The Futility Infielder

It's that time of year again, where I'm obsessively keeping track of four different games, and not even travel can tear me away from the action. I spent the past weekend in Washington, DC, but baseball was never far from my field of vision or my consciousness.

On Friday night, Andra and I paid a visit to her friend high school friend Joe and his family (wife and two little kids). We went to a burger joint in Bethesda for dinner, where the TV was running the Yankees-Blue Jays game with the sound off. I was vaguely aware that the Yanks put four runs on the board in the first inning off of Ted Lilly. Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano led off the Yankee first with back-to-back homers off of Lilly, who's been downright brutal this year (his ERA is now up to 5.72) after two pretty good years in Oakland and Toronto.

Lilly didn't even make it out of the second inning, but by then I was more absorbed in the company of my hosts. Back at their place, kids in bed, beers in hand in front of a massive 36" TV complete with DVR and the Extra Innings package, we chatted for a couple of hours while flipping through the late innings of the Yankee game, the Mets-Nationals game, Red Sox-Orioles, Brewers-Cardinals (Andra and Joe grew up in Milwaukee), Twins-White Sox, Marlins-Braves, and Indians-Royals. It was a veritable smorgasbord, and I felt invested in each game. It's amazing how doing the Propsectus Hit List has familiarized me with the narrative arcs of all 30 teams, expanding my appreciation for their small triumphs, rolling my eyes at their self-defeating foibles, rooting for or against each one as the season grinds down to the end.

I watched as the Yanks wrapped up a 5-0 win behind Shawn Chacon, his second straight combined shutout of the Jays inside of a week. Chacon isn't a dominant pitcher -- he struck out only four in sixteen innings in those two Jays games, and is at 4.84 per nine innings on the season, along with 3.93 walks -- but he gets the job done with a lot of lazy popups and fly balls. Despite the flies, he stays away from the longball quite well (0.81 per nine, and that's with half a season in Colorado), and opposing batters are hitting just .255 against him. He's the posterboy for a serious DIPS correction, but every time I watch him, I just count my blessings and tell my statistics to shut up.

As the games began wrapping up, my hosts and my wife retired for bed, leaving me to sit riveted as I watched the red-hot Indians finish coughing up a 6-2 lead. Bobby Howry, who'd anchored the Tribe's setup corps with a string of 23.1 innings without allowing an earned run as the team made its move on the White Sox, had suddenly proven himself human, giving up the tying runs to the Sox on Tuesday and here surrendering a game-tying homer to Royals third baseman Mark Teahan. D'oh!

Royals closer Mike MacDougal came on with a tie score in the ninth, and after getting one out, his defense broke down behind him. The second baseman muffed Grady Sizemore's routine grounder. MacDougal exacerbated the situation by hesitantly fielding Coco Crisp's chopper and airmailing it wide of first base, putting runners on second and third. Jhonny Peralta slapped the go-ahead single on the next pitch, and that, for all intents and purposes, was that. With the White Sox victory, the Indians remained 1.5 games out of first place in the Central.

Saturday found Andra and me in the company of my BP colleague, Chris Kahrl, and after an afternoon that included a walk by the Washington Monument and Cindy Sheehan's protest on the DC mall and a trip to the Corcoran Gallery of Art to see the opening of an Andy Warhol retrospective, we headed to RFK Stadium for the night's game between the Nationals and the Mets.

We arrived with the top of the first already underway, just in time to see Cliff Floyd draw a walk off of Livan Hernandez to load the bases with just one out and a run already in. One 2-0 count later, David Wright drove a Hernandez fastball off the face of the left-center mezzanine for a grand slam and a 5-0 lead before Chris and I could even smirk at the two teams' lineups.

And what lineups they were. With both teams having more or less seen their chances of winning the NL Wild Card reduced to zero, what we ended up was a Sunday lineup on Saturday night. We're talking laughably bad, particularly in the case of the Nats:

NO. NEW YORK         WASHINGTON
1. J. Reyes, SS      B. Watson, LF
2. M. Cairo, 2B      C. Guzman, SS
3. C. Beltran, CF    R. Zimmerman, 3B
4. C. Floyd, LF      P. Wilson, CF
5. D. Wright, 3B     M. Byrd, RF
6. M. Anderson, RF   T. Blanco, 1B
7. R. Castro, C      D. Cruz, 2B
8. D. M'k'wicz, 1B   G. Bennett, C
9. T. Glavine, P     L. Hernandez, P

Friends, that isn't a lineup, it's a white flag. Chris and I were unaware that Robinson had commented before the game that he was going to sit his regulars for much of the rest of the way, but this was ridiculous. The Nats' top seven hitters, according to VORP, were all on the bench, with Hernandez himself the best relative to his position. Sub-Mendozoid Brandon Watson leading off, Guzman, with the lowest VORP of any major league hitter, batting second, disappointing, powerless Marlon Byrd fifth, and a black hole until Hernandez. Only Ryan Zimmerman, the #4 pick in the 2005 draft, and Wilson, an overrated but semi-useful power-hitting outfielder, would be worth salvaging from this trainwreck.

