I'm not sure if we in the blog community are encouraged to endorse print media, but the cover article of today's New York Times Magazine is all about Bonds and his makeup as a professional athlete. It's pretty good. That's all.

Bud's Reign and Rockies' Rain all washed out

I cannot believe this. On the air, on KNBR 680 AM radio in the Bay Area, I'm hearing the horrible weather looming over the ballpark in Denver this afternoon. The lights at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, have just gone out, a tornado has sprung up in the vicinity and lightning has struck quite near the game, which is now in its ninth inning.



Broadcaster Jon Miller astutely chimed in that the perilous meteorological conditions may symbolize the labor struggle leading to the looming player strike tomorrow, August 30, the strike date posted by Donald Fehr and the players' union reps. Will the players strike? Some say they will. ESPN.com has publicized clever signs brandished by fans nationwide at recent games; one message — "You strike, we're out!" — sums up the sentiments nicely.



More optimistic followers of the labor negotiations point to upbeat comments made by this or that player for this or that ball club. Tom Manager leaves one of his starters in for a certain number of pitches. Dick General Manager shuffles a few non-prospects for a 35-year-old starter and cash. Harry Ballplayer (not in the Wade Boggs way) sells the union line, something like caring about the fans. Many fans point to these as signs of progress. Others hold more skepticism.



Baseball thinkers and writers who understand the labor struggle better than I do cover the process with more insight and clarity than I could ever aspire to, so I'll just stick to the weather in Colorado in this space. But it strikes me that the Rockies, more than any other franchise, exemplify the disastrous path baseball has taken since '94.



The expansion to the Rocky Mountains — strictly Bronco territory until then — seemed to work, initially. Starting with the team's inception in '93, the Rockies outdrew beyond expectation. They were the first team (I may be wrong on this) to draw four million tickets in a season. In only their third season they reached the playoffs, losing to Atlanta in the National League Division Series. The highly-touted Blake St. Bombers tandem of Castilla, Bichette, Galarraga and Walker rang in brand-new Coors in style, mashing home run after home run into the jam-packed stands.



Recently, however, the Rockies have struggled in their personnel decisions, and have also failed to maintain a fruitful farm system. Darryl Kile never settled into the thin Rocky Mountain air. The unloading of aging cash vacuums like Dante Bichette and Vinny Castilla proved to be smart moves by the Colorado front office, but current GM Dan O'Dowd has misspent those Benjamins on Mike "Gosh, the schools are great here" Hampton and Denny "I look like the young John Lithgow but I pitch like the old John Lithgow" Neagle. The current roster features two legitimate stars (Molson Man Walker and Tennessee Helton), and more so-called "tools" outfielders-turned late-bloomers (Kapler, Payton, Cust) than Clint Hurdle can cram into a lineup card.



Attendance, while healthy by, say, Tampa Bay standards, has declined noticeably since the The Year That Ellis Burks Was God (1996), and who could blame the fans? Would you show up to see Shawn Chacon cough up seven in four and watch as the Rockies come back to win 13-8? With the NFL season gearing up for kickoff? With the Avs putting up such a great fight in this year's Stanley Cup Playoffs? With the Colorado State football team riding last year's thrilling campaign? With Nuggets GM Kiki Vandeweghe keeping basketball interesting in the post-LaFrentz/Van Exel/McDyess era?



The Colorado Rockies, an organization that thrived as a fan-friendly product through the mid-to-late-nineties, have failed despite playing into all the scams of its generation. Expansion. New ballpark. Money. Fans. Homers. Money. Contracts. Losses. Failure. Lightning. Thunder. Rain. Wind. Destruction.



As the baseball world awaits word from New York — be it good news or bad — the ballclub in Denver is feeling the harsh effects of 1990s baseball already. They threw money at top-name players, and those contracts backfired. Now, their team is lousy, stuck with the lowly-but-hopeful Padres, behind three good-but-beatable teams. Hey, the days of Kevin Ritz and Jody Reed may not sound very exciting in retrospect, but fans were excited then.



The game has been called by now, and hopefully residents in the Denver area are protected during the storms. We all know by now that more imoprtant things than baseball command our attention at times. However, in the coming hours, we will discover whether Miller's comment, which sparked this train of thought for me, is timely prescient, or merely an inspiration for this rant.



