Newsletter Extra: Mariano Rivera

I originally wrote this last May, after Mariano Rivera suffered a season-ending knee injury in Kansas City. With Rivera expected to announce his retirement tomorrow, it seems a good time to bring it back.

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My daughter is named for Mariano Rivera.

She was "Mariana," owing to her mother's deep and abiding love for the Yankees' closer, until about the ninth month of the pregnancy. As we got closer to her birth, my inability to correctly pronounce the name -- I couldn't quite get my accent around the "a" in the first syllable, leaving it flat -- led her mother to shift gears to "Marina," a name even my tortured diction couldn't butcher. Make no mistake about it, though -- her name is a tribute to the man.

That's who Mariano Rivera is: someone you can safely name your kid after, and, when some day she wants to know about why she has her name, be proud when you tell the story. Forget the baseball parts. Rivera isn't just about numbers -- 608, 2.21, 206 -- or even championships. He's not about a plaque in the Hall of Fame or a retired number on a wall. He's not even about a crowd standing and cheering in joy, in admiration, in love. No, Rivera is about the spaces in between the numbers, the equanimity with which he went about his job, the calm and the purpose and the class that I find myself in awe of. Rivera has given up series-losing home runs and World Series-ending hits, and was the same man in those moments that he was when in the middle of a pile of giddy Yankees celebrating yet another World Championship.

It runs deeper than that, though. In an era when we always wonder about the gap between the player and the person, when there's always that reserve, that reluctance to commit, that hesitation, there's never been a need to worry about Rivera. The quiet, hard-working, beloved man of faith who spent eight months trying to be the best teammate he could be spent the other four months as a quiet, hard-working, beloved man of faith trying to be the best husband, father and man he could be. In the latter days of his career, he's had to measure the pull of doing good outside of baseball against his loyalty to his teammates and the money he could make -- for doing that good -- in his career. Rivera has been responsible for so much good when he hasn't been holding a baseball in his hands, donating money and time and effort to make the world a better place for the people he could touch.

That's what made the scene so hard to watch. We know that Rivera has been struggling with whether to extend his career at each of the last few decision points. Since March, when Rivera said that he'd made his decision and would reveal it during the season, there's been a sense that this could finally be it, that we might be seeing the last days of Rivera. Yankee fans' panic over this has absolutely nothing to do with who would pitch the ninth inning; it's not a baseball loss, but a personal one. A generation of Yankee fans has no memory of a time when Mariano Rivera wasn't there at the end of baseball games, the evercool Bronx DJ mixing Metallica and Sinatra 60 times a year and getting 50,000 people to dance to his beat. Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada are missed. Derek Jeter is respected. Rivera…Rivera is essential.

We don't know how it's supposed to end. We know only that it's not supposed to end on a warning track in Missouri at 6:15 on a Thursday evening in May. It's not supposed to end with a stumble and a cry and a panicked round of Tweets. It's not supposed to end like this. Fans of the other 29 teams -- even fans of sports who don't particularly care for baseball -- know that it's not supposed to end like this. Mariano Rivera doesn't get carried away from baseball sitting on a cart wearing warmups and sneakers. He walks away from it in pinstripes, head held high, surrounded by teammates and fans, bathed in tears and cheers, and holding a baseball in his glove, one last 27th out, one last win secured, not for himself, but for everyone but him.

Selfishly, I want it to not be over. I don't ever want it to end, but when it does, I want to be there, on my feet, clapping until my hands hurt, tears streaming down my cheeks, trying to say, "Thank you for everything" from Section 414. I want there to be a little girl on my shoulders, taking it all in, who will grow up to display the qualities of her namesake: the dedication to others, the calm in the face of adversity, the endless reserves of inner peace. I want Marina to see Mariano and be proud to share his name.

Newsletter Extra: Mike Trout and Alex Rodriguez

Over the weekend, the Angels renewed Mike Trout's contract for a 2013 salary of $510,000, just $20,000 over the minimum salary. While a bit surprising, and certainly a hardball move, the Angels were well within their rights to renew Trout. In fact, it's the ability to pay Trout a tiny percentage of his market value or of his worth to the team that subsidizes the risks of paying Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton their market value to perhaps lose money on the deal.

