Sports Writing

Keith Foulke’s changeup is SWEET. Bonds, check swing, K. Amazing. And I thought Pac Bell (okay, fine, SBC) was a pitcher’s park. Sox seemed determined to prove that wrong.

It’s trading season! Hidalgo (the player, not the horse in that Viggo Mortensen movie) to the Mets for Weathers. On the Billy Koch trade to the Marlins, here’s my thoughts (first posted on Boston Sports Media: I’m lazy these days and doublin’ up comments). Isn’t it weird to trade with a team that you’re playing a series with? It’s like Beinfest went, hmm, I like the look of that guy sitting on the bench, I’ll take him.

Great, great win. A shutout at Coors, led by Derek Lowe. Who’d have thunk it? And it sounds like he knew what he was doing, which is a nice change:

England 3, Switzerland 0. I’m focusing on the sports news that makes me happy and ignoring the teasing comeback at Coors. La-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you. (And yes, I do watch football aka “soccer”. My favourite team is Everton - supposedly John Lennon’s, but maybe that’s apocryphal. As I said on Boston Sports Media Watch, great in the 80s, went nowhere in the 90s, now has a great young talent - Wayne Rooney - and a good youth system whose best products play for other teams. It’s like being a Royals fan.)

Since I’m currently fuming about Embree giving up a HR, I’ll just go to my Happy Place. Or I can read the Bill James chat wrap-up on ESPN.com, which produced this interesting comment:

#@$! Saw that awful 5th inning where we loaded the bases with none out, and still managed to get zip. Nice catch by Bellhorn in the bottom of the 5th though. And I got all excited to see ESPN’s game log, which claimed “K Youkilis struck out looking, M Ramirez scored.” Thought Manny managed to steal home! But I guess, freaky as Coors Field is, it ain’t that freaky.

I’m an economist by training, and a former writer by profession: in much the same way, I a sabermetrician by inclination, but I watch and write about baseball for the poetry. Which is a long-winded way of saying, here, please read this excerpt from Neyer and James on pitchers, because not only are they great at breaking down - and reconstituting - the data, they do so in a way that doesn’t dessicate baseball, but makes you love the game even more. The part from the excerpt about pitchers not knowing what made their fastballs rise or sink reminds me of Derek Lowe’s attitude to his sinker:

From the article on Theo Epstein and trading in today’s Globe. If there’s been one deep disappointment in Epstein’s tenure, it’s been that Mendoza, such a big part of the Yankee championship teams, has never been a factor in Boston.

Shades of Spud Webb winning the Slam Dunk Contest

Now that’s Gold Glovin'!

Man, I love that Trot’s coming back, but he’s only going to play Wednesday’s game, so my political wonk’s desire to see a Kennedy pitch to Nixon with Johnson catching is shelved.

A great Dustin Pedroia story, buried in the Globe: After his freshman year at ASU, Pedroia gave back his $20,000 scholarship for the next two years. The son of a tire company owner, he could afford it, and he gave it up so the program could recruit more pitching.

Isn’t it nice now that Red Sox Nation can go back to resting easy on days when Pedro is pitching? Of course, it helps that Pokey’s making ridiculous, ludicrous catches. It also helped that Nomar and Millar got on base through the BB and HBP. Why is it we have the cluster of Bellhorn/Pokey/Nomar and Youklis/Mueller vying for 3 spots, and we still have to play Millar on first? And how much is Steinbrenner paying these teams to roll over?

What can you say on a night where Dave McCarty was the best pitcher on the team? Let’s just call it a wash. The low-scoring pitcher’s-park-abiding Dodgers probably got more runs today than they did in their last 10 or so.

When I was writing for Let’s Go: New York, part of my duties was writing about Brooklyn (except the stuff along the L like Williamsburg, which another writer covered). So one day, since I was checking out the Brooklyn Children’s Museum I decided, what the hey, let’s look for what’s become of Ebbets Field. So there I was in the middle of Crown Heights during a summer drizzle, gazing at the depressing sight of the Ebbets Field Apartments. It was a desolate Sunday afternoon, not many people on the streets, but it was a special moment.

I tuned in early and it looked like another pitchers’ duel. Next thing I know the floodgates are opened, the rain is down, and a rout is on. Sigh. That “Pokey” chant when Bellhorn made the mistake was really declasse, though: Bellhorn’s not that bad a fielder, and putting him at 2B behind Arroyo and Wakefield instead of Pokey is pretty decent strategy. And in any case, chanting for a backup is hardly any way to boost a player’s confidence or of getting behind the team in general. That’s my $0.02. (Which, in US$, is $0.013 or so.)

Ain’t nepotism grand? I see Nick Francona got taken in the 40th round of the draft. I remember being stunned the first time I heard that baseball had 50 draft rounds - I grew up following football (aka what’s known in America as “soccer”), which doesn’t have any such thing as a draft, and the first draft I ever followed was the NBA’s, which is nowhere near this deep. (Funny how the more socialist Europeans seem to reject the idea of a draft for their pro sports - for better or worse, the English Premier League is more of a free market than MLB.) It’s great to see the names of the lower draft picks - it’s almost like Theo Epstein is using the picks to give a few shout-outs to friends, family (Beau Mills, this means you), and local boys (in the 39th, the Sox took Zak Farkes, a Back Bay kid and the SS at my old college).

Checking out the blogosphere, it seems Sox blogs are proliferating. I quite like Surviving Grady, especially since it’s as skeptical about interleague as I am. Plus, I agree: clearly, Richie Aprile was the most intense of them all.

Using the nifty Infoseek BlogPulse tool, I thought I’d track blogosphere interest in three of my favourite rookies, Youkilis, Lew Ford, and Khalil Greene. The results are here. It’s quite cool to see the results - clearly people are talking more about Youkilis in general, but of late Greene has gotten a bit more attention.

What an amazing Pedro performance (tied for 3rd-best pitched game this season in the AL, with an 85 Game Score). The curveball was biting, the radar gun was clocking. Vintage, vintage, vintage - a veritable Turn Back the Clock day. Back to 1999 that is, what with Pedro v. Wells, a 1-0 scoreline with the Sox giving poor run support… ah. First 1-0 game that the Sox have won since 2000, which is either testament to our offence or a slur on our pitching.