Rumble in the Bronx

It was inevitable. Phil Hughes makes two sub-par starts and suddenly they're coming out of the woodwork: "Why didn't the Yankees trade Hughes for Santana when they had the chance???" Now I'm not going to tell you that I was dead-set against the deal (though I did think the Yankees were making the right decision to pass). But I also recall that opinion was fairly divided in the two camps. To listen to the chatter now, it's as if everyone had volunteered to pack Phil's bags.

But while I find the current overreaction somewhat laughable (and utterly predictable) it should not take away from the fact that Phil Hughes is genuinely struggling. But, that, too, is less laughable but still fairly predictable. Coming into 2008, Hughes had made 13 starts in the major leagues, sandwiched around a lengthy stay on the DL. Anyone who thought his transition from minor-leaguer to #2 starter was going to take place without a hitch needs to readjust his expectations.

While there's no rule that every starting pitcher takes a year or two before he figures it all out -- C.C. Sabathia went 17-5 in his rookie year, with nearly a strikeout per inning -- it's more often the case. Just look at some the current "aces" around the league and you'll see a group that struggled in their first full seasons on the mound: Jake Peavy, 12-11, 4.11 ERA; Josh Beckett, 6-7, 4.10; John Lackey, 10-16, 4.63; Erik Bedard, 6-10, 4.59. Hughes may very well suffer the ups and downs of a young pitcher this season, but those struggles won't necessarily preempt a stellar career.

Yet in addition to resetting their sites on Phil Hughes, Yankee fans need to readjust their expectations for 2008, as well. Not only has Hughes struggled early on, but so has his young rotation-mate, Ian Kennedy. Add to that the inconsistent Mike Mussina, and the older, fragile Andy Pettitte and the Yankee pitching is riddled with question marks. Past its #1 hurler, Chien-Ming Wang, just how many quality starts can this group be expected to produce?

Fret not, though: the Yanks are on the right track. Mussina will be gone next season, along with a number of other dead-weight contracts. (Carl who?) With another year of experience under their belts, Hughes and Kennedy might be fighting Wang for the #1 slot in the rotation by 2009. Throw in Joba (starter or reliever), Cabrera, and Cano, and the Yankees have a solid, young nucleus with more farm-system talent on the way. So what if the Yankees miss the playoffs this year? The payoff will be that much better in the end.

* * * * * * * *

By the way, since last we spoke, the Tigers won a game! Unfortunately, that win did not herald a turnaround. Not only have they not played at that super-charged .700 level, they aren't even winning more than they lose. At 2-10, now 29th in hitting, dead-last in slugging and ERA, one could make the case that the Tigers are actually playing worse now than during their winless streak. More and more, it looks like it will be a long season in Tiger Town.

Break up the Orioles!

The 2008 baseball season is not even two weeks old and some teams' starts are raising eyebrows, especially the bad ones. The Mets, after an Opening Day loss at Shea to the Phillies, are now 2-4. At that pace, the Mets stand to lose 108 games this season! What? Six games isn't much of a sample? Forgive my over-eager extrapolation. I suppose they've got a chance to turn things around over the next 156 games.

But there's another contender off to an ever worse start and the next 150 games may not hold so much promise. The Detroit Tigers, picked by many as World Series hopefuls, are shockingly 0-7 to start the season. Sure, it's a long season, but 0-7 is still a legitimate hole.

Let's say the Tigers shake off the slump and start playing .700 ball, a pretty impressive clip. (Over a full season, a team that played .700 would win 113 games.) So at that rate, over the next two weeks, say 14 games, the Tigers would be 10-11. Ugh. But what if they could keep that torrid pace for over a month? The Tigers might make it to 21-16. Okay, that's certainly better, and .568 baseball leaves you with about 92 wins. But winning 21 out of 30 games after you've lost your first seven sounds like a tall order.

