It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
I still have a lot of respect for Pat Tillman, and I think that Jake Plummer ought to be able to honor him by wearing a patch on his helmet for as long as he wants. Off Wing Opinion has more.
(I think this is a general principle — if Tom Brady wants to wear a patch honoring his grandmother, he ought to be able to do so — but one crack in the wall at a time.)
“After last night’s victory, the Sox said Bronson Arroyo and Tim Wakefield would pitch Games 3 and 4 (if necessary), but did not say which pitcher would start which game.” (Boston Globe.)
Also, Schilling’s going to pitch Game 1 and Martinez will pitch Game 2.
Advantage: Population: One.
OK, let’s stop dicking around, shall we?
Here’s what it is. Bronson Arroyo has a 4.01 ERA. His K/9 is 7.2 and his BB/9 is 2.4. Derek Lowe has a 4.91 ERA, a K/9 of 5.2, and a BB/9 of 3.4. Arroyo’s K/B ratio is 2.95; Lowe’s is 1.53. Finally, Arroyo’s RSAA (Runs Saved Above Average, a measure of how many runs the pitcher has allowed versus the league average) is a very average -1… but Derek Lowe’s is -25. Second worst in the American League.
Lowe has benefitted immensely from having good defense behind him lately, but we should not cripple that excellent defense by forcing them to protect a declining sinkerball pitcher. Here are your Red Sox pitchers for the postseason:
Martinez, Schilling, Arroyo, and Wakefield start. Reverse Schilling and Martinez if the last week of the season forces it.
Lowe is your “someone needs to save the day for a couple of innings” guy. He is also your emergency closer. See also: Oakland/Boston, 2003 playoffs. See also: man, I wish there had been someone other than poor Wakefield to pitch in extra innings of that ALCS game 7, also in 2003.
Foulke closes. Embree and Timlin are the clear setup guys. Scott Williamson has pitched two scoreless innings since coming off the disabled list; my opinion is that he’s gonna be good to go in the playoffs. If not him, Ramiro Mendoza. (Look at his performance in August and September and tell me I’m wrong.) Mike Meyers fills out the bullpen as a lefty specialist, and since you want him around you don’t get to have both Williamson and Mendoza. Which is OK, it’s an awesome bullpen anyhow. No weak points.
Ten pitchers. Eleven wins. Certainly doable with that pool. But I make no predictions if Lowe goes into the postseason as the #3 starter. He lost every postseason game he started last year; this is not an unobvious observation. I hope Francona has made it as well.
This is it. 8.5 games behind, 3 games against the division leader over the weekend, and the best chance to climb back into the race in the balance. Fortunately, the pitching matchups are highly favorable.
Schilling should beat Lieber. Arroyo, who is significantly better than his 3-7 would indicate, ought to beat the journeyman Sturtze. Note the insane 55:41 run:earned run ratio that Arroyo labors under. Go, Red Sox defense! Lowe vs. Contreras… well, that’ll be entertaining. I’m predicting an 8-7 game. In the third inning.
Mind you, Derek Lowe has an 87:66 run:earned run ratio. Yeesh. OK, I fired up the spreadsheet; read the extended cut for the bottom 15 R:ER ratios for pitchers who’ve gone over 20 innings. Hint: Red Sox pitchers are well represented, particularly if you filter for larger sample sizes. As much as Lowe was helped by great run production last year, he’s been hurt by lousy defense this year. The real Lowe underneath all the effects of the players around him is still not that good, though.
Anyhow, the point of all this before I got distracted by the lousy Red Sox defense was that I would like to believe that this is the point at which I stop expecting the Sox to do anything this year. That’ll fall by the wayside if they make it to the playoffs, but I’d like to believe it right now. If they don’t sweep the Yankees this weekend — and they need to sweep — then I think they should trade Nomar for prospects; they should sluff Lowe off; and they should think long and hard about Varitek: if they aren’t gonna win this year, and he wants a long-term contract, and they expect Shoppach to be ready the year after next, then they should trade Varitek and rent someone passable for next year to hold down the fort until Shoppach is ready. I wouldn’t feel that way if Varitek was represented by anyone but Scott Boras, but he is and I do.