No one other than Trout should have a problem with this decision. The Angels might have paid him more -- there's some precedent for teams with standout rookies paying those players more in the second year -- but there's no connection between Trout's 2013 salary and any decisions he might make five years down the road. An extra $300,000 now isn't going to influence a $30 million choice in the future, and thinking it will is one of the sillier myths in sports. There is no loyalty. Say it again: there is no loyalty. The Angels made the same business decision that Trout will have to make down the road, and that's the only relationship between the two.

The flip side of Trout making $510,000 off a season in which his performance was worth $30 million or more to the Angels in added wins isn't hard to find. Vernon Wells' 2013 salary is $21 million, after a season in which his performance was worth about 10% of that. Wells, however, is 34, at the back end of a career that will probably end soon, one that will get him a single appearance on a Hall of Fame ballot, maybe a token vote from a writer who liked him. (Criticism of his play aside, you can't find anyone to say a bad word about Wells.) Wells had five years banked as a regular and was 27 years old when the Blue Jays set him up for life with a seven-year contract extension worth $126 million. Since signing that deal, Wells has had two good years and four other ones, and at best he's a part-time player for a team with at least four outfielders better than he is.

This is the way MLB is structured. It was wholly unplanned -- arbitration came first, and that only for players with a couple of years in the league, then free agency and its six-year requirement -- and has created a significant disconnect between when a player is likely to produce the most and when a player is likely to get paid the most. From the start of his career through 2006, Vernon Wells made $9 million and produced 19 bWAR. Since then, he's made more than $80 million and produced a tick less than 7 bWAR. He's owed another $42 million and the ratio of salary to wins isn't likely to get much lower. This is the way the system is set up.

There are people, some of them working out of Tampa right now, up in arms over the fact that Alex Rodriguez is scheduled to make $28 million this year, and owed $114 million over the final five years of a contract signed after the 2007 season. That contract, due to Rodriguez's decline and increased susceptibility to injury -- things you never could have seen coming when you signed a 32-year-old, I guess -- weighs on the Yankees payroll. It has made Rodriguez a target of fan and media ire. Rodriguez isn't the first, of course, just the one taking the biggest shots today. Throughout the game there are players who are huge targets merely for signing contracts that included salaries they had little chance of being worth on the day they were signed. Alfonso Soriano and Jayson Werth and Barry Zito and Johan Santana. We rail at these players, call them overpaid bums and wish our teams would get rid of them.

Here's the thing: if you're not going to storm the barricades when Mike Trout makes 3% of his market value, then you lose the right to do so when Alex Rodriguez makes 300% of his. They're the exact same thing. Pay and performance are only loosely correlated in MLB, with service time a significant distorting factor. Players without it are systematically and in some cases violently underpaid, and those with it go the other way. Fans only get crazy over the latter class, though, an effect of the simplistic way in which baseball economics has been covered for 40 years.

Maybe Mike Trout eventually gets paid, becomes another Vernon Wells or Alex Rodriguez, making on the back end what he never made on the front end. If so, it's probable that there will come a time, 15 years down the road, when a local columnist will rail against this aging, broken-down guy who isn't worth his $40 million salary and who should just get out of the way so that the team can give the money to someone else.

Or maybe we'll all just be that much smarter by then.

World Baseball Classic predictions

First Round:

Pool A: Japan and Cuba
Pool B: South Korea and Taiwan
Pool C: Venezuela and Dominican Republic
Pool D: United States and Mexico

Second Round:

Pool 1: Japan and South Korea
Pool 2: United States and Venezuela

Semifinals:

Venezuela over Japan
United States over South Korea

Final:

Venezuela 6, United States 3

Tournament MVP: Miguel Cabrera

Newsletter Extra: HEY A-ROD, IF THE POPE CAN DO IT, YOU CAN TOO

Special to The New York Daily Postday

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Now, there's really no excuse.

Monday's news that Pope Benedict XVI will be stepping down for health reasons provides Alex Rodriguez with the perfect example of self-sacrifice in the face of adversity. The Pontiff, with years to go on a lifetime deal, walks away from a gig far greater than that of "part-time Yankee third baseman," putting the Catholic Church ahead of his own ego.

If the Pope, the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, can walk away, then so can A-Rod, the disgraced and despised roider at the center of the Biogenesis scandal. Perhaps in doing so, A-Roid can regain a fraction of the respect and dignity he has sacrificed at the point of a needle.

