Based on Value Over Replacement Player, it's Chan Ho Park - despite a strikeout/home run ratio of just over 2:1.

Syesha Mercado deserves to make the American Idol finals ahead of David Archuleta.

* PitchFX is changing things so fundamentally that I'm not sure we have any comprehension just how much. Was color TV considered a gimmick when it first came in?

* I've finally cracked the video thing. No, my big egg-shaped head isn't different, but the problem isn't me ... well, it is, but you know what I mean. The problem is that most people surf at work, meaning video is both a bandwidth and an attention problem. What's needed is closed-captioning -- the video could run, but you could read along. Of course, if all you get is a talking head that's muted and reading along, that's not compelling. I need to figure out how to get more stuff -- diagrams, anatomical drawings -- into the act. Ideally, I could show the injury happen itself, but that's still a rights issue. So, if you want to start a business, vlog captioning is my idea. If it's already out there, let me know.

* A Ken Griffey Jr deal back to the Mariners will probably end up being the last deal of the Bavasi Era in Seattle. I have a piece that's been in limbo regarding the "Top Ten GM Candidates" that I need to finish.

* If Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Colin Meloy (The Decemberists) sang together, would the world end? I think it would just be very depressing, if brilliant.

* American Idol has jumped the shark. If they were smart -- and they are -- they'd take about five years off and let the talent "build" out there. An interim step would be some kind of "celebrity" AI. Take a group of already signed, but neglected talent jump in. Add in some people looking for respect or a second chance - I'm thinking Ashlee Simpson here - and you have something interesting. Even a seeming "ringer" like Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera might have trouble with the wrong theme.

* Jay Bruce is leading the International League in nearly every hitting category of note and Dusty Baker is inserting Corey Patterson as his leadoff man. I don't have anything past that. "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

* More fun with Minor League stats:
*Mike Hessman has 17 HR. SEVENTEEN!
*Brian Mazone has four wins for a team that doesn't have ten wins.
*How is Luke Hughes not better right now than Nick Punto?
*Bobby Brownlie is making something of a comeback in the Nats organization and was just bumped up to Triple-A. *Mat Gamel and Matt LaPorta both have OPS over 1000 in Double-A, but will have to convince the baseball world that defense really doesn't matter. With Ryan Braun in LF and one of these two in RF, I'm not sure having Dwayne Murphy would help. The Brewers would have to have nothing but K/GB pitchers to make it work. Hmm.
*Ever root for a guy just because of his name? I'd love to hear several announcers deal with Chris Jakubauskus. Heck, I'd like to hear the Raniers great Mike Curto do it.
*Same thing with Kila Kaaihue.
*It used to be you could tell when someone really knew prospects by whether they knew how to pronounce "Nageotte" (Nazh-ette). Then it was "Komine" (Ko-min-ay). Who is it now?

* Is there a better site out there now than Ballbug? No, there is not. Even better, it's the epitome of "Bissinger's Dilemma" - content is content and good blogs are right there aside good newspapers or "pro" web sites like BP and MLB.com. The next step will be disintermediation of comments, which will be a big deal because of ad revenue. After that, I think there's going to be a much bigger disintermediation, but I'll wait until I've figured out the profit angle on that before talking about it.

During the middle of the game last night, I was on-line checking the scores...2-0, 2-1, 3-2, 1-1. Sure sign of a recession when you see lines like that in the Junior Circut. BP takes as look at why scoring in in the American League is down this season. Tom Verducci examines the issue as well, and Jake Luft wonders what ever happen to Travis Hafner.

  
Golf Road
Chapter Five (continued from Tim Redding)

When I first found these ripped up 2008 cards on Golf Road I envisioned spreading the lucky, hopeful buzz the find gave me over an entire month, writing nearly every day about one of the cards, welcoming the spring by celebrating the miraculous renewal of each trashed present-day journeyman, a month-long 22-chapter novella that would ultimately establish the bus stop on Golf Road as my personal church, a temple for the embrace of the moment in the heart of the blind spot of the American Dream, which also happened to be the heart of my own strongest desire to escape the moment. It was pretty ambitious. It was bound to end up incomplete.

In truth there’s not much to the story. The bus came by and I got on. That about wraps things up regarding the day I found the cards. There’s also a Grateful Dead song that starts with those words. The bus mentioned in the song is metaphorical in some ways, but the metaphor has its roots in an actual bus, Furthur, which belonged to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who used the vehicle, an old conveyance for schoolchildren that the proto-hippies had emblazoned with Day-Glo paint, to roam the land ingesting prodigious amounts of LSD and acting unusually around members of the general populace. This was in 1964. They believed they could transform society by passing along, through artful pranks, the enlightenment they were experiencing. Mostly they exhibited their painted naked bodies and yelled at tax-paying citizens with a megaphone. When they returned to California from the cross-country trip they began inviting the general public to acid tests, which the Grateful Dead fully participated in, managing somehow to play their electrified instruments and add strange music to the general sensory assault while they, like everyone else there, hallucinated ferociously. In other words, the bus came by and they got on.

