Fun with Opening Day rosters

April has always been one of my favorite months, mostly because it means the end of winter and the beginning of baseball season. Opening Day is something of a personal holiday for me, and so I don't totally mind that we've now stretched it out to last a full three days.

As a Red Sox fan, this year has a bit of a different feel for me, as the Sox purged half their roster last August and have now fully embraced a youth movement for the first time in years. As I mentioned on Twitter on Monday, the Sox' Opening Day lineup this year was their youngest on average since 1998, when Pedro Martinez made his Boston debut, Nomar Garciaparra was a 24-year-old MVP-caliber shortstop, and Manny Ramirez was a young slugger for the defending AL champion Cleveland Indians. Meanwhile, Jackie Bradley Jr., now the team's starting left fielder, was at home eagerly awaiting his 8th birthday. So yeah, it was a long time ago.

At any rate, my little bit of sleuthing with respect to the Sox' lineup led me to check out some other teams' lineups, to see what kinds of trends I might uncover. While this type of stuff might fall under the category of "Things That Interest Me and Only Me", so be it. I'll share it here anyway, just in case you care.

This year's Red Sox, with an average age right around 28.5 years old (remember, this is of the Opening Day starting lineup, not the whole roster), clocks in as the 8th-youngest lineup out of the 30 major league teams. The five youngest Opening Day lineups belonged to the Royals (27.1 years), Astros (27.5), Mariners (27.6), Nationals (27.7), and Indians (28.0), while the five oldest lineups belonged to the Yankees (31.6 years), Phillies (31.2), Rangers (30.7), Blue Jays (30.4), and Tigers (30.3).

The banged-up Yankees blow pretty much everyone else out of the water in terms of age, thanks in large part to the oldest outfield in baseball—at 34.5 years old, only the Cubs (33.5) come anywhere close. While the Yankees are currently fielding a cobbled-together lineup of rookies and retreads, things wouldn't be much different for them even if they were perfectly healthy. Substituting Jeter, A-Rod, Teixeira, and Granderson for Nunez, Nix, Youkilis, and Wells actually increases the team's average age all the way up to 33.2 years old, a figure that would make them the oldest team in baseball by a margin of more than two years. No matter how you slice it, these guys are old.

All told, the average age of an Opening Day starter this year is 29 years, 39 days, yielding an average birthdate of February 23, 1984. The average birthdate for a Yankee, meanwhile, would be September 14, 1981, and for a Royal, March 11, 1986. In other words, I'd be older than average in any one of these lineups, and that's just a little bit depressing.

By position, Designated Hitters (like these guys), Right Fielders (like these guys), and First Basemen (like these guys) are the oldest on average, whereas Center Fielders (like these guys) and Shortstops (like these guys) are the youngest. There are 41 Opening Day starters who were born in the 1970s, 9 born in the 1990s, and about the same number who are younger than 25 (35 of them) as those who are 35 or older (37 of them). There were no Opening Day starters this year who were 40 or older, though Todd Helton and Ichiro came pretty darn close.

Age not doing it for you? You want to know about these guys' names? Fine, I can do that, too. As far as last names, we had 4 Cabreras, 3 Gonzalezes, and 15 other surnames shared by 2 players (also a Barmes and a Barnes, a Beltran and a Beltre, a Brantley and a Brantly, a Braun and a Brown, and a Gomes and a Gomez).

There were 10 guys named Chris, 7 guys named Justin, 7 Matts and a Matthew, 6 guys named Carlos and one named Carl. We had 5 Michaels, 2 Miguels, and 4 Mikes; 5 Joses and 5 Joshes; 5 Jasons and 2 Jaysons; 5 Brandons and a Brendan. We had 4 AJs, a BJ, a CC, a JJ, a JP, and a guy named RA. And finally, in my personal favorite, there were 3 Johns, 2 Jons, a Juan, a Jonathan, a Jonathon, a Johnny, a Jonny, and a Jhonny. Just spell it however you want, guys, it doesn't make it any more unique.

We also had 7 names that showed up as both a first name and a last name—those would be Desmond, Francisco, Gordon, Jay, Martin, Nelson, and Ryan. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective), none of those gentlemen owned the unique distinction of having the same first and last name. I'm holding out hope for a Desmond Desmond somewhere in the near future, and I'm sure there's somebody out there who will oblige.

Do names and ages have anything at all to do with the overall success of a team? Who knows? The favorites out in Vegas this year include one of the youngest teams (Nationals) and some of the oldest teams (Tigers, Blue Jays), with a lot of muddled confusion in between. Let's just hold this one for later, and revisit it all in October. Sound good?

