Steven Rubio's Online Life

end of an era?

Yesterday was the deadline to renew my Giants season tickets and get "early bird" extras, including a chance to buy more tix for Opening Day. I let it pass. The final deadline to renew isn't for awhile yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll let that pass, too. Had full season tix since the new park opened, partial packages going back to 1984. Can't really justify spending thousands of dollars any longer.

so, should I have a world cup 2010 blog next summer?

My World Cup blog in 2006 was actually popular, at least compared to my regular blog, so I suppose I could do another in 2010. Times have changed … I seem to get more comments from the re-posts on Facebook than I do for the originals here, so I don’t know what a separate blog in 2010 would look like. Oh well, I have several months to think about it.

This came to mind this morning as I watched the World Cup Draw. At first glance, the USA seems to have a reasonable group (England, Slovenia, Algeria). Nate Silver’s pre-draw thinking had England as the 3rd-best team in the world, but Slovenia is only #36 and Algeria was the worst team in their “pot.” (The USA is #16.) Youneverknow and all that, but the Americans should walk vs. Algeria, and will likely be favored against Slovenia. Which leaves their first match, against England. If/when England wins that match, the table will likely be ENG 3 SLV 3 USA 0 ALG 0, and people will freak out. Slovenia will be the second match, and if the Americans win that, the final table will probably be ENG 9 USA 6 SLV 3 ALG 0.

In short, while ENG-USA has the most marquee value, the most important date for Americans during the group play will be Friday, June 18 (7:00 AM my time).

shake hands with the ball

Unless I miss my guess, a good majority of my vast readership will have no idea why this photo is important. If you know an Irishman, you might ask him:

fun with numbers

Look at this list of numbers: 136, 94, 97, 84, 86, 73.

Here’s one that’s even more consistent in its way: .510, .444, .437, .420, .394, .384.

This one’s a bit more herky-jerky: .383, .290, .332, .294, .319, .280.

And finally, a last list that goes in the opposite direction: 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

Now, imagine that it’s your job to figure out what the next number will be in the above lists. The last one is the easiest … odds are, even without knowing what the numbers represent, that we can guess 38 with confidence. Again, context matters, so we’re just guessing here, but for the top list I’d guess somewhere between 60-75. For the second list, .360-.390. For the third, .270-.300. I’m sure to be wrong here, but I’m willing to claim that I won’t be very far off. The first three lists are of numbers that are all becoming gradually smaller, the last list is of numbers that are getting larger by 1 each time.

These numbers are the OPS+, SLG, OBP, and Age for Ivan Rodriguez over the past six years. Longtime readers will have an easy time figuring out what comes next: there is a rumor that the Giants are thinking of signing Pudge to a one-year deal. He’s getting worse every year, he’s well-past his sell-by date, he doesn’t get on base, he plays a position where the team already has a young guy in waiting … he’s the perfect Sabean pick. (It must be noted that these rumors don’t often pan out.)

Since the Giants moved west in 1958, there have been nine catchers who managed to play at least 81 games in their “age 38” season. There are some very good players on that list (Carlton Fisk and Gary Carter, to name two) … you have to be good to still play half your team’s games at C when you are 38. Do you know how many of those nine players managed an OPS+ of 100 or better when they were 38? None. You know how many had an OPS+ of 75 or lower? Five. The best season any of them had was Gregg Zaun last year (OPS+ 97), with the Giants’ own Benito Santiago second at 96. There is no one else in the 90s. Those great catchers I mentioned earlier? Gary Carter hit .218 when he was 38, Carlton Fisk hit .221. Elston Howard, a pretty good player in his day as well, posted an OPS+ of 42 when he was 38.

Do you think Ivan Rodriguez, clearly declining with age, is likely to somehow jump above every player on that list of nine, to become the first player since 1958 to catch half his team’s games while providing league-average offense? The most similar player to Pudge-at-37, according to Baseball-Reference.com, is Ryne Sandberg, a Hall-of-Famer who didn’t have 2288 games squatting behind the plate to slow him down. What did he do at age 38? Whatever it was, it wasn’t playing baseball … Ryno retired.

I sure hope Rodriguez’ defense balances out his offense. Oh, let’s be honest: I sure hope Rodriguez is nowhere near a Giants’ uniform in 2010. The best possible conclusion to this blog post would be that it became irrelevant because Brian Sabean saw the light.

i read the news today, oh boy

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski in Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport:

The market in sports fans is becoming more global. This means that a century-old model of fandom – the man who supports the hometown team he inherited from his father – is collapsing. The new globalized sports fan will happily snub his local domestic league … if you live in the US and like soccer, you are more likely to support Manchester United than your local MLS team, which in any case may be hundreds of miles from your house. …

These people want to see the real thing. Global fans want global leagues. For most of them, that means the NBA, the NFL, or the Premier League. It was therefore wrong to imagine that Beckham could save American soccer by playing for the Galaxy. American soccer is alive and well and lying on the sofa watching Manchester United on the Fox Soccer Channel (177-8).

(I just wanted to add that I wish I’d written that last sentence … it’s a classic, and I betcha the authors knew it when they wrote it. As someone who writes a lot and often has no idea what people will think of the results, I can tell you that once in awhile, you know.)

freddy sanchez

Should Giants fans be happy? Two years, $6 million a year. I’ll leave certain questions for another day (is this market value? how good is Sanchez compared to other possibilities out there?). What I’ll focus on is simple: how good is Sanchez likely to be over the next two seasons?

