The Futility Infielder

Not that I'm complaining about the eventual outcome, which looks quite rosy, but if all the time that I've been devoting to wedding-related activities could be put towards my writing, I could have started a blog... or a book. But rather than kvetching, I'll just offer a few quick hits for your reading pleasure:

• Reason #265 whiy I love New York City: the day after I wrote my 10th anniversary piece, I was wandering the East Village with an old friend in town for my bachelor party. We were waiting to cross at a light, and I looked down at one of those plastic boxes for those community magazines, the kind that sit next to the more prestigious Onion and Village Voice boxes. Atop of one was a dog-eared but intact paperback copy of The Lords of the Realm, John Helyar's look at the history of baseball's power elite. I haven't read it, but I've been meaning to since coming across his quoting of Charlie Finley ("Make 'em all free agents!") came up as I was writing the David Ortiz chapter of Baseball Prospectus' book on the Red Sox this winter. By the looks of that price at Amazon, Lords is not the easiest book to find these days -- my copy says $6.99, that one and the one at BN.com, both with the same covers and pub dates, are going for $29. Score!

I used to joke that as I walked down the streets of this city, books and CDs would stick to me as if they naturally belonged in my hands. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have proof (and a witness) that this is true.

• There's plenty of good stuff from Rich Lederer at his new Baseball Analysts home. Last week's long-awaited three-part interview with Bill James made for some fine reading. In the lightning round, Lederer offered James the names of a handful of players for some free associaton. My favorite response was about Rickey Henderson, whose career might best be summed up by the quote about him in the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: "If you could split him in two, you'd have two Hall of Famers." Here's what he told Lederer:

Rickey is one of a kind. Someone should write a really good book about Rickey. There is an essential connection between ego and greatness and no one better illustrated that than Rickey. When Rickey is 52, he will still believe that he could play in the majors. You can say that his ego is out of scale to his real world, but his ego is what made him so special. Somebody should document mannerisms and Rickey was a walking catalog of annoying mannerisms. He was a show. Every at-bat was a show. It's not like a Reggie Jackson show where it's done for television. It's a live show. It's done for the guys in the ballpark and the guys on the field. The show made him totally unique.

Here's hoping somebody gets on that Rickey bio. I'd read it.

This week Lederer brings us a tale of the time his father managed the Dodgers for a day. George Lederer was a baseball writer for the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram (is that a mouthful?). On March 7, 1964, he and Dodger manager Walter Alston swapped places for an intrasquad game, with Lederer managing one side and Alston filing the game report to the I-PT.

It's a good thing neither man quit his day job. Lederer's team lost 6-2, while Alston showed himself to be something other than the second coming of Red Smith. Still, the Dodger skip delighted in watching the writer's gaffes. He managed to get off a couple of good lines, and took great pleasure in recounting an on-field practical joke of which his replacement was the butt:

Before the game, Lederer reminded me a lot of Pee Wee Reese. Maybe it was because Lederer wore Reese's old jersey. Come to think of it, there couldn't have been another reason.

One of the writers said, "Lederer in uniform reminds me more of Captain Kangaroo."

One of the contributing factors to Lederer's defeat might have been in the fourth inning when he was a victim of a prank by Pete Reiser, his own coach.

The score was 2-2 with the Collier Cats batting, none out and a runner on first base. Derrell Griffith of the Cats grounded to the right side and collided with Dick Tracewski, the second baseman who was covering first.

Griffith and Tracewski lay sprawled. Neither moved a muscle. Lederer, deep in thought, didn't move either until Reiser yelled to the dugout: "Hey, Lederer, get some water. Hurry."

Lederer panicked. Not knowing whether to bring the hose or a bucket, he fumbled, finally filled a Dixie cup with water and ran to the scene.

"Where do you want it, Pete?" Lederer asked. "Give it to me, and hurry," yelled Reiser. Then Pete drank the water and added a polite, "Thanks."

Photos and the complete article are available at the site. Thanks for sharing, Rich!

