Truck Day!

It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day. It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day It's Truck Day!

And not a goddamn day too soon.

Park Effects in Action

In an attempt to sneak a little baseball content into what is notionally a baseball blog, check out Adrian Gonzalez's 2010 spray chart from PETCO Park, superimposed over the layout of Fenway, his new home for the next zillion years:

(h/t "FoulkeHampshire")

We make that as 17 hits AGonz is picking up by virtue of his move to Boston, with probably 2/3 of those being XBH. Giggle.

The Five Stages of Being Awesome, by Manny Ramirez

1. With 1 out and runners on first and second, make improbable full stretch running catch:

2. Immediately following catch, leap over outfield wall in order to high five Red Sox fan attending game in Baltimore:



3. Remember the play is still live, throw ball into infield:



4. Double off runner at first base, ending inning:



5. Commence disco with teammate Jon Van Every, who has been called up that very day and now has a fantastic anecdote for his grandkids:



Awesome. It's the play of the year, and we're not even to Memorial Day yet.

Spring Training Thought for the Day: Eight to Grow On

Spring training has inched along from the utter meaninglessness of ping-pong and Ozzie Guillen to the merely near-total meaninglessness of games pitting big-leaguers against local colleges. These games generally serve as an autograph opportunity for the college kids, and an early tee-time opportunity for the MLB contingent. As a competitive event, they tend to end up looking something like this:

One such matchup took place today, with the defending World Champion Red Sox taking on Boston College, the defending fifth-place team from the ACC Atlantic Division. The resultant beating (22-zip Sox thru five innings) was, well, unsurprising.

However, special mention must be made of BC pitcher Steven Cadoret, who seized his opportunity to compete against the best by putting up the following line:

0.2IP 5H 8R 6ER 5BB 0K 1WP 0HR 81.00ERA

By the looks of it, "Steven Cadoret" is French for "Daniel Cabrera."

Still, though, it's a useful reminder of just how freaking good guys in the majors are. We here at the GRBG expect that Cadoret could strike us both out on no more than 7 combined pitches. Yet the big leaguers are even better than he is, and by an order of magnitude. This is why we mainly stick to the fantasy advice.

Spring Training Thought for the Day: Cross-Training Can Be Valuable

Spring training is nothing if not grueling. Here Dustin Pedroia of the Red Sox wisely prepares for the coming Red Chinese invasion by brushing up on his ping-pong skills in a game against Kevin Youkilis. Which makes the whole thing worse, because the only part of Youkilis that has any chance of being in shape at this point in the season is his goatee.

Anybody else ready for the games to start?

(Photo credit Jim Davis of the Boston Globe; image originally posted here.)

Spring Training Thought for the Day: Everybody Dance!

Possible captions:

• Members of the Boston Red Sox demonstrate skills they learned during their offseason exhange program with the Bolshoi Balllet.
• Here come the Sharks/like a bat out of hell!
• Straight as a bunch of French horns.

Man, how can you not love spring training?

(Photo credit Jim Davis of the Boston Globe, image originally posted here.)

The Assimilation of Dice-K

Even though Daisuke Matsuzaka has only been in Boston for a single season, he seems to be acclimatizing nicely. He's adjusting his training regimen to better accommodate the demands of the U.S. game, and is feeling more comfortable addressing the media.

And oh, yeah--per the photo in the Boston Globe article linked above, he's also grown a mullet:

Look at that baby! That's the finest Boston sports mullet since Zho-ay Zhu-neau's heyday in the early '90s. And even more impressively, look how far he's come since his arrival in Boston last winter:

The Eastern European tight puffy coat of yore has been replaced with the glorious, flowing hair-neck so characteristic of Trans-Am drivers from Revere. By next year, Dice-K will be buying party-balls of Coors Light from Cumberland Farms, and by the end of his contract he'll be a racist douche just like the rest of RSN. One. Of. Us. One. Of. Us. . . .

