The Twitterverse was aflutter Tuesday with mention of ESPN news editor Barry Stanton’s Hall of Fame ballot. Stanton did not vote for either of the eventual inductees, and he was the only ESPN voter not to select Roberto Alomar, but he wasn’t entirely stingy with his ballot. He voted for five players: Jack Morris, Edgar Martinez, Tino Martinez, Don Mattingly, and B.J. Surhoff. While the individual picks may be hard to understand at first blush, his vote for Edgar Martinez is hard for a Fangraphs blogger to complain about, and it made me want to play devil’s advocate and justify the other players on the ballot.

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On New Year’s Day, the National Hockey League will play its annual Winter Classic — that’s the one day a year that NHL hockey is played outside, on a rink in a football stadium that’s constructed in a couple of weeks and used precisely once. I was in Pittsburgh for Christmas, and went to Heinz Field to see the Steelers-Panthers game, and got to see the practice rink that was built just outside the stadium; following that game, the gridiron turf would be covered by ice.

I’m not hugely opposed to two-sport arenas — the cookie-cutter baseball-football stadia of the ’70s may have been ugly, but they were serviceable, and terrific baseball was played in them. But I’m glad that baseball hasn’t gotten into trying to build a stadium that has to be demolished a week later. The Winter Classic is a fine idea, and it has proven a ratings boon, but one has to mention: isn’t it gigantically wasteful to build a huge hockey rink that, simply by virtue of its being on a football field, can only be used once?

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No surprise: player salaries are going up. But they’re not going up by much. This week, we learned that baseball’s average salary cleared $3 million for the very first time, and the minimum salary rose to $414,000. Craig Calcaterra noticed a helpful AP breakdown of the minimum and average salaries over the past 40 years. Craig’s main takeaway is that salaries have risen a lot over the past four decades, and that’s true. But an interesting trend emerges in the data: their climb has significantly slowed. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fun fact. In baseball history, there have been exactly twenty-five nine-figure deals — twenty-five contracts for $100,000,000 or more. Four of them have gone to free agent pitchers. Position players have received the other 21, and of those 21 contracts, 11 have been contract extensions, and just 10 have been free agent contracts. (Of the top five contracts in baseball history — Alex Rodriguez, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Joe Mauer, and Mark Teixeira — four three were extensions.)

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Baseball has historic rivalries outside the New York-Boston corridor, though you wouldn’t exactly know it from SportsCenter. If you’re in California, you know that Giants and Dodgers fans still hate each other, a half-century after the teams left New York, even if the commute from NoCal to SoCal takes a bit longer than the old crosstown subway. And if you’re in the Midwest, you know that there’s no love lost between the Cubs and Cardinals. But it’s easy to miss that genuine disgust if you live outside those media markets, particularly since those rivalries can feel a little tame compared to those two AL East squads who combine every year to spend more than $300 million. Fortunately, Ryan Theriot has taken it upon himself to reinject a little genuine venom.

“I’m finally on the right side of the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry,” Theriot said on the radio. And many Cubs fans couldn’t wait to tweak their former hometown hero. “He’s full of the false hustle and overrated grittiness that you seem to hold so dear in your baseballers,” Andy wrote in an open letter to Cardinals fans on Desipio.com. “He’s on the right side alright. Yours.” Another Cubs blog, Tales from Aisle 424, published a post titled “Theriot’s Best Skill is Pandering,” and said, “I’m glad he turned on the anti-Cub sentiment so quickly because I no longer have to dread the standing ovations the guy would have inevitably received every time he stepped out of the Cardinals dugout.”

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For the past several years, Bud Selig has been a guest lecturer in Marquette Law School’s 7303 course, “Professional Sports Law.” His daughter (and successor as owner of the Brewers) Wendy Selig-Prieb, was a 1988 graduate of the law school. On Tuesday, the school announced that Selig was formally joining the school as adjunct faculty.

As it turns out, Commissioner Selig has an even deeper connection to Marquette: Kennesaw Mountain Landis lectured there in 1909, when he was a federal district court judge in Chicago, long before he became baseball’s first commissioner in 1921. Marquette law professor J. Gordon Hylton did a little digging and discovered that Landis’s lecture was entitled “Public Criticism of the Judiciary,” in which he used the example of baseball to defend the right of individuals to criticize judges:

Adverse criticism — denunciation that is unjust can permanently injure nothing or nobody. And as a rule its impotency increases with its bitterness. But very great injury can be done even a virtuous cause by an attempt to forbid inquiry into it or comment upon it… I have been going to baseball games for thirty years. I never saw a game or heard of one where somebody did not call the umpire a robber or a thief, and yet no intelligent man doubts the integrity of baseball.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about Bud Selig’s proposal to add two wild card teams; in the interim, that proposal has all but become a certainty. “Expanded playoffs appear inevitable” is the Yahoo headline for the Associated Press story. And, of course, it makes sense why it would be inevitable: Selig and the owners believe that more playoff teams means more money, and players and teams have little incentive to resist a plan that gives them more of a shot at the postseason. Two more facets of the plan from two weeks ago seem more likely: the new wild cards will first appear in 2012, not 2011, and they will probably play a best-of-three series rather than a one-game playoff.

