Re-Imagining the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview

Jason Wong of The City Graphics has redone the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview Edition cover replacing the Phillies with the defending Champion Giants.

That looks much better to me. Be sure to check out the rest of his work.

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The Giants Plan for fighting East Coast Bias

Major League Baseball is dominated by teams on the East Coast more than any other sport. This is something that shouldn't be surprising, as the topic of East Cost Bias is pretty prevalent in the blogosphere and also in the regular media.

The Giants are working hard to try to overcome this obstacle and it also appears to be something that is on MLB's agenda, too.

The Giants are going to be the feature of a documentary for Showtime, which I'm sure that you have heard about. It's been pretty big news. One of the things that most people may not have heard is other teams besides the Giants were considered for the spot.

According to Bill Nuekom, some other big market teams also expressed interest in having the show feature their teams. This is really a no brainer, as any team that wants to try to expand their tentacles outside of their little region should be open to the national exposure that this would bring. What is surprising is that MLB specifically chose the Giants over some of these big rating teams on the East Coast.

MLB, who had the final say in this thing, decided to go with the defending champion Giants and I think it was probably the right choice for baseball, even discounting my own feelings of wanting to see the Giants become the powerhouse team of the West Coast.

The Giants have a young, marketable team that should create good story lines and allow fans to connect to the personalities on this team. Brian Wilson is made for TV and is ready to be a rock star, Tim Lincecum is "The Freak" and the face of the franchise. Finally, there is Buster Posey, who is the perfect All-American boy to connect to middle America. This doesn't even touch on the cast of supporting characters that Giants fans know and love that America will, too.

It is past time for MLB to try to do some proactive action to expand the limelight outside of the Acela Express corridor. It's in the best interests of baseball to expand the number of teams that reach a national audience. The recent trend of low ratings for teams not from New York, Boston, or Philadelphia can only be reversed when teams outside of these cities get play, too.

Right now, baseball is in a viscous catch-22 where only the big teams get ratings and, therefore, only teams that draw ratings get national attention. This is the first step in breaking this cycle and hopefully the beginning of the end of the worst of the "East Coast Bias."

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Madison Bumgarner: The Right Choice for the Fifth Spot

After his game four gem in the World Series, I am expecting big things from Madison Bumgarner. The man is completely unfazed with anything you throw at him. He has the composure of a 20 year vet and the body of a 20 year-old kid.

The man is fearless going after hitters. If he gives up a HR to someone like Albert Pujols, his body language tells you "whatever, onto the next batter." I do like what Bochy is doing with leaving him in the five hole in the rotation. I believe he's the correct choice for the anchor of the premier staff in baseball. He's a much better anchor than Joe Blanton on the east coast beloved Phillies.

Mad Bum is only 21 years of age. I believe we have only scratched the surface of his talent level. His strikeout-to-walk rate was over three in his rookie season. He also has a very good ground ball rate at 45% and a fly ball rate at 38%. He also does a great job of keeping the ball in the park, with his HR/FB percentage at 8% last year (these numbers are a bit inflated because of the ball park he pitches in). For a fifth starter, I will take this any day of the week.

Final statement: Madison Bumgarner is the best fifth starter in Major League Baseball.

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The Phillies Signed Cliff Lee, So What

The Phillies blew every ones mind with the sneaky signing of Cliff Lee. The mystery team that only seems to exist in agents minds was actually real and made the big splash.

With the signing comes the overreaction. The Phillies are going to be unstoppable and all that. Well it is just talk, remember that they lost Jayson Werth who was a big part of their offense and are looking to shop Joe Blanton now.

Dave Cameron of fangraphs put it together and figured out how good the 2011 Phillies should be. Here is what he came up with. He figured +21 wins for the starting pitching another +4 wins for the bullpen and the following for the lineup:

Carlos Ruiz: +2.5 WAR
Ryan Howard: +3.0 WAR
Chase Utley: +6.0 WAR
Jimmy Rollins: +3.5 WAR
Placido Polanco: +2.5 WAR
Raul Ibanez: +1.5 WAR
Shane Victorino: +3.0 WAR
Domonic Brown: +2.0 WAR

Throw in another win off the bench and you get +25 from the pitchers and +25 for the lineup and when added to the replacement base of 48 wins it is a 98 win team.
Now before you crawl into your hole never to be seen again let's check the Giants.

