Bad votes.

I think many of us in the sabermetrically-inclined crowd tend to discredit older sportswriters as less likely to consider strong statistical arguments and more likely to use specious reasoning to justify their award or Hall votes. I haven’t found that to be true while collecting Hall ballots, and here’s some proof that younger sportswriters can be just as specious:

1. [Tim Raines] admitted sliding headfirst the year he used because he kept coke in his uniform pocket and didn’t want it to fall out — which is an act as disrespectful of the game as you can imagine.

I presume Buscema will be leading the “recall Mickey Mantle” campaign, since we know Mantle showed up drunk for games on multiple occasions. And, of course, his last phrase is pure hyperbole, since I can imagine many more disrespectful acts, like throwing games for money. Except I don’t have to imagine it at all.

Raines had an addiction. He admitted it, sought treatment, has been clean for something like twenty years, and became a model citizen and good clubhouse guy for the second half of his career. His cocaine problem is a non-factor in discussing his Hall candidacy.

2. As a player whose key Hall of Fame attribute was his speed, I want to examine a little further whether the use of a stimulant could have enhanced his performance whether he used it for that purpose or not.

That’s just pathetic. Cocaine is now a performance-enhancing drug? Perhaps cops should take a sniff of coke before setting off to chase down suspects on foot. The perps wouldn’t stand a chance against those juiced-up cops!

And how is Buscema going to examine this further? Will he review the peer-reviewed studies on the effects of cocaine usage on athletes?

3. He wasn’t a surefire Hall of Famer without that issue by any means; in fact, I had only seriously considered him after several compelling columns turned my head.

This is perhaps as damning to me as the first point. Here we have a first-time Hall voter who, at certain points in his article (such as explaining why he didn’t vote for Dawson), shows awareness of stats like OBP. And yet when presented with Raines, whose .385 career OBP sits comfortably aside Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn’s (.388) and eventual Hall of Famer Derek Jeter (.388), Buscema needed other writers to point out to him that Raines is a surefire Hall of Famer … and still isn’t convinced.

When you only use statistics that support the point you already wanted to make, or you weigh statistics that support that point more heavily than those that don’t …

Bert Blyleven … but ultimately I still would have liked to have seen at least a little better winning percentage and/or more Cy Young votes, an ERA title and more than one 20-win season in 22 years.

… you raise a question, at least to me, of whether you understand the statistics at all. If we’re still talking about Blyleven’s win total – and acting as if that’s unconnected to Cy Young votes – then we’re still running uphill.

One ballot doesn’t prove the point that we may be discriminating a bit too much by age when talking about voter tendencies, but based on the 80-odd ballots I’ve got, I haven’t seen anything to convince me that the voter’s age is a major factor in affecting his Hall choices. Buscema was just kind enough to display his logic in public.

Thank you.

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who’ve chosen to visit this blog, whether it’s to lurk, to comment, or even to buy something by clicking through to amazon.com. I started the blog as an outlet for some food-related writing for which I didn’t have a proper outlet, and it’s grown in scope and audience beyond anything I expected. I’ll end December with over 10,000 unique visitors and over 150,000 hits for the month, and I can’t tell you what it means to know that I’m reaching that kind of audience.

So thank you all for coming, talking, buying, critiquing, suggesting, and cooking. The more you visit, the more it drives me to write. I wish all of you a happy, safe, and prosperous New Year.

You paid for this.

A staffer at Minnesota Public Radio has about as tired and lazy a take on the Santana trade talks as you will ever find:

The Big Market Teams (BMT) are low-balling the Twins with offers that won’t include another star player (like Jose Reyes or Robinson Cano) or two-top shelf prospects (like Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester). This is a travesty.

The travesty is that my tax dollars are going to fund an outlet where a man who apparently failed out of his high school economics class on day one gets to speak his empty mind.

The team that acquires Santana gets ONE YEAR of his services, plus the value of an exclusive negotiating window, blunted somewhat by the fact that the acquiring team would then have to extend Santana for 2009 and beyond before seeing what he does in 2008. This writer wants another team to give up, say, four years of Jose Reyes signed to below-market salaries PLUS something else for that one year of Santana. It is conceivable that there would be a GM stupid enough to make that trade, but the fact that no one is willing to make that trade is not a travesty; it is common sense.