Why Not To Sign Pitchers Long-Term Contracts

After "pass[ing] all physical exams and testing, as well as the MRI the club required [him] to take" [link] in the course of the negotiations, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling now has been diagnosed by one doctor as having a shoulder tendon made of pasta. No, really:

Dr. Craig Morgan said yesterday [that] "Instead of being a single tendon, it's like three pieces of spaghetti or linguine, and when that happens it's end-stage disease in the tendon."

Manchester Union Leader article
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Leave aside the bite this injury takes out of Boston's starting pitching depth this year, and focus on what it means for the blood pressure levels of major league general managers like Theo Epstein. The Red Sox had multiple doctors examine Schilling before signing him to his most recent one-year contract. Yet the shoulders of pitchers are complicated to the point where those doctors all missed a frayed tendon that apparently resembled a plate of bucatini al'amatriciana. And this was an injury that was at least theoretically detectable at the time of the exam--most pitching injuries aren't.

This is all by way of a reminder that building a major-league pitching staff is an inherently fluky process. Even X-rays and MRIs can't give GM's the information they need to make informed decisions about pitchers, and its starting to look like the only technological advancement that would really make the nut is a time machine. As a result, I'm sure the Yankees have Dr. Emmett Brown sequestered away in a fallout shelter under the Bronx County Courthouse. But until he hits pay dirt, the randomness factor of pitcher injuries is going to throw some real- and fantasy-league teams into chaos every year.
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I suppose that's part of the fun. But it sure as hell makes it harder to fill out a keeper list.

GOULET! Goulet? Hey, Goulet? Oh, Sh*t...

Just a brief request to pour some out for Robert Goulet, who passed away today after kicking the Red Sox off on their World Series run by singing "The Impossible Dream" on Opening Day. Next year, the Sox should finish off Michael Flatley by having him dance with Jon Papelbon on Opening Day.

That Word...I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Colorado Rockies owner Charlie Monfort has already demonstrated an inclination towards reality-avoidance, as epitomized by his claim that "Christians, and what they've endured, are some of the strongest people in baseball." Because, you know, Christian ballplayers endure a lot as famous, wealthy members of the dominant religion in America.

However, Charlie has outdone himself with this pronouncement in the wake of Colorado's sack-drowning at the hands of the Red Sox in this year's Series:

"These guys did amazing things," Monfort said. "I think this team is a better team than Boston. It would have been nice to have another two, three, four days. We'll wake up tomorrow and go, 'There's no baseball game to go to,' but what a deal they did. It's an amazing thing they accomplished just to get here."

That statement is, if you think about it, fairly genius. Follow the chain: Christians are strong and awesome; the Rockies are Christian; therefore the Rockies must be strong and awesome. External data proving or disproving the chain is unnecessary (and possibly immoral).

That is a pretty damn good way of preempting questions about the WS loss: "Charlie, can you explain why your team was swept?" "They weren't swept. In Heaven, that is. Down here, results were more equivocal."

So here's to you, Mr. Monfort. Would that we all could selectively deny reality like you. The world would be a much more interesting place.

Three Trades Both Teams Lost

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Tonight, millions of sports fans around the country will sit down to enjoy Game 1 of this year's World Series between the Colorado Rockies of Jesus and the Everyone Hates Boston Red Sox. Given the disparity in the two teams' history, payroll, and fanbase, most of the focus during the telecast is going to be on the differences between the clubs.
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But that focus overlooks the odd bond between the Rox and Sox: they have partnered in exactly three trades, all of which qualify as among the most pointless in major league history. We here at the GRBG are nothing if not completists, so we thought we'd break these dispensible trades down in unnecessary detail. Onward!

1) July 27, 2000: Colorado trades Rolando Arrojo, Rich Croushore, Mike Lansing, and cash to the Red Sox for Jeff Frye, Brian Rose, John Wasdin, and Jeff Taglienti (minors).
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So the biggest name in that trade is . . . Rolando Arrojo, I guess? And that's really just because he was the Jose Contreras of his time, drawing a lot of interest when he came over to the States after defecting from Cuba. Let's briefly run down the post-trade feats of each player, shall we?

