It’s been four months since MLB did something noteworthy with their playoff schedule, when they announced in March that they were cutting one off day in the middle of the LCS. A very minor change — deleting that off day didn’t actually move up the start date of the World Series — but a step in the right direction. Now comes an even more welcome announcement: the 2011 World Series will start earlier after all, and Opening Day will come a few days early to ensure that the World Series will be concluded by the end of October.

This requires breaking with tradition ever so slightly, so that Opening Day for most teams would be Friday, April 1, rather than on a Monday. If it’s approved, the first official games of the year will be played March 25 and 26 in Taiwan, of which Yahoo! Sports’s Kevin Kaduk disapproves: “Opening day should always occur on American (and Torontonian) soil.” Moving up Opening Day allows them to move up the playoff schedule by a week, so that the World Series will begin on October 19, 2011; this year, it’s scheduled to start on October 27.

There are a lot of off days, but, as I said in March, MLB is hamstrung by Fox’s needs. Fox spent $3 billion for the right to broadcast the World Series through 2013, and so Fox Sports essentially writes the game schedule. In order to maximize ratings, Fox tries to avoid broadcasting games on weekends, and prefers to avoid Friday night World Series games whenever possible — so off days are written in around those preferences.

Rob Neyer throws further cold water on the happy news, pointing out, “The difference between the weather on November 4 and the weather on October 27 is not, generally speaking, going to be a whole lot different, and there’s a reasonable chance it will actually be better on the 4th… Essentially, they’re trading potentially lousy weather in a few postseason games for potentially lousy weather in a few dozen regular-season games.” That’s similar to what Dan McQuade of Walkoff Walk points out is an “insanely weird defensive quote from the head of Fox Sports,” Ed Goren: “I’ve been in cities where the weather is awful in mid-October, and beautiful the first of November. So if we’re playing Game 7 of the World Series on Oct. 28, and it’s snowed out, don’t blame baseball.”

We get it. But baseball’s supposed to be played from April to October — the very first World Series ever took place from October 1 to October 13, 1903, when Deacon Phillippe led and the Pittsburgh Pirates over lost to Bill Dinneen and the Boston Americans. MLB will have to go back to the drawing board in 2013, when the next World Baseball Classic is planned, but for now it’s nice to know that the 2011 season will end some time in October, as it should.

“If this was Strasmas, we got coal in our stockings.”

My friends just got married a month ago, moved into their new home together a week ago, and so they did what any newlywed couple who met in college in Atlanta would do: they checked to see when Stephen Strasburg would make his next start against the Braves — Tuesday, July 27, the calendar said — and then they drove four hours to Washington to watch. I rushed home from work to meet them and take the stadium-bound Metro, which was packed to the gills with red-shirted and red-capped Nats fans, nearly all of them wearing some variation on Strasburg #37.

We joined the crimson sea of fans pouring into the stadium, and took our seats at 7:04, just in time to see the pitcher warming up. And just in time to notice that the cleanshaven Latino on the mound did not bear much resemblance to the 6’4″, goateed Strasburg. Realization dawned on us all at the same time. There would be no Strasmas this week. He’d felt sore during his warmup pitches just a few minutes before we arrived, and the team quietly yanked him. Nationals Park, which was filled by 40,043 Strasburg-enrapt fans that night, echoed with boos of confusion and outrage.

The fill-in was Miguel Batista, a wry 39-year old, who understood the fans’ dismay: “Imagine if you go there to see Miss Universe and you end up having Miss Iowa, you might get those kind of boos. But it’s OK,” he told the AP. “Miss Iowa” is putting it mildly: he hadn’t started a game in two years, and has a career record of 96-110 and an ERA of 4.53, in 16 seasons for eight different organizations. (The real Miss Iowa took the analogy in stride: “It was kind of a diss at first. But I think that I’ll handle that.”)

