Yesterday, I was pissed because I had to apologise to the BBWAA. Turns out I called them a whole lot of unkind names over the injustice they were going to commit upon Zack Greinke, and then they showed me who’s the boss by giving him the damn award anyhow. So that was a sad day. But that was yesterday.
Today is a whole new day, and the BBWAA has gotten back to its usual business of concentrated crazy by giving the Manager of the Year award for the best managers of the year to objectionably bad managers Jim Tracy and Mike Scioscia. Exactly like we knew they would. So today I do not have to apologise to the BBWAA. I can call them hair-brained lilly-livered half-wit ignoramooses and all they can do is sit back and take it. Because, today, they’ve earned it.
Jim Tracy is, by all accounts, a really nice guy. I’ve never heard anybody say he’s a dick — the players all seem to like him, so, hey. Nice guy. That’s cool; I like nice guys. But as a baseball manager, he’s about as skilled as average, as long as we can assume that by "average" what we really mean is "average vole." Jim Tracy is one of the most blinkered, by-the-book managers I’ve ever seen. Dude on first with fewer than two outs? The next batter will bunt. Every time, no exceptions. For fuck’s sake, the thing that makes Jim Tracy most famous to me is the time he ordered Troy Tulowitzki and his 1.049 monthly OPS to try to bunt legendary speedster Todd Helton over from second. Never mind how stupid it is to have a dude who’s been not-outing 42% of the time try to bunt. Just focus on the fact that Tulo has exactly nine successful sac bunts in his entire career, and, if he fucks it up, probably Helton gets thrown out at third and he’s effectively bunted the runner back to first base. Manager of the Year my aching ass.
And Mike Scioscia? Nobody likes throwing away outs on the basepaths like Mike Scioscia. The Los Angeles Angels of Azerbaijan led all of MLB in caught stealing in 2009. They successfully completed a miserable 70% of their steal attempts, which is well shy of the completion rate you need to maintain in order to be gaining runs from your steals. That’s right — the Angels would have scored more runs if they never tried to steal a base. For fuck’s sake, giant man Kendry Morales attempted ten steals this year. Kendry Morales! He was caught seven times, yet it did not appear to occur to Scioscia that continuing to have Morales attempt to steal was hurting his team. The one thing the Angels did well was taking extra bases on hits — Baseball Prospectus has them at 10.68 EqHAR for the season, which is a shitload, but they gave almost all of it back with their boneheaded steal attempts and attempts to advance on groundouts and flyouts. They finished the year at a pedestrian 1.3 EqBRR. (If you can’t find the Angels on that chart, it’s because BP weirdly lists them as ANA, because I guess it’s still 1997 in BP-world.)
To put these numbers in some meaningful context, the rule of thumb is that ten runs is roughly equal to one win. So those ten runs of hit advancement earned the Angels exactly one win in the standings. For this one win, people want to give Mike Scioscia the Manager of the Year? For one win? This guy was worth two wins this year. Let’s give him two awards — Backup Catcher of the Year and Backup Backup Catcher of the Year, because he’s a fucking backup catcher. Also, did I mention that Scioscia’s bad decision-making gave that entire win back? Actually, the Angels didn’t get shit from all that basepath unclogging. Oopsie!
The reason I’m assuming that Scioscia got the award due to his terrible baserunning management is because the alternative is that he got it because Nick Adenhart died, and I abjectly refuse to believe that. That is far too banal even for the BBWAA.
And, yes, I know it is not, in fact, too banal for the BBWAA. And, yes, I know it probably really is the fucking reason. But I will persist in this delusion nonetheless.
November 18th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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It looks like I was wrong. For half a year, I was wrong. I kept saying, over and over, that the chuckleheaded clod-pates at the BBWAA were going to award the AL Cy Young to expensive winner of 19 games, he who pitched tolerably well but was granted an astounding six entire runs per start, hunger-crazed meatloaf fiend Carsten Charles Sabathia. I was sad about this, because King Felix Abraham Hernandez, lord of Seattle, was a whole hell of a lot better, had the same number of (stupid) wins desipite getting only 4.4 runs per game, but didn’t play for a playoff-bound team from New York and would probably get fucked for it.
But, really, I was sad for Zack Greinke, who pitched, kind of appropriately, like a crazy man. He was hilariously good, but he was stranded on the least-relevant team ever in the history of irrelevant teams, where he only won 16 games due to a sad-sack 3.8 runs per game. Clearly he wouldn’t win shit. 16 wins? Kansas City?
Set aside the fact that 16 wins with 3.8 RS/GS is completely insane. Baseball writers don’t think like that. They look at two numbers and three letters. The numbers are whatever comes before W and S, and the letters are NYY. Clearly Sabathia was a lock.
But no! The BBWAA surprised me and Dave and everybody in the whole world by showing a little bit of intelligence. Greinke won the award in a landslide. Hernandez (correctly) came in second, with Verlander third and Sabathia a distant fourth. So I apologise to the BBWAA. You’re not quite as stupid as I thought!
You still have a few awards left to fuck up, though. Get to it!
Addendum, from that article about Greinke’s win:
He failed to get a victory in six starts in which he allowed one run or none.