• Rolando Arrojo: Immediately after the trade, started 13 games for the Sox, putting up an ERA of 5.05 while the Sox fell from 2.5 GB to 9 GB in a span of 6 weeks. Pitched two more seasons out of the bullpen and was out of baseball after 2002.
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• Rich Croushore: I have been a Red Sox fan all my life, and I have never heard of this pinwheel. Threw 4.2 innings for the Sox, and never played in the big leagues again. Last seen selling crop insurance outside of Alliance, Nebraska (maybe).
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• Mike Lansing: Put up an unfathomable line of .194 /.230/.223 for the rest of the '00 season. For the sabermetrically inclined, that works out to an OPS+ of 14, meaning he was 86% less valuable than the average major league hitter. Or, looked at another way, only 14% more effective at the plate than a cadaver would have been, with arguably less range than the cadaver in the field. Sox fans hated him at a near-Jack Clarkian level.
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• Jeff Frye: Actually played pretty well for Colorado after the trade, but was not re-signed, and was out of the majors after the '01 season. The major career event on his wikipedia page? "On August 31, 2001 at a game in the SkyDome, aphids were in the ballpark causing him to wear a mask on his face for the whole game." While that's an ignominious way to be remembered, it does make him smarter than Joba Chamberlain.
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• Brian Rose: One of the many, many failed Red Sox pitching prospects to come along between Clemens and Papelbon. Appeared in all of 12 games for Colorado.

• John Wasdin: Still referred to by Red Sox fans as either "Way Back" Wasdin or "White Flag" Wasdin. Pictured at right in his Yomiuri Giants uniform. 'Nuff said.

2) December 19, 2001: Colorado trades Pokey Reese to the Red Sox for Scott Hatteberg.

Arguably the single most pointless trade in MLB history, as on December 21, 2001, just two days after the trade was made, both Reese and Hatteberg were released by their new employers.

Reese was released because the Red Sox belatedly realized that they did not want to risk going to arbitration with him. Hatteberg was released because . . . well, I don't know frankly. Still, when a trade results in an aggregate zero games played and 4 days of service time for its participants, it can pretty safely be characterized as dispensible, even if each player subsequently gained a measure of fame (Hatteberg for his portrayal in "Moneyball"; Reese for his status as mascot on the 2004 WS champion Red Sox).

3) March 30, 2005: Boston trades Byun-Hyung Kim and cash to the Rockies for Charles Johnson and Chris Narveson.

Ah yes, the day Theo took poor B-H Kim out back behind the barn for tea, sympathy, and a shotgun blast to the nape of the neck. Kim gets a bad rap for his late-season failings in Boston in '03; Grady Little pretty much wore Kim's arm down to a nub because he didn't trust any of his other relievers. Perhaps unsurpisingly, then, Kim was never an above-average pitcher in 2.5 years with Colorado.

Showing the increase in their internal efficiency under the Epstein regime, the Sox released Charles Johnson on the same day he was acquired, lowering the Reese record by two days. Narveson also never played for the Sox.

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So there you have it: three trades, involving 12 players, that yielded a total of about 8 remarkably undistinguished seasons. If that history is any indication, this year's World Series will have the entertainment value of a Princeton-Georgetown football game, and possibly comparable ratings as well. Let's all pray these teams think of something else to do over the next 10 days other than play Pass the Trash.

Perhaps We've Been Too Subtle . . .

As we draw towards the close of 2007, two trends have become increasingly apparent to observant Americans: (1) the country is going to hell in a handbasket, courtesy of a cabal of deranged Southerners; and (2) Boston sports teams are threatening to dominate as they have never dominated before. What most Americans don't seem to have realized, however, is that these two trends are inextricably linked. Consider the following:

For many years, Massholes had a disproportionately large voice in the federal government. From JFK and RFK in the executive branch, to Teddy Kennedy in the Senate, to Tip O'Neill in the House, prominant Bostonians drank and philandered their ways through years of power and influence in Washington. The country responded by strengthening civil rights for women and minorites, expanding the social safety net, winning the Cold War, and implementing new rules designed to liberalize the passing game in pro football. Life was good.

