"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."-A. Bartlett Giamatti

Until then... one thing I missed writing about during my "hiatus" was the All-Star Game fiasco. At the time, the phrase "could screw up a two-car funeral" kept running through my mind, applying to MLB in general, but actually for a change Selig deserved less blame than he received. As usual, he was clueless in a public-relations sense, and turned a bad situation into a worse one, but he wasn't actually filling out the lineup cards. That would have been Joe Torre and Bob Brenly, who are really to blame for letting the problem get out of hand. It was their "let nobody play more than a couple of innings, let's get everybody in" strategy that resulted in running out of players. Gee, I can remember not that many years ago when somebody like Dave Winfield or Ozzie Smith or Mike Schmidt would play practically the whole game. ESPN ran graphics after the game which showed that as recently as the mid-90's, between 5 and 10 players on average didn't get into All-Star Games, and going back to the mid 70's nearly 15 players on average didn't play. In the 1970 game, which went 12 innings, both teams had three pitchers left at the end of the game, and the NL had Hoyt Wilhelm ready to go, who being a knuckleballer could have pitched another 12 on his own. If the two guys in the dugouts had been able to manage their rosters effectively, the tie would never have happened.

As usual, some people drew the wrong conclusion from the tie, such as "they've got to put more emphasis on winning... it's not like it was in the old days... too much clowning around..." Yes, I think playing to win instead of playing to get everybody in would be a good thing, but with so much money invested in player's salaries, it's never going to be cutthroat again. Ask Ray Fosse about whether that's a good or bad thing.

Since I have those predictions for the season up there for all to see, it's only fair to ask how my picks look. First of all, though, I've been happy with the showing of my two "favorite teams". To be honest, both have done better than I thought, and since the end of hockey season, the Expos have actually been drawing... well, "below average" crowds instead of "ridiculously below average" crowds. It may not be enough to keep the team in Montreal, but the attendance increase did seem to show that fans will support a team perceived as being in contention.

The Twins are running away with their division, surprising me because teams almost always revert toward the middle after a sharp movement in one direction. In the AL Central, I thought this would mean the Twins would move back toward .500. Wrong. Unbelievably, as recently as a few weeks ago Selig insisted that the Twins are still contraction candidates.

I seriously overestimated the Phillies' chances, and underestimated the Expos. Otherwise, pretty good, except I didn't think the Braves would be that good. Also, on the records, I didn't forecast the good teams to be as far above .500 as they'll end up being, and I gave the bad teams too many wins. The standard deviation on the wins should be greater next time I do this.

All in all, not too bad. The Braves, Yankees, and Diamondbacks are in front as I thought, and I picked the Twins and Cardinals second. The AL West is close like I forecast, only it's three teams instead of two. At least I can be proud that I didn't pick the Mets to win their division, as I recall some did in their preseason predictions :)

Interleague play began this weekend, and this year the switch is that the teams play different teams than in the past few years. That is, until now the AL East played the teams from the NL East, ect. Now it's being scrambled around, which is okay, I guess, if they're going to have interleague games at all, except...

There's a massive imbalance in interleague play to begin with, assuming that teams are in competition for a wild card slot. Somebody, I can't remember exactly, is going to get to play extra games against teams from the AL Central (Royals, Tigers, and-- increasingly-- Indians), while teams from another NL division have to play the same number of games against the AL West, whose worst team (the Rangers) has the potential to score a jillion runs in any given game. The unbalanced schedule is already playing havoc with the idea of a fair competition for the wild card, and the inherent problems of interleague matchups just compound it.

Also, I heard a mention of the Cubs-White Sox interleague games that are upcoming... what? Aren't they both in their respective Central divisions? Ah, but this has "special significance", so the Commissioner's Office probably sanctioned a trade-off of one matchup for this one. Again, though, what gives? Are we saying it's okay for teams to decide for themselves who they're going to play? Why not say that it's okay for teams to try to schedule as many games as possible against the Devil Rays? Make it like college football, where the top teams get to schedule Drake or somebody like that instead of having to play a top 25 team. Tampa Bay could be the 2002 equivalent of the Washington Generals... or if anybody is familiar with Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, the Ruppert Mundays. On the other hand, I can see Bud Selig's mind turning... "Hey, if we let that happen, the Devil Rays can hold out for the high bidder to decide who gets to play them... and they will get added revenue flow... and that will make them a big-market club!!"

