The Firing of Dusty Baker

Current Cincinnati GM Walt Jocketty, who served for 14 sparkling years in the same position with St. Louis, has forgotten more about baseball than the entire membership of Rho Beta Iota fraternity will ever know. So if he actually did fire Dusty Baker today after six seasons because the Reds skidded to six consecutive losses to end the season, he should be rushed to the hospital for an emergency brain scan.

Jocketty has been too successful for too long to make a move so utterly lacking in sense that even a Kardashian should know better. Even great teams endure winning lulls during the course of a long season. Judging a field general's 972-game performance with the club by one bad week (against a formidable and highly-motivated opponent) is like demoting a star player because he's oh-for his last five games.

The silliness is even more fundamental than that. Evaluating a manager based on his team's record is like appraising an movie actor based on the screenplay. In each case, their performance has some impact on the final product, but it's vastly less important than other considerations.

In reporting Baker's firing, many sports news outlets examined his managerial won-loss record, as if that would reveal something about his managerial acumen. It hardly needs to be explained that managers are entirely dependent on their teams' talent; Moe, Larry and Curly could have skippered the 1998 Yankees to the World Series while this year's Astros were beyond the help of Jimmy Dugan himself.

Like an iceberg, much of a manager's value is accrued out of view. But after 20 years in the position with the Giants, Cubs and Reds, two things are clear about him: 1. players love playing for him and 2. he might be the worst tactician in the history of the sport. 

If a team values stubborn intransigence in their chief on-field strategist, Dusty is their man. He refuses to acknowledge the importance of on-base percentage, despite its objective truth. He cost the Reds dozens of runs over six years by leading off speedsters with abysmal OBP and he cost an impressive list of top-shelf pitchers (notably Kerry Wood and Mark Prior) significant portions of their careers by almost-literally working their arms off. 

Which makes his firing all the more puzzling. Dusty's entire managerial career is a miracle, a 20-year exaltation of rampant ignorance, validated three times by the very lords of ignorance -- baseball writers -- with Manager of the Year awards. The truth is, Dusty should never have been hired, but once in place never ceased being what he was hired to be.

As is often the case, all this is much more an indictment of the people paid to analyze the game than the people who perform on the field. They will continue to use won-loss records as a proxy for real evaluation tools without ever acknowledging their utter futility. As for Dusty Baker, his teams won 90+ games three of the last four years. Some desperate front office, like Seattle's, will be sufficiently bamboozled to hire him so that he can bat Neifi Perez leadoff.

Swinging Bunts and Bloop Hits

Miracle on 161st Street
More on this in a full post, but if Joe Girardi isn't AL manager of the year then I'm Barry Manilow. He's taken an ever-changing replacement-player roster to contention and done it without a hint of rancor or complaint. He's incorporated the Alex Rodriguez Traveling Circus into the family with beneficial results. And he's had to have The Talk with a parade of .196 hitters whose 15 minutes in pinstripes has ended. 

All that and his ace has gone half-joker. If this team were challenging Toronto for the cellar, no one would blame them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dodgers Make A Splash
Did I miss the memo on pool parties? Is that another unwritten rule that you're just supposed to intuit? Man, I can't keep track. I always thought that celebrating in a pool was a great idea.

What's the unwritten rule on calling opponents classless? Someone ask Willie Bloomquist. What's the unwritten rule on politicians who can't get anything done in Washington commenting on the baseball team celebrations? I think "shut up" is the rule, John McCain, but I don't know because it's unwritten.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Star Bucs
A yearlong fear: The Pirates have a spectacular season but run out of steam -- as young, inexperienced teams often do -- in the last 10 or 20 games. They fall into the Wild Card and lose the one-game play-in. Six months of developing goodwill disappears in nine innings. It feels like another "Wait 'til Next Year" scenario in Pittsburgh.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yasiel Who?
More on the MVP races in a full post, but consider this couldabeen: In exactly half a season of work, Hanley Ramirez is hitting .351/.403/.656 with 20 homers and 10 steals from the shortstop position. He's playing some of the best defense of his career and has been worth 5.6 wins for the Dodgers. In half a season. 

The last player to post 11.2+ wins against replacement without taking drugs*? Pedro Martinez 13 years ago. The last everyday player? Yaz in '67.

