There are many good reasons to support Barack Obama in 2008 but his decision to not wear an American flag lapel pin might be one of the best I've seen. I have no problem with anyone who decides to wear an American flag lapel pin. But what has happened is the wearing of a pin has turned into a requirement and anyone who doesn't wear one will be subject to having their patriotism question. It is shameful how many politicians wrap themselves around the flag while repeatedly supporting policies that desecrate the constitution through illegal wiretapping, imprisonment, torture and a disastrous war that was never authorized by Congress. The guardians of false patriotism have predictably started their Swiftboating of Obama by portraying his stand as vain and self righteous. This is an early preview of the general election where McCain will have little else to run on. But anyone who favors substance over symbolism should applaud Obama. Conservatives constantly rail against 'political correctness' and its infringement on free thought but conveniently forget this concern when faced with their own dogma. Please forgive the cliche but reminds me of yet another Seinfeld episode.

2008 MLB Preview/Message from God

I was going to write a detailed preview of the 2008 before seeing this in Over the Monster. There is no need for my prognosticating when it is clear that more powerful forces are favoring the Sox to repeat as World Series champions.

M.V. Domination

For the 5th year in a row Martha's Vineyard crushed the pathetic Whalers of Nantucket 48-6 last Saturday. Obviously Bill Belichick spends no time tutoring Whaler coach Vito Capizzo while summering on the lesser of the 2 islands. I am allowed to gloat being an M.V.R.H.S alumnus as well as being a 1 year veteran of the mighty Vineyarders football squad. It might have been junior varsity and I sucked but I did have a uniform and helmet.

Happy Halloween

Sox Win!

Click on the picture. There are some real geniuses out there.

First a few belated comments on the ALCS. I had some mixed emotions on the Sox remarkable comeback. Cleveland has always been my 2nd city of sports. My father grew up there and was a devoted Indians, Browns and Ohio State fan. He loves to recite the entire starting lineup of the 1948 Indians and has told me at least 100 times the story of his going to a double header in 1948 where Bob Feller pitched the first game and his favorite player of all time, Satchel Paige, pitched the second. I have been to games at the now demolished Cleveland Municipal Stadium with my grandfather. Cleveland has very good baseball fans as you can see in the infamous Beer Night of 1974. At the same time I’m still pissed at Ohio for the 2004 Presidential election. Now Cleveland is a very strong union town and I’m sure they went for Kerry but that does little to soften my anger for the entire state. Plus there is the Indians logo issue which just doesn’t play well in 2007. So of course I wanted the Sox to win but certainly bad that the much maligned Cleveland had to face yet another humiliation.

Now for last night's game it is amazing how different my attitude is towards the Sox since 2004. Gone are the days when I would expect a spectacular collapse that would torment me through the winter. I'm by no means overconfident but I no longer expect to lose. Last night with the Sox down 1-0 I was calmly waiting to take the lead. And when Okajima and Papelbon came in to relieve Schilling I would have been much more surprised to see them blow the lead than get the save.

This is obviously a very good Boston team and the series is looking very good. Yet I'm not quite ready to call it over because I really expected the Sox to win the first 2 games with Beckett and Schilling starting. One more win by a pitcher other than Beckett and it is over because the Rockies are not going to beat him. I like our chances tomorrow night because teams tend to not fair well against Matsuzaka when facing him for the first time.

So all in all to this point this is the most enjoyable post season I've ever had even though the Fox network and Taco Bell are trying very hard to destroy it. This 'steal a base and America gets a taco' crap is beyond annoying. The obviously scripted shots of Royce Clayton talking about it in the dugout are a real shame. Not to be a whiny killjoy but does America really need a free taco? Can I send my taco to Sudan where they could actually use it? And one wonders what would happen if Cialis ran the same promotion and if Manny Ramirez hit a homerun, half of America gets a chemically induced boner.

