Ichiro! in paper of record
An Artist Who Makes the Field His Canvas. Talks about Ichiro’s unique swings and style.
They also have this photo about “the left-handed advantage” which says that lefties are closer to first and so have an easier time getting hits… which isn’t actually true. You can look up overall splits and see that they’re within a point or two of each other.
The good one is the “Suzuki’s Swings: Unorthodox and Unstoppable” graphic.
Anyway, check it out. NYT is registration-required, but… Bug Me Not.
Vindication comes, mostly
“Pete Rose and Major League Baseball have reached an agreement that would allow him to return to baseball in 2004, and includes no admission of wrongdoing by Rose, Baseball Prospectus has learned.”
— Return of the Hit King, Baseball Prospectus, August 12, 2003
At the time, MLB and Rose both denied that the story had any merit. Rose slid off that story in the next year, especially after his book was released and he was widely criticized for taking attention away from the Hall of Fame inductees that week, and Commissioner Selig made it clear he wasn’t even considering Rose any more. He, and Mike Schmidt, and others all made statements that implied first that there had been side agreements (keep your nose clean for a year first, try to stay out of casinos and certainly don’t gamble) and later hinted at a larger deal between Rose and Selig.
During this time, my response to questions has been “we had several sources, they were excellent, we believe we met any reasonable standard for printing the story, and in time we’ll be proven right.”
On July 19th, 2004, WKNR 850 Cleveland had an interview with Pete Rose in which he states that he and Selig had come to terms and that they drew up an “unsigned agreement”. Unfortunately for Rose, after the book problems, Selig ended their ongoing negotiations.
Unfortunately for me, their archives only show the last couple shows, and because I can’t seem to get to their server, I can’t guess out the URL. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this post with a link to the interview itself later today. You can, however, find references on the Net that mention the contents of the interview, so don’t just take my word for it.
Slowly, Rose has parceled out the truth about what happened. We’re up to almost entirely confirming the story-as-reported, requiring only the conditions. And for total clearance, we need a copy or we need someone in the know to tell who signed off on the agreement from each camp on behalf of Rose and MLB, providing both Rose and Selig with the ability to deny that they’d personally agreed to anything, or in Selig’s case, that he’d come to a decision about what he’d be doing.
I don’t think we’ll get it at this point — while Rose may offer at some point a version of the story that includes the conditions, it seems unlikely he’d ever get around to naming names, unless he ever decides to take this to court.
I wrote a series of articles at Baseball Prospectus examining Rose and the Dowd Report before he admitted that he bet on baseball (while still denying damning evidence that he bet from the clubhouse, another example of his truth-in-its-own-time thing), which meant that I was the logical person to author the article with Will.
At the time, I got chewed out by Rich Levin, MLB’s executive vice president for public relations. Bob DuPuy and Bud Selig both implied that we made the whole thing up out of spun sugar and air. DuPuy in particular had some choice words about how this was a great example of “irresponsible journalism.” Many more people believed that we’d invented it as some kind of publicity stunt for the site. I spent much of the time since then regretting the mistakes we made working on the story that cost us the chance at the magic evidence bullet.
No more. I waited on someone mainstream to pick up this story for too long, and it hasn’t happened. Now that I’ve written this up, I feel relieved, and hope that I’ll never have to write about Pete Rose again. It may take another year for everything we wrote and said to be proven entirely true, and it may never come. I’m all right with that.
I hope too that even the people who believed baseball entirely will come around to acknowledge that we didn’t make this up, that if nothing else, the foundation of our story, that Rose had reached an agreement with baseball — was true.
Derek
PI, Paper of the People
Check out this double-team action:
The Answer Guy, first person in print willing to take up the issue, takes up the fight again:
Q: Joyce Rafferty of Seattle, responding to an item in last week’s column about the new bleachers on the Center Field Landing area of Safeco Field, comments, “People might want to know that those bleachers on the Center Field Landing are covering up a couple of sections of fan bricks at Safeco. It is covering up mine and that is upsetting to me. I have written the Public Facilities District about this matter and it is in the process of talking to the Mariners about this matter, although I haven’t heard back from them yet.”
AG: Kevin Callan, executive director of the public facilities district that overseas Safeco Field, confirms the receipt of Rafferty’s letter and has suggested she and others concerned about this matter might want to speak at the district’s quarterly meeting Monday at 4 p.m. at the Mariners’ Safeco Field offices on First Avenue. Callan says the team has assured him that, if the bleachers are retained next season, the covered fan bricks will be moved to another area of the ballpark. “There is no way that the team will get to keep the fan bricks covered with those bleachers,” Callan said. “We are not sticking our heads in the sand on this matter.”
