WHAT?!" Hold on, let me explain.)

"Mo" blew two saves in the 2004 ALCS, then another very early in 2005 in a game against Boston. When the Red Sox had their first home game with the Yankees in '05, during introductions, Fenway Park gave a standing ovation to Mariano Rivera. Nobody expected this. It wasn't like the Boston Globe urged the people at the Park to do it. Rivera's reaction? He laughed and played along. That's how Red Sox fans remember Rivera: the one guy, above all the other Yankees, that we really wished we had gotten instead. (And, yes, the guy that Dave Roberts ran on.)

Also, you really think I'd ever have such malicious thoughts about a person who looks that much like Tony Dungy?

Just wondering, will Baltimore still be in first of the American League east by the all-star break?

Nah. The Rays should be, far and away, the favorites in the AL East going forward. However, it is reasonable to believe that we could hit late August and see everyone but Tampa Bay in that division all the way out of the playoff race.

OR one of the big money teams in the division holds within ten games through the end of July, then trades for a piece or two that brings them back into the fold. Keep in mind that, as much as they're struggling, the Red Sox and Yankees both have all the resources they need to make that deal. (Whether they WILL, or whether it will work if they do, is another story.)

The problem with the Orioles is that their general manager is a man by the name of Dan Duquette. As a Red Sox fan, I am quite familiar with Duquette, whose personnel decisions were often hard to understand. He loved to trade high-level prospects for very short-term players, which did damage to the team long-term. (He also got run out of Boston on a kind of bum rap. The biggest complaint against him was that he believed very publicly that Roger Clemens was in "the twilight of his career" in the mid 1990s when Clemens left Boston. Considering what we know now about that situation, um...maybe we owe Dan an apology? Also, he was largely responsible for bringing in Pedro Martinez, and I call Pedro "one of the best pitchers ever" enough that I should probably go easy on the GM that brought him here.) So really, I don't imagine the Orioles will have staying power.

In unrelated but incredible news, Major League Baseball is considering a rule change that I support one hundred percent. I hate the fake-to-one-base, throw-to-the-other move. It never works, and it always seems like the pitcher's going to snap an ankle. I would be ecstatic to see baseball get rid of this stupid play that never works.

collegestudent22 wrote:I just don't understand why the benefit from taking steroids should matter in the records, while the benefits from having more modern equipment (like metal bats, or even better wood bats, more scientific footwear, etc.) or better, more scientific training regimens shouldn't make a difference in determining records

It's worse than that. Here's a small sample of things that destroy the illusion that players can be compared to one another across eras:
-Among our most sacred records: Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hit streak, Cy Young's wins and losses records that nobody will even approach, Ted Williams' .406 season, all of Babe Ruth's numbers. What do they all have in common? Not one of them had to face anything but white people to reach those milestones. And none of them had to travel west of the Mississippi River to do it. Most of their contemporaries didn't make enough money to call baseball their only profession. They worked jobs in the offseason. And talking about controlled substances, Babe Ruth is known today as a big-living drinker, but he achieved stardom during something called "prohibition" you might have read about, making him the roaring twenties' version of Dock Ellis.
-The last pitcher to win thirty games, and the holder of the modern day record for ERA in a complete season, hit both of those milestones during a season when baseball tweaked the pitcher's mound to benefit pitchers.
-Since 1969, baseball has been slowly adding to its roster of teams, meaning that there are a lot of major league jobs that went to players who in prior eras would never make it out of the minor leagues.
-Now that there's a team in Colorado and another in Arizona, the laws of physics have a hand in increased home run totals.
-We often forget in all sports that the rules are constantly changing, and usually those rule changes benefit the offense because people are generally more entertained by offense. This makes records related to offense very easy to break over time.

I will find out who in the Yankees management decided to let Cotton Eye Joe be the 7th inning stretch song and I will kill him.

