Foul Territory

Check out Jay Jaffe's Prospectus Triple Play over at BP, if only to see the phrase "portable vortex of suck" used in a sentence. It's in the section on the Dodgers.

As promised, here is my National League preview. There's been some turnover on the playoff teams, as well as some big names changing teams. How will it all shake out? Here's what I'm predicting at this early date.

National League East

Atlanta Braves: People have been predicting the end of their division title run for years now, and every prediction has been wrong so far. I'm not ready to hand the title to one of the up and comers, but I'm not saying the other teams can't win. What I know is that the Braves added good starter in Tim Hudson, the enigmatic Raul Mondesi, and the 37 year old Brian Jordan. Mondesi and Jordan are coming off bad seasons, but looking to rebound. How much their 33 and 37 year old bodies can take is a mystery at this point. John Smoltz makes the move back to the rotation to join Hudson and Hampton, replacing the departed Jaret Wright. If Furcal and the Jones boys turn in expected seasons and the old outfielders keep it together, it looks like the shoulder of Smoltz may determine whether the streak reaches 14. I haven't mentioned the Brave bullpen because it really doesn't matter; Leo Mazzone will make they be successful, further cementing his Hall of Fame case.

Florida Marlins: A healthy and motivated Carolos Delgado will be a menacing left-handed force in the middle of the Marlin lineup. This team has no real weaknesses in its everyday lineup, except possibly for Encarnacion in the outfield, but he has the potential to be valuable even with a low average, as long as his power shows up. The team has suffered from lack of power up the middle, but the recent power spike of Alex Gonzalez and the addition of Delgado should help offset the lack of homers from Pierre and Castillo. A full season of Lo Duca should also be valuable, if not Pudge from the World Series year. Cabrera is a superstar in the making who only stands to improve at the tender age of 21. Burnett, Beckett, and Willis anchor a rotation bolstered by the aging Leiter. Mota and Alfonseca in the bullpen have great potential. This team could be fun to watch this year.

New York Mets: What will all the free agent money get Omar Minaya? It says here a third place finish and a lot of howling in the papers. Martinez and Beltran are good, if expensive, acquisitions. Pedro of today is a good pitcher, though not worth what he was paid and not for that length of time. He needs long rest to be effective, which limits his starts, though pitching in Shea stadium with the pitchers batting should make his starts last longer. Beltran is a star, though much of his contract was earned in two weeks of postseason play. He brings the whole package and should help the Mets offensively and defensively. Cameron is still good, and Piazza, though not what he was, can still hit the ball. I question the rotation with the aging Glavine and the unproven, if highly paid, Benson and Zambrano. They will not be bad, but I still think the two teams above are better.

Philadelphia Phillies: I bet this wasn't what Jim Thome had in mind when he took Philly's money a few years ago. Now that Bowa is gone, maybe this team can live up to its potential. Abreu is the best player you've never heard of, and Lieber was a steal. I will say that this team is the one most likely to outperform this prediction. I think all four of the teams discussed so far have a pretty good shot at the division, and may end up separated by five games or less. If Philly's players live up to expectations, they could end the Braves' run, but that's been said for a number of years now, so I'm waiting for them to prove it to me. I'm not sure what they'll get from Kenny Lofton in center. The Yankees didn't want to keep him around, as he's lost a step and can be a bit of a whiner. Maybe a reunion with Charlie Manuel and Jim Thome will do him good and he'll have a bounce back year.

Washington Nationals: New city, new name, still no owner. The financial handcuffs on this team makes it hard for them to compete, and they are the only team in the division that has no real shot at the playoffs this year. I hope that the eventual owner is willing to invest in the team and work to make it competitive. If it could be done in Montreal (1994), it can surely be done in Washington. They've been fairly active, signing Guzman, Guillen, and Castilla, but I fear only Guillen is worth the money. Vidro is excellent, and Johnson will hit if he is healthy, which he surely won't be. Livan Hernandez will continue to defy all logic about pitcher abuse and put up another fine season, and Loaiza will again try to prove 2003 wasn't a fluke. They can't win the division, and a .500 season will be reason to celebrate, not to mention a huge accomplishment given their circumstances.

National League Central

St. Louis Cardinals: The NL Champs should be back in the playoffs again. This is typically one of the more competitive divisions, but I think St. Louis has the edge. Mark Mulder, though something was wrong last year, should still be one of their better pitchers. The rest of the rotation is solid, and that's all they should have to be with this offense. Pujols is an animal, if he can shake those nagging injuries, Edmonds is still one of the best, and a full season of Larry Walker won't hurt. Losing Renteria will hurt, and the problem was compounded by overpaying for his replacement in David Eckstein, who is my hero. This may come back to bite me, but I feel more confident about this division winner pick than any of the others, assuming none of their starters blow up.

Chicago Cubs: Say goodbye to Sammy Sosa and Moises Alou. Say hello to Jeromy Burnitz. Even an unhappy and declining Sosa is a player most teams would like to have in the lineup, but a lot of people felt he had to go. A healthy Mark Prior should be a big help, but let's see him stay healthy for a few years before ordering his plaque in Cooperstown. Nomar was the shortstop bargain of the winter, and Aramis Ramirez has come fully into his own. Much of the linupe remainst he same, though the Ryan Dempster closer experiment could be telling for this season. The four horsemen of Prior, Wood, Maddux, and Zambrano could make life miserable for the rest of the division, but I'll need to see more out of the lineup to convince me they'll top the Cards.

Cincinnati Reds: The annual Griffey hamstring watch is about to commence. He's a Hall of Famer if he never steps on the field again, but I think we'd all like to see at least one more full season from Junior. Lucky for the Reds, they have four guys who can play the outfield pretty well in Dunn, Kearns, Griffey, and Wily Mo Pena. The infield is less potent, except for the always dangerous Sean Casey. Hopefully, Ryan Freel will not be relegated to a utility role and will be allowed to play regularly, as he is a good young player. The Great American Ballpark is a great place for power hitters, and not so great for starting pitchers, who can get tired in the slugfests that are sure to come. Add new starter Eric Milton's homer-happiness, and it could be a recipe for trouble if he can't keep it in the yard.

