More Buck, On Opening Day

It’s opening day, and despite the Giants performing about as well as we all expected (take the under 72.5 games, the UNDER), and despite Kerry Wood getting crushed today, it’s a wonderful day of baseball. Today I finally finished David Halberstam’s “October, 1964” a history of the 1964 baseball season which finished with the Cardinals defeating the Yankees in 7 games.

I remember that world series well, and I even kept a scrapbook, at least for 3 or 4 games. I remember cutting out the picture of Mickey’s walk off homer in to the upper deck in right field in Yankee Stadium off knuckle ball pitcher Barney Schultz. It was the end of an era for the Yankees, and just the beginning for the Bob Gibson led Cardinals.

Bob Uecker played for the Cardinals that season, by the way, though he never made it into the World Series. At least he’s in the Hall of Fame, which is more than Tim McCarver, the first string catcher can say.

There are some interesting stories about the racism faced by the black ballplayers of that era, and Buck O’Neil is mentioned quite a bit. He was the Cubs scout who signed, among others, Lou Brock, whose trade in 1964 to the Cards was the critical piece in their pennant drive.

Halberstam wrote the book in 1994, before Buck was well known. Yet despite not being a significant character in the story, the last lines in the Epilogue are about him. Here are more words from one of the most eloquent fans of Buck. We should all take a moment and think of Buck O'Neil on opening day, and if somehow you haven't read Joe Posnanski's "The Soul of Baseball", well what the hell are you waiting for.

Those last words of "October, 1964":

Buck O’Neil finally retired after scouting for many years for the Cubs. He remained in Kansas City, where he had made his home when he played and managed for the Monarchs and where he now runs the Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame. Interviewing him was one of the singular pleasures that came with writing this book.

Keeper Shmeeper

I really don’t have time to do this, but I know you all are counting on me to explain what happened yesterday. We here at Sour Grapes aim to please.

Before I begin, I need to make a statement. When I write these recaps of keeper lists and the auction itself, it is obviously from the perspective of our vision of value. As a result, our team always looks better to us because we follow OUR values, and you guys don’t. It is a standard rule of fantasy sports that our own teams look better to us the next day than we expect, because we are using our own valuation methods to evaluate our teams.

That doesn’t mean our values are right. We bid $26 on Tom Gordon last year. The bastard who bid $25 shut up. We bid $39 on Andruw Jones. Why in hell didn’t the guy who bid $38 realize what a bargain he would be at $40?

After last season’s Auction Recap, I asked Mr. Leaguer what he thought. He said we seemed to spend a lot of time bragging about how good our team was. That was certainly not my intent. I tried to write a piece about the auction that recounted what happened, but obviously it was from our perspective, and used our opinions and valuations. And I wanted to discuss our strategy and how it worked out.

By the nature of the beast, our team looked pretty good to us based on our opinions and valuations. Duh. Plus, your teams looked a little worse to us because for some stupid reason we can’t understand, none of you seem to agree with us about everything. BTW, several teams including Mr. Leaguer said they rated our team near the top.

Up until we got Rotolab, which uses Shandler’s values, we actually created our own values for each and every player. Starting last season, we’re using the Shandler values, with about 10% of the players modified by us. So there is some level of independence in the values we use, though we have put some of our opinions back in. Still, things are going to look better to us than they are…unless we’re actually right.

So here are my keeper observations.

I ran all the keepers through Rotolab. I assumed that Larry will keep Kouzmanoff (he won’t) and throw back Andy LaRoche (he won’t). This actually helps his current valuation by a few bucks because Rotolab shows a profit for Kouz and a small loss for LaRoche because of his injury. Of course, in a keeper league, it’s not all about 2008.

We also assumed that the Cartel will activate Votto as their 10th player. It’s hard to imagine he’s going to be sent down.

Here is what we get.

There are 3 teams with profits between $80 and $90 – Cartel, the defending champion Bums and … us. Kerry Wood is now valued with a profit of $11, and this pushed us into the top group. Of these three teams, the Bums have spent the most money, which means they will be less affected by inflation than us.

There are 3 more teams with profits between $60 and $70, and I would consider them all to be serious contenders. These are the Falkuhns, the Cappers and the Old Rips. We thought the Falkuhns and the Cappers would actually be up in the top group, but the Falkuhns’ extension of Hermida to $15 and the Cappers decision to keep Snell and throw back Duncan depressed their ending profits a little more than we expected.

All of the teams except the Old Rips have some saves, have a couple of starters, and have at least a good start on steals. The Old Rips have no saves yet, and they have only Jake Peavy as a starting pitcher. As for power hitting, all of the teams except the Cartel are projected to already have over 100 homers and 400 RBI’s. The Cartel only has 4 hitters kept, so they have a lot of spending yet to do.