First up is the pichers:

Tim Lincecum: +6.5 WAR
Matt Cain: +4.5 WAR
Jonathan Sanchez: +3.5 WAR
Madison Bumgarner: +3.5 WAR
Barry Zito: +2 (Very Expensive) WAR
Bullpen (which one of the best in baseball and last year was worth 6.2 WAR) +5 WAR

Now the lineup:

Buster Posey: +5.5 WAR
Aubrey Huff: +3 WAR
Freddy Sanchez: +2 WAR
Pablo Sandoval: +3.5 WAR
Miguel Tejada: +1.5 WAR
Pat Burrell: +1.5 WAR
Andres Torres: +4 WAR
Cody Ross: +2 WAR
Bench: +2 WAR

If you add it all together and you get the same 50 WAR added to the 48 of the replacement level and the Giants have the same potential to get to 98 wins next year too.

The east coast media are salivating over this deal but the National League title will still have to come through San Francisco.

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Did Roy Halladay really Out Duel Tim Lincecum?

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The headline of the recap from ESPN is "Roy Halladay outduels Tim Lincecum to boost Phillies past Giants in Game 5" but is that really what happened or is it just ESPN's east coast bias showing through?

When you take a closer look at the numbers it is really hard to justify saying that Hallday pitched better then Lincecum.

Lincecum matched or beat Halladay in every stat.

Innings pitched, 7 compared to 6. Strikeouts, 7 compared to 5. Walks, 1 compared to 2. Hits, 4 compared to 6. Earned runs each with 2. Line drives given up, 6 compared to 7. And finally gamescore, 65 compared to 55.

The only difference in this game is that Lincecum's defense let him down while Halladay's was able to make plays when it mattered most.

There is absolutely no justification to that headline and I wonder if the guy who wrote it even watched the game. The storyline of this game was the mistakes made by the Giants defense and the plays that the Phillies made.

If you watched the game you could see that Lincecum was the better pitcher and that Halladay was visibly on the ropes but had enough left to make it through with some backing of his buddies in the field. The headline could have still focused on Halladay if the headline guys read the story and wanted to make a big deal about him pitching through a pulled groin.

They could have blown it up like the "bloody sock" game.

This is just a lazy attempt and makes you wonder if 800 pound gorilla of the sports world even watches the games.

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The Evolution of The N.L. West

Much has been said about the National League West over the last decade, but most of the talk has been negative with quotes like " The N.L. West is in fact the worst division in the MLB." But if you look at the past decade the N.L. West really hasn't been that bad.

Over the last Decade a National League West team represented the National League in the World Series three times, What makes it so special is that three different teams were in it. The Arizona Diamondbacks in 2000, The San Fransisco Giants in 2002, and the Colorado Rockies in 2007.

In addition the Wild Card winner has been from the N.L. West in 09, 07, 06, and 02. The division has not been dominated by a single team unlike the A.L. East (Yankees) or say the N.L Central (Cardinals). Since 2000 only one team has not won the division (Colorado but they have been to the promised land) and all of the other teams have won it more than once with Arizona and Los Angeles having the most titles with 3, then San Fransisco and San Diego with two.

The current N.L. West features four of the five teams with reccords above .500 and the team with the best record in the Nation League. Try and tell me now that we have the worst division in Baseball now East Coast Bais pushers. The current N.L Wild Card leader comes from our division that team happens to be our San Fransisco Giants.

The division has evolved into the best division in the National League, it is the most complete and balanced top to bottom. The torch Ladies and Gentlemen has been past to the A.L. Central for the worst division in Baseball.

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Matt Cain Snubbed for Pitcher of the Week

Two lines to look at:

2-0, 16.0 innings, 9 strike outs, 3 walks and a 0.56 ERA

2-0, 12.1 innings, 22 strike outs, 5 walks and a 2.19 ERA

Both are strong lines, the first belongs to one Matt Cain and the second belongs to the phenom Stephen Strasburg.

Strasburg beat out Cain to be the pitcher of the week and maybe it is just my Giants bias clouding my vision but Cain seemed to have a little bit better of a week that has been a continuation of a hot 5 start stretch. However the writers who vote on these things saw it differently maybe they have beeen watching too much ESPN.

Cain can't seem to get any love or catch any breaks. First he has no run support over his career which has killed his W-L record even with outstanding pitching. The last couple of years even when he has pitched exceptionally he has been in the shadow of Tim Lincecum and now that he is having arguably his best stretch of pitching in his career it is being overlooked because of the debut of Strasburg.

Just a continuation of the hard luck for Cain.

ESPN East Coast Bias Update

Last month we began talking about the pretty well established fact that ESPN favors teams on the Easy Coast at the expense of the teams in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

Well, I just wanted to take a second and post about ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball Schedule that has been released for June:

June 6 – Milwaukee Brewers at St Louis Cardinals

June 13 – Chicago White Sox at Chicago Cubs 

June 20 – Los Angeles Dodgers at Boston Red Sox

June 27 – New York Yankees at Los Angeles Dodgers

 

So for the month of June we have just 1 West Coast team represented and of those there are no match-ups that don't feature the ESPN favorite Yankees or Red Sox.

