It breaks my heart to observe it...but that was an awful game.
Game 7 of a great World Series wasn't just devoid of drama, it was a showcase of why baseball is turning off a lot of people.
Talk about pace of play, this game loses a footrace to a sloth, a snail and Brian McCann.
The bottom of the 5th inning, in which Houston twice replaced the pitcher, and the catcher instigated roughly 11 visits to the mound, an inning that featured two hit batsmen but not a single run -- that half inning alone obliterated a half hour of your life. You can never get it back.
Ah, but it was heaven for advertisers. For that half inning alone, including just prior and just after the frame, you were subjected to twelve 30-second ads, not including all the announcer reads and the lovely innovation of short in-frame spots during lulls in the play.
Not to be outdone, the 6th inning, top and bottom, wasted away another half hour of your life. No pitchers were removed mid-inning and only one run scored.
There were 284 pitches thrown in a game that produced just six runs, two of them on a single swing. Lance McCullers recorded seven outs, held L.A. scoreless and needed 49 pitches.
Y-a-w-n.
I mean that literally: the game was nearly three hours old with a third of the way to go.
I went to bed. In the middle of Game 7 of the World Series. I have never done that before.
I would have stayed up all night to see the World Series play out. But it wasn't playing out; it was droning on, withering before our eyes. This was basically a series of advertisements punctuated by mound conferences.
Evidently I didn't miss a thing. The combined 14 innings of one-run ball pitched by the two teams' "relievers" would have been exciting to start the game, but with the score already 5-0 it was a snoozefest. So I decided to snooze for real.
There is plenty of time in the off-season for deeper thoughts on the underlying causes of this and how bad it is for baseball. I've long advocated for a rule preventing a pitching change if the pitcher on the mound hasn't yielded a run in that frame. But this isn't the time for that.
It should be the time to celebrate the Astros and their first World Championship in 56 years of existence. It's exhilarating to see a team dogpile in ecstasy at the conclusion.
But I was deep into REM sleep by then.
Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, the science of analyzing catcher defense is entering a transformative stage. New in-depth research by Baseball Prospectus and others has determined that framing -- the art of employing catcher stance and glove movement to confuse the umpire into calling a strike on a pitch that was actually outside the strike zone -- has an immense impact on the game.
The impact, in fact, goes beyond the balls and strikes in question; research demonstrates that it alters the entire pitcher-batter dynamic. Consequently, framing mavens behind the plate can have significant impact over the course of thousands of pitches in a season.
One-Two-Three-For Dartmouth!
How much impact? Based on complex new calculations derived from video of every single Major League pitch since 1988, Baseball Prospectus asserts that Brad Ausmus added 24 wins over his career with his cunning deception. Other big gainers include Jose Molina, a wretched hitter whose catching prowess gave him 22 wins of value in his career; Yadier Molina, who is even better than we thought; and Jonathan Lucroy, who doubles his career value at this relatively early stage.
But the two backstops whose stock ratchets up most significantly are Russell Martin and Brian McCann. They rank third and fifth among active catchers (information only goes back to 1988, so the readjustment can only be done for recent players) in the number of wins added to their value by the new calculations. What's special about that is that each has demonstrated excellence at the plate as well as behind it and are now both in serious contention for the Hall of Fame, if voters take this information into consideration and further research doesn't debunk or mitigate these findings.
Adding in the new defensive metrics, McCann, 32 and Martin, 33 now rank seventh and ninth all time in WAR for catchers. McCann slots in just behind (though by a wide margin) Yogi Berra, and Martin after Joe Torre, but both surpass Mickey Cochran, Roy Campanella, Roger Bresnahan and others previously enshrined. (Of course, Campy comes with caveats.)
Neither is done, of course, though McCann seems to have lost his defensive powers, Samson-like, with the departure of his facial hair. Each could certainly accrue another 10 career wins, inviting a powerful Hall argument for each.
The Big Loser
Who loses? Former Miami steals-killer Charles Johnson enjoyed a brief burst of fame, but the metrics suggest that was his entire game. Retrospect suggests he was a replacement level player for his career. Worse, the new data shoves Jorge Posada off any foundation his Hall of Fame argument might have rested on. The new accounting says Posada's entire career had all the value of Lucroy's first six years.
Further research is being done every day by dozens of seamheads that will almost certainly tweak these calculations, and the tweaks will be further tweaked and then tweaked again. But their vector probably won't change much, altering our perception of catchers over time.