Sources in the Yankees' front office who are unauthorized to speak on the record backed the idea. "If this doesn't point the way, I don't know what will. I mean, the Church isn't the Yankees, but it's close enough. And Pope Benedict has more mobility right now than A-Rod does."

"I mean, there are ways to raise the heat. We could play 'Ave Maria' in the clubhouse. Maybe bring back Chad Curtis. But it's up to him."

Rodriguez has been under enormous pressure to leave the game over the past month. On the heels of a humiliating postseason in which he single-handedly torpedoed the Yankee offense in an ALCS sweep at the hands of the Tigers, Rodriguez underwent a left hip arthroscopy last month. He is, at best, expected to miss half the season and could miss all of it. The Yankees have signed Kevin Youkilis to play third base while A-Rod recovers, meaning they're spending $40 million on aging third basemen this year, all in the name of the most unpopular baseball player since A-Rod's fellow cheater Barry Bonds retired.

A source close to A-Rod dismissed the idea. "Alex wants to get healthy and get back on the field, to earn both the money he's owed and the respect of Yankee fans everywhere."

That's small-minded and weak. Neither Yankee fans nor the Yankee front office nor MLB wants to see Alex Rodriguez don pinstripes again. Pope Benedict XVI was as beloved as A-Rod is despised, and he still found it within himself to set ego aside and resign.

It will, as so many things with cheating ballplayers do, come down to money. Rodriguez is owed $114 million for the five years remaining on his contract, and, unlike Benedict, he hasn't taken a vow of poverty.

Then again, what A-Rod could do would be, in many ways, greater than what Pope Benedict did. After all, Pope Benedict is backed by a deep bench of Cardinals and a Church with both an unlimited budget and no luxury-tax concerns. The Yankees are hamstrung by their desire to get under the tax threshold for 2014, a move that would save the Steinbrenner brothers millions in tax penalties for years after that.

This isn't really about money, though. Pope Benedict has lit the way for Rodriguez to regain his good name. If he were to come clean about his steroid use, cite his bad hips and his desire to leave the record books unsullied by his tainted numbers, and walk away now, Rodriguez might regain a measure of the respect he's lost over the past five years. He'll always be a cheater to some, but to others, a move like this might be enough to reconsider his career by the time his name comes up for the Hall of Fame five years down the road.

It's your move, Alex.

Newsletter Extra: Momentum

As you surely know, Sunday's Super Bowl was interrupted early in the third quarter when about half the Superdome's lights went out. The game was delayed for 34 minutes, and from the time the game resumed to the end, the San Francisco 49ers played better than they had prior to that point. For most, this made the loss of lighting a key trigger event in the game. I spent some time on Twitter yesterday pointing out how silly this was -- even over and above the bullshit dump that is "momentum" -- but it's worth spelling it out in greater detail.

The game resumed with the 49ers in a third-and-14 spot at their own 40-yard line. Colin Kaepernick was chased and completed a short pass to Delanie Walker well short of the marker. Down 28-6, facing fourth-and-seven from their own 46, the Niners elected to punt, a pretty bad decision that went largely unnoticed. Andy Lee punted the ball into the end zone, and the Ravens took over at their own 20. Joe Flacco immediately completed a pass to Torrey Smith for a first down.

Full stop.

At this point, both teams' units have been on the field since the delay. The Niners offense ran a give-up play, their punter managed to miss the red zone from his own 30 or so, and their defense allowed an immediate first down. The aftermath of the blackout delay was that the game was going exactly as it had gone from the opening kickoff. Even if momentum existed the way the entire sports-media community insists that it does, it had not moved following the blackout delay.

The Ravens proceeded to run three more plays on this drive, falling short of a first down by about a yard, maybe less, and electing to punt on fourth-and-1 from their own 44. (Again, a bad decision, but cowardly punting is the way the big, strong manly football of the NFL is played.) Sam Koch followed Andy Lee's lead and kicked the ball into the end zone.

Now we're on the third possession, the eighth snap, about two minutes of game time and maybe ten minutes of real time into the post-delay football game. Now is when the game did change. Kaepernick scrambled twice for a total of 20 yards, and the Niners' comeback was on.

