The Rake Magazine

^{AP Photo/Jim Mone}

I love baseball stats, love them as least as much or more than the next woman. And like so many others, the explosion of the statistical analysis of baseball was what drew me deeper into the grip of the game at a moment in my life when I was just starting to pull away.

Maybe it doesn't happen the same way for everyone, but in my case there was a period of vulnerability after I stopped thinking of baseball as a game I could play, and before I learned to think of it as a game I could simply enjoy. This would have been the late '70s and early '80s. There was not yet cable television in my hometown, and beyond the Sporting News and Baseball Digest there wasn't much in the way of baseball literature available at the local newstand/bookstore. We could watch the Game of the Week, listen to Twins broadcasts on WCCO, and drive up to the occasional game in the Cities. But for most of my early life pretty much everything I knew about Major League players laboring beyond Minnesota I learned from Topps baseball cards and from watching whatever teams I was exposed to in the post-season.

For a few precarious years there in my adolescence I barely followed the game. I guess I could blame Jim Dandy and Black Oak Arkansas, who came to my hometown and played Riverside Arena in the late '70s. I could blame Ted Nugent (same story), or Blue Oyster Cult (again, same story). Eventually, I suppose, I could blame The Ramones and The Clash and dozens of other bands that helped salve my crushed dreams of being a professional baseball player. I could blame all the garfong I smoked and all the Special Export (the Green Death!) I drank while parked in the darkness along Toke Road just outside town.

I could blame adolescence and hormones and Calvin Griffith and the Metrodome and Paul Thormodsgard and Glenn Borgmann and Craig Kusick and Terry Felton and the 1981 strike and all those mediocre Twins teams in the late '70s and early '80s.

By the time I moved to Minneapolis in 1981, however, I had discovered Bill James, a guy with a gift for contextualizing all those statistics in the Baseball Encyclopedia and cooking up stats of his own that made the game seem as intricate and difficult and complex and wondrous and just plain fun as it had ever seemed to me as a 15-year-old struggling with the realization that the skills necessary to succeed at the sport were light years beyond my own abilities.

I learned about James from a geek at the local public library, and through him I received dog-eared, hand-me-down copies of some of James' earliest, self-produced Abstracts. By the time Ballantine started publishing the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1982, I --who had been a sub-indifferent math student in high school-- was a full-on stats geek.

For years, in fact, I was a junkie. At a time when all of my friends were going to college or playing in bands, I was working in a series of parking lots and ramps, where I had ample time to pore over numbers, fiddle around with statistical formulas, and listen to games on the radio. Two years running I chucked everything and went to Florida for spring training. In 1987 I got a job at Tinker Field in Orlando, then the spring home of the Twins.

Perhaps I was born for ruination, but there is no doubt in my mind that baseball accelerated the process. It was fun, though, at least for the most part. And the stuff I learned from James, and from the people who popped up in his wake (I'm thinking of John Thorn and Pete Palmer's 1984 collaboration, The Hidden Game of Baseball, and Earnshaw Cook's pioneering book from the sixties, Percentage Baseball, which I learned of from James), made the game a lot more interesting, and gave the off-season an obsessive focus that probably wasn't entirely healthy.

Eventually, of course, pretty much every serious baseball fan got indoctrinated into the Sabermetric army, and the stuff got increasingly complicated or --even worse-- rarefied. It started to worm itself into even popular discussion of the sport, into the mass media, and into television analysis. James and a legion of his proteges became baseball celebrities (James is now a senior advisor in the employ of the Red Sox, and one of his most talented disciples, Rob Neyer, is a columnist for ESPN.com).

I still love James (he has a terrific new book just out, by the way, Bill James Gold Mine 2008), but I also think it's time to admit that I've become something of a heretic. I used to know the basic formula for James' Run Created stat off the top of my head; I don't anymore. With the explosion of baseball punditry made possible by the internet, and the mind boggling proliferation of baseball bloggers, the statistical vivisection of the game has become wearisome. There's only so much of the stuff a guy can digest before it starts to get in the way of simply watching a game for the sheer pleasure of witnessing marvelous athletes playing the most difficult sport in the world.

