This is the problem with trying to write your predictions while taking law school classes; you finish them three or four weeks into the season and they lose all value. I promise that I will get to the NL at some point, hopefully over the weekend, although, in all honesty, that’s unlikely given the fact […]
This is the problem with trying to write your predictions while taking law school classes; you finish them three or four weeks into the season and they lose all value. I promise that I will get to the NL at some point, hopefully over the weekend, although, in all honesty, that’s unlikely given the fact that I have to take two exams in the next two blah blah blah blah blah. No one cares.
Fortunately, the AL East is pretty easy. And despite what other people will tell you, it’s actually the best division in baseball.
It’s easy to start with the Devil rays, because everyone thinks that they’ll finish last. They’re wrong. The Rays will finish fourth. They would actually be a year or two away from contending with the big boys except that they have the worst general management in sports. Fact is, that Zambrano- no, the wrong Zambrano– for Kazmir trade may go down along the lines of Bagwell-for-Anderson. Nice job, Mets. Anyway, it’s the same old story in Tampa Bay. They have a lot of young talent, they’ll lose a ton of games, Kazmir will be great, and no one will show up. Also, they’ll get into an inexplicable brawl with the Red Sox at some point. Hey, whatever it takes to put 6,000 fans in the seats every night.
The fifth place team in the east will actually be the Orioles, and I still think they’ll win 76 games. They’re not good. Let’s come to grips with that. The rotation is lousy, the bullpen is suspect, and the lineup has two aging stars. Awesome. I’d go on but it’s actually more depressing than talking about the Royals. Seriously- the Orioles ought to have won two championships since the opening of the new park, don’t you think? They had sellouts every game, a weak division, and they still couldn’t get it done due largely to owner ineptitude. Ineptitude, by the way, is so under-descriptive here it’s almost criminal. It’s like saying the Grateful Dead were a little too “hippie” for the mainstream. Peter Angelos… ah, words fail me. Let’s move on, for the sake of Boz and all the other good Orioles fans out there.
Toronto? Solid. Good rotation with a lot of backups (hey, there you are, Victor!!! Sorry you didn’t last with the Mets more than… never mind.) Frankly, they could win the division if all turns out right, despite losing a guy like Ted Lilly, who I think was among the best offseason signings of them all. BUT: I look at their lineup and see too many guys named Overbay and Zaun. It’s not a big deal to have a few holes in your lineup in the AL East (see Red Sox, 2007) but having several holes without the requisite offsetting power in other spots will kill you. Not enough bullets in the gun for the Jays this year, methinks.
And then that brings us to the Yankees. You know what? $200 million buys you a lot of talent, and for the first time since I can remember- possibly ever- I picked them to win the East before the season. I first wrote those words three weeks ago, before their rotation became Pettite, Wang, and three guys named Mo and their bullpen came to resemble the 918th at the beginning of 12 O’clock High. Now it’s late April, and the pitching situation is SO dire that I have to reconsider. It’s funny: if you could tell me I had the choice between hearing a) allied forces have captured Osama Bin-Laden, or b) Mike Mussina and Chien Ming Wang have come down with injuries so gruesome they belong in Saw IV, I would think long and hard and choose b. Every time. And… actually, I wouldn’t think that long. Or that hard.
Anyway, the lineup is stacked as usual, almost frustratingly so with guys like Robinson Cano. Here’s the thing: the MFY’s have had a tradition of buying the best player every year, and that’s fine, that’s how they roll. But karmically, when their top-dollar imports go down with injuries, they don’t deserve to have their AAA callups step in and play above replacement level. That’s just not fair. It’s also not fair that A-Rod hit roughly 35 home runs in two weeks in April, and his team is still in last place. Don’t get me wrong; I hate A-Rod. He’s a phony, a terrible teammate, a faker. He’s also the most talented player in baseball, and he can’t seem to catch a break. He really is a fascinating guy in that way. He’s got one of the most overrated players in the game playing his position, not as well as he does, and yet he gets booed when he hits a home run up or down by three runs. He’ll hit a walkoff one night and then get booed when he pops up to end the game the next day. Obviously, I take glee in his struggles, but there’s a part of me that sympathizes. How does it feel to be among the best in the game and work for a fan base so demanding that it’s never enough? Interestingly, I think the upshot of his hot spring will be that he bolts after the season if the Yankees don’t win the world series, and at this point it looks like they might not even make the playoffs. Most people have him going to LA or Anaheim, but I think he’d match up in Houston. He coulud hit 60 jacks a year in that short porch, feasting off crappy NL pitching, playing in a relatively low-pressure environment. We’ll see.
So the lineup is stacked, but the rotation is pretty old and has some holes. The departure of the Big Unit- a delightfully disastrous appearance in pinstripes- has forced Chien Ming Wang to step up and pitch like an ace. The guys at Hardball Times make a pretty compelling argument that Wang will suffer a huge dropoff in 2007, and I’m willing (and eager) to believe it. If you don’t strike out enough guys, basically, you’re hosed.
I think Wang is hosed, despite that great sinker.