But Wait, There's One More
There's one more guy who benefits from better information -- the greatest hitting catcher of all time. The knock on Mike Piazza was that he couldn't throw anyone out, and new data about framing and pitch blocking isn't going to change that. But Piazza, it turns out, was a superb blocker and framer, gilding seven career wins onto his already bulging HOF resume.
Don't you feel even sillier for not voting for him now?
Baseball events have continued apace despite a Braindrizzling hiatus. How can that be? Perhaps Joe Posnanski kept things afloat in the interim.
The Cy Young Awards were announced this week. There's not a whole lot of room for debate on Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer. Kershaw led the planet in ERA, and that includes Little League. Scherzer's 21-3 record and nearly six runs of support per start don't accrue to his credit, but he shouldn't be penalized for them either. Scherzer gets the prize because he dominated AL batters to the tune of a nifty 2.90 ERA, 240 strikeouts in 214 innings, and a best-in-class .97 WHIP.
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The same for Rookie of the Year awards. The trophy would have gone to Yasiel Puig in almost any other year. He punched balls all over the yard, 60% better than league average, and added dynamite to a moribund Dodger offense when he arrived. In years when such luminaries as Geovany Soto, Jason Jennings, Angel Berroa and Bobby Crosby earned top honors, Puig would have run away. Sadly for him, his freshman season coincided with Jose Fernandez's, which awoke ghosts of Fernandomania en route to a 12-6, 2.19 with more whiffs than frames pitched.
In the AL, Wil Myers and his .293/.354/.478 in slightly more than half a season was the pretty clear choice over shortstop Jose Iglesias and a couple of nice pitchers. In all, not much to complain about.
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The MVP Awards went as expected to Andrew McCutchen and Miguel Cabrera. Both were excellent choices. That Cabrera wasn't the best choice doesn't change the fact that he had another MVP-caliber season. It's difficult to be disappointed when a great candidate, the second-best of the league's 600 players, secures the honor. It's easy to be disappointed that Major League baseball writers don't know the difference between a great hitter and a great player, and can't fathom how one player's value isn't dependent on the performances of his teammates, but if being disappointed in baseball writers were a virus, we'd all have a permanent case of Ebola.
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You probably heard that teams made $14.1 million qualifying offers to 13 players, every one of which was declined. This is a ritual dance carried out by GMs and players under the new collective bargaining agreement. The players are now free agents who may seek multi-year deals. The teams may or may not want the players back but they will receive compensation draft picks if their former player is signed elsewhere.
Let's take the case of Braves backstop Brian McCann. The Georgia native is leaving by mutual decision, a net benefit for both him and the team even if he inks a five-year, $12 million/year deal with a catcher-starved franchise. (Hello Yankees! By the way, $12 mil is going to be cat pee compared to what McCann commands.) That serves McCann, who at 29 is headed into his decline years, but would guarantee the McCann family $60 million, rather than $14.1 million. It serves the good people of Atlanta -- or Marietta -- because the Braves have cheaper options and serious budget constraints. Leading the parade to replace the seven-time All-Star is Evan Gattis, whose above-average hitting comes with a half-million-dollar price tag and whose value is much greater behind the plate than in left field, where he attempted to hide in 2013. In addition, Atlanta would receive a first round supplemental pick from the signing team.
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Speaking of the Braves, they've flipped Turner Field into the trashcan after just 17 years, like it's a disposable lighter. Shame on the the various entities (which included NBC and the Atlanta Olympic Authority) for paying the massive retrofit costs to turn Centennial Olympic Stadium into Turner Field without requiring the Braves to sign a long-term lease.
The franchise and its new hosts, suburban Cobb County, claim the new home will be a "public-private partnership." This is code for an arrangement in which the public pays the bill and the team reaps the benefits.
In most "public-private" arrangements around sports stadiums, municipalities foot the bill and then lend their borrowing authority to the team for a portion of the costs. The team repays its loan at a discounted rate because the bonds are low-interest and tax-free. The municipality restricts its future borrowing ability for things like schools, hospitals, sewer systems and infrastructure that teams regularly complain about.
Many econometric studies have demonstrated that even after accounting for all the possible spending resulting from relocated sports teams, municipalities rarely earn back the value of their investments in stadiums unless those edifices are key cogs in new downtown development. Baseball teams are relatively smal businesses whose payrolls generally leave the state from November through March. The stadiums lay empty roughly 250 days-a-year and their use often generates as many costs for the city as tax income, all while the bonds demand repayment.
So the Braves will begin play in their third home in 21 years when they move to Marietta while the Red Sox have competed in the Fens for more than a century.