Houston Astros: Few teams have lost as much as Houston this offseason. Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltran are gone from the team that nearly made the World Series. Biggio and Bagwell are a year older and slower, but Berkman is still a killer B, though his return from a church flag football knee injury is uncertain, and I'm not making that last part up. They didn't lose a large number of players, but they did lose a lot of production from the middle of the order that will be difficult to replace. Hindsight says they should have made their pitch to Beltran and moved on when Boras balked, but that's hard to do in the heat of the negotiation. As such, they lost Beltran while a lot of other free agents signed elsewhere. The return of Clemens will be good, and Pettite hopes to be healthy. Clemens-Pettite-Oswalt is a good trio that will win some games, but the losses and age related decline will prove too much to overcome in a competitive division.

Milwaukee Brewers: They have a few nice hitters, and most think they fleeced the White Sox in the Podsednik-Carlos Lee trade, but I don't feel they can compete, though they have a chance to win a few games. Geoff Jenkins finally had an injury-free season; let's see if he can do it twice in a row. Lyle Overbay and Junio Spivey are solid players in the infield. I fear the rest of the lineup is a bit weak. Ben Sheets is a front line starter for sure, and Doug Davis should be fine if last year's strikeout rate increase holds up, but it takes more than two starters to get the job done in the days of the five man rotation. Replacing Dan Kolb, last year's All-Star closer, will be a chore, but closers are not as rare as the media leads you to believe. What's unsure is if Mike Adams can do the job.

Pittsburge Pirates: Another year of development out of the young players could help Pittsburgh get out of the cellar. Oliver Perez has the stuff to make scouts and stat-heads alike drool. The two Wilsons and Jason Bay look to build on excellent seasons, and Matt Lawton will provide some more outfield bang. I can't help but think that there had to be a better option at catcher than 39 year old Benito Santiago. Shouldn't they be letting people play who will be around the next time they can contend. Free J.R. House! Anyhow, we've been waiting on Wells and Fogg to fulfill their promise for some time now, and this year would be as good as any for them to break out. I still think they'll be closer to the bottom than the top, even if Mesa can again drink from the fountain of youth and save a whole bunch of games.

National League West

Los Angeles Dodgers: The Dodgers should be playoff bound again this year. Rather than stand pat with the team that did it last year, they took action in free agency, and it looks like Paul DePodesta did a pretty good job. If good Derek Lowe shows up, the contract they gave him isn't quite as bad as it looks. Lowe has a fragile psyche and is pretty much a head case, if you ask me, but when his sinker is working, he's nigh on unhittable. Perez, Weaver, and Penny are all good pitchers, though Penny's arm injury from last year is still cause for concern. J.D. Drew and Jeff Kent should proved some power, provided neither breaks down, Kent from age and Drew because that's what he does. Also, it helps to have one of the most dominant relievers in baseball finishing off games for you.

San Francisco Giants: As the Barry Bonds show heads into a 2oth successful season, one wonders why Brian Sabean is allergic to players under 30. No one who truly understands the game thinks Mike Matheny is a better choice over the cheaper and better Yorvit Torrealba, who is rightly ticked off about this past offseason. Alou and Vizquel are a lot closer to 40 than 30, and the Giants must be starting the only outfield with every member over 37. I just feel there were better options than the geezers, and that those options would have been both cheaper and better, just as with Torrealba. The pitching will be similar to last year and will again benefit from the pitcher-friendly SBC Park. Perhaps they can win the wild car on the back of another historic Bonds effort, but I'm skeptical, and I can't help feeling like Sabean really screwed things up, but he won't look as bad as he is because of Bonds and Schmidt.

San Diego Padres: They're looking to build on last year's successes and move on the contend in the future. If things break right, they could surely be in the thick of things come September. Petco park depresses offense enough to let pitchers develop, and maybe it will increase the effectiveness of new starter Woody Williams. Jake Peavy was in the Cy Young discussion at the end of last season, and he's only 23. Khalil Greene was good as a rookie and stands to get better. They have good power on the corners (3B excepted) and good defense up the middle. The back of the rotation is a concern, bt they may surprise some people this summer.

Arizona Diamondbacks: For a team supposedly on the verge of bankruptcy, they sure spent a lot on free agents. They added Troy Glaus and Russ Ortiz, and traded for Javier Vazquez and Shawn Green. This should be enough to get them back out of last place, but I bet they'd win a few more games with Randy Johson than Javier Vazquez, who may yet be traded, if you ask me. The bullpen is a question mark as well as whether they are getting pre or post All Star Break Vazquez. Some of the players (Clayton, Counsell) seem to be over the proverbial hill, and I really have no idea what's going to happen with this team, just as no one had any idea how bad they'd be last year.

Colorado Rockies: How to win at altitude? No one has figured it out, but they're sure they answer is more pitchers, both to survive the high scoring games and account for the slow recovery time at that altitude. Todd Helton will be a monster yet again as he powers fantasy teams everywhere. Everyone else is pretty much worth a shrug, and an, "Eh, it doesn't matter." Jason Jennings is the "ace," and no one else is that good. It's another last place finish in Denver. Personally, I think you need sinkerballers to win in Colorado, but why would any free agent sign there after watching Mike Hamption implode before Leo Mazzone rescued him?

There it is, the National League. As Gregg Easterbrook says, all predictions guaranteed wrong or your money back.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come; and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Song of Solomon 2:11-12

So Ernie Harwell began each season in the broadcast booth of the Detroit Tigers. He spent 42 years calling their games, and I thought it a fitting way to kick off my baseball preview, as pitchers and catchers report this week, and spring games are just around the corner. Teams are listed in order of predicted finish. National League preview will be forthcoming.

American League East

New York Yankees: Randy Johnson is the big addition as Steinbrenner continues to seek the championship that has eluded his team since their victory over the Mets in 2000. Lieber is gone, Bernie Williams is a year older and slower, and no one knows what to expect from Jason Giambi. Will Tino Martinez continue is resurgence from last season? Even though they overpaid for Pavano and Wright, and they seem determined to kill their farm system, it says here that Sheffield, Rodriguez, Posada, Johnson, Mussina, and Rivera have enough to carry this team to another division title.

