Braves' broadcasts offer an intriguing experience this season because of the challenge facing the broadcast crew when their team is hopeless.
 |
| Braves lose....again. |
A really good broadcast team recognizes the following and adjusts accordingly:
1. No individual game matters. If the Braves win tomorrow, they'll be 19-46. If they lose they'll be 18-47. Eight percentages points worth of suck one way or the other.
2. Almost none of their current players matter. Jeff Francoeur, AJ Pierzynski and Nick Markakis are just filler. The cavalry is coming but it's not here now.
3. The corollary to #2 -- the players who will lead this team to success are mostly elsewhere. Like on the farm -- or in someone else's farm.
4. It's much more important that the young players learn their craft than perform well now. If Matt Wisler and Aaron Blair are the future, they will have to improve.
5. The Braves are in the market to trade veterans for prospects. The young players on other teams should be of more interest to Braves fans than the veteran flotsam and jetsam on their own roster.
One would expect to hear less about the contributions of Erick Aybar, a 32-year-old shortstop, than about the progress made by Mallex Smith, a 23-year-old center fielder. Indeed, listeners should be salivating for news about the progress made by Minor Leaguer Dansby Swanson, the Braves' shortstop of the future, than about anything Aybar does for the team today.
Broadcasters Haven't Given Up
Alas, the broadcasters, though acknowledging their team's futility, are still struggling to accept the full reality. Last night it reached comic proportions with 25-year-old ace Julio Teheran on the mound. Teheran's record tells you everything you need to know about the performance of him and his team: he's the ace of the staff with a 2.93 ERA, 85 K and just 24 BB. And his record is 2-7.
Aside from openly rooting for a timely Atlanta hit or Teheran strikeout, broadcasters Jim Powell and Don Sutton delved into the prospect of a trade of Teheran. The discussion is mostly nonsense.
Ain't Gonna Happen
The best player on the team isn't going anywhere. He's 25 and is signed through his age 29 season at a nice discount. What can Atlanta possibly get for the ace of their staff that would make them better in 2018, which is management's time horizon?
If they did decide to swap Teheran, it would have to be for an investment in the future. The announcers proposed that the Braves would only accept a "middle of the order bat, 25 or less and under team control" for their pitcher. Well sure, in the same way that I'm not selling my cat except for a winning Powerball jackpot ticket. That is, it ain't gonna happen. No trade partner is sufficiently stupid.
No, You're Not Getting Bryce Harper
Teheran has been worth 8-9 wins against replacement his first three full years -- about three a year. That's a good pitcher. But it's not what the announcers described -- Kris Bryant or Nolan Arenado, players worth 5-6 wins a season. No contender is going to trade one asset for another in order to acquire the lesser asset.
Any plausible Teheran deal would have to be present value for future value, the kind Atlanta pulled off in acquiring Swanson from Arizona for Shelby Miller. That can only mean Teheran for a boatload of prospects from the low Minors.
Hopecasting
So why are Powell and Sutton entertaining such silliness? Because Teheran is their guy. they like him. They have to see him in the clubhouse after the game. So while they feel compelled to discuss the possibility that he's shipped off, they bloat his value beyond objectivity. They are prayercasting and it's not serving their listeners.
Bottom line, it's the right discussion for the third inning of a meaningless mid-June tilt against the woebegone Reds. It's just a pretty silly conclusion. I'll be listening to see if the Braves announcers improve over the course of the lost season too.
Which would you rather your team did, score an extra 12 runs every 11 days or an extra seven runs every 11 days?
Ha, trick question! Because to get this question right, you have to know something that isn't in the question.
Without this extra bit of information, Major League managers, players and broadcasters -- particularly that last group -- are getting this question wrong.
What you have to know is that scoring runs is good. Scoring more is better. Ha, I didn't mention that the first time!
And so, three times this weekend, I heard broadcasters rhapsodizing about how a batter had "sacrificed his batting average" in order to hit a ground ball to the right side that moved a runner from second to third. The phrase in quotes is from Don Sutton, a Braves announcer who pitched during the '60s and sometimes sounds like he's still there.
The is no valor in sacrificing a runner to third. It is simply dumb.
On average, with a runner on second and none out, teams plate 1.083 (more) runs. ("More" because the team might have already scored.) With a runner on third and one out, they score, on average .94 runs. Don, that's fewer runs. Hitting to the right side to trade an out for a base diminishes a team's ability to score runs.