(Dig those extended sentences? I can reel ‘em off all week.)
This obsession with always contending gets in the way of building a perennial contender; it may at this juncture be necessary to take a step back. There are a huge number of teams who still think they have a chance and there are not a lot of great players on the market. If the Sox’ chances are poor this year, and they are, and if they can improve their chances in future years at the cost of whatever remaining chance they have this year… they should make trades. Screw the fellowship of the miserable.
The Boston Globe bought the Boston Dirt Dogs. I guess this means that there’s been a truce on one front in the sportswriters vs. fan site war.
Mike Grasso asked me what real-life Japanese pro wrestling (aka puroresu) was like. I can answer that question at more length than he probably imagined, and I’m gonna. Brace yourselves.
There are four distinct styles of Japanese pro wrestling at the moment. There’s a lot of crossover and blending of styles, but at the end of the day the four basic styles remain distinct. The first and oldest is strong style, which is the most like US pro wrestling. Second and third, in no particular order, are puroresu and garbage wrestling. Lucharesu is a cruiserweight style, heavily influenced both by Mexican lucha libre and Canadian technical wrestling. Garbage wrestling is the stuff with lightbulbs and thumbtacks and explosions and fire. Finally, and newest to the scene, there’s shoot wrestling; it’s a reaction to the popularity of mixed martial arts (such as the UFC).
Strong style is more or less the mainstream of Japanese wrestling. Up until the 1970s, Japanese wrestling was not noticably different from US wrestling. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW, then one of the two biggest wrestling promotions in Japan) deliberately moved away from the cartoonish aspects of US wrestling. They made the conscious decision to eliminate false finishes, run-ins, and other gimmicks; they figured they’d attract more fans if they simulated a real sporting event better. It was a huge success. The desire for verisimilitude also resulted in higher impact moves; 80s and 90s AJPW was known for the number of times you’d see someone dropped on their head. Compare this to Memphis wrestling, in which the piledriver was “outlawed” in order to make the emotional impact of the move that much stronger.
Lucharesu really didn’t get going until the late 1980s, although the seeds of the style were sown years earlier. You can trace lucharesu to a classic series of matches between Tiger Mask I and Dynamite Kid. Some will remember Dynamite as half of the British Bulldogs; he was a British-born wrestler who trained in Calgary under the legendary Stu Hart. The Hart family and trainees have always been known for their devotion to technical wrestling; Tiger Mask I was fascinated by lucha libre. The fusion of these influences is lucharesu.
It’s a very quick style, wrestled mostly by wrestlers under 200 pounds. The smaller wrestlers are more agile and able to do more aerial moves than the bigger strong style wrestlers. Lucharesu ranges from the purest forms of the style, found in promotions like Michinoku Pro, to stuff more like the original Tiger Mask/Dynamite Kid series (and more akin to strong style), found in New Japan Pro Wrestling. Either way it’s fast-paced exciting stuff. Matt and Jeff Hardy were strongly influenced by lucharesu. Ultimo Dragon, currently wrestling in the WWE, is one of the best lucharesu guys ever — although he’s a shadow of his former self.
Garbage wrestling is what most people think of when they think of Japanese pro wrestling. I’m not a huge fan of the stuff; a garbage match has to be very good before I want to watch it. It’s essentially strong style with dangerous objects serving as the high impact moves. Instead of getting the crowd into a match by throwing a suplex, garbage wrestlers set themselves on fire and jump from balconies. It’s a valid style but I blame it for way too many idiot backyard wrestlers by way of Mick Foley. It got hot in the late 1980s, and has been up and down ever since. The style is too hard on wrestlers for a garbage wrestler to have a really long career.
