Rotoman

Yahoo! Sports – Poll Results: Is Beltran Worth It?

I’m not sure if this link will show you the poll results, but as I type this Friday night 42 percent of respondants say he’s worth the big bucks, 58 percent say he still has something to prove.

Since we don’t know how many bucks we’re talking about (and the Yankees appear not to be involved in the bidding), this landslide seems to indicate something other than an evaluation of Beltran’s fantasy friendly and awfully attractive talents.

I’ve been noticing the comments on RotoWorld lately seem to suggest than any contract less than $2M is a fair deal for a backup player or a middle reliever. This isn’t meant as a critique of their comments so much as a suggestion that we all get a grip. Are most of the players who are signing for $1M that much better than the players who can be had for $300,000?

In some cases, probably, but the reality is that there is so much dough out there that until the contracts approach $10M a year a lot of teams aren’t flinching. I’ve always sided with the players on labor issues, because is isn’t their problem if owners want to spend too much, but the money is getting freaky.

But the insane money and the casual disregard of everyone but Doug Mientkiewicz about it is really bugging me. Sports used to be our best reality TV, in part because we could imagine it all happening in much the same way even if there wasn’t an audience willing to pay for it, but that isn’t true anymore. Now more than anything else, it all resembles professional wrestling.

I now find myself wishing that they would all simply shut up. Make your money, I’m not against that. Create your entertainment empires. Just don’t ask me to pay for your stadiums, and let the players play.

Especially if that means that Carlos Beltran will joins the Mets. Yes, I think I’m becoming more of a fan, less of a fantasist. And I’m wondering what that 58 percent were thinking.

The Rules of the Clubhouse

I totally like the feeling of the Rules at the Baseball Clubhouse. I like what they mean and I like how they said them. I read some of the retrosheet entries and I love the idea of calling up the boxes with personalized descriptions for personally meaningful games.

That said, everyone is just a little too happy in the Baseball Clubhouse. But I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing.

Yahoo! Sports: Sportsticker Baseball Notebook

I started reading this story about the Indians and Reds and stumbled over the following: “In an age of statistics and computers in the world of baseball, these two men understand the concept of building a solid baseball organization with an emphasis on communication, scouting and player development.”

It all adds up to the fact that both the Cleveland Indians, led by Shapiro, and the Cincinnati Reds, headed by O’Brien, will field talented young teams in the 2005 season. ”

Who is writing this tripe, I wondered, and there was the byline: Fred Claire. Hmm, familiar name, not unlike that of the former Dodger GM. I figured it was his son, perhaps, but in fact a bio/disclaimer at the bottom of the piece confirms that it is Fred himself.

It also says Fred is flogging his book, Fred Claire: My 30 years in Dodger Blue.

Fred was a journalist before he joined the Dodgers, but reading this piece it is clear that whatever lust for the jugular he once had (by that I mean a desire to tell the truth) has given way to a kind of PR writing that fortunately doesn’t even try to disguise its partisan impulses.

The piece ends: “The headline-grabbing deals don’t reflect the style of the two general managers from Ohio, or the type of budgets they have been given to build teams.

Even so, the people in the game know the talent on the Cleveland and Cincinnati teams and they know the future of these two franchises is bright.

It has a lot to do with leadership. ”

I don’t know why Sportsticker would want to run this stuff, nor why anyone would want to read it, but I know why Claire wants to write it. He’s had one of the greatest jobs in the world, did a credible job with it, and now gets to root for others to, if anything particular, validate his perspective about how a baseball team should be run.

Not exactly a scandal here, but clearly a case of caveat emptor.

Yahoo! Sports

Proof positive the Mets only sign guys after they’re over the hill.

Boston Champs Nickname T-Shirt – Boston Red Sox – Drunken Bleachers

And they say there aren’t real nicknames anymore…

Jenny (867-5309) by Tommy Tutone

While trying to summarize about all of the rather amazing baseball happenings this week, I came upon this rather amazing fact: The guy who wrote Jenny (867-5309) was named Alex Call, and he was in the band that backed up Elvis Costello on My Aim is True.

Ask Rotoman’s Message Board

I started the message board two years ago as a way to solicit questions for my mlb column, and for the first few months I posted most of the answers. But gradually a coterie of regulars arrived and have, for the most part, stuck around.

There have been some squabbles and some fights, but I have to say that the general tone has been pretty fun and full of interesting baseball/roto chat. I point all this out because while I’ve been leaving the blog here alone, the regulars have been taking care of all the breaking news.

I find myself stopping by just to find out what the latest skinny is.

Baseball General Manager & Scouting Course / Training / Sabermetrics | Sports Management Worldwide

This ad says the course started in Fall 2004, but it popped up among the ads served by Google at the askrotoman discussion board. Eight one-hour online chats for college credit? To be a major league GM? Amazing.

Born Suckers – The greatest Wall Street danger of all: you. By Henry Blodget

It isn’t a new thing to point out the similarities of financial markets and fantasy baseball. This story by the former genius, Henry Blodget, is as compact and lucid a litany of the mistakes we make in both spheres.

There are logical inconsistencies, mostly because there are no hard and fast rules that we can follow that will easily make us perform better picking our stocks or ballplayers, but certainly we’ll do better more of the time if we avoid the perceptual and behavioral mistakes Blodget writes about.

ESPN.com: Page 2 – How can you be sure?

I’ve started to weigh in on the steroid news a few times, but really haven’t had anything new to add. So I deleted the posts I’d written.

This references a Skip Bayless column that offers Barry Bonds some reasonable doubt. I think Bonds is the greatest ballplayer we’ve ever seen, the greatest we could ever see, but I’m nagged by his late-career rebirth. I think it’s possible he got serious about conditioning and did this, but I think it’s far more likely that, like Mark McGwire, he saw his physical reliablity in eclipse and decided to do something about it.

And so he trained hard and he got extra stuff. Stuff that was legal, at least according to MLB’s rules.

What I know for sure is that the rules that McGwire and Bonds (and perhaps Sosa and others have violated) are only going to be redefined. With each generation of nutrition, supplements and technology, we’re going to see new assaults on our notions of the integrity of records. We can pretend it’s a level playing field, but that certainly isn’t true.

For each generation what willl matter is what is happening now, and the glory of the past will be devalued as measure (without necessarily being devalued as narrative).

That’s as it should be. Bonds eclipsing Ruth or Aaron doesn’t diminish them. It’s just part of the ongoing story that amazes and intrigues us. Which is as it should be. That’s the new way.