The tradeoff, however, was obvious: in return for heightened political influence, Boston agreed to throw the athletic competitions that mattered most to conservative yahoos. Thus, for forty years the Patriots were incompetent, the Red Sox infuriating, and big-time college sports non-existent. Even the Celtics agreed to use only white players, though that one backfired. (The Bruins were left alone, because nobody cares about placating the Canadians.)

Now, however, we've been subjected to seven years of governance by residents of the South and Mountain West, who have done much to reverse the works of the Masshole years. Boston's influence at the federal level is at its lowest ebb. The result? The Patriots have won 3 Super Bowls in the GWB era, and are in prime position to win another. The Red Sox have won a World Series, and have a good chance to win another. The Celtics have added many large Negroes. (The Bruins remain anonymous. Still don't care about Canada.)

Still, the Southerners appear not to have noticed that Boston is trying to take away all that they hold athletically dear. Therefore, we've been forced to install Boston Freaking College as the #4 college football team in the country. Think about it, yahoos. College football is all you have left. Don't make us take that away as well. We're willing to let BC sink back down into the comfortable anonymity of Sweet 16 appearances, Frozen Four runs, and Meineke Car Care Bowl titles. But we need some reciprocity.

This is your last warning. If stuff doesn't start changing, and soon, not only will BC win the national title, but we'll be sending down Tom Brady to perform gay marriage ceremonies for your sons, Matt Ryan to perform abortions on your daughters, and Kevin Garnett to expand every single one of your wives' horizons. Let no one say they were not warned.

Hello, My Name Is Jose and I Will Be Your Batterer This Evening

Former Boston second baseman Jose Offerman, best known to Sox fans for his hands of stone, feet of lead, and contract of purest albatross, now has a new claim to fame: batshit crazy mound-charger.

The picture above is of Offerman, who is now playing for the Long Island Ducks of the independent Greater Southern New England Baseball and Pie Eating League (aka the Atlantic League). He was hit in the leg by a pitch in last night's game against the Bridgeport Bluefish. After undoubtedly running through an extensive decision tree, Offerman settled on responding by bringing his bat out to the mound to give the pitcher a taste of the good life.

First things first, I have to admire Jose's form on his forehand approach shot here. Racquet back, good shoulder turn, stepping into the ball nicely, all first-rate stuff. I think he was going for a slice shot out wide to his opponent's backhand, but instead had to settle for breaking the middle finger on the pitcher's non-throwing hand and accidentally concussing the opposing catcher on his backswing.

Jose's groundstrokes now supplant Izzy Alcantara's steroid-fueled karate kick as the greatest mound charge in late-90's-related Sox history. One wonders what the next step will be. If in a couple of years Brian Daubach brings a MAC-10 out to the mound with him in a charity softball game in Conestoga, it will officially be time to check the walls of the Fenway clubhouse for lead paint.

Bill Simmons' Book Is Murdering the Sox

On July 12th, Bill Simmons, who is everyone's favorite Boston-centric sports columnist (except for those for whom he is their least-favorite Boston-centric sports columnist) announced that he is writing a mystery book of some sort.

Speculation on the book's topic has ranged from a history of the NBA from the Magic-Bird Era onward, to an explanation of how it is acceptable to record a rambling, 52-minute conversation with your best friend and then release it as "entertainment", to a devastating deconstruction of Samuel Huntington's controversial political science treatise "The Clash of Civilizations."

All of that is kind of besides the point given that, whatever the topic, Simmons' book has already done more damage than the Necronomicon. On July 12th, when Simmons made the announcement, the AL East standings were:

Boston:........54-34 --
New York:...44-43 9.5

As of today, the standings are:

Boston:........71-47 --
New York:...67-51 4.0

Not content with merely sabotaging the Red Sox, the book has also apparently turned Eric Gagne into Heathcliff Slocumb, and may have actually killed a member of Eric Hinske's family.

