The Daily Something

MOVING DAY

2009-09-18T09:02:00.001-05:00

So, great news (for me)--this blog is moving! I'm joining a couple Friends of the Blog, and a whole bunch of great sports bloggers I don't know yet, over at the Bloguin Network. Very excited about the move--they've designed a much prettier new site for me, and the network is growing really fast with all kinds of quality sports blogs (mostly sports, anyway, as far as I know). It's exciting stuff.

In related news, I've finally shelled out the ten bucks for my own domain name: thedailysomething.com.

So while you'll have to update your RSS feeds, bookmarks, etc., and that will be annoying, and I'm sorry, at least the new addy will be easy to remember!

Please join me over there, take a look around, leave a comment, etc. There's nothing new up there right now, but as of tomorrow (or at least by Monday--headed to Wisconsin and a Brewers game this weekend), the baseball-related ramblings will be popping up over there, just like they used to over here, just about every single day.

And this one will be dead. Still here, but dead. So remember: TheDailySomething.com. See you there!

Should Vada Pinson be in the Hall of Fame?

2009-09-18T09:00:00.002-05:00

Friend of the Blog Brad from Baseball In-Depth doesn't say it in so many words, but seems to think so. As (understandably, I suppose) do the folks at Reds Nation.

Brad does what he does often and very well, which is compile really interesting (if kind of arbitrary) sets of statistical benchmarks a player reached in his [career/season/series of seasons] and show you in whose select company the player put himself by putting up those numbers. It's good stuff. Here, Brad comes up with critera that puts Pinson up there with the likes of Bonds, A-Rod, Mays, and Aaron. And those lists are great fun, and the accomplishments are pretty impressive.

But here's another list Pinson will end up on, should he ever make it into the Hall:
Harry Hooper
Sam Rice
Richie Ashburn
Vada Pinson
Billy Southworth
Lou Brock
Max Carey
Tommy McCarthy
Ned Hanlon
Lloyd Waner

That is the complete list of current Hall of Famers (plus Pinson, placed where he would fall in the order) who had significant Major League careers as players, were primarily outfielders, and put up an OPS+ of 115 or less.

With the exception of Brock, every one of these guys was elected by the Veterans' Committee, in whose fickle (and brittle) hands Pinson's hopes now rest. Brock is frankly a pretty questionable selection himself, but he did have 3000 hits and hold the all-time stolen base record for quite a while, so we'll leave him out of it.

Hooper is a virtual unknown today, but it just so happens that he was inducted five years after the wonderful book The Glory of Their Times, in which he was prominently interviewed, was published. I'm willing to bet that that had more to do with his place in the Hall than his 2466 hits or .281 batting average.

Rice hit .322 and is currently the player who has come the closest to 3,000 hits without actually getting there (and will probably be so forever, since nowadays a player who needed fewer than 13 hits to get there would almost certainly be able to find somebody to put him on the field for a few final weeks). I'd still argue he was a very poor selection, as his gaudy batting average was almost entirely a product of the live ball era.

Ashburn is one of the greatest defensive center fielders ever to play the game, and led his league in OBP four times. When is a 110 OPS+ more than a 110 OPS+? When you're a leadoff hitter with a career .396 OBP and can cover ground like Mays or Speaker.

Southworth was inducted as a manager.

Carey is probably the best comp for Pinson currently in the Hall. Mostly a center fielder but probably not a great one, OK but not great hitter. Carey has going for him a vastly superior OBP and a huge string of years leading the league in stolen bases; Pinson probably had a better peak. It's hard to see what it is that caught the VetCom's eye with Carey.

McCarthy was a giant collective brain fart by the VetCom. All but one of his good years were in the old American Association, and even giving him credit for those, he shows up as an average hitter with a way-too-short career.

Hanlon is another manager.

Waner is famously one of the worst selections the VetCom has ever made -- it almost seems like some of them just confused Lloyd with his very-good-at-baseball brother.

So you can see where I come out on this. Pinson did have a very nice start to his career; from ages 20-24, he played virtually every game his team did and posted a 128 OPS+. But that's all that is, a nice start--once it became clear that that was his peak (just one that hit much earlier than normal), that didn't look very impressive at all. And from age 25 through the end of his career, he was basically an average hitter.

I understand that OPS+ isn't everything. Not even close. But the thing is, that fact actually hurts Pinson more than it helps him, since a hitter's most important job by far is to get on base, and Pinson's OPS came mostly from his power. OPS+ certainly wasn't what the voting writers were looking at when they rejected him in the 1980s, but they were nonetheless able to gather that he simply wasn't that good.

And there's something to be said for star power, flash, leading the league in various categories, and so on...but I just don't think that two top-ten MVP finishes, one gold glove, two all-star appearances, and a couple years leading the league in hits, doubles or triples comes anywhere close to getting Pinson there. The likes of Brady Anderson and Steve Finley (did anyone else know those two were brothers-in-law until just now?!) have most of those things.

Another number: 55.7. That represents Pinson's Adjusted Wins Above Replacement Player according to Baseball Prospectus, another thing I'm quite sure the voters in the '80s weren't looking at. If Jim Rice (55.1) is your idea of a qualified Hall of Famer, maybe Pinson is your guy. It's also worth noting that he finishes ahead of Brock (54.4) Lloyd Waner (38.6!!), and Sam Rice (50.6), and comes within spitting distance of Hooper (57.7) and Carey (59.1). He beats a few more atrocious selections like Chick Hafey (31.1!!!) and Chuck Klein (44.4), and comes fairly close to Billy Williams (59.3).

But he's well behind guys generally considered (or considered by me, at least) to be deserving-but-low-end Hall of Famers, like Ashburn (76.2), Puckett (66.5), Stargell (82.2), and Slaughter (72.1). He's also pretty indistinguishable from non-Hallers Fred Lynn (56.2), Darryl Strawberry (60.0), and Dave Parker (58.5), and he's way behind Dwight Evans (70.2).

Again, not by any means a decisive factor on its own, but I think that if you take everything together, the inescapable conclusion is that Pinson is deserving only if you're in favor of a really big Hall--one that has room for not only both Rices and Carey and Hooper and Brock, but also Lynn and Strawberry and Parker and Evans and probably Dale Murphy and Harold Baines and a couple dozen other guys.

I think Pinson has a good chance to get in. It's the Veterans' Committee, and he's a Red, and Joe Morgan's on the Veterans' Committee. And if he does get in, he'll be very far from the worst selection they've ever made. But in this day and age it would be tough for them to top the likes of Hafey and McCarthy in terrible selection terms. And I think that at the end of the day, Pinson just wasn't even that good, let alone great, and there's really no reason to put him in the Hall.

The Best One-Link Links Post Ever

2009-09-17T09:00:00.002-05:00

I don't have time today, but luckily, junior from the brilliant but now long-departed FJM blog put up one of the greatest things I've ever read in my whole sadly long history of reading stuff on the internet:

Jesus Is The Derek Jeter Of Christianity

In which the author basically goes all FJM on the ass of Allen Barra, normally a pretty solid dude as baseball writers go, who (about two weeks ago now on WSJ.com) made a truly pitiful attempt to make a case for Derek Jeter to win the MVP award. I mean, no serious case can be made, for Jeter or for anyone other than Mauer, but Barra did a noteworthily execrable job of trying to make one. And junior points out exactly how and why that is like no one else (except those other FJM guys) can.

Junior is hilarious, and it's great when he gets really great material (that is, really awful writing) to work with. If you haven't happened to read this yet, go do it. And if you saw it but didn't make it all the way to the last paragraph, you missed the best part...

The Somethingiest Something of the Aughts: The Hitters

2009-09-16T09:00:00.003-05:00

Funny thing about writing a daily blog with no remuneration and no one to hold you accountable: sometimes life gets in the way and you don't really feel like writing anything. Sorry about my absence on Tuesday, but real-life Monday sucked like you wouldn't believe. Things now are...not okay, but they're not getting any worse, so here's your new thing.

As he often does, Rob Neyer made me think of something today. He pointed out (via some link to somebody else) that there's something of a race for the batting champion of the decade, with Ichiro! and Pujols running pretty much neck-and-neck. Which left me wondering who led in all the various other categories, and by how much. And as long as I was wondering, I thought I might as well write about it. Verducci, the "somebody else" in Neyer's post, did much the same thing, but I don't care about that, and I'm going to look at some different categories and in a different way. So away we go, stats through Monday night:

Home Runs: Alex Rodriguez, 430
No surprise here. A-Rod led his league in homers five times this decade, and this is the first year he's likely to finish out of the top eight (and he's only four out of the top ten, with at least two of the dudes in front of him out for the rest of the season). What's a little surprising is by how much A-Rod leads: he's up by 62 over Jim Thome's 368, meaning he's hit about 17% more homers than anybody else this decade. The 1990s' leader was Mark McGwire, with 405. The 1980s? Mike Schmidt, with 313. Eight players have hit more than 313 homers from 2000 through 2009, and I suppose Andruw Jones or Lance Berkman could make it nine or ten with a couple hot weeks.

Runs Batted In: Rodriguez, 1227
That's right, the unclutchiest choker ever leads the decade in the lazy man's ultimate clutchy stat, by a comfy 125 over Pujols (approximately one season's worth, which is appropriate since Pujols didn't start playing until 2001). Your 1990s leader was Albert Belle (really?) with 1099, and 1980s was Eddie Murray with 996. Murray's total would place 10th in the 2000s, right between Big Papi and Bobby Abreu.

Runs Scored: Rodriguez, 1181
That A-Rod guy? He's a good player. And one who stayed pretty healthy for an entire numerological decade, which has at least as much to do with it. This is a closer contest than the ones above, with Johnny Damon close behind at 1110. Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu mean that four of the top five have spent at least some of the decade as Yankees. 1990s: Barry Bonds, 1091. 1980s: Rickey Henderson, 1122. Hey, score one for the eighties, almost!

On-Base Percentage (min. 3000 PA): Barry Bonds, .517
What what what? Bonds OBP'ed over .500 for the whole decade? Somehow that shocks me. But I guess OBPing .559 in 2001-2004, four of his five full years in the decade, will do that. Todd Helton is a distant second with a Coors-aided .439, with only three other players within 100 points of Bonds. Frank Thomas led the nineties at .440 (Bonds just behind at a merely fantastic .434); 1980s, Wade Boggs at an equal but more dominant .440.

Slugging Percentage: Bonds, .724
Naturally, and well ahead of Pujols at .630 (though Pujols will end up with nearly 2000 more plate appearances in the decade). 1990s: McGwire, .615 (Bonds right behind again at .602); in the 1980s, Schmidt at .540. In the aughts, you'd have to go to #19 before you drop below .540; Schmidt slots between Teixeira at .542 and Bagwell at .534.

OPS+: Bonds, 221
Well, duh. Pujols second at 173, then Manny at 160. Theoretically, this should be pretty constant across the decades, and it almost works that way, but doesn't. Bonds paces the nineties again at 179, Schmidt the 80's at 153.

Stolen Bases: Juan Pierre, 455
That surprised me a little, but Pierre has played since 2000 and was a regular from 2001 until late 2008, while Carl Crawford (#2 but way behind at 359) didn't play full time until 2003 and missed about a third of 2008. 1990s: Otis Nixon, 478; 1980s: Rickey Henderson, 838. Rickey led that decade by a whopping 255 (over Tim Raines) and missed leading the 1990s by 15, coming in second place. He was #105 in the 2000s.

Hit By Pitch: Jason Kendall, 155.
Up by 17 on Jason Giambi. I never thought of A-Rod or Jeter as guys who get plunked a lot, but they're both in the top ten; lots of plate appearances -> lots of stray inside fastballs, I guess. Chase Utley has been hit 104 times despite not becoming a regular until 2005. Craig Biggio was hit 147 times in the 90s (and was fourth in the 2000s at 132). Don Baylor crushed everyone else in the eighties with 160, 52 more than Chet Lemon and more than three times as many as #8 Lloyd Moseby.

Sacrifice Flies: Mike Lowell, 76.
Now that's a surprise. One leadoff triple by Denard Span could mean that Lowell gets tied by the even more surprising Orlando Cabrera, now at 75, and don't count out the less surprising Carlos Lee (74). After that, you hit Abreu at 66, and I don't think he's getting ten sac flies in three weeks. Frank Thomas had 82 in the nineties, Andre Dawson 74 in the eighties.

Double Play Groundouts: Miguel Tejada, 222.
Again, the identity of the leader is surprising, but even more surprising is the margin; Miggy is crushing Paul Konerko and his 193. Belle led the 1990s at 172, and Jim Rice predictably dominated the 1980s with 224. Rice's 224 trumps Tejada's 222 by more than it looks like, considering that (a) Julio Franco was second in the eighties at 166, which would've been seventh in the aughts, and (b) Tejada took over a thousand more plate appearances than Rice did to arrive at his total.

Plate Appearances: Bobby Abreu, 6864
This one could very easily change hands before the end of the decade, as Derek Jeter is only six behind Abreu and is batting leadoff for the best offense in the majors. Next is Tejada, a hundred behind Jeter. Biggio had 6794 in the nineties and Dale Murphy had 6540 in the eighties.

Hits: Ichiro!, 2005
He's 85 ahead of Jeter or anyone else for the decade, which is especially impressive when you consider that he was in Japan for the year 2000. Going down the rest of the list, Pujols is the next one you'll see that did not play at least a little big-league ball in both 2000 and 2009 (he's ninth at 1697), and to find the next such player, you'd have to go all the way down to #33 and Jeff Kent, who retired after last season and may end up 600 hits behind Ichiro for the decade.

Just a Day: April 15, 1968

2009-09-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I've finally broken the twin streaks of posting these on the 10th of the month and writing about the 10th of a month. This time around, the randomizer gave us Tax Day in the Year of the Pitcher, April 15, 1968.

1968 was a fascinating year, but April 15 was a Monday, which, like now, was probably the slowest baseball day of the week. Only six games were played, and five of them were kind of unspectacular. Let's get to that one huge, glaring exception right away, huh?

The Astros beat the Mets 1-0 in 24 innings. About 35% of the innings played in all of MLB on this day are played between the two relatively recent expansion squads. 23 year old Tom Seaver starts and goes 10 for the Metropolitans, permitting only two hits and no walks, and at one point retiring 25 batters in a row, but I guess he didn't pitch well enough to win, as Don Wilson gives up five hits and three walks but holds the Mets scoreless through nine.

The Mets threaten in a few innings, but can't get anything through; the Astros get a man on third with one out in the second (on a double and a Seaver wild pitch), but then see him erased on a fielder's choice groundout and don't get another baserunner until the 10th. There's a lot of back and forth in extras, but nobody can get a run across until the 24th. In the bottom of that inning, with Les Rohr pitching, Norm Miller singles. Rohr then balks with Jimmy Wynn batting, so Wynn is then intentionally walked. After a weak Rusty Staub groundout advances both runners, pinch hitter John Bateman is also intentionally walked, bringing up Bob Aspromonte, who blew the Astros' previous best chance in the 2nd. Here, he hits a grounder to short. Utilityman Al Weis boots it, and the longest shutout win in history is over. Some contemporary accounts reprinted here.
Just a couple more things about that amazing game--Tommie Agee and Ron Swaboda both go 0-f0r-10. Both teams finish an identical 11-for-79, a .139 batting average. Pitchers issue a total of twelve walks, six of them intentional. One of the only hitters to have what you might call a good day is Hector Torres, a career .218/.260/.281 hitter, who had three singles in eight at-bats. There are 35 strikeouts, and Seaver records only three of them.
The Twins beat the Orioles 6-3. Carew and Oliva collect two hits apiece, and Bob Allison has two doubles and a triple. Dick Boswell goes the distance to get the win, permitting four hits and six walks while striking out seven (too bad they don't have pitch counts available). The Twins go to 5-0 on the year, but go 74-83 the rest of the way and finish 24 games behind Detroit. One telling sign of the times: Bob Allison, a fading star in his last full year at just 33, had a productive season batting 5th in a pretty powerful lineup in front of three pretty great hitters (though they were rarely all healthy at the same time this season), cracks out 22 home runs...and ends up with 52 RBI.
Bob Gibson has arguably the "worst" game of his incredible season, permitting three earned on five hits and three walks (striking out five) in seven innings of work. The Cards come back to win it in 10 innings, 4-3, Joe Hoerner facing one batter to earn credit for the "win." Gibson gives up 3 or more earned seven times in 1968, but after this, his second start of the season, doesn't go less than 8 innings in any other start all season (he'd also gone 7 in his first start on April 10).
The A's beat the Yankees, 6-3. I mention this only because a 22 year old named Reggie Jackson, who hits his second home run of the season, was batting second in the A's order. He batted second for the first 32 games, 8th (!) for a while, then 5th or 6th for a while, then moved back to second for most of the rest of the season, starting a total of 69 games there. Almost nobody these days (or then, I would think) would bat a guy who strikes out as often as Reggie in the #2 slot, but it's a pretty good spot to put him. Of course, the following year, 1969, is the one in which Reggie had 37 homers at the break, and 47 for the year. He started that year batting second too, but was very quickly moved to the third slot, and spent the next 18 years or so batting third or fourth somewhere.
Billy Brewer is born. Lefty reliever in the mid to late nineties, and one of the great baseball names of all time.

Jeter Is Just Alright with Me

2009-09-11T09:00:00.004-05:00

So Derek Jeter has been in the news quite a bit lately. He is, after all, the most recent proud owner of a Viagra Milestone Moment. Yesterday, Craig was excoriated by legions of barely literate Yankee fans* in the comments to the NBC blog for suggesting that maybe seven separate stories by one newspaper surrounding the tying (not even setting, tying) of a single franchise record by a single player was overkill.

* I'm not making a generalization about Yankee fans at all, just talking about those particular Yankee fans, and I'm not exaggerating. Go read those comments and discover for yourself.

Also yesterday, Jason at IIATMS put up what I think is a really nice piece on what Jeter means to him as a fan. And I think that's great. Jason expresses exactly what one should feel about a great player that's played for your own team for 14 years.

I've been a pretty harsh Jeter-basher over the years (only mentioned him once on this blog, but it wasn't friendly), but none of that has anything to do with how Yankee fans feel about him. And really, none of it has anything to do with Jeter himself; while I feel he's showboated and behaved overtly selfishly more than the greatest leader in baseball history should, guys who play hard are fun, and he seems like a pretty solid character overall.

Rather, my problem has been with how the national media has taken all that love and all that character and rolled it together into this larger-than-life, iconic hero for the whole baseball nation. It obscures his weaknesses--which have been real and numerous--and takes a lot of attention away from other players who (if only momentarily) have been better. Kirby Puckett and Tony Gwynn were heroes to their own fans, and that's a wonderful thing. And they were great players. But they weren't the kind of players who should have dominated all coverage of the sport. I believe that essentially, Jeter is basically what would've happened if Puckett or Gwynn or Cal Ripken, Jr. had played his entire career with the Yankees instead. And that can get awfully annoying to the rest of us.

But let me change gears completely: I think it's time for us -- and by "us" I mean sabermetric types who are fans of teams other than the Yankees -- to back the hell off and give Jeter his due. No, to this point, he arguably hasn't been markedly greater than Barry Larkin or Alan Trammell, both of whom will have a hard time getting into the Hall, while Jeter will waltz in on the first ballot if he retires tomorrow. But those guys should be in the Hall, and the unfortunate fact that they haven't gotten the attention they deserve isn't a great reason to deprive Jeter of the credit he has earned.

Furthermore, you can't really look at Jeter and compare him to those other guys and say "and he hasn't even had his decline phase yet!" anymore. Yes, the decline phase is coming eventually, but Jeter is 35 years old. At 35, Trammell was no longer a full-time player, and immediately became a very bad half-time player for his final three seasons starting with age 36. Larkin had already declined significantly and was in his last year as a useful player. Jeter, meanwhile, is having one of the best seasons of his career.

And then there's that defense. I remain thoroughly convinced that Jeter has never been even an average shortstop, and I think Bill James was probably more or less right when he wrote that he was one of the worst regular shortstops we've ever seen who was allowed to stay at the position for more than a year or so. Moreover, it still kind of pisses me off that they moved A-Rod to third for him, when A-Rod was obviously the superior shortstop. But. UZR and plus/minus aren't available before 2002, and I don't trust any other defensive stats. Even the new measures are subject to wild fluctuations from year to year that can't just be explained away by players having good years or bad years. But by UZR, Jeter has had two awful years, one bad year, and four more or less average years since 2002, and now this year he's been above zero, and actually very good (+5.1). I'm not prepared to believe that a guy who can look that good at age 35, and average so many other times, is as awful as we once thought.

Another common stathead criticism of Jeter is that (in a given year) he's not even the best player on his own team, and I guess I get that when you're trying to combat all the Jeter love, but it also strikes me as a little silly--the fact that Bernie Williams is having a great year or A-Rod is A-Rod shouldn't take away from Jeter's greatness any more than Nick Punto and Delmon Young being bad at baseball should take away from Mauer's MVP candidacy. And at any rate, now -- at an age when most middle infielders, even the best of them, are in serious decline or retired -- Jeter unquestionably is the best player on his team, and that team is the best team in the game right now. So that doesn't work anymore either.

Finally, there's his consistency. Jeter has been one of the two or three best shortstops in the American League every single year for at least the last twelve and possibly more, and that's really something when you're playing at the same time as A-Rod and Nomah and Miggy. That's more than one can say for Trammell or Larkin, both of whom fluctuated quite a bit over their careers (and Larkin was always hurt). Jeter could justifiably have won two MVPs, and would be in line for a third deserving MVP this season if not for Mauer.

No, Jeter is not one of the three or four best Yankees of all time. It's profoundly silly to compare him favorably to Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig or DiMaggio. But he's a great, great player, certainly among the greatest of our current time, and it's time to stop begrudging Yankee fans their right to enjoy that. And maybe to start enjoying it just a little bit ourselves? I can't believe I just said that.

Totally cool to keep ripping on ESPN and Tim McCarver, though. I mean, everybody has a breaking point.

Three Comparisons

2009-09-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

One: Half-Season MVP Division

Through their first 42 games with their new, National League teams:
Manny Ramirez, 2008: .395/.478/.743 (1.222 OPS), 29 R, 14 HR, 43 RBI
Matt Holliday, 2009: .379/.437/.702 (1.139 OPS), 33 R, 12 HR, 41 RBI
(thanks to the StL P-D for that one.)

Two: I Told You So Division

Orlando Cabrera, since August 1: .256/.283/.353 (.636 OPS), -6.2 UZR (yes, -6.2 runs in 34 games. I mean, what?)
Nick Punto, season: .220/.320/.275 (.595 OPS), +1.4 UZR

Three: Obviously, They're Just Being Cheap Again Division

Since June 3:
Nate McLouth: .264/.353/.439 (.792 OPS), -5.2 UZR
Andrew McCutchen: .278/.355/.470 (.826 OPS), +2.4 UZR

Better Luck Next Year: Chicago Cubs

2009-09-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Hey, happy 09/09/09 (at 9 a.m.)!

So, theirs is the one failure that has surprised me most in 2009. At 70-67, the Cubs haven't been awful, but I (and almost everyone else) thought they'd run away with the NL Central, and instead they've let the Cardinals run away with it. The Cubbies are now about 11 games behind in the division and eight games (and five teams) out of the Wildcard, with just 28 to play. So the streak without a championship will certainly run to 101 seasons; any chance it ends there?

2010 Cubs now under contract, with 2009 WAR
C: Geovany Soto (1.1)
1B: Derrek Lee (4.0)
2B: Mike Fontenot (0.2)
3B: Aramis Ramirez (1.7)
SS: Ryan Theriot (2.3)
LF: Alfonso Soriano (-0.7)
CF: Kosuke Fukudome (2.5)
RF: Milton Bradley (1.7)

Pitchers, with 2009 FIPs:
Ryan Dempster (4.02)
Ted Lilly (3.88)
Randy Wells (3.85)
Carlos Zambrano (3.90)
Sean Marshall (4.35)
Bullpen: Carlos Marmol (4.01), Aaron Heilman (4.43), Angel Guzman (4.34)

It would be kind of gratifying to blame this season on GM Jim Hendry's predictably terrible offseason moves -- chief among them his baffling decision to pick up mediocre "closer" Kevin Gregg and his severe overpayment of problem child Milton Bradley -- but take a look at this. This is the difference between the following players' 2008 and 2009 WARs:
Soriano: 3.9
Soto: 3.5
Fontenot: 2.9
Ramirez: 2.3
TOTAL: 12.6

Add those 13 wins to the Cubs' total right now and they're 83-54, about two games ahead of the Cards (and that's assuming, probably falsely, that none of those extra wins come against the Cards).

Now, that oversimplifies things. Rookie Jake Fox came in and relieved some of the pressure from losing Ramirez to injury with a solid bat (though WAR says he's given most of it back on defense), and Lee has been much better than expected. And it's not like Gregg hasn't cost them a win or so, and Marmol's complete loss of the strike zone, and Dempster and Harden not being quite as good as they would've hoped...but really, make whatever little adjustments you want, and still, if you give those four guys listed above their 2008 numbers back (and none of them were outlandish numbers, really), you've got a real race for the division.

So here's where I normally do the three things they need to MAKE happen and the three things they need to HAVE happen...but I don't think that works here, for a few reasons:

First, there aren't a lot of moves to be made for this team. They might bring Harden back and kick Marshall back out of the rotation, or they might sign another starter, and they could certainly stand to improve that bullpen, but outside the pen, everyone on the list above has been a quality full-time major league starter at his listed position sometime in the last two seasons. That's not to say that you can't improve one of those positions, but it's just hard to see how it would go down. Most of these guys are well paid, few would be terribly attractive targets to teams looking to dump talent, and the Cubs' prospect list is pretty thin at the top. I'm sure Hendry wants to do something anyway, but I'm not convinced that anything he might do is likely to actually help this squad.

Second, and maybe more importantly, I'm not sure they'll be permitted to make any moves at this point. Assuming the sale of the team is even finalized by the time for moves to be made, who knows how much the owners will want to spend? They've already got more than $10 million each (and in some cases, much more) committed to Lee, Bradley, Dempster, Fukudome, Soriano, Ramirez and Zambrano for 2010. Now, the Cubs and Wrigley Field may look to you and me like bottomless bowls of money (in the sense of the bottomless cup of coffee you might get at a diner), but we also know that millionaires and billionaires get to be millionaires and billionaires by not looking at the world that way. There's definitely a limit to what the Cubs will (and in a business sense should) spend, and I think there's a good chance they're already pretty close to that limit for 2010. Also, a lot of these guys' contracts are expiring in 2010 or '11, and while that may mean that 2010 is when you really go for it, it also means that it might be a bad time to sign a big free agent to a long-term contract; it's hard to believe with a team like the Cubs, but you might be looking at a rebuilding situation in a year or two.

Of course there are still potential trades out there. Josh proposes that the Cubs trade Soriano and Bradley for Vernon Wells, which would trade two bad contracts for one and free up some payroll in the short term. Even if the Jays would do that, though (and I can't think of a reason they would), if I'm the Cubs, I'm saying no to that one. In all likelihood, the Jays are getting the two best players in a three-player deal, and Bradley's contract isn't that bad (he's still a valuable player despite all the bad press, and has a chance to be a very valuable one again in 2010).

So I'd pretty much stand pat and hope for the best. With four starters with FIPs right around 4.00, they've got one of the best rotations in baseball (Randy Wells' minor league record suggests he's not really that guy, but even if not, Sean Marshall isn't that much of a dropoff). Bring Harden back (4.30 FIP in 2008, but 3.58 career), and it gets even better. I don't see much else for them to do right now than to count on some combination of bouncebacks by A-Ram, Soriano, Soto and Fontenot, improvements by Fukudome and Bradley, or another big step forward by Jake Fox to provide offense behind that pitching staff. And improve the bullpen, naturally, but scoring runs is the big thing.

One idea, though: trade Milton Bradley to some AL team for prospects. He's okay in the field, but he arguably has more value to a team that can DH him to keep his bat in the lineup. Then, move Fukudome back to RF and pick up a good one-year center fielder...someone like free-agent-to-be Mike Cameron. Fukudome is a plus defender in the corners and an average defender in center, while Bradley is merely an average defender in the corner. Cameron will be 37, but has long been one of the best outfield defenders in teh game and can still cover plenty of ground out there. He's still got a pretty solid bat, and has the kind of gap power that Wrigley could turn into homer power (small sample, but he has a career .577 SLG there). It would improve their defense without sacrificing much, or possibly any, offense (unless Bradley bounces back into 2008 form).

I'd be reluctant to do that, because the bad press and low power output have made Bradley pretty undesirable right now. They'd get very little for him, and may end up having to pay a large portion of his salary (which, depending on the team's budget, might put even Cameron out of their range). It's a lot of work and a lot of risk for a pretty marginal improvement.

The Cardinals are almost guaranteed to come back to earth in 2010, barring a big surprise move or two in the offseason (more on that at some point, I'm sure); there's no reason to think A-Ram will get hurt again; and Soriano and Soto almost couldn't help but get better. So while the bad news is that I don't see a lot of ways for them to get better for 2010, the good news is that I think the team as currently constituted (plus some cheap bullpen help and maybe Harden) has a very good chance to compete.

