MLBeat

Because that's way we do things here. The pitcher's name was Jon Herring, and there is apparently only one link in all of the Internet that can confirm his existence. Trust me, he was real.

Possibly too real, it turns out: Since this is a blog I am required to publish some unsubstantiated rumors. The gossip among some Alabamians I consulted was that Herring was sufficiently impressive to reach Toronto's AAA affiliate before succumbing to substance abuse and/or general attitude problems, culminating in an episode wherein he punched out his coach. Accuracy of the details notwithstanding, when the folks at Baseball Prospectus say "there is no such thing as a pitching prospect," this is precisely what they're talking about.

This past weekend saw the conclusion of Interleague Play 2005, a merciful end for the Giants, who were brutally swept by the cross-bay rival Athletics over at McAfee Coliseum. In case anyone needed evidence that the struggling A's were beginning to turn it around while the struggling Giants were not, look no further. The most demoralizing aspect about this for the Giants is not that they were swept, but that they were defeated in three distinct ways. The nugget recaps:

Friday, 6/24: 4-3. The Close Loss. Joe Blanton is Moneyball-lickin' good, allowing 3 runs (0 ER) in 8 IP. Jeff Fassero, meanwhile, starts for San Francisco and allows homers to Bobbies Kielty and Crosby.

Saturday, 6/25: 6-3. The Sloppy Giveaway Game. Dan Haren goes the distance. Nick Swisher hits a three-run jack. Five different Giants, including new acquisition Alex Sanchez, make errors. (Lost amid the humiliation is Mike Matheny's eighth homer, tying his career high already.) Sanchez is relegated to the DH slot the next day.

Sunday, 6/26: 16-0. Utter Devastation. Swisher homers from both sides of the plate, six A's go 3-for-5 or better. The Giants can only muster one hit. Ouch!

That Sunday drubbing in particular probably evokes more pity than it should. A blowout of those proportions looks more painful than it is because the last two hours are anticlimactic, or if you will, five innings of Scott Munter pitching to Adam Melhuse. The stakes are so low during the Munter/Melhuse Time that by the time it's over, everyone on both sides is already mentally detached from the events of that day and prepared for the next.

(As an aside, I can hardly believe that San Francisco manager Felipe Alou chose not to let a position player pitch those last couple innings. He would have delighted the crowd and saved his bullpen the wear and tear at the same time. This should happen anytime the deficit is ten or greater with two innings or less to go, am I right?)

Ah yes, those moments when events turn so miserable that laughter is the only recourse. This takes me back to my freshman year of high school baseball, when I was a benchwarmer on a team so bad it could make paint peel. We were playing Alabama Christian Academy, whom we would come to dominate in later years, but this year they had an ace pitcher, a tall and lanky lefty who had been deemed a preseason high school All-American. His name was Jon something. It doesn't matter.

Jon not only struck out our first nine batters of the game, but he did not allow even one foul ball over that span. We simply couldn't touch his pitches. Eventually we had a baserunner in the fourth inning when he plunked a batter in the ribs with a low-90s fastball. Oh yeah, and he also homered and tripled at the plate for good measure. (We lost by the mercy rule, 11-0 after five innings.) Setting aside the matter of whether I was witness to the most dominating all-around performance by anyone at any level, the point of the story is that, as a benchwarmer with nothing better to do and no good way of reconciling the shame that I felt at not even being good enough to crack the lineup of a team that was getting so spectacularly smoked, I concocted, along with my fellow benchwarmer Rush Elliott, a list of terms for games that were better than perfect games, because "perfect game" didn't really begin to describe what Jon was inflicting upon our team after three innings:

• Perfect Game: No baserunners allowed. Three up, three down every inning.
• Awesome Game: A Perfect Game where no balls make it out of the infield.
• Ultimate Game: An Awesome Game with no balls in play, only strikeouts.
• Divine Game: An Ultimate Game wherein the bat does not even touch the ball.
• Holy Divine Game: A Divine Game with no called balls, meaning every batter strikes out on three pitches.

I realize these definitions begin to go beyond the realm of practicality and more towards baseball theory, but it bears mentioning that, pitching against us on this particular day, Jon was divine through three and ultimate through four. (And while we're on the subject, Katie Brownell should receive credit for an ultimate game. Congrats Katie, and many more.)

This Game Report feels necessary because, for a Braves fan, this has been one of the most perversely-hyped games of the year. Tonight we see a struggling Atlanta team beginning to turn it around due to the fortuitous arrival on the schedule of the Cincinnati Reds, the stumbling, bumbling Cincinnati Reds, losers of five in a row and dwellers of the dreaded 15-games-under-.500 area.

