George Kontos Needs to Pick It Up

The Giants lost 10-6 to the Blue Jays with eight of the runs scored off of Barry Zito and the last two off second-year pitcher George Kontos.  Kontos now has a 4.71 ERA, which is just not good enough for a reliever pitching his home games at AT&T Park on one of the best, if not the best, top-to-bottom staffs in major league baseball.

In fairness to Kontos, he has pitched better than his ERA, at least until today, when he gave up two runs on five hits and a walk in 1.1 innings pitched.  Kontos has struck out 20 batters in 21 IP while allowing only seven walks and three fewer hits than innings pitched.

I like Kontos.  The Giants got him from the Yankees for back-up catcher Chris Stewart, which in my mind (and given the Giants’ current strength at catcher) was little more than a box of cracker jack.  In fairness to the Yankees, they’ve gotten 77 games and counting out of Stewart, and fangraphs values his contribution to the Bombers to date at $3.8 million, a lot more than Stewart is likely being paid (fangraphs likes Stewart’s defense).  Suffice it to say the trade was one that was good for both ballclubs.

Kontos has a good arm and finally broke out in a relief role, after starting his professional career as a starter, at AAA Scranton-Wilkes Barre at age 26 two seasons ago.  He was terrific out of the bullpen for both the AAA Fresno Grizzlies and the Giants last year.  I was hoping he’d be a solid middle reliever for the Giants at least through age 31.

That might have been too much to hope for.  Kontos was 27 last year, the age at which the largest number of major leaguers have their peak season. Kontos is 28 this year, and he may already be on the decline.

Meanwhile, Heath Hembree, who is three and a half years younger than Kontos, is blowing them away pitching for AAA Fresno.  He currently has a 1.89 ERA with 20 Ks in 19 IP and a WHIP just below 1.00.

If Kontos doesn’t pick it up and Hembree keeps pitching the way he’s been pitching at Fresno, expect the two players to trade places well before the All-Star Break.

Karma Catching Up to Frank McCourt and Other Notes

The never ending saga of the Frank/Jamie McCourt divorce has entered a new phase.  Jamie is seeking to re-open the former couple’s marital property settlement agreement and obtain an additional $770 million on top of the $131 million she received previously.  All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving ex-husband.

Frank McCourt is a sack.  According to wikipedia, McCourt financed his 2004 purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers mostly with debt which he repaid in part by raising ticket and concession prices every year he owned the team.  He paid himself and his now ex-wife enormous salaries out of the Dodgers’ enormous revenue streams, but largely avoided paying taxes by structuring these payments as “loans.”

During his tenure, McCourt effectively ran the team into the ground, so much so that the team filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011, despite being one of the top three or four teams in MLB in terms of revenue streams.  MLB was able to force McCourt to sell the team, but McCourt then sold the team for $2 billion, more than 4.5 times what he had paid for the team only eight years before.

Frank McCourt is an insatiably greedy scumbag who married a woman after his own heart.  When the marriage failed (surprise, surprise!), she went after his ill-gotten gains with the determination of a hungry lion after an old and sickly wildebeest.  In my book, that’s karma.

As a San Francisco Giants fan, I normally wouldn’t shed a lot of tears over terrible things happening to the Dodgers.  As a baseball fan, however, it bothered me to see a storied franchise being raped by an “entrepeneur” who wasn’t content to take the typically obscene profits major league owners make in the course of buying and selling top franchises, but had to milk the situation for still more.

I’d rather see the Dodgers fail the old fashioned way: poor baseball decisions like bad trades and overpaying already expensive free agents who don’t end up performing as the team hoped.

Meanwhile, in today’s baseball action, I see that Andy Pettitte won again and is now 3-0.  If he is really and truly off Vitamin S for good, it’s great to see a soon-to-be 41 year old continuing to flummox major league hitters.