*As far as we know.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Joba Rules
At $2 or $3 million in his last year of arbitration, it's hard to see Joba Chamberlain sticking with the Yankees in 2014. He's regressed as a pitcher, walking 5.4 per nine innings and contributing replacement value the last two years. His home run rate has risen each year but one to an unsustainable 1.7 per nine innings. At this point he's little more than a middle-inning mop-up guy. For the suddenly cost-conscious Yankees, that may not play.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#Quitchacussing
Issues Brandon Phillips shouldn't comment on publicly: chemical weapons in Syria, Russia's crackdown on gays, possible implications of the Affordable Care Act, his .310 on-base percentage. You want to shut up the Enquirer writer, Brandon? Get on base more.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cashnering In
After closing at TCU and 93 MLB games as a reliever, Andrew Cashner may be emerging as a rotation ace this season. At 10-8, 3.21 for the Padres, the bearded one has hurled five straight games of at least seven frames relinquishing two earned runs or fewer. Scouts believed Cashner had the best stuff of college pitchers in the 2008 draft.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flipping the Script
The Red Sox are just the fourth team all-time to win 93+ games the year after losing 93+ games. With two more victories, the Indians will become the fifth.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Playoff Odd In yesterday's post, these were the quoted AL playoff odds from Baseball Prospectus:

Tampa Bay 70%
Texas 67%
Cleveland 49%
Baltimore 9%
KC  4%
New York 1%

Just to give you an idea how fluid these ratings are, consider them one game later:


Tampa Bay 78%
Cleveland 60%Texas 50%
KC  6%
Baltimore 4%
New York 2%

It does call into question how a team can plummet from highly likely to a toss-up after one loss, as the Rangers supposedly did. These playoff odds remind me a bit of five-day weather forecasts. Follow the fifth day forecast over the week and you'll see it change daily before ultimately missing the mark.

I Don't Believe What I Just Saw!

I've covered the MVP races and the AL Cy Young, but the NL Cy Young is a whole other kettle of fish. That's because Tim Lincecum and Chris Carpenter are in a virtual dead heat, with Dan Haren, pitching in the thin desert air, hot on their heels. I'll take that one up after the season.

Most of the comments on these posts come off-blog, but this one is worth addressing. Mark from New York asks, "if on-base percentage is so superior to batting average, why do you often reference a player's batting average?"

The traditional measures -- triple crown stats for hitters, W-L and ERA for starting pitchers and saves for relievers -- run the gamut from virtually meaningless (RBI, pitcher wins) to pretty illuminating (ERA). Home runs and batting average are somewhere in between and suffer from the same weakness: they propose to measure things that are more fully measured in another way.

Home runs tell us something about a hitter's power, but they don't account for doubles and triples, which slugging average does. Batting average gives us a glimpse of a player's out-avoiding ability, but not as complete a view as on-base percentage, which includes walks and HBP.

So here's how batting average is important: there is no way to hit .375 and not be a good on-base guy. Even a free swinger who accepts only the occasional free pass grudgingly is going to sport a nifty OBP if he's batting .375, and it's virtually impossible to hit .375 without being a selective hitter.

Conversely, no .213 hitter would make a productive lead-off batter, even if he collects walks like they're pennies. OBP is largely dependent on batting average, so I often use the BA shorthand to denote a player's ability to reach base safely.

RBIs are different. A bad hitter can collect 80 RBI if he plays a lot and bats in the middle of a prodigious order. It happens all the time. David Ortiz (.233/.325/.447) has 84 RBI already. Brandon Inge, who I don't believe has hit safely the entire second half of the season, is now at .235/.322/.424, but with 76 RBI. It's been a miserable year for Jimmy Rollins (.247/.291/.414), but he's knocked in 71. There are better examples from previous years, but you get the point. RBIs are a stew of hitting and opportunity, and if you gets lots of opportunities, you don't need much hitting.

A great example on the other side of the coin is Kirk Gibson's magical 1988 for the Dodgers. The league MVP that year (one of the most astute selections ever by the writers, in my opinion), Gibson hit .290/.377/.483, stole 31 of 35 bases and played a spectacular left field in a ball park that didn't give up hits without a fight. He paced his team in homers, doubles, walks, HBP, runs and of course OBP and SA. He also led the league in intentional walks, which tells you something about how other teams feared him.

And he knocked in 76 runs. Was Gibson not clutch? Did you not watch the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series that year, or did you just not believe what you just saw? Gibson was the acknowledged leader of the team, the hardscrabble Mr. Hustle who was unfazed by the situation or the size of the human being, or the wall, that was bearing down on him.

