→ January 17, 2008
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I’m back …

… and I missed something right in my wheelhouse, a comparison of baseball to classic movies. From Buster Olney, by way of Fire Joe Morgan:

If you want to quibble with the fact that he won the award in 1978, or with his placement in some particular year, OK, I get that. But to ignore the MVP voting entirely, as if it isn’t at least some kind of barometer of his play over the course of his career, is embarrassing. This is like saying, “Hey, forget the Oscar voting of the 1950s. Marlon Brando was clearly overrated.”

I think that’s a fabulous idea. Let’s compare the mindblowing stupidity of MVP voting to the mindblowing stupidity of Oscar voting. For example, guess how many combined non-honorary Oscars Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Federico Fellini won?

One.

That’s right – just one, won by Welles, for writing the screenplay to Citizen Kane. Three of the greatest directors in the history of motion pictures died with a total of zero Best Director statues.

Citizen Kane itself was nominated for best picture (one of ten in 1942), but lost to How Green Was My Valley. When the American Film Institute published its list of the 100 best movies of the 20th century, Citizen Kane was #1. How Green Was My Valley wasn’t on the list.

Paul Newman didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar until 1986, for The Color of Money, a Lifetime Achievement Award in all but name. Cary Grant never won an Oscar. Humphrey Bogart won one, for The African Queen, but not for Casablanca, a movie that didn’t yield a single win in any of the four acting categories. Peter O’Toole never won an Oscar; he was nominated for Lawrence of Arabia but lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. Audrey Hepburn won once, for Roman Holiday, but wasn’t even nominated for My Fair Lady in one of the most blatantly political votes in the history of the Oscars. (The award went to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins; Andrews starred in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady but was replaced by Hepburn for the film.)

Stanley Kubrick won one Oscar, for Best Effects/Special Visual Effects for 2001, but was 0-for-3 as a director. An American in Paris beat out A Streetcar Named Desire (which was nominated) and The African Queen (which wasn’t) for Best Picture in 1952, while Singin’ in the Rain – an infinitely better picture than An American in Paris, and possibly the best musical ever – received just a pair of minor nominations two years later. Stanley Donen was never even nominated for an Oscar.

Consider some of the best contemporary figures too. Johnny Depp has just two nominations and no wins. Nicole Kidman has one, for The Hours. Martin Scorsese has just one Best Director win, this past year for The Departed. And everyone knows how long it took Steven Spielberg to win his first Best Director award – long enough that he won the Irving Thalberg Award first.

So yes, please, let’s compare MVP voting to Best Picture/Director/Actor voting. We could argue all day about which is worse.

Filed Under: Media, Sports
→ January 8, 2008
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Vacation.

I’ll be offline starting on January 9th, running through the 16th, for vacation. I’ll keep an eye on comments here, but won’t be posting on this site or writing for ESPN.com. Thanks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ January 8, 2008
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Hall results.

Quick note: ESPNEWS will replay the Jim Rice segment from my appearance at 5:20 pm EST. Enjoy.

I’m not surprised by anything except Raines’ poor showing.

Anyway, here’s a comparison of my final tally to the actual percentages, with the last column representing a straight difference (my % – actual %)

TOTAL 120 Pct 543 Actual Diff
Gossage 108 90% 466 86% 4%
Rice 82 68% 392 72% -4%
Blyleven 79 66% 336 62% 4%
Dawson 79 66% 358 66% 0%
Morris 58 48% 233 43% 5%
Smith 44 37% 235 43% -7%
Raines 42 35% 132 24% 11%
McGwire 29 24% 128 24% 1%
Trammell 29 24% 99 18% 6%
John 22 18% 158 29% -11%
Concepcion 16 13% 88 16% -3%
Murphy 13 11% 75 14% -3%
Parker 11 9% 82 15% -6%
Mattingly 6 5% 86 16% -11%
Baines 4 3% 28 5% -2%

My tally’s estimates were within five percentage points of the actual figures for five of the top six guys; I’m pleased with that. I ended up a high on the three main stathead favorites (Bly, Rock, Tram), and low on the three guys who really don’t have any business in the Hall (Rice, Morris, Smith). Assuming I do this again next year, I’ll try to identify a few more retired voters, since that’s a good chunk (as many as 200?) of the voter pool.

But seriously, who the fuck voted for Shawon Dunston?