Two theories:

1) The game changed when the delay happened and momentum shifted, only it waited until the Niners failed and then the Ravens averaged six yards a play on their drive and executed a bad idea of a punt, to make that clear.

2) The Ravens punting on fourth-and-1 gave the Niners an opportunity, and Kaepernick's two scrambles -- he had one in the entire game to that point -- opened up an element of the offense that made it incredibly hard to defend.

You can listen to a thousand football players and a million sportswriters, but there's an infinitely better argument to be made that the fourth-down punt at midfield was what changed the game, rather than the delay. Here's the thing, though: nothing changed the game. Two good football teams played, and at some moments, one team played better than the other one did.

I find the "momentum" discussion painful because it diminishes the game and the athletes who play it. The desperate need to find reasons for everything that happens and to assign meaning to small streaks of events is disrespectful to the talented men on the field. The difference, the real difference, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers is measured in tenths of a percent. Play that game 10,000 times and no team will win more than 5100 of them. Outcomes are what they are not because of some mystical force that -- according to its own adherents -- comes and goes unpredictably, but by the effort and execution of absurdly talented men. There's just enough randomness in the form of bounces and officiating -- where NFL refs have a lot more leeway to affect a game than do their MLB counterparts -- so that the entire construct rests shakily, like that couch at grandma's no one will dare sit on.

If you can't appreciate the football game you watched last night on its merits, if you need to parse the events just so to fit a narrative, have at it. But when you do, get it right: the fourth-and-1 punt, not the blackout, was the hinge on which the two teams' play swung.

Newsletter Extra: Breakdown

Reader Travis Leleu did an analysis of the newsletter's content…I'll let him explain:

I visited each of your newsletter articles (453) available on your website and looked how frequently you mentioned teams and players. Each team/player only counted once per article, i.e., an article mentioning the Yankees twice only counted once.

To the results: you wrote about the Yankees and Rangers a lot, nearly three times as frequently as the Astros, Blue Jays, Marlins, and a few other teams.  Your most commonly mentioned player was Cliff Lee (makes sense; he's been a big trade deadline / free agent / superstar pitcher over the sample period).

This analysis was done last fall, so it's slightly out of date. (That's on me, not Travis, as I've been sitting on this for a while.) But it's fun to share, and I hope you'll get a kick out of it. Thanks to Travis for doing the work.

Cliff Lee: 70 (15%)
Albert Pujols: 49 (10%)
Ron Washington: 44 (9%)
Derek Jeter: 42 (9%)
Buster Posey: 35 (7%)
Josh Hamilton: 33 (7%)
Ryan Howard: 33 (7%)
Mariano Rivera: 31 (6%)
Alex Rodriguez: 31 (6%)
Mike Napoli: 30 (6%)
Tim Lincecum: 29 (6%)
Adrian Gonzalez: 29 (6%)
Tony La Russa: 29 (6%)
Neftali Feliz: 29 (6%)
Carl Crawford: 29 (6%)
Ryan Braun: 28 (6%)
Chase Utley: 28 (6%)
David Price: 28 (6%)
Evan Longoria: 28 (6%)
Lance Berkman: 27 (5%)
Ian Kinsler: 27 (5%)
Michael Young: 27 (5%)
Mark Teixeira: 27 (5%)
Felix Hernandez: 27 (5%)
Jayson Werth: 27 (5%)
Jonathan Papelbon: 26 (5%)
Justin Verlander: 25 (5%)
Miguel Cabrera: 25 (5%)
Edwin Jackson: 25 (5%)
Stephen Strasburg: 24 (5%)
Aubrey Huff: 24 (5%)
Roy Oswalt: 24 (5%)
Bruce Bochy: 23 (5%)
Hunter Pence: 23 (5%)
Clayton Kershaw: 23 (5%)
Matt Kemp: 23 (5%)
Adrian Beltre: 23 (5%)
Jose Bautista: 23 (5%)
Jason Heyward: 22 (4%)
Joe Mauer: 22 (4%)
David Ortiz: 21 (4%)
Shane Victorino: 21 (4%)
Jorge Posada: 21 (4%)
Adam Dunn: 21 (4%)
Zack Greinke: 20 (4%)
Elvis Andrus: 20 (4%)
Kevin Youkilis: 20 (4%)
Charlie Manuel: 20 (4%)
Cole Hamels: 20 (4%)