“Um, I mean, not sticking our heads in the sand on this matter anymore.”
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
If that’s not good enough for you. John Levesque’s column today is “Brick by brick, fans taken for granted” and folks, if you want to see someone give it to the Mariners, and were left unsatiated by the Go2Guy’s weak attempts to talk to the team about beer prices, check this out, and please, set down any beverages you may be drinking
“Covering up the bricks was clearly a mistake on our part,” Armstrong said last night as he watched the Mariners suffer their 90th defeat of 2004. “There’s no excuse for it.”
No, that’s really in the article. You can go read it again. Has Chuck Armstrong ever admitted the team was wrong before, that they’d done something inexcusable? I don’t think he has.
And I don’t want to spoil the end of the article, but Levesque hammers the team at the end, oh, it’s a beautiful thing. Hits all the high points, notes the arrogance inherent in this act, the… just go check it out. It rules.
Now, I don’t know it was people’s emails to the PFD, or the PI, or anyone in particular that got us to this day, but I have to believe that getting the letters out and having one printed — particularly Ken Haselman’s, which ran in the Sunday Times-PI and noted his brick was covered — has made a huge difference. We’ve seen the Mariners write up a form letter to respond to complaints, Rebecca Hale’s made an official and probably annoyed statement to the press, and now the PFD’s up from their refreshing nap and looking into things.
I want to point out too that the PI has now run four different pieces on this, ranging from the first knowing jabs from the Answer Guy to Levesque’s eviscerating column today, and even if you credit the letter to the Times (and I don’t know who handles the content mix on Sundays, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt) they’ve run one, a reader letter.
I’m a happy dude today. Now we just have to get them pulled for next year.
Are You Ready?
A word of warning for anyone planning on attending a Monday Night Football game in the near future; beware the TV timeout. I think we sat through 842 of them. I’m going to have to reprogram my body to not shut down every three minutes for a commercial break. I’m guessing this is one event that is better on TV than in person. Especially when the home team gets beaten to a pulp, then has their star break his leg on a meaningless drive at the end of the game.
Also, the Worst. Fan. Ever. contest is officially over. It belongs to the narcoleptic that was to my left. He was a pretty big guy and apparently hadn’t slept in months. He snored through 98 % of the game, several times ending up leaning on me. We had to prod him whenever people wanted to get by. He did wake up for the cheerleader dances, though.
Angels at Mariners, September 13th
Escobar versus Baek.
Baek looked bad last time I saw him pitch. His stuff wasn’t working and he didn’t seem ready to be starting.
Mariners hitters at home: .255/.323/.432, 68 home runs
Opposing hitters at Safeco: .252/.338/.431, 101 home runs
Part of that is opportunity: because the M’s don’t bat in the ninth sometimes, their AB total would be lower anyway.
So far, Anahiem has whupped up on the Mariners: 5.76 ERA, 3-10 record, 24 HR in 13 games.
I’d like to see Jeremy Reed get a serious hit, Ichiro! to get a couple, and Baek.. well, I’d like a pony, too, and I’m not going to get that either.
7:30 — Escobar’s not supposed to go to his mouth and blow on much less lick his fingers before touching the ball. Pitchers can’t even blow on their hands unless they’re received prior permission from both managers before the game and it’s a cold game, which it isn’t. You’re never supposed to lick your fingers. If I was managing the M’s, I’d be all over that — every time he licks his fingers the umpire is supposed to immediately call a ball. It’s in 8.02(a)(1) — why Melvin doesn’t want his players getting every advantage he can squeeze out of this escapes me. Doesn’t he want to field a competitive team and try to win as much as possible to preserve the integrity of the pennant races? That’s what he says he wants, after all.
Many fans want Section 101
No, really — if you’ve send the M’s an email, you may get back a response that says “Bleacher seats are extremely popular with our fans as a place to enjoy the game and we have received many requests for these seats in the
centerfield ball catch area.”
You’ll all remember last year the angry fans picketing the stadium demanding that the centerfield landing be filled with bleachers. The angry chants, the petitions… I was scared violence might erupt, but fortunately things were pretty civil. It’s good that the Mariners took the will of the fans into account when they put those things in.
Attendance
Last night was the first time in a while I’d seen an actual huge crowd at Safeco. Interestingly, if you went up to the ticket office and asked for seats they were telling people that there were only scattered singles available, but there were huge chunks of the upper deck with no one sitting in them at all. I’m not sure what happened there, but I wonder if the scalpers bought them all up early in the season and then got hit by busses or something.
The M’s are 10th in home attendance this year, with 36,000/home game (and I believe that’s tickets bought, as we’ve noted before). The M’s are surrounded by teams with better records. The only close bad team is Arizona in 15th place with 32,000/home game.
