Sweeping Up After The Weekend

I know this is Matt's line, but since he's in New Hampshire this morning... Good morning, Fackers. And it's a good morning, indeed.

Going into this series, we said that Yankees vs. Red Sox games are different, said that all indications were that the Yankees had the advantage and predicted that the Stadium would finally come alive. We were lucky enough to be right on all three counts and anyone, well any Yankees fan, who watched the entire series was treated to a satisfying performance in which the Bombers looked like what their record says they are: The best team in baseball.

Over the long haul, you have to look at numbers like run differential to even out the ups and downs of the season, but over a short series against a heated rival, it's hard not notice that the Yankees seemingly ripped the momentum away from the Red Sox at every juncture possible. When the Sox jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the 3rd inning on Thursday, the Yanks immediately tied it up on a homer by Johnny Damon. When the Sox back back with two more in the 4th, the Bombers responded with 8. They finsihed out the series by allowing two runs over the next 32 innings, both of which were quickly erased by back to back jacks from Damon and Teixeira.

We try not to talk a whole lot about "momentum" and "clutch" and other fluffy intangibles which evade statistical verification of their existence in the long run on this site, but this weekend the Yankees made it impossible not to do so. A-Rod found two incredibly high leverage situations to hit two home runs, as did Johnny Damon. The bullpen allowed only 4 runs in 14 1/3 IP, while the only runs allowed by a Yankees starter were the 5 Joba Chamberlain gave up Thursday night. In short, the Yankees stepped up to the plate and made this a turning point in the season.

Taking four games from the Red Sox all but deletes the memory of the first eight they lost. The Yanks had already overcome those in the overall standings and all that was left was the notion that the Red Sox had their number, which Nick Swisher responded to by saying "but we changed cell-phone providers".

It's been a long time since the Yankees and their fans have had reason to be riding this high. Not since 2006, when they swept the Sox in a 5 game series which also put them 6.5 games ahead, perhaps. Big Papi got one hit all series and Dustin Pedroia unfortunately had to break the news that he is in fact not magical.

The Yanks have won 31 of their last 41 games and are on pace for 100 wins. They are 27 games above .500, which is pretty incredible since they were actually below that mark 33 games into the season. How quickly we forget.

Who knows, maybe they will suffer a let down when they welcome Toronto to the Stadium tonight and Sergio Mitre takes the hill. But let's enjoy this feeling while it lasts.

"Let's Move On"

Yesterday, I dropped the sentence above at the very end of the Manny and Ortiz post. It was met with some friendly disagreement in the comments so I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the point.

The overriding sentiment from the commenters was that the Sox fans had their fun with all the steroid controversy surrounding the Yankees and now it's time to give it back to them.

Sox fans were merciless with Jason Giambi until the day he left, no doubt. They got various steroids chants going for Andy Pettitte on the heels of the Mitchell Report, but those have largely subsided. They were anxious to point out that they had the "clean" years of Roger Clemens' career. But let's see how aggressive with the "You-Took-Ster-Oids" chants they are next time A-Rod comes to Fenway. Like any other fanbase Red Sox Nation has it's fair share of dickheads, but most people with a reasonable amount of frontal lobe activity are going to realize they are now the pot calling the kettle black. If any of the fackin' Sullies and Murphs do start to get mouthy, Yanks fans can counter with "So-Did-Pa-Pi". What are we going to do beyond that?

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of personal satisfaction and Soxenfreude involved in all of this. There more certainly is. Aside from the Yankees, it's the most central theme of this blog, for fuck's sake. But any of the idiots who were foolish enough to point the finger at the rest of the league, and really thought they were going to skate away with no stars on the Red Sox being implicated in PED use, and thought that 2004 was a gift from God, pure as the driven snow, just took a shot to the solar plexus. And that's good enough for me.

This news doesn't change what happened in 2004 from our eyes, though. The '04 roster of the Yankees included A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Jason Giambi and almost certainly some other guys who haven't been outed yet. Their cheaters were a microscopic amount better (or just luckier) than our cheaters.

