Youk

Kevin Youkilis' entire career has been built around
not making outs. (Getty Images)

A few people have suggested over the years that the most telling offensive statistic in baseball might be something called “out percentage.” I think that’s a pretty good idea. It’s not really a new statistic. It’s just on-base percentage turned inside out, but sometimes it’s a good idea to look at something from a different perspective. The magnificent writer Gay Talese used to write out a sentence in big block letters, hang the sentence on his office wall, and then go to the other side of the room and look at it through binoculars.

Out percentage answers a clear question: What percentage of the time does a hitter make an out? That’s all. Outs are the sands of time in baseball. You know this. You get 27 of them in a nine-inning game. You will lose some of them by strikeout, some by groundout, some by flyout. You will lose two of them at a time in double plays. You will surrender some of them moving a teammate a single base or scoring them from third base. You will forfeit some outs trying to get an extra base for yourself.

Through the years, it has always been the role of baseball analysts to tell us something about a hitter’s personality. This player is a clutch hitter, meaning he hits better when the situation demands it. This player is not a clutch hitter, meaning he shrinks when the team needs a hit most. This player is a run producer, meaning he has a distinct ability to score the runners already on base. This player is a table setter, meaning he has distinct ability to be one of those runners on base when the run producers come up. This player is a great teammate, meaning he is skilled at bunting and hitting behind runners and doing those “little things that don’t show up in the box score.” And so on. And so on.

LeBron: Champion

LeBron James averaged 29 points, 10 rebounds
and seven assists in the Finals to win his first 
NBA championship. (Getty Images)

In the end, this was exactly as LeBron James had imagined it. Maybe the journey was not quite as easy as he had hope, but it wasn’t that hard either. And the ending was easy. There he was working into the defense, magnetizing two and three and four defenders, kicking the ball out to a wide open man who cooly made a three-pointer. Miami made 583 out of 589 three-pointers on this night. That might not be an exact figure. But it’s close enough.

There was a freaked out Oklahoma City team -- all of them so young, so raw, so swept away by the moment and the hopelessness of it all.

There was the Miami crowd, its team of superheroes up by 25, cheering as loudly as it ever has, wanting more and more and more …

There was LeBron James holding the trophy.


Yes, it turned out just as LeBron had said it would. There was some pain along the way. There was some disappointment along the way. But, let’s be honest, there wasn’t a lot. LeBron came to South Beach to win championships. He did what no player had ever done -- he teamed up with two of the biggest stars in the world, he announced on national television his intention to take over the NBA and have a lot of fun doing it. He did just that. And it didn’t take long. In his second season, he and Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and a handful of what John Updike memorably called “gems of slightly lesser water” won their first championship, won it going away. The last quarter was a Beach Party, with the game decided, with LeBron making crisp passes leading to three pointers and dunks, with the insatiable crowd able to enjoy being the best without the inconvenience of a close score.

LeBron James won.

He didn’t just win a championship. He won. Period.

Rooting Against LeBron

LeBron James is one win away from securing his first NBA championship. (Getty Images)

I could be imagining this -- I was on vacation in L.A./Hollywood the last week with the family, so there were numerous hallucinations -- but it seems to me that a lot of people are admonishing me for rooting against LeBron James. I don’t mean me personally, I mean all of us in the “We Hope LeBron James Fails Miserably Club.” Like I say, I could be imagining it, but it just feels like there have been many people lately who are writing and saying and tweeting that it’s unseemly or bitter or just plain wrong (perhaps even crazy) to root against LeBron.

I’ve decided I’m going to keep rooting against him anyway.

Cain Perfection

Matt Cain's perfect game on Wednesday was
the first in Giants history. (Getty Images)

OK, so figure this one: From 1900 to 1980 -- though many of those years were dominated by pitching -- there were only seven perfect games thrown.

In 1904, the great Cy Young threw a perfecto against Philadelphia.

In 1908, Addie Joss -- who would be elected to the Hall of Fame though he only pitched nine years -- threw a perfect game against Chicago.

Charlie Robertson was not a great pitcher, but he was great on April 30, 1922 against Detroit. The Tigers would say after that perfect game that he was cutting the baseball, and they even turned in a few baseballs after the game to league president Ban Johnson. Of course, the perfect game stood.

The next perfect game was Don Larsen's in the 1956 World Series, which inspired the classic line: "The imperfect man pitched a perfect game."

