I have a problem.

I. Hate. Julio. Lugo.

I hate the stupid sub-.300 OBP he had last year. I hate the stupid hitting streak he’s on right now, because I know he’s just doing it to be even more of a $%@#$ later. I hate his enormous bug-eyes that stare so widely AND YET STILL MISS THE BALL. I hate that he wears his belt higher than Steve Urkel. I hate that he’s owned in 56% of ESPN fantasy leagues—who are you people and who is your leader??

Because of Julio Lugo, I am even starting to hate the song “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” which makes me hate him even more, because that’s a good $#@%* song, goddammit.

I hate that Lugo’s six errors are nearly TWO-THIRDS of Boston’s 10 team errors. I hate that he would have even more errors if the official scorer were allowed to assume EVEN THE MOST BASIC AND ELEMENTARY LITTLE-LEAGUE LEVEL DOUBLE PLAYS. I hate that even when he doesn’t make an error, he still finds a way to suck. I even hate the one thing about him that doesn’t technically suck—his speed on the basepaths—because that speed masks the true depths of his sucktitude in the batter’s box.

Is this measured, or rational, or fair? No, no, and hell no. But then, hatred so rarely is.

So most of all, I hate that Theo Epstein offered him way more money than any other GM was even imagining offering him, so that now, not only are we paying through the nose for this @#$*%!, we can find no one else to take him off our hands. The $26 million remaining on the deal would be better spent stuffed directly into owner John Henry’s 164-foot yacht, the Iroquois, and burned as fuel.

And of course, I hate that Julio Lugo is blocking fuzzy-cheeked Jed Lowrie. Did you know that Lowrie has 5 RBI in 26 plate appearances, while Lugo has 5 ribbies in 86 plate appearances? Typical. More errors than runs batted in! And five GIDPs too! Even with the speed! And I laugh—LAUGH!—at the fact that in the ninth inning of of a recent game, with the Sox up by a run and Manny Ramirez out of the game, Terry Francona moved Lugo to left field and Lowrie over to shortstop as a defensive replacement.

But it is not happy, trilling laughter. No, it is cold, cynical laughter. Because, as I was forced to conclude in this week’s Metro column, Julio Lugo’s below-average play and above-average pay likely mean that Jed Lowrie’s days in Boston are numbered. Not only is the entire left side of Boston’s infield locked up through 2010, Jed Lowrie may not be a natural shortstop anyway, as he lacks some of the necessary “first-step quickness” (in the words of Baseball Prospectus). However, he has worked hard to cut down on his error rate and his throws are generally solid, so his comparative lack of range may not be immediately apparent. This leads me to conclude that, at short, the most that could be hoped for is the defensive capability of Derek Jeter, who has very sure hands but, like that other good-looking Derek, one Mr. Zoolander, “can’t go left.” Thus, another team may be happy to take Lowrie and stick him at second base. As for the possibility, explored by Coley at MLB Trade Rumors last weekend, that Boston would keep him and use him as a super-utility guy? It’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely as long as he has even greater value to the team as trade-bait.

But Red Sox fans, take heart. Even if we are stuck with Julio Lugo through 2010, we do have another, potentially even better shortstop prospect waiting in the wings. Right now, he’s down at Greenville, Boston’s single A affiliate. Oscar Tejada, writes Baseball Prospectus, is a “toolsy Dominican” who was “impressive” last year, in his debut season for the Gulf Coast League, “showcasing gap power, good speed, excellent range, and a cannon for an arm.” He’s still “at least three to four years away,” but he’s also “brimming with potential.” Some additional info:

The Good: Tejeda has all of the tools necessary to be a star-level shortstop. He’s a good hitter with a line-drive stroke who has the frame and the bat speed to develop into some power. Defensively, he has excellent range, crisp actions and a strong arm.
The Bad: Not even 18 yet, Tejeda is still rough around the edges in many aspects. He still hasn’t seen enough breaking balls to make the proper adjustments to them, and he needs to improve in the little parts of the game, like bunting and baserunning. Like many young, flashy shortstops, he’s prone to errors when trying to make spectacular plays.
Perfect World Projection: A starting shortstop with the ability to create runs at the plate, and prevent them in the field.
Timetable: Tejeda’s youth and inexperience leaves him very far from his potential. While it seems like he’s ready for a full-season assignment, he’ll be only 18 for all of 2008, and there might be a need for patience.

