The Atlanta Braves released Melky Cabrera two days ago, after he had finished the season as the worst player in baseball, with -1.2 WAR. Among players who played enough to qualify, he was one of six with negative WAR this year, along with Carlos Lee (-0.8), Adam Lind (-0.3), Cesar Izturis (-0.3), Skip Schumaker (-0.2), and Johnny Gomes (-0.1). That’s about standard: there were five players with a negative WAR in 2009, seven in 2008, seven in 2007, and seven in 2006. Only one player had a negative WAR in more than one year, Jermaine Dye, whose lead glove produced -0.4 WAR in 2009 and -0.8 WAR in 2007.

Otherwise, though, appearances on the negative WAR list tend to be brief rather than protracted — though you still don’t hear the phrase “replacement player” escape Jon Miller’s lips very often, very few players can hang on in the majors when they’re performing below replacement level. Most of the players at the bottom of the barrel are fringy guys who tend to be around zero, give or take a win, like Mark Teahen, Jeff Francoeur and pre-2010 Delmon Young, but some of the players on the list are surprising: baseball’s second-worst position player in 2009 was its 17th-best position player in 2010, Aubrey Huff. Baseball’s second-worst position player in 2007 (above only Dye) was 23rd-best in 2009, Jason Bay.

Though there are usually a handful of position players with a negative WAR in any given year, that isn’t always the case with pitchers. This year, there wasn’t a single one, and from 2006-2009, there were only six total. (There weren’t any Jason Bays in the bunch, either. The “best” pitcher in the bunch is Jason Marquis, who posted a -0.7 WAR in 2006, then received a $21 million contract two months after the season ended, but that may have been more a reflection of Jim Hendry’s spending priorities than Marquis’s star power.)

Having a negative WAR, of course, can be a leading indicator of the end to come. Of the fourteen position players with a negative WAR in 2006 and 2007, six were out of the majors in 2010: Jermaine Dye, Ray Durham, Craig Biggio, Angel Berroa, Preston Wilson, and Shawn Green. And Jason Kendall’s career surely isn’t long for the world. We can do a similar analysis of the 18 players with a negative WAR from 2008-2010, and predict that within the next four years we’ll see the disappearances of Garret Anderson, Jose Guillen, and Carlos Lee, and very possibly Yuniesky Betancourt, Emilio Bonifacio, and Melky Cabrera himself.

Replacement level is an awfully low bar to clear, and being the worst player in baseball is not something that is easy to recover from. Whether or not WAR is a mainstream stat, the underlying truth that it measures is plainly reflected by the careers of the players who post a negative WAR. If Melky can’t clean up his act in a hurry, he’ll soon be out of baseball.

We don’t often write about broadcasters on this site. The men and women who put the action into words are the ones who provide the first storyline for a game, and at their best they blend observation with insight, allowing the best moments to tell themselves. Of course, they’re usually terrible, and it’s a long, long way down from Vin Scully to Chip Caray. It’s a hard job to try to tell the game as a story that’s equally meaningful to every listener, because the baseball audience is so split between fans who really only understand the game through the lens of back-of-the-card stats like wins and RBI, and fans who hear the word “run producer” like nails against a chalkboard. And playoff baseball frequently brings out the worst commentators, usually multisport announcers who don’t have any familiarity with the teams they’re calling, and so try to mask their ignorance with lame humor or a moral high hand. As John Collins writes at Neon Tommy, “This is the time of year when baseball broadcasts should be at their best, yet the national broadcasters who get dropped in the booth make sure the coverage is at its full-blown worst.”

Back in February, Jon Sciambi, one of the better broadcasters, wrote a great piece for Baseball Prospectus about how broadcasters can bridge the gap, but it’s clear that we’re not there yet. Last fall, TBS took a ton of flack for the miscues of the gaffe-prone Chip Caray (“Line drive base hit… CAUGHT!“), and so they fired him and replaced him this year, first with regular TNT basketball analyst Ernie Johnson, Jr., and then with the aggressively bland Dick Stockton. (Like Caray, Johnson is the son of a longtime Atlanta Braves announcer, and both have called Braves games this year. Newsday’s Neil Best correctly judged Johnson an upgrade over Caray.) Their ratings have dipped nonetheless, as my colleague Maury Brown predicted back in September.