• Back in the day, the Detroit's' Bobby Higginson was a pretty good outfielder, peaking with a .300/.377/.538 season in 2000, his age-29 season. To that point, he'd hit .281/.367/.489 in his career, all of it with the Tigers. Just prior to the beginning of the 2001 season, he signed a four-year, $35.4 million contract extension to take him through 2005.

Then, Higginson's career fell off a cliff. He's hit only .260/.347/.406 the past four years, and his decline, coupled with that immovable contract, has made the Tigers' woes that much worse.

Reading this column, it's apparent that the zombie takeover of Bobby Higginson is complete; I now pronounce him officially undead. Check this quote:

"You have to hit for average. That's what people get caught up in. There's only one Oakland A's team out there that really cares about on-base percentage. It looks better if you're hitting .300 and getting on base .320, than if you're hitting .260 and getting on base .360."

Higginson was third on the Tigers last year with a .353 on-base percentage, but hit only .246.

Eeeeech. Slow, aging outfielder with moderate plate discipline decides to discard the only skill that's keeping him in the big leagues. Two words for Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski: sunk cost.

• Not that it's a challenge to find the anti-Moneyball backlash, of course. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting some of the ignorati. Why, here's Chris Dufresne in the L.A. Times:

OBP (on-base percentage). Somewhere between Bill James and "Moneyball," the OBP overtook ERA in a palace coup to become baseball's most elite statistic.

Oh, and it could lead to the Dodgers' ruination.

OBP is based on the total of hits, walks and hit by pitches divided by total at-bats, walks hit by pitches and sacrifice flies — kind of sticks in your throat, doesn't it?

The theory on OBP is you can trade star players for a bunch of slap hitters who work every count to 3 and 2.

Some believe OBP is a code word for "cheapskate ownership."

Ba-dum-pum. Presumably, Dufresne's working the Laff Hut out on Route 21; he'll be there all week. Try the veal...

• It's not the Moneyball A's, but it's still the green and gold... and the silver and black. Rebels of Oakland is an hour-long HBO documentary on the colorful A's and Raiders teams of the 1970s. I missed it during its first airing a couple of months back, but I was psyched to find it on HBO In Demand while doing some late-night channel-surfing this past week.

The doc alternates the sagas of the two teams as they rose to their championships, providing ample footage of both as well as latter-day interviews done in a manner similar to ESPN's SportsCentury series. On the Raiders side, you get to see one of the most vicious, ugliest defenses known to man and NFL Films. Ben Davidson, John Matuszak, Ted "The Stork" Hendricks, George Atkinson, Jack "The Assassin" Tatum and some of the most devastating hits on wide receivers and QBs you've ever seen, plus quarterback Kenny "The Snake" Stabler, wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff (covered in gobs of stickum) and coach John Madden in all of his weird, sideline-pacing glory.

On the A's side, you get Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers in their early primes helping the A's to three straight World Championships from 1972 to 1974. You also get to see the madness that was Charlie O. Finley, who paid his players extra to grow mustaches and hired Stanley Burrell, the future MC Hammer (!), as his teenage executive VP; from Chicago, Finley would keep tabs on the team via phone to Burrell, his eyes and ears in the clubhouse.

As the voiceover (done by stalwart narrator Liev Schreiber) discussed Finley's antics, I thought of what an impression he must have made on the relatively naive (in a baseball sense) George Steinbrenner. Think about it: Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1972, when a tyrannical owner was at the sport's pinnacle. Soon enough, Steinbrenner was bullying his players and managers publicly as they won their own titles.

The difference, in a nutshell, is that Finley was a man who knew baseball talent himself; he served as his own GM and oversaw the development of that homegrown talent. But he was a miser who refused to reward his players for their successes on the field, and his breach of Catfish Hunter's contract ushered in a new era of upwardly spiraling salaries. At the other end was Steinbrenner, unflinchingly willing to pay top dollar for talent, but lacking -- to this day, some would say -- any real understanding of how to evaluate it. There's a book in there somewhere, too.

If you've got HBO, find time to watch this one.

• Heh, I love a good trainwreck, so I can't wait to see how this comes out in the wash...