“Brendan Donnelly is hanging up his goggles,” to borrow Tim Dierkes’ memorable phrase. The old man of Anaheim had an amazing career, pitching 10 seasons in the minors before ever getting a shot at the majors, debuting on the World Champion 2002 Angels, and pitching a total of nine seasons in The Show, including an All-Star appearance in 2003.

We don’t talk a lot about pitcher wins here, but his record is remarkable: in his career as a reliever, he went 32-10, and his .762 winning percentage is second of all time among pitchers with at least 40 decisions. He’s the eighth-winningest pitcher ever born in Washington, DC, and he’s one of only seven All-Star pitchers ever to debut after turning 30 in the minor leagues.*
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When you think of the Braves, you think of old guys. The Braves have had remarkable continuity over the past two decades: even the biggest departures, from John Smoltz to Tom Glavine to John Schuerholz to Bobby Cox, have remained or returned to the fold with the team. (Schuerholz is team president, Cox is a consultant, Glavine is a special assistant to the president, and Smoltz is a color commentator.) All four first joined the team more than 20 years ago — as did Chipper Jones, drafted in 1990 by GM Bobby Cox. And the new manager, Fredi Gonzalez, was hired precisely because he didn’t think too far outside the box. As Jones explained, “The way I see it, we just got a younger version of Bobby.”

But the Braves are a young team in an old team’s image. The faces of the franchise are two 21 year olds on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The names on the lockers have changed, but this is still a team built around young pitching and young talent up the middle. With the injuries on the Cardinals pitching staff, it might be the second-best team in the league. But is that good enough?
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Two days ago, Major League Baseball announced that it had hired John Thorn, an author and member of the Society for American Baseball Research, as its official historian. The position had been vacant since the 2008 death of Jerome Holtzman, the longtime Chicago sportswriter who invented the save stat. Thorn is a great choice: a historian who combines a sense of humor with a love for the game’s minutiae, his hiring is probably the best thing to come out of MLB’s press office all winter. But his hiring is good news for another reason: unlike Bud Selig, he doesn’t believe Abner Doubleday invented baseball.
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Once again, our elected representatives have decided there’s something rotten in Major League Baseball, and they want to do something about it. On February 15, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) wrote an open letter to Bud Selig and MLBPA head Michael Weiner calling for a ban on chewing tobacco:

The use of smokeless tobacco by baseball players undermines the positive image of the sport and sends a dangerous message to young fans, who may be influenced by the players they look up to as role models.

The Senators noted that smokeless tobacco (or “spit tobacco,” as crusader Joe Garagiola, Sr. prefers to call it) has been banned in the minors since 1993, and called for a ban to be inserted into the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, before the current one expires in December. Their call for prohibition comes shortly after Tony Gwynn‘s cancer diagnosis and Stephen Strasburg’s resolution to quit dipping, which inspired Craig Calcaterra to issue a declare his wish that it be banned. (Could it be that Dick Durbin reads HardballTalk?)

But Durbin and Lautenberg would need players who are voluntarily willing to agree, for the first time ever, to ban a substance that is neither illegal nor a performance-enhancer. And they may find that more difficult than they imagine, even among players whom tobacco has hurt the most. After having been a heavy tobacco chewer in his early career, Brett Butler was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1996. “I probably went through a can every 2 or 3 days,” he told me. “I was getting it straight from the factory when I got to the majors.” He has been outspoken about the possible harms of chewing tobacco, but he has no sympathy for a ban. “I’ve used it as a platform to promote not using chewing tobacco,” he says. “But at the major league level I think we should be free to do what we want.”
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Today, Gary Sheffield retired. Following Andy Pettitte’s retirement earlier this offseason, that makes two players on the Hall of Fame bubble who were named in the Mitchell Report and admitted to using Performance-Enhancing Drugs — “the cream” in Sheffield’s case, and Human Growth Hormone in Pettitte’s case. Shortly after Sheffield’s announcement, Dave Cameron argued that his drug admission will keep him out of Cooperstown, writing that his stats are fine, but they’re not very different from a number of his peers in the era, and when you combine that with the drug use, “It is hard to see Sheffield gettting elected.” Dave may be right, but Bill James has argued precisely the opposite: “It is my opinion that, in time, the use of steroids or other Performance Enhancing Drugs will mean virtually nothing in the debate about who gets into the Hall of Fame and who does not.” It’s hard to know exactly how voters will regard drug use in the future, because we really don’t have any rational standard for how to deal with players who have used Performance-Enhancing Drugs. We need a working standard. Fortunately, a couple of pitchers from the 19th century give us a good place to start.

