NY Boston Fan

Wow, the refs in the UConn-Pitt game have really been terrible huh?

Jim Caple, who I enjoy more when he's trying to be funny than when he's trying to be serious, takes us around Spring Training. The whole thing is worth the read, but especially for the Red Sox entry:

Wednesday was RHP Bronson Arroyo's day to insult Yankees 3B Alex Rodriguez. Arroyo told reporters that Rodriguez never replaces the toilet paper roll when it runs out, drinks milk right out of the carton without pouring it into a glass and talks on his cell phone while he drives. ... Club president Larry Lucchino announced that fans will have to return all home runs and foul balls from last season so that the Red Sox can display them for everyone to enjoy this year, then place them in a time capsule. ... Today is OF Johnny Damon's scheduled day to insult Rodriguez, and he is expected to say that the Red Sox never considered him a real Texas Ranger, either, not like Rusty Greer and Dean Palmer. ...

Former Sox doc Morgan, so key in the Sox World Series victory last year, saw no evidence of steroid use in Boston during his long tenure there. As reported in the Globe:

"I would go on record as saying there was no steroid use, to my knowledge, by the Red Sox in my years with the team. I'll be honest with you. I can't say no Red Sox player, because I was there when Jose Canseco was there. Even with him, there was nothing overt in the clubhouse, but did people suspect it? Sure. But there was never a, `By the way, can you stick this needle with steroids into my buttocks?'"

Most interestingly:

"Roger, when he was with us, I never saw it," Morgan said. "Roger was just a moose of a guy. As he got older, his body changed, like all of us. In retrospect, who knows? I would be extremely surprised. I saw him with his wife and kids, the way he worked, he had an outstanding character. I'd be very surprised."

And:

"There was never any indication that Nomar ever used steroids. That one year when he wanted to add mass because he was such a skinny guy, he just worked very hard with Chris Correnti and B.J. Baker [physical therapist and former assistant trainer]. He later found out that maybe the added mass wasn't the best thing for him, and he took some off. It wasn't that much of an advantage for him. He was better a little lighter...He didn't have the excessive acne, he didn't have the excessive weight gain, he wasn't on edge," Morgan said.

Back when Jose Canseco was dominating the headlines, I had planned to post pointing out Barry Larkin's retirement, which was being completely overshadowed, even though Larkin definitely has a claim that he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Well, I never posted that.

My follow-up post was going to be actually looking at Larkin's career, with my expectation for a conclusion that he does in fact deserve to be enshrined.

Well, I never got around to that either.

Luckily, over at Hardball Times, they beat me to the punch and did the dirty work for me. So go read a well put-together argument that I would have made in much less convincing fashion, without the cool stats tables, and be glad that they put it together instead of me.

Over, at Mike's Baseball Rants, best known for his picking apart Joe Morgan's ridiculous analysis and his work on the hall of fame (two subjects I really enjoy), he has put together a look at the 10 worst trades of all times, to follow up on the posts that I linked to last week.

The worst trade of our lifetime, according to his metrics, was the Astros sending Glenn Davis to the Orioles for Steve Finley, Curt Schilling, and Pete Harnisch. Three unproven players with enormous potential, for one boring slugger. While Finley and Schilling didn't really make their names with the Astros, they were able to turn them around for other pieces. But as much of a steal as this was for the Astros, it was ten times worse a blunder for the Orioles. They lost two above average starting pitchers in one deal, and we know how easy those are to come by.

Amazingly, this trade happened less than six months after the Astros made another move where they sent away a veteran for a youngster with potential. Thanks Lou Gorman. Your idiotic move did nothing to prevent the Sox from being swept by the A's, and it now ranks #4 on the worst trades of all time.

The Astros might be the smartest team ever based off of those two moves, but they fell on the bad side of trade #6, giving away Joe Morgan.

Amazingly, Schilling has been a pawn in two of the worst trades of all time. The Sox getting Mike Boddicker for Schilling and Brady "I'm sure he didn't take steroids that year" Anderson checks in at #9 on the countdown.

The moral of the story: don't trade Curt Schilling. Too bad Mike's research wasn't around when Arizona decided they wanted Casey Fossum. Too bad for the Yankees, that is.

My home state's Junior Senator, along with the recent election loser, are hoping to make Election Day a national holiday.

Besides, asking "what took you so long?" I want to ask, why not?

- Everyone likes getting a day off from work
- Voting wouldn't cut into precious "free time" either before or after work
- People who want to volunteer to help old people vote, etc., wouldn't have to burn a vacation day, like I did last year
- You would think, it's hard to argue with things that make it easier to vote that don't cause additional opportunity for chicanery. Government for the people and all that jazz.