Requiem for the Yankees

I feel bad for piling on and no Yankee fan should mistake my opinion as sincere criticisms designed to improve their ball club but Joe Torre’s managing in this post season was so horrendous I see no way that he could keep his job. I could talk about a lot of things. There is the head scratching choice of Clemens in game 3 over Hughes which predictably burned out the pen for game 4. And Matsui with a recently drained knee over Giambi who Torre mysteriously refuses to give post season at bats to despite having excellent numbers. But the most glaring is his decision to pitch Wang over Mussina in the deciding game. I don’t think Wang could have looked any worse in his game 1 start and had never pitched on 3 days rest in his career. Yet Torre decides to start Wang over Mussina who hadn’t pitched since September 28th and had looked good to average in his last few starts. Add to that that Mussina’s good post season stats and the choice is even more queer. As much as I enjoyed the Yankee batter futility with the exception of Johnny Damon and Robinson Cano you really can’t say too much about their failure. They faced some very good pitching and didn’t come through. It happens. Perhaps this year will finally deflate the last few bloated Yankee fans who have always thought of the World Series as an entitlement rather than a gift. As I heard many angry Yankee fans over the weekend say on WFAN this team seemed more designed to sell 4 million tickets than to win a World Series. And Yankees fans should be very pissed off. They were the second best team in all of baseball this year and they won just a single game in the playoffs. And for those of you keeping track of such things the Yankees are 4 and 10 in the post season since game 4 of the ALCS in 2004 and have lost 13 of their last 17 playoff games despite have very good teams every one of those years. Now that is a curse!

There is one thing I will gloat on a bit and that is Jeter grounding into the double play in the 7th inning which really buried the Yankees.

Your 2007 American League Wild Card Champions

I'm not saying this to be a wiseass because if the Yankees go further than the Sox in the playoffs and win the World Series, Yankee fans will not care one bit that they won as a wildcard. But in terms of marketing don't you think the sales of this t-shirt will be horrible?

So winning the A.L. East is meaningless yet satisfying at the same time. I'm certain the players don't really care how they make the post season, nor should they. But what is so gratifying about this season is that the loudmouth Yankee fans who always thought the the Sox would blow it have to accept that over the course of the 162 game season Boston was the better team. I don't want to hear that they won the season series because that isn't relevant. The Yankees were 9-9 against the Orioles this year. Does that mean they were even? It certainly bothered me that the Yankees won the A.L. East every years since 1996. So, sit on it, Murray Chass.

Looks like the Red Sox are making it a tradition of completely over the top celebrations. I thought Friday night looked pretty ridiculous until I remembered Kevin Millar saying that he thought the Sox didn't drink enough after winning the wild card in 2003 and Kevin Millar was a very wise man.

Larry Craig is inconsistent and kind of creepy.

Chris Matthews expression after the clip is a 10 on the unintentional comedy scale.

Guinness is good for you?

I was very pleased to learn from the BBC that getting dogs drunk on Guinness reduced their incidents of heart disease. Unfortunately for the dogs it had little effect on the mortality rates of animals being used in stupid lab tests. But it is nice to know that dogs who drink stout have fewer heart attacks. Next I would like to see which brand of nail polish causes more cases of testicular cancer in squirrels.

V Day

A pathetic 2 months since my last post when I complained bitterly about Paul Pierce and the sad state of the Celtics. The situation seems to have corrected itself. Also on June 27th the Sox where 9 games up on the Yankees. Today they are 7.5 games up and soon to be 8 after Mike “The Mess” Mussina gets hammered by the Tigers tonight. I’d like to reenter the blogging world by proclaiming loudly that the Sox have pretty much locked up the A.L. East. A quick look at the numbers shows that if we play 1 game under .500 we’ll finish the regular season with 95 wins. For the Yankees to equal that win total they would have to go 23 and 9 in their remaining 32 games and their pitching staff simply isn’t good enough to do that. I won’t talk too much smack because I think the Yankees are quite likely to win the wild card. And with a team that has underperformed mightily and with a top three of their rotation Clemens, Pettitte and Wang they are not a team you would want to face in a short series. Add to that the extra motivation they would feel playing a Sox team that completely emasculated them 3 years ago and it gets a little scary. But for now I’m just going to enjoy our first A.L. East title since I was still in college and celebrate Steinbrenner’s empire looking like Shelly’s poem.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

Where is your head?

I'm on the verge of completely turning on Paul Pierce. Last year he negotiates a 3 year $60 million dollar extension which will make him one of the highest paid players in the NBA. So instead of being grateful to a team an owner that invested so much money in a player that probably doesn't deserve to be paid as an elite, he starts grumbling that he wants to be traded if the Celtics don't make a get another elite level player. Now the Celtics have very little space under the cap to get a free agent due to Pierce's contract and missing out on Oden and Durant made their #5 draft pick not all that valuable. I'll never understand why players who want to be traded go to the press which instantly weaken their team's bargaining leverage with anyone they hope to negotiate with and making an eventual trade more difficult. I say screw Pierce. By the time the Celtics are decent again Pierce will be beyond his prime. His body type makes me think that he is not going to be great player in his 30's. A charitable observer would say that Paul desperately wants to win and is frustrated by the current state of things. Well so am I but this is not going to make it any better and if he really wants to be traded he isn't helping his own cause by being such a loudmouth. Danny should get the most he can for him and start over. My God the Celtics are a disaster.

