On The Week's Top Five

1. Giant Heads and Talking Basketballs

Does the person who concocted the NBA's advertising campaigns have some sort of fetish with gigantism? I don't know when or how oversized craniums became the rage among America's youth--appearing on posters and in the stands at college basketball games and now in these bobblehead advertisements and talking basketball soliloquies narrated by Moe Szyslak that resemble a Timothy Leary fever dream--but it makes me think the American advertising industry is in desperate need of some new ideas, preferably packaged inside a case of Benadryl.

2. Playoffs

I confess: I did not watch enough of the NBA regular season to determine with any accuracy which teams were the favorites coming into these playoffs, but here's what I've realized: It doesn't matter. All that watching the regular season would have done is confuse me, as (with the possible exception of the final 8-10 games) it seems to mean less than it ever has before. The talent among the top 16 teams is dispersed enough that an eight-seed seems fully capable of defeating a one seed, which is a great thing for the NBA, but further proof that college basketball is far better, since in college basketball, this happens in a single-elimination format every single year.

3. Predictions

That said, I will take O.J. Mayo's beard, followed by Pau Gasol's blithe nonchalance, followed by:

3.) Kevin Garnett's Nelson Muntz-like facial contortions.
4.) Derrick Rose's soon-to-be-depleted modesty.
5.) Knicks fans' delusional sense of self-importance.

4. Baseball's Problem...

centers entirely around the fact that Kyle Farnsworth is a competent closer.*


5. Goodreads

SI's Thomas Lake on the shooting death of Denver Bronco Darrent Williams.

The St. Pete Times' Ben Montgomery on the baffling disappearance of a local diver.

*And I say this as someone who drafted Farnsworth in a fantasy league, fully expecting to release him before tax day arrived.

On Cinema, Sports and Predictability

I think we can all agree that this year's Oscar ceremony was particularly terrible. What we might not agree on is the reason why it was terrible. You may single out James Franco's blank pseudo-stoner visage, or Anne Hathaway's array of cheerleading yodels, or that horribly uncomfortable moment when Spartacus nearly toppled off the stage, or when one of the characters from Strange Brew was hired to mimic the voice of Bob Hope. You may have found the transitions from silent film to the E.T. soundtrack somewhat jarring, and you may have found the daisy chain of celebrity introductions particularly bizarre, and you may have been distracted by the dearth of Charlie Sheen jokes. But we all know the real reason this year's Oscars were so eminently forgettable is because they were so utterly predictable.*

This is the problem with an event like the Oscars: Given the flood of awards shows that come before (and the amount of coverage given to each), the winners seem patently obvious by the time the ceremony arrives. Imagine if there were five National League pitchers with 20 victories apiece, and sportswriters voted for the Cy Young Award every week in September before the final vote at the end of the season; that's essentially what the Oscars have become. They're predictable, and there's nothing worse, in cinema or in sports, than predictability.

This, above all else, is what's riding on the NFL and NBA labor negotiations, from a fan's perspective. Baseball, whether true or not, suffers from a perceived lack of parity--even if the Yankees or Red Sox don't play in the World Series, there is a perception that they are going to, and that spending six months following a small-market team may result in the occasional anomalous playoff run, it is generally a futile pursuit. And so baseball has suffered, and the NFL--despite a growing uncomfortability with the repercussions of violence--remains America's most popular sport, because a socialist collective can win a championship...and the NBA is in a state of flux, especially now, as power increasingly becomes concentrated in a handful of major markets.

Of course, I'm not saying sports will ever be as predictable as the movies. This is why, if I had to choose to eliminate one of the two from my life, I would choose film (though I'd prefer if it didn't come to that). Entertainment value is in the eye of the beholder, but I'd still prefer a world with surprises.

*For what it's worth: I would have voted for Fincher, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Lawrence and Exit Through the Gift Shop.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

 1. 6/17/94

In researching my latest book,* I spent several days in the basement of the University of Maryland library, watching raw footage of Len Bias. I watched documentaries, I watched game tape, and--most fascinating of all--I watched several hours of spliced-together news footage depicting the aftermath of Len Bias' death. This was a revelatory moment; on those tapes, you can actually witness Bias' death slip from the realm of absolute mystery into the realm of self-inflicted tragedy, and then slowly became a societal signpost, a proxy for a larger War on Drugs.** I saw the whole story unfold before my eyes; it was all there on those tapes.

This is what's brilliant about Brett Morgen's 30 for 30 documentary, June 17, 1994. Sometimes the raw footage is all you need to depict a critical moment in history. Morgen eschewed narration; he didn't interview anyone, because he didn't have to. The story was right there, and even those of us who lived through it tend to forget the emotions it invoked, and none of us understood, at the time, what a watershed moment this was. Only in looking back do we see those threads. This is why that episode of Mad Men last season, in which the characters mostly sat around watching televised reports about the Kennedy assassination, worked for me, while I know it didn't work for so many others; because sometimes the best way of depicting reality is to capture its reflection.

2. The Strasburg Bubble

Seriously, who still pays this much for a baseball card? Is Bernie Madoff able to access EBay from prison? Are we about to enter another period of rampant and irresponsible speculative maneuvering, as witnessed in the 1980s?***If so, I have a ream of Dan Gladden cards that could use a good home.

3. America Number One!

Let me reiterate: I'm not anti-soccer; I've actually enjoyed this World Cup quite a bit, especially the parts where Alexi Lalas isn't permitted to say anything. I'm just anti- American soccer. And let me be clear, all you Fox News acolytes: This does not make me anti-American; it just seems that we, as a country, have no pressing need to be good at this, any more than we need to win a gold medal in hockey or a Nobel Peace Prize. If Ghana wins the World Cup, then it is the biggest thing that has happened to Ghana since...well, since Ghana. They would dance in the street for weeks. If America wins the World Cup, it is a three-day story, and some drunks in Detroit might overturn a few compact automobiles, and then we immediately start talking about Alabama's offensive line and Trevor Hoffman's struggles and Tiger's sex life. So this is my argument: Why should I root for temporality when I can root for immortality?

I expect my IRS audit shortly.


*Only a few more weeks to pre-order, while (yet to exist) supplies last.

**You can also witness an early television appearance by Tony Kornheiser, whose hair, even when he had more of it, was truly an unfortunate hereditary accident.

