Sports Writing

One thing sad about the steroid scandal is that fluke seasons such as Brady Anderson’s 50-homer year seem to be suspect to many. Here’s just one example of the ‘roids insinuation with regards to Anderson. (Although the author also wrote that Ichiro’s “.270 average so far this year [2004] suggests that he won’t return to his 2001 form this season either”, heh.)

There’s a really good article by Gordon Edes on Jason Varitek in the Globe, including this choice bit on the 1999 ALDS Game 5: “[Pedro] pitched in a totally different way than he’d ever pitched before, in the middle of what was then the most important game of his career,” Varitek said. “He was a power pitcher, and that game he pitched backwards. He had to finesse people. He used his curveball, he used a cutter, which he’d never used before, and all of a sudden he’s in a different realm.

Mark McClusky on Baseball Prospectus looks at the numbers for I-Rod, Palmeiro, and Juan Gone, and says there’s nothing in the numbers to suggest that they were juicing. To be more specific, there’s nothing that says they took something that caused their performance to be out of the ordinary - since, as McClusky points out, there are no studies that show the link between offensive performance and steroids. McClusky’s wise words on the matter:

More serious, I really hope the Bonds story isn’t true. Bonds may be a jerk, but he’s got phenomenal talent - regardless of whether he took steroids or not. Incidentally, before all these steroid scandals I used to think ‘roids had to be injected. Then I heard about “the cream” and “the clear”. I wonder if learning about the ease of delivery - putting drops under your tongue is a lot more innocuous-sounding than injecting yourself in the butt - may have actually sparked the interest of some misguided gym rats? Or maybe this was fairly common knowledge, and I was just not clued in into the world of performance enhancers.

Barry Bonds’ former mistress says he was on the juice, at least according to the NY Post (for what that’s worth). Not sure about the allegations, but I thought this line was funny:

A diversion into hoops: here’s the old heave-ho - from 87 feet. And again!

John Sickels was doing good work on the minor leagues for ESPN - which unfortunately was insider-only stuff… now he got “downsized”, and he’s started his own blog, Minorleagueball.com. Looks very, very promising.

So poor Jay-G gets to be the fall guy for all the ‘roid takers, saying sorry - although legally he can’t say what he’s sorry for. Ah. To quote the boyband Take That, “whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it…”

Spring training is almost upon us - it’s Truck Day today! So time to look at the young’uns… in this interview, Abe Alvarez talks about his one big-league game, and his upcoming 2005.

So there’s a Boston Dirt Dogs claim that Nomar will be “named” in the new Canseco book. Named as in named as a user of steroids, or named as in just mentioned? I don’t know, but I need more evidence than that SI cover, and that’s speaking as a non-Nomar fanboy. And Canseco has shot (ahem) his credibility to the point that what he says gets taken with a huge grain of salt.

Spent part of the second day of the Chinese New Year holiday watching Bull Durham with the Tim Robbins / Kevin Costner commentary on. Among the things I learnt from the commentary:

Happy Lunar New Year, one and all! (Joke stolen from the Boston Sports Media Watch forums.)

(Image of Petagine taken from BaseballGuru.com) There’s been a lot of Sox dealings with the Japanese leagues this offseason: signing Denney Tomori, selling Jamie Brown’s contract to the Hanshin Tigers, and now signing Roberto Petagine from the Yakult Swallows. (Gabe Kapler going to the Yomiuri Giants technically was an FA deal, not a Sox deal.) The Japan Times now reports on the formalisation of those ties, with the Sox agreeing to send two coaches (Far East area scout Jon Deeble and Double-A manager Todd Clauss) and two minor-leagures (and minor leaguers Justin Sherrod and David Murphy) to join the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks spring training camp next week. I’m hoping this all works out better than the Korean experiment…

The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal talks about how the stats revolution in baseball was driven by stathead fans, whereas what’s happening in football is really top-down: This all stands in stark contrast to baseball, where fans with a mathematical bent sparked a reformation in how to value players. As chronicled last year in the Michael Lewis bestseller Moneyball, over the last 30 years advanced stats spread from mimeographed newsletters to baseball front offices, where a few smart general managers embraced them and used them to get more bang for their buck in player acquisition.

Was pointed to this set of baseball comics by Choi Hoon (clearly, the series is big enough that the Korea Times wrote an article on Choi). They’re really good, they seem very much into the nuances of the game - there’re bits about Livan Hernandez’s workhorse abilities, Charles Johnson’s uselessness, and even a Robb Quinlan joke. Robb Quinlan!

I wish all visitors a Happy Lunar New Year! Since trivia visitors seem to make up quite a bit of my visitors this week, I should note, building on an earlier post, that there are now 4 seasons in which a city has won both the World Series and Superbowl:

I was doing a search for a book I dimly remembered as involving a crazy sister (it turned out to be My Sister From the Black Lagoon, by Laurie Fox), and I came across this page of e-mails to Zodiackiller.com, a site dedicated towards finding the Zodiac Killer that terrorised San Francisco. I guess if you run a site like that, the conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork, but this letter is a particular gem:

Now, Feb 17 is when pitchers and catchers report. So I guess sports can no longer be an excuse - must do something on Valentine’s! Anyway, Jose “Typhoid Mary of Steroids” Canseco says he helped Mark McGwire juice up (which Tony LaRussa disputes). He also claims to have taught I-Rod, Rafael Palmeiro, and Juan Gone to juice up. Seems like, at least by his claims, everywhere that Mary went, the roids were sure to go. Sadly, the state of baseball is such that it’s hard to dismiss such claims, even by Canseco. This one claim is especially hard to believe, though:

What a game. And as usual a Vinatieri FG was the decider, although not quite in the dramatic way of Super Bowls 36 and 38 (seriously, there should be a point when you just stop with the Roman numerals).