And here's my essential problem with the now incessant barrage of baseball statistics: while the best of the new (and relatively new) stats can provide a remarkably accurate view of the big picture (given a large enough sample size), and are excellent hindsight tools as barometers of past performance and its bearing on future expectations, they can never adequately address the snapshot quality of any individual game. Because in any individual game, or any series of individual games, all sorts of unexpected shit still happens on a regular basis. Great players can kill teams for sustained stretches almost as brutally as lousy players, and the brutality can be all the more painful as a result of the expectations. Minor players, shit players, footnotes, reclamation projects, and journeymen can do astonishing things that are, in the context of expectations, as thrilling as a monster game from a superstar. Season to season and game to game, aberrations are a big part of what makes the sport so consistently gratifying.

My other problem is this: Bill James was not only a terrifically entertaining writer; he was also --and this was crucial-- consistently challenging and possessed of a playful mind and a wide-ranging curiosity about all sorts of stuff that he was more than willing to admit was technically and practically useless. There was always a sense --and there is still a sense-- that he was working very hard to make his egghead nonsense fun. He was funny. He was attuned to the peripheral delights of baseball, the ugly guys and fat guys, the regular affronts and abominations, whether they be inexcusable uniforms, terrible ballparks, or particularly brutal lines in the boxscore.

James was the best. He still is the best, even if he has a lot to answer for. And, sorry, but after thirty years of poking around in the shit he spawned, I see very little but a legion of pale, earnest imitators, attic bachelors and basement barons who have long since lost sight of the forest for the trees. Or the trees for the forest. I can't quite decide which.

And after all those years, and all that rooting around (and just plain rooting, the numbers be damned), I feel like I'm now in a position to draw my own conclusions about players and teams based on --and, yes, thanks to people like James-- what I've learned and what I know and what I see. My father, who knew nothing about any of the new-fangled statistics, could watch a handful of games and zero in on exactly the sorts of players that analysis and stats now confirm for us are valuable. And he considered them great players for --at least generally speaking-- precisely those reasons that the statistics validate them as such.

He's gone now, but if we sat down over a couple days and ran down all the statistical categories that are around today, I believe he would agree with me that there are only a handful --OBP (on base percentage), OPS (on base percentage plus slugging), and WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched), for instance-- that contribute a damn thing to the appreciation of watching a game or critiquing a ballclub, no matter how much they might contribute to a player's leverage in an arbitration hearing or salary negotiation.

Pathetically, I suppose, the one most valuable thing I've learned from watching thousands of baseball games is that the team that scores more runs than it allows wins; the team that does that most often wins the most games; and four runs is the magic number: the team that scores four or more runs wins the overwhelming majority of its games. And sometimes the good teams (at least on paper), the expected teams, are the clubs that pull off that trick. But often enough --just often enough to keep things interesting, and more often than the stats slaves are perhaps willing to admit-- they're not.

And sometimes a guy like Roger Maris hits 61 homers, or a guy like Norm Cash hits .361. Or a team like the '87 Twins win the World Series.

Even when you can't understand a damn thing about it --and perhaps especially then-- baseball is a beautiful game.

^{AP Photo by Duane Burleson}

We've been spoiled. While the Twins starting pitching and offense have too often been an iffy, up-and-down proposition throughout most of the 21st century, the bullpen has pretty consistently owned the late innings and protected leads. It was easy, in fact, to take them for granted. It didn't seem to matter what collection of spare parts and previously anonymous warm bodies showed up in Florida in mid-February; by the time opening day rolled around Ron Gardenhire and Rick Anderson would have assembled a pen that was generally one thing Twins fans didn't have to spend a lot of time fretting over.