***And depicted in Dave Jamieson's excellent (and highly recommended) book, Mint Condition.

On Baseball and Deja Vu

“The use of steroids and amphetamines amongst today’s players has greatly subsided and is virtually nonexistent, as our testing results have shown...The so-called steroid era...is clearly a thing of the past."
--Bud Selig, 2010.

"baseball's drug problem is over...baseball is going to be the first sport to be free of drugs. The players have had enough of it."
--Peter Ueberroth, 1985.

(Photo: Corbis Images)

On the Wisdom of Bud Selig

All right, so I know it's become a sport in itself to bash Bud Selig, and I also understand that I'm pretty hard on baseball around these parts, but I listened to Selig spend an inning in the booth during the Twins-Red Sox game this afternoon,* and honestly, I'm not even sure what game he's talking about anymore. "Baseball is more popular than ever," Selig said, more than once, and while it is true that attendance may be at record levels, let me make a radical presumption here: This does not mean baseball is more popular than ever. In fact, this is such a patent falsehood that I was waiting for Selig to follow up by promoting General Motors stock. Suggesting baseball is more popular than ever is the moral equivalent of suggesting that the teletype machine is more popular than ever. And suggesting that baseball has essentially conquered all of its major issues, as Selig did later in the interview, while deflecting concerns about night games and dreadfully slow play, is one of the most brazen acts of propagandizing I'd witnessed since Baghdad Bob fled for the Emirates.

I know there are a lot people who still love baseball as much as they ever have--but there are far fewer than there used to be. And I also know those of us who are disgusted with baseball and those who continue to watch it find Bud Selig equally repulsive. Every commissioner of a major American sports league is something of huckster--it's part of their job, to stretch the truth, to attempt to control the narrative--but Selig really is either the most disingenuous commissioner in the history of American sport, or he is the most naive. Often, it seems he might be both.

*I was at the gym, which I figure grants me an exemption in regard to this.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Greenberg

It is no doubt a sign of my inherent immaturity that I still consider Kicking and Screaming* to be my favorite comedy of all time.** That movie, of course, was a product of a youthful Noah Baumbach, who went on to write/direct Mr. Jealousy (OK), The Squid and the Whale (excellent), and Margot at the Wedding (horrifying). It was with some trepidation, then, that I went into Greenberg, because a movie about an unlikeable character played by Ben Stiller seemed like the plot synopsis of seven of the ten worst movies of the previous decade. But the brilliance of Greenberg is that its essentially a grown-up version of Kicking and Screaming, a story about a man who never really recovered from the mistakes of his youth. All the regrets that the characters in Kicking and Screaming anticipated about their future existences have come to pass in Greenberg. It is a beautiful Los Angeles tableau. It is subtle and nuanced; it is so good that it almost redeems everything Ben Stiller has done since Permanent Midnight.***(Well, except for Duplex.)

2. 96 Teams

Don't get me wrong--like everyone else, I find the notion of the NCAA tournament expanding to 96 teams to be a craven example of how nothing matters in modern sports besides the bottom line. But I have to be honest--the idea of more basketball being played is not going to somehow deter me from watching more basketball. Which is the very reason why the NCAA is doing this in the first place.

3. Horsehide

I am told baseball season commences shortly, so I will dispense with predictions:

A.) The teams with the largest payrolls will win their respective divisions, with the exception of one "small-market" sleeper, which will then permit Bud Selig to justify his entire tenure as commissioner.
B.) The Yankees will win another World Series, permitting their fans to utter idiotic statements like this.
C.) Whippets will become the new clubhouse drug of choice.
D.) Alex Rodriguez will briefly date Jennifer Aniston, then, upon their breakup, will tearfully confess to an addiction to Papaya King hot dogs.
E.) The Cubs will remain the Cubs.

*Not the inane Will Ferrell movie of the same name, for I refuse to acknowledge that movie's existence.
**That my girlfriend once approached Carlos Jacott at a Legal Seafood restaurant in Boston and whispered, "Go away, cookie man," in his ear is one of the primary reasons I'm marrying her.
***It also prominently features Galaxie 500's "Strange," which has to be the best song ever written about Twinkies.

On Doctor K

I still recall from memory Dwight Gooden's pitching numbers from the 1985 baseball season: 24 wins, four losses, a 1.53 ERA. I should clarify here: I was not a Mets fan at all. Never have been, never will be. Back then, I pulled for the Phillies, and I saw Mets' games only periodically, on the channel then known as WOR (Channel 9), where Tim McCarver would regularly unveil his self-righteous declarations of certitude while Ralph Kiner would impart his foggy wisdom ("Solo homers usually come with no one on base") before segueing into advertisements for Manufacturer's Hangover.

Even so, those Mets were the most intriguing baseball team of the decade, and largely because of Dwight Gooden. In 1985, he threw 16 complete games. In 1985, he struck out 268 batters. I remember his numbers because at the time they seemed as if they couldn't possibly be real; no pitcher in the brief era during which I'd watched baseball had ever approached Gooden's abilities. Everything about him seemed inherently flawless: The high leg kick, the hat pulled down just so, the BB of a fastball, the curveball that dangled like an overinflated zeppelin before flopping into Gary Carter's mitt. His was the first curveball I ever heard referred to as "Uncle Charlie," and while I still have no idea what this means, it was a pitch that seemed deserving of many nicknames. I remember spending hours of Little League practice attempting to replicate his wind-up and delivery--ball dipping down beneath the hip, arm pushing straight forward, chest bursting toward home plate; there was no hitch, no hesitation, only a steady rhythm that seemed to emanate from someone other than the kid who was hardly more than a few years out of Little League himself, hardly older than the 16 he wore on his jersey. Dwight Gooden in 1985 was the prototype of what I imagined a pitcher to be, and he always will be.

Anyway, Dwight Gooden is in trouble again, and this is terribly sad, but this is not what caught my attention. What caught my attention is that Bill James is now (seemingly) advocating for Dwight Gooden's induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I'm not going to fall into a discussion of numbers here, because that's not my territory, but on a sentimental level, I'd obviously like to see this happen. Because for me, Dwight Gooden defined what might be the last truly great era in baseball history. For me, despite the numbers, Dwight Gooden deserves election to the Hall of Fame before Roger Clemens.