Batista, somehow, then he led the last-place Nationals to victory over the first-place Braves. The sea of red quickly came over to his side as he quieted the Braves for five innings, and my Braves fan friends went from nonplussed to depressed. It’s somehow more thrilling to watch a phenom blow your team away with 100-mile an hour fastballs than it is to watch a geezer lull them to sleep with moxie and guile. “If this was Strasmas, we got coal in our stockings,” my friend’s wife told him. Nats fans must have felt the same way today, when they learned he was making his first trip to the DL. Still, on Tuesday night, the fireworks roared at the end of the game, and Nats fans discovered a new kind of Strasmas: the one where they win on a day that Strasburg didn’t even pitch.

Ralph Houk died Wednesday, one of nine managers to win a World Series with the Yankees, along with Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, Bucky Harris, Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, Bob Lemon, Joe Torre, and Joe Girardi. He was the first manager ever to manage the Yankees to a World Championship after winning a ring with the team as a player, later joined by Martin and Girardi. (Yogi Berra’s backup catcher before the emergence of Elston Howard, Houk won six rings with the Yankees from 1947-1954. His three World Series appearances in the Yankee manager’s chair are more than all but Torre, Stengel, McCarthy, and Huggins.) In all, he spent nearly three decades in the team’s clubhouse from the 1940s to the 1970s, first as a bench player, and then as field marshal.

He is 15th all-time in managerial wins, and one of only 22 managers with more than one World Championship. He maintained a reputation as a tough but fair players’ manager, going by the nickname of “Major” because of the rank he earned in World War II. According to the New York Times obituary, one former third baseman of his, Clete Boyer, recounted his clubhouse attitude: “At his first meeting, Ralph said we knew how to play the game better than he did. So if we wanted to bunt, bunt. If we wanted to hit and run, then hit and run.” But he made an even bigger impression on another young third baseman, Bobby Cox, who followed Houk’s example as a Yankee bench player who rose to become a manager. “I loved Ralph… Ralph Houk was a big influence on me with how he treated people,” Cox told MLB.com. “Our personalities are both pretty tough.”

Houk’s reputation as a manager declined the longer he managed. After he won his World Championships in his first two years as a manager, he never won another championship in 18 years as a skipper. His influence on Cox seems to have been one of style rather than strategy: Houk was not a particularly influential tactician. Chris Jaffe, author of “Evaluating Baseball’s Managers,” points out what may be the two most noteworthy features of Houk’s managerial career: “He arguably had the greatest start to his career of any manager in history,” and “his relievers lasted longer per outing than anyone in baseball history.” By contrast, Cox, his protege, is up there with Tony La Russa as the manager whose relievers have the shortest, most specialized appearances.

In the last few years, when the great Yankees of the past were mentioned, Houk’s name was rarely mentioned. Yogi Berra has long held the title of “Greatest Living Yankee,” and Houk’s managerial successes — when they are remembered at all — have often been chalked up to Mantle and Maris, rather than the man at the helm. That may be unfair to the man. As Jaffe remarks, “He was well respected enough to manage 20 seasons without ever getting fired, an impressive achievement.” That is a remarkably bland compliment for a man who won eight World Series with a team, six as a player and two as a manager, but in the end, Houk left a bland affect on all but his teammates and players. As for them, they loved him fiercely, and they won a lot. Of course they did. They were Yankees.

Brian McCann was the MVP of the All-Star Game on Tuesday, the first catcher to win the honor since Sandy Alomar Jr. in 1997. (Sandy’s brother Roberto won the award the following year, the only pair of siblings to share the honor.) He’s only the fifth catcher ever to win the award since 1962, the first year it was given out, along with Alomar, Mike Piazza, Terry Steinbach, and two-time winner Gary Carter.

Perhaps because they play the least single position on the diamond which produces the least offense, catchers seem underrepresented on the lists for baseball’s ultimate honors. And the National League has especially suffered.

In the last 50 years, five catchers have won the MVP. In the American League, Joe Mauer (2009), Ivan Rodriguez (1999), and Thurmon Munson (1976) have all won Most Valuable Player Awards since the award last went to a National League backstop, Johnny Bench in 1970 and 1972. The previous catcher MVP was also in the American League, the Yankees’ Elston Howard in 1963.

