An interesting non-baseball note

As of 2 months ago i had never heard of the Washington Post's segment "on being."

Today, my roommate was featured.
Interesting coincidence.

I'll get back to baseball later. There's some trade-related news worth talking about.

More off-season complaints

Okay so, here's part two of my ongoing series of off-season complaining.

The Yankees are seriously overpaying Mariano Rivera.

Apparently Rivera is close to signing a new contract with the Yankees worth $45 million over 3 years, making him the highest paid closer in history by nearly $5 million/year.

Like many others on the much-hated Yankees, i wish i could say that Rivera actually lacks talent, but the fact is that he has been one of the most dominant closers in the game over the last 10 years. That being said, he seems to have become much more hittable in recent years. Over the last three years his WHIP (walks/hits per inning pitched) has risen slightly every year. More importantly, his OPS-against (on-base plus slugging) and slugging-against have increased. In short, he's letting more runners reach base, and the hits that he's giving up are going for more bases.

Rivera is undeniably one of the best closers of all time. Maybe the best closer of all time. I just think he's in the twilight of his career, and the Yankees are overpaying him. That being said, I think they made a good decision in not agreeing to a fourth year in the contract, as he apparently requested.

The comments on the ESPN story about the deal seem to be fairly well split between "he's getting too old" and "he deserves it for the crap he's put up with in New York." I think the later is a valid point, but I have a feeling that the Yanks aren't including performance bonuses in the contract based on putting up with crap.

The last issue that i have with this contract goes back to my last post, about Posada.

Posada averages about 140 games per season, and, though I don't have stats to back this up, probably plays just about every inning of those games. Lets assume, for the sake of argument, that Posada's age gets to him a little bit this year, so he only plays 120 games, and can only play 8 innings per game before being pulled for a defensive improvement. Again, this is hypothetical.

That would put Posada at 960 innings played over the course of the season. Posada will make $13.1 million next season.

Rivera, on the other hand, averages roughly 75 innings per year and would be making $15 million next season, assuming this new contract is signed.

13,100,000 / 960 = $13,645.84 per inning
15,000,000 / 75 = $200,000 per inning

I realize I'm over-simplifying things a bit here, but all things considered, is Rivera really work nearly 15 times more than Posada is? Seems a bit extreme to me. If I was Posada, i think i'd be a little upset. Then again, if I was Posada i'd be made of money, playing baseball for a living, and married to a former model.
I guess he probably has better things to do with his time than worry about how the Yankees value him relative to Mariano Rivera.

Second-guessing game

One of the best things about the offseason is i get to spend 5 months second-guessing every decision made by baseball's front office, as well as all of the teams. It's only been a couple of weeks, and already I've seen a bunch of stuff that I'm just not sure about.

First off, Jorge Posada's new contract.


Let me preface this by saying that Jorge Posada is a great player, he just plays for the wrong team. I wish he didn't play for the much-hated Yankees so that I could find it in my heart to truly like him as a player. That's basically how I feel about Derek Jeter as well, while we're at it.

The Yankees recently gave Jorge Posada a contract worth $52.4 million over 4 years, which apparently means that Jorge Posada is worth roughly 360 times to the Yankees what I am to my company.
Jorge Posada, while a great player, is a 36-year-old catcher. Catchers, historically, don't age well, and Posada is getting toward an age when all players begin to see a decline in their abilities (with one notable exception), not just catchers. ESPN's Keith Law mentioned this in his ranking of this year's free agents when he reached Paul Lo Duca, but for some reason seemed to overlook that fact for Posada, who is a year older than Lo Duca. I think Posada still has a couple more good years of catching in front of him. After that, I think that the Yankees had better hope that he converts into a solid first baseman.

I'll get to some more things in a later post.