Unfortunately, War Emblem couldn't complete the Triple Crown this weekend. Even if he had, though, it just wouldn't have produced the same reaction as it did when it happened in the 70's. Secretariat and Seattle Slew were both legitimate media superstars with tremendous public enthusiasm. During the early period of Watergate, somebody suggested that Nixon ought to name Secretariat to replace Agnew as vice-president because he was the only figure left in the country with widespread public respect. Even the losers (a tip of the cap to Tom Petty!) in their Triple Crown bids were popular. Canonero II had songs written about him. Even if War Emblem had won, I don't think he would have had that kind of future.

Why? It's true that basketball and hockey playoffs extent further into summer now than they did back then, maybe crowding out horse racing coverage. We also have a decent World Cup team this year. (I'm writing this less than an hour before the match against South Korea. Go Team USA.) So maybe less space is available to cover the Triple Crown. But the main problem is that the horse racing industry has done as much as it could for the past 20 years to maximize profits at the expense of creating public interest in their sport. Start with the explosion of off-track betting, which cuts out incentive to actually go to the track, and factor in the big money in breeding fees, which almost guarantees that successful horses don't race any longer than is necessary and then are retired to protect investments. There's no reason to go to the track, and no horses with long-term careers to follow, and they wonder why horse racing is dying in this country?

I had an idea a few weeks ago that it would be interesting to get a handle on which teams are doing better or worse than they should be by comparing their actual won-loss record to their expected won-lost record. You might know that over the course of a season a won-lost percentage will almost always be the ratio of their runs scored squared divided by their runs scored and allowed squared. If at this time of the season a team has only scored as many runs as they have allowed but they have a .600 winning percentage, logic suggests that they probably aren't going to keep playing .600 ball. So, my idea was that I'd see what the big discrepancies were and write about it here.

For a brief time before we started wondering whether Mike Piazza was gay or how many players are on steroids, baseball people were debating whether the just-retired Jose Canseco had a Hall of Fame career. First of all, there's Jose's claim that he was "blackballed" into retirement... if memory serves, I think he was hitting .265 with little power at AA when he quit. That isn't being "blackballed".

Anyway, since he wound up just a little short of the 500 homer mark, the discussion revolved around whether Canseco should be in the Hall of Fame. Every eligible player with 462 home runs is in the Hall... but he got to that mark by hanging around for about 10 years with relatively few big seasons. So, early on the consensus of others was that Canseco fell just short of what Bill James once called the "Bonds Line"-- referring obviously to Bobby Bonds.

But, then some people brought out the old "Keltner List", which James drew up to allow us to measure a player's Hall-worthiness against subjective questions, not numerical milestones like 500 homers. This caused me to rethink my doubts, because by far the most stringent test of the Keltner List was the question, "Was this player ever regarded as arguably the best player in the game?" The number of players about whom you could say "yes" is really small, and if you could say that about Canseco, it would boost his case.

So really, nobody is suggesting that Canseco's tours of duty throughout the bowels of the American League during the last decade is going to get him to Cooperstown. If he has an argument, it has to be that he was so good in the late 80's and early 90's that all he had to do was stay on his feet long enough to put up respectable career numbers. And he was good through those years. He was the MVP in 1988, when he hit 40 homers and stole 40 bases. [Note: 40 homers used to be a very, very good total for a season :)] And he was able to contribute to a team which won three consecutive pennants and one world's championship. Trying to remember back to those days, it seemed reasonable to argue that Canseco was the best player in baseball-- either him or Rickey Henderson, anyway.

We don't have to trust my recollections, though. How do Canseco's seasons in Oakland look in sabermetric terms? Total Baseball figures Jose as the best player in 1988, 6.2 games above average... but his other seasons during that stretch don't look so good in retrospect. They were above average, and the 90-91 seasons were pretty good, but as a whole they aren't as dominant as I remembered.

Well, Total Baseball isn't the absolute authority on the numbers. Bill James has just introduced the concept of Win Shares to measure player values, and along the way he implies that the Total Baseball linear weights formulas were severely flawed. The problem is, Canseco doesn't come out very differently. The general Win Shares guidelines are 20-30 WS= an all-star season, 30 and above = an MVP-type season. (Just for comparison, Bonds' 2001 season rates a 54.)

Canseco's Win Shares totals from 1986-1992 are: 21, 17, 39, 14, 26, 31, and 16. Just based on this formula, he had two MVP- quality seasons-- 1988 (which he won) and 1991 (he finished 4th). More than that, though, are the seasons when for one reason or another he didn't reach all-star plateaus. Over his best three-year stretch, his total Win Shares ranked 10th , behind not only future Hall of Famers like Henderson, Yount and Boggs, but also behind Bobby Bonilla, and equal to Julio Franco. And the best player in baseball, by this measure, during those years? Will Clark.

