T.T. on the Radio

Big thanks to Marty Lurie of KNBR-AM 680 in San Francisco for having me on his show Saturday. Our interview is now available online. Happy opening day, everyone!

THE SETUP MAN spotted at Giants Spring Training

Scottsdale, AZ, 3/24/2014

That's Marty Lurie of KNBR-AM 680 on the left, and Giants GM Brian Sabean on the right. Photo by author and Giants superfan Jane Ganahl.

An Observer Asks Y

Because it is my goal to report on only the most important trends in pro baseball, I just spent the better portion of a coffee break searching for coverage of the large and growing influx of players whose first names begin with Y.

Am I the only one who’s noticed the invasion of the Y Guys? Bewilderingly, Google says yes.

You know what I’m talking about: Yasiel Puig, Yu Darvish, Yoenis Cespedes, Yadier Molina, Yunel Escobar, Yovani Gallardo, Yuneskys Betancourt and Maya. A quick search at baseball-reference.com yields 15 current major leaguers with Y names. Once upon a time, the list consisted of a single name: Yogi Berra.

1959

2014

Granted, 15 players in a pool of around 750 is still just 2 percent, but I challenge you to come up with another letter adding players at this rate! The letter Z for instance (adjusted for the hundreds of California-bred Zacks infesting rosters at the moment) boasts only a single current major leaguer, Yankees’ outfielder Zoila Almonte. Some unfortunate letters are actually losing representation. The letter O, for example, has fallen on hard times. A league once filled with Ozzies, Oswalds, and Oil Can Boyd is now down to Octavio Dotel.

But Y is hot! The 15 players mentioned above include a startling number of All Stars (Yu, Yadier, Yovani, Yasiel), perhaps a higher proportion than any other letter. And Yogi Berra, of course, is in the Hall of Fame.

How do you explain this madness? My hunch is that it’s a cultural phenomenon. With very few exceptions (most notably Darvish, who is Japanese and Iranian), Y Guys tend to be from Latin America. Cubans and Venezuelans are especially likely to have a Y name. I tried searching for coverage of a larger phenomenon, a baby-naming trend in Cuba for example, but my limited Spanish, coupled with the inability of Google to penetrate a country where ’57 Chevys still ply the roads, failed me.

Whatever the reason, consider yourself informed. When the 2014 season begins next week, and you find that the opening day lineup of your hometown team includes a Yorvit, a Yamaico, and two Yoervises – remember where you heard it first.

PS – I’m changing my name to Y.Y.

Opening Day

The baseball season may be three weeks away, but you can get a head start this morning: The Setup Man is now on sale. The scouting reports have been stellar: "a must-read book" (The New York Post); "a treat" (Kirkus Reviews); "a clever debut" (Publishers Weekly).

Early feedback from readers suggests the book may be habit-forming. I have already been blamed for one reader's loss of productivity. Caveat lector: This is not a self-help book. I unleashed Johnny Adcock on the world; what he does from here is his business.

Fighting Sexism with Sabermetrics: A Proposal

Baseball is a sexist game. If you don't believe me, try explaining to my ten-year-old daughter why there are no women players in the major leagues. Or why girls interested in baseball have to play another game, with a larger ball, and they have to pitch underhanded.

"Daddy, this isn't baseball..."

But that’s not news. The news in baseball, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a bunch of new statistics. Batting average and ERA are no longer seen as useful measures of a player’s performance on the field. Instead, we have new acronyms like OBP, WHIP, and the all-knowing omnibus statistic, WAR, which stands for Wins Above Replacement and measures, in one handy number, the value of a player relative to the average performance at his position.

The other new thing is that major league teams are flush with cash like never before, thanks to lucrative new contracts with cable sports networks. It seems the networks have realized that live sports are the onlly type of content that can’t be downloaded free with BitTorrent. (They can, but then they wouldn’t be live, which is sort of the point of live sports on TV...)

I smell a bubble, and I’m not the only one. 

I am, however, the only one who knows what to do about it. The new salaries can stay. Teams just need to attract more viewers. Specifically they need female viewers, since these astronomical cable contracts seem to assume that every American man and boy with access to TV will be watching major-league games every night forever.

So baseball on TV needs female viewers. That’s fine, except that baseball is a sexist game (see above).

Enter my wife. She’s irreverent, observant, and swears like a sailor: precisely the qualities required to appreciate baseball. I’ve watched dozens of baseball games on TV with my wife, but she’s still shaky on the rules. For example she’s not sure how many balls make a walk, or even why they call it a “walk” when the players seem to be jogging down to first. 