So it looks like Simmons has managed to join Matt Damon on my Boston celebrity lead pipe list for the season. On behalf of Sox fans everywhere, I call upon Damon to STFU, Simmons to postpone the book until Bruins' season, and all other tangentially famous Massholes (I'm looking at you, here, Mariano) to just sit quietly, until the threat has passed, for God's sake.

I realize this is all teetering dangerously close to stereotypical Boston panic-mongering, but I don't terribly much care. I'll be rational tomorrow; right now I am fearful and atavistic, like a retard in a thunderstorm. Let's just win another one tonight and get me back off the ledge, OK?

If It Takes You 86 Years to Beat Them, Join Them

By trading for Eric Gagne today, the Red Sox have made it clear that they've decided to try to win it all this year by copying the model of, oddly enough, the 1996 Yankees.

That Yankees team won it all behind two elite playoff starters (David Cone and Andy Pettitte), and a lights-out back of the bullpen that featured Mariano Rivera setting up John "Protected" Wetteland. Together, those two guys functionally lopped the last two innings off playoff games, and put a ton of pressure on opposing offenses to score early.

Those four pitchers were good enough to lift an otherwise average offense to a title. The Yankees team OPS+ for the season was only 99, and New York finished 9th in the American League in runs scored with 871, 162 behind the league-leading Mariners. Heck, the team's highest-paid hitter (and highest-paid overall player, in fact) was midseason acquisition Cecil Fielder, who would be edged permanently out of the league and wedged permanently into a booth at Stuckey's just two seasons later.

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The Sox already had two elite postseason starters in Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling (with, I suppose, Dice-K filling the Jimmy Key role if you want to push the analogy). With the Gagne trade, the Sox now can alternate Gagne and Hideki Okajami in the Rivera/setup role, and reduce some of the wear and tear on Wetteland clone Jon Papelbon. It's sort of a neat approach, and is a very different way of constructing a team than the Sox' pre-Theo method of assembling 9 guys the size of Jack Clark and turning them loose on the league.

Also, as is obvious from the picture at left, the Sox can also now platoon Gagne and Julian Tavarez at Designated Ugly Guy. That platoon will probably be enough to lead the league in ugly now that Randy Johnson is out for the season.

But the really cool part is that the Sox likely didn't give up much to get Gagne. Kason Gabbard aspires to have Aaron Sele's mid-period career as a starter who varied between acceptable and useful, depending on whether he could thrown his big curveball for strikes. David Murphy is a tweener OF who has Terrence Long on his list of BP comps.

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And Engel Beltre is . . . well, nobody knows exactly what he is. He's all of 17, and apparently is toolsy. That's not all that helpful, of course--Toe Nash was toolsy as hell, and I believe that at the moment he's a part-time crab shucker in Bogalusa.

At any rate, it looks like Sox are going to hope that their offense, which is much weaker than the '03-'05 editions that made it to the playoffs, can outscore their opponents if it has a two-inning head start. I have to say, that makes a certain amount of sense.

Very Occasionally, I Am Wrong

Just last week I saddled and mounted my high horse in order to mock El Ang's pickup of Coco Crisp in our fantasy league. My rationale at the time was:

Coco's BAs by month since coming to Boston, starting with the most recent (and counting only those months with more than 100 PA):

.235/.224/.235/.241/.243/.278

Over that length of time, suck tends to find its own level. At this point, "forever" translates roughly to "as soon as we think the bigs won't cripple the psyche of Jacoby Ellsbury".

Compelling stuff. But how did Coco respond? By throwing up a line of .433/.456/.750, including three dingers in the recent series in Atlanta, since Ang plucked him off the scrap heap.

As I mentioned before, the guys at SoSH have done yeoman's work in this thread breaking down some changes Coco has made to his stance recently. Either those changes are working like ganagbusters, or we need to sign whichever Gold Club dancer has managed to put the Electric back in Coco's Slide. Perhaps Mystique and Aura have a place on the Red Sox after all.

Hubris In Action (or, Why Matt Damon Should Be Encouraged to Shut the F@#$ Up)

For those who may have missed it, on June 5th Matt Damon appeared on Letterman in full Red Sox regalia and proceeded to taunt the dynamite monkey that is the New York Yankees:



For those who can't view the above, here's a link.

