The Sports Retort

Interesting Perk in Beltran's Contract

Well, it's been quite a while since I've even looked at my blog, but the Carlos Beltran signing prompted me to resurface.

It's not that I'm happy the Mets signed him instead of the Yankees--although that's indeed a welcome development.  The Yankees are going to be a tough team in 2004 even with an aging Bernie Williams patrolling center field.

Rather, I noticed one of the perks in Beltran's contract:  the Conditioned Ocular Enhancer.

There's some surprising stuff in his contract, including deferred money to the tune of $8.5 million each year from 2008 through 2011.  It's a classic Scott Boras move--he can announce to the world that he secured his client a $117 million dollar deal, but it's actual value will be less due to the deferred payments.

However, if you examine the  "perks" section and pass  over the de rigeur luxury box for home games and hotel suite for the road,  you will see this item:

"Club will lease conditioned ocular enhancer machine."

What on earth is this contraption?

It's a PED--a performance-enhancing doohickey.

A conditioned ocular enhancer (COE) appears to be a modified pitching machine developed by Dr. Mike Bonaventura that fires tennis balls which can be color- and number-coded.  The fundamental piece of advice for hitting is to "keep your eye on the ball."   The COE is supposed to train a batter's eye to perform just this function by firing balls at up to 15o mph.  The batter is supposed to swing only at a specific color or number, depending on the drill.

I first heard of this approach last summer; the U.S. Olympic softball team used the machine during batting practice.   Obviously, the team's  dominant, gold-medal performance was great advertising.

It turns out that the Kansas City Royals were using the machine back in spring training in 2004.   Juan Gonzalez had the machine brought to camp, and when the Royals decided not to spring for the $85,000 machine for the regular season, Gonzalez, Benito Santiago, Beltran chipped in to pay for one.

The Royals didn't hit well in 2004, but Beltran did and he parlayed his career year into national stardom via the NLDS and NLCS and his shiny new $117 million contract.

Beltran will also be bringing the COE to Shea.  It will be interesting if this contraption starts to catch on.

(Thanks to "Mikael" and "pyrite" on Baseball Primer for some of the story links.)

Taking a Break

I'll be doing some travelling, so I'm going to take a break from the blog for a while.

I burned out as the season went on, and once the playoffs started, I was anxious enough that I found it difficult to keep the necessary distance to write. 

This blog has been a fun outlet for following baseball, and especially the World Champion Red Sox during the year.  It gave me the excuse and the practice for investigating what has been happening in the world of sabermetrics the past few years. 

I'm not sure what to do with the blog when I return, and it has nothing to do with the Sox finally winning.  Rather, it has to do with the very good question:  why does the world need yet another Red Sox blog?

It  seems there's been a huge explosion of Red Sox blogs--there's so many I can't keep track of them.  When you add these to the discussion boards at Sox Therapy,  SoSH and Red Sox Nation,  not to mention the coverage by major New England dailies such as the Globe, the Herald, the Projo, and the Courant, it's just too much.  Sox fans are enthusiastic, generally informed, and opinionated.   It seems that an active discussion board like SoSH best represents Sox fans.  We can all pipe in to our hearts' desires.

The time and energy commitment necessary to keep up a proper blog was pretty rough as well.  Heck, it did in a far better writer than I, Bryan Gunn.  Gunn wrote the excellent Red Bird Nation, but recently decided to hang it up.  So we'll see if my desire to write about baseball returns after I've had a chance to do some travelling.

So: so long for now.  Enjoy the hot stove!

Oh, and one last time (who am I kidding): 

Wooo!  The Sox are the World Series champions!

Bye-bye, Vinny

The Expos signed Vinny Castilla to a 2 -year, $6.2 million deal. 