It's even worse with one out. Teams reduce by nearly half their run-scoring ability by trading a second out for advancing a runner to third. The advantage gained by the ability to score from third on an out is more than wiped out by all the lost possibilities that sacrificing an out derails.
Two caveats:
1. All this assumes average players all around. Obviously, a pitcher should try to hit to the right side. So should a weak #8 hitter if a good pinch hitter waits on deck.
2. There's nothing wrong with hitting to the right side. Making an out -- in any direction -- is where the screws loosen.
But suppose your team just needs one run? You're tied in the bottom of the ninth. Or in extra innings. Or the pitchers are dominating and one run is worth its weight in gold.* That's a different story. In that case, moving the runner to third with no one out adds a run every 25 opportunities. It's more or less a wash. But with one out it still reduces the chances from 42% to 27%.
*Runs are abstract concepts without weight, even on, like, Jupiter. Better they should be worth their number of letters in gold. Or their game score influence, though I don't know how to translate that into avoirdupois. So forget the whole thing. Runs are really important in that situation, whatever one we were talking about...
The upshot: it's generally a stupid move. Hit to the right with a runner on second, sure, but not at the expense of trying to reach base safely. Unless you're the Padres, in which case your team's goal is evidently to score fewer runs.
Sandy Koufax's bifurcated Major League career would have made Henry Jekyll proud: the mediocre first half (seven years, 36-40, 4.06, six wins against replacement) and the spectacular second half (six years, 129-47, 2.24, 44 wins against replacement.)
Considering the totality of his career achievements, Koufax is a pale shadow of the average Hall of Fame hurler. Yet omitting the Left Arm of God from Cooperstown is unthinkable. His peak years, in which he posted ERAs an astonishing 43%, 59%, 86%, 60% and 90% better than league average, were the equal of anyone's, ever.
Where Koufax's career was an avalanche, Don Sutton's was the inexorable drip, drip, drip of a waterfall in drought. Sutton truly excelled in just three seasons, but his reliably good performance across 23 years earned him a bust in the Hall as well.
Thus the premise for the widely used "JAWS" rankings for Hall of Fame contenders: both full career value and peak value are relevant. Whereas some players earn their ceremony for sustained excellence, others get in with bursts of greatness.
This is why 2013 is so important for Robinson Cano's Hall of Fame resume. Cano has not played nearly long enough to accumulate the career numbers for the Hall, but another eight-win season catapults him to average peak WARP for Hall of Fame second basemen. After that, it would just be a matter of accumulating the remaining 30 WARP or so over the second half of his career. That feat is accomplished by playing well, if not spectacularly, for another six-seven years before tailing off in his late 30s.
It's not quite fair to say Cano's age-30 season is a make-or-break campaign for his Hall of Fame resume. He's young enough, after all, to slip for a year or two before rebounding in another season. The Hall is filled with gentlemen who were absent from the discussion at age 30 but sprang into it thereafter. Paul Molitor jumps to mind: although he was a seriously fine player in his first nine seasons, he'd never cracked .842 in OPS before his age-30 campaign. In his 30s, he perenially batted above .300, crossing .850 OPS six times, including three seasons above .900. Molitor also contributed value to the Brewers - and then Toronto and Minnesota -- every year through his age-40 season.
More numerous are the meteors who start their career on fire but flame out just when this discussion might have begun. Dwight Gooden found his cliff at age 25, but Fred Lynn posted five 4+-win seasons in his first seven years, then starting after age-30 never reached that height again.
So it's premature to place the burden of Robby Cano's Hall of Fame case on the shoulders of 2013. But another performance like last year's, or the year before or the year before that, begins to put him in the rarefied air that is breathed only along Otsego Lake.
Injuries limited Roy Halladay to 156 innings and a 4.49 ERA in 2012, adding almost nothing to his Hall pass. A bounce-back 2013 would really solidify the case for old Harry Leroy, because he's right at the standards on both career and peak. He owes some of his voluminous value to durability -- 220 innings or more in each of the six years previous to last -- which Hall voters and the general public seem to esteem less than actual greatness. Another top-five pitching performance this year would make it difficult to deny Halladay entrance in 2020, or whenever. The question is whether at 36 he possesses the might to once again throw 230 frames of sub-3.00 ERA. (There is this hope: it's a contract year for Halladay.)
The noodle just began wrapping around this question and these two names emerged from the goo. If you are thinking of a player whose ticket might be one more good year from getting punched, put his name in the comment section and we'll dig in.
