While we sit in break during baseball’s dead period ( I don’t watch the All-Star games in any sports), time to take a look back over the first half of the 2009 MLB season.

-Only slightly related to the topic, MLB ’09: The Show is an amazing title that stands as one of PS3′s best exclusives without fanfare. Still a few AI bugs like fielders taking forever to throw the ball if they think a runner isn’t going to try to score, etc. but a great game overall and maybe the best baseball game ever.

-Billy Beane, long a target of my hatred, is fielding yet another lousy offensive team. His fellow moneyball enthusiasts, Paul Depodesto and Sandy Alderson, are currently fielding the very worst offense in the majors with the San Diego Padres. Idiots try to say that the Red Sox are a success story and that GM Epstein uses moneyball principles. Let’s get something out of the way, Theo is a Beane disciple who values walks, but if he has a $100+ million payroll every year and can afford to pay the posting fee for Dice-K, the Red Sox are NOT a moneyball team.

The Holliday trade has brought absolutely nothing to the lineup. Jason Giambi, Orlando Cabrera, and Nomar Garciappara are all flameouts, in fact Giambi is hitting .192 in 260 at bats. He got rid of Danny Haren a couple of years ago, Haren is now one of the top 5 starters in the entire league and was already well on his way to being that a few years ago. The A’s got six players for Haren: Dana Eveland, Brett Anderson, Greg Smith, Chris Carter, Aaron Cunningham and Carlos Gonzalez. The biggest contribution this year among those players has been from Anderson, who has an ERA in the mid 4′s in 83 ip this year. In other words, still no impact.

Best Pinto salesman ever?

Eric Chavez, one of the few players Beane has seen fit to reward with a huge contract, is out for the season again after only 30 at bats, and his career might be over. Beane’s most productive years as a GM came when he had a roster full of steroid users like Giambi and Miggy Tejada. He’s done absolutely nothing without them, other than overlook potentially good managers within the organization — like Ron Washington who’s left for success in Texas. Yet somehow this guy is lauded as a genius for having a small payroll and doing nothing with it. He’s given credit as a talent scout for what.. thinking that Dan Johnson was the 1b of the future? For acquiring Arthur Rhodes as a closer? For saying Charles Thomas was the leadoff man they needed? Rarely is someone not only given this much of a free pass by the media but actually treated as some kind of a hero. I guess this is what happens when the media and fanbase are filled with stat geeks jacking off at the fancy way Beane makes his spreadsheets in Excel. BTW, according to the sabermetrics geeks, Raul Ibanez’ contract with the Phillies was terrible. Nice work guys.

-The one stat however that NEEDS to be invented is something that more accurately measures wear and tear on a pitcher’s arm than innings pitched. If innings pitched are such a big deal wouldn’t pitchers be on an innings count? Instead they’re put on pitch counts, because that’s the true measure of how much a pitcher had to work, in addition to looking at how often they were in difficult situations — whether that be via a long at bat or pitching out of the stretch. If Greg Maddux throws a complete game shutout on 87 pitches am I supposed to believe he was under more duress than a Joba Chamberlain 104 pitch, 4.2 inning outing? Of course not, so why emphasize ip so much?

Pitch counter, not an innings counter

-Another long time pet peeve – the calculations by the sports media of the number of games a team is under .500. You cannot calculate a team’s distance from a .500 record based on potential games played, you have to calculate it on actual games played. If a team is 10-20 in 30 games played, they are commonly referred to as being 10 games under .500. In the case of a team that has played 30 games (10 + 20) a .500 record would be 15-15. That means that subtracting the win total of a .500 record from the current actual record gives you 15-10 which is 5. The team, then, is five games under .500 because 5 more wins would have put them at that mark. The current usage indicates that if a team won 10 games in a row they’d be at .500, which is true but has nothing to do with actual games played. In addition, it eliminates the possibility that a team has finished all of their games. If a team is 71-91 did they finish 20 games under .500? Of course not, because there are no ties in baseball, and there are only 162 games in a season so there is no chance of them “winning their next 20 games in a row”. Rather, they finished 10 games under .500. Yes it’s nitpicking but the expression, as currently used, makes no sense.

-I wrote awhile ago about the treatment of Barry Bonds vs. other convicted or suspected steroid users. Little did I know that Arod would only have it mentioned for a week or two upon his return, and Manny would actually be cheered regularly as soon as he came back. I’d do a follow-up to the article if the situation weren’t so sickening.

