Massive Xmas update

I hope everybody had a great Christmas or whatever it is you celebrate, assuming you celebrate something this time of year, or are, in fact, alive. Lots of goodies for you today. I've finally got the internet running here, just in time to write a post over a plate of ham and sausage, toast and eggs, while watching Arsenal face Portsmouth. So let's get at it...

Awesome paraphrased Wilnerisms of the holiday season
Wilner did us all a favour and dipped into the ol' mail bag yesterday, which was great all around but started out spectacularly. Spelling out how the mail bag would work, Wilner explained:

"E-mail was edited for space only (it was REALLY hard not to edit some for punctuation and grammar, but I held back), and I took out any compliments to me. I really do appreciate them a lot, but I don’t think you readers want me to publish other people telling me how much they like me. Gotta be pretty insecure to be throwing that stuff up there."

Now, who... what sort of insecure person could he be referring to there? Hmmm...

(OK, so apparently it's not aimed at a single person, but a whole bunch of douches who do that sort of thing.)

I'm sure it will come to me, but in the meantime, when I read that it reminded me of a few passages in the afterword of Michael Lewis's Moneyball. It's not new or anything, and I'm sure a lot of you have already read it, but just accept it as a Christmas gift from me, because I already typed the whole damn thing out...

For the most part, the city of Toronto appreciated the change [to JP Ricciardi's style of management]. But even there, in that gentle and decent place, was that noisome sound-- the miserable squeaks of protest from the Club's Women's Auxiliary. One morning during the 2003 season, Toronto woke up to a front-page story in the Toronto Star that raised alarming questions about the new Blue Jays. "The White Jays?" it was called. The headline, along with the mug shots of the players, read: "In a city of so many multicultural faces, Toronto's baseball team is the whitest in the league. Why?" The baseball writer behind the article, Geoff Baker, had made his own little study. He'd found that there were ten nonwhite players on the average big league twenty-five man roster and that, after Ricciardi's wheeling and dealing, the new Jays had only six. The new GM seemed to be systematically trading for lower-priced white guys. How sad, how regrettable, in a city as famous for its diversity as Toronto, that the Blue Jays no longer represented it. "Ricciardi is at a loss to explain the number as anything beyond coincidence," wrote Baker, who was not similarly at a loss. He found an explanation in the way JP Ricciardi ran a baseball team.

It was an intriguing line of attack, but with a tactical weakness. By its very nature, it demanded a response from outside the Club. (That, in the end, is the Club's Achilles heel. It can never fully escape the larger culture that supports it). Letters poured into the Star, the Star's ombudsman was called in to apologize for the package, and other newspapers took the piece to heart. The National Post ran a withering editorial that pointed out out that the Jays' promotional campaign featured two players, Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells, both black. That Toronto was 8 percent black and 2 percent Latino, its baseball team was 12 percent black and 12 percent Latino, and so, taken literally, the article made the case for reducing the number of racial minorities in Blue Jays' uniforms. That it was grotesque to make racial generalizations based on a couple of moves. Wrote the Post: "The story, shot through as it was with vague hints of racism, comprised a smear job on a baseball team with no other agenda than to win games and please its fans."

But where the anger climaxed was in the Blue Jays clubhouse: the players were ticked off. You see, they were laboring under the impression they'd been selected for their ability to play baseball, not their skin color. Carlos Delgado told the Toronto Sun, "It was the most stupid thing I've ever heard. It doesn't make any sense. You don't see anybody writing anything about the Maple Leafs not having a black guy or the Raptors having 90 percent black players. It (race) has nothing to do with it. We don't have any kind of problem in the clubhouse and we don't need that shit."

Enter, stage right, Richard Griffin, a second [rate] baseball writer on the Toronto Star. Griffin was another old baseball guy who had been on Ricciardi's case from the start. Relentless in his ire for the new regime, and their new methods, he never missed a chance to point out where they were going wrong. Now he explained patiently to the Star's readers that they should not "shoot the messenger." His colleague's article hadn't been about racism, he said, but... well, what was it about? He cast about for a phrase and came up with: "The fluctuating racial mosaic of baseball." Ah! So that's it, the innocent Toronto newspaper reader must have thought as he scratched his noggin. Then Griffin clarified his meaning: "Jays GM JP Ricciardi along with Oakland's Billy Beane and other new wavers," he wrote, "believe in building offense through patience at the plate and taking no chances on the bases. That's pre WW-2 style of play. Under those criteria, Jackie Robinson could not have played in the majors."

