Brock Holt: Too Valuable to Start

Baseball is a funny game. On one hand, it seems very simple. Throw ball, hit ball, catch ball.  But part of the allure of the game is how complex the game actually is under that surface.

This came to mind yet again as I read Over the Monster's article What needs to happen for Brock Holt to play full-time for the Red Sox? The main point of the article is that the same thing that makes Holt valuable to the Sox – his above average versatility – will prevent him from being a starter. As Matt Collins writes:

Last season was his coming out party to the league, and he played almost literally everywhere. He logged 327 innings at third, 264-2/3 in right, 101 at short, 74 at second, 57-2/3 in center, 70-1/3 at first and 60 in left. He joined Denny Hocking as the only players since 1914 to play at least eight games at each position besides pitcher and catcher. One would think that would be enough to earn an everyday role somewhere, but on this team, Holt might be too valuable on the bench to have a consistent spot in the lineup.

This seems counter intuitive until you dive into the logic. As Collins details, in every position on the field, the Sox have better options then Holt at each single position, both as a starter and as a backup, but nobody that's a better option for ALL of the positions. (Catcher and Pitcher excluded, of course, but honestly i'd like to see Holt give those a go as well.) Holt's value as a backup extraordinaire outweighs his value at any single position. Bizarre. But at the end of the day, we're lucky to have a player like him - I have no doubt he'll prove his worth many times over the course of the season.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Clown Show in Buffalo

A few free minutes to entertain you with a Bills rant:

Last Thursday, EJ Manuel, the Bills valuable starting QB, didn't slide at the end of a run for some inexplicable reason and suffers a sprained knee. So what does the team do? They decide to promote a QB from their practice squad and name him the starter against an extremely tough Bengals defense. So wait. If Thaddeus Lewis was good enough to be a potential starter, then why hasn't he been the backup quarterback all of this time? What about our current backup - Jeff Tuel? Keep in mind this is a team who only keeps two QBs on the roster - if they didn't think "Tuel Time" was going to be the man, why not put him on the practice squad? I'm not really buying the explanation.

If that's not enough for you, last year, the Bills cut one of their most popular players - Brian Moorman, their long-time punter - in favor of a young guy. (That's right, the Bills have been so bad, many of the jerseys you see in the stands is of their PUNTER.) The only problem being that Shawn Powell sucked. So after an historically bad special teams day against Cleveland last week, they dump him and sign - wait for it - Moorman! Who is still a decent punter, despite being out of the league this year. But how is signing a 36 year old punter supposed to prepare the team for the mythical future in which the Bills actually are competitive?

And just so you don't forget, Jarius Byrd, our all-pro safety franchise player who has been quarreling with the team all season over his contract while showing up with plantar fasciitis in BOTH feet. He's been out all season. But just as he's getting healthy enough to play, all of a sudden NOW we're open to trading him?

I love the Bills but it does seem at times that it's being run by a bunch of clowns. In the meantime, our odds of having a winning season, much less making the playoffs, are getting dimmer and dimmer.

A Celebration of the Pedroia Contract Extension

I'm a huge Red Sox fan, and you may have heard that Dustin Pedroia signed an extension with the Red Sox that will keep him playing in Fenway until he's 38. At first glance, this seems like another one of those absurd long-term baseball contracts that never seem to pan out at the end (A-Rod, Pujols, etc.). But there's a couple of mitigating circumstances that seem, to me, to make the deal a good one. They are:

• The compensation is a bell curve. Rather than the most expensive years of the contract coming at the tail end, Dustin will be making his most money in the middle of the deal (2017-2019) and only (only?) 13 and 12 mil respectively in 2020 and 2021. This becomes even more important when you take into account the endlessly escalating salaries for players. if Pedroia is an average player at the end of this contract, the Sox will most likely be paying for an average player.
• The Sox are averaging out the cost of his early years. Most arguments against these types of deals is that the teams are "paying for past performance. While i'm sympathetic to that argument, the fact is that Pedroia was a steal for many years. Fire Brand of the American League took at look at his 2008:
  

  In 2008 he had 213 hits, 54 doubles, 17 home runs, 20 stolen bases (and was only caught stealing once), and an outstanding .326/.376/.493 slash line. He posted an outstanding 6.9 WAR and was the starting second baseman for the AL All Star team. In addition to that, he took home the Silver Slugger, Gold Glove, and MVP awards. All of this from a player who celebrated his 25th birthday during the season, and pocketed a salary of just $457,000.