Can we please finally all agree that wins — by which I mean not actually winning, but the pitching stat misleadingly called "wins" — are complete bullshit and should never be looked at by anybody for any reason ever? We can? Good. That’s a relief. Here I thought I’d have to hear all about fucking wins next year, too.
November 17th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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I don’t really have a problem with them. Chris Coghlan won the NL, and Andrew Bailey the AL, and, sure, whatever. They’re fine players.
Coghlan would have been my third choice in the NL, following Randy Wells and Phillies pitcher slash rap sensation Ja Happ, who had damn near identical (and very very good) stats for the year. Identical to each other, I mean, not to Coghlan; Wells and Happ are starting pitchers, and Coghlan’s like a left fielder.
Coghlan: .321 / .390 / .460 / .850, 122 OPS+, 9 HR, 53 BB, -8 FRAA. Not a bad rookie year to be sure. Not much power, but he got on base like a sonuvabitch. Unfortunately, he played exactly replacement-level defense in left field (0 FRAR), which, in my eyes, kind of hurts his value.
Meanwhile, here are a few rook pitchers:
Wells: 3.05 ERA, 165.1 IP, 1.276 WHIP, 0.8 HR/9, 2.5 BB/9, 5.7 K/9, 2.26 K/BB, 147 ERA+
Happ: 2.93 ERA, 166 IP, 1.235 WHIP, 1.1 HR/9, 3 BB/9, 6.5 K/9, 2.13 K/BB, 145 ERA+
Zowie. I give the edge to Wells mainly because of the lower HR/9, but god damn are those two dudes similar. And, to my mind, better Rookies of the Year than Coghlan. But, again, whatever. Coghlan’s a fine choice.
(Baseball Prospectus, incidentally, does not agree with me, giving Happ the edge over Wells by half a win: 5.9 to 5.3 WARP3. But it says both are much more valuable than Coghlan, who comes in at 3.1.)
Bailey was actually stunningly good:
1.84 ERA, 83.1 IP, 0.876 WHIP, 0.5 HR/9, 2.6 BB/9, 9.8 K/9, 3.79 K/BB, 238 ERA+
The only fly in his ointment is that 83.1 IP, which != much. I know, I know, he’s a closer. But still, he only pitched 83.1 innings. I guess when you’re impossibly brilliant and magnificent for those 83.1 innings that makes up for it. I can deal with that. Let’s put these numbers in context.
Mystery Player: 1.76 ERA, 66.1 IP, 0.905 WHIP, 0.9 HR/9, 1.6 BB/9, 9.8 K/9, 6 K/BB, 243 ERA+
Very very similar lines, right? Would it put Bailey’s Rookie of the Year in perspective if I point out that Mystery Player is the best pitcher of all time? And that Bailey pitched seventeen innings more?
(Bailey was worth a stunning seven wins to his team, according to WARP3. And he only pitched 83.1 innings. Ye gods. Mystery Player was worth eight, and he’s the best pitcher of all time.)
November 16th, 2009
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Darien |
Baseball |
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You thought I was done? I’m not. Remember how long I went on about Kingdom Hearts 2?
The game plays fast and loose with its physics. Every world tells you before you land on it what kind of gravity it has, but it never matters — low G or high G world, the dune buggy handles exactly the same: like it’s made out of frictionless silly putty. It slides and bounces like a crazy machine. And if that’s not enough for you, it also seems a bit loose on the situations that require a space suit. You can be out crawling around on the Citadel exterior, and, rather sensibly, you need a suit. Shepard even has a dialogue scene in which he tells everybody about it. But when you’re up on the docks, apparently exactly as exposed to space as you are when you’re in the maintenance grooves or whatever? No suit needed.
Now, I’ll buy that, in that exact situation, there’s a magical force field that ships can go through but, like, atmosphere can’t, and that’s why you don’t need a suit out there. Fine. But riddle me this: why is it that, when you’re standing in the council chamber, and spaceship debris bashes through the big window and a large chunk of the wall — outside of which is that exact maintenance groove area you just suited your way through — it doesn’t disrupt the atmosphere in the council chamber at all? No vacuum forms, nobody needs suits, nothing.
While we’re talking about the council, anybody happen to notice that for high-powered, galaxy-ruling oligarchs, they sure aren’t very concerned with security? They have this giant Citadel security force, but every damn time I have a meeting with them, they’re totally cool for me to walk right up there all covered with guns and grenades. That doesn’t fly with the oligarchs here in the United States of Earth, but the absolute rulers of the whole galaxy are cool with it. Go figure.
On a related note, anybody else notice that C-Sec never managed to spot the fact that the floating hover-chair the evil mastermind in Mass Effect: Galaxy rode around on was actually, like, a tank armed with biological weapons? You’d think they’d check for this shit before they let Dr. Proton there meet with the council, but apparently they don’t. Or maybe they ostensibly do but they’re just awful at finding it, kind of like the future galactic version of the TSA. Grats, by the way, to the TSA for completely not finding the prohibited items I managed to get onto the airplane last month through the cunning subterfuge of, like, putting them in my suitcase. On top.
