Free coffee and baseball: This is a match made in heaven, from Sarah’s point of view. Two notes: 1. Jose Canseco is worried that he’ll get poisoned via free coffee. 2. Jonathan Papelbon is advertising free coffee (with purchase of either a flatbread sandwich or a pizza) at Dunkin’ Donuts, available the day after the Red Sox win. Sounds a bit complicated to me—and it’s cheap of DD to exclude their own employees. Not to mention that Paps looks like a cheeseball in this photo. Why didn’t they just go with a real post-game shot?

Speed: the Blue Jays are going to be swiping more bags this season. And speaking of speed, I enjoyed watching the A’s relievers throw over to first with Jason Varitek standing on the bag. Yes, let’s make sure the 35-year old catcher doesn’t steal.

Fans: It just goes to show you that the Dodgers really do have a special relationship with their fans, as LA hurler Brad Penny warmed up with a lucky fan yesterday. Across town, Angels owner Arte Moreno bought souvenirs for several fans. And it seems that Baltimore’s long-suffering faithful are finally abandoning their ballclub. Just don’t get mad when the Sox come to town in May and bring their hordes of free-spending fans with them, transforming Camden Yards into Fenway South. The O’s need the revenue.

No-hitters: Yesterday, ESPN.com carried a teaser for the Chicago-Detroit game saying the Dontrelle Willis was throwing a no-no through five innings. To me, that’s just false advertising. Sure, it’s technically accurate to say that D-Train ended up one-hitting the White Sox, but it would perhaps be more descriptive to say that Willis went five innings, while walking seven and striking out none. It was the least dominant no-no bid I’ve ever watched. An outing more worthy of ESPN’s hype would have been Jake Peavy’s two-hit complete game or Manny Parra’s legit seven-strikeout no-hit bid, carried through five innings.

Reds Rookies: On the heels of Johnny Cueto’s stunning debut Thursday, another Reds rookie pitcher impresses today. Edinson Volquez has pitched five innings so far, with seven K’s and one earned run. He’s scattered three hits and two walks.

Sleep: The Red Sox really do need it. Their odyssey from Florida to Japan to California to Toronto is starting to tell, and it’s most readily apparent on defense. Boston has already committed two errors halfway through today’s game. They had two errors yesterday, too, and have racked up a number of sloppy near-errors over the past few games. They have a day off tomorrow and open Fenway Park on Tuesday.

Juan Pierre is an average outfielder. At best.
He has no power.

He has a terrible arm.

The contract the Dodgers signed him to before last season was insane.

On that, we can all agree.

So it’s really no surprise that the Dodgers have opted to go with Andre Ethier, Andruw Jones and Matt Kemp in the outfield, relegating Pierre to the bench.

But is Pierre wrong to complain about being demoted? I’m not so sure.

Here’s what Pierre told the L.A. Times:

“If they want to go a different route,” Pierre said, “I can live with it and I have to understand it but it’s something I don’t get.”

When the Dodgers signed Pierre, they knew exactly what they were getting — and they were thrilled to have it. So what’s changed?

In the four seasons before he signed with the Dodgers, Pierre didn’t miss a game. Last season, with L.A., he played all 162.

In 2006, with the Cubs, he batted .292. With the Dodgers he hit .293.

With the Cubs, Pierre’s OBP was .330. Last year it was .331.

With the Cubs, Pierre struck out 38 times and walked 32 times. With the Dodgers, he struck out 37 times and walked 33 times.

With the Cubs, Pierre stole 58 bases. With the Dodgers, he stole 64.

In every way possible, Pierre lived up to reasonable expectations. He has been, if nothing else, consistent.

If you interviewed for a job, told your prospective employer exactly what he/she could expect over the next four years and then went out and did exactly what you promised you would do, wouldn’t you be pissed if the company all of a sudden decided that wasn’t good enough?

I’m not saying the Dodgers were wrong to bench Pierre. By playing Ethier, they’re making the team better.