Well, if you want to steer the conversation away from racism there are safer examples to pick. It was the nearest thing baseball writing has seen to a Marx Brothers routine. Griffin was Harpo, who, seeing his friend engulfed in flames, grabs the bucket of water, without noticing that it's marked KEROSENE. What made the whole episode doubly weird is that Jackie Robinson was exactly the sort of player the A's and Jays salivate over. He had the stats they tended to stress-- high on-base, plate discipline, great power for a second baseman, etc.-- plus he was undervalued. Indeed, one way of looking at the revolution in baseball management is as a search for less dramatic versions of Jackie Robinson-- players who, for one unfair reason or another, often because of their appearance, had been maligned and undervalued by the market.

Still, in one way these two Toronto baseball writers were right: no matter how artfully it tried to insinuate racism, their story wasn't about race. Race was merely a tool, a weapon in a bigger, more important struggle: the fight against people who didn't take the scout or the sportswriter on faith. What had got under their skins were all these... little nerds out there with their Web logs and baseball stats and computers who thought they had something to say about building a baseball team. Pelted with rotten fruit, Baker claimed that the response to his story was no more than a conspiracy of these nerds. "We suspect," he wrote to me, "that many of the emails and letters complaining about the story were in part the result of an organized campaign started on the baseball web logs and by other parties with an interest in refuting the story." Those pesky outsiders!

The "White Jays," the uninformed rantings of baseball writers too lazy to pick up a telephone, the snide asides on ESPN, the knowing jokes about Billy Beane's "genius"-- it was all of a piece. To defend the Club against the new idea, the members had to distort the idea.

Oh yeah, Wilner's mail Bag...
Holy shit. OK... that was a fuckload longer than I had planned. I meant to focus on Wilner's latest. The mailbag is awesome because it's basically just Wilner being Wilner, only it's in print. It's not quite the same as when he verbally slaps the dick out of somebody's mouth on the radio, but it's still pretty good. More importantly, I don't have to frantically type it out in order to quote from it.

The most interesting nugget from his latest blog, however, didn't involve Mike ripping someone to shreds but the fact that Bill James "projects 800 runs scored and 655 runs allowed, which leads to a Pythagorean winning percentage of .598."

In other words, 97 wins-- which Wilner then qualifies with: "It doesn’t account for unearned runs, though, so throw 50 of those in there and you still come up with 92-93 wins." I then qualified that with: "Wait a second, that's what Bill James looks like?"

Maybe it's the six-day bender talking, but there is still a part of me that genuinely thinks this team could have a year like the projections suggest. I'll believe it when I see it, of course, and obviously they'll finish third, but as far as projections go, I'll take what Wilner says James is saying. It's still kind of Christmas so why not?

Oh yeah, that other guy
Right. Riiiight... I was going to let the huge loaf in Sunday's Star pass, but there is something sick inside me that makes it so I can't, and in a moment of weakness I read Griffin's piece on Johnny Mac. While I agree with him that I'd prefer to see the PMoD as the starter, that's about the only thing about the article that I didn't find... well, kind of insane. For one thing, have we seriously come to the point where telling a ballplayer he's been demoted before the manager gets to because the guy hadn't checked his voicemail is the kind of scoop that warrants two paragraphs of jerking off into your own paper's mouth? Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford must be rolling in their graves.

The rest of the column smells a whole lot like the stuff those passages from Moneyball were driving at. The guy just doesn't get it. Either that, or he's so truly lost in a blind rage at what he thinks is Ricciardi but is actually the impending sense of his own complete fucking uselessness that whether he gets it or not no longer even enters the picture, he just goes on waving his hands and making a lot of noise. I mean, holy fuck, he actually has the balls to make derisive remarks about Ricciardi winging it! Friggin' incredible... if you don't mind me nicking a bit of his lame shit shtick, this tool's winged more pages than Federal Express. Zinger! Hey Master Planner, so instead of Scutaro or McDonald you'd prefer Olmedo or Adams? When Glaus inevitably gets hurt, you'd prefer Olmadams to be first off the bench? It makes zero sense. Molina and Koskie and now Eckstein were bad moves? Making low-risk improvements on weak positions is why the Jays finish third every year?

Seriously, what the hell is he talking about?

Jason Stark on "Keeping up with AL heavyweights"
More old news, but ESPN's Jason Stark wrote a piece way back on the 19th that sheds a little light on what Ricciardi's current philosophy for competing in the AL East is: pitching. Nothing shocking there, but it sheds a little light on the reasoning behind the Rios-for-Lincecum proposal that refused to die a couple weeks back. Ricciardi says, "The way we look at it, we're at least one of the top seven offensive clubs in the American League. And none of the seven of us are going to be able to pummel people to death. So the best chance we have is to outpitch the other teams in our division."