The game usually does a great job of creating the illusion of player choice; most of the time, it really seems like your actions are shaping the way the game unfolds (even though, of course, they’re not). But the hundred billion sidequests are kind of totally exempt from that philosophy; they all exist just completely in isolation, and nobody ever hears or cares about what happens, even down to the point where, if you do the quest involving Admiral Kotaku’s death, all the other mobs will still talk about him as though he’s alive. Hell, Captain Anderson will continue to give you directions to where Kotaku would be if he hadn’t gotten killed.
There are hachievements to be had. They’re not integrated Steam hachieves, but that’s to be expected, since the Steam release was a late-life sort of thing. Many of the hachieves aren’t clearly explained, though most of the time this is to havoid giving spoilers right there in the damn menu, which I heartily endorse. The real problem is that, when you earn a hachieve, the game pops up a message saying so. But it doesn’t tell you which one it was, or what you did to get it. And there’s no way to access the hachieves screen without exiting back to the main game menu.
The way mobs walk away after conversations is troubling. They look very sinister and purposeful; for a fair long time after I started the game, I was way suspicious of pretty much everybody, because when I was done talking to them they all seemed like they were heading off on some evil mission. Spoiler warning: they’re not. It’s just weirdly animated.
There’s no way to skip the cutscenes other than deleting or renaming the movie files themselves, which apparently doesn’t cause the game to crash — I disabled the minute or so of intro movies just fine. But, seriously, BioWare. That shit should be skippable.
I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and I was staying on the fifteenth floor of the MGM Grand. The elevator to the lobby took, what, fifteen seconds? Yet, even with future elevator technology being presumably more advanced, it takes about a full minute to get from the hangar to C-Sec. And guess where Citadel Fast Travel doesn’t have a fucking terminal? That’s right: the hangar. The exact place it damn should, since every trip to the Citadel involves landing at the hangar and then returning to the hangar when you’re ready to leave. So you have to take the minute-long elevator ride down to C-Sec every single time, and then again on the way back out. And why exactly the dick is the elevator to the Alliance hangar right in the middle of C-Sec, anyhow? That’s, like, kind of a weird place. And does no other race have a hangar? I guess not.
You know what bugs me? The Elcor. Specifically, it bugs me that there are exactly three Elcor in the entire game, because they’re awesome and there should be more. Also: there should be more Hanar. More Elcor, more Hanar, more less Batarians.
I realise they’re basically just the C’tan, and the C’tan never had a reason for what they were doing, but would it really hurt to give the Reapers some kind of motivation? They just destroy shit because… they do. They just come on over, gather up their army of Necrons Geth, and kill everybody. Then they’re done for the day and go home to kick back and play like the Reaper version of Wii Sports Resort for fifty thousand years. Not that that sounds like a bad life.
It’s possible over the course of the game to fix like every single thing the Citadel races have ever done wrong, up to and including the complete genocide of the Tyranids Rachni, except you can’t do anything about the Orks Krogans and the genophage (incidentally: "geno" is from the Latin (originally the Greek) meaning "sexual / reproductive," and " phage" is from the Greek meaning "eater," so am I the only one who reads "genophage" as meaning that the Krogans were infected with oral sex?), which is probably the thing you care about the most. And apparently there’s a point in the game at which you may have had an opportunity to do something about it, but, for whatever reason, the game doesn’t allow you to pursue that avenue.
There’s a big major plot point involving messages left by the extinct Protheans detailing the stuff they left behind to help fight off the Reapers next time they come back. Fine and dandy. The only trouble is: the game’s main antagonist is relevant to the plot because the Reapers (which are machines) needed an organic being to interpret the messages, since they were encoded in such a way that only organics could decode them. To which I say: fuck the heck? Gloss over how stupid the whole idea of magical data that can’t be interpreted by machines is. Didn’t they encode and store those messages on these beacon gadgets? Which also play them back? And are, incidentally, machines? So machines can store, reproduce, transmit, and just generally encode, decode, and process this data… but only organics can actually like observe it? Fuck the heck are you even talking about, BioWare?
Squad AI isn’t all it could be. The biggest problem (other than squadmates running directly into the line of fire) is that your squad will often abjectly refuse to take point. And say you’re playing a sniper build — you’re a complete support gun. You need uninterrupted time to line up your shots where you’re not getting lasered or biotic shocked or whatever the hell. But your team absolutely will not go out there and lay down any covering fire or anything. They’ll stick behind you while you try to snipe. Which is even more egregious when you consider that squadmates almost always choose the assault rifle — whether they’re trained to use it or not — and then pick distant targets to shoot at. I’ve had dudes in melee tearing my squad apart while they uselessly try to spray assault rifles at other dudes across the room. Occasionally the AI will use the pistol or the shotgun, but I’ve only ever seen Liara use the sniper rifle. Maybe small sample size.
Incidentally, "biotic" is a real word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
And, hey, the game makes a big deal of the difference between "VI," which means "Virtual Intelligence," and "AI," which you goddamn well know what it means thank you very much. VIs are okay, but AIs are severly restricted for… some reason that isn’t explained. But, seriously, what’s the difference? Merriam-Webster defines "virtual" as "being such in essence or effect though not formally recognized or admitted." So the main difference is that we lie about one of them and heavily regulate the other? I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the galactic government’s position, but the game heavily implies that there’s some real, substantive difference between the two, and I have no idea what it is.
