The Wild NL West

SAN FRANCISCO -- There is no way to prove it, of course, but I think that San Diego's Adrian Gonzalez is the most underrated player in baseball. He is, in my mind, the only guy in the game that Fire Joe Morgan's Ken Tremendous could have written this about on Deadspin:

"You know who's overlooked? Adrian F----- Gonzalez. Nobody in the world outside of Adrian Gonzalez's immediate family has any idea he even exists, much less that he is one of the very best hitters in the world. A reporter recently asked Yorvit Torrealba to talk about how good Adrian Gonzalez has been for the Pads this year, and Torrealba said, 'There is no one on our team by that name. You are mistaken. Perhaps you mean to ask about David Eckstein?'"

Scully

My story on Vin Scully and Los Angeles over at Sports Illustrated.

This is part of an NL West week. Tomorrow, a story on the general awesomeness of the NL West. And then, some live coverage of the Giants-Padres series, though it looks like the Padres will need the sweep. And there's some other stuff in the works as well.

ERA and Ks

So, you probably know that at the moment Felix Hernandez leads the American League in ERA and strikeouts. Roy Halladay and Adam Wainwright are close to the top in both categories in the NL, but neither is leading and probably neither will lead. So mostly this focuses on King Felix.

Felix may not end up leading the league in either category. Jered Weaver is only three strikeouts behind, and he will pitch Friday. Clay Bucholz is just a few hundredths behind Hernandez in ERA and he's scheduled to go Saturday. I assume King Felix will pitch the Mariners finale on Sunday, but I guess that hasn't been announced yet.

Diary of a Losing Team: Brutal Honesty

I'm fascinated by these Domino's Pizza commercials. You have seen them, I assume. The basic plot line is that the guy who is running Domino's has come to accept that the pizza sucks. And he promises to do something about it.

And so, the commercials somewhat sheepishly show a photo someone sent in of the pizza he received with cheese stuck to the box ("Unacceptable!"). They offer up past customer reviews that makes their pizza sound like manilla folders with Ragu on top. They talk about how basically the company had ripped off the American public for many years by giving them gawdawful substandard pizza. But now things are going to change.

LJ's Many Carries

You may have seen that Larry Johnson was released by Washington last week, and there are rumors that he might be signed as a quick fix in St. Louis now.

Larry Johnson was one of the greatest running backs I ever saw. That was mainly the end of 2004 and all of 2005. In 2005, he ran 1,750 yards and 20 touchdowns. He had a great offensive line blocking, but he was still a force of nature, a near unstoppable blend of power and speed. I wrote at the time that he was awfully similar to the great Jim Brown, and I actually heard from two of Brown's former teammates, who agreed.

Now, five years later, he's out of a job. No doubt Larry brought some of his pain on himself with the way he lived his life. He has made his share of mistakes -- on the town, on Twitter, etc.

Missing Marmol

You may or may not know this -- I didn't until brilliant reader Hard_8 alerted me on Twitter -- but Chicago's Carlos Marmol is having one of the greatest strikeout seasons in the history of Major League Baseball. It's obscene, really. Marmol has struck out 131 batters in just 73 innings this year. That's 16 Ks per nine innings. Nobody in baseball history has ever been within a strikeout of that:

Best strikeouts per nine (min. 50 ip)

1. Carlos Marmol, 2010, 16.00

2. Eric Gagne, 2003, 14.98

3. Billy Wagner, 1999, 14.95

4. Brad Lidge, 2004, 14.93

5. Armando Benitez, 1999, 14.77

Ode To Quiz

This is going to be an essay about Dan Quisenberry. It is something I plan to read at the last Quisenberry Golf Tournament for the Harvesters food bank, which will take place Monday at the Shadow Glen Golf Club in Olathe, Kansas.

The tournament has been going on for 17 years, which is pretty remarkable stuff for a charity golf tournament in today's world. It's even more remarkable because Quiz did not start the tournament until he had been retired from baseball for three years. And it's even MORE remarkable because Dan passed away a dozen years ago (has it really been 12 years?), and the tournament has continued all this years thanks almost entirely to the heroic efforts of Janie Quisenberry Stone, who has worked so hard to keep it going.

The tournament has raised almost $900,000 through the years -- enough, the Harvester people calculate, to provide 4.5 million meals to those who desperately needed them.

Every community, of course, has its own charities, its own challenges, its own daily heroes who try in big ways and small to make things better. Dan and Janie have been a couple of those daily heroes. If you have a moment and a few extra dollars, I would ask you to consider helping out Harvesters. OK. Now the essay, which is about baseball.