It will never happen, of course. And it will never happen because Dwight Gooden was so unbelievably great in 1985 that anything he did afterward could only be seen as a disappointment. Gooden was too good for his own good; even if he hadn't fallen into a decades-long spiral of substance abuse, it would have been virtually impossible for him to live up to what he'd accomplished in the summer of '85. Therefore, Dwight Gooden will not be a Hall of Famer because Dwight Gooden is not as good as we imagine he could have been. We see Dwight Gooden, and we cannot see past the failed potential engendered by 1985; we project an inherent personal weakness onto what is essentially the genetic defect that killed his career.* Dwight Gooden killed Dwight Gooden, we say, and that's the end of it.

Now perhaps this is a perfectly fair way of determining eternal transcendence; but what if it's not? Isn't Dwight Gooden's fall from grace more noble than Roger Clemens' craven determination to erase the ravages of time? Isn't there something more beautiful about a single youthful memory, coated in amber? In some ways, Dwight Gooden represents both the beauty and the tragedy of baseball in the era before steroids and Bud Selig ravaged the game's insides. In some ways, Dwight Gooden in 1985 represents the last purely brilliant moment in baseball history. And if not the Hall of Fame, that ought to be worth something.

*Chuck writes similar things about Ralph Sampson in his book: "His superiority seemed natural and therefore unearned. And while people don't necessarily hate that kind of greatness, they inevitably find it annoying." I'm not sure if there's a direct comparison--Gooden is probably a slightly more sympathetic figure, because of his drug problems--but there are definite parallels.

On The Fantasy Baseball Experiment

Long ago, when I was a desperate and unpopular adolescent, I wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a curious tome called Rotisserie League Baseball. This was in (approximately) 1986, and the first fantasy league I curated included four teams, with the statistics calculated on notepaper and diligently stored inside a Trapper Keeper, most likely with a Def Leppard logo outlined by Exacto knife on the front cover.

I've written a number of times on this forum about my subsequent disillusionment with the game of baseball, and I won't bore you again with the details. But today, I began my engagement in what I believe is an unprecedented experiment: For the first time in years, I have joined a "serious" fantasy baseball league. I did this largely for the camaraderie, because the participants in this league are some of my best friends from college, and the commissioner of this league is an enigmatic and detail-oriented savant who treats the league with the kind of reverence that belies its paltry entry fee.* Therefore, the banter of the league itself will be unavoidably joyous. But my opinion of baseball itself has not changed; I find it staid and tiresome. Any romance it clung to has been subsumed by two decades of hypocrisy. Therefore, my experiment is this: I am going to attempt to remain competitive in a fantasy baseball league without watching a full inning of Major League Baseball all season long.

Now, there will likely be some unavoidable exceptions to this rule: I may be required to attend a game or two as part of my work duties, or I may be courted by a friend in possession of Yankees tickets. But for the most part, my goal is to avoid watching more than six outs in any particular contest. I will base my fantasy strategy entirely on facts and figures, which is the way it should be, anyway, even though I apparently have little to no grasp of how many these statistics are now calculated.**I will not be colored by appearances, or by allegiances, or by emotionality, or by news/gossip, or by team standings (which I will check as rarely as possible); in fact, in the first round--it's a ten-team, five-player keeper league--I deliberately chose someone I had actively never heard of until this morning: Adam Lind, of the Toronto Blue Jays, who apparently hit 35 home runs and drove in 114 runs last year and was most definitely not in my kitchen this morning. Other than that, I can tell you nothing about him. In fact, I can tell you nothing at all about the Toronto Blue Jays, except that (I presume) they still play in the SkyDome, which was once the subject of this utterly outstanding Steve Rushin piece...19 years ago.

In that spirit, I plan on choosing Terry Pendleton with my next pick.

*A few days ago, he sent out several pages of pre-draft "News and Notes." Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we could somehow channel all the energy exerted on fantasy sports into neuroscience. And then I spend twelve minutes contemplating Mike Dunleavy's 3-point percentage, and I am jarred back to reality.
**Today I read this sentence, in the $7.99 fantasy baseball magazine I scooped up at a local bodega: "He's regressed in the counting and rate stats two consecutive years." I was worried, for a moment, that I had mistakenly purchased a copy of Institutional Investor.

On The End of Baseball As Metaphor

This is not a post about Mark McGwire and steroids, because, like most of you, I don't really care enough to debate the ethical quandaries of steroid use anymore. This is a post about baseball itself, because all the anger and self-righteousness and backlash to the self-righteousness seems to skim over the real issue here, which is that baseball, having been mismanaged for the past two decades by a gang of dimwitted used car salesmen, has now succeeded in bulldozing its mythology for an entire generation.

This is the meaning of Mark McGwire, and others like him: He demystified a game whose popularity is based in a largely sentimental connection with an "America" that no longer exists. So now all that work Ken Burns put in, all those hours Doris Kearns Goodwin and George Will spent rhapsodizing about Three-Finger Brown and the American character and how the '51 Series is a metaphor for the Korean War, mean absolutely nothing anymore. Without that sentimental connection, the game itself is a diminished product. Baseball, through labor disputes and strikes and the increasingly disenchanting war between the Tri-Lambda moneyball geeks and tobacco-spitting traditionalists,* has essentially degenerated into a regional sport, and if you don't believe me, take a peep at the television ratings: A World Series between the Yankees and the Phillies, two of the media markets that still arouse strong interest, drew a 11.7, which was the highest number since 2004, but barely half of the 1990 numbers.

And I know that there are people who still draw that emotional connection with baseball--on rare occasions, during one of those interminably dramatic playoff games, when Fox deems it wise to cut to the face of every child in Yankee Stadium, I still feel it, too--and there always will be. But there will never be as many as there once were, and they will never be able to argue that baseball captures the Zeitgeist or serves as a metaphor for the American character. Football is America's pastime now--I'd argue that the greatest rivalry of the 00's, eclipsing even the emotional exceptionalism of Red Sox-Yankees, was between a pair of NFL quarterbacks--and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. And who can say that in two decades, a generation of kids won't feel more of a connection with soccer than they do with baseball?

The story here is not just about Mark McGwire, or the slow unfurling of the steroid era. The story here is that the only people still gullible enough to buy into the mysticism and folklore of baseball might be Bob Costas and the justices of the Supreme Court.

*As a casual fan, I have no interest in analyzing VORP, or even understanding what it means. Following baseball in the Internet age is like collecting comic books.

