It’s been more than a while since my last update so I’ll just jump right in.

Couple of thoughts:

On the media: I think it’s funny how much people write about the fact that Murray Chass doesn’t like blogs. Guess what, I don’t like Murray Chass. So who cares? Whether Murray likes blogs or not, is irrelevant. It’s like discussing whether or not dinosaurs like meteors.

On the All Star Game: Expand the rosters to 35. Allow any team with a starting pitcher selected to the team to designate him as officially unavailable, then he gets to dress and hang out, but he can’t pitch and he doesn’t count against the roster.

That isn’t so bad, is it?

On the Fact that the Yankees suck: This will be the first year in what 12, 13 years that I won’t be watching baseball in October. That will be weird. I blame my wife. It’s a perfect correlation. The Yankees have never made the post season in a year in which I have been married. Sorry.

Finally, the fine fellas at FJM linked to a story by Jeffrey Flannagan of the KC Star in which he does a segmentation of sports fans, and one of the segments are stat loving VORPies by any other name. Flannagan calls them (me, us?) MOM’S BASEMENT.

I took it upon myself to hunt down Mr. Flannagan’s e-mail address and fired off the following note.

Mom’s Basement? Seriously?

First off, I love stats, my favorite baseball book is Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s great, you should read it. If you get paid money to write things about baseball, you should really read it. At the same time, my favorite baseball player is Jason Giambi, because he is totally human, and sweaty, and looks like he’d be a good dude to get hammered with. In other words, I’m glad he’s not a computer. I like stats, but I also like the imperfect, quirky cool guys who play the game.

In your attempt at jock humor, you managed to be offensive to those of us who like to understand the game of baseball by evaluating the facts. Well done, you should be very proud of yourself.

While I have a firm grasp on what VORP and WARP3 and EQA are, I will assume that you do not. (By the way, if you are going to make fun of long acronyms, how about the NAACP or the AARP, those are pretty long! What’s that? No? Fine, have it your way.) But, shame on you. You are a sportswriter, it is literally your job to at least know what those pretty simple baseball stats are.

The real problem with your piece though, is the utterly lazy creation of an already lazily created stereotype. You may take shots at my belief that batting average is a stupid statistic, or that pitchers wins are an unfair way to judge a pitcher. But you may not insinuate that my beautiful loft in Chicago, my beautiful wife, and my lack of mom living with me, are figments of my imagination.

If I may steal an arrogant device from Olberman, That sir, is where I draw the line.

Regards,

Steve Bonner. (and his mom) Shut up mom, you’re ruining everything!! (want some soup dear?)

In his defense, Flannagan replied to me in like 15 minutes and said,

Really wasn’t trying to strike a nerve with any of the stat folks. I just
think it can get a little carried away. Stats can be fun, but in the end, if
you want to know if a player is good, trust your eyes. Your eyes know.

Loved your email, though, and your sense of humor.

The lesson here is, of course, that I’m funny. Also, Flanagan was nice enough to reply, so there’s that.

He wasn’t anything to write home about, very inefficient, and very walky. You can’t give up 4 walks, but in fairness, he was getting squeezed, and it smells like a fluke more than anything. The positive was that the 3ks pretty much balanced out the walks. As the walks go down, his results will get better.

Meanwhile, Cano and Melky continue to piss me off. Farnsworth, Hawkins and Veras are abysmal. I was high on a Farnsworth resurgance, and it looks like I was dead wrong. I was also big on Veras, but he has arguably worse command than Farnsworth. Hawkins is just emminently hittable.

Giambi is second on the team in OPS to A-Rod, and I will continue to trumpet Giambi’s success because of all those who thought he was done.

No less than Goose mother-fuckin’ Gossage wants to know. Goose thinks it’s bush of Joba to be all fist pumpy when striking out a guy who took his ass deep just a few nights before. Roy White, doesn’t think Melky and Cano’s celebration style is in tune with the YANKEE WAY. I have to agree, and just to sharpen my pencil and underscore the point, here is a list of 10 things that are absolute crystalizations of the YANKEE WAY.
10) A firstbaseman on ‘roids, who sorta apologizes for doing something.
9) A starting pitcher who dated a 15 year old.
8 ) Karim Garcia and Jeff Nelson’s bullpen shenanigans.
7) Torre talking smack about A-Rod to SI, during a season in which A-Rod was getting killed by The Stadium faithful.
6) Hiring and firing and hiring and firing and hiring and firing your manager.
5) Hiring a crook to dig up dirt on one of your players.
4) Booing a guy mercilessly for having the temerity to wear an unretired number.
3) Booing the best player in the game for an entire season, for no good reason.
2) Insulting your manager with a $7million salary offer.
1) Pathologically refusing to give Chris Britton a chance!