Benny, Benny

Did I know who Benny Feilhaber was before yesterday? No and I follow the U.S. National team pretty closely. This was an absolutely fantastic strike to win the 2007 Meaningless Cup. It was exactly the kind of spontaneously creative goal that the United States team could not produce for years. It was also nice that the tv camera caught the 8 U.S. fans in attendance at Soldier's Field. I’d be pissed off at Hugo Sanchez’s pathetic comments after the game if it wasn’t for our complete dominance of the Mexican national team for the last 7 years. There were quite a few things I didn’t like about this game most notably the weak first half and DaMarcus Beasley’s whiff that should have given us a third goal. I don't expect too much so the Copa America should be fun.

No no-no

I don’t want to take anything away from Curt Schilling's near no-hitter yesterday but if Alex Cora had reached Shannon Stewart's grounder in the 9th and got him out at first, it would have been one of the luckiest and least deserved no-hitters in the last 20 years. It all come down to batting average on balls batted into play. The best way to get a no-hitter is to limit the number of balls put into play by striking guys out. There is a reason why Nolan Ryan has 7 career no-hitters, he was one of the best strikeout pitchers in the history of baseball (#4 all time in strikeouts per nine innings) and had a ridiculously long career. The logic is simple, the fewer balls put into play, the greater the chance that there will not be a hit. A batter that strikes out has a 0% chance of getting a hit but a batter that puts the ball into play has about a 30% chance of getting a hit. Yesterday Schilling struck out just 4 batters. If the averages had held Schilling should have given up at least 7 hits. There have been 24 no-hitters since a pitcher has had less than 4 strikeouts and still had a no-hitter (in 1993 Jim Abbot struck out just 3 Indians and walked 5 in the luckiest no-hitter I could find). In the 24 no-hitters since 1993 the strikeout average is 8.45. So if anyone should be congratulated on yesterday’s 1 hitter it should be the Sox defense which converted 24 of the 25 balls in into play into outs. I can't say enough how happy I am with the Sox improved defense over last year. So far they are converting .709 of balls in play into outs compared to the woeful .683 last season. It was a good performance by Schilling but not even his best of the season. That would have been on May 28th against a much better Cleveland lineup when he struck out 10, walked 0 and gave up no home runs.

Demetri Martin

With a few exceptions I hate stand up comedy. Like musicals I think there are a few good ones and the rest are unbearable. It’s not like I have any knowledge of current comedians but of what I’ve seen I think David Cross and Sarah Silverman are very funny. Chris Rock used to be up there but he seems to be floundering. Recently I saw a little of Demetri Martin. He obviously owes a lot to Steven Wright but I thought his jokes were hysterical.

The National

I bought The National's "Boxer" last week and can't recommend it enough. It's not exactly cheery summer music with lyrics like...

"arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under
oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over
surprise, surprise they wouldn’t wannna watch
another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults"

but that is some good writing.

Here is a boring video to a great song.


But National Carpet is twice the band of The National.

Best of Times

Baseball Prospectus has a Postseason Odds generator that plays out the season one million times and gives you a percentage chance of a team winning their division and winning the wild card. Right now the Sox are a 96.35115% chance of winning the AL East, a 2.21765% chance of winning the wild card. So it looks pretty good for the playoffs. Buster Onley had a bit today in his blog where he writes that only one team has ever come back to win their division after falling over 14 games back. It was the 1914 Boston Braves. Yankee fans can't blame their pathetic-ness solely on injuries. Damon/Abreu/Giambi/Matsui/Cano are monumentally under performing. In fact, if it wasn't for Jeter/Rod/Posada hitting out of their heads, Yankees might be the worst team in American League. Boston lost their #1 starter in Beckett for over 2 weeks and managed to stretch their lead from 8 1/2 to 14 1/2 games. The Yankees can come in to Boston and sweep the series and still be over 10 games back. And how smart does Theo look right now? Passing on Pedro and Damon. Signing Varitek (which I strongly criticized because I'm a moron). This is shaping up to be a very pleasant summer.