I hope Oscar Tejada comes along well. I hope he’s ready to go by spring training in 2011. And I hope to God that I still have eyes to see him by then, because if I’m stuck watching Julio Cesar Lugo for the next three full seasons, I may actually claw them out.

Many have been predicting the San Francisco Giants to suck, and suck hard, this season. Some have even predicted a 100-loss campaign. So how are the Giants doing so far? Let’s have a look…

As is to be expected, the Giants are last in the Major Leagues with 27 runs scored in 11 games, or an average of 2.45 runs per game.

Sole good hitter Aaron Rowand is struggling at the plate and in the field, due to the fact that he probably has a broken rib.

Centerfielder Dave Roberts will likely have surgery on his knee and be out for months.

In other injury news, top outfield prospect Nate Schierholtz is out with a wounded right shin, outfielder Randy Winn hurt his ankle by hitting himself with his own bat, and reliever Keiichi Yabu has blurred vision after hitting himself in the eye with a rubber band.

Switch-hitting outfielder Dan Ortmeier has been so sucky hitting from the left side that he and the team have made a mutual decision to make him an exclusively right-handed batter from now on.

Putative team ace Barry Zito (0-2) has already been so terrible that he was booed by the home crowd during his introduction at the Giants’ home opener in San Francisco.

Even The Onion is piling on the Giants now, with their article “San Francisco Giants Band Together To Score Run.”

Oooof. That’s the sound coming out of Detroit this morning. A few days ago, you might’ve heard “D’OH!” or “GAAAH!” or any number of expletives. But this morning, there is only the resignation and deflation of a drawn-out “ooooof” as the last remaining molecules of enthusiasm leak out of Michigan like air from a punctured tire.

Any day your ace pitcher takes the mound, you want to win. But when that ace pitcher is doubling as the only pitcher on your staff not surrounded by flashing neon question marks and you’ve lost the first five games of the season, you really, really want to win. And when instead of winning, you drop to 0 and 6…oooooof.

If you’re a Tigers fan, you see Justin Verlander taking the mound, you figure their lineup is due to get some hits, and you reckon their time has come. You don’t expect to get routed to the tune of 13-2. Add the info that the team doing the routing, the Chicago White Sox, are a division rival, and it’s just rubbing salt in the wound. And like a bad traffic accident, we can’t look away. Let’s do some rubbernecking and see what some Tigers blogs have to say about this pile-up.

Eric Jackson of D-Town Baseball attended the game, but found it so embarrassing, he left early. “I don’t leave games early too often but I did tonight,” he writes. “It was cold and there just wasn’t a good game out on the field. Listening to the game on the ride home made me feel good about my decision.”

Bless You Boys offers a slightly different take on the sound of woe emanating from the Motor City (EEEEAAAAAK!) as Ian Casselberry asks his readers, “You don’t really want to read a recap of that game, do you? Because I sure as hell don’t feel like writing it.”

At Mack Avenue Tigers, a shell-shocked Kurt Mensching adds more lamentation (”MEHHHHHHH”) and writes: “The ‘greatest lineup in baseball’ averages 2.5 runs per game. The Tigers hit into five double plays. They stranded nine runners.” Yes, Virginia.

Over at Roar of the Tigers, Samara Pearlstein is deep in the denial stage. “What… was… that? Seriously: what did I just see on my TV? Was it baseball? I’m not entirely sure. It LOOKED like baseball, but I’m inclined to believe that it was simply a very detailed fake.”

“Time for chicken-bone cross,” confirms Mike McClary of the Daily Fungo.

And for the ultimate exercise in masochism, you can read a liveblog of the game at The Detroit Tigers Weblog. An abridged version:

8:15 - middle of 1: A 19 pitch inning. Not exactly the kind of efficiency you’re looking for. And Verlander can’t seem to keep his fastball down.

8:40 - I didn’t know it was possible to go 3-0 on Juan Uribe.