Unexcused absence ends tomorrow

2009-09-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

I'd like to say I'm working on something big for tomorrow, but while I'm hoping to have something big for tomorrow, the truth is I haven't started it yet, having spent the last three days in (or driving to and from) Minnesota. Back to it on Wednesday morning....

Happy Birthday...

2009-09-04T09:00:00.006-05:00

Mike Piazza!

Mike, who sure seems like he should have a more Italian middle name than "Joseph," is 41 today.

I don't really have anything new to tell you about a guy like Piazza, but lookit (also just seeing how/if this new BBREF feature works):

Report Created on Baseball-Reference.com

[There we go! Took a few tries.]
So...yeah. A lot of people are saying Mauer's having the best year by a catcher ever, and maybe he is when you factor in defense and such, but it's pretty hard to compete with that.

Piazza outhit Larry Walker by OPS+, had only four points less of batting average and six fewer RBI...and Larry Walker was a RF who played in the best hitters' environment in history, Piazza a catcher (technically) in a pitcher's park (which doesn't factor into the OPS+, of course, but the HR and RBI). The Dodgers even finished ahead of the Rockies in the standings. Where does this rank among the worst MVP snubs of all time? Would Mauer 2009 be worse?

The All-Metrodome Team Revisited

2009-09-03T09:00:00.005-05:00

I meant to do this weeks ago, but of course, just as they said they would, the Twins released the combined fans-and-experts' All-Metrodome Team selections about a month ago.

In four posts this spring, I named my own All-Metrodome Team. So how'd I do?

Here's the "real" All-Metrodome Team, with asterisks next to selections that were also mine:

C Joe Mauer*
1B Kent Hrbek* AND Justin Morneau*^
2B Chuck Knoblauch*
3B Gary Gaetti*
SS Greg Gagne*
OF Tom Brunansky
OF Dan Gladden
OF Torii Hunter*
OF Kirby Puckett*
DH Paul Molitor

SP Bert Blyleven
SP Johan Santana*
SP Frank Viola*
SP Brad Radke*

RP Joe Nathan*
RP Rick Aguilera*

MGR Tom Kelly*

^ I cheated and put Morneau at DH; they cheated and put Morneau as a second 1B.

Not bad, right? 18 names, and the super-awesome panel of Twins experts and I agree on 14 of them (78%).

But: I only picked 15 names. Because the ballot only allowed for 15 names, so I went ahead and stayed within the rules (except Morneau, and only because the DH picks were ridiculous). Our panel did not; they added for PR reasons, I have to assume, Morneau, Blyleven, and Gladden, because all three currently have roles with the team and they didn't want to offend them or the viewers/listeners (given that, though, it's a shock that they didn't pick both Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire).

So here's where they were dumb:

1. Leaving Shane Mack off. It's not any kind of surprise--I acknowledged when I made my pick that most people wouldn't agree with me--but just take a look at it, and he's a no-brainer. He played just five seasons with the Twins, but was an integral part of the 1991 World Series team, and played phenomenal defense at all three outfield positions while putting up a 130 OPS+. I knew they'd leave him off, but to name four outfielders, out of twelve on the ballot, and still leave him off? Terrible.

2. Dan Gladden. What? I mean, I know he's a radio broadcaster now (a terrible one, by the way), I know he's a World Series hero and one of the few to play in both Series, and I know...well, that's all I know. Gladden played five seasons with the Twins (hey, the same number as Mack, and with a whopping 300 more plate appearances!) and posted a 90 OPS+. Great outfield defense, but no better than Mack's--his defense simply made him about an average player, while Mack's made him one of the better players in the league. There's no contest. Not only that, but Jacque Jones, Michael Cuddyer and Matt Lawton were all better choices than Gladden as well.

3. Tom Brunansky. He was fine--and my first runner-up, so I guess if I'm gonna pick four he's in--but not even close to Mack.

4. Paul Molitor. I get it--Hall of Famer, St. Paul native, was a coach for a while, and the other choices were David Ortiz, Chili Davis, Roy Smalley and Dave Winfield. But he played only three seasons with the Twins, and only in the first was he actually a competent DH. If you're going to cheat and throw Morneau in anyway, why not do what I did and throw him in at DH?

5. Bert Blyleven. Obviously one of the Twins' two greatest pitchers of all time. His Metrodome-era career, though? Three and a half seasons with approximately a 100 ERA+ and the (at the time) two highest HR-allowed seasons in history. If he's not in your employ, there's no need to expand the team to add him at all.

Honestly, though? It's a lot better than I thought they would do. Hrbek's on the team, Gaetti over ~~Morneau~~ Koskie [EDIT: heh, all you Canadians look the same to me] [EDIT AGAIN: I actually picked Koskie over Gaetti, but noted that it was basically a toss-up, so whatever], and they got all three of the correct pitchers along with Blyleven. I was pleasantly surprised.

Should Hitters be Platooned More Often?

2009-09-02T09:00:00.001-05:00

Ryan Howard is a good hitter. A very, very good hitter. He has a .921 2009 OPS and a .961 career OPS (142 OPS+). Howard's splits look like this:

vs. RHP, career: .307/.409/.561 (1.071)
vs. LHP, career: .224/.308/.446 (.754)

Against righties, Howard is every bit the monster he's reputed to be. Against lefties, he's a well below-average first baseman. But wait, there's more:

vs. LHP, 2008-09: .212/.290/.406 (.696)
vs. LHP, 2009: .198/.284/.348 (.632)

Every club's AAA squad has a right-handed hitter who could probably play a passable first base and put up a .700 OPS against left-handed pitching.

Of course, you can't platoon Howard. You should, but you can't. His overall numbers and his resultant reputation are just too good. He's not going to lead the NL in homers and RBIs every year by platooning. Also, in his (almost deserved) MVP year of 2006, he did put up a .923 OPS against lefties (which is pretty much the whole difference between MVP-quality Howard and the last couple years' pretty-decent-first-baseman Howard).

But consider another case. Tonight, the Twins were facing White Sox southpaw John Danks. They started Jason Kubel at DH and in his customary #5 slot in the order, and they started Delmon Young in left field and in the #8 slot. Forget for a moment that it's crazy to play either of these guys in the field, and just consider this (vs.LHP/vs.RHP):

Kubel's splits, career: .667/.844, 2009: .622/1.010
Young's splits, career: .805/.697, 2009: .861/.578.

Kubel, looking at his total line, has always been a good hitter, and has been one of the 15 or so best hitters in the league in 2009, with a 140 OPS+ and .387 wOBA. Young, on the other hand, has been as disastrous as ever, with a 78 OPS+ and .288 wOBA. Yet: Kubel is just as helpless against lefties now as he's always been, or even more so--the only difference is that he's crushing righties rather than just holding his own against them. No matter how lovely his overall numbers are (and add a .300 average, 22 homers and 77 RBI to that OPS), Kubel has no business ever serving as the designated hitter against a left-handed pitcher. Ever. Delmon Young is Kubel's perfect platoon partner, and DH vs. LHP may be the only role for which Young is actually suited.

There's another great reason to platoon, too. Say you're playing a team with a southpaw starter but a shortage of lefties in the 'pen, or a right-handed closer that you know they're going to use in the ninth. How awesome is it to have the luxury of using Ryan Howard or Jason Kubel (or your righty thumper if the situation is reversed) at exactly the right time, rather than just hoping his turn in the order comes up when you need it to?

So here's my idea, for some future really, really ballsy manager and/or GM:

We need to stop thinking of "hitting" as a skill. Rather, there's hitting vs. LHP and there's hitting vs. RHP, and they're totally separate skills, and your ability to do one doesn't make it a whole lot more or less likely that you can do the other.

So Ryan Howard has been awesome, and has put up some awesome stats, but he hasn't somehow earned the right to keep sucking against LHP by virtue of being awesome against RHP, any more than Tim Lincecum has earned the right to start in center field by virtue of being an awesome pitcher.

This kind of thinking would lead to a lot more platoons in more extreme situations (and there are a lot of them), and teams would properly value right-handed hitters whose numbers look bad because they hit against RHP 70% of the time, but who are highly valuable as the less-used half of a lefty/righty platoon. But even more commonly, it would change the way managers set batting orders and rest players. Almost every player (as we all know, but which I don't think people pay enough attention to) has a significant split in favor of opposite-handed pitchers. For instance, Mauer is a Hall of Fame .951 career vs. LHP and a merely pretty-good-for-a-catcher .762 vs. LHP, and while he deserves to start most games against both, he's probably not a #3 hitter against lefties, and he should never get a day of rest when a righty is on the mound unless the team has faced six righties in a row. Even Roberto Alomar, a switch-hitter and future Hall of Famer, probably batted high in the order far too often against LHP, against whom he had an OBP 50 points lower than he had against RHP (.337/.386).

It's not a big deal on a case-by-case basis (except in extreme cases like Howard and Kubel), but a manager who really looked at these things, roster spot by roster spot, and utilized significant platoon advantages whenever possible -- in setting the lineup and order and actually using platoons where appropriate, not merely pinch-hitting at the end of the game -- might pick up an extra win or two over the course of the season. And DHing Kubel against lefties just has to stop.

Fun with RBI Opportunities

2009-09-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of the RBI Opportunities Report over at Baseball Prospectus. Sort by OBI% (and enter a minimum number of PA), and it shows you the percentage of runners on base during each hitter's PA that that hitter has driven in. If you want to impress on somebody how completely context-dependent players' RBI totals are, it's really nice to be able to head over there and point out how David DeJesus is doing a considerably better job driving in the runners that have gotten on base for him than Mark Teixeira is, or that Yunel Escobar comes out ahead of Ryan Howard.

But that's not totally fair to the sluggers, is it? I mean, really, a player has one RBI opportunity in each plate appearance that's not accounted for here, because he could always drive himself in, and of course Tex does a much better job of that than DeJesus does. So to get the true percentage of potential RsBI converted, counting the hitter himself as one such potential RBI, we'd have to do this (where "ROB" is the total number of runners on base for the hitter's times at bat, according to the BP report linked above):

RBI / (PA + ROB)

Right? I'm sure this isn't by any means a new idea, but I haven't seen it. I don't have the kind of database I'd need to really do this for everybody (I'm pretty sure I could do something like that, but haven't got around to figuring it out yet), so let's take a look at just a few.

First, the leaders in RBI total in each league (all stats through Sunday):
AL

Name	PA	ROB	RBI	RBI%
Teixeira	579	410	101	.1021
Morneau	541	382	96	.1040
Morales	498	329	94	.1137
Bay	524	356	92	.1045
Pena	539	372	92	.1010
Longoria	536	371	90	.0992
Markakis	585	384	89	.0918
Martinez	557	293	86	.1018
Abreu	539	357	86	.0960
Hill	591	369	85	.0802

Name	PA	ROB	RBI	RBI%
Fielder	575	399	119	.1222
Howard	562	412	111	.1137
Pujols	566	373	110	.1170
Braun	565	397	95	.0988
Dunn	549	400	91	.0959
Reynolds	535	350	90	.1017
Zimmerman	569	404	90	.0925
D.Lee	501	362	87	.1008
Ethier	561	399	87	.0906
H.Ramirez	530	338	85	.0979
Kemp	539	366	85	.0939

First of all, note that this is a terrible way to measure the value of anything. It gives a huge advantage to guys who get the most opportunities with runners on base (much less of an advantage than just counting up RBI totals gives them, but still) and punishes guys who get lots of PA without runners on, since your odds of hitting a solo HR are a lot worse than your odds of getting a runner home from third. But anyway, it was just for fun. And as I said, the Baseball Prospectus OBI% method has the opposite problem, so I thought I'd give the HR hitters a bit of a bump.

So. Teixeira is not the best in the American League at driving in runs on a per-opportunity basis. Fielder may be the best in the NL; he's at least the best out of the top 11 in total RBI (note that he also leads the NL in plate appearances, so his dominance of this made-up statistic is especially impressive).

But you know, all those big guys at the top still do a pretty good job by this method. Still, though, to lead the league in RBI seems to take a healthy amount of ability and luck: of the four guys with over 100 RBI as of Sunday, three of them have seen the first (Tex), second (Howard) and sixth (Prince) most runners on base during their PAs. The fourth, of course, is Pujols, who is just 15th in ROB.

Your luckiest, most opportunity-dependent RBI leaders are the guys you'd actually expect...especially Aaron Hill. A lot has been written lately about how Aaron Hill is suddenly this big surprise run producer, and yeah, it's pretty shocking that he's cracked out 31 homers. But with a .322 OBP, he's just a slightly above average hitter (.350 wOBA). He's acquired all those RBI (and to some extent all those HR) by having the most plate appearances in the majors. He's also 8th in the AL in ROB.

Of the 10 RBI leaders in the AL, 6 are in the top 10 in the league in ROB. 8 are in the top 14. Morales and V-Mart are the oddballs (-slash-impressive run producers) at #24 and 48, respectively.

Of the 11 RBI leaders in the NL, 7 are in the top 10 in ROB, and 10 are in the top 17.
Hanley Ramirez is your real Mr. RBI (well, after Fielder), way down at #26.

So, yeah. Next time someone starts talking about a Good RBI Guy, you can correct them--about 90% of the time, he's more of a Lots of RBI Opportunities Guy.

A few more, just for fun:
Mauer.....464.....268.....79...... .1079 (better than all of the above AL guys except Morales).
Jeter.....582.....296.....60.... .0683 (all those leadoff PA make this a useless stat for him).
Utley.....556.....338.....84..... .0939 (if only he could be hitting behind Utley every day).

Okay, that was pointless but fun. Next time, something poignant but mind-explodingly dull.

Better Luck Next Year: Cincinnati Reds

2009-08-31T09:00:00.007-05:00

You could say that a deficit of 19.5 games (that's how far the Reds are behind the Cardinals as of this morning) isn't likely to be made up in a year--especially not when there are three more teams between you and first place--and you'd be right. But the Reds have some intriguing young players and have been dragged down by some pretty devastating injuries, so it's worth taking a look.

2010 Reds now under contract, with 2009 WAR
C Ryan Hanigan (0.9)
1B Joey Votto (2.7)
2B Brandon Phillips (2.3)
3B Scott Rolen (3.0)
SS Paul Janish (0.6)
LF Chris Dickerson (1.8)
CF Drew Stubbs (Rookie)
RF Jay Bruce (1.0)

Pitchers, with 2009 FIPs:
Aaron Harang (4.18)
Bronson Arroyo (5.10)
Johnny Cueto (4.75)
Homer Bailey (5.23)
Micah Owings (5.75)
Bullpen: Francisco Cordero (3.18), Nick Masset (3.84), Danny Herrera (4.05)

Bad, but filled with promise. Stubbs should be a hell of a player. Bruce is having a nightmare of a season, but was the top prospect in the game not two years ago, and he's been terrific in right field. Phillips plays good D and can hit better than the league-average line he's put up so far. Votto is a stud who missed a bunch of games this year, and his defense (by UZR) looks pretty bad for 2009, but was +10 runs (roughly +1 win) in 2008; a rebound by him should be expected and will make a huge difference.

Harang has taken a bit of a step back from his "unheralded ace" status of a couple years ago, but is still a solid pitcher, and all of the other four starters have shown signs that they can be very good pitchers (some more likely to be than others, but it's all possible). This is a team, however, that will badly miss Edinson Volquez, who is expected to miss most of the 2010 season. Their bullpen is full of guys with pretty ERAs; most bullpen ERAs can't be trusted, but given the sheer number of them, you have to figure they can find three or four talents in there that can anchor their 2010 'pen in front of Cordero.

Then again, they could just decide to blow the whole thing up any day now. Their odds are long, and Harang, Arroyo and Cordero are all pretty expensive. But let's just say they decide to go for it. And anyway, why would they have picked up the last year and a half of Rolen's contract if they weren't going to go for it?

What They Need to MAKE Happen
1. Get an impact player at catcher or shortstop. Impact catchers are hard (okay, impossible) to find on the open market. Bengie Molina wouldn't be a bad gamble at the right price (decent defensive skills and an OPS close to average qualifies as "impact" by catcher standards), but I'm sure someone (very likely his current club, the Giants) will overvalue his veteran leadership and RBIs and drive him well out of reasonable range.
At shortstop, I'm sure they can get the recently departed Alex Gonzalez back for a song, but that's approximately one song more than he's worth at this point. His defense has been good, but his bat has completely vanished, and comebacks by middling shortstops at age 33 aren't good bets (even if the bat comes back, the defense slips--see Guzman, Cristian).
So unless someone like Molina falls into their laps or they can swing an improbable trade for an underutilized catcher on someone else's team (I'm looking at you, Chris Iannetta), the focus should be on getting a better shortstop. The best of the free agent class is likely to be Marco Scutaro, though Miguel Tejada is out there too, and there are several likely to be available in fairly minor trades who could give you a +2.5-win-or-so performance.

2. Separate Dusty Baker from Willy Taveras and Everyone Like Him. I'd be all for firing Dusty Baker--the man just doesn't know what he's doing--but if you can't do that, you've got to purge your team of all possible gutsy, toolsy players so that Dusty can't be tempted to actually use them. Taveras is a blindingly fast runner, an excellent defensive center fielder, and an overall crap player because he can't hit to save his life. He'd be a fine pinch runner/defensive replacement, but Dusty would use him way more than that. Drew Stubbs needs to be the center fielder of both the future and the present for this team. No more Taverases and Corey Pattersons, anywhere, ever. Unfortunately, Taveras is owed $4 million for 2010 for some reason, so if he's healthy, he'll likely be given every opportunity to win a spot on the team. So come to think of it, just fire Dusty already.

3. Find a platoon partner for Chris Dickerson. The Reds have two reasonable options for left field: Dickerson and Laynce Nix. Nix has shown some nice power and both have played good D, but Dickerson is the better player, and both are lefties who can't hit lefties. It would be ideal if the Reds could move Nix for a similar bit player who bats right-handed. Dickerson is a career .289/.388/.460 hitter against righties. If they were able to pair someone like the Tigers' Ryan Raburn (.242/.355/.516 vs. LHP this season) with that, they could have the equivalent of something like a $10-12 million player for the cost of essentially two minimum salaries. (I have no particular reason to believe that Raburn would be available, but guys like him certainly will be--many are likely hidden away in AAA because of their inability to hit righty pitching.)

What They Need to HAVE Happen
1. Jay Bruce needs to get good fast. This was a guy that was projected as something like a .300/.350/.550, 40-HR hitter with good D in the outfield corners, and quickly. The defense has been there in '09, but the offense has been offensive, with 18 homers but a .207 batting average and a .287 OBP through Saturday. On one hand, there are all kinds of reasons to expect him to bounce back; he's very young, he's walking more and striking out less than in 2008, and he's been victimized by an almost unbelievably low .202 BABIP, so there's no question that a lot of it is bad luck. On the other hand, though, his line drive and ground ball rates have plummeted while his fly ball rate has shot through the roof (35.2% in 2008, 49.6% in 2009), which isn't conducive to getting a lot of hits. He's very likely to be a productive player in 2010 regardless, but getting back to hitting the top half of the ball every now and then would probably help a lot.

2. Scott Rolen needs to stay healthy. It's hard to believe Rolen will be just 35 years old in 2010; in some ways, he's seemed old since pretty much the day he arrived with the Phillies 13 years ago. From 2004-2008 he played 142, 56, 142, 112 and 115 games, and if he plays every remaining game in 2009 he'll still end up in only 132 for the year. But when he's on the field, he's still a star. He plays excellent defense -- if not as excellent as five or six years ago when he was the best-fielding 3B anyone who missed Mike Schmidt's prime had ever seen -- and is currently hitting .312/.368/.466. Much of that was in the tougher American League, and there aren't a lot of markers to suggest that he's benefiting from a lot of luck, so .300/.370/.480 or so would be a reasonable expectation from a healthy Rolen in 2010. This is a team, as I've said, whose status as a contender kind of on the brink as it is, so they badly need every game they can possibly squeeze out of Rolen.

3. Either Johnny Cueto or Homer Bailey needs to fulfill his potential. A year or two ago, they were two of the better pitching prospects in the game, and while Cueto has been much better than Bailey in the majors, neither one has come close to doing what people thought he could do. One of those two guys needs to take the leap and form a strong 1-2 with Harang. The good news is that in his last two starts, Bailey is 2-0 with 11 hits, 5 walks, 11 strikeouts and an 0.60 ERA in 15 innings; the bad newses are that (a) Cueto has seemed to get worse every month he's been in the majors, and (b) those performances dropped Bailey's ERA all the way from 7.53 to 6.04.

The Reds are going to have a tough time avoiding the 90-loss mark this year, and they're not going to emerge from Spring Training '10 as anything like favorites. But if all these things happen and they get a couple more little breaks here and there, I can see them winning something between 85 and 90. And is it really that hard to see 87 wins or so being enough to win the Central?

Hanley being Hanley

2009-08-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

I know you've probably all seen this, but Rob Neyer thinks Albert Pujols might not be the MVP.

And I'm going to go one further: right now, right this very second, Pujols is not the MVP. Hanley Ramirez is.

It was barely two weeks ago when I said this: "it's impossible to make an argument against Albert." And it was. But since I wrote those words, late on the evening of August 11, here's what's happened:

Pujols: .261/.404/.522
Hanley: .481/.542/.731
and just for fun, Utley: .296/.500/.729

Well, that changes things, doesn't it? I don't think Albert's getting that triple crown after all (sorry, lar).

As I write this, Fangraphs has the three top NL WARs as 6.9 for Ramirez, 6.8 for Utley, and 6.4 for Pujols. That half-win difference isn't big, but it isn't too close to call, either. Say you don't think they've got defense right at all, and you want to go with plus-minus instead of UZR? That bumps them about four runs closer together. Narrows the gap a lot, but doesn't close it. Hanley still wins.

Look, Pujols is going to win the MVP. No question about it. And that's certainly not any kind of a tragedy; he's still having an incredible season. But imagine you're at the beginning of the 2009 season and building a brand-new team. You can get an average defensive shortstop (and Hanley is that, despite his bad reputation) who you know is going to hit .365/.428/.575, or you can get an average defensive first baseman (and Pujols has been that in '09, despite his good reputation) who you know is going to hit .313/.441/.666. Knowing what you do about what most shortstops are like and what most first basemen are like, don't you grab the SS and hope to pick up a 1B who can hit a little later on? I know I do. And that (well, the stats, but that in a nutshell), to me, is why Hanley Ramirez is the NL MVP right now.

Happy Birthday...

2009-08-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

Jim Thome!

I can't think of a hitter in the last 10 or so years that has been more fun for me to watch than Thome, #1 on my now-two-man list of tolerable White Sox. He turns 39 today, and is in his nineteenth season in the major leagues. (Incidentally, his 20th seems at least somewhat likely to come with his fourth different ballclub. Maybe the Mariners?)

Three quick things about Thome:

(1) If he wants to, he's now almost a lock to top 600 homers. He's not the hitter he once was, with a 124 OPS+ in 2008-09 after a 154 OPS+ from 1995-2007, and he has to rest or miss games to injury a lot more than he used to, but there has got to be at least one AL team (like, say, the Mariners) who can use 120 games of a .250/.370/.500 DH. He'll come close to 30 homers again this year, but even if he doesn't hit another one this year and falls off precipitously after that, all he needs is 18 homers a year for two more years. If he's healthy and wants to play, it's almost impossible to see him not managing that. Maybe once he's the eighth to hit #600 (only six right now, but A-Rod will almost certainly get there first), people will start noticing him a little.

(2) He's got close to the most extreme splits of any Hall of Fame hitter ever. He's hit a Bondsian .294/.430/.616 (1.046 OPS) vs. RHP, and a Todd Zeilean .239/.342/.423 vs. LHP. In fact, there's little doubt that, just as is the case with Ryan Howard (more on that in the coming weeks, probably), for most of his career it would've made sense to platoon him, if not for the fact that his performance against righties (who are, after all, something like 70% of MLB pitchers) is so great that his overall line gives him a reputation that prohibits it.

Thome's OPS against lefties is just 60% of his overall OPS. That's kind of amazing (though since I brought him up, Howard's is 58%). Obviously most lefties have a hard time hitting lefties, but consider some of the other all-time elite lefty hitters of the retrosheet era: McCovey, 75%; Reggie, 83%; Helton, 75%; Mathews, 70%; Bonds, 87%; Yastrzemski, 65%; Griffey, 85%; Mauer (couldn't resist), 72%. Yaz was actually pretty dreadful against lefties, too, but even he had less extreme splits than Thome, and none of these other guys is anywhere close. Which kind of draws attention to how incredibly awesome he's been in those other 70% of his PAs.

(3) He's really quite funny in fictional, all-caps chatroom form.

Better Luck Next Year: Seattle Mariners

2009-08-26T09:00:00.005-05:00

Today begins a series that will be in an unspecified number of parts over an indeterminate number of weeks in which I look at a team that is out of the 2009 playoff picture, but that might have designs on 2010.

I've been planning for a couple days now to do this starting with the Mariners, a team I already know pretty well, but then yesterday Rob Neyer had to come in and rain all over my parade, concluding that the Ms' "long-term prognosis doesn't look so bad. But the growing pains might be a bit ugly. Perhaps the only bright note at the moment is that there's nowhere to go but up."

First of all, what? Did he write that last year (when the Mariners were 61-101) and forget to post it until this year? Because right now the Mariners are better than a .500 team, and when you're a .500 team there's about as far to go down as there is up. I know what he meant, though: most of the article was about hitting, and the Mariners' offense has been truly dreadful. And it's true that you have to score runs to win baseball games.

But here's the thing: you don't have to score a lot of runs as long as you give up even fewer runs. And that's been the Mariners' mantra this year, due mostly to the most vastly improved defense in the entire history of sports that use the term "defense." I think they're in a pretty good position to keep doing it next year, too...with a few tweaks here and there.

Here are the Mariners' best position players currently under contract for 2010, with their current 2009 WAR in parentheses:
C: Johnson(0.5)/Johjima (0.3)
1B: Brad Nelson? (rookie)
2B: Jose Lopez (1.7)
3B: Jack Hannahan (1.1)/Bill Hall (0.2)
SS: Jack Wilson (1.9)
LF: Michael Saunders (rookie)
CF: Franklin Gutierrez (4.2)
RF: Ichiro! (4.2)
DH: Mike Carp (rookie)

Pitchers, with 2009 FIPs:
Felix Hernandez (3.11)
Carlos Silva? (5.91)
Ryan Rowland-Smith? (5.27)
Brandon Morrow (5.70)
Jason Vargas? (5.26)
Bullpen: Aardsma (3.14), Lowe (3.56), White (3.86)

It looks bad, but it's not, at least for a starting point. Ichiro seems to go from overrated to underrated and back again just about every other year, and currently he's underrated again, and having what might be his finest offensive season while still playing great D. Gutierrez has continued to be the best defensive outfielder in the game while blossoming into an average-hitting outfielder, which makes him on balance one of the better players in the league. King Felix will be my recurring pre-season pick for Cy Young every year from 2010 until further notice (perhaps 2019 or so). The bullpen is good.

What they need to MAKE happen:
1. Re-sign Russ Branyan. He won't be as cheap as he was this year ($1.4 million), but it shouldn't be all that tough to convince him to stay, either. The Mariners will have ended up giving him something like 100 more PA in a season than any of his seven other teams ever have, and Safeco Field--a pitcher's park in general but a friendly place for lefty home run hitters--is a great place for him. Brad Nelson is 26 and has put up just an .811 OPS in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League; that's not going to do it for this team. Branyan provides badly needed power, can get on base, and actually holds his own at first. Unless somebody wants to go crazy and give him a ridiculous contract based on one surprising performance, he's a no-brainer for them.

2. Sign one pretty good starting pitcher. Erik Bedard and the Mariners were a match made in that place that also brought you Ike and Tina Turner. He's gone. That starting rotation after Felix looks awful, but remember, they're a better-than-.500 team with a rotation that's no better than that right now, plus a fluky performance by Jarrod Washburn. One good pitcher would make a big difference. No telling who will really be available at this point (Rich Harden? John Lackey? Bring back Joel Pineiro? Randy Wolf? The reanimated Ben Sheets?), but they'll be out there.

3. Re-sign Adrian Beltre. Among the many brilliant things he's done, rookie GM Jack Zduriencik actually did a fantastic job making arrangements in the event of a Beltre departure in free agency. Bill Hall hits lefties well, Jack Hannahan hits righties...well enough to spell Hall when he's flailing, and they both play very good defense while costing relatively little. But put them together, and they're no better than an average player. As Dave Cameron wrote on USS Mariner yesterday (bad day for me to try to talk M's, come to think of it), they badly need another core player, and as awesome as the Gutierrez trade was for them, they had to give up real major-league value for that--value that they can't afford to part with this year. A healthy Beltre is that kind of player. He might be a hard sign--he's a Boras client, and a lot of teams understand how huge his defense is now--but then again he's coming off a horrible, injury-plagued season, and maybe he likes Seattle. Who knows? If not that, they need another core player. But who? They should have a ton of money--pretty much everyone save Ichiro is pretty cheap right now--but there just aren't that many free-agents-to-be out there who would fit, and they don't have the kind of prospects that would being in a superstar.