The writer in question, David Zingler, says that this situation demonstrates “exactly what’s Wrong with Baseball.” I think his article shows exactly what’s Wrong with Public Radio. Despite a simple economic argument that trading Reyes for Santana would be a terrible deal for the Mets, and despite mountains of evidence that there’s nothing substantially wrong with baseball, Zingler plows right on ahead with his argument, because he’s a Twins fan and he’s angry. He can be angry if he wants to be, even if his reasoning is fault, but it would be nice if he wasn’t doing it while on the dole.

UPDATE: Great minds, etc., etc.

Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Before I get to the writeup, a quick note to those of you who pushed me to pick up Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen: I did pick it up today, and I’ll read it at some point in the next few weeks. The picture of Moore on the back scares the crap out of me, though. I would move to the other side of the street if I saw that coming at me.

I think Willa Cather is one of the most underappreciated novelists out there, and I can’t figure out why. Her novels are wonderful, beautifully written with great attention to detail and a deep understanding of human emotions. Her main characters are always compelling. And for people who read with an agenda, she offers a little of everything – she was as sincere an American patriot as you’ll find (by which I mean she clearly loved America and Americans, especially the immigrants who made this country what it is), and for the multiculturalists, she was one of America’s first great female novelists and probably its first great lesbian novelist. For whatever reason, however, her work has been gradually deprecated over time, and it’s a shame.

My first introduction to Cather’s work was My Ántonia, a story of immigrant families on the Nebraska plain, with a focus on the eldest daughter, Ántonia. It’s a beautiful novel that starts out as something of a love story but instead is a celebration of friendship wrapped around a praising of the immigrant’s work ethic.

Cather appears on the three main book lists I’m working through via another novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. While I’d rank this just a shade below My Ántonia, it’s still an amazing book. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of friendship, even more so than My Ántonia, along with a story of faith, set among the New Mexico territory when it was still largely uncharted land.

The main character, Father Jean Latour, doesn’t become an archbishop or receive a visit from the Reaper until the book’s final chapter; the book is almost a biography of his life starting from his transfer out to the southwest. Latour is accompanied by Father Joseph Vailliant, a slightly flawed foil to Latour’s compassionate Catholic faith, and the two slowly build their church’s following in their oversized territory village by village, overcoming corrupt local priests, narrowly avoiding a murderer, befriending the real-life frontiersman Kit Carson, and all the while deepening their friendship.

If there’s a criticism of the novel, it’s the general lack of conflict; problems are solved in short order and there’s no villain or enemy or large obstacle overshadowing the whole book. But I’d argue that to point out this as a failing of the book is to miss the point – Cather’s writing is compassionate, sensitive, almost sentimental, emphasizing the bonds that form between friends and the way that those bonds help us react to and influence the world immediately around us. It’s an optimistic outlook, one that I suppose is out of favor at the moment in the literary world, but if we value diversity in everything else, we should value it in literary viewpoints too.

I weep for our language (part 3)…

Even the New York Times is losing its grip on our grammar: Witness John Branch’s Seeing Vulnerability in N.F.C. Foes, Giants Are Confident:

And the Giants, boosted by a 7-1 road record and the knowledge that none of the five top seeds are currently on even a two-game winning streak, see reason to view their postseason outlook optimistically.

(Emphasis mine). “None” takes a singular verb – none of the top five seeds IS currently on a two-game winning streak. So that’s bad, but not uncommon. What’s awful is that some copyeditor at the Times liked that sentence and used it for a pull quote, repeating the grammatical error:

None of the five top seeds are on a two-game win streak.

Now, maybe I’m a little off on this one, but what exactly is the skill set required to be a copyeditor? If command of the language isn’t #1, it’s #1A, right?

By the way, I’ve got a 1 pm chat today (Friday 12/28) over at the Four-Letter.

Dinosaur thinking.