Let's do it! I want November 7th, 2006 off. It's never too early to look forward to a day that I can sleep in!

(and now, I will go back to my self-imposed as little politics talk as possible)

The MetroStars have signed Youri Djorkaeff, who last played on the struggling Blackburn Rovers (with Brad Friedel). This is a good signing for the MetroStars, and the MLS, for several reasons

- His name is fun to say. I'll be interested to see what inflection or syllabic changes the Metro announcers make so that they aren't constantly saying "Jerk-off" when the ball is in midfield.

- He has won a World Cup. No one else in the league can say that.

- I had him on my fantasy team the last two years (yes, I have an English Premiership fantasy team), and he is a useful goal-scorer.

- He'll fit in nicely in the midfield with 2004 league MVP Amado "Che" Guevara and youngster Eddie Gaven. That is a midfield that will love to attack. This team could score some goals this year.

- Along with his World Cup championship, Youri brings some great experience playing with clubs in a number of strong leagues. He is known around the world, and perhaps can provide encouragement for other international stars to come to the US toward the end of their career.

Now the downside:
- He's old. About to turn 37 years old actually. It is a long summer, and despite playing at a high level just a couple of years ago, he is certainly on the decline.
- There is a chance that he'll sit on his contract, not take the MLS seriously, and spend more time at La Bonne Soupe than he does at the gym.

Overall, I'm happy to see a player I know, with some international credability, coming to the MLS, and the fact that he's coming to my home team makes it all the better. Now, who wants to start the Djorkaeff fan club? I think you could get a lot of confused 15 year old males to sign up.

Pitchers and catchers report for the Sox today.

It all seems so boring, without the inevitable six days of "When will Pedro show up?" speculation.

(and everybody's celebrating)...need Real Audio

Anyone else think it's funny that an actor named Sizemore was caught with a fake penis in his pants?

Dearest Tom,

STOP DOING DRUGS!!!

Sincerely,
Your career

Go read this article if you have a few minutes, and you're still a Pedro fan.

The last page is a bit more of "the Sox could have had me if they had done this..." but the first 2 pages especially are really interesting.

I can't wait to see Pedro at Shea this summer.

I really am not sure which I care about less:

Jose Canseco's self-promotion

or

The NHL's season coming to an end.

Spring training starts soon, for the sake of making espn.com readable, it cannot come fast enough.

Great news for Red Sox fans today, on 2 fronts, as the Twins have signed Johan Santana to a four-year extension.

The first reason this is great, is it keeps Santana away from the Bronx. Much like Beltran last year, it already seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the Yankees would get the young star after this year. He would command a high salary that Minnesota couldn't afford, and George would do whatever it took to put this ace at the top of the rotation for years to come.

The second reason this is great, is the Twins seem to be on a collision course with the Yankees every year in the playoffs. They haven't beaten them yet, but Santana twice in a five-game series is always going to make things difficult for the perennial AL East champs.

Well, I didn't look at the numbers behind the numbers (if I had known they were there I wouldn't have had to do my own math on the Bagwell thing, see previous post). If I had, I would have noticed that they didn't even include Jeff Bagwell in the trade analysis at Hardball Times. Adding him in quickly sends the Red Sox to last place on the worst traders of the expansion era list.

Instead of the Bagwell trade being responsible for their 3rd worst place, the trade doubles their crappiness to send them to last.

Following up on my "wow, the Mets really ARE that bad at trading," I wanted to check up on how much the Bagwell for Larry Andersen trade accounted for in the Red Sox showing up as the 3rd worst traders of the last 40 years.

Well, after his well-worth-it month with the Red Sox, Andersen actually went on to play for 4 more years, in the national league. In all, after the trade put up 24 win shares. Jeff Bagwell has put up 386 and counting.

That deficit of 362 Win Shares is the difference between the Red Sox being the 3rd worst, and being 14th worst. More evidence that the Bagwell travesty should certainly be included on any list of the worst moves ever, across all sports.

Oh well, Jeff Bagwell may be going to the hall of fame some day, but Scott Cooper was the last Red Sox third-baseman to make the All-Star team, so that has to count for something!

Edited Monday morning to add: The Hardball Times made a mistake. They didn't include trades that involved minor leaguers, and as such, didn't even count the Jeff Bagwell trade. In fact, it moves the Red Sox from third to last, to last place, on the worst traders of the expansion era. The Mets are the second worst. Schweet.

According to Murray Chass in the NY Times today, the Yankees knew about Giambi's steroid habit.

