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July 3, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
The Rainiers announced on June 27th that "Fun Entertainment LLC" (formerly Unsmiling Consolidated Industries AG, incorporated in Dusseldorf, Germany) signed a letter of intent to buy the team from owner George Foster, who's been trying to get rid of them for years. While the team is tied to a lease through 2005, Cheney stadium is pretty run-down and the owner has been fighting for years for wide-ranging improvements. If the new ownership doesn't get a sweet deal, they'll start looking for places to move. Tacoma's a beautiful industrial town, as much as any city has personality in modern times, where strip malls with the same stores and the vast parking lots of Wal Mart determine as much local geography as the character of the region a hundred years ago. Tacoma's also poorer than Seattle, and with the whole northwest economy in shambles and Boeing self-destructing, it's going to be hard for the city to come up with a couple million dollars to support minor-league baseball, and it's even more unlikely the state would help.
July 1, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
I love new managers. Each one is a chance for a new approach to rotation and bullpen management, in-game strategy, and roster handling. This off-season, Bob Melvin was called the dark horse candidate by local media. To the surprise of many, he interviewed so well that the Mariners hired him over others who had more managerial experience. Since his hire, Melvin has the best record in baseball at 52-28. And yet...the dark horse has shown himself to be a dim bulb.
Melvin has two big, predictable flaws that have emerged in the first half of the season, both ripe for post-season exploitation: He uses his best relievers to protect a lead, any lead, and is prone to punt the game when the team is behind by even a run, putting his worst relievers in. He's also inordinately fixated on "playing the percentages," frequently pinch-hitting to his disadvantage in order to get a lefty/righty matchup or play a guy who's 5-15 lifetime against a particular pitcher--the same is true with his use of the relievers.
In both cases, it appears that Melvin is operating out of fear, or at best, a fixation on being conservative. If a team's behind by one run and Joe Mopup gives up six runs, the fans aren't going to be as mad about that as they would if the team blew a six-run lead and lost the game. There's a psychological impact of a bad bullpen that can drive teams to spend a lot of money to patch holes. Fans expect to see a lead protected, and they get more angry with every collapse. By protecting any lead, Melvin assures the paying crowds that almost any lead will be a win. The flip side, that the team may never come back from a deficit, is ignored.
Similarly, Melvin's matchup games are easily defensible in the press. A manager can't be faulted if he pushes what are perceived as the right buttons and it doesn't work out; there's not a lot of second-guessing about that kind of old-school thinking.
June 26, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Not satisfied with the questions of his loyal readers, Derek Zumsteg tears into his fake mailbag and finds some superb reader queries. Plus the debut of Derek's Team of the Damned Annoying.
June 24, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Edgar Martinez's Hall of Fame candidacy remains controversial, judging by my e-mail, which baffles me.
There is a historical precedent for electing a Designated Hitter to the Hall of Fame. As baseball has evolved, the players who have evolved with it have been recognized for their accomplishments in the new roles they've filled. Shortstop, for instance, hasn't always existed in its present role, but would anyone argue that no shortstop should ever have been elected to the Hall of Fame because they would be the first? For most of baseball's history, the relief corps has been random swing starters, position players, the rotation on their off-days, and passers-by. Would anyone argue that true relief aces like Goose Gossage and Dennis Eckersley shouldn't even be considered because their contributions in relief came in a role that didn't exist, or wasn't important, throughout baseball history? The DH is a position in the rules, and the DH contributes to a team's success or failures.
June 19, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Despite years of Kids' Inning mishaps, the Mariners announce they're bringing the kids again this year to run the show. Derek Zumsteg recounts a few kids' horror stories, including the real reason Lou Piniella left town.
June 17, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Derek Zumsteg reaches into his bag of useful ideas to bring you this handy-dandy guide to marketing the game of baseball. Not to be taken internally.
June 12, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Derek Zumsteg's latest Breaking Balls takes a closer look at Edgar Martinez's Hall of Fame candidacy, sparked by an onslaught of e-mail.
June 10, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Does Edgar Martinez belong in the Hall of Fame?
Edgar, in conventional terms, is a weird case. His career is outstanding, but limited by organizational incompetence at the early end, and his own desire to hang out with his family on the late end. He's fragile, earlier injured badly too often in the field, dogged as he aged with hamstring injuries that slowed him. Because of this, his counting stats fall short, while his rate stats remain amazing (Edgar could easily finish this season in the top-10 hitters all time for his career on-base percentage, and top-20 all-time for his career slugging percentage).
