Sports Writing

If you’re looking to buy World Championship rings, the Sox have some replicas to sell. Cheap at $2,999. (Why do they even bother doing the “$1 less” trick for something that costs 3 grand? Does it really work?)

Hey man what is that you’re thinking Maybe you can get away There must be lots of pressure And lots of bills to pay Amphetamines & coffee It almost makes you gag

Rumours have it that Pedro is set to re-sign for 3 years/$40 million. We’ll find out soon.

Headlines of the year: a gallery of Sox-lovin’ front pages. Enjoy.

The signs on Pedro are starting to look brighter. After Larry Lucchino’s belligerent-sounding “it takes two to tango” comment last week, I was getting a bit worried, but the new reports make Pedro sound much happier. As David Ortiz said, “He ain’t going to no Mets”.

The Sox signed Matt Mantei. Brilliant move. Could fall flat, of course, but the damage would be minimal - $750k for a very tough competitor with a phenomenal 11.4 Ks per 9 innings. The Yankees can have their early-70s soul group of Womack and Wright.

If you’re going to overpay for one pitcher this holiday season, it should be Pedro.

So the Sox have offered Pedro-Tek-Lowe arbitration, along with a whole gaggle of players. Some were “offered arbitration with the understanding they won’t accept arbitration”, as per Theo Epstein. Makes sense - gives more time for the dance to continue. Radke’s no longer a possibility, as the Twins signed him.

The win probability was epsilon for the Mudville nine that day With a minus-two run differential, and just three outs left to play Ah, the poetry of modern sabermetrics.

Rob Neyer notes that Wade Boggs deserves a Cooperstown spot despite the fact that no one ever gets really excited about Boggs: If you’d like to knock him down a peg or two because he wasn’t always considered the teamest of team players, feel free. But it’s still fairly difficult to construct a reasonable argument that Boggs isn’t one of the five or six greatest third basemen ever. (link - it’s Insider Only, but Neyer’s main point can be seen in the few paras they let us outsiders read)

Gammons on juicing. Wonderful stuff, with lots of good points, including the one about Gaylord Perry and his spitballs, and the fact that Giambi and Bonds aren’t the only bad guys in this fiasco:

I’ve ranted about the concept of “productive outs” before - any stat in which the best AL and NL teams are the Devil Rays and the Expos respectively can’t be good. Indeed, any stat in which your best hitters are Miguel Cairo, Brandon Inge, and Tony Womack sounds dubious to me.

Okay, so I’m a big music fan, as can (hopefully) be seen from my reviews blog, but I don’t know why it never occurred to me to write this random bit of trivia down until inspired by some SoSH message-board random questions: Ed Cobb wrote not just the Standells’ “Dirty Water”, that classic Sox anthem, but also Gloria Jones’ / Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (more info). I always found that a random coincidence, and I’m grateful for both songs.

Looks like the Yankees’ case for voiding Jason Giambi’s contract is quite weak, if the NY Daily News is to be believed: Steinbrenner had many conversations with several of his employees about Giambi’s steroid addiction (alleged then, a fact now that Giambi’s grand jury testimony in the BALCO case has been revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle). Steinbrenner’s due diligence investigation confirmed the obvious, according to two MLB sources, but he decreed Giambi nonetheless would be the crown jewel of his mercenary brigade. (Link)

A thought experiment I came up with: let’s say baseball weren’t a monopoly, and rival leagues were allowed to form. Let’s say MLB clamps further down on steroids, and a league sprouted up that allowed its players to juice up or whatever they saw fit (leaving aside the question of how the league obtained steroids in the first place). Would that rival league succeed? Or would it go the way of the XFL?

An interesting blog that I check in with from time to time is Jeff Angus’s Management by Baseball, which features really nice long articles on what business managers can take from baseball. (I work in strategic planning, so this is a nice intersection of my work and hobby.) Most recently there’s a good piece on Ichiro, making the point that Ichiro learnt how to adapt to his new work environment (i.e. the different strike zone of MLB), as opposed to, say, Maury Wills:

I’m also a football (henceforth referred to as “soccer” for all you Americans) fan, incidentally, so I thought this thread on whether it was possible to apply sabermetrics to soccer was quite interesting, particularly with the stuff posted by Voros McCracken, he of the finding that pitchers have very little control over batting averages on balls put in play. Who knew? I’m intrigued by the potential for analysis coming up in soccer…

You know, I hated how he was a waste of $5 million when he played for the Sox, and I always made fun of the fact that he was referred to universally as a “nice guy”, but I’ve concluded that Tony Clark really is a nice guy. Seems to be the only Yankee willing to go on record to take Giambi’s side:

Now it looks like Bonds has used the infamous “clear” and “cream” steroids, but (as he claims) he never knew what they were. There are three positions you can take on this:

Thinking further about the weird list of pitchers that the Diamondbacks supposedly asked for from the Yankees in the trade for Randy Johnson (just as a reminder: Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, Scott Kazmir, Edwin Jackson, A.J. Burnett, Ted Lilly, Jason Jennings, Kenny Rogers and Shawn Chacon), I was just reminded of the idea of in game theory that the optimal strategy may sometimes be to act in completely random or irrational ways. (Irrationality was, as Schelling put it, one of the tools underpinning nuclear deterrence, for instance.)