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Yesterday, Major League Baseball announced that Derek Jeter just won his fifth Gold Glove at the age of 36. Many people greeted this news with a grin or an eye-roll; Aaron Gleeman pretended to be incredulous that Jeter was “denied a National League Gold Glove award,” while baseball-reference.com briefly posted a comment that said “We can’t believe it either.”

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The baseball season is too long. Emotionally, I wish the season were year-round, but intellectually, I have a real problem with major leaguers continuing to play in November. (That’s partly because I’m a purist, and partly because, as I wrote on my old blog, I’d rather that November be reserved for the occasional World Baseball Classic.) So I’m completely unsympathetic to Bud Selig’s suggestion that baseball add two additional wild card teams in 2012.

Under this proposal, each league would have three divisional champs and two wild cards; the two wild card teams would play each other in a one-game playoff or best-of-three series, for the right to advance further in the postseason. The other six playoff teams would presumably simply take that half-week off, making the playoffs even longer, and reversing baseball’s previous efforts to ensure that the 2011 playoffs would not spill over into November.

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Within a few days of their seemingly invincible teams getting bounced from the playoffs, Placido Polanco and C.C. Sabathia announced they’d undergo near-immediate surgery, Sabathia on his knee and Polanco on his elbow. “[It] nagged me all year,” said Sabathia of the pain in his right knee. Of Polanco, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “It was the middle of August, between his third and fourth cortisone injections, when Placido Polanco first acknowledged he’d probably need surgery on his left elbow following the season.”

Baseball players are taught to minimize pain, while castigated for hiding an injury. Ultimately, this philosophy isn’t particularly good for the players’ health, and it isn’t good for the team, either, when a player playing hurt botches a play. The logical tension may not be quite as stark as Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker James Harrison’s telling recent admission, “I don’t want to injure anybody… I try to hurt people,” but it’s a similar attempt to create a bright line out of a grey area. What’s worse, an article in yesterday’s New York Times reviews a study in the medical journal The Lancet that suggests that cortisone may actually have deleterious long-term health effects. (According to the study, “Corticosteroid injections reduced pain in the short term compared with other interventions, but this effect was reversed at intermediate and long terms.”) So Polanco may be paying for his four cortisone shots well down the line.

There are two issues to consider with pain and injury, then: the long-term health consequences, and the short-term game consequences. Will Carroll’s efforts notwithstanding, player health is still one of the less-understood areas of baseball analysis. We have an imperfect understanding both of the causes of injury and of the effects of playing through pain and injury. Players are lauded for playing through pain — Sabathia and Polanco had fine seasons, despite Sabathia’s carrying his 300-pound frame on an injured knee all year, and Polanco playing with bone fragments and chronic tendon damage in his elbow — but we don’t really know what the long-term consequences of playing through injury will be. (Alan Schwarz has done admirable work examining the effects of concussions, but that’s only one of many types of injuries that baseball players are likely to receive in the course of the job.) Because Sabathia is younger and is signed to a longer contract, the Yankees have a greater incentive to protect their investment than do the Phillies. But neither team has any financial incentive to worry about their player’s health beyond the length of their contract: it’s in their interest to patch the players up and get the maximum utility of them for the duration and no longer.

The short-term game consequences may be a more persuasive reason for the teams to take their players’ injuries more seriously. Sabathia obviously didn’t pitch well during the playoffs, allowing 11 runs in 16 innings, and going six innings or fewer in each of his three playoff starts — that, despite having gone more than six innings in 26 of his 34 starts this year. So, with the usual caveats about small sample size, it seems plausible that the injury that nagged him all year may have affected his stamina and effectiveness in the playoffs. Likewise, Polanco’s 6-for-29 in the LDS and LCS may suggest that he was playing at appreciably less than 100 percent. The Phillies have him under contract until 2012, so they have to weigh their need to win now — especially in the playoffs, when the end of the season is always perilously close — with their needs to keep him healthy for the next two years. Obviously, neither Sabathia nor Polanco was the biggest reason the Phillies and Yankees lost. Still, it’s easy in hindsight to say, if they were going to lose anyway, they might as well have benched them. That’s a facile conclusion, but the premise is inarguable: the players were playing through chronic pain, they played poorly, and the teams lost.

Obviously, what we need most of all is a better understanding of health and pain. Clubhouses would benefit from encouraging players not to ignore pain but to acknowledge it, and openly and honestly assess whether they’ll play better tomorrow if they sit today. There’s no way to play a completely pain-free 162 games of baseball, but there are ways to make the pain more manageable. The first thing that needs to be done is to acknowledge the realities and consequences of that pain. Only then can teams make informed and educated decisions about their players’ health.