Boston Red Sox: Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe are gone, replaced by David Wells, Matt Clement, and Wade Miller (midseason, most likely). Schilling, Arroyo, and Wakefield remain, and this team should have good pitching, as a healthy Miller could be a difference maker. The team will score runs with Ortiz and Ramirez, but will the pitching continue to stop the other teams? I'm not ready to hand the title to a team dependent on a pitcher who turns 42 in May and Wade Miller's return, but if both of those things go right, the Red Sox could be as good as last year as the Yankees get real old, real fast.

Toronto Blue Jays: This was almost the Orioles until I looked at pitching. Halladay should bounce back after an ineffective 2004, and the rest of the rotation should be solid, if not spectacular. Eric Hinske moves across the diamond and gets a chance to prove his ineffectiveness the last two years is the fluke, rather than his spectacular rookie season. Replacing him is Cory Koskie, who should provide some pop in the middle of the order, if not a high average. The outfield is young, save for Wells, and they hope to improve, though it's painfully obvious that they're playing for third, with little short term shot at the two big dogs.

Baltimore Orioles: It's probably not a good sign when your top starter spends time in jail after hitting a judge in his home country. When his ineffectiveness grows with his expanding waist, it's cause for concern. As for the lineup, even if Sammy Sosa continues in his decline phase, he is better than most left fielders on the market this winter. Lopez and Tejada should continue to hit, though many of the other players are right around their age 27 peak, so drastic improvement would be unusual. Can Mora keep it up? Will Palmeiro have more baseball Viagra to keep him going? They should focus less on aging veterans in the future, and more on developing the talent it takes to dethrone the two richest teams.

Tampa Bay Devil Rays: Another year, another last place finish. Roberto Alomar joins the club, even though there's no reason to have him. Let the kids play. As usual, they need to focus on the players that will be around when they are able to contend, not the old timers they can collect for today. The organization is headed in the right direction, though. Upton, Lugo, Gomes, Cantu, and Kazmir should be given all the chances they can get to develop. Hopefully, this is the year we find out how badly the Mets were fleeced in the Zambrano-Kazmir trade. This team could crawl out of the basement, but I think the teams ahead of them improved too much.

American League Central

Minnesota Twins: It's them or the Indians, and I like their bullpen better. Full seasons from Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau should help as well here in the cheapskate Central. They'll deal with the loss of Koskie, and Johan Santana was the best pitcher in the league last year (not to mention recently locked up with a four year salary). The performance of Radke, Punto, and Rivas could end up telling the story of their season. Joe Nathan should continue his dominance as a reliever as they fight tooth and nail with the Tribe for the crown.

Cleveland Indians: They were right in the thick of it last year until a late season meltdown allowed the Twins to pull comfortably away. Mark Shapiro had a long term plan, and he's executed it well to get them on the brink of contention. They have a lot of young talent and are not totally unlike the mid 90's Indians with good young talent and few well-placed veterans. I like the Millwood signing, especially the shortness and dependence on good performance. He's not a front liner, but he will help this team a lot. C.C. Sabathia continues to be one of the better young lefties in the league, and the hamstring that shut him down in September is ready for 200+ innings at the top of the Cleveland rotation. Travis Hafner hopes to build on his near-MVP quality season, and Victor Martinez is a star in the making. This team could make the division very interesting.

Chicago White Sox: Magglio Ordonez plays for Detroit, but I still think the Sox will finish ahead of them. Frank Thomas hopes to play more than last year, depending on his recovery from ankle surgery, while Konerko looks to build on his monster season of 41 HR. The rotation, with Buehrle, Garcia, and Contreras at the front should be at the least serviceable, with Garcia and Buerhle possibly spectacular. I'm less enthused about new White Sox Dye, Podsednik, and Pierzynski, as their recent performance does not say "playoff bound" to me, though the price was right on Dye. They might miss Carlos Lee more than they think, and we'll get to see if Pierzynski's "clubhouse cancer" routine has a Chicago showing.

Detroit Tigers: Bonderman has great stuff, but the support just isn't there. They will be better than last year, and they might break .500, but I foresee another fourth place finish. The pitching isn't enough, even though they've added the remains of Troy Percival, and they will need more out of their outfield than Magglio can give them by himself. Bobby Higginson is a big hole in the lineup, while Alex Sanchez hit the emptiest .322 in the history of the game, walking only 7 times while hitting all of 2 homers. This is not sustainable. The team seems to be at least headed in the right direction, and there is evidence of a plan, but this year is not the year it all comes together, especially with Ivan Rodriguez yet another year older. He is unlikely to be around when the Tigers next contend, but he should continue to play well, as his high average last year was augmented by some pop.

Kansas City Royals: Too bad for Rob Neyer. His team will likely find the cellar again. They are looking better than last year's train wreck, though. Remember the name Zack Greinke, as this kid will be great. He's only 21, and he's got what it takes to win at this level. After him, the rotation isn't great, though I like the Lima signing. In the lineup, they don't get a half year of Beltran like they did last year, but they Marrero pickup at catcher is a good one, and I'll be very disappointed if Calvin Pickering doesn't get the chance to be the next overweight DH in the David Ortiz mold.

American League West

Anaheim Angels: Who doesn't like to see K-Rod pitch (other than opposing batters)? He slides into the closer's role after the team let Percival take the Tigers' money. I wouldn't be surprised if all three of my division winner picks ended up wrong, but I think Anaheim has enough in the tank to repeat last year's success, while Oakland may have been looking toward 2006 with their offseason. MVP Guererro is a superstar and Steve Finley has at least one good year left. The Cabrera pickup may have been necessary to keep pace with the other teams, even if they overpaid. There is uncertainty at third as we'll see if Dallas McPherson fulfills his early promise since the departure of Glaus. Darin Erstad still has no business at first, and Bartolo Colon is still one of the best. If things break right, they could make the World Series, but only if it all goes right.