Others followed. The man who would become my step-father was the first in my family to get on the bus, dropping out of college, growing his hair long, crisscrossing the country on a motorcycle, eventually stumbling around the Oregon woods on acid made by the Merry Prankster’s own famous chemist, Owsley. My mother followed him onto the bus. In fact they literally met on a bus to a peace march. I don’t know if you could say my father ever got on the bus, but he didn’t throw rocks at the bus or anything, and when the family split up he did ride another kind of bus (Greyhound) up to see us a lot, and my brother and I took the same Greyhound down to see him every summer. A few years later I rode a Greyhound all the way across the country. There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel. That’s another line from the Grateful Dead song. It’s a reference to Neal Cassady, who was the driver of the Merry Prankster bus and who I first read about in On the Road a couple years before my cross-country bus ride. I wanted to ride beside him, crisscrossing the country in a frenzied search for ecstatic visions, so I tried to get on the bus, but it was a Greyhound. Once the Greyhound had taken me and my liquefying spine to California I saw my first Grateful Dead show and started tripping pretty hard during the first notes of the first song the visibly aging men on stage were playing, Jack Straw. We can share the women we can share the wine. There were people sharing things all around me, most notably hugs in big unshowered hug circles. I found I wanted no part of it. It wasn’t all the hairy armpits, either. I’ve never been a joiner. I prefer solitary, even lonely, anonymity, where without ever having to actually talk to anybody I can painlessly imagine great untroubled renown and warm feelings of vibrant community. I went to a few more Grateful Dead shows over the next couple years and it was the same thing: strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands, as another of their songs go, and me off to the side, my jaw clenching and my nostrils flaring with the chemical pulse coursing through me, my pupils like fire-blackened dimes. At one show a hippie girl even shouted at me, in a rhetorical way that was akin to a distancing shove of the palm to the chest, “Why are you hiding?”

Anyway that was all a long time ago. More recently the bus came by, the Pace Bus, and I got on and slid my transit card into the slot. That’s about it. Cowboy Neal wasn’t at the wheel but it turned out that Kevin “Cowboy Up” Millar was partially and in pieces in my pocket. Quite a while later the bus arrived at the CTA terminal and I got off. I got on a train. I got off the train. I walked home. Same as any other day. Today I heard on the radio that there’s a physiological phenomenon called synaptic rutting, which leads to physical and mental degeneration and which stems from the kind of repetitive living that I engage in. But I guess there are always slight variations in my routine. On the day in question, of course, I was able on my arrival at my apartment to delay the routine of simultaneous ingestion of food and television by dumping my card shreds onto the counter and with the help of my wife piecing together whatever we could. When she went to take a shower I taped up the pieces, trying to be careful at first but then deciding to be willfully haphazard, so that the torn parts showed even in the cards that had all their parts.

Not all the cards had all their parts, and I guess it says something about me that these partial cards are my favorites. Of those favorites, this Kevin Millar card is first and foremost. This is not surprising, given my favorite team, and given that the player featured on the card not only started what turned out to be the greatest rally in team history but also seemed to be the foremost contributor to the 2004 Red Sox’ renowned looseness. He was, and probably still is, a goofball. Before Millar the Red Sox had always stared into their chronic collapses with the Yaz-faced dourness of a man being told there was no cure for his hemorrhoids. Conversely, Millar’s response to the deeply humiliating 0-3 hole the Red Sox dug for themselves in the 2004 playoffs was to smile like he had just stumbled from a keg party and tell reporters that his team was going to shock the world. He didn’t sound like the raving young Cassius Clay, the first to make such a claim, but rather like a guy who was simply prepared to continue having some fun playing baseball. How much Millar’s attitude and locker room hijinx actually contributed to the team’s famous comeback is a matter for debate, but the fact is the team seemed to take his lead and play the game both without tension and with passion, a sure sign that they were, as any goofball would have wanted it, enjoying themselves.

I was just thinking last night that the goofball is a lucky guy. Last night as he played first base for the Baltimore Orioles a run scored when he let a groundball go through his legs. He has managed to put together a good career, but what would have happened if that error had not occurred in the first inning of an early-season game that his team would come back to win but instead had occurred in, say, the tenth inning of the sixth game of a World Series? But then again maybe there’s something to being a goofball. Maybe goofballs are just luckier. Maybe they know that the mere fact of being alive is itself a pretty lucky thing, so you might as well enjoy yourself when you can.

I was lucky to find these cards, especially the partial 2008 Kevin Millar. In the days following my find I continued to search the grass around the bus stop on Golf Road. I didn’t find anything the first time I did this, but on the second day I came up with three scraps, one of them the missing piece of Kevin Millar. I put them in my back pocket when the bus arrived. Later, as I was exiting the train station in my neighborhood, a guy was handing out brochures for some street fair. I avoid interpersonal contact whenever possible, but because of one of the briefest chapters in the spotty employment history that has brought me to Golf Road I now take things from people when they hand them out. Several years ago I got some money by working for an outfit that handed out surveys in front of movie theaters. We had to say the same thing over and over: “The producers would love to hear what you think of this movie.” The repetitiveness of this, and the fact that I had to go against my deep-seated personal preference to leave people alone, made me start crying on the subway home. But my money was so thin I had to do it again a few more times. Most people I accosted passed me by. During the movie we filled in blank surveys with fictional responses to the movie we hadn’t seen, then when the movie let out we went up and down the aisles and pried any castoff surveys loose from the gooey floor. So anyway I always take pity on poor slobs handing out things, which led to me taking the brochure and shoving it in my back pocket, then pulling it out when I came to a garbage can. When I got home I found that I only had two scraps of cards in my back pocket. The final piece of Kevin Millar had been jarred loose somehow, probably by a ripple from my lackluster, ridiculous past.