9:40 - Aaaarrrrghhhhhh.

So we’ve got “EEEEAAAAAK,” “MEHHHHHHH,” and now “Aaaarrrrghhhhhh.”

10:35 - Top of 9: Do you realize if it weren’t for White Sox errors and wild pitches this would be a shut out?

10:55 game mercifully over: Fitting that it ended on a double play. This blew.

What’s wrong with this team? Lee Panas of Tiger Tales has a sobering diagnosis:

Poor pitching (by their Ace Justin Verlander no less), poor hitting including five double plays, horrible fielding especially by Carlos Guillen….they are just awful in every phase of the game right now. I’m still very confident that this team is going to score a lot of runs this year but other than that I’m not sure what to expect. The pitching is filled with question marks and their infield defense looks much worse this year with the immobile Miguel Cabrera at third and Guillen struggling at first. Even Edgar Renteria, while an improvement over Guillen, is showing his lack of range at shortstop.

So let’s see—pitching, hitting, fielding….yep. That pretty much covers it.

Many blogs note this faintly quivering ray of hope: Curtis Granderson’s hand is sufficiently healed. He’ll resume baseball activities today and rejoin the lineup in about 10 days. Granderson’s return will add speed to a team that one scout called Jurassically slow without him.

But as for the popular idea that a road trip will clear their heads (and heat up their bats), I think Roar of the Tigers put it best:

Hilarious note for the upcoming series: the Tigers were just swept (a billion times, it seems) at home, and the Red Sox were just swept by the Blue Jays on the road (after having been on the road for a billion years, it seems). Everyone is talking about how much good it’ll do the Sox to get home. Everyone (or, OK, mostly Joe Morgan tonight) is talking about how it’ll do the Tigers some good to get on the road. Rock, meet Hard Place.

But Detroit Tigers fans weren’t the only ones to get hit hard in the kisser last night. Home plate umpire Jeff Kellogg took a fastball to the face (Fire Joe Morgan notes that AJ Pierzysnki “got crossed up and just missed it”). Kellogg was wearing a mic for the game, giving Jon Miller got the bright idea of airing the audio from the incident. The moment seems to encapsulate, in allegorical fashion, both Detroit’s 0-6 start (symbolized by Kellogg) and the baseball-watching world’s stunned reaction (embodied by Pierzynski):

(smack)

Pierzynski: Oh — my God.
Kellogg: (on the ground) Fuck.

As regular visitors to UmpBump know, I have no love for Derek Jeter’s glove. I have no personal animus against Jeter, despite my disdain for the Yankees, which is less of a raging hate-on and more of a well - I’m - a - Red - Sox - fan - so - what - do - you - expect? kind of thing. I’ve always felt that Jeter seemed like a pretty classy guy and that he definitely has one of the finest boohiners in baseball. I even felt a twinge sympathy for Derek Jeter when I read recently that despite his raft of “objectively hot” model-stripper-singer exes, he might need a few tips in that department. Apparently, he hit on hot indie actress Sienna Miller at a club, only to get ignored when Sienna didn’t even know who he was. Ouch. (Dude, she’s already going out with the Anti-Jeter anyway!).

Yet I could only spare Jeets so much sympathy. After all, Derek Jeter has won multiple Gold Gloves, yet his defense sucks. And even more infuriating, no one in the professional commentariat seems able to admit his defense sucks. I will agree that Jeter has pretty sure hands, and so you rarely see him bobble the ball, but there is simply no evidence that Jeter’s defense is actually that good. And in fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary:

1) Last year, Derek Jeter ranked in the bottom half of major-league shortstops in fielding percentage, put-outs, and assists. He ranked second-to-last in range factor. He was dead last—in all of baseball—in zone rating. In fact, the only stat in which Derek Jeter even ranked in the top ten of MLB shortstops was double plays. And last year, the year he took home the trophy, he caboosed it there, too. Simply put, there is no statistical evidence that Derek Jeter is even a good defensive shortstop, let alone a great one deserving of praise and trophies. Now, I’ll admit, he had a pretty good year in 2005. But he had absolutely abysmal defensive years in 2001, 2002, and 2003. When you look at other, more abstruse stats—David Pinto’s DER leaps to mind—the evidence is clear: Derek Jeter is not good at defense. And the weight of all of these metrics taken together is clearly on the side of sucks-more-than-he-doesn’t-suck.