A friend of mine who is smart and frequently argues for the intangibles, momentum, and chemistry aspects of baseball says that his ultimate Hall of Fame standard is that a player must transcend the sport for a period of time, to almost rise above the game, and that no player should even be considered unless they have dominated and changed the game around them. I like that standard, because it means Will Clark gets in while Rafael Palmeiro doesn't.
June 6, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
If you've followed any of the media coverage surrounding Sammy Sosa's corked bat, you're probably already tired of it. If you've seen Rick Reilly on ESPN, looking as if his head might explode with anger at any moment, while implying that it's a short step from corking a bat to being hopped up on steroids, you're probably dog tired of it.
So I'm going to leave Sosa out of this for a while.
June 2, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Derek Zumsteg sits down to watch yesterday's Yankees-Tigers contest expecting to write a column on Roger Clemens' 300th win. Here's his diary of yesterday's game.
May 29, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Relocation's gotten a lot more complicated lately.
Some time ago, baseball narrowed all the potential sites for an Expos move to Portland, Oregon, and two Washington, D.C. bidders: the District of Columbia itself, and a Northern Virginia group. These three groups have traveled to make presentations to MLB about their sites and funding packages. In short, Portland's got no economy but a funding mechanism and sites, Northern Virginia has some money and bad sites, and D.C. has sites but is still working on money. All of them have expended a lot of effort, and have jumped through MLB's hoops like cute, obedient doggies. So Selig decided to try and prod another bidder into the process, taking an open opportunity to say that he'd be delighted if San Juan, Puerto Rico would make a bid. This is another reason city governments shouldn't trust MLB.
May 27, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
I looked at the standings page of my local sports section for the first time this weekend, having watched games with only a general sense of team success. I was looking to see the Cubs under Baker, the reloaded Phillies, and a couple of other easy stories. My how things have changed.
One of the stathead tenets is that there's a ton of freely available talent floating arouns out there: guys you can pick up for minimal cost who will do a servicable job. Granted, these aren't All-Stars or anything--they're replacement level, or just good enough to be on a major-league roster. This fact is expressed in all the good player valuation stats, and it's generally applied as "If you can field the Tigers for $5 million, any money spent over that should make you better than the Tigers."
That said, the Pirates this season are providing an interesting study in stathead application. Faced with a bad team and declining attendance at PNC Park, the Pirates front office decided to make playing .500 ball an organizational priority to try and attract fans. They brought in free agents on one-year deals fix their worst problems--like Kenny Lofton to play center field--but in the process they've pushing back their best young hitter, Craig Wilson, to the point where he's now fighting for playing time.
May 22, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
In my first Breaking Balls column, I wrote about how to run a team to avoid revenue sharing (and in the process, make your team a net drain on the system, rather than pay in). It didn't take long for a team to find a way to do this that I hadn't thought of.
The Chicago Cubs, who already do the undervaluing-your-media-rights thing for their superstation, have opened up a whole new avenue I hadn't even considered.
The Cubs sell tickets at cost to "Wrigley Field Premium," a ticket broker down the street. Premium sells these tickets for an outrageous mark-up. Greg Couch, of the Chicago Sun-Times, has written some great columns on this I'd recommend if you're interested. He reported that while a Cubs-Yankees game was sold out ("Obstructed view only") from the Cubs, Wrigley Field Premium was selling them for insane markups--$1,500 for a primo $45 seat.
The Cubs and WFP are the same company: A Cubs VP is the President of WFP. The Cubs are contracted to do the books for WFP. And WFP gets to return tickets they don't sell.
May 20, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Derek Zumsteg chimes in with a handy, dandy guide to identifying your local sportswriter. Not to be taken internally.
May 15, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
One of baseball's most-mocked rules is the Infield Fly rule. Bad comedians making fun of baseball will say they understand quantum mechanics but don't understand infield flies. Announcers frequently get it wrong, fielders don't use it to their advantage, baserunners sometimes get confused by it. In fact, the only people who seem to consistently know what's going on are the umpires.
