If Bill Simmons Publishes Your Question In A Mailbag Column, You Are A Douche By Association, Pt. 1

Actually, based on these questions, most of these people were already douches on their own. But I digress. Let's get to the awfulness.

Back in mid-January, you might remember me writing a "Dr. Jack" breakdown of the undefeated Patriots and the '86 Celtics, trying to figure out which team was greater and leading to hundreds of "You better not have jinxed the season!" e-mails. When the Pats blew Super Bowl XLII three weeks later, more than a few Boston fans blamed me, like my column had the opposite effect of "The Secret" or something.

Can you really blame a writer for altering the outcome of a football game with a column? Of course not. It's patently ridiculous.

Can you really accept a writer who works for a national sports site's decision to devote 75% of his columns to teams from one city? Well, you don't have a choice. He's already tragically popular. It is still, however, patently offensive.

The truth is, I just picked the wrong Boston team for the breakdown -- instead of comparing the '08 Patriots to the '86 Celtics, I should have used the '08 Celtics. With the playoffs just three weeks away and KG, Pierce and the gang running on all cylinders like no Celtics team since Larry Bird's heyday, it now seems like the optimal time to break this baby down "Dr. Jack" style.

Without further ado ...

(Wait for it ...)

(Wait for it ...)

April Fools!

Somehow, that's even less funny that my own pathetic attempt at an over-the-top April Fool's post (see below). My joke was neither directly nor ironically funny. This is unfunny in both of those ways, and in dozens of others that I'm not even smart enough to understand or describe.

(Just give us a few seconds while we revive my dad.)

(All right, we're good.)

Oh! Wow! I just realized something. Fuck me, I'm ignorant- he portrayed that as a joke not because if he really did it it would torture/infuriate people like me, but because many Boston fans are fucking dunderheaded enough to believe that if he had done it it would jinx the 2008 Celtics. I gotcha. Wow. That is sad.

Hey, what about an April Fools' mailbag? Is that something you might be interested in?

Reference from "Entourage," circa 2006. How very relevant. At least his 80s shit is stuff that's managed to stick around in some capacity for 20+ years.

Q: Your stubborn insistence on writing basketball nonsense for months on end reminds me of when Pearl Jam made albums like "Binaural" to purposely drive fans away. The baseball season just started and have we been treated to an SG column about it? No! I'd even read a Red Sox column or a Tom Brady column just because it's not a basketball column. You do realize the baseball season started right?
-- Danny G., Kansas City, Mo.

Too bad Danny is now a douche by association for getting his question printed. Seems him and I share some similar thought patterns. No, I would not rather read about the Sawks or Tom Brady than basketball, but the general idea here is a good one.

SG: Fine, we'll make it an April Fools' mailbag with no basketball questions. (Frankly, any comparison of my hoops columns to "Binaural" is a wake-up call. I might never write about the NBA again.) Speaking of baseball, allow me one extended thought about the American League heading into the season. Why the American League and not both leagues? Because that's the league in which I watch 162 Red Sox games a year and throw myself into my AL-only fantasy keeper league. I know the American League to the degree that when Leo Nunez pitched two scoreless innings in Detroit on Monday, my reaction wasn't "Who the hell is Leo Nunez?" but "Why didn't we start Nunez over Ian Kennedy this week when he was one of my big sleepers and Kennedy isn't even starting until Saturday?" I am an AL junkie. And if it comes at the expense of following the National League, then so be it. I'm not going to apologize. There's only so much time in the day.

You know, that makes a ton of sense. I know plenty of football fans that only follow the AFC. Basketball fans who love submediocrity and accordingly only pay attention to the Eastern Conference. NASCAR fans who only know anything about even-numbered cars. I mean, with so many other sports being in full swing for much of the baseball season (particularly in July and August), who has time to learn a little bit about every team in both leagues? What a ridiculous idea. And it's not like baseball has certain stats like wins, batting average, and RBI that are really easy to look up and generally allow someone who knows the names of players who accrue them in large amounts to put up rough but decent analysis of said players/teams they play for. That's such a crazy concept. You might as well try to juggle electric eels while taking a shower.

Anyway, here's my big extended thought: We're headed for a potentially historic offensive season in the American League. Consider the following things ...

Shockingly, nearly every single point he makes in an effort to prove this idea ends up being wrong/anecdotal/unprovable/stupid/douche.

