Zombie Bob Ross, The Tragic Death of Nick Green, and a Sweep

Just like last time the Red Sox swept the Yankees, some journalist is going to publish something ridiculous about how terrible the Yankees are. The offender this time is Gordon Edes.

(Look, I hate the Yankees, and am loving the Sox 8 - 0 record vs. them, but I can't deny that they're a good team. That's what makes the rivalry fun. There's no joy in winning 8 games against, say, the Washington Nationals, because you're supposed to win all 8 of them.)

Brace yourself for this one.

BOSTON – A regular bunch of pinstriped artists, these Yankees. They can’t beat the Red Sox, so all they want to do is draw the big picture for you. Joe Girardi talked about the big picture. So did CC Sabathia, Nick Swisher, Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon. At any moment, you expected the Yankee clubhouse guys to start passing out sketch pads and brushes.

That was a terrible joke, and I know something about terrible jokes, given how many I've made in the short lifespan of this blog. I would also like to point out that one does not use "sketch pads" to paint. (Like the name suggests, one uses them to sketch.) YOU SIR FAIL AT EVERYTHING.

“It hasn’t been fun for us against the Red Sox,” Girardi said after the New York Yankees fell to 0-8 against the Red Sox this season following a 4-3 collapse Thursday in which they couldn’t hold a two-run lead in the eighth with their best pitcher, Sabathia, on the mound. “But the big picture is, there is a long way to go.”

Well, we’re here to paint a different picture for you, one that doesn’t employ the don’t-worry, there-are-over-100-games-left broad strokes offered in defeat by the Bombers.

Oh, breaking out your sketch pad, are you? I eagerly await your I-Am-Going-To-Say-Somtehing-Totally-Retarded pointillism masterpiece. Seurat himself will no doubt rise from the grave and salute you. (Or maybe just Bob Ross. Incidentally, I think Zombie Bob Ross would totally beat Zombie Seurat in a fight.)

Anyways, I'm going to take the middle road between Edes and Girardi, because I think they've both got valid points. Picking eight isolated games in which a team loses all 8 of the games is not a good barometer to said team's merits because of the small sample size. I will say, however, that all 8 of these losses are to Yankees' main rival in the division, so they do count for more than Girardi wants to admit. If the team fails to win the division this year, I think the 8 losses to the Red Sox to open the season series will be very significant.

Many fans know enough hardball history to recall that as recently as last season, the Tampa Bay Rays spent the summer unable to beat the Red Sox in Fenway Park, then turned it around with a huge series win in September and won the ALCS against Boston in October. Some New Yorkers with longer memories will recall that the powerhouse Mets in 1988 won 10 of 11 regular-season games from the Dodgers, holding them to a grand total of 18 runs in those games, only to lose the NLCS in seven games to L.A.

But these Yankees haven’t yet earned the right to take the long view, not when they’ve been a portrait of shocking imperfection against the Red Sox, displaying flaws that could well mean Steinbrenner & Sons will once again be questioning their investments come October. You pony up over $423 million for three players, like the Yankees did last winter, and you expect masterpieces, not something you’d be embarrassed to hang in your basement.

Okay, let's break this down: Team A sucks miserably against Team B, then finally does something good against Team B in the playoffs. So the Yankees could easily be Team A and the Red Sox could easily be Team B this season. Except this can't be true because the Yankees just finished losing 8 games in a row to the Red Sox meaning they are a terrible team and therefore cannot possibly do something good late in the season. The only way this is logic is if you're a dadaist.

I'm also ashamed to hang Edes' metaphors in my basement, mostly because I fear someone would catch me and wonder why I was trying to nail an imaginary concept to a wall.

Maybe that’s the real reason for all those empty front-row seats in the new Yankee Stadium. Why pay top dollar to see a team that, whenever their archrival shows up, reminds their fans that the grandeur of their new surroundings can’t by itself restore a balance of power that has shifted since 2004 from the Bronx to the Back Bay? Yankees president Randy Levine would disagree, but you might as well spend your bucks on soccer instead.

I'll agree with this, considering that this series WAS IN BOSTON. Anyone that bothered to show up to Yankee Stadium for the last three games probably wouldn't have enjoyed themselves much. Trivial factual accuracy aside, the I'm-Going-To-Say-Something-Completely-Retarded pointillism masterpiece just arrived. Yankees fans don't go to other games against other teams because of the team's woes vs. the Red Sox. Zombie Seurat is disappointed to discover that he cannot eat your non-existent brain, Gordon Edes. (Zombie Bob Ross, on the other hand, is muttering something about happy trees.)

Also, I'll have to double check this, but I'm pretty sure the worth of a front-row seat at Yankee Stadium is roughly equivalent to the entire net worth of Major League Soccer.

