29 November 2009

Major League Lily-Gilding

Just in case you're still munching on that old chestnut about the Yankees not being the only team with  financial advantages, here comes Exhibit Z: Roy Halladay will reportedly approve a one-way ticket to NY despite an ixnay on the adetray in his contract.

If I recall correctly, NY is not shorthand for Cincinnati. Or more pertinently, for Boston or Anaheim. The Yankees don't just flash the most Benjamins; they also offer Broadway, a market of 40 million eyeballs, outfield monuments and 27 shiny rings. It gives them advantages that even free-spending competitors will never have.

That Toronto would dump their ace on their own division just demonstrates how miserably desperate they are. NY is reportedly prepared to trade some prospects before they sign Halladay to another mega-contract, but there is no way the Blue Jays get anything like equal value. Roy Halladay is literally worth more than the entire Yankee farm system, which right now has three serious prospects, one of whom lacks a position.

There is some serious lily-gilding here, and I'm not talking about the pitching staff in the Bronx. We don't actually need any more evidence that the playing field is tilted steeply towards the Yankees. But that's what a Halladay-to-NYY transaction would be. At the rate we're going, why don't they just have the AL All-Star Team play in pinstripes. Imagine how exciting and unexpected it would be if they win the World Series.
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26 November 2009

Never The Answer

If being a great baseball player sold short because his team stinks is matter, Allen Iverson was anti-matter.

In baseball, insightful analysts recognize that no one player is responsible for his team's success or failure. The reason is obvious: he occupies one position on the field, one spot in the batting order, one slot in a five-man rotation. In a game that mostly aggregates individual performances, he's not one of the individuals in the match-up 80% of the time. (The same for football: for all the impact a quarterback has, he's got his helmet on the bench next to him most of the game.)

In hoops, one player can be on the court all game. He might have the ball in his hands half the time on offense. He can be the difference between mediocre and great, bad and very good, dismal and promising.

On the other hand, basketball, like football, is a sport of synergistic team performance. Every player's actions affects the team dynamic in a way that no shortstop can on a strikeout, walk, home run, grounder to third, fly ball to right, etc.

Which brings us to the case of Allen Iverson, perhaps the most over-rated player in NBA history. Iverson, who apparently retired today, was unquestionably an entertaining uber-talent. But even at the peak of his nearly-transcendant skills, he was a drain on his teams.

New basketball analysis, fired by the imaginations that gave us sabermetrics in baseball, recognizes that it's not so much about how many points you score, but how efficiently your team scores them when you are contributing. Because Iverson's monopoly of the ball cast a shadow on the rest of his team, it was particularly significant that he sucked up so many possessions to score his 30-points-a-game. If the guy with the rock isn't maximizing the value of his teammates, he's diminishing the team, not enhancing it.

Iverson's supporters would point out that he accumulated assists like they were illegitimate children. That's a valid point, but again, he needed nearly all the teams' possessions to do so. His assist efficiency was low, crowding out the rest of the team's opportunities to create assist situations. On top of that, Iverson treated defense like it was...practice.

I don't believe it's a coincidence that in his one year of "college" -- (from what I understand, he never attended any classes) -- Georgetown flamed out in the playoffs despite a roster of NBA players, or that his Olympic squad's participation was a debacle, or that none of his NBA teams won a title, and only one accomplished much of anything.

All during Iverson's career, I argued that I wouldn't want him on my team. It wasn't the ghetto attitude, the disdain of practice, the ball-hawking, the tatoos, the injuries or the off-court dysfunctions that put me off, per se. Allen Iverson could only function as the center of his team's universe -- as his late career vividly demonstrated -- but building a team around him was a guarantee of failure, or limited success anyway. A mix of hard-working  players who share the ball, know their roles, and play together to score, rebound, get to the stripe and defend is a much more potent formula.

This stands in stark contrast to the misguided argument that one baseball player (or football or hockey player) is superior to another because of his ring count. There's plenty of information documenting all this, if you care enough to know.
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20 November 2009

Right, Right, Right and . . . Hey!

What's going on here? When do the pigs start flying?

First the writers correctly pin the Cy Young medal on Zack Greinke and his 14 wins. Better yet, there's nary a misguided dissenter.

Then, offered up a bevy of delicious NL Cy treats, they choose the tastiest morsel in Tim Lincecum. I could not have blamed them if they had picked the shiny new Chris Carpenter or even the nicely wrapped Adam Wainright. But give them credit for finding the narrow distinction among the three.

