24 November 2010

Take the Money and Run


Hal: Hey Derek, how much you want to break some records for me the next coupla years?

Derek: I dunno, a hundred fifteen for five years.

Hal: Ha! I've already made you rich beyond what you deserve. Get real.

Derek: Okay, then a hundred for four years.

Hal: Are you kidding me? You're out of gas at 37 and you want me to pay you at 41?


Hal: Your glove can't handle short and your bat doesn't play anywhere else but second. And Cano way we're moving you there. I'll give you 45 for three, but only because of our special bond.

Derek: That will not do. I am the Yankee captain. Everyone loves me. I will attain my 3,000th hit.

Hal: Fine, go play the field. See how much Pinstripe Pride is worth in Houston. Enjoy that legendary Mariner tradition.  I hear summer in Dallas is nice. You'll love hiding in the power-packed Padre lineup. After the Diamondbacks offer you 15 for two years in left field, come on back. The offer will remain on the table.

Waldo: Psst, Derek. Sign the deal. Make a budget. Cement your legacy. Pretend you're going out on your terms. Die a Yankee.
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22 November 2010

Hall of Mirrors


I see the reconstituted and renamed Veterans Committee has another opportunity to vote Marvin Miller into Cooperstown. I've already scored a TKO on this particular horse and will go to my corner after a few short words.

A Baseball Hall of Fame without Marvin Miller is like a Civil War Hall of Fame without Robert E. Lee. A Baseball Hall of Fame that includes Bowie Kuhn and not Miller is like a Basketball Hall of Fame that shuns the Harlem Globetrotters while admitting the Washington Generals.

Whether you were on his side or not, Miller is one of the five most influential people in the history of the game. (Who else? The Babe, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson. That's the list.)

Baseball's failure to vote Miller into the Hall is no reflection on the man who transformed the business of the sport and was perhaps the greatest union leader ever. It is instead a referendum on the judgment, indeed the sanity, of those casting the ballots. 

Choose carefully, gentlemen.

19 November 2010

Quick Hits


The revolution was televised. As recently as five years ago, the baseball writers could no more have found their way to bestow the Cy Young on a .500 pitcher than to explain the general theory of relativity. Not only did they correctly identify Felix Hernandez as the best pitcher in the AL this year, but they did so by a country mile over a perfectly plausible second-best candidate.

David Price went 16-9, 2.72 with 28 quality starts in 31 tries. He was money down the stretch, going 4-0 1.67, propelling the Rays ahead of the Yankees to the #1 seed in the playoffs. For the win-obsessed, CC Sabathia went 21-7. But the writers eschewed Sabathia completely and gave King Felix three-quarters of their votes.

Perhaps David Price's best pitch was in Hernandez's behalf. "I feel like they got it right,'' he said on a conference call. "I feel Felix deserved it. He didn't have the wins, but that's the part you have the least control over.''  That's impressive insight from an athlete.

Roy Halladay, clearly the best pitcher in the NL and probably in baseball, is more typical of jockdom. " I think, ultimately, you look at how guys are able to win games. Sometimes the run support isn’t there, but you sometimes just find ways to win games. I think the guys that [sic] are winning and helping their teams deserve a strong look, regardless of how good Felix’s numbers are.” 

It's the job of the people who study the game to exercise a deeper understanding of it than those whose job is to play it. For the second year in a row, the baseball writers have demonstrated this ability.
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Met fans, rejoice, and stop worrying about who your manager is going to be. Frankly, it doesn't much matter as long as he gets along with the players.

Sandy Alderson as GM and Paul DePodesta as AGM are anti-Minayas. They will give the team positive mass, energy and momentum. Alderson schooled Billy Beane in Oakland before moving to an inner orbit in MLB's executive suites. Described by some as "old school" because he's 63, Alderson will bring new ideas to Queens.

Evidence of that was his first hire, DePo, whom the Dodgers would regret firing as GM a few years back if they had enough sense to avoid messy divorces. The new management team's first order of business, after deciding who'll implement their plan on the field, will be to surround Wright and Reyes with some sustainable talent and shed the Bay-like contracts that darken the Mets' future.