I say this game is "perversely-hyped" because of the explosive potential of Reds starter Eric Milton, a notorious flyball pitcher who signed a notorious three-year contract in the offseason, and now sports a notorious 3-8 record and 7.97 ERA, with an even more notorious 22 HR allowed coming into the game. I put Andy Marte into all of my fantasy starting lineups specifically because he would be batting against Milton (He ended up going 1-for-4 with a double). Milton's contract (he makes 5 1/3 million dollars this season, a total that will increase in the next two years) explains why the Reds have kept giving him chances in the rotation, so struggling offenses everywhere shouldn't get too stressed out, because sooner or later Eric Milton is coming to your town. Here I shall credit the ever-savvy fans at alt.sports.baseball.atlanta-braves: they saw this opportunity coming well in advance.

Will these impossibly bad trends continue for Milton and the Reds? We find our answer by the end of the first inning. Julio Franco, batting third in a prominent display of the dilapidated state of Atlanta's lineup, launches one 382 feet to make it 1-0. You can feel the Cincinnati crowd groaning, here we go again. Andruw Jones ends the inning with a fly ball to the warning track that doesn't exactly abate their worries.

The Braves owe their recent struggles to their overcrowded DL, exemplified tonight because Jorge Sosa not only has to start on the mound tonight, but he has to do it on three days' rest. (Also, and perhaps even more damning of the latter-day Braves in general, the WGST radio promos that once were read by luminaries like Smoltz and Glavine are now coming from Chris Reistma. Shudder.) Sosa promptly gives the run back to Cincinnati in the bottom of the first. We could be in for quite the slugfest tonight.

Sosa, however, doesn't exactly roll over. He pops the mitt repeatedly at 96 mph and strikes out Ken Griffey Jr. in a tight situation with a nasty slider in the third. Sosa, who was acquired from Tampa Bay for Nick Green to shore up the bullpen before the season, even singles to right in a two-on, one-out situation when everyone was looking bunt: his first major league hit.

For the Reds, nothing is going right. Paul Wilson, who was supposed to hold the rotation together, is instead out for the year. Skip Caray, with not much prodding needed from his co-broadcaster and son Chip, spares no one in the Reds organization. "It's pretty obvious they're not going to win anything with this group." On GM Jim Bowden's defiant statement that the Reds are not trading-deadline sellers yet: "To me, that's a pretty singularly stupid statement. If you can make a trade and improve your team today, why not do it?" [That was Caray referring to Bowden as Reds GM; Bowden has in reality moved on to Washington and been replaced by Dan O'Brien.] On our starter tonight: "Eric Milton would have to pitch 25 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings to get his ERA below 6. That's scary." "Why would you pay a flyball pitcher to come here? You're defeating your own purpose."

Two innings later, Franco does the unthinkable and homers again. Father Time, as he has come to be known, is only a couple of months away from having the chance to become the oldest player to homer in MLB history. Andruw Jones adds another bomb in the fourth, the 25th dinger allowed by Milton on the season and the 19th for Jones, making him the new NL leader.

(Random thought while listening to ads between innings: Since every one of these ads seems to recur ad nauseam all season, every season, why not make one of these a parable of Dickensian complexity, one that would take approximately 100 listenings to make the full amount of sense? It would be ridiculed at first, but would eventually draw rave reviews, and might go on to positively impact all of American culture. People's attention spans would grow longer, and soon we would have a middle brow rejuvenated. Think big.)

Interestingly, Sosa is abruptly removed with one out in the fifth inning, two batters shy of qualifying for a win (the Braves are up 4-1 at this point). You can hear the surprise in the Carays' voices, and they can see the surprise in Sosa's reaction. He was pitching well, with only one walk and 75 pitches thrown. What prompted this? Skip theorizes that he "hit a wall" in the fifth, but c'mon. Sosa will have trouble seeing this as anything other than a slap in the face, or perhaps punishment for some unseen behind-the-scenes transgression. Time may tell, or it may not.

Adam Bernero comes in to face Sean Casey, who is 2-2 so far. Casey rockets one out of the park to right, but foul. Two pitches later, he rockets another one out, but foul again. Then he singles to right, keeping the inning going. For a moment, things look ominous -- "you don't like the way things are shaping up," Skip laments, noting that Griffey, Randa and Dunn are coming up -- but fortunately Griffey bails out Cox and Bernero with an easy ground ball double play. Inning over.