In personal sporting news I went to Martha's Vineyard to defend my title in the 30-39 age group at the Oak Bluffs Memorial Day Road Race. Last year I rather flukely won my division which was more evidence of a poor group of competitors than my skill. The good news is I cut 21 seconds of my time from last year running the 5K in 20:37 compared to my 20:58 in 2006. The bad news was that this time put me 21st overall (compared 15th in 2006) and 7th place in my age group. I was a bit disappointed because I was hoping to finish with my average pace under 6:30 minute miles which I consider the "fast line". But this defeat was quickly forgotten when I went back to my Mom's house and watched my Sporting Clube de Portugal win the Taca de Portugal on a fantastic goal by Liedson. Forca Sporting! View the beautifully homemade clip below.

Pitching and Defense

Obviously Boston improved their pitching staff with the addition of Matsuzaka but almost a quarter of the way through the season the most noticeable improvement in the team has been their defense. Many argue that Boston was a great defensive team last year and point to their low error total and high fielding percentage. But fielding percentage is a very deceptive stat and can lead someone to think that a poor defense is good and vice versa. The problem with fielding percentage is that it only takes into account errors committed and does nothing to rate the speed of a defense. Putting yourself in a position to make a play is just as important, if not more important than making the play. Take a hypothetical 10 ground balls hit to two different shortstops. Shortstop A (Derek Jeter) is has a great glove and accurate arm but is very slow and has poor reaction time. Shortstop B (Miguel Tejada) is very fast and has great reaction time but occasionally misplays a ball with his glove or makes an errant throw every once in a while. In the 10 balls hit to Shortstop A (Derek Jeter) he fields 6 of them cleanly and throw the runner out at first, pumping his fist after each out. But 4 of the balls hit in his area go for hits. Shortstop B (Miguel Tejada) has 10 balls hit in his area, 8 of which he gets to because of his superior range but one goes for a hit and one he commits an error throwing to first base because he was off balance because he had to run 20 feet to reach a ball that Shortstop A would never have come close to. Now if you only use fielding percentage as a measure of defensive ability you would say that Shortstop A (Derek Jeter) is better than Shortstop B (Miguel Tejada) because his field percentage is 1.000% and Tejada’s is .888%. But you would be ignoring that of the 10 balls hit in his area Tejada turned 8 of them into outs and Jeter only turned 6 into outs. If you only consider the results an error is the equal to a play not made. This can be applied to team defense as well. If you only look at fielding percentage you are missing the more important stat which is the rate in which balls put into play are turned into outs or Defensive Efficiency. This brings me to the Red Sox this season. Last year many said that the Red Sox were a great defensive team due to their fielding percentage being the best in the American League when in fact their defensive efficiency was 12th out of 14 teams. Alex Gonzalez and Mark Loretta had undeserved reputations as great players at their respective positions. To be fair like Jeter both were very sure handed and had accurate arms but were very limited in their range and didn’t get to many balls hit in their area. In effect they were more Jeters than Tejadas. This season we have the much speedier Julio Lugo at short and Dustin Pedroia at second as well as a healthy Coco in center. This has lead to the Sox currently being 2nd in the league in defensive efficiency. At the same time their fielding percentage has dropped to 12th in the American League which makes some say that the loss of Gonzalez and Loretta has hurt their team defense. But the exact opposite is true. So with a great number of balls hit into play being turned into outs the pitching staff’s ERA has been lowered as well. When you look at a pitcher’s stats the ones most often used to judge their abilities are the stats that are the most dependant on the quality of the defense behind them (Wins/Losses/ERA). Taking Josh Beckett as an example I think his 7-0 start can be attributed to 3 things; fewer walks, giving up fewer homeruns, and most importantly a vastly improved defense behind him.

MOBA

I used to think that there was no good reason whatsoever to go to Dedham. I need to reevaluate that opinion after learning of The Museum of Bad Art. If all art was this entertaining, I'd go to museums much more often. I firmly believe that if you can't do something well the next best thing is to make fun of people who do it poorly.

Roger Clemens: The Great White Barry Bonds

Now the Yankees have two chronic human growth hormone freaks on their team and possibly 3 if you want to add Andy Pettitte. It seems terribly unfair and whiffs of racism that Barry Bonds is solely pointed out as a performance enhancing drug cheat and guys like Clemens and Jason Giambi get away with the same offenses. Red flags fly all over the place with Clemens as they did with Bonds. But the mainstream media is almost completely ignoring his connection to performance enhancing drugs and play up the feel good story. The photo above is a fine example of Roger's frequent steroid rages.