Oakland Athletics: Trading away two of the Big Three in one offseason has turned some heads, but most are willing to allow that Billy Beane is smarter than everyone else. I think they want to win now, but the moves were made with an eye on remaining competitive for years to come. I'm not sure they kept the right one of the three, but time will tell. The lineup has gone younger with the letting go of Dye, who was not one of their better investments. Swisher and Crosby are young and talented, and have a good chance to improve this year. Scutaro moves back into the utility role, and new catcher Kendall is a solid player who will help in a lot of ways. If they win the division after losing two of their best starting pitchers, I think the rest of the West should just give up and admit resistance is futile.

Texas Rangers: Nice looking infield, and Seattle's going to have to prove it to me. The starting pitching, as usual, is a big suspect, but they seem to have the bats to make up for a lot of it. Blalock and Texeira are a year older and a year better, while Young is solidly in his prime. Soriano's decline due to bad selection continues, but he should be able to hold his current level of production (remember when he was the next Hank Aaron?). The outfield is just all right, though the Hidalgo addition is one of the underrated deals of the winter, as his numbers should jump in the Texas hitting environment. Chan Ho Park is, as usual, craptacular.

Seattle Mariners: They made a big splash in free agency, grabbing Richie Sexson and Adrian Beltre. If Sexson is recovered, they can't be nearly as bad as last year's disaster, but I'm still picking them for the cellar, as they are still old. Boone is old, steroids or not. Moyer can't cheat time forever, and the rest of the team just doesn't have what it takes to pull the rest of the team to contention. Of course, watch this be the year they put it all together and win the division, but I'm not banking on it.

Still to come, the National League...

If you read as much sports journalism as I do, a theme starts to become evident. That theme is the fact that there are two main groups involved in the reporting and analysis of athletics, be it baseball, football, hockey, ice dancing, whatever. Roughly, those two groups are the mainstream media (MSM) and bloggers. Now, it's not really that simple, but let me explain.

The MSM are the writers generally on the payroll of a newspaper, magazine, or television channel (and their assorted web sites). These are the men who have access. They can get time on the phone or in person with the players, coaches, general managers, and owners of professional sports teams. They can call Lance Armstrong, and he'll call back. More than that, they even have his phone number. The value of these men and women is that they can write stories with actual quotes from the players and coaches, and they attend a lot of athletic events. There are good and bad writers in this group. The good include Peter King and Peter Gammons, guys who are widely read, can get a good story, and will take a poliete shot at someone if the situation demands it. These two specifically have the advantage of being so widely read that if they tick someone off, the team or player can't just ignore them forever unless they want their coverage to go down. Other, less known, writers don't necessarily have that luxury, which is why a lot of MSM reporting can come across as sugar coating the truth, at least for that writers home beat. We need the MSM because someone has to go to all the games and tell us what happened, and guys like King and Gammons have a lot of connections developed from years of work so they can bring information to the masses that would otherwise go unreported, since you and I don't have Mark Shapiro's cell on speed dial. There are a lot of local writers that fall into this category as well. They follow a team every day for the whole season and build up familiarity with the players, coaches, and front office so that they can report the goings on to their readers. Often, a good local writer will catch the attention of one of the big boys (SI, ESPN) and get a feature or two or a longer stint writing for a national audience. Jason Whitlock of ESPN and the Kansas City star is an example of a local columnist who hit it big and now is known nationally.

On the other side, there are the bloggers. I'm lumping a lot of people in with the bloggers (like Baseball Prospectus), and it doesn't mean everyone in this group writes for free or even writes in blog format, though many that write articles also have a blog on the side. The main difference between these groups in my mind is access (again). Most of the people I'm calling bloggers do not have access to the players and coaches on anything like a regular basis, if even at all. They focus more on analyzing what goes on in the world of sports. The biggest breakthroughs in statistical analysis have come from the bloggers, as they spend most of their time analyzing data as opposed to trying to track down Luke McCown for a quote. These are the guys that come up with Win Shares, VORP, and DVOA. The men and women (they're mostly men, but not all) who come up with and analyze this stuff are very smart and care a lot about what they cover, but they don't necessarily have the ability to get Phil Garner on the phone to ask him about his lineup. An advantage these writers have is that they have no affiliation or personal relationship with a team, so they don't have to worry about offending anyone, as long as they practice responsible journalism. No one can retaliate by restricting access that they don't have.

Several writers muddy the waters a bit. First, Bill James all but invented advanced statistical analysis in baseball by trying to find answers to questions that no one thought were answerable. He's written a ton of baseball books since he self-published his first Baseball Abstract, and he now works for the Boston Red Sox. He did most of his work without a lot of access to players and coaches. He only had the statistics and operated strictly outside the mainstream, which I think he liked. However, his is so well known and now employed by the Red Sox that he is somewhat in between the two groups. On the other side is Rob Neyer. Rob works for ESPN, and his work isn't even free on ESPN.com, yet he seems to rarely speak to the players (unless they're retired) or executives. Occasionally he'll have an interview with a team exec, but this is rare. He makes his living as the resident sabermatician at ESPN. His work seems to mirror that of the bloggers more than the MSM, but there he is, entrenched in the mainstream. Perhaps it's no surprise that he got his start as a research assistant for Bill James, and that they have since collaborated on The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers.

Perhaps in a future post I will analyze the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual authors, though this will be tough for the bloggers, as they only survive as long as they are good. For the MSM, once dug in, bad writers are rarely dismissed (Tracy Ringolsby, anyone?). They achieve credibility not by their ability, but by title. This is how we end up with monsters like Productive Outs.

Jose Canseco's big appearance on 60 Minutes was last night. I didn't watch it, but I've heard more than enough about him and his new book that that is for sale beginning today. The information he has given out in the book and in many interviews over the past week or two has put the sports media into quite the tizzy. This, combined with the BALCO investigation, leaked grand jury testimony, and John McCain trying to gain some points in the eye of the public has resulted in thousands of stories about steroids, HGH, THG, "the Clear," "the Cream," and whatever else is tangetially related to the issue.