On Several Decisions That Seem To Defy Logic

Because it's Friday the 13th. Because the sky is angry. Just because.


1. So just last night, LeBron James made a command decision to shed his signature number, 23, out of respect for ruthless egotist, tongue-contortionist and expert shoe salesman Michael Jordan. That's all very nice, as is LeBron's overarching desire to retire Jordan's No. 23 altogether, thereby elevating an undeniably transcendent basketball player whose greatest political stand came when he used an American flag as a sponsorial shield to the level of, say, Jackie Robinson. "There would be no LeBron James, no Kobe Bryant, no Dwyane Wade if there wasn't Michael Jordan first," LeBron said, and then he declared he would change his number to 6, which is Julius Erving's number. Of course, it is not difficult to argue that without Julius Erving, there would be no Michael Jordan. Therefore, I propose that the No. 6 be retired, as well, along with every number worn by any Hall of Fame player in the history of basketball, and that LeBron, in an overarching tribute to capitalism itself, replace his jersey number with an oversized American flag.

2. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, America's Failed Presidential Candidate, has named his top candidates for Time magazine's Person of the Year, since either A.) His opinion still matters to some indiscernible demographic of xenophobic hotheaded Yankee-lovers, or B.) He will do your panel discussion the cheap. Giuliani's choices were The Economy and Derek Jeter. Now, one of these things is not even a person, and the other is simply based upon the ways people use their environment to meet their material needs. Then again, this is a man who once spent several minutes on the radio berating a ferret. How he still has any career at all is one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 world.

3. And then there is Bud Selig, who seems wholly determined to tether his legacy to a nostalgic sense of intransigence. As baseball failed to consider expanding its instant-replay policy, Selig said this: "Life is changing and I understand that. I do like the human element and I think the human element for the last 130 years has worked pretty well. There have been controversies, but there are controversies in every sport." It's a good thing you enjoy controversies, Mr. Commissioner, because that's pretty much been the default position of the game itself since you took it over and began running it slowly into the dirt. Since the 1990's baseball has become defined by series of tangential controversies and concerns--over drugs, over economics, over statistics, over umpiring, over labor disputes, over Giuliani's seat placement. On most of these, Selig is at least partly to blame; in fact, can I blame him entirely for No. 2 (above)? After all, he is the human element in baseball. He's right, though--life is changing, and this is why baseball no longer matters the way it once did.

(Photo: AP/Cleveland.com)

On the USFL, Instant Replay, and Baseball's Refusal to Adapt

So I watched last night's ESPN 30-for-30 documentary on the rise and fall of the USFL, and I highly recommend it, if only for two reasons: 1.) It utterly eviscerates Donald Trump, and anything that makes Donald Trump look like an idiot* can't be all that bad,** and 2.) Burt Reynolds is prominently featured. The narrative was well put-together, and director Mike Tollin's archival footage was first-rate, but there was one thing they glossed over that I wish they'd spent more time on, and that was instant replay. After all, the USFL essentially invented the entire concept, silly red flags and all, and it's something that has become utterly commonplace in American sport, this notion that technology can be effectively utilized to correct human error. And yet...here is baseball, just now engaging in this discussion, almost twenty-five years on, as its umpires continue to defend themselves by evoking the inherent prejudices of their internal organs.

And if last night's game is not a metaphor for baseball's continued refusal to adapt to modernity, maybe this Buzz Bissinger piece will convince you: For if you read between the lines, if you can get beyond the needless pissing match between Bissinger and the SABRmetrics nerds, the basic point is that Moneyball is not what dictates success in this modern incarnation of the game. Money is, and always has been, and, with rare exceptions, always will be. It's an ethic Trump would appreciate.

*See: The Apprentice, The Art of the Deal, everything else Trump has engaged in since 1986.
**I should say, I have a brief section about the death of the USFL (and take several digs at Trump) in my new book. (Available now for pre-order! Though as an ever-supportive friend recently pointed out, "Why should I bother to pre-order a book that MAY or MAY NOT be released to the public 10 MONTHS FROM NOW?" To which I say, Fair point.)

On the Curious Case of Pete Rose

For some reason, I don't remember the day that Pete Rose was banned from baseball. I don't remember where I was, and I don't remember what I was doing, and I don't remember how I felt about it. Maybe that's because the argument has carried on for so long that it no longer seems like it ever didn't exist; it has become the Great Running Sports Debate of the past two decades. Your opinion of Pete Rose is now indicative of your politics, of your upbringing, of your tastes, of your viewpoint on the entire direction of modern society. It is, as former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent admits in this excellent "Outside the Lines" piece on the 20th anniversary of the Rose decision, about something far bigger than Pete Rose; it is essentially a parable, a deterrent, a running commentary on the consequences of gambling in sports. And I guess this could be a valid viewpoint (I do recognize that gambling in sports is perhaps the worst transgression imaginable), even though I disagree completely, even though I find it sort of haughty and naive to imagine that the spectre of Pete Rose's banishment could possibly serve as a deterrent any more than handing out copies of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song to members of the Crips could stem gang violence.

At this point, unless I'm missing something, it seems obvious what's happening here. Rose has become such an iconic outsider that he engenders more and more sympathy as the years pass; a recent USA Today poll found that an overwhelming number of people found Rose's crimes to be far less severe than those of the Steroid Generation, proving that there are still inherent advantages to martyrdom. In the OTL piece, Rose's former teammate, Joe Morgan, says that Rose's greatest strength, his willingness to keep on fighting, is actually working against him. That may be true, but at some point, I think it became irrelevant whether Rose actually gets back into baseball, or gets into the Hall of Fame. At some point, this whole thing clearly became about the fight itself.

The Fight has become the new definition of Pete Rose; it's become his identity in the latter half of his life, and it's reinforced the identity he established as a baseball player, as a willfull overachiever who never gives in, as the kind of man who would trample over a catcher in an All-Star game if it served his own singleminded purpose. If anything, admission into the Hall would defuse Pete Rose's entire persona, which may be the best reason, at this point, for Bud Selig to just let him in. It would render Rose into an ordinary human being. All the reasons for his defiance would wither away, and Rose would finally appear the way he should have from the start: As a great figure in the history of baseball, and an extremely small man.

(Also, it should be noted: This book will no doubt give far more insight into Rose's psyche, then and now.)