Barry Bonds Boycotting hall

Some news came out a few days ago saying that Barry Bonds has announced that he'd boycott the hall of fame if they accept his 756th home run ball marked with an asterisk.
If you were not aware, the ball was purchased at auction by fashion designer Marc Ecko, who then put it to vote whether the ball would be launched into space, marked with an asterisk and sent to the hall of fame, or sent to the hall of fame as it was. Ultimately the asterisk option won out. The hall of fame said that they would accept the ball, since it is a piece of baseball history, but didn't make any specific promises as to how it would be presented, if at all.
I don't really understand why Bonds would think that boycotting is the way to go, but honestly I wouldn't mind if that's how it went down. Obviously I'm not alone on that either.
Bonds has said that you can't have an asterisk in baseball. I'm not entirely sure what he meant by that, but the idea seems to be that he doesn't feel that baseball history should be marked with qualifiers, and should be left pure.
I saw one interesting article that pointed out the irony of his sudden distaste for impurities in baseball.
Not surprisingly, there are some people who would side with Bonds on this.
Ultimately I don't have a problem with the ball being marked or being shown with the mark. I think it signifies the state of baseball these days, and the feelings that many people have about Barry Bonds.

To use an extreme comparison, it's not entirely unlike the Negro League displays in the Hall of Fame.
It may be tempting to pretend like that dark period of segregation never existed, but it's dishonest and important to remember.
If it turns out that Barry Bonds has never used any performance enhancing drugs, then it's unfortunate that he would become the symbol of the steroids era of baseball. At the same time, however, he has brought this upon himself to some degree, by making himself one of the most inaccessible and unlikable characters in baseball for the duration of his career.

World series

Thank god the world series is over. That was truly painful.

I don't have any particular feelings about the Sox winning, like a lot of people. I don't think their fans have become as annoying as Yankee fans, like some people claim. It would have been nice to see the Rockies win, but i knew going into it that their chances were not good, especially with that long layoff.

Mostly I'm glad it's over because it means I don't have to take in baseball games through the filter of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver anymore.

Joe Buck is not a good announcer. I'm not sure why, but I find him to be really grating. I think it's something to do with his tone (or lack thereof) and his insistance on trying to put everything in historical perspective.

Meanwhile, Tim McCarver makes Joe Buck seem like a broadcasting genius.

Tim McCarver has been one of my least favorite broadcasters for as long as I can remember. Even when i was a little kid I recognized him as being a rather lackluster broadcaster, and i know i'm not alone on this.

McCarver may be the only broadcaster about whom i have heard more people complain than either John Madden or Joe Morgan. He may also be the only broadcaster ever to be mocked by another show on the same station that employs him.

To be fair, I don't know that i could do any better, but I really think that I could offer them both some pointers that would improve their performance.

Here are some things that i would suggest:

• Think about what you're going to say, write it down, read it, think about it again, and if it still seems like it makes sense then go ahead and say it. This particularly applies to McCarver.
• Stop trying to put everything in historic perspective. I don't really care if Asdrubal Cabrera is the first ever player named Asdrubal to make a diving stop of a ground ball on the third batter of the second inning of the ALCS against a team with the word Sox in their name. If you have to add that many qualifiers to make it seem historically significant, it's probably not historically significant.
• This is a big one: Stop talking about the next game as if the current one is over. I don't care if they plug the next game, but don't assume the outcome of the current game. Any avid baseball fan will tell you that this is an extremely obnoxious thing to do. Even if the score is 15-1 with two outs in the bottom of the 9th, don't assume the win. For most baseball fans, I think this is comparable to discussing a pitcher's no-hitter while they are in the middle of it. It's a huge faux pas.

Thats really about it. If they can work on those three things, I can probably live with them for a while longer.

Bonus: three players who went to school in the area were in the world series, two of whom I played against in High School: Javier Lopez from the Sox went to Robinson; Jeff Baker from the Rockies went to Gar-Field; Joe Koshansky from the Rockies went to Chantilly.

Weeee I'm posting a video.

See? I told you.

Who are the rockies?

The Rockies are going to win the World Series. They may never lose another game, for that matter. I think the Rockies and the Patriots will need to play in the spring to determine which is the greatest team in the history of sports.

So who the heck are the Rockies? I was watching the game last night and one of my friends literally did not know that there was a baseball team in Colorado.

I think some of these sports websites need to do some sidebar profiles on the Rockies. There have been a lot of stories about how hot they are and all of that, but most of them only make a brief mention of who they are and what they did throughout the season. Most of the team is relatively unknown aside from Matt Holliday, and even he is not exactly high-profile. Seems to me that it would be in the best interest of the various media outlets to try and get people interested in the players and make some sort of attachment.