Six catchers have been named World Series MVP in the last fifty years. The last catcher to be named World Series MVP was an American Leaguer, Pat Borders in 1992. Prior to that, catchers went back-to-back in 1982 and 1983, the Cardinals’ Darrell Porter and the Orioles’ Rick Dempsey. Steve Yeager shared the award with two of his Dodger teammates in 1981 — the only such three-way tie in history — and Johnny Bench won the award by himself in 1976, as did the Athletics’ Gene Tenace in 1972.

The picture is slightly reversed in the League Championship Series, in which four catchers have won the MVP, all from the National League: Ivan Rodriguez in 2003, Benito Santiago in 2002, Eddie Perez in 1999, and Javy Lopez in 1996.

With the exception of the LCS, it seems that the number of catchers given awards has significantly decreased. We often complain that MVP voters focus exclusively on measures like home runs and RBIs, but it’s quite possible that is more true now than ever before. After all, as many catcher MVPs were given out in the 1950s — three apiece to Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella — as have been given out in the fifty years following. By contrast, fourteen of the last eighteen MVPs in both leagues have gone to corner infielders and corner outfielders, the players whom you’d expect to hit a lot.

Obviously, the list of MVP winners is a remarkably — dare I say it — small sample size from which to draw any strong conclusions about the changing nature of baseball analysis. But it’s striking all the same. Brian McCann has a long career ahead of him, and this likely won’t be the last award he receives. However, it looks like he may have to hit like a first baseman if he wants to be named Most Valuable Player once more.

This summer, American audiences have gotten to channel-flip between the two sports that are most frequently called boring: soccer and baseball. Yet they could hardly look more different. Soccer is a timed game of nonstop movement in which players are in motion for 45 minutes at a time, and scoring is rare and highly random; baseball is an untimed game in which players are rarely in motion for more than a few seconds at a time, in which players can acquire nicknames like “The Human Rain Delay” for their facility at slowing down play. Non-soccer fans (I’m one of them) often complain that, in soccer, no one ever scores; non-baseball fans often complain that, in baseball, no one ever moves.

Of course, the World Cup has an added dimension beyond regular soccer: it’s a single-elimination tournament with excitement fueled by nationalism. It’s like March Madness, if the universities had armies and navies. It’s the only chance most of us ever get to watch a single soccer game in a packed bar surrounded by hundreds of other rabid fans. Major League Soccer has been hurt by the recession, but the U.S. men’s soccer team has probably never been as high-profile as it is now. Bill Simmons predicts that Landon Donovan’s winning goal over Algeria to send America into the Round of 16 was such a signal moment in American sports that it will, ultimately, cause soccer to take off in America.

Part of baseball’s genius is that, at its heart, it’s a game of individual matchups: each pitch is a moment frozen in time, the isolated product of mostly discrete and intelligible forces, handedness, true talent, park effect, and so forth. Each moment is a data point, each game a data set. It is the perfect playground for statistical inquiry. On the other hand, soccer is a game of flow. The clock never stops, the whistle never blows, and the action hardly ever resolves neatly, at least until the ball has hit the back of the net. FIFA keeps few statistics more advanced than pass completion percentage, and goals are so rare that — when they aren’t being waved off or ignored by the referee or mucked by the goalie — it seems mostly a matter of luck that any are ever scored at all.

The meaning of “luck” in baseball is hotly contested, of course, but over the course of a long season, controversial calls have a habit of evening out. That isn’t necessarily the case in a seven-game-series, let alone a single-elimination tournament. But while the best baseball in the world is played in America, that isn’t true of soccer. Among the major professional sports leagues in America, Major League Soccer is the only one that doesn’t possess the best players in the world who play its sport. Major League Baseball, the National Basketball League Association, the National Hockey League, and the National Football league all monopolize global talent in their respective sports; MLS mostly makes do with Americans who aren’t good enough to play elsewhere. That isn’t a problem with the rules of soccer, but a problem with the concentration of talent. If the English Premier League were moved brick by brick to America, like the London Bridge, it’s likely that Americans would watch.

I don’t expect I’ll watch much soccer after this weekend’s championship match — I’d probably rather watch Arsenal-Manchester United than Orioles-Pirates, but Comcast rarely gives me the option. I’ve spent a fun few weeks watching the best players in the world, but I’ll be happy to return my full attention to my favorite sport. After watching Spain play the Netherlands, I imagine that trying to watch DC United would just seem boring.