A quick word on Mariano

One last quick post and then I'm done for the weekend (seriously, I'm done... four posts in one day is out of control for me, and somehow I still haven't worked down my backlog of old material at all).

I just wanted to say a brief word about Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, who might well have ended his career last night when he tore his ACL shagging flies during pre-game batting practice. Despite my obvious Red Sox bias, I've never had anything but the utmost respect for Rivera, something I've made clear here on two previous occasions. As I wrote in one of those posts,

Despite his playing for the Yankees, I respect and admire Mariano. Like many other Dominican [uh, sic] ballplayers, he came from almost literally nothing and therefore has a terrific attitude about the game. His utter lack of a sense of entitlement is refreshing, and it comes across in every interview that he conducts (like this one, which is a personal favorite). He truly seems to appreciate how lucky he is to get paid his huge salary to do what he does, and I wish there were more athletes like him.

I of course realize that I'm a complete idiot, because Rivera is from Panama, not the Dominican Republic (which I knew all along, but somehow screwed up in that post because I was thinking of Pedro Martinez... stupid Red Sox bias). But my points still stand--I can't think of many other Yankees that would be as gracious in defeat as Mariano was in 2004/2005. Rivera is humble, laid-back, friendly, and--to hear my father tell it--incredibly good at dealing with the media. Guys like Mariano are the reason we watch sports, regardless of our affiliations as fans.

At any rate, the brutal irony of Mariano's injury is that it was a well-articulated dream of his to play center field for the Yankees at least once before he retired. Now, he may never get his chance, all because of an injury that was sustained while "playing" center field. For a guy with as accomplished a career as his, it's a shame if this is how it all ends.

To honor Mariano, I'll now post the Clip of the Week that never was, a clip of the man showing us all how to make a baseball glove out of a cardboard box. This is useful info, people... take notes.

 

Clip of the Week

Seems like I forgot to post Clip of the Week yesterday. Whoops. Also seems like Blogger has been very ornery today, and so I haven't been able to get this up until now. Double whoops.

At any rate, there were some good things this week. This video was oddly mesmerizing, this one cracked me up, and this one was just frightening. But I'm a sports nerd, and as you all know by now I'm a sucker for anything that mixes the athletic with the intellectual.

This video from the New York Times definitely qualifies, and while I might hate the Yankees, I have nothing but respect for their closer, Mariano Rivera. He is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, and I can say with near certainty that we will never see another pitcher quite like him again.

Root, root, root for the Tigers

Well it's finally Opening Day today (though not for my Red Sox, for that I'll have to wait a day), and we'll kick things off this afternoon in the Bronx, where the Yankees host the Tigers at the new Yankee Stadium. I'll of course be rooting for the Tigers, because I always root against the Yankees, but this time around I've got a pretty good reason why you should too:

On Thursday, the New York Yankees begin their regular season at Yankee Stadium, a gleaming $1.5 billion behemoth that opened in the Bronx in 2009 as the new home of one of the richest franchises in sports.

But next to the stadium is a lingering eyesore – a protracted construction project that was supposed to have been transformed into three public ball fields months ahead of opening day. Instead, some coaches and neighborhood residents say, it remains a joyless Mudville...

The city promised to build the fields, which are starting to take shape directly across 161st Street to the south of the stadium, to replace others that were bulldozed in 2006 to make way for the stadium.

The razed fields, in Macombs Dam Park, were the only regulation baseball diamonds nearby, and were home to neighborhood pickup games and youth leagues, and to teams from schools like All Hallows High School, a parochial institution several blocks away.

“We’ve gone five years now with no ball fields here,” said Sean Sullivan, 55, the principal of All Hallows and a coach of its baseball team, which has spent five years scouring the city for home fields. “They took the parks away from my kids, and now our team is a bunch of gypsies.”

The team, which played part of its 2009 season in Staten Island, is still searching for a site for its league opener on April 7.

The fields were originally to be completed late last year, as the centerpiece of Heritage Field, a 10-acre park where the former Yankee Stadium stood. But the groundbreaking was delayed until last June, and city officials now say the fields will not open until fall 2011.

“They built the new stadium in record time, but building replacement parkland for the community is literally dragging,” said Helen Foster, who represents the neighborhood on the City Council.

That's pretty weak. Admittedly, the majority of the anger is directed at the city and not the Yankees, and that's probably fair. Having lived in New York for several years (and worked in the shadow of Ground Zero), I recognize how ridiculous that city can be when it comes to political boondoggles getting in the way of projects (see Freedom Tower, Second Avenue Subway).