Speaking of spending, these 6 teams have the following money left to spend: Cartel $211, Old Rips 197, Pecklers $191, Cappers $186, Falkuhns $156 and Bums $142. The Falkuhns will have $13 more if they keep LaRoche instead of Kouz. These stats favor the teams with the least to spend, because there is some fierce inflation out there. And on this score, I warn you all that there is a plan circulating among what may well be a majority of the teams to close FAAB until mid-May beginning in 2009. It is almost a certainty that we will have a rules meeting before next season.

The next group of teams range from plus $30-40: the Busch Leaguers, the Pounders and Hobo Artillery. All of these teams have a couple of pieces, but they all only kept 6 or 7 players. They all have a fair amount left to spend: $165, $184 and $200 respectively. This is NOT a good thing, given the monster inflation out there. Mr. Leaguer and Joe Cool will be hard pressed to repeat their high finishes from last season, but they are both seasoned veterans, and should be watched carefully at the auction. As for the Hoboboys, well good luck, guys.

The Lickers made some deals with their draft picks to swing from negative to positive in profits. And they are the only team to have two catchers. That ought to do it for them.

Kenny9 has $210 to spend, which makes him very dangerous, particularly to us because he has pledged to screw us out of Marmol, no matter what the cost. I believe that he will be soliciting you all for a new place to live when this happens.

Finally, new Mr. Melonhead. He’s got the most money, $218, to spend. We don’t know him, we don’t know what to expect, and he’s filling some big shoes. Well, they were old shoes. Good luck, man – you’re gonna need it this year.

A few surprises, at least to us. I’m not sure we would have extended Hermida. Those farm extensions from $5 to $15 are tricky, and we face decisions next season on Pence and Loney. The same could be said about the Bums extending Milledge, who we wish to remind you all, they got from US in a deal that Mr. Leaguer called “preposterous.” We were pretty sure Cartel would bump Hamels, which is the most dangerous decision of the three.

We would have kept Duncan instead of Snell. Snell gets another year, but Duncan has the most profit in him.

I had to go look up Ryan Ludwick, kept at $6 by Hobo. I can’t imagine he would have gone for much more.

We thought the Pounders would keep Rowand. In fact, they threw back Rowand and kept Feliz, which is probably more of a statement about the Giants as it is about the Pounders.

I’m looking forward to seeing who the Bums buy as starting pitchers. We guessed they’d keep Hampton at a buck instead of Chipper at $29. Chipper had a great season last year, but that could be the move we look back to at the end of the season for good or for bad.

We struggled with whether to keep Nick Johnson. We surely hated to throw him back after donating a $5 Kaz Matsui to the Bums last year. In the end, Johnson simply won the job over a guy who is Mo Vaughnish, a diabetic, and a serious injury waiting to happen. I’d be curious as to what the others in the league would have done. I know that Mr. Leaguer traded for him in the big LA league and then threw him back, though he had a lot of good keepers there. I just wish the Giants would trade for him (I put the full court press on Larry B. on this score). It would be bad for the Pecklers, but good for the Giants. One of the great questions of the Auction on Friday will be what Oatmeal goes for.

Finally, what do Brian Wilson, Kyle Kendrick and Manny Parra have in common? They are the only 09X players kept. The Pecklers spent a lot of money last season grazing among the potential 09X players, and kept no one, though we came close on Keppinger. We were surprised no one would bite on him for a 2nd round pick, which convinced us to toss him back.

Under Fire

No baseball here.

Hillary Clinton’s gaffe this week about her claims that she came under hostile sniper fire in Bosnia while first lady has me bugged.

She claimed multiple times, both in a speech and in interviews, that she and little Chelsea had to run for cover as soon as they landed for a visit in 1996. "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Ooops. There’s video. And witnesses. Sinbad, who was there, noted: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’”

The Junior Senator from NY did a 180, admitting she had “made a mistake.” It turns out, she misspoke.

There is the word that gets me. “Misspoke.” Did anything at all like this happen anywhere at any time to her? Like maybe in South Africa in 1994, or in Lebanon in 1997 or in Afghanistan in 1999? If at some point, if she really had to run across a tarmac dodging bullets, I can buy that she may have made a mistake and misspoke about the incident.

But if nothing like that ever had happened to her, that’s not a mistake. That is not misspeaking. If I had ever had to dodge bullets in a foreign country, I’d remember that. And if I never had to do that (I haven’t) but said I did, I’d either be lying or hallucinating.