Canseco's credibility has been attacked over and over again, it seems with good reason. He has historically done and said things that seem designed solely to garner attention, money, or usually both. To most, this book is no exception. The timing and some of the more ridiculous claims are designed to puff up sales numbers and get him on 60 Minutes. Well, he succeeded on the second count, now that the book is out, we'll see about the first. The general consensus by most intelligent writers that I've read is, "Yes, he's an opportunistic, money-grubbing, often lying weasel, but it is unlikely that every word in his book is a lie." This is probably true. No doubt there are bits of truth within the book, as no thinking person believes that baseball is clean from steroids except for those who have admitted use in public (Canseco, Ken Caminiti). Surely others are using something, as the use of stimulants has been documented in baseball for many years (greenies), and recent grand jury testimony by Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi has confirmed the use of at least the products distributed by Victor Conte and BALCO.

However, I'm having trouble with some of the things Canseco has been saying. He seems to be trying to to give himself a lot of (in my mind) undue "credit" for what has been going on in baseball in terms of performance enhancing drugs. He has made himself out to be the harbinger of steroid use in baseball, as if no one was using before he started injecting himself and his Oakland teammates (like McGwire and Giambi). After bringing steroids to Oakland, he supposedly carried them to Texas, where he helped teammates like Rafael Palmeiro, Ivan Rodriguez, and Juan Gonzalez get into steroid use. Not only that, he says that George W. Bush, then a part-owner of the Rangers, knew about this, which strains credibility, unless the future President was hanging out in the locker room and weight room, which I can't imagine happens with too many owners of professional sports teams. His last incredible statement was when, on television last night, he claimed that he would not have been a professional baseball player without steroids. This seems to overstate things more than a big. He hit 462 home runs in a long career, and he became the first 40-40 man in baseball history in 1988. He also won Rookie of the Year and MVP at different points in his career. There is a monstrous gap between a guy unable to make a Major Leage team and the American League MVP. The gap is so large, that it is all but inconceivable that any chemical, let alone those available in the late 1980's could bridge it.

He also goes beyond his first hand knowledge and starts naming players that he "suspects" use or used steroids or other performance enhancing drugs. He names Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, based solely on changes in their appearance and longevity. Anyone can look at the records of these players and say they're doing something unsavory, but the fact remains that they are two serious physical specimens, and it's not inconceivable that their genetics are far superior to the average person so that they can continue to perform at a very high level. It's been stated that, with testing in place, it's almost sure that they weren't using, yet he still set the OPS record and Clemens won the Cy Young award. These are the kind of unfounded allegations that get in the way of truth, and they serve no purpose but to inflame, which seems to be his goal anyhow. I know that Bonds admitted to using some chemicals in his leaked testimony, but no one has any idea how long he used them, and he himself said he stopped because he was getting no benefit.

So that's where we stand. His credibility is thin, there's no way to unequivocally prove or disprove anything he says, and a lot of names are more tainted now than before since the book's release. There's no way to know what will happen next, except that sports writers will fill many column inches and kilobytes of web space with stories, opinions, and calls for reform.

I wanted to mention the possibity that's been put forth that the Yankees can't void Giambi's contract because steroid abuse language was eliminated from his contract at Giambi's request, but Jay Jaffe did a great job on it already.

There has been some news today about the NHL labor dispute, so I thought I'd write a little bit about labor troubles in professional sports.

I think professional athletics are one of the few places where the general consensus in the public is sympathy with management. I could be wrong about this for any given labor dispute, but I think that sports team owners are more likely to have the public on their side during a labor dispute than the owner of the local steel mill trying to get a collective bargaining agreement signed or the CEO of a national airline trying to extract wage concessions from its pilots, mechanics, or flight attendants. I think the main reason that professional athletes get so much less slack in the eye of the casual observer is the same reason it always is: money. To your average person who watches SportsCenter, reads the morning paper, and occasionally turns on sports talk radio, the amount of money taken in by these players is staggering. The wealth of the owners is rarely mentioned, unless someone is talking about Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who became very very rich at a fairly young age. Therefore, it seems like these players for are rich enough, gosh darnit, are petty and out of touch with reality. What I think a lot of people know in the back of their minds, yet don't think about too often is how the owners have way more money than individual players. They have to. That's how they got to own a professional sports team worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Few people know how much Arte Moreno or Jeffrey Lurie is worth, but lots of people can tell you all about Alex Rodriguez and his $252 million salary or how Roger Clemens avoided arbitration by agreeing to the largest one year contract in baseball history at $18 million. This is the sort of information that is all over the news, so when players strike or the owners lock them out, it's hard for the manager at the local Kinko's to get on the same bandwagon as hockey players who have an average annual salary of $1.3 million, especially without having the context of the net worth of the group they are fighting put in the spotlight.

Some discerning fans, media, and bloggers, though, have done some work to dissipate the backlash against professional athletes and their high salaries. It's true that the players can only make as much money as at least one team is willing to pay. The players are not holding the owners hostage with contract demands, as an owner can choose to let a player walk as easily as the same player can refuse a contract offer. Now, there are times in a labor dispute where the players are right, and there are times when the owners are right. This is why they have the negotiations, so that each side can gain concessions from the other so that both sides can live with the arrangement that is reached. People are starting to understand that player salaries don't skyrocket as a matter of course, they skyrocket because of competition for scare resources. The scarcer the resource, the more someone is willing to pay. That's why Barry Bonds is worth a lot more than me to the San Francisco Giants.

This brings me to the current labor dispute between the NHL Players Association and the team owners. It is expected that the season will be officially canceled during this coming weekend. As widely publicized, the owners want "cost certainty," which is code for a salary cap, and the players are having none of it. This has caused the death knell to sounds on this season, and possibly next, depending on how hard each side wants it to be. Eventually, they may end up with replacement players like what happened in the NFL and almost happened after the 1994 MLB strike. This is the sort of thing that can result in the owners getting their way as players realize they need to play so they can get paid. However, I'm not sure if this will work as well as it did in football or baseball. This is mainly because there are other options for NHL players to play professional hockey. Canada has a lot of minor professional hockey leagues, and there are countless other spread throughout Europe. The big money is still in the NHL, but at least there are options, which there really aren't for baseball and football.