I’m saying they were wrong to sign him in the first place. Their inability to evaluate free agents has placed Joe Torre and Juan Pierre in an impossible situation. Pierre wants to play, but he doesn’t want to break the contract he worked so hard to land. Torre wants the best team possible, but he knows a starting gig was promised to Pierre — and he knows Pierre has lived up to his end of the bargain.
I think Pierre is right to be upset.

This is one of a series of posts in which we rip each team for their offseason blunders and praise them for their wily moves.

If the Dodgers had done absolutely nothing at all this whole offseason, I would have given them an “A” grade, because given this year’s free agent class and the incredible amount of talent already in the Dodgers system, I honestly feel that would have been the best course of action. Indeed, the Dodgers failed to contend last season, not because they didn’t have the right players, but because they had the right players and refused to play them until it was too late.

Just think: even if the Dodgers had not signed a single free agent, they could have put this team on the field (2008 ages in parentheses):

C Russell Martin (25)
1B James Loney (24)
2B Jeff Kent (40)
3B Andy LaRoche (24)
SS Rafael Furcal (30)
LF Delwyn Young (26)
CF Matt Kempt (23)
RF Andre Ethier (26)

Outside of Kent, that is an incredibly young, incredibly talented team with lots of upside and would have had no real holes anywhere in the lineup. The Dodgers would also have had an already set bullpen and rotation, and even if someone went down with an injury, they would have already had reasonable in-house replacements - Nomar Garciaparra at 1B and 3B, Juan Pierre and Jason Repko in the outfield, Chin-Lung Hu and Tony Abreu in the middle infield, and Hong-Chih Kuo, Eric Stults, and Johnathan Meloan in the rotation and bullpen.

Of course, we all knew that there was no way in hell that Ned Colletti would stand pat and run that lineup I have proposed out there, given his completely lack of trust in anyone younger than 30 and his deep, abiding love of the big name. And sure enough, Colletti ran out and splashed around in a pool of Frank McCourt’s money, signing new manager Joe Torre, centerfielder Andruw Jones, and Japanese starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda. These moves drew a lot of positive press, but did they really help the team for 2008? Let’s have a look…

Joe Torre is one of the most respected managers in the game, and if the Dodgers had one spot they could have upgraded after last season, it was at the end of the bench, where Grady Little showed a disturbing lack of ability to keep control over his clubhouse, which fell into backbiting and bickering as the Dodgers fell out of contention. So it seems pretty hard to take issue with the Dodgers signing a manager who is widely regarded as one of the best around at handling a major league clubhouse.

But I am going to take some issue nonetheless. As I have argued previously in this space, I think that Torre’s in-game managerial skills are overrated at best, and downright suspect at worst. Also, as right as he may have been for the Yankees in the late 1990s, I am not at all convinced that Joe Torre is the right manager for this Dodgers team, now, in 2008, ie a team whose chances of contending absolutely depend on a manger who is willing to play largely untested but supremely talented kids over proven but inferior veterans, a manager I am not at all sure Torre is capable of becoming.

For example, Torre has already gone on the record as saying he is likely to view Juan Pierre as a starter:

“I’ve always been one to favor experience….Juan Pierre brings so many things. He plays all the time, he gets 200 hits, steals 60 bases. We know he has no power, but he’s a gamer. He’s the type of player that fits into a winning situation.”

Ouch. That is not a good sign.

Meanwhile, Torre remains the highest-paid manager in the game, and I am not sure that money wouldn’t have been better spent elsewhere - say signing a top-flight middle reliever or something.

Similarly, the press also rained praise upon Ned Colletti for signing Andruw Jones, despite the high price tag, hailing it as a case of buying low and minimizing risk by not locking the team in to Jones’s mid-30s decline years. But Andruw Jones was pretty helpless at the plate last year, and while he is extremely unlikely to repeat last year’s showing, and certainly represents a big upgrade from Juan Pierre in center, both offensively and defensively, it is not at all clear that the Dodgers have made themselves a better team by giving Jones Manny Ramirez money for the next two years, unless Colletti and Torre are committed to forcing Pierre into a bench role, which there is no sign that they are. If, as seems to be the plan, Juan Pierre is shifted to left field, the Dodgers may actually be a worse team for having signed Jones, because if Juan Pierre is allowed to take away even 200 at-bats that would otherwise have gone to Matt Kemp or Andre Ethier, the Jones signing becomes worse than a wash.