“Not everyone is perfect and I am not going to judge what anyone does in their lives,” McCourt said. “But he has paid the penalty and it is now up to us to welcome him back to the team. It is up to the fans to decide how he is embraced and so far they have been supportive.”

ESPN Article: Fans being supportive of Manny

-Congrats to Pittsburgh’s Zack Duke on his rebound from a horrible couple of years. Not a guy with big talent or an impressive fastball, but a competitor who easily could have given up on himself after Jim Tracy tried to ruin his career. Great story, as is Grienke’s comeback from mascumeunstration disease.

-Lost in all the coverage of the firing of Manny Acta, Nationals manager, was the fact that this team was constructed by a now absent Jim Bowden. After leaving the Reds, Bowden made a series of confusing decisions, including stacking the roster with far more mediocre outfielders than they or any other team needed. Congratulations Nick Saban, we’ve found your long lost brother.

One funny game to play is to look back at coverage of Barry Bonds by the media, and then compare it to coverage of steroid users like Raffy Palmiero, Roger Clemens, and now A-Rod, and laugh. The drinking game version involves reading articles about Barry’s home run chases and taking a shot every time an article doesn’t mention steroids. The reason this game works so well is that with the advent of the internet, we now have RECORD and not just speculation. And the best part is that the media (especially ESPN) would like to fall back on things like “well it’s because Barry is a bad teammate or mean to the media or”… Nope. Sorry. Won’t work.

What is Barry? He

Roger Clemens was a notoriously bad teammate and was notoriously standoffish to the media – especially after poor performances. He also was a horrible opponent, crafting a legacy of head hunting and even going so far as throwing a bat at hitter Mike Piazza in the middle of a World Series game. Legendary Boston sportswriter Will McDonough constantly referred to him as “The Texas Con Man”, and took any chance he could find to tell people about Roger’s true nature.

“If the Texas Con Man was pitching tonight in the World Series, he would have been the lead item in this column. But I wanted to begin by writing about a good guy rather than a slug, so I start with Gary Anderson, one of the best stories in pro football history.

Will McDonough wrote that even when NOT talking directly about Roger. People hated Roger everywhere he had been — not only fans but teammates who couldn’t care less about him leaving despite his great production in places like Toronto. But what happened when an aged Roger went to the Astros and went on an absolutely insane, record-breaking campaign through the National League? In 2003, Roger’s final year with the Yankees, he had a 3.81 ERA, and opponents hit .247 off of him. In 2004 with the Astros (and at age 42!) he dropped that ERA down to 2.98 and opponents only hit .217 off of him. In 2005, at age 43, he amazingly crushed that 2004 season by putting up a 1.87 ERA in over 200 innings with opponents only hitting .198 off of him.

Take that in. He had a full two runs drop off of his ERA in two seasons at age 43. Two full runs.

The media must have been all over this right? An old player, not liked by media or teammates, putting up record breaking numbers near his mid-40′s that dwarfed his previous stats, and doing so without any other notable changes in the rest of the league (significant drop in hitter quality etc.), was guaranteed foundation for widespread media speculation right? After all, Roger also had a clause in his contract that he didn’t have to travel with the team. What a horrible teammate! What about supporting your other teammates when they’re pitching and you’re not? What about mentoring young pitchers? They must have pointed to this as a sign of outright selfishness the way they did when SI covered Barry Bonds right? He must have been shredded.

Nah. He was the greatest comeback story of the year. His not traveling with the team was just good planning!

At 43, pitcher defies years and batters:

Then came five up-and-down years with the Yankees, an announced retirement and an unretirement to join the Astros, who play a 15-minute drive from his house.

He seemed to be making a kind of sentimental goodbye. Instead, he has re-emerged as the game’s top pitcher.

Psychology certainly seems to play some role in the cycles of Clemens’s career. He made it clear that Duquette’s “twilight” line had motivated him in Toronto. In Houston, the team allows him to skip some road games, and Clemens seems more relaxed as a result.

Roger Clemens Enters the Zone – New York Times

Meanwhile Roger would be named 82 times in the Mitchell Report.

Hm.. well clearly, their coverage of Raffy Palmiero, a player who started off as a mediocre Cubs prospect and somehow ended up in the 500 homer/3,000 hit club, must have foretold his steroid abuse, right? The media was all over that! Or was he portrayed as the poster child for a classier mlb, an everyman without a lot of muscle who clearly couldn’t be a cheater? Was his early inability to pile up big power numbers a red flag or a selling point for the tale of his epic, yet humble journey?