November 15th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
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It’s been a while since I’ve complained about a video game, and I just finally got around to playing Mass Effect, so, hey, match made in heaven, yeah? Now, don’t get the wrong idea: it’s a decent, albeit overrated, game. It’s a space opera featuring all your favourite Warhammer 40k races and the Dark Eldar, and the human nation is called the Alliance, which: fuck the Horde. But there are a bunch of things about it that just ain’t right.
First off: the Asari. The Asari do not reproduce sexually. It’s not exactly asexual, either; their reproduction is actually via some magical Vulcan mind-meld nonsense. Fine; I mean, it’s a video game. They reproduce through magic thought transfer. I can live with that. But they have both primary and secondary sex characteristics, and are capable of engaging in what we would recognise as sexual intercourse, even though it’s entirely unrelated to their reproduction. How the hell does that evolve? Why would the Asari have a fully-developed set of human-like sexual equipment and a sex drive and absolutely no use for it?
Frogger. Remember when I whined about Bioshock making you play Pipe Dream all the goddamn time? Well, hacking things in Mass Effect means playing Frogger. And there are about as many things to hack as there are in Bioshock, so you end up playing Frogger about as often as you play the actual game. Later in the game at least it’s more viable to use the "omni-gel" to auto-hack things, but early on you just can’t afford that. So get down with the Frogger.
Speaking of items: they’re a pain in the ass. The game dumps huge amounts of loot on you almost constantly, and the inventory limit is a stupidly-small 150, which means the game is constantly throwing up this nag screen about how you have too much loot. It’s a floating text box that sits on-screen for about twenty seconds and covers up a good deal of information you’d probably rather like to read. Getting rid of items is also a pain in the ass; whether you’re melting them into omni-gel or vendoring them, you have to do it one by one.
Making the items even worse is the fact that they don’t have descriptive or meaningful names. There are about a trillion different item "brands," all of which are fairly meaningless names. There are also multiple "levels" of each item, so you’ll get, for example, the Striker III or the Tsunami VII, neither of which means anything. And it’s not always the case that a higher number is better; the Scorpion VI, for example, is better than a whole lot of armours of level VII or VIII. Also, have you spotted another problem? Yep: the game uses roman numerals. Makes it pretty damn hard to spot at a glance if an item is better than something you already have, and contributes to the general sense of item names being meaningless gibberish.
The dune buggy sucks. I’m sorry; it just does. You’ll be rocking the game for a little while, running around on the citadel, solving problems and getting involved in intrigue, and then you finally get access to the galaxy and you’re probably pretty pumped about it. And then what? I’ll tell you goddamn what: you spend hours and hours flying around to featureless bumpy planets and driving the stupid dune buggy. The buggy controls really badly, too, and the gun never seems to aim where it says it’s aimed. And it’s very easy to get stuck somewhere on an enemy fortification. Seriously, Bioware: would it have killed you to add some details to the ten thousand planets in the game? Like some trees, or some architecture, or some critters, or something?
I mean, something other than lava. Because you better goddamn believe there are planets with lava. And there’s a planet where you have to drive up and down this windy path through some lava, and, if you fall down, it’s instant death. The other feature on the planets: giant worms. They take about a billion shots to kill, and if they randomly pop up underneath you? Instant death.
Mass Effect is a Bioware game, so, of course, you’ll have to deal with at least one mob giving you an unprovoked lecture about racism. Seriously, Bioware. We get it. Please chill the hell out.
Also, hey. I’m sick and tired of games where the villain turns out to be a good guy who’s being controlled by an evil monster from space. That’s just about the oldest twist in the book — nearly every Final Fantasy game ever made used it, for fuck’s sake — and it’s sort of lame. Let’s somebody make a game where the villain is actually the villain, hey?
November 14th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
2 comments
You know the drill. The winners are:
1B: Adrian Gonzalez, SDP (11 FRAA, 3.8 UZR)
2B: Orlando Hudson, LAD (16 FRAA, -3.3 UZR)
SS: Jimmy Rollins, PHI (-6 FRAA, 2.7 UZR)
3B: Ryan Zimmerman, WAS (6 FRAA, 18.1 UZR)
OF: Shane Victorino, PHI (-5 FRAA, -4.1 UZR)
OF: Matt Kemp, LAD (10 FRAA, 2.6 UZR)
OF: Michael Bourn, HOU (4 FRAA, 8.6 UZR)
C: Yadier Molina, STL (16 FRAA)
P: Adam Wainwright, STL (-2 FRAA)
This is a little confusing, because there are a few cases — Hudson most prominently — where FRAA and UZR totally diverge. What can you do? Fielding metrics are still very young. This is why we look at several and try to iron the kinks out. More reliable than just eyeballing the dude’s, like, jersey to see if it’s really grass-stained from diving catches. Anyhow, the moment you’ve been waiting for; the should-be winners:
1B: Adrian Gonzalez, SDP (11 FRAA, 3.8 UZR)
2B: Chase Utley, PHI (10 FRAA, 10.8 UZR)
SS: Rafael Furcal, LAD (11 FRAA, 8 UZR)
3B: Ryan Zimmerman, WAS (6 FRAA, 18.1 UZR)
OF: Nyjer Morgan, WAS (22 FRAA, 27.8 UZR)
OF: Randy Winn, SFG (13 FRAA, 16.5 UZR)
OF: Justin Upton, ARI (9 FRAA, 7.4 UZR)
C: Yadier Molina, STL (16 FRAA)
P: Ubaldo Jimenez, COL (6 FRAA)
Jimenez is in a dead heat with Ryan Dumpster in FRAA, so I looked at other stats to break the tie, and found that Jimenez is ahead in RF/G, RF/9, and even stupid smelly Fielding Percentage. So I gave the nod to him. Third outfielder was also kind of a wash among a few qualified candidates — only Morgan and Winn really stood out from the pack. I picked Utley over Hudson at 2B because Utley’s rated as very good by both composite metrics, and they give me wildly different answers on Hudson, even though Hudson’s good metric is rated much better than Utley’s.