While Castilla has become something of a joke to the rest of the baseball world due to his inability to hit on the road (including a career road OBP of just .301), he was justifiably one of the few stars in the short history of the Rockies.   He could really hit in Coors, and had a great glove.   You would think that even given his advanced age and the team's budget crunch, the Rockies  could have come up with $3 million a year.  After all,  Castilla averaged a respectable 39.9 VORP in his six seasons as a starting third baseman in Colorado, including a 35.4 mark in 2004.

However, the Rockies are most likely better off without Castilla.  They weren't going to have much of a shot at .500 in 2005 even if Vinny was around.  More importantly, due to the Expos' haste in signing Castilla before the December 7 deadline for teams to offer their free agents arbitration, the Rockies will receive two draft picks as compensation.   The Rockies will receive the Expos' second-rounder in 2005, and a supplemental pick at the end of the first round.   This should give the Rockies 3 picks in the first 50 or so picks of the 2005 draft.

The Rockies are caught in budget straight-jacket as a result of huge contracts given to Denny Neagle, Mike Hampton, Larry Walker, and Todd Helton.  They need to sweat out 2004 as Preston Wilson ($12 million) and Charles Johnson ($9 million) are in the last years of their deals.

With some smarts, luck, and some money, they could turn those three draft picks into some decent players for the future.   It looks as if they're batting around .500 with their first round choices, and worse than that with their second rounders.  Their fans hope they come up with more first rounders like Jeff Francis (2002)  and even Jason Jennings (1999) , and fewer like  Matt Harrington (2000).  Their most notable second round picks in recent years include Jody Gerut (1998, later traded to Cleveland) and Aaron Cook (1997).

Hardball Times: Baseball Annual

If you're missing baseball already, or if you're interested some interesting baseball writing and reference material (graphs and stats), the Hardball Times has produced an annual.

You may know the Hardball Times, a terrific baseball website which brought together a lot of talented baseball bloggers, including Aaron Gleeman, Larry Mahnken of the Replacement Yankees Weblog, Craig Burley and Robert Dudek of Battersbox, and  studes of Baseball Graphs/Fun With Win Shares.

The book contains articles reviewing the 2004 season, a collection of their best articles, some studies such as Craig Burley's excellent work assessing college hitters.  There are also 40 pages of graphs and statistics, including stuff that's hard to find elsewhere, such as breakdowns of the results of pitchers' balls in play (e.g., groundballs, infield popups, outfield flies, line drives).

There's already a positive review on the Baseball Primer message board.

The book sounds intriguing--I encourage you to check it out; I'll be ordering a copy myself.  The order page is here, and a sample is here (PDF/Acrobat format).

2004 MLB Awards

Major League Baseball will kick off the announcements of their 2004 awards on Monday the 8th with the NL and AL Rookie of the Year awards.

The "Internet Baseball Writers Association" (I guess there is one) announced their awards October 29. 

Most internet writers tend to be into Bill James, sabermetrics, Baseball Prospectus, etc.  Despite these common affinities, I'm surprised to find that IBWA's picks match mine exactly (except for Manager of the Year--I don't have much of an opinion there):

National League:

Player of the Year:  Barry Bonds
Cy Young: Randy Johnson
Rookie of the Year:  Khalil Greene
Manager of the Year:  Bobby Cox
Executive of the Year: Walt Jocketty

American League:

Player of the Year:  Vladimir Guerrero
Cy Young: Johan Santana
Rookie of the Year:  Bobby Crosby
Manager of the Year:   Buck Showalter
Executive of the Year:  Theo Epstein

Some thoughts:

Hot Stove League Tools

Ready for the Hot Stove League?

Here are some resources:

Sortable Free Agent Tracker:

MLB.com has a free agent tracker which you can sort by team/position, and by signed/unsigned/all status. Assuming MLB keeps it updated, it will be useful to keep track of say, which starting pitchers are still available.

Elias player rankings:

• AL Players
• NL Players

These are the rankings used to determine compensation for the team losing the free agent. If the original team offers salary arbitration to the free agent, and the player signs elsewhere, the original team is compensated according the player's category.