The third big offseason move the Dodgers made was to sign highly sought after Japanese starter Hiroki Kuroda to a 3-year $35.3 million deal. While Kuroda definitely pitched like an ace in Japan, most projections have him pitching more like a 4th starter in the major leagues, which means that at $12 million per year, he would be one of the most expensive 4th starters around. Evaluating the Kuroda deal comes down to the question of whether Kuroda would outpitch Esteban Loiza this year (the man he is bumping from the rotation), and even though he probably could, it is very questionable whether the difference in their performance would be worth all that money.

The only other move the Dodgers have made all offseason at the major-league level was to sign veteran Gary Bennett to be their backup catcher. While this deal didn’t make big headlines, I think it was another questionable move by Ned Colletti, signing a veteran where a rookie or a no-namer would do. I can’t help asking myself the question, “Is Gary Bennett even replacement level?” We are talking about a guy who has had an OBP under .300 for the last five seasons in a row, and has never walked more than 24 times in a season. And given that everyone recognizes that star catcher Russell Martin was probably overused last year and will need to be rested more often this season, it would have behooved Colletti to have come up with a backup catcher who could at least achieve replacement level output when he plays.

Sill, when all is said and done, the Dodgers’ offseason has to be accounted a success this year, because Colletti somehow resisted the temptation to trade away Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Clayton Kershaw, and didn’t make any truly terrible deals as he has done in past years with Juan Pierre and Jason Schmidt. Assuming Colletti can show similar restraint going forward, Dodgers fans have reason to be cautiously optimistic about this coming season, and especially the next few years after that.

Offseason Grade: B

Additions: Joe Torre, Andrew Jones, Hiroki Kuroda, Gary Bennett

Losses: Luis Gonzalez, Randy Wolf, David Wells, Mark Hendrickson, Mike Lieberthal, Olmedo Saenz

Projected Lineup, Rotation, and Closer:

SS Rafael Furcal - .270/.333/.355, 25 SB
LF Juan Pierre - .293/.331/.353, 64 SB
1B James Loney - .331/.381/.538
CF Andruw Jones - .222/.311/.413, 26 HR
RF Matt Kemp - .342/.373/.521
2B Jeff Kent - .302/.375/.500, 20 HR
C Russell Martin - .293/.374/.469, 21 SB
3B Andy LaRoche - .226/.365/.312

RHP Brad Penny - 16-4, 3.03
RHP Derek Lowe - 12-14, 3.88
RHP Chad Billingsley - 12-5, 3.31
RHP Hiroki Kuroda - 12-8, 3.56 (Japanese stats)
RHP Jason Schmidt - 1-4, 6.31

CL Takashi Saito - 1.40, 39 SV

- Hot Offseason Action Index -

So in honor of the 50th anniversary of their move to Los Angeles, the Dodgers are going to play the Red Sox in an exhibition game on March 29 in the historic Los Angeles Coliseum, which was originally built for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and was the home of the Dodgers for four seasons from when they moved to LA in 1958 until Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

Baseball games at the Coliseum are of course famous for having a ridiculous short left-field line. It was 258 feet back in the 1950s, and is going to be even shorter than that this time around. Back in the day, they had a 42 foot mesh screen out in left field to compensate, but even so, it was still pretty easy to hit homers, and lefthanded Dodgers outfielder Wally Moon famously adjusted his swing to poke inside-out homers down the short left-field line, which became affectionately known as “Moon Shots.”

90,505 tickets for the game went on sale this past week, and every ticket was sold the first day. One hundred percent of proceeds from the game go to “ThinkCure,” a new charity founded by the Dodgers to fund cancer research, and modeled after the Red Sox’ Jimmy Fund, continuing the McCourt’s quest to turn the Dodgers into Red Sox West. Still it is a good cause, and the McCourts are going to match donations up to $1 million dollars, so I can’t really say anything bad about this event.