Anyhow, the point is: Furcal, Morgan, and Winn were very thoroughly robbed by the BBWAA idiots, who would rather look at jersey dirt than soil their eyes with numbers. Numbers aren’t that scary, guys; I mean, it didn’t take me very long to find the answers to these questions, and I’m a certified moron who doesn’t even get paid to do this. You think maybe you stooges could give research a shot someday?
November 11th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Dig this. AL gold gloves were awarded today. Derek Jeter won his fourth gold glove at SS, for a season in which he was worth eleven runs fewer than an average shortstop. That’s right: Baseball Prospectus has Derek Sanderson Jeter at -11 FRAA on the year. And the award for being the best-fielding shortstop in the American League. You need any more proof that gold gloves are stupid? Don’t need to look far. Let’s check the rest of the list. Here they are in all their glory, player name and 2009 FRAA and UZR.
1B: Mark Teixeira, NYY (-2 FRAA, -3.7 UZR)
2B: Placido Polanco, DET (13 FRAA, 11.4 UZR)
SS: Derek Jeter, NYY (-11 FRAA, 6.6 UZR)
3B: Evan Longoria, TBR (16 FRAA, 18.5 UZR)
OF: Adam Jones, BAL (6 FRAA, -4.7 UZR)
OF: Ichiro Suzuki, SEA (6 FRAA, 10.5 UZR)
OF: Torii Hunter, LAA (1 FRAA, -1.4 UZR)
C: Joe Mauer, MIN (4 FRAA)
P: Mark Buehrle, CHS (5 FRAA)
Looks like Polanco and Longoria were good choices, but the rest? Yikes! Here’s a corrected list of winners. I’ve picked the leaders in FRAA and UZR for each position to try to get a bit of variety instead of just going for straight FRAA; I figure that makes the case stronger, yeah?
1B: Kendry Morales, LAA (3 FRAA, 4.9 UZR)
2B: Placido Polanco, DET (13 FRAA, 11.4 UZR)
SS: Cesar Izturis, BAL (8 FRAA, 10.8 UZR)
3B: Evan Longoria, TBR (16 FRAA, 18.5 UZR)
OF: Franklin Gutierrez, SEA (23 FRAA, 29.1 UZR) (!!)
OF: David DeJesus, KCR (18 FRAA, 15.1 UZR)
OF: Ryan Sweeney, OAK (8 FRAA, 24 UZR)
C: Gerald Laird, DET (17 FRAA)
P: Mark Buehrle, CHS (5 FRAA)
So. What have we learned today? We’ve learned that the gold glove voters hit the mark 33% of the time. We’ve learned that 22% of the time they awarded their award for best defense in the league to a below-average defender. We’ve learned that they committed a crime by leaving Franklin Gutierrez out in favour of the stunningly average Torii Hunter. A hate crime, probably. They hate the truth.
They can’t handle the truth!
November 10th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Hey, apparently Sammy Sosa is looking pretty white these days. A little Jacksonian, there, Sammy! It’s worth pointing out that the authour of that article says: "Despite the fact that I hate the Cubs and never was a Sosa fan, I’m not posting this to poke fun at Sammy." In an ironic twist, I love the Cubs and sure was a Sosa fan, and I totally am posting this just to poke fun at Sammy. This is because I am a bad person.
In other news, Sammy’s wife is super fucking hot. Yow.
November 8th, 2009
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Darien |
Bullshit |
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I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Yankees — contrary to an ardent prediction from both Jimmy Rollins and the Pour 24 bartender in Las Vegas I was arguing with about baseball — won the World Series. So that means, predictably enough, that it’s time for all the armchair social engineers in the world to start whining about the unfairness of the Yankees’ payroll and demanding a salary cap.
First thing about your salary cap wet dream: it won’t happen. The MLBPA will never go for it. Can you imagine even trying to pitch something like this?
You: Hey guys, here’s my plan. I want to make sure you all get to win more. Every year. I want you all to win the World Series every year. You want to win, right?
MLBPA: Hell yeah! Where do we sign?
You: Wait, wait, there’s more to the plan. Not only do you all get to win, but you get to stick it to the Yankees.
29/30 of the MLBPA: Fuck the Yankees!
You: Yeah! I can tell you guys are feeling me on this. Now, here’s what we do. First off, you all get a lot less money —
MLBPA: You’re fired.