I’m guessing she’s lying. The whole focus of her campaign is that she is the Democrat of experience, and she’s only talking about this trip to demonstrate her foreign policy experience. Personally, I don’t buy her qualifying as experienced because she was the first lady of the US for 8 years and the first lady of Arkansas for 10. Her only public display of involvement in the Clinton administration was her miserable failure to get anything connected to health care reform passed.

But she did hug some little kid at an airport in Bosnia. There you go – ready to be commander-in-chief on day one. Proof positive. Imagine what John McCain will do with her phony sniper experience. After all, he really was put in a box in the Hanoi Hilton for 6 years.

On the other hand, maybe we ought to consider that hallucinating thing. She did tell the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that she was “sleep-deprived” which caused her to misspeak. Uh, let's go back to the lying excuse. After all, would you want a sleep-deprived Hillary Clinton to be picking up the Red Phone at 3 AM?

Lottery Winners?

From the Chicago Tribune: “Piniella also announced Tuesday he would announce his closer by the end of this week. Kerry Wood, the probable closer, will pitch back-to-back outings for the first time this spring Wednesday and Thursday.”

We should know by tomorrow night if our $3 Mr. Wood will be the closer for the Cubbies to start the season. He’s been excellent since his second outing this spring, and if he can pitch well on Thursday, his first back-to-back game, he’s in.

Nothing beats a cheap closer. Except, as the Cartel would point out, two of them. Change Wood’s projected pitching value to $25 from $2, and the Pecklers move up into the top group of keeper lists, with the Cartel, the Bums, the Rips and the Cappers.

Not the Falkuhns? Still waiting on that trade, Mr. Dot. I'm sure it will be a doozy.

Good trade yesterday between the Bums and Any 9 for both teams. The Bums look like they will go with $1 Mike Hampton as their #10 (it still leaves Saito as #11, and they might keep him). So they traded part of that deep, cheap pitching staff, John Maine, for the #1 pick in the minor league draft. They could afford to give away their 2 draft picks, as they have Schierholz and another minor league guy I’ve never heard of that they want to keep.

Any 9 gets a quality pitcher at a good price ($10) for 2 years (yeah, right, like anyone could stay on Kenny 9’s roster for 2 full years besides Ryan Howard), and he also gets a third draft pick. He’ll now be picking 12, 13 and 24.

Where are those other trades? Lotsa talk, no action.

-30- +1

OK, I was wrong, but I was close. There was a wake for McNulty. I was right about that. He just wasn’t dead. Now how could I guess that alternative?

I loved the final episode. There were some incredible lines:

Norman – “The Commissioner is about to have a Come to Damascus moment.”

Rawls – “You’re a cunt hair away from being indicted.”

Vinson - "That sentimental motherfucker just cost us money."

And of course, the piece de resistance, Jay Landsman (the actor who played Jay Landsman, not the real Jay Landsman, who was also an actor in the series but who wasn't a good enough Jay Landsman to play Jay Landsman) providing the ultimate eulogy for McNulty. Here it is in its entirety:

He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman's shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don't say that about many people, even when they're here on the felt. I don't say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat'ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole.

And I'm not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion-to-every-other-facet-of-his-humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — "from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned." He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I'd want it to be you standing over me catchin' the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had.

Beautiful words, Sgt. Landsman. And If I am laying there dead on some San Francisco street corner, I hope Jay Landsman will provide the words of eulogy for me. Of course, I’m not “nat’ral po-lice”, but I am an asshole.

A guy is sitting at a bar. Suddenly the drunk guy next to him erupts: “All lawyers are assholes,” he growls. The first guy stares him down and says, “I resent that.” “What, are you a lawyer?” the drunk answers. “No, I’m an asshole.”

The Wire, RIP

The End

No, not of the blog. In just 5 hours, after 2 weeks of impatiently waiting, I’ll be watching the final episode of television’s greatest series, The Wire. If you haven’t been watching, and apparently that is a lot of you, well – you just don’t know. The best writing, the best acting, the best conception – it’s perfect. Perfect except it will soon be gone.

BEWARE – POTENTIAL SPOILER COMING

If somehow you are reading this on Sunday afternoon, before The Wire airs, you might not want to read the rest of this at this time.

When the season started in January, there were many articles in the media (the show, if nothing else, is a media darling) about The Wire and the then upcoming fifth and final season. In one of those articles (I’m guessing The New Yorker, but there were many), I saw a clue about something I anticipate we will see tonight. If you don’t want to see this, stop reading, you idiot, and come back tomorrow. You can see then if I’m right.