What we are heading towards is a realization that almost nothing is free from the stain of PEDs, one player and subsequently one fanbase at a time. Very few individual accomplishments and absolutely no Championships in say, the last 15-20 years or so are going to above reproach.

Like always, the Yankees are at the forefront of this, like they are in almost every aspect of baseball. We as Yankee fans are again ahead of the curve. Whether you like dragging people into the mud with you is a matter of personal preference, but it don't get a whole lot out of it.

Okay Maybe One More Thing...

Welcome To Club 103, Fellas

Back when the news of Manny's positive test in 2003 came to the forefront, I asked "why couldn't it have been Ortiz?", but I must admit that this isn't nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the sluggers who propelled the Boston Red Sox to end an 86-year World Series championship drought and to capture another title three years later, were among the roughly 100 Major League Baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the results.

First of all, thanks to the lawyers (Yankee fans, presumably) who chose two leak these two (and only these two) names out of the 98 or so that were still under wraps. If only the guy who conducted the Mitchell Report had any connections within the Red Sox organization, you might not have had to risk being held in contempt of court!

I think we can cast aside the notion that Manny's most recent test was an isolated incident. In light of this new information, given how steady his career numbers have been, it's hard to imagine when he was clean. With Ortiz on the other hand, his transition from Minnesota to Boston (in 2003) draws a pretty clear line. Whatever. Here's the fun part....

Hey David, are you ready to taste your own medicine and take a voluntary one year suspension?

"I would suggest everybody get tested, not random, everybody," he said. "You go team by team. You test everybody three, four times a year and that's about it."

And if a player tests positive for steroids?

"Ban 'em for the whole year," the slugger said.

Oops.

Objectively speaking, there is something pretty despicable about the fact that these guys were told the tests would remain anonymous, and now, one or two at a time they are leaking out like death by 1,000 papercuts. It's not fair, but like Omar Minaya would say, you can't put the cat back in the bottle.

The moral of today's news isn't that the Red Sox Championship is tainted, it's that we now understand the entire sport to be slightly more dirty than we previously assumed. It's not a good thing for the sport to have the accomplishments of the best players of an era systematically knocked down one by one. It's not going to be fun to look back in 10 or 15 years, when what timeframe actually defined the "steroids era" begins to crystalize, and realize that very few of the remarkable accomplishments we saw were as they seemed at the time.

Let's move on.

Big Papi Is En Fuego

No, I'm not talking about the fact that his average has reached a stratospheric .204 and has an OPS 30 points lower than David Eckstein.

The magic of Google Adsense brought me this gem.

/clicks link

AAAAAAAH! Papi, your beard is on fire!

But before you put that out, tell me more about what is in that snazzy-looking bottle...

Baseball star and fan favorite, David Ortiz launches Big Papi En Fuego, a new lifestyle hot sauce, which is never off season! Ortiz, a lifelong hot sauce enthusiast, was inspired to create the perfect hot sauce that was both spicy and flavorful. Big Papi En Fuego is made from a secret recipe, and while we can't give it away, the sauce does include fresh, natural ingredients such as habanera peppers and fresh lime. Big Papi En Fuego makes a great addition to marinades, cooking and cocktails. It is not just a hot sauce, but a way of life!

No... it's just a hot sauce. A hot sauce that could nevah compayah to Youk's fackin' hot sauce. Early reviews indicate it's not nearly as spicy as it used to be. Perhaps you could could use it to enhance some of Ortiz's Big Papi Salsa.

Papi's culinary empire also includes a red wine, but he's clearly got a ways to go before he attains Youk's status in the food industry.

Given his performance this year, all these red and hot items don't really fit his image from a marketing perspective. Perhaps he might want to partner with Ben and Jerry's for an ice cream. They could call it "Papi's Plunge" and have it feature sour grapes, humble pie and a sense of nostalgia. It would taste worse than vanilla but cost ten times more.

"the MT curse?"

John Henry came up with a new one on Twitter last night...

the MT curse?

Oh, I get it, you sniveling douche... It's the curse of Mark Teixeira!