  So we can see his bigger salaries as evening out the cost of his earlier years. Of course, there's no guarantee that Pedroia will continue to be the excellent player that he currently is. But even if he becomes average, the value of the contract can be averaged out by looking at how much of a bargain he was for many years. 
• He'll be the face of the franchise. Currently, the only reason Dustin is not the main man on the Sox is the presence of one certain Large Father. But as impressive as Ortiz' late career resurgence has been, he won't be wearing the B for much longer and then Pedroia will be the main man on the team. Does this make sense from a baseball perspective? No. But from a business perspective - from the eyes of the owners who need to sell the team - it's a big deal to have a much-loved role model as the face of the franchise. I love the fact that "our guy" will be a 5'8" firecracker rather than some "perfect" player that has half of his personality.
• Attitude. As a fan, I love how Pedroia plays the game. With passion, spunk, and unrelenting effort. I love the fact that he has never once talked or complained about his contract or how much money he has made. I love the fact that despite he's one of the best players in the league, he actively pursued a new deal that made him a Sox for live, regardless of the money. As he put it himself:

It was a no-brainer to me. This was a place where they gave me an opportunity to play professional baseball. I want to make sure I do all I can to prove to those people who take a chance on me right. I'm not here to set markets or do anything like that. I want to make sure the team I'm on wins more games than the other team's second baseman. That's the way I look at it.

Anyways, that's just details. In the end, I just love watching the guy play. I'm excited to know that Pedroia will be in Boston until he retires - it's just no fun watching your favorite players go to other teams. So for the next 10 years, you'll find me wearing my #15 shirt and rooting for the little guy!

Originally Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Newsflash: Hockey is Exciting

The Bruins/Penguins game on Friday night was intense - as exciting as a 1-0 game you'll ever see. The most amazing part of it was the scrum that occurred during the last two minutes of the game. It had it all - Rask making some saves despite losing his stick, a miss on an open net, whiffed shots... but the highlight for me is at 56 seconds remaining when Chara blocks a shot with his HAND and still makes plays afterwards.

There's literally nothing more exciting than playoff hockey. And it continues on Wednesday with Boston vs. Chicago. Go Bruins!

Modern Offense and the Buffalo Bills

As I've gotten older, the amount of time I spend on football has diminished. There’s a number of factors for this – decreased free time due to the kids, ambivalence about the sport due to the increased knowledge of how much damage the participants are doing to themselves, the dire state of the Buffalo Bills – but for  visceral excitement its hard to match watching a good NFL game.

I say this because Joe Buscaglia’s article for WGR 550 is one of the best things I've read about football in a long time. Going beyond a simple reaction to how the Buffalo Bills offense looks after the 2013 draft, he details how he feels a modern offense operates in today’s NFL and how the Bills are matching up. In short, he posits that once you have a good QB (the essential player in the NFL, and why the Bills have been bad for so long), you surround him with skill players in a spread offense, which diminishes the importance of the offensive line (since they no longer need to block for as long). It’s a fascinating read, and one that actually gets me interested in both football and the Bills again. After all, it is the offseason - the best time for a Bills fan, since our hopes have not - yet - been cruelly crushed under the merciless heel of fate.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Buscaglia has to say about the defense!

A La Carte Sports Pricing Now!

On the unbundled cable front, hardballtalk speculates that the complete arrogance of the Dodgers new cable deal might spend the death toll for bundled cable:

To pay for [the reported $8B deal], Time Warner is going to charge other carriers (Direct TV, Dish Network, other cable systems) $4 or $5 per subscriber for the right to carry the new Los Angeles Dodgers network they’re operating, with those costs passed on to the other carriers’ customers. This is how all sports TV rights deals go. ...
Many — probably most — of the customers who are seeing their cable bill go up are not Dodgers fans. They just want to watch Nick Jr. or History Channel or BBC America or any number of other channels. But, because you can’t (for the most part anyway) pick and choose which channels you get, the non-sports watchers are helping subsidize the sports watchers.
Joe Flint and Bill Shaikin of the L.A. Times ... talk to one former TV executive who thinks that such a pattern is unsustainable:

“[“a la carte”] is the solution everyone should be looking at seriously,” said Derek Chang, a former senior executive at satellite broadcaster DirecTV. Such a move, he added, may be the only way to lower the cost of TV sports. “Ultimately the market for fees would then reset.”