It will be interesting to see how Hall of Fame voters treat Pettitte however many years from now.  On the one hand, his numbers are clearly Hall of Fame worthy: he’s almost certain to finish with more than 250 career wins, a terrific winning percentage and an excellent post-season record for numerous World Champions.  On the other hand, he’s an admitted steroids/PEDs abuser.

However, he copped to his PED use a lot faster than most of his fellow cheats, told a pretty good story about why he did it (trying to recover quickly from an injury to help his team, blah, blah, blah), and even fingered another reputed and more significant steroids cheat, all-time great Roger Clemens.  That might buy Pettitte some sympathy from Hall of Fame voters — Americans, as a group, love to see the mighty cut down to size, but we’re awfully forgiving when said mighties abjectly admit their mistakes and ask for forgiveness — it has a lot to do with our Puritan (read broadly) heritage.

Meanwhile, Roy Halladay and the Phillies beat the Cardinals today 8-2 in a game called on account of rain after six and half innings.  I wonder if umpires are more likely to shorten games on account of rain when the game is a blow out?

My guess is yes, umpires do.  They are human, and I can’t imagine that they don’t take into account the score and the inning when deciding if it’s rained long enough to call the game.  If the game was 3-2 after six and a half, I suspect the umpires would have waited longer to try to get more of the game into the record books.

Has anyone done any research on this question?  If not, it would make an interesting research topic for the SABRly minded.

Meanwhile, I have no idea whether the Pirates will contend this year, but at least they’re trying.  Right now, the Bucs’ decisions to take on A. J. Burnett’s (albeit at a steep discount) and Wandy Rodriguez’s salaries last year looks brilliant.  Today Rodriguez completely shut down the Braves, the hottest team in baseball; and Burnett has a 2.63 ERA and leads the NL in strikeouts.

The Latest on the Biogenesis PEDs Scandal

The New York Times and others report today that the player alleged to have purchased documents from Biogenesis America in order to destroy them and thus hide his performance enhancing drug use is Alex Rodriguez.  No surprise there.

Needless to say, Rodriguez’s spokesperson (not the man himself) immediately denied the allegations completely.

The story as reported reads like a future episode of TV’s Law and Order (you heard it here first).  Michael Porter Fischer, Biogenesis’s former marketing director, had invested $20,000 in the company.  He later had a falling-out with Biogenesis founder and front man Tony Bosch.  Fischer demanded his money back, plus a $4,000 profit.

Bosch reportedly repaid the $20,000 investment only.  Sources say that it was Fischer who leaked documents to the Miami New Times, who originally broke the scandal story back in January.

The claim is that ARod, through a middle man (perhaps AFraud’s favorite cousin and bagman Yuri Surcat?) gave Bosch $4,000 for Bosch to give to Fischer to shut his mouth and turn over documents.  Sources say several burly goons located Fischer, threatened him, gave him the $4,000 and took away some documents.  [Note to organized crime wannabees: combining death threats with a modest, but not insignificant, bribe seems like a good way to get a potential witness' "cooperation" so long as you convince said potential witness that you can get to him or his family if he goes to the cops or otherwise spills the beans.]

Anyway, sources say that MLB’s representatives spoke with Fischer, but that Fischer didn’t give them much information.  According to espn.com, reporters have gone to the home in Coral Gables Fischer once shared with is mother and sister.  His sister, a former high school classmate of Tony Bosch, said that Fischer abandoned the home last fall, telling the sister, “Whatever you do, don’t answer the door or nothing!”  Thoughtfully, Fischer left behind his two rottweilers and 300 pounds of dog food when he fled the home.

I’m telling you — throw in a murder, and you’ve got a semi-true crime TV episode!  Unless, of course, it’s all too comical and ridiculous for a believable crime drama.

Baseball Brawls

Because of the big brawl yesterday between the Padres and the Dodgers in which Zack Greinke broke his collar bone, apparently when he and Carlos Quentin traded shoulder blocks, Sports Illustrated is running an on-line article it advertizes as “the most notorious brawls in baseball history”.  It then lists 13 relatively recent brawls, only three of which occurred before 1993 and none before 1965.