2) Lee Panas, a Detroit Tigers fan and research analyst, looked at six different systems for evaluating a shortstop’s fielding and combined them to devise the number of runs that player would have prevented if he had played in 150 games. In fact, Derek Jeter came in dead last. Jeter actually cost the Yankees a whopping 27 runs with his glove last year. That is some hardcore defensive suckage.

3) A professor at the Wharton School recently finished an evaluation of nearly half a million baseball plays (every play from 2002 to 2005) and estimated that Jeter was one of the worst defensive shortstops in that span, costing his team an average of 14 runs a year with the leather during that period.

4) Francis Bacon would have agreed.

5) Tom Tango of The Hardball Times wrote an essay about how awful Jeter’s defense is, and I believe it’s in the 2008 edition of their book. However, I can’t find it online, so here’s BP’s summation:

[W]ith Jeter on the field the shortstop makes an out on 11.6 percent of balls in play. However, when looking at all pitchers that Jeter has played behind when pitching with other shortstops on the field, the rate goes up to 12.5 percent—that’s a difference of 38 plays over a full season, and the second-worst mark for a regular shortstop in baseball, behind only [Michael] Young. Tango then does likewise controlling for batters (Jeter is 25 plays worse, fourth from the bottom), a runner on first base (11 plays worse, ahead of only Felipe Lopez), and park (18 plays worse, ranking in the bottom half).

And yet, somehow, the people with the microphones just refuse to believe the evidence that is staring them in the face. When I was watching some Red Sox Spring Training coverage over the weekend, there was NESN’s Tom Caron chatting it up with the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo. The two of them just went on and on about how great Jeter is on defense, and how you can make stats prove anything, and how only lame homer Red Sox fans don’t “respect” Jeter (as if “respect” is synonymous with “think his defense is really great, even when it’s clearly not”). They even claimed Jeter’s defensive ability is actually just really clutch (oh, is that what they’re calling it these days? those crazy kids!). Cafardo kept talking about Jeter’s skills ‘after the seventh inning,’ as if Jeter is just keeping all his defensive range in reserve for those close-and-late situations. Even worse, to cap it all off, they finished up the segment by showing a clip of Jeter with the Gold Glove trophy and saying, “Well, Jeter has the hardware and you can’t argue with that, ha ha!” I would posit that one actually can argue with that, as I hope I have just effectively demonstrated.

I respect Derek Jeter. I respect his ability to reliably hit .300 with moderate power. I respect his ability to sell flavored water on TV. I respect his dimples.

I just think his defense sucks.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now might have noticed that some of us harbor a faint disdain for the defensive abilities of a certain Derek Sanderson Jeter.

So it was with some interest that we read Lee Panas’s recent blog post evaluating the defensive contributions made by major league shortstops in 2007.

Panas looked at six well-known systems for evaluating a player’s defense and averaged the number of runs a player prevented last season according to each system, normalizing the results for 150 games.

In first place was John McDonald of the Toronto Blue Jays, who would have prevented an amazing 26 runs last season had he played in 150 games. In close second was Troy Tulowitzki, who saved 25 runs. From there the drop off was pretty huge, with the seemingly ageless Omar Vizquel taking third place with 16 runs prevented.

And in DEAD LAST PLACE out of the 30 shortstops evaluated, averaged across 6 different systems?

Yep, it was Derek Jeter of the Yankees, with an average result of 27 extra runs allowed above a shortstop of average range, over the course of 150 games.

Man, how did this guy ever win a gold glove?

Of course, we here at UmpBump believe in moderation, and we understand that any player can have an off year, so we took this news in stride, and refrained from any unnecessary, self-satisfied glee:

From: Nick
To: UmpBump Staff

Check out this list of the best and worst defensive shortstops last season… Any guesses as to who was dead last?

From: Sarah
To: UmpBump Staff

BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Someone please blog this!

What is going on with Eric Gagne? My one-woman quest to find out.