What they need to HAVE happen:
1. Those few core players they do have--Ichiro, Felix, Gutierrez, and hopefully Beltre or a reasonable facsimile--need to stay healthy. You always hear that, but this is an especially thin team at the top, making it especially true.

2. Brandon Morrow needs to make a big comeback. No, he'll never be the guy who was drafted five picks later, but he's still got basically unhittable stuff. A little control would go along way.

3. One of those rookies, Saunders or Carp, needs to show something. I'm sure Zduriencik can (and will) replace one of those guys, but not both, and there's really nothing else on the way up.

I don't know. Maybe it's because I like the team and really want this to be true, but seeing how they're doing this year, I think with a few tweaks and a little luck, this team could win 90-93 games in 2010 and make a really good run at the division.

Figuring Out the AL Central, or: I Have Hope Again

2009-08-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

About a week ago, everybody was writing off the 2009 Twins. I certainly did. Most Twins bloggers did. The folks on the wrong side of the MVP debate were arguing that Joe Mauer couldn't win it because he was playing for a team that wasn't going to make the playoffs, and the argument against them wasn't that the Twins were a contender after all (they weren't), but that the whole idea that the MVP and the playoffs were somehow linked was absurd (it is). And yeah, the 2006 team overcame a bigger deficit in a short amount of time, but as Aaron Gleeman reminded everybody, that team was good; this one is not. The Twins had the easiest schedule of any contender post-All-Star Break, and they came out looking terrible.

Well, there's another difference from 2006, too: Detroit and Chicago were good back then, too, and now they're fundamentally no better than the Twins are. Coming into play yesterday, all three of those teams had Pythagorean records of within a game of each other (right around 63-61). And the actual standings, the Twins having won six of their last seven games while the other two have scuffled a bit, now look like this:
Tigers 66 58 --
Wh.Sox 63 62 3.5
Twins 62 63 4.5

The Tigers are still in control, but it's far from decided. Now take a look at the teams' remaining games against opponents that aren't each other:
Det (24): LAA-2, TB-6, CLE-6, KC-6, TOR-4
Chi (25): BOS-7, NYY-3, OAK-2, LAA-3, SEA-3, KC-3, CLE-3, CHC-1
Min (23): BAL-2, TEX-3, CLE-6, TOR-3, OAK-3, KC-6

The Tigers have 8 games against very good teams, the Twins just 3. The White Sox have 13, and then 4 more against the M's and Cubs, against whom they're about equally matched. The Twins' five opponents other than Texas (who they handled pretty well on the road last week) are the five teams with the most losses in the American League. I think it's fair to expect the Twins to pick up 1 game on the Tigers and 2 on the White Sox based on that schedule, and if they don't, either they're tanking or one of those two teams is playing out of its head. That would leave the Tigers 3.5 up on the Twins and 5.5 up on the White Sox. Then you've got this:

Det vs. Min: 7 games
Det vs. Chi: 6 games
Min vs. Chi: 6 games

It's easy to say it'll all come down to that, but realistically, it'll all come down to Detroit. If the Tigers can win 3 of those games against the Twins and 3 of those games against the White Sox, it's hard to see them falling apart so badly in their other games that they give up the lead. But if the Tigers drop 4 or 5 games against either or both, it should be a pretty good fight.

More interestingly, all six of those games between the Tigers and White Sox come in Detroit's last 10 games, and the other four of the last ten are all against the Twins. As I said, the Tigers are still in control: the various playoff odds sites seem generally to have the Tigers at about 50-55% and the Twins and Sox at 20-25% each, and that seems about right (though I'd put the Twins closer to 25% and Sox closer to 20% based on the remaining schedules). What that means, though, is that there's almost a 50% chance that the Tigers won't win the Central. Which, if nothing else, should once again make for some very exciting baseball in those last ten games in the least exciting division in baseball.

How is this possible?

2009-08-24T09:00:00.001-05:00

I mean, how is THIS possible?

I mean, from a job performance standpoint, I'd be one of Minaya's strongest defenders. He fleeced the Twins in the Santana deal. He's spent a ton of money without wasting a ton of money. Sure, he gave $13 million a year to a highly overrated and declining 70-innings-a-year pitcher, but everybody makes mistakes, and in New York that's hardly the kind of thing that ruins seasons. Their season was ruined by injuries, not any failure of Minaya's.

At the same time, though, is he irreplaceable? Consider for a moment how many brilliant baseball people would love to take the Mets' GM job tomorrow. If you put all of those people in a line, would Minaya stand out? And if you put all those people in a line and knew that one of them had waited way too long to fire a good friend who totally messed up and then tried to blame it all a reporter who was just doing his job, wouldn't you eliminate that one from consideration?

I don't know. I just don't get it. I mean, Minaya is under contract for at least three more years, but even to the cash-strapped Wilpons, Minaya's salary isn't the kind of thing that will be missed (he's making about 1/3 of what they're paying J.J. Putz. I gotta think Kim Ng and Paul DePodesta are wondering what a body has to do to lose a job around there about now...

Frivolous Friday

2009-08-21T09:00:00.002-05:00

Bit of a cop-out today. Again. But a fun one this time, I think.

First things first, though: it's 2009, and ya gots ta do what ya gots ta do.

Ergo, you can now become a fan of the blog on Facebook or follow the blog (-slash-me) on Twitter. I hope you'll do both. Not much going on in either place yet, but stuff will happen eventually.

Also, this blog now has an e-mail: BillDailySomething (at) gmail dot com. So if you've got something to say that you don't want to share with (a tiny, tiny portion of) the world, send it there. Sometime soon I'll have a box where you can access all that stuff. In the meantime, join the FB page and follow me on Twitter anyway.

Second: so I've been a fan of The Onion for something like thirteen years now. Just brilliant, funny stuff. And they were all over the baseball today.

First: I actually think their written stuff has declined a bit in the last few years, but this little number is pretty perfect. That's baseball.

And where they've fallen behind in the written content, they've made up for with their marvelous fake-tv stuff. At least as amusing as the bit itself is how perfectly they've mimicked the ludicrous excess of Sportscenter:

Baseball Superstar Accused of Performance-Enhancing Genie Use

A Few Observations on Andruw

2009-08-20T09:00:00.003-05:00

When will this guy stop talking about the Rangers? It's all Rangers all the time at this blog allasudden!

I don't have a ton to say today, but I've been thinking about Andruw Jones.

First, the Dave Cameron article
Away back on May 1, I linked to an article that Cameron, one of my favorite baseball writers, wrote on April 28 called Welcome Back, Andruw (and then responded to criticism over that, Cameron did, with this piece on the usefulness of small sample sizes). My feelings on it were only insinuated in this space, but you could pretty much tell (or tell for sure if you read my comments below the initial article) that I was really skeptical about basing anything on 35 plate appearances by anybody, no matter how great those 35 were.

Since April 28? Jones has gone on being a part-time player, batting .204/.312/.463 in 253 PA to drive his season batting average from .370 to .222, his OBP from .514 to .337. He's still got tons of HR power (a rate of 39 per 162 starts). but not a lot else.

I doubt Dave will say it--after all, Jones is better than he was in 2008 (it would be hard to be worse), and, for the year as a whole, better than 2007--but he got one wrong for once. Not just with Andruw--a guy with a .300ish OBP (as he's been since the 28th) who is mostly a DH and LF just isn't a particularly useful player--but with his ruminations on small sample sizes. Line drive rates and contact rates and all that fun FanGraphs stuff are approximately as susceptible to sample size fluctuations as batting average and homers. As I pointed out in the comments to Dave's initial article, Andruw Jones had almost the exact same stretch in 2007 as he did to start 2009--but in July, not April, so nobody even noticed. Small samples are interesting, not useful. A great month should adjust our expectations for what we expect a guy's final line to look like (as I tried to do a few times very early on), but we should wait a bit more than 35 PA before we start adjusting our expectations for the rest of the season.

Second, on defense
This is just a passing thought, because I've watched Andruw just twice this year and have no idea what I'm talking about. But: he's just 32 years old. I know he's gained some weight, but has he really fallen so far in two years that he's gone from a (deserving) Gold Glover in 2007 to a DH in 2009?

I just can't believe that. First, even in 2008 when he looked completely lost and useless with the Dodgers, UZR had him as approximately an average center fielder. Second, in his limited time this year (5 games in RF and 12 in LF), his UZR has been great (doesn't mean much, but it doesn't mean nothing, either). Third, he's tried five steals in what was, let's face it, not very many times on first base, and he's only been caught once. I have to believe that he'd at least hold his own if given a chance in left, and, I mean, he's Andruw Jones. How do you not even try him in center, even once?

Now, the Rangers' D has been great (and is probably the biggest part of their success). Consider: UZR thinks Michael Young is as bad at 3B as he used to be at SS, but no one else on the team has been more than 1 run below average at any position. With Nelson Cruz and Elvis Andrus, they've got two of the best at their positions in the game, and even Josh Hamilton (who looked horrible last year) has put up a good number. But anyway, Hamilton has been hurt, and guys need rest now and then. How has Andruw gotten a total of 17 innings in the OF? Has he really lost that much at 32?

Third, a weird observation about his splits
Putting those crazy first 35 PA back into play, so for the whole season: .224/.302/.552 vs.R, .220/.380/.420 vs.L. 13 of his 17 HR have come against righties, but 20 of his 30 walks have come against lefties.

That's two totally different players. You might think a lot of guys are two different players based on their splits, but all that usually means is that one is a good player and one is a bad player. Andruw is two totally different players--of roughly equal value, but just about as different as they can be. Against righties, he's Dave Kingman; against lefties, Max Bishop.

I'm sure that's not that unusual, especially with less than a full season's worth of PA. But I thought it was kind of funny.

The Worst Intentional Walk I've Ever Seen

2009-08-19T09:00:00.002-05:00

I watched the Twins game against the Rangers last night. One of those weird games that for a while, nobody seemed to want to win...least of all Rangers manager Ron Washington.

Now, I don't see a lot of the Rangers, but I've always liked Ron Washington. Maybe because he's a former Twin, maybe because he just carries himself like the kind of guy who should be a very good manager (the way I think most non-Twins fans probably see Gardy). But this was...interesting.

Top of the 6th inning. Four runs already in for the Twins, now tied at 5. Nick Punto on first, Delmon Young on third, two outs. Right-handed reliever Jason Jennings is the new pitcher. Before even throwing a pitch, he picks Punto off, but the defense bungles it -- Omar Vizquel throwing to third behind Delmon for no particular reason, and unsuccessfully -- so now there are runners on second and third with two outs. Leadoff hitter and LHB Denard Span at the plate. After Span comes RHB Orlando Cabrera. Washington has Span intentionally walked to get to Cabrera with the bases loaded and two down.

Some numbers for you to consider:
Denard Span vs. RHP, season: .281/.367/.381
Orlando Cabrera vs. RHP, season: .294/.318/.394

Now, granted, Jennings himself has huge platoon splits, and would much rather face a righty than a lefty. But Span is an atypical lefty. He's never had big platoon splits in the majors or minors, he has almost literally no power, and this year, he actually has severe reverse splits (with an .842 OPS against lefties compared to the .748 above). As a right-handed pitcher, the only thing you're worried about against Span that you're not especially concerned about with Cabrera is the possibility of the walk--the very thing you're handing him for free!

And remember, there are two outs, so no double play. The only advantages here are the chance for the 3B or SS to get a closer force out (how often do you think that really makes the difference?) and whatever small advantages you think you get from facing Cabrera rather than Span and from Jennings facing a RHB rather than a LHB. And for that you're loading the bases -- in a tie game in just the 6th inning, remember -- and risking a huge inning, a run scoring on a HBP or unintentional walk, etc.

Ohhhhhhhhh, and I have just one more set of slash stats for you. Consider the guy who comes up after Cabrera:

Joe Mauer, vs. all pitchers, 2009: Seventy million/eleventy billion/Zorbon-X6Qsquared.

That's right. Rather than face slap-hitting, reverse-splitted Denard Span with two outs (a situation in which the most likely negative outcome was a walk anyway), Ron Washington thought it would be a good idea to intentionally load the bases to face what in that situation was a very similar hitter, just one hitter in front of the very best hitter on the planet. Say O-Cab scratches out an infield single? You're looking at a one-run deficit with the bases still juiced and Babe Freaking Ruth coming up. And for what purpose again? Oh yeah...none in particular. I'd much rather have two chances to get the out pre-Mauer than one.

Pretty definitely the worst IBB decision I've ever seen. One of the worst managerial moves I've ever seen, period.

Ah yes, and it "worked." Cabrera hit the ball hard, but Byrd tracked it down in center, and Mauer was left on the on-deck circle (and naturally homered to crazy-deep center to lead off the 7th, his second of the game). No justice, I tell you.

But then, okay, here's a little bit of justice for you: if Jennings pitches to and retires Span to end the inning, and then O-Cab leads off the 7th with the out to center, there are three outs in that inning, rather than two, at the point when Delmon Young comes up and hits the 2-run homer that real-life Delmon hit to give the Twins the lead (and eventually the win). Not nearly as immediately gratifying as my O-Cab-single-plus-Mauer-grand-slam scenario would have been, but a little bit of karmic retribution nonetheless.

Intentional walks are dumb. Intentional walks that load the bases one seeing-eye single in front of the best hitter in the game are unforgivably dumb.

Mid-day Update: Ask and You Shall Receive

2009-08-18T12:20:00.003-05:00

Often. If you ask the right guys, I guess.

I posed the question of this morning's something to the esteemed David Pinto in a comment at his blog, and this afternoon he took the time to answer it. His approach to the question is more simple sabermetrically than my own attempt (he just took their career averages, no messing with BABIP and stuff) and infinitely more complicated mathematically (he actually understands math)...and is, I'm sure, much, much better overall. Here's where he comes out:

Summing all the individual probabilities results in an overall probablility of .3259 for Albert finishing ahead of Ramirez in the batting race. That doesn’t mean he wins the batting title. Pablo Sandoval is still in the mix, and Bruan and Helton are more than capable of putting on a push of their own. One in three aren’t bad odds, however.

One in three! I mean, figure that if Pujols passes Hanley, there's about a 50/50 chance that Pablo or Braun or Helton end up ahead of Pujols: .163. Then, more realistically than I was this morning, say there's a 40% chance that he ends up ahead in both HR and RBI. .065. The number looks awfully tiny, but that would mean (if my guesses were at all accurate, which they're not, but I figure they're good enough to give us an idea) there's about a 6-7% chance that Albert Pujols will be the first Triple Crown winner in 43 seasons (73 in the NL).

Pretty cool, huh? I mean, I'll confess, I didn't want to guess at the odds this morning because I didn't want to embarrass myself (like I'm about to), but I was thinking something like 1 in 200, 1 in 500, etc. Eh. But 1 in 14 or so? That's something I can get kind of pumped up about.

Prince Albert and the Crown

2009-08-18T09:00:00.005-05:00

The other day, I opined in passing that, standing first in HR and RBI and (then) fourth in batting average, Albert Pujols had the best chance to win a Triple Crown that we'd seen in a good long while.

And, well, does he, really? I mean, it's obviously still not likely (it never is), but what are the chances? You probably know by now that I'm not going to sit here and give you precise mathematical odds, but let's look at the English major's version of the question: can we envision it actually happening?

Albert went 1-for-4 on Monday, so this morning is batting .325. Leader Hanley Ramirez's Fish didn't play, and he's been on fire lately and now stands at .356. Already not looking good. Pujols does have the HR lead by one over Mark Reynolds, though (39 to 38 after both hit one yesterday), and is just two behind Prince Fielder for the RBI lead, 105 to 107.

I'm going to commit a big no-no right off the bat and assume away HR and RBI. ZiPS calculated for the rest of the season thinks Albert ends up with 50 HR and 138 RBI, and that that will best Reynolds by two in the former and drop six behind Fielder in the latter. So even in the two categories he's closest in, he's only a favorite to hold one of them. But I'm going to assume he does get both; it just feels like the more likely result to me, and anyway, the bigger hurdle will obviously be the batting average. Also, if Pujols goes on the kind of hot streak he'll need to in order to win the batting title, odds are he'll be piling up the HR and RBI too. So in reality, I'm sure there's not even a 50% chance that Pujols ends up leading in both HR and RBI, but let's just say he does it.

Now. The Marlins have 44 games left, and Hanley has averaged 3.88 AB per game played. Say he starts every one of those 44 games; at that rate, he's got 170 more AB. This season, he's been BABIPing out of his head, with a .404 batting average on balls in play that's unsustainable by anybody; his pre-'09 career BABIP was approximately .340. So say he reverts back to that, and maintains his current HR and strikeout rates. He strikes out in 18% of his ABs (31 times), homers in 4.2% (7), and gets a hit in 34% of the remaining 132 (45). That makes him 52 for 170, a .305 BA over the rest of the season (seems unrealistically low, doesn't it? Wonder if I'm doing something wrong...oh well, pressing on). That still puts his overall 2009 batting average at a robust .340.

By the same AB/G * Games Remaining formula, Pujols ought to have 147 AB left in his season. He'll need 57 hits in those 147 AB--a .388 batting average the rest of the way--to put him at 192/563 = .341 for the year.

Pujols has been a bit down on BABIP this year (.294), either because he's been unlucky or because he's hitting more flies and fewer liners. But let's assume, again, that he gets back to his career BABIP (.321) and keeps the other rates the same. 11.4% Ks (16), 9.2% HRs (14), and 32.1% of the remaining 117 ABs are hits (38). That makes him 52 for 147 (.354), and puts him at just .332 for the year...but if just five more hits fall in (or leave the yard) somewhere in there, he's right where he needs to be.

Doesn't sound too bad, right? Not likely, sure, but with just five hits' worth of better-than-average luck and with a slide back toward the mean by Hanley, it could happen! And just last year, from July 10 to August 31, Pujols played in 45 games and hit .392. So I'm not sure there's anything Pujols can't do, but if there is, hitting .388 in 43 games ain't it.

So, sure, it can happen. If Hanley slips back to .340 or so (if he stays at .356, Albert has to put up a .450 average the rest of the way to catch him). And if the current #2 in average, Pablo Sandoval at .330, doesn't finish just as strong as Pujols does. And if Pujols holds off Reynolds for the HR title and Prince for the RBI one.

So the odds of this actually happening are probably tiny. Not statistically insignificant, not one in a million, but small enough for most of us lay folk to write it off more or less completely. Still, though, it's absolutely possible (certainly more likely than Mauer hitting .400, which we're still hearing a lot about), and probably the "best" odds at this point in the season that anybody has had in many years. I think it's something we should really keep an eye on for at least the next week or two (though if he goes 0-for-9 in the next two days or something, it's basically all over).

Pennant Sniffles

2009-08-17T09:00:00.002-05:00

As of the end of play on August 15, 2009, this many games separated the leader from the #2 team in the divisions/wildcard race:

AL East: 7.5
AL Central: 2.5
AL West: 4.5
AL Wildcard: 0.5

NL East: 4.0
NL Central: 4.5
NL West: 4.5
NL Wildcard: 1.0

Only one of the races is essentially over (thuh-uh-uh-uh-uh Yankees win the East), but none of them are particularly close, either. I think the odds are very good that the teams in playoff positions as of August 15 (Yanks, Tigers, Angels, Red Sox, Phillies, Cardinals, Dodgers, Rockies) are the same eight teams that make the playoffs. Maybe swap in the Rays and Giants for Sox and Rox, but it's hard to see a lot of movement outside of that.

And it seemed to me that that is unusual. Isn't there usually at least one really great (non-wildcard) race going on right about now?

Well, I decided to check. The average distance between the first and second place teams (not counting the wildcard here) is 4.6, the median is 4.5, and the closest single race is 2.5. How does that compare with the rest of the last ten seasons? Average/median/closest on August 15:

2009: 4.6/4.5/2.5
2008: 4.3/2.25/0
2007: 2.67/3.0/0
2006: 5.67/4.5/2.5
2005: 5.92/4.25/2
2004: 6.83/8.5/2
2003: 5.5/4.5/0.5
2002: 8.58/7/1.5
2001: 5.33/2.75/1
2000: 4.33/4.5/1

Averages: 5.37/4.58/1.3

I think what's leaving me with the impression that the races are less interesting than most (other than the fact that my Twins right now are worse than they've been through August 15 in any of those seasons) is that last column -- no division closer than 2.5 games. The two years before this one, we've had a tie on August 15 (the Dodgers and D'Backs in '08, Cleveland and the Tigers in '07), and 8 of the 9 seasons before this one had a team closer than 2.5.

On the other hand, the greatest difference between any division leader and the #2 is 7.5 games, which is what keeps the average and median from looking out of line. Normally by this time, at least one team would have a lead of 10 or 12 (or 14 or 19.5) games. The fact that nobody's totally running away with it yet is probably even more unusual than the fact that nobody's closer than two and a half.

So that's what it is about this year, I guess: there are no extremes. None of the races are all that close (even the wildcard race seems less wide-open than in years past), but none are complete embarrassments yet, either. Also, the races in 2007 and 2008 were unusually tight by this date, so if you're just thinking of the last year or two (as I probably was) you've been spoiled.

So of those last ten years (well, nine, since 2009 isn't done happening), how many of those August 15 leaders ended up in the playoffs?

2008: 7/8
2007: 5/8
2006: 6/8
2005: 8/8
2004: 6/8
2003: 5/8
2002: 6/8
2001: 5/8
2000: 8/8

No correlation, really, is there? 2000 was one of the closer years by my dumb little average/median/closest measure, and yet all the teams at the top of the standings stayed there (there wasn't even a division leader swapping places with a wildcard, as there were in some of the others). 2008 was probably the closest season, and yet the only ones to swap places were the Sox and Twins (and it took a 163rd game for that to happen).

So if all this tells you anything, it's that the standings right now don't really tell you much. Yet, I can't shake the feeling that there isn't all that much that's likely to change. I think the Rays might overtake the Red Sox for the wildcard, and I suppose it's possible that the White Sox make up the 2.5 games on the Tigers, but it just seems like the safe bet is everything staying the way it is. Maybe it's just that the teams that are in place right now seem like they're acutally the best teams. In 2003, the Royals(!) were leading the AL Central by 2 games on August 15, and I bet even they were pretty sure that wasn't gonna last. I don't see anything like that here; if you're leading your division right now, you really do look like the best team in that division.

But then, is it just dumb to call anything a "safe bet"? At this point in 2006, the Twins were .500 and 8.5 games behind the Tigers (and 6.5 behind the White Sox), but won the division. In 2007, the Rockies were 5 games back, falling to 6.5 before winning 14 of their last 15 games and the NL West. So maybe it's dumb to write anybody off (within reason; sorry Nats and Royals). But I just don't think all that much is going to change this year...I promise I'll make fun of this later when the Braves have gone 40-5 and coasted to the playoffs.

My Favorite Thing Today: two great Joes collide

2009-08-16T09:00:00.001-05:00

Staying very much on the map for this one, because two of my very favorite things in the world came together in a beautiful way yesterday: Joes Posnanski and Mauer.

If you're like me (and let's face it, most of you are), you've probably at least skimmed past that post in your feed already (as much as I love Poz, I find that I just don't have the stamina to always read the 10k or so words he writes every other day or so, much as I try), but it's definitely worth a serious look. You'll read a lot on here for the next three or four months about how great Mauer is, how Mauer is clearly deserving of the MVP award, and then how Mauer got completely screwed out of that same MVP award. But Joe, of course, puts it a lot better than I ever will.

Sigh. Gonna be another frustrating award-announcing season, I think.

My Favorite Thing Today: Baseball In-Depth

2009-08-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Dave Pinto at Baseball Musings linked to this blog the other day, and so far I'm digging it. It's a regularly updated, heavily stats-focused baseball blog run by one guy who has a law degree...hmm. Can't quite put my finger on it, but something about that just kind of clicks with me...

Anyway, I don't know that there's one post I'd recommend above the others. I'd suggest going over there, checking the whole thing out, leaving a few comments and so forth.

Hoping to find time to actually say something tomorrow or Monday. 'Til then!

My Favorite Thing Today: pants

2009-08-14T09:00:00.001-05:00

So things are going to be light here for a few days. Real light. And it might be more like ten days. I'm sure I'm overreacting to some degree, but I feel like I could work 48 hours a day for the next week and still not get done everything I need to get done.

So in lieu of my own posts, unless and until I have something I just really need to say, I'm going to link to one thing somewhere in the tangled series of tubes that I really like. And I'm going to go off the map a little bit -- I assume that everyone who reads this blog is also reading Lar, Jason, Mark, Josh, etc. every day (and my other blogger friends whenever they get around to posting) like good little boys and girls.

My favorite thing today isn't even about baseball; I promise I won't make a habit of that. But as it turns out, a guy I was playing a lot of softball with in law school not so very long ago is now freelancing for ESPN's Page 2, and yesterday he posted a story that I thought was really clever and pretty funny: walking a mile in John Daly's pants. It's on the front page of Page 2 as I type this, so it's not "off the map" to most of the sports-loving world, but I kind of doubt I get a lot of overlap with the Page 2 crowd. So, if you haven't checked it out yet, you should.

So that's it! Incidentally, don't ever search for John Daly images at work. I didn't, thankfully, but, well, just don't...

Drastically changing the mound height was a terrible idea. Let's do it again!

2009-08-13T09:00:00.007-05:00

Yesterday, Bill Conlin came up with quite the conlin.

In a nutshell (and I really don't think I'm being unfair to his work at all, but you be the judge): with the pitcher's mound higher than it is now, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams and Lefty Grove did good things. Therefore, baseball should raise the mound back to where it was in 1968. They lowered the mound after 1968. This was ostensibly to restore the balance between pitching and hitting, but really it was to restore the balance between the AL and NL. Because, see, the NL was more racially diverse, and was better. Rose led the league in batting average at .335 in the NL, while Yastrzemski led the AL at .301. There were a bunch of Hall of Famers in the NL, and only a couple in the AL. Bob Gibson is in the Hall of Fame, while the pitchers who put up great numbers in the AL in 1968 are not. Therefore, the NL was a whole lot better than the AL, and baseball saw this as a problem, so they lowered the mound just to make the AL as good as the NL again, and now they should raise it again. Ruben Amaro, Jr. doesn't think they should do that. Ruben Amaro, Jr. is an idiot.

Have you already figured out how crazy this is? 'Cause, frankly, this is a busy day for me, so I don't have a lot of time to explain it to you. But here, look at this:
1968 AL: .637 OPS, 2.98 ERA, 3.4 R/G
1968 NL: .641 OPS, 2.99 ERA, 3.4 R/G

If Ichiro! were playing in the 1968 AL, Ichiro! would probably hit .350, even while Yaz finished second at .301. And that wouldn't do a thing to change the balance or imbalance between the leagues. Randomly listing facts about the league leaders in certain statistics is just about the worst way you could possibly look at balance between the leagues as a whole. And in fact, Conlin doesn't just list facts, he lies about them: in extolling the NL, he cites the fact that McCovey led the NL with 36 homers as though it shows you how much better the NL was, but doesn't mention that over in the AL, Frank Howard hit 44 and Willie Horton hit 36.

To Conlin, the AL was embarrassingly atrocious; the NL produced "below-average but not anomalous offense." Back in reality, though, the difference between the two leagues was essentially a rounding error (and they were both very, very anomalous). You know how I feel about Conlin generally, but this is poor even for him. In almost any other profession, if you put in the effort and showed the level of competence Conlin does in this piece, you'd be investigated and probably fired.

Here's a big reason why I hate the writing of hopeless hacks like Conlin: they have the ability to take things I really believe in and, just by writing in support of those things, make me start looking for reasons to disagree with those things. I do think that lowering the mound was a short-sighted, kneejerk reaction to a very weird season (and a pretty weird five or six seasons). It was silly. They shouldn't have done it.

Additionally, I don't doubt that, in the beginning, the AL as a whole was slower to integrate than was the NL as a whole. The lag in some AL teams' response to integration was deplorable, and I don't doubt that it hurt competition. For a while.

On the other hand, I don't think that the mound height is to blame for the high ERAs or low inning totals of today. Starting pitchers threw a lot more innings in the 1970s, low mound and all, than they did in the 1950s or 1960s. Pitching ruled, low mound and all, in 1988-1991. It's a cyclical game. These things happen. Also, I'm not totally convinced (without research) that the competitive disadvantage from the AL's collective racism lingered all the way to 1968, the year 22 A.J. (Anno Jackie, The Year of Our Jackie 22). The fact that the NL seemed to have all the great players of color doesn't mean that the AL wasn't trying. Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey were a lot better than Willie Horton or Tony Oliva, but they were all about equally non-white.

And on a third hand, or something like that, I totally agree with Amaro. Changing the mound height back to where it was more than 40 years ago would be exactly as drastic and rash a change as the one Conlin is denouncing for being too drastic and rash. There's just no reason to do that, and there's no reason to believe that doing so would do the things Conlin thinks it would.