At least the article included Juan Marichal hitting catcher John Roseboro over the head with his bat after Marichal claimed that Roseboro buzzed his head with a throw back to pitcher Sandy Koufax, because Koufax wouldn’t throw at Marichal after Marichal had plunked at least one Dodger (Koufax reputedly refused to throw at hitters because he was afraid his 98 mph fast ball, the fastest of his day, might kill someone).

You see, before 1965 baseball was a game of peace and love where no one ever mixed it up.

What a load of BS.  Baseball was a rough, rough game in its early professional days and has gotten more and more tame as players have become better paid and MLB has worked to make the games family entertainment.

In the 1880′s and 1890′s the game was hard fought in a literal sense.  Umpires were routinely threatened by players and fans, and it was not uncommon for both to back up their tough talk with physical violence.  The best teams of the era, the St. Louis Browns of the 1880′s American Association and the Baltimore Orioles of the 1890′s National League regularly abused umpires and opposing players forcing/inspiring other teams to follow suit.

During this era, there was generally only one umpire monitoring the action, and when his eyes were following the ball, fielders tried to impede base runners by getting in the way, tripping them, throwing knees or elbows and even body blocks, or grabbing their belts.  Baserunners responded in kind, and one base runner famously defeated the belt-grabbing strategy by unhooking his belt so that when an opposing fielder grabbed it, the fielder was left holding the belt as the runner continued round the bases.

Fans threw glass bottles and rotten eggs at opposing players and umpires, and on-field fist fights were common.  Most professional baseball players came from poor or working class backgrounds, life was hard for working class men in the late 19th century when the national economy was notoriously boom or bust, and a major league ball player’s salary was something worth fighting for.

The game got so rough that baseball and ballplayers got unsavory reputations, which kept many potential fans away from the ballparks.  This only changed when the American League announced itself as a major league before the 1901 season and quickly began moving teams into the biggest cities.

The AL’s driving force and strong man Ban Johnson felt the “rowdyism” of the 1890′s was bad for the game, and he wouldn’t allow it in his league.  The NL eventually followed suit.

Further, as major league revenues and salaries, more former college players entered the game and brought with them the ethics of elite and more upper class amateurism.  Most notable of these players was New York Giants ace Christy Mathewson, probably the player most mythologized during his own day of any player in baseball history.  [Matthewson had attended Bucknell University, was exceptionally handsome and was far and away the best player on the dominant club of his day -- there is a certain irony in the fact this All-American icon died prematurely as a long-term result of being gassed by his own government in a training exercise during World War I.]

However, the cleaning up of major league baseball wasn’t something that happened over night.  It was a long and slow process, and with the exception of the famous Marichal/Roseboro bat incident, the game has gotten more and more tame as high salaries and professionalism have reduced the incentives for violence.

Here is a post from espn.com which at least goes back beyond 1965 in referencing famous baseball brawls/fights.  I particularly like the quote from Yankees’ catcher and Hall of Famer Bill Dickey after he famously broke Washington Senators’ outfielder Carl Reynolds’ jaw with a single punch following a home plate collision on July 4. 1932: “It was hot, and the games had been close, and I had been banged around for days,” Dickey said. “When Reynolds came at me high, I just had to hit somebody.”  [Dickey received a month-long suspension and was fined $1,000, probably a sixth of his 1932 salary.]

Even if Sports Illustrated’s memory doesn’t extend back any further than incidents for which it can provide pretty pictures, don’t for a minute think that human nature has changed much since the American pastime turned pro in the late 1860′s.

What Are the Chances Johan Santana Makes the Hall of Fame?

At this moment, probably not good.  Johan Santana had shoulder surgery today and, according to espn.com, will miss the entire season for the second time in three years.  He is vowing to pitch again in the major leagues, but whether he actually does remains to be seen.