I'm not really sure what will happen here. Will the NHL come back in its present form? Hard to say, though I can say that in the year and a half I've lived in Raleigh, I've never once heard someone talk about the Hurricanes, and they made the Stanley Cup finals in 2001. There is the possibility that the players will eventually come back and accept some sort of cap, or the league will become totally restructured. I would be very accepting if the league announced that it realizes it expanded into too many Sun Belt states and would be contracting to a much smaller league with teams only in places that have proved to be willing and able to support a professional hockey team. I really don't know what will happen. I guess it depends who blinks first, or who the NLRB sides with in the possible governmental intervention. In this specific dispute, it's hard for me to not side with the players, especially after they gave a long list of concessions they were willing to make, and the owner's rejection sounds an awful lot like them deciding that they just can't control themselves and need a salary cap to keep them from setting fire to a big pile of money. I'll admit I don't know all the details, but it seems like the owners should be able to control their own checkbooks. As I said, it will be interesting to see how it all turns out, even for a non-fan like myself.

It's been said that the New England Patriots of recent years are similar to the late 90's New York Yankees. I wrote a little bit about this in my other blog, but I thought I'd give it a more detailed treatment here on my sports blog.

First off, we need to get some things out of the way. Boston fans absolutely hate it when people say the Yankees are similar to the Patriots. This mostly stems from 86 years of watching the Yankees with 26 World Series in between Red Sox championships. To your average Boston fan, the Yankees represent everything wrong with sports, even if secretly they would give their collective right arm to trade places. As such, it is difficult to talk to a Boston fan about the similarities, because all they hear is, "blah blah Patriots blah blah blah blah Yankees blah blah." Getting past this is the first step to a rational conversation. If the St. Louis Rams were in the position of being compared to the Yankees, you can bet there wouldn't be such an outcry in Missouri.

Starting with the players, you can see similarities between the two teams. Winning in any team sport requires players to focus on winning as a team and working together to achieve that goal. It also helps if you're able to use homegrown players complemented by free agent veterans when necessary. Both teams have made use of this model, though the Yankees have been working with a higher payroll compared to the rest of the league. Where you see some similarities is what happens to players when they join each team. The Patriots have a lot of players that were not nearly as good else where as they have become with the Patriots. Rodney Harrison and Mike Vrabel are two that come to mind. For the Yankees, you have players like Scott Brosius, who was a nice player, but nothing like the star he became for a short while in the Big Apple. Vrabel went from hardly playing in Pittsburgh to starting at linebacker for a three time Super Bowl champion. Both teams also have had a good complement of homegrown talent. New England has Tom Brady, Stephen Neal, and Troy Brown, among others, while the Yankees can counter with Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada. Again, there are some differences due partly to the economic might afforded teams playing in the country's largest media market as well as the lack of a salary cap in baseball. These differences manifest themselves in the high profile free agents that New York is able to attract on an almost yearly basis by offering contracts that would surely become salary cap casualties in the NFL. On the other hand, the Patriots have more flexibility in their dealings than the Yankees due to the lack of guaranteed contracts. If Jason Giambi were a football player, he'd have been cut months ago (and replaced by Don Mattingly, if the latest Yankee moves are a trend, but that's another story).

Additionally, Tom Brady is Derek Jeter. I can't take credit for this comparison (hats off to Aaron at Football Outsiders), but it seems valid to me, though it must drive Bostonians crazy to see this comparison between their All-American Tom with the face of all they despise. Each player is a homegrown, good looking, outgoing team leader who does not typically have the stats of the best players at his position (there have been exceptions to this for each player; Brady in 2004 and Jeter in 1999), yet the media and (some) fans revere him as the best at his position if not the best player in the league. I can't remember who or where, but I saw something on the web where a writer argued for Jeter as 2004 MVP. Also, Tim McCarver can't go five minutes without talking about how great Jeter is, even as he misses another ground ball up the middle, and I've seen in more than one place Tom Brady annointed as the best quarterback to ever play the game, even though he's only in his fourth season as a starter. Both players also have a tendency to date celebrities. To me, this comparison is the closest between the Patriots and Yankees.

There are also some coaching similarities. Each team is considered to have a top notch head man, though that means different things in each sport. In football, it's tactical skill and motivation that is important, while Joe Torre's main strengths are dealing with his owner (more on the Boss later) and juggling the players' egos. What each coach has done, whether on his own or with help from management, is assemble some good talent around him. Willie Randolph has found his way to a managerial position after a number of tries. Mel Stottlemyre has been effective, if not Leo Mazzone, and Don Zimmer is a former Manager of the Year (1989). For the Patriots, everyone keeps calling Bill Belichick a genius, and his defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel was just hired to coach the Cleveland Browns while his offensive coordinator Charlie Weis has been given one of the most prestigious jobs in all of college sports as he heads to the Golden Dome to try to recapture lost glory for Notre Dame. Though there are differences between the two teams, the overriding theme is competence in coaching.

The owners are a point where there is the largest difference, in my estimation. To my knowledge, Robert Kraft has never been banned by the commisioner (for the Dave Winfield incident) or kicked off the executive council or suspended following illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon. Additionally, Steinbrenner has been angling for a new publicly funded stadium for his team, while Robert Kraft built Gillette Stadium with entirely private funds. Kraft seems to take a lower profile in the day to day football operations than his counterpart in the Bronx. He allows his football people to pick the players, while Steinbrenner seems unable to allow Brian Cashman the freedom to build a team on his own. He is, to his credit, desperate to win and willing to take drastic measures to keep his team on top.

Obviously any analogy breaks down eventually, but I think that the comparison of the Yankees' and Patriots' recent runs of success is an apt one. The next few years will be telling, especially if the Patriots next few seasons look anything like the the last four title-less years for the Yankees. Players will wnat bigger contracts and coaches will move on. Will the Patriots be able to sustain this run of excellence, or is the window about to close?

It's 21-14 Patriots right now, and Corey Dillon just went in for the go ahead touchdown. The rest of the Internet has done a good job analyzing and re-analyzing every possible aspect of the Super Bowl and Jacksonville, so you can check out some of the links to the right to check out that info. I'm going to talk about Corey Dillon.

