The Robbing of Troy

In another indefensible example of east coast bias, Troy Tulowitzki, phenom rookie shortstop of the Colorado Rockies, lost the 2007 Gold Glove to Phillies SS Jimmy Rollins. This award is not based solely on fielding percentage (if it were, Troy would have won, as he had the highest fielding percentage in the league at .987). Instead, the Gold Glove is awarded to the player who exhibits "superior individual fielding performance" as voted on by coaches and managers in each league. Every casual fan of baseball knows Jimmy Rollins, and he's a stud at short. But Troy Tulowitzki is one of the greatest shortstops I have ever seen - and if you don't live in the Denver metro area or you're not a huge fan of baseball, you've probably never heard of him. He routinely throws people out from the grass, he has snatched up grounders that were on the first-base side of second, and he helped the 2007 Rockies achieve the highest fielding percentage of any team in the history of Major League Baseball (no Rockies earned a Gold Glove this year). As a bonus, he turned an unassisted triple play this season, the first in the MLB since 2003 (and the 13th in MLB history).

But forget my personal opinion of the guy, let's take a look at the stats:

• Both Rollins and Tulo had 11 errors on the season


• Tulo had 561 assists to Rollins' 479


• Tulo had a .987 fielding percentage to Rollins' .985


• Tulo was involved in 114 double plays to Rollins' 110


• Tulo's Range Factor per Nine Innings is an unbelievable 5.39 to Rollins' paltry 4.41

For those of you who aren't familiar with Range Factor, it was developed by Bill James (of Moneyball fame) as a better statistical indicator of defensive ability than fielding percentage alone. Read about Range Factor here.

Troy Tulowitzki was robbed, pure and simple. Rollins fans will point to the fact that he started 7 more games than Tulo this year. Awesome. Rollins is an excellent shortstop and a scrappy guy to play all 162 games of the season. But Tulo started 155 games - is that difference what cost him a Gold Glove? He deserved the '07 Gold Glove award, and if not for Milwaukee's Ryan Braun, he would have had the Rookie of the Year award to go along with it (that award isn't awarded until November 12th, this is just a prediction). Tulo also serves as a refreshing departure from the whiny, spoiled, Carl Everett-type complainers who play in the Majors - Troy always has a smile on his face in the field and in the dugout, he's always willing to talk to a reporter or sign autographs for kids in the stands, and he always acts grateful to have the chance to play baseball for a living. He's a stand-up guy and a class act, not to mention one hell of a ballplayer. You may hear more from me about the Rockies getting screwed by east coast bias if Holliday doesn't win the MVP after coming in first in two of the three categories of the Triple Crown.

Confessions of a Boston Expatriate

My friends are crazy. Two of them bought round trip plane tickets from Boston to Denver for this weekend, hoping to somehow get tickets to the World Series. I told them it was going to be hard, because the tickets were averaging close to $900 a piece on Stubhub.com. They booked the flights before they had any real hope of scoring tickets, and then for the next couple of days scoured internet sites looking for deals on World Series tickets. Then, yesterday morning, they struck gold - eBay had two tickets in the upper decks for a reasonable price, and my buddy was the top bidder. They were going to the Game 4 of the Fall Classic, which could turn out to be the clinching game for the Sox.

After they got the tix, I knew I had to act fast and I began searching out one solitary ticket for the same game on Craigslist. 45 minutes later I was pulling into a gas station off 470 to meet up with "Steve", who was lucky enough to get into the Rockies website a few times and buy a bunch of single tickets. I'm not going to tell you how much I paid, but I had the leverage of cash and the ability to buy immediately - which is something an arm-chair scalper likes very much. So long story short - the three of us are going to the World Series Game 4 on Sunday. I also lucked out and got a hard ticket (my buddies got "print-at-home" tickets that look like boarding passes), and I plan on mounting the stub with a picture from the game and keeping it on my wall.

After I moved out here I immediately took to the Rockies. Talk about your perennial underdogs - as of last year they were a team that had been to the playoffs exactly once in their 14-year history, a team that had finished the season above .500 only a handful of times, and a team that had never even been to a National League Championship. Also, if you had $4 in your pocket, you could go to a game any day of the week. Fenway used to be like that, before 2004. I remember shortly after I graduated from college, a couple of us were dropping off a buddy in the Back Bay on a summer evening, and one of my friends was like "Want to go to the Sox game tonight?" It was that easy. Well, it's still that easy at Coors Field. The Rockies are a team that any true fan of baseball can really get into.

So after I moved here, a lot of people began asking me who I

would root for if the Sox and Rox ever faced off in the World Series. This question was usually followed by laughter and a sarcastic "Yeah, Ok!", because there was no way that was ever going to happen. The Rox finished dead last in the division two years in a row, and the Sox were only making it to the Series every other decade - what were the odds that the two of them would both have excellent seasons at the same time? Well, now we're not laughing, it's late October and we're watching every pitch. I didn't know who I'd be rooting for during this Series. In my head, I reasoned that I should be rooting for my old home town team, the same team I had followed and screamed about for 25 years, the same team I had seen play at Fenway since I was 8 years old, when a bald sweaty fat dude in his mid-30's could buy a kid a soda without being investigated by Chris Hansen. (The guy bought me a soda because I had turned an unassisted triple-play in a little league game the night before.) But reason doesn't come into play when you're a fan, and when the Sox started teeing off on the Rockies - the team I had followed religiously for the past two years; the team that I watched from the stands at least 10 times over the past couple of summers; the team that helped Abby and I feel like we were true immersed citizens of Denver - that was when I cringed and realized that I didn't want the Rockies to lose. My mind told me I should want the Sox to win, but my heart is with the Rockies. I am a Rockies fan. Let the "Benedict Arnold" taunts begin.

So, what's it mean to go to the world series? There's a great article on mlb.com here, that explains it better than I ever could.