1. The quality of AL starting pitching has gone south

Why?

because of two trades (Johan Santana and Danny Haren),

OK, fair enough.

some injuries (John Lackey, Kelvim Escobar, Curt Schilling, Scott Kazmir, possibly Josh Beckett),

Lackey, Beckett, and Kazmir should all be 100% by mid-May, but I guess this point is about half right.

overprotective inning counts (Felix Hernandez, Clay Buchholz, Phil Hughes, Kennedy, Matt Garza and Francisco Liriano)

Hernandez, despite missing some starts, threw 190 last year. That means the M's will probably get him up around 210 this year. But yeah. Just because they don't let him throw 140 pitches a night (look at 33 year old Livan Hernandez and his 81 mph fastball to see how that works out), let's boldly claim that Hernandez is somehow contributing to AL pitching getting worse this year.

Buchholz, Hughes, Kennedy, Liriano, and Garza combined to throw 198 innings last year. Total. This year, if they stay healthy, they'll probably clear 650. Not that these guys are as good as Haren and Santana, but that 450 innings they throw might come somewhere close to being in the neighborhood of balancing out the departure of the two aces. Again, I'm not saying the kids are going to have sub-3.00 ERAs and strike out a guy an inning. But their expected emergence prevents the teams that own them from relying on crappy retreads like Jeff Weaver, who still doesn't have a job. They'll see a lot more action this year than last, and at least two or three of them are bound to turn in good seasons. And somehow, this makes AL pitching worse in 2008 than it was in 2007. That's like saying "I won the state lottery, but I didn't win the Powerball, so I'm actually getting poorer."

and the disappearance of reliable, "I know I'm getting 200-220 innings, 140-170 Ks, 13-17 wins and a solid ERA and WHIP out of him" guys

Any support for this assertion? Any way you can justify this at all? In 2007, 14 AL pitchers fit this profile. In 2006, 15 did. In 2000, 13. It's all pretty consistent over the course of the last 8 seasons. I'm forced to wonder, therefore, when the hell these types of pitchers started disappearing and how that's going to make 2008 any different than other recent seasons. Oh, yeah, I figured out why: Bill Simmons is pulling nonsense out of his tightly clenched sphincter in order to try and prove a nonsensical point.

Wait! He does offer some support!

(leading owners to overpay for the likes of Dice-K, Jeremy Bonderman, Rich Harden, A.J. Burnett and others in my draft last weekend).

Matsuzaka fits that profile you just listed, dummy. Burnett would've fit it had he stayed healthy. Bonderman fit it in 2006. Bill's fantasy league (imagine the level of dickbag in the room during that draft!)- the one and only true predictor of what to expect from athletes in real life.

2. Not only were Kenny Rogers and Tim Wakefield drafted in my keeper league, not only did the bidding war for Wake climb to $7, but my buddy Hench and I shared a fist pump after we landed him.

That's because you stupid cunts are Red Sox fans. That says absolutely nothing about the level of pitching in the league as a whole. Nothing. Less than nothing. Also- take note that this is another attempt at reinforcing a point about predicting the real life future based on what happened during a fantasy draft.

3. We can have up to 10 keepers, so our friend Mikey incredibly decided before the draft to keep Andy Sonnanstine at $8. Even more incredibly, nobody made fun of him or thought it was a bad move.

He stunk last year, but he was a rookie. He's got great minor league numbers. Maybe he puts it all together this year. Maybe he breaks out like Kazmir did in that ballpark during his first full year. Maybe that guy just wanted to focus more on drafting a lineup as opposed to a rotation. What real conclusion about the level of pitching in the AL in 2008, as compared to 2007, can we draw from this? The answer: go fuck yourself.

Along those same lines, Erik Bedard was shut down with a sore shoulder last season, gave up eight homers in spring training and went for $30 in our auction. Did I mention that pitching is thin in the American League this season?

Last year, Bedard was arguably the best pitcher in baseball from May 1 until he was shut down at the end of August. He rehabbed fully. And no one gives a fuck about how superstars play in spring training. Considering he'll be making half his starts in Seattle's big park, that guy who got him for $30 has pretty good odds of laughing hysterically all the way to the bank. Yes, you did mention that you think pitching is thin in the AL this season several times. And you have been completely wrong almost each and every one of those times.

4. The overall quality of middle relievers and set-up guys is even more (pick an adjective: disturbing, appalling, grisly, macabre, comical) than usual. I mean, back in June 2005, if you had asked me to choose between one of two predictions -- "In 2008, Alan Embree and Keith Foulke would still be the lefty-righty set-up combo for an AL team" or "In 2008, Kevin Federline will have five Grammys, an Oscar nomination and his own late-night talk show" -- I would have gone with K-Fed in a kajillasecond.

Durrrr... Those guys were hurt three years ago. Therefore, there's no way they could possibly be effective now. This is the kind of thought process that runs corporations into the ground, wastes billions of tax dollars every year, and allow Billy Beane to win 90+ games a season with payrolls in the mid eight figures. I'm not even going to name any awesome AL setup guys. Suffice it to say: there are a lot of them. In some cases, several on the same team!