Despite arriving in Boston to much fanfare, Eric Gagne has nearly been run out of town by apoplectic fans who have seen him almost singlehandedly cut the team’s division lead over the Yankees. But why? Why does this venerable closer suddenly suck? He didn’t have a stellar start to the season in Texas, but he was solid. So why the sudden suckage north of the border? Is it a mental block because his role is different? Could it be a physical ailment? He’s been injured so often these past couple of years. Is he 31 and past his prime?Is he just tired? After all, his last full season of work was in 2004.

Multiple times now, Gagne has gotten two outs but been unable to get the third. Does he have a third-out problem? Or is it a first-pitch strike problem? He struggled to throw first pitches for strikes last night, but many times he has actually been ahead of the batter when he’s ended up getting rocked. Is he working too slowly? He seems to plod agonizingly around the mound, as if daring the networks to go to commercial between his pitches. The guy sitting next to me at the ballgame last night suggested that Gagne was rattled by the Fenway crowds; but though Gagne looked visibly confused last night when the Fenway Faithful gave a furious roar of joy for no immediately obvious reason (the manual scoreboard had just been updated to show Tampa Bay pulling ahead of New York), I don’t think the closer temperament requires library-type silence to get the job done.

So why, Eric? Why?!

I’ve narrowed it down to five possibilities:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, oooof. As in, a solid punch to the gut. Which is how Theo Epstein, Terry Francona, and all the Sox fans and media prognosticators who lauded the Eric Gagne trade are feeling, or ought to be feeling, right now.

After last night’s game, Eric Gagne’s ERA with the Boston Red Sox now stands at 9.00.

And that’s not the kind of 9.00 ERA you get when you first join a team and give up 1 run in your first inning of work or something. Nay, it’s the kind of 9.00 ERA you get when you give up 14 runs in 14 innings of work.

When the trade first when down, I wrote a post in this space wherein I denegrated the deal, arguing that at most, the Sox could expect to get about 20 innings out of Gagne the rest of the season. Well, a month and a half down the road, Gagne is right on pace for 20 IP, but even I didn’t imagine he would be right on pace for 20 runs allowed.

My argument at the time was that I thought Kason Gabbard had too much upside to give up for only 20 innings of relief work plus a few innings in the playoffs, but lets face it: in hindsight even trading a bucket of used baseballs for Gagne would have been too high a price, given Gagne’s performance, let alone a major-league-ready starting pitcher and two other prospects.

I mean seriously, how high does a pitcher’s ERA have to go before a manager says “This man is no longer my set-up man. At best, he is my mop-up man/long reliever”? Apparently, that point is somewhere beyond one earned run per inning pitched for Terry Francona.

Oddly, the AP article on last nights game began with the sentence “Once the best closer in baseball, Red Sox reliever Eric Gange as suddenly become shaky.” As if this shakiness were some crazy new development. But Gagne has been either shaky or injured for going on 3 years now, so apparently the AP and I have different definitions of the word “suddenly.”

Although I do feel compelled to make one tiny point in defense of Gagne’s otherwise atrocious performance thus far with the Sox. To wit: the route J.D. Drew took to Russ Adams’ back breaking double which wound up just clearing his glove was one of the worst I’ve seen in a while. It was like he’d never played right field before. These ex-Dodgers are really killing the Red Sox, at least insofar as a team with the best record in baseball can be said to be getting “killed.”

I’m going to sleep now, and when I wake up, I will realize that this was all a dream, and that the Red Sox and the Yankees have not yet played.

Because there’s just no way the best two relievers on the Red Sox could have given up six runs in one inning. Right?

Yet there is this incontrovertible text evidence in my cell phone:

Sarah to Coley, Sept 14, 11:15pm: Hold me.

Coley to Sarah, Sept 14, 11:17pm: I have Papel-blue balls.

Sarah to Coley, Sept. 14, 11:18pm: He is suddenly their Papelbitch.

And then there was the following evidence, in my g-chat archive:

Me: oh honey. this is terrible.

Boyfriend: i’m too depressed to talk about it. i baked a red sox cake.

Me: was it really good for the first half

Boyfriend: yes.

