Neifi Perez and I inspire Joe Posnanski

I have a chapter in a new baseball anthology called Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player of All Time, which is out this week from Da Capo Press.

I wrote about Neifi Pérez, who infuriated fans of the Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers in a long career that started with the Colorado Rockies, for whom he put up ballpark-aided, deceptively half-decent offensive numbers, and ended with his suspension for using amphetamines.

The piece is not sarcastic. I really did come to admire Neifi Pérez.

To be a guy like that, to be a guy who makes fans in four cities tear their hair out, to be possibly the single worst regular player in the major leagues in multiple seasons, to last for a dozen years in the big leagues, start more than 1,200 games, get caught stealing an astonishing 45 times in 102 attempts, you have to be a hell of a ballplayer.

The worst player in the major leagues is a hell of a ballplayer. The worst player in the history of the major leagues, whoever he was, was a hell of a ballplayer. Neifi Pérez was a hell of a ballplayer.

The chapter was excerpted this week by my employer, Salon.com, and many former readers of my old sports column showed up in the comments to say kind things about being glad to see my byline and wishing I would bring the column back. I would if it were up to me, but Salon is a business and it makes business decisions, and that’s about it for now.

Part of my job these days is to improve the headlines and coverlines of the pieces that run in Salon, and I did that to my own piece. Well, I changed the headline. I’m not sure I improved it. I forget what it was originally but I changed it to “Neifi Pérez: Bad baseball Hall of Famer.”

I’m gratified to say that this phrase, “bad baseball Hall of Famer,” inspired Joe Posnanski, whom I admire quite a bit, to call on his blog for the formation of a Bad Baseball Hall of Fame. He asks for nominations. Go on over and nominate someone, but be warned, Johnnie LeMaster has already been nominated. A lot.

And while you’re clicking around, why not go buy the book? Here’s that Amazon link again.

Funny thing about having the chapter excerpted in Salon: The readers quickly spotted an error that both I and the book’s excellent editor, Sean Manning, had missed in our multiple, in my case dozens of, readings of the piece. Here it is: “[Dusty] Baker and Detroit’s Jim Leyland have their critics, but they’ve each won more than 1,000 games and three division titles. Baker has won a pennant, Leyland two pennants and a World Series — the latter with Neifi on the postseason roster.”

Of course, Leyland’s World Series win came in 1997 with the Florida Marlins, not in 2006 with the Detroit Tigers and their ineffectual utility man, Neifi Pérez. Not sure how I got myself turned around in that sentence, but there it is, captured for posterity, a mistake I must have read right over 50 times without catching.

I always said my readers at Salon were the best editor in the world. There they go again.

Did I mention you can buy the book? I don’t get royalties or anything. But it’d be nice if a book I contributed to sold a few copies. And it’s good too, a fun read. Roger Kahn’s piece on Jackie Robinson is almost worth the cover price alone for the way it portrays Robinson, whom Kahn both covered and worked for, as a real person, not the paper saint we’ve come to know in the last 20 years.

I’ve read about 15 of the 25 chapters, and there’s not a dog in the bunch yet. Even my old pal Buzz Bissinger’s piece on Albert Pujols isn’t bad.

The top-heaviest league of all time

A reader named Jack wondered if the 1954 American League, the year of my Near-miss league New York Yankees team, was the most top-heavy league year of all time.

“Indians won 111, Yankees 103 and the White Sox 94 … the same total as their ’59 pennant winners but 17 behind in ’54. Then it was about a 25-game drop to the other five,” he wrote.

Exactly 25 games, in fact, to the 69-win Boston Red Sox, who finished 42 games out.

I responded that it was a good question, and if I were ever laid up with a broken leg or something I’d research it. Well, I overestimated how difficult it would be to research that question, which means I underestimated the usefulness of Baseball-Reference.com, which at this point in history there’s no excuse for doing.