Before arriving on Yawkey Way this week, the Yankees had a built-in excuse for losing their first five games against the Boston Red Sox. They didn’t have A-Rod, who was still recovering from hip surgery.

Plus their pitching sucked.

But this week Rodriguez was back, expensive new bauble Mark Teixeira came into town riding a hot streak of seven home runs in his last 15 games, and the pitching could hardly have been lined up better – new imports A.J. Burnett and Sabathia bookending Chien-Ming Wang, who was supposedly on the comeback trail.

"Hardly have been better"? You have one over-rated pitcher, one very good one, and one who had a 14.46 ERA coming into his start last night.

So what happens? Burnett and Wang couldn’t get out of the third inning in their starts.

I wasn't particularly surprised that Burnett sucked, but my feelings on him are already well-known. Also, scientists apparently have managed to distill optimism into an inject-able form and given Edes a good dose straight into the back of the skull, because there's no other reasonable explanation for his surprise at Wang's performance. HIS ERA IS OVER 14. (Yes, I know, I constantly mention how ERA is a bad way to judge a pitcher, but having an ERA of 14 after throwing over 20 innings is universally horrific. In his *best* start of the season Wang went 4.2 innings and gave up 5 runs. The dude can't pitch.)

Sabathia pitched magnificently but was brought down by a guy he could stuff in his back pocket and still have room for his wallet – Dustin Pedroia, the Red Sox gnat who refused to yield in a 10-pitch at-bat before drawing a walk that galvanized Boston’s winning rally....

Thus the sportswriter fetish for "scrappy" white guys continues. You could easily replace the "Dustin Pedroia" in that sentence with "David Eckstein", "Scott Podsednik", or "Darin Erstad" and find it had been written roughly 47891323409214213 times before. (Though the Erstad ones would also have some mention about how he used to be a punter.)

...“Look, there are more than 100 games to go. Our day is going to come. But we got outplayed these eight games. They played us well. There have been some close games, some we probably should have won. But we’ve made way too many mistakes.”

It began with Rodriguez, who couldn’t get the ball out of his glove for an easy force play Tuesday night. Yankees right fielder Nick Swisher missed a fly ball Wednesday night, then committed an unholy base-running gaffe Thursday, getting doubled off second by left-fielder Jason Bay after a leadoff double in the second inning. “I thought the ball was going halfway up the wall,” Swisher said...

What actually occured was Swisher was too busy drawing a pentagram in the infield dirt to notice Bay had caught the ball. Fortunately for Swisher, his ritual was completed before he was out, and Beezlebub was still summoned. (Nick Green, alas, was promptly killed). The day was saved when Indiana Jones showed up (being pursued by Nazis, of course) and closed up the portal to Hell by...DID YOU PROOFREAD THIS ARTICLE GORDON EDES? Isn't there something called an "editor" who can let you know when you make poor adjective choices? Is this really what journalism has devolved to?

The rest of this article talks about the various ways in which the Yankees lost the game. There's nothing particularly mock-worth (since it's just summary), except for this:

...Pedroia, the next batter, fouled off five straight two-strike pitches, three of which were clocked at 95 miles per hour...

We need to know this because Dustin Pedroia is incapable of hitting any pitch thrown faster than 76.2 miles per hour. (It's like Speed, except without the terrorists and bombs and Keanu Reeves.)

So the Yankees go home to face the Mets, two games behind the Red Sox in the AL East, yet miles behind in how they are perceived.

“I’d like to sit up here and say, ‘It never means more than it means,’” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “But it’s hard not to get excited.”

Now, that’s a truer picture.

What Francona is actually saying here is he's trying hard to not excited over a relatively meaningless 3-game sweep (much like the point Girardi was making). So, ultimately, you have just contradicted the entire purpose of your poorly argued article. Bravo, Gordon Edes, bravo.

Now if you'll excuse me, Zombie Bob Ross has filled up my sketch book with paintings of happy trees and is starting to look a wee bit peckish...

Gambler's fallacy

If you flip a coin ten times, there is a good chance it will come up heads all ten times. Does this mean the coin is rigged? Probably no, and this is just a case of small sample size. Flip that coin 100 times, and you'll no doubt find that the coin comes up heads just about as many times as it does tails. Flip it 1,000 times, and the ratio of heads to tails should get even closer to 1:1. This is basically the Gambler's fallacy at its finest, and it seems the baseball world falls prey to it far too often. If we are to rise above it, however, it should come as no surprise, for instance, that the Yankees are in first place and the Royals are under .500 right now. Anomalies exist over a small sample size, but everything will eventually tend towards the expected result.

So on that note...