There was talk about a cast party after filming the last scene. I don’t know if it’s the last scene we will see, or if it’s the last scene they filmed (well, I know it is at least the latter). The article referred to a scene in a cop bar where a wake was being filmed. We saw one of those two or three seasons ago for a real cop who died who had a small part in the show and who must have been close to the creators. Anyway, what that meant was that somebody on the police force is going to die in tonight’s episode. My guess is McNulty. The way this show is, it really could be anyone, because we have become attached to so many characters. But the way things are reeling out of control for Jimmy McNulty, the main character (to the extent there is a main character – at least his name comes first in the credits), it seems obvious now, and it seemed obvious when I read that in January. Nothing has happened to change my mind.

Has any show ever killed off the main character? Of course, MASH killed off McLean Stevenson, but he was really #3, and he was leaving the show. I guess McNulty is leaving the show, or the show is leaving him, and so it is an easier idea to off him. But throughout the series history, and particularly this season, we have seen so many characters we’ve come to appreciate killed off: DeAngelo Barksdale, Frank Sobotka, Stringer Bell, Bodie, and in just the past few weeks Prop Joe, Omar and Snoop. Brilliantly drawn, brilliantly acted, each one so special, each killing powerful. But they were all from the bad guys side (actually it was never clear to me if Frank Sobotka was a bad guy). Tonight it’s gonna be one of the good guys (I think) and who knows, maybe lots of bad guys.

What I know is it’s going to be great, 93 minutes of great. I can’t wait. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, order up season 1 on Netflix. I own the first 4 seasons, and starting next week the boss and Max and I will start watching one more time from the beginning. But first, before we start at the beginning, we need to see the end. Thanks forever to David Simon and Ed Burns, the creators, and to the biggest, blackest, baddest cast ever assembled. BRILLIANT!

-30-

It Was Windy

This is a stat line that speaks for itself:

………….. IP..H…R…ER..BB..SO..HR
N Lowry 1….0…4…..4..…9….0…..0

Technically, it was a no hitter.

I’d say if the Bums were thinking about keeping him, they probably changed their mind yesterday.

Speaking of the Bums, they have hiding on their potential keeper list Mike Hampton at a buck. He’s looking like the #4 starter in Atlanta this season. The Braves are raving about him.

Beware the hype.

I Scream

I’ve been a bit busy these days, working 7 day weeks, so the blog is getting a little spotty. Here is a classic blog entry, a quick one based on an observation yesterday.

I was “on the road” yesterday, meeting with some big clients on the Peninsula. After a meeting in Los Gatos, I had a craving for some ice cream, and stopped at a Baskins nearby.

Of course, I was looking for my classic coffee ice cream with something crunchy. They had a seasonal flavor called “Tax Crunch” which had coffee ice cream, hunks of chocolate and rice crispies. A little weird, but close enough, and given the name, I felt it was made for me. I ordered a one scoop on a sugar cone. It was not one of those scoops you see in a marketing photo – you know, a big scoop and at the bottom of the scoop there is a bunch of ice cream sticking out in all directions that makes it look like they gave you a bunch more ice cream, and you’ve got to eat that extra fast before it falls off. Kind like this one above.

Nope, that’s not the one I got. The one I got makes this second one look like a real fresser (if you don’t know that word, they use it in Jewish delis to refer to the extra large size of something). It was basically a ping pong ball on top of a sugar cone. The Baskins' and Robbins' cost: $2.49. Are you freaking kidding me? Now I may be wrong, but can’t you just go to Safeway and buy a pint of fancy ice cream (maybe coffee and bacon bits?) and a box of sugar cones for around that? Talk about a high profit item for Jack and Marian’s! * **

*Jack and Marian’s was an incredible Jewish deli in Brookline, Mass for many, many years. The had the largest menu in the world, maybe three feet square, and they had every permutation and combination of sandwich you could imagine. Periodically on the menu there were starred (*) items. If you searched real hard, in the middle of the menu was a small note in very small type that said “starred (*) items indicate high profit items for Jack and Marian’s. Not popular items. High profit items. Great restaurant, RIP.

** In the spirit of my blogging hero, Joe Posnanski, I am moving to the asterisk system for asides.

Anyway, I’m probably sounding like my Grandpa Izzy*, complaining about the prices. He of course used to do full charge bookkeeping work for his business clients for $5 per month, and he did it with a fountain pen.

*Actually, Grandpa gave me some of the best advice I ever got. When I was interviewing for my first accounting job coming out of USF, I told him about the interviewing process. He put his arm around me and said “Don’t take less than $25 per week.” You laugh, but I consider that excellent advice.

Back to Baskins. You know their ice cream isn’t all that great. I don’t think I’ll be back any time soon. If I’m going to pay that ridiculous sum for an ice cream cone, it better be a fresser.