Jordan on Shatner

This is a little bit late, but if you haven't read this bit of brilliance -- Pat Jordan on William Shatner -- then you have missed out on a bit of joy in your life.

Joe Blogs Changes

Well, I have been thinking about how to make this blog make sense. As you know, I hope, the Curiously Long Posts is alive and well over at Sports Illustrated. And for a little while, for reasons that were not always entirely clear to me, I was running a mirror blog where I was essentially printing the same posts in two places.

Then, of course, my blog got hacked and I believe I was able to take it down before it handed out malware to every Snuggie loving sports fan in America.

So, now I have this easier-to-maintain blog ... which seems somewhat without a mission. I started out with the same Curiously Long Posts concept -- again reprinting stuff on the SI blog -- but I'm thinking now that this would make me a lot like the awesomely impressive WordGirl villain and criminal "Lady Redundant Woman."

So, I'm going to try to give this blog its own character ... we will see how that develops over the next few weeks. I don't know exactly how that will go, but I'm considering:

1. Guest posts.

2. More links.

3. More of a mix of shorter and longer posts.

Like I say, we will see. As you know, we here at Joe Blogs* are not always especially good at follow-through (I'm telling you, the iPad review is coming! It's coming soon!). But, this is the plan.

*Joe Bloggs, you may know, is -- well let's let Wikipedia explain: -- "commonly used as a placeholder names in United Kingdom, Irish, Australian and New Zealand teaching, programming, and other thinking and writing." I vaguely knew this, which was why I was calling the site "Joe Blog." I added the "s" to the name and changed the subtitle. Oh, yeah, things are changing now.

Nolan and Ichiro

This is going to be about Ichiro Suzuki, and so you may find it strange that it begins with Nolan Ryan. I think the comparison will make sense by the time we're done here, but frankly I'm a bit worried about something. I'm worried that people will think I'm making judgements about Ichiro and Ryan, about the way they play the game, about their CHOICES in baseball. I'm not. I don't even know that they have actually MADE choices. This probably doesn't make any sense to you at all. Maybe it will. Well, we will just dive in and see where this thing goes.

Let's start with an odd question: Was Nolan Ryan (compared with the greatest pitchers in baseball history) better at striking out batters or better at walking them?

32 Great SI Covers

Well, 7,000 plus words and 32 great Sports Illustrated covers are up on my SI Blog. Hope you enjoy. I'm very tired.

I might need to change the subtitle of this site to "Posts Never Longer Than 300 Words!"

32 Flukiest Home Run Seasons

This list goes along with the piece I did about Jose Bautista and the meaning of 50 homers.

* * *

So, I came up with a formula to determine the 32 flukiest home run season. I would tell you the formula except I kind of forgot how I did it. I know I incorporated the player's average homers per 162 games and the player's second highest home run season and things like that. I would give a hat tip to my friend Bill James, who helped me come up with the formula, but I suspect Bill would not want to be considered an accomplice to this mathematical crime.

Anyway, here's the list:

Taking nominations ...

With the awesome SI cover this week. I'm taking nominations for the best SI cover ever. We'll post the winners. It will be great!

Drop your nominations in the comments section below.

(I should have said this at the top -- swimsuit covers are not eligible).

The Cover

Maybe, just maybe, the sweetest Sports Illustrated cover of my career (so far):

Stuff Coming Up

OK, so, by now I hope you have found this blog. I'm not entirely sure yet how this thing will differ from the old blog ... or if it will differ at all. We'll have to see how it plays out.

For those of you who didn't know or read about it in the last post, I had to take down the old blog because it apparently got hacked and it would redirect certain readers into Spam Hell. I have not heard yet of it doing any damage to anybody's computer, and I hope it didn't. My own computer seemed to bypass the redirect; I don't know if it's where I have my spam settings or what. Maybe you never even noticed it. Anyway, I took the site down. And I started this simpler to operate blog here at Blogspot. I think it was something I was going to have to do eventually anyway.

The Kenny Williams Story

Here's the piece I wrote about Kenny Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox. This should go well with the story I wrote about Jim Thome, which will run in next week's issue of Sports Illustrated.

Joe Posnanski � Posts A Football Man in a Baseball World �

Um, hi

So, you may or may not have noticed ... but it appears my last blog got hacked. After spending way too much time trying to clean all that up I, well, I started wondering very seriously why I was working so hard to get that cleaned up.

Folks, I love this blog. I love you Brilliant Readers. But this thing has become a bear. You may have noticed that I already write quite a lot. And I simply do not have time to deal with blog maintenance, spam elimination, comment monitoring and all that. Especially when everything is already going up here at my Sports Illustrated Blog.