Anyway, read the article, have a good laugh. The craziness and all-around logiclessness of the whole thing is really pretty amazing.

But then come back and tell me what you think of the mound height thing (or what you think you would've thought if Conlin's article hadn't turned you instinctively against the idea).

Who wins the awards?

2009-08-12T09:00:00.001-05:00

This isn't about who should win; there's still plenty of time for me to rant and rave about that. But based on what we know of those wacky, zany voters and their rationalizing, usually wrong-headed tendencies, if the season ended today, who would win? I think it's a tighter field than normal for at least four of the six main awards, so it's an interesting question right now. Here are my guesses:

NL MVP: Albert Pujols, Cardinals.
Might as well start with the easy one, huh? It's impossible to make an argument against Albert, even one of the silly irrational not-at-all-individual-performance-based arguments people often try to make. As I said yesterday, a competing D-Backs team might throw Mark Reynolds into the mix, and a slide out of contention by the Cards might throw just about everybody into the mix, but for now, this is Al's to lose. He leads the league in games played, runs scored, home runs, RBI, OBP, SLG, and OPS, OPS+. He's fourth in batting average--currently 21 points behind Hanley, but a triple crown is about as much in play right now as it's been in 40 years. I don't believe anybody could screw this one up.

AL MVP: Jason Bartlett, Rays.
And then right away it gets interesting. WAR will tell you it's one of Bartlett's teammates, Longoria or Zobrist. But neither has a high batting average--they're just stellar offensive and defensive players, that's all. Longoria does have the high RBI total (2nd in the league), but he'll have to get that average above .280 to have a real shot. Next on the WAR list is Joe Mauer, and note that WAR doesn't give catchers any credit (or demerits) for defense, because of the difficulty measuring it; Mauer is universally hailed as a very good or great defensive catcher, so that would probably have bumped him up to first. But he missed a month, and might win a batting title but won't hit 35 HR or rack up 100 runs or RBI. His teammate Justin Morneau is hitting well over .300, near the top in HR and RBI, and legitimately the second-best hitter in the league after Mauer, so he probably wins if the Twins win the division...but I'm sitting here watching them get blowed up by the Royals, and I don't think that's likely.

So I'm going with Bartlett (actually the fourth Ray in WAR, also behind Carl Crawford). We know the writers love him; he's one of those scrappy little guys, and the Tampa writers voted him Rays MVP last year, when he was just plain terrible. This year he's hitting .340 with a 142 OPS+, 11 homers and 21 steals, and he's perceived as a great defensive shortstop (though UZR thinks that passed him by two years ago). Dustin Pedroia took the award last year with less (superficially) impressive credentials than that. If the Rays fade, I think the Yanks' Mark Teixeira takes it.

NL Cy Young: Tim Lincecum, Giants.
This should be another easy one. Lincecum has a 2.20 ERA and also leads in complete games, shutouts and strikeouts. But Adam Wainwright and Johan Santana both have 13 "wins" to Lincecum's 12, and Wainwright has a pretty ERA too. If one of those two somehow gets to 20 wins and Lincecum is at 16 or 17, they'll steal it from him (which would be a kind of poetic justice if it were Santana, since Colon stole one from him in exactly the same fashion in 2005). Luckily, that's not likely at this point. Lincecum's teammate Matt Cain has a shot to take it, too, but probably only if Lincecum falters or is injured.

AL Cy Young: Josh Beckett, Red Sox.
The league's two best pitchers, Halladay and Greinke, pitch for teams that aren't likely to get a lot of wins from here on out, though they're both very much still in the race for this award, especially Halladay. Beckett already leads with 13 "wins," pitches for a pretty good team, and has a solid ERA. If he picks up 5 more "wins" I think he takes it. It's pretty open, though. Verlander, Buehrle and even Sabathia have outside shots.

NL Rookie of the Year: Dexter Fowler, Rockies.
There are some pitchers who have really strong claims to this award, but it takes a lot for them to give it to a pitcher, and none of those guys has been a full-time starter all year. Fowler has been up all year, and he's played almost all of the Rockies' games. He's got a respectable batting average and OBP, and he's stolen 26 bases, including 5 in one game early in the season. I think he takes it, though pitchers J.A. Happ of the Phillies and Tommy Hanson of Atlanta have solid claims.

AL Rookie of the Year: Jeff Niemann, Rays.
The AL has no Dexter Fowler. No rookie has played enough that they would currently qualify for the batting title, and none of the ones who have played significant time have played particularly well. The White Sox' Chris Getz has a .268 average and 18 steals in 20 tries, but...well, ew. The Rangers' Elvis Andrus has been phenomenal, but it's all defense, and the voters don't know from defense. Niemann walks too many and strikes out too few for a guy who looks so much like Randy Johnson, but he has 10 "wins" and a good 3.73 ERA. He and the Jays' Ricky Romero (also 10 and a 3.66, but I feel better about Niemann for some reason) probably have the best shot.

So really, five of the six are pretty much up in the air right now, or so it looks to me. Tell me what I'm missing...

'Hoos on Third

2009-08-11T09:00:00.004-05:00

So I went to the University of Virginia for some degree or other some unspecified number of years ago*, and I loved the school, and the "city" of Charlottesville, more than just about any other non-living thing ever, and so I have a soft spot for baseball players who were Wahoos. And for everyone else who was, too: Tina Fey, Tiki and Ronde Barber, Tina Fey, Katie Couric, Tina Fey, Edgar Allan Poe, Tina Fey...and so on.

*Pozterisk! I act like I'm all anonymous and everything, and yet I get the sense that I've probably put enough personal information in these posts to allow a motivated individual to locate my social security number, annual income, favorite N*Sync member, and home address with just a few simple Googlings. Well, I'll save you the trouble: it's JC, by far.

On the baseball side -- alone, perhaps, among all worthwhile pursuits -- UVA has a fairly short and undistinguished history. Though I suppose most colleges outside of California would have to say the same. There's somewhat questionable Hall of Famer Eppa Rixey, and there was one of my all-time favorite no-names, former Yankee first rounder Brian "Buck" Buchanan (who, at least as a Twin, swung at almost literally every pitch as though it had just spat on his mother in front of him), but that was just about it, until recently.

Now, of course, there's the golden boy, 4th overall 2005 draftee by his sort-of-hometown Nationals, Ryan Zimmerman. For several years now, he's looked for all the world like the next Natural, and we've been waiting for him to break out and be a star, and you had to figure he's already the best position player ever to come out of UVA. And, well, his playing for the Nats has meant that nobody's really noticed since that 30-game hit streak ended, but the breakout is on and in full force. At .306/.372/.537, he's currently putting up career highs in batting average, OBP, SLG and (predictably) OPS and OPS+, and has already tied his career high in homers (24) with a third of the season to play. His always-stellar defense, at least according to UZR, has taken another step up. Thanks in large part to that D, WAR has him as the most valuable mortal in the Major Leagues (second overall to Pujols, of course). As I type this, he's working on another hitting streak -- 13 games, so far -- and has been on fire during the Nats' recent winning streak.

And yet, one could, if one wanted to risk the wrath of the WAR gods, make a pretty strong case that not only is he not the most valuable non-Albert in the NL; not only is he not even looking like the best UVA position player ever right now; but he's not even the best UVA position player currently playing his own position in his own league. That honor, or so the argument would go, is Mark Reynolds'.

Yep, Mark Reynolds, a college teammate of Zim's (Reynolds seems to have played short, at least when the two played together, which fell outside my time there), drafted one year earlier and fifteen rounds later by the D-Backs (he was actually the third Cav selected in that draft). He isn't the fielder Zimmerman is, though he won't hurt you either: his UZR/150 is -0.9 to Zimmerman's staggering +19.2, but his bat has made up for a good chunk of that. Thanks in large part to an otherwordly-hot start to this month (he'd hit .424/.500/1.091 with 7 HR in 8 games through Sunday), he's moved into a tie for the Major League home run lead.

The guy known only (if at all) as the current all-time single-season strikeout leader, a guy who hit just .239 in 2008, with moderate patience and a ho-hum 28 homers (in a home run hitter's ballpark) to go with those 204 Ks, now sits at .290/.377/.613 for 2009 and is on pace for 52 homers, about 110 runs and 115 RBI, and nearly 30 stolen bases at a respectable success rate. If Pujols' Cardinals were the bad team and the Diamondbacks the good one, Reynolds would be a favorite to wrest the MVP award (however undeservedly) from the hands of the demigod himself. He's probably a good bet to finish second or third as it is.

One thing, though: Reynolds' strikeout rate hasn't changed at all. Well, that's not true; it's all the way down to 36.7% from his 2008 high of 37.8%. But he's on pace to accumulate many more plate appearances and thus to shatter his own record, with 218 strikeouts. Put another way (appropos of nothing, but interesting), he's already struck out 107 more times in 2009 than Pujols has, 151 to 44. Used to be 107 was a high number for one guy to put up in a season. Ha!

And not much else underlying those numbers has changed, either. He's swinging at about the same number of pitches both in and out of the zone, and is making contact only slightly more often. He's hitting ground balls at the same rate (35.8%), fewer line drives (17.7%, down from 19.1), and more fly balls (46.5%, up from 45.2). But hitting a fly ball 1.3% more of the time doesn't turn 28 home runs into 52.

The difference, then? Well, there are two. First, there's that pesky BABIP thing again. Guys who strike out almost 40% of the time do not also hit .290 -- not without a ton of luck. Here's another awesome B-R/P-I list: highest batting average by a player with at least 170 strikeouts in a season. Four guys have topped .290: Ryan Howard in 2006 (181 K, 58 HR, .363 BABIP); Sammy Sosa in 1998 (171 K, 66 HR, .325 BABIP); Bobby Bonds in 1970 (189 K, 28 HR, .388 BABIP), and Jim Thome in 2001 (185 K, 49 HR, .356 BABIP). All except Sosa had a BABIP at least 30 points higher than their career BABIP. And Sosa struck out 40 fewer times (nowhere close to 40%) and hit 14 more homers than Reynolds is on pace to. The highest batting average by a player to strike out 200 times, of course, is .239, since Reynolds himself is the only one who has done it. It takes a lot of luck, and to the extent that you don't have that, it takes a ton of home runs.

Reynolds' BABIP right now? .371. He's young enough that that significantly impacts his career number (currently .358), but in his one other full season, 2008, his BABIP was .329, right about what you'd expect from a power hitter who hits it hard.

Second, while he's hit fly balls at almost the same rate as last year, a ridiculous 29.8% of them have left the park. How crazy is that--put the ball in the air, and there's a nearly one-in-three chance that it goes out? This after HR/FB rates of just 16.2% in 2007 and 18.2% in 2008.

Sure, he could've just gotten stronger, be hitting balls farther, and 29.8% isn't unthinkable, but it's out there. Think of the strongest guys you can since 2002. Dunn? 22.6% career, with a high of 24.2. Pujols? 20.3/22.5. Teixeira? 19.1/22.4. Prince? 19.6/23.9. To get close to 29.8%, you have to go to the very strongest meatheads in the game (and I use that term fondly): Jim Thome (28.0/35.4 since 2002), Ryan Howard (31.8/34.9). So, yeah, it's doable, maybe it's legit. But do we really think Reynolds -- a college shortstop, remember, listed at 6'2", 220 -- is the new Ryan Howard (6'5" and a dubious 256)?

I think he's probably not. And sure enough, a quick glance at HitTracker Online shows Reynolds leading the NL with 12 "Just Enough" homers -- HR that would've been long outs with a slightly stiffer breeze or one fewer bite of Wheaties that morning. Now, you usually have to hit with a ton of power just to be on that list at all, and Reynolds also owns the single longest homer in the bigs this year. So this is a strong, strong guy. I just don't think he's 50 homers strong. I'm going to throw out wild guesses because they'd be fun to check on later: from August 10 (since the data I'm using is through August 9) through the end of the season, Reynolds will hit .250 with 9 HR (giving him 45).

So he's a year older, he's been a lot luckier, and in the long run I don't think there's any way on earth that Mark Reynolds is anywhere near the player that Ryan Zimmerman is, but it's clear that, strikeouts and all, he's turned himself into a hell of a player anyway, and I'll sure be rooting for him. And at least right now, in a sport in which most kids get drafted at 18 or pulled out of Central America at 16, the two best third basemen in the National League, and maybe in all of baseball, attended one of the two or three best public institutions in the country. That's... something.

Just a Day: June 10, 1989

2009-08-10T09:00:00.005-05:00

Aaaaand we're back! In the last seven days I've been able to follow no baseball at all save watching parts of most of the Nats games with my Beltway-centric extended family (and what were the odds that they'd turn out to be the team of the week?) and checking Twins scores. So while I get caught up, let's talk about stuff that happened 20 years ago.
Oddly enough, the randomizer came up with the same month and day it did the last time we did this, which happened to be one month ago today. That is to say: the two posts were written for July 10th and August 10th, and both times it came up with June 10th. Coincidence? (Yes.)

At the end of play on Saturday, June 10, 1989, your division leaders were Baltimore, Oakland, the Cubs, and the Reds (in a virtual tie with the Astros). The Cubs and A's (the eventual world champs) would hang on; the Orioles and Redlegs, not so much.

Once upon a time, the Yankees and Red Sox sometimes played games without completely dominating all sports coverage everywhere, and this was, presumably, one of those games. The Red Sox visit The Stadium and win 14-8, behind a 4-single performance by Wade Boggs and a 3-for-4-with-a-homer by #8 hitter(??!) Nick Esasky. Esasky's HR was his ninth of an eventual 30, good for fifth in what was kind of a sixties-esque American League. Roger Clemens starts for the Sox and picks up the win despite surrendering four earned in seven innings. Kind of a down year for Roger, actually, and in the heart of his otherwise eye-popping prime...though he still finishes fifth in ERA+.
There are five shutouts, though only a couple of them are complete games, which is a little surprising to me. In fact, pitchers were pulled early all over the place, many well before 100 pitches. In this game, Storm Davis is pulled after five innings, having permitted a run on two hits and a walk with six strikeouts, having thrown only 72 pitches, and having struck out the last two batters he faced. Injury, maybe (or maybe they just figured it was Storm Davis and they wouldn't push their luck), but Davis certainly wasn't the only one.
It's quite a day for future Hall of Fame pitchers. Not a particularly good day, just a voluminous one:
- Clemens, as mentioned, goes 7 and picks up a cheap win;
- Bert Blyleven goes six, giving up 4 runs (3 earned)...and being pulled after only 79 pitches (he was 38, but was also having one of his best seasons);
- Greg Maddux gets knocked around by the Cards for five and a third, and his Cubs can do nothing against Joe Magrane. Maddux, 23, already has an All-Star appearance under his belt and will finish third in the Cy Young voting (Magrane will finish fourth), but I think there's a strong argument that Magrane, 24, looks like the better pitcher, both on this date and at the end of the season;
- Randy Johnson shines for 7.2 innings (and a more back-in-the-good-old-days-like 122 pitches): 3 hits, 4 walks, 7 Ks, 1 ER in helping the Mariners beat Cleveland, 3-1. It's just his third start for the M's, and he hadn't given up more than 2 earned, struck out fewer than six, or walked fewer than three in any of 'em; and
- John Smoltz is even better but draws the "loss" because he pitches for a woeful Atlanta team that's headed for 97 of them. Smoltz, having a brilliant season at 22, goes 7 (and again, just 89 pitches! ...He's pinch hit for, but with one out and no one on), strikes out 8 against 0 walks, and surrenders one earned run on just four hits. He and his horrible squad are bested by fearsome Jim Clancy and the Astros, 1-0.
It's even a bad day just to be a very good pitcher; David Cone and Jimmy Key combine to give up 8 runs in 7 2/3.
It's also bad day for the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev (can't find a full and free article online) defends claims that he's become a despot, denounces rumors of assassination and coup attempts, et cetera. The flailing superpower continues to hang on, if only to provide ready ominous enemy fodder for Tom Clancy novels, for two more years.
Tom Browning throws one of those shutouts, beating the Dodgers and another pretty good pitcher, Tim Belcher, 5-0. Browning pitches a nice game, and the Reds keep pace with the Astros in their lingering tie for first place.

From that point on, the Reds are the second-worst team in baseball (ahead of only the Tigers, who lose 103 on the season), finishing a depressing 17 games back of the eventual NL champion Giants. Some might speculate that there were distractions. Regardless, the Reds' abject failure (after foundering under Pete, they went a much-improved 16-21 under former Red All Star Tommy Helms) ushers in the Lou Piniella era and some pretty hefty housecleaning, which pays off in a pretty big way pretty quickly.
No one notable debuted, ended his career, or died on this date (though Alex Sanchez--no, not that one--did make his fourth and final appearance), and no one we know about yet was born (though Freddy Garcia blew out fourteen candles on this day).
Not a whole lot else worth noting happens in baseball (or elsewhere) either, though it's worth noting that the Tiananmen Square Massacre had taken place just six days earlier. Also, I found this from just two days earlier (it's from Wikipedia, and I like the story so much I don't have the heart to fact-check it):
June 8 - At Veterans Stadium, the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates score 10 runs in the top of the first inning against the Philadelphia Phillies, three of which come on a Barry Bonds home run. As the Phillies come to bat in the bottom of the first, Pirate broadcaster Jim Rooker says on the air, "If we lose this game, I'll walk home." Both Von Hayes and Steve Jeltz hit two home runs to trigger the comeback for the Phillies, who finally tie the game in the 8th on a wild pitch, then take the lead on Darren Daulton's two-run single and go on to win 15-11. After the season, Rooker conducts a 300-plus-mile charity walk from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.
Hitter of the day: probably Esasky for his 3 hits and a homer. Pitcher of the day: probably Browning for his complete-game, five-hit, one-walk shutout. I sure wish that Rob Deer had hit three homers or something, but alas.

Well, dammit.

2009-08-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

It's just like I was saying the other day: the one and only thing this team needs is just one more middle infielder who can't hit and can't field his position. Success!

At least they didn't give up much, I guess. I mean, analytically, in pure value terms, this isn't a bad deal at all. It just doesn't help the Twins in any significant way, and I guess I was hoping (despite knowing better) for a little more.

Note: the entire T-D-S editorial staff is off to the beach for a week with his family starting tomorrow. I'll probably post Something every now and then, but I very much doubt that it'll be Daily. Back to regularly scheduled programing on August 10!

The Bi-Daily Something?!

2009-07-31T10:06:00.005-05:00

So this is a first for me, two posts in one day, but I have to point this out now.

Read this. Digest. Come back.

Ready? Good.

I was going to write my Pirates post for today, and then when the news broke yesterday I was going to write about Ortiz and Manny, and then I got fed up with it and re-decided to run with the Pirates post.

Craig has written exactly what I would have, only approximately a thousand times more clearly and convincingly. The idea that these leaks are going to keep happening so we should just end the silliness and release all the names now is kind of like criticizing the Pirates for trading their average players; while the sentiment is somewhat understandable, it's completely and totally wrong.

What needs to happen is the opposite--investigate this. Find those spineless unnamed attorneys who have access to the list and are violating a court order and making a mockery of the various codes of ethics to which they're bound by releasing these names, and prosecute them as severely as possible. Need attention from somebody? Need a quick buck? Well, now you've got your wish: you can become widely known as that one ex-lawyer who now sells crack in the alley, because you've forfeited your right to practice law (not to mention your dignity, etc.).

Totally legit to be disappointed in Ortiz, if you're so inclined. But if you're feeling shocked, and outraged, and angry? Save that for these faceless low-lifes, not Papi.

Lay Off the Pirates Already

2009-07-31T09:00:00.001-05:00

So it's very, very popular -- fashionable, even -- to slam the Pirates lately. And by "lately," I mean these last few days, but also the last sixteen years.

And it's understandable to a point. They are going to finish this year with their seventeenth straight losing season; no way around that. And then all those fire sales. How can you ever stop losing if you trade off all their players every year? One of the articles linked above goes so far as to call it a "losing philosophy" (should be no surprise that's from the Red Sox' flagship network); another calls it "business as usual" and predicts that the prospects they're gathering in these deals will be ushered out in the same way this year's roster was, and blames them for not drafting well...naming three players the youngest of which was drafted five years ago.

Well, it's time to stop all that. It really is. This may look like the same old Pirates (that is, forever becoming the new Pirates, jettisoning talent to save money), but to the extent that that ever existed, this is very different.

First: It makes no sense to look for patterns in the last sixteen years. Neal Huntington has been General Manager of this club for two years. And he's done a weird thing here and there, but it's pretty clear that he's smarter than the other guys.

Second: I've heard at least five different people talk about what a great team the Pirates could've had if they'd just been able to hang onto their players. Well...no.
C: haven't traded a good one, unless you go back to Jason Kendall (2004)
1B: Adam LaRoche
2B: Freddy Sanchez
3B: Jose Bautista
SS: Jack Wilson
LF: Jason Bay
CF: Nate McLouth
RF: Nyjer Morgan or Xavier Nady

SP: Snell, Gorzelanny.

Sanchez is a slightly above average player. Jason Bay, for all the attention he gets for the RBI and stuff, is...a slightly above average player, thanks to his glove (or lack of any idea what to do with one). Ditto McLouth. Wilson and Morgan are talented defensive players who can't hit and aren't young enough to learn. The rest, currently, are all somewhere between subpar regulars and terrible baseball players. So depending on the rest of the pitching (and there'd better be a lot of it), this could be an 80-win team. Even if you want to go all the way back to 2003 and add Aramis Ramirez to the mix and gave them their current catcher (Ryan Doumit) back...give them 83 wins. At the best.

They weren't going to compete with that squad, and none of those guys except maybe Morgan were going to be around the next time they might compete. Each of the guys above was worth more to some other team than he was to the Pirates. Basic rule of economics (probably too basic): if you have something and someone values that something more than you do, you should take as much as they're willing to give you for it.

Third: They're not giving these guys away, you know. They somehow took a freakish half-season from the very mediocre Xavier Nady and got the Yankees to give them Jose Tabata for it, now a 20 year old more than holding his own in AA. The Giants gave them Tim Alderson for Sanchez for some reason--a pitcher and another 20 year old doing well in AA. And then there's former top prospects Milledge, Clement, and Andy LaRoche, still decent bets to be good players sometime soon. And then there's a litany of lower-profile or too-soon-to-tell guys, and it's not like those don't have plenty of value too. They've built themselves, if not a good farm system, then one that's much better than they could've dreamed of having two years ago.

Fourth: This Pirates team (as opposed to the pre-Huntington one) does draft well. The negotiations with Pedro ~~Boras~~Alvarez were a farce, but he's signed now, and is doing fine in his first pro season and could be doing fine in the Majors by 2010. Andrew McCutchen was drafted under the other regime, but is 22 and going to be a star very soon.

Fifth: They play in the best ballpark in the Majors (at least among those built in the last ninety years or so), and in a good sports town. Start to show signs of putting a winning team together, and the fans -- though it'll certainly take a while to convince them given their recent history -- will come out.

Is there a chance that none of these young guys pan out, or only a few of them, and those guys are gone again as they get toward free agency? Of course there is. (And if that's what happens, it'll probably still be the right thing to do.) But there's a pretty good chance that, two or three years down the road, a bunch of these guys will be household names, and they'll be looking to bring in a few guys to put them over the top.

So maybe it happens, and maybe it doesn't. But I like the moves they've been making lately, for the most part. And whatever happens two or three years down the road, hanging on to Sanchez or Adam LaRoche now wasn't going to make that future any brighter.

On the Twins and the Deadline

2009-07-30T09:00:00.003-05:00

So I've been called out. Or called upon. Or called something.

And in stark contrast to the caller-outer himself, when that happens, this guy responds. Or he is this time. I mean, you know, he's not making any promises.

The question: what should the Twins do with the rest of this season? Buy? Sell? Nothing (which we all know is what really will happen)?

My answer: well, it's complicated. First, of course you don't pack it in right now, especially since, as TCM notes, there aren't all that many sellable commodities anyway. I'm writing this with the added perspective of one extra game over TCM, but it was (or felt like) a pretty huge game--they completed the sweep over the White Sox and jumped past said stockings into second place. still just two games behind the Tigers (and six out of the wildcard, but with four teams in front of them, two of which are clearly better teams). The Twins aren't particularly good, but the Tigers and Sox aren't either. The Twins and Tigers are separated by two games in the standings and one in expected W/L; they're separated in run differential by a single big blowout (currently 11 runs). And I don't see the Tigers or Sox getting any better this year either. There's absolutely no reason not to do everything within reason to win this year (for your sanity, three additional uses of the word "reason" have been omitted from this sentence).

That said, I don't think you should ever engage in a big buying spree unless you (a) feel like you have a great chance to win it all and (b) are pretty sure you're gonna suck for the five years after this anyway (old team, expiring contracts and so on), and neither of those things are in place here.

Moreover, the realistic middle infield options are pretty well gone; I doubt the Mariners are moving Lopez at this point; Jays GM Riccardi has shown himself to be a useless trading partner, so Marco Scutaro is probably out; and my favorite target, Freddy Sanchez, just went to the Giants (and for waaaaaayyyyy too much). If they're going to get significant middle infield help, it's going to come from Mark Grudzielanek (which, as I've said before, isn't nearly as unlikely as people seem to be assuming it is). And for God's sake, Just Say No to Orlando Cabrera.

But what the Twins both (a) need and (b) can feasibly get is another pitcher. With Slowey gone for the year, they could use a starter, and as weird as the Mariners' last couple days have been, I bet Jarrod Washburn is still available. But even he might cost too much for what he's likely to bring them (I sure hope they're asking, though).

My answer, then; be buyers, but for only one thing: a dependable relief pitcher who won't cost any big prospects. Arthur Rhodes. John Grabow. There are probably ten or twelve of these guys who will or should be available, and they're all pretty fungible, because they all have equal amounts of the one quality we're looking for here: that elusive quality of not being Jesse Crain. If a team wants too much for one of these guys, you forget about him and move on to the next guy on your list.

Matt Guerrier's and Jose Mijares' ERAs look awfully good right now, but I just don't trust those numbers (and neither does FIP--both are 1.5 to 2 runs higher than their ERAs). And with the starters struggling the way most of them are, another bullpen arm for depth--regardless of whether he slots into the 6th-7th behind those two or in the 8th in front of them--would really help.

So that's it. Get a relief pitcher. Hope Grudzie gets ready quickly to provide some much needed league-averageness. Don't go crazy just trying to "make a move" and thereby give away anything you're going to miss a bunch later (like, say, Danny Valencia). Catch the Tigers. Leave the White Sox in the dust. Win the Series. 'Kay?

Stuff I'm thinking about

2009-07-29T09:00:00.002-05:00

After the standing ovation the Dome fans gave Mark Buehrle after his bid for a second consecutive perfect game was broken up in the 6th inning last night, I've decided it's time to give up my resentment of Buehrle, all based on the litany of incredibly stupid things he said to or about the Twins five or six years ago. He's a hell of a pitcher, and hardly the most offensive thing on the Sox (Hawk, Guillen, Pierzynski, and Kenny Williams, in that order). From now on, he'll be on my list of likeable White Sox players (Thome and Buehrle, in that order).
And oh, yeah, Buehrle set a major league record last night by taking that perfect game into the 6th inning. With the 17 in a row he retired last night, the 27 in a row from the perfect game, and the final batter of his outing before that, he retired 45 straight batters, shooting past the old record held by his teammate, Bobby Jenks. So, a hearty congrats to Buehrle...if throwing two no-hitters in his career was unlikely for him, 45 batters in a row is like winning the lottery. (And then the Twins won anyway, so all is well.)
Vikings fans: everything's okay again. Hallelujah; the nightmare is (apparently) over.
You probably didn't notice this because he's a Nat, but Josh Willingham hit two grand slams on Monday. Ruth, Gehrig, Mays, Aaron, Griffey, Bonds or McGwire? No. Willingham, Mueller, Tatis, Tabor, Hoiles, Nokes, York, and pitcher Tony Cloninger? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes, among a select few other, similarly surprising names (and F-Rob).
Here's a contemporary article on Cloninger's two slams, which I have to say were quite a bit more unlikely and interesting than Willingham's. And here's the boxscore. Cloninger's career OPS was a very pitcher-like .486, and outside of 1966, his career highs in parts of seven other seasons were two homers and eight RBI, or exactly the total he came up with in those two swings in one game in '66 (he added a ninth RBI in the game). Even better, Cloninger had had a two-homer, five-RBI game less than three weeks earlier.
How is Omar Minaya not history already? This was about the most incompetent display I've ever seen by an executive of anything.
I continue to believe that the Rays are the best team in the East, and in the entire American League. But they're six and a half games behind the Yankees for first, four behind the Red Sox for the wildcard, and have Texas and conceivably even the White Sox or Twins to contend with for that as well. They may be better teams than the Yankees and Red Sox, but I don't think it's likely that they're that much better.
I dislike the wildcard, but the National League wildcard race is shaping up to be the most (and before too long, could end up being pretty much the only) interesting race in the Majors. Fully half the league (Florida, Atlanta, St. Louis, Houston, Chicago, Colorado and San Francisco) is within three games of the wildcard lead, and since two of the divisions are already virtually wrapped up by Philly and LA, those teams will really be fighting for that one spot. It shouldn't exist, but I'll be interested in seeing who gets it anyway.