We get to see baseball in the Coliseum again after all these years, it’s Dodgers-Red Sox, and all the money goes to charity. Now that is just cool all around.

According to the AP, Don Mattingly won’t be the Dodgers hitting coach this season, due to family concerns. Instead, he’ll be a special assistant of some sort. Mattingly’s publicist released this statement to announce the change:

“Donnie is prioritizing his family first,” his agent, Ray Schulte, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “The Dodgers have been very supportive, creating a position so Don can still make a contribution to the team throughout the year!”

Now, I’m no publicist. But I’ve worked in journalism and I’ve worked in communications and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that, when drafting a statement about a client’s family problems and subsequent role reduction, you probably want to steer clear of exclamation marks. An exclamation mark suggests this is a positive development. But let’s be real. Mattingly’s new position is a step back, not a step up. And his family problems, whatever they are, should hardly be cause for celebration.

Don, I wouldn’t fire your publicist over one lousy bit of punctuation. But I’d tell him to be more careful?

San Diego Padres - a left fielder

To say left field was a revolving door for the Friars last season would be generous. It was more like there was no door at all, and anyone could just walk through and play. After trying all manner of flotsam there last year, including castoffs like Jose Cruz, Jr., Paul McAnulty, Russ Branyan, Terrmel Sledge, Rob Mackowiak, the Padres have still not found a solution.

Although Scott Hairston did hit like a man on fire after coming over from the D-Backs in a late season trade (.981 OPS in 87 AB), and is the putative starter if the season were to start today, before coming to the Pads he had an awful .659 OPS in 176 at-bats with the Snakes, so it’s hard to have any confidence in him.

Another reason it would be useful for the Padres to add at least one more capable player to their outfield mix is that their starting centerfielder is the aging and injury prone Jim Edmonds, who is highly unlikely to make it through a whole season without several trips to the DL.

Arizona Diamondbacks - a fourth outfielder

After an offseason in which they did just about everything right, the team’s only discernable hole is in the outfield. The Snakes seem committed to going with youngster Justin Upton as their everyday rightfielder, despite his unsightly .221/.283/.364 line last season. But now that Arizona has traded away its two best outfield prospects in Carlos Quentin and Carlos Gonzalez, if Upton falters or if either of the other two guys go down for any extended period, the D-Backs’ only replacement option off the bench is some 28-year-old 4-A dude named Jeff Salazar, a guy who nobody would want to see playing in the outfield every day.

Colorado Rockies - a left-handed reliever

Like the Diamondbacks, the Rockies are another team with very few holes left, having fulfilled their promise to the fans to return last year’s World Series squad virtually intact. They did “lose” Kazuo Matsui to the Astros, but that may well be a blessing, as it opens up a spot for top infield prospect and purported defensive wizard Jayson Nix, and even if Nix falters, the Rocks still have several other options to choose from at the keystone, including prospects Omar Quintanilla, Jeff Baker, and Ian Stewart, and former Braves star Marcus Giles, whom they just inked to a minor-league deal.

The Rockies are set to turn over half their bullpen, however, with LaTroy Hawkins having already bolted for the Yankees and free agents Jorge Julio and Jeremy Affeldt set to depart as well. Although the Rockies were able to sign Luis Vizcaino to fill Hawkins’ shoes, they probably need to sign at least one more reliever, especially a left-hander to fill the situational lefty role Affeldt handled last season, as they have no particularly appealing internal options to replace him.

Los Angeles Dodgers - continue resisting the temptation to trade away their young guns

A good argument could be made that the Dodgers could have improved their team dramatically by making no moves whatsoever this offseason, and just letting their highly touted, major-league ready prospects have a chance to show what they can do.