The Braves' bullpen, which has had its share of fits and starts in '05, seems to have calmed down a bit, with Reistma, John Foster, and Adam Bernero settling into roles. Blaine Boyer, who Bobby Cox thinks has "truly superior stuff" according to Skip, comes in to escape a seventh-inning jam. Celebrated relief acquisition Jim Brower pitches a scoreless eighth, and Reitsma closes out the game uneventfully.

Estrada jacks another two-run homer in the eighth, this one off Ryan Wagner. It is Cincinnati's 103rd longball allowed already. To make matters worse, catcher Jason Larue hurts his knee rounding first in the eighth and has to exit the game. Sometimes you're having a bad day, maybe a little down in the dumps, maybe getting an unjust speeding ticket or spilling your soy latte all over your dress shirt, and then you happen to encounter a homeless man walking in the street, his bare feet cracked and swollen, and you suddenly remember that you have it pretty good, all things considered. The Braves may not take the NL East in 2005, but they've got a good fighting chance, and anyway it's heartening to see the rookies getting the experience to help ensure that 2006 and beyond will be in good hands. Meanwhile, the chances of contention waved bye-bye to the Reds a long time ago, and they're basically playing out the string already in late June.

Division rivals Washington, Philadelphia and Florida all lost today, making this an all-around cakewalk of a night. Kelly Johnson is coming around, Sosa and Kyle Davies have earned their temporary starting assignments, and with the bullpen shored up we might finally have a competitive team on our hands. Tomorrow the Braves will attempt to complete a four-game sweep of the Reds, making this weekend an expected but still much-needed confidence booster, and just in time for the Florida series next week. It's been a more trying season than the small sample of Game Reports on this site thus far might have you believe, but this is one weekend where order appears to be restored. We'll know in a couple of weeks if this was a mirage or not. Final: 6-1 Braves.

Well, it depends on the question. But the Braves are locked in a tailspin, having lost 12 of their last 18 and playing about as badly as a team still over .500 can play. (If they lose their next two games we won't have to flesh out that particular debate.)

The recent downturn is due to a perfect storm of injuries (Chipper, Thomson, and Hampton are on the DL, while Furcal and Hudson are apparently trying to gut it out), slow starts from rookies called up to help (Andy Marte, Kelly Johnson), and, yes, a faulty bullpen. With relievers apparently spontaneously combusting all throughout MLB this year, Brower signed with Atlanta almost immediately after clearing waivers at 1 p.m. today, and though he is mere scraps from the Giants bullpen, apparently Brower had several suitors. Bobby Cox had quite the glowing endorsement: "I think he's all right. He's always pitched good against us. [Note: the Braves had a tidy .350 average against Brower.] He can throw a lot. We'll see where Jimmy fits in."

Nothing to sell your life savings about, no, but Braves bullpen acquisitions are rarely above-the-fold news when they happen. It's usually not until three months later, when we collectively look up and Brower has a 1.62 ERA as a Brave, that anyone says anything, which is probably how Cox and John Schuerholz like it. So far this year we've had Dan Kolb, Jorge Vazquez, Roman Colon, and a few others thrown at the wall. Nothing else to do but hope Brower sticks.

This falls under the realm of "not directly related to baseball." I don't have to apologize for that, so I will merely disclaim all such future posts with the OT header. Good? Good.

Last night the San Antonio Spurs dismantled the Detroit Pistons, 97-76, in Game 2 of the NBA Finals. The most noteworthy aspect of ABC's coverage came during the sort of trivial moment that is becoming embarassingly common these days: the cross-promotional celebrity courtside interview. Michelle Tafoya, a veteran sideline reporter who is simply too competent for chores like this, had to go interview Eva Longoria, star of "Desperate Houswives," in the stands as we were coming back from a commercial break. It goes without saying, of course, that "Desperate Housewives" is a hit show on ABC, and it just so happened that an episode of "Desperate Housewives" would be coming up right after the game.

I don't even remember the interview itself, since I have wisely conditioned myself to tune out promotional offerings in every guise (studies have shown them to be bad for your soul). But I did hear Tafoya toss it back to Al Michaels and Hubie Brown with this line:

Guys, I was told very strictly before that interview that I was not allowed to ask about Tony Parker, so with respect to Eva, I did not.

(For those who don't know, this is a reference to the fact that Longoria and Parker, the Spurs' point guard, have been a hot item at one point or another. Maybe they still are. Needless to say, I don't keep up.)