As I wrote about here, bundled cable makes a mockery out of capitalism, because there's no mechanism by which the consumer can let the supplier know the true value of their product. To reiterate my example, I pay Verison something like $45 extra a month for their "Basic Plus" package (or whatever meaningless name it's called) just so I can have access to NESN and Red Sox games. I get a shitload of extra channels with that package, but do I watch any of them? Hell no. I'd happily pay for NESN alone, but that's just not possible. Stop subsidizing bad programming! Split apart the bundles and institute a la carte cable pricing and let the market do its work!

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Freeda Stations!

What Football Does

As much as I enjoyed watching last night's exciting Super Bowl, i've become very ambivilant about watching the sport given all that's come to light about just how much the players are damaging their bodies by playing. Stories like Junior Seau's suicide, the concussion storyline in general, and Dan Le Batard's incredible story about Jason Taylor's tactics for staying on the field. LeBatard captures some amazing stories, but here's the money quote:

Taylor was leg-whipped during a game once in Washington. Happens all the time. Common. He was sore and had a bruise, but the pregame Toradol and the postgame pain medicine and prescribed sleeping pills masked the suffering, so he went to dinner and thought he was fine. Until he couldn’t sleep. And the medication wore off. It was 2 a.m. He noticed that the only time his calf didn’t hurt is when he was walking around his house or standing. So he found a spot that gave him relief on a staircase and fell asleep standing up, leaning against the wall. But as soon as his leg would relax from the sleep, the pain would wake him up again. He called the team trainer and asked if he could take another Vicodin. The trainer said absolutely not. This need to kill the pain is what former No. 1 pick Keith McCants says started a pain-killer addiction that turned to street drugs when the money ran out … and led him to try to hang himself to break the cycle of pain.
The trainer rushed to Taylor’s house. Taylor thought he was overreacting. The trainer told him they were immediately going to the hospital. A test kit came out. Taylor’s blood pressure was so high that the doctors thought the test kit was faulty. Another test. Same crazy numbers. Doctors demanded immediate surgery. Taylor said absolutely not, that he wanted to call his wife and his agent and the famed Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion. Andrews also recommended surgery, and fast. Taylor said, fine, he’d fly out in owner Daniel Snyder’s private jet in the morning. Andrews said that was fine but that he’d have to cut off Taylor’s leg upon arrival. Taylor thought he was joking. Andrews wasn’t. Compartment syndrome. Muscle bleeds into the cavity, causing nerve damage. Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg. Fans later sent him supportive notes about their own compartment syndrome, many of them in wheelchairs.
Taylor’s reaction?
“I was mad because I had to sit out three weeks,” he says. “I was hot.”

It's difficult to enjoy the violent hits when you know what they are doing to people. And even harder when you're surrounded by your kids, wondering why you preach nonviolence 99% of the time and then clap when you watch over sized men barrel into each other at top speeds.

Speak So Loudly

“What you do should speak so loudly that no one will hear what you say.”

- Marv Levy

When Heroes Fall...

So it turns out that not only did Lance Armstrong dope his blood when he was winning all of those Tour de France titles, but, as Michael Specter writes in the New Yorker: "he was the king—better at doping than he was at pretending to win bicycle races through grit and determination." There are a lot of sordid details, many of which are incredible to read, but the kicker is this statement by the USADA: "the evidence in the case against Lance Armstrong is beyond strong; it is as strong, or stronger than, that presented in any case brought by USADA over the initial twelve years of USADA’s existence."