Of course, Ned Colletti being Ned Colletti, he had to go out and sign at least a few big names, giving fairly outrageous contracts to outfielder Andrew Jones and Japanese import Hiroki Kuroda. But so far he has resisted the deluge of trade offers for coveted young players like Matt Kemp, Clayton Kershaw, and James Loney, and if he can keep on resisting those offers, as well as the temptation to block them any further with free agent signings, the Dodgers should be in pretty good shape to make a run at the playoffs this season.

San Francisco Giants - EVERYTHING

Here is a short list of the things the Giants need: a first baseman, a second baseman, a third baseman, a starting pitcher, a closer, and three other relievers of any ability. Outside of the outfield (Rowand, Roberts, Randy Winn), and the young arms in the rotation (Cain, Lowry, Lincecum), this team is going to be absolutely terrible, and they have no promising prospects of any real note on the way either. The Giants are well nigh a stone cold lock to have the worst offense in the National League this year.

So the Dodgers have signed Japanese starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda to a 3-year, $35.2 million deal.

As a Dodgers fan, I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this. I mean, Kuroda was definitely the best Japanese pitcher on the market this year so that’s good, but how good is he really? We know his is better than Kei Igawa, but we also know he is worse than Daisuke Matsuzaka, so where exactly does that leave the Dodgers? Maybe he is a 4th starter in the Majors? But he could also turn out to be worse than a 5th starter. I’m not sure a pitcher falling into that range is at all worth $12 million a year or a 3-year commitment.

But one thing that really bugs me is the way pretty much the entire sabermetric community has been attempting to evaluate Kuroda and in fact all Japanese pitchers, namely by looking at stats like their strikeout and walk rates per 9 innings.

Now in fairness, in recent years, since we have come to understand the magic of BABIP and the fact that pitchers really have little control over what happens to a batted ball once it is put into play, things like strikeout, walk, and homer rates have been increasingly used to evaluate and project pitcher performance, dare I say with increasingly effective results. And in general, you can put me squarely in the camp of people who favor using these metrics to project performance by major leaguers from year to year and minor leaguers called up to the majors.

HOWEVER, I think that these types of stats begin to approach uselessness when evaluating Japanese pitchers. At least if they are used in isolation, and not part of a more considered approach.

Why? Because as anyone who has any real familiarity with Japanese baseball knows, there are real cultural differences between Japanese and American baseball that merely looking at stats cannot show you.

In this particular case, the difference is that in Japan, nothing a batter can do is worse or more humiliating than a strikeout. Japanese batters will do almost anything to avoid striking out, including choking up on the bat, slap-hitting, and bunting against tough strikeout pitchers. Japanese managers routinely bench players who strike out a few times in a row. In fact the swing they teach Japanese players from their youth is deliberately designed to sacrifice power in exchange for fewer strikeouts.

Walks are also somewhat more frowned upon in Japan than America. In many ways, the attitudes in Japanese baseball are what American baseball was like until about 15 years ago, where batting average is worshiped as the ultimate stat, and walks are seeing as almost disappointing.

Meanwhile, in America, while there are still the occasional grumbles about people who strike out too much and once in a while somebody like Dusty Baker says something like how walks “clog up the basepaths” (and gets endlessly mocked for it), pretty much everyone recognizes that strikeouts are not as bad as we once thought, and that walks are pretty much unequivocably good. And pretty much all players except Ichiro use the modern, full bodied swing designed to generate home runs and a lot of hard line drives, rather than the all-arms, slap-hitting swing which really hasn’t been seen much in America since the days of Ty Cobb.

So while looking at strikeout and walk rates work great for evaluating the chance for minor league pitchers to do well in the Majors, because those players are playing within the same baseball culture, it is completely foolish to do the exact same thing for Japanese pitchers. Hasn’t anyone noticed that basically all Japanese pitchers, from Hideo Nomo to Daisuke Matsuzaka and everyone in between, have seen their strikeout rates improve and their walk rates decline when they come over to the Majors?