The other fascinating story through April is the purported demise of Mariano Rivera. At this point his ERA is over 12, and he would have to throw 38.1 scoreless innings to match his 2006 ERA of 1.80. Everyone goes through bad stretches, but last night the dregs of the Sox lineup (Pedroia, Varitek, Crisp) were taking monstrous hacks off him. They hung a crooked number on him and he didn’t even make it through the inning. He’s had a few slow starts before, but it was always a dinker here, a hung cutter there. Right now, he’s just getting shelled. Part of it is a problem of consistent work; this team’s offense is so insane, they’ll blow the doors off a lot of #4 and #5 starters and he won’t have a save opportunity for a few days. Many people have said that it’s sad, like watching Willie Mays stumble around centerfield for the Mets at the end of a great career. I couldn’t agree less. Rivera forever cemented his reputation as a classy, self-deprecating kind of guy when he jokingly acknowledged the standing ovation at Fenway at 2005’s opening day. Great. But until he stops wearing pinstripes, I hope his every appearance on an MLB mound is an agony of bases on balls, crushed mistake pitches, and Yankee fans booing. Nice guy? Sure. Less loathsome than most other Yankees? Absolutely. That changes nothing. I can hope for nothing more than that this is not merely a slump but rather the beginning of the end, so that I may fiddle and dance as his career burns.
So what’s the upshot of all that? With a disastrous bullpen and an injury-riddled rotation, the Roger Clemens watch becomes that much more interesting. They may sign him for $30 million pro-rated when all is said and done, because they’ll be so desperate they’ll be willing to give him the moon. Meanwhile, the bullpen is so decimated that Scott Proctor is on pace for 158 appearances this season, and Clemens has said that he wants to go somewhere with a bullpen that will protect leads. As the Yanks become more desperate, in theory, Clemens becomes more hesitant to sign there. My guess? He’ll sign there. I’ve been down this road before. What Roger says is never as important as what Roger does, and what Roger does is sign for the absolute maximum number of greenbacks, every time, without fail. New York will give them to him, so he’ll be a Yankee by June. (I also pointed out in my AL West preview that I think there’s a chance that Ichiro will be in pinstripes by the deadline as well, if the Mariners are well out of it and Steinbrenner starts going wacky and forcing ridiculous trades.)
The 2007 Red Sox are an interesting team the same way Richard Nixon was an interesting person: fascinating, complex, and deeply flawed.
On the one hand, you have a lineup that can only be described as bloated: with talent (Ortiz, Ramirez, Drew, even Youkilis) and with misplaced dollars (Crisp, Varitek, Lowell). The Crisp situation is fascinating. If baseball were steel, business school students would read case studies in years hence about how the Red Sox correctly determined that going into the stretch run with a gimpy (but fan favorite) Nomar should be traded for Orlando Cabrera and other assorted spare parts, how they correctly decided that they shouldn’t pay O-Cab’s asking price, how they incorrectly decided that Renteria was the right answer at shortstop for 2005, how after 2005, they (maybe) correctly decided to ship Renteria out of town, how they ingeniously flipped him for Marte, how they inconceivably traded Marte, then a sure-fire 3B power-hitting stud, for Coco Crisp, settling for the aesthetically beautiful Alex Gonzalez era at short, then decided to overpay for Julio Lugo to start 2007. Truly; Shakespeare himself could not compose a more ridiculous flip-flopping of names and jerseys, especially seeing as Rents was the man who made the last out in the 2004 season for the Cardinals.
Despite his recent struggles, I remain optimistic that Crisp will turn it around in 2007 and start to hit like he did in Cleveland. I am not, however, optimistic for Jason Varitek. My God, the rumors coming out of spring training were true. He swings like he’s standing neck deep in oatmeal. Of course, there were those of us (myself included) who cautioned against signing a 30+ year old catcher to a big money 4-year contract, but… I guess we’re not the guys pulling the strings. Basically, at this point, Sox fans are hoping desperately for a league-average year out of Tek, and next year we’ll settle for a season like Gus Sinski’s in For the Love of the Game.
On the other hand, though, you had, at least until late March, the most interesting rotation in baseball. Schilling coming off an injury, Beckett hopefully adjusting to AL hitters, Papelbon in the five spot, and good ol’ Timmy Wake holding down #4. Oh. Then there’s some asian pitcher in the #3 spot. Never heard of him… (more on this later).
Before moving on, I have to point out one thing. On principal, I have ignored Dan Shaughnessy’s missives on the Red Sox since 1997: the year I went to college, and, incidentally, the year my red sox fandom went from casual to fanatic. His tired vitriol, his unrelenting nattering-nabob-of-negativism-ishness, and above all, his ceaseless flogging of his “Curse” book made me want to stab him in the face. Repeatedly. With a tire iron.