Santana’s claim to be a Hall of Famer rests on the fact that he was indisputably the best pitcher in major league baseball for the five year period from 2004 through 2008.  During that span he led his league in wins, ERA, innings pitched or strike outs eight times, won two Cy Young Awards and could have, with a little more luck, won four Cy Young Awards.  Santana was clearly a better pitcher than Bartolo Colon in 2005, and there was very little daylight between his and Tim Lincecum‘s numbers in 2008.

However, Santana’s career wins total is presently 139, and that’s awfully few for a Hall of Fame candidate.

The (relatively) recent pitcher whom Santana most closely resembles among the All-Time Greats is Sandy Koufax.  Koufax finished his career with a record of 165-87 (.655 winning percentage), not a whole lot different from Santana’s 139-78 (.641 winning percentage).  Both were left-handed strike out pitchers with excellent command.

Koufax was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972, his first year of eligibility.  The problem for Santana, of course, is that Koufax’s last five seasons were clearly better than Santana’s best five.  Koufax led the league in wins, winning percentage, ERA, IP and Ks 13 times his last five seasons.  Using the newer metric, wins above replacement, which should take into account the facts Koufax’s days were a much better time to be a pitcher than Santana’s and the Dodgers of Koufax’s era were better than Santana’s Twins/Mets, Koufax’s last five lead Santana’s best five 40.8 t0 35.4 according to baseball reference’s formula and an even larger 43.3 to 31.6 using fangraphs’ formula.

The Dodgers won three pennants and two World Series in Koufax’s last five seasons, and Koufax also threw four no-hitters (compared to one for Santana) and a perfect game in his career and set what was at the time the single season strike out record and is still only one behind the all-time record.

Something else that will hurt Santana’s future Hall of Fame chances is that unlike Koufax, who walked away from the game at his peak, we’ve had to watch Santana battle arm problems for the last four years, which has made it easier for people to forget just how good Santana was when he was at the top of his game.

In my mind, the biggest knock on Santana as an all-time great is that he was never a pitcher who finished what he started.  In his career, he has thrown only 15 complete games.  In comparison, Koufax completed 27 games in each of his last two seasons.

The game has changed a lot, of course, since Koufax’s day, and it’s highly unlikely that any major league pitcher will ever again complete as many as 27 games over the course of two consecutive major league seasons, let alone one.  Even so, Santana hasn’t completed a lot of games even by the standards of the current era.  Santana is tied with the much younger Matt Cain for 14th place among active pitchers and is miles behind Roy Halladay (66) and CC Sabathia (35) the active leaders.

Although complete games are much rarer than they once were, they are still awfully important since bullpen fatigue is a much bigger problem now than it was in the days when starters regularly finished games and the last couple of guys in the bullpen didn’t pitch a whole lot.  Aside from the fact that Roy Halladay’s wins total is much higher than Santana’s, his record of throwing complete games is going to make him a much more attractive candidate to Hall of Fame voters even if Halladay doesn’t do anything more in his career.

A number of Hall of Fame starting pitchers failed to win 200 games in their major league careers: Dizzy Dean (150-83; famously hurt his arm while pitching with a broken toe he suffered in the 1937 All Star Game), Addie Joss (160-97; he died two days after his 31st birthday of tubercular meningitis), Lefty Gomez (189-102; pitched on six Yankees’ teams that won the World Series), Dazzy Vance (197-140; established himself as a major league pitcher at age 31), Rube Waddell (193-143; led the AL in Ks six years in a row between 1902 and 1907), Big Ed Walsh (195-126; the last pitcher to win 40 games or throw 450+ innings in a season) and Happy Jack Chesbro (198-132; his 41 wins in 1904 is the most by any pitcher since the mound was moved back to 60 feet six inches in 1893).

What I take from this list is that Johan Santana will need to come back and match Dizzy Dean’s 150 career wins to have  a serious shot at making the Hall of Fame.