On Red Sox Nation

Well, that should just about do it.

Allow me a brief chronology: I first parted ways with baseball in 1994, when they chose to deep-six the World Series out of spite. I came back in 2000, when I moved to a cramped and leaky one-bedroom apartment in Boston, in a neighborhood known as the Fenway. I was close enough to the park that I could hear the crowd from my living-room window, and in the instant it took for the satellite to catch up, I knew that something intriguing was about to transpire on my television set. I was a graduate student, and I was perpetually broke, and I would walk to the gym on Lansdowne Street and purchase a five-dollar Italian sausage for dinner on the way home. The Red Sox were a distraction from my own work, a distraction from my attempts to write and to think and to comprehend a Samuel Beckett novel. Hell, the Red Sox were a Samuel Beckett novel.

And so I became a Red Sox fan, at age 27, for the same reason every vaguely literary soul who moved to Boston became a Red Sox fan back then; because they represented the eternal struggle of mankind. The Red Sox were made up of men like Rich Garces and Trot Nixon and Brian Daubach: They were a collection of likeable but flawed humans, forever nudging a boulder uphill. I pulled for them mostly because I could not help but sympathize with all those people who had bided the past eight decades in search of a single triumph.

And then, of course, not long after I joined up with these desperate souls, it just kind of happened; they stumbled into victory, and they did it behind a pair of (seemingly) guileless goofballs who pounded horsehides onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. And in the wake of that victory, the Red Sox themselves became something completely different; they became, as we are all well aware by now, a trend, a fad, a mainstream movement, an army of sorority girls in pink caps, a subsidiary of the school of fan obnoxiousness. The whole thing always seemed kind of hollow and false, as if their souls had somehow been inhabited by spectral figures who had wandered out of an Iowa cornfield. Now we know why. It is because the Red Sox, like everyone else in the game, sold their soul for victory.

And it doesn't matter that this whole issue is increasingly shrouded in moral relativism, and it doesn't matter that Bill James could very well be right when he says that, in 40-50 years, steroids will be rendered utterly mundane and will be accepted by the mainstream, and that no one will hold much against those who chose to engineer their own bodies. Because if nothing else, the steroid era has already transformed the most charming franchise in baseball into something hulking and unrecognizable. And I'm not sure there is any way of going back.

On Fight Clubs, Journalists, and German Magazines

Just when I have gone and condemned baseball as a stultifying and backward-thinking sport, thereby alienating approximately 47 percent of the already modest readership of this corner of cyberspace--well, along come the Mets, whose general manager, Omar Minaya, having previously hired Tyler Durden as VP for player development, defended himself by auditioning for the role of media ombudsman, accusing an unsuspecting Daily News reporter named Adam Rubin of "lobbying" for a job in player development. This led to a press conference of the genre classified by cultural anthropologists and light-beer enthusiasts as "extremely uncomfortable," during which a man's career flashes before our very eyes.

In this case, it was immediately clear that, even if Minaya's accusations were completely true (and Rubin claims they are exaggerated), his attempt to deflect the blame was embarrassingly ill-advised. And while Rubin may have erred in his judgment (though given the nature of the newspaper business, one can hardly blame him), the error appears forgivable and had little or nothing to do with the actual business at hand. "My reporting was solid, met the journalistic standards of sourcing and beyond and was untainted by any personal agenda on my part," Rubin wrote, and at this point, I have little reason to doubt him, because he is a trained journalist who is getting paid for his work and who publicly disclosed his role in this situation, and the Mets' management appears to have corroborated his account. In other words, no one denied he wrote the truth.

This is not an ideal situation, but in the end, this the way it should be. There is course correction on both ends, and we move forward, with Minaya clinging to his job and Tony Bernazard/Tyler Durden accepting a position a prominent soap company. Still, I have no idea if this is the way it will be in the future, most notably if the future is being prophesized correctly by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of book called Free, which Malcolm Gladwell ably dissected in this New Yorker piece. In what seems like a deliberately contentious interview with a German magazine called Der Spiegel, Anderson declared that the very concepts of "media" and "journalism" and "news" are antiquated, 20th-century notions, stated that "newspapers are not important," and then said this:

Attention and reputation are two non-monetary economies. The vast majority of people online write for free. We've tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting. They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun....In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.

So here's a question: If Adam Rubin were, say, a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, who was, shall we say, writing about this for a blog called "The Daily News," would this story have ever broken in the first place? Or would Rubin have decided it was in the best interests of the fans to maintain Bernazard/Durden's place in the organization, and to preserve Omar Minaya's reputation? And if he had broken this story, and Minaya had accused him of a conflict of interest--of accepting free box seats or cheering in the press box or soliciting autographs from David Wright--well, what would be the repercussions? In our hypothetical scenario, Adam Rubin is working for free, doing it for the attention and the reputation, and treating his public responsibility as a hobby...so how would he ever be held accountable*, and how would anyone know what to actually believe? (Besides, don't the Mets embody enough moral complexities without adding another layer?)

This is the future Anderson appears to be heralding, a future that most intelligent bloggers don't even advocate,** a future that may be economically viable but that is also intellectually dangerous. My guess is that even Omar Minaya understands this now.

*And don't tell me his audience would hold him accountable, because if this were true, Perez Hilton cease to exist.
**According to a survey conducted by my alma mater and all-around bitchin' party school Penn State University, 75 percent of sports bloggers do not see themselves as rivals of professional journalists. The other 25 percent were busy searching Bing for photos of Megan Fox.

On the "Randomness" of Baseball

I know that yesterday was perhaps the greatest day of an otherwise somnolent baseball season (it's gotten so bad that even Bill Simmons seems utterly bored with the Red Sox), and I know that, given the recent tableau of mid-summer sports stories involving perverts, virgins, zebras and Steve Spurrier, I probably should not attempt to squelch the euphoria of a perfect game being secured by a sublime ninth-inning catch,* but I cannot help myself. Because on the same afternoon, I also read this interview with Buster Olney, who is perhaps the most respected baseball writer in the country, and who was asked to opine on the probability of a legitimate salary cap in baseball:

...I don’t think there will ever be a true salary cap in Major League Baseball, not only because the union won’t necessarily go along with it, but also because teams like the Red Sox and Yankees and Mets probably don’t want it, either. This is why Wellington Mara’s decision to put the interests of the Giants beneath those of the N.F.L. at large, decades ago, was so extraordinary. In theory, it would be good for baseball’s parity — certainly it would be good for the Blue Jays and Rays — but a lot of rival executives believe that baseball benefits from having the Cubs, Yankees, and Red Sox serve as franchises that always generate interest in the sport, no matter where they play.