This is why I get so sick of people saying that Takashi Saito was a fluke for being a mediocre middle reliever in Japan but an astonishingly good closer in America. No, he is not a fluke. His pinpoint command, and ability to miss bats just plays better in America, where people actually try to take walks, but also don’t mind striking out as much. In Japan, his always being around the zone was not as much of an asset because nobody was going to walk anyway, and his low-90s fastball with late life and back-door slider were not as effective either against slap hitters who would wait back an extra second on those pitches and just try to slap them into play.

Which is all to explain why I get so annoyed when people say things like this:

The thing is, Kuroda isn’t all that exciting of a pitcher. To best make my point, we’ll play the beloved compare Kuroda to a mystery player game.

Kuroda, age 32 season: 179.7 IP, 6.16 K/9, 2.10 BB/9, 2.92 K/BB, 1 HR/9

Mystery pitcher, age 28 season: 192.7 IP, 5.70 K/9, 2.66 BB/9, 2.14 K/BB, 1.03 HR/9

And the mystery pitcher is…a small Filipino woman. Have I just blown your mind?

No wait, it’s Kyle Lohse. Point is that while Kuroda is the superior pitcher, the fact that Lohse is four years younger, pitched in two of the biggest hitters parks in baseball, and actually was facing big league competition makes the gap mighty close. Now, since the general reaction to a Kyle Lohse signing would be Jonestown-esque, acquiring someone who might be a little better shouldn’t inspire much confidence.

Now the guy over at the True Blue LA blog (whom I actually respect in general) obviously thought he was being pretty clever by noticing this comparison between Kuroda and the much reviled Kyle Lohse, but while as I indicated above I’m not so sure that Kuroda is all that exciting of a pitcher either, I submit to you that the reasoning behind this kind of comparison is severely flawed, and that a rate 6.16 K/9 in Japan is much more impressive than it would be if it had been achieved in America.

Comparing home run rates is also silly, since Japan has much smaller ballparks than America does. And I’m not even going to get into the different strike zone in Japan, or the different ball, as this post is already getting quite long. The point is, when it comes to rates like these, Japanese pitchers need to be compared to other Japanese pitchers, or other pitchers who came to America from Japan. Comparing these rates directly to Kyle Lohse, who is pitching against batters with a completely different hitting philosophy, is truly comparing apples and oranges.

Most Dodger fans have been hoping and praying that the Dodgers would just stand pat and do nothing this offseason. Why? Because the Dodgers are so stocked with young talent, and the free agent market this year is so bad, that the Boys in Blue would probably have a better chance of winning the division next season if they just turned things over to kids than if they blocked them with pricey, overrated, veterans of declining ability. In fact, this author feels the Dodgers probably could have won the division last year if they had let guys like Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Andy LaRoche play from the start, instead of blocking them for most of the season with “big name” veterans like Luis Gonzalez, Nomar Garciaparra, and Juan Pierre.

So when day after day of the Winter Meetings went by without the Dodgers doing anything at all, hope began,slowly but surely, to well up in the hearts of Dodger fans. Hope that maybe Colletti had finally learned his lesson and was finally going to give all that young talent, talent every team in baseball had been chasing after all fall, a chance to prove itself on the field.

We should have known better.

We should have known that there was simply no way in hell that one Ned Louis Colletti Jr. was going to leave Nashville without signing at least one “experienced veteran” to an overpriced contract which would block at least one of his hot young prospects for at least a few more years.

And so, Andruw Jones is now a Dodger.

What bothers me most about this deal is that the Dodgers could have one of the best young outfields in baseball virtually for free if they went with a lineup of Kemp, Andre Ethier, and Delwyn Young.  But instead at least two of those guys are now going to be blocked by Pierre and Jones at an annual cost of nearly $30 million (it had been my secret hope that the Dodgers would take advantage of the incredible demand for centerfielders this offseason by trading Pierre).

And what bothers me almost as much about this deal are the specifics of the contract that is reportedly being given to Andruw Jones. $19 million per year??? For a player who just came off a season in which he batted .222 and had an OBP of .311??