Why ESPN’s Shows Outside of Live Sports are Becoming Unwatchable:

Once upon a time I watched Sports Center and I enjoyed it. Once upon a time I watched Baseball tonight and I enjoyed it. Now not so much.

Maybe I am the only one who feels this way but it seems that as I get older I could care less and less about the non-sports programming on ESPN. I used to watch for hours, it used to be on in the background while I did other things; I knew the programming schedule and watched shows religiously.

Now when I tune in it feels like they are trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the level of discourse has slipped considerably. This may sound snobbish but many of the personalities on the air talk in catch phrases and have become parodies of what the highlight readers used to be.

The network seems to gloss over the coverage and rarely goes in depth and breaks things down even on shows dedicated to a specific sport such as baseball tonight.

However I am not all that disappointed by this trend because now there are so many more outlets for sports information. As a sports fan I am no longer beholden to the sports section in the newspaper and ESPN for my daily sports fix. The alternatives are plentiful and add so much to watching sports.

The constant promoting of the big name teams at the expense of covering the rest of the league is disappointing to anyone but the most casual fan but maybe with things becoming more specialized this is what the trend will be.

The movement seems to be that ESPN will focus on the Yankees, Red Sox, home runs, web gems and a few other newsworthy items while giving a few seconds of coverage about the rest of the league, while league dedicated channels focus more on the league and local sports channels focus on specific teams. With blogs giving in depth and varied analysis and twitter giving real time and breaking news.

This probably a good thing but it really seems to be a big shift as for the longest time that ESPN was the go to place for sports news now it is an after thought unless I want to know something pretty general or want to have some sports background noise on.

Raise Your Hand If You Are Tired of the Bias!

I am not sure about the rest of the Bay Area but I am extremely fed up with ESPN, the self proclaimed World Wide Leader™ in sports has developed a love feast for the East Coast leaving great stories like the Giants and the rest of the N.L. West in the dust.

The exception to all of this is the L.A. Dodgers who manage to make it on ESPN because they have a HOF manager in Joe Torre. An example of the bias one might ask?
For the answer to this question just watch Sunday Night Baseball, here is the schedule:

April 4 Opening Night: New York Yankees at Boston

April 11 St. Louis at Milwaukee

April 18 New York Mets at St. Louis

April 25 Atlanta at N.Y. Mets

May 2 N.Y. Mets at Philadelphia

May 9 N.Y. Yankees at Boston

May 16 Philadelphia at Milwaukee

May 23 N.Y. Yankees at N.Y. Mets

So looking at this, does one see the problem here? 7 of the 8 games feature N.L./ A.L. East teams and not one West Coast team. There is not even a game outside out the Eastern or Central Time Zones. Perhaps ESPN needs to open up some west coast offices to get away from the East Coast echo chamber, come on guys there are other places where sports are played as well.

The argument that that is where the people are doesn’t hold water either. There are a number of large markets in the west; San Francisco is the 6th largest television market and 4th largest radio market. However we are treated like a second class sports city.

When you miss a game you have to wait 45 min on SportsCenter because the Red Sox struggling is much more important than a Giants game and even then they are just as likely to take a shot at Bengie Molina for being slow.

If the situations were reversed and the Giants were struggling and the Red Sox just swept the Yankees, the headlines would ring out “oh the Rex Sox are back! They swept the Yankees!” The lead story on SportsCenter and ESPNews is now the Yankees are struggling and what are they going to do to get over it.

Does this sound familiar? When Boston comes into town during interleague play Giants fans I beg you get an East Coast Bias Chant going in AT&T.

Giants have the best fans on the west coast

This one is just for you guys, the fans. We here in the Bay Area always support our teams, but especially Giants fans. The Giants have the second best national league average attendance west of the Rocky mountains at just over 36,000 a night, the only national league team above the G-men? Those bums of L.A. No disrespect to the Dodgers but AT&T Park is much nicer than Dodger Stadium (Or for that matte better than just about every park in baseball). At least here in the Bay Area we do not arrive in the 3rd and leave in the 7th like some people(Bums).

Although AT&T has lacked something that it deserves, a tradition that is done during each game. For example: Roll Call in Yankee stadium, Giants fans we need to prove to the east coast that we can compete with their traditions.

A few ideas, lets create the rally Panda so if we ever meet those nowhere close to L.A. but close to Disneyland Angles in the World series again we can defeat the Rally Monkey!

We also need to get louder with the "he's a bum chants", when I go to games these are always the most fun to be a part of and they do mess with the heads of players trust me I know!

So Giants Fans keep up the good work and together we can make AT&T Park the best place to watch baseball in the MLB, like they say; there's magic inside!