So the nation's most plugged-in baseball writer is admitting that game he covers is essentially collusive and largely pre-determined. And I know this shouldn't surprise me--this is America, after all, and, as Secretary of State Trump might remind us, our nation was built on back-room collusion--but it does seem somewhat paradoxical, given what baseball has become, given the Moneyball generation's oft-comical insistence on algebraic rationality, on precision and formulaic decision-making. I do not pretend to know the precise answer to these questions, but if the entire structure of the game is essentially a sham--if five of the teams with the top six payrolls (NYY, Bos, ChC, Bos, Det**) are at or near the top of their divisions, if four of the bottom-five payrolls (Oak, Was, Pitt, SD***) are a combined 86 games under .500--well, then why should I bother to learn what VORP stands for? Why should statistical analysis mean anything at all, if the playing field itself is not inherently level****? Why shouldn't Bernie Madoff be hired as the general manager of the Washington Nationals*****?

Which I guess means that what happened yesterday--a rare and entirely unpredictable confluence of skill and luck on the south side of Chicago--is the best baseball has left to give us. And now that it's over, I can go back to dreaming of a Penn State offense being helmed by a 372-pound quarterback.

*I heard a broadcaster claim afterward that this was, in fact, the greatest catch in the history of baseball, which seemed like a hyperbolic and short-sighted statement until, off the top of my head, I tried to think of a better catch. And I could only come up with this.
**The Mets are the exception, but the Mets fans I know seem to enjoy presuming that they are the exception to every rule. I've never really understood how the fan base of a franchise that has won two World Series, produced perhaps the most memorable team of the modern era, and competes in the largest city in America (albeit in Queens) manages to portray itself as a victim of the fates. But I'm getting there.
***The Marlins are the exception, which seems appropriate, since the Marlins don't actually have any fans.
****Insert indignant steroid reference here. Also, I am aware that there is revenue sharing, but it it hasn't succeeded in changing results: Last year was only the second time since it began that a team from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston did not appear in the World Series. (Here is a very Bill Veeck-friendly idea for tweaking it, courtesy of Michael Lewis).
*****Given my ignorance toward the goings-on of the Washington baseball club, this may have already occurred without my knowledge.

On Moneyball and the Death of the Sports Movie

It's true: The film adaptation of Moneyball, the book that spurred an ongoing Civil War between cranky sportswriters and brilliant nerds who are much more interesting when dissecting politics, appears to be dead. This saddens me for several reasons, not the least of which is that, like every other semi-rational human who read this book (incuding the author, Michael Lewis), I cannot even begin to imagine how this movie's narrative would have progressed without inducing somnambulance in theatres, and I cannot imagine how Brad Pitt would have gone about embracing his inner SABRmetrician, and I cannot imagine what the marketing campaign would entail (A Beautiful Mind meets Little Big League!). That, in itself, would have been kind of awesome to see (as would anything involving Demetri Martin).

But it's more than that. It's that there are certain filmmakers you trust, just as there are certain writers you trust, and certain musical artists you trust, and you are prepared to follow them wherever they go. This is why, if Radiohead decides to re-record the soundtrack to Les Miserables using kitchen utensils that once belonged to Roman Polanski, I will purchase said album. This is why, if Philip Roth writes a novel about an alternate universe where Dolph Schayes became the commissioner of the NBA, I will purchase said book.*

And this is why, if Steven Soderbergh somehow does con a studio into allowing him to make a movie about baseball statistics and the geeks who love them, I will be there. Because there is no cinematic category quite as moribund as the modern sports film. In fact, given this list from a 2003 issue of Sports Illustrated, I can easily make a case that the only truly great sports films since the release of 1988's Bull Durham** are documentaries: When We Were Kings, Hoop Dreams, much of HBO Sports' recent catalogue, ESPN's SportsCentury***, Murderball, certain unboring segments of Ken Burns' Baseball, Dogtown and Z-Boys, etc.

This is due, obviously, to the increasing commodification of Hollywood, and to the notion that the only sports-related feature films that appeal to mass audiences are the ones that adhere to blatant stereotypes and facile storylines. But I think it's also happened because we are so overexposed to sports these days--to that which seems real and unreal, to the ugly storylines and the bizarre twists and sick reveals of the modern age (see: Vick, Michael)--that the real thing can generally be presented in far more vivid form than anything that might have been filtered through the visions of seven Hollywood producers, including at least two who believe Oddibe McDowell was a member of Hootie and the Blowfish.****

I think Soderbergh, who works in verite, whose low-budget films (including The Girlfriend Experience, which was stolen away by my friend Glenn Kenny's freakishly creepy performance) are so "real" as to arouse a certain amount of discomfort, might be the one person in Hollywood who could actually break through this incredibly low ceiling. And even if Moneyball kind of sucked--even if it were the incoherent mess we all suspect it might be--well, at least we've tried something different.***** Because the only way a sports movie can succeed with actual sports fans in an age where sports have essentially become reality television is to make it so unbearably real that it somehow seems truer than real life.

*Note to self: This is an idea to develop.
**Which has also gotten a little hokier with age.
***Which remains the greatest thing that network has ever done.
****I have heard that this movie, Sugar, about a young Dominican pitcher, is excellent. But I have yet to see it.
*****And there is no possible way it could be any worse than Benjamin Button.

On Things I Am Just Not Buying Today

Like everyone else who is engaged with these here Internets, I find myself besieged by a flurry of contrarian analysis. I often wonder if contrarian opinion is in fact the primary reason the Internet--well, at least Slate--was invented.* And if someone endeavors to convince me that, in fact, Paul Shirley is a more effective post player than Shaq, or that Kevin Faulk is the primary reason for the Patriots' success, or that we should think without thinking, or that we should not decide anything, ever, or that pineapple is the root cause of most cancers, I wish them well. I will still eat pineapple; I will still feel indifferent toward the Faulk family; I will still struggle to decide what to eat for dinner. But today, I stumbled across a pair of well-crafted contrarian opinions that simply ceased to convince me.