I mean, Jones is still a pretty talented player, who may well have simply had an off year, so it would have been one thing if Colletti had shrewdly leveraged Jones’s weak performance last season to sign a decent player at a below-market price. But to make said player the fifth-highest paid player in all of baseball, behind only Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Derek Jeter, and Carlos Zambrano, especially when you don’t really have any pressing need for a centerfielder, and are now going to have to find someplace for the $45 million centerfielder you signed last year to play, is just stupidity.

The only people to whom this deal can make any sense are those who live on Planet Scott Boras, or those who let Boras take them for a ride there. My question is, why is it always the Dodgers who have to have the gullible GM who will believe whatever Boras says and hand out the most ridiculous contracts in Boras’s storied career?

When Rob Neyer chronicled the stupidest contracts given to Boras clients last month, he cited the contracts the Dodgers gave to Darren Dreifort and Kevin Brown as the two worst. This one may not be quite as bad as those two since it is only two years, but given the ridiculousness of the annual value and the fact that the Dodgers had no real need to do this, it needs to be added to Neyer’s list.

It’s Hall of Fame Week here at Umpbump. We’ll be taking a closer look at the Hall and giving you our take on who does and doesn’t belong in Cooperstown. In the last of our 5-part series on who belongs, we have a look at the case for Brooklyn Dodgers legend Gil Hodges.

It is long past time that Gil Hodges was put into the Hall of Fame.

One of the core members of the mighty “Boys of Summer” Brooklyn Dodgers dynasty, the soft-spoken Hodges was the beloved first baseman and cleanup hitter of a Dodgers squad that went to 7 World Series in a 13 season stretch. More than any other player, Hodges defined that team - his first full year in 1947 marked their first trip to the World Series, and his last full season in 1959 marked their last World Series appearance. In the intervening years, Hodges had 7 seasons in a row in which he banged out at least 100 RBI, and 11 seasons in a row in which he hit at least 22 homers, including two seasons over 40. Although Hodges’ career totals in the counting stats are sometimes seen as falling short, it is important to note that he did lose 4 prime years to service in the Marines during World War II, and even so, when he retired in 1963 he held the National League record for most home runs ever by a right-handed batter.

But while Hodges’ hitting numbers alone are impressive, he was also one of the finest defensive first basemen of all time. Throughout the 1950s, Hodges was universally acknowledged as the best defensive first baseman in the National League, acclaimed for his soft hands and great range. Hodges won the first three gold glove awards ever awarded to first basemen, including winning the first award in 1957 when there was only one Gold Glove at each position for the entire Major Leagues. Presumably, he would have won many, many more if the award had existed earlier.

Hodges also deserves commemoration as a respected Major League manager, who masterminded one of the most famous and improbable World Series runs ever as the skipper of the 1969 “Miracle” Mets. All in all, Hodges managed 9 seasons in the Majors, and was at the height of his esteem and respect as a manager when health issues forced his retirement in 1972 and caused his untimely death at the age of only 47 later that year.

The fact is, no player has ever come closer to making it into the Hall of Fame with out actually getting in than Gil Hodges. Consider:

• No player has ever received more votes from the Baseball Writers Association over the course of his 15 years of eligibility without getting in than Gil Hodges and his staggering 3010 votes.
• Gil Hodges is the only player to ever receive more than 60 percent of the vote in a year without eventually getting in. Today, clearing 50 percent is considered almost a sure sign that a player will eventually get in.
• At various times during his 15 years on the ballot, Hodges finished with more votes than 21 different players who would later become Hall of Famers.

There are historical reasons for why Hodges has been kept out of the Hall of Fame. Many have cited his early death as having prevented him from having the time to become one of the game’s respected elder statesman and get all chummy with the members of the veterans committee who elected so many of their buddies in the 1990s.

Just to take one example of an a first baseman inferior to Hodges who got elected by hanging around long enough to become a respected elder statesman, consider Tony Perez, who was elected in 2000 after years of heavy lobbying by “Big Red Machine” teammates already in the Hall, such as Joe Morgan. Hodges outslugged Perez (.487 to .463) had a higher OBP (.359 to .341), made more All-Star teams (8 vs. 7), won more Gold Gloves (3 out of a possible 3 vs. zero), had just as many 100-RBI marks (7) in fewer seasons, and his 370 homers were only 9 fewer than Perez hit in 2,748 additional at-bats.