In many ways, that's a pretty genius two minutes of comedy. I think it's safe to say that Damon didn't co-write that material with Ben "Aspiring .Sully" Affleck. I especially enjoy the part where Damon notes that if the Yankees beat the Sox ten more times, they'd still be in second place.

However.

Jesus, Matt, couldn't you just let it be? Couldn't you just limit yourself to checking espn.com's standings page in the morning and basking in its warming glow? Couldn't you occupy yourself by heading over to NYY Fans and giggling at the masses clamoring for A-Rod's head? Because since you decided to give in to temptation and let the Yankees have it with both barrels, the A.L. East standings have gone from this:

1st Boston............37 20 --
4th NY Yankees ...24 31 11.5

to this:

1st Boston............41 24 --
2nd NY Yankees ..33 31 7.5

I mean, seriously, Matt, cut the shit. That's 9 wins in a row for New York, their longest such streak since 2005.

I want to make it clear that we here at the GRBG do not believe in curses, whether theoretically applied by an all-time baseball great, or by the star of such motion pictures as Stuck on You. Purported curses have been used to excuse all manner of incompentence and bigotry over the course of the years, and we want no part of perpetuating the myth of their existence.

However.

The ancient Greeks used the term hubris to denote the concept of a mortal who oversteps by thinking himself to be above his station. For example, it would probably be an act of hubris on my part not to defer to my close personal friend Aristotle's explanation of the concept and its dangers:

[Hubris is] to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. . . . As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater. (per Wikipedia)

That's good stuff, there. Fucking Affleck didn't get anywhere near that shit, either. And it's a dead-on description of Damon's rant.
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So, what happens to those who anger the gods through an act of hubris. Well, the classic example is Icarus, son of Daedelus, who crafted working wings out of feathers and wax. Icarus took the wings made by Daedelus, but got overconfident and flew too close to the sun which melted the wax and caused him to do a fatal Quintuple Lindy into the sea.

Now, I'm not suggesting that either Matt Damon or the 2007 Red Sox are about to plunge into the sea (though if Julio Lugo and his .587 OPS want to take a hop off the Zakim Bridge, we won't stop him). They have plenty of pitching, and the perverse advantage of having two glaring lineup holes (Lugo and Coco Crisp) that they can try to plug going forward (it's actually easier to fix big, isolated problems than it is to improve a team being held back by slight across-the-board underpeformance. This is why the stars and scrubs strategy works well in fantasy leagues.) Also, it's unlikely that the Yankees will continue winning every game they play.

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However.

However...

Justify Your Existence

The recent passing of David Halberstam led me to re-read The Teammates, Halberstam's book about the friendship between 1940's-era Red Sox Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom (Not the Misanthropic One) DiMaggio. The book was written in the twilight of Halberstam's career, and his realization of that fact lent itself well to the overall elegaic tone of the book, which ends with Williams's death in 2003.

Upon re-reading, however, I was actually most fascinated by the book's appendix, which contains career stats for each of the four teammates. More specifically, Williams's 1941 season jumped out at me in a way it hadn't before. Just about every serious baseball fan knows that 1941 was one of the great seasons in baseball history, the year in which Williams hit .406 and threw in a walk-off home run in the All-Star game for good measure, but lost the MVP vote to Joe (Very Much the Misanthropic One) DiMaggio and his 56-game hit streak.

But I hadn't gone back to look at that season since the mainstreaming of sabermetric analysis changed the way we (or at least I) look at stats. Two things from the stat line in Halbertsam's book really stood out once I looked over it with a more modern eye.

First of all, Williams's slash line that year was .406/.553/.735, for a neat little OPS of 1288, and an OPS+ of 235 (league average OPS+ is set at 100, and the stat adjusts for ballpark and era). Barry Bonds and his pharmacist have since teamed up to better those numbers, but they're still boggling to see in print. An OPS+ of 235 means that Williams's bat was more than twice as valuable than that of a league average player that season. That's insane.

