The Futility Infielder

All right, Yankee fans and readers of quality baseball writing on this here web-o-ma-phone, you've got a nice little addition to your reading list to celebrate. Steven Goldman, who writes the essential Pinstriped Bible column for the YES website, has added a new little widget, the Pinstriped Blog.

Goldman is -- and I say this with as little hyperbole as I can muster, even with the fact that I count him as a personal friend -- quite possibly the best baseball writer in the country, at least among those who have sprung forth in the era of the Internet. No partisan hack or house organist, he's been able to carve out a niche writing a column that takes an objective eye to the Yanks, and done so on George Steinbrenner's nickel. As he consistently reminds irate Yankees fans whose butts chafe at his criticisms of sacred Yankee cows such as Derek and Tino and hoary baseball myths like the importance of RBIs and pitcher Wins in player evaluation, the PB is an argument about winning baseball. Those of you who come here to enjoy smart commentary, whatever your rooting interests, have much to gain not only by making the PB a weekly stop, but by getting a daily dose via his blog.

I bring this to light not only to celebrate its presence but also to shed a little light on what's been going on in my life over the past month. Goldman, who is also an author of Baseball Prospectus, has been tapped by the BP übermenches to head up a new project:

I've been editing a new book from the Baseball Prospectus about (forgive me, Yankees fans) how the Boston Red Sox went about breaking their so-called curse and winning the World Series. We talk about where they got smart, where they got lucky, and of course we detail every one of their confrontations with the Yankees in 2004. Among other topics, we explore why the Yankees have been so successful against Pedro Martinez, why the Red Sox seem to have the key to Mariano Rivera, and how the recipe for future confrontations between these two superpowers will require the Red Sox to emulate aspects of Yankees' methodology, loathe as they might be to admit it. That will be out this spring.

Yes, the bearded YES-man is editing a book on the Red Sox, and if that isn't enough, I'm part of the project as well. That Pedro Martinez chapter he referenced is mine, and I spent a good part of December working on it, mining data via Retrosheet, going over my own blog entries about his two late-September starts against them, watching parts of those performances via MLB.tv, and bemusedly reviewing his history of outrageous Yankee-themed quotations about drilling the Bambino in the ass and calling the Yankees his daddy.

With much of BP's core staff tied up with their annual player guide, late in the game I agreed to do another chapter upon returning to NYC following the holidays, this on David Ortiz, whose career I knew much less about than Martinez's frustrated legacy against the Bronx Bombers. Regarding Cookie Monster (or Papi), Steve brought a quote of his that he referenced today to my attention for inclusion in that chapter:

"Something in my swing was not right in Minnesota," Ortiz told the Boston Globe. "I could never hit for power. Whenever I took a big swing, they'd say to me, 'Hey, hey, what are you doing?' So I said, 'You want me to hit like a little bitch, then I will.'"

Hehehe... even though the project concerns the championship victory of the team I loathe and the worst collapse in baseball history of the team I spend the most time covering, I'm incredibly grateful and excited to be part of it. It's a great story, one of the best in baseball history, and as a writer I'd be a damn fool not to put aside my own rooting interests to participate in its telling with a group of writers I admire (and earning a little scratch in the process). Not to worry, Sox fans, among BP's ranks there are plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle to insure a balanced book, and that includes editor Goldman.

That I drew a chapter in which the Yanks won most of the battles made it a little easier to swallow, as did the breaking news of Martinez's departure for Flushing Meadows. In that context, I really warmed up to Pedro, viewing the performances and antics of his Sox career in the past tense and reconstructing his season through the point of view of the chapter. Pedro the dominant pitcher of 1999-2000 bored me. Pedro of 2001-2002 just pissed me off. But the fallible Pedro of 2003-2004 is one of the more fascinating baseball characters of our lifetime, and a reminder why there's little need for fiction in baseball: the real thing provides better drama than we can possibly dream up. Red Smith had a point.

At one point during my stay in Salt Lake City, when the deadline was bearing down on me and the Cabernet from my dad's wine cellar had been especially good, I drifted off into one of those beautiful half-slumbers that I could recall later. In my dream-state, I was driving a car down a desert highway, and Pedro was riding shotgun, laughing bemusedly through his half-lidded expression as we talked about his battles with the Yankees on the field and in the media. The message, I guess, is that now that he's no longer a Red Sock, I'm free to appreciate him that much more, and I certainly do. And in a strange way, the dream and the writing brought me a kind of closure with the whole Sox win/Yanks lose angle of the past postseason. I can live with it now; the last tantrum has been thrown, the last hat stomped.

Anyway, I've probably spilled more beans about the project (not to mention my own psyche) than I should have, so I'll cut off the topic and turn my attention to Cookie Monster. Pinstriped Blog: go read now. BP Sox book: buy this spring. You have your homework.