But the simplest and biggest reason Hodges has been denied the Hall was that Hall voters deeply love the statistic of batting average. Although Hodges was good at drawing walks, his batting average was “only” .273. Just to give some perspective, even by the time of Hodges death in the 1970s, the Baseball Writers had only ever elected five players who had a career batting average below .300, and all five were either catchers or shortstops. Even today, it seems likely that many of the Veterans Committee voters look first at Hodges’ batting average and get no further, simply thinking to themselves “.273? That is not a Hall of Famer.”

But that is a shame. Because Gil Hodges was the prototype of the modern first baseman which all teams look for - a premier home run hitter who also gets on base and plays flawless defense around the bag.

So to recap: 1. Gil Hodges was the cornerstone of a legendary team which went to SEVEN World Series. 2. Gil Hodges put up Hall-worthy career numbers despite losing 4 years to military service. 3. Gil Hodges was the best offensive first baseman in the National League throughout his career. 4. Gil Hodges was also the best defensive first baseman in the National League, and perhaps all of baseball, throughout his career. 5. Nobody has drawn more support from more people for Hall induction than Gil Hodges has, without actually getting in.

Let’s put this man in the Hall already.

Rumors were flying all over the baseball world last night that the Dodgers have all but decided to fire manager Grady Little and replace him with Joe Torre.

As a Dodgers fan I would have mixed feelings if this whole thing actually goes through. On one hand, I have no particular love for Grady Little, who in two years at the helm of the Boys in Blue proved himself to be a borderline incompetent in-game manager, but even worse, completely lost control of his clubhouse down the stretch this year.

In this day and age of high-salaried, high-maintenance ballplayers, a manager’s biggest job has become managing the egos in the clubhouse (second biggest job: dealing with the media), and Grady decisively proved that he couldn’t do that.

So I’m not sad to see Grady go at all.

But on the other hand, Joe Torre is a supremely overrated manager. Granted, he was adept at performing what I just said were a manager’s top two jobs of managing the egos and managing the press, so credit where credit is due, but where the overrated part comes in is all the additional credit he gets for all the World Series titles that the Yankees won.

The fact is that Joe Torre was blessed with supremely talented teams for all twelve years he was with the Yankees. All twelve of those teams were the best team on paper heading into the season, and all twelve would have been expected to go far into the playoffs, no matter who was managing.

Joe Torre lived up to what we would have expected from any manager under those circumstances. He did an okay job. In the first five years (with no small amount of luck - Jeffrey Maier, anyone?), he won four World Series, but in the last seven years he didn’t win any.

Moreover, any sort of close examination of Torre’s in-game managing calls reveals that he was a less than stellar tactician, extremely rigid in his use of the bullpen and the bench, abusive with his star relievers to the verge of ruining careers, and prone to irrationally overplaying personal favorites.

Look, I’m not trying to say that Torre was a terrible manager by any stretch of the imagination. As I already said, he was good at PR, and he also brought a sense of dignity to the team and was popular with his players and the fans. And those are all good things.

But what it boils down is, are Joe Torre’s managerial skills really worth between $15 to $20 million over the next three years? I mean how many extra wins a year was Torre worth to the Yankees? 1? Maybe 2 at most? How many wins did he cost by playing Miguel Cairo at first base? Wouldn’t the Dodgers be better off spending all those millions on a starting pitcher, or three stud relievers, or a third baseman?

To me this is just more evidence that Frank McCourt and Ned Colletti really have no idea what they are doing and continue to be afflicted by one of the worst cases of big-name-itis in the majors.

I would much rather see the Dodgers spend big money on actual ballplayers, or scouting, or player development, than on a big-name manager. There are lots of baseball guys out there who could make players feel good and not say stupid shit to the press, but there are decidedly fewer guys who can hit 30 homers a year or throw 95 mph with movement.