And the next three perfect games -- Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax and Catfish Hunter -- were all pitched by future Hall of Famers.

The point is, for 80 years, there was a certain easy-to-follow rhythm about perfect games. You might see one a decade. And the value of these perfect games would be reinforced by the near misses surrounding them. Billy Pierce had his perfecto broken up by the 27th batter; Milt Pappas' 27th batter walked on a borderline pitch; Rick Wise gave up a run and then retired 32 straight batters; Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts and Woodie Fryman all gave up leadoff hits and then retired 27 in a row, Ernie Shore retired 27 straight (including a caught stealing) in relief of Babe Ruth (who was thrown out of the game after one batter), and, of course, most famously, Harvey Haddix threw 12 perfect innings only to have it all come to a sad ending in the 13th. The perfect game wasn't just a wonderful achievement, there was an aura about it. I once compared it to the four-minute mile. I'll get back to that.

 

A Serious LeBron

LeBron James single-handedly broke the Celtics in Game 6 in Boston on Thursday (Getty Images)

Last time, I compared LeBron James to Genie from “Aladdin.” This time, I’m thinking about the end to “The Hustler.” I’ll have to give you a bit of a rundown of that movie to get to the point, so let’s just say SPOILER ALERT for those of you who have not seen “The Hustler.” And if you have not seen it, well, go. Now. The older I get, the more I think it is the best sports movie ever made.

The movie is about a pool shark named Fast Eddie Felson played, of course, by Paul Newman. Fast Eddie is kind of a genius and also kind of a knucklehead. He’s charming, and goofy, and he believes he can sucker anybody, and he’s probably right. His genius is pool. It’s clear that he can play the game the way Greg Maddux could pitch, that is to say on a level above. He has been using that genius by traveling from pool hall to pool hall with his partner, Charlie; together they work many different kinds of hustles. But Fast Eddie -- though he has a hard time explaining it -- wants something bigger than money. He believes that his goal is to be the greatest pool player in the world. And he knows the only way to do that is to beat the best, Minnesota Fats, as played by Jackie Gleason.

With the First Pick ...

In one of the biggest NBA draft blunders, Portland chose Greg
Oden (left) with the No. 1 pick in 2007, ahead of Kevin Durant.
(Getty Images)

When the Oklahoma City game ended Wednesday night, and the Thunder had rumbled to the NBA Finals, the first thought in my mind was the Great Northwest. Of course, I thought about Seattle fans and how they had that team just ripped away from them. I mean, Oklahoma City is a great place, a Midwestern city I always enjoyed. But being a Clevelander, that Seattle thing hits me especially hard. From what I can tell about the Seattle-to-Oklahoma City deal, Clay Bennett makes Art Modell look like … well, I can’t even type any words that might praise Art Modell, but Bennett’s move might have been even more dubious.

And, after thinking about Seattle, I thought about Portland:

“With the first pick in the 2007 NBA draft, the Portland Trail Blazers select Greg Oden from Ohio State University …”


I tweeted those words and got flooded with responses, some of them virtual laughter ("LOL," "haha," "hahahaha," etc), some of them winces (“ouch,” “cold,” “cruel man, just cruel”) and some of them a bit bizarre (“Oden was the right pick at the time!”). But I have to admit, I wasn’t exactly thinking about any of those reactions. I was simply thinking about the quirks of luck and timing and choices. Kevin Durant has led the NBA in scoring the last three seasons. He was a thoroughly unstoppable scorer in this San Antonio series, especially in the fourth quarter and especially when the Thunder most needed those points. He’s taken over from Kobe Bryant, I believe, the role as the most essential player in the Western Conference.

Portland took Oden first. Oklahoma City nee Seattle took Durant second.

LeBron Talk

Maybe LeBron James doesn't like being Jordan-esque, a killer on the court. (US Presswire)

LeBron talk begins, of course, with “Aladdin.” The Disney movie. Well, where else would we begin? You might remember -- especially if you have children and have been pressed to watch Aladdin 284 times -- that there’s a scene where Genie explains a few things he cannot do. These were the provisos and quid pro quos. Rule No. 1: Genie can't kill anyone. Rule No. 2: Genie can't make anyone fall in love. And …

“Rule No. 3: I can’t bring people back from the dead. It’s not a pretty picture. I don’t like doing it!”