That seems high, and yet it’s cause for worry for the team. That’s 4,000 under last season, in a year in which season and advance ticket sales were really good, making for a huge base. Even on the worst matchups, mid-week, the Mariners have announced attendance of 28,000.
So here’s where this gets wacky: if you figure that the M’s got $20/head out of the average fan showing up between ticket and everything else, that 4,000 fan drop-off is $6.5m in lost revenue from last year. There are easily that many no-shows in the stands many nights, and if you figure the M’s don’t lose $5/head selling the ticket but not “everything” that’s another $1.6m. I’m surprised the team hasn’t explained that this is where Sasaki’s money went — even though in the past higher-than-planned attendance wasn’t used on payroll.
I haven’t found anything on ratings, but they’ve got to be down — even my wife asks “why bother?” when I tune into games sometimes, and she troops to more home games than anybody I know (not including me). The Mariners were fortunate to negotiate their deals at the height of their success, but the broadcasters are going to bring this up next time.
What’s this project to next year? I notice there’s been a huge difference in tone in the advertising to season ticket holders this year: Lincoln’s no-apology apology letter, for instance, and the constant reassurance that they appreciate season ticket holders (rather than the usual “get deposits in now” strategy). After a year like this the Mariners are going to see a huge drop in season tickets and advance sales will be way down too… unless the team makes some huge moves early this off-season, and I don’t mean Ibanez-style. There are season ticket holders who will bolt if they see a repeat of last year’s off-season. Or at least that’s what I hear… whether or not people follow through on that’s another matter.
If the Mariners win, I think the day-of-game sales will come back up. Safeco Field’s still a great place to see a baseball game in the summer, mingle — whoops, not anymore — and Seattle’s turned into a good baseball town. But season ticket holders buy expensive seats and because they’ve purchased them in advance, are more likely to show up because they’re financially invested. They also give the Mariners their money up-front, which is a substantial amount of float to make money off.
Another factor is that games are more fun to attend when they’re well-attended. It’s less fun trying to get your food and beer, but the difference in game experience between having 10,000 and 20,000 is huge, and 20,000 and 30,000 is large as well… and a sell-out packed house makes almost any game worth watching. A large season-ticket base ensures that the stadium’s always got a lot of fans in it, which makes it more pleasant for the casual fan to come out and cheer along.
The Mariners said they’re looking to spend a lot of money this off-season to help rebuild the team. Part of what they may be considering goes beyond on-field costs: if they sign Beltran, for instance, he might be worth overpaying if it staves off the erosion of their lucrative ticket base as they try to build a winning team again.
The New Meche
Man, I switched over to the veggie dogs tonight from the Ivardog, and I think I might have gone a little crazy with the onions.
Anyway. I don’t think it’s as useful to look at K ror BB rate as it is to look at percentage of outcomes. Did anything really change from the early Meche to late Meche?
Yes, clearly.
Meche’s walk rate went from 14% of batters he faced to 4%. His HR rate went up by half, from 3% to 5% though two hundred at-bats in either direction isn’t enough that I’d really want to draw conclusions from it. He’s striking out about 19% of the batters he faces. And that’s in Safeco, too, which makes the HR rate even more eye-popping.
An average pitcher’s rates are (and I’m doing rough estimates here, please forgive me if I screw up) about 8% walk rate, 15% K rate, and 2.5% HR rate.
So Meche has turned into almost a super-powered Franklin. He’s striking guys out with the same curve he’s been teasing us with for years, but not dominating, and he’s walking almost no one. The price he seems to be paying is that when he can’t get the K, he’s coming back over the plate and taking his chances. Sometimes that means the pitch is crushed.
If he can keep this up, munch innings, he’s an average major league starter. A bit of an odd one, but there are many different ways to get to any particular spot. Now, what’s that worth — $2m? $3m? Is the risk of re-injury large enough that it’s too expensive for a gamble?
Bow down to Ibanez
Okay, first — Ibanez looks baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad at first. We can argue about whether he’d get better with regular play, but he’s baaaaaaaaaad right now.
HR for him was his first since Auguest 21st, his second since returning from injury. After the All-Star break Ibanez has hit for average but almost no power at all: his line is .292/.344/.400 compared to .262/. 344/.490 in the first half of the season. If we wanted a hollow OBP left-handed first baseman, we’d have been better off with Olerud.
All hail Gil Meche
Something for everyone tonight.
For the Meche-as-awesome crowd: his first shutout since 2000. Only 1 walk.
For the Meche-as-not-awesome crowd: only 4K in nine innings of work, required a bizarre Manny mistake to get the shutout.
For the organization-as-dumb crowd: threw 129 pitches in the effort.