The Futility Infielder

You're reading the words of a happy man, and not just because the Yanks find themselves one game up in the AL East going into the weekend's showdown in Fenway. No, I'm a happy man because my copy of Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning arrived on Wednesday.

Mind Game, for those of you who haven't heard this particular song and dance yet, is a book about how the Red Sox took a rational, sabermetrically-derived approach to building a team and in doing so, overcame the better part of a century's worth of mistakes, including the pervasive, institutional racism that made the Sox the last team to integrate. It follows the narrative arc of their 2004 championship season -- which, as you may have heard, was their first since 1918 -- but digs back into their sordid past to emphasize the failures of imagination and intelligence that doomed the Sox, focusing on the way the John Henry-Theo Epstein regime solved some of those problems in building a championship team.

Never mind that this was a copy I had to buy online because I couldn't wait for the publisher to send me my author copies. Never mind that the book is an in-depth exploration of something that at its center caused me a great deal of personal frustration. Never mind that the green and red cover looks like a Christmas morning trainwreck of bad design (nobody consulted this graphic designer) and clashing colors.

No, I'm a happy man because I get to hold in my hands the first baseball book to which I ever contributed (Will Carroll's The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball's Drug Problems was published first, but my work on this was done prior). And that feels pretty incredible. Someday, holding my newborn son or daughter or a book of my creation in my arms will bring me more satisfaction. But for right now, this feeling is tough to beat.

I wrote two chapters for Mind Game, which was well underway and yet below the radar when I officially joined the Baseball Prospectus team last November. The first one, now titled "Deconstructing Pedro," is a look at Pedro Martinez's mighty struggles against the Yankees, who won 19 of the 30 games in which the diminutive Dominican started. I mined data from Retrosheet and pored over the game logs of all of his starts against the Yankees, looking for patterns, querying the database gods at BP to shuffle the numbers a few different ways.

I had a great time reading through my own writings on the topic -- blog entries and game reports that Steve Goldman, who edited the project, had in mind when he offered me the chapter. Without too much difficulty, I was able to cull a "starting nine" of memorable Pedro-versus-Yankees games, many of which brought out the rabidly irrational partisan in me in a way I don't really miss now that it's gone. I got to relive the circumstances of memorable quotes such as "Why don't we just wake up the Bambino, and maybe I'll drill him in the ass?" "YES Network wants me to die," and "I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy."

I wrote the chapter as Martinez was locking up his four-year-deal with the Mets, and as I followed the news, I felt a great weight lifting from my own shoulders as a fan. Finally, I could take some appreciation in the accomplishments of the best pitcher of his generation, and enjoy the quirky sense of humor that lay beneath that armor of defiance. I don't think I can put it any better than I did back in January:

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.

The second chapter I wrote, now called -- to my eternal amusement and satisfaction -- "You Want Me to Hit Like a Little Bitch?" about the long and winding road David Ortiz took to becoming the Sox's most feared slugger. The title comes from a quote in which Ortiz described the Minnesota Twins' attempts to stop him from swinging for the fences, and the main thrust is to show how two very different teams could take such divergent views on the same ballplayer. There's a commonality to what they saw -- a not-too-nimble guy at the left end of the defensive spectrum, where talent is cheap -- but the Twins were rolling in those types of players, not that they knew how to use them, while the Red Sox were busy creating international incidents to grab as many of them as possible to fill their first base and DH holes.

For all of the work I put into the book, until receiving my copy I had yet to see any of the 320 or so pages to which I didn't contribute. It's a hefty book, 352 pages, crammed full of words and tables and charts that include leaderboards for most of the advanced metrics that the book relies on -- all-time and Boston-only single season and career leaders for VORP, EQA, FRAA, SNVAR, WXRL, and a few more noodles from the BP alphabet soup. Twenty BP writers contributed in all, including the late Doug Pappas, with Steven Goldman, who edited the project, batting cleanup and tying the whole thing together (he listed much of the book's content here).