I wrote recently about the persistent thinking among some old-school baseball folks that amateur baseball players shouldn’t use agents or care about money, but I wasn’t expecting to find a concrete example so quickly. A Baseball America article on the recent meeting between some college coaches and MLB scouting directors featured this anachronistic beauty from American Baseball Coaches Association executive director Dave Keilitz:

“This has kind of become a phenomenon in the last 15 years or so—every kid seems to have his advisor, not just advising him on pro issues but on where to go to college and what position to play and all of that stuff, and that has really come into being in the last few years,” Keilitz said. “It’s a total frustration to many baseball programs and coaches, and it certainly is with the pro people. It’s almost a shame when you call a kid that you think you’re interested in and he refers you to his advisor—some 16- or 17-year-old kid and he has an advisor.”

It’s a shame? A shame that what – these kids are actually seeing their interests represented properly at the negotiating table? That they’re getting advice from a professional with (usually) previous experience in the draft? The typical first-round pick out of high school and his family are engaging in the biggest financial negotiation of their lives. God forbid they get some help.

Oh, I get it. It’s a shame that colleges and MLB teams can’t bend these kids and their parents over like they used to. No, wait, that’s not a shame. That’s fantastic. The shame is that Keilitz is openly wishing it was still 1965.

A Clockwork Orange.

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange appears on the three major lists of the best books of the 20th century (Modern Library, Radcliffe, and the TIME 100), one of 25 books to pull off the trifecta. It’s a masterwork, a deeply philosophical novel that poses serious questions about liberty and free will, as well as a linguistic tour de force written in a brilliantly expressive invented slang.

The novel is narrated by Alex, who refers to himself as “Your Humble Narrator,” a teenage tough called a “droog” who spends his evenings causing mayhem, assaulting older citizens, dabbling in the occasional rape, and listening to dramatic pieces of classical music. Eventually arrested in a home invasion gone awry, Alex spends two years in prison before he’s offered a chance to gain his freedom in two weeks if he submits to an experimental treatment known as the “Ludovico Technique,” probably the best-known sequence from the book or the movie version, where Alex is forced to watch violent films with his eyelids held open. In its final third, Alex re-enters society and the questions begin: Is a man still a man if he’s acting morally by force rather than choice? How much do we want or expect our government to do in the name of public safety?

Burgess created his own slang for the novel to give it a futuristic or alternate-history feel. Most of the new words draw from Russian vocabulary – “nadsat,” meaning teenager, from the endings of the Russian words for the numbers between eleven and nineteen; “viddy,” to see, from the Russian “vidyet” – with occasional invented slang words, like “sinny” for the cinema. It makes the first few pages of the book a bit tough to get through, but after a while, it becomes easier to follow and adds color to Alex’s language, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes almost musical, while also creating a clear delineation between his speech and that of the adults around him.

My senior year in high school, I took an AP lit class with Mrs. Glynn – who saw phallic and “concave” symbols on every page of every book – and she assigned us a choice of one of three books: Slaughterhouse-Five (also on all three top-100 lists), Catch-22 (ditto), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (omitted by Modern Library). I ended up reading and enjoying all three, since they presented moral or philosophical questions, often about horrible situations, with heavy doses of humor and a thoroughly modern tone. A Clockwork Orange would have fit perfectly on this list, and if anything, Burgess’ novel is more clever and more serious than the other three.

Hall of Fame: Ballot-counting.

Note that as of Monday, 12/31, I’ve moved the updated counts to a new thread.

UPDATED: Monday, 12/31, 10:45 am EST.

At this point, with at least 10% of the total ballots counted, I feel pretty comfortable calling Gossage’s election. It’s too soon for me to call Blyleven, Dawson, or Rice either way.

I’ve found or received 75 Hall of Fame ballots from official voters so far, and tallied up the results:

TOTAL 75 Pct
Gossage 68 91%
Blyleven 52 69%
Dawson 52 69%
Rice 51 68%
Morris 37 49%
Raines 32 43%
McGwire 20 27%
Smith 21 28%
Trammell 14 19%
John 14 19%
Concepcion 14 19%
Murphy 11 15%
Parker 7 9%
Mattingly 3 4%
Rose (write-in) 2 3%
Baines 1 1%

If you find another ballot, post the link in the comments below and I’ll update the tally as needed.

New Yorker piece on Scott Boras.

Several friends within MLB told me that the New Yorker profile of Scott Boras was a must-read, but I just stumbled upon it today. They were right – it is a must-read, and I give Ben McGrath credit for being balanced on a subject that (who) unbalances a lot of people.