The Greatest Baseball Mascot Ever

The Chicago Cubs are thinking about adding a mascot in order to make the team more “kid-friendly” in connection with the team’s five-year $300 million plan to renovate Wrigley Field.  The Cubbies are currently one of only four major league teams (the others are the Angels, Dodgers and Yankees, according to wikipedia — at least three teams have multiple mascots, not counting costumed idiots who run 7th inning stretch races — the Reds apparently lead the majors with four different mascots) without a mascot.

It’s a crying shame.  Mascots are a blight on the game, at least in the mind of this hard-core baseball fan.  When I shell out the bucks to see a major league baseball game, I come to see the action on the field, not to watch some costumed jack-ass parade around in the stands.  Mascots have always struck me as bush league entertainment which no major league team should dignify.

At least the Giants’ current mascot Lou Seal (some one dressed up in a fluffy seal costume at AT&T Park) largely stays out of the stands and instead rides around in a golf cart on the outfield and foul territory grass firing souvenir T-shirts and the like into the stands using an air cannon during the half innings.  At least a few lucky fans get something out of this silliness.

It could be a lot worse.  I went to a Phillies’ game at the Vet in 1991, and I can’t tell you how irritating I found the Phanatic.  Granted, we had paid for upper deck seats and then in the second or third inning talked our way into the lower deck box seats with a facile lie about how we joining our family but had lost our ticket stubs (we were college age at the time and I still locked like a high school student).  Now that ticket prices are really high, you can’t get away with that stuff anymore.

Even so, once in the lower deck, the Phanatic briefly blocked my view of the game in progress more than once with his “antics.”  Each time, I naturally enough shouted out, “Get the f@#$ out of the way — I’m trying to watch major league baseball!”  Even then I had a rapier-like wit…

It pains me to acknowledge that in three years of this blog, I have never once mentioned the greatest of all major league mascots by a wide margin — the San Francisco Giants’ Crazy Crab.

The Crazy Crab lasted only one season — 1984 — but he was worth his weight in, well, dungeness crab meat.  He would come out during the 7th inning stretch to his theme song, “Love That Crazy Crab” and the fans would go wild.  Everyone in the stadium would boo for the duration of the time that the Crazy Crab was on the field and probably half (including me once I saw others doing it) would try to throw garbage at the Crab or at least onto the field.

You have to understand that in 1984 the Giants were terrible (they finished 66-96, the worst record in MLB), and they played in a horrible stadium (Candlestick Park was one of the first 1960′s era multi-use poured concrete stadia — they hadn’t ironed out the kinks of what was a bad idea to begin with: the fans were miles away from the foul lines in order to make space for football games, and the winds at Candlestick Point which picked up around 3:00 p.m. and continued throughout the night were brutally cold).  After Opening Day that year, only serious baseball fans came out to watch the Giants and their opponents play, and we had little use for the Crazy Crab.

Even so, as someone who turned 16 that summer, I loved the Crazy Crab if only because it was so much fun to hate something that intently.  It was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the “Two-Minute Hate” described in George Orwell’s 1984, except that the animosity towards the Crazy Crab was probably more sincere.  I have little doubt that if the 11,000 or so of those of us in attendance had had the opportunity to physically confront the Crazy Crab en masse, we’d have torn the poor SOB inside the crab suit to shreds.

The Giants’ website at the link above says that the Crazy Crab was always intended to be an “anti-mascot.”  I don’t remember it that way.  At first, the Giants’ organization seemed serious about the Crazy Crab as a mascot and only started playing up the Crazy Crab as a joke once the fans responded with utter ridicule.

I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports pages religiously in those days, and I don’t recall any claim that the Crab was presented as anything but legitimate at the outset.  Again, you have to remember that 1984 was the acme of the initial mascot craze.  The San Diego Chicken was introduced in 1977, was a huge hit, the Phillie Phanatic was introduced in 1978, was a huge hit, and then every team had to have a mascot.  The Giants were one of the last hold-outs, but they had to try something since the product they were putting on the field most seasons in the early 1980′s was poor.