But I digress.

I have a friend (yes, the rumors are true) with whom I talk baseball every time I see him. We take turns bemoaning the plight of our teams (Oakland and the Mets) and argue about who has the better players, etc. When we're going back and forth, nothing ignites passionate disagreement between us more than a good ol' Hall of Fame debate — the merits of this player vs. that one, did so-and-so peak too early...



Vladimir Guerrero hit his 200th home run a few nights ago against Milwaukee, and the brightest star his side of Niagara said that he has his sights set on 600. With so many young players (A-Rod, Helton, Andruw, Vlad) climbing higher up the all-time lists with each crack of the bat, my thoughts return to my friend and the player central to one of our most hotly-contested Hall of Fame debates: Sammy Sosa.



Now, I don't mean to offend anybody here. To some of you, Sammy Sosa may be a first-ballot Hall of Famer if you ever saw one. And I can see your point. He's been an incredible force the last four and a half seasons, finishing with more than 60 home runs in three of four full years. He's slugged over .600 and improved his walk total each of the past four seasons, and he has a chance to finish his 2002 campaign as a member of the 500 club. Despite turning 33 just this summer, Sosa's gaudy numbers over the last five years have generated discussion about Sosa's place in history, and with another productive season almost in the books, it's hard to deny that Sosa has been one of the greatest hitters of the last decade.



As is the case with everyone who's been a Mets fan the past two seasons, however, I've learned that to deny something that seems obvious to everyone else — like, I dunno, a certain team's postseason chances — is altogether very possible, no matter how difficult it may seem. To follow that thought: Sammy Sosa is not a Hall of Famer. Not yet, at least. Why not? Well, it doesn't take a ton of research to realize this, but without his home runs totals, Sosa doesn't really have anything special to support his candidacy. Let's stroll through the record books, shall we?



To gain a better understanding of his achievements, it's important to compare Sosa to two groups of players — his contemporaries, and everyone else. Sosa has hit 39 homers so far this season, sending him past Ken Griffey, Jr., for the second-highest active total. Among active players, Sosa also places inside the top 25 in slugging, runs, hits, total bases, RBI and steals. Such an elementary examination of the facts certainly supports the notion that Sammy is a very good hitter, one of the best playing today, which is an assertion I'm comfortable agreeing with.



But Sosa's numbers fall apart somewhat when viewed in a more historical light. His 489 career home runs still hold up, yes; 19th all-time is something to be proud of. However, strikeouts aside (he's closing in on Dave Kingman for seventh), Sammy doesn't place among the top 25 in any other main category. His .548 career slugging mark is close, and he'll finish 2002 ranking someplace around 60th in RBI, but nothing besides the homers really stands out as exceptional.



"Okay, Misha, that's fine, but what would you say about Mark McGwire? What did he ever contribute other than a healthy dosage of bombs? I suppose you're telling me McGwire doesn't belong in the Hall?" This argument is interesting, and by "interesting," I don't mean anything sarcastic like "flawed" or "misleading." I mean, it's those things too, but that's not what I'm saying. Big Mac struck out a ton and will be remembered only because he hit homers, and without his four-year surge of dominance from '96 through '99, there's no way he reaches Cooperstown, either.



Still, there's a hell of a difference between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. In fact, there are many differences. McGwire had a much better OBP (.394 to .348) despite batting 15 points worse over his career. He takes Sammy in slugging (.588 to .548), and his 162-game averages are superior in homers (50 to 43) and nearly double in walks (114 to 63). McGwire also had a better strikeout rate and slightly more RBI over 162 games, while nearly matching Sosa in runs. In runs created, McGwire blows Sosa out of the water. Essentially, McGwire was quite a bit better than Sosa at a few things, and I think the difference means McGwire's inclusion in the Hall.