Bill Simmons, pop culture guru that he is, also mentioned this in his blog today, with an excellent take of his own: "Here's what I would have done: Since Eva was talking about how she grew up rooting for the Spurs, my last question would have been, 'If you could date anyone on the team, who would you pick?' She would have had to answer that, right?"

This all may seem to be a small matter, but Tafoya's line was brilliant. She got her interview, made it through without offending anyone, and used that little aside to expose the PR machinations surrounding celebrity interviews. A layperson watching the interview would have the natural reaction, "Told very strictly not to mention Parker by whom?" That same layperson can presumably connect the dots from there: oh, right, a publicist.

This was a cynical move, but my respect for Tafoya immediately increased tenfold. The publicist's job involves staying invisible to you, the consumer. All you're supposed to see is Longoria, sitting there in the stands, acting like a regular Josephine who loves basketball, and definitely NOT acting like a celebrity with an entourage that's prepared to scuttle her off for a Cosmopolitan photo shoot the very instant this courtside interview adjourns. But if you're only idly paying attention to this interview, then you come away with that last line in your head and nothing else.

So congrats, Michelle. Anytime a jaded reporter manages to cut through even a modest amount of the bullshit, it gives me great satisfaction. For some reason I am reminded of an old Rolling Stone profile of R.E.M., written by Chris Klein. The band had just fired their longtime manager, Jefferson Holt, and Klein found himself handcuffed by secrecy when asking guitarist Peter Buck, "Can you say anything about the incident?" After Buck's obligatory "no, I can't," many writers would have simply let the subject drop, but Klein pressed on: "Can you say anything about not being able to say anything?"

And that, dear reader, was all it took to coax out the answer he'd been looking for.

Earlier I mentioned that pretty much everyone around MLB has begun to grasp the importance of on-base percentage. Now, no less a figure than Peter Gammons has confirmed and elaborated on the subject a bit.

It's quite illuminating to hear every broadcaster, scout and talking head in baseball rip on Moneyball in a decidedly knee-jerk fashion whenever it pops up in discussion, and yet here we have a suddenly widespread practice around MLB for managers to put high-OPB hitters in their leadoff spots, speed be damned (Brandon Inge?!). A few years ago Oakland GM Billy Beane tried this with Jeremy Giambi and was roundly panned; now Gammons has decreed the practice to be the order of the day. While this turnabout has been approaching for years, it seemed unthinkable as recently as the turn of the century.

The main misconception about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book that has come to be reviled as Beane's Mein Kampf, was that it was conceived as an advocate of stats-crunching, laptop-carrying front office geeks who only look at spreadsheets in lieu of videotape, who draft only college players sight unseen, etc. Lewis did not set out to promote OBP over AVG, statistics over scouting, or any other cause, but instead to merely explore how, in an era of Yankee dominance fueled by the ever-skyrocketing Yankee payroll, coupled with Bud Selig priming the pump for further labor strife by trumpeting MLB's supposedly critical problem of "competitive imbalance," Billy Beane and the Oakland A's were able to succeed consistently on a much smaller payroll. That's it.

What Lewis found was Beane's use of statistics, such as OBP, that a) other front offices paid far less attention to and b) correlated more strongly with winning than, say, batting average or overall athleticism. This led to players like Scott Hatteberg, Matt Stairs, and Olmedo Saenz being undervalued in general and thus available at low cost to the A's. It was not the only advantage Beane was able to exploit during his team's run of success -- he also relied, and presumably continues to rely, on pitches seen per plate appearance and other metrics so far on the inside that Beane wouldn't even reveal them to Lewis -- but OBP was undoubtedly a bedrock.

The gap has since closed. Sabermetric-friendly GMs decorate the landscape, from Los Angeles to Toronto, and all of them have more financial resources than Beane. The defending champion Boston Red Sox have a GM who trumpets Baseball Prospectus and keeps Bill James in his employ, not to mention a starting second baseman, Mark Bellhorn, whose obscene strikeout totals and marginal defense belie his high OBP, making him a prototypical "Moneyball player." Another Beane philosophy depicted in Moneyball, the practice of heavily favoring college players over high-school players in the draft, has caught on with such force that the pendulum has arguably swung back the other way, negating any advantage Beane may or may not have had in that regard. That this changing of the guard corresponds with Oakland's foundering in the AL West standings does not bode well for the boys in green and yellow.