So I looked into it. Now, I don’t know how to define the most top-heavy league, but let’s use Jack’s rough definition, the best combined record of the top three teams. The ’54 Indians, Yankees and White Sox combined to go 308-154, which for the mathematically sharp-eyed among you is easy to spot as a .667 winning percentage.

According to my research — a word about the research: I was sober and reasonably careful, but let’s not go betting the house on the results, OK? — those 308 wins were the most by any three teams in one league in one year between 1901 and 1968, which covers the so-called modern period before the advent of divisions. Even when the schedule expanded from 154 games to 162, in 1961 in the American League and ’62 in the National, no three teams ever combined to win 308 games.

Dividing the league into divisions, which happened in 1969, presented a different enough picture that I didn’t include that period in this survey. I mean, if one team in each of the West, Central and East combined to win 315 games, it wouldn’t feel like a top-heavy league. It would just feel like a series of one-sided division races.

But while 308 wins was the most by any trio, by winning percentage, the 1954 A.L. was only the third most top-heavy league in the period. The most top-heavy by that reckoning was the 1909 National League. The top three teams that year were Pittsburgh, with 110 wins, the Cubs with 104 and the New York Giants with 92. That’s only 306 wins, but for some reason the league schedule was only 153 games that year, not 154. And the Pirates had a rained out game they never made up. So the overall record of those three teams was 306-152, a winning percentage of .668.

The drop from the third-place Giants to the fourth-place Cincinnati Reds was only 15 games. The lopsidedness wasn’t spread as evenly as it would be in the 1954 A.L. The bottom three teams, Brooklyn, St. Louis and Boston, lost 98, 98 and 108 games respectively.

The top three in the N.L. in 1906 also had a better combined winning percentage than the ’54 A.L.’s top three — barely. But that’s a little misleading — a little like saying that King Kelly and I are the highest-scoring pair of guys named King in history with a combined 1,357 runs.

There was nothing special about the second- and third-place teams that year. The Giants won 96 games and the Pirates 93. But the Cubs were the winningest regular-season team ever, going an astounding 116-36, the only major league team to ever win three-fourths of its games. They won the league by 20 games — over a team that won 96.

Anyway, the combined 305 wins in, again, a 153-game schedule, with both the Cubs and Giants having one unplayed game, meant an overall record of 305-152, a winning percentage of .667. But that was better than 1954, because it was .6673, while the ’54 A.L. teams combined to go .6666.

So, by this measure anyway, the combined winning percentage of the top three teams, the 1954 American League was the third most top-heavy league in history, behind only the 1909 and 1906 National League. It was certainly the most top-heavy that anyone now living can remember. But if you measured it a different way — say, the distance between third place and fourth — you’d get a different answer.

By the way, the best third-place team I found in my little survey — and it only might be the best I noticed, not the actual best — was the 1962 Reds, who won 98 games but trailed both the Giants and Dodgers. They both won 101, then the Giants won two of three in a playoff.

Meanwhile, my ’54 Yankees just lost two out of three to the ’25 Washington Senators. We’re 7-5, one game behind the 2008 Red Sox. Next up, three at the 1977 Kansas City Royals, then back home to the Bronx for a four-game weekend set — we’re up to the last weekend of April — against the 2007 Cleveland Indians.

1954 New York Yankees, owned by me

So I’m playing in this celebrity baseball simulation league, a third simulation team for me, though it doesn’t take up as much time as my two Scoresheet teams, which don’t take up as much time as the wife thinks they do.

And clearly the definition of celebrity is being stretched here.

I was invited by Jonah Keri to play in the Seamheads Near Miss League, which uses Out of the Park Baseball to simulate a season for a circuit made up of good teams that did not win the World Series. I chose the 1954 New York Yankees, ignoring my distaste for all things Yankee partly because I misunderstood the initial description, thinking the league would be made up only of second-place teams, and second-place teams don’t come any better than the ’54 Yanks, who went 103-51.