Dillon has said a lot of less than positive things about his Cincinnati Bengals temas while he we playing there. He threw his teammates under the bus in the press on more than one occasion. It was tough for him I'm sure, as he clearly had top-tier talent while toiling away on the league's worst franchise. Now, he is on the Super Bowl-leading New England Patriots and most of the media can't say enough good things about him and his attitude.

It's been suggested by at least one Internet columnist (King Kauffman) that a lot of the perception we have of the players in professional sports is a result of each player's representation in the media. I'll agree with this, but he goes on to suggest that maybe Corey Dillon isn't as bad as he was made out to be in Cincinnati, though, to his credit, he argues that he is unlikely the saint he's been made out to be this year. As he says, the real answer is somewhere in between, as the train wreck that is the Bengals was surely frustrating to play for.

Saying all that, I can't say that Corey Dillon is to be absolved of all guilt because he now plays for a winner. No matter how well he behaved this year, it doesn't erase the previous years of bad behavior. There's no way it is appropriate for him to have said the things he said about his team and teammates. Things like: They better get it right, or, at the end of the season, I've got a surprise for them. I'm tired of it. Six years of this B.S. I ain't lying to you.-- I'm sick of this crap, period." It only gets worse from there. I know that they are professional athletes, and that professional sports has gradually become more player (and less team) centric over the years, but you have to at least have respect for your teammates, especially in a sport as team-oriented as football. It's for this reason that Dillon lost his job to Rudi Johnson during the 2003 season. He's proved that it wasn't for lack of talent, but that the Bengals decided they would be better off without his mouth running.

The lesson here is the same as the lesson in all sports. Don't badmouth your own team. Winning is hard enough when everyone is on the same page. There's no reason to make life difficult, and whether we know the whole Cincinnati story, it looks like Dillon's character could be called into question for his actions while a Bengal. True class is shown in the way you carry yourself when times are good and when times are bad, though I don't think Dillon has ever been accused of having class, though it looks like he will be wearing a Super Bowl ring before the night is out.

That's one of the first things I thought today after reading that Emmitt Smith has retired. You see, Emmitt Smith was probably the only real sports hero of my childhood. I had a few of his cards, and I read his book, The Emmitt Zone. I watched a lot of Cowboys football while he was in the midst of his prime playing for one of the greatest teams in the history of the league. I remember the separated shoulder game, where he dragged his broken body down the field to beat the Giants at the Meadowlands in the 1993 season. I remember where I was when the Cowboys won those three Super Bowls, twice over the Bills and once over the Steelers. No Super Bowl will every compare to those, at least in terms of my experience, now that Aikman, Irvin, Moose, Novacek, Deion, and, yes, Emmitt have all hung up their cleats for the last time.

I say I'm not a kid anymore because I was not yet in high school when Emmitt set the record for rushing touchdowns in a season, and here we are in 2005 on the day he announces his retirement from football, the day before my 24th birthday. When I watched Emmitt, I lived with my family, wore big glasses, and strolled the halls of CVCA with my collared shirt, dress shoes, and a belt. Now, as he announces his retirement, I live in my own apartment, drive a car I paid for, buy all my own groceries, and work a full time job as an engineer. I'm not as attached to the Cowboys as I was then, but I still check their score before any other. I haven't seen too many of their games, but I want to sit in the stands at Texas stadium some day before it's gone so I can know what it's like in that football crazy town, where the Cowboys are as important as anything that happens between Sundays.

I've really only had one real favorite team. Oh, I rooted hard for the Cavs to beat the Bulls when Mark Price, a six foot tall white guy from Oklahoma, was somehow among the game's best players. It wasn't the same, though, as watching the Cowboys take on the 49ers at Candlestick as I hoped Charles Haley, Darren Woodson, and Leon Lett would find a way to bottle up the elusive yet strong Steve Young and his target, Jerry Rice. I have two videos, one for each of the first two Super Bowl seasons won by that Cowboys team. I've seen them both numerous times. Even into college, I would come home during Thanksgiving or Christmas break, put my dad's bike up on the rollers (kind of a bicycle treadmill), pop in the tape, and get a workout in the basement while snow swirled outside. I could remember what it was like when the Cowboys were America's Team, and they won all the time. It's been rough the past few years watching them struggle while teams with dubious history (the Bucs) or none at all (Panthers) make it to the Super Bowl, but I'll hold on. They will win again, and I'll be there, just like I have been since I first heard of this Emmitt fellow.

He was supposed to be too slow or too small to be a success in the NFL. That's why the Cowboys got him. He wasn't picked first, he was picked 17th. What the scouts didn't know then that they surely leared to regret was that you can't measure elusiveness or toughness with a 40 yeard dash. He was at his best running between the tackles and making that first guy miss. He didn't break a lot of long runs, but he always did enough. He definitely could smell the end zone when he got close, and his 164 rushing touchdowns can attest to that. No one has rushed more times, for more yards, or found the end zone more times than Emmitt. He'll waltz into the Hall of Fame as soon as he's eligible in 2009. Maybe I'll go to Canton and see the Hall, if I haven't already by then.

You can argue that he wasn't the greatest running back of all time, and it doesn't bother me to say that you'd be right in saying it, but no one combined his ability with his longevity in quite the same way, and none of the running backs were ever my favorite player. So decide where he stands in the pantheon of backs, just don't try to tell me he wasn't my favorite.

There's a revolution afoot in the world of sports analysis. It's been going on for quite a while now in the world of baseball, but the other major sports are catching up fast. For years, there were two ways to evaluate players. First, there were the conventional counting and rate stats (an example of a counting stat is RBI, while batting average is a rate stat). Second, there was what your eyes told you. Who's a good athlete, who's slow, who has a nice swing, or a good looking gait. That was all that was available for the longest time, and professional sports teams suffered for it, at least in terms of getting the most value for their money.

Bill James was one of the first to realize these inadequacies, for baseball at least, and work on trying to quantify value in a more accurate manner. Hundreds of others followed in his footsteps, and many more continue to develop their own ideas about performance analysis in baseball and other sports. The web site Football Outsiders has attempted to take a new look at professional football that goes beyond yards and points. They have developed some rudimentary methods for looking at the contributions of single players. One of these is called Defense-Adjusted Points Above Replacement. In basketball, people like John Hollinger have developed ways to better evaluate a player's contribution, equalizing players who get different amounts of playing time, and also determining how much to weight each statistic (e.g. rebounds, blocks, assists). John has developed a stat called Player Efficiency Rating that tries to assign each player a number that can be used to rank him against other players.