Rose and the Hall (Sigh.)

2009-07-28T09:00:00.003-05:00

So some journalist reports that some Hall of Famers (whom I'm sure Czar Bud respects very much, but to whom he has no reason or obligation to listen on this issue) have mentioned to Selig that they think Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. That journalist extrapolates, out of thin air, that this means Selig is "seriously considering" reinstating Rose. (Seriously, that's it. Read the article. All he has to go on is that Hank Aaron said something, and that Selig likes Aaron.)

Based on this, whatever it is, this "news" was everywhere, all day. All it takes is a Hall of Fame ceremony and one piece of terribly irresponsible journalism, and Charlie Hustle is back on everybody's mind. That piece of irresponsible journalism has since been predictably and fully refuted, but not before anyone who tuned into Mike and Mike in the Morning, or Sirius/XM Home Plate, or browsed past ESPN or a number of other sports outlets or blogs, had to put up with a full day of uninformed, senseless debate.

So about that senseless debate...let's continue it! Should Pete be reinstated (or just go into the Hall without being reinstated by baseball itself; not debating the two alternatives, since no baseball team will ever hire him, so either one would have essentially the same impact)?

I discovered today that I'm of two minds on this issue. Or two somethings, anyway. So I'm going to do a bit of point-counterpoint, with myself. Deal with it.

POINT: No way, no how does that ass belong in the Hall of Fame.
by: Everything Bill Knows and Believes

MLB Rule 21 says, in part (subpart (d), to be exact):

Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.

This rule hasn't been touched since well before Pete's career started. It was, as most everyone familiar with this debate knows by now, posted on the bulletin board of every clubhouse at every park in which Pete played or managed, and continues to be posted there today. Pete did whatever he did with full knowledge that he was violating this rule, and with full knowledge of the rule's consequences...or if not that, with deliberate and inexcusable ignorance thereof.

And it's true that the Hall of Fame didn't officially adopt the mirror rule until Pete's case came up, but Shoeless Joe never made it in either. And no matter what anyone tells you, while the Hall is a museum, its purpose is to celebrate baseball, not merely chronicle it. Does it really make sense to enshrine someone that baseball has seen fit to banish from the game? If there were an anti-PED policy posted in every clubhouse throughout the 1990s that carried permanent banishment along with it, you can bet I'd be dead set against Bonds, McGwire et al. too.

And it's not just about following the letter of the rule; there's damn good reason for that rule. Even if we knew he never bet against his own team -- and we won't know for sure until Pete decides he needs more money and publishes another book telling us he did do it -- just betting on one's own team creates all kinds of incentives and pressures that have nothing to do with trying one's best to win each individual game. If there's one thing that professional sports should have a no-tolerance policy for, it's gambling on a game the bettor is involved in.

Pete Rose was a great player for 15 seasons. (Unfortunately, he selfishly hung around for six mostly terrible ones afterward to nab that hits record, but his actual performance isn't the issue here.) He also very likely did more than anyone in the last 90 years or so to cheapen the game and threaten its integrity. He did so knowing he might be banned for it, and he got banned for it. Let him stay that way.

COUNTERPOINT: Get this ass off my TV.
by: Bill's Deep Loathing of Pete Rose and the Idiotic Half-Formed Arguments People Try to Make for Him

I agree with everything that EBKAB says above. But at the same time, this issue won't go away until Pete dies (and maybe not even then, since there are still Shoeless Joe apologists out there too). And this issue is really, really freaking annoying. It's miserable, painful almost, to visit anything from a random internet message board to ESPN.com and read arguments about why the Hall just isn't the Hall without Pete and so on. It's even worse to get to this time of the year and see Rose on my TV, shamelessly begging to be let in so he can charge an extra ten bucks an autograph.

So: put an end to it. Let the guy in. It'll be like ripping off a band-aid; the year he goes in, the media coverage will be as unbearable as if Brett Favre retired again, Tiger Woods missed a cut and Terrell Owens said something all on the same day (best if it happened in a year when no actual worthwhile human beings were going into the Hall for Pete to overshadow). But then, you know what? He'll be mostly forgotten. Nobody in the media cares about a "story" anymore once there's no more anticipated action to it; once Rose is in, there's nowhere else for him to go. Story over. I mean, yeah, they'll show a shot or two of him behind the podium at induction ceremonies, and maybe he'll get booed up there or something, which would be news, but it'll barely be a blip. All the contentious debate about Jim Rice ended the moment he was inducted. Nobody really cares what Michael Irvin does anymore. Sure, there are some unique elements about Rose's case, but is there really a reason to expect this to be all that different? He can say whatever he wants to, but nothing else is ever going to happen. He'll just be another guy. Pretty much.

Put him in. Shut him up. Try your best to forget he ever existed.

---------------------------------------------------

So overall, point 1 wins. There's absolutely no way Pete Rose belongs anywhere near the Hall, and it might actually make me sick if and when he goes in. But if that happens, I'll try to take some small comfort in the fact that we'll all be hearing a lot less from Pete from then forward.

Instant replay now, please

2009-07-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

A week ago today (I think I can finally talk about it now), the Twins blew a ten-run lead to fall behind the A's 14-13. They appeared to tie the game in the top of the ninth, when Cuddyer came around from second on a wild pitch and slid in comfortably ahead of the catcher's throw to the pitcher covering the plate. The umpire called Cuddyer out, however, ending the game.

But Cuddyer was safe. There's absolutely no question about it. You could see it live on TV. You could see it, in fact, from any possible angle except the one at which the umpire had chosen to place himself. He was inexcusably out of position, and thus blew the call in an absolutely critical spot. It was terrible, and the umpire, Mike Muchlinski -- apparently a minor league umpire substituting for a regular crew member -- should never see action in the majors again. Still, though, it was an isolated incident, it was a non-regular umpire, and it was publicized enough that we can expect the rest of the umpires around the league to take a lesson from it. Hard to get too worked up about it, in the big picture.

Until yesterday. With the Cubs up 3-1 in the eighth, the Reds are threatening a comeback, with runners on the corners and only one out. On a fly ball to medium center, Edwin Encarnacion tries for the plate. Fukudome makes a great throw, he's called out, and the inning is over.

Except he wasn't out, not by a long shot. This was an even worse call than Muchlinski's; it's not clear if Cubs catcher Koyie Hill ever tagged Encarnacion, but if he did, that didn't happen until at least two thirds of Encarnacion's body had safely crossed the plate. And there was no trickery or other confusing element of the play; it was a close enough play as plays at the plate generally go, but not that close. There's no excuse for getting that one wrong. So instead of it being 3-2 with a runner on second and two outs in the 8th, it's 3-1 going into the bottom of the inning, in which the Cubs score two and effectively put the game away. So it didn't change the outcome of the game as clearly as Muchlinski's screwup did, but it was an even more obvious screwup, and it certainly may have changed the outcome.

Even worse? This time, it wasn't some triple-A schlub. This umpire was Laz Diaz, a real-life Major League umpire who's been at it for over ten years. Replays showed he got into the exact same position Muschlinski had gotten himself into, completely screening himself off from actually viewing the play that it was his job to interpret. So much for learning from the other guy's mistakes.

So it seems to me that at least one, and very likely both, of these two things are true:
(1) Laz Diaz and Mike Muchlinski are incurably incompetent; or
(2) we need instant replays across the board, now.

If it's (1) and not (2), what we need is a league-wide audit of the umpires, and for the ones who can't handle basic things like getting into the proper position on a play at the plate to be made gone (or at least heavily retrained). But why not just implement (2) regardless?

Really, what's the serious argument against instant replay, and how can those considerations possibly mean more than the importance of getting the calls right and avoiding altering the outcomes of games by virtue of terrible calls? This seems unbelievably simple to me. Yeah, you make the game a little longer, you take some (possibly very little, depending on how you implement it) of the humanity out of the game, and so on. But you get the calls right, and you protect the integrity of the games against incompetence like Muchlinski's and Diaz's.

There's a lot of room to argue about how to go about it and how pervasive to make it, how the replay should be triggered, etc., but I don't see the argument that replay should be kept out of the league altogether, or limited to home run calls as it is now. We have the capability to get calls like these right (and have for decades now), so we should get them right. What am I missing?

Most unlikely thing ever?

2009-07-24T09:00:00.003-05:00

Okay, so, I have a particular (and probably, at this late date, irrational) dislike for Mark Buehrle, I dislike the White Sox even more than I do the Yankees, and I don't think Hawk Harrelson should ever get to be happy about anything (though only for as long as he continues to hold a job he's almost uniquely unqualified for).

But even I have to admit that this was pretty special. And if you haven't seen THE CATCH, then...well, then you probably don't like sports very much, or you're on vacation or something, because it's been everywhere. But in either case, watch it anyway.

Matthew Pouliot pointed out one thing about Buehrle's feat that I thought was just extraordinary:

Mark Buehrle has led the AL in [most] hits allowed three times and finished in the top five a total of six times, yet he now has two no-hitters to his credit. . . .

I knew Buehrle gave up kind of a lot of hits, but I hadn't put it together yet. That floored me. Common sense dictates that a likely candidate to throw a no-hitter is one that gets a lot of strikeouts and thus keeps hits down. Buehrle doesn't do that at all and generally has had a pretty poor defense behind him, leading to a lot of hits, most days...and yet he's now gone completely without twice. How rare is it that a contact-and-control pitcher like Buehrle throws two no-hitters?

The answer to that is surprising in weird and wonderful ways (okay, that may be overselling it, but it's interesting). Here are the sixteen pitchers to have thrown two or more no-hitters since 1940 ranked by career hits per nine innings, alongside their strikeouts per nine innings:

Nolan Ryan: 6.6 H/9; 9.5 K/9
Sandy Koufax: 6.8; 9.3
Randy Johnson: 7.3; 10.6
Jim Maloney: 7.4; 7.8
Don Wilson: 7.6; 6.6
Bob Feller: 7.7; 6.1*
Hideo Nomo: 8.1; 8.7
Virgil Trucks: 8.1; 5.1
Jim Bunning: 8.2; 6.8
Warren Spahn: 8.3; 4.4
Steve Busby: 8.5; 5.6
Carl Erskine: 8.6; 5.1
Bill Stoneman: 8.6; 6.8
Ken Holtzman: 8.7; 5.0*
Bob Forsch: 8.9; 3.6
Mark Buehrle: 9.3; 5.3

I think that's everybody. Don't read a lot into the raw strikeout rates; in the 1940s and 50s, Trucks, Spahn, Feller and Erskine all regularly finished in the top 10 in K rate with numbers around (or below) 5, and Feller and Holtzman both saw their rates decline sharply late in their careers.

So, Buehrle obviously isn't the worst pitcher on this list (in fact, I have to admit he's much closer to the best than the worst). Buehrle is the only pitcher ever to do it with a career average of more than a hit per inning, and in context, in an era in which virtually every hitter in the lineup strikes out a hundred or more times a year, you could argue that his 5.3 strikeouts per nine is even less impressive than Bob Forsch's 3.6.

The most impressive thing might be that Bob and his brother Ken Forsch--who had stats roughly equivalent to Bob's--combined for three no-hitters. But anyway, if you're going to pick the most surprising pitcher to throw two no-hitters based on actual pitching talent, you'd probably go with Busby, Stoneman or Forsch. And Busby, Stoneman and Wilson all had pretty short careers, so maybe they're the most unlikely based on the number of opportunities to do it. But if you're looking for the most unlikely guy to do it based on those criteria above -- hits down, strikeouts up -- I think Buehrle has a good case.

So I have no idea what to make of the rest of this, but here is one long and kind of rambling random thought:

Nolan Ryan, of course, threw a record seven no-hitters. He's also the all-time career leader in fewest hits per nine innings. Sandy Koufax threw a second-place four, and is also second all-time in H/9.

Ryan and Koufax would clearly be the most likely to hold the all-time #1 and #2 positions for no-hitters -- to my eyes, anyway -- but how "likely" do you think it actually is that these exact two guys would hold those exact two spots?

I'd bet that if you restarted baseball history from the beginning and checked back 150 years later, there would be a very, very small chance (maybe 0.5% or so, as a totally random and worthless guess?) that the two all-time leaders in H/9 would also be the two all-time leaders in no-hitters pitched. Consider: Sid Fernandez, J.R. Richard, Andy Messersmith, Kerry Wood, Pedro Martinez, Sudden Sam McDowell, Bob Turley, and Dave Boswell are numbers three through ten on the H/9 list among modern starting pitchers, with 2,128 starts among them, and those eight guys combined for a grand total of zero no-hitters. And then consider Bob Forsch and Mark Buehrle and Johnny Vander Meer.

Not that I think Buehrle or Forsch would be likely to throw seven no-hitters in any universe, but they did get two, and Pedro zero, and it strikes me as more likely that any one of dozens of guys who get a lot of strikeouts (but not the most) and consequently are pretty good at suppressing hits (but not the best) would have five to seven really great games than it is that the very most unhittable pitcher ever would hold that record too. Ryan and Koufax having the most no-hitters is like the odds that the next two guys you run into on the street are named Mike and John. Maybe it's more likely than any other combination, but it's still not likely.

So here's what that all comes down to, in my little head: I think that throwing one no-hitter is mostly luck (see Bud Smith, Eric Milton, Jose Jimenez), and that throwing two no-hitters is about 80% luck and 20% having the right sort of skill set, with the balance continuing to shift gradually toward "skill" as you go on from there. It's certainly no coincidence that the three modern guys with more than two no-hitters -- Nolan, Sandy and Bob Feller -- are three of the most unhittable pitchers in history, but how is it that Pedro, Maddux and the Rocket never had even one? Isn't it pretty easy to imagine a world in which Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson threw five or six and Ryan had maybe one or two (with like fifty one-hitters)?

This got really off-track, but I guess there's only so long that I can talk about Mark Buehrle. Conclusion: Buehrle, while I have to admit he's a very good or even great pitcher, is the most unlikely pitcher of the last seventy seasons, based on his skill set and environment, to have pitched two no-hitters. And hey, he's still only thirty, which means (a) his K rate probably only goes down and his hit rate probably only goes up from here, making him look even more out of place on this list; and (b) wouldn't it be amazing if he threw another one sometime in the next ten years or so?

So Who's Garrett Jones?

2009-07-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

I mean, aside from "the one ex-Twin I would've been most surprised to be blogging about three months ago"?

Jones was born in the Chicago-area city of Harvey, Illinois, also the hometown of Hall of Famer Lou Boudreau (though I wonder if a small city twenty-five miles from here would be considered "Chicago-area" in 1917). He was drafted by the Braves in the 14th round of the 1999 draft. He's listed at 6'4", 225 pounds. He's played 1,038 minor league games and hit 158 minor league home runs.

And now he's hitting like Babe Ruth. He played in his 17th game of the season on Wednesday, and hit his ninth home run. Through Wednesday, he's hitting .313/.378/.821. If he had started the Pirates' season this way, he'd be on pace for 86 homers and 48 doubles (and, because he plays for the Pirates, only 104 RBI).

He's getting worshipful newspaper columns.

Garrett Jones is, frankly, a minor league slugger, and not a particularly great one. Or that's what he was through July. His career minor league line was .258/.312/.450. He opened some eyes with a nice year split among high-A and double-A as a 23 year old in 2003, thereby earning himself the reputation among the team and media as the secret hidden power in the minors and holding it for the next three years or so. But it wasn't even that nice (.302/.347/.564, 31 HR, which doesn't project well from a 23 year old who spent half that time in high-A), and he went downhill from there, with two straight years of approximately a .300 OBP in triple-A.

His pre-this-month career major league line was .208/.262/.338, with 2 HR in 84 PA for the Twins in 2007. Yet he kept getting referred to as the potential power the Twins sorely needed, which was very successful in drawing the wrath of Gleeman.

This year, Jones was having a solid year with the Pirates' AAA club, but not that solid: .307/.348/.502. That compares pretty well to his .279/.337/.484 line from 2008, and definitely isn't the kind of thing that sends a signal that a 28 year old is about to break out in a big way.

But break out he has, so far. He homered in four straight games (five total), and before that happened he was slugging .613. Right now, it looks an awful lot like they won't be missing whiny Adam LaRoche at all. But...

Jones, 2009: .313/.378/.821, 9 HR (69 PA)
Chris Shelton, first 17 games of 2006: .406/.457/1.000, 9 HR (70 PA)
Chris Shelton, rest of 2006: .246/.316/.356, 6 HR (342 PA)
Chris Shelton, since: .219/.328/.333, 2 HR (126 PA)

It's great that, per the article linked above, John Russell thinks Jones can keep it up, and the columnist thinks that Jones "looks the part." But in the ways that matter, he looks a lot more like Chris Shelton. In fact, he's two years older than Shelton was in 2006, and Shelton's minor league numbers through that time were significantly better (and he's still raking in the minors, by the way, now for the Tacoma Rainiers; he just can't do it in the bigs).

I hope Jones really did just flip a switch and turn into a star. The Pirates need some good news, and he always struck me as a decent guy. But the odds of that happening were really, really low when the Pirates called him up three weeks ago, and as impressive as his first seventeen games have been, not much has changed on that front. He's still just a 28 year old, middling minor league slugger having a really solid few weeks, and it'll take quite a bit more than that to prove otherwise.

Here's hoping he proves otherwise.

can't tell you more 'cause I told you already

2009-07-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

Taking a badly needed break from baseball after last night's disaster, I walked a handful of blocks down the road to Wrigley Field tonight to see this. Our seats were terribly far away (would've been awfully nice seats for a Cubs game, though, way up but right behind the plate), but it was a lot of fun. Even if it was essentially the same show we saw eight and a half years ago, well, it's a damn good show.

So I've not paid any attention to baseball today (aside from all the chatter in the comments earlier), and I'm not gonna 'til tomorrow. What did I miss?

Pictured: the best team to call Wrigley home in 2009

MVPs and RsBI

2009-07-21T09:00:00.005-05:00

Sorry for a third consecutive Twins-related post (this one doesn't have much to do with the Twins at all, it just starts out that way), but DicknBert really ticked me off the other day.

This was Friday night, the same night that Alexi Casilla made me (and apparently Billy Smith) wish the second base position had never been invented. It was the second game back after the All-Star break, and the "Carsoup.com question of the day," or some similarly silly promotion, was: who are Dick and Bert's picks for MVP through the first half of the season?

Both picked Albert Pujols for the National League MVP, which is the only pick a thinking person can make. But Bert goes first, and his AL MVP pick (stats up to the last date he could've made the pick, through July 16) is:

Jason Bay. .260/.380/.527, 20 HR, 72 RBI, 56 R, 125 OPS+. He's a left fielder, and probably the worst one in the league; UZR says he's already cost the Red Sox 8.1 runs, or essentially 1 win, with his defense alone.

Then it's Dick's turn, and he starts out by indicating he agrees with Bert on his NL pick, but disagrees on the AL. Thank God, I think. Dick's pick:

Torii Hunter: .305/.380/.558, 17 HR, 65 RBI, 56 R, 140 OPS+. He's a center fielder, and has always had a sterling defensive reputation, but the stats have never agreed, and this year UZR has him at -2.1 runs.

So kudos to Dick Bremer, I guess, for picking a much, much more valuable player as his Most Valuable Player than Bert did; Torii is the better hitter, plays the more important position, and has been the much less damaging defender. But it should go without saying that neither of these guys is anywhere near the actual most valuable player in the American League.

And then I started thinking: what do these guys have in common? And then Blyleven listed off all the other guys he could have picked: Miguel Cabrera, Justin Morneau, Mark Teixeira, Evan Longoria...and that's about when it dawned on me.

1. None of these guys is Joe Mauer.
2. On a related note, each of these guys is near the top of the league in runs batted in.

Now, let's be clear about this. He had a huge slump over the weekend that has muddied the waters a bit, but as of July 16, there was only one remotely reasonable selection for AL MVP, and that was Joe Mauer. There's just no debating that. You could've made an argument for somebody else, but you would've been indefensibly wrong. Check it:

.373/.477/.622, 15 HR, 49 RBI, 49 R, approx. 182 OPS+. He wasn't just leading the league in batting average, or on-base percentage, or slugging percentage, or OPS, or OPS+; he was leading the league in all of those things. And he's a catcher, and one of the best in the business; consider that while the average AL LFer (Jason Bay's position) has a .771 OPS and the average AL CFer (Torii's) has a .743, the average AL catcher has just a .712 OPS...and that number is significantly buoyed by Mauer himself. Aside from Pujols, there is nothing in all of baseball right now that even has a case for being anywhere near as valuable as a great defensive catcher with an 1.100 OPS. And, yeah, he missed a month, but he was still leading the league in almost every cumulative stat that attempts to measure player value, too; that's just how much better he was than everybody else.

So there are DicknBert, Mauer's own home team announcers, and not only do they not pick him, they don't even mention him as being in the conversation. Morneau, sure, but not the runaway best player in the league hitting right in front of him (incidentally, the only other player even arguably in the conversation is Ben Zobrist, who also went unmentioned).

So it's really clear to me that all they did was look at the RBI leaders and pick the one they think is having the best year (Bert didn't even do that, he just picked the #1 RBI guy, despite the fact that he's hitting roughly as well as you'd expect a LF to hit, and much worse than you'd expect a terrible defensive LF to hit). That would be fine and all, since it's just two guys on a small-market local broadcast filling air space, except I'm pretty sure that that's what the writers do, too. Here's an ordered list of how the leader in RsBI has fared in the MVP voting the last five seasons (so 10 total contests, AL & NL):

1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3*, 5, 7*, 23

The average of these numbers is 4.8; the median is 2. In the two races with asterisks, there was a very close second-place finisher in the RBI race who finished first or second in MVP voting. The 23 throwing the whole thing off is Vinny Castilla, who had about an average offensive year in the middle of the lineup for the 2004 Rockies...if the Rox had won 94 rather than losing 94, Vinny might have wound up as the worst MVP pick in modern history.

Writers (and most everybody else) have seemingly always been in love with the RBI; I stopped with 2004 because before that, Barry Bonds stepped up, was intentionally walked approximately 800 times a year, and forced them to get away from RBI for a couple years. And of course every now and then they'll pick a middle infielder--like Rollins in 2007 or Pedroia in 2008--but they almost never end up with the right middle infielder. The only way they end up on a non-RBI guy is: when the RBI champ is playing for a bad team (and where your team finishes in the standings should have nothing to do with how valuable you are, but that's a discussion for another day); when other big RBI guys all have something go wrong; and when some little middle infielder is bestowed with the tag of "heart and soul" or "team leader" of some first-place team. In 2008, Morneau was the big RBI guy for the contending team, but he fell flat on his face in September, so he finished "only" second to sparky 'n' scrappy little Dustin Pedroia, whereas in 2006 Morneau did well down the stretch, so he won it. In both years, Joe Mauer was far and away the Twins' MVP, and you could've made a case for him for league MVP too (though Derek Jeter was in the discussion in '06 and Pedroia actually had a decent case in '08).

The thing about it is--and I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but whatever--raw RBI total has almost nothing at all to do with a player's value. It's remarkably easy for a decent hitter with some power who spends 160 games hitting 4th or 5th in a high-scoring lineup to wind up in the top two or three of the league in RBI, and to be an average or worse overall player (see Ryan Howard ca. 2008 and 2009). The work Mauer did in getting on base in front of all those Morneau RBI, and in playing impeccable defense at catcher, was just much, much more valuable to the Twins, in '06 and '08 and again in '09, than the RBI themselves are. And I think people are starting to recognize that, or at least the writers who refuse to recognize it are retiring or dying off and being replaced by the Rob Neyers, Keith Laws and Christina Kahrls of the world. But when the two guys whose entire livelihood is made by watching Mauer do his thing and relaying the wonder of it all to the masses can't get this down, it really makes you realize how far we still have to go.

The Twins Know Casilla Sucks Too

2009-07-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

Hey, I guessed one right! Just took 2 1/2 months longer than I had hoped.

Apparently the team decisionmakers watched Casilla flailing around second base and had the same reaction I did (tastes a lot like what you had for dinner the night before), because today they signed 39 year old Mark Grudzielanek to a minor-league deal.

I expect story-breaker Seth's reaction will be echoed by most Twins fans: essentially, "ew." He's old; he hasn't played in nine or ten months; he's old; he's not Freddy Sanchez; and he's old.

But. It's clear that the Pirates want a lot for Sanchez. Otherwise, they wouldn't be making the big show of making extension offers to him and Jack Wilson (offers both of them rejected, but still). A year ago, Sanchez was a terrible player. At 31, he's reaching the age where most middle infielders start to break down. For all we know, that could happen in August.

Grudzielanek, meanwhile, made it through that barrier age and then some. In every year from 2003 to 2008, Grudzie hit between .290 and .314 and posted an OBP between .331 and .347 (with an outlier .366 in '03) with a SLG between .399 and .432. Combined with surprisingly good defense for his age (saving 3.1 runs over average in 2008 per UZR), that's a damn fine second baseman. Not an All Star or anything, but the kind of solid everyday player that playoff teams have filling all their non-All-Star positions. Not as valuable as Sanchez was in 2006 or has been so far in 2009, but a whole lot better than Sanchez ca. 2008.

Now, some assumptions need to be made. One needs to assume that (a) the Twins did their homework and determined that Grudzie has been working out and is still in playing shape, and (b) if he reports to the complex at Ft. Myers and proves otherwise, the Twins are ready to make another move. Because if one thing on this earth is clear, it's that nothing is happening this year as long as Tolbert or Casilla stays at second base.

But my hopes are relatively high. Grudzielanek has certainly wanted to play, and would've been signed in February or March had it been any other offseason--it would be profoundly stupid of him not to stay in playing shape. I don't think it's crazy to hope that he'll take a week or two in Florida and be ready to be the same .300 hitter with doubles power that he's been for forever. And if that's the case, you've got a player who, over the remainder of the season, is probably about half a win worse than Sanchez, and who in the context of baseball economics has cost virtually nothing. Whatever small piece of the Twins' future that would've been mortgaged to obtain Sanchez, it's a good bet that that piece is worth more than a half-win in 2009.

So, for maybe the first time in his tenure, I'm going to provisionally approve of something Billy Smith has done.

Then again, it's feasible that this is just a tactic for use against the Pirates--if Huntington thinks the Twins are desperate and he has them over a barrel, it would be really, really smart to show him that they have another option besides the two subreplacement stiffs they've been throwing out there. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. Either way, I'm liking this move...and that's a really weird thing for me to say.

Casilla sent down, called back up, still sucks

2009-07-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

Please don't make me watch this dude anymore.

Alexi Casilla came into Friday "hitting" .180/.242/.225 in 31 Major League games this season. That's good for a 28 OPS+. 28% of an average major league hitter. For comparison's sake, the first no-name National League pitcher who popped into my head (and I'll never even be able to guess why) is the Pads' Kevin Correia. Correia, this season, has a 32 OPS+.

Which would be fine if he were the best defensive second baseman in the history of the world (that's a total lie -- there's nothing that can make a 28 OPS+ okay). But the sad truth is, he's also a terrible second baseman. UZR thinks that he's cost them 5 runs out there in his limited work this season, and from watching him, that seems low to me. All in all, FanGraphs has him at just over one win below replacement, which is something like saying if you had put pictures of random AAA second baseman on a board and threw a dart at it, then played the guy that dart hit for 31 games instead of Casilla, the Twins could expect to be a game closer to the Tigers right now. Just gross, all the way around.

Unfortunately, Matt Tolbert isn't noticeably better, with a 37 OPS+ (and -0.9 wins below replacement, meaning that if you'd played Random AAA Guy at 2B every day, they could be two whole games better), and Casilla was tearing it up, relatively speaking, in the minors ( .340/.379/.449). So, contrary to my hopes and expectations, the Alexi Casilla Era began anew last night.

Ian Kinsler reached leading off the Rangers' first, and then attempted to steal second. Mauer uncorks an absolutely perfect throw, coming right up to Casilla on the short hop, and Kinsler's out by a good six feet. Except Casilla doesn't even touch the ball. Just skips on past him; Kinsler ends up on third, and somehow Mauer gets stuck with the error. Later in the game, the Rangers double steal, and Mauer has the guy at second dead to rights...except Casilla doesn't even cover the base.

And that's the thing that gets me. I have a certain tolerance for terrible players, especially if they're 24 years old and were considered decent prospects not so long ago. I also have patience for good players who sometimes make mental mistakes. But if you're a terrible player and you have no idea how to play the game or where you're supposed to be in a given situation? GTHO.

The Twins would be doing both themselves and the Pirates a big favor to go out and make a really solid offer for Freddy Sanchez before the deadline. The Twins get an automatic 3-win-or-so expected improvement over the last 70 games, while the Pirates are spared from their GM's apparent inexplicable desire to sign two 30-something middle infielders to multi-year deals. C'mon Freddy!