I’ve never been down with the demonization of Boras. He’s serving his clients’ interests, and if he wasn’t doing so and there was no other agent filling this role, then MLB owners would be making a lot more money and the game would be no better off. The so-called haves/have-nots structure has nothing to do with Boras or with players in general trying to earn market salaries. And people who demonize him seem to forget that his aggressive strategies work, and that there are no style points in negotiations.

Couple of quotes that stood out:

At one point while I was in his office, Boras took a phone call, and explained afterward, “The draft is looming.” I asked if he planned to travel to Orlando, where the draft was being held. He smiled. “I think the draft is here,” he said. “It’s not in Orlando. We’re in the room”—he pointed up, toward the war room—”and we’re telling teams who they can draft, who they can’t. That’s basically how the thing goes.”

I would bet that the folks at MLB headquarters went apeshit when they saw that. But Scott’s not exactly wrong here, as I wrote before the draft, saying he was “the one man who might have the most say in how the first round unfolds.”

“The scouting director for the Twins was a very abrupt man,” Boras recalled in his office, referring to George Brophy, who died a few years ago. “He went public, saying, ‘It’s disgusting that these kids are being represented. They’re draft picks.’ All these antiquated thought processes. I kept on saying, ‘He’s a young man in a negotiation against a system, which requires him to sign a professional sports contract, which is governed by a collective-bargaining agreement. Why wouldn’t he need a lawyer?’ I said, ‘Why do your teams have lawyers who draft all these things up? You’ve unilaterally imposed all these rules.’ He sat there, looked at me, and goes, ‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m just talking to you about baseball. That’s not how we do things.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re changing. We’re changing for the betterment of the game. The great athletes aren’t going to come to baseball if you keep the bonuses at this level, because some owner will pay for that talent. It just happens to be in a different sport. Baseball players play football and basketball, too.’ “

I’m sorry to say that Brophy’s mentality still exists within the industry. There’s a sense that these kids should just be honored that anyone is willing to pay them to play baseball. Needless to say, I think that’s bullshit.

Critics of Boras call him a “compulsive liar,” or a “congenital liar,” while also granting that he, at least, seems to believe what he says. I prefer to think of it primarily as optimistic, adversarial embellishment…

I’m with McGrath here. I have talked to Boras a handful of times and don’t think I’ve ever felt that he was lying to me or caught him in an inaccuracy. He pushes the truth, which is one way in which he is like every other agent I’ve ever met, but I’m comfortable with that because it’s part of an agent’s job.

A Death in the Family.

James Agee’s A Death in the Family is praised as an American classic, as a lyrical account of the death of a 36-year-old father of two and the effect this has on his family. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

I hated it.

Yes, there is an inherent sorrow in the event at the book’s center, based on the death of Agee’s father when Agee himself was just six years old (the age of the older child, Rufus, in the book). Jay Follet gets a call in the middle of the night that his ill father is nearing death, and he races up to try to get there before the old man dies. It turns out to be a false alarm, and on the way home, Follet dies in a one-car accident. I think we can all agree that that’s a pretty awful turn of events.

What Agee does from there – and in his defense, he had not finished working on the book at the time of his own death at age 45, with publication and a Pulitzer Prize coming two years after he died – left me cold. The constant changes of perspective, flitting from one character’s mind to another’s and back and forth in time, break any emotional connection the reader might have with the thinly-drawn characters. Follet’s wife/widow, Mary, is depicted with broad brush strokes as a staunchly Catholic woman drawn deeper into her faith (which isolates her from the rest of her agnostic family, who didn’t approve of her marriage to Jay in the first place) but with little voice of her own. Rufus gets the best material in a passage that describes his first meeting after the accident with the neighborhood toughs who pick on him daily, but by that point, I’d checked out emotionally. As for the lyrical prose, I must have missed it; there wasn’t a phrase or a passage that stuck with me for more than a few seconds, and I often found myself skimming paragraphs (Agee could have stood to shorten those) to try to get back to the dialogue. Yet somehow, this book won the Pulitzer – okay, I suppose I should stop pretending that means something, because it doesn’t, and being dead absolutely helps your chances of winning – and made the TIME 100, which has been a much more reliable reading guide. I suppose everyone’s entitled to a miss every now and then.