What the hell is up with Juan Pierre and when is it going to stop? Excluding tonight's game, Pierre currently has an EqA of .349. No, I am not making that up. Juan Pierre, the man who's never had an EqA of above .276, and hasn't been above league average (.260) since 2004, is putting up Albert Pujols-like numbers (career EqA of .345). Logic tells us that he'll eventually go back to being an exceptionally mediocre baseball player, but, for now, let's all bask in the supreme oddity of his current production.

THE PANIC NUMBER

So the Indians have begun the season with an unfortunately miserable start. But the nice thing about the start of the season is it's a small sample size when it comes to gauging a team's overall performance. Teams that start poorly can rebound to be champions, and teams that start well can end of being the Kansas City Royals. (Hence why I haven't thrown myself off the Tobin Bridge due to poor performance of my beloved Red Sox.) Anyways, Jeff Passan is out of mind for writing off the Indians already.

So before burying the Indians with more than 95 percent of their season to play, allow us to present a few facts: Over the past 25 full seasons, 45 teams in Major League Baseball have begun their seasons 1-6 or worse. Of those 45, eight have finished the year with a better-than-average record. And of those eight, only one – the 2007 Philadelphia Phillies – made the postseason. In which they were promptly swept.

See why we call 1-6 the Panic Number?

It gets uglier when looking at the full seasons of the wild-card era. Since 1996, only three teams have finished above .500 after starting 1-6: the ’04, ’06 and ’07 Phillies, who seem to have a knack for reversing ugly starts.

The Indians, on the other hand, have started 1-6 twice since 1982. They went 60-102 the first time, 61-101 the second.

This is certainly an interesting theory, but it confuses correlation with causation. In other words, the two ideas are certainly related (since, well, bad teams tend to lose games), but there is no way to prove that this 1 - 6 definitively caused the team's whole season to go down the toilet. And why is The Panic Number (TM) 1 - 6? Isn't that a little bit arbitrary?

Furthermore, if 1 - 6 is really so damaging to a team that, for whatever reason, it will doom them to another 155 games of futility, wouldn't that mean it ANY team that hit The Panic Number (TM) during the course of the season suffer the same fate as the 45 referenced above? (In other words, what's the difference between going 1 - 6 in games 1 - 7 and winning game 1 and then going 1 - 6 in games 2 - 8?) If this is true, then the benchmark for any team that goes 1 - 6 is the aforementioned 2007 Philadelphia Phillies that won 89 regular season games and got swept in the post-season. Thus we can assume that it would be very difficult for a team to achieve any higher than this.

Except that assumption is TOTALLY WRONG. Check out this list of teams from the past five years alone that have had at least 1 stretch of 1 - 6 and made it past the high water mark of the 2007 Phillies. (All of the following teams made the playoffs.)

2008

Tampa Bay Rays: 97 – 65, 1 – 6 from July 6 -12
Chicago Cubs: 97 – 64, 1 – 6 from Aug 29 – Sept. 5
Philidelphia Philles: 92 – 67, 1 – 6 from June 16 – 24
Milwaukee Brewers: 90 – 72, 1 – 6 from May 1 – 8, July 25 – 31 and Aug. 9 – 16

2007

Boston Red Sox: 96 – 66, 1 – 6 from May 30th – June 6th
Los Angeles Angels: 96 - 66, 1 – 6 from April 11 – 17
New York Yankees: 94 – 68, 1 – 6 from April 19th – 26th, May 22nd – 29th, June 20th – 27th
Arizona Diamonbacks: 90 – 72, 1 – 6 from April 17 – 24th
Colorado Rockies: 90 – 73, 1 – 6 from June 21st – 27th

2006

New York Mets: 97 – 65, 1 -6 from Sept 20 – 26
Minnesota Twins: 96 – 66, 1 -6 from April 16th – 23
Oakland Athletics: 93 – 69, 1 – 6 from May 19th – 25th

2005

Chicago White Sox: 99 – 63, 1 – 6 from Aug 10 – 19, Sept. 9 – 15
New York Yankees: 95 – 67, 1 – 6 from April 10 – 17, May 27 – June 3
Boston Red Sox: 95 – 67, 1 – 6 from July 9 – 18

2004

New York Yankees: 101 – 61, 1 – 6 from Aug 15 – 22
Atlanta Braves: 96 – 66, 1 – 6 from May 5 – 12, June 16 – 23
Los Angeles Dodgers: 93 – 69, 1 -6 from May 12 – 19, June 20 – 26
Houston Astros: 92 – 70, 1 – 6 from June 11 - 17
Minnesota Twins: 92 – 70, 1 – 6 from Aug 5 - 11
Anahiem Angels: 92 – 70, 1 – 6 from June 27 – Jul 4

I think we can safely conclude The Panic Number is a little silly. Although now I'm going to spend the rest of the season following the Indians in the hope the don't become part of this.