Bill Simmons has written about the terrible state and haphazard selection of announcing teams in basketball and football; he’s been complaining for a decade, but the situation has hardly improved. The problem seems to be that networks few their broadcasting teams and studio analysts as a calling card, a sort of equivalent to “the best political team on television,” when, for the most part, they’re just furniture. The New York Daily News’ Bob Raissman tactfully refers to the TBS studio analysts as “The Valley of the Stupid Gasbags.” Especially during the playoffs, when TBS and Fox are the only show in town, and even mlb.tv is only available to viewers outside the US and Canada, there’s just no choice involved in the matter.

(I ponied up for mlb.tv’s $9.95 supplemental coverage, which allows you to view the play from different angles. But it isn’t an edited television feed, it’s just the raw feeds from the various cameras. So you can’t actually watch the action of the game and see where the ball is hit. It’s kind of cool, but also incredibly disappointing — especially if, hypothetically, you’re at work during a playoff afternoon game and trying to watch it from your computer, like the World Cup or March Madness. Hypothetically.)

TBS didn’t exactly learn the wrong lesson from the Chip Caray debacle: Caray is excitable and loud and frequently yelps before thinking, which lends itself to verbal snafus. He has never been able to enhance the moment. Stockton is boring, but at least not deleteriously so. His old-school tendencies were on full display during the Braves-Giants series, when he failed to make note of Paul Emmel’s blown call on Buster Posey, and repeatedly pronounced the word “error” as “erra,” as though he were a 19th-century Brooklynite. But he has called a decent game. As Matthew Coller wrote at The Biz of Baseball:

TBS’s baseball coverage hasn’t been terrible by any stretch, it’s been exactly what we expected. It’s been regular old vanilla baseball, and minus the yellow jackets (except Craig Sager) we could have seen similar coverage in 1981. That’s how baseball is, I suppose. But, when the YES network and almost every affiliate has super slow-motion cameras, when every team has professional baseball sideline reporters and when MLB Network features more exciting analysts, we are left to wonder: Is this all as MLB on TBS will ever be?

Since Major League Baseball is committed to selling postseason games as a block to a network, we won’t see an end any time soon to the problem of national broadcasters calling local playoff games. Until we at Fangraphs can identify more rigorous metrics to determine who the best and worst broadcasters are, we’ll have to trust our own ears. And plug them whenever Tim McCarver starts to speak.

“Twice in the past decade, I have really tried to find evidence that say that steroids matter in baseball. And both times I invested a lot of effort, and ended up finding no evidence that steroids mattered.” — Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics

Since the publication of Freakonomics in 2005, the book has become something of a franchise for co-authors Stephen Dubner and Arthur Steven Levitt: it led to a sequel (SuperFreakonomics), a New York Times blog, a podcast, a regular segment on NPR, and a just-released documentary film. Not bad for popular nonfiction.

On Tuesday, they trained their eyes on the so-called “Year of the Pitcher,” the 2010 season which has seen a significant decline in scoring and increase in no-hitters, and asked the question: is the steroid ban responsible? Twenty-four minutes later, and after interviewing Levitt, Mitchel Lichtman, Doug Glanville, and Padre manager Bud Black, Dubner concludes that… well, it’s hard to say, really, but maybe it has something to do with defense. That’s the same conclusion drawn on their blog by Hayes Davenport (a Comedy Central writer, on staff at Will Ferrell’s “Big Lake”). The 24-minute podcast was shrunk to a six-minute segment on NPR’s syndicated Marketplace program, alongside stories about the Nobel Prize in Economics and safety guidelines for the Boeing 787.

The research presented isn’t particularly eye-opening… but then, it’s being presented on NPR. This may have been the Year of the Pitcher, but in many ways it’s also been the year of the mainstreaming of advanced statistics. Fangraphs is on ESPN! Bill Simmons is a stat nerd! Dave Cameron is King of All Media! The kind of conversations taking place here, and at Insidethebook and Billjamesonline and Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus and Athletics Nation and all the other pioneering stat sites, are expanding to latte-drinking radio listeners and Will Ferrell fans. Sabermetrics was a tiny subculture for so long that it can be hard to adjust to the fact that what used to be the bleeding edge is now the mainstream.

Welcome to the mainstream, fellow nerds!