The 1993 San Francisco Giants went 103-59, but I witnessed that. I figured the ’54 Yankees would be a little more interesting and educational for me. I also just finished reading Allen Barra’s Yogi Berra bio, which of course covered 1954.

The league is run by Mike Lynch of Seamheads.com, whose first celebrity league was the Seamheads Historical League, in which owners built a team using all of the players who ever played for a franchise. Joe Posnanski’s Cleveland Indians won it, winning the World Series over the Boston Red Sox when Tris Speaker threw out Reggie Smith trying to go from first to third on a single by Jimmie Foxx.

I’m pretty sure that precise play never happened in real life.

Here’s the owner’s directory so you can see the other big celebs involved.

I don’t really understand Out of the Park Baseball, though it looks pretty cool and if I had a spare few hours every night I could see really getting involved with it. What I did was set my lineups and pitching rotation and send them to Lynch, with a few very broad strategy instructions — no one runs but Mantle, no one bunts but Rizzuto — and sat back to wait for the results.

Filling out a lineup card for the 1954 Yankees isn’t too difficult. There aren’t that many choices. Berra’s going to catch, you know? This league isn’t using playing-time constraints, so I get a break there and I get to use Bill Skowron as my regular first baseman. In real life Skowron, a rookie that year, platooned with Joe Collins, starting 56 games at first while Collins started 75. But Collins hit .271/.365/.446 in 398 plate appearances while Skowron hit .340/.392/.577 in 237 PAs. The Moose it is.

Also, we’re using the designated hitter rule in the American League, so while in real life Casey Stengel used Hank Bauer, Gene Woodling and Irv Noren as a three-way platoon in left and right field, I get to use all three. Though in another playing-time trick, I’ve got the left-handed Noren sitting against lefties, replaced by … the left-handed Enos Slaughter!

We’ll see how that goes, but in real life Slaughter, who played in 69 games that year at the age of 38, had a crazy reverse platoon split, putting up a .700 OPS against righties and an .814 against lefties.

How it’s going so far is the Yankees are 6-3, on a five-game winning streak and tied for first in the A.L. East with Bill Simmons’ 2008 Boston Red Sox. Doesn’t seem like a fair fight to me. Bill’s guys are young and fit, plus David Ortiz, and mine are in their 80s, or dead.

Also in the division: Milo Kaminsky’s 1969 Baltimore Orioles, Jack Perconte’s 2007 Cleveland Indians, Gary Gillette’s 1961 Detroit Tigers, Jason Bova’s 1985 Toronto Blue Jays and Joe Dimino’s 1925 Washington Senators.

The Yanks got off to a rough start, losing two in a row before salvaging the third game against Joe Hamrahi and Craig Brown’s 1977 Kansas City Royals. Then they got pounded by the Senators 11-1 to fall to 1-3 before Eddie Lopat threw a shutout to launch New York on its winning streak, two wins over the Senators and a three-game road sweep over Perconte’s ’07 Indians.

Take that, former big-leaguer, who by the way has been blogging entertainingly at Seamheads about his career.

Next up, we go to Washington, Whitey Ford, still looking for his first win, against Tom Zachary in the opener.

Using Skowron over Collins is really paying off so far. Skowron’s 7-for-31 with no extra-base hits and a .520 OPS. Collins is 6-for-14 with a triple and a 1.071 OPS. Small sample size, but there might be some good reason why playing Skowron over Collins won’t work. Slaughter, by the way, is 4-for-15.

According to Baseball Almanac, my highest-paid player is Mickey Mantle, who made $21,000 that year. In today’s money, that’s $166,470. It’s good to be an owner.

In or out? Come on, man

According to the baseball prospect site Scouting Book, the No. 104 and 105 prospects in baseball right now are, respectively, left-handed pitcher Josh Outman of the Oakland A’s and right-handed pitcher Will Inman of the San Diego Padres.

And yes, I am interested in who the 105th best prospect in baseball is, aren’t you?