So maybe comparing Sosa to the great McGwire isn't fair; after all, a slugger of McGwire's talent comes along once a generation. And this really is the heart of what I'm saying: except for his home runs, players with Sosa's numbers (or better) are abundant in today's game. Here's a chart showing the career 162-game averages for Sosa and other hitters of his generation with a shot at the Hall:

	# of seasons	Runs	2B	HR	RBI	BB	SO	OBP.	SLG.	OPS.	AVG.
S. Sosa	11.34	105	26	43	117	63	158	.348	.548	.896	.279
J. Gonzalez	9.71	102	38	42	136	45	122	.344	.563	.907	.296
R. Palmeiro	14.62	97	35	33	106	76	78	.376	.521	.894	.293
M. Ramirez	7.31	111	39	40	135	92	134	.407	.562	.999	.312
L. Walker	10.07	113	40	33	110	70	100	.398	.576	.974	.318
F. Thomas	10.25	111	38	36	123	123	91	.432	.568	1.000	.314
M. Piazza	8.40	100	29	40	124	66	93	.390	.576	.966	.322
E. Martinez	10.66	102	43	25	101	103	92	.425	.530	.955	.315
B. Bonds	14.80	121	34	41	109	126	89	.425	.592	1.017	.294
K. Griffey, Jr.	11.31	109	32	41	119	80	106	.379	.563	.942	.295
F. McGriff	14.27	91	29	33	104	88	124	.380	.514	.894	.286
J. Thome	8.24	107	31	38	108	116	163	.412	.560	.972	.285
B. Williams	9.23	113	37	24	105	88	98	.411	.487	.889	.306
J. Bagwell	10.80	117	39	34	120	109	116	.414	.550	.964	.302

As you can see, there are a dozen guys with numbers like Sosa's, and most of them have serious chances at Cooperstown. This list doesn't even include players who aren't eligible yet but who also have good numbers, like Jason Giambi, A-Rod, Vlad, Giles, Helton and Chipper. Sosa's numbers are very good, but even his only outstanding mark, his home run average, fails to clearly elevate him above the rest. A glance at the all-time career homer leaderboard shows that at least twenty of the top fifty home run-hitters played most of their careers in the past 25 years. Twenty-one active players are inside the top 100. Because of this, whenever somebody asks me questions like, "Would you keep Sosa out if he hit 500? How many would it take?" I have to explain that I don't know how many he (or anyone else) would have to hit. As far as I'm concerned, no number of home runs thrown into discussion is safe, certainly not the Hall yardstick of old, 500. Four players — Sosa, Griffey, McGriff and Palmeiro — will probably reach the milestone this or next year. It is not out of question to speculate that, ten years from now, a dozen more could lay claim to the same feat.



Look, it's impossible to ignore what Sosa has accomplished over the last five or six seasons. If you hit sixty home runs three times, you're going to get attention, and you probably deserve it. But Sammy Sosa is a perfect example of why fans should avoid measuring players by their milestones. Three and a half seasons ago, Sosa wouldn't have even made today's top-100 list. Does a player really go from outside the top 100 — in his only statistical category of dominance, no less — to a Hall of Fame plateau in three and a half seasons? Home runs and saves are the only categories I can think of that allow someone to bypass so much history in such a short period of time, and there isn't really much history in the all-time saves list, anyhow.



Sammy Sosa will pass Lou Gehrig on the home run leaderboard by the end of the month, and pretty soon will start drawing comparisons to the all-time greats. And somewhere, a lonely, dissenting baseball fan will wonder how so much praise is showered on a player who's not even a great among his peers.

Stick-in' it to Wireless Park

I was fortunate enough to be at Pac Bell Park for the Giants-Cubs game tonight, and while the Giants pulled off a 10th-inning victory against Chicago, you wouldn't have known it if not for the scoreboard. His first time up, Barry Bonds stepped into the box and was greeted by something like 14,000 camera flashes. He lined a pitch from Kerry Wood to the warning track, eliciting groans from the unusually-packed-for-a-Giants-game-in-the-first-inning crowd. When Bonds doubled in the fifth inning, it was the most unanimously-booed double I have ever had the pleasure of reacting to. After Bonds came out of the game for pinch runner Tom Goodwin in the eighth, so many "fans" left the ballpark so quickly you'd think there had been a bomb scare. By the time Benito Santiago dribbled an infield single between Billy Mueller and Six Finger Alfonseca to push across the winning run in the 10th, the game had become something of an afterthought. Most of the boats had left McCovey Cove. The arcade section containing the right-field bleachers, which had been packed tighter than a post-game Express Caltrain only innings earlier, once more featured standing/breathing room, its former tenants long having returned to their garlic fries, cell phone conversations and other assorted things not remotely related to baseball or the game at hand.