There’s this excellent book I’ve mentioned before called Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s about baseball. And numbers. And it’s written by dudes who are way smarter than me. It has a chapter in there called "Does baseball need a salary cap?" in which they go into great detail about salary caps of different sorts and what impact they would have on the game. Remember the luxury tax? Remember how only the Yankees ever pay it? That’s because, in order to get it past the union, the bar had to be set hilariously high. If you tax everybody, everybody just stops spending and baseball players stop making so much money. If your goal is to engineer society such that entertainers make less money, this may appeal to you, but you’re an ignorant fuckface anyhow. So I don’t really care.
"Perhaps 12 of 30 Major League teams have any possibility of reaching postseason play, and fewer still have a realistic hope of winning a pennant. Unless baseball changes the way it does business, it risks seeing its fans drift away, tired of their teams’ futility." San Diego Padres owner John Moores said that in 1999, a year after, rather hilariously, his team went to the World Series. But, comedy hypocrisy aside, is Moores right? Is it really only 12 of 30 teams? Well, to find out, let’s take a look at how many teams have been to the postseason since 1999.
It’s 25. Twenty-five fucking teams. The only teams that haven’t made it to the playoffs? The Orioles, the Royals, the Nationals, the Reds, and the Pirates. What do those teams all have in common? That’s right: extremely shitty management. So, in a nutshell, every team can make the playoffs, except those teams run by gibbons. So fuck the Yankees, amirite?
"The more complex the arrangement you devise to level the playing field, the more it feels like the winners are those who can game the system," concludes Baseball Prospectus. Other than the irrelevant and probably-damaging inclusion of the useless phrase "feels like," you’re right on the money, BP. That’s how systems are. But let’s get to the part where I make fun of a baseball article, hey? It’s by Jeff Passan, who has a bee in his bonnet for salary caps, and it’s entitled "Yankees widen baseball’s chasm," which has sort of an anal-sex vibe I’m not sure I like. But don’t blame me; blame yourself or God.
Less than 24 hours after the richest team in baseball won the World Series, its biggest foe began reloading for next year by making a trade.
When you open with a salvo like that, it really reinforces the idea that you wrote this article back in 2001 and you’ve been saving it since then.
The Boston Red Sox are among baseball’s most affluent as well, so giving up a couple of prospects to the Florida Marlins for high-ceiling outfielder Jeremy Hermida amounted to a no-brainer.
What? You’re pissed about Jeremy Hermida? You said it yourself: he’s a high-celing player. Theo Epstein thinks he has a ton of potential. And he only costs $4 million! Did you realise that? Fucking anybody could have afforded this guy.
Never mind that Hermida will cost around $4 million this season and, depending on Boston’s other maneuvers, might play a fourth-outfielder role.
Oh. So you did know that. What’s, like, the problem?
The Red Sox, just like the recently crowned New York Yankees and another handful of teams with payroll flexibility, can afford such luxuries.
Only a "handful" of teams can afford a $4M outfielder? Fuck the heck are you talking about, Jeff? Is your favourite team the Dellview Mud Hens, who have a payroll entirely made up of this summer’s lemonade stand profits? Everybody can afford a $4M outfielder with a high celing. The Marlins — the team he came from, remember? — have the lowest payroll in baseball, and still could have afforded him if they thought he was worth it.
In a market that could see an overload of young, arbitration-eligible players deemed unaffordable by small-market teams, those high-revenue teams could be in an even more dominant position than before.
In other words: Get used to seeing the Yankees and their ilk in the World Series.
Here’s my impersonation of this passage: could see, could be, could have, could could could maybe maybe. In other words: necessarily must be!
How that can happen when Major League Baseball so proudly trumpets its sport as a more real testament to parity than the NFL is the collision of two combustible factors: the depression of the free-agent market and the increase in salaries for arbitration-eligible players. Free agency is supposed to be a player’s nirvana. In many cases, the automatic raises given to players in their fourth, fifth and sixth seasons can make them more.
Baseball is so proud of its parity as opposed to the NFL because, so far this century, no team has been a repeat World Series winner. There hasn’t even been a two-year dynasty. Meanwhile, as you may recall, the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl like every fucking year until their invincible space quarterback got old and hurt. That’s a pretty good indication that baseball’s had more parity than football, on account of, like, that’s what parity means.
Incidentally, I really really like how you’ve reached the crazy-man backdoor conclusion that the reason baseball needs a salary cap is because free agent prices are dropping.
So the trade of Hermida from low-revenue Florida to big-bucks Boston, just like the rumored deal of Mark Teahen from the Kansas City Royals to the Chicago White Sox, may be the start of an offseason as packed with activity as any in recent memory.
Is this also because the free agent market is depressed?
"Get ready," one small-market American League team official said, "for a lot more."
This quote’s just kind of dumped in there in the middle of a bunch of quacking about about hot stove season. I didn’t take it out of context at all, because it wasn’t in any context to begin with. A lot more… what? A lot more of the article? This is like the print article version of those Mike and Mike breakers where KISS comes on and says "hey, we’re KISS, Mike and Mike will be right back!" except anonymous? I’m not just being snide, here; I really have no idea what this quote is about.