On SI.com, Scott Howard-Cooper makes a valiant and well thought-out attempt to persuade me that it is not necessary--and, in fact, may be a waste--to choose a point guard with a top-10 pick in the NBA draft. "Two starting point guards among the last 12 champions have been All-Stars," Howard-Cooper wrote. "No Hall of Famer was in the role since Isiah Thomas with the Pistons in 1990." And these are fair points, but then Cooper lists the past twelve point guards to win a championship, and while it is true that none of these men were the best player in their starting five, certainly none of them were the worst player in their starting five, either. In fact, nearly every one of them--from Derek Fisher to Chauncey Billups (who might wind up in the Hall of Fame) to Tony Parker (ditto) to Rajon Rondo (who appears on track to be a perennial All-Star)--is actually quite good (even Jason Williams did not detract from Miami's title run).

At the moment, Ricky Rubio, the Spanish phenom, is projected to go with the third pick to Oklahoma City, and my question to Cooper is this: If Rubio has as good a career as any of the four players listed above**, wouldn't he be a pretty solid pick, even at No. 3?

In fact, here are the No. 3 picks in the draft since 1998, grouped by results:
That Worked Out All Right--Deron Williams, Ben Gordon, Carmelo Anthony, Pau Gasol, Baron Davis
Eh/Oops--Mike Dunleavy, Adam Morrison, Darius Miles, Raef LaFrentz
Undetermined--O.J. Mayo, Al Horford

So: Of the five No. 3 picks that have worked out in the past 11 years, 2 1/2*** were point guards in college. And if Mayo pans out, it will be 3 1/2 out of six.

And none of the busts were guards.

To quote Isaac Mizrahi, who appears on the pale imitation of Project Runway that my girlfriend insists upon watching, despite the notable absence of Tim Gunn: "I'm just not buying your design, Scott."
--
And then there is Deadspin's resident contrarian, Tommy Craggs, whose indignant screed centers around journalist Steve Wilstein, who broke the McGwire-androstenedione story in 1998 and has now been nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame's J.G. Taylor Spink award, given for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing." Somehow, Craggs (an undeniably talented writer/reporter, who seems gifted with the ability to see the hypocrisy in everything, a skill I sometimes wish I had), argues that Wilstein's story was the kickoff of a decade-long witch hunt which has "helped create a phony atmosphere of crisis." At one point, even Nancy Reagan gets swept up in this whole argument.

Having spent the past two years of my life writing about the mythology of the drug war in the 1980s, I certainly sympathize with Craggs' point: There is reason for cynicism on all sides in baseball these days, and there is certainly a case to be made that the steroid argument is itself based on a phony/flimsy/questionable premise, and that exposing the results of tests that were never supposed to be revealed is in fact a violation of privacy, a travesty, the end of civilized humanity, etc. But all Wilstein did was expose an issue that probably should have been opened up for public discussion five to 10 years earlier; if it had been, maybe these issues could have been handled in a more rational and sensible manner, without the ensuing witch-hunt (though given that this is baseball we are talking about, probably not).

I mean: Would it have been best to act as if the issue did not exist? It is true that andro was legal at the time but raising the question of whether it should be legal--or if perhaps this was only the exposed tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg--was not unreasonable, and this is all Wilstein did. It doesn't matter whether we care or not; given that we are subsidizing this sport with our season-ticket purchases, we at least deserved to know what was happening so we could judge for ourselves, didn't we? This is not about the moralizing that followed in Wilstein's wake; this is about exposure of information and examination of the issues, which, last I checked, was still our job. And I happen to think Wilstein did just that.

Then again, I probably would have dropped out of baseball either way.

*If I were forced to summarize the overarching impact of the Internet on the past two decades of American culture in just two words, it would be these: You're Wrong.
**Presuming Rondo does not devolve into Harold Miner.
***Gordon played both guard positions in college.

(Photo: Associated Press)

On Several More Inconsequential Things That Matter to Me

1. Kobe Bryant
He wins, and yet he still can't win. I suspect he will spend his offseason sequestered in a hyperbaric chamber on Mount Kilimanjaro so as to combat the aging process and facilitate his quest for three more championship rings. This, I presume, is the only thing that Kobe truly believes will make him happy. And I do believe that at the age of 55, Kobe will have seven championship rings, and he will also live on a gated compound in Malibu with a fleet of housekeepers and several dozen reptiles as his sole company, and he will blog often about the the crossover dribble and Shaq's checkered tenure as the president of Pixar Studios and the rise of the lizard people.

2. Bryce Harper
First off, it's baseball, so it's only marginally relevant.* But the same frenzy erupts whenever a prodigy chooses to somehow defy our expectations for him, as if he will immediately end up marooned in the Vast Marinovich Cavern of wasted potential. But is this always true? Or is this an example of what Leonard Mlodinow writes about: That our natural human prejudices simply lead us to remember the bleakest scenarios, and therefore color our perceptions?

For example: Here are the fates of the other nine high-school athletes to have appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, courtesy of the Wichita Eagle's Bob Lutz. The success rate is actually much higher than I imagined, if we define "success rate" in terms of "becoming a productive member of society" rather than "LeBron James":

Indiana high school basketball standout Rick Mount, in 1966, was the first. He still has the No. 7 career scoring average in NCAA history (32.3 points). He played four seasons in the American Basketball Association before retiring.

Tom McMillen, another high school hoops standout, was a cover boy in 1970 and played 11 OK seasons in the NBA before serving three terms as a U.S. Representative.

Kansan Mike Peterson appeared in 1971, billed as a four-sport star. He was a good athlete at Emporia State. (Appears fine, according to the link above, though seems like he may relate, more than anyone else on this list, to Springsteen's "Glory Days."--MW)

Bruce Hardy, from Utah, was billed as the country's top prep football player when he appeared on a 1974 cover and played 12 years in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins.

Hockey player Bobby Carpenter went on to become the first American to score 50 goals in a season after appearing on a 1981 cover. (Played nearly two decades in the NHL.-MW)

Kristie Phillips was hailed as "The New Mary Lou Retton" in 1986 but instead went to LSU and became a cheerleader. (Phillips has accomplished a great deal since then, if we are to measure one's worth through Wikipedia.-MW)

Texas high school pitcher Jon Peters was on the cover in 1989 because of his 51-0 record. But he tore a rotator cuff and was out of baseball by the age of 21. (Peters appears to have turned out fine.--MW)

Kevin Garnett appeared in 1985 and has become an NBA star.