No, Gibson knocked in 76 runs because no one was ever on base when he came to bat. The team won with pitching, defense, and Gibson, posting a putrid team batting line of .248/.305/.352 . Most of Gibby's 25 long balls were solo shots because leadoff speedster Steve Sax and centerfielder John Shelby were busy making outs 68% of the time. We know Gibson had a great year, no thanks to RBIs.
b

Journalistic Malpractice

I often encounter people who defend the baseball media's c0verage of the game. They don't know or understand anything about the gains made over the years in analyzing player and team performance, they don't understand or want to acknowledge the tremendous impact of luck on the game and they're unwilling to let go of the comforting old shibboleths that attend the sport.

I understand this. Change must happen slowly and incrementally. In many ways, this is already happening. OBP and SLG are now regularly displayed in some newspapers, on some game broadcasts and on ballpark scoreboards.

Today I refer you to an article in my hometown paper, the Charleston Post and Courier, about the struggles of Kelly Johnson and Jeff Francouer. Specifically with respect to Francouer, the article makes repeated references to his batting averages, but not a single reference to walks, batting eye, pitch selection or OBP, the very nub of Francouer's problem. This is, quite frankly, journalistic malpractice.

Francouer swings at everything, which leads to a cascade of problems. Pitchers don't have to hit their spots to get him out. He never walks, so his OBP has never topped .336, even when he batted .300. He's making too many outs, particularly for a corner outfielder, even when he hits for average, which he hasn't done in two years.

Many sportswriters, and others who weren't paying attention, were impressed with Francouer's early performance. In his first full year, he batted .260, smacked 29 homers and drove in 103. Add his rifle arm in right field and the cogniscenti were agog. But the seeds of his decline were plainly evident even then. He drew just 23 walks and posted a pathetic .293 OBP. Not only is that unsustainable, pitchers picked up on it and are now exploiting his lack of selectivity. This year, he's neither walking nor hitting for average, leaving him with a line of .248/.282/.346. That's Rey Ordonez territory, but without the shortstop's glove.

The story I reference -- half of which is on the travails of Kelly Johnson -- runs 48 column inches, quotes the GM, manager, hitting coach and both players, and required at least one road trip from Charleston to Atlanta. Yet it utterly fails to inform its readers about Francouer's basic problem because the writer is still using performance analysis tools popular in 1970.

Imagine going to your doctor today and getting 1970s treatment for heart problems or cancer. Many of us would be dead today with that level of care. Or imagine your car mechanic giving a 1970s tune-up to the computer system in your Accord. That's intuitively unnacceptable. Yet sports journalism consumers have not begun demanding that sportswriters stop employing statistics proven innacurate 30 years ago and instead raise their level of performance analysis to standards developed since then and recognized as far superior.
b

Leading Off: #5 In A Series

Who's a better leadoff hitter, Willy Taveras, who batted .251 without power last year and stole 68 bases in 75 attempts, or Jason Giambi, who hit .247 with 32 homers and two steals and runs slower than a stocking?

Well, if you're looking for speed on the basepaths, Taveras is the easy choice. But if you are, the question is, why?

The purpose of a leadoff hitter is to get someone on base in front of the big hitters in the lineup. In that regard, Taveras reached base safely 161 times in 530 trips to the plate last year. The technical term for this is "blecch." To his credit, he turned many of his one-base safeties (singles, walks and HBP) into two-bases, but that hardly atones for a .308 on-base percentage.

Even after his 32 home runs, Giambi got himself on base 36 more times than Taveras in '08 and consumed fewer outs, giving the batters behind him more opportunities to create runs. Certainly he might clog the bases on occasion, and leading him off would reduce the number of multi-run homers he hits, but it's hard to see how that would offset 36 extra scoring opportunities.

Maybe because he could be better utilized in the middle of the lineup, Giambi isn't the better pick here, but if he's not, it's by a lot smaller margin than you thought when you heard the choices, right? And if not Giambi, then how about Conor Jackson of Arizona, who stole 10 bases, but reached base safely 48 more times than Taveras, consumed fewer outs and hit just 12 home runs? Or Yunel Escobar, a 10-homer guy who got caught in five of his seven steal attempts, but reached safely 41 more times and made fewer outs? Or two or three guys on Taveras' own team, the Rockies, like Ryan Spilborghs, whose .407 on base average came with six dingers in half a year's at-bats?

The point is, we have this imprint in our minds about what a leadoff hitter should look like -- speed without power. But the most important attribute of a leadoff hitter is his ability to get on base, which makes guys like Willy Taveras really poor choices. An outfielder with a .604 OPS should bat eighth -- if anywhere. Taveras, because of his stellar base stealing and defense, may merit a spot in the lineup, but not at the head of it.

The speed myth has been passed down into baseball legend, and it takes some hard thinking to recognize that although we've always done it that way, we can now see empirically that it's wrong.