But this… Well, I hesitate to even link to it in the fear that doing so might drive one or two additional readers his way. Suffice it to say that I have never in my fifteen years of reading the Globe and other papers seen anything so unprofessional, so intentionally confrontational, so deliberately violative of the one, the only true rule of journalism: don’t make yourself the story. Congratulations, Dan, I guess, because at this point you’re just a tired caricature of yourself. You’re an embarassment, and I guess in perpetuating the CHB persona, you’ve earned yourself another few hits on boston.com. Congrats. p.s. I hope you cough blood.
Where was I? Oh, right. Daisuke. Man… it’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about a new addition the Red Sox, and that probably goes back to ’97 with Pedro. I’ve said all along that I think he’ll come through the AL and just dominate for one or two trips around the league, and then hitters will figure him out and he’ll settle down to have a respectable season. So far, it hasn’t happened. He’s been good, but not great, and while he could have started 3-0 with decent run support (you can’t, for example, blame him for losing this gem by King Felix) he’s been touched for 10 ER in 13 innings in two starts against the Yankees, winning only because the lineup bailed him out. Obviously, the guy is so talented he’ll be successful at the MLB level, but I just hope that Sox fans won’t turn on him when he doesn’t turn out to be Pedro part II, because here’s the thing; there is no Pedro part II. There could not possibly be such a thing. At his prime, say ’99-’00, Pedro Martinez was so much better than anyone else who had ever tried or ever will try to throw a baseball with his or her right hand that it transcends baseball. From a statistical standpoint, he was so many standard deviations above everyone else, you can’t even meaningfully compare Pedro’s ’99-’00 to years from other pitchers. You need to compare it to Einstein’s 1911-1912 (gravitational redshift, general covariance & the use of tensors, theory of relativity), or Napoleon’s 1804-1805 (crushes Russia and Austria at Austerlitz, defeats Prussia, steamrolls through Poland to whup the Russians again, places puppet rulers on the thrones of German states). He was just so much better than everyone else that he can only be compared meaningfully to people outside his genre.
Dice-K, as great as he is, will never do that. No one will ever do that again, and I hope Red Sox fans will understand that.
The bullpen is a question mark, although Papelbon solidifies it at the back end. Timlin, love him though we might, is past his prime and all signs point to a continuing rapid decline. Brendan Donnelly has been falling off as well, as 35 year old power pitchers tend to do. The bright spot so far has been Okajima, who came in for a nutsy save last Friday in the comeback against the MFYs. At this point, they look reasonably stable, but it’s an old pen, and over the course of a six-month season, it’ll be interesting to see how they hold up.
Lastly, I have to say I was really disappointed about the Papelbon to the bullpen situation. It’s tough to complain about a team that’s 15-7 and has the best record in baseball, but coming as it did, late in spring training, it smacked of desperation. Obviously, having a guy who throws that kind of gas pitch 180 innings is preferable to having him throw 60 innings, even if those 60 innings are higher leverage and higher quality. Frankly, if it was an organizational priority to have Paps in the rotation, they should have prevented such a situation by targeting a closer so as to allow him to stay there instead of pull a panic move at the last minute and slide him back into the pen. While I wasn’t crazy about the rumored options (Washington wanted an insane boatload of young talent for a guy with mediocre stuff in Cordero, and Brad Lidge is either a guy who just needs a change of scenery or one who needs a new career), they should have had better alternatives than a 74-year old Mike Timlin and Joel Piniero to step into the closer spot. So far, Tavarez has pitched as well as one can expect in the #5 slot, and his antics, particularly as they relate to Dice-K (his oft-replayed gesticulations showing that Dice should pitch A-Rod inside, because he’ll get scared, for example), have been hilarious. I worry about handing him the ball 30 times in a season, though, and I certainly hope that Lester will recover and progress to the point that he can be called up, forcing Tavarez back into a long man role.
So where does that leave us? Well, pre-season I had to pick the Yankees. Right now, it’s obviously tempting to go with the team with the 6.5 game lead in the standings. That Sox bullpen still scares me, however, and it’s inevitable that the Yankees will right the ship somehow, given their bottomless pockets and willingness to acquire anyone at any price at any time. But what if Hughes doesn’t pitch up to expectations coming out of AA? What if they can’t sign Roger, or if they do and he isn’t effective? What if Torre continues to abuse that pen, to the point of bringing in Andy Pettite on off days? What if Rivera really is cooked, and Professor Farnsworth has to step into the closer role (which would be accompanied by me and most other Red Sox fans assuming the facial expression typically associated with Wile E. Coyote as he plots to capture the road runner)? Frankly, that Yankees team is SO one dimensional, and their pitching is SO flawed, that there’s a chance they could be out of it by July.
Nope, I can’t risk jinxing it. I’m picking the Yankees. They’ll win the division by 8 games…
p.s. I have a $100 bet with HBWT reader Colin, a Cubs fan who roots for the Indianapolis Colts (ugh), that Mark Prior will never again start 31 games in a season. Had we been intelligent, we should have built some sort of inflation adjuster to the bet, but hey, we didn’t. Anyway, I asked Cubs fans before the season what they thought, and to a man, they all encouraged me to double down. Then this happened, and then this happened, and I think the window has closed. Oh well.