That's an incredible statement, and really does put everything that Lance has ever said into a different perspective. I mean, not only did Lance deny doping, but he did so vehemently, so passionately that it's hard to believe it was all an act. It was like he thought he'd never get caught - although in the end, history always people always get caught. Lance's image is in shambles, his biking titles (and marathon finish!) stripped from him, and he's currently laying low,  not defending himself publicly and stepping down from the head of Livestrong.

Other then wondering what kind of man can lie so vehemently about what he knows to be true, the question of what this means to Livestrong is the most fascinating question to me. Lifestrong is a good charity regardless of Lance's actions, and has (and will) achieve a lot of good in the world. But how it moves forward in the face of the disgrace of its figurehead will be very interesting. As Suzanne Vega sings in "When Hereos Go Down" (linked above):

When heroes go down / They land in flame
So don't expect any slow and careful / Settling of blame

I'm not expecting, or even advocating, that Lance's forming Livestrong to somehow mitigate his lies and cheating on the playing field. But the issues, and the person, are complex, and it's good to keep that in mind as we ponder the meaning of Lance Armstrong's rise and fall.

Bringing Back What Was Washed Out

Looks like the Bills really are desperate.

Short story: regardless of who they sign, until they find a real quarterback (Sorry Fitz, you're a backup and always have been), the Bills are doomed to be no better than .500. (Need proof, see "The Bad" section here.)

Yesterday's Debacle, Explained

"The Pats ran against what can effectively be described as a 4-1-6 alignment for most of the game, [and] ...the Pats' ground game, which picked up 6.2 yards per rush."

From an accurate write-up by Buffalo Rumblings, the premiere Bills blog out there.

6.2 yards per run! No wonder the Bills got their asses handed to them. Despite all of the money laid out on defensive players this off season, the Bills still have the same old question marks. And I have no faith that they'll be able to address them anytime soon.

The only good news? Brady will be retired in a few years.

Football Hurts Your Brain

I've known for sometime that I would be, at best, uncomfortable with my sons playing football when they got older. Now, I think i'm going to prohibit them from playing at all:

This link is to a TERRIFIC Frontline episode on high school football, and it has a segment on brain injuries. The most frightening part is a team of doctors who set out to do a study of changes in cognitive functions of high school players in the hours and days after a concussive head injury. But there weren't any significant episodes in their first couple days so they decided to put their time to use by doing some baseline studies of cognitive functions of the players before any injury.

One of the things they learned was that there was a measurable decline in cognitive function just from the ordinary helmet-to-helmet impacts on every play, even when there was no concussion suffered by the player. They tracked this group of players for several weeks of practice, and measured the decline in their brain function - thinks like short term memory, pattern recognition, etc.  The concluded that the cumulative effect of all these sub-concussive impacts of the brain on the inside of the skull lead to the same conditions as a concussion.

Scary stuff. h/t the Dish.

Basketball Officiating

I love basketball. I always have. It was the first professional sport I watched with any regularity. I spent countless hours as a kid shooting hoops in my driveway pretending I was Larry Bird. However, with notable exceptions (the Celtics championship runs of 2008 and 2010), I rarely watch basketball anymore. Why is this? In a word: officiating. Basketball officials have WAY too much power. The given vagueries of a referees foul calls often dictate the pace and outcome of a game more than the play of a superstar. They turn the ending of great basketball games into boring trips to the different free throw lines.

It was with great chagrin I saw this play out yet again in the Syracuse/Ohio State contest on Saturday night. The foul calls came fast and furious, often for nothing more than incidental contact, making what could have been a magical matchup into a long slog whose biggest suprises came when someone would score a basket without a foul being called. As Nick Fasulo put it:

The Orange, who committed an average of only 15 fouls a game this season, were whistled 29 times tonight, while the Buckeyes were called for 20 fouls. ...
Of the 16 players that took the floor, three fouled out, 10 committed at least three fouls, and everyone committed at least one foul.
With Sullinger sidelined for most of the first half, there was a huge chunk of the game where the best player on the floor, one of the best players in college basketball, was unable to compete and showcase his skills in front of a national audience.
The same goes for Dion Waiters, and also Rakeem Christmas.
Even when the team’s best players were on the court, many were reluctant to play with a smidgen of physicality.