The theme tying all three of those sports together is the goal of isolating individual players from their teams in order to better understand individual value. Each of these sports is a team game, and the success of the team is a function of the individual contributions. What's difficult is determining what those individual contributions may be. Baseball got the jump on this one, because much of player evaluation in baseball is tied to the singular act of hitting a ball thrown by a pitcher. Every outcome is discrete and measurable, so determining value is not as difficult, given the right statistical tools. The argument tends to lie in which part of hitting is more valuable. Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver make it sound like bunting and stealing are way more important than they prove to be, while more sophisticated methods show that slow players who hit doubles and home runs and take walks have more offensive value than fast guys who are good bunters. For pitching, things like ERA are heavily influenced by the quality of the fielders behind you, and to add to the confusion, the batting average allowed by a pitcher on hit balls is at least partially random. Therefore, it seems that a pitcher who doesn't let the ball go in play is a valuable asset. Defense is the next frontier of performance analysis in baseball. In defense, there is much more interaction between teammates, so isolating individual value is difficult. It's a lot easier to play outfield next to Torii Hunter than it is next to Craig Biggio. In the same sense, a fast shortstop will take chances away from his third baseman. Gold Glove awards and fielding percentage are nearly useless, as Gold Gloves can be won from a single SportsCenter clip (Derek Jeter, 2004) and high fielding percentage only counts the balls that the player gets to, not the ones that he can't reach because he gets terrible jumps (Jeter again, coincidentally). Statistics like Zone Rating and Fielding Runs Above Average do a lot to assign value to individual players, but even the inventors of those stats realize their limitations.

The interaction between teammates makes evaluation in basketball and football more difficult. The more players on the field or court, the more difficult it is to isolate an individual contribution. Basketball is easier because there are less players and every player generates statistics, and many of those are somewhat independent of their teammates. That way, John Hollinger can come up with his player efficiency ratings based on things like points per shot and turnovers, because those things are easy to measure. As with baseball, measuring defense is not as easy, as steals don't tell the whole story, as a gambling player can get a lot of steals, but also get beat for a lot of easy layups. Team defense is also a hard thing to evaluate, but I know smart people are working on it. As for football, we've only reached the tip of the iceberg. There are 22 guys on the field at a time, and many of them never touch the ball, even if they're vitally involved with the offense. It's impossible to evaluate a running back without his blockers, receivers without the quarterback, and a quarterback without all three. Aaron Schatz over at Football Outsiders is doing some revolutionary work, but he realizes how far he is from understanding offensive and defensive line play apart from some rudimentary statistics.

It's this kind of thinking that is getting Ivy League graduates with little athletic experience but lots of analytical ability jobs with professional teams and allowing others to make a living writing for widely read sport-specific websites. For many, the goal is to see how to improve a team by helping that team determine where allocate finite resources to derive the greatest benefit. Figure out what is undervalued, and get it at a bargain. It's not a lot different than analyzing stocks, except that previous results do tend to predict future returns. Other sports will soon get on the performance analysis bandwagon once some smart person determines how to isolate individual performance.

We made our way to Cameron Indoor Stadium tonight to see Duke host Carolina in an ACC tilt. Our seats were fantastic, center court, four rows from the floor. We could hear every shoe squeak, every shouted instruction. We even walked around on the court afterward.

Of course, this is because it was a wrestling match, not a basketball game. Duke-Carolina wrestling isn't quite the high profile affair it is in basketball. There are a few reasons for this. First off, neither team is ever anywhere near the top of the national rankings, and neither team will win the conference either. Duke is probably slated for a bottom half finish. Secondly, Duke has no scholarships. None. Zero dollars available for potential Duke recruits. At a school this wealthy, it's a crime. Their assistant coaching budget is also less than that at Messiah College, and their overall budget makes me sick (I'll keep that number to myself, but suffice it to say you would throw up every time you saw Duke Basketball on television if I told you). The third reason that it's not quite up to basketball standards is that wrestling just isn't the same down here in the South. The best high school wrestlers head to the Iowa States and Minnesotas, while the ACC is left to pick up mostly second tier guys, if they have scholarships to spend them on, that is.

None of this kept the match from being enjoyable to watch. UNC has a young team that will only get better, and Duke has a national champion coach who does his best with the limitation placed upon him by the university. Many of the matches were close, but Carolina predictably prevailed over a shorthanded Duke squad, who has been without their ACC champion 125 pound wrestler since he suffered a season ending elbow injury. Duke's younger wrestlers were not on par with their opponents, but the older wrestlers on the team were able to hang in and win a few matches based on superior experience, if not talent.

Two things stood out to me tonight. First, the classless behavior of the UNC assistants. C.D. Mock seems like a good guy, but his two assistants left a lot to be desired. There they were in a match they were winning handily, complaining to the official all the time. The match was not close for a lot of the night, and yet they complained. I wanted them to back it off a little bit and focus on their wrestlers and not the officiating, which was not a problem. Second, the Duke announcer did a horrendous job. He obviously knew the sport, and may have been a member of the team who wasn't competing tonight, but he was terrible. He felt the need to explain every little thing like he was doing play by play and color commentary for a television broadcast. He talked strategy, rules, told us the score, which we could read off the scoreboard. He also talked about differences between high school and college wrestling. Lastly, he kept referring to the Duke wrestlers by their first names, talking about what they were trying to do and how they scored. It was too much talking. A little explanation is fine for the obviously uninformed crowd, but he went way, way over the line.

I've seen Carolina wrestle three times in the last week, at three different venues, and I'd say they're at least a year or two away from taking a shot at the ACC title, and a lot depends on what NC State and newcomer Virginia Tech do in the next few years, but they have some good young wrestlers that should improve. C.D. Mock's skills as a technician will be easy to evaluate in a few years after seeing the progress, or possible lack thereof, in his young wrestlers.