Unbreakable

Only one player has gotten more than 750 hits
from age 39 on: Pete Rose. (US Presswire)

Twitter is a remarkable thing. On Saturday, I discovered that Pete Rose is on Twitter. Anyway, it SEEMS to be Pete Rose … based on the fact that this Twitter page is linked from Rose’s official Web site.

But, even though it is linked, there seems some dubious things about it. For one thing, the account had been active for like two weeks and yet when I first checked in, Pete had like only 500 followers (at last check, it was a bit more than 2,000). For another, there were a few tweets that didn’t exactly sound like Pete -- a whole lot of “Check out PeteRose (dot) com”-type pitches. But, like I said, it is the account that links from the official site, and there WERE some pretty cool tweets on there. So I decided to test it out.

I tweeted: “Let’s find out if Pete Rose is real. What is the most unbreakable record in in baseball besides the hit record?”

There are three things I thought about as I tweeted this. One, there is no way -- absolutely no way -- Pete Rose could resist answering. Pete Rose, for whatever else you can and will say about him, loves talking baseball. It is an obsession with him. I have interviewed him numerous times and every time he seemed reluctant to talk at the start, and every time he ended up talking for hours because the guy can’t help himself. He loves talking about pitching, about hitting, about the ways kids play today, about that one time in San Francisco, about that other time at Shea, about Derek Jeter’s chances for 4,000 hits (laughter) about how he would hit Mariano Rivera (back off the plate so a cutter would not saw him off) and on and on and on. Of course, with Pete, beyond the baseball, you get plenty of color commentary about other things, but the context is baseball. He loves it.

New Tiger

For three years or so, I’ve been a Tiger Woods skeptic. In the larger picture, this has not changed. I still do not think Woods will break Jack Nicklaus’ record for most major championships. I still do not think Woods will ever resemble, for extended stretches of time, the impossibly great golfer who won four major championships in a row or the unprecedented golf artist who won six major championships and finished second four other times between the Masters in 2005 and the one-leg U.S. Open in 2008. I think people in golf -- like people in baseball and football and all other sports -- tend to underestimate the erosion of the years. Woods turns 37 in December, his knees are reconstructed, his confidence has taken a beating. When people compare Tiger Woods to his younger self, Nick Faldo inevitably says: “He was a different guy then.” That seems true to me.

All that said: On Sunday, Tiger was Tiger again. I don’t just mean that because he won the Memorial, Jack Nicklaus’ tournament in Dublin, Ohio. Woods won in Orlando earlier this year; he will win tournaments. I don’t just mean that because he hit a near-impossible chip-in that Jack Nicklaus himself called the greatest shot he’d ever seen (it wasn’t clear if Jack meant it was the greatest shot he’d ever seen at the Memorial or in his whole life, but it doesn’t really matter; Jack doesn’t get gooey-eyed very often). Woods has hit a lot of impossibly great shots over the last three years; his ability to make magic on the golf course has never really gone away. I don’t even just mean that Tiger had what golf announcers call “the look,” that now-famous mode where he stalks every putt and stares down every approach shot and seems to go to that place within himself that allows him to remove all doubts.

No Mo No No-Nos (Mets Edition)

Santana had help in his no-no. (US Presswire)

The Mets’ no no-no streak was never quite as unlikely as we made it out to be. The San Diego Padres, founded in 1969, have never thrown a no-hitter.* The Cleveland Indians have not thrown one in more than 30 years, The Milwaukee Brewers have thrown only one in their history (Juan Nieves, of all people) and the Toronto Blue Jays have also thrown just one (more fitting -- it was Dave Stieb). The Mets, with a 50-year drought, also did not set the record for most consecutive years without a no-hitter … they were not especially close. The Philadelphia Phillies did not throw one for 57 years.

*Though the Padres have been no-hit seven times.

And as far as the Mets having a lot of great pitchers who threw no-hitters elsewhere, well, yes that’s kind of interesting in the “Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln” sort of way. But many, many, many great pitchers never threw no-hitters at all. Greg Maddux never threw a no-hitter. Steve Carlton never threw a no-hitter. Tom Glavine … Pete Alexander … Don Drysdale … Don Sutton … Sam McDowell … Pedro Martinez (though I always counted the nine perfect innings he threw against the Padres in 1995) … Whitey Ford … Fergie Jenkins … John Smoltz … and the most unlikely of all, Roger Clemens … none of these pitchers threw no-nos. How in the world did Roger Clemens, one of the most unhittable pitchers in history, never throw a no-hitter?