At any rate, the Crazy Crab made the fans completely unruly, and the players on the field started getting into the act.  According to the Giants’ website, the poor SOB inside the crab suit was eventually tackled by a San Diego Padres player and later sued the Giants for an allegedly resulting back injury.  I guess that’s why the team generally keeps Lou Seal inside the golf cart today.

My Heart Bleeds for Mike Trout

With Spring Training still in the early stages, there isn’t much substantive, or at least particularly interesting, news about MLB today.  For example, the second story on both espn.com and sportsillustrated.com is Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman breaking his leg while sky-diving — he isn’t dead or even mentally incapacitated, so who really cares?

For this reason, I suspect, there has been considerable discussion about the fact that the Angels renewed Mike Trout‘s contract for 2013 for $510,000, only $20,000 above the league minimum, in spite of the phenomenal rookie year Trout had.

Fangraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote an article about the Trout contract and the MLB salary scale in general, which contains some good points, as Cameron’s stuff usually does, but which left me feeling a need to comment.

Cameron says that Trout’s second year contract is the norm under the system in place, as set forth by the collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) between the players’ union and the owners, and that this system is good for competitive balance because it helps the low revenue teams compete.

Cameron puts this system at the feet of “the union,” which is only half true.  It takes two to bargain a CBA, and inexperienced players’ salaries are low because the owners have fought like hell to keep them low.

In fact, the reason inexperienced players’ salaries are low is because the owners have a strong argument to keep them low: the fact that most major league players need a long minor league apprenticeship before they are ready to play in the majors.

Minor league systems are almost always big money losers for the parent teams, even if a few minor league franchises are profitable (the old Louisville Redbirds spring to mind — the Bats have done well too playing in a smaller stadium).  As such, major teams have successfully argued that teams should be able to keep player salaries low for the first few years to recoup their investments.

Cameron notes that other unionized sports have adopted similar pay scales to MLB.  Well, there are reasons for that.  The Baseball Players’ Association was the first real union in professional sports; as such, its CBAs constituted a starting place for negotiations in other professional sports.

Hockey, like MLB, has an extensive minor league system.  The NBA does not, and salaries for second and third year players are much higher than in baseball.  The NFL has the weakest players’ union, plus the fact that because of all the injuries, many marginal players have short NFL careers — both explain why inexperienced players (with the extremely notable exception of high draft picks) have low salaries in the NFL.

Further, the idea that low early career salaries are “unfair” to rookie stars like Mike Trout doesn’t withstand a lot of scrutiny.  Most of the best and most valuable players have careers long enough to reach arbitration and then free agency, at which point they get paid and then some.  Most of the players who don’t last long enough to reach arbitration or free agency either aren’t that good or get hurt before they reach their full potential.  [Don't suggest Mark Prior, who blew out his arm before he could get the big arbitation/free agent bucks -- he signed a record-setting contract as an amateur draftee out of college.]

There are exceptions, of course, but really not that many when you consider the whole of major league playerdom.  Cameron writes, “I sympathize with players in Trout’s situation. If his career goes the way of Grady Sizemore, he may never land the massive paycheck that his talent is worth.”  This comment only proves the point that Trout will eventually get paid unless he suffers an extremely severe and extremely rare injury.

Despite all the injuries, Grady Sizemore has been paid $26.37 million over the last five seasons, according to baseball reference.  This means that, unless there has been or is in the future some serious profligacy, neither Grady nor his immediate descendants will ever go to bed hungry.

All this being said, the Angels really did renew Mike Trout’s contract for too little.  The Angels apparently didn’t want to disrupt their “salary scale” for young players, which is why they gave Trout only a $20,000 raise.  As if the Angels had a young player like Mike Trout come along every year or three.

What the Angels need to be thinking about is how they are going to keep Trout around when he becomes a free agent five years from now.  If they low-ball Trout now, he’s going to want market rates, which the Angels can well afford to pay and have indeed paid as recently as Albert Pujols and C. J. Wilson.  Or even worse, Trout will want to test the free agent market to see what’s really out there for him.