If you read most baseball blogs critically, you start to notice two things. 1) The self assured tone. Apparently everyone with a blog knows everything as a black ink fact. 2) The judgemental self affirming bullshit. It goes like this, Blogger hates Player A, Player A plays poorly,  The Blogger writes, “See I told you Player A was no damn good!” Then, if Player A plays well, The Blogger writes, “Player A got lucky, Player A is only good in scenario x, Player A’s success is the fluky product of a small sample size.”

Jason Giambi has gotten his OPS up to .809. This despite a batting average of only .183. Giambi leads the Yankees in HR with 7, and is on pace for about 30. Has Jason been good in 2008? Well no, not really, his EQA of .280 is nowhere near as good as we had all hoped it would be. When you are paying a dude $23 million, you might expect an OPS of significantly higher than .809, however over the last 7 the big G has an OPS of  1.544. In other words, recently he’s been showing signs of life. But instead of talking about that, the folks at Was Watching, keep advocating his release, and comparing him to Cano who has been a SHIT TON worse this season than Giambi, an absolutel fuck ton, like 100 points of EQA worse. This stuff gets me so pissed off, that I won’t even get into the Was Watching treatment of Cashman over the fact that Rasner is pitching well.

Also, those holier than thou guys at NoMaas are ripping IPK for his cocky as shit press conference after he pitched a one hitter against a bunch of Triple A fry cooks. Given the fact that Kennedy seemed to be pitching scared while he was in the Bronx, I think a healthy dose of over-the-top swagger might actually help him.

This just points out the fact that it doesn’t matter what color Crayon you draw with, idiocy comes through inhb all formats.

I’m bullish on:

Farnsworth. He’s allegedly added a cutter, his delivery looks smoother, he’s only given up 2 runs in his last 9 and 2 thirds. I think he might have a career year. Also, he’s walked only 8% of the batters he’s faced this season so far. The only other year in which his BB rate was less than 10% was 2001and he finished that season with an ERA+ of 151.

I’m bearish on:

Robbie Cano. As with Melky Cabrera, I’ve always been a little skeptical of Cano’s supposed utility. Unlike Melky, Robbie has done nothing to make me eat my words. Early in the season, Joe Morgan and Jon Miller were ranting about how Cano was the best hitter on the Yankees next to A-Rod. So far this season, he’s the worst hitter in baseball. I think the slump has gone on so long, that he’s got to be suffering mentally over it, and that makes me think that it’s gonna be a long summer for Robbie. Either the league has figured him out, and he’s taking for fucking ever to counterpunch, or he refuses to make some sort of adjustment. Reminds me of Soriano. What is it with these secondbasemen?

….them down!

Watching Joba get beat last night made me think about Mo. And thiking about Mo always leads me to the same internal debate, is Mariano Rivera the best pitcher I’ve ever seen? I think the answer is yes. Pedro was as sickeningly dominant in his prime, and he was a starter, which is almost inarguably a harder row to hoe.

Still, the all time leader in ERA plus is Pedro with and Adjusted ERA+ of 160. Mo’s is 196. The reason Mo is not the all time leader is that he hasn’t pitched enough career innings to qualify. But, that’s gonna change, probably this year. Mo has thrown 966 innings in his career, the cut off for qualifying is 1000 innings and 3000 batters faced, (Mo has faced 3879 batters,) so conceivably, by the end of this season, Mariano Rivera is gonna be the best pitcher of all time as judged by ERA+. What’s crazy is that it’s not like he’s gonna sneak past Pedro by a few points. We’re talking 36 points of ERA+. That is insane.

Still, he’s not a starter. So how can he be the greatest pitcher of all time? Starting pitchers are more valuable to their team, of that there can be no doubt. Also, starters have to navigate their way through the oppositions lineup 3+ times a game if they want to be really effective. Mo has to do it largely 3 or 4 batters at a time.

But still, Mo has been around forever, and he’s been dominant forever check out his ERA+ by season:

If you judge Mo by his own standards, he had a couple of “tough seasons” in the middle of his career, but what’s amazing to me is his consistency:

A dip in the middle, and then a marked resurgence, shows me that Mo made some adjustments along the way.

