A Few Good Men

Gordon Edes of the Boston Globe has spent the last week or so working through the Boston lineup, assessing existing players and looking at potential replacements. Today's entry was on first base, where the big question is "do we need a first baseman with more power?" Kevin Youkilis, the position incumbent, was not a prototypical power guy. He hit 13 homers. Nick Swisher and Paul Konerko hit 35 apiece. Ryan Howard and Albert Pujols hit about 87 apiece. Can't we do better than Youk? Well, the options that Edes presents were, frankly, a little depressing. Scott Hatteberg, Carlos Pena, Aubrey Huff, and Scott Spezio were the other four "probable" options for Edes. Oh my goodness. It's an orgy of riches. None of these guys, with the possible exception of a complete revelation from Pena, would provide even league-average power for the position. Unless you're going to teach Wily Mo to play first or fire up the wayback machine to get the Mo Vaughan from 12 years ago, there's not much out there. For now, Youk has the advantage of being both cheap (still a year from salary arbitration) and capable of getting on base. His .381 OBP was among the league leaders for first basemen. The major problem is, of course, if you punt a little power at one of the traditional power spots, you've got to find it somewhere else.

In a reverse segue, that brings us to the potential signing of Alex Cora to a 2-year extention of service with the Red Sox. Although it's easy to drink the Jerry Remy kool-aid on Cora and say that "every time he's in there, he does something good to help the team," the fact is that Cora finished the year with a .238 average and a slugging percentage under .300. That might not even be acceptable from Ozzie Smith or Bill Mazeroski. It's just really low. It just is not a lot of production. The point, however, is that this isn't a big deal one way or the other. Cora's a backup. He's a utility guy who can play anywhere in the infield and give you very good defense whenever it's required of him. If he gets a hit, good. If he's playing enough that you notice that he never hits a double, that's a problem. I'm counting on the front office to understand this also, and have a plan in place. From the buzz, it sounds a lot like that plan might be Julio Lugo. I'm not as sold on his offense as many others are, but then again, the offensive options at shortstop aren't what they once were (read: 1999). The charges of spousal abuse still bug me a bit, but, they were dropped, right? Eh. Well, I've come to sort of like Julian Tavarez. Maybe I'll like Lugo. If the Blue Jays don't snap him up first, that is.

Another good man went down today, much to the dismay of my fellow midwesterners in Minnesota. After going 12-3 and posting an ERA down around 2, rookie pitcher Francisco Liriano underwent Tommy John surgery today on his pitching arm. He'll be out pretty much all of 2007. This puts a major kink in the Twins hopes for repeating as Central Division champs. No Radke, no Liriano, a less than stellar development of Jesse Crain. That's not good. Terry Ryan has a way of pulling amazing prospects out of his hat, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think that division will be the most interesting and competitive in baseball again next year- with the Indians returning to the party, and the White Sox sticking around, but slipping a bit.

Finally, I just want to give some love to Retrosheet. The other night, I was watching "A Few Good Men" on TV, and there was a scene in Tom Cruise's apartment when he had the ballgame on in the background. The announcer said something like "The ball goes over Puckett's head! And here comes Ripken! The Twins streak is over!" Out of curiousity, I wanted to find out what that game was. Knowing the movie came out in 1992, I looked at the 1991 season. The Twins had a 15-game winning streak that year that came to an end on June 17 at the hands of the Orioles (the film took place in the DC/Annapolis area). Cal Ripken scored from first on a double in the bottom of the ninth to win it. It was just nice to be able to take that snippet from the movie and place it in context of what was happening in the baseball world. Because that's what it's about, Scout.