Last night was Cito Gaston’s last home game in Toronto, after nearly three decades with the organization. Today, Dusty Baker — Gaston’s teammate with the 1975 Braves, and a fellow protege of Henry Aaron — reportedly agreed to a three-year contract extension with the Cincinnati Reds. The 61-year-old Baker and 66-year-old Gaston are, respectively, the first- and third-winningest African-American managers in baseball’s history, with 2293 wins, three pennants, and two World Championships between them. And yet, in the 35 years since Frank Robinson was named the first African-American manager in Major League Baseball’s history, they’re two of the only African-Americans ever to sit in the manager’s chair.

It is probably not a coincidence that two of the most successful African-American managers ever were both teammates of Henry Aaron’s, and both men have consistently credited Henry Aaron as a mentor. It’s also not a coincidence that both men are in their 60s, and no other active African-American managers are even close to their win total. The second-winningest African-American manager is Frank Robinson himself, a contemporary of Aaron’s. According to a list compiled earlier this year by Gary Norris Gray of the Black Athlete Sports Network, there have been 14 African-American managers in the past 40 years. It’s not a perfect list — he mistakenly put Jerry Manuel in his list of Latino and Hispanic managers, for example — but it’s reasonably comprehensive: Don Baylor, Cecil Cooper, Larry Doby, Davey Lopes (who is descended from Cape Verde, an island off the coast of West Africa), Hal McRae, Lloyd McClendon, Willie Randolph, Jerry Royster, Ron Washington, Maury Wills, Manuel, Robinson, Gaston, and Baker. Of those 14, only 11 ever managed a full season — Royster, Doby, and Wills were midseason replacements who were canned before they ever got a chance to manage their 162nd game — and just nine ever won as many as 200 games, a total reached by 250 other managers in history.

Gaston remains the only African-American manager ever to win a World Series. And yet he had to wait more than a decade, from 1997 to 2008, to be given another managing job — of the 22 managers who have won multiple World Series, he’s the only one that has happened to, with the exception of two former player-managers more than 70 years ago (Bill Carrigan and Billy Southworth). He recently raised eyebrows by comparing himself to Tony La Russa, because they both have two World Series rings, but it probably goes without saying: Tony La Russa wouldn’t have had to wait a decade for another managing job. Gaston isn’t that good, but you can’t win two World Series completely by accident, either. His visibility may have been hurt by all those years he spent in Canada, but that seems like an insufficient explanation for his unprecedented decade in the wilderness. (Interestingly, Frank Robinson had a similar layoff between managerial posts, between his 1991 Baltimore Orioles and 2002 Montreal Expos.)

There are four African-American managers in baseball right now: Washington (58 years old), Manuel (56), Baker (61), and Gaston (66). Gaston is retiring, and Manuel is likely on the chopping block. There are no young African-American managers in baseball, and few active players who are seen as likely managers when they retire. (An exception is Terry Pendleton, who is a strong internal candidate to replace the retiring Bobby Cox. Pendleton is currently Bobby Cox’s hitting coach, as Gaston once was.) Major League Baseball has long acknowledged its desire to improve baseball’s appeal to young African-American players with its RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) program, but it hasn’t done much of anything to improve its own track record with regard to the front office.

It’s been 35 years since Frank Robinson integrated baseball’s managerial fraternity, and still too little progress has been made. The departure of one of the most successful black managers ever only highlights just how much work is yet to be done.

UPDATE: The above list is not comprehensive. Other African-American managers include Dave Clark, who managed the Astros for 13 games in 2009, as reader timmy! points out.

Today, Joe Posnanski wrote a piece about Jose Bautista’s remarkable 50th home run. Bautista’s the first man to crack the 50-home run barrier since 2007, just the 26th man ever to reach such a gaudy number, and even though he’s already done it it’s still hard to believe. Two months ago, I wrote one of the stupider things I’ve ever written, when I predicted Jose would cool off before reaching the 35-homer plateau. So is his season a fluke? The answer depends on two things: just how much talent he truly has, which he’ll get to display over the next several years; and just what we mean by the word “fluke,” the meaning of which has drastically changed in the years since the Steroid Era, when outlier performances are all too often simply assumed to be chemical-induced.