There are two parts to this: An infield fly, as defined in Rule 2, and the infield fly rule, where in certain situations, the batter is declared out when he hits an infield fly, to remove the force play. With zero or one out and runners on first and second, or first, second, and third, when a ball is popped up, and the umpire declares the ball an infield fly, the batter is out no matter what happens. This is 6.05 (e): No force is on, so the infield can't slyly let the ball tick off a glove and try to force the runners into a double or triple play. The runners can frolic about how ever they like--tagging up to try and run if it's caught, or running on the chance it will drop--but they usually just stand on the bag and wait for the next batter to come up. Sometimes, though, things go wrong.
Tuesday night, we got to see a great example in the Giants-Expos game.
May 13, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
There's only one game this season I've gone back and watched again from start to finish: Mike Mussina's May 7th start against the Mariners, where he pitched eight innings, gave up five hits, one a homer, struck out 12, and walked none. Mussina's been otherworldly so far this year, and watching him I know that it's not that he's particularly lucky--he's working with top-shelf stuff and great command. Batters are left walking back to the dugout shaking their heads and asking their hitting coach: "What am I supposed to do with that knuckle-curve he's throwing for strikes?" And the coach shrugs, because he doesn't know either.
It was a great game, because it made me sit and think about what pitchers are and become: Mussina was almost forgotten last season, his years of excellence not recent enough, and now he's offering a traveling clinic on how to pitch.
And this, in turn, leads me to wonder about Freddy Garcia's failure to move from future ace to ace. I wrote about this a little last September and found that Garcia had been lucky in his good seasons with seeing balls put into play turned into outs by the fine Mariner defense of 2000-2001.
May 8, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
I've been talking lately to fans of different sports, and thinking about what makes baseball fans--seriously fanatical baseball fans, the people who would identify baseball as their favorite sport and might have to think about it if you asked them who the runner-up was--different.
Baseball is so special, in its season, that it seeps into the follower from day to day and week to week. Football fans, for instance, get one three-hour game a week and then speculation on who'll be the starting quarterback and other scraps of news. Baseball offers us nearly a game a day, each day a fact: my team won or my team lost. There's news, streaks broken and started, debuts to watch, slumps, hot streaks, every morning you get up and read something new in the sports section.
May 6, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
There are few things in this world that confound me more than our obsession with other people's opinions.
Honestly, why is it that we spend so much time caring if Martin Sheen is anti-war, Dennis Miller is pro-war, or if Leonardo DiCaprio is pro-hazlenut? So what if a reliever having a somewhat surprisingly good year is uncomfortable with guys who like other guys, in a different way. Big deal.
I'm referring, of course, to last week's comments in the The Denver Post from Rockies pitcher Todd Jones, which read: "I wouldn't want a gay guy being around me. It's got nothing to do with me being scared. That's the problem: All these people say he's got all these rights. Yeah, he's got rights or whatever, but he shouldn't walk around proud. It's like he's rubbing it in our face. 'See me, hear me roar.' We're not trying to be close-minded, but then again, why be confrontational when you don't really have to be?"
May 1, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
Things I've Learned Watching Baseball on TiVo:
This year after talking to Jonah Keri and his wife, I put down money to buy a TiVo before the season started, and I've found that besides its general life-enhancing qualities, it's taught me a lot about baseball. I love, for instance, being able to do the instant eight-second replay on third-out close plays when the broadcast goes almost immediately to commercial. So here's what having unlimited replay capability, along with slow-motion and freeze-frame, and all the other amazing TiVo features, has revealed to me.
First, ties do not go to the runner. Ties go to the defense. The runner needs to clearly beat the throw to the glove to be safe at first. After that, there is an enormous swing in the out threshold of different umpires. Baseball has hugely increased the quality of the umpires in the last few years--you'll see second base umps run out to cover fly balls and make better calls on traps than they ever did before, for instance--but there are as many standards for caught stealing as there are men who put on the uniform. I've seen the standard on out-calling take many forms:
April 29, 2003
by Derek Zumsteg
"Derek," people sometimes ask me, "you drink a lot of beer. And I by that I mean a frightening amount of beer. What should I, the casual beer drinker, enjoy while I sit at home and watch my Rangers get their ass handed to them game after game?"
So at great personal expense which, my accountant tells me, I will unlikely be able to deduct as a cost of business, I took the time to drink a lot during baseball games so that I could offer this report to you in the hopes that it enhances your enjoyment of this season.
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