Yesterday, Fredi Gonzalez became the second third managerial casualty of the year, following Trey Hillman’s ouster in Kansas City (update: and Dave Trembley in Baltimore. Thanks, Rob Stratmeyer). But while the Hillman layoff was understandable — three days before he was axed, Joe Posnanski wrote, “I don’t think Hillman will survive. And, things being what they are, I’m certainly not saying Hillman should survive” — the Gonzalez firing was a bit more head-scratching. As Buster Olney wrote yesterday:

Gonzalez as manager of the Marlins has been a dead man walking since the end of last season, when folks in the team’s baseball operations had to talk owner Jeffrey Loria out of firing him, and then going into this season, Loria indicated he expected the low-budget Marlins to contend for a championship, a goal that was probably unrealistic given the lack of depth in the team’s roster at the major league level.

GM Larry Beinfest has assembled some strong teams for owner Jeffrey Loria, but though they’ve often contended for the Wild Card, they’ve never been viewed as serious playoff threats — and no wonder, because their payroll is so low that they were criticized by Major League Baseball at the beginning of the year for not using enough of the revenue sharing money they received to actually pay players. Considering all those constraints, it’s rather remarkable that Gonzalez managed a 276-279 record in three-plus years in his first managing job.

Of course, whenever you want to know why something happened in baseball, you should usually listen to the denials. Fredi Gonzalez attracted a great deal of attention earlier for the Hanley Ramirez incident, when Hanley dogged it after kicking a pop-up and Fredi pulled him from the game. And so, of course, in a statement after his firing, Fredi Gonzalez announced: “This is something that I want to make very clear: My exit from the Marlins had nothing to do with Hanley.” So it’s a fair bet that his exit from the Marlins had a lot do to with Hanley. Every baseball person, and every Marlin who spoke to the media, supported Fredi’s behavior during the run-in — but, as a number of wags have pointed out, it’s a lot easier for the Marlins to get themselves a new manager than a new Hanley Ramirez.

Ultimately, the Marlins didn’t do much harm to Fredi’s image. Right now, he’s perceived as a martyr who made the most of a bad situation with an unrealistic, penny-pinching owner, who doesn’t kowtow to superstars, and who is the likeliest successor to Bobby Cox in Atlanta, one of the most coveted manager’s seats in baseball since the last manager Jeffrey Loria fired, Joe Girardi, took over for Joe Torre in the Bronx. Being fired doesn’t hurt Fredi. And if Loria hires Bobby Valentine, as seems likely, the team probably won’t see much difference in the won-loss column: though Valentine’s style is very different from the methodical Gonzalez (Chris Jaffe has compared Valentine to Dodger overtinkerer Charlie Dressen), Bobby V is an above-average skipper.

But Valentine should take care to get an ironclad prenup. After all, his two predecessors were fired unfairly. If Bobby actually wants to manage in Miami, rather than just put himself in position for a future plum, he should make sure that Loria gives him a better guarantee of payroll than either Gonzalez or Girardi received.

We’ve had some Awful Umpiring this season, from the Buehrle Balks to the Galarraga One-Hitter, and players are calling out individual umpires by name more than ever before. The recent ESPN poll of major league players about the best and worst umps in baseball was especially revealing: it was the first time in my memory that players were asked their opinion of umpires by name, and while the results were eye-opening they weren’t at all surprising. The worst umpires were CB Bucknor, Joe West, and Angel Hernandez, which we all knew anyway, but it was remarkable to hear the players admit it.

Yorvit Torrealba got suspended for three games after protesting balls and strikes on Monday, when the brim of his batting helmet incidentally touched umpire Larry Vanover. But Vanover escalated the argument considerably. Watch the video, and you’ll see he actually took a step toward Torrealba. Torrealba will have to take the suspension sooner or later — umps are sacrosanct, and no part of you gets to touch any part of them — but Vanover’s actions feed into the overall problem that more and more players are calling out this year: the umpires think the game is about them, they like drawing attention to themselves, and, as a result, it’s hard to trust them to be neutral arbiters.