Roger Clemens exemplifies the compromised history of the Steroid Era, which literally has made it hard for many of us to justify having rooted for many of the greatest players in baseball history. Jose Bautista exemplifies the way that the taint of steroids continues to affect our ability to enjoy the game. If Bautista had hit 50 back in the age of innocence, say, in 1990 like Cecil Fielder did — when the half-century mark was reached for the first time since 1977 and the last time till 1995 — we might be able to marvel at his accomplishment and cheer Bautista as a hitter who had, for one brief moment, either unlocked his entire potential or found the perfect four-leaf clover. And of course Bautista isn’t the only guy ever to have a massive home run spike. Posnanski found 31 other similarly fluky seasons, including Maris’s 61, Bonds’s 73, Adrian Beltre’s 48, and Hack Williams Wilson’s 56. Many of these flukes occurred during the Steroid Era, and in retrospect the word “fluke” seems misguided. But many others didn’t, and the list helps remind us that there have been other Jose Bautistas in the past, who came out of nowhere and went nuts for a while.

But in 2010, it’s harder to enjoy an out-of-nowhere home run performance in the same way, in the way we still enjoy other career years. Take, for example, Ryan Dempster’s nearly equally miraculous 2008, when the 31-year old failed starter and failed reliever with a 4.82 career ERA moved to the rotation once more and had the finest season of his career, a 17-6 record with a 2.96 ERA and 3.41 FIP that netted him a $52 million contract in the offseason. Or the wonderful Andres Torres, whose 5.4 WAR at the age of 32 has made him one of the best stories in baseball, but who might be dogged by a lot more nasty innuendo if he’d come out of nowhere to hit 30 homers instead of just 14.

As Posnanski writes, we’ve always treated home runs differently: “Home runs alone define how many people look at the game,” he writes, calling such a burst of such seemingly obvious insight his “obviopiphany.” And: yeah. Home runs are in many ways baseball’s signal event. They’re the most important counting stat in the game, because they’re so easy to count and so easy to remember. Our national obsession with homers are what caused Roger Maris’s hair to fall out and Hank Aaron to receive death threats, allowed Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to bring baseball back from the precipice of the 1998 1994 strike and convinced Barry Bonds that he’d never be taken seriously until he hit more homers than any of them.

And they should be the most important counting stat. They have a higher WPA value than any other event on a field. There’s no single more important counting stat on the back of the baseball card. If you were explaining baseball to an alien or a Frenchman, you’d mention homers pretty early on. There are as many slang terms for a home run as there are words for snow in the Inuit language, and that tells you just how important homers truly are: if you really want to know what ballplayers revere, just look at what they nickname. The more different things you can call something (“hammer,” “Uncle Charlie,” “12-to-6,” “hook,” “curveball”), the more essential it is.

Bautista may have picked the wrong era to get hotter than a June bride on a feather bed, but there’s at least one way out of it: keep hitting them. As Posnanski writes, “We have to see how his career progresses from here.” For some reason, most people believe that the lesson of the steroid era is that momentary spikes are due to “the juice,” while protracted success is due to talent. As Posnanski mentions, Carlos Pena never hit more than 27 homers until he was 29, when he hit 46 homers in 2007, but he hits a bunch of homers every year, so 2007 wasn’t exactly a fluke, and no one accused him of acquiring his power through illicit means. So the only way for Bautista to look legitimate will be for him to keep hitting them year after year.

Once miracles are cheaply bought, they are no longer easily enjoyed. I hope Bautista can keep it up, so that we can finally feel at liberty to enjoy his miraculous season.

All the way back in April, I wrote about an incident in which A.J. Pierzynski faked being hit by a pitch and went to first base. Rob Neyer called him out for lying his way to first base — cheating — and suggested that baseball ought to have a punishment mechanism to punish players who succeed by lying. It’s worth thinking about, as I wrote: “It’s bush league, it’s unsportsmanlike, it delays the game, and it creates a major moral hazard problem, because it incentivizes every other player to lie.”

So guess who else was incentivized to lie? Derek Jeter. Last night, in the middle of the worst season of his career, Jeter turned away from an inside pitch which glanced off his bat and then brushed his uniform, then hopped away in pain, got checked out by the Yankee trainer, and then went to first base. In the clubhouse afterwards, Jeter admitted the ball hit his bat and he was “acting” for the benefit of the umpire, saying: “I’m not going to tell him, ‘I’m not going to go to first,’ you know? My job is to get on base.” Because he’s Derek Jeter, he has been mostly applauded for his bravado. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon, whose team was victimized on the play, said, “I wish our guys would do the same thing.” ESPN analyst Tim Kurkjian said it was brilliant, that whether you called it lying or cheating, Derek Jeter was simply doing his job to get to first base by any means necessary.