Me: and then totally awful for the second half? did jonathan papelbon leap through your kitchen window and throw the cake in the trash and then swear into his glove?

Boyfriend: Sadly no.

Me: did it leave like 18 million pieces of frosting on base?

Boyfriend: yes.

Me: goddammit.

Boyfriend: but the cake has two layers, one red and one blue

Me: is it frosted with the broken dreams of an entire Nation?

Boyfriend: i don’t want to talk about the game anymore

Desperately in search of some bit of hard evidence that my beloved Red Sox had not, in fact, pissed away a game that they had clearly dominated through the first six innings (I could watch a lowlight reel of Giambi’s errors all day), I checked the box score, the play-by-play, even the photos. And that’s when I realized that this game couldn’t possibly have happened. No. In fact, there’s only conceivable explanation—I’ve gone back in time!

Now at least I can get some sleep. After all, I already know how this ends!

Sure the Giants took two out of three from my beloved Dodgers in our own house this week, but I almost don’t mind, because the Dodgers didn’t give up number 755, and other than the Dodgers winning and the Yankees losing, there is nothing I love better than watching Barry Lamar Bonds suck hard.

And Bonds sure has sucked of late. He batted .186 in July. His 0-21 slump was the longest of his career since 1991. His knees are creaky, bone-on-bone after having all that cartiledge removed, he is plagued by shin splints, and after every game his ankles swell up like water balloons. And I’m loving every minute of it.

In baseball, real power comes from the legs. This rule may apply to Bonds least of all, because his swing is so short and his bat is so quick, but even Bonds is having visible trouble driving the ball without a solid set of legs under him. How many times have we seen Bonds hit the ball right on the screws this year, only to see it die on the warning track? How many times have we seen even Bonds himself fooled, thinking it’s gone, only to see the ball fall harmlessly into an outfielder’s glove? A lot more than ever before, that’s for sure. And I can’t get enough.

But perhaps, best of all, Bonds is pressing, for the first time in human memory. I mean, it’s only human to occasionally get excited and go after a fat pitch just a bit outside the zone. But what always made Bonds so incredibly dangerous, what elevated him from the realm of amazing to nigh unto superhuman, was the fact that he simply never swung at bad pitches. With the patience of a saint, he was always content to let you walk him, no matter how much a hit might have been more tempting. The steroids gave him all that power and longevity, but no drug I know of could give you that ridiculous amount of calm indifference.

But now, as he gets closer and closer to the most hallowed record in sports, Bonds is doing all kinds of crazy things. He’s expanding the zone. Scouts say he’s become pull-conscious, for the first time anyone can remember. The other night against the Marlins, he swung at a 3-0 pitch for the first time in almost two years. And nothing could be sweeter.

Not that you can really blame Bonds for trying to make things happen. Pitchers are challenging him more and more with the bases empty, but when he does come up in key situations, his protection in the Giants lineup is so scanty that he never gets anything to hit. This season Giants no. 3 hitters are hitting only .265 with a .333 OBP ahead of Bonds, and the protection behind him is even worse, as no. 5 hitters are batting .249 with a .302 OBP. The Giants are but a bleached, translucent shell of the team that dominated the NL West in the late 1990s and early 2000s, 11 games out of first place, the only team in the division with no chance of making the playoffs, and Bonds looking less and less like he will ever get to win the World Series title he claims is the only thing he truly wants. And I’m on cloud nine.

Let’s face it, the Dodgers don’t exactly have a sparkling record against Bonds. He’s hit a number of big home runs off them over the years. That homer in 1997 to kill their playoff hopes. His 500th home run, off Terry Adams. His record-setting 72nd and 73rd home runs, off the inimitable Chan Ho Park in 2001.

But this year, the Dodgers are exacting revenge, and no team has done as well at holding Bonds in check. So far this season, Bonds is 5 for 36 against the Dodgers, for a .139 average. In the last two series against them, he is 1 for 19. And just to rub it in, the Dodgers just “happened” to be holding “Steroids Awareness Night” right when Bonds happened to be in town. Just hours before Bonds hobbled out to left field, 100 little-leaguers trotted out to center for a heart-to-heart with Dodgers players and staff about the dangers of steroid use. And I’m walking on air.