FanHouse DanDuquette

With the playoff chase coming down to the wire, our MLB editor rounds up the five biggest pennant race stories in Eye Toward October.

- Champs Getting Stronger: The Red Sox have suddenly opened up a sizable four-game edge in the wild-card race after winning Tuesday while the White Sox and Twins lost. The news gets even better when you consider that Mike Lowell and Josh Beckett are set to return on Friday, with J.D. Drew and pitcher Bartolo Colon possibly returning next week.

It's easy to compare the 2008 Sox to the last Boston team that defended a title. Like this year's version, the 2005 team was ravaged by injuries to key players. There's one major difference, though, and that's the depth in the organization. GM Theo Epstein's vision of making the Red Sox a nine-figure player development machine has bloomed fully, and because of it Boston has a very real chance to repeat.

Their minor league system is among the most robust in the game, far different from the Dan Duquette era, and it's enabled the Red Sox to plug many of the holes they've had over the course of a trying season.

When Julio Lugo went down, Jed Lowrie came up and improved the team. When the team needed a spot starter for Josh Beckett, they turned to pitching prospect Michael Bowden. When the team needed another outfielder because of Drew's injury, they were able to deal a prospect with good upside for Mark Kotsay because of their minor league depth.

If there is one thing you'll never convince me of, it's that the mayors of large cities in America would ever do anything borderline unethical. Like, for example: former Red Sox GM Dan Duquette and a former Pittsfield mayor would never have lent a favor to each other. Why, never! Never, say, sold a pair of World Series tickets for face value when the rest of the public was paying $2,000 for them (via SbB):

Duquette told investigators that he sold Ruberto the two tickets for $190 each because he wanted his minor league team, the Berkshire Dukes, to play at a city park, according to a statement made public today by the State Ethics Commission. "By selling the World Series tickets to Ruberto at face value, where the general public could only obtain such tickets at prices more than $50 over face value, Duquette provided something of substantial value to Ruberto for or because of official acts to be performed by Ruberto as mayor," the statement says.

Sheesh. That sounds terrible. Next thing you know, metropolitan tax dollars will be misappropriated and pilfered through corrupt local representatives, and baseball players will start using steroids. Our republic is doomed.

International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.

The Israeli Baseball League has been a minor fascination around here since the MLB 'House started. International baseball is interesting altogether, actually, and who doesn't love the potential of new leagues? Israelis? Oh. Well that's not good:

"There will be no league in 2008," Haim Katz, president of the Israel Association of Baseball, told the Post on Thursday. "The main difficulty last year was that there wasn't sufficient work on the ground to prepare the terrain and to familiarize people with what was going to happen," said Zimbalist, a pioneer in the field of baseball economics. "There needs to be a lot more marketing - to introduce a new sport into a country, you need to promote it, and it wasn't adequately promoted. Once it got started, the communication system between the league and the potential fan base was not in place."

There's a chance the IBL will return in some incarnation in 2009, or beyond, but by the sounds of it the league seems doomed. Too bad. I, for one, will never forget Dan Duquette's Israeli redemption song. Oy vey. That's the joke, right? I'm supposed to say oy vey? Can someone Jewish bail me out here?

(HT: Walkoff Walk)

In the wake of the Mitchell Report, a common thread of discussion has been the relative measure of redemption afforded Dan Duquette since the revelation from Roger Clemens' former trainer that Clemens used steroids to extend his Hall of Fame career. If you'll recall, Duquette failed to retain Roger Clemens after the Rocket's slight decline in the mid-90's, claiming Clemens was in the twilight of his career. Clemens went on to pad his resume in a serious way, and that was that.

But now Duquette is actually getting phone calls from people congratulating him. Seriously:

2. Duquette. He's been fielding calls of congratulations ever since the release of the report, which goes a long way toward explaining how Clemens extended the "twilight of his career,'' by, oh, a decade or so. Duquette, who despite a largely successful tenure as Red Sox GM, has been ridiculed hundreds of times for predicting Clemens was nearing the end. Since leaving the Red Sox in 2002, he has never offered another GM job and is currently working as the director of operations for the Israel Baseball League and president of the Duquette Sports Academy. Yet, he won't gloat. Prodded as to whether he's been vindicated, Duquette said, "I'm not sure what I need to be vindicated for ... Red Sox fans are very sophisticated, and you can leave that judgment to them.'' He did get a chuckle when I asked him whether he himself was in the twilight of his own career. Laughing, the 49-year-old responded, "No, I'm still a young guy.''

I'm not sure what Duquette's not sure about. Minus steroids, the Twilight Comment is one of the great managerial gaffes in Major League Baseball history. With Clemens' apparent fondness for rear-stuck needles suddenly in the equation, the decision looks considerably better. It doesn't completely vindicate Duquette -- it's likely Clemens would have had a few more productive seasons, PEDs or not -- but it's a start.

Roger Clemens had a pretty good year in 2006. He posted a 136 OPS+ and struck out 257, solid numbers for any player. But Clemens' 1996 season followed irregular years, and Clemens appeared to be declining. So the Red Sox, led at the time by Dan Duquette, proclaimed Clemens on the downside of his career and let him go.

Then, of course, Clemens posted two insane Cy Young seasons in Toronto, before being traded to the Yankees and haunting Red Sox fans forever. Naturally, Red Sox fans blamed the front office -- especially Duquette -- for misreading Clemens' career curve. But we now know, thanks to the Mitchell Report, that Clemens started using steroids soon after he left the Red Sox, leading to his stunning increases in OPS+ and innings pitched in the following years.

So are Dan Duquette and the Red Sox staff vindicated? I say yes. After all, steroids aside, it's likely that Clemens would have continued to decline year-over-year, and for the money Clemens was demanding it was smart to avoid signing a long-term veteran contract. We're still not sure how much steroids can help a player, but in Clemens' case it seemed to wake his tired arm right up. It's unrealistic to assume Duquette would factor potential steroid use into their cost-benefit on Clemens, right? Duquette deserves to be the whipping boy for many of his failures in Boston, but in retrospect, he deserves a pass on the Rocket and his big, needle-pocked rear end.

Attention baseball people: Are you from Western PA? Have you ever worked with a mildly successful small market club? Or helped rebuild a big market club? Do you know Robert Nutting? Could you possibly be described as "blue collar" or "hard working" or any other cliche that is often applied to Pittsburgh?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, chances are quite good that you'll be hearing your name linked to the open Pittsburgh Pirates' CEO position any day now! I know, I know, it's a dream job. Anyways, John Perrotto of the Beaver County Times gives the first list of potential replacements for Kevin McClatchy today. The current thinking is that even though Bob Nutting owns most of the team, he knows squat about baseball and will look for a baseball person to replace McClatchy while running the business side of things himself.

The thing about this list is that Perrotto didn't actually talk to Nutting about who he was considering hiring, he talked to other people about who they think Nutting might think about. The most prominent names on the list are Larry Lucchino (like he would leave Boston for Pittsburgh), Jim Duquette, and Dan Duquette (pictured). Most of the people are employed by other teams, meaning the Pirates would need to get permission just to talk to them. Personally, I just hope it's not a Duquette, for everyone's sake (except Orioles' fans that would likely pay Nutting to hire Jim away).