But wait a minute. By any means necessary? Haven’t we had to endure a decade’s worth of holier-than-thou sanctimony condemning the notion that “any means” are acceptable? Part of the praise is directed at Jeter because, of course, he’s Derek Jeter. Pierzynski is an unpopular player, so when he lied his way on base, he was called out for it by me and others. When Jeter did it, he was praised by the opposing manager. Jeter’s the kind of guy about whom ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski can write:

Jeter’s name is where I draw the line in the PED sand. He is the absolute last guy I’d ever suspect of juicing. It seems so, well, beneath him. He is the one player who I actually think would walk away from the game if he thought he had to cheat to compete.

Now, of course, we know that Jeter does cheat to compete. Look, I’m not trying to write yet another post complaining about how sportswriters turn their brains off when it comes to Derek Jeter. Instead, I think this illustrates, once again, that the way that we approach the notion of cheating is seriously misguided. The steroid era imparted two valuable lessons: everyone has the incentive to cheat, and unless you cheat with steroids, no one cares. Earlier this season, the Philadelphia Phillies were accused of cheating by stealing signs, and officially warned by Major League Baseball, and the furor died down more or less immediately.

As Bill James recently wrote, breaking the rules may not be the worst thing in the world: “We are not a nation of Hall Monitors; we are a nation that tortures Hall Monitors. We are people who push the rules.” Babe Ruth broke the rules. Everyone breaks the rules. But we should acknowledge that there are rules, and we should agree on what it means to break them. Cheating is when you do something against the rules for your personal gain. Steroids have been banned; so have corked bats, spitballs, emery boards, amphetamines, and outfield telescopes. Lying to an umpire is effectively cheating: it’s trying to take credit for something you didn’t do. And when two players cheat in exactly the same way — like Pierzynski and Jeter, or bat-corkers Babe Ruth and Albert Belle — they should be held to the same standard.

In Nigeria, the country’s massive film industry is sometimes called “Naijawood.” During the past week of baseball, Nyjer Morgan has become a human highlight reel of spectacle himself, running into catchers, pegging a fan, rushing a pitcher, and finding himself at the very bottom of a dogpile. Opinions vary about each of his individual acts, but the overall body of work, culminating in yesterday’s brawl, has brought him near-universal condemnation and an instant “Nyjer Morgan Needs to Go” over at FJB, Nats Triple Play, and Nationals Enquirer. Quite a turnaround for a guy who, one year ago, received a writeup by Dave Cameron proclaiming that “Nyjer Morgan and Adam Dunn are nearly equals in value,” and of whom the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg wrote, “[Morgan] is preordained to read the words ‘fan favorite’ at every stop in his baseball career.” Morgan’s having a bad year in a lot of ways. But just how bad is he?

On Saturday, August 21, Morgan engaged in an “ongoing dialogue” with a fan in Philadelphia, and then threw a ball into the stands; the ball hit and injured a different fan. (Another fan defended Morgan’s actions.) On August 25, Major League Baseball suspended him for seven games, which he appealed.

On Saturday, August 28, Morgan ran into St. Louis Cardinal catcher Bryan Anderson, who was standing aside from the plate; Morgan didn’t touch home, and was called out when Ivan Rodriguez turned him around and pushed him back towards the plate. He cryptically described his version of events: “I could have took the kid out if I wanted to, but I kind of grazed him. It wasn’t, in my eyes, intentional.” Manager Jim Riggleman condemned his actions and held him out of Sunday’s game. Morgan took exception to Riggleman’s public statement of condemnation, saying, “You don’t blast your player in the papers.”

On Tuesday, August 31, on a play at the plate, Morgan ran over Marlin backup catcher Brett Hayes rather than slide. Morgan was on second with a Alberto Gonzalez at first when Adam Kennedy hit a slow double-play ball to Dan Uggla; Uggla flipped to Hanley Ramirez at second for the first out, but Hanley double-clutched and threw home to get Morgan, who had rounded third and was trying to score. It was a high throw, and Hayes was standing directly on top of the plate, blocking it with his body. Had Morgan slid, he might have scored; but if the throw had been lower, Hayes would have been crouching and he’d have been out with a slide. So Morgan may have calculated that the only way to score the run was to knock the ball out of Hayes’s hand. Hayes held on, recording the out, but sustained a separated shoulder, a season-ending injury. After that play, Morgan reportedly cursed out a Marlin fan.