They'll need a couple of years to clean the stables at Citi, but once they do, they'll get a squad of thoroughbreds back on the field and give orange and blue fans something to believe in again.

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Speaking of field generals, I see that the voters have tabbed their managers of the year for 2010. Were Ron Gardenhire and Bud Black the best managers in baseball this year? I don't know. But I do know this: not a single one of the writers who voted for this award knows either.

Admit it, BBWAA, there is no manager of the year award. Gardenhire and Black were voted managers of the teams that most outperformed expectation. Whether the manager has any, much less significant impact on that result is dubious at best.

The unacknowledged truth is that managers are measured by results for which there is little evidence that they affect. The strategic, in-game decision-making is so proscribed and rote that any reasonably knowledgeable baseball fan could handle the duties. Team leadership is another story, but most of that goes on behind closed doors, out of the view of you, me and baseball journalists.

If we were really identifying the "best" manager, wouldn't it stand to reason that the same people would win repeatedly? Or is managing really such a fleeting skill that this year's hero is next year's goat? Only one manager has repeated in either league since the award was established 27 years ago -- Bobby Cox in '04-'05 -- and that was because the '04 team was gutted and expectations for the '05 Braves were lower than a pregnant ant's belly.

Each year I vote for MVP, Cy Young and ROY in the Internet Baseball Awards, but I never bother to cast a ballot for manager of the year. Where I can gather facts and analyze them appropriately, I can cast an informed vote. I don't feel comfortable pulling the lever without being informed. Evidently, this is not a deterrent for a lot of people.
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12 November 2010

Mr. "Knows His Ultimate Zone Rating From His FRAR"


Amid the muck and slime emerged the first primitive beings, crawling out of the mire, basking in the life-giving rays, slowly evolving and adapting, toddling, knuckle-scraping, walking upright and finally reclining with a good book.

The ascent of Man? Sure, but also the ascent of modern baseball analysis. Although the state of baseball journalism remains fairly dismal, there are nonetheless heroes in the midst. A paean to those luminaries who have the guts to leap upstream is long overdue.

Here's to you, Mr. Understands the Value of On-Base Percentage and Isn't Intimidated By VORP.
Best Sportswriter -- Joe Posnanski, Kansas City Star, Sports Illustrated. Joe Poz was one of the first to recognize that Bill James had proposed baseball's relativity theory and that it would revolutionize the game. Joe writes with humor, warmth and a level of comprehension of baseball's inner life rarely found elsewhere. 

Here's Joe Poz on Joe Morgan: "...he became a symbol of the closed-minded ballplayer-turned-announcer who believed in the power of heart, the magic of grit, and that to win you need winners, and that to become a winner you need to learn how to win, and that to learn how to win you need to win, and that to win you need winners." 

You can read more of Joe's work here and here .

Best Sports Broadcaster -- Brian Kenny, ESPN. Here's what blows my mind about Brian Kenny. The guy is sharp as a laser. His interviews crackle and he pummels conventional wisdom with iron insights and joie de vive. His sons both attend Berkeley. And yet he did his higher learning at St. John's, which is a just four years of Yourtown Community College. BK mixes stat-comfort with a keen mind for the human side of sports.

Kenny also has the most cerebral guests, most notably Greg Easterbrook, author of Tuesday Morning QB, and an email-reading segment called Kenny's Log-Ins. His week-nightly radio show makes my nipples rise. Catch excerpts here.

Best Play-By-Play Broadcaster -- Jon Sciambi, ESPN. With apologies to Charlie Steiner, Gary Cohen, Dan Shulman and their Gentile counterparts, Sciambi stands out among the standouts. Like the above-mentioned , you'll never catch Boog mumbling some conventional tripe about momentum or clubhouse chemistry. Moreover, he actually works the new analysis into his broadcasts and explains to his listeners how and why it matters in a way that increases their understanding without dropping a load of statistics on them. Here's the test of a great PBP announcer: enjoyment of the broadcast is inversely proportional to the competitiveness of the game.