Finally, and most recently, we’ve got the fusion of mixed martial arts and pro wrestling. Over the years there have been a number of promotions in Japan which purport to put on “real” martial arts matches. (No, nobody pretends that pro wrestling is real anymore except in the context of a show.) Some of them really do, such as Pride. Some of them don’t. Mixed martial arts is way more popular in Japan than it is over here, and several wrestling promotions are making good money staging either real or faked matches between pro wrestlers and mixed martial arts stars.
A couple of promotions, like the now defunct BattlArts, put on shoot-style matches but didn’t pretend that they were real. In my eyes, this is the apothesis of the style — you aren’t hampered by the need to con the fans, and you can take advantage of the benefits that scripting storylines gives you. It’s a win/win.
This essay totally ignores women’s pro wrestling in Japan, or joshi puroresu. The styles are more or less the same, as far as I know, but I don’t watch enough of it to talk about the subtle differences.
Good places to learn more:
The eloquent Bill provides his own Kaiju review, which touches on all the Lovecraftian elements I ignored. Plus he opens a much needed discussion on the subject of Super Wrong, and how Super Wrong’s valets failed to do right by the budding superstar.
I girded my teeth. I gritted my loins. I ventured out, bold and unafraid, into the strange world where art students meet wrestling and nothing is safe; where every entrance theme is J-Pop; where the heels are square and the faces are from Mars. I did it — for Johnny.
I dunno, man. It’s like wrestling, but they wear big Japanese monster suits made out of foam rubber. And it happens in my city. Like I wasn’t gonna get down to a show eventually.
Recap? Not so much. I mean, there were five matches, one unscheduled. There was a musical tribute. I am thinking that a detailed explanation of the latest developments in the Dr. Cube/Unibouzu feud might be a waste of time.
Kind of to my surprise, the wrestling was about as good as I’d expect from semi-amateur wrestlers inside very ungainly monster suits. Which is to say I wouldn’t expect to see any of these guys in the WWE any time soon, even without the suit, but I was not completely horrified either. Dr. Cube did make one leap from the top of the cage which made me want to scream “Down with backyard wrestling!” but otherwise it was all well within my tolerance for both safety and skill.
The key, and this is what really surprised me, is that the booking was out of sight. I am not kidding, here. The good guys won every match except the comedy match leading up to the main event, then the tweener beat the heel in the main event, then the evil heel conned the tweener into another title defense and won. It worked really well, and — more surprise coming up — whoever booked this stuff knew how to book both the storyline and the matches.
“Whoa,” saith I. “They’re building to a face comeback, and now they’re giving the fans hope, and now the heel is cutting out our hearts!”
Plus all the good bits like the heels getting arrogant and refusing to take the easy pins, and run-ins that didn’t last forever, and so on.
Also the announcer put his heart and soul into it while maintaining the personality you’d expect out of a guy named Louden Noxious. There were faces and there were heels and this guy spent a lot of time driving home that point. He made the show comprehensible and totally avoided the usual indie problem where people cheer for the heels and kill the drama of the match.
(He did play by play during the match. This turns out to be a really good idea, if you can pull it off. You need a good announcer.)
So by the end I was all happy and I bought a T-shirt. Also on my way out I saw a couple of guys in RoH T-shirts, indicating that I was not the only indie wrestling snob there. I will probably go again. It worked both as humor and as a wrestling show, which is the kind of dualism you need for good comedy.
A few days ago I was listening to Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) on the morning sports show on WEEI. He didn’t say anything deeply surprising, but he did mention that he’d run into Bill Belichick at his agent’s office in New York the other week. Apparently, Coach Belichick is writing a Moneyball-style book about football — no surprise, since he takes the same value for money approach as Billy Beane. I’m looking forward to it, assuming he successfully navigates the publishing rapids.
If you’re a Red Sox fan who’s wondering why the hell Mark Bellhorn is on the team, this article may help. His unintentional walk percentage is tenth in MLB; if he could hit, he’d be dangerous. Doesn’t make him a starter (unless, say, Nomar’s on the DL) but it explains why he’s out there right now.