Outman, 24, who has about the best name for a pitcher since Barney Strikeout back in the ’20s, came over from Philadelphia in the Joe Blanton trade. He’s not just a prospect, he’s a rookie. He had a cup of coffee last year and made the A’s rotation out of spring training. After two poor starts he’s in the bullpen.

So far in two starts and two relief outings he has an ERA of 5.23, with 11 strikeouts and six walks in 10 and a third innings. He has a mid-90s fastball and an arsenal of breaking balls, but control has been a problem.

Inman, 22, is a little guy — for a pitcher, that is; he’s 6-foot, 200 pounds — who has dominated in the minors, striking out well over a batter per inning with a better-than 3-1 strikeout to walk ratio. But his size and unorthodox pitching motion have led scouts to discount the results. Here’s ESPN’s Keith Law after watching Inman pitch in the Futures Game last year:

Will Inman’s delivery drew a lot of laughs in the scouts’ section — he looks like he’s “doing the pigeon,” for you old-school “Sesame Street” fans — and he throws severely across his body with a fringe-average fastball and a big, slow-roller curveball. He’d have a hard time being a fifth starter in most parks, although Petco Park might make him a No. 3.

Inman was pretty good at Double-A with San Antonio last year, posting a 3.52 ERA in 28 starts with 140 strikeouts in 135 and a third innings, but he also walked 71, which is too many. He’s back at San Antonio, and he’s off to a rough beginning. In three starts, he’s 0-1 with a 6.23 ERA. His walks are under control, with only two in 13 innings, but so are his strikeouts — only 10 so far.

Inman vs. Outman. In vs. Out. Which is better? It’s almost like a parallel to the debate about whether bloggers (OUTsiders) or reporters (INsiders) are more effective at covering a subject, isn’t it?

No. No, it isn’t. Not even a little. That’s just stupid. But I’m going to follow Inman vs. Outman anyway.

The House That Oops Built

I love, love, love this story from Accuweather.com positing that the crazy number of home runs that have been hit in the first few games at Yankee Stadium are a result of the stadium’s less-steep grandstands acting as a wind tunnel that pushes balls out to right field if the wind is blowing out of the west.

I don’t care if it’s true. I love it.

“Although the field dimensions of the new stadium are exactly that of the old stadium,” Gina Cherundolo writes, “the shell of the new stadium is shaped differently. AccuWeather.com meteorologists also estimate that the angle of the seating in the new stadium could have an effect on wind speed across the field.”

Cherundolo goes on to note that the old ballpark had more stacked tiers and a big upper deck, which acted like a big wind baffle. The wind came over the top and dropped into the bowl, where it swirled.

But: “The new Yankee Stadium’s tiers are less stacked, making a less sharp slope from the top of the stadium to the field.” This, she writes, might allow the wind to come over the top of the grandstand and follow the gentle downslope of the seating. Then, depending on the direction of the wind, it would rise back up as it approaches the outfield seats.

And why, class, does the new Yankee Stadium’s grandstand slope at a gentler angle — that is, make the upper deck farther away from the field — than in the old Yankee Stadium?

Without having looked at the plans for the new park in a while, I can answer and so can you. It’s the same answer for every new stadium. The grandstand is shaped that way to make room for luxury boxes.

Take that, free-spending Yankees! I don’t mean on the billion-dollar stadium. The taxpayers mostly paid for that. I mean all that pitching you spent about a quarter of a billion on this offseason. You went and built Coors Field circa 1995 for them!

It only works when the wind’s blowing a certain way, at a certain strength, which it is now, and which Accuweather.com says will happen again in the fall, when the Yankees are watching the World Series. That is, if the meteorologists’ speculation is correct.

But we Yankee haters will take it. It’s the House That Oops Built.

Cycles within cycles within cycles

The second week of the baseball season was a cycle fest. On Monday Orlando Hudson of the Los Angeles Dodgers had a single, double, triple and home run in the same game. Then Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers pulled off the rare feat on Wednesday and Jason Kubel of the Minnesota Twins did it Friday.