The first stops in the selling GMs’ contact lists, of course, will be the numbers for executives with nine-figure payrolls. Nine teams cracked $100 million on opening day last year; five of them made the postseason. And if baseball’s equality argument didn’t die with that reality, perhaps it will when the have/have-not divide becomes even greater until the 2011 collective-bargaining talks aim for a solution.
So, wait. You’re telling me that 5/8 of the playoff teams were in the top 9/30 in payroll? That’s… not really much of much, Jeff. So barely more than half the teams came from a subset that’s barely less than half the total pool? Get ready to catch me, because I might faint from the amazingness of this revelation. You’re tarting up this cherry pick as the proof that baseball doesn’t have parity? Like, in the face of the fact that the only teams that haven’t been to the playoffs lately are the ones run by macaques? Damn, Jeff, I don’t know what to say. Maybe if you’re going to be cherry-picking you can at least pick a good cherry next time?
The disparity is greatest at the top, where the Yankees bathe in money while some teams can draw a tub only half full.
Which is why the Yankees win the World Series every year. And it’s also why the Mets — who have baseball’s second-largest payroll — won the NL pennant. And it’s why the Cubs and Tigers (third and fifth) won their divisions. And it’s why the Astros (eighth) were just so overloaded with fucking awesomeness. That’s right: the fucking Astros are one of those over-$100M teams, and they’re mediocre-to-bad every single year. That seems hard to believe, since the salary cap fools have drilled it into everybody’s head that payroll is the one-and-only thing that matters in baseball.
Also, the tub metaphor? Not so good. D+
Yeah, yeah. Grass is green, sky is blue, etc. Everyone knows the Yankees are the last living embodiment of Wall Street in American sports, and yet the figures still stagger: New York made $100 million more in revenue than any other team, according to calculations from Forbes. And the Yankees brought in twice the revenue of 18 teams.
Well… yeah. The Yankees are in New York City, which, as you may have heard, is not very small. It’s also the case that the Yankees own their own television network, which draws an amazing amount of revenue (the other teams that own their own networks — the Red Sox, Cubs, and Braves — also make a shitload of money. This is not a coincidence). Maybe baseball should require all cities to be the same size and all fan bases to be equally devoted?
Granted, the majority of those teams receive money from MLB’s revenue-sharing program, to which the Yankees are the greatest donor.
Sure do. And sure are. So… there’s already a system in place? And yet the Yankees still won the World Series once this century? Fuck. Gotta get more systems.
It doesn’t lessen New York’s ability to spend preposterous money, whether it’s the billion-plus dollars over the past half-decade or the $300 million lavished on Alex Rodriguez, the $180 million given to Mark Teixeira or the $161 million bestowed upon CC Sabathia. Those contracts, along with that of A.J. Burnett, give the Yankees a commitment toward 2013 of $92.9 million. Which is bigger than the 2009 payrolls of all but a dozen teams.
Alex Rodriguez was given, you may recall, a $252M contract in 2000. This was clearly an example of the huge, expensive Yankees being unfair. Except that it was the fucking Texas Rangers (2009 payroll: $68M) who offered it. The Brewers ($80M) went to $140M on Sabathia. The Orioles — the Orioles! — were way in on Teixeira, and they only have $67M to play with. Yes, none of those teams could have signed all four of those players without adding payroll. But it’s not the case that nowhere in baseball was there any competition for them.
Also, how disingenuous is it to cherry-pick expensive players and say that some teams pay less for their entire payroll? As though we’re supposed to think that Jerry Hairston and like Mark Melancon make that kind of money also.
Be it Matt Holliday, Jason Bay or John Lackey, the Yankees can offer more than anyone and can do so with the backing of a big, fat, knuckle-to-knuckle ring. Should they particularly fancy a nontender, they can pay him more – or give up a prospect to ensure he doesn’t hit the open market, as the Red Sox did with Hermida.
The Yankees are believed not to be players for Holliday, Lackey, and Bay, on account of they have enough outfielders and John Lackey isn’t very good. And is the fact that a non-Yankees team just signed a young player with upside a point against the Yankees somehow? This is the second time you’ve mentioned it.
Cash in baseball yields more than talent.
It does? I mean, I guess it also gets you like Carl Pavano and Kevin Brown, who didn’t have very much talent. Is that what you mean?
It buys the freedom to take risks and the leeway to make mistakes.
Ah — I guessed it. You are talking about Pavano and Brown!
It allows for peace of mind with the Yankees, who watched their plan to build around pitching from the farm system (Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy) implode, only to find rescue with a quarter-billion-dollar bailout from Goldman Steinbrenner.
Bailout joke! Topical. Hip. Also, the 2009 New York Yankees: the only team ever to pick up free agents after their prospects don’t pan out.
Now, let it be said: Money does not equal a World Series championship. It never did and it never will.
So why write this article?
It does drastically increase the chances that a team will make the postseason, at which point it isn’t chalk, per se, but generally leans toward the most talented teams … which are often the most moneyed.