So, if a crucial element of Canseco's case is that he was arguably the best player in the game during his best years, the analysis doesn't back it up. He was surely one of the 10 or maybe even 5 best players, and if he had a number of years afterward where he contributed on a steady basis, that might be good enough. But-- again looking at Win Shares-- after '91 he never surpassed 16.

I wouldn't want to base an argument for or against solely on sabermetrics, but on the other hand if there isn't anything in the most sophisticated statistical analysis to support his case, you have to question how much of a case Jose has. For now, I think I have to say that he falls a little short of where he needs to be.

I don't want to make this page a constant source of Selig-bashing, but my new favorite player is Denny Hocking, the Twins' player representative. Asked what he thought about the Commissioner's attack on the Forbes article, which claimed that far fewer MLB teams are losing money than Selig has testified, Hocking said, "Who should I believe, a magazine that spends 365 days a year researching finances, or somebody with zero credibility?" [emphasis added]

On to the actual game... One odd development of the season has been the quick firing of Davey Lopes and Phil Garner, before more than a few weeks went by. On one level this doesn't make much sense-- why would you let one guy go through spring training, getting his team ready, open the season with him as manager, and then... get rid of him after 10 games? Why not make a change in February? It's like, why did ABC renew What About Joan and then cancel it after two airings in the fall?

Actually, you can construct parallels between Joan Cusack and Davey Lopes... both are seemingly likable folks who were involved in enterprises where they weren't given a lot to work with. The Brewers certainly don't have enough talent to really let us know if Lopes can manage or not, while Ms. Cusack had to carry the hopelessly-bereft-of-comic-timing Kyle Chandler through her series' short run. (I could go further and note the similarities between the Selig family's stewardship of the Brewers and the mismanagement of ABC, which drove Who Wants To Be A Millionaire into the ratings ground, but maybe another time.)

So two years dealing with the Brewers may not be enough to tell us anything about Davey Lopes, but as for Phil Garner, the timing may have been questionable but he has never delivered much in the way of managerial results. Sure, for most of those years he had to deal with the Brewers, and then the Tigers aren't powerhouses either, but still... if I'm not correct, 9 losing seasons in a row? The impression I get of Phil Garner is that he believes that attitude should lead to winning, forget about actually playing the right people. I'm sure he will eventually resurface. Hopefully for Royals' fans, he won't be Tony Muser's replacement.

And of course, part of the reason that the Brewers and the Tigers felt free to make changes so early in the season is that neither of them are going anywhere... if the A's or the Mariners or the Braves got off to slow starts, Art Howe or Lou Piniella or Bobby Cox wouldn't be on the block, just because everybody would know that sooner or later they would get on a hot streak and then you'd want your mangerial system intact.

Another thing I've noticed early on is that just by random chance, I've tuned in to see quite a few dramatic late-inning rallies. One of them was the game where Scott Rolen homered off John Smoltz in the 9th to tie the game, and then Pat Burrell homered in the 10th to win it... and then this past weekend, there was Greg Myers--Greg Myers-- hitting a three-run walk-off shot against Troy Percival. At the same time, I think on the same day, Randy Johnson stuck out 17 and Rafael Furcal hit three triples. If the people running major league baseball would stop telling everybody how much trouble the game is in and let the action speak for itself, people would realize that there's more good baseball available now than ever before. If I may quote Miss Carly Simon: "These are the good old days."

By now the season is well underway, but it's still far too early to draw any conclusions other than Barry Bonds is still Barry Bonds, and Curt Schilling is on pace for 18 shutouts this season. Since no teams are having any starts of "signature significance", instead of writing about what's happened so far I thought I would write about the two teams I am rooting for this season.

It's been years since I've had a real rooting interest in any teams. When I lived in Milwaukee I loved the Brewers, but to paraphrase something Bill James said about Charley Finley, cheering for Bud Selig's team was difficult when he was across town, damn near impossible if he was hundreds of miles away. If you asked me, I'd probably say that my favorite team was made up of the players that I enjoy watching-- Bonds and A-Rod and Bobby Abreu and Andruw Jones and Edgar Martinez. If it meant that I didn't have the same type of emotional attachment to the course of a season that die-hard fans had, well, that's what rotisserie leagues are for, right? It's enough for me to be a Fan of the Game, except when I see a game in person, when I cheer for the home team, even the Cubs.