Three players hitting for the cycle in five days. I couldn’t remember such a thing happening before. Hitting for the cycle isn’t vanishingly rare, like throwing a perfect game, but it’s an unusual event. It only happens a few times a year in the big leagues.

I decided to try to find out if three in five days had ever happened before. It didn’t take long for me to find Retrosheet’s List of cycles and I opened it, prepared to squint happily at it for hours trying to find another crazy five-day period in which three players had collected each of baseball’s four hits in one game.

How far back would I have to go? What names would I be able to pull out of the colorful past if such a thing had ever happened? I started at the bottom of the chronological list, began scanning up and —

It happened at the end of last year. In baseball terms, it happened last month. Cristian Guzman of the Washington Nationals hit for the cycle on Aug. 28, followed by Stephen Drew of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Adrian Beltre of the Seattle Mariners both doing it four days later, on Sept. 1. This set of circumstances was so monumentally fascinating that I’d completely forgotten it. I’m not even sure I’d been aware of it at the time.

Mark Kotsay of the Atlanta Braves had hit for the cycle two weeks before Guzman. So that was four in 19 days, something for this year’s big leaguers to shoot for.

That was kind of an anticlimax.

But I’d come this far, loaded the Web page and everything, so I decided to look for the last time three cycles had been hit in five days before last year. Because I figured that would be just as exciting as the Guzman-Drew-Beltre trifecta that had so thrilled me back in ’08, or would have if I’d noticed it.

It almost happened in July 1970. Tony Horton of the Baltimore Orioles hit for the cycle on July 2, then Tommie Agee of the New York Mets did it on July 6 and Jim Ray Hart of the San Francisco Giants on July 8. A seven-day stretch.

In August 1933 four players did it in 16 days, and the first three of them were Philadelphia A’s. Mickey Cochrane did it on the second, Pinky Higgins on the sixth and Jimmie Foxx on the 14th. Earl Averill of the Cleveland Indians added a cycle on the 17th. Big month for the cycle, but no three of them were within five days of each other.

There were three cycles in an eight-day period in 1887, the first and third by the same guy, Tip O’Neill of the American Association St. Louis Browns, who are now the National League St. Louis Cardinals. He did it on April 30 and May 7. In between, Fred Carroll of the N.L. Pittsburgh Alleghenys — soon to be renamed the Pirates — cycled on May 2.

The only other three cycles in five days episode I found happened in June 1885. Dave Orr of the American Association New York Metropolitans did it on the 12th, followed by George Wood of the N.L. Detroit Wolverines the next day and Henry Larkin of the A.A. Philadelphia Athletics on the 16th.

Boy! That must have been exciting. I wonder if people back then had the same reaction to that thrilling sequence of events as I had to the Guzman-Drew-Beltre sequence last year. Fat lot of good that cyclefest did in June 1885. Within a half-dozen years, the Metropolitans, Wolverines and Athletics were all extinct.

Here’s something with a little more historical resonance than last year. The last time three big-league players hit for the cycle in the same calendar month was in June 1950, when George Kell of the Detroit Tigers did it on the second, Ralph Kiner of the Pirates on the 25th and Roy Smalley of the Chicago Cubs on the 28th.

Roy Smalley was the father of Roy Smalley — dad was Jr. and son was Roy III — who was a shortstop in the ’70s and ’80s, mostly for the Twins. It’s funny that the son, who was a pretty good hitter for a shortstop, never hit for the cycle but the father, a banjo hitter who never managed an OPS-plus above 85, did.

That’s how the cycle goes. It’s a random collection of events, a false “accomplishment,” important only because someone along the line thought it was kind of cool when it happened. There is no list of games in which players have hit two doubles and two home runs, a demonstrably better performance than a single, double, triple and home run.

But the thing is: That guy was right. The cycle is cool.