It is a factor, yes. You probably haven’t heard about this, since absolutely nobody has ever talked about it ever, but the Cubs haven’t won the World Series in 102 years. They’re one of the biggest-spending teams in baseball. The missing factor? The Cubs aren’t run particularly well. They’ve had lousy ownership and lousy front-offices, and all the money that’s been pumped into them hasn’t fixed that. It’s led mainly to questionable deals like huge amounts of money to mid-level players like Alfonso Soriano, while smarter teams like the Red Sox get David Ortiz for one million dollars. Do you see?
Also, no, the playoffs don’t lean toward the most talented teams. That’s the regular season there that you’re thinking of. The playoffs are basically a big dumb luck-fest. They’re fun, sure, but terrible teams can win it all if they get hot at the right time. Like the 2006 Fatinals.
There is some sort of equation to explain this from the perspective outside of New York, and it goes like this: $$$$$$$$Yankees$$$$$$$$ = suck.
I love this article, since it’s cynically whining about how the Yankees have too much money and also complaining about people who cynically whine about how the Yankees have too much money. It’s the journalism equivalent of a double play. And also it has that killer joke with the dollar signs.
That equation won’t change anytime soon.
God I hope not.
Unlike the low- and mid-revenue teams freezing or paring payrolls, the Yankees should stay in the neighborhood of $200 million, if not in excess. The YES Network is a cash cow. Merchandise sales are going to be bonkers. Seats – even the champagne-and-caviar ones – will sell next year. A championship whets the appetite of every Yankees fan and leaves the lingering feeling that makes you hungry for more.
Yes, the Yankees have a large fan base. They’ve also marketed themselves brilliantly. Say what you will about George Steinbrenner, he did an incredible job of getting people interested in a team he paid (are you ready for this?) ten million dollars for back in 1973. CBS couldn’t make any money on them, so they fucking gave them away. Srsly.
The rest of the baseball world, meanwhile, wretches at the prospect of continued Yankees dominance.
Here’s me wretching at the prospect of more articles like this: :-wretch
Also, where were the articles like this about the Phillies winning the NL pennant two years in a row? Fucking dynasty, man. Dominance and all that. Wretch wretch.
There is no equalizer, like a salary cap, to reel in New York’s spending – only the team’s weighing of bottom line vs. success, a scale that tips toward the latter year in and year out.
I refer you once again to Baseball Between the Numbers, which goes out of its way to explain that a salary cap is both impossible and useless. What would you cap salaries at, Jeff? League average? That would be somewhere in the neighourhood of $80M (I eyeballed that; no promises for accuracy). So nobody’s allowed to spend more than $80M on players, right? And remind me again what it is that happens that gives the Cardinals, Rockies, Reds, Diamondbacks, Royals, Rangers, Orioles, Twins, Rays, Athletics, Nationals, Pirates, Padres, and Marlins the ability to compete financially with the new payroll celing? Incidentally, three of those teams have won the World Series lately, three more have been in the World Series, and still another three are frequent contenders.
Also, get this. Jeff Passan is seriously complaining that the Yankees would rather win than save money. Do you see this? To Jeff Passan, I’d imagine the Royals are the model of what a baseball team should be: they care so little about winning and so much about saving money that they don’t even spend all the money the existing redistributionist scheme gives them from other teams. More teams should be like that! Think how much more fun baseball would be.
Philadelphia was more than a sacrificial lamb, certainly, but the Phillies ran into a hotter, more talented Yankees team, and that’s a bad combination.
Just like how last year’s big-spending juggernaut Rays ran into a hotter Phillies team, yeah? And how the 2003 Yankees ran into a hotter Marlins team that I’m sure desperately outspent them?
It’s frightening to think the Yankees’ payroll was about $85 million more than the Phillies’ – the biggest disparity since the Yankees outspent the Marlins in 2003 by more than $100 million and lost – but it’s a truth that isn’t worth fighting because it’s changing no time soon.
Oh, wait, the Yankees spent a hundred million dollars more than the Marlins? And still lost? Wow. Why did you write this article again?
"The Yankees won the World Series," team president Randy Levine said, "and all is right with the world again."
Although he could’ve chosen words a little less, well, embarrassingly obnoxious, Levine’s point rang true because it’s surprising that a team so endowed (with revenue, with fans, with history and, most of all, with talent) could go nine years between World Series victories and six years between appearances. That’s not happening again, not anytime soon.
Jeff Passan, augurer and fortune-teller, he who sees the past, the present, and the future, has said it to be thus: the Yankees won’t ever not win the World Series again. Because they’re endowed with history.
Also, why would the team president not talk like that? It’s kind of his job.
The landscape is shifting, the chasm widening, baseball beginning its descent toward a place it can’t afford to go long term. The consequences are playing themselves out, and right into the hands of the New York Yankees, who are poised to start the next decade just as they did this one: with a championship.
Evidence presented: nothing.
Quantity of rhetoric employed: much.
Comedy moment: Jeff Passan’s article last year after the Phillies won the World Series talked about how they wouldn’t be back anytime soon, since their payroll is too small. Makes them unable to compete with the Mets and the Cubs, don’t you know! Guess it was just luck that they were able to squeeze by the Cubs in the NLDS and the Mets in the NLCS this year.
November 6th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Tim Lincecum is a pothead. I never would have guessed! That clean-cut, non-greasy not-hippie?
November 6th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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