Eddie Guardado, LaTroy Hawkins, J.C. Romero, Bob Wells, Jack Cressend, Tony Fiore, Juan Rincon, Mike Jackson, Johan Santana (remember him?), Jesse Crain, Aaron Fultz, Matt Guerrier, Joe Nathan, Dennys Reyes, Pat Neshek....I'm sure I'm missing a few, and, yeah, some of those guys took their lumps in Twins uniforms before they found their niche; others were salvaged from some other organization's scrap heap. The bottom line, though, is that since the Twins millennial turnaround the bullpen has been a constant.

Fans who have been paying attention long enough --anyone who, say, still shudders at the name Ron Davis, or remembers LaTroy's brutal stint as the closer -- know what a luxury that is. Still, the various meltdowns and injuries (Romero, Rincon, Crain, Reyes, Glenn Perkins) notwithstanding, the late-inning guys have been nothing if not resilient and relentlessly effective.

Which is what makes what's happened the last week --in Chicago and, especially, in Detroit --so startling. Coming into this season the starting pitching was, charitably speaking, a question mark, and with few exceptions the starters have been pretty damn good. Better, certainly, than any of us had any reason to expect. And they sure as hell should have won three games the bullpen has coughed up in spectacular and debilitating fashion.

The culprits in the first two cases --a 7-4 loss to the loathsome White Sox, and Monday night's 11-9 heartbreaker in Detroit-- have been the uncommonly reliable Matt Guerrier and Pat Neshek. It's too early to be seriously concerned, I suppose, but these weren't just instances where Guerrier and Neshek were getting nicked. No, they were getting rocked. Granted, Jermaine Dye's seventh-inning single off Neshek that tied the score in Chicago was the result of a decent pitch and a very ugly swing, but it seemed to open the floodgates, and they've been open pretty much ever since.

Both Guerrier and Neshek are finding way too much of the plate with their fastballs, but also, most notably, with their breaking balls. Maybe it's the cold weather, but Neshek in particular doesn't seem to have either access to the velocity he's showed over the last couple years or that Frisbee-like movement on his slider.

I guess what makes these early struggles a bit alarming is the fact that both guys were in the A.L. top ten in appearances last year (74 for Neshek and 73 for Guerrier). Guerrier set a career high for appearances and innings (88), and pitched two or more innings 14 times. The rotation being what it is --and, sorry, Livan Hernandez is fun to watch, but the league's eventually going to catch up to a guy with his stuff and his strikeout ratio-- the fortunes of this team depend heavily on the seventh and eighth-inning guys getting the game to Joe Nathan. If this shit keeps up all those dollars the Twins are paying Nathan are going to be more a pension or a retainer than a salary.

It's probably also too early to get too concerned about Joe Mauer, but I don't think it's too early to start to recognize and perhaps accept what he is. And what he is is a very good catcher with a pretty swing. Folks, our Joe is not a superstar. He's not a guy who can carry a team for a week or two at a time. He's not even a middle-of-the-order guy. He belongs in the two hole until he demonstrates otherwise, and I honestly don't expect him to ever demonstrate otherwise.

When Carlos Gomez gets on base (and this looks like it's going to be increasingly infrequent as other teams get the book on him: feed him a steady diet of sliders down and away and fastballs up and in), Mauer's skills are ideally suited to move him over and even drive him in, provided doing so doesn't require much more than an occasional line drive or sacrifice fly. He has excellent plate discipline and bat control --perhaps, as many people will tell you, too much discipline and control. Mauer is what he is, and moving him to third base or the outfield, I'm pretty sure, is not going to change the kind of hitter he is. He's a natural, a controlled, instinctive hitter, but I'm afraid I've seen no indications over the last several years that he's willing to change, adapt, or even learn anything new. If he gets better he might be Wade Boggs.

I never much liked Wade Boggs.

Early April baseball in the Midwest can be a flat-out teeth-kicker. Baseball, of course, can kick your teeth in on a regular basis no matter the month, but shit like last night is brutal, even if it (literally) comes with the territory. Couldn't they at least have given us a rain delay, so we could have stretched out the night a little bit?