#1 - Why is John Henry on Twitter? Doesn't he have a comely lass with luminescent locks colored like the deepest of night to tend to? The fact that he has a Twitter account (with a fucking caricature for an image, no less) really speaks to the kind of ego this guy has. "Draw ME a picture of ME. No, make the eyes more beady! Exxxcellent! Now I can pair this with an endless amount of personal updates about where I am eating dinner, whine about pitchers hitting MY players, or dispel rumors about what things I plan to buy with MY untold fortunes!"

#2 - How does this necessitate a curse, exactly? Every player who ever turned down more money than the Red Sox were offering (which, oh by the way, almost never happens) means the team they sign with is cursed? How about the Curse of Johnny Damon or the Curse of A-Rod? It's all bullshit, but at least those two make some sort of sense.

It's funny to me that there is still all this whining coming out of Boston about not getting Teixeira despite the fact that Youkilis is having an outstanding season, the Sox are 8-0 against the Yanks and are in first place by two games. Imagine if they were floundering and Youk was hitting like Papi?

The fact remains that the reason Boston didn't offer as much for Teix is because they didn't need him as badly. They have a great first baseman in tha Youkstah. Stop acting like jilted lovers, you guys dated for like a week.

More Worthless: Wang Or Papi?

The parallels between these two didn't become apparent to me until I read this post on Mass Hysteria, which seemingly took just as much pleasure in Chien Ming Wang's demise as we have in Papi's. They have more in common than just their names being euphemisms for one's penis.

In the first inning of last night's game, we saw a clash of fallen heroes: Papi, the populist champion of Red Sox Nation and Wang, the most revered athlete in the island nation of Taiwan. The Dominican native has long dominated the battle between the two. In 44 plate appearances against Wang, Ortiz was hitting .432/.523/.703 with 7 walks. He worked another base on balls and won the symbolic battle of two stars wrapped in momentarily coinciding downward spirals.

Both have been a terrible detriment to their teams this year, but in different ways. If these two were actual methods of torture, Wang would be more like waterboarding (brutal for short stretches) whereas Ortiz is the equivalent of Chinese water torture (a slow drip that eventually drives you insane). So which is worse?

According to FanGraphs, Papi is far less valuable than Wang. He clocks in with a value of -$4.7M and a WAR (Wins Above Replacement) of -1.0. Surprisingly, Wang is "only" costing the Yankees $600,000 and one tenth of a win. It would seem that the formula FG is using is letting Wang off the hook since he only pitched 21 1/3 innings so far this year. This should instead count against him, since his lack of length taxes the Yankees bullpen and has stranded them in every one of his starts. You can do a lot of damage in 21 1/3 innings. And Wang certainly has.

A starting pitcher has the ability to sabotage a game in a way no other player does. A starter giving up 6 runs in two innings is less valuable than anything a position player could do. Yes, even going 0-7 with 3Ks and leaving a small army on base (while DH'ing).

Here are Wang's 5 starts this year:

There's no way those only cost the Yankees 1/10th of a win.

In order for the Yankees to win any of those games, they would have to score more than the number of runs he allowed, obviously. Based on the Yankees offense this year, here are the probabilities that they score X or more runs in any given game.

Of course, this assumes that the bullpen is going to be perfect throughout the rest of the game, which is extremely unlikely when Wang averages only 2 2/3 innings per start and the Yankees bullpen has an ERA of 4.91. That number might even be a little favorable considering when you need to get 6 1/3 innings from the pen, you are using mop-up men or overtaxing your competent relievers.

So if you project how many runs the bullpen is likely to allow on top of Wang's performances and line those up with how probable it was for the Yankees to score more runs than that, you'd come away with a much better estimate of just how bad Wang has screwed the Yanks in his starts so far this year.

SPW% is the likelihood that the offense would score more runs than the pitching staff allowed in any given game. The most runs the Yanks have scored this year is 12 and that was only once, hence the 0% chance of winning the game against the Indians (which of course they lost 22-4) and the 1% chance against the Rays (2% chance they score 12 runs and 50% they win in extra innings).

Add those percentages up and you get a 54% win probability out of a total 500%. That's not costing the Yankees 1/10th of a win, friends, it looks a lot more like negative 4.5.