Now look, no one is going to confuse this Detroit team with the 1988 Orioles, a team that lost a record-setting 21 straight to open the season. But so far, the Tigers have earned those losses and the numbers aren't pretty:

• a .234 team batting average (24th in MLB)
  
• a .332 team slugging percentage (29th)
• a staff ERA of 5.20 (27th)

Bad hitting + bad pitching = bad baseball. So far in 2008, that equation fits no team better than the Tigers.

Not So Cranky Today

It's hard to be cranky all the time, even for the Sports Crank. Baseball season is underway, the NCAA tournament is almost over, and the Rangers clinched a playoff berth last night by sweeping the ice with the Islanders.


And they get to do it again tonight at the Garden.

March Malady

It's dirty little secret time: I can't stand the NCAA Tournament. Every year at this time, we are inundated with cries of "March Madness" and I couldn't care less. Sure, I'll fill out a bracket or two, but my methods usually consist of one of the following:

1. Picking the higher seed in every matchup, eventually resulting in four #1 seeds in the Final Four. Sure, that's never happened, but you'd be surprised at how well it works until one of those teams gets knocked out.
2. Finding some "expert" on one of the numerous sports sites out there and using his bracket as mine. Surprisingly, this method generally seems to fall short of method #1.

And in spite of the fact that every office in America has its own tourney pool, interest in the tournament itself is dwindling. I know -- ratings for anything on television are down these days. But still, the fact that the ratings for this year's NCAA tourney are down across the board means I'm not the only one who's tuning out. And if you use the ratings as your guide, there are fewer people actually watching the games than watched "Survivor" in the same time slot the week before.

Yes, there was a time when I had what could be called a "passing interest" in NCAA basketball. I hated Laettner & Co. at Duke. I got a kick out of the upstarts at UConn (beating Duke, natch). And of course there were the Fab Five at Michigan. But that was a long time ago (and an eternity in sports).

So for the next two weeks, as nearly every conversation with another guy begins with, "So you watchin' the games?" I'll continue to nod my head and mutter something about my Final Four picks still being alive. But when that championship game tips off in a couple of Monday nights, I'll have just one question: "Who's on 'Dancing with the Stars' tonight?"

"I must have misremembered about that whole steroid thing..."

At this point, I'd say I felt sorry for Roger Clemens... except for the fact that any man as arrogant and off-putting as Clemens has been for the past 20 years deserves every bit of scorn directed his way. It's one thing to be branded a cheat; it's another thing entirely to be known as a cheat and a liar. And Roger Clemens is making a case to be the sports world's #1 representative of both.

While I agree that Brian McNamee is not exactly the poster boy for Truth, Justice and the American Way, he simply presents the more plausible case. With George Mitchell, the Federal Government, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, and the Nanny backing all or part of his assertions, McNamee makes the best case. Clemens? Apparently the only one to speak for him is that bastion of honor, Jose Canseco. I don’t know about you, but that’s an endorsement I could live without.

So while Clemens digs himself deeper and deeper into this hole, it's fair to think that he's now sunk lower than the original poster boy for steroid use in baseball, Barry Bonds. I'd make the case that Clemens is even worse than Bonds, since Bonds was still performing at an All-Star level when he supposedly started using. Clemens, though, was in the midst of a downhill slide. Who's to say when his career may have ended had he not started "supplementing" his workouts?

But as much as Clemens shares with Bonds, there's another notorious figure whose story parallels Clemens' even more eerily. It wasn't that long ago that another icon from the baseball world, confronted by a government report and mountains of evidence, chose to wage a never-ending campaign of denial:

Jim Gray: Pete, now let me ask you. It seems as though there is an opening, the American public is very forgiving. Are you willing to show contrition, admit that you bet on baseball and make some sort of apology to that effect?

Pete Rose: Not at all, Jim. I'm not going to admit to something that didn't happen. I know you're getting tired of hearing me say that. But I appreciate the ovation. I appreciate the American fans voting me on the All-Century Team. I'm just a small part of a big deal tonight.

JG: With the overwhelming evidence in that report, why not make that step...

PR: No. This is too much of a festive night to worry about that because I don't know what evidence you're talking about. I mean, show it to me...