I was angry at first, but what are you gonna do? Punch yourself in the head? Fuck it, life is short. You might as well celebrate what luck comes to you and leave the rest for someone else to find.

Back on this day in 1961, the Washington Senators (AL version 2.0) did something that no team has ever done since. The Senators sent three straight pinch-hitters to the plate and all of them drew a walk. This remarkable bit of patience by batters coming off the bench was not all the work of the Senators hitters as we shall see.

Continue reading...

Nothing will be solidified until sometime tomorrow, but based on all the ink spilled on the subject, come Wednesday night, or Thursday afternoon at the latest, there will be a Jedmonds in our midst.

I'm trying to find positives, trying not to just spew obscenities, and it's absolutely killing me. Here's what I'll do instead. I'll outline what I believe the club is thinking, and then we'll see if I want to call in an airstrike when I'm done. The chain of events should move something this:

• Edmonds will be signed and added to the 25-man roster (there shouldn't be a move with the 40-man, since my accounting shows 38 at the moment).
• Pie will be sent to Iowa, where he will work on the corrections the club wants him to make to his swing, while getting daily game action to transfer those corrections from conscious action, to unconscious reaction.
• Edmonds will start in center field.
• Edmonds will hit fifth.
• Fukudome will hit second.
• Theriot will hit eighth.

That's six separate things, and judgment on the first item - the addition of Edmonds in the first place - needs to be reserved until the other pieces are assessed. We're left, then, with five items requiring comment. Let's start with the easy stuff.

Fukudome will hit second, and Theriot will hit eighth.

To me, these moves are undeniable positives. Fukudome is the perfect prototype for a Major League two-hole hitter, so much so that it makes one wonder at the collective sanity of a club that heretofore has refused to put him where he so clearly belongs.

I understand the reasoning - the Cubs want to break up the right-handers in the middle of the lineup and either gain some late game platoon advantages, or force their opponents to spend their bullpen chits in quick succession to gain the advantage themselves - but I remain unconvinced that this use of Fukudome and his skillset is a net positive when compared to what's gained by hitting him higher in the order - namely, more PAs for Fukudome, which based on his OBP would mean fewer outs in general for the club, and more RBI chances for Lee and Ramirez. What the Cubs hope is that the acquisition of Edmonds will allow them to both have and eat their proverbial cake.

Then, of course, Ryan Theriot becomes displaced by Fukudome's move, and since it makes no sense to put him in a traditional RBI spot, is migrated to the bottom of the order. Despite his early hotness, Theriot is pretty clearly the worst hitter in the lineup most days, so treating him as such by placing him just before the pitcher is optimal even when he's performing well, and will become a near necessity once his descent to mortal climes commences.

Still, despite all the sense it makes, the only reason any of this is happening is because....

Edmonds will hit fifth.

For Fukudome to move, there has to be another lefty to take his place in the 5-hole, and in order for that lefty to viably do so, he needs to be someone who has some power and ability to drive in runs. This is something that Edmonds brings to the table. Assuming, of course, that he can drop a year or three on his way to town.

There is a root issue with the ploy, and it goes like this: Jim Edmonds is no longer a good hitter. He hasn't been since 2006, and he hasn't been truly dangerous since 2005. It is a tremendous leap of faith to assume that a 38 year-old who is two years removed from his last productive season, and two years removed from the last time he was a legitimate power threat, will jump into your lineup and bring the game he had in days of yore when dragons feasted on the flesh of men and damsels yodeled helplessly from the tallest local tower.

Sure, there's an outside chance that Edmonds can put together a solid month or so and be of use during his stay, but more than likely, he'll be so bad as to unplayable, or he'll injure himself yet again because....

Edmonds will start in center field.

As bad as Edmonds is likely to be at the plate - and considering the number of RBI opportunities he'll have because of the guys hitting in front of him, his badness could be especially damaging - he might be even worse in the field. It won’t just be Edmond’s area that’s affected, either. When a center fielder’s range has become diminished to the point that Edmond’s has, that necessitates the men on the corner playing tighter to center, leaving the lines vulnerable. Later in the game, if the lines are being guarded, the gaps become larger. The entire outfield defense is affected, domino-like.

The good news is, Wrigley's relatively small, so some of his foibles will be masked. The bad news is, eventually the team will go back on the road where the pastures will be considerably less kind, and once they do, I fear the combination of terrible hitting and worse defense will be too much to bear. Especially since....

Pie will be sent to Iowa.

This is something I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, despite the lack of concrete results, I think Pie's looked better at the dish lately, more like someone who has an inkling of what to do than a hopeless heap, and I'd love to see him get enough playing time let the changes he's made fully take hold.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for following what I'll call The Rich Hill Model, where you send a guy down with every intention of bringing him back the minute he shows that he's internalized and deployed the lessons he's meant to glean on the farm. Certainly with Hill, it was an absolute necessity. With Pie, I don’t believe that’s the case, although I can see the argument that by giving him a couple pressure-free weeks in Iowa, Pie will more quickly digest his intended learnings. Of course, in the end my thoughts are irrelevant because….

