Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

Just a quick note to announce that my next book, Heavy Waves, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. and edited by the redoubtable Brendan Curry.  The book is an exploration of the culture of high-risk, high-adrenaline athletics, focused on the tiny cadre of surfers who roam the planet looking to take on the biggest, baddest, deadliest waves on Earth.

Let me just state for the record that these guys are insanely talented, and clearly nuts.  But they’re also remarkably respectful of the forces of nature, they’re in love with the idea of being so close to the primal energies of our world, and they know more about oceanography and the eco-systems than I could’ve possibly imagined.  They’re dudes, sure, but duuuudes they most certainly are not.

So I get an excuse to be at the beach every possible moment for the next few months, and then we’ll see just where Heavy Waves goes.  It’ll be a fun ride.  I’ll keep you posted.

A Monday Roll.

* Memo to Joe Torre: Tell us something we don’t know.

In a new book, Torre says (well, people imply it for him, so that he doesn’t have to be on the hook for it) that Alex Rodriguez was (1) a prima donna in love with himself, (2) casually dismissed as “A-Fraud” behind his back by teammates and colleagues, (3) obssessed with the Yankees fans’ ongoing love affair with rival teammate Derek Jeter, and (4) all of the above concurrently, usually while driving a ball 400 feet to left-center field.

Right. Got that.  Had it a long while ago, in fact.

All we really can glean from the advance galleys of Torre’s book (written by SI’s Tom Verducci, with Torre’s thoughts cast in a third-person guise) is that, however many layers of complexities there are to Alex Rodriguez as a player, Torre as a manager drilled through almost none of them.  For a man often lauded as a players’ leader, Torre made almost no headway with A-Rod, and he didn’t solve the A-Rod/Jeter issue in time to produce a single World Series title from that duo before being kicked to the curb by the Cashman/Steinbrenner axis of power.

Instead, we get in the new book the same information about Rodriguez that was always known.  He won’t tomorrow suddenly become a teammate favorite, because he never was — not in Seattle, not in Texas, not in New York.  But that’s not news.  It’d be nice for any new book about the Yankees, let alone one principally engineered by Joe Torre, to reveal something about what really makes Rodriguez tick, since he was obviously a self-consumed great ballplayer long before the Bronx got hold of him.  There’s a great story in there somewhere.  Maybe someday Jeter himself will tell it.

* * * * *

Rolling on: The NFL’s sudden interest in seeing the 49ers and Raiders partner up for a shared stadium deal in the Bay Area is so laughably out of touch, you almost don’t know where to begin.  Yes — obviously — it’s more affordable to do one new building than two such facilities, but aside from the geographical squabbles, did someone at Goodell HQ recently confuse the Raiders/Niners relationship with that of the Giants/Jets?  Money’s one thing, but there can’t be a sports franchise owner on Earth who’d want to get mixed up with Al Davis and his merry band of litigators.  Take it from a friend who once fronted for Al in some legal proceedings: Litigation is about all the man has left.  It’s still a way for Davis to roar.  Everybody else, steer clear … The Texas coach who got fired after his team beat a girls’ basketball opponent 100-0 is, of course, being skewered from coast to coast.  But wait: Is everyone saying they’d be happier if it were only 88-0?  67-0?  It was 59-0 at the half.  What’s the cutoff on the embarrassment meter?  … Can’t help it, and I’ve felt this way from the start: I believe the Radomskis and the McNamees straight down the line.  It isn’t pretty, and there is still a hardy group arguing that it doesn’t even really matter (hey, if everybody cheated, isn’t that like having a level playing field?), but on the substantive portion of what the two are saying — most recently, Kirk Radomski asserting that Brian McNamee indeed admitted to him that he injected Roger Clemens with steroids — the ring of truth is there.  These are lifelong second-tier baseball underlings being dragged into the light of day under threat, mostly, and the transcripts released so far reveal them as guys who sometimes contradicted themselves in clumsy efforts either to not get charged or not rat out their ballplayer buddies.  But what they’ve told investigators — and now the public — carries the sad air of reality.  It was an era of cheating epic even by pro sports’ Gulliverian standards, and it isn’t ended yet.

-30-

Jeff Kent?  Gosh, no, now that you mention it.  Kent just completed a wonderful Major League career: hit a bunch of home runs batting next to Barry Bonds, spoke his mind with regularity, did some great things in the community, spatted with teammates, played in a World Series.  He touched quite a few bases.  And that is nowhere near the same as saying he’s a Hall of Famer.

One of the dangers of constantly lowering the bar on HOF election is the “Well, he got in” theory, and you’re already seeing it at work.  In Kent’s case, people are making the argument that his career was at least the equal of Jim Rice’s, and Rice was just voted in to Cooperstown.

And that’s the problem, of course: The voters’ last-gasp mistake on Rice is now the excuse to make a similar gaffe with Jeff Kent.  Kent (to be absolutely clear and repeat myself noisily) had a really good, but not epic, run.  I covered most of his years in San Francisco, and though he was a prickly sort who didn’t seem to derive much happiness from the trappings of the big-league life, his quality of effort and intensity were unquestionable.  He played through pain and injury without complaint, managed to make a fit with Bonds, had the offensive seasons of his career, and helped the Giants to some of their best seasons in the modern age.