Palmeiro a pillar of strength, humility:

He is still just a bit over 200 pounds and his physical stature has never been imposing. When he walks in the Orioles’ clubhouse in jeans and sneakers, he resembles more a weekend warrior more than a future Hall of Famer..

Palmeiro admits that making the adjustment to professional baseball was difficult. The Cubs thought they were getting a power hitter who could be their first baseman of the future, but what they got what a contact hitter who launched just 25 home runs in his first 258 games in Chicago, although he did make the All-Star team in 1988.

“I have always had the ability to hit home runs,” he said. “But when I made the transition to professional baseball, the transition from the aluminum to the wood bat, I wasn’t a big, strong guy, so for me it took a while to make the adjustment. Hitting coaches started tweaking my swing and wanted me to be more of a level type of hitter. I have always been a line-drive type of hitter. Just kind of lost my approach, and that’s what got me here.”

Ahh, humility

The LA times promoted him as a “true gentleman” of the game:

It was a fitting celebration for one of baseball’s true gentlemen: A champagne toast in the clubhouse for Rafael Palmeiro, not some crazy beer-over-the-head soiree.

LA Times Article

Palmiero would be suspended for steroid use after emphatically denying any use in front of Congress less than six months beforehand.

What about A-Rod? If we use Barry as a template, what red flags were there for the media? We probably don’t need to get too extensively into his unprecedented production as a player. But in the way of some interesting details, he hit 57 home runs in 2002.. as a shortstop. That’s an all-time record. He hit 52 as a third basemen in 2007 with the Yankees. That’s another record. He’s a member of the exclusive 40/40 club. He’s the fastest player in MLB history to reach 500 home runs. Red flags? Let’s take the example of raving hypocrite Brandon Funston’s analysis:

So Barry Bonds is about to make history with the launching of his 756th career home run, breaking the MLB mark set by Hank Aaron. Whatever. I’m not going to get into the morality behind this whole deal. Those who have major issues with Bonds breaking the record (and, frankly, that’s most everyone outside the Bay area) can take solace in the fact that Alex Rodriguez should take his crown in roughly six or seven seasons from now. Records were meant to be broken, and not always by better men – by “better men,” I’m only referring to the traits that make up a “decent” human being

Nice call, Brandon.

And we can’t use the whole “yeah he was a good guy so we couldn’t tell” argument, because, let’s be honest, nobody likes A-Rod. Not even his former manager apparently.

In an explosive new book called “The Yankee Years,” Torre gets most personal in his attacks against Alex Rodriguez, who he says was called “A-Fraud” by his teammates after he developed a “Single White Female”-like obsession with team captain Derek Jeter and asked for a personal clubhouse assistant to run errands for him.

Torre Book shreds A-Rod

Now that we learn A-Rod has been on steroids, what is the media’s defense for their kid-glove coverage? The only thing they’ve ever pressed him on is his lack of post-season production. Watch any episode of Baseball Tonight on ESPN and you’d see people defending him for “not being on steroids because he’s had the same build since he came into the league” (further proof John Kruk is the dumbest man in ESPN history). Meanwhile he remembers Barry being a “skinny kid when he started.” Well by all means then let’s base our entire coverage on muscle mass.

It’s telling that the same group of people continues to defend their new golden calf, Lance Armstrong, with one hand while writing about every update on Barry’s courtroom adventures with the other. Clemens was loathed, and his production spiked sharply in middle age. Raffy was always a phony. A-Rod is hated by his teammates, and produces astronomical numbers. Lance Armstrong is part of a sport so riddled with steroid and HGH use that anyone in the winner’s circle is automatically assumed to be guilty of doping. None of them have gotten 1/1,000th of the type of criticism Barry has. It’s Barry the public wants to see bleed, it’s Barry the media chased down constantly; whom they wouldn’t allow to enjoy a single moment without mentioning steroids. The reasons seem obvious, and now the disparity is documented. Thanks, internet, now they can’t just call this a conspiracy theory..

Lance Armstrong, you’re on the clock.

Bonds as the Lone Villain

Article by Steve Broome

*Somehow Peyton Manning won the MVP, despite the Titans’ Albert Haynesworth clearly having the best season of any player in football. considering the makeup of the media, however, I should probably be glad Brett Favre didn’t win.