This obviously isn't overly scientific or definitive, so what do you think? Who would fetch the ham sandwich on the trade market and who would come with chips? Which one of these guys would you rather not have?

David Ortiz's Eye Chart

Big Papi, after being left out of the lineup for the Sox' victory 6-3 over the Tigers, is going to have his eyesight checked:

"I've been thinking about getting my eyes checked -- for real," he said. "My vision has always been 20-20, and I'm not feeling anything crazy, but I'm going to get it checked out."

Being the helpful chaps we are over here are Fack Youk, we have set up a free and easy eye test that our good buddy David or any other washed up slugger can use. Papi, just print the image below out on an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper, tape it to the wall at eye level, and stand 10 feet away.

Nice Try, Sports Guy

It was only a matter of time until Bill Simmons weighed in on the demise of David Ortiz. We've already had some fun with it, but not nearly as much as our buddy Simon on Sports who did some digging on FanGraphs and found out that they estimate Ortiz's value on the free agent market to be negative $5.2M. 

In his most recent ESPN The Magazine column, Simmons sounds like he's left Papi for dead:

At first, we Sox fans thought we were just watching an early-season slump. Then three weeks passed and we started worrying. The guy couldn't hit the ball out of the infield. His bat was so slow he had to cheat on fastballs; even then, he couldn't catch up. One swing a night made him look like the drunkest batter in a beer league softball game. Look, I've seen slumps. This was different. This was the collapse of a career.

I'm not ready to throw dirt on the guy quite yet. His struggles weren't quite as bad as Ortiz, but at the begining of last year, everyone had completely given up on a 36 year old Carlos Delgado and he ended up raising his OPS by over 200 points in the second half.

Like I did when the Manny HGC story came out, Simmons assumed that there was a good chance Papi's torrid mid-00's were a product of the juice, but he's since changed his tune. 

He just looked old. It reminded me of watching Jim Rice fall apart in the late '80s, when he lost bat speed overnight the way you and I lose a BlackBerry. That was painful too.

By mid-May, I was pondering another theory: Maybe Papi was older than he claimed. In Seth Mnookin's book Feeding the Monster, he recounts the story of how Boston nearly blew the chance to acquire Ortiz because they were concerned that he was much older than the media guide said.

This is an intersting theory, and right off the bat it seems to make a lot of sense. High profile Dominican guys like Vlad Guerero and Miguel Tejada have both been busted for fudging their ages recently, so the when performance seems out of line, it's reasonable to question that. 

Watching Papi flounder now, I'd believe he's really 36 or 37 (not 33) before I'd believe PEDs are responsible.

If he was three years older, it would make it more likely to me that Ortiz used PEDs.

On the surface, Ortiz being older seems to explain away his decline and works to rationalize him at this stage of his career. However, Ortiz's prime already took place in his late 20's and early 30's. If you take Simmons' lower estimate and add three years to his age, he would have hit 10 home runs at the age of 27, when a player is nearing the end of their ostensible physical prime. 

In Papi's defense he made a remarkably steady rise to being a power hitter, increasing his home run totals and slugging percentage every year from 2000 to his apex in 2006. The incredible (and somewhat suspicious) thing about Papi's carrer arc is that the biggest jump in home runs (+11) came when he went from the 12th best home run hitting park in 2002 (HHH Metrodome), to the 25th (Fenway), a layout that does not favor left handed hitters. 

Papi's late peak wounldn't be totally unprecedented. Raul Ibanez's highest home run total was 33 at age 34. However Ibanez didn't fall off a cliff like Papi. Despite hitting in Seattle, one of the very worst home run hitter's parks in the league, Ibanez continued with 21 and 23 HRs over the next two seasons and will almost certainly set another high water mark this year. Jason from IIATM,S can't help but wonder if something in up with him too. 

Every player ages, but not too many become totally useless in the matter of one season like Ortiz has, or goes on a sudden homer binge at age 37 like Ibanez. Unfortunantely for them, a significant portion of those who have these dramatic late career fluctuations are linked to steroid use, so the suspicions are going to swirl. 

Papenfreude