Sanchez once won a batting title, hitting .344 in ‘06. Since then he has hit .304, .271, and .293. I’d suggest that he is unlikely to hit .300 again … keep in mind in all of this, he will be 32-33 years old, which is when most players are in decline. Of course, if he also got a lot of walks, .293 would be pretty good. You know what the most walks Sanchez has in one season is? 32. Just what the Giants need, another guy who won’t walk. His career OBP is .334, which sadly looks good compared to some of his teammates. If he manages to hit .300 with 32 walks, his OBP will be around .340 … and this is the upside. He doesn’t hit homers (high of 11). He does get doubles, but there, as elsewhere, the trend is unsettling: he led the league in doubles with 53 in 2006, but in the three years since then, he’s had 42, 26 and 29 doubles.

He’s not a great defensive second baseman, although he is not the worst. If you check out his page at Baseball-reference.com, the best match for Sanchez at his age the last two seasons is a 1920s 2B named Cotton Tierney. Like Sanchez, he had a pretty good year when he was 28 years old, then gradually faded. At 32, he was out of baseball; Sanchez will last at least two years longer. Sanchez has been an All-Star the last three seasons, largely because he played for a bad team and every club must have at least one representative.

I see an average 2B, coming off an injury, already in his 30s, whose upside is to continue to be average. Is that worth $12 million?

i read the news today, oh boy

Dave Whelan, chairman of Wigan Athletic:

He is absolutely sacked - we will not tolerate football players who get sent to jail for 18 months.

LeBron James in Maxim, asked who he would dunk on, out of everyone on the planet:

If it doesn’t have to be a basketball player, George W. Bush. I would dunk on his ass, break the rim, and shatter the glass.

do i have a dog in this hunt?

To be honest, I never remember those sayings … dog in the hunt, is that it? Anyway, the World Series begins this week. I’ll be rooting for the Phillies … I’d prefer to have no dog in the hunt so I could just enjoy the games, but … well, I won’t be rooting for the Phils, I’ll be rooting against the Yankees.

The Phillies don’t interest me all that much. My primary attachment to them is that my friend Charlie is a fan, and I hope it works out for him again this year. I actually know more Yankee fans than Philly fans, and so I apologize in advance for not wishing their team well.

It’s not about the money the Yanks spend … I don’t care. But the best team in any sport (speaking historically) is never likable. The only people who should root for the Yankees are people who root for the Yankees. Their fans love their team just like the rest of us do, and more power to them … the Yankee fans I know are all great people. But the rest of us should root against established power. The Yankees have a billion championships; that is reason enough to hate them, if you aren’t already a fan of the team. I don’t hate them the way I hate the Dodgers … if the Yankees had the track record of the Kansas City Royals, I wouldn’t hate them, but no matter what the Dodgers’ history, I hate them. With the Yanks, though, it’s all about rooting against the behemoth.

Having said that, I will add that I hope A-Rod has a stellar Series. This whole “can’t do it in the clutch” bullshit is, well, bullshit. Fans of Barry used to listen to the same thing, until he kicked serious ass in the post-season, after which everyone forgot how sure they were of their accusations of choking. Reggie “Mr. October” Jackson was an average-at-best post-season performer until he hit those famous homeruns in the ‘77 World Series … in fact, in the ALCS prior to that Series, he hit .125 with no extra-base hits. It’s all about the small sample size, folks. Prior to this year’s post-season, A-Rod had proven over the course of over 2000 major-league games that he one of the great hitters of all time. Yet people looked at 39 post-season games and decided they were more indicative of his abilities than the other 2000 games. So it’s nice seeing him poke a stick in the eye of those idiots.

martin tyler

News that isn’t of interest to most of you, about something that won’t happen until next summer. For my money, Martin Tyler is the best English-language soccer play-by-play announcer I’ve ever heard. And now ESPN, who has the English-language U.S. rights for next summer’s World Cup, has announced that they have signed Tyler to be their #1 guy at the big event.

This isn’t a case of Eurosnob-ism … there are some good American announcers, although in my opinion the best of them are color commentators. But Tyler’s better than them, and better than the other U.K. announcers as well. This is great news.

r.i.p. only baseball matters?

I know many of you think my Brian Sabean rants are tiresome, and that I am over the top in my disdain for the job he has done as Giants general manager. But I’m not worthy of being in the same room with John Perricone and his blog, Only Baseball Matters. John combines a love for the Giants, a belief in rational analysis, and a subsequent hatred for Sabean that far surpasses anything I could think of. He’s one of the most entertaining writers on the web, and insightful as well.

But he’s had enough. In his post “Get ready to say goodbye,” he tells us “I’m not gonna waste my time, my energy, and my love for baseball on this collection of fools.” And by “collection of fools” he means “Brian Sabean and anyone who gives Brian Sabean power.” Gonna miss ya, John … but you sure are going out with a bang:

Facts. Like the fact that it’s Brian–fucking–Sabean who decides what player the team should pursue and sign, and the fact that he has pursued and signed the wrong guys time and time again. Or the fact that it’s been Sabean who has made the decision to throw tens of millions of dollars on the fucking ground for this laughable collection of worthless hitters –not to mention the useless dregs we’re still paying to work at 7-11– thereby rendering the team unable to pursue a real hitter once again. Or the fact that this is the same exact excuse we were hearing from Sabean eight fucking years ago when the Giants could’ve landed Vladimir Guerrero. In point of fact, this same exact excuse has been made by the Giants, made by Brian Sabean, year after year; and once again, the local media are knocking Grandma out of the way as they run to the rescue and make sure that we mere mortals, who cannot possibly fathom any of the important and complicated details of the inner workings of a major league team, must remember that it’s NEVER EVER EVER EVER THE FUCKING GENERAL MANAGER’S FAULT!!!!

IT IS!!!!!!! IT IS, IT IS, IT IS, IT IS!!!!!!