Goldman, of course, is best known for his tireless work over at the YES Network website, writing The Pinstriped Bible and its companion, The Pinstriped Blog. It's been asked why a Yankee fan such as him or myself would work on a book about the Red Sox. Aside from the obvious financially-related answers, it's because we pride ourselves on being able to approach the topic in an objective and critical manner to do justice to a fascinating story about which -- despite all of the other books on the market -- much had been left to say.

Thinking about the two chapters I wrote, I'm reminded of something Buster Olney said about covering the Yankees: as a writer, you don't root for teams, you root for stories. I'm lucky enough that I get to wear both hats (to say nothing of the Dodger, Yankee and Brewer caps which dot my apartment) as a fan and a writer, but in writing my chapters I learned what Olney meant. Even covering two players who were instrumental in beating the Yanks, I had no trouble becoming engrossed in the topic. Understanding, appreciating and communicating why something happened -- even if that wasn't something we ourselves may have hoped to happen -- and doing it well won't always make you rich, but it does bring a great deal of satisfaction, and I'm confident that we've done it well enough to satisfy both Red Sox fans and fans of the game in general.

Some would argue that BP has missed the boat with the timing of the book coming almost a year after the fact, but really, that's a feature, not a bug. This way, ours didn't get lost in the instant Soxploitation books that flooded the market when the team won; it's not a quick reaction to the marketplace such as the slew of King/Shaughnessy/Montville tomes, not that those don't hold their virtues for diehard Sox fans. It aims to be a timeless, authoritative tome on how to build a championship team, using the 2004 Sox as its template, and as such, should have an appeal that extends far beyond the Mass Turnpike.

Anyway, this constitutes the end of the sales spiel, other than to say that at a list price of $13.95 (and considerably lower on Amazon and other online merchants), it won't bleed you dry, and I think it's a book you'll pull out often to hone those arguments about the "Holy Gospel of On-Base Percentage" (that's a chapter title), the importance of controlling the strike zone, and the proper way to run a bullpen. I'm extremely proud to be associated with this product, and I encourage anybody who enjoys reading this blog to check it out.

• • •

So, Thursday night's radio gig was a bit of a dud for me, not that it wasn't an entertaining hour of listening (you can hear it here or, with a bit more fidelity and a copy of iTunes, you can listen here). Cliff Corcoran of Bronx Banter and Ryan Toohil of The House That Dewey Built chatted with host Christopher Lydon at length about the Boston-New York rivalry; Cliff comes in at about 4:50, Ryan comes in at 14:15, and yours truly comes in around 37:00 and gets sandwiched between two studio callers, drawing all of about five minutes of airtime. I felt screwed; the biggest disappointment was that I didn't get to mention Mind Game to an audience for whom the book was in the wheelhouse. But hey, I've gotten to do TV and numerous episodes of Baseball Prospectus Radio, so I'm not too worried that my media dominance (hahaha) wasn't exactly furthered here. The show is still worth a listen even if the host spent far too long celebrating Bill Simmons.

• • •

Ah yes, there's a series to discuss, isn't there? Let's face it, we all knew -- Yankee fans and Red Sox fans and MLB schedule-makers -- it would likely come down to this final weekend, didn't we? The tantalizing part about the matchup is the potential -- still at about 65 percent, according to BP's Postseason Odds page -- that the losing team will miss the playoffs. We can all taste the blood.

And yet the matchup is somewhat anticlimactic. There's less at stake with the Sox having finally broken their 86-year run of futility. These two teams are not the juggernauts that have squared off in the past two ALCSes. They're both extremely flawed, with weaknesses in the rotation and particularly the bullpen; the Sox pen's ERA of 5.26 ranks last in the AL, while the Yanks' is extremely shaky in front of Mariano Rivera, stocked with no-talents like Leiter Fluid, Smolderin' Embree, Wayne the Bane, the Proctologist, and Fraudriguez. Tanyon Sturtze has been burned beyond recognition by Joe Torre's usage pattern, while Tom Gordon has been decent but not great. Only Mariano Rivera has had a stellar year, though it's one marred by a couple of dings at the hands of the Sox.