But not quite as insane as the second point, which is one that I'd never quite realized before: Williams put up that line in his age-22 season. Twenty-mother-fucking-two.

Can you imagine the media frenzy that would erupt now if some 22 year-old kid showed up and hit .400? Peter Gammons would have (another) stroke. John Kruk's ball would ascend into his abdomen. Joe Morgan would criticize the kid for clogging up the bases (OK, so some things would stay the same). Just for reference, here are the age-22 seasons of some recent phenoms:

Ken Grffey, Jr.: .308 /.361 /.535 (OPS+ 148)
Albert Pujols: .314 /.394 /.561 (OPS+ 155)
Miguel Cabrera: .323 /.385/ .561 (OPS + 151)

Nifty and all, but not even close to Ted's season. That kind of work is essentially unprecedented and unduplicated for that point in the development curve (which tends to peak around age 27 for ballplayers as a population).

So, what does all this have to do with a fantasy baseball blog? Well, not a ton, honestly. But I think there is something here that points to the allure of fantasy baseball. I can't think of another sport where someone can get a real charge out of looking over a line in a player's career stats.

This is not a particularly original thought, but the historical language of baseball is numbers. Similarly, the language of fantasy baseball is almost entirely numbers (except here at the GRBG, where it's a mix of numbers and dick jokes). That means there's an overlap between an appreciation of the history of real baseball and an appreciation of the here-and-now of fantasy baseball that I think a lot of people undersell. And that's why we here at the GRBG don't mind focusing so heavily on fantasy stuff--at the end of the day, it's all just thinking about baseball.

I recognize that, coming as it does on the heels of Ang's increasingly influential Derby previews, this post makes a bunch of quasi-serious ones in a row. Accordingly, the GRBG promises that the next post will contain at least one Ryan "The Cum" Dempster joke to compensate. You gotta know your strengths.

Three Names Aren't Enough

Wily Mo Pena is rapidly turning into one of my favorite Red Sox players. He appears to have been created in a laboratory somewhere in the Dominican Republic by scientists who had no ethical qualms about taking a four year-old and pumping him full of Martian DNA, veterinary supplements, and arroz con pollo.

Wily Mo won last night's game against Baltimore by hitting a towering grand slam that probably triggered alarms at NORAD. His demeanor during the resultant trip around the bases resembled that of a fat kid in elementary school who just whaled a home run in kickball. The entertainment value of the whole 30 seconds or so was off the charts. I almost wore out both my TiVo clicker and my fiancee's patience re-watching it.

That's why we here at the GRBG have decided that even the three names bestowed on Wily Mo Pena by his parents are insufficient to fully describe his awesomeness. A nickname of some sort is in order. We'll put forward a couple of possibilities that are floating around out there. Vote early and often on your favorite, and I'll start campaigning for it to be used by the gang at SoSH (who, incidentally, came up with my favorite nickname ever, re-christening Mark Bellhorn "Bartleby" for his habit of "prefering not to" swing at nearly every pitch that came his way). Feel free to suggest others as well. Onwards.

"Cerrano"

This one is probably the most obvious. Like Pedro Cerrano, the slugger from Major League, Wily Mo very much hit straight ball, but his bat is scared of curve ball. At press time there was no word whether Wily Mo's dinger last night was prefaced by a formal rejection of his ancestors' voodoo god, but logic almost demands that such a rejection in fact took place.

Pros: Kind of looks like Cerrano; nickname would pay proper homage to what many consider to be the best Charlie Sheen/Corbin Bernson movie ever made.

Cons: Could lead Wily Mo into a second career as a fictional President of the United States. While I don't deny the entertainment value inherent in that, it would probably distract Wily Mo from his slugging.

"Super Genius"

I've seen this one floated in a couple of different places. The hook is the Wily/Wile E. pun, so you see where they're coming from. Also, as noted above, Wily Mo's emotional age appears to have been stunted at around 8 or so, probably as a side effect of the Dominican scientific communities actions as described above, so the Looney Tune seems appropriate.

