You’ve probably seen the end of Tuesday night’s Pirates-Braves game. For the few of you who haven’t, a quick recap: After each team had scored three runs in the first three innings, both teams went scoreless for the next 15. Finally, in the bottom of the ninth nineteenth inning, the game ended after Julio Lugo slid through catcher Michael McKenry’s swipe tag five feet from the plate and umpire Jerry Meals called Lugo safe. In a video posted on mlb.com, you can see the play from three different angles. They all make it look like a tag was applied, though in Jack Moore’s words, it’s more of a “tangent-point tag” than a catcher bear hug. (McKenry used a swipe tag, not blocking the plate. Could that have anything to do with the Buster Posey injury?)

If you squinted, the replay angles were slightly inconclusive — it looked like McKenry got him, but it also looked like it was possible that he missed Lugo by picometers, rather than brushing his glove across his uniform. A few people defended the call: Rob Neyer thought that the ump “might have been right”; Jonah Keri wrote that “he may have been safe”; and Jack Moore mused, “I’m just not so sure it’s as obvious as everybody says it is.” But then, in a postscript, Meals viewed replays of the play and announced, “I was incorrect.” Joe Torre, the Executive Vice President for Operations for MLB, said the same: “The tag was applied and the game should have remained tied.”
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Of the 30 managers in the major leagues today, eight of them never made the major leagues as players (Manny Acta, Terry Collins, Fredi Gonzalez, Jim Leyland, Joe Maddon, Jack McKeon, Mike Quade, and Buck Showalter). That’s a far higher percentage than was the case a decade ago, in 2000, when it was just three of 30 (McKeon, Showalter, and John Boles), or in 1990, when it was five of 26 (Leyland, McKeon, Nick Leyva, John McNamara, and Tom Trebelhorn). Of all of the things that have been affected by the sabermetric revolution — and by the very existence of the book Moneyball — our understanding of managers and the role they play has been shaken but not particularly enhanced. Still, the tide appears to be slowly changing toward greater acceptance of managers who never played in the majors.

When I wrote about Jim Riggleman three weeks ago, some readers disputed my characterization of him as “a mediocre manager” based on his losing record and the fact that most of his teams finished near the bottom of the division. Wins and team place are the two traditional stats used to describe managers, but as many readers pointed out, much like pitcher wins, they aren’t particularly reliable indicators of a manager’s true talent or effect. In the comment thread I supplemented the analysis with stats from Chris Jaffe’s 2010 book Evaluating Baseball’s Managers, in which Jaffe developed a complicated method of trying to evaluate a manager’s effect on his team by measuring how the team and players did in proximate years without him. Jaffe’s metrics upheld the earlier characterization that Riggleman was mediocre. But it’s hard to know exactly how to quantify what a manager does — even as we instinctively understand that what a manager does is important. (Incidentally, Riggleman never played in the majors either.)

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The Marlins have the worst attendance in baseball. In fact, for the sixth straight year, the Florida Marlins have had the worst-attended home games in the National League. That’s an indignity they share with the last team that Jeffrey Loria owned, the Montreal Expos, who were last in the league in attendance for seven straight years from 1998-2004. (Loria sold the Expos and bought the Marlins in 2002.) The Marlins’ home attendance is so bad that the team recently conceded that they have no hopes of filling their stadium at any point for the rest of the year: they’ve closed the upper deck of Sun Life Stadium, for reasons of cosmetics and pride — it will provide “a better ambience,” said a team spokesman. But the real reason is that they don’t want to have to pay security personnel and support staff to cover a part of the stadium that absolutely no one buys tickets for.

In fact, the upper deck had already been closed on weeknights, and was only held open on Fridays and Saturdays, which the club is finally putting a stop to. Instead, the team will just automatically upgrade their upper deck season ticket holders to lower deck seats, and nuts to anyone who wants nosebleeds.
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Don Buddin wasn’t a good player, though he wasn’t a bad one. The former Red Sox shortstop died Thursday, June 30, at the age of 77, an embodiment of an age that no one at Fenway particularly wants to remember. As Dan Shaughnessy wrote in an unexpectedly tender eulogy for him: “Buddin became the poster boy for bad times… And the nasty stuff from the stands sounds louder when there are only 8,000 people in the ballpark.” Boston Globe writer Martin F. Nolan referred to the time as “the empty-seat epoch of Don Buddin.”