Just for fun, I did the same graph for Pedro’s career, and you’ll note a difference. Pedro’s chart peaks in the middle as one might expect. His 2000 season was really incredible as his ERA+ that season was 134 points higher than his career median.

What I take away from this, is that both pitchers have been historically excellent, and they’ve been excellent throughout their careers. Every season, and not really a bad one in the bunch by league standards. But Mo seems to me to be a bit steadier. His peaks aren’t that out of line with his career averages he’s just been machine-like for 13 seasons. Maybe it’s a stretch to say “best pitcher ever” but he’s damn close, and I don’t care how badass Joba is, if you expect him to somehow replace Mo, you’re going to be deeply disappointed.

I think that there’s a decent chance that this is Brian Cashman’s last season as Yankee GM. Actually, I think this is an inflection point, and either Cash is gone after this season, or he re-ups and we’ll have him to kick around for a LOOOOOONG time.

I know that there are some prominent annoying bloggers and writers who have spent the last few years taking shots at Cashman whenever they get the chance. These kinds of fans seem to want to see Cashman gone, never to darken Yankee-land again.

And you know what? I hope they get their wish. I think Brian Cashman is one of the smartest GMs in baseball. Is he perfect? Is he infallible? No way. Does he have a moderately long list of moves that haven’t panned out? Sure.

But given the fact that Cashman is in charge of baseball’s highest payroll, he is going to make big bets. And when you make big bets, your failures are often spectacular. Not only that, but holding the fact that the Yankees haven’t won the WS since 2000 against him, is asinine. So much of success in the postseason is luck dependant that you can’t really blame the GM for a team’s bats going to sleep for 20 innings at a time. It’s fluky by nature.

The Flip Bondy piece I linked to above mentions that the White Sox won the WS with a bunch of Yankee castoffs. I fail to see how that’s Cashman’s fault. First of all the Sox’s Championship season was the definition of a fluke. The team saw career seasons from all their starters, and almost miraculous season’s from it’s corps of relievers. Since they won the Series, what has that group of Yankee castoffs done? Not very much, 90-72 was good enough for a third place finish in 2006, and then a disaster in 2007 as they flipped the script and finished 72 and 90.

Then, Bondy goes on to say that the A’s, Jays and Cubs have squeezed some good juice out of Ted Lilly. Ok, so why is that an indictment of Cashman and not of the Yankees coaches? It doesn’t make much sense.

At the end of the day though, I kinda hope that these idiots get what they want. I hope Cash bails, and builds a respectable winning team in Washington. He has ties to the area stemming from his days at Catholic U. Meanwhile, who’s gonna run the Yankees? Who’s gonna temper Hank’s Boss Jr. inclinations? Jean Afterman? Damon Oppenheimer? Really, who are the Yankees gonna replace Cash with? You need someone who is super smart, and SABR inclined. You need someone who will not be afraid to push back on his owner(s.) You need someone who is unflappable and level headed.

As we’ve seen so far in 2008, just replacing a leader because we’re all sick of him (Joe Torre) doesn’t mean the new blood (Girardi) is gonna magically get better results. But for those who like to clamor for Cashman’s head, I hope you enjoy the post Cashman era, because it’s gonna suck.

They’re back to mediocre thanks to a three game sweep of the Mariners. It’s tempting to say, “well shit, it was the Mariners,” but this team has gotten smacked around by less than the Mariners this season, so I’ll take a sweep, regardless of the victim.

The Yanks are a game over .500 and 3 games back of the Red Sox, who broomed the Rays this weekend. After a day off today, the Indians visit the Bronx. Pettitte, Wang and Moose are scheduled to take the hill, but Igawa could surface.

Generation Tres, or the Three Amigos or whatever is on hold, but the bats are showing signs of waking up. Let’s hope they don’t hit the snooze button.

The Phil Hughes story, was just about to end very badly. Hughes was about to be sent down to the minors. Fans would grumble, and whine about the trade that didn’t happen. Steve Lombardi would continue to bash Brian Cashman for betting the future on Hughes.

But Phil caught a break, literally. He’s not going to touch a baseball for a month, so my guess is he’s gone for 6-8 weeks. That means, that the story arc gets new life. Now we can watch his rehab, and hear from the team and anonymous scouts that “the life on his fastball is back, his location is way better than it was pre injury” blah blah blah. Then we can all wait in anticipation as he makes a few minor league tuneup starts, and then we can all hope to see the Phil Hughes we were promised when he returns to the big league club.

Fun times!