James, of course, is a superstar of the highest magnitude. (Charley Rosen finds this statement reprehensible.--MW)

3. Hydrogen peroxide
I find it kind of miraculous that merely by adding a molecule to water, we can create a product that disinfects my wounds, washes out my mouth, scrubs my contact lenses, bleaches hair, removes skunk odor, propels rockets, and induces vomiting in dogs.

*It's strange: Now that I've essentially become a baseball dropout, my only updates come through Facebook. So my complete knowledge of the game in the past month is this: Someone dropped a fly ball; therefore, the Mets are cursed. Also, the Royals are predictably terrible, and the Indians can only win when waterfowl become actively involved in the game, and the Phillies must be all right because no one seems to be complaining much. I suppose if I can find friends in 25 more cities, I will never need to watch a single inning ever again.

On Several Inconsequential Things Affecting My Life This Week

1. Chris Matthews
Ha! I'll admit it...I watch Tweety's show on the elliptical machine at the YMCA; I watch at home, when I am attempting to prepare something that resembles a dinner. I thought the resolution of the 2008 election would force me to stop gawking, but the mundanity of the post-election news cycle has rendered Matthews an altogether fascinating figure, a man who seems to think he has Washington figured out, all while Washington regards him as a special-needs child. Sometimes it feels like watching a version of The Truman Show, where everyone is acting except Matthews himself.

When I read this almost unbelievable New York Times magazine profile of Matthews a year ago (Favorite line: I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews’s skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended), I didn't think it could possibly be an accurate portrayal; now, after spending two years with Tweety in my living room, I'm certain that it is. Today, for instance, Matthews and his wildly spinning Republican guests discussed the frontrunners for the 2012 presidential nomination. The whole thing felt vaguely pornographic; to Matthews, who really is the most excitable political creature on television, I have no doubt this has been breakfast-table conversation since November 12. I have no doubt he dreams of Mitt Romney, but only in the context of electoral strategy. He even has a segment on his show called The Politics Fix, which would be like adding a segment to Around the Horn called The Arguing Sportswriters Moment.

Of course, I'm not sure who else could be watching this show, except the editors of Talking Points Memo and a few depressed auto-industry lobbyists drinking Manhattans at a happy hour in Georgetown. But trust me when I say it is the most fascinating hour on an otherwise bleak summer television landscape. It is worth it for those moments of pure Matthews, interrupting his guests with questions that make Charlie Rose seem like a master of brevity, and advancing theories based solely on politicians' sartorial choices and purposefully contrarian Politico articles, and wrestling with his superego (not to mention the force of nature that is Pat Buchanan), and I am just waiting for the moment when he says something so incomprehensibly advanced that he can finally begin fundraising for his own presidential campaign.

2. So You Think You Can Dance
My girlfriend finds this to be the greatest invention of the Fox television channel since Life on a Stick. I find it a fitting punishment for months of subjecting her to Tuesday night football games between Ball State and Akron--most notably, I am speaking of the scrambled judge who serves as a Paula Abdul doppelganger. I assure you, her shriek is the embodiment of existential despair.

3. Baseball season
And so, in a matter of days, we enter the netherworld between the end of the NBA season and the beginning of HBO's Hard Knocks, that dark time when we are forced to either abandon the television during prime time and re-engage with our lives, or actually watch baseball. I'm trying, baseball, but I look at you and all I see is a king-sized syringe and a framed portrait of Bill James.
Also, the Tigers are in first place. That is irrational.

On "Parity" in Baseball

Darren Everson has an intriguing piece in the Wall Street Journal about how, in an age of quantification and statistical projection, most baseball teams rely on "sleepers" to push them over the top. He bases his theory on this:

Even franchises with a financial edge like Boston and the New York Yankees and Mets are having trouble building dominant teams. In fact, this is shaping up as potentially the greatest stretch of parity in baseball history. In the past three seasons, just one team has reached 100 wins -- last year's Los Angeles Angels. Since the 162-game schedule was universally adopted in 1962, the average is roughly one 100-win team per season.

I will admit this: I have not looked at the baseball standings all season (I try not do so until at least early June; otherwise, it feels as if I am looking at the Top 25 after Week One of the college football season, and Ohio State is ranked No. 1, based on its 73-9 defeat of Southern Toledo). However, I just looked at the standings now, and I do not see anything particularly surprising. Perhaps there are fewer dominant teams, but if this is baseball's idea of parity, I don't find it particularly compelling. Because I imagine it will shake out the same way it always does.

Like most casual (and disillusioned) modern fans of the sport, I believe baseball's reality is largely predestined before the season even begins. For instance, I do not imagine that the Pirates or Royals will be able to win their division, probably ever (and I assume their own fans don't believe it, either, no matter how good a story Zack Greinke might be). I imagine that, of the Yankees and the Mets and the Red Sox, at least two of those franchises will be among the eight to make the playoffs, despite the tabloid-fueled hand-wringing*. I imagine that those three teams will spend the most money chasing after the "sleepers" Everson is referring to in August and September, and therefore, doesn't that mean those teams still have greater odds of succeeding in finding a "sleeper" who can carry them over the top? I imagine that teams like Tampa Bay (2008) will remain statistical anomalies rather than some larger indicator that baseball is finally close achieving true parity through SABRmetrics and number-crunching, and not even a battalion of Nate Silver-esque geniuses can convince me otherwise. I believe that baseball will continue on the path toward becoming a niche sport, two steps above the NHL, until it realizes that a salary cap and revenue-sharing are the only ways to achieve true parity, and to embrace modernity. And I don't believe that one team's pickup of Mark Bellhorn will be enough to tip the balance.

*When was the last time the Yankees got off to a good start, for that matter? I'm sure this has been covered elsewhere, but in in 2008, they started 9-10 and won 89 games; in 2007, they started 9-14 and won 94 games; in 2006, they started 8-8 and won 97 games; in 2005, they started 11-19 and won 95 games. Certainly, you can argue that the Yankees are a crumbling dynasty, that they do not evoke the same fear they have in the past, but you cannot argue that, because they have started the season at 10-10, that they are no longer a relevant factor in the American League East.

(Photo: Associated Press/WSJ)