Edmonds will be signed and added to the 25-man roster.

It’s looking inevitable, and if I do a straight tally of the five items above, I’m coming out about 2.5 pro and 2.5 con. While that implies I might be able to live with this arrangement for a time, if I think about how the above might be weighted, how I might prioritize these various parts, I think it’s more important for me to not have an obvious piece of dead weight on the roster than it is for me to see some marginal gains from lineup reconstruction. Edmond’s likely contributions on offense and defense could be so damaging as to not only wipe out any gains from the batting order changes, but be a major net negative if allowed to go on for any length of time.

I won’t be phoning for bombers if this deal does, indeed, get done, but if the experiment goes as I think it will, and lasts beyond the month of May, rest assured I’ll be calling for the cavalry.

Hi, everybody! Welcome to the show! Are you ready for another exciting round of "What's Wrong With Him?" Ok, let's play!

Kurt Suzuki. What's wrong with him?
Suzuki hit a homer on Wednesday, but hasn't had a hit since. The homer is looking like a fluke. His hitting has actually been plummeting like a stone since Bob Geren moved him into the leadoff spot when Travis Buck got hurt a few weeks ago. Suzuki is hitting .209/.277/.256 from the #1 slot in the batting order; it's clearly time to call that experiment a failure. Suzuki is a catcher in his first full MLB season. He's still got a lot to learn and absorb. It's time to take some pressure off the young man by placing him back at the bottom the batting order.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. The correct answer is:
If you play a catcher as often as Jason Kendall, he'll eventually end up hitting like Jason Kendall. He needs some days off.

Rich Harden. What's wrong with him?
Harden's first start off the DL Sunday against Texas was pretty weird. He got the first two outs fairly easily in each of his first three innings, and also the leadoff batter in the fourth, but thereafter got smacked around before he could finish off each inning. Will Carroll remarked on BP that "Harden didn't have his control, but he did have his mid-90's velocity." I'm not so sure I agree with that. Harden's control is not really his strength, anyway. Gameday kinda confirmed my suspicions--he hit 96 and 97 mph a couple of times, but most of the time, his fastball sat at 93. While watching the game, I thought Harden's fastball was lacking its usual little extra oomph--batters were making more contact on it than they usually do. He admitted afterwards that he felt tired out there. He was also not throwing his splitter or his slider, to help avoid injury. The Texas hitters knew he was only a two-pitch pitcher that day, so without a blow-away fastball, Harden had to use the changeup more often than normal to try and fool the hitters with. A few of those got left up and over the plate, and got appropriately whacked. But the core problem is that with a few exceptions, Harden was just throwing fastballs, not Fastballs.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. The correct answer is:
Rich Harden was sporting goofy beard-like thing he had growing on his chin. Just because he took Chad Gaudin's spot in the rotation doesn't mean he had to try to grow an ugly beard like Gaudin's. Gaudin's beard-like thing kinda suits his mug in a strange sort of way, but it just looked totally out of place on Harden's baby face.

Barry Zito. What's wrong with him?
People have been asking me that question for several weeks now, but I hadn't actually seen him pitch this year until last night. As always, the whole key to Zito's existence is his unusual ability to reduce the BABIP of right-handed batters. Without that skill, he's nothing. Nearly every non-knuckleballing MLB pitcher who ever pitched yields a BABIP of about .300, but Zito in over 5,500 PA has yielded a BABIP against RHB of only .261. (He's a more conventional .290 against LHB.) This year, his BABIP against RHB is .339. Why the huge difference this year? People have been harping on his loss of velocity, but I don't think that's really the source of his struggles this year. His unusual skill comes from an unique pitch sequence that is set up by his curveball, as I explained here. The problem I saw last night was not all that different from his mediocre nights that he had in Oakland when his curveball wasn't working. The curve wasn't that nasty pitch he used to throw that starts out looking like it was clearly a ball, and then sharply snaps over the plate. Instead, the ball just kinda rolled up there. He was throwing curveballs, not Curveballs. He didn't seem confident in throwing his primary weapon, afraid he'd hang it or something, and without it, he's a two pitch pitcher, just like Harden, but without about 10mph of speed. He had good control of his fastball last night, and a decent changeup, and that was good enough to get him through the order twice. But just like in Oakland, the third time through the order was a problem without the Curveball.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. The correct answer is:
Barry Zito is a head case. The guy thinks too much. He would be a lot better pitcher if he was an idiot, and just stubbornly stuck with what works. He tinkers with his motion to try to increase velocity, and ends up losing velocity, control, and, most importantly, deception. Every time he tries something new, it screws him up, and he eventually ends up going back to the old stuff. Rick Peterson is the only pitching coach who had success with him, because he recognized that Barry Zito is too smart for his own good, and wouldn't let him change anything. No, you can't throw a slider. No, you can't change your stride length. No, you can't change your stretch motion. Curt Young and Dave Righetti have been too much like nice, spoiling uncles than stern fathers, too willing to let him try new stuff. Barry Zito should not vote for Barack Obama. Zito needs a pitching coach who will tell him, "No, you can't!"