Before I make my general point, I feel a disclaimer is appropriate. In the few dozen games I've attended in my 18 years, I've been a part of some pretty special moments. I got to see my favorite player from my childhood, Darryl Strawberry, smack three homeruns against the White Sox one steamy summer night in the Bronx. I saw David Cone's first start back from his shoulder aneurysm in '96, when he no-hit Oakland for seven innings but was lifted by manager Joe Torre for precautionary reasons. Cone had pitched the first game that this life-long Mets fan went to in '89, and this comeback game cemented him as my new favorite player, as Straw — the constant disappoint — had fallen somewhat out of my good graces over the years.



A few summers later, with Don Larsen throwing out the first pitch on Yogi Berra day in the Bronx, I was in the stands to see Coney pitch a perfect game against Montreal. That same summer, I sat in the stands with my grandpa and 30,000 screaming Dominicans as Sammy Sosa belted two homers against the Mets on Dominican Night at Shea. I've seen a grand slam, a playoff game, several major league debuts, many extra-innings games and even the Village People (before "Until There's A Cure Day" a few summers ago at the Stick). These moments aren't all terrible rare, or even particularly unique; the point I'm trying to make is that I've been at more than my share of games that were overshadowed by an accomplishment or offset by one circumstance or another.



That said, I have never been part of a crowd as disinterested in a game as tonight's Pac Bell crowd was. The fans seemed so caught up in the Bonds sideshow that they completely missed obvious clapping moments like Russ Ortiz walking off the mound with the lead after pitching seven strong innings. The Cubs tied the game in their half of the 9th with a base hit well over the head of Shawon Dunston. Dunston, though, who never makes a play in the outfield look pretty, fell on his ass attempting to make a play, and was raucously booed when he stepped up to the plate later in the game.



Look, on a theoretical level, I appreciate that the Giants built Pac Bell Park. The sight lines are great from every seat in the building, it has unbelievable views of the Bay and it's not too hard to look at, either. But after going to a dozen or so games the past three seasons, I'm ready to move back to Candlestick. It's been great going to sold-out games held at an architectually-astounding park with all the "modern amenities" and so forth, but the Pac Bell fans are killing me. Not only are most of the fans stupid, but they can't even be stupid in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind type of way. They all bring their phones, and their calling plans all seem to require that they place and receive several calls while in their seats. When they cheer, it's de-personalized garbage they read off of the scoreboard, and many of them don't arrive until the fifth inning.



Candlestick was an eyesore of a ballpark, and it didn't draw anywhere near the number of fans that the "Jewel of San Francisco" rakes in. It didn't have an oversized baseball glove or a Coke bottle slide, and I'm pretty sure there were never any Portugese water dogs. The Stick was concrete grey and grass green, and the only other colors were in the opposing teams' uniforms. When you went to watch a game there, though, by God, that's what you went to do. Make no mistake about it; Candlestick Park was a dump and I'm probably more happy than sad to be watching games in a more hospitable environment. But when doing so is at the cost of sanity, I just might watch Barry go for 700 from my couch.

OPS-olutely horrible

As of this morning, none of the Detroit hitters who qualify for the batting title (or other rate stats) have an .800 OPS. With Robert Fick (.792) and Randall Simon (.775) leading the pack, the Tigers are the only team that can make this claim. They should be so proud.



Although I think OPS really is an overused stat in making basic player evaluations/comparisons, and .800 is a fairly arbitrary cutoff (after all, Fick is only eight points away), the Tigers are still pretty pathetic. The Yanks have six qualified hitters over .800, and the Red Sox have five (plus the quite-productive Cliff Floyd, who obviously won't finish the year with enough ABs to qualify in either league but whose OPS is over .900). If they continue like this, Detroit will be the first team without an .800-OPS hitter since... You guessed it: the 2001 Tampa Bay Devil Rays.