Because I have to post something today

2009-07-17T09:28:00.009-05:00

Yesterday, there were two different and, I think, kind of crazy, posts on the Hall of Fame and steroids made by two very different people. (If it hasn't come through yet, I'm in the stop-moralizing-and-put-them-all-in camp, and I'm sure there will be a day to discuss that, but today is not that day.)

First: Jeff Pearlman puts out this one. It's almost a caricature of the typical indignant whine: "But they cheated! What's happening to this country? Think of the children! Integrity! Sportsmanship! Character!" Which is certainly not surprising coming from him, but nonetheless disappointing, since I've been reading his blog for a couple months now and find that I really enjoy almost everything he writes about any topic other than baseball. People just have blind spots, I guess.

Consider this, though: "As soon as they chose to cheat—to violate the law of the United States in an effort to enhance their careers—they deemed themselves ineligible."

One day earlier: Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Come on, man. At least be consistent with the reasons behind your crazy.

Second: Meanwhile, Bill James comes out with his thoughts on the topic, which would be a big deal except that link is subscription-only (though it's only a very-worth-it three bucks a month) and has been read by a grand total of 200 people so far.

It should come as no surprise that I like Bill James. A lot. "Revere" probably isn't too strong of a word. "Worship"? Debatable. I've read unauthorized biographies (okay, biography) of Bill James. I have friends that call me Bill James. There are, finally, a few really extreme numbers people who are starting to resist this notion, since he's kind of softened his stances in the last few years, but I maintain that everything good that happens in baseball these days goes back to Bill James at some level.

But this article? Kind of crazy.

Okay, only one part of it. The first part, where he says that all the steroid users will go into the Hall eventually because "steroids keep you young" and eventually "every citizen will routinely take" steroids (which he then calls "anti-aging pills") "every day." Now, I'm fully prepared to accept that Bill knows a lot more than I do about everything there is to know in the world (the law, my own personal life, you name it), but that seems really out there to me. I'm hoping it's satire and I'm just missing the joke...but I don't get that sense from reading it at all.

Most of the rest of the article is great, actually. James argues that (2) the moral high ground will vanish once someone who used PEDs gets in (and they will, even if it takes someone about whom the news doesn't leak until they're already in); (3) "History is forgiving[, and] statistics endure," something I've been saying since this whole mess started; and (4) old teammates advocating for their PED-using brethren will help get them in (not sure how I feel about this, but it's not crazy).

And fifth, James puts forward the best pro-inclusion argument I know of in the most eloquent way I've ever seen it put. Just trying to take the very best bits while hopefully still respecting Bill's proprietary rights:

It seems to me that, at some point, this becomes an impossible argument to sustain—that all of these players were “cheating”, in a climate in which most everybody was doing the same things, and in which there was either no rule against doing these things or zero enforcement of those rules. If one player is using a corked bat, like Babe Ruth, clearly, he’s cheating. But if 80% of the players are using corked bats and no one is enforcing any rules against it, are they all cheating?
...
It seems to me that, with the passage of time, more people will come to understand that the commissioner’s periodic spasms of self-righteousness do not constitute baseball law. It seems to me that the argument that it is cheating must ultimately collapse under the weight of carrying this great contradiction—that 80% of the players are cheating against the other 20% by violating some “rule” to which they never consented, which was never included in the rule books, and which for which there was no enforcement procedure. History is simply NOT going to see it that way.

I would encourage you to subscribe, to read the whole article, and to soak up everything else on his site as thoroughly as you can. But anyway, I'd have to say that fifth argument absolves him of all the crazy of his first argument. Pretty solid stuff there.

Feel free to discuss/berate/question in the comments.

Oh, Pedro

2009-07-16T09:00:00.002-05:00

The week from hell continues (I have about one of those a month). I'm working on a more interesting post, but it's not happening today.

So how about this?

What is it with great players at the end of their careers having to jump from one unmemorable stint with a wrong-seeming team to another rather than just leaving well enough alone?

Now, when I first heard this, I figured the Phillies must've looked at him really closely and determined that he was 100% healed from whatever was ailing him last year, when he was, um, horrible. So then what's the next thing that happens? They put him on the DL.

Incidentally, does that ever happen? I've never heard of anyone going from free agency straight to the DL before.

Anyway. It's not a big deal in the end; they're paying him $1 million (up to $2.5 with incentives). He might not even make an appearance with the big-league club. But here's the thing: you have to figure that however many appearances he does make with the Phillies, he'll hurt the team approximately that many times. He hasn't been a good pitcher since 2005, and he was awful when healthy last year.

Consider this: he gave up 19 HR (tied for the fourth-highest total in his career) in just 110 innings in 2008. Shea was a bad home run park; Citizens Bank is a good one. In 10 innings in the Phillies' home park last year, Pedro surrendered 4 home runs. Terribly small sample size and all that, but Pedro is 38, hasn't pitched competitively in nearly ten months, and obviously isn't healthy. Say he goes down to AAA for a couple starts and uses guile and the awe of facing Pedro freaking Martinez to go 12 innings and give up 3 runs and strike out 10. If you're a Phillies fan, do you really want him up and facing the Mets at CBP in August? Or do you kind of have to secretly hope he never makes it out of the minors? I know they're feeling pretty desperate, but it would almost be hard to find somebody that wouldn't figure to be better than Pedro right now.

Links of the Week or So

2009-07-15T09:00:00.006-05:00

I had big plans for today's post, but paying work gets in the way again. I did sort of try to watch the big non-exhibition exhibition game while I was doing said work. And I'm told it was a good game, but without being invested in it, I kind of missed all the interesting stuff, I think. I came away from it with the feeling that it was terribly boring. I didn't think at the time that the ball Crawford caught was going to clear the fence, but even if it was, it didn't strike me as that great a catch. A very nice one to be sure, but Crawford, phenomenal outfielder that he is, makes a better catch than that just about every day of the season. MVP material, really? Maybe that's why I came away disappointed--no real standout performances. I would've loved to see Pujols go all hey-I'm-the-best-right-handed-hitter-you've-ever-seen on everybody in his home park. But anyway.

Topical and timely! It's a transcript of what the Sotomayor hearings would be like if they were conducted by the 1977 Royals instead of the SJC. It's...funny. Not terribly coherent, but funny. I can't decide if it would help one's appreciation of it to know more or less about the players involved. And it took me a while to realize he meant "the members of the 1977 Kansas City Royals, but in the present day, armed with their personal experiences of the past 32 years," not just the team straight out of '77 from like a time warp or something. Anyway, it's an experience.
Also timely, at least as of yesterday! wezen-ball's look at best players never to be All-Stars. I'd still say Tim Salmon or Kirk Gibson has to top the list; it depends on where you come down on the whole peak vs. career thing. Shouldn't we weigh peak even more than usual when you're considering stuff like this, since if a guy's had some really big years, it's that much more of a surprise that he wasn't an All-Star? That said, though, Tony Phillips was a really solid player too, and I'm sure he deserved at least a couple nods. One of the few utility players who could really play any of the five or six positions you could put him in, and an ideal leadoff hitter (for what I'm looking for, anyway).
I might've failed in my quest to complete Minerva's poetry challenge last week, but look! This week's? Already done, baby! Funny thing is, we didn't plan that. She was planning to do that type of poem anyway.
More interesting stuff from Tango: Jamie Moyer = Jack Morris. Almost exactly, as of today. And yet, one of those guys is kind of a running "old guy" joke while the other will probably end up in the Hall three or four years from now. I was kind of proud of my snarky comment to that post, I have to admit.
This Dayton Moore quote has finally convinced me that the Royals are trying to be tragically, snobbily, pathetically hilarious. The haughty ineptitude is too perfectly executed to be real. In other news, I don't really understand the pleading rules of our court system, and as an attorney, I don't see why I should have to. Next time I'm asked to file an answer to a complaint, I'm going to scrawl "DINT DO IT" in crayon on the back of an old receipt with my right (non-dominant) hand and mail it to the judge. My bosses would be cool with that, right?

I wish that this were a Royals shirt. Or Dayton Moore himself. But anyway, it's what I think of whenever people are being both incredibly stupid and incredibly self-aggrandizing or condescending:

Baseball Is Poetry, Vol. II

2009-07-14T09:00:00.008-05:00

A favorite college professor of mine posted this wonderful baseball poem of his yesterday, and it put me in the mood to do another one of these.

The Cliff's Notes:
First: on Monday, MLB.com posted a 2009-All-Star-rosters tribute to Ogden Nash's delightful 1949 poem, "Line-up for Yesterday". That was fine and all, but I decided to do my own tribute to Nash, comprised mostly of players from post-'49. I'm sure it's been done before, but I don't care. Loyal readers may detect one slightly satirical entry.
Second: last night's Home Run Derby recapped in Haiku form. I was really hoping to do an entry for Minerva's latest poetry challenge, but I'm afraid I've run out of hours in the day (and night, and most of the next morning). I tried--sonnets are freaking hard. Anyway, away we go:

A Lineup for Nearer Yesterdays
A is for Aaron,
who topped seven-fourteen;
his passion and pride
before and since, unseen.

B is for Barry
and Bonds too, of course;
an unparalleled talent
from sense quite divorced.

C is for Calvin
Edwin Ripken, Jr.;
when it came time to play
he'd never defer.

D is for Doby,
the AL's pioneer;
the stats show he did
more than just persevere.

E is for Eckersley,
mulleted closer sublime;
he'd enter and the other guys'
death knell would chime.

F is for Ford,
Casey Stengel's top gun:
save him for the big games,
consider them won.

G is for Griffey,
or Junior, to you.
Played just the way
we'd all like to do.

H is for Henderson,
base-stealing's top name--
Rickey played 'til they kicked
Rickey out of the game.

I is for Ian Kinsler
'cause there just ain't no I's;
the fine slugger of Texas
defaults into this prize.

J is for Jackie,
bigger than any game.
The world got a little better
because Jackie came.

K is for Koufax,
the ace of L.A.,
turning visiting lineups
into a fine-cut fillet.

L is for Larry
(but you know him as Chipper);
sixteen Hall of Fame years for
one Hall of Fame skipper.

M is for Maddux and Musial,
Mantle and Mays;
as great as great gets,
each worthy of praise.

N is for Niekro,
the lord of the flutter,
winning 20 for teams
often found in the gutter.

O is for Ortiz,
the much-feared Big Papi;
his bat is a force,
tho' his defense is sloppy.

P is for Pujols
and his incomparable power--
he keeps getting better,
almost by the hour.

Q is for Quiz,
the wisecracking sidewinder;
to catch sight of his sinker
you'd need a depth finder.

R is for Ryan,
of the seven no-hitters;
his uncontrolled heater
still gives batters jitters.

S is for Spahn
the tireless lefty,
who'd face fearsome lineups
and butcher them deftly.

T is for Torre:
at the bat and the helm,
Joe had the stuff of
the Hall of Fame's realm.

U is for Utley,
the king of sack two.
Don't try to dissuade him:
he says "boo? Eff you!"

V is for Valenzuela,
enigmatic Fernando;
he killed in '81--
sustain he could not, though.

W is for Williams,
the Thumper, the Kid;
if a hitter on God's Earth
can do it, Ted did.

X is for Eckstein,
the X Factor to you;
hustles into your heart
and onto this list, too.

Y is for Yaz,
the basher of Beantown,
and still last to wear
the three-titled Crown.

Z is for zenith,
the apex, the best;
these stars all stand there--
so the records attest.

Home Run Derby Haiku Recap
Inge comes up empty--
that's just eleven less than
he hit all last year.

Mauer, Al, Pena
in a three-way-tie swing-off.
Yeah, Joe's got no chance.

"Ball Track" trails ball's flight
with a goofy yellow line;
worse than Berman's jokes.

Fielder wins it all,
hits the night's four longest shots;
Big Man Hit Ball Far.

How to Make the Derby Watchable

2009-07-13T09:00:00.001-05:00

Happy second-worst day of the summer, everybody. I don't think there's any question that the Wednesday after the All-Star Game, with no baseball of any kind at all, is worse, but the Home Run Derby and the celebrity softball nonsense don't do a whole lot to save the Monday prior, either.

That said, and despite the title of this post, I will actually watch the Home Run Derby. I'll watch it live or DVR it and flip through it late tonight. But I won't really care, and I won't really pay attention; unless somebody goes all Josh Hamilton on the thing, it'll just be something to have on in the background.

It still seems like a relatively popular thing, by cable TV standards, so I'm sure ESPN is in no hurry to change anything at all. But here are some things that would make me care about it, anyway, in descending order of importance:

1. Just Make Chris Berman Go Away. I don't care how this is done or who replaces him, and I really mean that. This is the one night a year where I think I could deal with the brain-exploding inanity of Joe Morgan or Steve Phillips (and by the way, is it in Morgan's contract that he has to be smugly wrong about every single thing ever? And was Phillips hired only to agree with Morgan's wrongness in an even more smug way? Watching the Cubs/Cards game last night was like being continuously kicked in the teeth for three hours. The only tolerable part was the two or three minutes where the sound went out).

But that's the point--anybody could do the HR Derby job, even Phillips. You give little factoids between swings, and you get a little excited when somebody hits it a really long way. Jon Miller would be fantastic. Just--anybody but Berman. I remember thinking his little nicknames and (then-)30 year old rock music references were funny when I was twelve or so, but to hear them now, I'm pretty well convinced that I was a slower-than-normal twelve year old. I caught parts of a few classic HR Derbies over the weekend, and I think they'd be a lot of fun to re-watch if not for Berman's incessant distracting, unfunny bleating.

2. Get rid of at least one, and preferably two, rounds. The first round is always great fun. Everything worth remembering that has ever happened in the Derby has happened in the first round (may not actually be true, but it seems that way to me). You see all eight guys get to take their swings, and they're all fresh and trying to kill everything. Then you get to the second and third round, and everything kind of dies...some of which I blame on Berman, but it also just seems to run out of steam all around. And it goes on forever.

Everybody thinks, or at least acts like, Hamilton won the Derby in 2008, and I think even real-winner Morneau probably knows Hamilton should have won. He put on an incredible show that was certainly the most entertaining the Derby has ever been, and then he was punished for that by having to go out for two more rounds when he had nothing left because he'd taken something like twenty more swings than anybody else. I'd keep it an eight-man contest, but give everybody ten outs and get out of there. The Derby is supposed to be about power, not endurance. Seems to me the award should go to the guy who can hit a whole bunch of batting-practice home runs rather than the guy who can continue hitting some batting-practice home runs for the longest time.

3. Bring back the Classic Derby Format. As an alternative to #2, I'd like to see them bring back the old 50's TV show format for the second (and final) round. The eight guys compete in the first round in the current, ten-out format, and then the top two slug it out for nine innings. I'd like to see it at least tried, anyway. They might get even more tired, but they do get to take breaks while the other guy swings...so I don't know.

4. Keep sprinkling in "pure hitter" types. I'm very interested to see how Joe Mauer does tonight, and I'm disappointed that Ichiro! reportedly turned their offer down. The most (someone like me might say "only") interesting thing about the NBA Slam Dunk Contest is when the little guy -- Spud Webb, Nate Robinson -- gets up there and does something no one his height should be able to think about doing. Wouldn't it be similarly fascinating to see someone like Ichiro beat the big boys at their own game?

You always hear people say that guys like Cobb, Boggs and Ichiro are/were such great hitters that they could hit for power if they really wanted to, but that they decided to focus on batting average instead. That's always struck me as ridiculous, and if it is true, Ichiro should be fined or something for intentionally choosing not to do everything he can to help his team. But that's a little different from saying that, in a batting practice situation where all they have to try to do is hit 60-MPH fastballs out, Mauer or Ichiro could be really good at it. No doubt some of the time, or most of the time, they'd come up with 0 or 1. I'm half-expecting Mauer to turn in a performance like that tonight. But then what if he hits 12 or 15 in the first round and beats out the likes of Howard and Pujols? That would keep me interested, and I think they ought to try to get one guy like that in there just about every year.

Just a Day: June 10, 2002

2009-07-10T09:00:00.004-05:00

The ol' randomizer came up with a fairly recent one this time. Which is good, because it's already pretty late at night, and maybe I can get away with saying less than I would if I got myself absorbed in 1957 or something. (If you missed the first one of these, here's how it works.)

It's also another day with more than one very long game, which is kind of fun. It's interleague play, which is less fun (to me). In any case, onward!

Jamie Moyer throws a complete-game, 123-pitch shutout, the Mariners thumping the Cardinals 10-0. It's Moyer's second consecutive game allowing no runs (he'd gone 8 in a win over the A's on the 5th), and runs his record to 6-2, 3.52. He had looked done as a 38 year old in 2000, then exploded back to win 20 for the first time in his career in 2001. He'd go on to have another fine season (128 ERA+, though with only 13 wins), then win 21 in 2003 at age 40. He's won 68 games (and counting) since. I know I just talked about him a little while ago, but it's always worth remembering what a wonderfully weird career he's had. Ichiro! has three of his 212 hits, and inexplicable fan favorite Charles Gipson singles, triples, walks and drives in two.
In the same game, 32 year old So Taguchi makes his Major League debut and goes 0-for-3 for the Cards. I believe that Taguchi was the second Japanese position player to hit the Majors after Ichiro!, so it was fitting that he debuted opposite the first. Didn't turn out quite as well.
The Twins beat the Braves, 6-5, in 15 innings. I've just remembered for some reason, as I'm looking this over, that The Common Man was at this game and told me about it at the time; here's hoping he hops on and tells what he remembers (if anything). It was a historic opportunity to watch the great Greg Maddux at the Dome...and he's very much off his game, giving up 5 runs in 7 innings. Luckily, Eric Milton matches him run for run, and the bullpens take over and make quite a show of it. Eventually, in the bottom of the 15th, 37 year old backup catcher Tom Prince singles, then somehow lumbers all the way around on a Cristian Guzman double to win it. That must've been quite a sight (or quite a double). Journeyman reliever Tony "the Vulture" Fiore goes three scoreless for maybe his most honest "win" of the year; that puts him at 4-1, and he ends the season 10-3.
[Edit: here's the recap. Apparently Prince was running on the pitch, but it still seems like an awful lot to ask of the slowest runner on the team. Guzman: "I thought, 'hey, he can make it!'"]
Game of the Day: The Marlins blow out the Royals in 14 innings. Yes, you read that right. The Royals score in the bottom of the 9th to tie it at 6. Florida scores two in the 12th, but so do the Royals. So it's 8-8 in the top of the 14th, and the Royals suddenly go all Royalsy: walk, wild pitch, fielder's choice, wild pitch, double, intentional walk, single, walk, walk, single, fielder's choice, popout. Seven runs come home in all that, and the Marlins waltz away with the 15-8 win. Pitcher Mac Suzuki was out there for better or worse, and thus responsible for all that ugly: four walks (five in his two IP) and two wild pitches. They actually let him into three more games after this one, the last three he'd ever get into (in the Majors, that is--seven years later, his career is still alive and kicking in one of professional baseball's little out-of-the-way places).
[EDIT: recap. Amazingly, not a word about Suzuki's implosion. Derrek Lee homered twice for the second straight game, then hit 4 homers in his next 47 games.]
There was apparently a partial solar eclipse visible in parts of the Pacific side of the world.
According to Wikipedia (and uncredited), "the first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the United Kingdom."
I was attempting to sell cars at a crummy dealership in Washington state. This lasted less than a month. Probably the worst idea ever. What were you doing?

Link of the Week or So: Navel-Gazing Division

2009-07-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Not much to say today.

But I've finally stumbled upon the single most appropriate (and appropriately inexpensive) BBREF player page to be the first one sponsored by this blog! (I mean, who else but me has ever put him on the all-time anything team?)

I haven't been much of a self-promoter re. this blog, especially lately. Part of that is just who I am, and part is that I'm not convinced I'm doing anything worth promoting. As much as I love and appreciate all my current readers, I'm really just sitting here once a day and jotting down whatever pops into my head. I think it's the knowledge that I could definitely do a lot better if I put in (or had) the time to really polish it and think about exactly what it is I want to say. I don't know that I need hundreds of people to read my second-best.

On the other hand, maybe seeking more traffic will inspire me to actually do better somehow. And in either case, I'll definitely do more of these; not only is it about the most targeted marketing possible, but it's a way to support the best website in the world (not that they seem to need all that much support anymore). Let me know if you happen to stumble across any more particularly appropriate, unsponsored pages...

I have no title for this post about hustling and pretentiousness

2009-07-08T09:00:00.006-05:00

This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm pretty unabashedly a stats guy. Stat geek. Stathead. Sabermetrician (though the "-trician" makes it sound like I know something; I prefer "sabermetrically-inclined," which is clunky enough to permit me to sound like the dufus I am). Whatever. It might be a stretch to say I'm "proud" of it, but I certainly don't try to hide it. I enjoy it, a lot.

But there's one problem with stat geeks, and always has been. One annoying tendency that gives us a bad name, that sometimes makes it hard to take us seriously, that gets people angry with cause (as opposed to the kneejerk angry-because-I-don't-want-to-bother-to-understand-what-you're-saying reaction that we get so much more often). I've fallen victim to this tendency as often as just about anybody else, though I've been fighting it pretty hard of late.

That thing is this: someone establishes that some traditional concept or statistic is overrated or overvalued, and we go around beating people over the head with that fact, and eventually we treat the thing as though it has no value. That may be justified in some limited circumstances (I can't actually think of any, not even "saves," really), but usually all it does is distort our view of things and eventually come around to bite us in the rear.

The most obvious example of this, of course, is how about ten or fifteen years ago we started noticing that guys like Neifi Perez and Walt Weiss, while they might for all we knew be great defensive players, were killing their teams' offenses. We noted that the "pitching and defense beats offense" idea was, all else being equal, utter crap. We noted that offense was rather easily measured, quantified and even projected, and defense was not. These are true things and worth noting. But all of that led to the decision, at some point, that defense just wasn't important, at all. At some point I remember Rob Neyer writing that baseball was probably 55% offense, 40% pitching and 5% defense (or something very similar). I don't mean to rip on Rob, then and now my favorite baseball writer, and we were all thinking that...I just happen to remember that he said it in so many words. You'd almost think--and I think some people really did think--that you'd be better with seven slugging 1B-types in the field and lineup than with a squad built to cover the traditional positions.

Well...whoops. Now we can measure defense (pretty well), and we know that it's really important. That a guy can have enormous offensive value, but kill it all with his glove. That Franklin Gutierrez (aptly but unoriginally named "Death to Flying Things" by the guys over at USS Mariner) can be a below-average-hitting outfielder and still be one of the best outfielders in the league, all because of defense. Now we value defense even more than the rest of the world does. But the thing is, it was ridiculous to write off defense in the first place--just an absurdly overblown extension of the seed of a pretty sound idea.

There are lots of other examples, too. We knew that Jim Rice is a terrible choice for the Hall of Fame, and the argument after a while starts to sound like we think Rice was a terrible player; likewise, we knew Bert Blyleven belongs in the Hall, and after a while we're essentially arguing that Blyleven was Walter friggin' Johnson. We knew that stolen bases were being overvalued and that the out given away by a caught stealing or sac bunt was undervalued, so we eventually decide that stealing or bunting is never a good idea.

We're getting better at most of these things. A lot better. But the guys at the Inside the Book blog seem to have found another one that nobody's really talking about: the value of "hustle".

The problem here, I think, is this. We know that scores of players are wildly overrated because they "hustle" (are grinders or gritty or gutty or have heart or whatever), and others are wildly underrated because, in the eyes of most, they don't. Eckstein, Erstad, Podsednik good (dated examples, but you know what I mean); Dunn, Manny and Barry Bonds bad. We know that the good things the latter group does and the bad things the former group does far outweigh whatever value you might reasonably put on hustle and grit. So we've ultimately decided that hustle just doesn't matter.

Well, in the blog post linked above, MGL mentions a couple of plays in an inning where Adam Dunn was, like, militantly non-hustling, and it cost his team. The title of the post is "I'm not one to complain about players not hustling, but...," and I can understand why he puts it that way: most fans or reporters who complain about players not hustling are rooting around for ways to find fault with their team's best player. So and so may hit 50 homers a year, but he didn't run out that one routine grounder to second base, so he sucks.

But when a guy really isn't hustling, at all--I mean, not even trying--I don't think there's anything wrong with getting on him for that. Tom Tango (also of Inside The Book) put it best in a comment to MGL's post:

Ken Dryden, in The Game . . . was talking about how important practice is. That you keep practicing over and over and over at a high tempo so that your body is simply conditioned to do things that way all the time. . . .
To then decide in an actual game to put the brakes on is inexcusable as far as I'm concerned. At the very least, what the heck is wrong with considering these "routine" plays in an actual game identical to the "routine" plays in practice where you must run all out?
And . . . [i]t's not like in hockey where you are skating up and down and side-to-side in 45 second shifts and you are panting by the time you get back to the bench. It's a four second anerobic exercise. Adam Dunn gets paid 10MM to come to swing (or consider swinging) the bat 3000 times, to run 500 times, and to field (or back up a play) 500 times. That's $2500 for every "effort" he puts out on the field. If he thinks that one time he doesn't want to put [in] the effort, then he should give back the 2500$.

Maybe it sounds like I'm letting TangoTiger make my point for me here, and maybe I sort of am, to the extent that the point is "hustle matters." But the larger point here, I think, is that this is just one example of an endemic problem with sabermetric folk (one that was a lot worse 10 years ago, but still persists). Just like "Jim Rice does not belong in the Hall" ≠ "Jim Rice sucks," "hustle doesn't make David Eckstein a good player" ≠ "hustle doesn't matter."

I'm quite sure that we (and by that I totally mean "I") would jump all over Bill Conlin or Mike Celizic if we caught them engaging in that kind of phony logic. But we seem to think it's okay for us...and I think it all comes from pretentiousness. We start with some little thing we're very sure is right (something that is, in fact, right), and it leads to this thinking like we're perfectly right about everything on this topic, while the other side is perfectly wrong. I guess that's sort of a fact of life -- isn't politics more or less the same thing? -- but it's been getting better among the sabermetric community lately, and it'll be really nice if that trend continues.

Your National League All-Stars?!

2009-07-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

Oh, boy, what a day. Brutally kicked around (figuratively) in two small towns I've never heard of. Let's talk some baseball!

This doesn't happen all that often, but I have to disagree with tHeMARksMiTh: Charlie Manuel's NL pitchers and reserves are at least a little better than Maddon's AL ones. There's no Curtis Granderson, Tim Wakefield or Brian Fuentes here. Everyone either (a) is a huge star or (b) is putting up numbers that look like they could be All-Star numbers, in a vacuum, without considering their competition. I hate that Manuel, too, has taken five closers, but at least they've all pitched 30 or so really good innings; there's no Fuentes here.

But still.

All-Star: Jason Marquis, Colorado Rockies: 10-5, 3.87.
Not: Javier Vazquez, Atlanta Braves: 5-7, 3.05.
Marquis is having a really good first half. Probably fluky, but good. Still, he's probably the second-best pitcher on his own team after Ubaldo Jimenez, and Vazquez dances circles around both of them, but can't get anybody to score for him. Proving yet again that "All-Star pitcher" correlates more closely with "okay pitcher with great run support" than with any other label you might slap on there.

All-Star: Orlando Hudson, Los Angeles Dodgers: .288/.355/.416.
Not: Pablo Sandoval, San Francisco Giants: .333/.388/.566.
Hudson is okay, and (like Mike Young in the AL) has a reputation for being much better than okay. UZR thinks O-Dawg stopped living up to his defensive reputation years ago and now is a moderate liability (which is still about a 1000% improvement over Jeff Kent). He's a decent-hitting 2B who can't really field the position. Sandoval, meanwhile, is absolutely destroying the ball, and is shocking everyone by being at least passable at both first base and third base. The current NL team has two reserve 2B and one reserve 3B; no reason that couldn't be reversed. And most important of all, Sandoval is really fun to watch. Like a young Guerrero, he swings at everything and usually hits it. The casual non-Giants fan would really like to see this guy play. Hudson, meanwhile, while not nearly the WTF pick Fuentes or Wakefield were, is just another quickly fading 30+ second baseman. That pick just makes no sense at all.

All-Star: Brad Hawpe, Colorado Rockies: .327/.401/.589.
Not: Matt Kemp, Dodgers: .305/.369/.474.
It's hard to fault a manager for taking a guy hitting like Hawpe is, but Kemp is a centerfielder who is playing the position very well (somewhat uncharacteristically, but still), while Hawpe is a corner outfielder who has been absolutely dreadful, giving away on defense nearly everything he takes on offense. Kemp has also stolen 19 bases in 23 attempts; Hawpe is a stump. Maybe you can't cut a guy hitting like Hawpe is, but you absolutely have to make room for Kemp on the team. Maybe...we don't need five closers?

Your American League All-Stars?!

2009-07-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Took a whole weekend off, which was a first, and now I'm sitting in an Indiana hotel room on business and needing to go to bed. I'll make this quick.