The NL MVP will be a coronation. Long Live the King, the former Prince Albert. That one isn't close. Nor is the AL award, and from all I hear, the writers will validate Joe Mauer's season with the official secret MVP decoder ring.

Hey, this isn't supposed to happen. Sportswriters and broadcasters have an unblemished 30-year record of not knowing what they're talking about. This is no time to end the streak.

What are cranks like me going to do if the writers detour from their bouts of lunacy and lustily declare that the earth is round? There's no news or intrigue in that.

Well, for now, there's still enough fodder for a blog. But I'm thinking that I'll hang it up in 2011, maybe spend the extra time making movies with Oprah.
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19 November 2009

Congratulations, You're Fired

Jim Tracy and Mike Scioscia were named Managers of the Year yesterday. Which means, of course, that they'll be fired. Nearly every manager is, eventually.

Sportswriters voting for manager of the year is like frequent fliers voting for pilot of the year. They can measure whether landings equals takeoffs, but beyond that, how can they possibly assess the work of the nominees when most of it takes place in private?

The primary job of a team manager is to be a leader, to keep his team productive and on-task over 162 games.(Or as Casey Stengel famously observed, to keep the two guys who hated him from the 23 who weren't sure.) While managers make some strategic decisions, most of them are rote. Over the course of a year, the difference between a good strategist and a bad one is probably two or three games. That means a league's best manager -- whatever "best" means -- could be hiding behind a 60-102 record.

Were Scioscia and Tracy better leaders of men this year than Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, Joe Girardi, Jim Leyland and Hugo Chavez? This award suggests that sportswriters know the answer. In fact, what they know is how managers' teams performed compared to expectations, and vote accordingly. But the correlation between managerial skill and performance versus expectation is pretty weak.

In truth, if the award were for great managing, the same guys would win every year. If Tony La Russa is a genius, he's more or less a genius every year and should be Manager of the Year as often as Albert Pujols, the best player, wins the MVP. (Actually, Pujols has 400 competitors, La Russa just 15, so the skipper should pretty much monopolize the trophy.)

There's no question that Jim Tracy made some key moves that transformed the team from rocks to rockets when he inherited the Rockies from Clint Hurdle this summer. He also had to have caught lightning in a bottle, for which he got undue credit and now sports some nifty hardware. Players say they'd run through walls for Scioscia, and he obviously handled the aftermath of Nick Adenhart's death deftly, but it doesn't hurt that Jared Weaver, John Lackey and Joe Saunders can hurl.

Three of the last six Managers of the Year have been fired, so apparently the smartest skippers turned to dolts in two years' time. Either that or sportswriters don't really know what they're voting for.
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17 November 2009

Most Valuable Parttimer

I posted this blog...to the wrong site...the day after the World Series. Probably not worth resurrecting, but, well, you're getting your money's worth regardless.


Ultimately, the vote for MVP of the World Series has all the clout of an Afghan election. Seven games -- or two pitching starts -- is not exactly a barometer of anything.

Bestowing the honor on a player who batted in three games and fielded in none takes us from the ridiculous to the...um...really ridiculous. Hideki Matsui basically earned the trophy for getting three hits in the culminating event. Woo!

More to the point, it adds another data point against the wisdom that there are "big game" players, or that one guy is great in the post-season and another guy is not. It's just absurd to assume that a player's batting average or ERA in two playoff series is indicative of anything beyond those games themselves.

Which is why great players sometimes fare poorly in the playoffs and vice versa. It's not a character flaw; it's a small sample. Or maybe it's pitching match-ups, which is what put Ryan Howard on ice this World Series. The Yankees threw four lefties at him, and while Howard is Samson against righties, he swings a stickball bat against southpaws.

I'm sure there is a three game stretch in Horace Clarke's career when he went eight-for-13. And I'd be shocked if Babe Ruth never went one for 22 with nine strikeouts at various junctions in his career. Nonetheless, in case you hadn't heard, Ruth finished several spots ahead of Clarke in Hall of Fame voting.

This case was long ago made and proven, but you'd never know it from baseball writers and sportscasters, who continue to congratulate Alex Rodriguez for "stepping up," loosening up" or "coming up big." It's another example of ignorance being the dominant force in the profession.

Running of the Sports Media Bulls

On Sunday, Bill Belichick eschewed a punt on fourth and two from his 29 yard line with 2:03 on the clock and a six point lead. The tactic failed and the Colts scored the winning touchdown with 13 seconds left. On Monday, not to mention Tuesday through Friday, the recriminations flew.

This is a baseball post: I promise.

You can imagine the blowback from a coaching decision that defies conventional wisdom and then backfires. What particularly bemuses me is how the sports media has infused this decision with a moral characteristic. Repeatedly the decision is being called "arrogant."