Three strikes, you're out!
We have some lovely parting gifts for you, as reward for your effort. Thanks for playing!

An unassisted triple play is not
The culmination of tension that grows
Throughout a game. The tension of a spot
That such a play can come in only shows

Through offense. Unassisted triple plays
Can only come under a threat Two on
Or three, nobody out-offensive days
Are made of such, until at once they're gone

Within a blinding instant. Unassisted
Triple plays change momentum, not imply
The victors. There are few tales of eyes misted
In memory recalling them. But why?

Ephemeral but brilliant, the un-
Assisted play's one moment in the sun.

After I returned home from the game last night, I was all worked up to write an angry post about the cheap owners, the terrible starters, and the possibility of a 100-loss season. I even wrote the first paragraph, which I won't repeat here. But then I thought better of it. I thought that (if you'll excuse me) if my bad attitude was starting to wear thin even on me, it might be old news to readers as well. So I figured I'd sleep on it and see where things stood in the morning. (Sadly, with the major league schedule now completed for the evening, the record incontrovertibly shows the Rockies tied for the worst record in major league baseball. But we're trying to be uplifting here!)

So instead of writing a vitriolic "Cardinals 6, Rockies 5" blog entry, I went to finish all of the chores I had put aside to go to the baseball game. I cleaned the cat bin. I emptied the dishwasher. I did the laundry (including the Curt Flood jersey I wore to the game in protest). Then I decided to have a glass of lemonade, listen to Wilco's exemplary Sky Blue Sky, and finish this weighty history of the Ottoman Empire I've been trudging through for the past few weeks.

While I was stirring the frozen lemonade concentrate into a pitcher of water, I noticed that the back of the new shelf I bought to house my ever-expanding record collection, which perches on the kitchen counter due to single-bedroom space requirements, looked kind of bare and unpleasant. I thought it might be nice to brighten it up with some magazine clippings, and the first thing my eye caught over across in the stack on the far side of the counter was the monthly Rockies magazine.

The magazine also doubles as the program they sell at games, so there's always full-page pictures of everybody notable on the roster. Jeff Francis and Troy Tulowitzki have been on my fridge for a while. (I must digress to note that the issue in question, May 2008, has Manny Corpas, the "Eye of the Storm," on the cover, and also introduces a "Tulo and Nix" feature that I suppose will not be appearing again for some time.) Who's the next guy that leaps to mind that I need represented on the back of one of my shelves? Why, Todd Helton of course.

And then I began to think about Todd, as I looked for scissors and tape. How much have I written about Todd Helton this season? Not a whole lot. I gave credit to Garrett Atkins and Matt Holliday for doing their thing in the midst of all the anarchy, but I took Helton for granted. That's unforgivable. Todd Helton is the whole reason I live in Colorado in the first place. That's overstating things slightly, but I never would have moved to a region without a baseball team I could feel comfortable rooting for. And although the Rockies were pretty crummy from 1996-2004, I had always admired Helton as a great hitting, fielding, and throwing first baseman. He was a complete player at a position that began to see a preponderance of Mo Vaughn types during this era. So I figured even if Colorado was bad for many years, I would always have Helton's play to admire. That was good enough for me. I bought a Rockies cap, a purple #17 jersey, and I packed my bags.

(I also have, as a relic of a similar process, a #54 Houston Astros Brad Lidge jersey. It didn't work out so well in Houston, for myself or Lidge. Maybe I'll tell the story of my #10 Shingo Takatsu White Sox jersey another time.)

Coming back to my kitchen, and my lemonade, and my action photo clipped of that perfectly level swing at its very completion, I've decided to give the Rockies a break this year. They're horrible, and venal mistakes were made on the part of the management team that caused this to be so. But they gave me and a lot of other people a ton of joy last year. Yeah, by the end of the year Coors Field is going to be as empty as it was at the end of the game last night, after Mark Redman got lit up for five runs and three innings and a nice blast of cold rain fell through the middle innings. But it was never about full stadiums or winning teams for me, and I don't see why a little taste of success one year should change that.

It's a shame and a missed opportunity for the Rockies that they weren't able to follow up on their 2007 breakthrough with another contending season. That makes me sad because I want my team to win and the sharp dropoff in season ticket sales for '09 (after this year's surge and, accordingly, price hike) will hurt their chances to do so; but the fact remains that I like it in Colorado, I like Coors Field, and I plan to be here for a while. I'm stuck with the Rockies and the Rockies are stuck with me.