That, uh... really.. uh... worked well last year. FYI, the Jays were 10th in runs scored in the AL last year...

Good to see them getting some big press, I guess. At least, if I cared it would be.

The article also goes on to address the ongoing saga surrounding Johan Santana-- which is starting to make Brian Sabean's glacially-paced vacillations over the Rios thing seem like the amount of time Parkes takes before he forgets a piece of punchmeat's name once he wakes up in the morning. A lot of people-- Stark included-- are starting to think negotiations are dragging on so long is because the Twins are never going to move Santana to another team in the American League. That sentiment is echoed by MetsBlog, too.

Works for me, and I think it makes total sense for the Twins-- assuming they actually believe they'll be back to the playoffs in the next decade. I know people disagree, but I really think that the packages the Sox and Yankees have proposed for Santana have kinda been shit. What business do they have having "untouchable" prospects when they're trying to get the best pitcher in baseball, presumably with the knowledge that he'll be signing a long-term extension? The playing field is so slanted that those teams don't even have to try anymore! I'm crossing my fingers for the Mets.

Oh, um... here's something
I wrote this on a magical drunken Christmas eve. It was two days ago. I couldn't post it until now because the internet was down, and I'm pretty sure I should probably be hitting the delete key right about now, but what the hell...

I'm holed up in my parents' basement after maybe an hour of being the only person out on the streets at the magical hour of like one or something a.m. Christmas morning. I walked through the whole city drunk as a fuck after a night of hanging around at a friends' house having previously done "the Christmas thing" with my family. Both involved alcohol, so it was all good. A walk across town is actually kind of nice, especially when other people are afraid of the lone drunk stumbling around the sidewalk at the tail end of Christmas eve. It's almost humbling, but not really. This little place seems so big and empty, and the horizon so far away. It's hard even for a drunk not to see the magic in walking down a snowy path with the big moon shining while all the town-kids have a collective little moment there. That kind of homogeneity is so quaint you can't buy it. So, uh... yeah... baseball. I, uh... fielded an email the other morning from a reader who wanted to know why we have to swear so dang much dagnabbit. You know, I actually do kind of understand that it's a bit of a lame crutch that we have sometimes, but you know what? Fuck it. Why fuck it? Because fuck it, that's why. I gave him a much more articulate explanation (I think), but it's not one that I'd waste on you fucking clowns with your fucking hard-ons for all this fucking swearing and shit. I know what you're like! And while I'm thinking about how we put together this little corner of the interweb, that reminds me that I've been figuring on having a mild redesign before the season gets going (seven weeks until pitchers and catchers!). Nothing major, just clean the page up a little bit, make it a little friendlier on the eyes. (Suggestions are welcome and will be promptly ignored). We'll also... uh... well, so David Eckstein really didn't want to leave the Cardinals, huh? Did you see this? Did you hear about this? He was kind of pissed, I think, that his agent and the Cards didn't get shit done. So, I don't know if that's a good thing and he'll really pull his shit together this year to get the hell out of town, or if I should be pissed off at him. He tried to put a good spin on it about things always working out for the best-- but what a load of shit that is! Hey, and speaking of loads of shit, did you know that Brian Roberts thinks you're fucking stupid? He thinks I'm stupid too! What a dumb cunt! Oh hey, yeah,... now that you caught me red handed and have eye-witess testimony (of the kind that would hold up in court-- not hearsay, bitchez) uh... I ... uh... oh by the way, I did try steroids that one time, but ewwwww! I didn't like it. It made me vomit in my mouth a little. So I didn't do it again. . . Hmmmm-- guess what fuckface, I'm gonna wager that's one giant crock of fucking shit. Clemens too. Though I'm impressed that he took the denial route-- mostly because it's such an incredibly goddamn stupid and difficult PR move. Not that I ever thought Clemens was some kind of Ronnie fucking Hawking super-scientist, but come on... if for no other reason, you can be confident he's guilty simply because for shits and giggles a guy is absolutely not going to fucking willingly tell people that he shot a needle into another guy's ass a whole bunch of times.

Well, alright, sure... a guy might totally do that for shits and giggles, but you'd know he was just busting your balls. To let people think it was serious for this long? No way a guy fucking does that unless it goddamn well is serious. So let's just fucking admit it... Clemens did it [allegedly]. Alright then... so I'm pretty fucking full of Christmas cheer (read: booze) and libel right now, and uh... I think I need to pass out face down a little bit before I go off to another family get-together tomorrow, after which I can finally really let fucking loose and get shitfaced. Ohhh yeahh. Merry fucking Christmas from the DJF... who knows when we'll be back...