And in fairness to the Yankees, they don't seem to be completely blind to the blight they've caused:

A Yankees spokeswoman said the team donated $10 million to the parks replacement project in 2010, and gave $5.6 million worth of donations – including ballpark events, tickets and merchandise – to various Bronx organizations. The team also helped provide buses for local schools, including All Hallows, in 2009, she said.

But really, that donation might sound great to us common folk for whom $10 million is a lot of money, but it's a pittance for the Yankees, especially in comparison to the $1.5 billion price tag of the building that caused this problem in the first place.

The team's annual revenues (pre-revenue sharing) are pegged somewhere around $600 million, which means that the $10 million they donated to the parks project is roughly the equivalent of a couple of playoff games (which they would've gotten back had they not choked against the Rangers in last year's ALCS). In other words, it's a rounding error.

With the weight that the Yankees are clearly capable of throwing around in the Bronx (they got the ballpark project started and finished in a hurry, didn't they?), there's clearly more they can be doing to fast-track this process. But they've got their ballpark built, and they now seem not to really care about the neighborhood around them. So as a result, fields that were supposed to look like this (a year ago):

Instead look like this today:

Now, I'm not saying any of the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball wouldn't do just about the same thing in similar circumstances, so maybe my position here is unfair (it's certainly far from unbiased). But today, when you watch the Yankees playing in their $1.5 billion playground, just keep in mind what's going on across the street, and the Little League teams without a home for their Opening Days. Maybe for one day, you'll feel like booing the Yankees too.

[New York Times]

Jeter the "cheater"

It's been a couple of days, but I couldn't resist writing about Derek Jeter and his supposed "cheating" act on Wednesday against the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays. The whole thing just makes me laugh.

Do I think his actions were lame? Of course I do. Was it cheating? Yeah, technically. But it's nothing that doesn't happen daily around the league with little fanfare. Do I think this should be the impetus for Major League Baseball to expand its use of video replay? Good God, no. Baseball is slow enough as it is. Even if I did support the expanded use of replay (and I do, to a point, but I think most of the problems could be solved if MLB umps could swallow their egos and confer as a group more frequently, as NFL referees do), to allow its use on foul ball/hit-by-pitch situations would be ridiculous.

The real issue here is a fawning sports media caught off-guard by a man who they have gone out of their way to deify for nearly two decades. The treatment of Jeter has always been silly. A fantastic hitter with an average glove, he's been put up on a pedestal as "The Captain", the "guy who always plays the game the right way", and by God, he even calls Joe Torre "Mr. Torre"!! Let's all let him date our daughters.

ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski once went so far as to say that if Jeter was determined to have taken steroids, he would quit watching baseball forever. "It seems so, well, beneath him," Wojciechowski wrote. "He is the one player who I actually think would walk away from the game if he thought he had to cheat to compete." Wow, buddy. Check yourself. That's not objective journalism.

Fox announcer Tim McCarver has also been one of the worst offenders. I remember vividly a game against the Red Sox years ago, where Jeter was fooled by an inside fastball, and oops-ed a check-swing nubber down the line toward third base. It somehow stayed fair for an infield single, which opened the fawning floodgates. McCarver would swoon for the better part of the inning about what an amazing "piece of hitting" it was by Jeter, to get on base despite having been badly fooled. His response to the Jeter "hit-by-pitch"? Predictable.

“I cannot understand what the commotion is,” said the Fox baseball broadcaster Tim McCarver, a former major league catcher, as he took stock of the uproar.

“Why question that?” he said of Jeter’s actions. “I can’t believe anyone would say that’s cheating.”

For what it's worth, I actually agree with McCarver on half of his statement. I don't understand the commotion. But the second half, Tim's just wrong. Sorry, dude, but it is cheating. Cheating of the "it's just part of the game" type, which I don't really blame Jeter for at all. I'd have tried the same act if I was out there. Everyone does. But it is (technically) cheating. You're a journalist, and to deny that "he cheated" is a valid response is, again, bad journalism.

The fact is, the media have always looked at Jeter in a bizarre doe-eyed fashion, assuming that everything he does is perfect in every way. This is false. He's an amazing hitter, and I have immense respect for him as one of the best hitters I've ever seen. But he's always driven me crazy specifically because of the treatment he receives from the media. This whole debacle is no exception. It just makes me smile to see so many media members caught so incredibly off guard to learn that their hero is just a ballplayer like everyone else.

[New York Times]