By way of comparison, the Giants are relatively generous with their franchise players.  After Buster Posey won the 2010 rookie of the year award (and the World Series), the Giants bumped his 2011 salary to $575,000, still well within the pre-arbitration “salary range”, but more than most teams would give a second year player.  The Giants recognized that Posey was worth it and that it would help the team in contract negotiations in later years.

When Posey eventually reaches free agency, he is going to remember that the Giants have always been generous with him.  Don’t think this isn’t important — Posey is from Georgia and played his college ball in North Florida, and there are a lot of wealthy East Coast teams that could pay him top dollar while allowing him to play his home games closer to home region.

Meanwhile, the Angels saved $50,000 or $75,000 they don’t really need.  When Trout, who is a South Jersey boy, approaches free agency, he’s going to be lot more receptive to the kinds of offers the Yankees, Mets and Phillies can make him because the Angels low-balled him today.

It’s no knock on Buster Posey to say that Mike Trout is worth as much or more to the Angels in 2013 than Posey was to the Giants in 2011.  Trout is that young and that good.

Bobby Abreu’s Available Cheap

Here is an mlbtraderumors.com article which lists every option/player available to the Yankees now that Curtis Granderson will miss at least the first 30 games of the 2013 season.  It seems to me that if the Yankees need another outfielder until Granderson recovers from his broken arm, Bobby Abreu is the obvious choice.

In spite of his poor 2012 season (.242 batting average and .693 OPS), Bobby still got on base as he always has (.350 OBP last year, .396 career).  As such, Abreu still has some value and would be a terrific low-cost way to get some offensive value out of left field while Granderson is out.

Schadenfreude

For those of you not up on your German, schadenfreude is the taking of pleasure in the misfortunes of some one else.  In this case, the misfortunes are happening to the New York Yankees, and I’m not exactly sad about it at all.

J. A. Happ broke Curtis Granderson‘s arm with a wild inside pitch in a Spring Training game today, and Granderson will miss ten weeks while his arm heals.  I’m certainly not saying I’m happy about Granderson getting hurt.  I don’t wish that any player get hurt. Also, Granderson’s a great player, and I always want great players to stay healthy and play.

It’s just that I find it hard not to take a certain pleasure when bad things happen to the Yankees as a franchise.  They spend so much money to buy up the best players, and the team and its fans are disappointed any year they don’t win the World Series, even if they go deep into the post-season.  As a fan of a team that had a long, long stretch of futility before the last three seasons, it’s hard not to enjoy seeing the Yankees fall flat on their collective faces once in a while.  See how the rest of us live, you New York blowhards!

Everything seems to be going wrong for the Yankees right now.  They have gotten old and so overpaid that the team can’t (or won’t — see below) simply spend to bring in a whole new line-up of new stars, as they did under the Boss.

Derek Jeter is old and coming off a broken ankle.  Alex Rodriguez will miss at least half the year after hip surgery and is embroiled in another steroid scandal.  Mark Teixeira isn’t the player he once was, and at age 33 isn’t likely to be that player again.  C. C. Sabathia in 2012 showed signs of the injury problems many analysts, including his one, have been been expecting for a pitcher his size now in his 30′s.

In a rare confluence of events, not only the Yankees, but also the Red Sox, look like they won’t make the play-offs in 2013.  The Sox lost 93 games last year, and they don’t at all look a team that will suddenly turn around and win 90+ games in 2013.

Meanwhile, the underdogs may finally be ready to have their days.  The Blue Jays made several big moves this off-season at what appears now to have been a particularly opportune time for them to do so.  Maybe they’ll make the post-season for the first time since they won the World Series in 1993.

The 2012 Orioles made the post-season for the first time since 1997, and they have a relatively young team that will presumably get better.