That all brings us to last night. Because of the Hayes incident the night before, it was perhaps to be expected that the Marlins would plunk Morgan, and Morgan took his first beaning with equanimity as he jogged to first. But when Chris Volstad threw the ball behind him in the 6th (with the Marlins up 15-5), he charged the mound like a man possessed, winding up at the bottom of a pile of Fish as National 3rd base coach Pat Listach started punching Marlins just to even the odds.

This time, Morgan’s manager and teammates were behind him, at least in public. Mark Zuckerman of Nats Insider reports, “The consensus among the Nationals is that Morgan’s only real infraction in the last week was the incident with Anderson.” Based on everything I’ve read, I hesitantly agree. Morgan’s teammates believe that he had no malicious intent in throwing the ball into the stands or in running into Hayes at home, and they didn’t fault him for stealing two bases with his team down by 11 runs in the fourth inning.

As to the fan he hit with the ball, I can’t tell whether he’s to blame without video of the incident, but I believe that if he truly had malicious intent his teammates wouldn’t be sticking up for him at this point. However, I completely agree that he’s blameless for stealing bases after getting plunked. The rule against stealing bases with your team up by a lot or down by a lot, in my view, is one of the most absurd of all of baseball’s “codes,” one whose relevance was entirely dismissed by the steroid era, during which we learned that, quite frankly, no ten-run lead is ever completely safe. Morgan stole a base when the lead was 14-3, but it wound up being 16-10, and in a slugfest like that, anything goes.

While the events of the past 24 hours have heaped condemnation upon Nyjer Morgan, I think the Marlins are being forgiven too easily — which is surprising, considering all of the drama the team has produced this season. Morgan was the Nationals’ leadoff hitter, but Volstad didn’t hit him immediately — he struck him out in the first and gave up a sac fly to him in the second. (In the meantime, Volstad plunked Wil Nieves in the second and Alberto Gonzalez in the third, both presumably unintentionally.) Volstad waited till Morgan’s third plate appearance — when his team was up 14-3 — to go after him, which shows that he put his team’s runs above his team’s honor. But that’s just what Morgan did on the basepaths, stealing a run to get his team’s offense going. So Volstad threw the ball behind him the next time he showed up, and Morgan took the law into his own hands.

I’ve written before that I don’t have much use for baseball’s arcane, archaic notions of honoring your opponent by not running up the score on them. Morgan’s actions had clearly proved over the previous week that he was volatile, and getting in a bench-clearing brawl while appealing a 7-game suspension is not a good way to endear yourself to an arbitrator. But if you ignore his behavior in Philadelphia and St. Louis, I don’t think Morgan did anything wrong in Miami. Sure, he took his life into his own hands — Volstad is 6’8″ and has about 60 pounds on the featherweight Morgan — but while rushing the mound was inadvisable, it wasn’t hard to justify after the other team deliberately threw at him twice.

Morgan’s having a bad year at the plate because his walks are down, his strikeouts are up, and his BABIP is 47 points lower than last year. For the second year in a row, he’s leading the majors in times caught stealing. And the former eccentric fan favorite who once referred to himself as “Tony Plush” has quickly turned toxic in the nation’s capital. He isn’t doing the Nationals much good in the lineup right now, and it wouldn’t hurt their season much if Major League Baseball told him to cool off for a week, as will inevitably happen. But he isn’t the only one to blame for yesterday’s brawl. The headhunting Marlins shouldn’t be let off the hook.

If you’re anything like me, you despise the dearth of imagination in the nickname-industrial complex, which nowadays requires that every nicknameless athlete be referred to by their first initial and the first three letters of their last name. From time to time, a decent nickname will slip through the cracks — Carlos “El Caballo” Lee, David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Covelli “Coco” Crisp — but this relative paucity only highlights their general absence. Many of the nicknames that break the paradigm are derivative of previous ones: Francisco Rodriguez’s “K-Rod” is a takeoff on Alex Rodriguez’s A-Rod, just as Jason Heyward’s “J-Hey Kid” recalls Willie Mays’s “Say Hey Kid”, and Derek Jeter’s “Mr. November” recalls Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October.”

I was reading Robert Creamer’s terrific biography of Casey Stengel (born Charles, nicknamed “Casey” and “The Old Perfessor”), and I was struck by just how weird yet pervasive and evocative the nicknames used to be. The following passage about the 1913 Brooklyn Dodgers really did it for me:

Best of all, Robby [manager Wilbert Robinson] found an impressive young pitcher named Ed Pfeffer to take Rucker’s place as ace of the staff. Pfeffer, a big strong right-hander, was nicknamed Jeff after his brother Frank, who had pitched in the National League some years earlier and had been called Big Jeff after Jim Jeffries, the heavyweight boxing champion. His kid brother inherited the name.