So here's what I'm going to do. I've started this blogspot blog. Here is the direct link. I'm hoping to get the old address to redirect. And what I hope to do is still write here, link to my Sports Illustrated posts so that we can keep the conversation going, and I can use this for goofy posts that don't belong anywhere else, for interactive stuff, for polls, for naked self promotion and so on and so forth. I'm sure this thing will build up as we go.

I appreciate that this may not be the perfect solution ... but it's the best I have right now.

My Annual Gardy Rant

OK, so, it's happening again ... every year I feel more and more certain that there has to be something I'm missing. I had a long talk with someone close to the Minnesota Twins ... this someone is the latest in a long series of people who want me to understand just how wrong I am about Ron Gardenhire.

Amazing Baseball Stuff

There are two absolutely remarkable things happening in baseball this year ... or anyway, I think they are remarkable.

1. The Seattle Mariners might be having the worst offensive season in baseball history ... certainly in recent baseball history.

2. The Arizona Diamondbacks are definitely having the most fan-tastic season in baseball history.

The Jeter School of Acting

I've been after a good friend of mine to finally write a book he's been thinking about for a long time: A book about sportsmanship. There are, of course, a lot of books about sportsmanship, many of them good ones. But my friend has a view I haven't read much, a fascinating view. It isn't a "tsk tsk" kind of view. His feeling is that we have so blurred the lines of sportsmanship that it's hard to know the rules. We have become so divided on what is acceptable and justified and admirable when it comes to winning and losing that we are not entirely sure what to teach our kids. It isn't that we have lost our moral compass or anything that severe ... it's more that the lines of fair play, like umpire strike zones, are ever shifting and uniquely individual. It changes sport to sport, level to level, year to year. There isn't a clear line of thinking to follow anymore. I think it would be a good book.

And I think the Derek Jeter play on Wednesday would be a pretty good place to start. You know what happened -- the Yankees were playing Tampa Bay, seventh inning, and the Rays were winning 2-1. There was one out, and Chad Qualls was pitching, Derek Jeter was batting, and Qualls threw the ball way inside where it hit something and bounced back into fair play. The thing that was unusual about the play was that even on television you could hear the ball hit something -- it sounded like a very loud ping. "You could hear that from up here!" they said on the YES Network. That sound, you know, might indicate that the ball hit the bat. Ball hitting hand doesn't sound like that. Instead, the umpire said it hit Jeter and awarded him first base. Jeter came around to score on Curtis Granderson's home run, which gave the Yankees the lead.

The Human Element

At this point, you might know all about my various mixed feelings about instant replay in football -- I've written about it enough. The good parts of instant replay are obvious and decisive -- the NFL is using the best technology to get calls right more often. And there's simply no way around that sort of precision in today's game. We need it. Replay overturns terrible calls and clarifies close ones. Yes, we need it.

Now, coaches and teams are not powerless against a blown call (unless they've wasted their challenges, which happens). Sure, fans can and do still feel cheated by referees -- for questionable holding calls, dubious pass interference no calls, etc. -- but we can at least take solace in knowing the league is doing the best it can to fix mistakes. During the Chiefs-Chargers game Monday night, for instance, there was a punt that the Chargers were trying to down on the 1-yard line. Two different San Diego players were pretty clearly in the end zone while touching the ball. It was obvious in live action that the ball had to come back to the 20. But the official, in what seemed a momentary haze, placed the ball on the 1. That sort of bizarrely bad call doesn't stand in NFL games anymore, and that's simply worth whatever price. You can't get the basic calls -- in or out of bounds, fumble or no fumble, cross the goal line or no -- obviously wrong, not in America's most popular league.

Why I Like WAR (with Poker talk)

OK, here's a long and rambling essay I've pounded out about why I like Wins Above Replacement, not as the end-all, be-all*, but as a pretty good place to start when trying to figure out a player's value.

*"Be-all and the end-all" as phrase comes from Shakespeare, from MacBeth specifically, when MacBeth used to the phrase basically to mean "All there is to it." He was referring to killing King Duncan of Scotland, and he was essentially saying that if killing him the be-all and the end-all -- if he could kill the king and have that be the end of it -- it would be done. But because there could be consequences in the afterlife, there are more issues involved.

We tend to use end-all, be-all differently, as a phrase to describe the ultimate, the very best we can get, all we would really need.

But before going to WAR (alert: I will try to avoid war puns from now on), let me talk a bit about this little discussion I had with Bill James.