One of Baseball Prospectus' fine reliever stats is called Fair Run Average, which divvies up inherited and bequeathed runners according to a Run Expectancy Table (using the base-out state) to more accurately assign responsibility. It also doesn't let pitchers off the hook for unearned runs, for reasons that are best explained here (suffice it to say that preventing unearned runs is a skill that correlates with ERA). Here are the FRAs of the relevant (i.e., active) relievers for each squad:

Yankees   FRA
Rivera    1.54
Gordon    3.60
Sturtze   3.67
Small     3.69
Franklin  4.87
Proctor   5.43
Rodriguez 6.49
Embree    7.13
Leiter    7.49

Red Sox   FRA
Myers     1.17
Timlin    2.39
Papelbon  4.12
Stanton   4.31
Delcarmen 4.37
Gonzalez  4.58
Bradford  5.61
Hansen    8.44

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if one of those names on the second list seems familiar and yet somewhat out of place, it's because the Red Sox acquired two-time former Yankee (including 2005) Mike Stanton from the Washington Nationals yesterday for a pair of live arms. It's one of the latest deals ever made, and while Stanton won't be eligible for the postseason roster, there's a very real possibility he'll see some action against a big lefty bat like Hideki Matsui or Jason Giambi (suddenly this memory became much warmer). Don't be fooled by the symmetry of him essentially swapping places with Alan Embree; Stanton got his shit together in Washington (where his FRA was 2.83 in about twice as many innings as he had in NY), while Embree has been brutal in both venues (both his and Stanton's FRAs encompass both stops, as does Leiter's).

It's interesting to note that the Sox have three rookies among their bullpen corps. Hansen, their first-round draft pick from this summer, has all of 2.1 innings under his belt, while Delcarmen has 8.2; Papelbon is likely to be the only real factor of the three but since he threw 2.2 frames on Thursday, he probably needs a day of rest. With Keith Foulke out of the picture, the Sox are relying that what's behind the unknown Door #2 is better than the gimpy Door #1.

Don't be surprised if the Yanks call the number of last night's starter, Aaron Small, for an inning of setup on Saturday or Sunday in a spot where Sturtze would normally pitch. Jaret Wright, who's been the victim of too many identified flying objects lately, is also in the pen; recall that he resurrected his career with 13 innings of stellar stretch-run relief for the Braves in 2003. His ERA since returning from his Tampa rehab is 4.43 and while that's not particularly impressive, it could come in handy as an altertnative to Felix Rodriguez, who should just stay home. I hope it doesn't come to pass, but Wright is likely also the long man in the event of a shellacking or a short leash on Mike Mussina. It's a contingency the Yanks have to plan for; not a happy thought, but as contingencies go, there are worse.

But really, the series will have a lot to do with the starters, and to me the matchup favors the Yanks. Neither David Wells, who throws tonight, nor Curt Schilling, who goes on Sunday, are anywhere near 100%, though both have the outsized egos and big game reputations which have prepared them for this stage. Chien Ming-Wang goes against Wells tonight; he's never faced the Sox before, but he's been throwing very well in his last couple of starts since coming off of the DL. Less impressive is Mike Mussina, who starts on Sunday; he was rocked in Baltimore on Tuesday night, failing to get out of the second inning, though the elbow pain which sidelined him for three weeks reportedly wasn't a factor (yeah, surrrrre).

Ultimately, it's Saturday's rematch between Randy Johnson and Tim Wakefield that's the most tantalizing; recall that Johnson (and company) beat Wakefield 1-0 back on September 11 to begin a 15-3 tear which the Yankees have ridden to the brink of the finish line. This is the start the Yankee brass had in mind, this is the difference maker, all 42 years, gimpy knees, 96 MPH fastball, brutal slider and mean mofo glare. Quite frankly, there's no pitcher from either team that I'd feel more confident about at this stage, except for Rivera. I'm picking the Yankees to take care of business this weekend; whether the Sox, 10-7 over that same span, survive is the big question, though with the Indians having been cooled down by the same Tampa Bay Devil Rays squad that wrought so much havoc on the playofff picture, their chances have sweetened considerably. It should be a fantastic weekend for baseball.