From what I've seen of him, Joe Maddon is a pretty good manager. Certainly not great, and not nearly the tactical genius that his Professor Frink eyeglasses would suggest, but pretty solid. But give him half of baseball to work with and let him pick a roster out of it? Apparently not such a good idea.

The 2009 AL All-Star pitchers-and-reserves roster is...well, not terrible. But really, it shouldn't be all that hard to make it better than "not terrible." And Joe didn't.

And here's the amazing thing--the fans actually did a pretty good job this year. I mean, no, there's no way Josh Hamilton should have been elected even if he had managed to get into more than a handful of games in the first half, and Jason Bay's glove should've played him right out of consideration (and sometimes it's really hard to see defensive atrociousness, but there were a couple wallbangers in the Mariners-Sox game a couple days ago, and let me tell you--that guy has no idea how to play that Monster). Dustin Pedroia's play this year certainly doesn't justify taking him over Hill or Kinsler, but I'm willing to give the 2008 MVP credit for last year's second half. So all in all, not a bad starting eight.

But then Joe got his hands on it, and, well, have a look:

All-Star: Tim Wakefield, Boston Red Sox. 10-3, 4.30 ERA
Not: Dallas Braden, Oakland A's. 6-7, 3.13
Tim Wakefield is a fine pitcher having an awfully impressive year for a dude who'll turn 43 before the season is over. There is nothing a pitcher can do that the seventeen-years-younger Dallas Braden hasn't done better than Wakefield has this season, except play for a team that scores a bunch of runs.

All-Star: Brian Fuentes, Los Anaheim Angels. 23 Sv, 3.49, 28.1 IP
Not: David Aardsma, Seattle Mariners. 17 Sv, 1.41, 38.1 IP
Fuentes is leading the AL in "saves." You know how I feel about closers, and every year, there's at least one more or less average pitcher who gets into the game by racking up a bunch of saves (in 2008, if memory serves, we had a twofer, with George Sherrill in the AL and Brian Wilson in the NL). That's not entirely fair to Fuentes; his ERA is about average for a reliever, but his FIP is considerably better, at 3.11. Aardsma's, though, is 2.60, and in 10 more innings. I don't think 5 relief pitchers is really necessary to begin with (I think Nathan and Rivera would pretty well cover it), but if you've got to take a closer, it's got to be Aardsma. Fuentes is having a very Lee Smith-like year, with nearly as many save chances (26) as innings pitched (28 1/3).
You do have to credit Maddon, though, for picking Andrew Bailey, a very good reliever for Oakland, despite his having only 8 "saves." But Aardsma would've been an even better choice, and Braden would've been a better choice as Oakland's lone rep.

All-Star: Curtis Granderson, Detroit Tigers. .255/.339/.468 (108 OPS+).
Not: Nelson Cruz, Texas Rangers, .272/.334/.543 (126 OPS+) or Miguel Cabrera, Tigers, .324/.387/.544 (140 OPS+), among many others
This was, in my opinion, easily Maddon's worst selection. Granderson is having a weird year, hitting for much more home run power and with more patience than ever before but with almost no singles, doubles, or triples, so his overall value is way down. And his defense has slipped a bit, too, to where he's approximately an average center fielder. You don't need a Tiger, with Verlander and Jackson both (deservedly) on the staff. Cabrera belongs, but that gives you four 1Bs in a no-DH game. Nelson Cruz has been overlooked somehow, but his power and very good defense make him a much better pick than Granderson. Franklin Gutierrez (who had no chance because all his value is in his defense) would have also been a much better selection, among a few others.

All-Star: Michael Young .314/.370/.497 (126 OPS+)
Not:Brandon Inge, Detroit Tigers, .269/.363/.505 (124 OPS+)
Picking a Tiger over a Ranger in the outfield may have been Maddon's worst selection, but picking a Ranger over a Tiger at third base was pretty clearly Maddon's worst omission. Brandon Inge, unlikely as it may be, has been one of the best players in the league this year. He should not have to wait for the silly final vote to get onto this team. And that vote will probably be won by Ian Kinsler anyway (another player more deserving than any of these guys, frankly), considering how Rangers fans seemed to stuff the ballot box in the original voting.
Young, who has always been pretty badly overrated by the batting-average-and-hustle set, is having a nice comeback year with the bat, but he was an atrocious defender at short whose move to third has not made him any less atrocious. I can understand Maddon's selection of Young in a vacuum, but if you're only going to take one 3B to backup Longoria, Inge is that guy.

There are other highly questionable calls, too, but those are the ones that jump out at me.

Gotta be honest with you, though -- I haven't even looked at the NL roster yet. I guess I should give Joe a break until I see what Charlie Manuel hath wrought...

Hey...are you smelling utter failure right now? 'Cause I am.

2009-07-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

Oh, never mind, it must just be these guys!!
I don't really want to analyze what's going wrong, because I had a really long day at work today, and I'm not really up for depressing myself. Their defense is terrible. Their hitters not named Dunn, Johnson, Zimmerman and Guzman are terrible. Their pitching is...well, it's really not fair to grade their pitching when they've got that defense to contend with.

Just for fun, through 76 games:

Team	Year	W	L	Pct.	RDiff
Nationals	2009	22	54	.289	-104
Tigers	2003	18	58	.237	-156
Mets	1962	21	55	.276	-146

So, I guess the good news is that they're way, way up on those other two in run differential, which makes their expected(/Pythagorean) record seven games better than their actual record. But when the good news is that you're playing like a .382 team (which would still make them the worst team in baseball)...well. And of course the bad news is that their real record is one game ahead of the 1962 Mets.

I was going to go on and talk about the Milledge-for-Morgan trade and everything, but that's been talked to death and I don't really have anything to add except that I pretty much think the opposite of this.

The Nationals are really, really terrible. And they might actually keep getting worse; the Phillies and Mets figure to play better than they are now, and the Nats might have some pieces to sell off. And we might be hearing a lot more about the '03 Tigers and '62 Mets as this loooooooooong summer in the Capitol wears on.

Just a Day: May 23, 19091981

2009-07-02T09:00:00.003-05:00

So, last week was my wedding anniversary, and I took the opportunity to write about all the stuff that happened on that particular day. It was fun! So I thought that today, I'd look at some other random day in baseball history. I went to this site and had it pull random numbers: between 4 and 10 for the month; between 1 and [30 or 31] for the day; and between 1953 and 2008 for the year. Here's what I got this time:

May 23, 1981.

(Okay, so I originally entered 1901 to 2008, and it came up with 1909. Which would be great...except that as you probably know, Retrosheet and Baseball Reference only have boxes from 1953 on [and from 1920-1930, which I'll have to wade into sometime], and without that it's really hard to come up with enough to say unless you happen to fall on a really momentous day, which isn't the point. So 1981 it is!)

Anyway, on Saturday, May 23, 1981...

The Dodgers beat the Reds, 9-6. Rookie sensation Fernando Valenzuela (hey, check out the sponsor of that page!) has his second poor-ish start in a row after going 8-0 with 8 CG and an 0.50 ERA in the first 8 starts of his career. He still goes 8 innings, but gives up five runs, four earned, with six walks. Another notable rookie, Dave Stewart, bails him out by striking out two in a perfect ninth, and the Dodgers score four in the top of the tenth to give Stew the win. Ron "The Penguin" Cey belts his ninth home run of the young season, but he's only got four more in him in this injury- and strike-shortened year. The win put the Dodgers at a MLB-best 29-11 (.725), already 6.5 games up on the NL West. Quite similar to 2009, when the Dodgers were 30-14 (.682) on May 23 and 8.5 games up on the (smaller and weaker) West.

The 1981 squad would go on to finish first in the West for the first half, but play 27-26 ball and finish 4th in the second half, giving them a second-best-in-the-West record that would have kept them out of the postseason in any other year in history. The Reds, meanwhile, finished with the best overall record (66-42, .611) but didn't win either half. The Dodgers won the World Series, while the division-best Reds watched the entire playoff run from their couches. Weird, weird year.
Gene Green passed away at just 47. He had one very solid year with the bat, in 1961, while with the hundred-loss Senators (though he did lead the league in GIDP). Oddly, I can't find any indication anywhere of how it happened that he died so young.
Mike Schmidt hit his 14th home run of the season in the Phillies' 6-4 comeback win over the Pirates. That put him on pace for 58, assuming a 162-game season. He finished the year with 31 in just 107 team games, a 47-HR 162G pace. He ended the short season leading the national league in HR, OBP, SLG, R, RBI, total bases, extra-base hits, walks, times on base, and OPS+ (199). And the career .267 hitter even finished fourth in the league in batting average at .316, the only time in his career he went over .293. Those extra 55 games might have given him a real chance at the majors' only triple crown since 1967. Or (certainly more likely) he might have fallen back toward his career norms. Just too bad we didn't get a chance to find out.
This was a big day for multiple-extra-inning games. The Rangers manage just seven hits in 12 innings, but also draw ten walks in beating the Mariners 6-4. Bill Stein pinch-hits in the 9th and ends up the star, going 2-for-3 with 3 RBI. The Rangers had been down 4-0 before scoring four in the ninth to tie, and added two in the twelfth to win.
That wasn't even the longest game of the day...and neither was this one, though it came just one out shy. Rickey Henderson's sacrifice fly plates Mitchell Page, and the Athletics beat the Blue Jays 3-2 in 15 innings. Henderson, in his second of four consecutive years leading the league in both stolen bases and caught stealing, goes 3-for-6, but is caught stealing for the 10th time after leading off the first with a single. Interestingly, this game featured a matchup of the very best and the fourth-worst leadoff hitters of all time: Rickey for the A's, Alfredo Griffin for the Jays. Thankfully, the not-insane team won this one. Future A's manager Ken Macha came in on defense in the 9th and went 3-for-3 against his future employer.
This was the longest game of the day -- in outs, though almost certainly not in minutes. The Royals beat the Twins in 15 innings, 1-0. Paul Splittorff goes 11 shutout innings (six hits, two walks, two Ks...no pitch counts available, sadly), and Roger Erickson matches him for 9.1 of those innings (seven hits, one walk, seven Ks). It ends when Willie Wilson singles home pinch runner Danny Garcia, who played 12 games in '81 and was never heard from again.

What I love about this, based on the inadequate sample of the two I've done so far, is that when I first start looking at the chosen day, it looks kind of boring and uninspiring, but as I dig into it, there's always something. Like the Dodgers-Reds, and the three games that totaled 42 innings. I hope you enjoyed reading it some tiny percentage of as much as I enjoyed researching it...

Well, hell's bells.

2009-07-01T06:00:00.003-05:00

I've always been of the opinion that Mo Rivera should be the last reliever put into the Hall until someone comes and blows ol' Mo Rivera's records away. My Hall bullpen would hold Mo and Wilhelm, and then...um...well. Maybe Gossage? Maybe Eck (who's only half a reliever anyway)? Those two aren't selections that actually make me angry (as some do, sad to say), but I can't get too excited to have them, either.

But Rollie Fingers? Closer than I once thought, but no. Lee Smith? Fun character, good relief pitcher, but not close. Bruce Sutter? I'm going to assume he's in as some sort of weird inside joke.

Trevor Hoffman?

...Well. I've generally thought not, but everybody nowadays seems to disagree. He is the all-time "saves" leader and all, and still going strong (relatively speaking) at age 41. But here's the thing -- or one of at least two things -- and not just with Hoffman, but with all modern relievers: from 1994-2008 (his entire Padre career, essentially), and excluding his injury-wrecked 2003, Hoffman averaged 64 innings a year. Hoffman figured into a little over 4% of the team's innings over that entire period. He faced an average of 253 batters a season, or about the number of plate appearances you'd expect out of a right-handed platoon player and pinch hitter. Of course, the overwhelming majority of those batters faced came in games that were at least relatively close and in the ninth inning...but you could say the same thing for a lot of pinch-hitters, right? To me it's a sign of how useless the save statistic is that guys like Hoffman and Lee Smith could rack up more than 40 of them while barely clearing 40 innings pitched.

Well, at least that's what I thought about Hoffman until I read this by Aaron Gleeman today, comparing the only two members of the 500-saves club. Gleeman sure thinks Hoffman is a Hall of Famer, and I'm usually inclined to agree with Gleeman. And those numbers make it look awful close between Hoffman and Rivera, don't they? For one thing, I was shocked -- shocked! -- that Hoffman has a better career K rate than Mo does. That changeup is one helluva pitch. And they don't even look all that far off in ERA, as Gleeman sets it up. And of course Hoffman has all those extra saves (though Mo makes up a bunch of them with his postseason stats), and so forth.

But then you look closer. Mo has averaged 74 innings a year to Hoffman's 64; still criminally underused, but not to nearly the same degree. I remember reading that Rivera has more saves of four outs or more than any other pitcher in the last couple decades. That really counts for something. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if Hoffman were ever asked to pitch in the 8th inning, he'd forget where he was and/or which direction the plate was in.

And then there's that ERA difference. As I said, Gleeman makes it look close...but it's not. Pointing out, as Gleeman does, that Hoffman (2.76) and Rivera (2.30!!) have the two lowest ERAs since 1969 is a bit like pointing out that Tommie and Hank have the two best career home run totals in the Aaron family.

Moreover, Hoffman has pitched mostly in pitcher's parks (the Murph wasn't as extreme as Petco, but was still very pitcher-friendly), and in the league in which they still let the pitchers bat for some silly reason. Hoffman wasn't facing many pitchers, of course, but he was facing pinch-hitters for pitchers, who are typically weaker hitters than most of the starting 8 (and, still somehow a little-known fact: all pinch hitters face an automatic penalty to their hitting stats. Nobody pinch-hits nearly as well as he hits as a starter). Rivera, at 197, is the all-time leader in ERA+ (min. 1000 IP); Hoffman, at 146, is 5th, but a distant fifth.

And this gets to the other thing that bothers me about putting relievers in the Hall: relief pitchers just aren't as good as starting pitchers. Rivera wasn't all that young (25) when he posted a 5.51 ERA as a rookie swing man, starting 10 games. Goose tried it out as a starter once; his ERA doubled from his prior year in the pen, and then halved again when he went sheepishly back to the bullpen the next season. Eckersley was a good enough starter, but nowhere near a Hall of Famer in that role. Rick Aguilera was a barely passable #4 or 5 starter, but a dominant closer. Joe Nathan was, like Mo, a terrible SP as a new big-leaguer at age 25.

And on and on. Whatever they tell you about the pressures of the ninth inning and all that, it's just easier to be a good closer (that is, to throw one inning every time out) than to be a good starter (and throw 6-9 of them). Much easier. Only Hoyt Wilhelm could really swing it in the harder role, leading the league in ERA in his one year as a mostly-full-time starter. But he was a knuckleballer, so stamina really wasn't ever an issue, and I do believe that Wilhelm was a truly great pitcher no matter how you used him.

Basically, putting a closer in the Hall of Fame seems to me a little like putting a karaoke champion on the radio or hiring a great Strat-o-Matic player to manage the Dodgers -- they look great in their proper role, but put them with the big boys and they just don't fit in at all. A great closer typically becomes a great closer rather than a middling starter, simply because he's the very best of the not-good-enough. And that's not what I think the Hall is for.

So ultimately, I've had to think about it a lot harder, but I'm back to the place I started. If you're going to make the Hall as a 70-innings-a-season pitcher (or fewer, in Hoffman's case), you'd better be something more than just great. You'd better be damned close to the best who has ever done it. You'd better be a game-changing sort of presence. It would help if you popularized a signature pitch that changed the game in some small way. And you'd better have a certain something else, too. An attitude or a presence or a really compelling character -- something.

I hate to admit it (he is a Yankee and all), and I still think he often gets wildly overrated, but Mariano Rivera absolutely has all those things, and is easily the best pure relief pitcher who has ever played the game. And I have absolutely no hesitation about saying he's a Hall of Famer -- even if Sutter and Fingers and Eck and Goose weren't in, Rivera would have to be the one guy you make an exception for. Even with pitching 5% of his team's innings, I'm comfortable saying he's one of the all-time greats, and we've been lucky to be around to see him do his thing.

Hoffman, though? Not so much. He's been a great closer, and for a very long time. He'll go into the Hall, and it won't bother me even a little; a lot of worse selections have been made (a couple of them in the paragraph just above). For me, though, I just don't see how he rises above the "best of the not good enough to start" bump. He's about as good as Dan Quisenberry and John Franco, the difference being that he was used in a more extreme, get-the-save-or-don't-pitch-at-all way than anyone in history (except late-career Lee Smith, who became almost a caricature of the modern closer). I'm just not seeing it.

Of course, the way he's going now, maybe he'll keep dominating with his 82-MPH stuff until he's 47 and convert even me...

Running wild?

2009-06-30T06:00:00.002-05:00

I had big hopes for today (something about Mo Rivera and closers, most likely), but work has dashed them. I don't even really have time to be writing this.

But here's your ten-cent thought for the day: in 2008, the average MLB team stole 93 bases. In 2009, the Rays have already stolen 121 (just 31 shy of their 2008 MLB-leading total), and the average team is on pace to steal 105. That's about an 11% increase, and they're doing it more successfully (75% in 2009, 73% in 2008).

So it's definitely a difference, but not a huge, game-changing sort of difference just yet. Last year's MLB individual leader in steals (Willy Taveras) had 36 through June 29; this year, Carl Crawford has 40. Three stole 50 and four more 40 last year; this year, we're on pace to see five steal fifty, but only two or three more look like good bets to get to 40. And so on.

So it's true what they say, speed is coming back into the game and all that. But it's coming back in slowly, if you will. At a snail's pace.

It's not the kind of difference you really observe from a single day at the ballpark. I just feel like I've heard it talked about to a degree that goes well beyond what an 11% difference justifies.

Happy Birthday...

2009-06-29T06:00:00.003-05:00

Harmon Killebrew!

Killer turns 73 today, and still looks like he could hit a baseball about 500 feet.

I never saw Killebrew play, but I grew up hearing stories, and I've gotten to meet him in person several times at fanfest types of things. He's always come off as one of the true good guys. Maybe too good and soft-spoken for his own good; if he'd acted out a little, maybe more people would've remembered him.

Killebrew has the second-lowest batting average of any position player in the Hall of Fame (excluding those inducted as managers), at .256, three points ahead of Ray Schalk (who (a) was a catcher and (b) has no business in the Hall). He has the fifth-most HR, but he's not in the top 20 in OBP, SLG, R or RBI. That's the sixties for you; neutralized by baseball-reference to an environment where the average team scores 770 runs per season (which is about where the current AL is), his line is a much more HOF-like .270/.393/.535, and with 620 rather than 573 HR.

Five Twins have ever led the league (or tied for the lead) in home runs, and Harmon Killebrew is all five of them. Two Senators ever led the AL in home runs, and Killer was one of them, too...as a 23 year old in 1959, in his first full season, and really his only full season with the Senators (he only got into 124 games in 1960, and they were in Minneapolis the following April).

Most people will tell you that Killebrew was the model for the batter in the MLB logo. And it looks a lot like Killebrew's stance and profile -- in particular, the figure holds his hands low and close to his shoulder as the pitch comes in, kind of a Killebrew trademark. But MLB and the logo's creator have flatly denied that the logo was based on Killer or on anyone else in particular.

Killebrew made appearances with the Senators as early as age 17. This was because his large contract for the time (for a whopping $50,000) triggered baseball's short-lived Bonus Rule: for a few periods from 1947 until the amateur draft kicked in in 1965, amateurs who signed for more than a certain amount (at least initially, $4,000) had to be kept on the 40-man roster for two full seasons. From his age-18 season through his age-22 season, Killebrew played 113 games in the majors and posted an 85 OPS+.

Killebrew, helped to a large extent by his magnificent name, has probably the best-looking autograph I've ever seen.

Know how people complained that the HR Derby Era (posthumously renamed the steroid era) was going to change everything, because 500 HR always meant automatic induction to the Hall, and now it wouldn't anymore? Well, consider that Killebrew retired relatively recently (1975), and at that time, his 573 homers put him second all-time to Babe Ruth (and thus first among all right-handed hitters) in the history of the American League...and it still took him four years of eligibility to get in. Nothing about how it "used to be" is ever as simple as people think.

Links of the Week or So

2009-06-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

I can't find a whole lot worth talking about right now, so how about reading stuff from people who can?

Frequent commenter tHeMARksMiTh always does great work and has had, I think, a particularly great week, but I thought his writeup on the career of Hank Greenberg was the highlight.
Non-Baseball Division: Bethany over at one of my favorite sites in the whole series of tubes, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, finally got around to posting something I had sent her way back sometime before this blog even began. Turns out it had been posted on that site before, but that's hardly my problem. I thought this submission was a better one anyway, but that one didn't make the cut (or just skipped her attention) somehow. Oh well.
Ron Rollins wrote about agents in Japanese baseball, and pretty much everything there is something really interesting that I didn't know. You might guess from my Strasburg rant that I'm not really behind the idea that baseball agents are "the devil" (well, maybe Boras), but it's an interesting topic.
Obligatory Dave Cameron Article Division: this week, Dave points out that Juan Pierre hasn't been doing such a good Manny impression lately. I think that what I like about Cameron's stuff (when I'm not disagreeing with him completely, which has been happening more often lately) is that he's really good at pointing out flaws in the common wisdom that, once he's pointed them out, seem like the kind of things we all should have noticed already. I mean, you knew he wasn't going to keep hitting .400, but why haven't we already heard that he's been that bad for the last month or so?
Know how the other day I wondered how often one starting pitcher in a game was twice the age of the other? Well, lar at wezen-ball went to the trouble of figuring it out.
Joe Mauer has, inevitably, slowed down; he's stopped homering, which is the worrisome part, but his batting average has also dropped below .400. David Pinto says his odds of hitting .400 (as of Saturday morning, I suppose) are 1 in 275 or 1 in 1235, depending on...something. I honestly don't understand it at all. But it's Mauer, so it's interesting.
This seriously stretches the definition of "week or so," but the most recent post on Recondite Baseball has info on one of my favorite topics, the Three True Outcomes. No surprise that Dunn shows up at the top of the list, though he's keeping the spot warm for when Jack Cust hits 3000 PA. I haven't talked about Recondite Baseball, and I don't even remember how I came across it, but the one or two posts Theron makes over there a month are always worth reading.

That's about all I've got I'm sure there'll be something to say tomorrow.

A Tale of Two Aces

2009-06-26T06:00:00.005-05:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and all that crap.

Sometimes, the final score of a game not only doesn't tell the whole story, it totally misses the whole point of that story. And sometimes, when the danged score totally drops the ball like that, GameDay's got its back.

Chris Carpenter was, as he's been whenever healthy since first setting foot in St. Louis in 2004, outstanding yesterday. After hitting Alex Cora to start the game, Carpenter retired the next nine hitters, and made it look easy. If you flip through the GameDay link, you'll see nothing but 92-MPH sinking fastballs at the knees; sharp sliders exactly hitting the low-outside corner against RH hitters or riding in on the hands of LH hitters; and two-strike curveballs suddenly diving into the dirt. For those first three innings, it was like a video game; every pitch he threw (except that first time to Cora) went exactly where you would assume he would've wanted it in that situation. He turned human after that, but only a little, still hitting his spots with all his pitches with alarming regularity.

On the other hand, Carp's opponent yesterday was none other than probably the best pitcher of the 'aughts (I figure it's got to be him or Randy Johnson, right?), Johan Santana. And what is wrong with that guy? Through the first two innings, Santana threw 17 strikes and 16 balls. He wasn't striking out anybody. His GameDay log shows fastballs left over the middle of the plate, and his usually-awesome changeup (which should generally be down in the zone) left well up and away to most hitters. He was all over the place, especially early. He loaded the bases in the second with Albert Pujols coming up, and gave him a 93-MPH fastball right in Albert's wheelhouse that Pujols came just a few feet short of converting into four runs.

The story is also told by how the pitchers fared against each other: in his first two at-bats, Carpenter singled on the first pitch and then drew a walk. Santana struck out on three pitches and then popped out to very shallow right.

For the day, Carpenter pitched 7 innings; threw only 82 pitches (he was pulled for a pinch hitter; just another persuasive argument in favor of the DH rule), but 64 of them (78%) for strikes; allowed four hits, three singles and a double; and walked none while striking out five. He did hit the one batter.

Santana also threw 7 innings, but required 110 pitches, 74 of them strikes (67%, a huge improvement given his 50/50 start). He allowed 7 hits, one of them a double. He walked three and struck out only three.

But here's the catch: all four of the hits Carpenter allowed came in the fourth inning. They led to three runs. Ignore that little HBP to lead off the game, and Carpenter authored six perfect innings and one clunker (though it's not as though he was hit terribly hard even in that inning). Meanwhile, what with the Pujols near-grand slam and all, Santana stranded eight runners on base, permitting only two runs. The Mets bullpen held on (barely, with some nerve-racking wildness by K-Rod), giving Santana the "win" and Carpenter the "loss."

And today, you'll probably read about how Santana might be back on track after picking up the win in St. Louis. But that just doesn't tell the story of this game at all. These are two guys who are going in opposite directions.

In Santana's last 7 starts before yesterday, he had gone 43 innings, given up 10 HR and posted a 5.82 ERA, striking out 37 and walking 14; that's 3 fewer innings, 1 more walk, 23 fewer strikeouts and 8 more HR than he put up over his first seven starts. This one will make his ERA over that stretch look a lot better, and it's nice that he managed not to allow a HR for the first time in eight appearances...but there's not a lot to feel hopeful about here. This isn't the Santana of those first seven starts, and you have to start wondering if something is a little wrong with the guy.

Meanwhile, in his entire nine-start, injury-shortened season, Carpenter has been consistently fantastic, with a 1.53 ERA, 43 strikeouts against just 9 walks, and just 3 HR in 58 2/3 innings. Yesterday, he took his second "loss" in his last three starts, and allowed exactly three earned runs for the third time in his last four. But make no mistake: Carpenter has shown conclusively that, injuries and all, he's still a truly great pitcher. And the "L" by his name in the boxscore and the one unlucky inning don't change the fact that, in this particular matchup of former Cy Young Award winners on this particular day, he was the better pitcher, and it wasn't even remotely close.

On June 24, 2001...

2009-06-25T06:00:00.001-05:00

Of course, the nature of this blog means that June 24 was yesterday. But I'm writing this on June 24, so that's good enough for me. Anyway, eight years ago yesterday...

- Cristian Guzman, enjoying his one good season, had an unlikely 6 RBI, with a double and a homer, as the Twins trounced the Tigers 14-5. They came close to shocking Cleveland and taking the Division Title that year...but 2002 would be their year. By which time neither Guzman nor Keir Dullea was any help at all.

- Barry Bonds went 0-for-4 with a walk, which left him sitting on 39 HR, and on pace for 84.

- John Rocker got his first save with Cleveland after being traded from the Braves; the 26 year old had just four more saves left in him after that. I wonder if he's the only (nearly-)star-quality MLB player whose career was actually derailed by stupidity? Not, like, a debilitating accident caused by his stupidity; just plain ol' stupidity, in and of itself?

- The Mariners won to run their record to a ridiculous 55-19. They were leading the Angels by 18.5 games. It's a travesty that that team didn't even make the series. Probably one of the three best teams ever assembled...and with essentially no star power.

- I noticed none of these things. I was busy getting married to my best friend and a wonderful person who has kept me sane and happy and healthy for eight wonderful years. So forgive me for kind of a nothing post, but we've been celebrating, and I'd just like to appreciate that and marvel at the fact that it was already eight whole years ago. Also, just looking at a random day (random to the baseball world, that is, not to me...) can be fun.

Jamie Moyer could be almost your whole team's dad

2009-06-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

I don't think baseball-reference or retrosheet can do this yet (I could be wrong), but I'd really like to know how often one starting pitcher in a game has been twice the (seasonal) age of the opposing starting pitcher. I bet you could find a bunch of them just by looking at the last few years of the likes of Moyer, Ryan and Johnson and the first few of Feller and Newhouser. But anyway...I'd like to know, but not enough to actually go looking.

Regardless, it happened on Tuesday night, and it was bad news for the young guy, with 23 year old David Price and the Rays falling to 46 year old Jamie Moyer and the Phillies by a score of 10-1.

Now, Price didn't pitch that badly (though he pitched plenty badly), and Moyer probably didn't pitch that well (though I'd like to see anyone in his peer group do better). Price suffered from some terrible defense behind him...but did give up 5 "earned" runs (he surrendered all 10 total runs), and his K/BB/HR ratio was an ugly 1.0 (he racked up two of each in just over four innings). Moyer needed 101 pitches to get through six, and walked three, but he did double up on the younger's strikeouts, with 4, and he allowed only the one run to score.

Price throws a 94 MPH fastball and a sharp 86 MPH slider; Moyer hasn't thrown any of his pitches 86 in probably 15 years, and his fastball averages 82.