A person with knowledge of the contract said that before they signed off on
Giambi's seven-year, $120 million deal, the Yankees acquiesced to his request
and removed all references to steroids from the guarantee language routinely
included in contracts.

It's an interesting read, and anyone who wants to pretend that ownership and management from any team has been taken by surprise by the events of the past few years, is probably being naive.

I'm not judging the Yankees -there are players all over who were using steroids, and there was probably a pretty good idea by the teams about many of them. But I don't think this will be making it into any of the YES networks grandiose commercials about the perfection of the Yankee organization.

Hey Mets fans, do you ever get the feeling that for the past 40 years your team has been the worst traders in the entire sport?

Well, according to this analysis at Hardball Times, your feeling is right.

It's not the easiest thing to measure, since there is more to trading than just who produces what (position need, money, attitude, etc.). But the Mets have given up the greatest deficit of Win Shares over the past 40 years.

The Red Sox are real close behind. In their case, the deficit is almost 100% attributable to the Jeff Bagwell trade. He has 386 Win Shares, and the Red Sox are minus 380 over the past forty years. Since Larry Andersen only had a couple good years left in him from the time of the trade, well it works out that they've been pretty much even...except for that one enormous, catastrophic, monumental, unbelievable error in judgment.

The US was able to triumph over TNT (Trinidad and Tobago) in their first World Cup "hexagonal" qualification match today. There are 6 teams left, and the top 3 automatically go into the World Cup. The 4th needs to win a play-off with an Asian team to make it.

The final score was 2-1, with the 1 TNT goal coming right before the 90th minute. It seemed to be a solid effort all around, although the back line could have done a bit better as Keller was forced to make a good number of saves. Youngster Eddie Johnson scored, a good sign for the future. While a win over TNT seems like an expected result, consider this:

- The US drew at TNT in the 2002 qualifying. So they are already 2 points ahead of the game from last time;
- The US only won one game on the road in the 2002 qualifying;
- TNT is a tough place to play. The field was beat up from Carnivale just ending, and it being a cricket field. TNT uses Belichick-like tactics, keeping the grass short and the dirt patches plentiful, to maximize the team speed.
- The US, because of the labor dispute, hasn't really played together in some time. They used a lot of players who play in Europe right now to make sure they were fit, but the team chemistry couldn't have been at its best.

The magic number in 2002 was 17 points. That is what both the 2nd and 3rd place teams put up in 10 games to qualify. I'd say 16 points really will be enough to qualify. With 3 points on the board, and all five home games remaining, the US is looking good. They remain the favorites to take the group.

Next match: @ Mexico, on Easter Sunday. Should be wild.

With just over a week until pitchers and catchers reports, and three days removed from football ending, we take what we can get.

Tonight, at 9pm on ESPN, is UNC @ Duke. If you haven't had a chance to watch UNC yet this year, check this game out. They may be one of the most entertaining teams in college basketball in years. They're no Loyola Marymount, but they love to run and they have star after star.

Here's hoping they can put down Duke, who is somehow 17-2 this year.

This game always makes me think of ESPN2. Back when I used to live and die with this game, as the Pitt-UConn rivalry just wasn't doing it, there was a year that they put it on ESPN2 for no apparent reason. I believe the teams may have even been #1 and #2 in the country at the time.

We didn't get ESPN2 on our cable system yet. That was obviously a killer, since it's at least 11 years later and I still remember it.

The Huskies play at the Carrier Dome tonight, taking on the #8 team in the nation. ESPN, 7pm.

Lost in the shuffle last week, was a promise from the Blue Jays' ownership to up the payroll to about $70million per year for the next three years. The Red Sox haven't really made any moves since the Varitek signing, so technically they should not have gotten worse in that time, but there is some concern here.

The Orioles added Sosa, who declining or not, is a decent fielder and can be a monster at the plate. In Fenway, he could be really scary, and the Orioles give the Sox a harder time than they should every year.

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays, who have an Epstein type GM in charge, are expanding their payroll by about 40%. Clearly they will be able to field a better team with that kind of expansion, although I'm not sure what good it does for this year as there aren't many free agents still out there.

As the AL East gets tougher, the Sox win total declines. Even if they remain better than the Orioles and Blue Jays, which I expect them to do, losing out on a couple wins per year as the division competition gets stiffer could ultimately be the difference between the Wild Card and sitting at home in October.

As the AL East beats up on each other, if a second decent team can emerge in the AL Central (Cleveland?), it will have a much easier path to the playoffs.