The Mets offense featured a solid 3-4-5 in the disappointing but still promising Carlos Beltran, Cliff Floyd, and Wright. But that trio was drowning in a sea of mediorcity that illustrates how bad a manager Willie Randolph actually is. Jose Reyes has spent most of the season atop the lineup with a sub-.300 OBP, effectively strangling the Mets offense. Miguel Cairo is well below .300 in that department as well, having turned back into a pumpkin after shedding the pinstripes (should have taken that one-year deal, Miggy). Futilityman Marlon Anderson has spent much of the season at first base, where the Mets as a team have combined to hit .221/.297/.373 -- mostly thanks to Doug Mientkiewicz -- numbers that wouldn't pass muster for a shortstop in this day and age, let alone a power position. Castro has had a decent year, emerging as the heir apparent to the departing Mike Piazza.

As Chris and I snarked ourselves silly in discussing the two lineups, we surmised that Castro was no worse than the sixth-best non-pitcher on the field between the two teams, and that the chances of finding a lineup that could manage a .500 showing among those players was lean. We were preaching to the choir, but it was good, catty fun. Imagine reading a Transaction Analysis and a Hit List back-to-back, sprinkle in some alcohol and some four-letter words, and you're about there.

It was interesting to see RFK, the former home of the Washington Redskins football team and, going back to 1971, the departed Washington Senators. RFK had been hastily rejiggered to baseball specifications once the Nats' move from Montreal became finalized, but it still had a makeshift feel. Faded maroon and mustard seats, most of them empty, filled the upper levels, while the field level seats were an orange that had to make the Mets feel right at home. None of this was a very good match for the Nats' red and white unis. The outfield had no bleachers; instead a more or less solid green wall pocked with ad banners extended up from the outfield fence to the mezzanine level, with the bullpens flush from the gaps to either foul line. In its favor, the upper deck is closer to the action than at Shea Stadium, though not as close as in the Bronx. The grass field looked especially worn and perhaps overgrazed, with bare dirt patches easily visible from our spots in the upper deck just to the left of home plate (seat price $15 plus service). Foul territory was huge by the standards of the other 29 teams, helping to make RFK a serious pitchers' park. Not bad for makeshift circumstances; almost better than Shea thanks to the lack of aircraft overhead, but hardly one of the game's great ballparks.

Ryan Zimmerman, who came in riding an 11-for-25 performance for his cup of coffee, managed a single off of Tom Glavine in the first inning, but that was all these weak sisters got until the sixth as the game flew by. By 8 PM, we were already in the bottom of the fourth inning, the two teams swinging as though they had planes to catch.

In the home half of the sixth, Hernandez, who had settled down to outlast his potential disaster start (Chris had joked that if Livan went another nine shutout innings after the first, he could salvage a quality start, effectively a game ERA of 4.50), launched a fly ball towards Anderson in rightfield which the futilityman brutally misplayed into a triple. The big pitcher ran as if he were carrying his lithe brother El Duque on his back but still lumbered into third with a "triple" (thank you, official scorer). Glavine lost his shutout on a home-cooked infield "single" to second base by Watson, and two batters later, Zimmerman doubled him home -- his second of three hits on the night -- to cut the score to 5-2.

Somewhere in all of this Andra went on a refreshment run that lasted two and a half fast-paced innings. When she emerged, somewhat disoriented, it was with a tale of usher incompetence. As she carried a tray of beer, an ice cream sandwich, and a bag of kettle corn, the septuagenarian usher decided to sweat her presence in the upper deck. She set down her precious cargo and mistakenly produced her Corcoran Gallery ticket, which was blue and said "Ticketmaster" on it but otherwise bore no resemblance to our ballgame ticket. The usher squinted at it and then pointed her towards left-centerfield with the conviction only senility can bring. At last she spotted us and blew off the geezer's absurd directive.

The Nats couldn't close the 5-2 gap, but then that will happen when you lead off three innings, including the eighth, with a .208-hitting catcher like Gary Bennett. Jose Vidro, the team's regular second baseman, hit for Hernandez after Bennett in the eighth, but by then, Frank Robinson had already squandered one of his team's six remaining outs in the service of not making his regular catcher, Brian Schneider, squat for a single inning on his off day. Robinson was more liberal about his bench in the ninth, with Glavine having yielded to Roberto Hernandez. Carlos Baerga, who'd hit a game-tying homer off of Hernandez the night before, flied out for Byrd, while Nick Johnson ended the game flying out as well, wrapping things up in a tidy two hours and 24 minutes.. All in all, a raucous trip to the ballpark but not the most compelling game.

• • •

The latest Prospectus Hit List is up, and for the first time since June 19, there's a new team at the top. The Indians' incredible surge has helped them take the #1 spot from St. Louis after 12 weeks of Cardinal dominance. Still, the team is trailing the White Sox by two games and could conceivably miss the playoffs; their Wild Card lead at this writing is a mere four outs away from becoming a deadlock with the Red Sox. As of this morning, BP's Postseason Odds page showed the Indians with a 37.1 percent chance of taking the division, a 48.2 percent shot at the Wild Card, for an 85.4 percent chance of making the playoffs overall. The #3-ranked Yanks, thanks to winning on a night when the Red Sox were rained out, hold a 50.5-49.5 shot at winning the division and a 10.9 percent shot at the Wild Card for a 61.4 percent chance overall. The #4 Red Sox are at 58.9 percent overall.

The Indians are slated for three games with the resurgent Devil Rays before wrapping things up with the White Sox. The Yanks play the DOA Orioles for three more in Baltimore before heading to Fenway for the weekend showdown, while Boston battles Toronto for three more going into that series. Increasingly, it looks entirely possible that the Yanks-Red Sox series will be all-or-nothing for the two teams, something that will surely ratchet up the intensity. In a sense, the playoffs have already begun. Boil some coffee, hand me my rally cap, and bring it on.