Now, Moyer's 6 IP, 1 ER lowered his ERA for the season to just barely below 6, so let's not get too carried away. But that 5.97 ERA is good for (approximately) a 74 ERA+, which is 10th all time for a player 46 and older (minimum 70 IP). And of the seasons ahead of his, two are by Hoyt Wilhelm, two by Jack Quinn, and two by Phil Niekro, and one by Brian Dowling in 1901, which should hardly count. So you could argue that Moyer is the 6th-best 46 year old pitcher of all time. Also, only Niekro (and Dowling) was a full-time starter by that age; if Moyer tops 138.2 innings this year (also a Niekro number, at age 48), he'll have thrown the most innings in a season by a dude 46 or older, aside from Phil Niekro, in the last 108 years.

And he doesn't even throw a knuckleball! Now, I'm pretty sick of the Phils, but you gotta love Jamie Moyer.

Oh, what the holy hell is this

2009-06-23T06:00:00.004-05:00

Some utter rot from MLB.com:

"Frankly, you can't go wrong with Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies or Hanley Ramirez of the Marlins. And that's what makes picking a starting shortstop to represent the National League so tough."

He's talking about this Hanley Ramirez. And this Jimmy Rollins. The first (and it's pretty clear any way you want to look at it, but see e.g. this) is quite easily the best shortstop in the National League, and the other, so far in '09, has been the worst. The first is in the discussion for the distinction of "best player in the National League who is not playing first base for the Cardinals," while the other has never really been as great as his reputation, and seems to have lost it entirely (as middle infielders sometimes do) at age 30.

I mean, the actual news part of the article is good news -- Hanley finally surpassed J-Roll again in the All-Star voting after two weeks of Phillies-Phan-led insanity. But they should really stop pretending that MLB.com isn't beholden to MLB and its clubs for its editorial content. In fact, they should get rid of individual bylines altogether: a "By the Philadelphia Phillies PR Department" line rather than "By Alden Gonzalez/MLB.com" would've made this a little more palatable.

You Don't Mess with the Zobrist

2009-06-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

"Part of the payoff for Aubrey Huff, [Ben] Zobrist is less the Shortstop of the Future then [sic] the shortstop of right now. Too old to be considered a high-ceiling prospect, he's still a solid player with great command of the strike zone. He doesn't have much power to speak of, but if he can catch the ball and get on base, he'll be plenty serviceable for the time being."
-- Baseball Prospectus 2007

"While he's made it pretty clear that he's [sic] doesn't deserve a starting shortstop job, Zobrist is still a fundamentally sound defender with good on-base skills who will likely fill Josh Wilson's bench spot next year, but do it better."
-- Baseball Prospectus 2008

"Zobrist's miserable 2007 was the reason the Rays acquired Jason Barlett [sic] in the first place, but . . . Zobrist refashioned himself as a future super-sub able to play six positions. . . . Expecting him to deliver a home run every 16.5 at-bats again is a bit of a pipe dream, but he's one of the more valuable reserve players around, one who can give a team reason not to panic if a starter is forced to the disabled list."
-- Baseball Prospectus 2009

"A switch-hitter, he stands out the most for his ability to handle the bat, but all his tools except for power are average. The Astros often compared him to former standout utilityman Bill Spiers, and Zobrist projects more in that role than as a regular."
-- Jim Callis, Baseball America, July 12, 2006

Even if you didn't understand a word Baseball Prospectus was saying about Ben Zobrist, you can pretty much tell what they thought of him by the fact that they put a typo in his writeup every single year. That's pretty amazing. But anyway.

If you go by traditional qualifying rules (that is, you don't give Mauer hitless at-bats for the number of plate appearances by which he fails to qualify -- if you do that, he's still leading the world in every category ever imagined), the guy those quotes are talking about came into Sunday leading the American League in OPS and OPS+, sitting 4th in OBP and 1st in SLG. He isn't homering every 16.5 at-bats; he's doing it every 12.4. He barely has enough plate appearances to qualify (he's played in all but 8 of the Rays' games, but has frequently been used in that "supersub" role, limiting his ABs), but is still in the top ten in counting categories like Runs Created, Adjusted Batting Runs and Adjusted Batting Wins, and his 33 extra-base hits are five short of the league lead. If not for Mauer, Zobrist would be the story of the year among AL hitters. He's also played six positions (everything but first base, catcher and pitcher) and handled them all pretty well.

But the quotes above were all totally defensible at the time. Zobrist's overall minor league numbers looked pretty good, but he never hit more than seven home runs in a minor league season, and never slugged .500 in the minors (despite being on the old side of almost every level at which he played) until doing it for the 20 games he spent in AAA in 2008. When BP said he had "made it pretty clear" he didn't deserve a starting job, they were referring to Zobrist's 2007 season, which I would bet is one of the worst hitting lines a position player has ever put up in > 100 AB: .155/.184/.206, good for a 4 (yes, four) OPS+. That followed a 48 OPS+ in 2006, so looking at the first 303 plate appearances of his Major League career (.200/.234/.275, 33 OPS+), and noting that he was already 26, you could very understandably conclude that he wasn't ever going to hit enough to play in the big leagues.

Looking at his 447 PA since then (again, through Saturday), you'd have to conclude that this guy was an MVP candidate: .276/.374/.581, 145 OPS+, 27 HR, 72 RBI, 11/2 SB/CS. In 2006, he's a AAAA player; in 2007, he might not even be that; in 2008, he's a very serviceable supersub; in 2009, he's probably the second-best player in the AL. He was never a notable prospect, and he turned 28 a month ago.

This doesn't happen, does it? And how does this happen? Is he really one of the best players in the league allasudden, or is he (as ZIPs seems to think) due for a dropoff back to his 2008 level (which is still excellent) or lower (not so much)?

I think he's come too far along these last two years to be a total fluke. But very few players can keep up the pace he's on right now beyond a single year, if they can make it last that long (see Bradley, Milton), and I doubt Zobrist is suddenly one of those very few players. But if back to earth for Zobrist is a 120-130 OPS+? That's still one of the best ten or twelve players in the league. Not a bad haul for half a season of Aubrey Huff three years ago.

What do you think?

Happy Birthday...

2009-06-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

Dickie Thon!

Richard William Thon turns 51 today. He was born in South Bend, Indiana where his father was graduating from Notre Dame, but spent almost his entire childhood in Puerto Rico, from which he was signed by the Angels as an amateur free agent at age 16. Up and down with the Angels starting in 1979 at age 21, he was an Astro by the time he started to come into his own, in 1982. That year, he hit 10 triples and stole 37 bases in 45 tries. His overall line of .276/.327/.397 isn't going to turn many heads, but for the Astrodome in 1982, that was awfully solid, good for a 110 OPS+. 1983, then, was like a dream: .286/.341/.457 (127 OPS+), 20 homers, 34 steals (though in 50 tries this time). He made the All-Star team, and finished 7th in the MVP voting.

Maybe another young shortstop over in the AL was doing even more impressive things at an even younger age, but at just 25, Thon looked like a star. Wikipedia even claims that some considered him a future Hall of Famer (and cites Bill James' original Historical Baseball Abstract, which I wish I could find right now, as the source of that), and two pretty good seasons at ages 24 and 25 don't seem to me likely to lead you down that particular path, but he looked poised for a long and successful career.

Then: April 8, 1984.

A fractured orbital bone sounds like a terribly unpleasant thing. You can read about it here, but probably shouldn't do so while having lunch or anything. It can lead to serious vision problems...which is what Thon got when he was struck in the face with a Mike Torrez fastball on that day. His depth perception was shot.

The New York Times archives are full of references to Thon's determination to return to the playing field...and his repeated setbacks. Thon never got back into the game in 1984, and while he played in the Winter Leagues at home in Puerto Rico that winter, he got only 84 games in in '85. And frankly, he was terrible when he did play. He was a tiny bit worse in 106 games in '86, and played 32 awful games in '87, walking away from the team in July (presumably to undergo the eye surgery he had talked about wanting in March of that year) and acknowledging that his career might be over, as many writers seemed to be assuming it was. He'd just turned 29.

But it wasn't over. He signed with the Padres, and did pretty well, putting up roughly average offensive numbers (which are, of course, better than average for a shortstop) as a part-time starter. From there he went to Philly, where he reminded the game of what it might have missed out on seeing a decade or so of, hitting .271/.321/.434 (117 OPS+) with 15 homers. The speed was gone, but otherwise he looked much more like the promising young All-Star he had been than the mediocre backup infielder he had since become.

That performance earned him two more full years with the Phillies (then half-time gigs for the Rangers and Brewers after that), but he was done. He ended with a solid career, above-average numbers for a shortstop in nearly 5000 PA. But of course there's no telling what might have been.

You just have to admire a guy like Thon, though. Taking a fastball to the face would ruin (and has ruined) a lot of hitters. So would the continued setbacks and blurred vision and repeated trips to the minors or DL just a few years after finishing 7th in the MVP voting.

Even better? Thon was hit in the head with a pitch in 1987 -- less than three years after the Torrez incident -- while on a minor league rehab assignment. He missed five games. I'm pretty sure that if the first blindingly fast flying object to hit me in the head didn't get to me, nerves-wise, the second one would.

So no, I don't think it's particularly likely that he was working on a Hall of Fame career when it happened. But he was an exciting player, and a damn good one. And his perseverence in coming back time and again after the incident(s), culminating in his second very good season in 1989, is the kind of thing Disney will (and [gulp] probably should) make a movie about someday. Next time you're up against something that seems too arduous, think of Dickie.

So happy birthday, Mr. Thon. Hope you're seeing OK these days.

Insert Your Own Corny Pirate-y Pun Here

2009-06-19T06:00:00.002-05:00

Well, the Twins played three with the Pirates this week as part of the ongoing abomination that is interleague play.

Which can really only mean one thing: for the first time in, at least, weeks, I noticed the Pirates.

And hey: they don't stink right now! They dropped two of three to the Twins, but they took two of three from the Tigers right before that and came into the Twins series at 30-33, or closer to .500 than many Pirates fans can even remember (not true at all--actually, they had about the same record at this time last year, and then everything fell apart--but it's kind of fun to write). They have a positive run differential (+4), suggesting they might've played even better than that. How did that happen?

Well, Freddy Sanchez has been great; the high batting average and doubles power are back, and he's held his own at second base. Shortstop Jack Wilson can't hit, but more than makes up for it with his glove; ditto Nyjer Morgan, easily the most exciting 85-OPS+ left fielder in the league. Zach Duke is back looking like the ace of the pitching staff again. McLouth was doing a fine job in center, but so far McCutchen has been just as good.

Other than that, though? Really hard to say. Brandon Moss looks good in the field, but has been an even worse hitter than Morgan at the other OF corner. The LaRoche brothers have been fine, but certainly no better than average at their respective positions (but it's nice to see Andy getting a legit chance to show he can play). After Duke, the pitching staff has been awful (it seems like every year, one of Duke, Snell, Gorzelanny and Maholm is pretty decent, and the others take a year off--though to be fair, Maholm has been at least an average starter, and even has Duke beat in FIP). They don't have anybody that you'd really think will get a lot better anytime soon.

So anyway, I came into this hoping to be able to say "look out for the Pirates!" or something like that. But...no. They're only six games out at this writing, but with four teams in front of them, each of whom is probably legitimately a much better team than they are. This year's out. And you have to think there'll be some more selling off before this season's over; Adam LaRoche is a good bet to go, and they don't exactly have another league-average 1B ready to step in. Jack Wilson's probably gone too. Freddy Sanchez might stay around forever...but he's already 31, and probably not actually this good.

And it's hard to see them getting too much better in the near future. The Reds are up-and-comers. The Brewers will be pretty good for a couple more years, probably, and the Cubs have the resources to be good just about every year if they want to, and the Cardinals...well, the Cards have Pujols.

After McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez, there's not much on the way. Jose Tabata might still be pretty good some day...but that day is at least three years off. They took a "signability pick" college catcher with the #4 pick in last week's draft. It's hard to see them getting enough for LaRoche and whoever else they might get rid of to suddenly become a real contender in a year or two.

Come to think of it, it sucks being a Pirate fan. Maybe more than anything else in baseball. But hey, right now, they don't stink!

Weird Wright

2009-06-18T06:00:00.002-05:00

Hey, real baseball!

By any reasonable analysis you want to do, David Wright is having the best offensive year of his career. He has (through Tuesday) a career-high 161 OPS+, .430 wOBA, and already has 6 wins above replacement according to BP's WARP3 (which is insane). He's leading the NL with a .365 batting average (40 points over his career high) and a .458 OBP (42 points over his career high), while posting a .526 SLG that's right in line with his career average of .532. He's even stolen 18 bases, second in the NL (though he leads in CS with 8, already a career high in that category, so he's barely breaking even when he runs and probably should go back to being more selective).

The amazing thing you probably already know is this: Wright, who has a career full-season low of 26 HR, is doing all this while having hit just four homers all year. He's on pace to hit 11 all season, or three fewer than he hit in 283 PA as a 22 year old rookie in 2004. He's balancing some of that out with doubles, but he's only on pace for 8 more of those than in '08 (50 total, but he's always hit a lot of doubles), so his Isolated Power is down 70 points from '08; that SLG is being sustained mostly by that astronomical batting average.

Some have written that it's too hard to hit HR in the Mets' new park, so you might think that had something to do with it. Doesn't look like it, though; while overall scoring at Citi is pretty low, it's actually been the fifth most homer-happy park in the Majors so far, and in fact Wright has hit three of his four homers at home.

It gets weirder still. Look at these numbers (lifted straight from FanGraphs):
GB/FB: 0.95 (2008), 0.94 (2009)
LD%: 25.6% (2008), 25.9% (2009)
GB%: 36.2% (2008), 35.9% (2009)
FB%: 38.2% (2008), 38.2% (2009)

So Wright is hitting line drives, grounders and fly balls in almost exactly the same proportions as he did last year. Even fewer of those fly balls (4.6% this year, 7.6% last) are staying in the infield. We'd expect him to be hitting HR at more or less the same rate, even a tiny bit better...but, well, obviously, that ain't happening. You have to assume he's getting unlucky, homer-wise; he has to be hitting the ball pretty hard to maintain that BA, but the ones in the air just aren't carrying quite far enough.

So, we should expect the homers to come around. He's not likely to hit 30 again this year, but it's not unreasonable to expect him to hit 'em at a 30-HR pace from here on out (which would give him a total of about 22 for the season).

But there's a big, huge, flashing neon warning sign for Wright that has nothing to do with his HR power or batted ball types, and this is the incredible part to me: Wright is putting up that huge batting average not only while keeping the ball in the park when he does hit it, but while striking out once per game. He's struck out between 113 and 118 times in each of his four full seasons, but now he's already struck out 61 times in 61 games, which over a full season would top his career high strikeout total by 40+. His walk rate is up very marginally, while his strikeout rate is up by over a third. That's bad.

It's been a while since I've talked about BABIP, so let me just remind you: that sort of thing (a strikeout per game + a .365 BA) just doesn't happen. It varies a little based on the percentages of GB/LD/FB players hit, but when they don't hit a homer or strike out, we expect everybody to have a 30% or so chance of getting a hit (that is, a .300 BABIP). Wright's BABIP right now (well, through Tuesday) is .485. By comparison, Joe Mauer is hitting a ridiculous .429 right now, and his BABIP is "only" .443. Ichiro! is hitting .354, pretty close to Wright's BA, but with a BABIP of .374; he's done it by striking out about 1/3 as often as Wright.

A different perspective: Wright's .485 BABIP leads the #2 (PA-qualified) guy in the majors in that category, Kevin Youkilis, by 76 points. There is no one within 76 points of Wright, and then there are 43 guys within 76 points after Youk. The 2008 leader BABIP'ed .396, 89 points below Wright's '09 number.

So you get the point by now: it's not going to last. Something's got to give--Wright has to start making better contact, or his batting average will start coming way, way down, and then if he doesn't also start hitting home runs (and playing better defense, which is another weird thing I haven't even touched on here), it'll take a huge chunk of his value right down with it.

Wright has had an amazing first 62 games, and is an amazing player. There's really no telling what this guy can do. But I'm pretty confident in this: whatever he does, he'll look like a very, very different player over these last 100 games than he did over the first 62.

Geoff Baker is really, really wrong

2009-06-17T06:00:00.005-05:00

Shyster links to this latest gem by the Seattle Times' Geoff Baker, who last week ripped into an until-recently obscure blogger for doing something Baker himself has done in suggesting that maybe there are reasons to believe that Raul Ibanez's amazingly hot start to his age-37 season wasn't 100% natural.

Shyster is actually awfully kind to Baker in this one (and he calls Baker "off his nut"). Baker's piece (most of it) is presented as kind of a Libel Law for ~~Dummies~~Bloggers, and as Shyster notes, everything he says is right. Technically. And maybe in practice he's right, too; after all, even if there's no serious case that you've actually committed libel, just the fact that you might be sued for it (however baselessly) probably ought to be enough to give one pause. Obviously, he's right that in general, it's important to be careful whenever you're talking about something that's going to hurt someone's reputation.

But the claims and insinuations he makes about the law itself are so misleading and silly that I just can't leave it alone. To leave off the points Baker leaves off indicates that he either (a) has an alarmingly poor grasp on defamation law for a professional journalist, or (b) wrote the piece in an attempt to scare amateur bloggers away from their computers. I think it might be some of both.

Baker:

If you get sued for libel, your defense can be "the truth'' -- that what you wrote is true -- or that, even if what you wrote was false, you did not act with malice. In Canada, where I began my career, the law is much tougher and states that your stuff had better be true, or you're in hot water. It's a bit more lax here in the U.S. with the whole "malice'' thing.

Yeah, "a bit more lax." The basic tone of it is: "be careful, because if you say anything bad about someone and it turns out to be false, you'll get sued, and all they have to show is that little 'malice' thing."

Let me try to get across how crazy a misstatement that is. He might as well have said this: "If the government wants to get you for murder, all they have to prove is that you actually killed somebody. When I grew up in 14th Century England, all they needed was the King's word that you did it. It's a bit more lax here in the U.S. with the whole 'proof' thing." The requirement of "malice" -- and the legal term is actually "actual malice" -- has the practical effect of rendering almost any defamation suit filed by a celebrity like Ibanez utterly frivolous.

With all due respect to Mr. Baker, let me try to give you my own primer on defamation law*:

In the 1960s, the Supreme Court decided New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which laid out the following standards for a defamation suit where the allegedly defamed subject was a public official or public figure (a legal term we won't get into, but suffice it to say that Ibanez unquestionably qualifies for these purposes): (1) the statement must actually be false and harmful to the subject; and (2) the statement must have been made with actual malice.

Now, "actual malice" is another legal term, and it has nothing to do with the dictionary definition of malice (like simply wishing someone ill). It means that the statement must have been made with either (a) actual knowledge of its falsity or (b) reckless disregard of the truth.

Baker insists (in a later-posted update in response to some comments) that mere speculation or insinuation is enough. And it's not. Not for public figures. If the blogger Baker is so incensed with had said "Raul Ibanez is on steroids," period, and done so in a way that led you to believe he knew what he was talking about, that would be a different matter (assuming it's provably false and the blogger has no particular reason to believe it might be true). Or if Ibanez were not a public figure, the bar would be much lower (tellingly, Baker doesn't use the phrase "public figure" anywhere in his "primer").

But the post in question did involve a public figure and overtly put itself out as pure speculation, pointing to a number of signs that could be taken as support for the idea that Ibanez might be using PEDs. I have a hard time believing that that would qualify as defamation in a free-speech-respectin' country like Canada, but I'm absolutely positive that it would get laughed out of any court in our own country. For Baker to suggest that there are real worries for bloggers in cases like these is either intentionally misleading or shows an alarming level of incompetence in an area that's pretty vital to his own field of alleged expertise.

Of course, you "can be sued" over everything, however baseless. Celebrities love to file defamation suits, almost literally all of them baseless, as a way to rehabilitate their image (Clemens wouldn't sue over it if it were true, right?!) and in the hopes of scaring the defendant into a quick settlement (retraction and apology). You'd win the suit easily, and you'd have a good case for sanctions against the celeb (recoupment of your attorney's fees), but the risk, however slight, is so costly that they can usually bully you out of taking it. So if the fear is that you'd be sued, then yeah, it's a real fear. If the fear is that you're actually running afoul of the law, that's ludicrous. The athlete almost definitely makes more money than you, and uses it to bully you out of your right to free speech. It's sad, but true. So in most practical ways, Baker was right; he was just kind of disingenuous in going about it.

Now, let me be clear: I hate reading, writing, and especially speculating about PED use. You'll never see that here. The post in question was ill-advised and horribly written. But under our Constitution and NYT v. Sullivan, the blogger absolutely had a right to write it. It's very wrong to spread lies and baseless rumors, but to speculate about a public figure using publicly available information is pretty comfortably in the heart of our free speech zone. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible. I get the sense that Baker and a lot of other professional journalists consider amateur bloggers to have invaded their own private realm, and that posts like these are the equivalent of them attempting to brush an annoying gnat off their shoulders. Well...join the current century, guys.

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*Obviously, in no way is this legal advice, or any kind of advice at all. The message here isn't "defame away, everybody." Nobody wants to be sued even if they know they'll win, and to tread the line of spreading lies and totally groundless rumors (which CAN be defamation, even to a public figure) is a terrible, terrible idea, not to mention crappy writing. But the blogger in this case did absolutely nothing more than the things Baker and his colleagues do on a regular basis; the idea Baker wants to get across is that you're an amateur and you don't know what you're doing, so you're gonna get in trouble, so you crazy kids just get off my ~~lawn~~ turf already. And I have a big problem with that...but I'll stop ranting now.

Strasburg Redux

2009-06-16T06:00:00.001-05:00

A couple times last week I wrote in passing about Steven Strasburg and how silly I think it is that people (mostly writers and "experts") are so riled up about the amount of money he's apparently going to demand before ever throwing his first professional pitch.

To one of those posts, Ron commented like so (unabridged but compressed for space):

Strausburg hasn't proven anything. They're asking $50 mil who might be the biggest bust of all time, and he's not worth the money. I hope the Nats lowball and him, and Boras has to make the decision of taking less money or having him sit out the year. No college or high school 'deserves' that kind of money, no matter how good they were at a previous level. Players today get big arbitration and free agent contracts by putting up numbers at the major league level. Last time I checked, Strasburg had 0 professional wins, 0 professional strike outs, 0 professional shutouts, etc. How is he worth anything more than a basic contract and a chance to prove himself?

And over at his own site yesterday, tHeMARksMiTh chimed in with somewhat similar sentiments phrased in an entirely different way.

I replied to Mark's directly over at his site, but here, rather than tackle either of these arguments head-on, I'm going to try to explain my own position a little better.

1. I'm not saying Strasburg should get $50 million. Only Boras and Conlin have said that, as far as I can tell, and only Conlin seems to actually believe it. I don't believe anyone is worth that kind of money, and there's no way the Nats or anyone else would pay it. He should, however, get something approximating what the highest bidder would be willing to pay him. And:

2. there's absolutely nothing wrong with a kid hiring a representative to zealously advocate for him. Otherwise it's just the kid against the zealous advocates on the other side, and that's how you get the reserve clause and collusion and all that. Strasburg might be a bust. He might throw out his arm this fall and be back in school (for real this time) by spring. But that's exactly why he should be trying to get every penny he can, right now. And the Nationals should be willing to give him a lot of it, because:

3. Strasburg has proven plenty, thank you. He's probably the best college pitcher in history. He throws 100 miles an hour with control for 100+ pitches. Scouts say he can step in right now and hold his own in the majors. Scouts can be wrong, but many of them are very, very good at their jobs, and they all seem to agree on this one. His skills have a value apart from any statistics, professional or otherwise, you might want to tack onto them. And that value is a very, very large number. If you graduate at the top of your class from Harvard Business School, you're (even in this economy, I think) going to get your choice of a number of prestigious and lucrative job offers. You haven't written a single professional report or given a single professional presentation, but there's plenty of evidence you can do your job well. And you'll be making a lot more money than the guy who graduated at the bottom of your class, and more than a lot of other guys who went to Muncie State and have been writing reports and giving presentations for a less prestigious company for 20 or 30 years. That's the way the world works, and there's no real good argument for treating baseball as though it were any different in that regard. All that said, though:

4. I'm not really in favor of abolishing the draft. This has been something that's been discussed a lot lately, and I have to admit that the revolutionaries (like David Pinto) have a lot of great points, and probably make a stronger rational/economic case than the traditionalists do. But baseball is different, and there's a lot to be said for the (theoretical) best players going to the worst teams. However, there's a lot that needs to be done to make this fairer to the kids. Get rid of the ridiculous slotting system entirely (though it's increasingly being ignored by most teams anyway). Make draft picks tradeable, so that a team that doesn't value (or have the cash for) the top pick can immediately get value from a team that does. And so on. On the other hand,

5. We already know what a draft-free world would look like. There's no draft for overseas players. Any team is free to bid on any player. And you know what? The Yankees and Red Sox don't have anything like a monopoly on the best international talent, and never have. So I can't quite go so far as to endorse it (yet), but the world without the draft might not be such a bad or scary place.

So anyway. That does a slightly better job of explaining where I come down on this thing than I was doing last week. No, Strasburg shouldn't get $50 million. Nobody should, and nobody seriously thinks he will. But he should be able to get something like the top of what the market will pay for his services. And if the nature of sport prevents that from happening (which the international market suggests it probably shouldn't), the constraints on the draft should be loosened or lifted to get as close to that as realistically possible.

Lastly (maybe most importantly): there are a lot of arguments against amateurs "deserving" this kind of money and against changing the system. And I think most of them are shockingly weak, but I get where they come from. But what are the arguments in favor of keeping the system as it is? Why do we want to continue artificially shifting wealth from the kids to the(ir) owners? I'm all ears (er, eyes)...

I Approve of the Justin Upton

2009-06-15T09:48:00.003-05:00

Wasn't able to get a post together for this morning, so the Strasburg one will be pushed to tomorrow.

So how about this kid?
Everybody knew he was going to be good, but this good, this fast? He's hitting .306/.389/.569 (143 OPS+) and on pace for 32 HR, 35 2B, 11 3B and 24 SB. This after putting up a .250/.353/.463 (107 OPS+) line in 2008, batting .220 for the rest of the season after a hot April. He's also saved 4.4 runs above average with his glove and arm, according to UZR, after costing the team 6 runs last year.

Here is a complete list of guys who have batted at least 350 times at or before their age 20 season (Upton's age last year) and put up an OPS+ in that season of between 100 and 110.

He's already in pretty select company, with only 19 names (taking off the upper limit on OPS+ more than doubles the list and adds names like Mays, Mantle and Hornsby, but I'm interested in comparing him to guys who, like Upton, were good enough to play at age 20 but weren't quite there yet). Here's how those guys did the following year (prior year's OPS+ -> next year's (comment)):

Buddy Lewis: 102 -> 102 (big breakout the year after that)
Adrian Beltre: 101 -> 119 (then fell below 100 for three years)
Ruben Sierra: 107 -> 101 (broke out two years later)
Phil Cavarretta: 107 -> 65 (limited PA; broke out two years later and had an excellent career)
Freddie Lindstrom: 108 -> 111 (had two good years and somehow made the Hall)
Hank Aaron: 104 -> 143 (continued being Hank Aaron for 21 years)
Cecil Travis: 101 -> 103 (took a slight step up at age 23, career destroyed by the war after 27)
Edgar Renteria: 103 -> 80 (that's been Renteria's career in a nutshell)
Joe Torre: 104 -> 104 (jumped to stardom the following year; should be in the Hall as a player)
Travis Jackson: 103 -> 87 (see comment to Lindstrom, Freddie)
Ken Griffey Jr.: 108 -> 135 (the first was actually his age 19; jumped to 155 at age 21, and you know the rest of the story)
Clint Hurdle: 108 -> 96 (had a 120 OPS+ third year and flamed out)
Butch Wynegar: 109 -> 96 (Twins might have harmed his career with too much PT as a catcher at ages 20 and 21; good hitter for a catcher, but never had another full season as good as the first)
Roberto Alomar: 105 -> 107 (broke out two years later; no-doubt Hall of Famer)
Rick Manning: 101 -> 118 (fell to pieces immediately after that)
Ed Kranepool: 100 -> 93 (only had a couple years, much later, that were better than those)
Milt Stock: 102 -> 98 (same as Kranepool)
Whitey Witt: 100 -> 99 (missed the following year fighting in WWI; never got much better)

So that's it. Being on a list in which Aaron, Torre and Griffey are among only 18 other names is pretty impressive as it is, but it looks to me that you can safely say this about it: being an average hitter at age 20 (or 19 in some of these guys' cases) is great, but the real marker of a Hall of Fame-type talent is getting much better very quickly. Making the jump Upton appears to have made at age 21 rather than, say, age 23 or 24 might be the difference between becoming Hank Aaron and becoming Ruben Sierra.

Here's another list: best seasons by OPS+ at age 21. If Upton maintains his 143 OPS+, he'll slot in in a tie for 16th. All but two of the guys ahead of him and the majority of the 15 or 20 guys behind him are clear Hall of Fame talents (are in, are not yet eligible but will be in, or are Shoeless Joe).

So, we could be witnessing the beginning of something very special. Better start paying attention.