So Beane needs something different if he is to continue succeeding. We are approaching the window of expected influence from his 2000 Moneyball draft. Nick Swisher and Mark Teahen have made the bigs with limited success, though Teahen helped bring Dotel in last year's deadline trade; Jeremy Brown, aka the Poster Child, hasn't done enough to suppress his myriad of inevitable critics; meanwhile, Jeremy Bonderman, the object of Beane's ire in the book, has blossomed into the ace pitcher the A's could so sorely use right now. Like it or not, the draft class of 2000 will likely make or break Beane in the public eye, and so far the returns are distinctly mixed.

Never a slave to conventional wisdom, Beane dealt away his two best pitchers, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson, in the offseason for a handful of role players and prospects (notably Dan Meyer, Dan Haren and Daric Barton), making Oakland's future brighter but sacrificing the present to the talk-radio wolves. With a dismal season in the makings for Oakland thus far, what Beane needs the most right now are the patience of his superiors, which he will likely receive due to his track record, and the patience of the baseball media, which he certainly will not. I'm no A's fan, but I wish you good luck, Billy, and Godspeed.

Check the link on the right and you will find a grisly sight: the Mission Magicians are now close enough to the cellar-dwellers as to render the difference negligible.

Go back to last month and you will find that I feared as much. I was resting in first place when I last wrote about the Magicians, but it was a precarious position, with a full-participation league of relentless rotogeeks scraping and clawing underneath. Jason Lane had 5 HR and 5 SB then; he has 1 HR and 0 SB since. Brad Wilkerson, he of the hot first week, has racked up 0 HR and 0 SB in the past month. Injuries may explain his recent struggles, but little good that does me. The pitching, meanwhile, is even worse. A quick look at the league standings will tell you all you need to know on that front.

Generally the very best fantasy players make an appalling number of transactions, from waiver wire pickups to trades and so forth. I am fast learning that the converse does not hold: more transactions do not necessarily bring more success. A decidedly ugly sight is the desperate owner, going from Brad Halsey to Kevin Brown to Brian Moehler to Aaron Harang on little more than a whim, with each ensuing disaster start plunging me deeper into oblivion.

I know, I know...woe is me. But eventually controlling a fantasy team, an experience undertaken out of equal parts obsessive entertainment and obsessive competitiveness, ceases to be fun. This happens when you encounter some of the following Sticky Points:

• You start losing. This is universal across all of human history. Surely there was a point during the Battle of Saratoga when Burgoyne wanted to hit reset and blow on the cartridge. In my case, blowing on the cartridge would mean not drafting Damn KolBB, as the folks over at alt.sports.baseball.atlanta-braves have taken to calling the now-disgraced reliever. I took Kolb in the tenth round, passing up Brian Roberts, A.J. Burnett, Dontrelle Willis, Chris Carpenter...OK, this is getting too painful to continue.
• Everyone starts getting injured. Before the season started I traded Alfonso Soriano for Edgar Renteria and Curt Schilling, a deal that most agreed was a steal for me. Now Schilling occupies my IR slot, which is too bad because otherwise there would have been a place for Octavio Dotel (he of the now-infamous voluntary TJ surgery), Wade Miller, Greg Aquino, Frank Thomas, and now Chipper Jones, presumed to hit the DL soon with vague but reportedly painful foot problems that probably explain his recent swoon.
• Your league gets persnickety. This year we have a Serial Protester in our ranks, the type who will automatically complain about every accepted trade to the ESPN Review Panel. The Serial Protester, of course, is an anonymous cat, a status which doesn't lend itself to productive intraleague debate over the trades in question. This would be little more than a nuisance if the Panel didn't then proceed to actually veto a handful of the trades, for reasons it refuses to explain to the participants. The reasoning is shamefully inscrutable to me. Troy Glaus for Ugueth Urbina? Fine. Brady Clark for Julio Lugo? Fine. Foulke/LoDuca/Neifi Perez for Prior/Posada (pre-injury)? Fine, apparently. Rich Harden for Schilling? Veto. Dan Haren/Urbina for Mussina? Veto. Did I make a mistake to shell out money to labor under the ESPN monolith? Quite possibly.

The question for the Magicians, of course, is how to recover. Although we are in the first year of a three-year keeper league, it's probably too early to discuss rebuilding for next season. In that vein, though, and in all others, it's fair to say that everything hinges on a Schilling recovery: not only will he give me momentum in the pitching categories if he comes back at full strength, but a guy like that has to be valuable to the owner of a key prospect or two, should the proper situation arise. When his situation inevitably goes from bad to worse -- as it has done once already, pushing back his return to the All-Star break -- there may well be no remaining recourse but to fold like an origami duckling.