The Rays are one of MLB’s smallest market teams, but they make the most out of what they have to work with and can be expected to contend again in 2013.

The last time neither the Yankees nor the Red Sox made the post-season (excluding the strike-shortened 1994 season in which the Yankees finished with the best record in the American League) was 1993.  It’s long past time that someone else get the opportunity to fight it out in the play-offs.

That being said, the underdogs better make hay while the sun shines.  If the Yankees and Red Sox finish no higher than third in the Eastern Division, expect them to start shelling out again next off-season.  Their potential revenue streams (and in the case of the Yankees the fact that so many of their fans are front-runners) are such that it’s worth it for them to spend big on free agents if that’s what it takes to reach those play-off revenues.

Stray Thoughts

When I’m hard up for something to write about regarding baseball, one of the places I look is Sports Illustrated’s newswire.  It’s usually good for something that sparks my desire to comment.

The Indians are planning to put out an Albert Belle bobble-head next June in which he points to his flexed biceps, a pose the real Belle struck in the 1995 play-offs against the Boston Red Sox, when the Sox manager Kevin Kennedy asked the umps to check Belle’s bat for corking.  The gesture has a whole new meaning today, in light of all we now know about steroids in the 1990′s game.

I’m not accusing Belle of steroids use, but I do wonder about a bobble-head that celebrates something relatively forgettable that happened 18 seasons ago.  However, the Tribe hasn’t won a World Series since 1948, but last lost the Series in 1995 and 1997.

I guess Belle making a muscle is the best they can do.  As far as bobble-heads, I would have gone with their two big free agent signings this off-season, local boy (relatively speaking) Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn, or one of their young stars like Carlos Santana (if they haven’t already issued a bobble-head for him), and left it at that.

I was also amused by back-up catcher Francisco Cervelli‘s claim that he “consulted” with Biogenesis of America LLC, but never used any of their banned performance-enhancing products.  It may be true, but it certainly sounds ridiculous.

The players most likely to resort to performance enhancing drugs are (1) superstars, who want to be the very best and have unrealistic (?) expectations that they will be protected from disclosure so long as they perform; (2) marginal players, who have the least to lose (minor league careers at dirt pay) and the most to gain (significant major league careers and salaries) by using PEDs; and (3) aging veterans trying to hang on for a few more seasons.  That being said, all professional athletes can benefit from the boost they get from PEDs, and a lot of it probably comes down to each individual player’s willingness to push the envelope (i.e., cheat) to get ahead.

One thing to be said for Cervelli — his career numbers don’t suggest a player on steroids.  As a major league player, Cervelli’s strongest attribute is his ability to get on base (i.e., lay off pitches just out of the strike zone and draw walks — he has a .339 career on-base percentage), and he’s never shown a whiff of power (career .353 slugging percentage).  I don’t see how PEDs would give a player a better batting eye, and there’s no evidence at all that Cervelli has added strength by ‘roiding up.

Here’s a silly Spring Training article about how Barry Zito has a bounce in his step and renewed swagger after his fine performances in last year’s post-season.  I’ve already written about how Zito’s 2012 post-season finally justified the $126 million contract he signed with the Giants before the 2007 season.

However, Barry Zito‘s post-season performance in no way suggests that he still has the major league stuff to pitch his way successfully through the 2013 season.  Zito’s 15-8 regular season record was more a matter of good luck and the law of averages bouncing back, at least when one compares his 2012 performance to 2009 and 2010, when he had losing records but pitched about the same or better.

Compared to those two prior seasons, Zito’s hits per nine innings and strike outs rate were worse in 2012.  He threw a few more strikes in 2012, but not enough to justify his vastly better won-loss record.

I’m not taking anything away from Zito’s 2012 post-season performance by saying it’s highly doubtful that the ego and confidence bump he got will translate into a successful 2013 campaign.  Instead, the objective evidence suggests that Zito’s 2013 is more likely to look like his miserable 2008 and 2011 seasons, than his 2009, 201o and 2012 campaigns.