This is a baseball post: I promise.

The advanced analysis of sabermetrics have been around for 30 years. But in the football universe, this kind of research is new. It'll be 20 years, at least, before the sports media figures it out. But here's what is already known about situations like this: If his goal was to win the game, Belichick's decision was easily defensible.

I won't crunch all the numbers for you, but on average, teams make fourth and two about 60% of the time. They prevent teams from entering the end zone from 30 yards out about 30% of the time. From 70 yards out, that number increases to about 70%. So on average, going for it could be expected to yield success 72% of the time (60% + [30%x40%]), about the same as punting.

It's important here to note that these are facts, not matters of opinion. People will argue against the above with "logic," but they are dueling with spirits. Conventional wisdom has been proven wrong by the experience of thousands of NFL games.

Of course, these are not "average"teams. The Boy Horses had scored touchdowns on their last two possessions and have this special Peyton tool they use to carve up defenses in the final minutes. The Patriots spin fourth and two into gold like Rumpelstiltskin. There was more reward and less risk than usual to going for it. It was a much better decision than "on average."

Aside: In fact, teams punt way too much in general. There should be virtually no punting at all between the 40s, because the real estate gain does little to decrease the odds of the opponent scoring. But giving up the ball reduces the chances of your team scoring nearly to zero. New research has found this to be fact. It's not debatable.

This is a baseball post: I promise.

Not content to be ignorant about football, the sports media feels the need to demonstrate ignorance about psychology. They've decided that because Bill Belichick appears arrogant, his decision must have been borne of arrogance. How else could he knuckle up his head so badly? I don't know how a decision designed to advance your team's interests can be "arrogant" or "humble." I don't know how it could be "generous" or "miserly." Or "weak" or "strong" or "tall" or "short" or "happy" or "sad." Calculations like his are either made with good information or not, either well-considered or not, and turn out either well or poorly. It's just another effort of the sports media to explain away what it doesn't understand by applying tags that are impossible to disprove.

So how is this a baseball post? The running of the football bull is perfectly analogous to the baseball kingdom, where most of the sports media still, 30 years after the proofs were written, doesn't understand that some conventional wisdom is wrong. Bunting is often a bad strategy. RBI are a team event. Pitcher wins are so close to meaningless that no one believes they're just friends. Great players go through cold streaks and hangers-on can get hot.

Adding character overtones doesn't shed any light on the subject. If, for example, Barry Bonds hits under .200 in a couple of playoff series, concluding that he "chokes" or "isn't a big game guy" or "hasn't stepped up" doesn't make you an analyst, it makes you a phony. Barry Bonds hit under .200 over a dozen games hundreds of times in his career, but no one noticed because they hadn't viewed those dozen games distinctly from others. (It's worth noting that Bonds hit like Manny Pacquiao in the Giants' 2005 World Series run.)

So the reaction to Belichick was a microcosm of how sports media covers baseball and explains it to fans. It is, in short, a fraud, a daily series of malpractice cases for which no one has ever been held accountable, and people who commit this malpractice are lauded for their perspicacity and insight regularly. But as maybe the greatest coach in NFL history can tell you, they don't know what they're talking about.

09 November 2009

A Love Letter

Dear Junior,

To everything there is a season under heaven. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to reap, a time to sow.

A time to retire. That was last year. I swear it's not too late. Please.

You batted .214/.324/.411 during your swan song in Seattle. That's Gerardo Parra territory. You know Gerardo Parra? Me either.

As an ancient Mariner, you're an albatross. Worse, you're getting worse. You're so limited in the field that your DH defense stinks. So does your attendance. The dog eats your homework, not to mention your hamstring, a lot.

Give yourself a 40th birthday present next week. Trade yourself to your family. Watch Trey play high school ball. Talk old times with dad. Watch games in HD on your home projection sytem. Curse at Joe Morgan.

Please. Don't make us cut you.

Love,
Baseball Fans
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08 November 2009

A Word To the Unwise

Have you ever gone shopping for an item that you need and look forward to purchasing, only to discover that the available options at the moment aren't quite what you had in mind? Your two choices are to buy the best option available at the moment to quench your immediate desire, or to wait for what you really want at an advantageous price.

That's what awaits most teams in this year's free agency market. Teams trolling for top talent should pull up their nets and wait to cast next year.

Look at the biggest names on the free agent wire. Matt Holliday, Chone Figgins, Vladimir Guerrero, Jermaine Dye, Pedro Martinez, Bengi Molina, Miguel Tejada, Jasopn Bay. Presumably some combination of Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui will be on the market too.