As a baseball fan it's interesting to me to see two young and relatively unknown teams going at it in the NL, but I imagine that the casual fan is asking "Why should I care? Where's Derek Jeter?"

You could definitely do entire stories about the Rockies (and the Diamondbacks and Indians, for that matter) detailing who they are and what they did this year. Failing that, however, it seems obvious to me that they should be sprinkling their stories with player profiles and highlights. Stuff like that to make the readers feel some sort of connection to the team. All I see on ESPN is pictures and highlights from the current games.

Like I said, as a devoted fan of the game I am already interested in the series. However, I recognize that a more casual fan probably feels that they are not being given any reason to care about any team other than the Red Sox, and instead are just being told to care. As if the networks (TV, print, online, etc.) are saying "this is interesting. We won't tell you why it's interesting. Just know that you are interested."

On a somewhat related note, I'm not sure how to post pictures or video on my blog.
From a technical standpoint, I know how. I'll prove it later.
The thing is that the subject matter that I'm commenting on doesn't really have videos on the net that are able to be posted to a blog. mlb.com has a bunch of videos, but I'm pretty sure they all stay on their site. I will look into that though.
The same thing goes for pictures. They're all subject to copyright laws.
I can post pictures of random things i guess, but they may not be related to my subject.
Hmm...

ESPN vs. SI

I was doing a side by side comparison this morning of some sports illustrated baseball coverage and ESPN's coverage of the same story and realized why i like ESPN so much better: they give you everything you need on one page.

SI tends to have nicer pictures, I'll give them that, but in terms of information ESPN gives you pretty much anything that you could want from a story on one page.

SI basically gives you the story, a picture or two, some links to relate stories, and maybe a table sometimes.

ESPN gives you the story, pictures, video (to be fair, SI probably can't get the rights to the video sometimes), tables, etc etc. I really like their scoring summaries and their box scores, both of which SI could definitely have. It's all factual information, so ESPN couldn't copyright it. SI would just have to find a different way to do it. Same thing with the box scores. Sure, SI links to a box score, but why not just include one at the top like ESPN does? It really doesn't need its own page.

Another thing that ESPN has that i really love is links to player data. Again, I can't see a reason why SI couldn't do something like this. On ESPN the first mention of any player's name is a hyperlink to that player's profile, which includes stats, pictures, and all sorts of stuff. I like to look at that stuff, so having the link there is very convenient. On SI you have to go back and run a search to find that information.

It seems to me that SI is really missing the boat on a lot of extra information that they could be including in their stories.

And oddly enough, despite the fact that it has way more information on the page, i find that ESPN's page design seems to look way less cluttered than SI's.

Error by omission

I was looking at a story on ESPN yesterday and noticed some glaring holes in their content. Being as the story was on the web, there were a ton of things that the story could have, or even should have included, but did not.

The story is about the Roberto Clemente award nominees, and the fact that 6 Hispanic players are nominated this year. There were a number of sidebars and such that could have added some interesting and valuable information to the story, but instead the story only included a few pictures.

First and foremost, the article says that there are 30 nominees for the award. I wanted to know who the other nominees were, since the article only names 6 of them, and I had heard Ryan Zimmerman's name thrown around. I actually searched the web for this and couldn't find it anywhere, so in all fairness it may be that the names aren't supposed to be published yet, or something.

Second, they could have included a chart of the previous winners. I remembered that Carlos Delgado won the award last year, but I'd be curious to know who the historic winners had been. This would have been a perfect opportunity for a simple table on the page, but for whatever reason there is nothing of the sort.

Finally, I don't really know that much about Roberto Clemente, since he was before my time. I know that he died in a plane crash while doing humanitarian work, and I know that he is considered one of the all-time great players, but that's about it. This article definitely could've benefitted from a timeline highlighting some of Clemente's key accomplishments.

At first i thought that maybe the extra content had been omitted because the story was from AP, but then i checked again and the story is from an ESPN Deportes writer. The only reason that I can come up with for leaving out information like that is that they thought that the page would be too cluttered. If that's the case, I think I'd have rather seen them do away with the second picture on the page and replace that with one of the tables that i suggested.
At least, that's how i would have done it.

Hello

Internet!!!