Filed Under: Media, Sports
→ January 8, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today between 2 and 3 pm (along with Joe Sheehan and Tim Kurkjian) to react to the Hall of Fame announcement, which comes at 2 pm.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ January 8, 2008
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Attention Janeites…

Starting this weekend, PBS’ Monsterpiece Masterpiece Theatre will be showing adaptations of all six of Jane Austen’s novels, including the definitive five-hour Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. First up is a new take on Persuasion, the most overlooked of her novels, but one without a good film version; the most recent attempt prior to this one starred Amanda Root as Anne Elliott, who spent the entire film sporting a look of wide-eyed terror as if she was in permanent danger of having someone shove a twelve-inch carrot up her ass. Since the novel’s Anne Elliott is generally smart and independent, Ms. Root’s take didn’t quite work for me. The book is probably Austen’s wittiest, with some great characters and plenty of dry humor; the opening scene where Anne’s uncle decries the lack of attractive people about town is priceless.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature
→ January 6, 2008
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Updated ballot count.

This is it – my final tally. I’ve reached 120 ballots between published ones I found (with help from many folks, including the Tango and the indefatigable Repoz) and ones I gathered myself by talking to voters. That should push us up to around 20% of the total voting pool.

Without knowing whether or not there’s a skew to this sample, I’ll stick with what it tells us for predictions:

1. Goose Gossage will be elected to the Hall of Fame this year. He will be the only candidate elected.

2. If there are two players elected, the second one will be Jim Rice. However, it’s more likely that he will be elected in 2009 as he gains sympathy votes for his final year on the ballot.

3. Of the other players on this ballot, Blyleven, Dawson, and Raines will all eventually earn induction, but no one else will.

Also, my disclaimer: In response to a concern voiced in the comments by a Hall of Fame voter, let me emphasize that the totals below are a tally of published ballots and of ballots I have received from individual voters. It is not an official count.

As of 4:20 pm, Monday, 1/7:

TOTAL 120 Pct
Gossage 108 90%
Rice 82 68%
Blyleven 79 66%
Dawson 79 66%
Morris 58 48%
Smith 44 37%
Raines 42 35%
McGwire 29 24%
Trammell 29 24%
John 22 18%
Concepcion 16 13%
Murphy 13 11%
Parker 11 9%
Mattingly 6 5%
Baines 4 3%
Rose (write-in) 2 2%
Filed Under: Sports
→ January 6, 2008
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Love in the Time of Cholera.

I’m a big fan both of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s work and of magical realism in general, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera , which promised to take Garcí­a Márquez’ style and apply it to an epic romance. The result is more the story of a man who refuses to grow up, and in the end, is rewarded for it.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera revolves around the long-suffering Florentino Ariza, who falls in love with Fermina Daza when the two are teenagers, only to see her reject him and marry the wealthy young doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino decides that he must wait for Dr. Urbino to die, at which point he can resume his pursuit; in the meantime, he will get his rocks off with almost every woman who crosses his path (the novel claims he has 622 affairs over the 51 years of Fermina’s marriage, not including one-night stands, seemingly a mathematical impossibility for a man with a full-time job, even granting that Florentino conducted some of those affairs simultaneously), with a particular jones for widows. (I’ll give you all five seconds to glean the significance of that. Got it? Excellent. Let’s move on.)

It seems that this is intended as a soaring romantic tale of a love that wouldn’t die, that transcended the years, and so on, but that feeling disappears from the novel the moment Fermina rejects Florentino until after Dr. Urbino dies. Garcí­a Márquez (GGM, from here on out) tells us Florentino’s emotional state is due to his immense ability to love, but it seems to me that Florentino was suffering from a case of arrested development. When he approaches Fermina just hours after her husband has died to reiterate his undying love for her, he’s not being romantic – he’s acting like a self-centered teenager, tone-deaf to the emotions of the people around him. It is as if he has caught a disease and doesn’t wish to be cured.

That ending is one of the book’s brightest spots; it’s a clever and unexpected resolution to a plot that looks to be headed toward a predictable, Hollywood-style ending (they get together, one of them dies, the women in the audience cry and see it over and over again), and it includes some of the book’s best writing. GGM does have an incredible gift with prose, and uses it to great effect in parts of the book about love and sex, fear of aging and death, and familial relationships:

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him [her son], they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

One negative aspect I’ve noticed in other GGM works shows up again here – his obsession with bodily functions. For example:

Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. Good thing this wasn’t a scratch-and-sniff edition. One of the fantastic things about GGM’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude , is that it transports the reader into a sort of dreamstate, where closing the book results in a brief moment of confusion that’s akin to waking up in the middle of a vivid dream. Yet Love in the Time of Cholera continually interrupts any of its own attempts to create that immersive, dreamlike feeling with verbal tritones about urine, feces, vomit, or semen.