Remember when the Twins used to play in the American League West, back before the greedy fucks starting monkeying around with the divisions and came up with the utterly inane unbalanced schedule? Back then the Twins played in a division with teams like California, Oakland, Texas, and Seattle. Now you've got five northern teams in the Central, and at least for the next two years the Dome provides the only sure refuge from the dodgy weather in the first weeks of the season.

Maybe somebody can explain to me how the schedule makers manage to send the Twins on their first road trip of the year --in the second week of April-- to Chicago, Kansas City, and Detroit. It makes absolutely no sense.

The weather we've been having --on opening night, for instance, and last night (both in Chicago and here)-- has already had people wringing their hands about the wisdom of building the new downtown ballpark without a retractable roof. I understand that, certainly; I also wish like hell the Pohlads had poneyed up for a roof, and have some pretty raw memories of making the trek up to Met Stadium as a kid only to have to sit through rain delays that resulted in eventual postponement. I've also been rained out in Kansas City, both parks in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and New York.

No doubt about it, it sucks. It always sucks. It messes with the day-to-day, day-after-day rhythms of the game, particularly early and late in the season. But while sitting through close to a thousand games in the Dome --the Twins moved into the dump the year I moved to town-- I've gained a little perspective on rainouts. For the last ten years, for every game I've attended, I've made a plus or minus notation in my scorebook. Pluses represent all those games where I would have been at least relatively miserable sitting outdoors watching a baseball game. A double plus generally means either the game wouldn't have been played were it not for the Dome, or I wouldn't have slogged through the weather to sit through it. A minus has come to represent sort of the Dome version of a rainout: those are the afternoons or evenings where it felt like a crime to be sitting indoors on a beautiful day watching a game that was invented to be played outside on beautiful days.

I can tell without going back through all of my scorebooks that the minuses probably outnumber the pluses by at least five-to-one, which is something I suggest we all keep in mind during the dark early days of this season, and when the Twins finally do move into that new ballpark in 2010.

Shit, just on principle I'm going to feel obligated to gut out games in the new yard even on miserable April and September (and --knock wood-- October) nights, because I know how damn grateful I'm going to be for all those beautiful days and nights in between.

^{AP Photo, by Paul Battaglia}

I walk away happy as a clam from any baseball game that features a successfully executed suicide squeeze. It's a great, gutsy, and increasingly rare play, and last night, with the Kansas City Royals in town (I actually heard some radio guy refer to them as the "red hot Royals"), the Twins --with ex-Astros (Adam Everett and Mike Lamb) at both ends of the squeeze-- worked it to perfection. That, of course, was a good thing, since the Twins in the early going are once again playing like a team that needs to scratch and claw for every run.

Eventually you have to suppose opposing teams are going to figure out a way to keep Carlos Gomez off base (the obvious solution: don't give him anything to hit, let alone bunt), but right now he's making it look easy, and with a guy who has that kind of speed leading off --and Joe Mauer hitting behind him-- the Twins have the potential to manufacture a run every time he gets on base; once he gets on first he's demonstrated he knows how to get around.

As far as the anemic offense is concerned, there's probably no point in getting too wound up about it just yet, even if the production (12 runs in five games) is disconcertingly reminiscent of last year's misery. Surely, though, you'd think, the middle of the order will come around, and surely, you'd think, the bottom of the order can't possibly be as bad as it was last year, even if you have the sinking suspicion that the bottom of the order very well could be as bad as it was last year.

We've had several years now to watch Justin Morneau --and I've watched him very closely-- and when the guy is going bad he's an absolute train wreck. Right now he's not even close to being right. I know he and hitting coach Joe Vavra have access to videotape up the wazoo, and I can't for the life of me understand why Morneau has such a hard time figuring out what he's doing wrong. I mean, yes, I know, it's an extremely difficult thing, hitting major league pitching, but he looks anxious and off balance and he's jumping at pitches and beating them into the ground. His first (and thus far only) hit this year might have been the only truly decent swing he's had in five games, and it was exactly the kind of swing --waiting on a pitch he can't pull and driving it the other way-- that keys his success when he's going good.