Also, there's a really good chance the All-Star Game will be played in the hottest temperatures ever. It's looking like the 100's heat will last a very long time, quite possibly through the All-Star Game. If I were the Royals, I'd sell tickets to have fans sit in the fountains as hot as it's going to be.

ampersand wrote:I will find out who in the Yankees management decided to let Cotton Eye Joe be the 7th inning stretch song and I will kill him.

I think you mean the 8th inning song. The seventh inning stretch is usually "Take Me Out To The Ballgame," and on Sundays and patriotic holidays "God Bless America."

The eighth, apparently, is now the inning where ballparks find the worst piece of music in their arsenal and play it like it's tradition to do so. At Fenway they do "Sweet Caroline," because when you're looking for terrible music that drunk people can sing along with I guess you can't go wrong with Neil Diamond. (We need to start making up our own songs if we're going to sing in the stands. It's the one thing that seems the least bit charming about English pitch football to me, that their fans sing in unison. We need a full, two verse song about how much we dislike Alex Rodriguez as a ballplayer, and maybe another about how whiny Joe Maddon is. The least Liverpool can do is teach us to sing if they're going to suck all the blood and money out of FSG...)

The Cid wrote:At Fenway they do "Sweet Caroline," because when you're looking for terrible music that drunk people can sing along with I guess you can't go wrong with Neil Diamond.

Buncha drunk southie pricks, fahkin' black Irish bahstads gettin' off ta shitty music at the pahk...

It's all the trend followahs. Fahkin' pink hattahs, dood.

(That's how we refer to bandwagon Red Sox fans around here--by making some kind of reference to the multi-colored fashion-style caps that popular teams have. "The fans in pink hats" are our way of saying we liked this team before it was trendy to do so.)

-When people talk about the "best rivalry in baseball," they usually limit the conversation to a few candidates: Red Sox-Yankees, Cubs-Cardinals, Phillies-Mets, and Dodgers-Giants. But did you know that the division rivalry with the most playoff history is none of those? It's Pirates-Reds, who have met in five NLCSes (1970, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1990) and who are one of the best ESPN Classic matchups you can ever come across. I'm obviously partial to the rivalry involving my favorite team (though lately it's been a bit boring), but shouldn't Cincinnati-Pittsburgh be one of the rivalries mentioned in that conversation? I mention it because, at the moment, the Reds and Pirates are in position for playoff spots and separated by only one game atop the NL Central.

And don't say nobody will watch: Pittsburgh is an excellent sports market, and you bet your ass they'd support the Pirates if the Pirates' owner supported them at all. This is all going to be a shame when the Pirates trade AJ Burnett for pennies on the dollar and go in the tank at the end of July.

-The Phillies should trade Cole Hamels. If they were going to keep him around they'd have gotten a deal done by now, but either they don't want to give him what he's asking for or he doesn't want to stick around in Philadelphia. Problem is, they're going to ask for way too much--if Hamels doesn't stay in Philly, why would he be inclined to stay in another high-pressure market like New York or Boston? Chances are, he wants to go west, and if that's the case than west coast teams are not going to be inclined to give up a lot of prospects for a player they could easily sign in November. The best move would be to target a team that is willing to go for broke to win now and see if they'd be willing to trade a big contract (which Philadelphia could use to stabilize their batting order) with a mid-to-high level prospect for a few months of Cole Hamels. Maybe the Orioles or the Rays would pull the trigger on such a rental. Maybe the Yankees would offer Curtis Granderson straight up and hope they can win Hamels over long term with money. If I were the Phillies' GM, I'd call up the Red Sox the moment Jacoby Ellsbury comes off the DL just to hear Ben Cherington tell me to go to Hell.

Bottom line though: any deal the Phillies make to trade Hamels, if they do end up trading him, is probably going to be a good move. Cole Hamels is another Barry Zito or John Lackey waiting to happen. I'd bet on whoever gives Cole Hamels a long term deal regretting that deal. It's a safe bet.

In celebration of the All Star Break, here's XKCD's Randall Munroe with a physics thought experiment involving baseball.

I don't know how accurate it is, but I love it regardless.