Just marvel at that flight of fancy: because of a prizewinning boxer who’d retired in 1905, two brothers named Edward and Francis wound up being named “Big Jeff” and “Jeff.” Nowadays, they might have been called Eddie and Frankie, or maybe Ed and Frank; anything but Big Jeff and Jeff. Robby Robinson himself had a nickname so well-known that during his entire managerial tenure with the club, the Dodgers were known as the Robins. (Other players on that squad included George “Nap” Rucker, Ross “Tex” Erwin, James “Red” Smith, and, best by far, Fred “Mysterious” Walker.)

Of course, plenty of old-time nicknames were hackneyed, too, as SABR member Rick Solensky discovered hundreds of baseball players named “Lefty,” “Dutch,” “Doc,” “Deacon,” “Bull,” “Moose,” “Rabbit,” “Red,” and “Kid.” But even those could have their moments. Two of Stengel’s early mentors were Charles “Kid” Nichols and one of my personal favorites, Norman Elberfeld, the Tabasco Kid. So maybe, once upon a time, those names got worn out from overuse. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a few of them return. I certainly doubt Johnny “Big Cat” Mize minded when Andres Galarraga dusted off his nickname and wore it well. It’s such a good name it would have been a shame to use it just once.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. But I think it’s a shame that, with a few notable exceptions — Chipper, Boof, and Joba, bless your hearts — players are nightly announced to bat with the first names their mothers gave them. Look up and down any major league lineup, and you’ll see nary a Preacher nor a Schoolboy, neither a Dizzy nor a Dazzy, nor a Duke nor a Skoonj. Instead, you might find a V-Mart or an F-Mart, a K-Rod or an A-Rod or an I-Rod. Without question, the baseball that’s been played in this Year of the Pitcher has been truly transcendent. It’s just a shame we lack nicknames to match.

It’s been a fairly long time coming. On the one hand, there was the Mitchell Report and other leaked documents naming baseball players who had used banned or illegal substances; on the other hand, some of those players gave sworn Congressional testimony in which they claimed they had never used. So, in an announcement that likely brought few fans to tears, Roger Clemens was indicted today on charges of obstructing Congress, making false statements, and perjury.

Craig Calcaterra and David Pinto write that Clemens brought this on himself: by protesting the Mitchell Report too loudly, he practically dared Congress to subpoena him. Barry Bonds, of course, was already indicted in 2007, and his trial is scheduled for March; Clemens’s trial will likely have a similarly long wait.

Of course, this is what Congress wanted. An indictment was the inevitable result — and a likely goal — of Congress’s decision to subpoena testimony from athletes that George Mitchell accused of cheating. It was a circus in search of a gotcha. The Mitchell Report unearthed a number of names, but it neither revealed the full extent of steroid and PED use in baseball, nor the actual effect of steroid and PED use on a baseball player. The testimony made Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Rafael Palmeiro look foolish, but it didn’t offer much more than an opportunity for members of Congress to indicate their disapproval.

Of course, there’s plenty of disapproval to go around. Thanks to Major League Baseball’s hypocritical approach to steroids, players had numerous incentives to use, while owners and media alike chose to ignore the actual fact of use. (Most media, at least. The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell fingered Jose Canseco as a steroid-user back in 1988.) George Mitchell somehow spent $20 million of the taxpayers’ MLB’s money on a report that raised more questions than it answered. And the shrill, howling condemnation by talking heads and columnists is about as unlistenable as Roseanne Barr singing the National Anthem.

Calcaterra believes Clemens stands a good chance of getting off, because Brian McNamee has no credibility, and he also believes the indictment shouldn’t affect Clemens’s Hall of Fame chances, because after all it was the Steroid Era, and his success came against players who used too. Of course, that sort of rational argument would be a lot easier if the baseball community ever got around to having the conversation about steroids — what they are, what they do, and why people take them — that we’ve been avoiding since the 1980s.

Interestingly, if it takes as long to bring Clemens to trial as it has taken with Bonds, the Rocket could be Hall of Fame-eligible by the time he’s in court: this is the third season since his last game in 2007, and the Feds have taken more than three years to bring Bonds to trial. So the government’s competence in bringing the case could have a great deal to do with whether he gets in on the first ballot. But it’s hard to imagine that even a jail term could keep him out of the Hall completely.