The Cuddyer injury is unfortunate, but if it gets Jason Kubel a chance to play every day for a couple weeks it might be a blessing in disguise. I'm already tired of Craig Monroe (five strikeouts in nine at bats), and Kubel's present situation resembles nothing so much as where Cuddyer was a few years ago. Kubel is now a couple years removed from his catastrophic knee injury, and it's time to see what he can do when given a chance to play every day. I know there are plenty of folks out there who have given up on him, but anybody who saw the guy swing the bat in his minor league stops before the injury can't help hoping he can still be the player he was once projected to be. And naysayers should keep in mind that Kubel is still just 25 years old.

Another guy I really don't like in the early going is Brendan Harris. He showed he could hit a little bit last year in Tampa Bay, but he appears to be seriously lost on defense. Even watching him in pre-game drills he looks stiff and hapless and clumsy around the bag. A good hitter can go through slumps at the plate that temporarily obscure how good he really is, but first impressions on defense are generally pretty reliable. And given the emphasis the Twins place on making the plays in the field, I think Harris is going to be on a very short leash.

The good news: the starting pitching has actually been pretty damn stout. That was a very sharp and very encouraging comeback from Scott Baker last night (the guy had thrown 41 pitches through two innings, and managed to leave with two out in the sixth, a one-run lead, and a respectable pitch count of 84), and the bullpen looks to be as outstanding as ever. And after one turn through the rotation the starters have walked just one batter.

Today we'll get our second opportunity to marvel at Livan Hernandez, one of the most brazen slop tossers in the big leagues, a guy with the stuff to be a Town Ball ace. Try to just enjoy the show, and for the time being I'd advise you to fend off all thoughts of Ramon Ortiz and his April tease of a year ago.

^{AP photo by Tom Olmscheid}

Representatives of the local sporting press —of which I am a decidedly derelict member— were packed cheek to jowl in the Herb Carneal Memorial Press Box at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome Monday night. It was not, as you might imagine, a pretty picture. If somewhere there exists an International Society of the Churlish, on any given night the average press box is chockful of ideal candidates for membership.

The occasion for this particular gathering, of course, was Opening Day of another baseball season. The opener has long been regarded as one of the Holy Days in all of sports, which means that all sorts of characters —myself, for instance— who tend to make themselves scarce the rest of the season feel obligated to put in an appearance. When it comes to Twins baseball there are, unfortunately, way too many media types who are sort of professional sports versions of Christmas and Easter Only (CEO) churchgoers. I can assure you, though, that wherever you find a bandwagon you'll find an unruly hoard of media members jockeying for position at the wheel.

I've been as guilty as the next guy (or gal) in recent years, but I'm also penitent. Because I swear to you I really am a true believer, and I'm absolutely determined to get right with the baseball gods. Even if it means slogging through a foot of snow to watch a team carrying the weight of almost zero expectations.

I also feel the need to confess that I really wasn't in the mood to slog through a foot of snow tonight to watch a team carrying the weight of almost zero expectations (surprisingly heavy burden, that). I'm glad I did, though. Almost every time I've forced myself to make the drive-and-trudge to the Dome I've walked away glad I did.

I love the game, and I was surprised and cheered to see such a large contingent in the press box last night, and even more surprised and cheered to see 49,596 paying customers in the stands —the largest crowd for a Twins game since September 1996.

We all saw a hell of a game. And I know it's ridiculous to place too much stock in a team's performance in the first game of a long baseball season, but given that Torii Hunter was in the house, and given that everybody in attendance (or at least everyone who was paying attention) knew by the third inning that Johan Santana had been dazzling in his Mets debut (7 ip, 3 hits, 8 strikeouts, and 2 earned runs), it seemed somehow important, if not urgent, that the Twins give those nearly 50,000 people something to cheer about, and maybe even something to believe in, on an otherwise miserable night in Minnesota.

And they delivered, which was a beautiful thing.