Newspaper crisis means MLB plays in secret

Terrible news on the death of newspapers front. A USA Today report the other day told the story in its headline. Shrinking newsrooms put squeeze on MLB coverage.

Reporter Mel Antonen notes that membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America is off by 65 writers this year, reflective of newsroom layoffs and newspapers ceasing or sharing beat coverage. The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, share beat writers covering the Texas Rangers.

Those papers have always been competitors, but now they’ve united against a common enemy: their obsolescence.

Antonen paraphrases Los Angeles Dodgers exec Josh Rawitch noting the drop in newspaper reporters covering teams. A dozen or so traveled with the Dodgers in the early ’90s, compared to just two this season, plus the mlb.com beat writer.

I wonder how long MLB and most of its teams will keep using the “press box space” excuse when denying credentials to online writers.

Rawitch also points out that the loss of newspaper writers affects radio and TV stations that, in Antonen’s words, “need fodder from newspaper accounts of the games and notes.”

This of course is a microcosm of the larger crisis in journalism. Without newspapers, there simply isn’t enough raw information. I mean, I’m really having trouble following this baseball season so far, aren’t you? There just isn’t enough information out there. Never mind radio and TV stations. Won’t somebody please think of the bloggers?

My first thought when I saw Rawitch’s I.D. as a Dodgers exec was “I was just wondering whether they were still in the league.” With so many newspaper reporters dropping off the beat, it’s like baseball’s being played in secret.

What are we all going to do with only three beat reporters writing that Shlabotnik scored from second on Casey’s single, instead of 12? How can we really understand the game, I mean really get to the bottom of it, if Shlabotnik’s postgame quote — “I saw Casey hit it and I just ran” — is only scribbled in three notebooks, not a dozen?

The BBWAA lost a net 65 writers this year, Antonen reports, even after its forward-thinking decision to allow 22 Interthingy typists in. You can see for yourself how the BBWAA has its finger on the pulse of the modern world by Googling it.

Search baseball writers association of america and the organization’s home page does not appear in the first 100 results. Most people use Google’s default configuration of 10 results per page, and it’s common knowledge in the SEO world — you can Google that, BBWAA people — that hardly anybody looks beyond Page 1 of their results. The BBWAA home page would be absent from the first 10 pages.

There are three matches for pages on the BBWAA site among the first 100, including the second and third result, a press release about the 2009 Hall of Fame vote and the organization’s awards page.

It’s pretty much the same story if you search for BBWAA.

I’m sparing you the links to those pages because they include the eye-assaulting bright green background that until recently all BBWAA pages sported. Note to BBWAA: Maybe you’re losing members because you’ve blinded the ones who’ve checked your site?

The home page has recently been redesigned with a vision-preserving white background, so it’s safe to say: Here it is.

Now: Weren’t the Yankees and Mets supposed to open new stadiums this year? Has anybody heard anything? These really are dark times.

Tracy Ringolsby interview

New Salon column is a Q&A with Tracy Ringolsby, who lost his job with the Rocky Mountain News when it closed two weeks ago and immediately started a new blog with two colleagues to continue covering the Colorado Rockies. There’s audio of the interview too.

I’ve been reading Ringolsby since the ’80s, when he worked at the Dallas Morning News and his Sunday notes columns were syndicated. We talked about the future of journalism, a pretty hot topic in my circles lately as the newspaper industry comes crashing down.

My obsession with this subject — my attempts to educate myself about the current thinking, my own efforts to think it through — is the main reason why I haven’t been writing much for Salon lately. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, nor is there enough brain capacity, to think clearly about such disparate subjects and be able to spit out sports commentary I’d stand behind.

I’ll be writing about the Tournament over the next few weeks, I’ll have a Q&A with Allen Barra about his Yogi Berra book and I figure I’ll do the usual baseball season preview nonsense. Maybe by next month my obsession will have passed and I’ll pick up the column pace again.