All right, I still have some bullets from the game to get through:

• Hand it to the torturous Rockies offense to finally hit a groove in the ninth inning and ruin the one thing that was going to save my miserable night, the extremely rare experience of seeing a complete game thrown at Coors Field. Braden Looper wasn't dominant in the least, giving up ten hits and striking out only one, but he didn't walk anybody. His ball-strike ratio: 38-76. You hear that, Ubaldo? You hear that, Franklin? You hear that, Francis Channel?
• Speaking of #26, the reason I quite pointedly did not include Jeff Francis with Aaron Cook when I excepted Cook from the Rockies' "Festival of Crap" rotation I wrote about earlier is because Francis is not doing what he needs to do to go deeper into games. Even though he's put up some nice starts his last few times out, the Channel is still throwing too many pitches and walking too many. He's getting to the 100-pitch mark in the fifth or sixth and if he's going to be an ace (and the Rockies need him to be, with Cook's defense-dependency) he needs to throw first-pitch strikes and force opposing hitters to get aggressive early in the count. That's not really a note from last night's game but Francis does pitch tomorrow.
• Cardinals rookie outfielder Brian Barton looks a lot like Eddie Steeples, aka Darnell from "My Name Is Earl." His nickname should be "Crab Man," if it isn't already.
• Willy Taveras got an RBI groundout in the third, his fourth. The Rockies rank 29th in RBI from the leadoff spot this season. Anemic Minnesota is last. And Colorado plays half their games at Coors Field!
• Chris Iannetta's introduction music is "I Can't Dance," by one of my favorite bands (really, I'm not being sarcastic), Genesis. The music nerd slash baseball fan in me hopes that Iannetta is a fellow true believer and I'll run into him at a record store one day while I'm searching for a replacement for my slightly scratched copy of Trespass and we'll become fast friends due to our shared love of Tony Banks' synthesizer mastery and Phil Collins' inventive drumming. In the offseason we'll hang out in my apartment listening to Abacab and hopefully he'll be able to use his fame and influence to get "Turn It On Again" into a Guitar Hero game already. The realist in me, however, thinks that it is far more likely that Iannetta is just a really terrible dancer and his teammates thought it would be funny.
• I thought it was a great confidence boost for Manny Corpas when Clint Hurdle deliberately sent him in to pitch with Albert Pujols, who had a relatively quiet night (1 for 5 with a double), coming up. Corpas struck him out and completed a scoreless inning. Hurdle erred, though, by doubling down and leaving the dethroned closer in to pitch another inning. Rick Ankiel hit a titanic home run that ended up being the difference in the game. However, the loss shouldn't hang on Corpas's shoulders -- he has enough of those. This one belongs to Mark Redman.
• Finally: Ankiel's throw to catch Omar Quintanilla attempting to stretch a double into a triple (with two outs, even -- go say hello to the pine, meat) from the very deepest recesses of Coors Field's altitude-adjusted outfield was the single best I have ever seen. I still can't believe how perfect it was. It looked as if he was still pitching and just flipping the ball to third for a force-out -- not the motion of the throw, but the path of the ball. Generally when you whip the ball it goes on a line, but this had a lazy arc like Ankiel could have, if necessary, thrown it harder still. Crazy. It was like the YouTube thing with Kobe Bryant jumping over the car, only I actually saw it happen. The friendly Cardinals fan who was sitting next to me and I were trying to think of another current player who could have made the same peg and the only names we could think of were Vladimir Guerrero and Jeff Francouer. But I don't know if even those guys could have done what Ankiel did. Oh, and he also doubled off Willy Taveras -- who can run a bit -- when Taveras tried to advance to third in the first. That one was routine by comparison, but it would have taken Willy, Ankiel's Colorado counterpart in center, two cut-off men.

The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change.
—FDR

I finally watched Bob Costas's recorded live HBO special on the state of sports today as part of his semi-regular "Costas Now" sports talk series. The ninety-minute special consisted of five segments on different topics each with a Costas-intoned intro and a three-person panel interviewed by the host. Of the five topics, I found the one on the Internet mist intriguing.

Coincidentally, I finished Cormac McCarthy's latest master opus, The Road, this weekend as well. One was about two individuals trying to subsist in a world that had long since died, and the other was a novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Costas impaneled DeadSpin founder Will Leitch, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, and Browns receiver Braylon Edwards for the discussion on the Internet. The topic was poorly framed from the get-go and quickly devolved into Costas and Bissinger tag-teaming Leitch while Costas from time to time extended a hand to the reticent Edwards to get his licks in.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
—Marshall McLuhan

Costas introduced the special with the words, "It used to be that this was how we followed sports," accompanied with a shot of Dandy Don Meredith on an outmoded TV and a few old covers of SI from its glory days. "Today, for many sports fans, this is how you do it," Costas continued as a disembodied laboriously typed "www.espn.com". As if the often openly inebriated Meredith and the monopolistic pre-Sport SI are the ideal exemplars of sports journalism, and as if anyone who typically uses the web would waste their time typing in a URL they frequent instead of just selecting a favorite. It is a minor point but it gets to the level of experience the people framing the piece actually have with the Internet.

Next, they cut to Michael Wilbon who asks, "Bloggers? What are their credentials? Where do their opinions come from, just sitting on the couch?" This is from one of the blowhards that host the execrable Pardon the Interruption, a near self parody of sports talk with two hosts attempting to shout the other down while spewing highly inaccurate, knee-jerk reactions to topics: sports talk reduced to entertaining pap for the masses.

They leave it to two usually controversial athletes to be the voice of reason: Curt Schilling ("There's a huge disconnect between the reporter and the player they are covering.") and Sir Charles Barkley ("It's become like gotcha—they want confrontation."). Disembodied Costas ends the intro with, "It is for better or for worse an entirely different sports media landscape," by which, the viewer soon finds out, he means worse.