Pros: Wile E. Coyote is awesome. When Ang and I take over the world and the GRBG is transformed into our version of Pravda, we will immediately publish a strip showing Wile E. catching, cooking, consuming, and excreting that hot-dogging roadrunner. Beep beep that.

Cons: In the current version of reality, Wile E. is kind of a loser. Wily Mo shouldn't be saddled with negative karma like that. Also, it seems kind of mean to assign the "Super Genius" label to Wily Mo, because he might think we seriously believe his IQ is above 180--there doesn't appear to be a real deep understanding of irony there. "Super Genius" might work better on a player who is dumb, but knows it, and is therefore in on the joke. Jon Papelbon, we are looking in your direction.

"Di-di Mao Pena"

This is what I've taken to screaming at the TV when Wily Mo does something good. It comes from the russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, where Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro exchange the tick-iest line deliveries in in the history of the Western cinema. Facing Wily Mo is a pitcher's equivalent of russian roulette: the majority of the time you'll win by striking him out, but the occasional losses tend to be painful.

Pros: "Di-di Mao Pena" retains the wonderful cadence of Wily Mo's given name. Phrase used in an episode of The Simpsons, which is always good for bonus points. Fun to yell "di-di mao!" at the screen when Wily Mo comes to the plate.

Cons: Well, shit, it comes from a russian roulette scene in a movie about the Vietnam War. Not exactly the feel-good cultural reference of the year. Reference is probably dated at this point.

An Act of Felix

It's time to muster the terrible might of the Interwebs to right a baseball wrong. I submit that despite their loss at the hands of Felix Hernandez last week, the Red Sox should be credited with a sweep of their recent homestand. To do anything less would be to thwart the awesome power of Almighty Jeebus. Stay with me, here.

Hernandez's one-hit demolition of the Sox looks more and more impressive now that we have a little bit of distance on it. In their four wins over the course of a recent five-game homestand against the Seatttle Mariners and the Aztlan Angels, the Red Sox scored 14, 10, 8, and 7 runs. But in the game against Hernandez, they barely got the ball out of the infield. Here's what I wrote about Felix before this season started:

I don’t think anyone expected an ERA+ of 96 out of Felix last year. That led to a lot of hand-wringing last year about why Felix underperformed expectations. It seems like the answer seems a combination of bad luck, bad pitch selection, and an increase in FB rate that led to an unhealthy HR rate early in the season.

Felix’s bad luck is shown most clearly by the gap between his ERA and his xFIP. Felix’s xFIP was 3.56, second in the AL behind only Johan Santana. Given that the M’s play in a pitchers’ park and have a pretty good defensive club, that nearly full-run gap between results and expected results is really surprising.

Felix reported to camp this year between 20 and 30 pounds lighter, depending on who you believe, so it looks as though he’s determined to do what he can to keep himself healthy. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be a top 5 starter in the league this year.

So, at this point it's pretty clear that he was just sandbagging last year, doing the baseball version of wandering in the desert. This year, given that his ERA so far is 0.00, he has apparently chosen to assert his infallibitity. While it's been a while since I went to CCD, I'm 98% sure that infallibility is the exclusive domain of God. Thus, Felix clearly is seated as the right arm of the Father, and is himself a god. (A god. Not the God).

That's why I'm decreeing that the Sox' loss to Seattle wasn't really a loss at all, but rather an Act of God accomplished through His only begotten right arm, Felix Hernandez. The Red Sox should not be held accountable for bowing to the will of the Almighty. Hell, they should be rewarded for that kind of thing. Therefore, major league baseball should immediately declare the Sox the winner of the game, giving them a clean sweep for the homestand. I assume that Felix and the Mariners care not for these Earthly concerns, so that shouldn't be a problem. This seems like a win-win to me: the Sox get an actual win, and Felix gets the pub he deserves for being a divine being. Let's get started on this, people.

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P.S.: Bonus points to whoever can explain to me why the above Jesus jersey has a number 7 on the back. I could see 12. I could see 3. I could even see a little sideways 8/infinity sign. But I'm stumped by 7. Theories?