Buddin hit .244 over his five full seasons with the Sox: 1956 and 1958-1961. (He missed the 1957 season, spending the year in military service in Korea.) During his years with the team, Buddin held down the starting shortstop position while the team remained lily-white and Pumpsie Green (who would later become the Red Sox’s first African-American player) was kept in the minors. When Buddin remained the team’s starting shortstop on Opening Day in 1959, after Green had hit .400 in spring training, the fans booed. Racist manager Pinky Higgins — who had once said, “There’ll be no n****s on this ballclub as long as I have anything to say about it” — was fired that July, and Green was finally called up to the majors, but he was just used as a utility infielder. Higgins was rehired in 1960, and Green never received more than 260 at-bats in a season in his career. At the time of Green’s callup in 1959, the Boston Globe wrote, “Pumpsie Green can only hope he is given as much opportunity to prove himself as Don Buddin.” Needless to say, he wasn’t.
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When Jim Riggleman fired himself last week after winning 11 of his last 12 games with the Nationals, it was weird at first and only got weirder the more you thought about it. Jim Riggleman isn’t a great manager. His career record is 662-824. As Tom Boswell has written, he has “the worst record in baseball history of any 12-year manager.” Some analysts suggested that Riggleman didn’t want to resign, he just wanted to bluff Mike Rizzo into picking up his option year. But Jim Riggleman is a mediocre manager of bad baseball teams. He is not a man with a great deal of leverage: he is a beggar who thought he was a chooser. And unless another team boss makes a decision as foolish as Riggleman’s, he will never manage in the major leagues again.

According to GM Mike Rizzo, Riggleman gave an ultimatum: if he wasn’t given an extension before the team left for Chicago, he wasn’t getting on the bus. When Riggleman didn’t get his extension, he explained to reporters that the reason he quit was that his one-year contract was intolerable, and “I’m too old to be disrespected.” Riggleman’s hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, spent the next several days trying to come up with an explanation for why he did what he did. They couldn’t. Dave Sheinin and Adam Kilgore quoted an unnamed acquaintance of Riggleman’s as saying, “I can’t think of a single way in which Jim’s life is going to be better because of this… And I can think of a hundred ways it will be worse.”
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On Monday, John Maine left the Triple-A Colorado Springs Sky Sox, after posting a 7.43 ERA in 46 innings. Technically, he’s trying to come back from a 2010 shoulder surgery which was intended to deal with a shoulder problem that dated back to at least 2008, when they found a bone spur. But Maine has been injured for most of the last three years. In his career, he has never pitched 200 innings, and only once pitched more than 140 — his first and only full season in the majors, 2007 with the Mets, when he won 15 games with a FIP of 4.18 in 191 innings. Since then, he has been placed on the DL three times for injuries to his rotator cuff and shoulder, and had shoulder surgery in 2008 and again in 2010. He is considering retirement. But even if he decides to continue his comeback attempt, it is likely that the bulk of his major league career is behind him.

At his peak, Maine had a fastball that touched 95 miles an hour, which he supplemented with a changeup and slider that were approximately eight miles slower, the same velocity but different spin. It was perhaps ironic that he was swapped for Kris Benson, because they were somewhat similar pitchers: 6’4″ right-handers who threw over the top, fastball-slider pitchers who worked in the low- to mid-90s, and who saw their careers derailed by injury.
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“I wanna make a deal with you girl
and get it signed by the heads of state.
I wanna make a deal with you girl.
Be recognized round the world.
Well, it’s my nonalignment pact.”
— Pere Ubu, “Non-Alignment Pact”

By now, we’ve all had nearly a week to digest Buster Olney’s weekend revelations about baseball’s possible realignment plans: baseball is very likely to move a team from the National League to the American League so that each division will have an equal number of teams, and it’s also considering doing away with divisions altogether. Dave Allen believes the plan could actually lead to more competitive races, not fewer, even though the six division pennant races would be replaced by two leaguewide pennant races with four effective “wild cards.”