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What’s the hottest current sports business model? At least for the moment, a few days after the Super Bowl, the Green Bay Packers’ nonprofit public ownership is looking a whole lot sexier than the traditional model of for-profit private ownership, especially when those owners aren’t exactly model. While Green Bay’s owners — Packer fans who bought shares in the team, an arrangement that goes back to 1923 — just won a Super Bowl last week, the Mets’ shoddy ownership has been perhaps the biggest story of the offseason. It’s hard to know exactly how much money the Wilpons have lost, but between the team’s debt and the allegations of Madoff-related malfeasance, some or all of the team is going to need to be sold.

A few days ago, Forbes’s Mike Ozanian noted that the aggregate book value of the Mets franchise is -$225 million: with $375 million in debt associated with the team and $695 million in debt associated with Citi Field, the franchise has $225 million more debt than assets. So while the Wilpons are trying to sell a piece of the team just to dig themselves out from under their Madoff-related mess, the team is in a pretty dire need for dough. What if they went public?
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Spring training starts soon, and the Florida Grapefruit League is in trouble. Half the major league teams play in the Arizona Cactus League, many of whose cities are far from Arizona — though it has long been a West Coast-centric spring training league, the Cincinnati Reds moved their facilities out of Florida in 2010, and now all of the Illinois and Ohio teams are based in Arizona rather than Florida. The head of the Florida Sports Foundation, Larry Pendleton, is lobbying Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, to do whatever he can to convince teams to stay in Florida, but Pendleton must realize that the odds are against him. It’s easy to see why.

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“I suggest this article is so bad that you should not only be fired but live-sacrificed on an altar to a pagan god of pestilence and your remains fed to gremlins.”

— bc, in response to my 12/30 article, “NHL Winter Classic: I’m Glad Selig Didn’t Think of That”

“Alex, your sabermetrical analysis continues to amaze me. Keep up the good job of destroying FanGraphs with this political bullshit.”

— Part-Time Pariah, in response to my 4/30 article, “Should You Boycott the Diamondbacks?”

If there’s a way to win a popularity contest by writing about baseball online, I haven’t figured it out. In fairness to the collective wisdom of the Fangraphs community, many of the lumps I take are at least somewhat justified — the harshest language is usually reserved for when I speak from ignorance or err in a statement of fact — but few of the insults are quite as well-thought out as bc’s gem, which remains my favorite burn that I’ve ever received. Other commenters don’t seem to really care whether the piece is good or not, and are simply opposed to the simple fact that my columns aren’t statistics-based, like the above from Part-Time Pariah.

Obviously, my experience isn’t particularly unique. Everyone knows that anonymity can bring out the worst in people online, and the longer a comment thread, the more likely it is to fall prey to Godwin’s Law or descend into a morass of personal attacks. Yet despite all that, there is an internal logic to comment threads, whether it’s in the wilderness of unmoderated message boards or a smart blog with smart readers like Fangraphs. The issue came to the fore recently, when Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman wrote a piece about confronting a few of his online attackers and discovering that they were much more reasonable on the phone than on their Twitter feed. But one of them responded with his side of the story, indicating that Pearlman had somewhat distorted the facts — they hadn’t tweeted @jeffpearlman, they just wrote about him; instead, he had gone after them, confronting them by phone even though they hadn’t directly contacted him.

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Sports reporters are frequently criticized. But I don’t think their job is well understood. The media is often blamed for many of the ills in society, from the ever-expanding celebrity culture to the increasing loss of civility in the public sphere, to the preponderance of incorrect or misunderstood stories in the news. They often deserve that criticism. But I think they’re held to an unreasonable standard, because, in my view, sports reporters have a nearly impossible job. So, today, I’d like to try to define what sports journalism is, what it is not, and what it should be.

Why is it nearly impossible? Sports reporters are expected to report on the private business strategy of a monopoly corporation: this requires that they maintain a good enough relationship with the corporation that their access is not revoked, while maintaining both access and credibility. While political reporters have recourse to the legal system and the Freedom of Information Act if government officials decide to stonewall the media, sports reporters have no such luxury. And employees of the corporation, from executives to athletes, are instructed to say nothing of substance on the record. (Except for Ozzie Guillen.) Much of what we know about the inner life of the clubhouse and the front office comes from officially sanctioned leaking, anonymous sources, and tabloid and checkbook journalism from sites like Deadspin.

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There has been a small flurry of retirement announcements recently, with Kris Benson and Trevor Hoffman announcing their retirements this week. Billy Wagner already announced that 2010 was his last year, and Andy Pettitte just admitted that he wouldn’t be suited up for the beginning of the year, at least, though he wasn’t certain about the rest of the season. With their retirements in mind, as well as the work of Tom Tango and others on the current and increasing Hall of Fame logjam, I started to wonder how many good players tend to retire in any given year.

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