This article from SABR has a useful summary of the compensation rules.

Salaries:

Salary information tends to be scattered around the internet. Dugout Dollars emerged during the 2004 season as a good resource, but wasn't updated after the late July deadline deals. Nonetheless, it and Google are probably the best resources.

There's also good historical information on salaries and arbitration awards at the archive of Doug Pappas's labor of love, the Business of Baseball website.

Rob Corddry Red Sox Clip

In case you've forgotten what it was like when the Sox won the Series, the Daily Show has posted a clip from their Oct. 28 show. "Palestine Correspondent" Rob Corddry is supposedly reporting on Yasser Arafat's illness, but something else is on his mind. I found it quite amusing.

Daily Show Clip (Windows Media Player)

If you're not using Windows, here's a lower res Quicktime version.

Cards' Mitchell Page Fired

The Cardinals fired their hitting coach, Mitchell Page.

After leading the NL in scoring during the regular season, and thumping their way through two playoff series before flailing away against the Sox, the move screams "scapegoat." However, Page has admitted to having a drinking problem, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the firing was not related to the Cardinals' poor hitting performance in the World Series.

It's a sad moment and I hope Page is able to overcome his problems.

That a drinking problem was part of the story reminded me of an unhappier time for the Red Sox--actually, an especially frustrating time--the Joe Kerrigan "era."

If you remember, Kerrigan fired pitching coach John Cumberland only a few weeks after Kerrigan had been promoted from the position to manager following the firing of Jimy Williams. The team had been playing mediocre baseball under Williams, with a record of 65-53. Unfortunately, Kerrigan hastened the club's slide, going 6-11 in the his first 17 games, and had lost the last five in a row.

Cumberland was then fired for the poor performance of the pitching staff, despite the fact that the staff had given up just 11 runs in those last 5 losses. In fact, Cumberland was summarily dismissed right after the end of an 1-0 loss to the Yankees. Boston's David Cone lost a shutout in the 9th to lose to Mike Mussina, who had lost his own perfect game to a Carl Everett single in the bottom of the 9th.

Rumors that Cumberland had a drinking problem made the situation worse. Players had been unhappy with Kerrigan and with the team's performance. The firing was the last straw; Nomar was heard loudly complaining, "This is why nobody wants to play here."

The Sox continued to stink it up the rest of the way to finish 82-79, 13.5 games behind the Yankees.

I hadn't thought much of that year, until I read of Page's firing and was moved to look up John Cumberland. I found there was a good reason I've mostly forgotten about that Sox season.

Cumberland was fired on September 2, 2001. Obviously, something happened nine days later that made me a whole lot more anxious than a dismal September for the Red Sox.

Thanking the Sox

In a previous post, I mentioned the idea of a plaque or monument recognizing the 2004 Red Sox.

Joy of Sox has a nice "thank you" along these lines. (Alan even thanks Cesar Crespo, Byung-Hyun Kim, and Dale Sveum! Hey, they were part of the team, and as far as we know, worked hard to contribute even if we didn't like the results.)

At the Hardball Times, Ben Jacobs pays tribute to the 25 guys on the post-season roster. (He also mentions the 26th man, Ramiro Mendoza, who replaced Kevin Youkilis on the ALCS roster.)

Let's hope that as these remembrances of the 2004 team are written, people don't forget Nomar. He was gone before the hot streak, and obviously didn't play in the playoffs, but he was part of the team, too. We have the talk radio tapes to prove it.

Johnny Pesky's Joy

This picture of Johnny Pesky says it all:

(Picture from the New York Times.)

Pesky was unfairly labelled the goat of the 1946 World Series, when Enos Slaughter scored from first base on a double by Harry "the Hat" Walker to score the winning run in Game 7 of the 4-3 Series victory for the Cardinals. Pesky took the relay on the play and was accused of "holding the ball," allowing Slaughter to take the extra base.