The parallel problem, of course, is obvious. The more mistakes that umpires make, the easier, and more inevitable, become the arguments for instant replay. Sure, it makes the game seem less “pure,” and it will probably make an almost intolerably long game excruciatingly longer — especially if you imagine Joe Girardi and Terry Francona staring at each other across the top step of their dugouts, challenge flag in hand, ready to call back the slightest miscue, a possibility so nightmarish that it could cause Joe West to wake up screaming. Instant replay is, by its very nature, slow: it’s replay. It’s an imperfect compromise between a world where umpires are the law and a world where umpires aren’t necessary, where a GameDay Pitch Tracker calls strikes and balls and a traffic camera mans first base to call runners safe and out. We have the technology right now to do without umpires. We don’t have the gumption — but we have the tech.

So it makes sense that umpires feel like they’re under attack. They are. Their livelihood is being threatened by the times they live in. However, it’s also being threatened by the individual actions of individual umpires, from the explosively short fuses of Joe West and Bill Hohn to the completely inconsistent strike zones of Angel Hernandez and CB Bucknor. In ordinary times, a good umpire is like a good spy: the best ones are the ones you never hear about or think about at all. These are not ordinary times, and the spotlight is shining brightly. The more they step towards it — like Larry Vanover’s step towards Yorvit Torrealba — the brighter it will shine. The only way for umpires to decrease the drama is to take a step back.

A couple of days ago, Joe Posnanski wrote a beautiful post (okay, that pretty much goes without saying) called “What Strasburg Means,” in which he condensed why we’re all so excited about Stephen Strasburg: he’s limitless potential, possessed of such laughably, wonderfully, enjoyably freakish gifts that even in our era of cynicism and media saturation, we’re all reduced to anticipation and wonder. In Joe’s words, “Stephen Strasburg is Christmas morning.” And his debut did nothing but increase our wonder and anticipation for his next start. Especially in a season in which two (three) perfect games have already been thrown, there seems nothing he plausibly couldn’t do.

For us in the stat community, maybe, he might be significant for still another reason. As occupied as we often are with challenging conventional wisdom, with seeing the unacknowledged value in a pitcher like Bert Blyleven or the overvaluing of a hitter like Ryan Howard, we rarely get to join in the exact same cheers as the rest of baseball. Stephen Strasburg isn’t overvalued or undervalued: his 100 mile-an-hour-heat is exactly as blistering as it appears to the naked eye, and his knee-buckling hook is just as devastating as Lastings Milledge thinks it is. He makes our jobs easy: for once, as stat analysts, we can say that the conventional wisdom is earth-shakingly right. The kid’s legit.

I saw his first start from the upper deck of Nationals Stadium on Tuesday. I couldn’t see just how his hammer danced, but I could see the Nationals Pirates flailing, increasingly despondent, as he pounded the strike zone again and again, brought the crowd to their feet again and again, to the point that they expected excellence — audibly sighing every time the umpire called a ball — but erupted every time he delivered yet another strikeout. I was there as the guest of my friend Alyssa Rosenberg, who wrote a report of the game for a local magazine and wanted my “sabermetric” opinion of the start, and all I could tell her was what she already knew: he was amazing.

Sometimes seeing is believing.

Armando Galarraga just pitched the most famous one-hitter of the decade. His disappointment was understandable, but even the blown call put him in a pretty exclusive group. Since 1920, there have been just 136 no-nos, and just 489 one-hit shutouts. This year, before last night, there were exactly three of each: Ubaldo Jimenez, Dallas Braden, and Roy Halladay all twirled no-hitters, and Matt Cain, Mat Latos, and Johnny Cueto all pitched one-hitters. Galarraga is the fourth.

Galarraga wasn’t the only one to have his no-no bid ruined by an infield single, either: Latos and Cueto were similarly both undone by infield singles to shortstop. But Cueto only took his no-hitter into the third inning, and Latos only took his into the sixth, so the level of scrutiny was nowhere near the same. (Cain gave up a double to deep right-center in the second inning, so he wasn’t quite as heartbroken.)