So what did we learn? We learned that Congress believes that baseball is one of the most important issues of domestic policy in America. We learned that you shouldn’t thumb your nose at George Mitchell. And we learned that Clemens’s attorney, Rusty Hardin — who has been described as “slicker ‘n deer guts on a doorknob” — gave his client some really, really bad advice.

So here’s some good advice: don’t lie to Congress, and don’t bother holding your breath for the trial.

Yesterday, Chipper Jones suffered an ACL tear while making a spectacular play at third base; he’s almost certainly out for the rest of the year, and considering that he was retiring considering retirement at the end of the season, there’s a possibility that we have seen his last game in a major league uniform. (Jones’s agent has said he “doesn’t believe [Chipper] will simply retire without attempting to first rehab the injury,” so this is just preliminary speculation at this point.) Chipper Jones spent much of the year in the offensive doldrums, but had begun to heat up in the month of August, where he was 12-for-30 with three homers in nine games for the Braves. So the Braves will miss his bat. But they’ll miss his presence even more.

Chipper Jones was drafted by General Manager Bobby Cox as the first overall pick in 1990, famously going ahead of fireballer Todd Van Poppel in a draft-day override. Since then, as Jack Moore has written, he has been the greatest franchise player — has provided the most value to the original team that drafted him* — in modern history. His former teammates Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz will probably go into the Hall first, but he’ll be remembered as the franchise’s best hitter since Henry Aaron.

(*As reader Blue points out in the comments section, this should read, “… has provided the most value to the original team that drafted him with the first overall selection in the draft.”)

He’s had a strange career, though. His career began with an ACL tear, just before the start of the 1994 season, and looks like it might end on one. He won one MVP, and received votes in 11 other seasons, but never again finished higher than sixth. Until his 36th birthday, he never led the league in any traditional stat, until he finally won a batting title in 2008. (As a result, using the old Bill James Hall of Fame tools, he’s way above the Hall of Fame norm in HOF Standards and HOF Monitor, but way below the norm in Grey Ink and Black Ink.) From his rookie year in 1995 until 2003, Chipper Jones played in more than 94% of his team’s games every year; since then, he only once played in as many as 140 games. This will mark his first trip to the DL since July 2008, but since then, there have been ten separate occasions on which he has missed multiple consecutive games. While he’s been one of the best-hitting third basemen of all time, his defense has been below-average at best. And his admitted marital infidelity is pretty hard to defend, as well.

Still, as he’s gotten older, he’s been an unselfish leader on the team. In 2002, just three years after his MVP, he voluntarily moved from third base to left field to accommodate the team’s acquisition of Vinny Castilla; then, two years after playing his last inning at third base, he moved back. The left field move is commonly blamed for his numerous leg problems over the years, as they began to crop up shortly after he began playing his new position. On numerous occasions, he has offered to restructure his contract with the Braves to increase their payroll flexibility.

By now, most fans and baseball writers have gotten used to the idea of Chipper Jones as a Hall of Famer, so he probably won’t run into the problems that Ron Santo has had. But they may not realize quite how good Chipper has been. Last offseason, blogger Mac Thomason noted that, in Lee Sinins’ Sabermetric Encyclopedia last offseason, Jones led all third basemen in the modern era in Runs Created per Game and was in a virtual dead heat with Eddie Mathews at the top of the list for Runs Created Above Average. Chipper is 37th in all-time WAR, and sixth among third basemen (seventh if you consider Alex Rodriguez a 3B), behind Mike Schmidt, Eddie Mathews, Wade Boggs, Brooks Robinson, and George Brett.

Thomason goes on to say:

Chipper is the greatest player in Atlanta Braves history — and they’ve had some pretty good players. He’s clearly ahead of Dale Murphy, and even ahead of Hank Aaron (not counting the Milwaukee years). The only player who could have a case, because they’re so different, is Greg Maddux, and Chipper’s Braves career is twice as long. Scored purely as a hitter, he might be the best third baseman of all-time; he has the highest slugging percentage of any third baseman, and the highest OPS, and is third or fourth in on-base (depending upon if you count Edgar Martinez). I’d still rank Schmidt first, for a number of reasons, but second is muddled, and Chipper has a pretty good argument.

Whatever the future holds, he has had an incredible career.