Haynesworth was the clear MVP

*Speaking of Brett, Thomas Jones finally came out and said what a myrid of Favre’s teammates have no doubt felt in the past.

Days after the Jets’ 1-4 finish left them out of the playoffs and helped trigger Eric Mangini’s firing as coach, running back Thomas Jones blasted Favre’s final-game performance and suggested the QB’s play — nine interceptions and only two touchdown passes in the final five games — called for his benching.

“We’re a team and we win together … but at the same time, you can’t turn the ball over and expect to win,” the former Bears back told a New York City radio station. Favre threw three interceptions in the season-ending 24-17 loss to Miami that clinched the AFC East for the Dolphins.

“If somebody is not playing well, they need to come out of the game,” Jones told Hot 97 FM. “You’re jeopardizing the whole team because you’re having a bad day. To me, that’s not fair to everybody else. You’re not the only one. So when you get to the wire and somebody is just giving the game up, I mean, it’s just not [fair].”

Link

Somehow Favre’s actual postseason stats and performances have been overwhelmed by this imaginary legacy of his as a “gunslinger”. In reality the legacy should be of a careless qb with horrible decision making and a lot of downright awful clutch performances,especially in the playoffs. Meanwhile, off the field, Favre’s behavior was downright anti-social, a hilarious contradiction to the Wranglers jeans-wearing every man ESPN and Peter King (who I assume will be Favre’s biographer) never seem to tire of.

“There was a lot of resentment in the room about him,” a Jets player told Newsday yesterday. He requested anonymity because team owner Woody Johnson has stated publicly that Favre is welcome to return next season if he wants to. (Favre reportedly will take until the end of February to decide about returning.)

The 39-year-old quarterback is not as welcome with his teammates, according to this veteran. After the Jets traded for Favre Aug. 6, the sure Hall of Famer made no effort to ingratiate himself with the already assembled team, the veteran said. He said Favre spent most of his down time at the practice facility in an office specially designated for him near the equipment room, not with teammates in the locker room, even after the media departed.

“He never socialized with us, never went to dinner with anyone,” the player said. Asked to describe Favre in a word, he said: “Distant.”

The laughable part about the social behavior of course is how differently Favre would have been treated if he were say.. Barry Bonds. In fact we don’t have to guess how Bonds would have been treated (or most any black athlete for that matter) because we have actual examples. Sports Illustrated, for example, spent 16 years insulting Barry Bonds (I’m Barry Bonds and You’re Not) for things like being distant from teammates and having extra amenities at his locker (he has a bigger chair than the other players!). So why would Barry be vilified while the pill-popping redneck gets a pass for having an entirely separate office to work from? Probably for the same reason Bonds was roasted for his poor post-season performances until the World Series run he made with the Giants. Or for the same reason he was criticized for declining left-field play in his old age while Favre was voted to the 2008-2009 Pro Bowl despite leading the league in interceptions (and having a drastically inflated TD total due to one early 6 td performance against the Cards). Or for the same reason Barry’s performance enhancer use is a front page story every day but Favre’s dependency on prescription pills is a tale of the triumphant spirit of the human heart. Or for the same reason Roger Clemens got a pass despite extreme late-career bumps in pitching stats until the Mitchell Report was finally released.

You know, no reason at all.

*Tavaris Jackson might be the least accurate qb since Jay Schroeder. Just horrible. I did enjoy seeing him yell at Matt Birk late in the 4th qtr of the Vikings’ playoff loss to tha Iggles, when a shotgun snap by the center was down at Jackson’s ankles. As if that’s the reason your team was losing? Learn to throw a slant pattern, Tavaris. For what it’s worth Tavaris finished the game 15-35 with 164 yds, 0 tds and a pick.

*Enjoy a clip from Eddie Bravo, Rubber Guard master

*Don Nelson continues to get a national pass as he ruins the Warriors yet again. Stephen Jackson wants out, and the Mercury News continues to do a great job dissecting Nellie’s good ol’ insidious nature. Even “friend” Chris Mullin is not exempt from Nellie’s selfishness. In further hilarious Dubs news, some people are actually shocked at all of Corey Maggette’s shortcomings, as if they weren’t readily apparent by anyone who spent more than 10 minutes watching a Clippers game, as Corey flailed at a passing offensive player 10 feet away from him before idly standing by as the other team either scored or got an offensive rebound. Meanwhile, using such play as an excuse, Nellie is no longer even coaching the defense, deftly setting up his exit right after getting his extension.