5. Todd Jones, Troy Percival, Huston Street, Joe Borowski, George Sherrill and C.J. Wilson make up 40 percent of the league's closers. Would you ask any of those six guys to help you fix a flat tire, much less save a baseball game? I didn't think so.

Not trying to pat myself on the back here, but I've fixed a flat tire on my own. So I wouldn't need help from a MLB player in the extremely unlikely scenario that one of them would be passing by while I was fixing another one. Anyways, Street, Percival, Sherrill, and Wilson were all pretty much lights out last year. But Bill just saw Street blow a save to the Sawks in Tokyo, Percival pitched in the NL last year, and he's never heard of Sherrill and Wilson (despite being an AL junkie), so they go straight to the "suck" box. Jones and Borowski are definitely shaky. But you know what? Someone stop me before I start shouting like Adam Sandler... THEY WERE ALREADY FUCKING CLOSERS LAST YEAR. SO HOW THE FUCK IS THE FACT THAT THEY'RE NOT VERY GOOD GOING TO MAKE 2008 THAT MUCH MORE OF AN OFFENSIVELY FRIENDLY YEAR THAN 2007, YOU FUCKING HARD-ON?

Sorry.

6. In our auction, Hench and I paid $14 for Percival. And you know what? We'd do it again.

You probably overpaid, but the guy struck out 36 guys in 40 innings last year. His WHIP was 0.85. He's definitely an injury risk, but if he stays healthy he should be effective. In fact, his re-emergence after semi-retirement and subsequent move from the NL to the AL is a factor that will make AL pitching better in 2008 than it was last year. See how that works? When good players come into the league, it changes how things work.

7. Four of the top five teams have noticeable pitching holes: Detroit (bullpen), Boston (starting rotation, middle relief), Anaheim (ditto), New York (double ditto). Only Cleveland seems to be relatively well-rounded, and that's the same team that relies on Borowski to close games.

Unlike last year, when all of those teams were 100% rock solid when it came to pitching. Totally flawless. Just like the Titanic. (Too soon?) Also: what a fantastic example of anecdotal bullshit.

8. The AL has three monster lineups (New York, Boston and Detroit), two other very good lineups (Cleveland and Anaheim) and one lineup with a chance to become very good (Tampa Bay),

Again, unlike last year, when all of those lineups were full of beer league softball players and anemic children.

as well as an inordinate amount of good hitters who seem like they're poised for a gargantuan year either because it's a contract year, they worked out all winter, they're coming back from an off-season and/or they're ready to make the proverbial leap: Manny Ramirez, Bobby Abreu, Miguel Cabrera, Grady Sizemore, Billy Butler, Delmon Young, Carl Crawford, Alex Gordon, Vernon Wells, Nick Markakis, Josh Hamilton, Robbie Cano, B.J. Upton, Justin Morneau, Howie Kendrick, Travis Hafner ... for God's sake, the list doesn't end, and if the first three guys on that list have career years, their three offenses are going to be insanely, abnormally good.

Well, there's a couple things that are good to know. 1) This year, the AL has some veteran players who are in contract years, and some other good young players who will probably be better than they were last year. 2) If 36 year old Manny (BEING MANNY!) Ramirez or 34 year old Bobby (BEING ON THE DOWNSIDE OF HIS CAREER!) Abreu have ridiculously great seasons, the Red Sox and Yankees will have good offenses.

Let's pick through that list and find the actual candidates to make the AL better in 2008 than it was in 2007- Cabrera, for coming over from the NL; Sizemore, maybe; Gordon; Wells, to rebound; Hamilton, if he doesn't wear down; and Hafner, to rebound. The rest of the names on that list aren't real likely to be a whole lot better this year than last. Cano? Morneau? Markakis? Who the fuck do you expect them to become? I'm not saying they stink, I'm saying they're not going to break out any more than they already have.

So that's my prediction for the American League: We're in for a summer of football scores and eye-popping offensive numbers along the lines of what happened in '77, '87, '93 and the prime of the steroid era.

After all that bullshit, let's review the solid and salient points Bill made in attempting to prove that hypothesis:

Haren and Santana gone, Cabrera added. A few guys who were good last year hurt for a month or so. Kelvim Escobar and Curt Schilling hurt all season.

The end. And that gets us to an offensive explosion. Just... wow. "But... but... but! There are some young guys trying to break out! And Todd Jones and Joe Borowski are cl-" SHUT UP. NONE OF THAT MEANS ANYTHING.

Christ, this is exhausting. There's a lot of great stuff left to cover (including more thinly veiled racism from Bill) but I've gotta turn in. Tomorrow night I'll pick up where I left off. Now, to just tie up all the loose ends by going up to the top of the page and putting "Pt. 1" at the end of the title. Awesome. I am soooo awesome.