Dave Cameron wrote that eliminating divisions is fundamentally an act of fairness, and he endorses it for that reason. This morning, I spoke to Yahoo! sports columnist Jeff Passan, who wrote a column a year ago proposing “unalignment” for baseball, the first comprehensive treatment of the notion of getting rid of baseball’s divisions. He claims no credit for Major League Baseball considering a similar plan, but he still fiercely defends the proposal.
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Baseball culture has been changing a great deal recently, particularly when it comes to valid reasons for players to miss playing time. Way back in the old days, teams used to go shorthanded a lot more often than they do now. As Bill James recently wrote, “When a player has a minor injury now, we move him to the minors and let him get healthy before we put him back in the lineup. Thirty years ago players would sit out a week — on the active roster — then play their way back into shape at the major league level.” As specialization increased, and each team began to carry six or seven relievers, teams simply couldn’t afford to lose a player for that length of time. In 2002, the only way a player could leave his team without leaving them a man short was to go on the 15-day or 60-day disabled list. Anything short of being disabled — including a concussion, a childbirth, or a death in the family — and the team would have to play with a 24-man roster. Players were forced to make a difficult choice — essentially, they had to chose between doing the best thing for their families or the best thing for their teammates.

Times have changed. In 2003, MLB instituted the “bereavement list.” Now also known as the “Family Medical Emergency List,” it allows players to take time off for family emergencies, including the death of a relative. And in 2011, MLB instituted both the seven-day DL for concussions and the “paternity leave list,” which allows players to leave their teams for the birth of a child. Colby Lewis was the first person to use the list to attend the birth of his child in mid-April, and seven more players have made use of it since then: Grant Balfour, David Purcey, Ian Desmond, Kurt Suzuki, Jason Bay, Ross Gload and most recently Ian Kinsler. For the most part, the paternity leave list has gone off without a hitch. It’s hardly controversial for a father to want to witness the birth of his child. Right?
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Over the past week and a half, the reaction to Buster Posey’s season-ending injury produced a lot of sanctimony, as pundits have gone back and forth between deploring that one of baseball’s brightest young stars would miss the year, and deploring the hypocrisy that previous catcher injuries have not brought about debate about a rules chance. Amidst all the blather and debate about rules, though, Billy Beane’s Athletics have suggested a team-oriented way forward. Beane effectively ordered his catcher, Kurt Suzuki, to avoid injury:

I said to him, “I don’t want you planting yourself in front of the plate waiting to get creamed. You’re an Athletic catcher — be athletic. … I don’t want to lose you for six months.”

To me, this seemed like a remarkable public admission: I can’t remember another baseball executive telling the press that he instructed a player to try to prioritize avoiding injury. In a blog post yesterday, Buster Olney suggested that the greatest impact of Beane’s move may the fact that he’s providing public cover to Suzuki. Suzuki publicly agreed with the plan and described his future approach to plays at the plate in strategic terms, as he explained to the San Jose Mercury-News: “If I have a feeling it’s going to be a bang-bang play, and I’m putting myself in a vulnerable position, I’m not going to stand in front of [the runner]… If I think he’s going to slide, then I’ll take my chances.” Now that Beane has gone to the press, more players will be able to save face in baseball’s macho culture while avoiding injury, making it seem like sound baseball strategy rather than selfishness or cowardice — more like Rogers Hornsby and less like Roger Dorn.
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New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon has had a hell of a week. First, he gave two eye-raising interviews that appeared in the last few days (both are dated to print magazines that will appear on May 30): one with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin and one with Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci. The Toobin interview painted Wilpon as a kind, trusting, earthy guy who got suckered by Bernie Madoff and dearly loved baseball, yet who wasn’t above criticizing his own players, calling himself a “schmuck” for overpaying Carlos Beltran, or telling former GM Omar Minaya he was “full of shit.” Then, just today, he announced that he was selling a $200 million stake in the team to David Einhorn, a hedge fund manager.

The Toobin interview had more colorful language, but Sports Illustrated had the real bombshells: Wilpon admitted that the Mets could lose up to $70 million this year and that the team will likely be shedding a lot of salary, with $64 million coming off the books this offseason. Writes Verducci: “They will not put much, if any, of that money back into the major league payroll.” When Wilpon’s comments came to light, as the New York Daily News reported, Mets manager Terry Collins tried to clear the air with the team: “Don’t get (bleeping) distracted. We’ve got to (bleeping) focus on winning (bleeping) games.”
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