This has been a rather remarkable season: three no-hitters (two of them perfect games) and four one-hitters, in three of which the only hit was an infield single. The last year that there were this many combined no-hitters and one-hitters was 2007, with no-nos from Clay Buchholz, Justin Verlander, and Mark Buehrle, and one-hitters by Scott Baker, Dustin McGowan, Curt Schilling, and Felix Hernandez. The last time there were more than seven combined no-hitters and one-hitters was 2001, when there were three no-hitters (A.J. Burnett, Hideo Nomo, and the otherwise-forgotten Bud Smith) and eight one-hitters (Buehrle, Nomo, Mike Mussina, Kerry Wood, Mark Mulder, Jon Lieber, Randy Wolf, and Todd Ritchie).

The real challenge for Galarraga will be to keep pitching effectively, like Felix Hernandez, rather than turn back into a pumpkin, like Todd Ritchie. But he shouldn’t feel too bad about failing to join one of baseball’s elusive clubs. He already joined another.

“He’s a fucking asshole.”
Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, on umpire Joe West

It might be the highest-profile balk call in years: after Joe West rung up Mark Buehrle for two balks and ejected Buehrle and Guillen shortly thereafter for protesting the call yesterday, Major League Baseball announced that they were investigating the incident. Given the personalities involved, an explosion was almost inevitable: Ozzie Guillen is perhaps the most combustible and combative manager in the game (Chris Jaffe has called him the modern Billy Martin), and “Cowboy” Joe West is one of the most controversial umpires in baseball. Even the photo on West’s Wikipedia page shows him ejecting Guillen, all the way back in 2007.

Joe West likes the nickname “Cowboy” — it’s the name he uses on his website, where he sells his country music CDs (“Blue Cowboy” and “Diamond Dreams”) — but detractors often argue that it describes his on-field demeanor as well. And ejections aren’t the only thing he’s famous for. Back in 1990, West bodyslammed pitcher Dennis Cook to the ground; NL president Bill White was prepared to suspend West (back in the days when each league had its own president and crew of umpires), but Commissioner Fay Vincent intervened. As Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Potash writes,

The guy has a habit of creating and/or exacerbating situations like this. His dismissive hand gestures, his body language, his smirk, and his attitude are more incendiary than any of Guillen’s profanity. He doesn’t get any respect because he doesn’t give any.

But the more salient problem may be with the balk rule itself. What is a balk? In the official rulebook, there’s a dizzying array of situations which may prompt a balk to be called, along with the following comment:

“Umpires should bear in mind that the purpose of the balk rule is to prevent the pitcher from deliberately deceiving the base runner. If there is doubt in the umpire’s mind, the ‘intent’ of the pitcher should govern.”

Much of the game, of course, is designed to deliberately deceive, from the pitching motion of many lefthanders, to the fake-to-third-throw-to-first play, to feints by the fielders to fake as though they’re heading to second base for a throw. The balk call is intended as a corrective to prevent certain illegal actions by the pitcher, but it’s not clear that any of the motions it prohibits are any more successful in fooling baserunners than the motions it permits — and moreover, it’s not clear that the motions it prohibits are all that distinguishable from the motions it permits. What was different about Buehrle’s move to first on Wednesday, compared to this game in 2008, when he successfully picked off Franklin Gutierrez?

Even after watching and rewatching tape, few balk calls or noncalls are ever indisputable. (As blogger Mac Thomason has written, “Nearly all balks are randomly called by the umpires as far as I can tell, with the odd exception of a pitcher who falls down or drops the ball or something like that.”) Still, they’re an exceedingly minor part of the game. This year, there have only been 48 balks called all year in 1398 games played, and over the past four years, the numbers have been fairly steady: 138 balks in 2009, 153 in 2008, 139 in 2007, 145 in 2006. So even though they seem arbitrary, the rate at which they’re called has been fairly constant. Once this blows over, we’ll all go back to not thinking about balks much, because they’re so steadfastly rare. But that doesn’t make the rule any more sensible, or its enforcement any less prone to error.

“Cowboy” Joe West drew attention to himself on Wednesday, as he so often does. But he really should have drawn attention to the balk rule itself. This is one rule that could go out of the rulebook with no tears shed.