And that's a shame. I don't know much about Ohio State, but it's been a joy watching Syracuse play this year. Despite their many flaws (overconfidence, inability to rebound, maddening tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune times), Jim Boeheim assembled an incredible team whose depth made them more multi-faceted then 99% of college basketball teams. And when it counted most, they couldn't play their game. Not because they tried and failed, but because they were denied the opportunity to play the game as they had played it throughout the rest of the season.  And that's a damned shame. Hopefully Syracuse will be back in the Elite Eight again next year (even if Dion Waiters, arguably their most skilled player, won't be with the team), because it'd like to see more of them - and this time, it would be nice if the refs would let them play the game.

Psyching Yourself Up

An excellent video of performance anxiety followed by the ecstasy of accomplishment.

H/t Boing Boing

Football Hindsight

So Jabari Greer had two playoff interceptions for the Saints last night. Why can't the Bills get players like tha... Oh. Wait. Never mind. I forgot that the Bills have become a farm team for the rest of the league.

First Lines of Negotiating with the Dead

Writing, Writers, The Writing Life--if this last is not an oxymoron. Is this subject like the many-headed Hydra, which grows two other subtexts as soon as you demolish one? Or is it more like Jacob's nameless angel, which whom you must wrestle until he blesses you? Or is it like Proteus, who must be firmly grasped through all of his changes? Hard to get hold of, certainly. Where to start? At the end called Writing? Or the end called The Writer? With the gerund or the noun, the activity or the one performing it? And where exactly does one stop and the other begin?

- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

For more on this fascinating woman, you have to see her take on the hockey goalie.

Cross posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

NFL Rant

The Situation: Bills vs. Raiders, this past Sunday. Buffalo has the ball with ~14 seconds left on the clock, fourth-and-1 from the Oakland 6. Ryan Fitzpatrick goes back to pass and... the network pulls away from the game. To show the Pats/Chargers game. But that game hadn't yet started, so TV viewers on the edge of their seat, watching arguably the most exciting game of the young season, were subjected to 5 minutes of ads before being sent to the pregame - the pregame! - of the local game.

What did we miss? Only a 6 yard pass to David Nelson to put the Bills up three points. Oh, and a Da'Norris Searcy interception in the Bills end zone that ended the game

The NFL: Spending millions of millions of dollars to put out a top-notch product, but making it as hard as possible for the average fan to watch the games that they want to watch.

Football

The NFL season started tonight. I'm finding it hard to get excited about this season because once again my team is going to be below par.

I predict a 6-10 season for the Buffalo Bills. I can't even muster the energy to give an analysis about the season. I'll say this: Stevie Johnson will not match his season from last year, DE Marcell Dareus will be a beast if he can stay healthy but the defense will still be poor, and the Bills will be competitive in many games but will lose most of them.

The Buffalo Bills: the team that redefined mediocrity!

Lee Evans to the Ravens

Take a first round pick and get a fourth round pick in return. ...and that's why they're the Bills.

You cant even say they were trying to save money 'cause they just paid Evans a roster bonus of 1.5 million at the start of the month.

Just doesn't make any sense. And Brian Galliford at Buffalo Rumblings explains why.

Game Seven!

It's been a long time since i've been excited about hockey, but i've officially had Bruins fever for a while now. Partly because I live outside of Boston, partly because I went to the same university as spectacular goalie Tim Thomas (UVM, for those of you sorry enough not to know), and partly because the Stanley Cup playoffs are just simply awesome. The Bruins / Canucks series has been very entertaining to watch, even if it's been frustrating as hell watching the Bruins' offensive futility up in Vancouver.

But all that's put aside now: it's time for Game Seven! A game seven in hockey is in my mind the most exciting game in all of sports. It's do or die for two teams that have beaten the crap out of each other for six games already. The big difference between hockey and basketball game sevens is that in hockey, the refs tend to put their whistles away and let the players sort it all out. Which, given how brutal this series has already been, could get nasty! As prohockeytalk puts it:

If you think you’ve got this series all figured out, throw that knowledge out the window because Game 7 is a prison riot on ice. Anything can happen and anything goes. Records get tossed out the window and sometimes the rule book does too.

Go Bruins!