After a segment on sports talk in which the person with the pro position, Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, states without any real challenge, "Do I go crazy on the negative? I'm not stupid. I go crazy on the negative sometimes," Disembodied Costas turns to what he calls, "The wild west of the internet, the Blogosphere."

Leitch accurately states, "If you are really waiting to read the game story in the newspaper to find out what happened in the Cardinals game last night, you're probably over fifty," even though this delineation is used continually against him in the panel segment. Mike Scherr of Fire Joe Morgan finishes the segment intro ideally with, "The more transparent the world is, the better off we are. It's the basis of like democracy." Costas then smarms, "And who's gonna take a position against democracy, right?" We learn quickly that he will.

Costas goes quickly to the offensive, "Sure, it's 100% right when you say you don't need credentials in journalism to say the Indians should pull Carmona in the eighth [actually, Scherr said it but to Costas they and everything they represent is part and parcel the same]. But these are not the reasonable criticisms of the worst of the sports Blogosphere. The reasonable criticism is of the tone of the gratuitous potshots and mean spirited abuse. That's the reasonable criticism." Costas gets ready to rumble.

While Leitch is responding with a reasonable comment on how people differ online as opposed to face-to-face, but before he can continue, Bissinger figuratively tags Costas and begins his pummeling, "I have to interject because I feel very strongly about this. I think you are full of [beep]…Because I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty. They are dedicated to journalistic dishonesty. They are dedicated to speed. I am over fifty." After some disjointed challenge/allusion to legendary sports writer W.C. Heinz, Bissinger pulls out a file and reads some comments from one of the DeadSpin writers, "I can't tell if this guy's name is Balls Deep or Big Daddy Drew Balls." After he is told it is Big Daddy, Bissinger continues seemingly forgetting he is a man well over fifty who refers to himself as Buzz, "Big Daddy. OK, so Balls Deep. I will read a bit. Here's, here's, here's, here's insight in blogging because it really p*sses the S out of me…Seriously, because it is the complete dumbing down of our society, the complete dumbing down."

After reading some inane comment about notoriously overweight pitcher Rich Garces and his breasts, which Bissinger peppers with exclamatory and often blue commentary, he demands, "How can you be proud of that stuff?" This is followed up Costas (virtual tag again) reading reader comments on Leitch's blog and demanding an explanation as to their base content. This is not that dissimilar to asking an author to defend comments written on his work in an annotated edition or, even more to the point, on notes scribbled in the margin in a library edition.

Costas then riles Bissinger up again by quoting the dire fate of newspapers. Bissinger bites: "Yeah, of course, and maybe that's why I am so heated and angry because this guy [gesticulating toward Leitch], whether we like it or not, is the future. I'm not the future. [And the future] is going yo be glib. It is going, generally, to be profane [this from the man with the four-letter intro]. It is going to be quick. It's often going to be inaccurate."

Tag back to Costas: "That is a generalization. It has a lot of truth to it [which is?], but it is not all."

Bissinger, tag again, "It is a generalization and there are some good blogs out there [a statement repeated often throughout but never backed up with actual names], but I think they are very few and far between [also, not backed up]. I think the quality of the writing generally in blogs is despicable and, I say this as a writer who has spent forty years of my life trying to perfect my craft."

Finally, during the summation, Bissinger takes one last potshot, which is quick (by which I assume he means facile), glib, and profane, all the things he accuses blogging, and I quote it with all its excesses here: "You are sort of a Jimmy Olsen on Percocet. I mean, you are sort of. It's sort of strikes me that you say you don't want to be in the press box because the press box will get in the way. Actually, the reason there is a press box is because you have a certain vantage point of the game. And what it seems to me you are saying is, 'I don't want facts to. I don't want facts to inhibit me, facts to get in my way. So I am going to sit in my little room, and I'm, I, I, I, I'm gonna give this nebulous fan's voice', and I just don't know where you are coming from [so true]. I think you are perpetuating the future, and I think the future is in the hands of guys like you is really going to dumb us down to a degree that I don't know if we can recover from."

Aside from improper uses of "perpetuating" and "really", ending on a dangling participle, and generally speaking like he claims a blogger writes—I guess they give Pulitzers to anybody nowadays—, Bissinger gets to the core of the issue. The established media do not understand how a point of view that is not gleaned from the same privileged point of view as theirs could have merit. How can it not be better to be in the press box? How can it not be better to be in close contact with the players? He needs a validation of his worldview, a worldview that is rapidly disappearing from the landscape of sports reporting.

They are disappearing so rapidly that most of the major sports publications have long since recognized this and feature blogs via their online doppelgangers, even the New York Times, the bastion of journalistic integrity that the interviewees were repeatedly championing. The doom-and-gloom future to which Bissinger incessantly refers is not just here, it has been here for some time, and the world seems to be surviving.

The seasons change their manners, as the year Had found some months asleep and leapt them over.
—William "Author" Shakespeare, Henry IV

It all reminds my of my old Sociology professor and the man who coined the term WASP (and champion of the excellent though now-defunct Pennsylvania Book Center), E. Digby Baltzell, who foresaw how an aristocratic caste can hold down the elite in his seminal analysis, "The Protestant Establishment". Baltzell was speaking of politics but it still holds true in culture of sports media.