Best Color Commentator -- Dave Campbell, ESPN Radio. The guy with the lamest nickname (Soup) is absolutely terrific on those Sunday night broadcasts. You can really hear his exquisite talent come through when he covers the same two teams Sunday night that Fox covered on TV the previous afternoon. Twice the insight without the cliches and provably false shibboleths.

Best Sabermetrician/Writer -- Joe Sheehan, JoeSheehan.com and Sports Illustrated. Sheehan gets the nod over Keith Law and Rob Neyer primarily because you can find them without my help on the Worldwide Leader. Joe's the most provocative of the three, which is to say that he doesn't mind being an idiot in the service of an idea. He's also more of a writer than Neyer or Law, who have number-crunching chops that he lacks. Sheehan studies the nooks and examines the crannies of the game and brings mind-expanding analysis to it. Look, read them all and learn about the game.

It's not a desert out there. While there's still too much wind blowing through baseball journalism's ears, there are heads popping through the sand with neurons firing. I hope and expect that we'll be able to continue adding to this list in coming years.
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The Biggest Idiot of All


Today we take on the single most ignorant member of the baseball media, a person who doesn't seem to know the difference between the MVP and the Gold Glove and who is so singularly focused on the shortcomings of other scribes and gabbers that he lashes out at them willy-nilly.

That would be your humble reporter.

Two posts ago Braindrizzling lambasted the mainstream baseball media for crapping the bed on the AL shortstop Gold Glove vote. Sportswriters and broadcasters certainly play a daily Super Bowl of Stupidity and Willful Ignorance, but they cannot be blamed for the Gold Glove stinkbug.

It's the managers and players who vote for the Gold Glove. D'Oh! No wonder the vote is so lame-brained. If you don't believe that ballplayers generally know less about the game than educated fans, consider the analytic portfolio of John Kruk. And then consider that he beat out less knowledgeable former ballers. There's nothing about the ability to hit a speed ball or snap off Uncle Charlie that equips one to assess the nuances of the game, its performers or its strategies.

Fine, you say, but don't try to change the subject. This blog laid a Sabathia-sized egg on that post and deserves to be excoriated for it. So go ahead, excoriate. 

Baseball writers and broadcasters did not kidnap the Lindbergh baby, cause global warming, kill off the dinosaurs or create Snooki. People who cast stones should make sure their houses aren't made of glass.

Duly noted. You deserve better.
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11 November 2010

Jumbo Shrimp


I walked by a TV today that drooled out gossip about a pair of 19-year-old singers or actors or maybe they're just garden variety drug addicts. Anyway, on the screen popped some adult voyeur with his analysis of the couple's dating or fighting or public intercourse or whatever, and beneath his face the super identified him as a Celebrity Journalist.

Celebrity Journalist! Ha! 

I guess that's the infotainment version of "Gold Glove-winner Derek Jeter."

10 November 2010

An Election Than Shwe Could Love


[Note: this post has been edited to remove the idiotic assertion that the vote was the fault of baseball writers. Of course, the Gold Glove is voted on by players and managers.]

I see that the players and managers have voted Derek Jeter the best fielding shortstop in the American League this year. I see that Myanmar also had elections this week.

This is a perfectly reasonably Gold Glove choice. On Planet Baseball Insider.

The metrics agree that Jeter's defense was offensive. Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) places Jeter's glovework third worst among the 15 shortstops who played 500+ innings this season. The Plus-Minus system has Jeter's defense second worst among starting shortstops.

The rest of the planet appears to be on board. Jeter didn't receive a single Top Ten vote from anyone at the Fielding Bible for shortstop defense this year. (That's across both leagues.) Finding someone without a major league uniform who believes Derek Jeter is even a legitimate shortstop anymore is harder than finding Aung San Suu Kyii on the Burmese ballot

But the good men and women of the game have their reasons, probably similar to those that led to bestowing the 2008 Gold Glove for first base upon a DH (Rafael Palmiero). After all, Jeter made the fewest errors at short in the AL this year. Of course, King Tut made even fewer errors, and for the same reason: you can't bobble what you can't get to.