The natural inclination is to pay top dollar for the best free agent on the market, but that would be a mistake this year. Forking over Yankee-level bucks for Holliday's 263 at bats in a Redbird uniform would be the equivalent of chasing a hot stock. It would be an exercise in wishful thinking to expect him to produce a 1.023 OPS ever again.

Beyond that, who's on the list? Role players and has-beens. Don't get me wrong: Molina and Figgins are really good role players. Pedro and Vlad are really weres. Pick them up for a specific purpose, but don't bust the bank for them.Jason Bay is a delicious treat; winning his hand may require an unwarranted entree price.

The free agent wire hasn't cornered the market on available players, of course. Roy Halladay, just to name one game changer, can be had in a trade. You'd roll out kegs of coin for him, depending on what the Blue Jays demand in return. Halladay and his six or seven wins above a replacement pitcher could be the difference between missing the playoffs and winning a world championship for teams on the cusp.

But teams should be wary of that too. The case of the Yankees is instructive. New York passed -- the Yankees can have almost any player they want, so nearly anytime they fail to woo a free agent or consummate a trade they can be said to be passing on the deal -- on a swap with the Twins for Johan Santana. No doubt, the best pitcher in baseball would have gotten the Bombers into the playoffs last year, but the price of Phil Hughes and other young players might have cost New York its title this year and beyond.

Instead, the team horded its cash and got the wider, less delicate version of Santana in CC Sabathia. It just required a little patience. Imagine that -- the Yankees winning with patience.

The corollary to all this is that some great parts will be on the market this year, potentially at reasonable prices if teams are deft. Nick Johnson, for example,  could be a nice complementary player shuttled between first and DH, a defensive replacement and pinch hitter who can take a walk when you need it. But paying him as if he'll ever play a full season is folly. Joel Pineiro might be a nice #4 starter if a team can get him at #4 starter cost, but last year's 3.49 ERA is more likely fluke than trend.

The smart teams know all this and are preparing to sign no one if the market goes bonkers again. But someone will go all Alex Rios/VernonWells/Gary Matthews Jr. and empty the club's pockets for a mediocre player following one anamolous year. Hope it's not your team.

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05 November 2009

Whoop-de-Doo

So what have we learned? The team with advantages at every level and in every aspect of development wins. What could be more anti-climatic than that? It's as if we put a marble on a three-legged table and got excited about it rolling off the lowest side.

I'm not the first, last or loudest to bemoan this year's World Series purchase. I'm just amused by the response. Don't blame the Yankees; they're playing by the rules and doing everything they can to win. You'd want your team to do the same thing.

That's precisely the point. By the rules of Major League Baseball, it's the Yankees' league and everyone else gets to play in it. Allowing the team in the largest market with the deepest tradition and the most money to exploit its position to the exclusion of almost everyone else is uninteresting, unfair, and detrimental to the long-term interest of the sport. The Yankees have played in 40 of the 86 World Series since 1923. Even Yankee fans should be sick of them.

Listen to Yankee fans themselves. They reminisce about the last championship, as if it were eons ago. They wail about the long drought. It's been eight years, during which time they reached the World Series twice and the playoffs seven times. Good god, even Moses waited 40 years, and he didn't have a DH.

Baseball desperately needs a mechanism to level the playing field -- at all levels of the game -- or risk losing fans in all those cities that haven't sniffed the championship for a generation.
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03 November 2009

Hanging Chad

For all the chatter about Joe Girardi's "mistake" in sending out AJ Burnett on three days' rest, let me say this: unless you were decrying the "mistake" before the game, shut up.

I'd love to hear the case for pitching Chad Gaudin instead of Burnett before Game Five. Before knowing how the game turned out. But just after you found out what exactly a Chad Gaudin is. Should a guy with 75 career starts, a lifetime 4.50 ERA (5.50 in the NL) and a 1.6 K/BB ratio start ahead of a guy with 244 career starts, a 3.84 ERA (3.64 in the NL) and a 2.2 K/BB ratio who had already slammed the door once on the opponent?

Joe Girardi had to weigh the potential effectiveness of the former on two weeks' rest against the latter on three days rest. He lives and works with these guys, and knows their physical and emotional makeup. It's a manager's job to make exactly these kinds of judgments, and Girardi has shown a facility for considering the right information before casting his votes.

You don't know Gaudin and Burnett, don't work with them and aren't paid to make such judgments. So unless you argued prospectively that Gaudin was the man, you haven't earned the right to criticize what didn't work.
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