Baltzell's central thesis is that no state (or here, industry) "can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes." By democracy, Batltzell means the "process which assures that men of ability and ambition, regardless of background, are allowed to rise into the elite." By aristocracy, he refers to an upper-class community who "are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors [or antecedents] have been leaders" and that they "are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of the elite and the rest of the population."

The aristocracy in sports journalism is clearly the print media, mainly the newspapers. They seem themselves as the representing the traditional journalistic ideals. If sports media purport to be democratic in Baltzell's sense, then the best writers from each discipline—print, broadcasting, internet, etc.—would be allowed to rise into the sports media elite.

Baltzell goes on to say that the leaders will form an establishment, which is ideally "traditional and authoritative and not (italics his) coercive and authoritarian," that the establishment "must be constantly rejuvenated by new members of the elite" or it will instead become an impermeable caste. A caste for Baltzell "protects is privileges and prestige but does not continue (1) to contribute leadership or (2) to assimilate new elite members, primarily because of their…origins." That is, they now longer "stoop to conquer". Once the establishment becomes a caste, "the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating."

If this does not describe the current state of sports media, I will eat John Wetteland's salt-encrusted hat. The print media have now become the upper class caste that look down on other media types and refuse to allow them entrance into their inner circles, to the Hall of Fame and award voting, and to their executive washrooms (though did you notice Bill Conlin's personal hygiene? Eek!).

Today's journalism is obsessed with the kinds of things that tend to preoccupy thirteen-year-old boys: sports, sex, crime, and narcissism.... Moreover, if today's journalism has a driving principle, that principle centers on an obsession with hypocrisy…[R]eporters frame their stories by saying implicitly, "These people aren't what they say they are. Look, they lied to you." Although there is a cultural role for balloon deflators, journalism has brought this characteristic attitude of the early adolescent to the adult world and elevated it to the status of cultural religion.
—Steven Stark. "Where the Boys Are," Atlantic Monthly, September 1994.

Baltzell sees the Great Depression as the result of the aristocratic caste being out of touch with the needs of the country. "It is no wonder that a majority of American intellectuals felt that perhaps some kind of eternal justice had been done when the unquestioned rule of the country club-business establishment came to an end as of the stock market crash of 1929…wrote Edmund Wilson, 'One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power.'"

Repeatedly, Costas and the rest turned to the golden age of sports reporting, an era in which reporters created the visions of many a fan, who was not lucky enough to be at the ballpark. Those were halcyon days, but they ended with the advent of sports on TV. By the early Nineties, sports reporting was an intractable morass of traditional game reporting and rudimental analysis conducted largely as it had been for decades. Meanwhile more substantive analysis was being done by a new sabermetrically-minded generation of analysts led by Bill James. At the same time, the mania that is fantasy—baseball, football, etc.—was just taking root.

Fans were looking for new ways to analyze the game, and the traditional outlets were not supplying them. Their greatest concession was perhaps the full page of baseball coverage in the Sunday paper, something that Peter Gammons helped to popularize, that and maybe displaying a fuller list of league leaders in Sunday editions. Until fairly recently newspapers failed to include more than basic game stats in box scores, no season averages or cumulatives.

So while the print sports media were still the standard-bearers from a great tradition, they failed to incorporate new ideas and new ways of reporting to meet fans' needs. They were ready to be toppled just as the internet took hold.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1908.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.
—Harold, Jan. 25, 1990

This isn't the Ohio State School of Journalism, this is the big time. — Reporter nonpareil Les Nessman on "WKRP in Cincinnati"

Baltzell concludes, "What is honored in a land is usually cultivated there. The traditional standards…are in danger of losing authority largely because the American upper class, whose…members may still be deferred to and envied because of their privileged status, is no longer honored in the land. For its standards of admission have gradually come to demand the dishonorable treatment of far too many distinguished Americans for it to continue, as a class, to fill its traditional function as moral leadership."

The more that the old-school newspaper journalists try to point to their past and their traditions, the less impact they will have. And while their inner circle may still sneer at the internet, their publishers have embraced it.

Though I cannot locate the quote, Baltzell would often advise that one can see that the establishment is losing its power when it had to exert it. A class in power has the luxury of not typically having to use its power. What can be said of Costas and Bissinger's bullying of Leitch other than it was the last dying spasms of the traditional sports media exerting its power over an upstart. The last bit of power they can muster is as a moral high road based on its past to bring the youngsters to heel.

As their numbers dwindle so shall their power. They remind me of those stories of Japanese soldiers who disconnected from their units supposedly continued to fight World War II.

Baltzell ends by saying that this struggle cannot end unless "a minority of established leaders, with the authority to fill the moral vacuum that now engulfs us all, steps forward above the conforming crowd and, like Moses in ancient Egypt, shows us the way." This could be done by letting experienced bloggers into the inner sanctum of the journalistic elite, i.e., the Hall of Fame and award voting. Whatever happens, I take it that Costas and Bissinger will not be leading that charge.

Our ISP had scheduled us for another upgrade in the 7pm hour on Friday, which would have been in the middle of either or both of the Yankee-Red Sox game and/or the Dodgers-Padres game.

I managed to talk them out of that idea, and they have offered to do it tonight instead. So sometime tonight, not sure exactly when, we will be down for between one and fifteen minutes.

Update: This is complete.