Things I loved about the Super Bowl:

- The Patriots won (duh). Three in four years, no matter how close the games were, who the competition was, and how they got there, is what it is: a Dynasty.
- Deion Branch got the recognition he deserved on a national stage. This guy just finished only his third year, and he's put up two of the great receiving games in Super Bowl history.
- Freddy Mitchell, 1 catch for 11 yards. Shut up. If this guy is back in Philly next year I'll be shocked.
- The Eagles tried to pick on Randall Gay all night (did Asante Samuel ever even need to make a play?) Not only did this result in many opportunities for obvious jokes, but he really stepped up for the most part.
- I love watching the Pats D.
- I loved David Givens flapping his wings (although it lost its comedy value by the third or fourth time a Pat did it).
- I'm glad T.O. played, and played well, but not quite well enough to get the Eagles the win.
- I asked for two things: a Pats victory, and at least two commercials where monkeys were wearing clothes and acting like humans. I got my wish.

Things that I didn't love:
- It really was a sloppy game. Bad passes, turnovers, penalties. I'm not sure this game has too much re-watch value.
- Let's face it, it would have been nice to see the Pats just dismantle an opponent in the Super Bowl, one time, to put an exclamation point on the season.
- Turf cam. What a waste!

Now the Pats will try to find new motivation for next year. Proving that it wasn't all about Romeo and Charlie, or that just because they only won by 3 doesn't mean they weren't dominant, or that they've never won a Super Bowl in Detroit, or whatever they come up with, should hopefully be good enough to at least get them back to the playoffs. And I hope that the core remains the same, including Rodney Harrison, because it's fun as hell to root for this team.

Pats 29, Eagles 28.

Or Pats 19, Eagles 18.

OK, not really. Can you tell I have Pats-9 and Eagles-8 in my company's stupid box pool. Eight and two are the worst numbers by far, why do I get stuck with one of them?

In actuality, I think the Pats do a good job of shutting down Brian Westbrook, letting him get a little bit, but not too much, in the way that they controlled Edgerrin James. They will give up a couple of runs to McNabb, as they did to Big Ben, but nothing huge, just a couple of key first downs. Throw in a couple of big plays on kick returns and deep passes, and that is enough to have the Eagles score 23 points.

On offense, Corey Dillon is the key, and I think he breaks 100 yards. Deion Branch and Patten make some big plays. Givens scores his usual touchdown, they get a tight end touchdown, and a rushing touchdown as well from Brady/Faulk/Dillon. A couple of big kicks from Vinatieri, and you've got yourself 27 points.

Pats 27, Eagles 23. Take the points. Take the over. And then, hopefully, take this moment put it on a DVD, and let me enjoy this run as I look back on it years from now.

Let's go Pats!

Great news for US soccer!

I somehow missed this the week before last, I think it happened on a holiday. But the US will be full strength for their World Cup qualifiers:

The U.S. Soccer Federation ended its threat to use replacement minor leaguers in a World Cup qualifier next month, reaching an agreement Friday with the national team's union that calls for a pay increase in exchange for a no-strike pledge through 2005.

Thank you! The US team plays its first of ten matches on Wednesday, at Trinidad and Tobago. In World Cup qualifying, you're really safe if you win your home matches, and draw some on the road. They should be able to get at least a draw, and with a win will cement their status as the favorite to be the first team from the region through to the World Cup in 2006.

Now, if I can just remember to try to follow the action on Wednesday afternoon (2:30pm on ESPN2 for those at home) from my desk.

Super Bowl ads are going to be toned down this year.

"It would be surprising if they're not toned down, almost sedate, compared to last year," said Michael Bernacchi, a University of Detroit-Mercy marketing professor. "That's not to say they can't be creatively funny. It is to say the lowest common denominator of fraternity boy ha-ha is not going to be predominant."

I resent that. Excuse me if I think farting horses are hilarious.

They can tone it down, but they better have at least two commercials with monkeys in them, preferably where the monkeys are wearing clothes and getting the best of humans. That, and a third Patriots championship in four years, are all this humble man really wants on Sunday.

I'm impressed. The YES network, which I think most people would think of as a shill for the team, actually has some objective analysis on there, that I'm sure the Yankees would not approve of.

For example, in their evaluation of the Yankees non-roster invitees:

OF Doug Glanville, 34, symbolizes every shortcoming of the Yankees organization, the modern United States, and Western civilization.Chance of Making the Opening Day Roster: 96%

Richard Seymour is going to play on Sunday.

First of all, I should hope so, if they thought he might play in the Colts game, and it is now 3 weeks later. And it's the Super Bowl, you limp out there if you have to.

Speaking of limping, it remains to be seen how effective he'll be. But even having him at 85% on certain packages is definitely better than not having him at all.

So the Patriots just got better. Sweet.