Again: It’s just not nearly enough for a HOF vote — and certainly not as a first-ballot inductee, as Peter Gammons hallucinogenically suggested on ESPN today.  Gammons, a pro’s pro and one of the nicest men I’ve met in the business, simply couldn’t be more wrong this time.  There is nothing about Kent’s resume (beyond the all-time lead in homers by a second baseman) that suggests the kind of no-brainer welcome that awaited, say, Tony Gwynn.

Kent won the MVP once, it’s true, but he never finished in the top 5 in that voting in any other season.  He was a five-time All-Star, which is underwhelming by HOF standards.  He fielded adequately, ran the bases adequately (and sometimes with surprising effectiveness), batted .290 for his career.  In a few years, you’re not going to be able to remember much about any of the games you ever saw him play.

I believe in the revelatory capacity of numbers (although even there, Kent can be found wanting), but when it comes to my own Hall of Fame vote, I find myself demanding more.  I want my inductees not merely to have compiled great stats, but to have been the hands-down, no-argument best in the game, which is why, this year, only Rickey Henderson received my vote.  I flatly reject the more-the-merrier approach to the Hall.  I want it exclusive.  I want it to be so incredibly tough to crack that only the most brilliant players make it through, because those are the players I can remember without even trying.  It’s what makes a Hall.

Jeff Kent?  He did himself proud — played on a bunch of winners, helped many of those teams become winners, piled up some great years, made a stack of money so high that, as Pete Rose would say, a show-dog couldn’t jump over it.  It’s an awfully good life.  The Hall of Fame?  That is another life entirely.

Word out of Florida late Friday is that the Tampa Bay Bucs have fired coach Jon Gruden and GM Bruce Allen. This would mean that Gruden’s final game as Tampa’s coach was, let’s see here, carry the one … that 31-24 embarrassment against woeful Oakland that sent the Bucs into the off-season without so much as a playoff howdy-do.

It’s fascinating that the Raiders could be so consistently awful, yet figure into so many NFL headlines. The Gruden angle makes for great reading, what with his history with Al Davis and all — and it’s probably true that if the Bucs had defeated the Raiders (at home, on the final day of the season) and sneaked into the playoffs, Gruden’s firing wouldn’t have occurred.  As it is, the Glazer brothers are whacking the top two members of their front office after a 9-7 season, albeit one with four straight losses to finish.

Don’t worry about Gruden; he gets paid through 2011, and he can surely have another NFL job if he wants. But you’ve gotta love that symmetry: When Gruden, in his first year with Tampa Bay, coached the Bucs to a Super Bowl championship following the 2002 season, he did so by shredding the Raiders team that he’d left just the year before.  Six years and roughly 200 million Raiders losses later, it is Al Davis’s little band of scrappers that polishes off Gruden’s tenure in his hometown. The sword cuts both ways — and leaves blood pretty much everywhere you find it.

You can add Jim Rice to the list of marginal Hall of Fame players whose careers magically improved themselves in retirement.  Fifteen years after Rice’s HOF candidacy netted him less than 30 percent of the available vote, he was welcomed to the Hall on Monday after polling at 76.4 percent.  It takes a 75 percent approval rating to go in.

What happened?  Well, on a basic level, you already know what happened: Rice’s early low percentage gradually grew to the point of semi-respectability, then finally crested above 50 percent in 2006, and then gained momentum until he garnered enough votes to be enshrined.

And you also know the one unassailable fact in this docudrama: Rice didn’t play one additional game during that time.  He got no better.  He got older, but no better.  His numbers didn’t improve.  His career totals were not suddenly inflated.

It’s one of the questions I’ve been most often asked as a Hall voter ( and for the record, I voted for Rickey Henderson, and Henderson alone, on this most recent ballot): How does a guy go from solid-career-with-no-Hall-prospects to elated (or bemused) inductee … all while being retired?

I’ll give you the short answer and hang the details: The Hall voters are notoriously, proudly unpredictable in their individual takes.  In the absence of any firm criteria for selection, voters happily reserve the right to change their minds at any time, for any reason, even if that reason is grounded in unreasonableness.  Some explain themselves, some don’t.  At any rate, they’re not required to say a word about why they did what they did.

In the case of Rice, it could very well be that a few dozen saw how close Rice got last year, said to themselves, “What the heck — he’s right there,” and checked the line next to his name.  It’s ludicrous, of course, and it has nothing to do with Rice’s career — very good, but not HOF-worthy — but that’s the process.

As a candidate, you don’t come up for Hall consideration only once; you come up 15 different times, assuming you pull at least a 5 percent vote each year.  And the truth is, writers are as subject to whim, outside argument and plain useless sentiment as anybody else.  Give them 15 different potential sets of parameters, and all bets are off.

I’ve always found the votes fascinating for what they reveal.  This year’s results on Henderson — as well as the totals for Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. last year — make it clear that a small cadre of voters will never allow anyone to be inducted unanimously.  It has nothing to do with Hall-worthiness, or any of that rot.  It’s about tradition and the fact that no person elected through the normal voting process has ever been unanimous.

On the matter of Jim Rice, it is equally clear that a bunch of voters who were right about Rice for 14 years suddenly decided they were going the other way.  It’s their prerogative, of course.  My prerogative?  I’d raise the threshold for induction to 85 percent of the ballots cast.  That’s a crazy-high bar to set.  It would bar entry to all but the most definitive, no-argument Hall of Famers.

And that, quite naturally, would be the point.  Jim Rice back-doors his way in after 15 years, and no disrespect at all to the man or his career — but let’s be clear about what DIDN’T happen during those years.  He didn’t get any better.