The vote speaks far more eloquently about the ability -- and probably the interest -- of players and managers to decide these sorts of things than about Derek Jeter's defense. The truth is there has never been any correlation between the ability to smack a ball and the ability to tease out the complex nuances of the game.
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08 November 2010

The Worst Best of All Time


Baseball has attempted to play both ends against the middle by dividing into three divisions and adding a wild card. It's a compromise between the everyone-gets-a-trophy insanity of the NBA and NHL and the soul-crushing of baseball's early days when just the top two teams vied for the title.

Here's the cost: the chart below, courtesy of Baseball Prospectus, attempts to document the worst World Series winners of all time. The last and most relevant column is the team's projected winning percentage given its run-scoring/preventing profile and its strength of schedule. 

It's no surprise that the '06 Cards are first worst. They played sub-.500 ball in the second half and triumphed against the foundering Tigers in the Keystone Cops World Series. Blecch.

Dig deeper and you'll notice something: Of the 15 weakest champs, 12 hail from the Wild Card era. Five of the 11 titleholders since the turn of the millennium "earned" a spot.


Rank
Year
Team
W-L
1
2006
Cardinals
83-78
.497
2
1987
Twins
85-77
.497
3
1959
Dodgers
88-68
.533
4
2000
Yankees
87-74
.534
5
1985
Royals
91-71
.539
6
2003
Marlins
91-71
.545
7
1964
Cardinals
93-69
.548
8
1997
Marlins
92-70
.552
9
1996
Yankees
92-70
.552
10
1945
Tigers
88-65
.554
11
2008
Phillies
92-70
.555
12
1982
Cardinals
92-70
.556
13
2010
Giants
92-70
.558
14
1980
Phillies
91-71
.559
15
2005
White Sox
99-63
.561

Because short series are rolls of the dice, more weak teams are matching up for the Fall Classic. Moreover, because the playoffs are now weeks long, the winners are determined by a sprint after running a 162-game marathon. The best long-distance runner is often not the best dasher.

Expect more of this in the future, especially as the AL Beast continues to bulk up at the expense of other divisions, allowing mediocre division winners to ride a couple of hot starters to pay dirt. It's a Faustian bargain that's given more cities a rooting interest in the post-season but a less compelling championship series.
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02 November 2010

They Might Be Giants


And so, they're the Giants of baseball, the first San Francisco treat since the franchise moved in 1958. The Giants won the World Series because they played five great games. Their pitching was masterful, allowing five runs in the last four games; their defense sublime and their hitting sufficient.

The only shame was that the dogpile occurred in Dallas rather than in the Bay area. After about the first 23 seconds it looked as if the players didn't know whom to hug.

As Joe Buck aptly pointed out, this squad had accomplished what Barry and Bobby Bonds, Jeff Kent, Juan Marichal, Rob Nenn, Will Clark and other great Giant players had failed to. But looking into that quivering mass of celebrating humanity, I had to wonder about some of the participants.

Does Pat Burrell return home with any sense of accomplishment? The guy was a wind farm in the Series, fanning in 11 of 13 times at bat. Burrell saved his career in a couple of hundred swings with San Fran, but may have jeopardized all that with his World Series futility. Now a free agent, Burrell cost the Giants four runs in just four games (not including his Game 4 benching).

How about Mike Fontenot, is he celebrating his great achievement? A solid middle-infielder with the woebegone Cubs, Fontenot came to the Giants and promptly sat on the bench. He didn't see a single pitch in the World Series. What can he tell his homeys in Slidell -- "I'm a world champ"?

Or Barry Zito? The free agent bust-o-rama was left off the post-season roster but will still get a ring along with his millions. Will he wear it with pride? Will he include a World Series title on his post-playing curriculum vitae? He'd better decide, because that time is nigh.

I feel good about the Giants' championship, even though they weren't the best team in baseball. It's a nice prize for the city, which hasn't had much to cheer about in sports for a while. Though the series wasn't particularly exciting or memorable, it was very well-played and leads us to another exciting hot stove season.

Hey, don't put away the mitt!
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