This year is slightly different. Bud Selig tried to kill two franchises. I think that contraction would have been, and would be in the future, the type of action that could set baseball growth back around 20 years, cost a few billion in legal damages, and piss off devoted fans as a bonus. So for that reason, for this year anyway, I want to see the Twins and the Expos succeed... one way or the other.

The Twins are the easier case to generate righteous anger. Not only has the Twins franchise been a fixture in Minnesota for 40 years, with the kind of community loyalty that MLB ought to be rewarding instead of punishing, but the team was actually good last year. That's no guarantee they will be good this year-- It might just have been a fluke. It still seems incongruous that a team which led their division for much of the season, which finished in second place well over .500, and which drew over 1.7 million fans, could possibly have been a target for elimination.

It's exactly the strategy that Montgomery Ward followed for years, and which K-Mart is trying now. It didn't work for Ward's, and I don't notice anybody rushing out to buy K-Mart stock right now. Maybe the comparisons aren't good between department stores and baseball, but I still don't think it's a sound idea to tell the public that there isn't enough good product to go around. Besides, department stores function in a competitive environment. Baseball, as the Supreme Court has told us, is a government sanctioned monopoly.

So trying to cut out teams may be lousy PR strategy, but is it even good economic strategy? First of all, if baseball is in such bad economic condition, how come the value of franchises keep going up? The reality is that no team is really losing money in the long run, because the value of each franchise is appreciating so much on a yearly basis that the sale price could recoup any year-to-year losses (most of which, according to Forbes, are fictional anyway). For example, a team which was bought for around 10 million dollars in 1970 is probably worth something like $150-180 million today, even though it's one of the weakest in the majors and has never won anything.

I'm also pretty sure that MLB gets a piece of whatever t-shirts, hats, and souvenirs are sold at games around the country-- so cutting out the number of games (by almost 7%) would actually cost MLB money. Same thing with national TV money. I bet ESPN/ Disney would want to renegotiate their contracts just on the basis of less product available to televise.

I'll admit that the case for saving the Expos is more difficult to justify than that of the Twins. The team isn't all that good, nobody goes to their games, they aren't even on local TV. A sometime Montrealer tells me that, given a choice, people would rather concentrate marginal disposable income on the Canadiens instead of dividing their attention with the Expos. So it seems like a simple decision, right? Bon jour, les Expos.

Not so fast. If you look back at history, you'll find that Montreal has traditionally been a good baseball city. It was one of the strongest minor league franchises for years, and after the arrival of the Expos the team usually drew quite well. In the early 80's, with the Gary Carter/ Andre Dawson teams, over 2.3 million people came out to one of the ugliest stadiums ever created to see the team. Sure, there were ups and downs, like with any other franchise, but what the record shows isn't that Montrealers don't want to see the Expos. It shows that they want to see the Expos when they're worth watching.

It's hard to justify keeping a team in a city where most games' attendance figures hover in the mid four figures, so that's why I want the Expos to do better on the field this year. Give people an opportunity to go out and see a contending team, or even an exciting team, and then see whether the apathy continues.

And if the team improves and Montrealers still don't turn out, it's still that much more difficult to eliminate a team that's doing well... so perhaps the team will be relocated to some area that will support them. This is where my argument runs up against those who say that there aren't enough good players to go around, so one or two franchises won't be missed. In my opinion it is absolutely not true that the talent level in major league baseball has declined because of expansion (the roster of the Devil Rays notwithstanding). If anything, expansion is only keeping up with population growth. In 1945, there were essentially 30 or 32 "major league" teams (organized baseball plus the Negro leagues) with a national population roughly half of what it is today. 30 major league teams in 2002 doesn't seem very out of line.

The problem is that there are players on major league rosters who don't belong there, making the "dilution" argument more plausible... but some of them are there because of "human (general manager) error" in place of better players still in the minors, and others are there because of the insane roster management strategy of having 12 or 13 man pitching staffs so there can be at least one or two left handed relief specialists allowing their manager to play Tony LaRussa. Cut back the numbers of relievers, and suddenly I don't think you'll find as many questionable major leaguers anymore.

So as you can clearly see :), cheering for the Twins and the Expos this year is really in the best interests of the game-- to derail contraction once and for all, to give baseball another chance to succeed in two markets, and to at least give the Expos a chance to find a good home if the attendance figures continue to suck.

This winter our American NHL millionaires lost to the Canadian NHL millionaires for the Olympic gold medal, a fact which a Canadian friend of mine didn't let pass my attention. In all sincerity, if the USA couldn't win I was happy to see Canada win, because it obviously meant a lot more to them than it would have to us. But I also couldn't help but imagine what a USA-Canada rematch would look like in a little sport called baseball...