By tying up the romance story and fading out the various little subplots one by one, GGM leaves the reader with a satisfying ending that’s not unrealistically happy (one of the subplots ends very badly, although it’s brushed off a bit in the broader context). The problem is the meat of the book, where the reader sees Florentino and learns he’s not a romantic hero but a juvenile antihero unworthy of the exaltation that the ending seems to give him.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 6, 2008
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Compelling arguments.

A little hit-and-run on yours truly in today’s Canton Repository:

SAY WHAT? Scouts Inc. analyst Keith Law said during a Jan. 2 chat on ESPN.com that he does not agree with the line of thinking that says Omar Vizquel should be considered for the Hall of Fame because another great defensive shortstop, Ozzie Smith, already is there. “The difference here is that Smith was a far, far better defensive player than Vizquel is,” Law said. Indians fans who saw Vizquel play every day would beg to differ.

Let’s just question someone’s credibility without providing any evidence to back it up. But hey, I’m sure those Cleveland fans who saw Vizquel play (but almost certainly never saw Smith) are unbiased, expert sources.

Filed Under: Media, Sports
→ January 4, 2008
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Raines vs. Rice.

So I had an email exchange with a Hall voter who voted for Rice but not for Raines, and I thought it might be worth sharing. I’m withholding the voter’s name and am not saying whether or not his ballot was published. Anyway, I asked why he didn’t vote for Raines, and he wrote:

for a guy who played that many seasons, he should have well over 3,000 hits, or a .320 average. The steals are a plus, but on non-contending teams you can run every time you get on base after the all-star break, as henderson did in 1982.

Rice had a higher average, and he was a power hitter – and he didn’t play 10 years on artificial turf.

Here’s my reply; as I look at it now, it’s a little half-formed, but I’ll present it without edits. I was trying to rebut specific arguments rather than presenting a global case for Raines:

Batting average is inferior to on-base percentage in every way; batting average pretends that walks, hit by pitches, and (weirdest of all) sacrifice flies don’t exist. In fact, a walk is worth somewhere between 80% and 90% as much as a single is [KL: I guessed on this one, but if someone has a hard coefficient for BB wrt a single, I’d love to see it.], because most of the value in either event is in not making an out. So penalizing Raines for not hitting .320 in his career ignores the fact that his career OBP is one of the 100 best since 1900, higher than Willie Mays’.

Raines reached base safely 3977 times in his career. That’s more than Tony Gwynn (3955, in almost the same # of plate appearances), Lou Brock (3833, in 1000 more PA), and way more than Rice (3186, in about 1000 fewer PA), and just a shade behind Rod Carew (4096, in 200 more PA).

As for running every time after the All-Star Break on non-contending teams, Raines stole more bases in the first half in his career (405) than in the second half (403). Also, the Expos finished in first or within ten games of first in 1981, Raines’ first season; 1982; 1983; 1987; and 1990. He went to Chicago in 1991, and they finished in second, 8 games out; in 3rd in 1992, ten games out; and of course they won the division in 1993. He then won two rings as a part-time player in New York. Raines spent at least ten of his twenty full years on good clubs.

Rice, on the other hand, got more benefit from his home park than any Hall of Fame candidate I can remember. He hit .320/.374/.546 at home with 469 extra-base hits, and just .277/.330/.459 on the road with 375 extra-base hits. I compared him in my ESPN.com chat session yesterday to Dante Bichette, an OK player who looked like a star because he played in a great hitters’ park. So if you want to downgrade Raines for playing on turf for part of his career, you would need to downgrade Rice more for playing in a friendly stadium for his whole career.

Filed Under: Sports
→ January 4, 2008
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The Mailbag of Malcontent, part 2.

Received today in the ol’ ESPN mailbag, from a reader who didn’t provide his name or an email address:

just because u have some big degrees and use the words ‘above average” u think u kno so much. if u did u would not be a blog writer. u are the stephen a smith of baseball. someone that nobody in the industry respects and like u said u took this job for face time. u are an arrognat person that b/c of their degree belittles others b/c of ur credentials. u could not cut it in toronto (that should prove ur an idiot) and feel u are an expert. i only read ur blog b/c u discuss some minor leaguers, but u wonder why ur so unpopluar. i will pay u any amount and out analyze u on any position player. u make the most obvious observations-like rob deer strikes out. and by the way any asshole who gets into harvard (much easier in ur day) gets an A…look at the stats

This would not seem to require any further comment by me.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,