Livan Hernandez, the (maybe) (purportedly) 33-year-old righthander who was acquired so late that he doesn't even appear in the team's 2008 media guide, and a guy whose opening day start was already being trotted out by doomsayers as a harbinger of a season of protracted misery (this despite the fact that the big Cuban was making an opening day start for his fourth club, and has long been in the habit of giving his teams a couple hundred innings a year), anyway, yeah, that Livan freaking Hernandez --for at least one night, anyway-- went out and dispelled all visions of Sidney Ponson and provided a glimmer of hope that he might be, at the very least, the second coming of Carlos Silva, light somewhere in the vicinity of ten million dollars.

You can all do the math on your own, but out there all over the country last night --including in the opposing dugout at the Dome-- there were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ex-Twins laboring for other teams.

And in every single case I say good for them, and good for the Twins.

I wasn't thrilled with the Johan Santana deal. Like everybody else I wish the Twins could have gotten more in return. But the reality is they didn't trade Santana for four players; they traded him for four players and 150 million dollars.

And the Twins didn't just swap out Hunter for 22-year-old Delmon Young. They shaved ten years off their roster and millions of dollars from their payroll (The Angels are going to pay Hunter $90 million over five years). Anybody remember what kind of player Hunter was when he was 22? I love Torii, but trust me, down the road there won't be a Twins fan who would trade him even up for Delmon Young.

Or, based on an admittedly small but nonetheless thrilling sample size, for Carlos Gomez, the 22-year-old who was the centerpiece of the Santana deal and trotted out most of his highly-touted tools in his Twins debut. What did we see? Well, shit, you know what you saw, and everybody and their grandmother is going to tell you what you saw, but I'm pretty damn sure it was more than potential. The kid is 6' 4" and he can fly. We'd heard all about that, but he ran down balls in the gap, went 2-3, stole a couple bases (both on pitch-outs), drew a walk ("It might be the last one," Ron Gardenhire said), scored a couple runs, and exhibited perfect manners and genuine charm in the clubhouse. This was a guy who sat in front of his locker after arguably the most important game of his young career and talked quietly about gratitude and joy and having fun, a guy who admitted to choking up before he took the field.

Directly across the clubhouse from Gomez was Pat Neshek, who came into last night's game and struck out three of the four men he faced, including Vladimir Guerrero with the tying run on second and first base open. Neshek is a guy who exudes joy and gratitude; practically every time he opens his mouth it's apparent he still can't quite believe he's been given the opportunity to go to work every day in a major league ballpark. The dude's a vegan, for crying out loud, a fucking vegan warrior in a major league clubhouse. And he's more than happy to talk about that fact, and to insist that the decision had nothing to do with athletic performance and everything to do with a "lifestyle choice." He's also more than happy to talk about every pitch to every batter in every game he appears in (and seems to remember all of them in precise detail). When Gary Mathews Jr. blooped a two-out double in the eighth to put the tying run on base with Guerrero coming up, there were all sorts of people sitting around me who felt certain that the prudent choice was to walk Vlad. And when Neshek's first two pitches missed badly outside it definitely looked like the Twins had made the decision to pitch around him. "Nah," said Neshek. "I was going after him all the way. That's what I do, get right handers out. You know he's hacking, so there are a lot of places to miss. I love that challenge." At which point he broke into a huge smile that even blew his eyes wide open. He shook his head, raised his arms in a what-are-you-gonna do gesture and said, "It's a really fun game."

You spend any time in the Twins clubhouse --and this goes back years now-- and you'll hear some variation of that line repeated again and again, starting in Ron Gardenhire's office. I've long made a habit of poking around in visiting clubhouses and I can tell you that I've seldom, if ever, heard that sort of thing espoused anywhere else.

But the Twins, of course, are right, and I think they're on the right track. It is a fun game, and it was particularly nice, on a perfectly worthless night for baseball, to get a compact, well-played reminder of that fact.

It's the sort of thing that can get a guy going to church --or the baseball park-- again on a regular basis.