JG: Pete, those who will hear this tonight will say you have been your own worst enemy and continue to be. How do you respond to that?

PR: In what way are you talking about?

JG: By not acknowledging what seems to be overwhelming evidence.

As we know, it took nearly 14 years but Rose eventually emerged from his cocoon of denial: first, to admit that he bet on baseball; then to admit that he'd bet on his own team, the Reds. Who doesn't foresee Clemens’ voyage along this same road? After today's hearings, only the most-blinded Clemens loyalists can't see past the angry bluster, empty rhetoric and ridiculous lies. The day will come when Clemens, like Rose, will be forced to admit what we already know.

You could have turned your sets off there...

We all know what happened, so I don't need to debase myself here by typing it out. Besides, I might just vomit on the keyboard. At this point, though, I'm not really sure what to do. I honestly never expected anything like this to happen so I have no back-up plans.

My first reaction was disbelief, so much so that I'm not even sure if it was real. But my next thought surprised me. Even for me, it came off as a tad melodramatic. Yet as I sit here writing, I don't see another alternative: I'm pretty sure I've watched my last NFL game.

What happened on Sunday night is the NFL equivalent of rain falling upwards, mice eating cats or the Earth orbiting the moon. There's no logic to explain how it played out. Not a single iota of sense to the end result. It's as if the NFL spun a big wheel and picked the winner at random.

So if a sport, on the whole, cannot be governed by logic, cannot ensure that over the course of time the reasonable outcome will occur, than how can I invest myself in it? I can't. I know what I know to be true, so that if the complete opposite comes to pass, then there's nothing left in it for me.

And that's the last time I'm going to comment on that. So give me fall Saturdays. Go Michigan. My TV won't be going on come Sunday.

Figures Lie and Liars Figure

The conventional wisdom is that you can manipulate statistics to bolster any argument. So the fact that Team Clemens claims their latest testimonial -- an endless accumulation of numbers, graphs and exposition -- explains away Clemens' remarkable longevity is no surprise. SI.com's Tom Verducci does a great job cutting through the clutter and coming to the conclusion that you can use 18,000 words and still have nothing to say.

But I think Verducci lets Clemens off the hook. In fact, using the very statistics that Verducci provides, one can argue the case against Clemens grows even stronger. Let's take a look at the numbers from Clemens' first season in Toronto, both before and after the time that Brian McNamee claims to have first injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone:

1998	GS	W-L	ERA	K/9	OPS
Before	13	6-6	3.27	9.18	.592
After	20	14-0	2.29	11.11	.561

Combine his slow start in Toronto with four sub-par seasons in Boston -- twice under .500, no more than 11 wins, twice with an ERA over 4 -- and this is the portrait of a pitcher approaching the downside of his career. Then, like flipping a switch, Clemens becomes virtually unbeatable. But instead of the obvious, Clemens' camp instead serves up this implausible explanation:

By the mid 1990's, he had mastered the split-finger fastball, and the combination of Clemens' experience, his overpowering fastball, and his improved split-finger fastball led to two consecutive Cy Young Awards in what the record shows to be the best pitching of his career. -- Clemens Report

Really? In the 14th year of his major league career, after four-plus years on the decline, Roger Clemens had the best seasons of his life because he picked up the splitter? Really? Did I mention that was his 14th season?

But let's assume for the moment that we'll consider this ridiculous assertion, and that Clemens resurgence was due to his craftiness on the mound, rather than a slavish devotion to performance-enhancing drugs. What, then, do we make of Brian McNamee and his claims? Are we expected to believe that McNamee was so prescient that he'd broken down Clemens' exploits himself? Otherwise, how is it that he provided dates and doses that corresponded nearly exactly with the ups and downs of Clemens' post-Boston career? And that he was able to provide that information on demand, under oath, with a possible Federal indictment hanging over his head?

Clemens himself noted how hard it is "to prove a negative". It becomes even harder when your angry denials, backed by little more than an indignant attitude, stand in direct opposition to common sense. But hey, you can't blame Pete Rose... er, I mean, Roger Clemens, for trying.