You might expect that my wife would prefer to be watching something else on TV, that she’s indulging me by keeping the game on, but the truth is she likes watching baseball.

How can that be? She doesn’t understand what’s going on! 

Au contraire. She understands perfectly well what she wants to understand, which is that baseball players are hot. 

“Where have these men been all my life?” she exclaimed one night during the 2011 World Series.

Cardinals pitcher Joe Kelly, one of my wife's favorites 

I had to break it to her that baseball has been around for well over a hundred years, which means “these men” have been around at least that long.

Here’s another fun fact: she prefers watching games on TV to seeing them in person. Why? Because she gets to see the players up close. Which is important if you watch baseball like she does.

Women like my wife watch baseball now and then, but they could be watching it every night if we made an effort to draw them in. (Cable companies, are you listening?) Statistics like WAR have made it possible for fans to focus on the best players, to tailor their viewing so that not a minute is wasted on scrubs and losers.

Marco Scutaro, known in our house as "The Gentleman"

Let’s not leave women like my wife in the cold. We need a statistic that measures a player’s sex appeal the way WAR measures his performance.

What will this new stat be called? I propose ROF, which stands for Relative Objective F*ckability. My wife prefers COCK, which stands for nothing but cuts right to the point.

How will the stat be derived? Leave that up to the quants. For now, let’s just resolve that we need it. Imagine the possibilities! Fifteen or twenty years from now, when women are watching baseball in droves and mid-season games between the Astros and the Marlins are pulling ratings like Gray’s Anatomy, maybe we can start talking about real progress, like letting girls play hardball and making the major leagues co-ed. It may be a long way off, but imagine telling your granddaughter you helped open up baseball for girls. First thing’s first. Let’s get ROF.

Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, ahead of his time, c. 1983

Your Ex-Girlfriend is Rich, or Why I Can't Go Back to the Dodgers

I grew up a Dodgers fan. For many years after I moved to the East Coast--for college and the decade after--I followed Dodgers baseball from afar. Unfortunately, that period (1994-2007) was probably the worst stretch in the history of the franchise, and eventually distance did what it always does, and we fell out of love. By the time I moved to the Bay Area for work in 2007, I was basically no longer interested in professional baseball. Then in 2010, a local team of misfits and castoffs won the World Series. This was the year of Aubrey Huff's red thong and Brian Wilson's beard. To all the Dodger fans getting ready to close this browser window, I ask you: What could I do? The Giants were lovable, and THEY ACTUALLY WON GAMES.

So I changed my allegiance. In truth I'm agnostic when it comes to pro baseball--I just love the game--but Giants and A's games are what I get for free on my radio, and those are the teams I can see in person without getting on a plane. As a friend of mine said recently, "I'd watch the Marlins play the Rockies if somebody turned it on." I would, too, although I recognize that it's more fun to watch when you've got skin in the game.

Very recently the Dodgers got good again. The new owner is pouring money into Chavez Ravine, and even conservative prognosticators are predicting the team to win a hundred games in 2014. The farm system is apparently healthy again, and they've locked up their most important young stars. Now would be a good time to move my allegiance back to L.A.

But I can't--and it has nothing to do with the Giants. To me (and I imagine lots of fans still angry from the McCourt years) the Dodgers are like an ex-girlfriend who, ten years after you broke up, shows up on the cover of a magazine. She looks good, much better than you remember, and she's gotten rich. So what do you do? Swallow your pride and send an email of congratulations? That would be nice, but who does that? (Not you. Be honest.)

It has become a cliche to say that the Dodgers have become the Yankees. Not for me. I have always hated the Yankees. To continue the girlfriend analogy, the Yankees are the girl who never even knew your name in high school, because she was dating college guys. When she turns up on the cover of a magazine, you don't get that knot in your stomach, because it's nothing new for her. She's always been on magazine covers. The Dodgers are different. The Dodgers have a long history of sucking. In fact to the day he died, my grandfather, who loved the Dodgers as a boy in New York, called them "Da Bums."

So what will I do? Probably keep listening to the Giants and A's. I'll watch the Dodgers if someone turns them on. I might even cheer for them. If they're playing the Yankees.

Reporting date for authors

Available 3/11/2014

Pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report for spring training the week of February 10th. Position players show up a week later.

Let's put another date on the calendar: March 11 is when my first thriller, THE SETUP MAN, hits shelves in hardback, eBook, and audio.

Look out, Florida.